Wrong Genre Savvy/Web Comics

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Examples of Wrong Genre Savvy characters in Web Comics include:

• The title character of Mechagical Girl Lisa A.N.T. sees the events of her story as following the tropes of magical girls anime... including when they don't.
• Red Mage from 8-Bit Theater believes he's in a world that follows the rules of a tabletop RPG. To be fair, his efforts sometimes do work, but usually just when it's funny.
  • Like, for example, when he survived a fatal fall by "forgetting" to write the damage down on his character sheet.
    • We should note though, that the first Final Fantasy game did go much more closely with D&D design/rules than the series does now.
  • He did recently mention that only a certain number of enemies could be onscreen during any given fight. I don't think even Red Mage knows what genre he thinks he's in anymore.
  • This is a world where the actual success of any given plan is almost invariably inverse to the sense it makes.
    • Example of a failure: Trying to kill Sarda by having everyone's near-ungodly powers focused into an optimum role (i.e. Red Mage's varied attacks go into distraction and Fighter deflects all counterattacks while Black Mage and Thief go in for the kill) in an all-or-nothing surprise blitz attack. An example of a success? Black Mage killing Astos... with a terrible retort ("Astos? Mo' like yo ass is toast!")
• In an early arc from Sluggy Freelance, the otherwise-nameless Captain of a starship believes he'll be the sole survivor of an alien rampage because he's the "handsome masculine lead", but Torg questions the logic he used to reach that conclusion, calling him a "shallow, one-dimensional stereotype" and suggesting that Riff and Torg will be the sole survivors instead because they have the more interesting backstory. The captain shouts "What is this? A sci-fi thriller or a goofy buddy movie?" The alien promptly answers his question.
  • In a later Story Arc, Torg becomes convinced he's inside a Video Game. In all fairness, he did have a mild concussion at the time.
  • This is not the first time Torg has tried to apply VG tactics to Real Life. Or whatever passes for real life in Sluggy Freelance.
• Poor Piro from Megatokyo thinks romance works like either a Japanese Dating Sim or a Shoujo manga, and constantly beats himself up for not being able to live up to the kind of situations he figures romance should entail. It's hard not to laugh when he whines about how he should be an "expert" at the subject considering all the games and mangas he's played and read, totally without irony.
  • Largo on the other hand defines himself by Action Adventure Tropes, playing the Hot-Blooded action hero in totally inappropriate situations. Ironically, his girlfriend actually finds herself oddly attracted to this, despite or possibly due to her own deep-seated cynicism.
  • When Yuki is awakened as a Magical Girl, she instinctively reacts by seeking out cute, impractical uniforms and acting as if she were the main character in a series of that genre. She gets this drummed out of her when the "impractical" part makes itself apparent.
  • Thankfully, the second thing she does is meet Largo, who immediately dresses her in something resembling tactical gear. Also a wonderful example of how Largo is both Genre Savvy and Wrong Genre Savvy at the same time.
  • The setting in Megatokyo runs in multiple, overlapping genres at a time, and most characters have a Weirdness Censor for genres that don't overlap with their own. (Piro/Largo is only the most flagrant divide.) Most moments of Wrong Genre Savvy happen when a character wanders into an element of someone else's story or when the fantastic fails and Reality Ensues.
• Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer! from Girl Genius. He's convinced that he's the leading man, Baron Wulfenbach and Gil Wulfenbach are the diabolical mastermind and the mastermind's fiendish right hand man respectively, and Agatha Clay is the leading man's beautiful young sidekick (even if she's not the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter like he originally thought). Unfortunately he's completely insane and doesn't realise that he's wrong on all counts, so his genre-savvy plans are almost always inappropriate.
  • Once he realizes that Agatha is a Heterodyne, he changes on the last part and treats her as The Hero of her own story (possibly with himself as some manner of Mentor Archetype) -- which doesn't solve his problem, since he's still completely insane, and Agatha knows it and wants nothing to do with him.
    • Word of God is that he's re-cast his delusion slightly, Agatha is now the tragic love interest (he's going to kill her last, in some sort of love-suicide pact).
  • It would be helpful, at this point, to point out that this story Othar thinks he's the Hero of a quest to save the world by killing every last Spark. Including, last of all, himself.
  • Othar is more a case of Right Genre Wrong Story. We have been shown that the way he thinks is the way their world works. Doesn't make him any less insane.
    • Except that he thinks in straightforward Black and White Morality and lives in confusing Grey and Gray Morality. That's easily as big a mistake as a conventional genre mixup.
  • To be fair to Othar, though, when he's in his own stories, he's actually quite effective.
  • One of the radio plays questioned whether Othar really is delusional—after all, having Sparks in charge has been almost always catastrophic for common Europeans, and it's not at all clear that the heroes will be able to break that cycle.
  • And when Gil goes to show Tarvek off Castle Wulfenbach while staying himself, Tarvek accuses him of having been inspired by a penny dreadful.
• An odd example that may be both a subversion and a straight example occurs here. Lucy believes that she and the rest of the group are in a horror movie plot, which the current arc certainly resembles. This worries her because, due to the tropes associated with horror movies, none of them will survive. However, she isn't in a horror movie; she's in a webcomic. Given that the webcomic is Something*Positive, her chances of survival might be even worse.
  • Shortly afterward Wil Wheaton gets his arm cut off because one of the survivors is acting like its a zombie movie, and thinks a bite means infection... the catgirls don't work like that.
• In Chainmail Bikini, a D&D webcomic, the players see the new players' character fighting undead. They stand around and watch, thinking it's the scene where she impresses them with her power and they ask her to join their team. When she turns out to be losing the fight, they figure out that they've "picked the wrong cliched introduction" and that this is actually the one where they save her life and ask her to join their team.

Ramgar: Hold up. I think this is the cliche introduction where we see the new character kick so much butt we ask them to come with us. It's a classic of the medium. Let her have her moment of glory.
Lucretia: Will you imbeciles get over here and help? I'm inundated with undead!
Sapphire: Looks like this is the classic "we rescue someone and THEY ask to join US" intro.
Ramgar: Sorry, I wasn't sure which cliche we are supposed to be doing!
Lucretia: Expediency over verbosity, gentlemen!

• Wonderella after rescuing a genie finding a Djinn, here.
• Elan of Order of the Stick gets this sometimes. For example, the first time they defeated Xykon he activates a Self-Destruct Mechanism in order to invoke a Load-Bearing Boss situation. And then won't escape the castle until the last possible second to be more dramatic. On another occasion he correctly predicts the current villain will try the old abduct-the-love-interest ploy...but doesn't realize that he's The Chick.
  • Tarquin appears to have cast himself as the Big Bad and Elan as The Hero, unaware that it's Xykon and Roy respectively. What consequences this will have for him are undetermined.
    • Maybe, for him, it is. Just because the order is fighting to save the world doesn't mean he can't be the villain of his own subplot.
  • Tsukiko seems to think that she is a protagonist of Girl Meets Lich story and Xykon is her Love Interest, undeads are really Not Evil, Just Misunderstood, while the living are really evil and Redcloak is just an obstacle she has to eliminate to be with her beloved this proves her undoing
• Kevyn from Schlock Mercenary pulls one of these ... on himself, too.
• "Repeat after me: Despite what magical girl anime has taught me, the monster does not go down with the first strike."
• Bogleech Comics did a series in which fans of Romero-style zombie movies go up against monsters that are similar to zombies, but not identical to them. It isn't pretty.
• Eri-Chan from Okashina Okashi. She views her group and every world they end up in through Shojo-colored glasses.
• The rather odd Heroic Fantasy-High School RPG Class of Heroes has as part of its official website a brief webcomic about a rather unobservant teenaged boy who plays the game thinking it's a Dating Sim.
• In Platinum Grit, Jack Leaderboard was a private eye who thought and acted like the protagonist in a hardboiled detective story, going undercover as a removalist to crack a case. He thought he was uncovering a sordid tale of black magic and human sacrifice featuring Nils as seductive Femme Fatale and Jeremy as a cold-blooded murder with a perfect poker face. Nobody else even noticed his existence.
• In this Dinosaur Comics strip, T-Rex attempted to re-create a scenario that always happened in cartoons, too bad he is actually in a webcomic that likes to play with tropes. It was even Lampshaded in the end.
• The unfortunate torturee in this Exterminatus Now strip gets it half right. He's spot-on regarding the comic's goofy sense of humor, but makes the mistake of assuming that that implies an aversion to violence.
  • Either that or he thought the Mobian Inquisition operated like a certain other Inquisition.
• In Freefall, Winston manages to invert this after Florence—a Bowman's Wolf—startles him when he opens the door to a knock during a hurricane ... while he's watching a werewolf-movie marathon. Fortunately, while he realizes he just made the classic mistake of the horror-movie protagonist, he survives because he's in a science-fiction webcomic.
• Tiffany Winters in Eerie Cuties and Magick Chicks is a hereditary monster slayer and an obvious Expy of Buffy Summers. Loves cardboard speeches. Her repeated attempts to stake the vampire co-protagonist Layla DeLaCroix invariably end with no staking and a lot of blushing. Layla doesn't even seem to notice that the girl who works in the clothes shop she visits and quickly becomes her best friend knows she's a vampire, let alone tried to attack her.
• In Sinfest, the Storytime Zombie doesn't realize that news stories are not straight stories, and that elections are not choose-your-own-adventure.

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