Wrong Genre Savvy/Western Animation

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Examples of Wrong Genre Savvy characters in Western Animation include:

• Valerie of Danny Phantom is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who thinks she's The Hero, thinks The Hero is the villain, and thinks the Big Bad is her Mentor. When she discovers the truth, she is not pleased by the way she's been manipulated.
• My Little Pony: Paradise is well-versed in the tropes of fairy tales and legends, and yet she, a winged pony living in a Magical Land with unicorns and dragons, wonders why her life can't be more like a storybook. Uh...
• One episode of Bonkers featured a Screwy Squirrel-type character who goes on a crime spree. At first Bonkers thinks he's unstoppable, because the character always wins in his cartoons. Then Bonkers comes to the realization that this is his cartoon, and so is able to defeat him.
• Futurama: Fry's Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe when he thinks he's a robot counts as this:

Fry: "Fear not, for I shall assist ye!"
Hermes: "Robots don't say 'ye'! ...Quit thinking you're a robot!"
Fry: "I'll show ye..."

• South Park examples:
  • In "Stanley's Cup" the characters correctly realize that they are in a typical sports movie and thus deduce that are bound to win against all odds. They also understand that to achieve that, they need to invite a really good player to their team for the final match, which they also do. In the end they turn out to be Wrong Genre Savvy and are beaten brutally: the opposing players were the real protagonists all along.
    • The opposing team was a professional hockey team and Stanley's team were pee-wee players about five years old. There was no other protagonist, just a parody of the cliched sports movie ending with what threatened to be a Shocking Swerve if it didn't cross the line twice. The pee-wee players are crushed brutally, deconstructing Underdogs Never Lose by showing pro players simply mauling tykes. After the underdogs do lose, the Littlest Cancer Patient dies from losing hope. It's Played for Laughs.
  • A three-parter has the gang playing as super heroes; however, when Cartman starts acting very villainous and the others try to call him out on it, he mistakenly believes he's still a superhero and it's the other boys who are the bad guys.
• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode "Homer Goes to College", Homer is convinced that Dean Peterson of Springfield University is a Dean Bitterman type and spends most of the episode pulling ill-conceived pranks on him, even going as far as to try and run him over with a car at one point. The irony is that Peterson is actually a good-natured younger guy who gets on well with the other students. Homer also reacts to the rest of the college environment as though it were some kind of raunchy teen college movie when it quite patently isn't.
  • In "Brother From Another Series", Bart suspects that his archnemesis Sideshow Bob is up to no good when he's released from prison to work for his brother. While scouting around for clues, the following dialogue ensues:

Bart: He's more the same than ever. And I know where the evidence is. There's only one place where it could possibly be.
Lisa: Bob's trailer at the construction site?
Beat
Bart: That's even better! Let's go there.
Lisa: What were you thinking?
Bart: The haunted mine.

• • In "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy" Bart becomes paranoid of bizarre conspiracies, believes the adults are spend most of their time indoors by day because of some hair brained conspiracy he cooks up. But the reason was they were into Grampa's special tonic which gets them really horny.
• In The Fairly OddParents, Timmy's wish to never have been born was (admittedly) a desperate attempt to salvage his bruised ego (having obviously seen the Trope Namer movie). Unfortunately, Von Strangle uses the opportunity to test him in a particularly cruel way.
• On Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, Judy Ken Sebben aka Birdgirl seems to think she's in a typical superhero cartoon, much to Harvey's chagrin.
• On an episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes, as Beezy is being dragged to the altar for his Shotgun Wedding, he remains confident that Big Damn Heroes will save him. Of course, being on a Sadist Show, the trope gets subverted, and the wedding goes through though it still gets annulled.
• In an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, SpongeBob becomes convinced that Mr. Krabs is a robot thanks to having seen a movie where robots take over the Earth (and some coincidentally odd behavior on Mr. Krabs' part). After he and Squidward have ruthlessly interrogated the "robot", Squidward thinks to ask SpongeBob how the movie ended, to which he replies that it turned out there weren't any robots after all; it was a misunderstanding. Oops.
  • Mr. Krabs in the episode Born Again Krabs thought that the Flying Dutchman's visit is All Just a Dream, turns out it's actually real. It also turns out that by screwing around like everything is a dream Krabs has driven the Krusty Krab into bankruptcy.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Zuko is under the impression that he's The White Prince on a ?Redemption Quest for disrespecting his lord and father. It's not until he hears said lord and father decide to wipe out a continent that he realizes that he's actually the Noble Demon destined to make a Heel Face Turn - and because he dragged his feet for so long, he's going to have to go through hell to prove himself trustworthy.
• Beauty and the Beast - Gaston (Big Bad) thinks he's the hero, and that Beast (Jerk with a Heart of Gold) is a monster who wants to get his claws on Belle.
• The mane cast of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic got a bit of Wrong Genre Savvy in "The Best Night Ever", in which all of them thought they were in fairy tales or various other stories. In reality, they were in a moral-driven Slice of Life comedy, and this week's lessons turned out to be "Don't get your hopes up too high" and "good friends can help you make the most of a bad night".
• In the Animated Music Video for DyE's "Fantasy", the Final Girl does absolutely everything right to survive if she were in a Slasher Movie. Unfortunately for her, she's actually in a Cosmic Horror Story, and makes the mistake of looking directly at the Big Bad.
• In the first season of Martin Mystery Diana thinks that most of the paranormal monsters were Scooby-Doo Hoax, when in fact they really are paranormal monster/aliens.
• In a few episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2003, Michelangelo loves monster movies and panics when he meets creatures from beneath the earth, body-snatching aliens, or eldritch horrors. Someone always dies horribly. Lucky for him, he's not in a monster movie—he's in a Saturday Morning Cartoon.
• In The Owl House, this is lampshaded by the protagonist herself in the first episode, who realizes the Boiling Isles aren't as child-friendly as the fantasy worlds he reads about. She catches on fast though.

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