Genre Refugee

A Genre Refugee is a Stock Character from some genre who appears in a story that is in no other way part of that genre. The character is probably Wrong Genre Savvy, or may be the cause of wrong genre savviness in others. Since genres often have different tones, the character may be a Knight of Cerebus or the inverse.

Examples of Genre Refugee include:

Anime

• Rossiu from Gurren Lagann is a Real Robot character stuck in a Super Robot universe.
• Gai Daigoji from Martian Successor Nadesico is the inverse: A Hot-Blooded Super Robot hero stuck in a Real Robot setting.
• Kimi ni Todoke has three such characters, Chizuru, Ryu, and Kazuichi "Pin" Arai. Who seems to lost their way from a fiery shounen sport series to a lighthearted shoujo romance.

Film

• Nearly every character in The Big Lebowski has the wrong idea of what world they live in.
  • The Dude is clearly a Stoner Flick side character who wandered into a Film Noir plot.
  • Walter is the Shell-Shocked Veteran lead in a Vietnam movie who's struggling to readjust to society.
  • Donny is the simple protagonist of a Slice of Life film.
  • The Nihilists seem to think that they're in a Quentin Tarantino Villain Protagonist movie. As Walter demonstrates, they're very much not.
  • The Jesus, a Plot Irrelevant Villain, would be much more at a home in an underdog sports movie.
  • And of course the cowboy who think he's in a western.
• Tommy Frigo in Adventureland has wandered in from a raunchy teen movie.
• Steve the Pirate in DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story.
• Part of the reason that Sam Witwicky is so disliked by the Transformers fandom is that he belongs in a high school stoner comedy rather than running from Decepticons.

Literature

• Quincey P. Morris from Dracula. Nothing like the presence of an American cowboy in a gothic horror story set in Britain to make you go "Say again?"

Live Action TV

• The trio of mad scientist supervillains in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After they disable the museum guards with an ice ray and steal a precious diamond, our heroes start searching the ancient tomes for a "frost monster that eats diamonds."
• Gwen Raiden in Angel.
• One can argue that the very nature of Doctor Who makes the Doctor this. He's a Sufficiently Advanced Alien Science Hero who regularly finds himself in various genres and settings (such as the Old West, Ancient Rome, Highlander Scotland, World War II, modern day London) that a sci-fi protagonist has no business being in. The Fifteenth Doctor is probably the most overt as he's in two series about gods and magic, forcing him to chuck out Clarke's Third Law and play by the arcane's rules.
  • Katarina which got her Killed Off for Real in a matter of (In-Universe) hours. In a period piece of Classical Mythology, Katarina would be the ideal lead character in a coming of age story. In a Space Opera, Katarina was a Fish Out of Temporal Water too extreme for Doctor Who.
  • Per Word of God, Harry Sullivan was meant to be one, being a pastiche of the typical everyday hero from British pulp fiction magazine stories who had stumbled into Doctor Who and found himself Always Second Best compared to the Doctor, someone who actually knows what he's doing and succeeds on his skills, not status. Though Terrance Dicks noted this wasn't very consistent from writer to writer.
  • Leela. Despite visiting far-off future times and planets, she's written in the mould of trashy Victorian era Jungle Opera with all the raw sex appeal that comes with it.
  • Rose Tyler was clearly ripped from the pages of every trashy 2000s British Soap Opera. This was an intentional decision on the part of the writing team as they felt her status as such would make her a more readily accessible Audience Surrogate to introduce viewers to the then all but dead sci-fi genre. Her mother Jackie also qualifies, being even more an overtly British Soap Opera character who found herself in the middle of Dalek and Cybermen invasions.
  • Canton Everett Delaware III in "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon" is very much a character from a serious Period Piece drama set in the 1960s about the plight of openly gay man in a time before the civil rights' movement. Then the Doctor drags him into an Ancient Aliens conspiracy story.
  • "The Return of Doctor Mysterio" puts the Doctor, Nardole, and the Harmony Shoal in the middle of a Silver Age Superman story.
• Star Trek:
  • During the time of Star Trek: The Original Series, Leonard McCoy belonged on the frontier of the 19th century Old American West rather than on a 23rd century starship, the good doctor constantly voicing a disdain for new-fangled tech and freaky new life, like any good frontiersman.
  • Much of the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits sentiments in the first season of Star Trek: Picard is down to most of the crew being composed of this. Aside from Picard and Seven, the crew of La Sirena doesn't quite fit to the world of Star Trek. Rios, if anything, belong in Star Wars, Raffi belongs in a detective drama about One Last Job, Elnor is a young warrior lead in a coming of age story who wants to prove himself, Soji is the hapless patsy of a conspiracy movie and Agnes is the quirky and introverted smart girl lead of a Slice of Life series.

Video Games

• In any other game Bang Shishigami might have been The Hero (and Dogged Nice Guy to Lichi). In Blaz Blue he's treated with no respect, with his only canon "victory" to date being using his Super Mode to...flee from Terumi .

Western Animation

• An episode of Johnny Bravo involving all sorts of Halloween creatures also has a random gnome (of the lawn variety) mingling with them.
• The Simpsons:
  • Hank Scorpio in "You Only Move Twice" is clearly the Big Bad of a Bond film plopped into an otherwise ordinary Slice of Life Simpsons episode.
  • Frank Grimes in "Homer's Enemy". He'd be perfectly at home in a more serious drama show about the plight of the working man where he's the Only Sane Man. In a madcap show like The Simpsons, he's seen as a humourless and entitled bore.
• Some of Roger's personas in American Dad! are walking homages to one genre of fiction and/or character archetypes that look pointedly out of place in a dramedy like American Dad!.
• The title characters of Rick and Morty. Despite being sci-fi heroes, they often find themselves in scenarios (like a heist movie or a superhero conflict) that a Mad Scientist and his watson have no place in.
• Played for Drama, though not very much, in Solar Opposites. The family, Korvo in particular, are sci-fi characters and their interacting with mundane Slice of Life scenarios on Earth causes no end of chaos.
• Charlie in Hazbin Hotel is essentially a Disney Princess; being just as much as the Adorkable Genki Girl Friend to All Living Things as any Disney heroine; in Hell. It actually works against her for the first half of the first season. Since Hell is largely a Crapsack World that demands cruelty to survive, no one pays a huge amount of respect to someone so unapologetically peppy.