I know you didn't say that, hence why it was a question rather than a statement.
I went to cliche stories because you seem to not want genre-savvy characters, while genre-savvy characters could only utilise their genre-savviness if the world adhered to the general lines of the genre, and thus cliches and predictability (heck, genre-savviness is generally the ability to predict what is going to happen and use out-of-the-box thinking to try and get the best possible outcome).
People from the Middle Ages end up in a DnD world. Two of them are ancestors of Gygax and Arneson.I just prefer to see characters who aren't stumped by "how does one make a rope in the middle-ages" or "how do you put up a leather cuirass/saddle a horse" because they've never seen one .. or trying to tackle inworld problems with IRL modern thought processes..
purely a personal preference, of course.