I'm not sure what the trope's called, but I love stories where the protagonist succeeds in extraordinary circumstances simply by being calm and practical and not giving up, while everyone around them is losing their heads (figuratively, that is).
A lot of the Ethshar books (Lawrence Watt-Evans) are based on this -- with a story built around standard fantasy tropes and a protagonist that is practical and reasonable and doesn't accept the fantasy trope role.
Favorite example: from "Once Upon a Time: A Treasury of Modern Fairy Tales" (DelRay 1991), Watt-Evans's story has a small isolated village fall prey to a dragon. The dragon demands the sacrifice of a sheep every week. Simple math tells the villagers that they aren't going to be breeding sheep fast enough to keep up, so eventually it's going to end badly. They consult a magic oracle and send a boy on a quest to save the village. He brings back a practical young woman who the oracle indicated would be their salvation. The villagers, being genre-savvy, decide that they need to sacrifice the woman to the dragon because that's how it always works in the stories. The boy frees the woman and together they gather poisonous mushrooms, fill bladders with them, and stuff them into the sheep that's being offered to the dragon. The dragon eats the poison-filled sheep and dies.
There's a hint of this in a lot of Discworld, too.