Hanging a lampshade, sometimes referred to as hanging a lantern, is a technique where the story consciously recognizes something as being weird or cliché. Sometimes they can feel like the story is winking at the audience; a little “see what we did there.”
.comedy
Comedy, Tragedy, & Romance 109-02
Commercial fiction is written to entertain, but audiences can be very picky about the type of story they want to read or watch. Most genres engage the same issues as literary and mainstream, but they engage the issues within the genre framework, disguising a familiar topic in the trappings of their genre.