Deconstructed Trope / Visual Novels

• Crimson Gray: Deconstructs the Yandere trope by treating Lizzie as a mentally ill individual who needs treatment, as well as by removing Moe elements that usually are used to make Yanderes cute and desirable. The former is especially important given the lack of knowledge and stigma surrounding mental illness in Japanese society.
• Danganronpa:
  • The first game initially deconstructs Declaration of Protection and The Dulcinea Effect: Sayaka Maizono recognized whiffs of these tropes in her childhood classmate Makoto Naegi and exploited them to her benefit — planning to first worm her way into his affections and make him swear to help her, so she would be able to kill another student and pin the blame on Makoto himself. She would've possibly gotten away with this, had the guy whom she wanted to murder not killed her in self-defense.
  • As the later games explore Sayaka's reason for her actions in the first game, she turns out to be a deconstruction of other tropes: I Just Want to Be Loved and Attention Whore. Her desire for attention has a rather sad background, as she was raised by a single father who also was very workaholic and left her alone all the time. Young Sayaka spent several hours on her own in front of the TV and fell in love with the Idol Singer way of life, thinking that if she became one of these she would be given the affection and love she lacked; thus she worked hard, became a part of an idol group, and was so good at it that she became the Ultimate Pop Sensation, loved and admired by everyone in Japan. Then Monokuma exploited Sayaka's massive terror at the idea of being left behind and discarded, showing her a video of what would happen if she didn't leave Hope's Peak: that her group would be disbanded and she'd be totally abandoned by her fans... which ultimately made her snap hard enough to plan killing someone and use Makoto as a scapegoat — and finished when she actually TRIED to kill someone and ended up dead for it. All because Sayaka felt that, if she lost her fans's love and support, she would be literally worth NOTHING.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair deconstructs Reluctant Fanservice Girl with Mikan Tsumiki. A Shrinking Violet who has the misfortune of landing in inexplicably revealing positions whenever she trips. Embarrassing herself in front of everyone else. As it turns out however, she actually does this on purpose. Being so afraid of being ignored that she willingly makes a spectacle of herself in order to get attention from others. Not to mention it is strongly implied in Mikan's backstory that she was sexually abused.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony:
    • Shuichi's backstory deconstructs Asshole Victim. After exposing the culprit of a murder case, he found out that the man who was killed was an irredeemable piece of scum who had wronged his killer. As a result, he gained a fear of trying to expose the truth.
    • Maki is a Deconstruction of the Violently Protective Girlfriend, as her attempts to protect Kaito only make everything worse. In Chapter Five, when Kokichi kidnaps Kaito and holds him hostage in the hangar, Maki steals an electrohammer to break in and takes a crossbow and poison from her lab with the intent to save Kaito. She finds Kokichi and ruthlessly interrogates him about being a Remnant of Despair, but Kokichi has no idea what she's talking about. Given he's a chronic liar, she doesn't believe him and tries to kill him, only for Kaito to take the shot. Then when it turns out Kaito drank the antidote she brought, not Kokichi, everything Maki did becomes completely moot because he dies of a fatal illness he'd been hiding the entire time. Then Tsumugi reveals in the final chapter that Maki's feelings for Kaito were implanted in her during the brainwashing process to boost the show's ratings. Maki does NOT take this well.
    • Kokichi, Miu and Maki all deconstruct The Friend Nobody Likes, as being treated with suspicion and annoyance with their classmates causes them to act out more, further distancing themselves from them, making bonding impossible and the characters unable to improve their behaviour without the possibility of making friends on the cards. Maki is the only one of the three to survive the game because of Kaito and Shuichi's efforts to befriend her after she is outed as the Ultimate Assassin and she slowly learns to trust in them. By contrast, Miu has No Social Skills and after Kaede's death, none of her classmates are willing to look past her vulgar persona to see the Hidden Heart of Gold beneath except for Ki-bo, a robot, and possibly Shuichi if you do Miu's freetime events. Because of this, when Miu sees the outside world is in desperate need of help, it's an easy decision for her to try and kill Kaito so she can escape the Killing Game and go help them, since everyone inside the game hates her anyway and she has nobody to talk her out of it. For Kokichi, his lies push everyone away so nobody trusts him even when his intentions are good or when he's telling the truth. When the cast turn their backs on him after the fourth trial, Kokichi is consumed with guilt over Gonta and Miu's deaths and decides Then Let Me Be Evil since everyone is all too willing to believe he is the Mastermind. As a result, he ends up Dying Alone and never learns the truth of the Killing Game.
  • Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls viciously deconstructs the touching minigame found on handheld games like Criminal Girls or the countless fanservice games found on the Vita. Rather than prodding the girl to arouse her in the limited time, you are tasked with preventing the hands from groping Komaru before she is sexually harassed into obedience by Kotoko. In addition, Kotoko herself was a victim of molestation, which makes this situation more repugnant.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! explores what would happen if the Not Love Interest in a Dating Sim VN was just as in love with the protagonist as the other girls can be, and possessed Medium Awareness to know that no matter what, the game will never allow them to be together. The results aren't pretty.
• All-Loving Hero is semi-deconstructed in stages across all three routes in Fate/stay night as being impossibly idealistic yet not necessarily a bad thing... but only if you can keep your sense of perspective. A handful of other tropes are touched upon in this - such as The Dulcinea Effect - but are generally props for the main point that there is something basically wrong with Shirou.
• Each of the romantic routes in Katawa Shoujo features a deconstruction, depending on the girl you pick for Hisao. Not all of them are intentional, but it still counts due to the effects on each relationships:
  • Rin: Cloudcuckoolander: Feels dissonant with the rest of the world, and falls into depression due to nobody being able to understand her or her art. Becomes self-destructive and compulsive in an attempt to keep up with her art and gain inspiration. One of her Bad Endings implies that she's liable to kill herself due to these emotional problems. Hisao tries to be the Cloudcuckoolander's Minder but it seriously affects his own mental stability.
  • Emi: Plucky Girl: Tries to deal with her issues as much as she can, but this means she can't bring herself to get close to others.
  • Lilly: The Stoic: Represses her emotions to the point of utterly neglecting them, and it's not easy to know what she needs and wants.
  • Hanako: Declaration of Protection: Eventually gets fed up with Hisao and Lilly coddling her, and the more you try to protect her, the more resentful she is.
  • Shizune: Spirited Competitor: Is so competitive that she drives away almost all of her friends except for Hisao and Misha. And in her Bad Ending she breaks up with Hisao since she thinks she's driving him and Misha away too.
• Little Busters! deconstructs a couple of tropes:
  • Kud's route deconstructs Funny Foreigners and other characters whose entire appeal is that they're not too foreign by having her feel extremely isolated by the fact that, in her true home, she's still treated as though she isn't really Japanese and that all her attempts to be so are hilarious.
  • At another point, it uses Riki, who is narcoleptic, to deconstruct the sleepyhead trope and show how randomly falling asleep and being unable to control it can seriously limit one's options, with Riki trying to help out on a farm to provide for Rin after they run away, losing a whole day's work due to falling asleep, and being driven to tears over the fact that he could only ever become an office worker in life since his narcolepsy would prevent him from being able to put an honest day's work in for anything else.
• Piofiore: Fated Memories:
  • Nicola is fiercely protective over Dante whom he views as a little brother. However he proceeds to do many questionable actions in his and in Dante's route, such as seemingly betray Dante, kidnapping and attempting to (and can succeed in) kill Lili and aiming to destroy all the mafia families, all to "protect" Dante without telling his reasons, which is to free Dante from his responsibilities as the Falzone Boss. Meanwhile, Dante is left hurt and confused by Nicola's actions and when he did finally find out why Nicola was doing this, he explicitly pointed out he never wanted Nicola to do any of that for him.
  • Former Key Maiden Chloe strongly believed that they were meant to be with Dante's father Silvio due to "fate", even if the latter never reciprocated their feelings and proceeded to marry someone else. To some degree, Chloe is aware that once a new Falzone heir is born, the "fate" that chose them to be together would shift and change, rendering their "fate" with Silvio to become null and void.
• Your Turn to Die takes a handful of tropes commonly found in Visual Novels:
  • Sara Chidouin deconstructs a few common tropes visual novel protags are known for:
    • All-Loving Heroine: Deconstructed horribly. As it becomes quickly apparent, being a Magnetic Hero with a care for everyone trapped in a game that will have people die is not a good combination for one's mental health, especially when Sara personally blames herself for every single death that happens, even when logically she shouldn't blame herself for things that are very often beyond her control. This seeps into eventually causing permanent damage after Joe's execution, where Sue Miley's sadistic act of baiting Sara into saving Joe from his Cruel and Unusual Death by only prolonging his suffering destroys her utterly, and causes her to develop a series of nasty psychosis problems up to and including mass hallucinations, potential PTSD and further hallucinations of a demonic version of Joe blaming her for making him suffer. Even after fracturing entirely, she still holds this quality and tries her best to be there for all of the survivors, usually at the cost of herself.
    • Ordinary High-School Student: Sara being trapped in a circumstantially life-and-death Deadly Game and eventually becoming the unofficial leader of the survivor group by virtue of their magnetic personality and status as a Hope Bringer, in a similar vein to Makoto Naegi from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and Junpei from Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. Only what happens instead is different; the trauma of losing the ones she loves as well as her lack of the emotional fortitude required to deal with the deadly circumstances surrounding her and the pressure of leading others to safety causes her to completely lose it, and depending on your choices, outright go permanently insane from grief and self-loathing. This takes an even deeper shade with The Reveal that Sara is actually dangerously willing to full on betray and manipulate others for her own survival, as shown by her results in AI simulations, and it was only Joe's influence that prevented her from doing so in the game itself.
    • Magnetic Hero: While she can still sway others to her side, this doesn't always work as well as she'd like, she blames herself when things go horribly wrong, and some of the other participants distrust her specifically because it seems like the others are putting too much faith in a seemingly ordinary high school girl.
    • Young and in Charge: Despite effectively being a high school student, Sara's deductive skills and Magnetic Heroine characteristics has almost everyone looking to her for advice and leadership. This quickly shapes up to be a Deconstructed Trope, however, as Sara's high intelligence yet still-developing emotional maturity means she'd inevitably feel responsible for each and every death that happens to everyone. It's to the point Sou openly questions and even distrusts her for how everyone can put their faith in someone so young, and he's not wrong, either.
  • Sou Hiyori takes a part a couple:
    • Jerkass: He's a raging, uncooperative dickass in the vein of similar characters from other visual novels like Byakuya Togami in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc or Dio in Virtue's Last Reward. Then it's revealed that the organizers performed several simulated games with AI before the main show, and his antisocial and antagonistic personality resulted in him dying in every single one of them, prompting them to give him a 0.0% chance to survive. It also leaves him to be Out-Gambitted, as because of his strained relationship with the rest of his cast, they can derail his plans by virtue of trusting and working with each other.
    • Token Evil Teammate: A subversion as well as a deconstruction of the underlying behavior of one. His misbehavior and treatment of others has him constantly distrusted and alienated by the rest of the cast, openly cautious of him even while aware they're in the same boat. In truth, though? He's not malicious, he's terrified, well aware that he's in a game he's been calculated as unable to win, molded into taking on the behavior and identity of an emotional abuser for the sake of sheer desperation not to die. He isn't anything that can truly be called evil.
  • Kai Satou deconstructs the Aloof Ally concept. While Kai is working to escape the Death Game alongside the other survivors, he hardly has a hand in cooperation, and is distant from everyone else in the group, leaving much about him and his motivations in the air. When his actions are called into question (having previous knowledge of the building they're in, threatening one person into attacking another, hiding a tool of precious information and having previous contact with the kidnappers), he doesn't have anyone to back him up due to his avoidance of his allies. His defense ultimately comes down to claiming that Sou, the Token Evil Teammate of the group, is worse than him, and he promises to reveal information later. Unfortunately for him, his reasoning is too up in the air for anyone to side with him, he is then forced to kill himself to avoid giving the kidnappers the satisfaction of inflicting a CruelAndUnusualDeath. When it's later revealed Kai was actually Good All Along, the cast feels worse and worse about his fate.
  • Q-Taro Burgerberg, (yes, that's his real name). He fills the role of The Big Guy in the death game with his impressive size and physical strength, like characters such as Sakura Ogami and Seven. Unlike them, however, who are mainly defined by their nobility, Q-taro is defined by his skittishness and Dirty Coward streak, even leaving the entire cast to die in a bad ending.
  • Kanna Kizuchi takes apart the Heroic Sacrifice trope. Kanna claims that if the cast has to sacrifice anyone, then she should be the one chosen to save anyone the trouble of a Sadistic Choice. It's clear that there's little heroic about this; she's a Death Seeker with a martyrdom complex brought about by immense Survivor's Guilt. Her death does a great deal more harm than good, traumatizing Sou and Sara further, leading to Sou blaming Sara and giving her a PTSD attack so bad she breaks down, and ultimately leading into a darker route for the rest of the game.

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