Deconstruction / Other Media

---

Anime & Manga

• Monster Girl Doctor and Monster Musume both deconstruct Cute Monster Girl through Bizarre Alien Biology:
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: Mero (Monster Musume) cannot swim in chlorinated pool water for any period of time long than a scant moment, as it results in the same effect as a human sucking bleach fumes. She would get very sick. Likewise, Lulala (Monster Girl Doctor) has both lungs and fish-like gills but her pleural cavity needs to remain shut for her to be able to breathe air through her lungs; she grows accustomed to using the lungs to breathe as a result of spending the majority of her time on land as part of her Street Musician work, and nearly drowns herself when she rescues a boy in the water.
  • Fantastic Racism: While monsters are largely accepted in human society, there is still clearly a social bias towards "pretty" or "human-like" monsters over "monstrous" or "alien" looking ones. Rachnera (Monster Musume) and Kunai (Monster Girl Doctor) are perfectly nice despite her scary appearances, but the treatment they recieve leaves both of them a bit bitter and cynical towards people. It goes the other way too: Memé (Monster Girl Doctor) is a cyclops blacksmith girl who finds humans unnerving to look at.
  • Snake People: In Monster Girl Doctor) lamia are like real snakes in that their tongues are stored deep in their throats at rest. Bacteria within the mouth or tongue can easily spread to the throat as a result, leaving them unfortunately prone to throat infections and pneumonia. Miia (Monster Musume) has all of her organs stored in her human torso, leaving her snake-like tail a thick, broad trunk of strong muscle - she often hurts poor Kirohito in her attempts to "cuddle" him with it.
  • Harping on About Harpies: Papi (Monster Musume) is somewhat able to hold simple things like a cup or an ice-crean cone between her wings, but she is almost incapable of anything that requires complex dexterity since she has no hands. She also drops things a lot. Harpies in Monster Girl Doctor are oviparous and lay eggs that are larger than grapefruit, so when Illy develops an egg binding issue (where the egg gets stuck in the reproductive tract), it's extremely painful and would likely have resulted in her death if not for Glenn's assistance. As heavy clothes would only impede their flying and their high core body temperatures (like real life birds) leave them largely unbothered by the cold anyway, harpies wear hardly anything.
  • Our Giants Are Bigger: In Monster Girl Doctor, Gigas are massively strong to match their size and consciously try to avoid moving unless they absolutely have to. They also have extremely low metabolic rates for creatures of their size, so while they do not have absurd food requirements, it takes them a long time to recover from any illness. Dione spent ten years just getting over a simple cold.

Alternate Reality Games

• Omega Mart: Going hand in hand with the satirical angle, Omega Mart's advertising is designed to deconstruct tropes present in advertising for grocery stores, such as sale prices having absurd requirements (such as an offer for Omega Mart Yogurt being 2 for $10 only being valid if you purchase 30,000 units of the stuff or another product being on sale for $6.99... per point-one gallons.) or products being on recall for strange reasons or no discernible reason (people mistaking Omega Mart Lemons for regular lemons or just enjoying their Orange Drink).

Arts

• Young Sick Bacchus: Most other depictions of Bacchus show him as handsome and in the midst of a celebration, while here he looks as though he has come down with a venereal disease and makes him look freshly dead. People have often read in this painting that this is what he would look like after a full night of drinking and excess.

Fan Works

• The Bitter End of Ranma ½ is a deconstruction of several tropes from its home series.
  • Amusing Injuries: Ranma's abuse at the hands of Akane is very much not Played for Laughs or Slapstick comedy, but is instead shown to be a serious issue that leaves him critically injured on multiple occasions and ultimately results in his and Ukyo's deaths when Akane finally loses it completely.
  • Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male and Would Not Hit a Girl also get both barrels - his abuse at Akane's hands leaves him badly injured and is rightfully portrayed as horrific, while his denial that anything is wrong with his relationship and passivity result in increasingly severe injuries. When he goes to a support group for Domestic Abuse victims, he's the sole man present and is immediately viewed as being the abuser in their relationship, almost being turned away wholesale until Ukyo reveals his curse; it's even explicitly acknowledged by the members of the group that they had never considered the possibility that Ranma was the one being abused, rather than the abuser.
  • Akane's canonical Hair-Trigger Temper and Tsundere traits are deconstructed via Alternative Character Interpretation: her violent temper stems from legitimate mental issues as opposed to being mere personality traits, resulting in outbursts of extreme aggression that often take the form of violence directed toward Ranma followed by My God, What Have I Done? reactions of various strength, while her stubbornness and refusal to listen to advice ultimately lead to tragedy: Ukyo and Ranma are both murdered by Akane during one of her violent outbursts, while Akane herself goes insane after realizing what she just did.
• A Brighter Dark is a Fire Emblem Fates retelling that alters a few characters' (and entire countries') personalities to what they would logically be in that setting, and then shows how events would play out in that setting, without the presence and influence of the third kingdom Valla either. Nohr suffers from famine and starvation with Garon's every decision being a Sadistic Choice, such as invading Hoshido out of pure desperation. Hoshido meanwhile is fabulously wealthy, and a fantastic place to live, as long as you're Hoshidan. Combat is also a lot more graphic with Combat Pragmatism and dismemberment being common place.
• Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness:
  • What would the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows look like if you think about them in the context of our world? (torture in school, child soldiers, etc.)
  • Most notably, the same Battle of Hogwarts is portrayed as an actual battle, with lots of gorn, as opposed to Rowling's lighter portrayal of the house elves, ghosts, Sybill Trelawney, and Neville throwing stuff at the Death Eaters' heads.
• Eden, by Obsessmuch: Deconstructs the crack pairing of Hermione Granger and Lucius Malfoy, two people who would never, under any circumstances, fall in love or produce a child. Lucius Malfoy is a married pureblood supremacist who loyally follows Voldemort while Hermione Granger is a 17/18 year old muggle born student at Hogwarts who is best friends with Harry Potter and young enough to be his daughter. Their interests, goals, life styles and beliefs constantly clash and their growing attraction to each other not only damages them, but also risks hurting people in their lives and how they'd be seen.
• The Ghost Boy and the Combatants: Of Death Battle's Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny concept. It's shown by not just Danny but other characters they're not fond of being pitted against each other out of nowhere in a fight to the death.
• Halloween Unspectacular: The final arc deconstructs the Author Avatar trope. The series' writer, E350, has previously been portrayed as someone who watches over and records stories from various universes, and he also interacts with the characters on a regular basis. However, it's because of this that the Stranger hates him so much; despite all the power E350 has, he almost never tries to intervene and help the people of the universes he watches, content to record their suffering for his stories (and it doesn't help that the Stranger turns out to be the Bus Driver, previously a massive Butt-Monkey whose life ended up ruined by the wacky situations he kept getting into). The fact that E350 is a character in the story himself also means the Stranger is capable of subjecting him to a far more serious form of Rage Against the Author than he normally would be able to.
• Infinity Train: Blossomverse:
  • As a whole, the stories break down the plot of "Characters travel the world with a Pokémon by their side". Chloe Cerise gets thrown into the train, which will not let its passengers go until they confront their traumas and mental walls, and decides that she's going to reinvent herself by traveling across the train's multiple cars, and the fic discusses how a person can find their own self-worth and growth without Pokémon.
  • The story also explains what the repercussions are for the loved ones of people taken by the train if they're gone for weeks if not months on end, and how things could be different if their problems were noticed.
  • Another thing they like to point out is the conventions on the anime. For example, Gladion was heralded as a hero for being the one doing everything to protect his sister while Lusamine was chewed out for ignorance... but in truth, Gladion knew everything and could've told his mother what was going on much much sooner.
  • The story also deconstructs the vitriol-filled Accusation Fic and Revenge Fic. Anger and revenge play a significant role in all stories, but in here they only serve to make things worse, and the situations are a lot more grey than other examples of the same genre.
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest Rewrite deconstructs several highlights of the original comic:
  • Emma's revenge against "Jimmy" is shown to be selfish and petty, especially in light of how it did nothing to stop MI5's actions. Furthermore, "Jimmy" is shown to have been in the right for attacking the magical dimensions, as they were planning to invade Earth.
  • The comic's criticisms of modern superhero popularity is taken to task by explaining that, yes, they do make corporations lots of money, but they also serve as inspirational role models. And while they may subliminally teach that ordinary people should be dependent on extraordinary beings, you need extraordinary beings to solve extraordinary problems.
  • In a universe where the creations of H. P. Lovecraft exist, they're going to eventually be front-and-center instead of just mere footnotes.
  • Not related to the original comic, Robert A. Heinlein character Lazarus Long isn't seen as a wisdom-infused paragon, but a self-absorbed deviant. When he inspires Jack Nemo and Greta Mors to give into their lust, they become trapped in an unhealthy relationship, thus deconstructing Long's incest fetish.
• Monster Chronicles:
  • The story's plot can be seen as a deconstruction of Total Drama All-Stars. Like All-Stars, a Knight of Cerebus possesses one of the contestants, and Duncan is the only one to know what danger they are in. However unlike All-Stars, this story shows how horrifying this situation can be, as Cedric is a realistic example of a sociopathic criminal; he has no problem killing or mutilating the contestants or even people unrelated to the game simply for fun. And unlike Mal, Cedric does not care for the contest or its prize, and is only in it for his own amusement.
  • Duncan's character is also deconstructed over the course of the story. Like in All-Stars Duncan knew there was someone in the game who was a danger to the other contestants, and although he knew the danger they were all in, Duncan is more concerned with his bad boy rep. However, in this story Duncan's actions are portrayed as dumb and cowardly, and numerous characters call him out on it. Also, Duncan being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold is deconstructed, as in canon he is shown to have a good side and care about his friends, despite being a bully and a thug. Like in All-Stars, he tries rejecting his good side to prove he is still a bad boy. However, he ends up proving himself wrong by showing that despite appearing to be a tough guy, he is really a coward who would rather protect his reputation then do the right thing, and having a good side doesn't matter since he rejected it by choosing to be a bad person.
• New Tamaran:
  • The life of a Kid Hero would push the most abstinent teens to give into their sexual desires. Also, there'd be no time for any serious relationships, only platonic sex between friends.
  • Also, it's quite dangerous for humans to have sex with metahumans or powerful aliens ... unless the stronger lover has remarkable control over his/her strength and other powers.
  • Human militaries in a comic book setting would do a much better job at fighting an alien invasion than any number of metahumans.
  • If superheroes join a war of any scale, most of them will die, and the rest will probably be too traumatized to return to hero work.
  • Superheroes can't raise a family unless one of them abandons hero work.
• Pokémon Reborn: Ever wonder why the villains don't use the Pokémon they own on people directly if Pokemon are so powerful, according to the Pokedex? Well, in this fangame they do, ranging from a few broken ribs to death to getting your soul burned away to nothingness. They even have machines that can amplify the powers of Pokémon, and the first one you find, on a Pokémon that's not even that strong, to boot, has ravaged an entire city area.
• Poké Wars highlights how lethal the pokémon can be, and also deconstructs the Pokémon revolution genre by showing how such an affair is not just a clean humans vs pokémon battle but an utter clusterfuck of warring sides and survivors.
• Sasha and the Frogs: The fanfic serves as a deconstruction of the cartoon, Amphibia, where most of the situations that Anne has been through with Sasha taking her place has a realistic tone to it where the citizens are more serious with their jobs and duties as farmers and sellers, the Plantars being more braver (and understanding) towards Sasha, and Anne having angst and anger towards how Sasha being a false friend to her. In addition, the fanfic gave Sasha her well-deserved karma that seems to burden her and destroy her life entirely.
• Shattered Reflection is a Fire Emblem: Awakening fic that shows how the Shepherds would naturally react to learning that their tactician was a demon god that had destroyed the world in an alternate universe. It goes further with a bit of time travel taking the lead character to another version of the world to keep her tragic fate from befalling her sibling.
• Syngenesophobia deconstructs the Amusing Injuries and Played for Laughs fights that are a mainstay of the humour in The Loud House by showing exactly how much someone can be hurt in a Big Ball of Violence. When nine of his sisters gang up on him during a family dispute, eleven-years-old Lincoln Loud ends up in the hospital with severe wounds including a broken nose, broken arm, black eyes, fractured ribs and some teeth getting knocked out. And those are just the physical injuries. The rest of the fanfic deals with his recovery (which will take a long time of hospitalization) and his developing a crippling fear of his siblings. While his sisters do realize how far they went in their moment of anger and deeply regret it, they have to face punishment for what they did and are shunned by their friends when the rumour about them putting their brother in the hospital starts to spread.
• The Wind Done Gone: Of the Southern Belle trope. The original already deconstructed it by having everyone be too fed up with Scarlett that, when she finally changes, nobody cares. Here, it's taken further as The Wind Done Gone shows not only the dysfunctional and damaging aspects of Scarlett's upbringing but also the crippling aspect the belle psychology has had on her own mind, twisting her into a nigh-sociopath.

Manhua

• Bloodline: The Last Royal Vampire:
  • It is a rare popular Manhua that deconstructs the conflict of Abrahamic Good vs. Evil. The family of "Bloodline" are a set of vampires who have trouble adjusting to the human society and keeping their identities hidden. One problem is how they get food (since they can only drink blood), and they have similar moral values that make them very sympathetic. The claimed "good guys" are the Shengdi, who act like Knight Templar fueled by Fantastic Racism and With Us or Against Us ideology. They're willing to kill and torture people who defect or just get in the way.
  • Furthermore, as it transforms into a Fighting Series, it shows how dangerous and sudden their fights can be. The male protagonist Ye Ren even points out that it's nothing like the popular novels. Examples? He only sees a flash of Lilo's first fight and he couldn't tell if it was blood or weapon fire.

Tabletop Games

• A lot of John Tynes and/or Greg Stolze works features this. Unknown Armies, for instance, deconstructs the Urban Fantasy setting, the novel A Hunger Like Fire deconstructs the trope of the sensual vampire temptress and the RPGs Godlike and Wild Talents deconstructs superheroes stories set during World War II and the Cold War respectively.
• invoked While much of Warhammer 40,000 is indeed based around Cool vs. Awesome armies fighting in fantastically improbable situations, there's more than a few sources that depict the 40k universe in a deconstructed manner. For example, the short-story "What It's Like" deconstructs the Chaotic Evil Ax-Crazy Chaos Space Marines, generally seen as trigger-happy, moustache-twirling villains OOT, by explaining just how relentless and brutal each Marine has to be to not be stabbed in the back and left to be chewed on by Daemons for eternity, showing just how tragic these villains really are. Other works like "The Last Church" deconstruct the ideals and motives behind The Emperor of Mankind's actions, who is generally thought to be the best, last hope for humanity, and show just how petty, ignorant, immature, and ultimately egocentric he really was.

Theatre

• invoked While it's long since lost its "obviousness" (for lack of a better word), William Shakespeare's Hamlet was written as a deconstruction of the revenge drama tragedies popular in Elizabethan England at the time of its release. While it starts out for noble reasons, Hamlet's desire for revenge against his father's killer ultimately drags down just about everyone else around him, leading into the play's now-infamous Downer Ending. Additionally, the play shows that even if Hamlet really wants to kill his uncle Claudius for murdering his father, he frequently hesitates and struggles to do the deed unlike the contemporary protagonists of other revenge tragedies because he actually values human life and is understandably reluctant to actually kill someone in cold blood.
• A Streetcar Named Desire did not deconstruct any genre in particular, but it did deconstruct gender roles, physical relationships, and the American system of social classes in a rather harsh way. A common theory is that it was a direct response to Gone with the Wind, subverting the heroine, her marriage, and how she handles it in the face of a failing South.
• Euripides' Trojan Women and Hecuba portrayed The Trojan War as a human tragedy rather than a sweeping epic tale of martial valor in the Homeric tradition. In general, his tragedies are regarded as more "modern" than those of his predecessors because of their morally ambiguous protagonists, pervasive sense of anxiety and despair, religious skepticism and overall portrayal of mythological subjects and characters as real people.
• M. Butterfly is a no-holds-barred deconstruction of the "Oriental woman submissive to her white man" trope that Madame Butterfly codified, with a male Chinese spy disguised as a woman deliberately invoking this trope to get a French diplomat to fall in love with him and pointing out that Asian women are generally no more modest or demure than other women in real life.
• The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen became famous (and controversal) for not bending over to the standards of drama back then. Instead, he made people take a good hard look at them and asked, "Is this what you really want?" One major example is A Doll's House. The main character, Nora, is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who thinks that her husband will take care of everything in life. However, she realizes that what was between the two wasn't real love. The ending shows her setting out to find who she really is, with "the door slam that has reverberated around the world".
• Brigadoon shows what happens to the people of the Vanishing Village. The most tragic examples are stuck in a village surrounded by people whom they have no connection to except a low-level mutual loathing, and have to watch their true love marry someone else, and can't go off to do something else or try to get away.
• Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle is based on an older Chinese play called The Chalk Circle, in which two women both claim to be a child's mother and a wise judge determines which is the real mother and which is lying to get her hands on the child's inheritance. Brecht picks apart the story's assumptions: in his version, it's the child's real (biological) mother who only wants him for his inheritance and the other woman who loves the child for himself. And their case is being heard by a venal reprobate who was made a judge as a joke, for whom justice comes a distant third after pursuing his pleasures and keeping his own skin intact. The play has a happy ending, but possibly one that the original Chinese author would not have recognized as such.
• Into the Woods is essentially fairytale deconstruction: the musical. It plays out the events of a few fairytales simultaneously (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel) in the first act, but the second act is when everything goes crazy. Having only known each other for three days, Cinderella and her princes' marriage falls apart. Jack knocking down the beanstalk, killing the giant, and stealing his belongings angers his wife, who sets out to try to take revenge. Red becomes much tougher and angrier, pulling a knife on Jack at one point. Poor Rapunzel is so traumatized by the events of the first act that she goes crazy and walks off of a cliff.

Tropes

• The well-known Aesop "Be Careful What You Wish For" operates in this way. Person X makes wish Y. Wish Y is granted to person X. Wish Y then manages to have sufficiently negative unintended consequences on person X's life that wish Y now looks like a ridiculous thing to wish for. Thus, Wish Y is deconstructed.
• Freudian Excuse is deconstructed via Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: A character will use a personal tragedy to justify his or her immoral behavior, only to have their argument torn apart.
• The Hard Work Fallacy deconstructs Equivalent Exchange: No matter how hard you work for something, there's no guarantee you'll get it, and if you do, your effort probably wasn't the only factor.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Often involves a deconstruction of the person on the receiving end.

Visual Novels

• Doki Doki Literature Club! seems like a bright and cheery Romance Game on the surface, but it brutally deconstructs Breaking the Fourth Wall. Imagine if the character winking at the camera actually knew that their entire reality was fabricated to appease the real people living in a limitless real world just behind a screen. Monika goes against her programming to try and romance the player in an attempt to get something out of the real world.
  • It also deconstructs Reality Warper powers; being able to tear apart and alter reality on a whim would not necessarily result in reality surviving the process. The more Monika modifies the game — her reality — the more broken it, and everyone living in it, becomes.
• Fate/stay night, especially Unlimited Blade Works route, is a cold and cynical deconstruction of Martyr Without a Cause, Chronic Hero Syndrome, and other related "hero" tropes.
  Archer: There is nothing at the end of saving people.
  • Then reconstructs those same tropes wonderfully.
  • Fate/Zero deconstructs the Darker and Edgier Necessarily Evil I Did What I Had to Do Anti-Hero, by showing you how screwed up a person would have to be to embrace willingly that sort of mindset, not just as a last resort, but as the ONLY one, through Kiritsugu Emiya, and how his excesses ended up costing him everything in the end with nothing to show for it but saving his future adopted son, Shirou Emiya.
  • The entire Grail War system is a Deconstruction of tournament style anime. Honorable combat is either a byword for stupidity or a cover for an extremely elaborate trap, quarter is seldom asked for or given, civilians are preyed on even more than the fighters sometimes, the moderators are always in it for themselves, either supporting one team from the get go or working for their own ends, and finally, the prize is really a Monkey's Paw that's only capable of destroying.
• Sucker for Love deconstructs Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?; the whole point of the game is that the Player Character summoned an eldritch god from beyond the veil that has the power to destroy all of creation... in order to kiss her. While his single-minded determination to get a kiss from Ln'eta does end up wooing her, she still plans on ending all of existence once the date is over and has absolutely no intention of sparing him. There's also the fact that as the game progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that being around Ln'eta and performing her dating rituals has adverse effects on his mental and physical health.

Web Animation

• What happens when a cartoon that typically relies on Toon Physics and Amusing Injuries has neither of those tropes in effect? You get Happy Tree Friends, where cute little cartoon animals get maimed and killed in horrifically graphic ways in every episode.
• How It Should Have Ended sometimes actually deconstructs Stating the Simple Solution by showing that the outcomes are not always great. This is best demonstrated with the Inside Out episode where Joy actually utilized how the Forgetters use to send memory back to headquarters. Sure, it eases the problem that Joy and Sadness will encounter in the move and prevents Bing Bong's death. But Joy didn't learn Sadness's purpose and Bing Bong ended up going to Riley's mind, tell her about what happened, and destroyed her psyche. This turns Riley into a Womanchild still living in her parents' house with the emotions unable to control her.
• The Most Popular Girls in School became struck with realism ever since the creators finished making a Deconstructive Parody series called Dr. Havoc's Diary.
  • In Episode 74, Jeannie does one of Cameron's life with a painful "The Reason You Suck" Speech. Cameron is ultimately, someone sad and pathetic who is just getting fucked by teachers and college students without ever actually accomplishing anything meaningful in her life and that is probably stuck in this loop until something can break her out of it, which includes the opportunity given by the competition. After the speech, there seems to be a brief moment where Cameron realizes her life really is awful and that she isn't really enjoying it.
  • In Episode 75, we have one of the fashion industry, as Jeannie Halverstad mentions, is based on creating unrealistic standards of beauty that forces people with low self esteem to buy clothes that they hope will make them look better, even though it won't really help that much.
• ONE. can be seen as a deconstruction of Object Shows. In most object shows, the characters we follow are mainly one dimensional and don't really have a life outside of the show. Many object shows also focus on the show part of an object show. ONE instead focuses on the object part of an object show: we see characters with actual lives, who have actual names and an actual job. Then Airy teleports them into the Plane and essentially "objectifies" the objects, naming them based on what kind of object that they are. The Plane is meant to represent your typical object show setting: grassy fields and blue skies—and the longer characters from the first batch stay in the Plane, the more they forget about their life before ONE, to the point where they even forget their old name. The Audience Participation aspect of an object show is also deconstructed: sure, the viewers are given a choice on what character they want to be eliminated, but that choice had already been made before the show even began. Eventually the competition side of the show is no longer the main focus, while in a typical object show the competition is the show.
• Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles takes many first person shooter tropes and twists them. Everything from capture the flag, to why there are two bases in the middle of a box canyon with no strategic value, and Respawn. Interestingly, the new series called Reconstruction is a deconstruction of the parodic nature of The Blood Gulch Chronicles. Caboose is tied up in the brig due to his self destructive tendencies. Grif and Simmons face the firing squad after selling all the ammo to the Blue team. The reason that all the red and blue conflicts were pointless squabbling over an equally pointless flag and base is revealed to be a conspiracy by command. However, since that is a deconstruction of a deconstruction, arguably that makes it a Reconstruction as all the video game tropes are being put back together.
• RWBY, being a series that is about taking a hard look at the stories being told to us in-universe and out of it, is filled with deconstructions:
  • While Qrow's chronic alcoholism was played for laughs at first, it takes a dark, realistic turn once he learns about Salem's aforementioned Complete Immortality and that the man he dedicated his life to has been lying about the hopelessness of the mission to fight against Salem to him since day one. Suddenly, his "quirky" alcoholism becomes the desperate coping mechanism of a bitter, broken man struggling to come to terms with the fact that his whole life of service, of Undying Loyalty to a man who he believed had all the answers, has been a complete lie. Going even further, Qrow's alcoholism starts to become an outright liability, as it renders him useless against the Apathy Grimm and all but shatters Ruby's previously ironclad faith in him.
  • For that matter, the very story that would end up breaking Qrow and deconstructing the downsides of his alcoholism is in itself a deconstruction of the idea of Happily Ever After endings, with Salem getting her happy ending at first with Ozma...only for life to continue regardless. When her Happily Ever After took a turn for the worse due to Ozma's death by illness, the subsequent grief she went through mixed with the cruelty of the Brother Gods condemning her to immortality without her lover, and then destroying humanity in reaction to her defiance utterly destroyed her. It's temporarily subverted when she meets up again with a reincarnated Ozma...only for things to sour once again when he reveals he's acting under the orders of the very gods who tormented her. Things do not improve afterwards.
• Smash King has this as a heavy Overarching Theme of the series, such as the main protagonist who is widely renowned as a villain (Bowser) as despite his reputation, he desires something other than a life of villainy. One even more notable example that this trope especially works well on is Link, on how the pressure of being a designated hero can really turn for the worse. With Link it also works as a subtle Take That! to the other Machinima cliches, particularly how Link's ALWAYS the hero, ALWAYS saves Zelda, and ALWAYS beats Ganondorf.

Webcomics

• Kick the Football, Chuck. deconstructs Peanuts and its gags and sets them to the tone of Charlie Brown's cancer.
• The Pixel Art Comic Kid Radd, while largely light in tone, presents a "video game characters living in video-land" scenario where it's a very real problem that many inhabitants are innately armed and know nothing but killing. They know why they were created, and they don't like it. The player character Radd goes from slacker to Determinator because he always had the latter's mindset, but started his days in a game under the player's control, so he had to learn initiative completely from the ground up. Upon being freed, Radd needed instructions to walk independently.
• 8-Bit Theater is a deconstruction of Japanese RPGs, specifically Final Fantasy. 8-bit theater portrays a JRPG world if the chosen heroes were actually just as evil, if not worse, than the evil they fight.
• It's Walky! could arguably be seen as a deconstruction of the goofy 1980s cartoons creator David Willis is a fan of (mostly G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and Transformers). Sure it features a unique special forces group, SEMME (who were initially based on GI Joe) with an eccentric line up of operatives, who routinely foil the insane schemes of a Harmless Villain, but the eccentric operatives are soon revealed to be a bunch of dysfunctional screw-ups, and the Villain is in fact a Not-So-Harmless Villain.
• VG Cats deconstructs the cartoon violence of Tom and Jerry in this strip, showing the Real Life consequences of Jerry whacking Tom on the head with a mallet, as pictured above. Far from being amusing, it leaves Tom with severe brain damage (and possibly a paralytic neck injury) and Jerry in prison for assault.
• Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes takes a good hard look at the Unfortunate Implications of labeling whole races Always Chaotic Evil. It portrays goblins not as monsters but as people who live and love. It shows us that what Player Characters see as just an XP haul isn't so fun when you're the one they're killing to level up.
• The entire premise behind Darths & Droids is that the Star Wars universe is the result of a group of Tabletop Gamers (including a 7 year old girl) making it up as they go along. It lends a whole new perspective to the storyline of the prequel trilogy. The entire mess on Naboo was the result of the Player Characters epically ruining a delicate, carefully constructed plan by going Off the Rails, and engaging in all the sins of The Real Man, The Munchkin, and The Loonie. Palpatine is actually a good guy overthrowing a corrupt regime, and trying to bring a semblance of stability to the republic. Darth Maul was just a Chaotic Neutral Hired Gun who was only trying to work with the player characters, before they attacked him. To top it all off, some of the most bizarre and unrealistic plot points, such as Naboo being governed by a 14 year old Queen, exist because Jar Jar Binks is being played by a little girl.
• Strong Female Protagonist deconstructs the superhero genre, and asks what good superheroes can achieve when they're not facing immediate and palpable threats.
• MS Paint Adventures is Andrew Hussie's deconstructive love letter to a multitude of series, genres, concepts and tropes, including deconstruction itself.
• NIMONA: Nimona takes a look at stories that set villains as the protagonists and cast traditional heroes as antagonists. While most fanfics or original stories note that the villains are right and go that route, Ballister is not actually a villain. Instead, he was painted as one and merely decides to play the part. In addition, Ballister says he would cross the line if he ever hurt innocents and gets captured by the Institution when delivering a cure for a plague he caused. Nimona shows what would happen if a superpowered fangirl of a villain would do with immense powers and no moral code, leading to more destruction than before.
• In its darker arcs Roommates deconstructs Medium Awareness. How do you cope with being a fictional being? Your fate is literally written (or filmed, printed, uploaded on the internet etc.), your hopes and dreams are slave to the Theory of Narrative Causality, etc.. There is a reason why it has a support group for the canonically dead, no matter how silly this sounds.
• The Order of the Stick has a lot of Genre Savvy characters, but Tarquin carries it to the point where he sees the other characters as nothing more than plot devices and tropes. When he kills Nale, his own son one of the reasons he gives is that he has no place in the narrative anymore. Even Tarquin's allies are getting fed up with his meme obsession.
  • Tarquin actually manages to Deconstruct The Good Guys Always Win. When Tarquin's good son Elan points out that heroes always take down evil empires like his, Tarquin notes that for heroes to take them down, they must first exist, generally for decades or longer. Sure, he might get violently killed in the end, but he'll rule for years, and it'll make a great story for future dictators to take inspiration from when Elan himself overthrows him. Elan is so freaked out to hear his beloved tropes twisted this way that he has a full-fledged panic attack. Luckily he figures out a counter-deconstruction to tick his father off: if 'liberating' the empire will cause chaos and corruption anyway, why not ignore it entirely and let it rot itself over time from its Fascist, but Inefficient policies? It's a boring, anticlimactic ending that has about as many casualties as barging in and killing anyone guarding the tyrant, now with reduced inspiration.
• Slightly Damned
  • The demon's berserk form deconstructs Hulking Out, they grow several times their original size and can even gain new appendages but the transformation puts so much strain on their bodies that if they stay that way for too long they will die of over-exertion. Also, most of them lose their minds in the process, making them liabilities to their former allies.
  • The series also deconstructs a Forever War; the forces of heaven originally went to war with hell to defend Medius but after generations of fighting and dying (and the disappearance of their goddess) they went from all-loving hippies to fascists with strict caste laws and a code of genocide against demonic children. There's also the fact that hundreds of years of war have severely reduced the populations of both sides and now there aren't that many angels or demons left, prompting those in power to secretly forge a desperate alliance and attack a neutral party, Medius itself, for certain "resources".
  • Rhea's status as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold is called into question. While she's nicer to those she considers friends she was very unpleasant to everyone else to the point where she ended up in the Ring of the Slightly Damned which is only one step above Hell proper. Even then earlier in the series shows that she could also be pretty mean to her friends as well.
• Total Trauma: Of the original Total Drama series, and of the reality show genre in general. The comic's central theme is how the sadistic challenges Played for Laughs in the original show, as well as the relationship drama and betrayal typical of the reality show genre, would be deeply scarring to most people, especially high schoolers. Nearly every character has suffered as a result of being in the public eye at such a young age and spending their developing years pandering to or avoiding an audience.
• TwoKinds: The backstory and motivations of the villain Clovis are a deconstruction of Gender Bender and Karmic Transformation. He was magically transformed into a female version of himself by Lady Nora as punishment for his misogyny, a relatively common plot for this kind of story. Instead of him accepting his transformation or learning a moral lesson, however, this only worsened his personality due to how it interacted with his self-image — he retained his original male personality, which conflicted with his female form and caused him considerable mental stress (psychologically speaking, he's essentially a trans man under a magically-imposed inability to transition), and he was too arrogant and prideful to accept responsibility for his actions or really change as a person. As a result, what had been intended to teach him perspective and humility simply produced lifelong bitter resentment that drove him into much more extreme villainy than before.

Web Original

• Hatchetfield in general is one of the Town with a Dark Secret, and seems to be an answer to Welcome to Nightvale. The latter podcast talks about the unnatural oddities as normal, with radio host Cecil Baldwin reassuring listeners that everyone can handle the horror, along with their mundane lives, if they know what they're facing. As we see in Black Friday, regular people acknowledge that these horrors shouldn't be happening; far from Conditioned to Accept Horror, the protagonists have a Logical Latecomer response to finding out they're trapped with an Eldritch Abomination in the form of a Creepy Cute doll. Case in point, Lex is worried about getting her little sister to safety, as The Cassandra Hannah is in a Troubled Fetal Position and crying after watching Ethan die, while Becky and Tom hide out from the cultists in the movie theater and wonder how their lives led to such pointless violence. They acknowledge at the end of the show that none of them signed up for being survivors of a horror scenario.
• Aitor Molina vs. gives way too many consequences to most of the cartoony and reviewing tropes.
• Courier's Mind: Rise of New Vegas:
  • The series can be read as a deconstruction of the RPG protagonist and the worlds they inhabit as a whole: being seemingly the only person in the entire Mojave that can get anything done and often the only one that seems to even try to take any form of initiative leads to The Courier questioning the competence, intelligence, and/or work ethic of nearly everyone he meets in his adventures, needing to hold the hands of most people to solve even the simplest of issues as well as his own inability to say no to helping someone sort out their issues is a constant source of frustration for him, and also allows his ego and arrogance to quickly grow to increasingly insufferable degrees. And on top of that, being suddenly placed into a position that he, formally just a simple courier and freelance mercenary, can drastically alter the fate of the entire region begins to way heavily on his mind and by season 13, finally breaks him.
  • Of course, it's a Mind series. The entire show basically gives a middle finger to many of the game's mechanics. For example:
    • Performing medical operations on broken limbs while in the middle of the wasteland is very painful.
    • Doors made of 200 hundred year-old wood aren't bulletproof just because they're locked.
    • You can't collect meat and hides off animals without a knife, let alone carry all that meat around with you in your pocket without the blood getting on your clothes.
    • The Courier needs a duffle bag to carry all the loot he collects throughout his adventures. And even then, there's a limit to how much he can stuff into it.
    • Energy weapons that have been around for 200 years are leaky and risk running out of charge in the middle of a fight. Additionally, it's difficult to gauge how many shots they have left even if they're fully functional.
    • The Courier mentions you have to set an injured limb with a medical brace, before treating it with a stimpack, or else it won't heal properly and you could end up with crooked limbs. Later while saving a wounded Ranger from Vault 3, The Courier also has to remind him that the stimpack he gave him may have healed his wound, it can't instantly reverse the effects of prolonged blood loss and possible infection.
    • The Courier never considers attempting to loot a body that's been completely incinerated or liquefied by laser or plasma weaponry, nor does he try to search ghouls and most Nightkin, who have little to no clothes to hide loot in.
• Stardestroyer.net, as mentioned above in Fan Fic, deconstructs the seemingly Utopian Star Trek universe, pointing out holes.
• Sailor Nothing loves showing just how jarringly, horrifically, nightmarishly different the characters' lives are from Magical Girl anime. Several of them even watch an exaggerated, stereotypical version of such shows; the main character actually watches it to escape her life.
• Mario: Game Over. A remarkable deconstruction of Super Mario Bros.
• Furry Fandom works frequently portray a world as furry. I Wish I Was Furry! (NSFW!) shows what would happen if we woke up one day and the world actually was furry. The main character is even a human furry fan, like is typical for transformation stories. A furryized world, as it happens, is dark and brutal.
• Sonny Gets Mad Scienced is the "humorous" type of deconstruction. It revolves around two central ideas; telling a Mad Scientist story from the perspective of one of the nameless subjects experimented on, and being Genre Savvy doesn't always help.
• From The Onion: "Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks 2", sends up the idea of video games becoming progressively more realistic by taking it to a logically deconstructive extreme with an "ultra realistic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3". It mostly involves sitting around and waiting, when you're not going on pointless, tedious missions, suffering from homesickness or getting randomly killed. Single player gameplay clocks in at 17,250 hours.
• In an effort to make Creepypasta less frightening, some internet users have taken to providing reasons why they exist, such as Jeff the Killer being abused by his family, forcing him into homicide, resulting in his murderous tendencies.
• Pokémon Apokélypse is a deconstruction of Pokémon mostly played for laughs, with Gyms and Pokemon battles being banned for animal cruelty and Team Rocket as a legitimately dangerous criminal organization.
• Dance of the Manwhore and Quest of the Manwhore deconstructs the "manly seducer" character found in a modern dance pop. The video shows that this same kind of character, looked at a little differently, can come across as creepy, even dangerous, and that his superficial lifestyle may be hiding all kinds of personal issues, like drug addiction, and parental abandonment.
• Dark Simpsons deconstructs the original show as a whole. The Finagle's Law examples are exaggerated and things happen more realistically, and if something bad can happen to the Simpsons cast (sometimes after they perform their antics at the other peoples' expense), it will, and its consequences be taken to their Logical Extreme.
• SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE SPIDER-MAN, SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE NINJA TURTLES and SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE DUCKTALES Deconstruct the characters of the various shows, by showing just how horrific it would be if these characters where actually like the animals they were based on.
• Accidentally done in WrestleCrap's 2006 Gooker Award winner to its own website. The winner was the "Eddiesploitation", Creator/WWE's exploitation of Eddie Guerrero's death. Not only did RD regret even putting the incident as a nomination, knowing that it would be hard to write up its induction, but he pointed out that the website's tagline was "The Very Worst in Wrestling" and the "Eddiesploitation" was just that.
• Rumsfeldia: Fear and Loathing in the Decade of Tears, the sequel to the AlternateHistory.com story Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72, deconstructs the narrative of Ronald Reagan being a conservative icon, by having an actual ultra-conservative - in this case, Donald Rumsfeld - being elected into office in the 1980s. The result is neglect of civil rights, excessive nuclear proliferation, complete economic collapse, reduction of civil liberties, and environmental damage.
• A Funny or Die video by Casey Wilson and Scott Aukerman deconstructed the 1944 Frank Loesser song "Baby It's Cold Outside" in such a way that the situation (Casey wants to go home and Scott wants to have sex with her) is presented as a date rape: he slips a roofie into her drink, they fight, and he ties her to a chair with duct tape. In the end, she knocks him out with a shovel. What's disturbing is that they sing the song without changing any of the words, and everything they do is entirely appopriate to what they're singing about.
• Reddit's coaxedintoasnafu subreddit deconstructs many of the site's memes and trends.
• The Candy Hair saga (written by phantomrose96, of "It's Not Gay If He's Dead" fame) tears into Anime Hair and similar fashion-related tropes by depicting a world where people with unnatural hair and eye colors are forced to become protagonists in their own anime adventures. The main characters are a group of background characters who are sick of getting passed over due to their relative plainness and so start dying and styling their hair, among other things. However, they can't keep up this facade for various reasons (the rich rival, for example, is only considered one by the universe because of his dyed platinum blonde hair and fancy suit, and happens to be in trouble with a number of debtors and credit card companies because he's desperately trying to support his lifestyle). The villain is a girl born with pink hair who absolutely loathes the protagonist lifestyle because it cost her so much (including her amnesiac best friend, the saga's protagonist), and is under the belief that, by shaving and re-dying everyone's hair, she's giving them better lives.
• Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware deconstructs Gameplay and Story Segregation in a roundabout way. The Science Team, with their goofy antics, itchy-trigger fingers, and general trolling, wouldn't seem out of place as a random group of friends going for a romp through the game with a handful of cheat codes turned on. Gordon, who is stuck inside the fourth wall, is the only one to treat life-threatening dangers and loss of life as Serious Business and quickly starts going insane when he's the only one to do so.
• Welcome Back, Potter is basically Cracked making a show based off of the flaws in the Harry Potter setting they uncovered in the After Hours episode "Why The Harry Potter Universe is Secretly Terrifying". The Wizarding World puts all of their hopes and dreams into a Chosen One narrative, and while it scarred Harry for life (literally and psychologically) in canon, here it drove Harry to flee to America where he became disillusioned with the entire Wizarding World, Jarry rightfully pointing out how ridiculous it was for everyone to expect a 12 year-old orphan to kill "Wizard-Hitler" for them. Voldemort succeeded in taking over the Ministry of Magic because the only people who actually put up a fight against his army of Evil Sorcerers were Child Soldiers. It took the Wizarding World a lot longer to find Jarry than it should have because of how technologically primitive Wizards are and Hermione is intellectually stunted in various areas — like everyday economics, cooking and sex-ed — because all Hogwarts ever teaches is magic.
• Wileyk209zback's GoAnimate videos tend to do this, poking fun at the "Caillou Gets Grounded" trend popular in the community, most notably when the family goes to court for Boris constantly grounding Caillou. Even though Boris accuses the court of being a Kangaroo Court with a Joker Jury, it actually turns out to be a positive outcome for Caillou, as it screws up big time for Boris and he is declared mentally insane for having a "grounding fetish", all while Boris attempts to paint Caillou as the most obnoxious brat in history, and as the only sane person in his family, even going as far as to try and ground the courtroom when the sentencing is handed down and he is arrested.
  • Later on he did another one where Caillou's family attends a family therapy session, where once again it doesn't end well for Boris and he is similarly declared mentally insane for his unhealthy grounding obsession, and even tries grounding everyone in his family and the therapist. But of course things turn out well for Caillou, Rosie and Doris, and they earn their family bliss, but not in the way they expected.

---