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  • Green Day's seminal rock opera American Idiot is a deconstruction of the punk movement as a whole. The protagonist, Jimmy (styling himself Jesus of Suburbia and later St. Jimmy) starts out as a drugged-up slacker who gets bored with his life and decides to run away to the city to become a punk. But because he's a rebel without a cause or goal, he just sinks even deeper into drugs and becomes lonely and depressed, eventually leading to him returning to his old life.
  • Kendrick Lamar's second album good kid, m.A.A.d city could be considered a deconstruction of 90's Gangsta Rap made popular by groups like N.W.A. This album contains many of the normal elements of west coast hip-hop at the time (heavy gang violence, drug use, working with the homies), but changed it by having the character change with the events of the story (getting paranoid about violence during "m.A.A.d city", stopping after his brother dies in "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst", etc.) and the story ends with him becoming the Kendrick Lamar he is today.
  • Sia's "Chandelier", which topped charts the year it came out, is a deconstruction of a typical pop party song (such as those sung by celebrities like Britney Spears and Kesha). The singer stays up all night drinking, partying, and sexing it up, which has serious consequences on her life. The song also states that partying only worsens the singer's existing issues of loneliness and makes her ashamed of her actions.
  • Miranda Lambert's entire career is built between this and subversion of stereotypes about the image of a good, docile woman in country music and shows that women who abide by this tradition are miserable. Best shown in "Mama's Broken Heart".
  • Brand New Idol Society, or BiS for short, was an Idol Singer group built from the ground up by leader Pour Lui, who then proceeded to mercilessly deconstruct the manufactured Incorruptible Pure Pureness image associated with the genre with violent, hypersexualized, and often disturbing imagery and lyrics. This was most obvious with their album, IDOL is DEAD. Aside from the self-explanatory title, they also pulled a Bait-and-Switch with their single, IDOL, advertising it as a typical idol song while encouraging fans to buy the same single over and over again. The actual song turned out to be hard rock, with its music video featuring wota being enslaved and tortured while the group was paraded as martyrs on crosses. Another song, MURA-MURA, references the infamous head-shaving punishment one of AKB48's members inflicted on herself for being caught dating. Even the Lighter and Softer revival has its first music video show Pour Lui alone in an abandoned factory, scared for her life as it explodes. While idol music continues to live on and thrive, the group is credited for expanding the boundaries of what an Idol Singer can be, and it became the Trope Codifier for the alt-idol genre that which mixes Idol Singer tropes with metal music in various ways. Even traditional Idol Singer groups (several who were friends of BiS) have paid homage to the group.
  • "Girl In A Country Song" by Maddie & Tae deconstruct the bro-country subgenre of the 2010s using melody, beat and even quote from the biggest hit songs from the subgenre by singing from the perspective of the women who are sick of being treated like sex objects and have their agency or decisions taken from them that is commonly presented in the subgenre.

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.
  • The trope of the Bumbling Dad came about as a deconstruction/inversion of the Standard '50s Father. The Dysfunctional Family, of which BD is usually the head, was itself a deconstruction/inversion of all those "perfect" (or semi-perfect) Dom Com families of early television.

Other

  • Ever After High deconstructs the concept of fairy tales' endings. The characters are the children of fairy tale characters, and they are destined for the same endings as their parents are. Apple White is the daughter of Snow White hence she is sure to get a happily ever after, while Briar Beauty will also sleep for a hundred years, this means she will out live her friends when she wakes up. Meanwhile Raven Queen who is destined to be Apple's Evil Queen doesn't want to be evil and chooses to defy her destiny.
  • When it opened in 1967, the Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride at Disneyland was intended to be a deconstruction of the romanticized, swashbuckling Pirate that was popular during The Golden Age of Hollywood. While still pretty lighthearted as far as deconstructions go, it does feature a pirate ship attacking a small Caribbean town, pirates dunking the mayor in the well in order to get information out of him, pirates auctioning off women, pirates chasing women, and pirates getting drunk and burning down the town... all of which is Played for Laughs. The final show scene in the attraction shows a few pirates in an armory drunkenly firing at gunpowder barrels, which they mistake for rum barrels. For good measure, the ride begins with a lengthy trek through Dead Man's Cove, which doesn't feature any living pirates, but ones that have long since been deceased, with the surrounding treasure meaning nothing to them in the present. "Dead men tell no tales", indeed. Conversely, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (which were loosely based on the ride) serve as a Reconstruction to the romanticized, swashbuckling Pirate trope that the original attraction had denounced.
  • Reductio Ad Absurdum is one of the major proof techniques; a style of argument that does this to its opposition. It takes the opponent's argument and logically follows it through to an absurd or indefensible conclusion.
  • The visual novel, War: 13th Day, does an excellent job setting up a YA romance fit for a shoujo with Ambrosia before coldly deconstructing it in the True End. You learn this is not only Wildfire's perception of her but also her fantasy life. Think of it this way: Ambrosia's story is from Wildfire's biased observation, mixed together with her daydreams. The girl is jealous of Ambrosia and, thus, imagines that she has a perfect life. How true is that? We're not sure just yet.
  • When In Doubt, Blame the Eldar is one for Commander Self-Insert Fanfiction: While Commander Black may be, in his own words, "a brutally efficient self-replicating mechanism of war", he's in a universe where everyone else has been fighting non-stop for at least 6000 years, with no signs of slowing down. Often, he finds himself losing many battles.
    • Furthermore, unlike other Self-Insert protagonists, he's frequently unable to fix the problems in the Warhammer 40,000, because most of those problems are built on longstanding issues between the warring factions that have involved all sides crossing the Moral Event Horizon several times. If anything, his actions end up making the 40K universe worse.
  • Subvertising, as the name would suggest, does this to the Advertising industry by using graffiti or parody ads to criticize the company trying to sell things to people. Often, this is done by revealing the ugly side of their business operations, including turning the otherwise pretty, polished advertisement into something grotesque. Other times, artists criticize advertising tactics themselves, which are perceived as propaganda, and replace them with a pointed anti-consumerist message. Since defacing or replacing ads is treated as vandalism by most cities, subvertising tends to be done anonymously and through guerilla tactics. Prominent proponents of subvertising include the Canadian magazine Adbusters (which is most famous for instigating Occupy Wall Street) and the British-originated Brandalism group.

Alternative Title(s): Other

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