Construction Is Awesome

"Building makes me feel like I've fixed things from my past."

Rebuilding Earth ought to be a lot more fun than ruining it was.

— Doom II ending

Destruction is cool. Construction requires time, effort, planning, lots of minute stages, coordination... and there are seldom enemies and villains to defeat. The only antagonist is ourselves, our own flaws and laziness and that's not something people like to confront. A straight-up battle that ends with the destruction of evil is more entertaining and dramatic, and less self-accusatory. However, some works manage to portray creation and construction and raising as activities deserving of awe and respect, and the hard work they involve is represented as dignifying rather than demeaning.

There are various ways this can be shown, usually through;

• Architecture.
• Gaia's Vengeance and other Green phenomena.
• Geological formations.
• Industry, Labor, and Craftsmanship. More awesome if robots are involved. It's what they've been invented for.
• Weapon Construction: A special sort of example: the construction of tools of destruction takes some of its awe from the use the creation is intended for.
• Creating Life and Building Systems.
• ... Or something that defies classification altogether.

Occasional parodied with people building much faster than physical possible or lacking organisation having hilarity ensues.

Related to Creation Sequence, Hard-Work Montage, A-Team Montage, and maybe a Forging Scene or The Great Repair. Also, apparently, Building Is Welding, because it's showy, flashy, and manly.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Fullmetal Alchemist, alchemy makes construction (and repairs) very easy, but cool-looking nonetheless.
  • This becomes a Discussed Trope when Winry helps deliver a baby, and Ed praises the creation of a new human life (and her help in achieving that as a midwife) as being more incredible than alchemy.
• In My Neighbor Totoro, the Forest God and the kids magically grow a few seeds into a MASSIVE World Tree. In the morning, the tree is gone, but the seeds have germinated abnormally fast.
• In Origin: Spirits of the Past, the genetic engineering of super-powered plants on the moon is juxtaposed to their subsequent explosive growth to the point that THE MOON IS SPLIT IN HALF, burning reentry into Earth's atmosphere, and growing to cover all of the planet. It combines the Creation and Growth aspects of this trope with Destruction Is Cool.
• Franky from One Piece clearly puts a lot of heart into everything he builds, as do the workers from Water 7. His mentor Tom builds "With a don!"

Comic Books

• Parodied in Asterix and Cleopatra where the latter tasks an architect with the building of a palace for Caesar in just three months. An impossible task, so he calls the druid Getafix whose magic potion suddenly makes the construction work much faster, with the now super-strong workers tossing the giant stone blocks between each other.
• The various stages of the creation of Iron Man's armour.
• Also parodied a pair of times with Boom Towns in Lucky Luke with people running around with half houses, a saloon owner building the saloon around the already waiting costumers, an entire town built without streets and so on.

Film— Animated

• The mice and birds making Cinderella's dress in Disney's Cinderella.
• In Dumbo, a circus is "built". During a storm. By faceless burly black dudes. And elephants. It is awesome.
• The climax of FernGully: The Last Rainforest, in which Crysta and the other fairies cause a tree to grow around Hexus, imprisoning him again.
• In Frozen, Elsa uses her cryokinesis to build a fabulous palace out of ice, singing all the while.
• This is done with a Decon-Recon Switch in The LEGO Movie. There are 2 major sides in the show, Lord Business vs Cloud Cuckooland. The latter is a bunch of creative builders who build awesome and nonstandard things, but their creations tend to either not last long or not working as intended. The former is a paragon of "following instructions" who doesn't tolerate any kind of deviations, but his empire's boring buildings and vehicles are practical. Emmet's journey to become a Master Builder is the reconstruction - in the end, by combining the knowledge of instructions that he has as a part of Lord Business' system with his newfound Master Builder sense, he can make awesome constructions that are also functional.
• In The Prince of Egypt, this is subverted: the Pharaonic monuments are impressive, but they are built with slave labor.
• In A Troll in Central Park, the entirety of Big Applesauce is invaded by flower plants.
• In Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels, the Liliputians binding Gullliver and transporting him to town.

Film — Live-Action

• Flashdance has some cool welding sequences. WHAT A FEELING!. The inaccuracy of the way welding was depicted was mocked in The Full Monty.
• The construction of the various Iron Man suits in the eponymous films combines this trope with Technology Porn.
• Kind of An Aesop in Office Space, where the hero quits his stressful, unsatisfying desk job and finds working at a construction site much more fulfilling in the end.
• Star Trek:
  • The teaser trailer for Star Trek (2009) is made of this trope. Dramatic slow-motion closeups of welding, shots of workers dwarfed by the massive construction they're creating until The Reveal that they're working on none other than the Enterprise...
  • Star Trek Beyond ends with a gorgeous montage of the Enterprise-A being built.
• Star Wars. The construction of the Death Star. The construction of the Clone Army. The construction of Lord Vader.
• There was that... huge... geological thing Lex Luthor used in Superman Returns.
• Some of the stuff the protagonist uses in TRON once he regains his Admin powers.
• A major theme in TRON: Legacy.
• The barn raising in Witness. Parodied in The Simpsons episode where they get a pool.

Literature

• The Book of Nehemiah in The Bible is mostly known as "that book about the Jews rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem". (Which is actually just the first half.)
• In The Lord of the Rings, the reforging of the sword Narsil into Andúril, the forging of the Nine, the Seven, the Three and the One, the creation and armament of Saruman's army.
• The climax of Mistborn, when the Hero of Ages brings the entire Scadrial back to its former glory, undoing all the damage done before.
• The entire plot The Pillars of the Earth centers around the expansion/reconstruction of Philip's church into a massive cathedral.

Live Action TV

• Our Miss Brooks: Miss Brooks, Mr. Boynton and Walter Denton build a new garage for Mr. Conklin in "Do-It-Yourself".
• This trope is the core of Scrapheap Challenge, where teams need to use whatever scrap they can salvage to create vehicles and devices for challenges .

Music

• From Daft Punk's "Harder Better Faster Stronger": WORK IT, MAKE IT, DO IT, MAKES US, HARDER BETTER FASTER STRONGER, MORE THAN EVER HOUR AFTER, OUR WORK IS NEVER OVER.

Tabletop Games

• In the lore of Dungeons & Dragons 4e, this is Erathis' paradigm.
• The Alchemical Exalted has becoming a metropolis/patropolis as their final stage of evolution. In their case, they are so Awesome, they become Construction.
• The driving force of the Adeptus Mechanicus in Warhammer 40,000. Building things, be they weapons, vehicles, buildings, or anything in-between is less a job and more of a holy duty to them.
  • Angel Exterminatus has an epic scene of Perturabo and his legion constructing an immense amphitheatre at Fulgrim's suggestion. The whole process, from blasting a massive hole into the ground to lay the foundations to the creation of the building itself and the end result, is described in exquisite detail - and if that wasn't enough, they manage to do it in two days.

Video Games

• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead offers many construction options, from renovating abandoned houses and fixing up broken cars to building a zombie-proof fortress or creating a Deathmobile to run down hordes of zombies with.
• Being inspired by Minecraft, this applies to both Dragon Quest Builders and Dragon Quest Builders 2. The latter even makes the duality of creation and destruction a major thematic element of the story.
• One of the live-action (or made to look such in this case) trailers for Halo 3 centered on the inside of a Misriah Armory foundry on Mars assembling distinctive UNSC weapons.
• The primary appeal of Kerbal Space Program is that it lets you design, build, and fly your own spacecraft, space stations, and surface bases, including the possibility of assembling them part by part in orbit or on another planet's surface.
• Elaborate block-based construction projects are quite possibly the biggest reason to play Minecraft.
• The point of virtually all city-building games. Pharaoh has you building pyramids (sometimes more than one in a single city), while providing (by ancient standards) ridiculously high living standard for your citizens.
• Scrap Mechanic, a construction sandbox with Design-It-Yourself Equipment at its core, exemplifies this trope. It's really easy for the players to create magnificent, awesome machines that use actual physical and engineering priciples and utilize the game's available parts in novel ways to do pretty much anything one can imagine.
• Some Tycoon games, i.e. Railroad Tycoon.
• In Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts you not only control fleets of steam-era ships in gloriously detailed 3d battle, but you get to design them yourself and see how your design choices hold up in combat.

Web Video

• SMPLive:
  • Luemas is one of the best builders on the server, and she shows it with her huge, overarching base. She runs a construction firm at spawn with Travis, and other players often commission the two.
  • The Spawn Tree is a huge, intricate build of a tree that marks the server's spawn.
  • Altrive and Krinios are also well known for their large and elaborate builds on the server.

Western Animation

• The scene in the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "Tales of Ba Sing Se", when Aang builds a new zoo compound using earthbending.
• One of the core themes of Dinotrux. A group of dinosaur construction vehicle hybrids working together to accomplish feats of construction that generally end up saving the day. The climax of almost every episode features a building montage set to the show's main theme.
• Merrie Melodies short "Rhapsody in Rivets", in which a skyscraper is built to music, with the foreman acting as a Cartoon Conductor.
• Phineas and Ferb building their inventions, all the time.
• Construction of The Simpsons pool
  • "It is a fine barn but sure 'tis no pool, English""D'oheth"
• The Constructicons from The Transformers are a living example of this. The entire team is made up of Decepticons that transform into construction vehicles and they serve as the faction's resident designers, engineers and builders. Some of their creations include the Forge (a gladiatorial arena) and one of the main cities of Cybertron, Crystal City.

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