Deconstruction - Television Tropes & Idioms

Neon Genesis Evangelion deconstructs the Super Robot genre, and many typical anime personality types:
- Changed the Super Robot from an unfeeling mechanoid that is easily repaired to a biological entity that bleeds, feels pain, and may even have a personality.
- Most Super Robot shows have a teenage mecha pilot and a long-absent father who designed the mecha. So Evangelion shows how traumatizing it would be for a real teen to fight in a giant robot — and what kind of father would be long-absent to design the robot.
- Half the cast is made up of what seem at first to be stereotypical anime characters. As the series progresses, however, they are revealed to be severely messed-up people with the same sort of problems that would be expected of real-life Tsunderes, bottle fairies, and lovable sex maniacs.
- Quite a few old super robot shows featured mysterious, alien villains with very lightly defined motivations; cue the relentless attacks of the Angels, alien (or not) assailants with no motive or origin, simply malevolent MacGuffins to enable ~~psychobabble~~ the story to play with 'giant robot' tropes.
- Sunrise dedicated the last installment of one of its other mecha franchises to being the first response. Such was NGE's influence.
- Bliss Stage is the Tabletop Games equivalent, and specifically lists Evangelion (and various Evangelion byproducts) as an inspiration for its ruthless deconstruction of The Power Of Love. If all that's required is intimacy and affection rather than actual love...
Martian Successor Nadesico, on the other hand, does the same thing with its Affectionate Parody of Real Robot shows.
- Nadesico also delves into the Super Robot side of things as well. Many of the moral actions and choices made in the series don't have clear cut results or justifications, and many of the events are contrasted against the Super Robot Show Within A Show Gekiganger. Plus, the only pilot on Nadesico that fits the Super Robot archetype gets shot and killed early in the series, rather than getting the heroic death in battle he was hoping for.
Originally, Super Dimension Fortress Macross was meant to be a Deconstructive Parody of shows like Mobile Suit Gundam. While it veered off that course eventually and played a fair number of tropes completely straight (never mind inventing a few along the way), pretty much every major entry into the franchise has featured at least one major, often scathing, deconstruction.
- The early original episodes were fairly blatant in their deconstructive jokes (showing how a rookie would actually do in an unfamiliar combat robot, showing how, at least, Getting To Space Does Not Work That Way in terms of the anti-gravity generators, etc.) However, even after the show began to take itself seriously, it still subverted some viewer expectations, especially with the Bodolza Fleet. Space aliens take up orbit around Earth... and the Earth gets reduced to 90%+ toast, just as would happen if we really did get invaded by aliens. And then, of course, what followed was a good deal more optimistic about the post-apocalypse than what was generally shown at that time.
- The largest deconstruction the original presented, though, was dealing with said fleet. Unlike earlier Super Robot shows where the heroes could cleave through legions and win, the show directly acknowledged that one ship could not possibly hope to defeat an entire fleet. So it fell to culture — convincing the aliens that we deserved to live and that we're Not So Different after all — to actually save humanity. It sounds pithy now, but in 1983, this was absolutely profound, not just for anime but for television in general, even outside of Japan. Sure, the overlord of the fleet was still destroyed, but many of the aliens remained... and the rest of the original series, and parts of the entire rest of the franchise, have been dedicated to dealing with that fact and that the two races must live together now. This was a deconstruction in the strictest sense — in the wake of Macross, nobody could simply take a Kill Em All approach to villains unless they were so alien that they were incomprehensible. You had to acknowledge at least some humanity in your foe, or your series would be laughed at as incredibly moronic and childish. The effects of the show are felt to this very day.
  - And it's worth pointing out that Macross Frontier managed, in the end, to drive home the point that even the combatants in a Bug War are not wholly incapable of understanding each other.
  - Perhaps surprisingly, this deconstruction survived just about wholly intact in the Robotech adaptation of Macross, although its impact compared to Japan was blunted to some degree by the then-still-all-pervasive perception of the Animation Age Ghetto. It's not surprising how many modern SF and television writers and actors claim Robotech, or specifically the Macross section, as an inspiration, though.
- Basara Nekki of Macross7 is thought to be something of a deconstruction of both the typical heroic, selfless mecha pilot protagonist and the typical "positive musical band leader" archetype. He's actually quite a self-righteous Jerkass on a personal quest for self-fulfillment who happens to be a talented pilot and musician anyway; he's driven away tons of prospective accompanying guitarists prior to Mylene Jenius showing up and never really seems to get it through his head to put the needs of others ahead of his own. Unfortunately, a fair few people think that this characterization is one of the things that actually hurts the show narratively, so just how effective it was in the end is up for some debate...
- While the series plays a number of tropes straight, Macross Frontier features an absolutely vicious deconstruction of the Moe archetype in Klan Klein. At first she appears to be played straight and has a Sleep Mode Size, but as the series goes on the show takes pains to point out that the fact that she's what most otaku would consider a walking fetish doll while "micronized" is an almost nightmarish inconvenience for her. She and her heart's desire Michael can't really date too often in public since she looks like she's 12 when micronized (despite being at least 20), Michael feels uncomfortable around her at times due to her appearance, people have difficulty taking her seriously even when she has things to be very serious about, and worst of all, the fact that she has to change size to fight effectively is what essentially gets Michael killed. In the end, it's almost an Asuka-level evisceration of a character archetype, although thankfully for the viewer Klein has a little more mental fortitude than Ms. Soryuu does.
- MacF also provides a minor deconstruction of Everythings Better With Pineapples, which of course the original SDF Macross invented. In episode 17, we get all the classic signs of an impending character death — memories with "old music" (hilariously Fire Bomber songs), signs of an old love rekindled, and of course preparing a pineapple cake. Ozma looks like he's going to die and ends up fine, complete with resident Deadpan Snarker Micheal Blanc hanging a lampshade on "how tragic it'd have been if he died". Of course, the other side of the deconstruction then also gets applied when Michael is quite suddenly and tragically killed himself, with practically no waring whatsoever.
Gundam 00 had a few instances of Deconstructing tropes from previous Gundam series, including Gundam SEED Destiny, examples of which would be showing the corpse of Neil Dylandy to show everyone that he is indeed very dead, a very realistic portrayal of just how hopeless Rebellious Princess's Marina's situation is (her nation is now gone), and (arguably) Wang Liu Mei being a deconstruction of Lacus Clyne.
- Doesn't Neil's brother come back as the new, identical Lockon Stratos?
The Humongous Mecha genre of anime is always deconstructing, reconstructing, Parodying, and all the various different ways of redefining itself. Done so often mainly because the creators desperately want to keep the genre fresh and relevant. The entire Sub-Genre of "Real Robot" Mecha shows grew out of a deconstruction of the "Super Robot" sub-genre, and each of these are redefined in and of themselves so often, that sometimes the line between them is blurred.
Revolutionary Girl Utena deconstructs many, many Shojo tropes to the point of Mind Screw. The original hero became a Machiavellian and the newer heroes are just petty school children. Really. See also Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory.
The anime Paranoia Agent deconstructs sentimentality and cuteness in Japanese pop culture. One of the characters is blatantly (down to the Shout Out visual design) "what if a character from a teen comedy anime had to grow up and get a job?" And the cute things she encounters — animal mascots (especially one which she created herself), video games, cartoon merchandise — serve as an escape for people who are too immature to grow up.
Elfen Lied deconstructs the Magical Girlfriend, among other things. Or, it could just be an excuse to combine Unwanted Harem, Gorn, and Humans Are Bastards cranked up to eleven. Take your pick.
The anime and manga Narutaru (Shadow Star) deconstructs the pet monster genre in a very disturbing and bloody way. To control their companions, the children have a psychic link with them which can take a heavy toll on both their body and mind, and some become very aware of the power they have and abuse it (some to the point of mass murder), like most kids in the real world would. The manga also looks at how the government and military might actually respond to Mons being involved in all manner of strange and violent circumstances, which leads to a lot of cover-ups and extreme measures.
Bokurano (written by the same person who made Narutaru) is a Humongous Mecha deconstruction that showcases only too well the destructive side-effects caused by giant robot battles, not to mention the immense psychological stress caused by having a bunch of kids (who all have their own personal tragedies on top of it) responsible for the continued existence of planet Earth. And then they throw in the fact that the Super Robot they must use is fueled by the pilot's Life Force, meaning they're all dead even if they win, and we start crossing into Diabolus Ex Machina territory.
- Want to know what's even worse? It's later revealed that the creatures the kids have been fighting are actually human pilots from parallel universes, specifically the battles are contests to determine which of the selected universes would be erased from existence, who is doing and why has yet to be explained. So the pilots have to choose between either winning the battles and dying or losing the battles and dooming their universes.
  - The author manages to one-up himself by explaining that even if the characters manages to make it through the requisite 14 battles and earn their universe's right to live (killing all of said characters in the process), It's Not Really Over: the "system" that picks universes to fight might wrap around and choose the protagonists' again.
Berserk takes common fantasy tropes and smashes them to little pieces.
- Griffith, the Big Bad, is initially presented as a textbook example of a Canon Sue; he's handsome, intelligent, a swordsman exceeding even protagonist Guts, and is admired by all who meet him. This is an act put on for both his men and himself, as he's really a very flawed person who breaks down after Guts defeats him in a duel, and after having sex with the princess of Midland, he's captured and tortured for a year while his men become outlaws. After his backup plan of living with Casca fails because Casca is falling for Guts, he sells the souls of his men to become a demon god.
  - The way his dream is carried out is itself a deconstruction of the age-old "follow your dreams" maxim.
- Rosine, main villain of the Lost Children arc, is a deconstruction of the Changeling Fantasy who firmly believes she is the center of one because of parental abuse. She sells her parents to the same group of demons that Griffith joined so that she can live out her dream. She spends several years attacking nearby villages and killing the adults out of a delusion that adults cause children to suffer out of selfishness while kidnapping the children and transforming them into demonic fairies so that they can spend their wholes lives "playing", and realizes her delusion after Guts destroys the "paradise" she built and mortally wounds her after a particularly brutal fight.
- Isidro is a deconstruction of the Kid Samurai who shows how incompetent and delusional a Kid Samurai would really be (believing in Calling Your Attacks, choosing swordsmanship over throwing, which is his true forte, etc), with a bit of parody thrown in for good measure.
- The King of Midland deconstructs the "king who believes in merit over birth" archetype by wanting to have sex with his own daughter, wants Griffith to become King so that he can be relieved of the loneliness of the throne, and has alienated his wife.
- The whole series is a Perspective Flip on The Messiah and The Antichrist, and shows us just exactly how the dynamic between the two would work, as well as showing that both are not what they initially appear to be.
The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya is a deconstruction of its genre (whatever it may be), basically stating that the only possibly way for an improbable universe like this to exist is that the main character has to be warping the world around her to make it exist. It also seems to deconstruct tropes like First Girl Wins and Official Couple a fair bit, as things seem set up (again, by the first girl Haruhi) so that it's physically impossible for Kyon and Mikuru to become the Official Couple, despite his clear attraction to her, simply because Haruhi (whether by her will or subconsciously) does not allow it.
- It also seems to do this with the Perverse Sexual Lust between Haruhi and Mikuru. After all, if real people were actually inserted into their favorite shows, who wouldn't act like Haruhi does?
- Haruhi herself also serves as a deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, demonstrating exactly why inserting yourself into someone else's life uninvited and completely taking over all in the name of forcing your particular idea of fun onto them isn't necessarily the nicest course of action.
- Haruhi Suzumiya mocks and spoofs so many genres that in a sense it can be seen as a deconstruction of Anime in general. The show goes out of its way to twist every cliche scene imaginable, from beach scenes to space battles to harem to fight scenes.
Now And Then Here And There is a deconstruction of the ordinary-boy-meets-mysterious-girl-and-is-whisked-away-to-another-land story. The "another land" is a barren wasteland filled with genuinely troubled crazy people in power, child soldiering and exploitation, no magic to speak of (except for Lala-Ru's power), and almost devoid of water. Granted, protagonist Shu does defeat the Big Bad against all odds and return home by the end, but the last scene is barely hopeful or uplifting.
School Days is a brutal deconstruction of harem anime and the basic love triangle plot.
My Two Wings is arguably a deconstruction of futanari and how they would function in real life. The main focus is a woman who her grandfather hoped would be a Pettanko so he could raise her as a boy and without problems, but ended up with Gag Boobs, had to ditch the charade, and is in the dark about a lot of things related to sexual relations and her own anatomy. An early chapter averts No Periods Period just to show her in discomfort when she has her first period and her various romantic partners have varying reactions when they find out about her "equipment"... ranging from acceptance to crippling discomfort.
Arguably, Code Geass is a deconstruction of the super-hero genre. Lelouch's geass is much weaker than the super-powers possessed by Superman or virtually any of the X-men yet he uses it to utterly transform the world. In a sense, it plays the whole "boy becomes a super hero" totally straight.
- Same could be said for Death Note.

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Super Hero comics had a huge wave of deconstruction in the '80s and '90s, caused chiefly by two examples:
- Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns takes straightforward superhero action and makes it look absurd by having politics interfere. Batman's work becomes a tool for debates about "toughness on crime," while Superman's idealism makes him an easy dupe for the US government's plans for nuclear war.
- Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen is the genre deconstruction. It examines just why somebody would choose to dress up in fetish gear and beat people up. One "hero" is a sociopathic moral absolutist, one is an egomaniac, one is there simply because her superhero mother made her, and all are portrayed as human characters, with all their flaws. The series was also famous for observing how a superhero would impact our world. Some examples: USA wins in Vietnam thanks to the god-like Dr. Manhattan, Nixon stays in power when the Watergate scandal is covered up by the nefarious Comedian.
  - Moore's earlier work, Marvelman (Miracleman in United States) deconstructs many aspects of the Captain Marvel mythos and superheroes in general. In one particularly memorable instance, it deconstructed superhero battles by showing just how bloody and devastating they would be in a more realistic setting.
Deconstruction in comics is even older than that, dating at least back to the Bronze Age. In The Seventies, DC came out with Green Lantern/Green Arrow, in which the title characters do superhero stuff while at the same time, arguing about the morality and political implications.
Hell! You could even argue that it dates back to the Silver Age! When Stan Lee first pitched the idea of a superhero with real life problems his editor replied "Don't you know what a superhero is?"
While Kingdom Come was part of the mid-90's wave of Reconstructionist comics (made in response to the above-mentioned wave of deconstruction), its reconstruction of the Silver Age was accomplished by deconstructing the Dark Age, bringing it to its most extreme conclusion: the Nineties Anti Heroes, having killed all the villains, have become crazed Knights Templar and pretty much taken over the world.
The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen starts out with slightly-darker takes on Victorian heroes, but the second volume shows them sinking really low under pressure (and the ugly sides of Victorian culture that they each represent).
A story from the comics series Animal Man (noted for its Post Modernism) deconstructs Looney Tunes and similar cartoons: in "The Coyote Gospel," a grotesquely anthropomorphic coyote is repeatedly and brutally killed by an Elmer Fudd-style hunter obsessed with his destruction, and continuously reforms/regenerates in a most disturbing manner. Finally, in a scene reminiscent of the classic "Duck Amuck" short, the malevolent animator paints his blood in as he dies for the last time.
- Animal Man, and moreso Doom Patrol, are Grant Morrison's Reconstruction of Silver Age comic conventions. He thought they were more fun than the Dark Age.
Another interesting example by Morrison is Fantastic 1234. At first, it seems like a traditional deconstruction of the Fantastic 4. Ben Grimm is a self pitying misanthrope with a violent temper, Reed Richards is a emotionless autistic who seems to value his inventions more than his friends and family, Johnny Storm is a brooding Greaser whose tastes for fast cars and fast women can't fill the void inside of him, and Sue Storm feels she is trapped in a loveless marriage and is severely tempted to run off with Namor, who is presented as a coldblooded sexfiend willing to do anything to make Sue his own. However, it turns out to be a deconstruction of the original deconstruction when Reed Richards figures that Dr. Doom has been using a reality altering device to bring out the worst possible aspects of the four's personalities to destroy them within in order to utterly destroy Reed Richards. However Richards makes his own reality altering device, using it to essentially Reconstruct the Fantastic 4, saving the day. And for his arrogance, Doom himself suffers a particularly painful deconstruction at the end of the book, where it is revealed that he is a lonely, pathetic man-child with a ridiculous speech pattern who is not even remotely on Reed Richard's level of genius and whose vendetta against the four is petty and stupid. Also, he seems to be going bald. Ouch.
Marvel comics Marvels and its Evil Twin Ruins similarly focus on the impact of superheroes on an "average" person.
DC Comics' Jonah Hex: Sounds like old fashioned Cowboys and Indians hijinx on the wild frontier, right? Riiight.
Valiant Comics was a whole fictional universe worth of deconstruction. The lack of Comic Book Time, and Continuity Snarls set them apart from the big two. Strong characterization, focus on how the events effect the average person, and characters that combine elements of Golden Age and Dark Age heroes also help. A focus on Hard Sci Fi in superhero comics? Innovative. But when Harbinger, the company flagship introduces superheroes without costumes on the run for their lives from an unbeatable enemy, well that brings them firmly into deconstruction territory.

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Fan Fic has a tendency to try to deconstruct the series it's based on — either deliberately or simply by pulling the loose threads in the story or setting until something breaks.

For example, Crystal Tokyo, the Crystal Spires And Togas utopian Future of Sailor Moon, is frequently deconstructed into a Knight Templar dystopia — famously, in I'm Here To Help. Neo-Queen Serenity, Sailor Moon's future self, is described as "cleansing the Earth's people of evil". That would be enough to plant Epileptic Trees, but then in the second season, the Black Moon Clan showed up, time-travelling antagonists who refused to be "purified" and left Crystal Tokyo forever. That just made removing people's "evil" sound even more like a euphemism for mass brainwashing.
Similarly, the Federation from Star Trek, especially after Star Trek The Next Generation, is frequently portrayed as a semi-communist dystopia, only averting the worst horrors of the stereotype due to their Applied Phlebotinum. The website StarDestroyer.net is famous for advocating and supporting this view, as seen in this essay.
- This fanfic(?) shows how the Federation could go from the TOS to TNG in a disturbingly realistic way.
- Of course, a site named StarDestroyer.net might have some ulterior motives for doing this...
A great deal of Power Rangers fanfic (especially with the original characters) portrays the characters as if the constant power losses, mind hijackings, and secrecy actually had the profound psychological effects one would expect these sort of things to have on a teenager.
Some Kim Possible fics have her clear "beat the bad guys, save the world" morality crash against the intractable problems of the world, leading her to crack up or go rogue. Others have her Evil Counterpart Shego explain moral relativism to her.
In Fairly Oddparents Fan Fiction if you are writing about Cosmo and Wanda's failing relationship, or about Norm the Genie (in sympathetic) light, the tropes involved will be Deconstructed and the morality of the show will be Deconstructed.
Writing from a perspective of "the Decepticons were right" can swing between this and Draco In Leather Pants for the entire faction. The most recent Transformers Animated starts to lean this way itself, as the high command seems a bit morally suspect and the Decepticons are basically rebellious freedom fights whose leader happens to be Megatron.
The Jay/Silent Bob slash segment of The View Askewniverse fandom tends to explore the dark side of what is generally considered a simple comic relief duo. Themes include tragic back-stories to explain Jay's outlandish behavior and Bob's silence, the realities of drug use/abuse, and the angst of being secretly in love with your best friend.

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Shrek uses various fantasy/fairy tale tropes and twists them in a rather funny way. It showed a different perspective in your typical fantasy stories. Deconstruction doesn't have to be sad or angsty now, does it?
The merciless deconstruction (or Affectionate Parody) of various High School character tropes that went down in Not Another Teen Movie may very well be credited to the fall out of teen movies in the early 2000s. Until High School Musical came...
Last Action Hero is somewhere between a parody and a deconstruction of the action movie genre, heading more towards deconstruction after the protagonists go to the real world.
Jidai Geki films underwent an increasingly cynical Deconstructionist phase during the 1960s that arguably led to the genre going out of vogue for a good deal of the 1970s:
- Yojimbo
- Sanjuro
- Samurai Assassin
- The Sword of Doom
- Hari-kiri
Similarly, Westerns in the 1960s went through a Deconstructionist phase:
- A Fistful of Dollars — a remake of Yojimbo
- For a Few Dollars More
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
- Hang 'Em High
- The Wild Bunch — John Wayne is said to have complained that this film "killed the Western".
  - Even though it kinda started with The Searchers, in which Wayne's hero is unabashedly racist towards Native Americans.
- High Plains Drifter
- El Topo
- Django
- Worthwhile deconstructions later on include Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.
- The real deconstruction of the Western is Unforgiven; '60s Westerns more subvert Western tropes rather than deconstruct them. While a few of the common tropes of the Western Golden Age are treated as if they were serious (such as eliminating the Hooker With A Heart Of Gold and replacing The Ace with the Jerkass to be Darker And Edgier), '60s Westerns still use other unrealistic Western tropes: the lightning-fast gun fight, the regrettable ride into sunset denouement, and the white and black hat, although in the the '60s it's usually more of a grey and black hat. Unforgiven, by contrast, works precisely because it plays against the Darker And Edgier expectations of the viewer by going all the way down the rabbit hole: the lightning-fast draw is specifically demonstrated as practically worthless next to coolheadedness in a gunfight, the ride into the sunset leaves behind a populace not so much regretful as traumatized, and the Magnificent Bastard isn't put down by a gray hat so much as an even blacker hat whose actions (arguably, as it may well be Disproportionate Retribution at work) fail to cross the Moral Event Horizon only because the villain had it coming.
Battle Without Honor and Humanity (Jingi Naki Tatakai) is a brutal, brutal deconstruction of the Yakuza films popular in Japan around the same time, which tended to portray the Yakuza as a chivalrous, honorable organization of blood brothers. In the film, besides the main character, they're money-grubbing, backstabbing, treacherous, and vicious. Every vow of brotherhood or loyalty has been violated and the time-honored traditions of the Yakuza seem ludicrous, outmoded, or just plain crazy. The name of the film demonstrates this - Jingi is the term for the Yakuza code of honor.
To a certain extent, the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale deconstructs earlier Bond films through features such as a conversation mocking the Double Entendre names of previous Bond girls, Le Chiffre's comment about preferring simpler methods of torture to the Death Traps endemic to the series, having Bond respond "Do I look like I give a damn?" when asked how he wants his martini, and generally treating his profession as an assassin more literally. At least some of these features were present in the original novels, making the film something of a Reconstruction as well.
Santa movies aimed at adults as well as children usually attempt to deconstruct the Santa mythos — a recent one being Fred Claus, which implies Santa has a bad sex life due to his weight.
Cloverfield is a giant monster movie where, instead of focusing on the monster and the awesome destruction it causes, or the super soldiers fighting it, we focus on the people caught in the catastrophe, and what a completely tragic, horrifying experience a kaiju attack would be in real life. It also shows how the average person in such a thing would really have NO DAMN CLUE about the monster's origins, its ultimate fate, or really anything other than "It's here and it's killing everyone!"
- The original Gojira did a bit of the same thing with the tragic consequences, which makes Cloverfield almost a Reconstruction at the same time as it deconstructs.
Funny Games is intended as a deconstruction of the "torture porn" sub-genre of horror movies by presenting it in the most bare-bones and disturbing way possible. If you enjoyed the movie, you didn't understand it.
M Night Shyamalan presented deconstructions of Super Hero and Alien Invasion movies with Unbreakable and Signs. In the first, the main character has no idea about the nature of his powers or about how he should use them. In the second the lead just tries to keep his family alive while leaving the fight to the army.
- In a way, Signs is a reconstruction of the Alien Invasion theme — after all, the goal of the original War of the Worlds' protagonist was to reunite with his wife and brother.
The Wrestler is something of a deconstruction of Sports Movies in which the fallen and ailing sporting hero's Redemption Quest is to triumph against physical adversity and win a big bout against an old rival, which thus solves his current problems and allows him to move on with their lives with renewed success and appreciation from the fans. Here, what would be the subject of such a quest in such movies in fact isn't; Randy's real Redemption Quest is to build a new life for himself outside of the ring by fixing things with his estranged daughter and find love with Cassidy, the stripper with whom he has fallen in love. He ultimately fails at both, and the fact that he enters the big bout is in fact a symbol of his failure in this; although he wins the bout, it's strongly implied that his heart problems means that the effort killed him in the process.
Natural Born Killers brutally deconstructs the relationship between violence, the media, sensationalism, the audience's narrative expectations, and a handful of media formats, such as the wacky sitcom style used for Malory's background, complete with a laughtrack while her father molests her and various people are messily murdered.
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind deconstructs Romance movies by having nearly the entire movie take place after the honeymoon period of a new relationship when things start to fall apart. In fact, the thesis of the movie is effectively "romance can be so horrible that you will want to have your memory erased but when you add it all up, they're probably worth the angst".
Scanners sets up a fairly standard Hero's Journey, as Cameron Vale, blessed with Psychic Powers, is sent by wise old Dr. Paul Ruth to defeat Ruth's former pupil, Darryl Revok, who also has Psychic Powers. Vale befriends a White Haired Pretty Girl, Kim Obrist, who can help him infiltrate Revok's organization. Not unsurprisingly, it is revealed that both Cameron and Darryl are the two sons of Paul. With us so far? And then Darryl points out what kind of father would abandon his sons like that, and weaponize one against the other, and, indeed, would test a potentially dangerous new drug on his pregnant wife, thus making Cameron and Darryl psychic in the first place. "That was Daddy." Also, the psychic stuff is disgusting and creepy: scanning is presented not as a graceful and mystical power, but as a painful and unpleasant "merging of two nervous systems". And Ruth's dream of a scanner utopia turn out to be Not So Different from Revok's scanner-supremacy idea, as observed by Vale. Meanwhile, Cam and Kim never fall in love, as would be expected, because they're too scared for their lives.
The 1991 film The Dark Backward contains an animated sequence that deconstructs the Tom And Jerry cartoons: Tom's expy gleefuly pursues Jerry's, hatchet in hand, and then cuts him in half with it (guts spill); then Spike's expy appears and blows the cat's brains out (literally) with a shotgun. The main character's mother laughs out loudly at this scene (if I recall correctly).

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Enders Game is a deconstruction of the child hero and boring invincible hero. By the time the book ends Ender abandons Earth forever, has killed all but one of an innocent species that was antagonized by human kind, doesn't hook up with his love interest (because, you know, he doesn't get one) and had his ass handed to him psychologically. Oh, and he accidently killed ~~a fellow student~~ two fellow students but was never told about it.
This is Older Than Steam, dating back to the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. It deconstructs the Knight In Shining Armor by showing how much trouble the chivalric code can cause in the real world, and the dark, unspoken assumptions behind knight's tales (i.e, true gentlemen do not need to work). After its publication people never really read them in the same way again and the genre promptly died; to this day works containing knights in shining armor are surprisingly rare (though not unheard of; there are plenty of works that are chivalric in all but name, particularly games).
- Don Quixote inspired a run of eighteenth-century anti-romance novels, including Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism.
- On another level, though, the above summary is only half-true — a huge amount of Don Quixote is a reconstruction of the Chivalric Romance (bear in mind that the Don quotes whole excerpts from Amadis of Gaul and Orlando Furioso in places), after the genre was already laughably old-fashioned, and half of the joke is a Take That against the contemporary Moral Guardians who believed that such tales were inappropriate and corrupting for proper young ladies... which is why the book is about how chivalric romances lead to the corruption of a fifty-year-old man. After everyone else had stopped caring. Don Quixote proceeded to spur a revival of the genre (part 2 was partially Cervantes' rebuttal to an insulting Fan Fic) and became a tragic romantic figure for the remainder of Western history.
Another old example: the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is a rare case of a writer deconstructing all of his previous work. All the normal tropes of Dickens novels (the Changeling Fantasy, saintly dying women, mysterious benefactors, long-lost relatives, etc.) happen like clockwork. Then these tropes are revealed to be a malevolent lie created to manipulate the hero — who has been so morally ruined that he's more like an Antihero.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels started out as a simple parody of fantasy novels, but the series has now grown and evolved to include several novels that deconstruct not only fantasy novels, but fairy tales (Witches Abroad), Christmas stories and Victorian children's books (Hogfather), police procedurals (the various "City Watch" books), and other genres. They haven't stopped being funny.
Soon I Will Be Invincible is a Superhero novel, revolving around Doctor Impossible breaking out of jail to try and take over the world (again)... all the while wondering if he's done the smartest things he could do with his life and vast intellect. Most of the other characters are Captain Ersatz-es of other popular comic book archetype characters, with realistic human flaws added.
Arguably, Boris Strugatsky's The Powerless Ones of this World is a deconstruction of much of his own and his late brother's earlier works. Perhaps most prominently, "the Sensei", who is a wise old mentor (a fairly typical character for many Strugatsky novels), turns out to have been not only a Trickster Mentor, but also the initiator of the Xanatos Gambit that dictated much of the plot and was aimed at forcing the main character to unlock his full abilities. It succeeded, but not before making said main character a nervous wreck, inducing quite a Bitter Sweet Ending and causing much remorse to the mentor himself. Additionally, the topic of the Progressors is briefly brought up; one of the characters muses that the Sensei might be acting as one on Earth, and that he had, despite some occasional successes, failed miserably.
With A Companion to Wolves, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette do this to all bonded companion animal stories, especially Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders Of Pern.
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 2 and the Cold War respectively.
Foucault's Pendulum deconstructs its genre by examining the motives people have for believing in conspiracy theories. These include the exertion of control through secrecy, a frustrated creative instinct, and the pathological desire to see every event as a symbol of something deeper instead of as itself. Ultimately, people who devote their lives to these theories are portrayed as fools who are too wrapped up in their own fantasies to realize that it is all utter nonsense.
Wuthering Heights deconstructs the idea that All Girls Want Bad Boys, by showing exactly what happens when girls fall in love with troubled, angry men. Heathcliff is a 'bad boy', and Bronte shows exactly what this means; he's unstable, vindictive, violent, selfish and vicious. The relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine is depicted as being intensely passionate, but also intensely unhealthy (not least because they may or may not actually be brother and sister), and Heathcliff's response to being spurned for another man is to embark on a single-minded crusade of vengeance that ultimately results in the ruination of both lovers and their immediate families for absolutely no point whatsoever. As if this wasn't enough to illustrate the point, Edgar Linton's foolish sister Isabella elopes with Heathcliff because she's attracted to his bad-boy image. She gets what she wants, but not in the way she expects; an abusive husband who is openly contemptuous and violent towards her, and makes no secret of the fact that he only married her to get at her brother. This hasn't stopped a Misaimed Fandom growing around Heathcliff, however, who even to this day is considered a model of a romantic hero despite the fact that he's pretty much a sociopath and Bronte intended to make this absolutely clear.
- It also shows that what happens when good boys fall in love with troubled, angry women who are in love with said troubled, angry men...
- Ironically Bella from the Twilight series loves Wuthering Heights because she (and by extension the author) completely missed the point.
The Iron Dream, an Alternate History Mockumentary essay about Adolf Hitler's career as a pulp Sci Fi illustrator turned author, is a deconstruction of the Heroic Fantasy genre, intended to show the creepy fascist aspects at its core.
Two of Cyber Punk's early proponents, William Gibson (Author of, among others, the prototypical Cyber Punk book Neuromancer) and Bruce Sterling, (author of the Cyber Punk anthology Mirrorshades) got together to write The Difference Engine, which was meant to Deconstruct Cyber Punk by taking all the Cyber Punk storylines and themes and putting them in a Victorian Context. Instead they ended up giving birth to a new genre.
The Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel The Crooked World by Steve Lyons is a deconstruction of Looney Tunes-esque cartoons as the Doctor lands in a cartoon world and begins to influence its inhabitants' behaviors towards naturalism.
- And The Indestructable Man by Simon Messingham is a deconstruction of all Gerry Anderson's work, asking why Jeff Tracy founded the Thunderbirds, what SHADO personnel would really be like (yes UFO was Darker And Edgier to being with, but Messingham takes it further), and how the ordinary people of the Supermarionation world might feel about so much money being channelled into Awesome But Impractical vehicles. Most notably, the titular Indestructable Man is a Captain Ersatz Captain Scarlet who feels detached from humanity and wishes he was able to die.
World War Z could be considered a deconstruction of Zombie Apocalypse fiction by looking at how real-world governments and people would react to a zombie threat: Somewhat predictably, the Chinese attempt to suppress the truth, the Americans rely on first strike special forces but have difficulty achieving a general mobilisation...
Banewreaker by Jacqueline Carey and its sequel Godslayer deconstruct Heroic Fantasy in the most painful manner possible. It's hard to think of a fantasy trope not used, up to and including a more benign version of I Have You Now My Pretty, but Always Chaotic Evil is subverted, Sympathetic POV is averted, and the Designated Villains are made to be ultimately on the side of what's right despite committing horrible deeds out of necessity. It's enough to make your jaw drop, almost qualifying as Detournement.
While I'm not sure Stephanie Meyer intended The Host as a deconstruction of alien invasions, reading it rendered this troper incapable of lasting through three chapters of The Puppet Masters, due to the former work's complete aversion of Not Even Human and the latter work's reliance on it.
- If you want a subversion of Puppet Master motivations, check out the Animorphs, book #19 and onward, epsecially book #19. They make the point that being stuck as a small, deaf blind slug might be somewhat objectionable.
Can't remember the author, but there's a short story called A Troll Story in which a Viking warrior faces off against a troll. He wins, all right, but the story abruptly takes a deconstructionist turn: he goes insane from the troll's final curse, which renders him able to understand that there's no essential moral difference between the troll's slaughter of Vikings and his own slaughter of innocents in the towns he's raided.
A Princess Worth Dying For by Sergei Lukyanenko presents a fairly standard Space Opera world with a few innovative technologies thrown in. The sequel, ''Planet that Doesn't Exist" proceeds to deconstruct the entire setting, revealing that it was actually a result of a Xanatos Gambit orchestrated by time-traveling humans from the future, who wanted to create thousands of planets worth of allies in a fight against an alien race that kept the humanity from expanding out into space.
Since as of this writing, all the examples on this page are positively presented, a reminder should be given that Tropes Are Not Good. For instance, there's Out of this World by Lawrence Watt-Evans, which deconstructs both High Fantasy and Space Opera. Our hero is an ordinary schlub, so everything—everything—he tries fails miserably as the narration remarks that such things only work in fiction. Deus Angst Machina rears its ugly head when the villains rape and murder his wife and daughter.
Lord Of The Flies is a brutal deconstruction of the Kids Wilderness Epic, subverting Mighty Whitey and with serious Humans Are Bastards themes.
Snow Crash is a deconstruction (or possibly a Deconstructor Fleet) of the Cyberpunk genre. Stephenson exaggerates the genre's usual tropes and takes them to their logical conclusion — most notably Hiro Protagonist's outlandish array of skills and the fact that the Metaverse looks more like Second Life than any serious cyberpunk VR. The critiques inherent in Snow Crash flew over the heads of a lot of readers, but they informed many later works in the genre including Gibson's Bridge Trilogy.

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Doctor Who has, at various times both deconstructed tropes at wild abandon. Later, as a side-effect of Running The Asylum, deconstructed itself and its Fandom. The banally-entitled late '70's story "The Robots of Death" explored the real effects of living in a society with robots as a work force. Wouldn't, for example, Uncanny Valley rear its head? A few years later, writer (later briefly script editor) Douglas Adams had "The Pirate Planet", which explicitly gave the villain some actually specific purpose for his villainry rather than putting it down to some vague "powerlust" or the like. In "The Horns of Nimon", the Doctor's formerly Genre Blind companion notes though word play that the head guys have a "power complex".
My So Called Life is essentially a deconstruction of teen comedies, although the creators never declared it as such. Tropes like The Cyrano and A Simple Plan are played seriously, showing how unpleasant they would be in real life. And the parents, instead of being cartoonishly clueless, are clueless in a more realistic, and more painful, way.
Good luck watching another crime drama, even a relatively realistic one, after watching The Wire's rather brutal deconstruction of the genre.
Supernatural brutally deconstructed Heroic Sacrifices with Dean's "Deal With The Devil" storyline. He knows it was selfish and only did it because he should have stayed dead, feels like he's fucked up so much that he deserves eternal torture, he can't be without his brother and because John told him to look after Sam at all costs. For his part, Sam thinks it was self-righteous, hypocritical, suicidal and extremely selfish. As for the others — Bobby finally realizes how broken Dean was and how much he hates himself, both the Crossroad Demons call it needy and Azazel knows it was self-destructive, pathetic and self-loathing. So Heroic Sacrifices? Not so noble after all — more like selfish, pathetic, destructive and so very suicidal.
- Not forgetting Sam going to extreme lengths to attempt to save Dean in the same manner and the Groundhog Day Loop episode where Dean dies and Sam spends months brutally tracking down Dean's killer.
- And not to mention that it might have been pointless anyway. In John's case, Dean looked very much like he was going to give in to the Reaper in "In My Time Of Dying" and as for Dean/Sam, Sam was at peace and he had been saved from turning into the Anti-Christ. So everything that has happened from now to when Sam was brought back, is really all Dean's fault. Nice going, Dean.
The Gruen Transfer analyzes and deconstructs advertising.
Albeit Telenovelas are rarely prone to deconstruct the genre, a Colombian one named "La mujer en el espejo" deconstructed the hell out of the archetypal plot of "Former Pollyanna is betrayed by her love interest and gets into a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge via ~~Unnecessary Makeover~~ becoming fashionable and ruthless". According to this one, the only real way one no one could recognize you is having a Deal With The Devil to literally transform into another woman. Pity that you now are So Beautiful Its A Curse; your family obviously doesn't recognize you (which is very inconvenient when you're trying to advise and protect them from the villains), mirrors show your real appearance, who becomes your detached conscience and berates all your bad decisions, including the aforementioned deal; and your love interest liked you the way you were.
Firefly's primary raison d'etre is to deconstruct the Space Opera genre. For example, the series opens with an epic battle in which ~~The Empire~~ The Alliance soundly defeats the ~~Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits~~ Independent Worlds; The Captain's epic romance fizzles after his love interest witnesses him with another woman, and the Raygun Gothic setting is rendered completely moot by the fact that the protagonists are too broke to afford any of the cool technology.
Malcolm In The Middle could be said to be a deconstruction of all the classic family Sit Com tropes. Instead of being cute and innocent, the kids are evil little troublemakers. Instead of being a stern authority figure the father is a spineless coward. Instead of being a kind loving Matriarch, the mother is strict, arbitrary, unreasonable, and has a volcanic temper. Oh, and of course the lack of a laugh track.
- This troper would consider the show more a Reconstruction. The whole show seems to work on the theme that yeah, Malcolm's family is messed up and are seen as pariahs by just about everyone, but somehow their dysfunction actually endears them to each other and makes them better people in the long run. There is Deconstruction in the series, but it's all directed at the seemingly well-adjusted people who usually turn out to be callous, pernicious and occasionally con artists.
A dark deconstruction of a typical Dom Com can be found in Titus in which it shows how a dysfunctional family can be messed up in the real world.
The new Battle Star Galactica massively deconstructed the old one, by showing how it "really" would look like if the last people were fleeing from a genocide. By proxy, the show also deconstructed "light" sci-fi like Star Wars.
- Arguments have been made that the show is much less of a deconstruction, than it is simply a DarkerAndEdgier re-imagining; since it fails to address many of the problems of the original. This may be reinforced by the fact that the Cylons have been changed from an irreconcilable alien other, to an Anvilicious screed about mankind being destroyed by their own sins; interspersed with plenty of Fanservice and Fetish Fuel (two words: "dungeon ship"). Further reinforced by the fact that most of the major characters devote epic amounts of time to their personal dysfunctionalities; and seem to be only tangentially concerned with the fact that their entire race has been almost completely wiped out.
House is basically a deconstruction of hospital dramas
- Bodies deconstructs the genre even more so.
Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon ends up deconstructing its own source material in increasingly surprising ways as it diverges from the original story, until, by the end, Sailor Moon herself has become the Omnicidal Maniac villain; the senshi's power source, the Silver Crystal, turns out to have really been an Artifact Of Doom; and erstwhile villain Queen Beryl is revealed to have actually been trying to save the world, albeit only so she could rule it. The deconstruction arises here as a result of the audience's own genre expectations about the senshi's Power Of Friendship and the motivation of the Card Carrying Villains, and how naive and dangerous it'd actually be for the heroines to make such assumptions.

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Mad Magazine routinely uses deconstruction in its humor. Whenever it parodies a comic strip, television show, or other continuous series, trust Mad to find some deconstructionist way to kill off the main character or irrevocably change them.
The Pooh Perplex (1963) and Postmodern Pooh (2001) by Frederick Crews are mock literary essays about Winnie The Pooh from different perspectives (Freudian, Post-Colonialist, Marxist, etc.) that deconstuct the sins of literary critics:
- The earlier book deconstructs What Do You Mean Its Not Didactic, where the critics clearly don't care about the book they're reading, and only about using it to prove some point. Nine times out of ten, the point turns out to be using circular logic to prop up their own school of literary criticism (using Marxist theories to prove that Marxism is the best theory, for instance). Seeing critics solemnly dig for deep meanings and ignore the basic meaning is even funnier when the book is Winnie The Pooh. (The parody Freudian essay is written to sound like it was badly translated from German, and suggests that A.A. Milne clearly has issues because Eeyore is so concerned about losing his tail, If You Know What I Mean.)
- The second book deconstructs academic Serious Business and its tendency to Accentuate The Negative. The parody critics think every literary school except their own is evil, and the fate of the world depends on whether college students read books with a good or evil literary school in mind. It's dumb when it's Shakespeare, and ridiculous when it's Pooh. The Subtext is that these literary feuds are really about power and personal vendettas, which can only be justified by declaring them to be Serious Business. The Sociobiologist says she is better than all the other writers because she uses science, the pop theorist thinks his analysis of Fan Fic makes him more "with it" than the stodgy old writers, the Post-Colonialist uses his personal suffering as a License To Whine...no matter what the theory is, its real purpose is making themselves feel better by putting other people down. The book also deconstructs Deconstructionism, which turns out to be just as petty as the other theories.
- So hang on... how are we supposed to reconstruct Deconstructionism?
  - By making a work so horrible that it asks for it.
Many of the songs written by Serge Gainsbourg for the 60's French pop star France Gall were deconstructions of common themes in pop music and its role at the time in everyday life. The most well-known example is probably Poupée de cire, Poupée de son, winner of the Eurovision Song Contest of 1965, which deconstructs the idea of a star too young to actually understand love singing Silly Love Songs for cash that younger kids will believe.
A Real Life example: The Sokal Affair, in which physicist Alan Sokal wrote and submitted a paper that was literally nonsense to the Post Modern studies journal Social Text, in order to prove it would get published "if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." The journal published the piece, and on the same day of publication, the physicist outed the hoax in another publication, causing an uproar in many postmodern and philosophy circles.
Da Vinci's Notebook's song "Title of the Song" is a deconstruction of '90s boyband songs.
Reductio Ad Absurdum is 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.

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Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods spends its first act as simply a retelling of the stories of Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, all tied together with the story of a baker and his wife who are cursed with infertility unless they can procure certain items from all four. In the end it looks like everyone's gotten what they want and is happy, but suddenly the narrator announces "To be continued!" Act two begins with the idea that the giant was just minding his own business when Jack came up the beanstalk and killed him, and just builds from there into an incredibly brutal Anyone Can Die deconstruction of fairy tales.
The song "Poppa's Blues" from the stage musical Starlight Express is a wonderful deconstruction/analysis of a blues song — it is a blues song that tells you how blues songs are written, with a sense of humor about itself. The first verse goes:
Oh, the first line of the blues is always sung a second time.
Yeah, the first line of the blues is always sung a second time.
So by the time you reach the third line
You've had time to think of a rhyme.
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.
Hamlet has been read as a massive deconstruction of Elizabethan revenge dramas (although most of them end in tears for everyone). Measure for Measure might do the same for comedies. The whole thing is a source of much debate.
Romeo And Juliet can be read as a deconstruction of the idea that "Love at First Sight" can exist, since Romeo and Juliet's attraction is implied to be purely superficial, more to do with lust than love, and brings nothing but tragedy to everyone around them (and, of course, themselves).
- Yet people Completely Miss The Point and think it's a beautiful story of True love. That drives this troper positively insane! I can't help but wonder if people wouldn't think that way if the two families just blamed the other for "leading my son/daughter astray" and kept fighting their stupid feud.
The Yeomen of the Guard plays much like any of Gilbert And Sullivan's other operas, except the Deus Ex Machina never shows up, so everybody gets married to the wrong person.

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While the first two Metal Gear games played everything fairly straight, the Metal Gear Solid series is intended as a deconstruction of action movies (and, to a lesser extent, video games), twisting tropes common to them around in extremely horrible ways to establish how damaged everything and everyone would have to be for an action movie scenario to work in the real world. By the second game it's way out into the nastiest parts of the Deconstructor Fleet territory, shamelessly attacking fandom, the video game industry, the expectations of fans and even its own prequel and characters. Some would argue it goes a bit too far, to the point where it feels very painful to play a game which clearly hates you so much.
- Similarily, Metal Gear Solid 4 raises the question of what exactly happens to Action Heroes after the action movie ends. The choices that are presented are dying in a blaze of glory, suicide, or fading into obscurity.
  - Adding on to that, MGS 4 explores the concept of the Badass Grandpa. Snake's willingness to fight in spite of his advanced physical age isn't solely depicted as being admirable but also as being foolish and suicidal, people who idolized Snake back in the day patronize him and treat him as a burden, and in general Snake's age is the subject of cruel jokes. In fact, Snake's lifebar is changed to Old Snake to emphasize this.
Mass Effect spends just as much time deconstructing popular sci-fi tropes as it does playing them straight.
Aside from its take on Ayn Rand's philosophy, Bioshock can be seen as a deconstruction of action-oriented FPS games, as the game brings forth a world where people can conjure semi-magical abilities that seem to have no use other than warfare, specifically warfare in a video game, and builds its mythos from there.
- Not to mention its take on seemingly arbitrary objectives from Mission Control.
Most of the villainism of No More Heroes's Villain Protagonist comes from what would happen if a stereotypical videogame/anime geek retained their combat ability in the real world and lived life like they play games.
Iji manages to deconstruct the One Man Army trope... By making the protagonist slowly go insane from all of the slaughter, while the few enemies she tries to talk to refuse to listen to her and label her as a mass murderer. Though it's completely possible to avoid killing anyone at all.
- It also deconstructs the typical "save the world" plotline. Iji tries to get the Tasen and the Komato to leave the planet so that the world can continue living on like before... Except the planet has been completely devastated by the invasion and they are doomed anyway.(Though the ending shows plants growing some time after the aliens left.)
Planescape Torment is a deconstruction of RPGs. Characters in the gameworld comment on how adventurers are unwelcome in Sigil and how bad the main character looks and smells. It features a dungeon that deconstructs and ridicules the concept of dungeon hacking, the side-quests are... unusual to say the least. (Tired of these "Romeo and Juliet" quests that have you uniting annoying lovers? Planescape Torment has a quest where you have to destroy a relationship) Protagonist Without A Past is heavily subverted because NPCs remember your character while you don't (because he has amnesia). The main quest is mainly about people you gave quests in the past, rats are powerful enemies, there are none of the typical D&D races, and an ANGEL is one of the antagonists! Oh, and there are only two swords in the whole game. (Your character can only use one.)
Not a lot of people noticed because of its extreme popularity attracting plenty of people new to RPG tropes, but Final Fantasy VII is a deconstruction of the previous six Final Fantasies. Gone are all the magical fantasy races and tough, strong main heroes. All the fantasy races have been made near-totally extinct, magic's considered a science, and we don't get a hero. Instead, we get a tough young man who appears at first to be a wish-fulfilment hero character, capable and good with women, and then he does a rapid downwards slide into an extreme Heroic BSOD leaving him not so much traumatised as in a wheelchair, twitching and dribbling and making nonsense noises. It turns out he had gone insane and started to believe he was a magnanimous and successful soldier he'd once known - in other words, he was 'roleplaying' as a 'hero' himself to make up for the fact that he was a socially inept, self-hating fanboy who couldn't handle girls or real-life job responsibilities. Of course, he attracted a massive Misaimed Fandom which missed the point entirely, but Cloud was never supposed to be a character to model yourself on.
- It might, however, be safe to say that he got better.
The Condemned series does a good job deconstructing the Vice City setting of most crime games. By placing it in a Survival Horror context, it shows just how terrifying the concept of a rotting, crime-filled metropolis with a demoralized and incompetent police force could be in real life.
Most First Person Shooter of today's caliber has a very different take on what goes on in war. Killzone 2 is a good example — the ISA thought that by invading the Helghast homeworld and killing Visari will break the war machine, needless to say the Helghast did not break and ended up even stronger.
Fate Stay Night plays The Messiah and Pollyanna straight with Shirou in Fate, but in UBW the consequences of his type of thinking are deconstructed via use of Archer's backstory. The third route makes him realize early on that while it may do other people good to try and save everyone, it will make him miserable. By the end, in the non depressing ending, he appears to have given up said ideals to just live with Sakura.

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Megatokyo is described by its author as a subtle deconstruction of the Dating Sims he enjoys, with a mix of lampshade hanging, playing it dead straight and showing the darker side of each trope, especially Unlucky Everydude, Robot Girl, and Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends. At least one of the characters might well be aware of this...
- A more blatant deconstruction of the Dating Sim genre is Experimental Comic Kotone, to the point that the main character is intentionally left anonymous.
The Pixel Art Comic Kid Radd, while largely light in tone, presents a "video game characters living in videoland" 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.
Alien Dice is a deconstruction of Mons and especially Pokemon. The eponymous Alien Dice is a Deadly Game of Gotta Catch Em All. Here, any species, humanoid or animal-like can be turned into a mon and get captured when defeated by players. Also, the "mons", despite their Healing Factor do suffer badly in battle.
It's Walky could arguably be seen as a deconstruction of the goofy 1980s cartoons creator David Willis is a fan of (mostly GI Joe 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 Not So Harmless.
My Name Is Might Have Been deconstructs Rock Band. Yeah, the video game.
Vg Cats deconstructs the cartoon violence of Tom And Jerry in this strip. This troper doesn't even like cats (due to allergies) and still finds this sad.
Erfworld is a world where Tabletop Strategy rules are literally true, such as citizens popping in fully grown and a defeated team being frozen in time until someone comes to try and kill them. The more the rules become clear, the creepier everything starts to become.
- It also deconstructs the typical Strategist with Parson's reaction to the aftermath of the Battle For Gobwin Knob. Instead of being proud and/or relieved that he won the battle against impossible odds, he is horrified by the death and destruction he has caused, so much that he steps down as Chief Warlord in favor of Ansom.
Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes takes a good hard look at the Unfortunate Implications of labeling whole races Always Chaotic Evil. It portrays the titular 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.
Quentin Quinn Space Ranger, an offshoot of Tales Of The Questor, is Deconstructing Star Trek right now. So far the design of the starship Enterprise, the habit of using forcefield airlocks without wearing space suits and the Proud Warrior Race Guy have already been hit. Hard. Up next is engineering. (May 2009)

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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.
Who could forget this remarkable deconstruction of Super Mario Bros?
- "There Will Be Brawl" on The Escapist, the same site that hosts Zero Punctuation and Unskippable, takes some of the same ideas, throws in a good helping of Black Humor, and makes a whole series out of it. It also uses all the characters from Super Smash Bros Brawl in addition to the Mario series. In this story, Luigi is a drug dealer and the narrator, Wario is a small time mob boss with the Ice Climbers as his bodyguards, Link is the head of the police force, Captain Falcon owns a gay bar, and Kirby...is essentially the universe's version of Hannibal Lecter.
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.
  - Well not really. It's kind of like making a fake of a fake doesn't give you the original back. They're not putting any tropes back together, really, they're just taking apart the ones they replaced the original videogame tropes with.
  - A deconstruction of a deconstruction isn't a reconstruction. Think of derivatives: the derivative of a derivative isn't an antiderivative (a.k.a. indefinite integral), it's the second derivative.
  - Yeah, using Calculus to explain it definitely makes it easier to understand!
  - Surprisingly, it all makes sense now...
The SCP Foundation Wiki, although beginning as a creepypasta site, has largely evolved into a deconstruction on the "Modern-Day Fantasy" genre, depicting a shadowy organization entirely devoted to capturing and imprisoning all of those magicians, psychics, and mystic artifacts that populate said settings, to maintain the status quo.
- SCP 953 deconstructs the Fetish Fuel implicit in Petting Zoo People. SCP-953 is an Asian fox-woman described as beautiful, elegant, and completely willing to rip your liver out with her bare hands in order to eat it raw.
  - Of course, for some people, that might be Fetish Fuel in and of itself...
- One story deconstructs the concept of people with reality bending powers like Haruhi (though not a direct reference) in respect to how people would actually deal with them in the real world, as well as the inherent danger they pose. SCP-239 is deliberately fooled into thinking she's an actual witch to limit the use of her powers (making her think she can only do "magic" with certain set "spells"). However, the facade was not foolproof and the previously mentioned incident led many casualties, a major character going [Ax Crazy], and the reality bender herself being put into a medically induced coma. A related story describes the weaknesses of reality benders and the main character has killed over a hundred of them.
  - Original author (one of them) of the two SCP-239 stories here: the stories were meant as a deconstruction, but not of the genres specified, although I'm gratified to see that they can be interpreted differently. At the time, there was a vogue for new articles with reality-bending humans who were so powerful that the only "containment" was to give them what they want and hope that if you appeased them enough, they wouldn't go nuts. The stories were meant as a deconstruction of the concept of appeasement, and basically an illustration of what a soulless organization like the Foundation would actually do if faced with that kind of blackmail.
Furry Fandom works frequently portray an entire world as furry. I Wish I Was Furry! 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. And a plushophile. (It's exactly what it sounds like.) A furryized world, as it happens, is dark and brutal.
Sonny Gets Mad Scienced is the "humourous" type of deconstruction, the one with the Genre Savvy lead. There was also a series by another furry writer about strange artifacts that transformed people into furries. He encouraged other people to contribute. Nequ came up with two fairly normal entries, and then this. He also seems to have an openly admitted Expy of SCP, called ACS, that does to transformation fetishism and several associated kinks what SCP does to Urban Fantasy.

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Robert Smigel's Saturday Night Live 1998 animated short "Titey" is a merciless deconstruction of the then-current trend of Disney and Don Bluth trying to tell more adult stories yet still subjecting them to Disneyfication so as not to lose family audiences, even if they were inspired by actual tragic events. It's a mock trailer for an animated version of Titanic with Napoleon as a villain, Anne Frank as a heroine, and an ending where the ship doesn't sink and is reunited with its mother thanks to the encouragement of Talking Animal friends. Incredibly, Gilbert Gottfried, Whoopi Goldberg, and one of Disney's own trailer announcers participated as voices despite all having worked for the company at some point.
- That movie really happened.
  - And while it didn't have Napolean as a villain, it did have a rapping dog. Yes. A rapping dog. In 1912. It simply goes to show that as hard as many people try to mock the entertainment industry with absurdity, they will eventually produce something even more absurd and be completely and utterly serious about it.
Smigel went on to other parodies like "Bambi II" and "Journey to the Disney Vault", tearing into Disney's Cash Cow Franchise mentality and/or the company's tendency to be Undermined By Reality. Other companies don't get off lightly though; several times he has parodied Anvilicious children's entertainment to satirize the prejudice of, and Demonization used by, various religions. Consider "Religitables", a Veggie Tales parody where the horrors carried out under the banners of various religions (witch hunts, terrorism, the Catholic church child-abuse scandals) are brushed off and even celebrated.
There can be a very good case made for The Venture Bros being a deconstruction of Johnny Quest and Doc Savage''-style stories. Some say spoof, some say deconstruction, some say both.
Family Guy does a particularly nasty deconstruction of Loony Tunes and its Amusing Injuries, wherein Elmer Fudd is out "hunting wabbits", shoots Bugs Bunny four times in the stomach, snaps his neck amidst cries of pain, and then drags him off leaving behind a trail of blood.
Looney Tunes director Chuck Jones often used deconstruction on his cartoons. The best known example is Duck Amuck: First the scenery changes, forcing Daffy to adapt. Then Daffy himself is erased and redrawn. Then the soundtrack fails, then the film frame, and so on until Daffy is psychologically picked clean. Another example is What's Opera, Doc?, which takes the base elements of a typical Bugs Bunny cartoon and reassembles them as a Wagnerian opera. (Conversely, you could also say that it takes the base elements of Wagnerian opera and reassembles them as a Bugs Bunny cartoon.)
This trope is basically Robot Chicken's raison d'être. Sometimes it's just parody, though.
The famous Simpsons episode "Homer's Enemy" is a deconstruction of the general weirdness and insanity of its setting, showing Frank Grimes, a man who had to struggle for everything he got in life, still living fairly cheaply despite having a strong work ethic and comparing him to Homer. Well, you can imagine. The question was "What if a real-life, normal person had to enter Homer's universe and deal with him?". After Frank's (tragic) death, Homer is seen sleeping during his funeral and in a drowsy state, tells Marge to change the TV channel, bringing everyone to laugh. All during his funeral. The episode was disliked by some for carrying a too dark and cynic tone.
The Ed Edd N Eddy episode "1+1=Ed" is a deconstruction of how cartoons work, similar to Duck Amuck.
AEon Flux deconstructs Girls With Guns, or at least tries to while also dealing with political philosophy, morality, psychology. It also deconstructs the idea of cartoons that are nonlinear.

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