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" Sometimes I think you enjoy breaking these little geniuses." " There is an art to it, and I'm very, very good at it. But enjoy? Well, maybe. When they put back the pieces afterward, and it makes them better."
Wouldn't it be nice if the world were like the TV Shows, Films, Video Games and Comic Books you love? I'm sure it would be! Because then you'd have superheroes battling outside your door! Only to crash into your house in the heat of battle, smashing through your television and killing your pet. As the old Aesop goes, Be Careful What You Wish For.
No, it would not be cool if our fantasies were real, because our fantasies are usually rarely thought out and as such, if real, would have terrible consequences and/or indefensible preconditions.
Deconstruction occurs when you take a common fantasy, being a trope or a set of genre conventions or a typical plot, and attack it by showing how much it would suck if it were in fact real.
For instance, the dream of wanting to be a Princess Classic would be deconstructed by showing all the pressures and problems associated with actually being a Princess. Even more savagely, one could be Princess to a Prince Charming who lorded over an absolute monarchy where he was a tyrannical oppressor of the people (like most absolute monarchies)! The oppression would generate a revolution and before we know it, Ms. Princess Classic would have her head in the guillotine.
In essence, Deconstruction is Reductio Ad Absurdum applied to genre conventions/tropes/fantasies. Nothing about the trope (or set thereof) is actually changed, it is played straight. However, it is played straight without ignoring or hand-waving the potential real-life consequences/preconditions. Indeed, these consequences/preconditions are highlighted in gruesome detail, usually in order to take a cherished fantasy and demonstrate it to have negative and /or indefensible results or otherwise be unworkable.
Deconstruction is also usually followed by Reconstruction. Wheras deconstruction aims to attack our fantasies by showing them to be flawed, absurd, and unworkable and unpleasant in reality, reconstruction accepts these criticisms and builds a new fantasy that allegedly would work in reality. Continuing the Princess Classic example, a reconstruction of this fantasy would make it clear that Prince Charming is the Prince of a Constitutional Monarchy that strictly limits the powers of the royalty, and that government is handled by a constitutionally restrained representative democracy and thus the threat of any Regicidal Revolution is minimal.
Deconstruction and reconstruction can become cyclic tropes. A set of conventions is established (the initial "construction" of the genre or ideas that are used in the story), this set of conventions is played straight until some author gets bored or frustrated with the implications the fantasy brings and decides to show us the dark side of these conventions via a deconstruction of them. Atop the ruins, a more realistic narrative (i.e. one that accepts the criticisms of the earlier deconstruction) is then built via reconstruction (and in the future, this narrative gets deconstructed, etc.).
Note that to be a deconstruction of X (x being a trope or set/s thereof), a work must both abide by and criticize X. Merely making things Darker And Edgier is not necessarily a deconstruction, unless the author is clearly criticizing that-which-is-being-made- Darker And Edgier. For instance, Warhammer40000 cranks all its tropes Up To Eleven and deliberately makes every piece of lore and all of the factions so GRIMDARK that the setting is an ode to moral nihilsm; but in spite of the fact that it clearly paints an unpleasant picture, never once does it seriously compell the player to seriously question whether or not they would truly want to be a badass Space Marine fighting tentacle-rapey Slaaneeshi Daemonettes by stabbing them repeatedly with phallic and extremely large sword- chainsaw hybrids. Thus, 40k abides by the tropes without criticizing them.
Also, two important things must be said about deconstruction. First, deconstruction might shatter cherished fantasies into pieces, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. Cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction are basically how a genre or a trope evolves. Deconstruction is thus ultimately part of a constructive process. That said, a deconstruction is not automatically a great thing either; it is possible for a deconstruction to be done poorly, just as with any other type of story.
Secondly, deconstruction is a tool that broadens the range of dramatic possibilities open to a writer. Once again returning the Princess Classic example, her having to survive a revolution has a much greater dramatic potential than if she just "lived happily ever after".
Deconstruction can be applied in various ways to a number of targets. For instance, many works deconstruct a whole genre. For this, see Genre Deconstruction. Additionally, many works that are not deconstructions of their genre often will deconstruct a trope or two, sometimes for comedic purposes.
A parody that deconstructs at the same time as parodying is a Deconstructive Parody. A work that attacks or critiques social phenomenon is a satire, not a deconstruction (although a deconstruction may feature satire, and vice versa). See also Meta Trope Intro. Compare Post Modernism. Contrast Affectionate Parody. Not to be confused with the Deconstructor Fleet, which engages in parody, pastiche, and Genre Busting as much as it does in actual deconstruction. Subtropes include Deconstruction Crossover, when Deconstruction is done by staging a Massive Multiplayer Crossover.
See also Unbuilt Trope, when a work can be retroactively seen as a Deconstruction. See Indecisive Deconstruction for where to draw the line between a genre piece and a deconstruction.
Subtropes of Deconstruction
Please note: This page has been edited for clarity's sake. Please do not add any more examples. Add them to Genre Deconstruction or Deconstructed Trope or the appropriate subtrope. Where possible please move examples to these subtrope pages. This page is about deconstruction as a method, and thus should be stripped down to meta-examples.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Twentieth Century Boys goes nuts on every nuance it can find in the Saving The World plot. The Badass is brought down to the same level as the Action Survivor cast. The Attack Of The Fifty Foot Whatever is torn apart so brutally it's commented on in universe. The only reason the Big Bad exists is because he's a Psychopathic Manchild Complete Monster who actually believes in this crap, and he is much more Genre Savvy than the typical comic book villain who grabs the Idiot Ball at the perfect time. At the same time, it is a Reconstruction in that, no matter how many tropes it subverts, the characters are still Saving The World.
- Martian Successor Nadesico, on the other hand, does the same thing with its Affectionate Parody of Real Robot shows.
- 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...
- 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 her country never gotten better beforehand), and (arguably) Wang Liu Mei being a deconstruction of Lacus Clyne.
- Doesn't Neil's brother come back as the new, identical Lockon Stratos?
- It is more on the fact that unlike Mwu La Flanga, they made sure Neil was proven dead, and that Lyle, different from in brother in ways has new problems on his plate, such as dealing witth Machurian Agent Anew
- 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. Or both. 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). 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.
- Furthermore, the show deconstructs the 'magical tournament/There Can Be Only One' type of anime as well: 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 has Guts chop them up with his BFS.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Yu-Gi-Oh GX is another mass Anime Tropes Deconstruction, especially the original series' heroes' use of Defeatmeans Friendship (which the Big Bad's Cult uses in Season 2). And just look at what happens to its typical Idiot Hero-Boring Invincible Hero protagonist.
- It doesn't just deconstruct tropes, it also deconstructs aspects of the game itself; Judai's duel with Dimitri takes a stab at showing the flaws in the Possession Equals Mastery theory of netdecking, and a central theme in the anime is over which side of the Stop Having Fun Guys debate is Right.
- Its follow-up, Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds, is starting to follow in GX's footsteps; the third season's antagonist's plot against Synchros, and the counter provided to our heroes in the form of the Accel Synchro, seems deliberately crafted to deconstruct the debate over whether or not the monsters are Game Breakers, and the upcoming Crossover movie delves into how much the Plot Tumor of the game had grown in the anime and manga, by having the villain try to ''travel back in time and use the game to murder its creator, Pegasus J. Crawford, thus preventing the game from being created and, supposedly, prevent The End Of The World As We Know It that would've come, if the game stayed in existence.
- Rumbling Hearts is as brutal a Deconstruction of the very concept of Nakama as you will ever find.
- Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle starts out as a light-hearted Nakama Gotta Catch Em All adventure story with some darkness around the edges and interesting sexual subtext. One-third of the way through, everything you thought you knew turns inside out and the most light-hearted elements become harbingers of the ugliest secrets. From there on out, the series proceeds to do everything it can to make your mind boggle, including introducing major unexpected Squick into what had once been CLAMP's most popular and innocent pairing.
- Darker Than Black has a lot of fun mercilessly destroying most of the standard tropes regarding superpowers in anime. Oh, look at all the people with super powers from a mysterious source that the government is hiding from the public! Except that whatever gives them powers also disconnects them from their feelings, turning them into sociopaths. And they have to do stupid, weird, and occasionally painful things in exchange for using their powers. And they're not even considered human a lot of the time. And governments tend to snap them up immediately for military purposes, often Unpersoning them by inflicting Laser Guided Amnesia on their friends and family. They're pretty much just treated as walking guns. It also plays with the concept of antiheros, both pointing out how weird the psychology of a lot of stoic badasses would be (answer: so deep in denial it's not even funny) and demonstrating that a James Bond-style spy would probably not be viewed as a particularly heroic person by anyone he interacted with. In short, this is the sort of show where, when a character with a Transformation Sequence appeared, the fandom started taking bets on how long it'd be before someone stopped or attacked her in the middle of it. Seven episodes, it turns out, though it wasn't violent.
- There's also some deconstruction with character-types. Ordinarily, a Bottle Fairy and Lovable Sex Maniac are friends/allies to the hero. In Darker Than Black, the characters fitting those tropes (April and Genma respectively) are Hei's enemies.
- The show also plays around with Fantastic Racism quite a bit. There's actually a very good reason that characters treat Contractors the way they do, and they only escape being Always Chaotic Evil because we're shown that outright sociopathy doesn't necessarily make them any more evil than the normal humans. In fact the second season introduced us to a Complete Monster whose behavior improved when he became a Contractor.
- Even Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Reconstruction and Affectionate Parody of Humongous Mecha manages to deconstruct something — Only Sane Man. Rossiu, who was this for bunch of Hot Blooded Chaotic Good pilots later starts treating them all as an idiots and believing he's the only one who knows how to save the world right to the point when he commits acts of Shoot The Dog.
- The second half of the series also deconstructs the result of The Resistance successfully defeating The Empire and having to deal with ruling over the land they have liberated. Not everyone wants to be under their command and almost all members of Team Gurren admit they're not cut out for administrative duties. Also, once the Anti-Spiral invasion appears, Rossiu's ascension to power by scapegoating Simon mirrors similar situations in real-life politics where, during crises, people get high office by blaming their predecessors for what's going wrong.
- Busou Renkin does a nasty deconstruction of the Hard Work Hardly Works and Boring Invincible Hero ideas which are so common in shounen. Throughout the first half of the series, it's very frequently remarked how the hero, Kazuki, experiences dramatic improvement in his fighting abilities in a very short period of time and there are comments from Tokiko in episode 14 about how Kazuki seems to bounce back at his lowest point, fed by the energy of others. Well, come the next episode, he dies, and through said heroic will, rips out the "kakugane" (the source of his power and a replacement for his heart) from his chest and it is revealed to be a "black kakugane". Seems that when you have one of those in your chest in place of a heart, you get superhuman powers, but with a catch. Those with black kakuganes have Power Incontinence and constantly drain the life energy of anyone around them. Thus, what at first seemed like stock shounen-hero traits were actually a foreshadowing of Kazuki's powers being a curse.
- School Days is a brutal deconstruction of the ordinary harem romance anime series. It also deconstructs h-game adaptations and other slice of life romance series. Instead of the lead character being generally a good guy and all the characters being happy with the situation, besides some comedy style antics, and the show ending with the character getting the main girl, in this show the main guy is despicable, no one is happy about what Makoto is doing, and it ends not with him getting the girl, but after him having sex with most of the girls, he gets killed violently and then his killer is murdererd by another girl. Instead of being a light and fluffy comedy, this is a dark and chilling drama with a disturbing conclusion.
- The first book/arc of The Twelve Kingdoms plays an awful lot like a cynical writer watched one too many bad Trapped In Another World series and thought, "Okay, what would really happen if you threw an insecure teenage girl into a war-torn fantasy world?" The result is what seems to be the anti-Fushigi Yuugi, where the hostile, alien environment drives the heroine into a nervous breakdown even before she learns that everyone expects her to lead a nation.
- The "Perfect GT-R" arc of Wangan Midnight has a beautiful deconstruction of street racing. Jun Kitami, who at this point has been protrayed as a reckless, heartless daredevil tuner, says point-blank that there are no winners or losers and that Koichi did exactly the right thing in giving up this senseless hobby so he could return to his wife. Given that the whole manga is about street racing, plainly admitting a truth like this took guts. Even better, this happens in the very first arc after the Devil Z and Blackbird are introduced.
Comic Books
- 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.
Fan Fic
- 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.
When I dream I have this recurring nightmare that Walt Disney has taken over the world and turned it into a bright and happy place where people burst into song at the drop of a hat. Then I wake up and I'm living in Crystal Tokyo. I can't decide which is worse. — from The Babe Wore Blue by Mark Latus
- 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.
- Star Wars fan fiction writers like to deconstruct the morality of the good guys, particularly the Jedi, the Republic, and their successors. A lot. After all there has to be a reason why technology never seems to advance.
- Rockman: the Robot War, while it does take liberties with the cast, puts a dark twist on many tropes in the Mega Man games. In the aftermath of World War 3, Dr. Light develops the Robot Masters to assist in environmental clean-up and industry. Dr. Wily has a more sympathetic backstory, he feels that over use of robots will destroy humanity, and allies the Human Supremacy League, which is like a very well organized terrorist group. The Robot Masters are also mass produced, allowing for armies of Gutsman or Cutman to go on killing sprees, while the the orignals are the bosses in the initial stages. And this is the tip of the iceberg.
- 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.
- And the unfortunate truth, according to an article I read, is that a lot of that stuff is actually true of Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes in Real Life.
- This is true. In fact, in Clerks 2 the reason Jay gives for the duo having been in prison is the actual reason that Jason Mewes had been in prison a few months before filming. (He was caught with drugs after being arrested on "suspicion of mischief" which apparently translates into, "Driving around with a deployed airbag." Which, come to think of it, is hilarious rather than angsty.)
- Redwall fic commonly attempts to deconstruct the Always Chaotic Evil nature of vermin. Success varies.
- Those Lacking Spines starts off as a deconstruction of all the abundant cliches in Kingdom Hearts fanfiction, but soon it deconstructs everything in fanfiction.net... including the authors themselves.
- Challenge of the Super Friends: The End, everything about the original cartoon is played straight. When the Legion of Doom enters another universe, things have Gone Horribly Wrong, and end up like victims in the Event Horizon and Hellraiser films, while the Superfriends become fascistic and attempt to make their world a utopia in the villains' absence. Along the way, every character is deconstructed before being transformed beyond recognition.
- There are a few High School Musical fanfictions where after the characters have graduated at the end of the third movie, they go off to their respective colleges with no preparation for the real world. Scenarios like Sharpay getting knocked back from a theatre career for her attitude and something horrible happening to Troy are fairly common.
- Many Ranma Fanfics tend to deconstruct the whole gender bender/shapeshifting thing, by playing the mental stress these put on the characters straight and not for fun. Their over the top flaws from the manga (Ryoga and orientation, Ranma and socializing etc.) are used too. Usually this ends with a massive downer.
- While it wasn't avoided in the game, a lot of Final Fantasy X fanfics show just how much it would hurt to accompany your surrogate baby sister to her inevitable death, which everyone (including her) wants to happen—not to mention how Braska's death was celebrated with a humungous festival. For the sequel, there have been a few fics deconstructing how Yuna's radical change in personality hides the pain she's really feeling regarding a good two-thirds of her life. In fact, Yuna's a popular fan deconstruction of the Yamato Nadeshiko archetype.
Film
- 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...
- An even more mercilous deconstruction was Mean Girls. The movie sets up the standard formula: The poor heroine has her social life ruined by a group of popular girls, and loses the guy of her dreams, so she sets out to make things right and get her revenge. She accomplishes this about halfway through the movie, at which point you get the watch the lead popular girl's life fall apart, and the heroine take her place in the social ladder, ignoring her original friends and becoming just as mean herself. The clearest turning point is when it's overtly pointed out by one of the friends that the guy has left the bully, but still doesn't want her (or, for that matter, want anything to do with the whole fucked-up mess), but yet she's still trying to ruin the once-popular girl's life.
- Heathers did it earlier, putting some brutal twists on perceptions of teenage society and violence along the way. And with more murder.
- 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, although Yojimbo was an adaptation of Hammett's Red Harvest
- 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!"
- Funny Games is intended as a Postmodern 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. There's also the rather insane bit of fourth wall breaking, The mother steals the shot-gun, kills one of the two villains, the other quickly grabs the TV's remote control, presses rewind, to right before she shots him, and grabs the gun, saying "you shouldn't have done that, you're not allowed to break the rules". The point being, that protagonist can never win in a horror film, because that's "the rules" of the genre. Most of the Forth wall breaking scenes are basically the killers telling the audience that they're to blame for the family's suffering, because movies like this are entertainment for them. The lack of a fourth wall makes possible to most terrifing line ever uttered: "We're not up to feature length yet. What you want is a real ending with plausible plot development".
- M Night Shyamalan presented deconstructions of Super Hero stories with Unbreakable. The main character has no idea about the nature of his powers or about how he should use them.
- 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 — a big reunion bout with his main rival in the past — 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 Captain Ersatz gleefuly pursues Jerry's, hatchet in hand, and then cuts him in half with it (guts spill); then Spike's Captain Ersatz appears and blows the cat's brains out (literally) with a shotgun. The main character's mother laughs out loudly at this scene.
- Park Chan-Wook's "vengeance" trilogy, which includes Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance is very much a deconstruction of the revenge film. This is most true in the first film, in which all the violence committed only leads to further despair.
- Pleasantville deconstructs the stereotypical 1950s Leave It To Beaver style sitcom, and through it the whole phenomenon of 1950s nostalgia; it starts off as a typically wholesome, innocent and carefree place (especially when contrasted to the 1990s, a lengthy opening montage reeling out all the social problems seemingly endemic since the 1950s), but the introduction of colour into the black-and-white environment gradually peels things back to reveal the stifling and repressed attitudes towards race, gender and sexuality seething under the surface, and the social problems of the decade that such nostalgia frequently overlooks.
- Both The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski are deconstructions of film noir, specifically Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe stories, although Lebowski is also played for laughs. In both films, the protagonist is more or less a loser who lives by himself and comes to the wrong conclusion at the end of the case, but it's not a big deal since it never really mattered in the first place.
- The film Shin Kamen Rider Prologue is arguably one for the Kamen Rider series, showing a much more realistic and gruesome look at the themes of forced genetic engineering, phlebotinum rebellion, and giant bug people that were present through the franchise's Showa era.
- Whereas Unforgiven was Clint Eastwood's deconstruction of westerns, Gran Torino, which came out about a decade and a half later, is his deconstruction of his other big genre, the urban vigilante film.
- The film version of 1408 does this with the "Escape from something terrible and become a better person for it" kind of movie. The Protagonist wakes up on a beach, reliving an earlier scene when he's on the beach, showing the whole experience to be "All Just A Dream" he reconnects with his estranged father, gets back together with his ex-wife who he still has feelings for, and becomes a successful author, and the audience is lead to believe that this is the third act of the movie. Turns out, it was all just a sadistic game that the room came up with the torture him more, and it along with the apparition of his dead daughter prove to be the last straw setting off the real ending of him burning down the room so that nobody else will ever stay in it.
- A scene from The Mirror Has Two Faces shows Streisand's character deconstructing Cinderella saying that she drove the prince nuts with her obsessive cleaning.
- The 2008 movie JCVD is a deconstruction of Jean-Claude Van Damme himself, as an out-of-luck delusional actor as opposed to the real-life moderately success actor. Read the synopsis here.
- District 9 is a deconstruction of the "Aliens land on Earth" plot. The fact that the aliens landed over Johannesburg and were practically starving creates the bad conditions in the first place, but it's still fairly realistic and dark. It helps that the first half of the film is held documentary-style. It's basically Apartheid with aliens.
- One could argue that the first live action Scooby Doo movie deconstructed the gang's main quirks.
- In the cartoon, Daphne often became the Designated Victim, but took it in stride, even cracking a quip about it occasionally. In the movie, however, she openly despises the fact that she's "always the damsel in distress", and this combined with the fact that she blames it on the "incompetence" of the others makes her most reluctant to get the gang back together. (not to mention the most bitter)
- Velma was always the smart girl, but the movie portrays her as an under-appreciated Insufferable Genius.
- Fred was the defacto leader of Mystery Inc, and as such was often the voice of reason. The movie shows him as a literal Only Sane Man who struggles to keep the conflicting personalities of the team from getting out of hand.
- And then there's Scrappy...
- The explanation was that he wasn't young, he had a Gland problem, and was thrown out for mutiny, then, this hate eventually builded up into full on Take Over The World syndrome.
- Surprisingly, Shaggy and Scooby are actually almost identical to their cartoon incarnations.
- I think Zombie Island counted a bit better, firstly, in this movie, like the live action, they've gone their seperate ways, each going on to different careers, but they all pretty much mourn for the older days, not helped by the fact their new jobs leave them kinda miserable, their quirks get in the way of their jobs as well (Shaggy and Scooby eating all the Contraband in the airport got them fired), then, they meet real monsters, and the situation is treated different, it also, arguably, effectively turned a movie about a group of friends getting together again for a few more mysteries, into a horror movie, not to mention it actually deconstructed the Zombie Apocalypse genre by making it that the zombies weren't the threat, but the very people who hired them, it turned out the zombies were trying to save them from being in a nearly endless cycle of trying to warn the next victims until the end of time], that's probably how much of a Deconstruction it is.
- The Mila Jovovich version of Joan Of Arc plays out the way the true story went until she is captured by the English. In prison, she hallucinates a character (played by Dustin Hoffman) who's only function seems to be to question her calling from God.
- The Dougray Scott version of The Ten Commandments shows the many hard choices he had to make in following God. His conversations with God look and sound more like the ramblings of a madman.
Literature
- The Warlord Chronicles by by Bernard Cornwell arguably does this in regards to the King Arthur mythos.
- 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 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.
- Orlando Furioso was, itself, a deconstruction of the Knight In Shining Armour's obsessive love for his lady. After Orlando finds out that Angelica has no interest in him and doesn't hold up to his impossibly high standards (i.e. she had premarital sex with a shepherd, and eventually gets married to an Arab guy), he basically turns into The Incredible Hulk and runs around killing innocent people.
- 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.
- George R.R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire is generally seen as being one big deconstruction on fantasy and heroic mythos.
- 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.
- And the brothers' Hard to Play God deconstructs medieval chivalry, fantasy settings, the supposed glamour of royalty and nobility, and well-intentioned meddling by developed countries (in this case, civilizations: an idealist Commies In Space benevolent space-faring nation ideologically similar to Star Trek's Federation). The Middle Ages are also known as the Dark Ages for a reason: a Crapsack World is pretty much a given there.
- 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...
- 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 and the Apocalypse fantasy, intended to show the creepy fascist aspects at its core.
- 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.
- 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, evacuees are more concerned with temporary entertainment (ref. the disposed discs) than survival and don't really, properly prepare for a long-term stay away from urbania...
- 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.
- The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie is a pretty brutal deconstruction of many of the elements in fantasy, such as the "Wise Old Mentor", the Arthurian Aragorn-like figure, and the quest to save the world. As it turns out, the "Wise Old Mentor", Bayaz, is a ruthless, egomaniacal asshole (Abercrombie apparently did this on purpose, projecting what your typical self-serving politician might be like if he was immortal and had magic). The arthurian figure is a bit of an arrogant prick who grows a sense of compassion and nobility ... only to be brutally put in his place by Bayaz. Oh, and he's actually a whore's son, one of at least several boys placed in key families to provide pliable new king material for Bayaz when they grow up. And that quest? Turns out the whole "Epic Conflict" is nothing more than a feud between Bayaz and his rival from when they were apprentice wizards that has gone on for centuries, in which they've turned entire nations into tools to destroy the other. Both of them pretty much flout the rules that were not meant to be broken, and scoff at anyone who proposes to judge them.
- "A Troll Story" by Nicola Griffith, 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 Noble Savage 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.
- Stephenson's next novel The Diamond Age further deconstructs cyberpunk: it first introduces Bud, a typical Badass Longcoat cyberpunk protagonist...and then shows him to be an idiotic thug who is executed in the first chapter.
- At around the same time as Snow Crash was written,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, the point being that the themes commonly associated with Cyber Punk where nothing new, or even anything entirly fictional. Instead they ended up giving birth to a new genre.
- Ring For Jeeves could be considered PG Wodehouse's deconstruction of his own stories. The usual romantic comedy character-relation tropes are there, but the world they live in is remarkably different. All of Wodehouse's stories take place in a world of eternal Christie Time, but Ring For Jeeves explores what would happen if time actually progressed. World War II has happened, Britain is in the throes of social upheaval which separates Jeeves and Bertie (Bertie is sent to a school that teaches the aristocracy how to fend for themselves), poverty and suicide and graphic death are acknowledged, and Jeeves even admits to having "dabbled in" World War I. The book's setting, Rowchester Abbey, is falling apart at the seams and the characters who inhabit it start to feel like a pocket of old-fashioned happiness in a darkening world. In case any doubters still exist about 3/4 through the book, there's Constable Wyvyrn's musings about just how much the world has changed.
- Bret Easton Ellis's novel The Rules of Attraction could arguably be described as a deconstruction of Wacky Fratboy Hijinx-style books and films, using the female character Lauren to show the casual sexism and objectification of women commonplace in the genre, the character of Paul to similarly show how homosexuality is so feared by the genre's archetypal characters, the results of massive consumption of alcohol & drugs, the indifference of most of the characters to the feelings of others and the ennui and boredom which leads to the inevitable Wild Teen Party.
- Balzac's Illusions perdues is a particularly depressing deconstruction of the Bildungsroman.
- Incognita is a deconstruction of the courtly romances of the early 18th century, as it exposes just how shallow and stupid all the characters would have to be and how reliant the plot is on Contrived Coincidence.
- Coraline arguably deconstructs the "Magical Land" genre by showing just how dangerous a trip there can be, but most important by noting that whatever summoned you there can be bad, not good - and that the whole Magical Land may be an evil trap, as opposed to standard setting where evil is just a part which you should vanquish in order to either return home or live Happily Ever After in said land. Also deconstructs the Changeling Fantasy trope by showing that such claims may be lies.
- Fandom example: As the author banned all unauthorised fanfiction until a few years ago, the Dragonriders Of Pern fandom mostly revolves around RPGs. They're really good at deconstructing the titular dragonriders; while Anne compares them to being horse jockeys, the fans see riders as soldiers due to their combat against Thread, militaristic lifestyle, and the high risk of injury/death during Passes. Sure, you've got a lifelong companion who will always love, support, and transport you, but the minute you Impress, you can't back out of it — and during a Pass, you may really want to. Dragons are really big targets for Thread, and the telepathic bond means that when they get hurt, you'll feel it too — if you're physically hurt, you still need to keep it together unless you want them to panic, die, and leave you a traumatized wreck. And in everyday life, you have to oil and bathe a house-sized creature by hand, keep track of how much cattle they eat (the latter often nauseates people who aren't used to watching), participate in several-hour-long drills with about two days off a month, and make your own riding gear from scratch. While they have reason to be idealized both in canon and by fans, dragonriders' lives are definitely not carefree.
- Let's not forget that up to 25% of weyrlings (riders-in-training) don't even make it to full rider status — largely due to botched attempts at going between. And after that hurdle's passed, your first real Threadfall might do you in because no matter how much training you get, you'll never be prepared for the feeling of getting eaten alive by ravenous parasites until you actually go through it.
- Brandon Sanderson has said that he intended the background of the Mistborn trilogy as a deconstruction of High Fantasy, in which The Hero fails his quest, and a thousand years later, the immortal Dark Lord rules the crumbling, devastated world as a god. After the first book, it also becomes a deconstruction of what happens after the unlikely heroes defeat the Dark Lord, and the difficulty of introducing freedom and establishing peace.
- Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson attacks the popular view of World War One air combat which, rather than dueling "Knights of the Air", actually involved undertrained pilots diving out of the sun and machine-gunning their opponent in the back before he had a chance to defend himself.
- A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthurs Court was a particularly brutal deconstruction of the King Arthur mythos, which a lot of Brits took offene to. (It was compared, at one point, to defacating on a national treasure.)
- The Acts Of Caine books deconstruct Role Playing Games featuring Player Characters in a larger world (including Tabletop Games and MMORPGs). Pays particular attention to the relentlessly infuential (and often devastating) effects such characters tend to have on the world they're visiting. The trappings of a High Fantasy are there, but it's one hell of a Crapsack World.
Live Action TV
- 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.
- Star Trek experienced a successful Deconstruction with Deep Space Nine, a mildly successful Reconstruction with Voyager, a failed Deconstruction with Enterprise, and a very successful Reconstruction with the 2009 film.
Theater
- 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.
- Bertholt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children deconstructs the idea that war can ever be beneficial to a nation, by showing how the children are all killed because of their own best traits.
- Likewise, The Threepenny Opera deconstructs the idea of the Lovable Rogue and/or Magnificent Bastard with the famous character of Mackie "Mack the Knife"/"Macheath" Messer.
Video Games
- Haunting Ground could be considered as a deconstruction of the more typical survival games where the main character is given all sorts of weapons and ammunition to cut down a near endless stream of monsters. The most Fiona can do herself is kick the enemy, and she relies on her pet dog to keep the enemy at bay as long as she can. The game also has a feature where the main character panics and gets harder to control the more she's hurt, like most real people would do if they were being chased around by psychopaths.
- Haunting Ground uses very similar gameplay - and was originally intended as a sequel - to the Clock Tower series, the first part of which was published for SNES in 1995, before survival horror had established itself as the genre it is today. Perhaps a better example of a survival horror deconstruction would be the original Siren, which takes what at first glance seems to be a fairly typical zombie scenario, but instead of handing you lots and lots of guns and a character with a visible health bar, you get a cast of very average people who are clumsy in combat, have a very limited access to weapons (and no access to healing items whatsoever), and die very easily. Instead of fighting everything with wild abandon, you need to be stealthy and avoid close encounters, much like the average joe would have to do in such a situation. The sequels have been gradually slipping into a more conventional, combat-oriented style of gameplay.
- 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.
- 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.
- Half Life is arguably a deconstruction of the Excuse Plot of the original Doom. Both games have very similar plots; an experiment into teleportation technology goes horribly wrong. However, wheras Doom plays this incident as being a wonderful way to demonstrate one's masculine virility by filling demons full of lead, Half Life shows the player precisely how frightening such an incident would be; you must think, conserve ammunition and not act like a stereotypical Super Soldier in order to stay alive. Additionally, wheras Doom had almost no plot exposition whatsoever, Half Life frustrates the player with its lack of explicit exposition; demonstrating just how terrifying it would be to be stuck in a life-threatening situation with absolutely no information about it.
- 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 first tries to save the world on her own and fails. She can only do it by calling in the Komato, a warmongering race whose arrival seems to have made matters even worse. Then you reach the end of the game and realise the Komato's arrival on the planet did what Iji could not — saved humanity after all.
- 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.
- The Shin Megami Tensei franchise often plays around with tropes and expectations, but one of the main thrusts of the recent Devil Survivor title is an unrelentingly vicious deconstruction of "Mons" games in the vein of Pokemon. During the course of the game, many people obtain small handheld devices that allow them to summon various kinds of demons which essentially work like the Mons do in other games. Needless to say, it doesn't take very long before many start using them for power, or "justice", or the like, resulting in chaos and death on the streets of a locked-down Tokyo.
- 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.
- Yggdra Union deconstructs the tropes surronding The Empire by portraying the forces of Bronquia as just soldiers doing their job instead of gleefully evil mooks.
- It arguably deconstructes Tsunderes with Kylier by giving a realistic reason to her constant bitchiness towards Yggdra instead of a simple Love Triangle. She resents Fantasinia and its royal family as a whole for their Fantastic Racism towards her people, displaying a little Fantastic Racism herself.
- Not to mention the deconstruction of the resistance, how in spite of Yggdra being not villified, her weapon has caused more pain and suffering to the empire than what the empire does. And the Sadistic Choice(s) she must make.
- And the game takes a good hard look at would happen if you abuse The Messiah and make too much of a scapegoat of him with Nessiah. Yggdra Union has a lot of fun with deconstructionism.
- The Expanded Universe of Eve Online tends to do this for most MMORPG tropes. It thoroughly explores the consequences of law-unto-themselves immortal demigods waging perpetual war both between themselves and with the other, less gifted denizens of the universe. The mere existence of the player capsuleers ups the average daily death rate in New Eden by many thousands, and contributes in large part to the crapsack world New Eden now is.
- Chrono Cross mercilessly deconstructs Time Travel, specifically the Time Travel used in Chrono Trigger, by asking a simple question: "If you make it so a certain event never happened, what happens to the world, and the people in it, that came to being because of that event?"
- Kingdom Hearts deconstructed the Copy Cat Sue with Xion by showing just how someone would react to the revelation that they're an inferior clone of someone else and their sole purpose is to act as a placeholder for him.
- Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2 deconstructed many RPG mechanics by having them being actually relevant to story instead of being just for gameplay, and many of them not being in a good way either. Most improtantly, the experience point and level system: it's revealed that this is actually a perculair trait of the main character, being able to grow powerful just by killing lots and lots of enemies, which is actually the main character feeding on the death of others.
- Not to mention the way it subverts the Karma Meter, by making what seems like the right thing to do end up being exactly the wrong thing to do, as is often the case in real life. For example giving to a begger could be the dark side path, as it makes him a target for armed robery, and thus getting him killed.
- UminekoNoNakuKoroNi is a deconstruction of literaly the whole Murder Mystery genre. Despite that, it's supposed to be Fair Play Whodunnit, though one could argue about the amount of fair.
- Its predecessor, Higurashi, was also a deconstruction, this time of Multiple Endings and New Game Plus. Rika is pretty much the main character of a game with hundreds of bad ends, and the only good end is a Guide Dang It. So she starts her life again when she encounters a dead end... and again... and again... By the time we get to see her, she is about to give up on it, after seeing her best friends going insane and killing each other hundreds of times, and herself meeting a gruesome death every time, often because of the tinest mistakes. Fortunately, she finally gets her good end thanks to The Power Of Friendship.
- Umineko also has a brilliant deconstruction of the Tsundere Moe in the third arc.
- Far Cry 2 deconstructs Badass with the player character. The enemies attack you on sight, no one bothers to check if you're enemy or not...solution? You kill everything on sight, becoming just like them and racking up hundreds of kills, and by doing that, becoming the epitome of badassitude with enemies running from you in fear if your reputation is high enough...of course, this reputation doesn't just affect enemies, it affect friendly people as well, which you need them for malaria medicine...
- The online game You Only Live Once (found here) brutally deconstructs every meta-trope of your average Mario-style platformer (mainly extra lives). Just keep hitting continue...then when it runs out, refresh.
- It's hard to find a Fantasy trope that Dragon Age doesn't deconstruct. Want to be a bad ass elite warrior charged with ridding the world of The Legions Of Hell? Fine! Enjoy the fact that you can't ever leave your "chosen" (if you don't agree to join you get drafted anyway) order, that your induction will kill you (either right away, or in a decade or two), and you'll be killed if you try to back out. Want to be a mage? Fine! Your powers are discovered at a young age, your parents now hate you, as does the rest of the world who blame you for spoiled milk and dead babies, you get taken against your will to the circle's tower, where you learn your skills under the watchful eyes of church militants, if you get too uppity, they remove your soul with a magical lobotomy that turns you into an emotionless "tranquil", if you screw up a spell you become possessed by a demon, and/or become a deformed abomination, and don't think of escaping, they have a sample of your blood that lets the church track you down and kill you. Oh, and did I mention that the magical crystals needed to forge magical weapons are highly addictive and damaging to your sanity? You want to be an elf? Fine! Your civilization was destroyed hundreds of years ago by the human church for not worshiping their god. You can either be a Dalish Elf, who are nomadic, and constantly on the run from humans, or a city elf, forced to live in a ghetto, and subject to rape and abuse by your human masters. Want to be a dwarf? Fine! You live in the last surviving Dwarf city, the rest of the empire being destroyed long ago by the Legions Of Hell, and your people are literally a single battle away from extinction. The city is strictly isolationist, with a strong social hierarchy of castes that everyone is born into, and any challenge to the existing social structure is meet with brutal punishments. You can either be royalty, in which case you'll get caught up in a political conspiracy by your brothers to get you out of the way, or you can be a casteless, given a giant tattoo across your face at birth that says "I'm scum, and forbidden to be take on any dignified employment" because your ancestors were criminals, disowned by their clan, or had the audacity to visit the surface.
- It also arguably deconstructs the Xanatos Gambit with Loghain's master plan by showing that not only are such elaborate schemes just as likely to fail as they are to succeed, but their failure can have severe consequences.
- It should come as no surprise that the game was heavily influenced by A Song Of Ice And Fire, a Deconstruction in itself.
Web Comics
- 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 from Tsunami Channel, to the point that the main character is intentionally left anonymous, and the universe just won't let anyone to know his real identity.
- 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.
- 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)
- The entire premise behind Darths And Droids is that the Star Wars universe is the result of a group of Tabletop Gamers (including a 7 year old girl) making it up as they go along. It lends a whole new perspective to the storyline of the prequel trilogy. The entire mess on Naboo was the result of the Player Characters epically ruining a delicate, carefully constructed plan by going Off The Rails, and engaging in all the sins of The Real Man, The Munchkin, and The Loonie. Palpatine is actually a good guy overthrowing a corrupt regime, and trying to bring a semblance of stability to the republic. Darth Maul was just a Chaotic Neutral Hired Gun who was only trying to work with the player characters, before they attacked him. To top it all off, some the most bizarre and unrealistic plot points, such as Naboo being governed by a 14 year old Queen exist because Jar Jar Binks is being played by a little girl.
Web Original
- 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?
- 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.
- 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...
- Also the debriefing after her initial capture mentions her engaging in an unspecified activity with one of the agents, and then her "biting it off". Fetish Fuel and High Octane Nightmare Fuel, shaken, not stirred.
- 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.
- The Foundation themselves seem like an overall deconstruction of the entire concept of the Masquerade.
- 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. It revolves around two central ideas; telling a Mad Scientist story from the perspective of one of the nameless subjects experimented on, and being Genre Savvy doesn't always help.
- 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. They also have an openly admitted Expy of the SCP Foundation, called ACS, that does to transformation fetishism and several associated kinks what SCP does to Urban Fantasy.
- There's a story of theirs called "B-Snakes", which is based on "C-Snakes", a parasitic macrovirus created by another furry authour. The titular "b-snakes" are basically c-snakes but latex, and tend to cut through the latter like a hot knife through butter. The POV character is a random woman forced into a situation she doesn't understand tagging along with a spacefaring, wisecracking do-gooder who knows everything. There's a war between the "bad" Bs and Cs, and hints of a government conspiracy. By the end of the story, the Doctor Who Captain Ersatz turns out to have serious mental problems. The reason the B-snakes can kill C-snakes effortlessly is that they were engineered to by the government. And "the Doctor"(who happens to be an actual doctor) snaps and decides to take over the galaxy.
- Transcript takes the furry trope of mysterious pills that turn people into furries by having them be of dubious legality, and the equivalent of Viagra. People who take the pills with more...overt effects are looked down upon by the general public. Much like most furries. The protagonist accidentally kills his mistress after he takes a pill for a horse's endowment instead of one's stamina.
- Lola takes the standard "guy gets turned into a woman, likes it" story and shows the difficulties inherent in being someone who never existed, not to mention adjusting to the new gender role.
- The Youtube video Percy is a deconstruction of infomercials.
- This video from The Onion sends up the idea of video games becoming progressively more realistic by taking it to a logically deconstructive extreme with a "ultra realistic Call Of Duty:Modern Warfare 3". It mostly involves sitting around and waiting.
Western Animation
- 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 Jonny 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.
- That episode where Peter and friends became The A Team had a scene where the show's "amusing injuries" is discussed as actually life-threatening.
- 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.)
- 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, but liked by critics for the exact same reasons.
- According to That other wiki, the episode is a favorite among such people as Ricky Gervais and The Simpsons creator himself, Matt Groening.
- The Movie argueably decontructed the typical tropes associated with Homer's stupidity by having him screw up in such a colossal manner that not even Marge can take him anymore.
- The Ed Edd N Eddy episode "1+1=Ed" is a deconstruction of how cartoons work, similar to Duck Amuck.
- "Epilogue" of Justice League Unlimited can be taken as a deconstruction of the superhero genre, by having a woman deliberately make Terry McGinnis a superhero by killing his parents and replacing his dad's DNA with the DNA of Bruce Wayne, all in response to Batman growing older. It fits both invoked and deconstructed, because it shows the horrible consequences of making a superhero, as well as the kind of monster you would have to be to do it (killing innocent people to do something that might achieve a goal).
- Terry's father being killed was a tragic twist of fate. Waller's original plan was a complete reenactment of the Wayne murders, but she scrapped it and the entire project when her handpicked assassin convinced her that she would ultimately dishonor the very hero she was trying to recreate.
- Moral Orel deconstructs The Moral Substitute but presenting a culture where ALL MEDIA are Christian fundamentalist propaganda, and showing just how messed up and disturbing said culture would be.
- The episode of The Powerpuff Girls about them moving to "Citysville" deals with what would happen if their brand of heroics was applied to a real life city..
- South Park, as well as deconstructing everything else on the planet, has a fine line in deconstructing itself. In "Kenny Dies", the Running Gag character they had killed over seventy times already gets a terminal disease and slowly expires while Stan and Kyle react with utterly realistic grief and despair.
Other
- 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.
- Seriously though, a good way to reconstruct academic Deconstructionism would be to return to the actual methodology used by Derrida, devoid of the academic pretensions and post-modern cruft that built up around the technique. Go back to pulling the loose threads of ideas and stories, without making it about the nature of reality itself.
- The problem with this is that Derrida's methodoology is always going to end up at a debate over the nature of reality. Richard Rorty, a Postmodern philosopher, defined 'Deconstruction' as (paraphrasing) undoing the internal oppositions within the work, i.e. if a work is based on good vs. evil, light vs. dark or ham sandwich vs. turkey sandwich, demonstrate that the two 'sides' aren't so different from each other. In order to avoid an endless series of academic wank, I think it is best that TV Tropes confines itself to the 'casual' meaning of deconstruction (i.e. Reductio Ad Absurdum applied to tropes).
- We could write a book about the literary world...
- 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.
- 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. It is considered a valid arguing tactic.
- 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.
- If you want a real life example of Deconstruction, look no further than the history books. Every revolution in human history was biased around the idea of Deconstructing the existing society in hopes of reconstructing a better one at a later date. For a recent example: American Culture pre-1960: Authority is good, the country is never wrong, everyone needs to know their place. American Culture of the 1960s and 1970s: Authority is often wrong, those in power often abuse it for personal gain, many people are oppressed by the current system. American Culture post-1980: the current system, while not perfect, can be improved through the will of the people, it is everyone's duty to watch those in power to make sure they don't abuse it, and to fight for those who are being oppressed.
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