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Usual post-redereconstructionist stuff. You know, "Somewhere there's a dead animal and my girlfriend left me because the weight of the world makes me impotent," and yadda yadda.
"It strikes me that the only reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old one could do. We've been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it'll do."
" Having deconstructed everything perhaps we really should be starting to think about putting everything back together."
So the genre has just been deconstructed. What used to be seen as a wonderful and happy story has been shown as much darker than it was previously portrayed as. What hundreds of thousands of children wished were real is now considered the stuff of nightmares.
So, you wanted to be a Princess Classic? Well, your husband is Louis XVI.
So, you wanted to be a badass Super Soldier? Well here's your Training From Hell, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and existence being a slave to the orders of other people.
In short, your previous fantasy has been shown to be badly thought out and leading to (or stemming from) things that are not nice.
So, the merciless hand of reality has smashed your fantasy to little pieces. So what do you fantasize about now?
This is where Reconstruction comes in. A Reconstruction accepts the criticisms of the initial fantasy made in the previous deconstruction and then modifies the initial fantasy into something that would not be so bad in reality. Basically, where a deconstruction shows fantasy X as being much darker than you thought it would be, reconstruction corrects the fantasy to have less dark results.
For instance, Princess Classic is not being married into a fairy-tale monarchy, but a constitutionally-restrained monarchy with a representative and stable government. Thus, this time, Ms. Princess Classic will not end up like Marie Antoinette. She won't end up like Sleeping Beauty either, but as we all know, Sleeping Beauty was a completely unrealistic Fairy Tale.
And for the Super Soldier, the new age Super Soldier need not be trained from hell and unwaverling loyalty to their leader. But one whom had already saw the worst of wars and is willing to push themselves further and can play a quick game of Xanatos Speed Chess with the enemy. And their loyalty is to their fellow men who have fought on the fields
Compare the George Lucas Throwback, which usually involves quite a bit of Reconstruction, and Troperiffic works.
Often confused with Adaptation Distillation. Reconstruction is when a genre is revitalised for the modern age, not an individual work. Not to be confused with the Freeware RPG The Reconstruction. Or, for that matter with the Reconstruction Era.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Yuusha-Oh Gao Gai Gar was a direct, deliberate reaction to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- Though it took quite some time for it to really pull back from the Genre Buster Eva did, and it was only released in 1997, barely a year after the original Eva. There were actually still countless Darker and Edgier Super Robot Shows, and it was more of a George Lucas Throwback more then a complete Genre Reconstruction.
- Koutetsushin Jeeg likewise appears to be an attempt to make an old cartoon like Mazinger Z and Getter Robo in its entirety (and specifically, of course, to remake Kotetsu Jeeg), but with modern production values and techniques.
- This is a Cyclic Trope, especially in the Humongous Mecha genre: every decade or so when the genre is reaching the point of seriousness. Pre-EVA, there was also Giant Robo (though this was at least partially due to the manga being made in the 60's).
- This seems to have come full-circle in the closing year of the decade with Shin Mazinger, the first full-length remake of Mazinger Z, the show that created the Super Robot subgenre.
- Other earlier reconstructions include the 80s show Dancougar, which combined the old-school Super Robot formula with Real Robot-style sensibilities, and GunBuster, which has been described as "A Super Robot show disguised as a Real Robot show", and succeeds in once again getting viewers to marvel at the title robot's awesome power.
- Hey, Gun Buster!! What a show! You heard about the guy who directed that??
- In fact, Gainax itself seems to undergo a continuous cycle of deconstructing, then reconstructing, and then re-deconstructing, ad infinitum, various genres of anime, especially mecha. Just look at their history: Gunbuster, followed by Evangelion, followed by Gurren Lagann, followed by Evangelion again!!
- Rah Xephon examined the darker, serious sensibilities of Neon Genesis Evangelion's well-known deconstruction of anime and mixed it with more idealistic Super Robot tropes. How well it worked is debatable...
- Cross Game seems out to do this with Replacement Goldfish
Comic Books
- In 1986, DC's big two heroes, Superman and Batman both received Deconstructive treatments, with The Dark Knight Returns and Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow. These where followed almost immediately with attempts at Reconstruction with Batman Year One and Man Of Steel. Whether or not these where successful reconstructions is open to discussion.
- In comics, after the Dark Age of the 1990s, the best parts of the Silver Age were resurrected and celebrated in works like Astro City and Marvels.
- Kingdom Come was a particularly famous comics reconstruction that delivered a rather heavy-handed denouncement of the Nineties Anti Hero. Though it should be noted that the story ended up with all the super-heroes realizing they were flawed, removing their masks, and joining normal human society.
- Justice is more a reconstruction proper, as it is essentially Super Friends without the camp, token characters, and low-budget visuals.
- Grant Morrison's Final Crisis is increasingly interpreted as an attempt to redeem Silver Age idealism and high concepts in order to subvert the grimdarkness and "realism" of the Dark Age of comics.
- A good deal of Grant Morrison's stuff at least addresses the need for a reconstruction, such as in Animal Man, where the titular character complains that his entire family was killed off for the sake of "character development"; at the end of the series, the author returns them to life. The Flex Mentallo mini-series can also be seen as a celebration of how unabashedly weird the Silver Age could be, and how that's not necessarily a bad thing.
- Morrison's All Star Superman is this trope distilled.
- Alan Moore's Tom Strong was part of his attempt (along with most of the rest of the ABC line) to create super-hero comics that were purely entertaining and celebrated his favorite aspects of the genre.
- Likewise, Moore's Supreme, which basically took everything the Superman mythos had jettisoned on the grounds it was silly, and showed that it was actually pretty amazing if you looked at it the right way. Grant Morrison did the same thing with All-Star Superman.
- While the first two volumes of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen were definitely deconstructions of Victorian adventure fiction (and for that matter, the concept of the Massive Multiplayer Crossover), The Black Dossier seems a reconstruction of the concept (though in doing so, it becomes a deconstruction of 20th century fiction). If you aren't somewhat confused, then Alan Moore hasn't done his job.
- And even the first two books were a reconstruction in their own way. Sure, Moore brought on all kinds of moral ambiguity and tossed aside typical Victorian ideals, but at the same time he was taking some of the most awesome literary characters of the time and giving them their full due. It had been a long, long time since Fu Manchu had been anything but a parody.
- Superman itself is doing this since Infinite Crisis. The ideal - the Silver Age was awesome. Problem - you've got a bucketload of current continuity which contradicts it. Solution - keep the modern stuff, but bring in the Silver Age stuff and make this epic-y background thing.
Fanfiction
Film
- After the Spaghetti Western became all the rage for its take on the genre, along came Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, a fast paced action packed adventure film which brought back many of the cliches that the former category wiped off the map.
- Clueless is a reconstruction of Teen Movies after the bitter deconstruction of Heathers.
- Hard Boiled features every single police officer character as unambiguously heroic, as an apology by John Woo for the way Chinese films had started to glorify criminals (including some of Woo's previous films). Their conduct in the hospital sequence in particular puts an extra helping of "Heroic" in Heroic Bloodshed.
- Hot Fuzz was partially an attempt to revive the British police officer as a credible movie hero after almost every British crime movie of the previous decade (or at least since Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels) had instead focused on glorifying criminals.
- Some recent Westerns seem to be attempts at this (the 3:10 to Yuma remake, Appaloosa) in contrast to some of the more post-modern examples of the genre (such as No Country For Old Men and The Proposition).
- Appaloosa actually strikes the middle ground between Deconstruction and Reconstruction.
- Arguably the 3:10 To Yuma does the same. Had it come out 40 years earlier with everything exactly the same, it probably would have been considered a deconstruction just as much as the Man With No Name trilogy was.
- Shoot Em Up is aware enough of action movie tropes to border on Affectionate Parody, but instead of deconstructing them, it cranks them Up To Eleven in the most entertaining way possible.
- See also the appropriately named Crank.
- Silverado reconstructed the Western in The Eighties.
- When the James Bond series appeared dead (and had been somewhat deconstructed in the Timothy Dalton era), True Lies appeared to reconstruct the spy-action-adventure genre.
- Ironically, this movie is the remake of a French parody of Hollywood action-adventure movies.
- The Incredibles reconstructs the superhero plot, partially by correcting the mistakes and partially by transfering them to villains:
- Yes, superheroes need special suits, so Edna designs them.
- Yes, capes are silly so Edna's suits don't feature them (villains, though...)
- Yes, heroes cause destruction, but how else can you defeat evil robots?
- Most supers are eager to be supers, as opposed to be tired and suicidal.
- The only one Doing this for fame is, well, the villan
- And so on
Literature
- In The Canterbury Tales, the Franklin's Tale is a reconstruction of the courtly love genre, in that it maintains the pursuit of justice which was positive in the genre while jettisoning its role as a support for adultery and other unethical behaviors.
- The Dark Tower series began as a reconstruction of the Westerns the author enjoyed.
- Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin detective novel series was made with the specific intention of reviving and uplifting the Russian detective genre after it sunk to a particularly terrible low.
Video Games
- Skies Of Arcadia was stock full of Heroic Fantasy clichés at a time when most console RPGs between that and Final Fantasy VII were trying to subvert/deconstruct them. It was arguably a success, and is generally regarded as one of the best games in the too-short-lived Sega Dreamcast's library.
- After becoming famous for making the dark Real Robot game series, Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima went on to produce the much more unironic mecha game series, Zone Of The Enders.
- Afterwards, he went on to make Metal Gear Solid 2, one of the most extensive deconstructions of video games ever.
- And arguably, reconstructed them powerfully with Metal Gear Solid 4, taking the same deconstructive plot and putting it - and with it, many of the same genre presumptions - back together.
- Team Fortress 2 is a cheerful reconstruction of all the Acceptable Breaks From Reality found in First Person Shooters.
- Mass Effect was a reconstruction of the Space Opera genre and at least tried to get every classic Space Opera trope back into play. After the fusion of Space Opera and The Heros Journey in the Star Wars original trilogy and the Deconstructions found in the Star Wars Expanded Universe and the prequel trilogy, it was exactly the right time for it, too.
- Serious Sam and Painkiller were both throwbacks to older First Person Shooters in which the only objective was to kill everything in sight.
- The current Sam And Max episodic series courtesy of Telltale Games is a definate reconstruction of the old-school point and click adventure games, down to its absurd humor and Looney Tunes inspired logic and physics.
Music
- Sufjan Stevens' yearly Songs For Christmas EP's were a personal reconstruction of Christmas Music for Sufjan: his attempt to capture the sublime melancholy of Christmas music at its best, and to come to terms with the Glurge of the holiday season. (Sufjan had previously dismissed Christmas itself as a social construct.)
- Tenacious D's music seems to be a reconstruction of classic rock. Though they don't take themselves or their lyrics very seriously, they certainly take the music seriously. As they wrote in "The Metal":
You can't kill The Metal...
The Metal will live on!
Punk Rock tried to kill The Metal...
but they failed, as they were smite to the ground!
New Wave tried to kill The Metal...
but they failed, as they were stricken down...to the ground
Grunge tried to kill The Metal...
Hahahahaha, THEY FAILED! as they were thrown to the ground!
- Monster Magnet is another reconstruction of classic rock, as are the Hellacopters. (especially on their early albums)
- The Darkness, with their five minute guitar solos and soaring falsettos is either a reconstruction or brilliant parody of Glam Metal.
- Rappers like 50 cent, Boyz n da Hood, et al were suppose to be a reconstruction of hardcore hip-hop in the mainstream. But it never really caught on. Likely because of the lack of mainstream media support. Although "fiddy" defied this with radio friendly songs like "In da Club", "Candy Shop" etc.
- Similarly rap group Dead Prez tried to reconstruct rebellious, hardcore, socio-political rap.
- Would Flipsyde count as something related?
- The Tel-Aviv City Team (aka: "Tact Family" or "Mispachah TAKT") uses a large portion of their music to perform a deliberate reconstruction of Zionism or Jewish nationalism in response to the rather brutal deconstructions that came from the pro-Arab Left in the '90s and 2000s. They actually have a rap rivalry with the older left-wing group Hadag Nachash ("The Fish of Snake", a word-play on the Hebrew for "new driver") over the precise definition of Zionist hip-hop.
Web Original
- Red Vs Blue. Notable in that the new series is actually called Reconstruction. After five seasons of picking apart gaming tropes, they are now being put back together. What was once laughed at by the main characters is now a serious threat. Of course, it never made the audience stop laughing at them.
Western Animation
- The Justice League episode "Legends" is both an Affectionate Parody and reconstruction of the Golden Age. In it, a few members of the league travel to an Alternate Universe and meet the Justice Guild of America, ersatz versions of the JSA. The episode points out the racism and sexism prevalent in the Golden Age, and the Flash mocks the Guild's cheesy "let justice prevail!" catchphrase, but at the end of the story the Guild help defeat the villain, knowing that they'll fade from existence when they do, and when they yell "Let justice prevail!" that time, it's completely awesome.
- Much of the dislike for Batman The Brave and the Bold stems from people not realizing it's an Affectionate Parody as much as it is a Reconstruction of the Silver Age Batman. Although considering how many people only know of Tim Burton's and Christopher Nolan's Grimdark interpretations, it's not surprising.
- This troper feels it's a reconstruction of the things the DCAU deconstructed. The 2 universes are similar, and for everything the DCAU tore down, it puts in the spotlight. Like camp, bad jokes, and SINGING BATMAN (Batman: The Musical in Beyond denonstructed it, Batman: T Ba B reconstructed it).
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