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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.
Transmetropolitan's Channon Yarrow critiques the genre.

"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."
Kurt Busiek on the whole point of Deconstruction.

"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.

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