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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."
Reconstruction is possibly best defined in terms of the deconstruction that almost always precedes it. If deconstruction is the tearing down of a genre, then reconstruction is, naturally, an attempt to raise it from the ashes. If deconstruction is the firm, merciless hand of reality smashing down on the illusions we build to escape it, then reconstruction is the process of creating a newer, better dream in its place. While deconstruction seeks out the flaws in a theme or genre with malicious intent, reconstruction is a non-ironic celebration of what captured our interest in the first place.
Compare the George Lucas Throw Back, 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.
Examples:
Comic Books
- 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.
- 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 reconstuction 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.
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.
Anime and Manga
- Yuusha-Oh Gao Gai Gar was a direct, deliberate reaction to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- Gainax's Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and its mirroring of the evolution of Mecha anime is saying they got the message.
- 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.
Video Games
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. Tempest, meet teacup.
Film
- 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.
- Similarly, 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.
- Clueless is a reconstruction of Teen Movies after the bitter deconstruction of Heathers.
- Some recent Westerns seem to be attempts at this (the 3:10 to Yuma remake, the upcoming 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.
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.
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