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Quotes / Deconstruction

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    Anime and Manga 
Honey Trap: No way...! You'd go so far as to use children in your schemes...!?
X: It's because she had the immature heart of a child. Those negative emotions... that wavering heart was a necessity to turn her into a Kaijin. Add the right shock to that, and she was no longer able to maintain her sense of self.
Superwomen in Love! deconstructing Kid Hero after shooting a Kid Hero's sister through the shoulder, sending her spiraling into despair

    Film — Live-Action 
"The Federation is no more than a Homo Sapiens-only club."

    Newspapers 
"'Deconstruction' is an academic word. It means saying what everybody knows about the movies in words nobody can understand."

    Web Animation 
"Sometimes, it's fruitful to take a step back and examine the things we've come to accept, like saying the word 'Scunthorpe' over and over again until it's reduced to nothing but meaningless syllables and a spicy hidden cuss."

    Webcomics 
Bailin's thoughts:
- Finally out of the terrifying rumbly box (Li Yun's car)
- Finally back in cold, icy water
Li Yun's thoughts:
- New car needs to be deep cleaned (since Bailin barfed in it)
- Realized his only bathroom in his house is now occupied: daily hygiene activities may now be severely limited
- Inevitable water damage in bathroom
- His landlord is coming over in two weeks
- Had pet fish before, but not confident that knowledge is relevant here
Chapter 25 of Bailin and Li Yun shows that holding a Bathtub Mermaid isn't what it's cracked up to be

    Web Original 
"Lumet directed 12 Angry Men, which seemed to show the American Legal System at its very best. Well, it seems like Lumet wanted to bookend his career with a movie that shows the worst in the American Legal System. You thought the courts were honorable and justice is done, well F*CK YOU!"

"Did you ever think about how Mr. Wilson, the gruff antagonist in the syndicated newspaper comic strip Dennis the Menace, probably has a pretty depressing life? Well, today's Dennis the Menace would very much like you to think about it, for some reason!"

"Transit is an excellent example, with its insistence that the Doctor regards his companions as pets. That's not done out of dislike of Doctor Who in the least... But it's a reworking of the concepts of Doctor Who that is clearly a critique of it."

"Not since the last Voyager episode that I watched have I wanted to slap somebody around the chops with a freshly caught trout that is still wet and slimy as much as Courtney Peldon's Farris. She is the epitome of everything that is wrong with Starfleet: unwavering arrogance, the ability to look down her nose at everybody that isn't a member of Starfleet and a square vision. There is more than a touch of Picard in this character. [...] It's probably the best 'crazy cult' episode that Star Trek has ever attempted because this time it's personal and the attack is against the Federation itself."

Laura: Bruce complains about how frustrating it is to capture criminals and send them to jail when they always seem to get out again and commit more crimes, which — sorry, is the entire story of all Batman comics ever. Get used to it.
David: It is a nice little commentary. I mean, that’s the choice that Batman makes by not killing bad guys. And it's the main reason why Jean-Paul Valley was definitively a better Batman. Yes, I said that. AZRAEL 4 LYFE.
Laura: Hold on, David. I have a incoming message for you... "I HATE YOU."
David: I sort of saw that coming.
Laura Hudson and David Wolkin, "The Complete and Utter Insanity of Batman Odyssey"

"The deep, bloody gashes left on Kevin's soul from his cold-hearted family forgetting about him never healed and he goes on about how the whole thing traumatized him. [...] He'd totally grow up to be an unhinged, greasy, chain-smoking, Faces of Meth poster boy who only feels happiness when he slowly tortures criminals. I mean, your family forgetting about you once will mess you up, and your family forgetting about you twice will turn you inside/out. I bet that Dexter's dad forgot about him a couple of times and that's the real reason why he was the way he was."
Michael K., "Open Post: Hosted By A Grown Kevin McCallister Talking About His Shitty Family"

"When Leonard McCoy accidentally forgot his communicator at the end of "A Piece of the Action", it was a goofy joke. It was an excuse for Kirk to give the episode a nice punchline. [...] The franchise has reached a point where it treats everything with a level of seriousness that would make McCoy's mistake abhorrent rather than endearing."

"Yeah, there’s a universe where your favorite childhood television show is completely and utterly real. There are also plenty of universes that will take that, rape it, and run it through a meat grinder."

"The fact is that none of us are as innocent and wide-eyed as we were when we first saw Christopher Reeve save Lois from a burning helicopter while telling her that air travel is safer than driving. You're not getting that feeling back, people. It won't happen. It died along with all of the other things that made life worth living such as hope, a sense of wonder, and being able to eat all the candy you wanted without getting sick."

    Web Video 
"'I'd rather let a planet be wiped out than risk taking action, because doing the right thing might theoretically lead to some wrong, and it's hard to talk about how great you are when you have a guilty conscience!' The Sanctuary District ignores the problem as the Prime Directive ignores problems. The difference being, I don't think anyone sees the Sanctuary Districts as a sign of their own enlightenment."

"saya no uta is one of those stories that seems to really enjoy... hmm, i dont want to say "subverting romance" because what urobuchi does, here and in many other of his works, isn't really a subversion as much as it is an exploration of how far you can go with a belief that seems like a good idea at first. sometimes the answer winds up being 'yes, it's worthwile to stick to these beliefs even when it seems useless', like it is in madoka magica; but here, it seems to... very much not be the case at least to me
what i mean is that saya no uta's basic premise is a romance classic: protagonist feels tied down, suffocated and tortured by their everyday life, meets someone who is completely different from this ordinary world, and slowly breaks free of the constraining societal expectations that held them down, despite friends and family trying to convince her this is not the right thing to do.
saya no uta seems to want to explore this philosophy of life, that 'if it makes you and your beloved happy, even if other people don't like it, who are they to stand in your way?'. it pushes the ideology as far as it goes, and confronts you with how just because something feels right doesn't meet it IS, necessarily.
sometimes it's perfectly good and healthy to follow your desires (The Shape of Water is an example of a work that uses the same basic premise as an allegory for cases where society really IS stifling people's right to happiness), but there needs to be a line somewhere, and saya no uta questions where you would draw it"

    Western Animation 
Papa Smurf: We've lost every Smurfberry within a 50 mile radius, Farmer Smurf! How could this happen!?
Farmer Smurf: We're a medieval farming community with no access to modern pesticides who made the brilliant choice to subsist on a single crop! Yeeeah, we're all gonna starve.

"You'd think a house full of crazy people'd be fun. Actually, it's really depressing."
Bart Simpson, The Simpsons

    Real Life 
"With the benefit of hindsight and a greater understanding of anthropoid behavior patterns, science fiction author Philip José Farmer was able to demonstrate quite credibly that the young Tarzan would almost certainly have indulged in sexual experimentation with chimpanzees and that he would just surely have had none of the aversion to eating human flesh that Edgar Rice Burroughs attributed to him. As our political and social consciousness continues to evolve, Allan Quartermain stands revealed as just another white imperialist out to exploit the natives and we begin to see that the overriding factor in James Bond's psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women. Whether most of us would prefer to enjoy the above-mentioned gentlemen's adventures without spoiling things by considering the social implications is beside the point. The fact remains that we have changed, along with our society, and that were such characters created today they would be subject to the most extreme suspicion and criticism."
Alan Moore, "The Mark of Batman", introduction to Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

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