Named after an unrelated pre-existing term: Deconstruction

I've yet to see this.

Indeed, I would say most of the time, Deconstruction will result in Darker and Edgier in some form. We just have to note that the other times exist, and that one leads to the other, not the other way around.

Sometimes yes... However when you think about it would a girl really get naked infront of everyone during said sequence... no. They would carry the costume in like a backpack then run to the restroom and change manually then come out while the badguy continued to rampage. (To Love RU's Anime did it) that would be a deconstruction.

Getting told you have a wish and it ends badly is Darker and Edgier... Not working and an outright lie Is a deconstruction really.

edited 18th Aug '11 6:28:06 PM by Raso

@Artemis: Language isn't really mutable in academic circles, though, I think.

Well, then language is fluid, then. Just less so in academic circles. If anything else, I'm saying language is a robust enough system to allow words to take on different meanings in different avenues. So academics in a philosophy class may hew close to Derrida's (un)definition of deconstruction, whereas people editing a pop culture site may have more wiggle room.

Another good example would be Unforgiven. Westerns were pretty stale at the time, a relic from the past really, until Clint Eastwood really took them on, broke them open, showed you the gears turning, then put it back together and got it working again.

And then there's the Coen Bros., who've taken on Shaggy Dog stories, Film Noir, Heist films, and stories about a wide-eyed talent being corrupted by Hollywood and treated them almost as a dedicated mortician treats a corpse in preparation for display before loved ones; they find what once gave a particular genre life, evaluate what's changed in society (be it Values Dissonance or the like), and make it work for a modern audience.

Really, it's taking the old, stale, and abandoned and making it your own. If that can't be shoehorned into Deconstruction, then it needs its own page.

edited 18th Aug '11 6:44:03 PM by ArtemisStrong

What if we made a Dark Take On A Trope page or works that do it a lot page? That might stem the misuse.

That's Genre Relaunch or Reconstruction

edited 18th Aug '11 6:41:38 PM by Raso

^Played for Drama.

@Artemis Strong: You misunderstood. My point is not that works that examine the trappings of their genres are not a thing that I haven't seen this.

My point is that apart from this site, I've yet to see someone referring to this works as deconstructions.

Not always sometimes the darker take on the trope results in less drama. And really that name is bad for just playing a trope with a dark take.

Well I have. We all draw from different pools, I guess.

Sheesh this thread is hot!

I like Genre Relaunch, but I guess I don't understand what separates a Reconstruction and a Deconstruction. Wouldn't deconstruction without reconstruction end up being satire?

Ack! These terms. Even in the classroom they can be a morass that boondoggle the best of us.

edited 18th Aug '11 6:49:36 PM by ArtemisStrong

Links? Any text that actually does this? Also, most importantly, any test that does this without referencing TV Tropes and being an academically valid document?

^^^How so? Could you give me an example?

Why does it have to be academically valid? We're a buttload less formal than all that.

But howbout this one: http://www.unm.edu/~ithomson/Hero.pdf

edited 18th Aug '11 6:54:09 PM by ArtemisStrong

I made a minor edit to the description to try and make it clear this is "Played For Realism," not necessarily Darker and Edgier.

EDIT: Oh, and the Deconstructor Fleet TRS is still open, it just died when someone merged everything pre-emptively.

edited 18th Aug '11 6:56:05 PM by Discar

Well, for one, the basis of the rename argument is that the current use of the word Deconstruction goes against a previously academically established concept by Jacques Derrida.

As such and in this case, it is relevant for the article or whatever source you use to at least be somewhat related to actual literary criticism rather than faux pas lit crit that is posted in blogs these days

But howbout this one: http://www.unm.edu/~ithomson/Hero.pdf

Agh. Sorry, but I can't really concentrate on the article. Can you please give me an excerpt from it? It'd be greatly appreciated, man.

It could easily be played for Dark Comedy like a Dead Baby Comedy. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei does it regularly.

Screw it. Raso, pay attention to your mailbox. I want to explain this to you privately, so that we don't clutter up this thread.

edited 18th Aug '11 7:04:29 PM by Discar

I'd be against a rename. I've seen this term used in the TV Tropes manner elsewhere. In /a/, for example. We should really just clean up the description and do a sweep of the wiki to curb misuse.

^If that use is a result of the TV Tropes use, I don't see how it changes anything.

I've also looked up deconstruction on Google and found an essay relating to it. "However, as a result of the popularity of these techniques and theories, the verb "deconstruct" is now often used more broadly as a synonym for criticizing or demonstrating the incoherence of a position" That seems to be part of the description that we use.

I don't believe it is.

To the OP: As if literary criticism has the only claim on the word Deconstruction?

Nonsense. In fact, I'm not even sure that the literary sense came first. Isn't it originally a historical text analysis term?

Our description makes perfect sense for the type criticism as applied to tropes analysis instead of textual analysis.

edited 18th Aug '11 7:14:22 PM by Sackett

^^Article predates TV Tropes by 10 years. Definitely worth noting. I'm still annoyed at the definition drift, but it's had enough time to sink in that I can't really keep arguing for a rename.

Even if we don't rename, though, we really do need to do something about misuse, and possibly explain that the definition we use isn't the only one.

edited 18th Aug '11 7:21:07 PM by INUH

At this point, that might require a full rewrite of the description, explaining from the start that while this often ends up Darker and Edgier, it doesn't have to.

And I'm still not sure how we're going to be able to parse the misuse.

Nope. Here's the deal, though. Deconstruction's other means don't clash with each other the way this one does.

If we allow the two meanings to "coexist" (For the lack of a better world) we get a word that means that text have contradictory meanings and intentions and a word that means that texts have a single intended purpose and intention, which is that of taking a genre and studying its components throughly bit by bit and explaining how they would work in a realistic setting.

So you see, right there...that's our conundrum.

Also, unless you can prove that the first use of the word wasn't in 1967's Of Grammatology, then I'm forced to believe that was its first use. Which is the one that anyone in literary/analytical circles uses. Except here.

^^I think a full rewrite is just what's needed here.

As for fixing misuse...that's going to be a hell of a project, but it's one that's needed.

^See the link a few posts above for a use in the sense TV Tropes uses that predates TV Tropes by a decade.

edited 18th Aug '11 7:26:54 PM by INUH