Discussion GenreDeconstruction / AnimeAndManga

A large chunk of the anime examples page is Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which is of course a magical girl deconstruction. We have a page for magical girl deconstructions. Should we not, then, remove it from this page? The only reason I hesitate is that everyone loves it deconstruction status and I fear it would create some kind of edit war.

• The visual novel School Days (and its anime adaptation) is a Deconstruction of the harem genre and the Slice of Life romance genre. The lead, after finally dating the sweet girl he's been lusting after for ages, finds that dating her feels more like work and less like fun, so he pursues and has sex with one of the other girls who wanted him. Shortly after, he decides to sleep around, with no regard for the consequences and no desire to devote himself to a serious relationship. When the girl he first began cheating with discovers she's almost sure to be pregnant and confronts him, he wants nothing more to do with her, and after everyone finds out not only did he knock her up, but refuses to take responsibility, the other girls refuse to have anything to do with him. In the meantime, he's broken up with the first girl, but only after cheating on her for a long time. Said girl sinks into insanity and denial, especially since she knew he was cheating all along. Desperate after finding all his girls left him, he gets back together with the first girl, and tells the pregnant girl to get an abortion after making out with the other girl in front of her. Said girl later comes to his apartment and brutally murders him, the first girl sees the body, brutally murders her, and then leaves in a boat, cradling the guy's severed head in her arms, with a creepy smile on her face.
  • Many harem shows tend to take the route of the Unwanted Harem, with the male lead being an average guy who despite his bad luck, ends up gaining the affection of multiple girls due to being a Nice Guy, yet either remains oblivious to their advances or is unable to reciprocate, usually because he is already in love with one specific girl and doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of the other girls. Makoto seems like the average protagonist of this kind of stories at first, but as mentioned above he is NOT one. The plot shows how in reality not every male teen is as noble as the average harem series protagonist. Some hormone-driven young men in such a position might actually take advantage of the situation as shown in the series, sometimes even acting cruelly and misleadingly toward the girls in order to satisfy their own pleasure.
  • Also shown are exactly what kind of girls would be in an Unwanted Harem. At best needy, at worst psychotic. Kotonoha and Sekai particularly deconstruct Satellite Love Interest: they both lose what's left of their personalities to chase after Makoto... but this is done deliberately to show the terrible consequences.
  • The story also shows what could happen if someone really did treat a group of young women that all had feelings for him like your typical h-game player treats the female characters of a game, if some of those women happened to be extremely unstable. Most real people wouldn't react like that, some would. It also makes it clear that someone pursuing solely his or her own pleasure with everyone in sight while paying no attention to the effects that's having on others is an immature, maladjusted jerkass, and that such behavior can have terrible consequences.
  • Also brings up the true implications of the Lovable Sex Maniac / Bromantic Foil. Makoto's best friend Taisuke is a spirited yet hopeless romantic, and his perverted antics and subsequent rejections are portrayed as zany comic relief for most of the show. But then after being turned down once again on the day of the school festival, he resorts to actually raping a girl via taking advantage of her when she's at her lowest point; this not only throws the victim through the Despair Event Horizon, but it shows the character archetype to be much less harmless than commonly assumed.

The way it's written, it seems less like a deconstruction of a genre and more like a really dark take on it. The "deconstructive" consequences listed do not come from logical consequences of several girls being in love with the same guy (a basic premise of the harem genre) but from the fact that the guy is a collosal jackass and the girls are crazy psychobitches, neither of which is in any way a realistic consequence of a harem. A jerk is, if anything, LESS likely to have a harem, because that questions why are so many girls in love with him to begin with. Remember, Dark is not Deconsturctive.