Deconstruction is edgy and rebellious!
But at this point I don't really think it's just Tv Tropes that has a hardon for it.
Anyway, if you deconstruct a genre it's bound to be relatively original. At least more so than making the same thing. So, I guess, assuming you can't predict the quality of a work, it's better to be original than unoriginal.
Regarding deconstructing tropes, it's mostly a way to bitchslap bad, cliched tropes. Because when you hate a trope, in terms of satisfaction it would give the author, its deconstruction > subversion > aversion.
edited 15th Jul '11 4:46:05 AM by Excelion
Murrl LustFatMI agree that being a deconstruction doesn't automatically make it good, but if it's a deconstruction, that implies that it will show things playing out in a different way from what we're used to. That makes it a novelty. And sometimes a novelty is nice simply for being a novelty. This is especially true when it comes to entertainment as we're less sure of what to expect and therefore less easily bored.
edited 15th Jul '11 4:54:21 AM by Sereg
Because True Art Is Angsty is srs bizns.
On one hand you have those who like to play around with tropes and turning them on their heads. Then they're those miserable bastards who have to play gloomy all the time because that's how Real Life can be.
Now, not everyone is like that. Deconstruction is just a way to point out flaws that sometimes wouldn't work in real life. So they're pretty much ripped apart by writers. They can be either good or bad depending on who's writing and/or if they're competent enough to pull it off.
"Liar liar on the wall, give the world to me..."I think you have to remember that Tv Tropes is a site about, well, tropes. The people who stick around this site are the ones who enjoy playing with and identifying tropes more than other people. Deconstruction, which is all about taking tropes apart, is therefore an appealing way to look at works for such people.
Oh, and another thing: Being a deconstruction does not necessarily require something ot be Darker and Edgier (even if they often are)and being Darker and Edgier does not make something a deconstruction. The level of darkness or lightness of a work has absolutely nothing to do with how good it is, but having a very different level of ligtness or darkness from similar works (which deconstructions typically do) tends to make them stand out more and be more interesting. And in entertainment, being interesting is a positive thing.
My hypothesis is that because people here likes to snark about the way some people use tropes and I think that dark deconstruction is snarking at tropes taken to logical extremes, along with parodies.
Continuously reading, studying, and (hopefully) growing.But wouldn't a good story be different from the norm or an exemplar of it by definition? Why seek out a deconstruction then when a deconstruction has no guarantee to be good? I feel like it's founded on the assumption that deconstructions are good by default and that simply doing things normally is looked down on.
^ I don't know, it seems like the people who seem really set on deconstructions are the same ones that like to apply trope labels to things whether they fit or not as though they were a mark of quality.
edited 15th Jul '11 5:16:06 AM by Arha
What Anarchy said. This entire site is devoted to people picking apart works to see what makes them tick; deconstruction is the exact same thing. It's examining the parts that make a whole and how they do or don't work and do or don't fit together.
Deconstruction is not something that is inherently good, but the fact that people here like it is about as surprising as finding people who like football on a sports forum.
This thread's aim: Very metatextual here.
The owner of this account is temporarily unavailable. Please leave your number and call again later.I meant Sereg. And so far as I'm aware there's an official definition of deconstruction that we don't use and then at least two others floating around the wiki that we do use. One of which is basically wrong since it's really just Playing with a Trope possibly mixed with Darker and Edgier.
Personally, I think deconstruction works best as a transitive stage. It's not the end of all things related to the trope/genre, it's the middle-part of a process that eventually leads to reconstruction, taking what's been learned from deconstruction and applying it to make something more believable yet at the same time still evoking that feeling of awe and wonder you got when you first encountered the original trope/genre.
Basically, what I believe is that deconstruction for deconstruction's sake is pointless, but deconstruction as a point on the path to reconstruction is what it ultimately should be about. Not to say that deconstructions aren't great works in their own right (for example, Evangelion and Watchmen are two of my favourite fictional works), but they should be there to highlight the flaws in the original concept so that later works can work around this and make something that causes you to look at the concept again and say "oh wow, I didn't realise how frigging awesome this could be!" (Working on the previous two examples, they eventually led to Gurren Lagann and Kingdom Come, also two of my favourite fictional works).
...Uh... I hope what I'm saying makes sense, ahah. >.>
What also annoys me is that Darker and Edgier, which most people confuse deconstruction with, is a massively decaying trope in need of clearance.
We need a new trope for work that is simply dark.
Continuously reading, studying, and (hopefully) growing.Well, it's kind of understandable that some people would confuse the two, as highlighting the flaws in a concept does tend to have the sometimes unintended side effect of making the whole thing seem darker and more sinister than you first imagined.
Of course the problem is when people take it too far and don't even bother with the deconstruction aspect anymore, focusing solely on filling the work with as much death, violence and sex as possible and losing any kind of substance the work could've had. I've seen it argued that this is because a lot of the big, famous deconstructions were incredible dark, but that people mistake the dark parts as being what made them popular and don't realise that it was because they were intelligent, thought provoking works that just happened to be incredibly dark.
It's like what happened to the comic book industry during the 90s, really. >.>
edited 15th Jul '11 5:50:10 AM by Moerin
People who stuffs darkness and edginess in their work sometimes claim that they are deconstructing something so it is only natural that their works have it.
Okay, let's assume that we are going with this site's definition.
What bugs me is that if you think about it, TVTROPES!Deconstruction does not have to necessarily dark. Sure, Real Life is filled with cynical people and very morally depraved people who make other people's life hell.
But there are many people who holds idealistic view on life for a reason. There are many people who overcome extreme hardships, some even more extreme than fictional examples, and achieve great things. If you ask me, that aspect of real life is way too often overlooked by writers in favor of grim darkness.
In the essence, it's about jumping onto the bandwagon.
Continuously reading, studying, and (hopefully) growing.Ah! In that case, I wasn't trying to define deconstruction, I was merely stating that some of what being a deconstruction implies and that some other things aren't automatically deconstructions. Yeah...I wouldn't call Negima a deconstruction. Maybe it might deconstruct a couple of tropes (I'd have to think about it), but it's definately not a deconstruction itself (which would require genre level deconstruction). That said, the fact that it plays with tropes and mixes genres is part of what makes it interesting. As I said, doing things differently tends to do that, but deconsruction isn't the only way of doing things differently. But in order to be a deconstruction in the first place, it would have to do things (a specific type of) differently.
@d Roy: Exactly. Deconstruction doesn't have to be dark, which is something a lot of people fail to realise.
For example, let's look at (the quite frankly awesome) Martian Successor Nadesico. It's a deconstruction of various mecha and Space Opera tropes, and ultimately it's also a deconstruction of the Macross school of thought, that if we understand each other's culture we understand each other and thus will live in perfect harmony. Sure, it has it's darker moments, but on the whole it's pretty light hearted and ultimately swings more towards the idealistic side of things in the end.
...And you know what? It's even better because of it. It deconstructs the elements that it's composed of by showing you how farcical and silly they really are, by making you laugh along with the various antics that the characters get into. And by doing so, it ends up being incredibly enjoyable and it shows that the dark elements work best when they have the silly, lighter elements juxtaposed against them for maximum emotional impact. You like these characters, you find them charming and amusing, and so when the shit hits the fan you actually care about what happens to them.
...Uh... I think I was trying to make a point there, but it might have been lost in all my gushing. >.< Sorry about that.

As I'm sure you're aware, we get a lot of deconstruction threads and similar things around here. The latest one is the one by DGOC about the whole Accidental Pervert violence reaction thing. And I have to ask, why? Why does this site seem to love a deconstruction so much? Taking apart a genre or convention does not make something automatically good. In fact, while it implies a greater familiarity with the source and a certain ability to create a more flexible story, it also has its downsides.
For example, the author may be trying too hard to make a certain point such as with NGE. Everyone's problems were getting resolved too neatly, so the shit randomly hits the fan because it didn't fit the plan Hideaki had for the series. Instead of looking for deconstructions, shouldn't we instead look for actual good stories? There is nothing wrong with deconstruction and it can make for quite the interesting story, but it seems wrong to me to focus on it instead of whatever tale the author has to tell.
So why, tvtropes? Why do you focus so much adoration on the deconstruction? I have never understood this. And why do we claim that the simplest acts of playing with tropes are some master plan by the author to subvert our expectations? Does it really matter if we explore every little consequence? Does it make something better to make it darker? Just let a story be a story.