Any good fantasy deconstructions?

Actually, now that I think about it, The Hobbit works as a pretty good deconstruction.

You've got heroes on an epic quest to slay a dragon and reclaim their lost home and treasure, overcoming many dangerous obstacles along the way. But once they actually get to the dragon's lair, they realize they're completely unqualified for the task. They've got no way to kill the dragon, and stealing the treasure out from under him proves to be laughably impractical. All they succeed in doing is angering the dragon, causing him to go on a rampage through the neighboring town, killing a bunch of people.

But then the dragon is slain, not by the heroes we've been following, but by some guy who wasn't even introduced until that chapter. And when this guy tries to claim the dragon's treasure to help rebuild his devestated town, our "heroes" lock him out, determined to keep the treasure for themselves, and summon an army to slaughter anyone who tries to take it from them.

It's a beautiful moment when both Bilbo and the reader realize that, for all we've been invested in the dwarves' quest to get their gold back, they're actually the bad guys. It's only the arrival of an even greater evil, forcing an alliance between the two sides, that keeps it from being a Downer Ending.

edited 16th Jun '13 2:52:19 PM by RavenWilder

That's an interesting perspective. I never got the feeling that we were supposed to see the dwarves as villains, though, at least not all along. Rather, it was at that specific moment that their greed nearly destroyed them, but that's different from them having been the bad guys since the beginning.

About ASOIAF, others have and could say it more eloquently but me, but I'll try. The point of a deconstruction is to show why a given trope or convention is flawed, in and of itself. And if it's done right, it should come with a reconstruction, or at least an alternative. Martin's books don't show what's inherently wrong with medieval fantasy, they just take a medieval fantasy setting and turn the grimdark up, having horrible things befall the good characters at degrees that often border on Diabolus ex Machina. It's not a deconstruction if the only reason the world is miserable is because it's filled with assholes.

The dwarves aren't evil all along, no, but they are motivated mainly by greed. They're also clearly out of their depth on this quest, and their efforts to get their gold back only make things worse. Since the story's told from their perspective, they're Anti Heroes. But if the story were told from Bard's perspective, it'd be quite easy to see Thorin and ilk as villains and Bilbo as a Defector from Decadence.

Also, how about The Lord of the Rings as a Genre Deconstruction?

Sure, it's got a long-lost king reclaiming the throne, a benevolent wizard, prophecy twists, and noble stands against the forces of evil. But the thing is, none of that stuff actually works. Sure, the good guys score a few victories, but all they're really able to do is buy time before the villain's vastly superior army inevitably crushes them.

What ultimately saves the day is a couple of nobodies *

And, in the end, they fail. At the last moment, our main hero loses his resolve and decides that We Can Rule Together sounds too tempting to pass up. The day is still saved, but only because a minor, incredibly pathetic villain also wants the power our hero has just claimed, and their struggle ends up destroying the Big Bad by accident. Seriously, a guy trips and falls, and that's what resolves the main conflict of the story. Even in the grittiest, most realistic fantasy deconstructions, I don't think I've seen that.

EDIT: Re: A Song of Ice and Fire: Some people would say that portraying Westeros as populated mainly by assholes is just a reflection of real life.

edited 16th Jun '13 3:08:54 PM by RavenWilder

...God point on the LOTR thing. Though, given Tolkien's Catholic roots and the existence of Eru Ilúvatar, I had interpreted Gollum oh-so-serendipitously falling to his death to be an act of divine intervention. I think that some of Tolkien's annotations confirmed or suggested this.

That may be, but I'm a Death of the Author sorta guy, so that doesn't affect my view too much. Heck, if you haven't read The Silmarillion, you'd be forgiven for thinking Middle-Earth was a case of Devil, but No God.

edited 16th Jun '13 3:39:08 PM by RavenWilder

Well, aside from certain statements made by Gandalf.

Regarding the last page: look, the only father of deconstruction as a concept is Jacques Derrida. Claiming it's Martin or Moorcock is symptomatic of a terminal case of Small Reference Pools. -_-

I thought his definition of "deconstruction" was pretty different from the way we're using the term here?

, : If I recall correctly there's also at least one act of outright direct — and rather dramatic — intervention with the sinking of Numenor.

That was with regards to the Valar rather than Iluvatar, IIRC.

I just checked, and I believe that The Silmarillion indicates that the Valar called upon Eru, who then destroyed Numenor, removed the Undying Lands from Arda and reworked the world such that it was curved. Indeed, I believe that it indicates that the Valar "for that time laid down their government of the world".

But you can only understand Derrida if you read Heidegger- *shot*

I am curious how the term "deconstruction" got the meaning it has on this wiki. Was it used like this outside the wiki before the trope page was made? Did someone create the article with the name by coincidence, or did they badly misunderstand Derrida's concept? The conflation of the two terms irritates me.

People were talking about Mistborn, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned Warbreaker, it plays around with reader expectations of who's a hero and who's a villain a ton.

First off, something doesn't have to contain a reconstruction to be a valid deconstruction. That might be a personal conceit of yours, but deconstructions have value in and of themselves. What a deconstruction needs in order to be successful is to succeed as a story in its genre, apart from simply being a deconstruction, which ASOIAF does.

Second, ASOIAF isn't a deconstruction because it's filled with assholes, it's a deconstruction because it tends to buck narrative convention and typical fantasy tropes. Good guys do not win just by virtue of being good guys. Characters aren't running around with conveniently contemporary morals and attitudes. There are plenty of people around who would be The Hero, but the world isn't spinning its epic around them to make it happen. The Evil Overlord is overthrown - multiple times in multiple places - but it doesn't solve everyone's problems forever.

There's a stark difference between ASOIAF and something like, say, The Horus Heresy novels, which are filled with even more grimdark, but still follow a narrative template (although it's more tragedy than typical fantasy or space opera).

Well, it's like this: Back in the '80s, people in comics circles talked about Watchmen being a deconstruction of the concept of superheroes, with reference to Derrida's concept. Over time, though, people unfamiliar with what a deconstruction actually is took it into their lexicon as something else: A "true to life" depiction of how a set of tropes would work, with all the inherent problems on display. Strictly speaking, that is not a deconstruction, but often an element of deconstructive literature; but because of how the word was used, this definition became quite common in nerd circles, whence came the name of our article.

There are works of fiction that serve as deconstructions, I think, but they are much rarer than what I guess I would call "critical subversions."

edited 17th Jun '13 10:21:58 AM by JHM

K.J. Parker's Scavenger Trilogy pretty much eviscerates the entire fantasy genre. Yet, paradoxically, it is quite a good fantasy series. I don't think I am going to read it again for a while, for reasons.

Regarding A Song Of Ice And Fire:

I consider this series a Genre Deconstruction in some ways, but it is not necessarily the kind of deconstruction I'm looking for. ASOIAF is an "aversive" deconstruction, in that many tropes associated with High Fantasy like The Hero and Evil Overlord are not present, and there is no specific good vs. evil conflict.

The Sundering is an "inverted" deconstruction, reversing both the Big Good and Big Bad roles and the POV, in that the POV is from the Morgoth-equivalent and his minions, while the Manwe-equivalent is unseen and supposedly a Jerkass and Consummate Liar. What I'm looking for is a "subversive" deconstruction, that subverts the Evil Overlord and The Hero tropes but keeps the POV the same or makes it more balanced.

Not necessarily true. You're not taking into account the fact that it took a lot of effort to get to the one place that said accident would have actually mattered. Not to mention that Gollum could not have triggered that accident if Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam hadn't spared his life several times when they had every reason to kill him. If you read The Lord Of The Rings very carefully, you realize that there are no accidents in Middle-Earth.

edited 18th Jun '13 4:06:53 PM by shiro_okami

Perhaps some parts of the Dying Earth stories, in particular the stories following Cugel? As I recall he's sent off on a quest by a wizard — which is to say that he was caught attempting to break into the house of said wizard, a pretty much villainous fellow who whisks him off to the other side of the Earth with a barbed little alien/monster curled around his liver; Cugel is a rogue who thinks himself more clever and charming than he is.

Dying Earth and Lord of the Rings were both made before fantasy in the modern sense was a genre, what could they possibly have been deconstructing? I believe the T Vtropes term for all of this is Unbuilt Trope, not deconstruction.

edited 18th Jun '13 4:21:07 PM by MrShine

True, but read from a modern perspective they may nevertheless fulfil the same desire.

Uh, you are aware those books were inspired by myths and legends that go back thousands of years, right?

What you're looking for is a fantasy story that subverts certain key tropes. That's not really the same thing as a deconstruction. A Genre Deconstruction may subvert tropes, but that's simply a tool in its arsenal, not one of its defining characteristics.

edited 18th Jun '13 10:26:53 PM by RavenWilder

Hmmm.

I don't know if anyone has brought this up yet, but M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart is a kind of dissection of the whole desire to escape to a magical otherworld. China Miéville has referred to it as an "anti-fantasy" of sorts for that reason, and it's certainly not the only long-form work for dark fantasy in that category.

edited 19th Jun '13 2:56:05 PM by JHM

edited 19th Jun '13 3:01:41 PM by shiro_okami

M John Harrison's pretty neat, i'm reading through his Viriconium novels now. It bugged me that they were so hard to get a hold of though, had to order them through american Amazon because apparently the viriconium omnibus wasn't available anywhere in canada.

I'm currently reading the Elric books (The collections published by Del Rey; Stealer of Souls, To save Tanelorn .etc. I'm finding it to be awesome, the main character is an incredibly powerful wizard, but he is bound to a sword that hungers for the souls of men. A few people on this thread have referred to it as the grandfather of the deconstruction genre. Reading one of the books will explain the concept much better than I can.

edited 27th Jun '13 5:49:14 AM by CardsOfWar

I'm... not sure if it qualifies as a deconstruction, exactly, but Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide To Fantasy Land is a decidedly barbed look at a lot of the fantasy cliches, and is quite funny to boot.