Deconstructor Fleet

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"The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before." —Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Some stories and series seem to go out of their way to Subverted Trope as many tropes and Deconstruction as many genres as possible, or at the very least take them home and cuddle them and call them 'George'. A Deconstructor Fleet doesn't just use one topic for parody or Deconstruction. It sinks its meathooks into any trope it can find and folds and spindles it to shreds. When done well, the overall effect is to create something visibly original. Done badly, it may be seen as a generic Hate Fic, resulting in a small but loyal fanbase loving it and everyone else hating it. Even people not familiar with TV Tropes will notice how this show is different from others. Many such shows become Trope Makers in their own right. Do not confuse this with Deconstruction, which doesn't invent something new, but criticizes the old. In both cases, however, the ultimate goal of the writers should be to examine a genre or a set of tropes from a new perspective without losing their value as entertainment - not to make the viewer/reader/player feel bad for enjoying straightforward genre fiction. Please remember it's not enough to say that something is a example, it is important to say why it's an example.

The name is a pun on the Vogon Constructor Fleet from The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. Especially appropriate because the Vogon Constructor Fleet doesn't construct anything - its job is to facilitate hyperspace express routes by blowing up planets that happen to be in the way.

See also Genre Busting and Post Modernism. Compare Better Than a Bare Bulb.

Deconstruction Fic is a specific sub-trope for examples of Fanfic with a Deconstruction theme or plot. Fanfic examples go there.

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Anime and Manga

• Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai - The whole frickin' point is basically to deconstruct a genre per episode. And then, halfway through, it shift gears and begins to deconstruct itself.
• Bokurano - Just because a cosmic entity grants children gigantic mecha to pilot doesn't mean they'll necessarily use those mechs for the sake of good.
• Darker Than Black - Does its best to play with as many superpower tropes as it can, and often deconstructs them.
• Elfen Lied - Ever think having a cute, amnesiac, completely childish girl with no nudity taboos fall in your lap was a good thing? Wrong! FAR WRONG!
• Excel Saga - Technically it is a satire mocking the Japanese recession, but every little thing, no matter how mundane or boring, is depicted as totally awesome. The anime meanwhile, parodies a different movie or television genre each episode.
• FLCL, but Played for Laughs and Mind Screws.
• Gantz - The author himself said that he laid out to subvert as many tropes as possible with the series.
• Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni - Slice of Life, One dark secret (caused by a Hate Plague) and everything will get worse, FAR WORSE! There is one Downer Ending that is caused if you ignore the dark secrets to get life back to normal.
• It's not that Hunter X Hunter doesn't stand on its own as a shonen fighting manga, but especially once you get into the ant arc it becomes hard to ignore that Togashi wants to deconstruct shonen manga, its villains, and the Idiot Hero.
  • Specifically, the Idiot Hero and his frequent form of Cloudcuckoolander instinctive ethics. Gon verges on Blue and Orange Morality sometimes, but it's just the kind of thing Incorruptible Pure Pureness frequently invokes, carried just far enough to be slightly creepy.
  • Gon Freaks (said hero) is designed in tribute to Son Goku in several ways; there is a reason Gon catches a giant fish as his first act.
    • And then of course he recently sacrificed his life to turn into a huge muscle-guy with endless hair in order to destroy Nefelpitou for destroying the mentor Gon wasn't strong enough or old enough to save...it was horrifying as hell, but a little bit funny, too. Because look, it's grown-up Goku Up to Eleven.
    • The situation with Pitou that he's avenging is also a deconstruction of the way a villain's threat level and a hero's growth are often shown by giving them a Curb Stomp Battle the hero barely walks away from, and then turning the tables the next time. Because just surviving doesn't mean there aren't consequences for weakness. (Not that Togashi hasn't used the trope. Although at least once with Sensui it was slightly subverted by the death thing.)
  • Five-Man Band dynamics also played straight and deconstructed. Interesting because Gon, Killua, Kurapika, and Leorio map onto the team from Togashi's first big series.
    • They are: The Overpowered Idiot Hero, the Small Scary Killer, the Smart Pretty Boy, and the Big Idiot With A Heart Of Gold.
  • Kuroro Lucifer is weird. Hisoka does not belong in children's comics. And Meruem is an attempt to be psychologically realistic about a cosmic-level entity born full-grown to devour humans and conquer the world.
• Irresponsible Captain Tylor - Space Opera, completely Played for Laughs.
• Key the Metal Idol - One of the first truly brilliant Anime Mind Screws, it also sinks its teeth into numerous works and tropes of fiction, including Pinocchio/ Become a Real Boy, Mini Mecha, Real Mecha, Super Mecha, Eccentric Mentor, Idol Singer, and Magical Girl, in addition to subverting and deconstructing Emotionless Girl and Robot Girl.
• Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka - very much not your normal magical girl series.
• Medaka Box has pretty much become this. Taking shonen tropes (especially those found in Shonen Jump) to Up to Eleven while also showing issues that come with the characters having such off the wall powers, and even deconstructs the concepts of the God Mode Sue and Invincible Hero
• Mobile Suit Gundam - Deconstructs the Super Robot.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 00 - Deconstructs the rest of the Gundam franchise. It even has the voice actor of the original hero play the Big Bad.
• Mobile Suit Victory Gundam - Deconstructs the rest of the Universal Century Gundam franchise, given it was produced during Tomino's emotional lowest point against Sunrise's endless Executive Meddling. It tells everything buried deep in Tomino's mind about the commercial reality in the anime industries.
• Naruto - Decontructs Idiot Hero (Naruto isn't an idiot, he just act like one because thats the only way he can get a brief moment of attention, and it's a defence mechanism against his depression), The Messiah (Nagato via what happens when the universe goes out of its way to treat said archtype like crap), Cosmic Plaything (out of four examples, all but Naruto have snapped somehow as a result and even then Naruto barely avoided snapping), All Girls Want Bad Boys (Sasuke), No Good Deed Goes Unpunished (Kakashi suffered some major trauma as a result of what happened to his father), and revenge tropes in general (especially Sasuke).
• Neon Genesis Evangelion - Originally conceived as a deconstruction of the robot side of the Super Robot genre, the second half of the series (and the movies) become a psychological evaluation of the so-called "Hotshot Pilot", showing how fucked up they can be as far as wallowing in angst (a side effect of the show's creator going into therapy around the time the show began production). The show's original finale itself takes several swipes at the show's fanbase, in particular targeting those who only cared about which girl Shinji would end up with.
• Naru Taru - You will never look at Mons the same way again.
• Digimon Tamers, similar to the above (thanks to being penned by the same guy) is another Mons deconstruction. Remember the first two seasons? They're all fake, nothing more than a kids TV show and merchandise franchise. This Is Reality. The show explores how much damage real Mons could potentially cause to a cityscape, the consequences of endlessly trying to make your mon stronger (both for the mon and the Tamer), and the psychological problems that could result from being too attached to your mon.
• Ouran High School Host Club - Joyfully mocks the reverse-harem shoujo genre it often falls straight into.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica - While being selfish in most Magical Girl shows makes you the villain or the Alpha Bitch, using your wish to help others might lead to them to question everything, unknowingly take your help and forget you, or cause their suffering to build over multiple timelines. And you get to have all the fun of watching it happen and knowing you caused it.
  • Might not count due to it being more of a Cosmic Horror Story and Faustian Rebellion after it gets into full swing.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena - "Love is a battlefield" as a literal concept is common in Magical Girl, but most tend to forget that love, and especially young love, is inextricably linked with sexuality (and explorations thereof) and uncertain and non-absolute infatuations, often unrequited or with those with whom such a pairing would be socially unacceptable. And that's not even getting into RGU's regular savaging of traditional gender roles.
• Rosario to Vampire - No, seriously. In recent years Ikeda has taken it upon himself to ask what sort of background the girls in an Unwanted Harem might have come from, and to highlight the impact of being the Romantic Runner Up in such a relationship. It also shows how dangerous it is to be The Team Normal and the possible adverse physical and psychological effects of an Emergency Transformation. Not to mention Kahlua shows just how messed up being a Punch Clock Villain can make you.
• Rurouni Kenshin- Deconstructs many aspects of the Wandering Samurai found in the Jidai Geki genre.
• Saikano: So your shy, timid girlfriend turned out to have actually been a secret government human superweapon all along? Expect suffering, my friend. Lots and lots and lots of it.
• Shiki to vampire fiction. Starts out as a regular undead invade village, heroic vampire hunter fights them off. By the end, we're all left wondering who the real monsters are.
• Star Driver thrives on this. A great deal of the generic anime tropes used throughout the anime are turned up to eleven and played with massively to the point they feel totally new.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross - See its entry under Deconstruction for details.
• Suzumiya Haruhi - What do you mean "we should stay in one genre?" If we did that, Kyon wouldn't get to snark at them!
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann eats tropes for breakfast. At the very least, it deconstructs the Giant Robot genre. Some theories suggest that the first arc is based on 70s giant robot anime (roaming around having episodic Monster of the Week adventures), the second is the 80s (moving toward a Big Bad and beating his subordinates along the way), the third arc transitions into the 90s (a much more cynical setting that looks very similar to something else by the same studio), and the final arc is intended to reconstruct everything into something new. Along the way, it examines how the Hot Blooded type was treated in each of those. Among other things.
• Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle - Deconstructs ITSELF, its second half deconstructing its first half.
• Yu-Gi-Oh GX - Especially the original series' heroes' use of Defeat Means Friendship (which the Big Bad's Cult uses in Season 2). And just look at what happens to its typical Idiot Hero-Invincible Hero protagonist in season 3.
  • It doesn't just deconstruct tropes, it also deconstructs aspects of the game itself; Judai's duel with Kagurazuka takes a stab at showing the flaws in the Possession Equals Mastery theory of netdecking, and a central theme in the anime is over which side of the "Stop Having Fun!" Guys debate is right.
• Yu-Gi-Oh 5 Ds is starting to follow in GX's footsteps; the third season's antagonist's plot against Synchros, and the counter provided to our heroes in the form of the Accel Synchro, seems deliberately crafted to deconstruct the debate over whether or not the monsters are Game Breakers, and and the Yu-Gi-Oh Tenth Anniversary Movie movie delves into how much the Plot Tumor of the game had grown in the anime and manga, by having the villain try to travel back in time and use the game to murder its creator, Pegasus J. Crawford, thus preventing the game from being created and, supposedly, prevent The End of the World As We Know It that would've come, if the game stayed in existence.

Comic Books

• The Authority, of superteams in general and the JLA in particular.
• Planetary (also of the Wildstorm universe) went even further with the "Ironic Darkly Humorous Tongue-In-Cheek Deconstructive Parody of Superheroes" tone of The Authority by taking the same approach with other genres, including Hong-Kong action films, Japanese Giant Monster films, and 1930s pulp adventure.
• The Boys is a deconstruction of the "Bullpen" mythos that surrounds the superhero comic book industry.
• Captain Atom is a deconstruction of secret identities, origin stories, retcons, rogues' galleries, Steven Ulysses Perhero, even, arguably, The Good Captain, plus who knows how many other Superhero Tropes.
• Cerebus gave us the trope name for a reason.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen deconstructs the entirety of fiction and its relation to reality.
• Miracleman was one of the earliest Deconstructions of the superhero genre, showing the Fascist undertones of the genre, explored the abuse of power, and showed a particularly Gory and destructive superhero battle that was legitimately shocking at the time. Yet it still manages to explore Captain Marvel mythos in a very witty and Tongue-In-Cheek manner.
• Powers is a major one for at least half the superhero tropes. Taking place through the eyes of two non-powered cops, everything from investigating superhero crimes to tabloid obsession with superheroes to Beware the Superman to what a relationship between a super powered gangster and a mob boss would really be like to how fickle the public can be on things like the Super Registration Act to the stress of keeping a secret identity to immortality are put down on the page without any glamor or glorification.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, at least in the original Eastman and Laird run
• Watchmen is a deconstruction of the comics that preceded it. It was the comic book that brought in the Dark Age of Comics. You have this to blame for all the Darker and Edgier antiheroes to come out of the 80s and 90s.
  • Kingdom Come was a deconstruction that helped end the era that followed.
• Star Wars Legacy takes the Star Wars Expanded Universe, cuts it up into little tiny pieces, shuffles them, and glues it back together into a dark twisted reflection of it's former self that's hardly recognisable, and yet somehow still manages to capture everything that made the original movies great.
• See: Grant Morrison's entire oeuvre.
  • Animal Man and Doom Patrol both deconstruct massive numbers of superhero tropes, the superhero genre in general, as well as other tropes and genres that don't necessarily fall under superhero comics' purview. Animal Man gets all metafictional with its deconstruction, while Doom Patrol turns more toward Dada (though it doesn't necessarily qualify as Dada Comics, at least not as currently described.)
  • Having thoroughly deconstructed superheroes (though he certainly wasn't done; see basically everything he's done for DC Comics in the last decade or so), Morrison wrote SeroesThe Invisibles to deconstruct, well, everything else.
    • Also superheroes again. The titular heroes are set up more like a terrorist cell than a superhero team, but they're also, well, a team made up of a bunch of weirdos and superpowered people.
  • Literally, everything. There's probably more deconstruction happening in a couple given pages of The Invisibles than in most entire comic book series. It touches on action movie tropes, science fiction tropes, it blends together references to a plethora of literature and film, and a single trade volume alone features stories about voodoo, Aztec mythology, and an entire issue about the life of a throwaway henchman who gets shot in the first trade. By the end of the series it even gets around to deconstructing itself (at least, that's probably what it gets around to).
• Tron: Ghost in the Machine (follow up to Alternate Continuity Tron 2.0) dishes out some brutal deconstruction with a side order of Mind Screw. The comic opens with Jet Bradley going from a promising game designer to hunkering down in his Honorary Uncle's darkened arcade, virulently technophobic with a nasty case of PTSD from all the digital lives he had to take in the course of the game.

Film

• Airplane!- Good luck ever taking a Disaster Movie seriously again. The ironic thing is that the film itself is a remake of an obscure, existing disaster film, which was played completely straight and was rewritten to make it a comedy.
• Blazing Saddles is not only a parody of the Western movie, but a satire on racism and whitewashing.
• The Cabin in The Woods. You will never be able to watch a straight horror movie the way you did before, especially not with the You Bastard note that it ends on.
• Funny Games: A Torture Porn/Slasher Movie film with No Fourth Wall, and Dangerously Genre Savvy killers who know they're in a A Torture Porn/Slasher Movie film and break the fourth wall to attack the fandom of Torture Porn/Slasher Movie films, showing how the suffering of their victims is the audience's fault, because Torture Porn/Slasher Movie films are entertainment to them. They also change the outcome of the plot by using a remote control to rewind to seconds before the victims successfully fight back, and hung a lampshade on this by saying "you shouldn't have done that, you're not allowed to break the rules" meaning that the victims can never win a horror movie because that's "the rules" of the genre.. Long story short, if you enjoyed it, then you didn't understand it.
• Galaxy Quest The entire plot can be summed up in the question "what if the cast of a Star Trek like show got mistaken for the characters they played by an alien race with no concept of lies or fiction and was drafted into leading said race to victory in a war against evil genocidal aliens?
  • Older Than They Think: Some of its plot can be traced back to "Visit to a Weird World," a Star Trek Deconstruction Fic from 1968!
• Hot Fuzz is this for Buddy Cop movies, and shows the mountains of paperwork the characters would have to go through by the end of the film.
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a Black Comedy which averts, subverts, inverts, defies, parodies, and eventually deconstructs more tropes than it plays straight-- and it does it marvelously.
• Last Action Hero attempts to deconstruct action movies and the characters found within. It falls short, but the effort is there.
• Natural Born Killers brutally deconstructs the relationship between violence, the media and sensationalism, the audience's narrative expectations, and a handful of media formats, such as the wacky sitcom style used for Mallory's background, complete with a Laugh Track while her father molests her and various people are messily murdered.
• Pleasantville deconstructs 50s idealism and portrayal in media.
• Woody Allen's The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Deconstructing Harry, Mighty Aphrodite (complete with Greek chorus.)
• Scream works entirely by having genre-savvy characters pointing out what ought to happen next, and how to avoid it.
• Shrek is about an ogre who becomes a reluctant Knight in Shining Armor. The structure is that of a typical save-the-princess fairy tale, but with comedy and dramatic reversal added.
• The entire Spaghetti Western subgenre is one massive Deconstructor Fleet of its supergenre, The Western. The protagonists often shot first - and last - and were only the "good guys" insofar as they were less sadistic than the villains. See also the following entry.
  • The Good the Bad And The Ugly deconstructs not only the morality of Westerns, but the dramatic structure they're built on, stripping it down to the bare minimum.
• Unforgiven is also a massive deconstruction of the Western genre; Clint Eastwood's deconstruction of his own work, in fact.
  • Eastwood spent most of his career, post-Rawhide, deconstructing the Western; and even Rawhide itself was atypical for the Western genre, with its emphasis on cowboys actually working as agricultural labourers rather than freelance troubleshooters. His films of the 1960s replaced the good guys of the John Wayne era with stylish killers, motivated by greed, whilst his films of the 1970s and 1980s replaced the stylish killers with reluctant, tired men, sick of death and killing. Unforgiven took this to its logical conclusion, replacing morality and amorality with people doing things. English Bob, the supposedly ace killer, turns out to be a drunken fraud; Munny, the Eastwood character, has killed everything that walks and crawls, but hates it and eventually finds more success as a retailer of dry goods. "Little" Bill (Gene Hackman) is the town sheriff that preserves order by restricting freedoms (gun control) and basically terrorizing the local populace.

Literature

• House of Leaves is a literal Deconstruction of the horror genre, in that it is based on the postmodernist philosophy of Deconstructionism. Arguably, it is a deconstruction of literature itself, and with Only Revolutions it's a bit less arguable.
• Voltaire's Candide, a vicious satire of the Tastes Like Diabetes optimism that was so popular at the time.
• The Canterbury Tales is a meticulous parody of things such as morality plays and chivalric lessons. It is also older than Don Quixote.
  • Especially Chaucer's first story, where he can't decide which stereotypical villain to use -- a giant or a Saracen -- so he makes the bad guy a giant Saracen.
• Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear's A Companion to Wolves does this to the Animal Companion genre with their Manly Gay wolf bondmates.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld. It starts out as a fairly straightforward parody of heroic fantasy and evolves into something more complex, subtle, and deconstructive that takes precise aim at nearly everything.
  • This is especially true of novels that enthusiastically send up real-world social phenomena, such as Moving Pictures, Soul Music, or The Truth.
• The Dresden Files, which has an entire cast full of Genre Savvy people, a smartassed narrator, and a general love of all things tropey.
• Frank Herbert's Dune, which took John Carter of Mars and Lensman and imagined what it would be like if the settings of said space operas (a) obeyed real physical laws, (b) were populated by grown-ups, and (c), were based on/influenced by non-western societies.
• The Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh had been The Hero in stories for at least one thousand years before the Epic. The Epic revises those stories and adds new material to make him into The Caligula – and then for good measure it makes the gods (especially Ishtar/Inanna) into Jerkass Gods. The ancient Babylonians were masters of postmodernism. Postmodernism and flaying.
• Anything by Thomas Pynchon, with Gravity's Rainbow being probably the most famous example.
• Great Expectations, deconstructing all its author's work up to that point
• Gullivers Travels was a satire on... well, everything. From the then-current craze for published accounts of fabulous discoveries in the South Seas (to the point where almost any outlandish or impossible tale of discovery would be avidly devoured), to trends in science, philosophy and politics.
• Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, and its original Radio version, TV, video game and movie adaptations, as well. Of course, there's also a literal Deconstructor Fleet - the Vogons.
• Brandon Sanderson wrote the Mistborn trilogy as a deconstruction of a number of prominent high fantasy tropes. Word of God indicates that Sanderson was aiming at deconstructing the Evil Overlord, Chosen One prophecies, and The Hero in particular, but there are countless other examples as well.
• The Princess Bride - Along with its theatrical adaptation, this story is possibly one of the most well-known deconstructions of classic fantasy tropes.
• George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is the ultimate deconstruction of medieval fantasy, and what a world is like when a bunch of heavily armed and ambitious assholes with a lifetime of privilege can go about doing whatever they want. You'll never look at the Knight in Shining Armor the same way again.
  • The first book in particular has one actually honorable, law-abiding knight and a saintly princess that just can't wait to be married and begin popping out kids as the naïve newcomers at the Deadly Decadent Court. The first one gets a totally undeserved Humiliation Conga where he is forced to confess a treason he didn't really commit, then stripped off his lands and titles, then beheaded with his own sword and his head put on a pike; while the princess basically gets the ultimate Break the Cutie narrative.
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall realistically and painfully deconstructs All Girls Want Bad Boys and related tropes that feature prominently in works such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, written by the author's sisters.

Live Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer blends genres with considerable aplomb, lampshades and plays with all the tropes it can get its grubby little hands on, and put a modernized twist on various stories and myths.
• The Colbert Report is all about deconstructing and satirizing the Strawman Political (mostly right-wing, but he's not averse to throwing darts at the Left), and many other Politics Tropes fall as well.
  • So he throws both ways?
• Doctor Who has, at various times both deconstructed tropes at wild abandon and later, as a side-effect of Running the Asylum, deconstructed itself and its Fandom. The banally-entitled late '70s story "The Robots of Death" explored the real effects of living in a society with robots as a work force. Wouldn't, for example, Uncanny Valley rear its head? A few years later, writer (later briefly script editor) Douglas Adams had "The Pirate Planet", which explicitly gave the villain some actually specific purpose for his villainy rather than putting it down to some vague "powerlust" or the like. In "The Horns of Nimon", the Doctor's formerly Genre Blind companion notes though word play that the head guys have a "power complex".
  • The new series episode "Midnight" is especially notable. The entire purpose of the episode, except to scare people half to death, is a deconstruction of how people would really react to a weirdo genius knows-too-much alien stranger in a crisis. It... doesn't go well, shall we say.
  • "The Waters Of Mars" essentially deconstructs the Doctor himself and the mythology that the series has built around him. It involves the Doctor holding back death, defying the laws of time and space to save innocent lives and rewrite the history books and generally acting up to titles like the 'Lonely God' that the series has often thrown around about him, doing things similar to what he's done before and which would under other circumstances be presented as a Crowning Moment of Awesome... except here, the people who would normally amazed, dazzled and charmed by him are freaked out by what he's done and who he is, and his very actions are presented as wrong and indicative of his growing arrogance, indifference and alarming tendencies towards A God Am I Syndrome.
• Farscape and Firefly did pretty well to deconstruct the Space Opera, contributing to the drastic (and fairly sudden) shift in tone of Space Operas that happened around 2002-3. The shift was so sudden that Star Trek Enterprise dramatically shifted mid-series, the third and fourth seasons having a considerably darker, serious, and what would later be recognized as more modern tone.
• Myth Busters is dedicated not only to busting myths and urban legends, but deconstructing tropes.
• Seinfeld, with its observational humor, intersecting plot-lines, non sympathetic protagonists, and the famous Real Time Chinese Restaurant episode kicked off a revolution. Every Sit Com that came afterwards owes something to it (to the point that the original now sadly seems cliche).
• Supernatural has occasional bouts of ruthless deconstructionism.
• The Wire savagely deconstructs Police Procedurals. It's hard to go back to them afterwards.
  • It goes beyond that, after deconstructing police procedurals it goes on to deconstruct your perceptions of most of societies important institutions.
• Stargate SG-1 had frequent moments of brutal trope deconstruction. See fan-favorite "Window of Opportunity" for how it deconstructs and lampshades the Groundhog Day Loop.
• Twenty Four showed how saving the world is made complicated by politics and personal issues. It also showed just how much something like breaking the laws constantly and fighting terrorists take effect on the people who do it, and how torture just doesn't work when the people being tortured are so devoted to their cause, and how the action disturbs anyone who does it. Of course, so many people see it as the opposite, as glorifying it all when it's plainly inverse.
• Married With Children, originally to be called 'Not the Cosbys' took on many tropes of family-based sitcoms and turned them on their heads.

Video Games

• Alan Wake is arguably the House of Leaves of video games. It takes as many Meta Tropes as it can, such as Through the Eyes of Madness, All Just a Dream, Dead All Along, and Transfictionality and takes them apart with every plot twist, so that the player is left guessing which is true until the very end of the game, and probably beyond.
• The Bards Tale
• Bio Shock Using Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as a jumping off point, explores philosophy while deconstructing First Person Shooters, and the tropes common to early 20th Century fiction
  • The Antagonists of Andrew Ryan and Sofia Lamb deconstruct the idea of the Ubermensch, showing how such a person would be at best, a Well-Intentioned Extremist, at worst hypocritical and dogmatic. Ryan is also a composite of John Galt (the Hero of Atlas Shrugged), the Industrial Plutocrats of the time, and Ayn Rand herself. whereas Frank Fontaine, the real Big Bad of the first game combines the typical Randian villain, with the embodiment of the criticisms of Objectivism
  • ADAM is a deconstruction of both superpowers and Mundane Utility: the frivolous uses of the substance for plastic surgery, sports, and other mundane purposes left people hopelessly addicted, repulsively disfigured by genetic disorders, and irrevocably insane- thus creating the Splicers that function as the main enemies of the game. The only characters in the game who haven't ended up this way are people who didn't splice (Ryan, Lamb, and Tenembaum), spliced in moderation (Sinclair, Poole, Langford and Fontaine- prior to the final boss battle), or possessed a natural immunity (The Big Sisters, Eleanor, and apparently the protagonists.)
    • Or they died.
  • The twist of the first game deconstructs Mission Control, showing how FPS = But Thou Must in most cases.
• Cannon Fodder, which takes the Military and Warfare Tropes page and systematically tears it to pieces.
• Dragon Age: Origins is a gleeful deconstruction of just about every trope listed on the Standard Fantasy Setting page.
• Final Fantasy, starting from roughly VI on, has been subtly doing this, poking holes in the concepts of The Chosen One, the characters' dependency on Green Rocks or phlebotinum to solve their problems, cheerful heroes, sullen heroes, Heroic Sacrifices, and so on, all while diving deeply into Genre Busting waters. Final Fantasy VII is perhaps the most extreme example.
  • Even before that, a common interpretation of Final Fantasy V is that it was meant as a long, but loving, series of jabs and comedic deconstructions at common themes, characters, and plot points in the first four games. The GBA port only amplifies this.
• Metal Gear Solid as a whole is known for this. The first one deconstructs the original Metal Gear games as well as the Die Hard On an X formula, Sons of Liberty practically deconstructs the entire concept of video gaming itself (See here for more details), and Snake Eater does it for spy thrillers and Bond movies. Hell, the intro music, Snake Eater, sounds like it came straight out of a Bond film.
  • Actually, the first level of the game is a Bond Opening Sequence of about 30 to 90 minutes, that introduces the villains and starts the political crisis with a huge bang. Only then the actual intro starts that not only has James Bond intro music but also James Bond intro visuals. The next scene is back in America where Naked Snake receives his briefing for the actual mission that is the game's plot.
• No More Heroes rips into To Be a Master and Gotta Kill Em All plots, showing just what kind of sick, twisted world an equally sick protagonist would actually want to participate in.
• Planescape Torment takes aspects of the second edition D&D world and drags them out to their logical extremes. The characters and plot are deliberate aversions of cliches found in most typical fantasy games.
  • "Cliches found in most typical fantasy games" are mostly irrelevant in this case, since for Planescape this is almost normal. AD&D-2 PS sourcebooks has crazier stuff.
• Kreia is a one-woman deconstructor fleet, mercilessly breaking down each and every one of your preconceptions of the Star Wars universe. Uniquely for a series normally painted in Black and White Morality, Kreia disapproves of your more altruistic actions for reasons other than Stupid Evil; she will point out that raising others above their station cheapens their successes and causes jealousy in others.
• Shin Megami Tensei - Long before Naru Taru did, they had already deconstructed the sheer horror of a world populated by Mons.
• Arguably the biggest appeal of games in the Tales Series is the fact that they glue as many cliches together in the first few hours and then deconstruct them so much that on many occasions sections of the fanbase think that the Big Bad is the real hero. Some specific examples:
  • Tales of Phantasia started the trend. While tame now, back in the day the revelation that the main villain was after a completely understandable, totally reasonable goal--which unfortunately could only be achieved through rather amoral means--was a huge twist.
  • Tales of Symphonia grew famous for being a Deconstructor Fleet; it savagely tears into the concept of The Chosen One as well as the Idiot Hero; Fantastic Racism, while not necessarily "deconstructed", receives a lot of examination. The concept of a Determinator also gets deconstructed, as it's the Big Bad's primary flaw. A lot of effort is put into examining sacrifices and what it means for a person to be a sacrifice.
  • Tales of the Abyss so totally shatters the notion of prophecy, and the implications future-telling could have on people, both on a societal and individual level. It examines a lot of Cloning tropes as well.
  • Tales of Vesperia takes aim at Protagonist-Centered Morality, especially through the concepts of the Anti-Hero and Vigilante Man. Is a hero who makes decisions without considering the opinions of those whose lives he changes--whether it be ten people or ten million--really a hero?
• Several Flash games such as Achievement Unlocked and This Is The Only Level.
  • And who could forget You Have to Burn The Rope?
• The premise and plot of Penumbra and Amnesia the Dark Descent sound like complete Cliche Storms of various horror story tropes, but they actually make mincemeat of them by toying with the player on every occasion and subverting the hell out of every horror trope known to man.
• Thief cheerfully tears apart every stereotypical "thieves' guild"-related trope remembered from Dungeons and Dragons and also likes to play around with the various factions and creatures inhabiting its Low Fantasy setting.
• Would you believe if someone tell you that (some installments of) Touhou is a Deconstructor Fleet? Let us observe...
  • Imperishable Night: Deconstructs Immortality and associated tropes. The immortals have (literally) very alien mindset and can only keep their sanity intact by ripping each others to fine shreds every night.
    • The fighting game Scarlet Weather Rhapsody also deconstructs Ascend to A Higher Plane of Existence this way.
  • Phantasmagoria of Flower View (sic): Touhou deconstructs itself. Eiki explicitly tell the other characters that they are so going to Hell if they don't change their atrocious behavior. Eiki is a Judge of The Dead.
  • Unidentified Fantastic Object deconstructs itself yet again-- Humans Are Bastards and the playable characters are Knight Templar.
  • By applying some Fridge Horror to Mystic Square, one way to interpret the plot is to think of it as; "What if Alice actually went to hell?".
• Yggdra Union pretends to be nice, cutesy, and safely within the range of standard medieval fantasy plots for a little while. Then it rips its mask off and awesomefaces whilst tearing many common plot devices--along with the tried-and-true methods of the Turn Based Strategy genre--into tiny little bits as it goes. It's been four years since the franchise was launched, and we're still not a hundred percent sure about who the main character is supposed to be.
• Fire Emblem Tellius does this to Fire Emblem. Setting and Backstory aside, the 9th game (Path of Radiance) pretty much starts off as a Cliché Storm for Fire Emblem games. However, it starts to play with the tropes before the game's over. Radiant Dawn starts off as a deconstruction of the events of Path of Radiance, showing that Begnion is Not So Different in treating their newly acquired country well; and that even Crimea, whose victory in the Mad King War went like a fairy tale for them, was again Not So Different. The country was united during the Mad King War against a common energy, yet when that was over, things went back to normal with nobles and senators squabbling for power, beginning to doubt whether or not their new queen was truly fit to rule. After all, she was unknown to the general public until the Mad King's War.
  • Fire Emblem Tellius was preceded by Fire Emblem Jugdral, which went along to deconstruct common character tropes of the series.

Web Comics

• Erfworld. Do you think a game mechanics universe would be nice and cheerful and funny? Erfworld is what it would really be like.
• Narbonic, which takes Mad Science and innocence, skewers them both on a meathook, and goes from there; and its sequel:
  • Skin Horse: a deconstruction of everything from mad science to social work and 70's Blaxploitation movies.
• Order of the Stick plays mercilessly with both Dungeons and Dragons tropes, and storytelling tropes in general. Most notably, it's hung enough lampshades to decorate a lightbulb factory. Including hanging a lampshade on hanging lampshades.
  • For a few more examples, it has Zig Zagged with several parts of the Character Alignment trope. The Lawful Stupid character isn't stupid in any conventional sense, and actually is good (at least, until she goes crazy), and yet, she's an antagonist. The Lawful Evil Overlord is definitely evil, and yet seems like he'll be helpful overall to the protagonists. The Always Chaotic Evil goblins have a perfectly good reason built into the fabric of the universe to be evil... but there's no question that they are evil.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - The Far Side's evil twin. It has probably destroyed everything you know and love at some point.
• Schlock Mercenary
• The Last Days of Foxhound - deconstructs the backstory of Metal Gear Solid enemies, revealing first and foremost that it was never about Solid Snake. It was all Liquid.
• Cuanta Vida: Deconstruction of Team Fortress 2 par none. Because what's funnier than lovable characters who can die at any time, of horrible injuries no less, in battlefields miles from their homes? As with The Last Days of Foxhound, the game becomes MUCH less funny afterwards.
• Pretty much anything ever written by Andrew Hussie, but Problem Sleuth and especially Homestuck stand out in particular in this respect.
  • It eats tropes and shits memes like a cultural locust swarm.

Web Original

• Doctor Horribles Sing Along Blog attacks typical superheroism, plays the Mad Scientist for sympathy, and, since it's Joss Whedon writing, bedecks itself with lampshades.
• Girlchan in Paradise is a vicious parody of Cliché Storm Shonen Anime, particularly those with bad animation and corny dubbing. The characters all fit into some sort of archetype, with the titular Girlchan being a Shallow Love Interest and a Ms. Fanservice who had absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot (nor is she actually in Paradise).
• Ilivais X tears at a lot of things, but centrally the boundaries between love and lust, the concept of the Humongous Mecha itself (most namely the 80s Super Robot Genre), the inherent glorification of yuri relationships, and many other common anime tropes. The result can be fundamentally summed up as "Rah Xephon with the power of fuck"
• Sailor Nothing is like Sailor Moon, but a Darker and Edgier deconstruction.
• Vatsy and Bruno
• Metafictionized Phlebotinum Poisoning
• There Will Be Brawl Deconstructs Nintendo characters, Pastiches a number of classic movies, and Parodies the concept of Darker and Edgier.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Special Edition takes apart the very concept of Let's Play. It starts by creating a game that gradually gets more insane and bizarre as time goes on, adds a narrator who spits out random nonsequiturs, all while parodying 90s pop culture. Then it starts playing with the Fourth Wall by having the narrator get in a conversation with an in game character, and making it unclear whether it's the narrator or the player character itself who's talking. The final boss fight consists of the player jumping on the word "logic" while the narrator says "Check it out! It's the last piece of logic left! ...Screw that noise."
• The Whateley Universe starts as a deconstruction of the classic superhero comic books, but delves everywhere else when given a chance.
  • Of particular note, the story Give 'Em The Ole Razzle Dazzle is a deconstruction of various genres stretching from the 1930's pulp heroes to the start of the 1980s (when the narrator 'retired' and moved into Business).
• Po Gon Yu To was basically intended to be a deconstruction of nearly all anime cliches.
• Space Battles exists seemingly to promote deconstructions in all Fanfic.

Western Animation

• Most modern American animated sitcoms will tend to ruthlessly deconstruct everything it touches. Examples of these kinds of shows includes:
  • The Simpsons, the first one of these shows.
  • Family Guy
  • Futurama
  • American Dad
  • South Park
  • Drawn Together
• Any cartoon Steven Spielberg produced:
  • Animaniacs
  • Tiny Toon Adventures
  • Freakazoid
  • Pinky and The Brain
• Dave the Barbarian, while going back to Toon Disney's roots.
• Invader Zim, takes apart so many Sci Fi and Horror tropes it's difficult to know where to begin.
• The Venture Brothers, perhaps more so than any other example on this page. It has to be - it is a parody of shows with goody-goody adventuring teens and infallible superheroes, but its main theme is failure. It takes down every single convention of the comic book and cartoon world. It attacks the very notion that the premises of more conventional series would realistically allow them to contain genuinely good and mentally stable characters. That is to say, it's telling you that superheroes can't exist.
• The Boondocks combines sitcom trope deconstruction with racial and social trope deconstruction.
• Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated deconstructs just about every one of the franchise's most iconic tropes.
• Along the same lines as the Scooby-Doo example above is Transformers Prime, which takes a grittier spin on the Transformers series.
• Archer goes through cold-war spy tropes like adamantium claws through butter.

Real Life

• Almost all tropes applied to Real Life itself are deconstructed by default.

...and all of the examples from Trapped in TV Land.

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TV Tropes Wiki

• Avatar and The Airbending Fellowship of Vampire Slayers