In having a distinct....mental twitch whenever I hear someone claim their story is a deconstruction of "Genre/Concept/Character X"? It's funny,
because as an avid reader and contributor of TV Tropes, I'm well familiar with the concept of a deconstruction. But it seems that I keep classifying them
as subversions, because deconstruction seems to have taken on a sort of different meaning.
Doing your own thing is hardly new. Walt Disney is the world's most profitable fanfic writing group thanks to their interpretations of classic fairy tales.
And doing things a different way because it's always been done that way is also, in and of itself, not bad. It's quite good in some cases. We
wouldn't have the "He starts monologuing!" joke from The Incredibles if not for the concept of being aware that concepts exist and that they may
or may not make sense entirely but are part of a given genre.
However, more and more often, whenever I see something being claimed as a deconstruction, I wind up seeing something where you get the feeling the author
either A. wanted very much to write something in a different genre or B. has a distinct distaste for a given genre and is merely applying his personal
"logic" to it in order that we might see how it should REALLY happen. In some cases, this presents interesting alternate takes. The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow and others were useful in the sense that they provided something new and different, but
it seems almost to have produced a second genre. The "deconstruction", where deconstructing a genre just really means you can't stand it and so
you throw out almost everything about the genre you dislike in order to make it into something you like, and then claim deconstruction because, hey, that's
what deconstruction is, right? It means that the end result doesn't have to look like the original. Several comics concepts have become this of late.
Spider-Man: Reign, Warren Ellis's run on Thunderbolts, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Marvel: Ruins, and more. It's almost like considering that taking something happy and
enjoyable, ripping out the happiness by its spine, and cybernetically augmenting it with enough metric tons of angst to fill a Final Fantasy fanfic section to
overflowing is somehow "art" and "making something meaningful out of childish things".
Except it's not.
Hating a genre doesn't work when you want to deconstruct it. The audience should not be wondering "why do you hate this so much if you're writing
it?". If one wants to deconstruct something, they should at least be neutral to the concept, not hostile. And the best deconstructions tend to come from
people that genuinely enjoy the genre they're deconstructing. That know the idiosyncracies and little quirks of a given setting that we make jokes about
because they don't make sense but they're part and parcel of what makes the thing what it is. The Incredibles
is a wonderful, stupendous deconstruction and reconstruction of the superhero genre in one movie, but it's not a grim and gritty pile of angst that makes
me wonder why people actually pay money for this.
It almost seems that the term deconstruction is only used when someone wants their given project to be seen as "art" rather than entertainment, and
that people who are genuinely deconstructing various genres and concepts are avoiding the term due to that association. Given my own knee-jerk reaction to the
word itself, I suppose I can't blame them.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
because as an avid reader and contributor of TV Tropes, I'm well familiar with the concept of a deconstruction. But it seems that I keep classifying them
as subversions, because deconstruction seems to have taken on a sort of different meaning.
Doing your own thing is hardly new. Walt Disney is the world's most profitable fanfic writing group thanks to their interpretations of classic fairy tales.
And doing things a different way because it's always been done that way is also, in and of itself, not bad. It's quite good in some cases. We
wouldn't have the "He starts monologuing!" joke from The Incredibles if not for the concept of being aware that concepts exist and that they may
or may not make sense entirely but are part of a given genre.
However, more and more often, whenever I see something being claimed as a deconstruction, I wind up seeing something where you get the feeling the author
either A. wanted very much to write something in a different genre or B. has a distinct distaste for a given genre and is merely applying his personal
"logic" to it in order that we might see how it should REALLY happen. In some cases, this presents interesting alternate takes. The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow and others were useful in the sense that they provided something new and different, but
it seems almost to have produced a second genre. The "deconstruction", where deconstructing a genre just really means you can't stand it and so
you throw out almost everything about the genre you dislike in order to make it into something you like, and then claim deconstruction because, hey, that's
what deconstruction is, right? It means that the end result doesn't have to look like the original. Several comics concepts have become this of late.
Spider-Man: Reign, Warren Ellis's run on Thunderbolts, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Marvel: Ruins, and more. It's almost like considering that taking something happy and
enjoyable, ripping out the happiness by its spine, and cybernetically augmenting it with enough metric tons of angst to fill a Final Fantasy fanfic section to
overflowing is somehow "art" and "making something meaningful out of childish things".
Except it's not.
Hating a genre doesn't work when you want to deconstruct it. The audience should not be wondering "why do you hate this so much if you're writing
it?". If one wants to deconstruct something, they should at least be neutral to the concept, not hostile. And the best deconstructions tend to come from
people that genuinely enjoy the genre they're deconstructing. That know the idiosyncracies and little quirks of a given setting that we make jokes about
because they don't make sense but they're part and parcel of what makes the thing what it is. The Incredibles
is a wonderful, stupendous deconstruction and reconstruction of the superhero genre in one movie, but it's not a grim and gritty pile of angst that makes
me wonder why people actually pay money for this.
It almost seems that the term deconstruction is only used when someone wants their given project to be seen as "art" rather than entertainment, and
that people who are genuinely deconstructing various genres and concepts are avoiding the term due to that association. Given my own knee-jerk reaction to the
word itself, I suppose I can't blame them.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
