Let's Talk About Deconstruction

Look, I am fed up with surprise meetings in the morning, so if you send me a message asking to meet up in ten minutes, I’m going to throw something at you.

Re-reading The Illustrated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes right now, and still playing Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. I’ve been watching American Vandal on Netflix, though I also might try to get back into The Weekenders? We’ll see.

Let’s Talk About Deconstruction

This was considered as a topic to bring up in last week’s Saturday Note; however, due to an unforeseen logistical issue (I forgot), it was not used, and I thought I’d dedicate this week’s essay to it. ‘Deconstruction’ is another tropey term that people use way too often, but rather than using it as an attack on a piece of fiction, it’s used as a defense, if not outright praise. The problem is that it’s a lot more difficult to pull off than people think.

So, to wit: ‘Deconstruction’ is when you look at a story, genre, trope, or whatever in fiction (or nonfiction, I suppose) and actually examine how it would work outside of the context of the story. So, like… if you were making a story that was a deconstruction of criminal/gangster stories, instead of being well-dressed, morally complex characters, the gangsters in your story are a bunch of losers without a semblance of a moral compass, making one obviously bad decision after another. Or, if you wanted to do a deconstruction of a heroic fantasy of a knight slaying dragons, have the knight appear less like a stereotypical hero and more like a mercenary, or maybe a guy with a death wish.

[If you want to do a story where this sort of thing is examined, and then built up again–like say, would the modern world really like superheroes, and then show why they’re actually necessary, the way The Incredibles does–that’s called ‘Reconstruction’. Essentially, ‘Why might this not make sense?’, and then show why it does in context. But we’re not dealing with that right now.]

Deconstruction is used a lot for satire and parody, as you can probably imagine. It also often comes across as pretty mean-spirited, because it often is–The Boys, both the comic and the TV show, are headed by writers who think that superheroes are emblematic of immaturity if not outright moral degeneracy (the “superheroes are fascist!” school of thought, which is downright silly), and so superheroes are depicted as almost universally bad.

Sometimes it’s used as a defense for something that other people didn’t like about a work of fiction. When I used that in an April Fool’s Day article for ImpishIdea, one of the comments said something like, “Ah! Deconstruction! So it’s supposed to suck!” which is a bit of a reductive way to think of the term–nonetheless, that’s the way it’s used sometimes. When someone says an element or another doesn’t work for them, the fans’ response of, “Oh, it was a deconstruction!” to explain why it missed expectations, or didn’t feel satisfying.

For instance, there are some people who think the romance in The Princess Bride is rather shallow. We don’t get a lot of why these two leads like each other so much, they just do, they’re just in love with each other. The book fleshes it out a bit more, though it’s never really that deep–which is fine, because it’s adapted from a story the author told his daughters when they were children. Now for reasons, someone on TV Tropes insists that the reason it’s not well-developed is because it’s a deconstruction of shallow romantic relationships, in which the companions are only interested in each other’s looks! And, uh… that’s certainly A Take, because there’s nothing I’ve seen from anyone involved that suggests anything of the sort. We’re clearly meant to take this as True Love–the movie practically hammers it into our faces.

Likewise, for a good example from TV Tropes, it points out that for all that The Boys and others in that vein pitch themselves as, “This is what superheroes would really be like!” they essentially treat superheroes as celebrities with powers, and often leave out the supervillains–so yeah, of course the heroes are wasting everyone’s time, they don’t actually have villains to fight! You can’t deconstruct popular superheroes without including villains!

And then there’s the infamous example of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, in which Alan Moore tries to lampoon modern popular fiction, showing off how Victorian fiction was better, except it’s abundantly clear that he’s not very familiar with modern pop culture and resorts to making those characters unrecognizable.

Deconstruction isn’t a bad idea! It can work very well in the right contexts, in fact! It’s difficult to get it right, though, and I think it works better in individual scenes than it does in an overall story. Many people, including writers of those stories, think if they slap ‘deconstruction’ on the description that it automatically makes the story good, or makes criticism bounce off. It does not! And sometimes it’s just a nonsensical argument to begin with (the Princess Bride example above doesn’t really need that defense because it’s not aiming for something realistic).

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