There was probably some point in the past when the word “deconstruction” was actually useful. Roughly speaking, what I understand the definition to have originally been was something along the lines of “taking genre tropes that we usually take for granted and don’t question, and questioning them”. There are times those kinds of things can be interesting, but nowadays, when I see someone unironically using the word “deconstruction” to praise something, I take this as a sign that the person is probably just condescending and ignorant.
For an analogy, the word “deconstruction” has become similar to the word “Mary Sue” to me. “Mary Sue” used to refer to a certain archetype in writing criticism that probably was useful to discuss at some point, but instead got co-opted by condescending (and often misogynistic) people to become completely useless in practice. I do agree that the original “A Trekkie’s Tale” parody fanfic that spawned the term might have been a bit too cruel on the idea of self-indulgent wish fulfillment fanfic (and I think we really do need to move past the idea that anyone should feel bad about doing that), but if you actually read the original text, the thing being parodied wasn’t how “perfect” or “overpowered” the character was or how many “flaws” they had, but the fact they shove the character’s alleged greatness down the reader’s throat and make all of the surrounding characters worship them without justifying it. This is a common writing pitfall that usually results in the character turning off the audience instead; proper writing criticism nowadays refers to this as “character shilling”, which doesn’t have any gendered nuance (and isn’t particularly focused on fanfic). Meanwhile, the word “Mary Sue” has now become so equated to “female character I don’t like” that anyone actually using it seriously nowadays makes me immediately want to disregard them.
That was a digression, but my point is that a similar concept applies to me and the word “deconstruction”. Let’s keep in mind the fact that the word was originally supposed to mean “examining genres and genre tropes we take for granted more closely”. Now let’s look at some lovely examples of the word as used on TV Tropes as of this writing:
Deconstruction: Of the henshin hero genre. Shins transformation is graphic and painful, the monsters are incredibly desaturated in their color scheme, and the amount of gore here would make Kamen Rider Amazon proud.
(From the Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue page)
What exactly are we “deconstructing” here? The idea that transformations in henshin hero series aren’t normally graphic and painful? How do desaturated color schemes deconstruct anything? How does the presence of gore deconstruct anything? The only way “deconstruction” makes sense here is if we’re implying that henshin hero shows are always sparkly and shallow shows where nothing is brutal ever (for which GARO would beg to differ), so this “deconstruction” is here to say that things aren’t always pretty, which is a pretty shallow and ignorant point to make. But really, this is just a textbook example of the word “deconstruction” being abused to imply that something is apparently meaningful or deeper because it’s gory and edgy. It’s nothing but what I call “edginess fetishism”.
Here’s another lovely example:
Deconstructor Fleet: A very odd case, in that they tear apart every trope related to Mons… while still being the Trope Maker.
(From the Shin Megami Tensei page)
Someone actually wrote this with a straight face, trying to pass it off as an “odd case” instead of admitting that what they just wrote is an inherent contradiction. By the sheer definition of a deconstruction, you cannot deconstruct a genre that does not exist yet. MegaTen was the one that basically invented the monster-collecting genre as we know it; it was the one that went “hey you know how messed up it’d be to collect demonic monsters and have them at your disposal?” and everything else was what went “yeah actually that sounds GREAT” and made more idealistic takes on the genre after that. MegaTen obviously can’t “tear apart” any tropes when those tropes didn’t even really exist at the time the series first started! But just because MegaTen has a more cynical take on the concept of monster collecting, I’m expected to believe it means “tearing apart” anything that came after it. This “logic” can only make sense if you come from the inherent mentality that idealism is stupid and unrealistic and anything that’s grittier (and edgy) is a “reality check”.
Now, I do like myself a healthy dose of emotional pain in my favorite media, but I like emotional pain when it serves a larger narrative purpose. Unfortunately, this fixation with the concept of a “deconstruction” (which is actually “I use my edginess fetishism to dunk on media and genres I don’t respect”) has poisoned discourse of too many things, both things that I think are actually just shallow edge-fests and things I do actually like but seem to be put on a pedestal for the wrong reasons. If you ask me what I like about Puella Magi Madoka Magica, I’ll gladly tell you that I love the character writing, the inspired creativity of Gekidan Inu Curry’s work, the Kajiura music, the worldbuilding in general…but for someone like me who’s grown up with a lot of magical girl anime, the (mostly Western) idea that it was ever a “deconstruction” of the magical girl genre is, excuse my language, absolute bullshit. Madoka does a lot of things very well that deserve praise, and I think it’s honestly a shame that everyone keeps reducing it to a thing that should only exist to dunk on the magical girl genre (actually, it’s a completely conventional magical girl show). I grew up with Wedding Peach, a magical girl anime that was bizarrely more popular in Korea than it was anywhere else, and there was a fair share of coverage of the mental toll of being a magical girl and what they were fighting for in that one. Even the original Sailor Moon covered that too. As did Phantom Thief Jeanne (that one had a “the cute recruiter mascot is evil” swerve too). As does every year’s PreCure.
The discourse for many other things I like has been likewise poisoned. I really like Kamen Rider Gaim (which is also an Urobuchi Gen series), but what I like about it has to do with it being a very grounded and relatable portrayal of lost young adults, whereas actual (also mostly Western) discourse about the series is insufferable a la Madoka. Apparently it’s supposed to be a “deconstruction” of Kamen Rider, which is really funny because the series is Urobuchi’s thinly-veiled love letter to earlier series Kamen Rider Ryuki (actually, a lot of his work is a thinly-veiled love letter to it), which is specifically about the importance of idealism in a cruel world. A lot of the so-called “darkness” in Gaim is actually on-par with a good chunk of older series (particularly Ryuki and Blade), and I’m pretty sure paying tribute to them was actually an intended part of Gaim, so there’s something very bitterly ironic about the fact people like to exploit its name to dunk on other Rider series like it’s meant to tear them apart, instead of talking about actual praiseworthy things from the series like the very fun cast of characters. For another example, while I have a lot of good things to say about Digimon Tamers, discussing it with Digimon fans often ends up in dealing with insufferable people who act like it being the most unsubtle about inflicting suffering on its characters makes it a “gritty realistic deconstruction of Digimon” that’s superior to other series. (In reality, it’s not immune to sometimes being contradictory about its messaging and being a bit too black-and-white, and a lot of what it does in its second half feels like pointless shock value, so I’m more likely to take someone seriously if they’re praising Tamers for anything but how edgy it is, like the characters or even things like “Dukemon is cool”.) Meanwhile, I’m personally excited for the upcoming Digimon Survive, but I’m already seeing people starting to get insufferable about it because People Die in This One, and I’m fully expecting people to start calling it a deconstruction of isekai or something. Neon Genesis Evangelion deserves a lot of the acclaim it gets for its portrayal of mental health, but it is not and has never been a deconstruction of the mecha genre, and “unlike most mecha anime, this one’s about the characters!” is practically a meme among mecha fans as a statement of ignorance.
And so on and so forth. In the end, the word “deconstruction” is just shorthand for a streak of malice that indicates disrespect for a genre, or disrespect for anything idealistic. At this point, I think we’d be better off just trying to cut it out of our vocabulary. If you really want to discuss something in the original sense “deconstruction” was meant to mean, you could maybe try saying something like “a different take on this trope” or “a less fantastic and more grounded take on it” or something like that. Who knows, maybe you’ll even find better ways to elucidate what you like and don’t like about writing. But I have no patience for edginess fetishists anymore. The word “deconstruction” is, to me, just another way they deflect criticism by turning it into an excuse to be condescending with or towards things that deserve better. Both the idealistic things being dunked on and the “dark” but well-made things with more heart than just grimdark edginess deserve better than that. And if someone can only tell me that something is good for being a “deconstruction”, rather than elaborating on what else is so good about it, maybe it’s not actually that deep after all.
