Deconstructed Trope / Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater: Delusions of godhood. Technically Sarda isn't a deity. It's more like he wanted to be, which is why he went back in time to design the universe in his own image anyway. If anything, Sarda is a deconstruction of people who think they are/have the right to be deities by showing just how fucked up people of such mindsets have to be before they reach that conclusion. And, two words: Black Mage.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja deconstructs the Inverse Ninja Law by having Frans Rayner actively invoke it. He was able to kill off most of the existing ninjas at once just by getting them in one place, and, in an attempt to kill Dr. McNinja, constantly cloned him and made the clones dumb as bricks, not only forcing the original Doctor to have his ninjaness spread thin, but prevent the clones from understanding strategy. The Doc was only able to win by spouting several generic war buddy action movie lines and teaming up with Rayner, invoking tropes that turned Rayner into an Ineffectual Loner while he refused to team up, so they fought the ninjas together and then faced each other one on one again.
• Awful Hospital deconstructs the Interactive Comic trope itself. The readers suggesting commands are not abstractions and are very real and powerful beings of an unknown nature according to Word of God. After so many people tell Fern to seduce Harmburger, for example, it actually happens very briefly against her will
• Cyanide and Happiness is currently deconstructing the concept of a Child Prodigy having a job with their "Doctor Baby" series, stating that a child would be in many ways unprepared for an adult job.
• Dive Quest, from the guy behind Ruby Quest, deconstructs the usual structure of Collective Games by having the "players" exist in universe, as facets of the protagonists personality, accessed through the Orb of Infinite Psyche. This proved so popular that it's been used in several other games. It also provided justification for switching the player character by having the second character find a shard of the orb.
• El Goonish Shive deconstructs the Quirky Miniboss Squad. Hedge, Vlad and Guineas bicker amongst themselves, like normal minibosses, but Vlad has deep self-loathing, Hedge and the real Big Bad despise each other and Guineas is usually mistaken for an idiot because he rarely, if ever, speaks. They cheer up later, however.
  • "New And Old Flames" deconstructed the idea of betrayed trust and the resultant pain with Justin and his former best friend Melissa - as Noah points out, Melissa's confiding in her gossipy sister about his sexuality didn't just ruin Justin's life, it also destroyed hers as Justin has refused to forgive her for years. This has led to Melissa acting like an annoying Clingy Jealous Girl because his refusal to see things from her side means she can't get over her feelings for him - in turn, Justin's own pain blinds him to the fact that Melissa does have genuine human feelings and causes him to lash out at Elliot for daring to empathise with her (before Ellen chewed him out with a What the Hell, Hero? speech). The final shot of this Arc shows Justin staring after a departing Melissa (who has promised to not bother him anymore), with a look that is not pleased, annoyed or satisfied... but lost and empty. While what she did was terrible, Justin's unwillingness to move on has only hurt them both more in the long run.
• Gunnerkrigg Court deconstructs Adults Are Useless. The school staff are very competent, and much more knowledgeable about the strange goings-on than Antimony is. In spite of this, Annie never seeks their help; on a few occasions, she outright refuses it. While Annie's behavior is partially explained by her Back Story, it's still counterproductive to solving the mysteries that she's investigating.
• Homestuck manages to deconstruct the classic Reset Button way of getting a situation hopelessly back on track. The Scratch, once initiated, resets a session - and all the factors that went into it. Including the character's lives, memories, interests, what have you. Suddenly what seems a sure-fire way to salvage their game seems like a really bad idea. And that's before we find out that the Scratch is essentially a Deal with the Devil. Let's just say Alternia wasn't always a Death World and leave it at that.
• Kid Radd deconstructs a number of tropes, namely Collision Damage and the One-Man Army that many video game characters are - the former is described as the "Touch of Death", and its various implications as they apply to a more realistic world are taken under consideration. The latter often results in badly-repressed psychopaths and incidents of mass slaughter.
  • As Iji will also tell you. In fact, it's pretty much what Kid Radd would be if it were stripped of meta-references and were an actual game. Which is admittedly quite different, but they share many of the same concepts.
• Megatokyo is a not-so-subtle example of this trope when applied to the harem genre; more precisely, what happens when a standard male lead gets an Unwanted Harem and what does it really mean to deal with a Broken Bird as a part of your harem (yes, dealing with real, severe psychological issues, not the ones you can see in standard harem works).
  • Many of the stereotypes related to this genre are also deconstructed. Ping is a deconstruction of the robot haremette that wants to be human, Miho and Yuki of the Magical Girl (Miho also of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and the Dark Magical Girl). Kimiko, being the only character that's not based in any stereotype also counts as a big deconstruction of the Dojikko, idol and/or Kawaiiko tags.
• Misfile is a deconstruction of the Gender Bender: girl-Ash is basically the same as boy-Ash: same name, same clothes (more or less), same sexual orientation (i.e. she's still attracted to girls), same hobby racing and fixing cars. While we don't ever get to see boy-Ash, it's easy to imagine that the only difference between the two is Ash's physical body and the way people treat him/her. And yet Ash hates being female, alternating between resignation and fear that she will become some sort of girly-girl, even though there's no indication of that happening so far.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • It deconstructs Knight Templar by making the religious zealot paladin almost completely incapable of accepting that she could be wrong, believing herself and her every action to be the work of the gods even after she loses her paladin powers. The gods practically told her "No, what you're doing is wrong, get out!" and she still believes herself to be in their favour. It also explores the concept of Always Chaotic Evil in the case of Redcloak.
  • Belkar deconstructs the Token Evil Teammate. While his gleefully evil ways were initially played for laughs, lately they've proven to have realistic consequences, both on the world in general as well as his relationship with the rest of the party. In the afterlife, Roy gets a serious ding on his record because he's Belkar's leader, making him responsible for Belkar's actions, and hasn't just killed him yet.
  • Miko is also an intentional deconstruction of Lawful Stupid. It's shown just how badly she can screw up things, and the other Paladins are shown as quite reasonable.
  • The Monster in the Darkness is the result of an alternate look at The Reveal: specifically, what kind of life one would have to live to remain completely hidden from the heroes and readers before the big moment, and the effect it has on its personality. Specifically, its inability to contribute despite its great power has destroyed its self-esteem (more so than simply being a minion would have), and never having a chance to practice evil results in an inevitable F.
  • Genre Savvy is deconstructed with Tarquin. He sees everyone as nothing but plot devices to the point that when he murders his own son Nale he considers it nothing more than the removal of a useless B-villain that Elan has outgrown. Rich Burlew goes one step further by revealing in the forum that being Genre Savvy and a capable fighter are Tarquin's only real talents. He is not the experienced military leader everyone thought he was and his teammates find his genre savviness annoying and treat him in the same way the Order of the Stick treats Elan. If anything, Tarquin comes off as a huge Take That! against Genre Savvy villains.
  • Worthy Opponent is also deconstructed. At first, Tarquin joins the Linear Guild because he wants to fight Roy after he proved himself in battle. But later, Tarquin believes that as long as Roy leads the Order, Elan will never achieve his full potential as a hero. So he orders his forces to kill him.
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • Oasis is a deconstruction of the Magical Girlfriend. If you chose the right elements, you could describe her in a way that sounded exactly like, say, Steel Angel Kurumi. Basically, she's a gorgeous, super-human killer accidentally brainwashed to be "in love" with Torg. She's both a very tragic and intentionally shallow character, and a major threat to the protagonists as well as the main reason Torg can't be together with someone he really loves.
  • He's Just Hiding was deconstructed following the story "bROKEN". Torg's insistence that Riff and Zoë are alive is seen as destructive and insane by his friends.
• Nana's Everyday Life starts off as a Cross The Line Twice, Break the Cutie and Rape Her Regularily Black Comedy Sadist Show until it eventually deconstructs Black Comedy as a whole by upping the blackness to heart wrenching levels and providing punchlines that only further serve to highlight how utterly fucked up the "joke" really was in the first place.
• Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger
  • Cool People Rebel Against Authority The Space Pirate arc ends with Quentyn not expecting any more trouble from the pirates he had to rescue.
  • Organic Technology Its many problems enumerated at length, culminating the reveal that they don't really fathom the notion of Body Horror.
• Dora Bianchi of Questionable Content is a Deconstruction of the Ethical Slut. She's pansexual and open-minded about all kinds of practices...because her varied insecurities prevent her from having any kind of long-term meaningful relationships. Having grown up in the shadow of her Brilliant, but Lazy brother, she has a serious inferiority complex and crippling trust issues, which she hides by putting on a tough-as-nails front. She will cut friends and loved ones out of her life with very little provocation, and will hold a grudge for much longer than is healthy. The merest hint of her current romantic partner getting any kind of attention from another person, or the merest possibility of being cheated on, will cause her to explode, and either end the relationship or start pre-emptively mistreating her partner to the point where they end it. It gets so bad at one point that one of her friends advises her to seek professional help...which does seem to be having a positive effect.
• The Thanatos Gambit of Master General Alaric from TwoKinds seems like a Gambit Roulette at first, until it was revealed to be one of hundreds of possibilities he planned for.
• S.S.D.D. deconstructs a number of sex tropes, such as:
  • Polyamory: The relationship between Richard, Red, and Anne falls apart in a hurry
  • Bigger Is Better in Bed: Richard is so well-hung that Anne has to be careful when she has sex with him.
  • The Casanova: Richard enjoys his conquests less and less.
• Rain (2010) deconstructs a few, especially those related to the LGBT community.
  • If It's You, It's Okay: Rudy, a predominant homosexual, and Rain, a DMAB pre-op transgirl, decide to start dating early on in the story. This leads to many people, such as Rudy's parents, believing he's been "cured" of his gay feelings. While the two of them get along very well, many start to question whether their relationship can survive Rain's intent to fully transition one day. In the end, they do eventually break up, but not because of any loss of feelings on Rudy's part. Rain enjoyed the attention she was getting from him, enjoyed his company, and saw dating a boy as a thing "normal girls" do. However, she doesn't experience any kind of romantic or sexual attraction toward males. While the two do remain good friends, Rudy takes the breakup a lot harder than she does and it does leave a noticeable bitterness in his attitude through the rest of the comic. Not to mention many of his friends and classmates consider him "sick" again.
  • Innocently Insensitive/Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Drew, who attends catholic school and is very insecure about his sexuality and how people perceive him, ends up falling for Ky, who is biologically female but is genderfluid. For a long time throughout the comic, they try explaining to Drew how it works and seeing if the two can make a relationship work. It does seem to go well whenever they're alone, but he doesn't seem to want to be seen with them in public when they're not presenting as a girl. He goes so far as to out them as a girl in front of his classmates and continually asserts that he's not gay to them. This obviously pisses Ky off and even his friends tell him he shouldn't have done that if he expects to date them. Eventually, when discussing prom, Ky questions whether Drew actually likes them or just likes the idea of them; someone who can fit his confused view of himself. When he says he just doesn't want people to get the wrong idea, Ky brings up their mother, who distanced herself from Ky after they came out because she didn't want people to get the wrong idea as well. In the end, Ky concludes that, while Drew isn't a bad person, the two of them may just be incompatible and that they should call it off. He definitely regrets hurting them afterward.
  • Unlucky Childhood Friend: Allison's been in love with the same boy since first grade. After that boy turns her down because of personal issues and later moves away, she finds it very hard to date someone else. They get into arguments all the time and really are pretty incompatible, but she can't bring herself to break it off, feeling like she can't do better since the only boy she ever really liked turned her down. While they do eventually break up, she still feels really down over the fact that she can't be with the boy she really likes.
  • Plucky Comic Relief: Rudy Strongwell is a flamboyantly gay, energetic and sassy boy and is the most outwardly comedic member of the main cast. However, it's eventually revealed that his humorous nature is mainly a coping mechanism for him to deal with being discriminated against for his sexuality and many other hardships in his life.
• unOrdinary: Seraphina is among the highest tier of Ability Users by being able to stop time, being the former Ace and revered by everyone, being close to our main protagonist, having purple and green hair, not quite fitting in and last but not least, she has a cool name. It's eventually revealed that she pushes herself mentally to always be perfect and her mother puts a lot of strain and work on her. She admires John because he's imperfect and lacks an Ability or at least seems so but he still fights back.

---