Deconstruction / Literature

Deconstruction in Literature.

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• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • The series takes a harsh look at the Kid Hero. Every Half-blood is cursed to live a miserable life. They're all seen as problem kids and troublemakers due to the dyslexia and ADHD caused by their divine blood, so they never fit in among mortals, and at the same time they live in constant fear of monsters attacking them any time they're not at camp or another guarded place. They're lucky to reach maturity and it's almost unheard of for any of them to settle down and live a happy life outside of camp.
  • Parental Abandonment is brutally taken apart, as the struggle of the hero's mortal parent to raise a child alone is made very clear. Even after reaching Camp Half-blood, it can take weeks, months, and sometimes, years before a demi-god's divine parent will take notice and claim them. The driving force behind Luke and his follower's rebellion against the gods is the neglect and seeming abandonment they've suffered, and even though Percy hates Luke the most out of the good guys, he acknowledges that Luke has every right to be angry with the gods.
• Tadgifauna is a deconstruction of both Mons Series and the teenage hero. Having a pet monster fight other monsters is a lot less fun when Non-Lethal K.O. isn't in play. Haru's relatively young age and emotional immaturity leaves him ill-prepared to deal with the stress, violence and death he is forced to experience. Haru has more in common with Shinji Ikari than Ash Ketchum.
• Much of Kurt Vonnegut's work qualifies as this, in particular Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. The former is a deconstruction of the war novel and specifically the dozens of WWII novels and movies produced by his generation. In the opening chapter (which functions more as an introduction of sorts) Vonnegut relates the story of how he struggled with the book for years before the wife of a close friend gave him the idea of how to go about doing it. Breakfast of Champions, meanwhile, is a deconstruction of both the micro-world (20th century novels focusing on promoting the eccentricities of small towns and cities in the vein of Sinclair Lewis) and also the oddball science fiction morality play Vonnegut himself seemingly created.
• Madame Bovary is a fierce deconstruction of romance novels. Madame Bovary reads romance novels all the time, and comes to expect to live her own life that way, except her attitudes and behaviors destroy her life. She's a Stepford Smiler who constantly buys things to try and alleviate her own loneliness (it doesn't work), leaves her husband for another man who she expects will sweep her off her feet (he doesn't), and when she finally commits suicide, she expects arsenic to be a Perfect Poison that lets her die romantically (she spends several days in agonizing pain before she croaks).
• The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell does a combination of this and Demythification in regards to Arthurian Legend.
• Boris Strugatsky's The Powerless Of This World is a deconstruction of much of his own and his late brother's earlier works. Perhaps most prominently, "the Sensei", who is a wise old mentor (a fairly typical character for many Strugatsky novels), turns out to have been not only a Trickster Mentor, but also the initiator of The Plan that dictated much of the plot and was aimed at forcing the main character to unlock his full abilities. It succeeded, but not before making the main character a nervous wreck, inducing quite a Bitter Sweet Ending and causing much remorse to the mentor himself. Additionally, the topic of the Progressors is briefly brought up; one of the characters muses that the Sensei might be acting as one on Earth, and that he had, despite some occasional successes, failed miserably.
• The Thrawn Trilogy was the first major work to continue the story of Star Wars after the events of Return of the Jedi. It begins by immediately overthrowing all the implied gains from the end of the movie and establishing that this has only been the first big step in a war that will still go on for a long time and demand a lot of further personal sacrifices from the heroes. Luke starting a new Jedi Order and Han and Leia retiring from the Rebellion to be happily married with kids? Not very likely to happen.
• Hard to Be a God deconstructs medieval chivalry, fantasy settings, the supposed glamour of royalty and nobility, and well-intentioned meddling by developed countries (in this case, civilizations: an idealist Commies IN SPACE! benevolent space-faring nation ideologically similar to Star Trek's Federation). The European 'Middle Ages' overlapped with the last century/centuries of the 'Dark Ages' for a reason: a Crapsack World is a given there.
• The Doctor Who Expanded Universe Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Crooked World by Steve Lyons is a deconstruction of Looney Tunes-esque cartoons, as the Doctor lands in a cartoon world and begins to influence its inhabitants' behaviors towards naturalism.
• The Past Doctor Adventures novel The Indestructible Man by Simon Messingham is a deconstruction of all Gerry Anderson's work, asking why Jeff Tracy founded the Thunderbirds, what SHADO personnel would really be like — yes, UFO (1970) was Darker and Edgier to begin with, but Messingham takes it further — and how the ordinary people of the Supermarionation world might feel about so much money being channeled into Awesome, but Impractical vehicles. Most notably, the Indestructible Man is a Captain Ersatz Captain Scarlet who feels detached from humanity and wishes he was able to die.
• "A Troll Story" by Nicola Griffith, in which a Viking warrior faces off against a troll. He wins, all right, but the story abruptly takes a deconstructionist turn: he goes insane from the troll's final curse, which renders him able to understand that there's no essential moral difference between the troll's slaughter of Vikings and his own slaughter of innocents in the towns he's raided.
• Ring For Jeeves could be considered P. G. Wodehouse's deconstruction of his own stories. The usual romantic comedy character-relation tropes are there, but the world they live in is remarkably different. All of Wodehouse's stories take place in a Genteel Interbellum Setting, but Ring For Jeeves explores what would happen if time actually progressed. World War II has happened, Britain is in the throes of social upheaval which separates Jeeves and Bertie (Bertie is sent to a school that teaches the aristocracy how to fend for themselves), poverty and suicide and graphic death are acknowledged, and Jeeves even admits to having "dabbled in" World War I. The book's setting, Rowchester Abbey, is falling apart at the seams and the characters who inhabit it start to feel like a pocket of old-fashioned happiness in a darkening world. In case any doubters still exist about 3/4 through the book, there's Constable Wyvyrn's musings about just how much the world has changed.
• Greaves, This is Serious, by William Mingin, is another PG Wodehouse deconstruction. Upper-Class Twit Ferdinand Brewster begins to grow dissatisfied with his carefree life of idle frivolities, and begins questioning his valet Greaves to see if they ever do anything... productive. The answer is quite chilling.
• Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson attacks the popular view of World War I air combat which, rather than dueling "Knights of the Air", actually involved under-trained pilots diving out of the sun and machine-gunning their opponent in the back before he had a chance to defend himself.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was a deconstruction of Arthurian Legend, which a lot of Brits took offense to. (It was compared, at one point, to defecating on a national treasure.)
  • Ironically, it was later deconstructed itself. The Man Who Came Early also deals with a man from the modern era, in this case the mid-20th Century to a more primitive time, 10th Century Iceland. Whereas "The Boss" was able to introduce modern technology and achieve a position of wealth and status with his future knowledge, Gerald Samson, the protagonist of the story is unable to do anything for the people he lives with as all the technology he knows about requires an advanced manufacturing base that doesn't exist. He eventually ends up being killed by the villagers due to a series of innocent misunderstandings.
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald could be the earliest deconstruction of The American Dream. It shows the rich and happy as people who are empty on the inside and the fight between new rich and old rich lifestyles, particularly with Jay Gatsby.
• The Second Apocalypse series by R. Scott Bakker was an attempted deconstruction of what Bakker considers the crux of fantasy — a meaningful universe with metaphysical purpose. One of the premises of the series is "What if you had a fantasy world where Old Testament-style morality, with all of its arbitrary taboos and cruelties (like damnation), was as true in the same way that gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared?". Whether he successfully accomplishes this is heavily debated.
• A Tale of Two Cities. To many, the famous opening line ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...") seems cliché, but one needs to look at it in the context of The French Revolution. In the years following it, revisionists on both sides relied heavily on propaganda, romanticizing their own side as undeniably good, and demonizing the other side as undeniably bad. A Tale of Two Cities makes the assumption that each side was absolutely right and runs with it, and so both the aristocrats and the revolutionaries have, among their ranks, noble, honorable people fighting for what they believe is right, and sadists who just want some bloodshed.
• Agnes Nutter from Good Omens is a deconstruction of the Seer. On the one hand, we see that she is always right, but sometimes her predictions are oddly specific (don't buye Betamacks), too ahead of their time (jogging helps people to live longer), centered on her relatives in the future (she predicted for 11/22/1963 that a house in a small English city would break down, but doesn't mention the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the same day - one of her relatives might be in this city at that day, but apparently, none of them wanted to go to Dallas), and she didn't bother to order her predictions or explain them in detail. On the other hand, she uses her power to successfully Write Back to the Future (and also to avoid people responsible for delivering her message to snoop), and since she can predict everything, this includes knowing when Anathema will read a specific prophecy - so it always fits.
• Count and Countess is perhaps a deconstruction of the vampire romance genre—specifically, why it would just plain suck to fall in love with someone predisposed to bloodlust.
• Animorphs is one huge deconstruction of Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World, as the five (later six) heroes discover that War Is Hell and how badly it's messed them up. The series focuses on deconstructing tropes about heroes and morality, as the characters begin to do whatever they have to do to win, becoming more and more morally ambiguous and less and less heroic.
  • Kid Hero: It's obvious from the get-go that the kids, having no sort of military knowledge or practical connections whatsoever, are pretty much just making it up as they go and doing the best they can with what they have, and they're closer to Child Soldiers than anything else.
  • The Good Guys Always Win: Not a full deconstruction, as the kids actually do manage to save their home planet, but the fact that they're massively outgunned is a major element in the story, and the kids comment from time to time that only rarely are their missions actually successful. One of the major messages of the series is that, despite idealistic platitudes, victory ultimately goes to those who are ruthless and desperate enough to take the most extreme measures, not to the morally superior.
  • Violence is the Only Option: Initially, what with this being an invasion and occupation, the kids consider armed resistance to be their only option. But it quickly becomes apparent that Yeerks are not so different from the Animorphs themselves, capable of being reasoned and negotiated with, and at times a pacifistic and diplomatic solutions works out.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Hork-Bajir, Taxxons and Yeerks are pretty fucking scary aliens to look at, and the kids initially assume them all to be evil monsters. However, by the end of the series, it's obvious that despite outward differences, the three species actually have much more in common with humankind than is apparent at first glance.
    • Puppeteer Parasite gets it twice over: starting in the early books, the Yeerks are presented as unambiguously evil, and the series plays up how horrifying it would be for a host to be fully-conscious but unable to control themselves, forced to do horrible things to help the invasion. However, around book 18 the author starts to question if any species can be Always Chaotic Evil, and incidentally, what is it like to be a blind, slug-like creature who can never really interact with the world, except by making other beings its slave?
  • Big Good / Proud Warrior Race: While the premise of the series is that the kids are holding out until the Andalites come to Earth to fight off the Yeerk invasion, by halfway through the series it's become clear that the Andalites don't care about Earth or particularly any of the species they are "saving", but instead just want to exterminate the Yeerks, no matter the cost. A major part of the conflict in the last few books is not just fighting the Yeerks' open invasion, but making sure that the Andalites don't decide to quarantine Earth and "cleanse" it of the Yeerk plague.
• Gone with the Wind can easily be read as a Deconstruction of the then-popular "Moonlight and Magnolias" novel of the Old South and The American Civil War; in a real "Moonlight and Magnolias" book, the focus would be on Melanie and Ashley, with Scarlett and Rhett being their Evil Counterpart couple.
• Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet books are deconstructive in showing the implications of incredibly powerful magic in a society, versus those who don't have it. The "Andat" as created by the Khaiem cities are literally the embodiment of ideas into humanoid form, such as "Removing-the-part-that-continues" (nicknamed "Seedless"). Seedless, for example, can cause the seeds in cotton blooms to all spontaneously fall out of them or cause all the seeds in an enemy nation's crops to fall out before the appropriate time, or even cause all of their pregnant women to miscarry. This plays out as you would realistically expected, with technological advancement in the Khaiem cities curbed because they have the Andat as a source of wealth and power, and all the Khaiem cities being monarchies because the most important criteria for rule is whether you control the "poet" who controls the Andat. It's contrasted throughout the series with the Galt, a nation without Andat that instead had to rely on technology for power and prosperity, and is more advanced in many ways than the Khaiem - they have steam engines, for example.
• In J R R Tolkien's own introduction to The Lord of the Rings, he states that if the novel were a real life one, the Free People would have tried to create their own version of Sauron's ring, and that both sides would have held hobbits in contempt! Rather, that's Professor Tolkien's response to the idea that his story is allegorical. He despised allegory as a rule, and did not take kindly to people trying to equate the War of the Ring with World War II. Thus this statement is actually a Take That! at such readers for thinking so highly of themselves as to read themselves into the Fellowship role, whereas Tolkien thought of the Allies in more the Saruman role, particularly after the atomic bombings of Japan.
  • The novel itself can also be seen as a deconstruction of the heroic epics that Tolkien loved. Aragorn is a hero straight out of those legends - descendent of a lost line of kings, raised by Elves, told his true lineage at maturity, striding forth with his legendary blade and inherent authority to save his kingdom - all of which still leaves him with literally no hope of defeating Sauron himself because the Dark Lord has overwhelming military force even without the Ring. Ultimately his only role is to buy time and serve as a distraction while the less noticeable hobbits steal into Mordor to attempt the real mission.
• Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes is a morbid deconstruction of famous fairy tales. Goldilocks is eaten by the bears (as they would do in real life), the wolf decides to blow up the third pig's brick house with dynamite, the seven dwarfs steal the magic mirror from the Queen to predict the outcome of horse races,...
• "My Stepmother, Myself", written by Garrison Keillor for his book of essays "Happy to Be Here", deconstructed the fairy tales Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and Cinderella. Among other things, Snow White's husband turned out to be a necrophiliac, Hansel was The Load, and after living in a castle where servants did everything for her, Cinderella came to regard her stepmother as her new best friend.
• The Giver is a deconstruction of utopias and their necessary maintenance. In the slow revelation of the underlying rules The Community is built upon, it becomes apparent that played realistically utopias may become dystopias of their own.
• George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series heavily deconstructs a ton of tropes: A Child Shall Lead Them is a trope that results in inexperienced teenagers leading nations to war, or having other, more ambitious underlings undermine them at every turn. The Knight in Shining Armor is just a rich man that can afford armor and weapons and more often than not act like thugs. Nobility abuses the law and their power to avoid the consequences of their actions. There are loyal men, honest and brave, but these are far outnumbered by a massive number of scumbags that are simply there for power. And the knightly order that protects the rest of the world from a horrific threat? Millennia after the first appearance of that threat no one believes that they're real anymore, and instead there are only a tenth as many as there should be, and many of them are criminals or men that are there because they have no other choice.
• Snow Crash is quite a humorous deconstruction of the Cyberpunk genre, and also a Take That! to anarcho-capitalism and American libertarianism. There's no such thing as the USA anymore and the government is basically just the post office and the FBI (everything else has been privatised, including the military); all that's left is just a collection of motley city-states run by various corporations. Pizza delivery is very dangerous work, and not just because your boss will put a bullet in the back of your skull if the pizza arrives cold.
• The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh deconstructs many tropes inherent to the Police Procedural: The crime itself takes up very little of the book, with the rest devoted to buildup and the ensuing trial. There is no mystery as to what happened or who committed the crime, but the case is dragged out over months anyway. One of the defendants is innocent, save as an unwilling accomplice (who made multiple escape attempts from his partner) but he is never portrayed as a good person (and he is actually guilty of many more crimes, though nothing approaching murder). Rather than try to land the fairest sentence for each defendant, the prosecution wants—and gets—the death penalty for both, though both are overturned when California abolishes the death penalty several years later. Instead of eloquent, soulful arguments about why their clients deserve to live, the defense attorneys use underhanded methods that border on badgering both judge and witness. Prosecuting attorneys are driven from their profession in disgust. The star witness, a police officer, is very nearly Driven to Suicide by both PTSD and some fellow officers who blame either him or his deceased partner for not doing enough to prevent their own kidnapping. Closure comes not when the defendants are sent to prison, but when the trial is finally over and everyone involved is able to move on with their lives. Understandable, as the crime in question took place in Real Life.
• Hogfather deconstructs several Christmas tropes, and in particular heavily critiques both The Little Match Girl and the story of Wenceslas. In the former, Albert explains that the match girl's death serves to make others grateful for what little they have because at least they're not freezing to death in the snow. Death is having none of it and uses Loophole Abuse to bring her back to life before leaving her in the safe hands of the Watch. In the latter, the king is trying to give food to a man who already has a meal and would just have to throw the king's gift away. It's pointed out that the king is only being charitable to make himself feel better and that one night of charity doesn't make up for being a neglectful ruler the rest of the year.
• Sergey Lukyanenko's The Stars Are Cold Toys deconstructs the idealistic utopia of Strugatsky Brothers' Noon Universe with the Geometer society. On the surface, the world of the Geometers is a perfect utopia of what humanity might one day achieve: Crystal Spires and Togas, advanced technology, post-scarcity (to the point where they can waste resources on making their continents look like geometric shapes, hence the name for their race), everyone happily working towards the common good and enjoying life, the goal towards universal Friendship with other races. Then you dig deeper and find out that kids are taken from their parents at a young age and raised in boarding schools, anyone who starts doubting the wisdom of the Mentors or the philosophy of Friendship is deemed sick and placed in "sanatoriums" (basically, forced labor camps, who maintain those geometrically shaped coastlines), most of the food and drink on the planet is laced with tranquilizers to keep violence and base emotions down. Oh, and their current state of society was achieved after they have wiped out another sentient species on their planet (but they feel really bad about it, honest). And how do they turn non-friends (they don't have a word for "enemy") into friends? They send in agents to regress an alien culture to a more primitive state, then appear as emissaries from the heavens and offer their help to the primitives. As always, they believe that Utopia Justifies the Means.
• The Guns of the South deconstructs a few tropes.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: The racism presented by the Confederates is a product of its time, where they believe that slavery is the only way that whites and blacks can peacefully co-exist. The members of the AWB, meanwhile, are fanatical, reactionary, and virulently racist. Once the Confederate leaders see books from the 21st century, they're absolutely horrified that the AWB lied to them, seeing that they won't be Vindicated by History, and Robert E. Lee pushes even harder for abolition. This, of course, causes the AWB to turn on them and the two sides go to war.
  • This Is My Boomstick: The AWB present many future devices to the Confederates, but until explanations start coming out much of it is accepted as simply an advanced part of their own world; this produces a funny moment early on, for example, when Rhoodie is somewhat disconcerted at Lee's matter-of-fact reaction to seeing an MRE (Lee notes that he's familiar with the Union practice of desiccating vegetables for army use but hadn't been aware that the Federals had extended it to entire meals). It is not until Rhoodie explicitly states that he is from the future that Lee even begins to suspect such an event. Something the time travelers don't anticipate though is the Army's interest in field rations and instant coffee, which they start to provide them too.
  • Giving Radio to the Romans: The AWB come to 1865 equipped with modern guns, mortars, barbed wire, and landmines, as well as modern medical tools such as nitroglycerin pills. During their stay in the past, they also transform the small town of Rivington, North Carolina, into a veritable fortress. Once the AWB and Confederates go to war, their modern technology doesn't stand up to Confederates' superior tactics. After their time machine is destroyed, a few stranded Afrikaners promise to help rebuild 21st century technology for the Confederates, ensuring they will remain the most advanced nation in the world. The plan also has the unintended consequence of the Union and presumably other nations acquiring and replicating the same weapons. However, a computer technician flates states he can't make a computer for them, since they lack both the tools for doing so but also the tools to make those tools.
• Villains by Necessity: This is the book's goal in regards to fantasy fiction, turning the most basic idea — good versus evil — on its head. Some readers feel it fails though, since the "villains" are not so bad, with the "heroes" having very nasty sides in some cases.
• Njal's Saga deconstructs the Scandinavian male ideal. The men in the story are quick to resort to Disproportionate Retribution over perceived affronts to each others' manhoods and their feuding leads to a Vicious Cycle of offence, destruction and prolonged bloodshed. For example, at one point a hard-won legal settlement breaks down because a beardless man is offended by a silk garment sent as a gift; it's not even clear if the sender actually intended to slight him. It is made clear throughout that much of the death and destruction in the story could have been avoided if these viking men weren't so pathetically thin-skinned and lacking in self-control. This example is Older Than Print.
• The Rise of Kyoshi
  • F.C. Yee purposefully set out to deconstruct the process of finding the next Avatar, and explores what happens when things go awry:
    • Whenever a figure of authority dies unexpectedly, without a contingency plan in case of any delay in finding their replacement (Jianzhu at one point muses that it's the first time in the history of the Avatar Cycle that the new Avatar has gone undiscovered for so long), chaos will inevitably ensue. This is what happens after Kuruk's death, especially since he died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-three and obviously the reincarnation of him is going to take a while to find, raise to adulthood, and train. There's just no one to fill the hole he leaves in his wake, so the Fifth Nation pirates grow bolder and Jianzhu takes it upon himself to fix the power vacuum. The power consequently goes to Jianzhu's head and he starts going off the deep end.
    • Finding the Avatar as a child should be fairly simple with the Air Nomad method, right? You're just trying to find a kid who's drawn to all four of the toys picked out by the Avatar's past lives. Jianzhu and Kelsang find out that this isn't the case when looking for the Earth Kingdom kid; the Earth Kingdom is the largest and most populous of the Four Nations, so having every seven year old in every village play with the toys takes a lot of time. Also, in the world outside the humble and theocratic Air Nomad culture, young children like toys and don't like for them to be taken away when they get to play with them, and parents don't take too kindly to being told their kids aren't the savior of the world.
    • In addition, the reason they're using the Air Nomad method is because the Earth Kingdom one failed. Due to how large and populated it is, the Earth Kingdom uses geomantic rituals to pinpoint the location of the new Avatar right down to their doorstep. But these rituals prove useless if the new Avatar has a lifestyle that prevents them from staying in one place for too long, as Kyoshi and her daofei parents did.
  • We also get a sobering deconstruction of Give Him a Normal Life. Kyoshi's parents left her in the care of a villager in Yokoya Port, with an Orphan's Plot Trinket of resources that she could use when she grew older, or simply keep to remember them by. As Lek suggests later on, they might have thought their daughter would have a better (and longer) life amongst law-abiding folk...except that the villager immediately reneged on the deal once they left, and threw Kyoshi out into the streets. She was forced to live off garbage scraps to survive as no one wanted an extra mouth to feed, or to take responsibility for the daughter of criminals. Understandably Kyoshi loathes her parents for (as she sees it) abandoning her; far from wanting to find them again, her first reaction when she hears they're dead is relief and satisfaction.
  • The Bloodier and Gorier aspect of getting hit by bending attacks is essentially what would realistically happen when you get hit by them. People getting hit by pillars of stone as big as them at high speeds warrants shattered bones, not Amusing Injuries/Bloodless Carnage unlike the animated shows. This would be carried over to the sequel.
• Harrison Bergeron: This is a United States where everyone is equal. A little too equal. Everyone is equal to the lowest common denominator, with Mrs. Bergeron being easily forgetful, slow, and all around pretty weak, while her husband is forced to have handicaps like headphones that play loud noises to disrupt his train of thought, and glasses that give him terrible headaches while forcing his vision to be blurry. And although the society is supposedly run by the people, in practice Handicapper General Diana Moon Glompers (and in the film an entire secret organization of extraordinary people) run everything, because unintelligent people can’t be expected to cope with all the intricacies of government and society.
• The Mysterious Island deconstructs Deus ex Machina. There is a mysterious entity on the titular island which helps the protagonists immensely, and in ways that are increasingly dramatic and difficult to explain away as happenstance. Instead of praising their good fortune and moving on, the protagonists are driven to obsession trying to find out who or what the "deus" is, and what caused it to proceed from the "machina". This Deus ex Machina creates just as much drama as it resolves and drives the plot instead of wrapping it up.
• Who Is The Prey is a deconstruction of the CEO romance where the male lead is at first abusive and cold to the female lead, who later falls for him anyway. Fu Shenxing abuses and rapes He Yan and develops feelings for her, but she never stops hating him and plotting against him.
• Consider Phlebas tears apart the idea of a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits - "Kraiklyn's Free Company" are a gaggle of dysfunctional third-rate Hired Guns/Space Pirates who cruise around in a clapped-out old spaceship with equally clapped-out equipment looking for trouble... Essentially the setup of your classic RPG adventuring party or sci-fi Walking the Earth show. But instead of granting them a spectacular and improbable victory against all odds, the novel instead suggests what might realistically happen to a small, arrogant, undisciplined and poorly equipped fighting force in a very big galaxy.
• Troll Mountain: For the frequent portrayal of fantasy monsters as Always Chaotic Evil. The trolls do have a lot of violent, evil members, including their leadership, but there are also plenty of smart ones who get shouted down by the others. And the ones who attack humans are actually insane from near-starvation after being exiled.
• So This is Ever After: The book plays with and parodies many fantasy tropes such as The Chosen One, The Prophecy etc. Most specifically, the plot focuses on the aftermath of the heroes' victory over the villain, with The Chosen One Arek being made king and having to deal with rebuilding things, which is far harder in its way.

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