Deconstruction Fics based on video games.
- What Leads You Here: The implications of the game's ending are explored and dissected for all kinds of drama; namely the fact that the main characters are the only humans left on a planet lightyears away from Earth, the mission they're tasked with to restore and nourish the human race, the fact that their entire lives before this were the product of a simulation, and what the shock of fighting the Deimos has done to their mental state. Just to list a few.
- The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing is this in the form of an edited Let's Play of Animal Crossing: Wild World. It starts with showing just how disturbing finding oneself in a world full of Anthropomorphic Animals and not being able to leave would be... and then keeps going into downright creepy territory.
- Danganronpa: Paradise Lost decides to take the underlying issues of the backstory of Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls's main antagonist and present them upfront to demonstrate just how utterly messed up she became. Her living in the same house as her big brother Haiji, who infamously stated that he prefers women to be "as young as possible"? Turns out that he sexually abused her. The Suicide Pact she thought up, and claimed to have no intention of actually going through with? Turns out that she was intending to take her own life. All of her resulting Enfant Terrible behavior? Recontextualized as her finally deciding to become a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Yeah, Monaca Towa has issues.
- Round and Round We Go
deconstructs the Groundhog Peggy Sue trope by showing just how scaring repeating the most traumatic events of your life can be. Cayde ends up having to experience the death of Andal Brask, his best friend (and unrequited love) at least hundreds of times despite his best efforts to prevent it, before it dawns on him that his death is something he can't stop no matter what. He ends up being Driven to Suicide several times, and has to taken up carving marks on his arm for each month he gets through without screwing up.
- Dragon From Ash shows what would happen if the Messiah isn't exactly how people imagined them. In the heavily insular, deeply xenophobe Skyrim, having a Dark Elf for a Dragonborn causes much upset, anger and disgust among the Nords, with more than a few grudgingly paying respect to the position while still despising the candidate himself. As for the Dragonborn, his own culture's disgust towards the Tongues coupled with the Nords' rejection of him don't help him to accept his destiny — indeed, he's more struggling and afraid than truly focused on saving the world.
- Final Fantasy VII:
- While being a Fix Fic, the plot The Fifth Act deconstructs the Peggy Sue with Cloud accidentally time-travelling to the past. Cloud's biggest problem is that he doesn't know what actually went on in the past and he doesn't think things through, he goes in without knowing what's going on. For example, he shows up on the Wutai Front but didn't bother to check if Sephiroth was even there, he tries to bribe terrorists but without an advocate he goes nowhere, he joins Shinra but has no plan to get at Hojo, etc etc. Since this is post-Advent Children, the loss of his family and friends regresses Cloud's mental health and causes him to be very unstable.
- Final Fantasy X:
- While it wasn't avoided in the game, a lot of fanfics show just how much it would hurt to accompany your surrogate baby sister to her inevitable death, which everyone (including her) wants to happen. Not to mention how Braska's death was celebrated with a humongous festival.
- For the sequel, there have been a few fics deconstructing how Yuna's radical change in personality hides the pain she's really feeling regarding a good two-thirds of her life. In fact, Yuna's a popular fan deconstruction of the Yamato Nadeshiko archetype.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening:
- By Bonds We Are Bound deconstructs Chrom and Olivia's whirlwind romance that was mostly played for laughs in canon by having their marriage on the verge of crumbling due to lack of communication and each one having a secret affair (with the male Avatar and Lon'qu, respectively).
- Shattered Reflection by Natzo shows how the Shepherds would naturally react to learning that their tactician was a demon god that had destroyed the world in an alternate universe. It goes further with a bit of time travel taking the lead character to another version of the world to keep her tragic fate from befalling her sibling.
- By Bonds We Are Bound
- Fire Emblem Heroes is torn apart by the fanfic Journey Through Pressure. Kiran is angry and resentful about being ripped away from his home to fight a war in another world, even if he does understand why it needs to be done, and the problem of finding a way to send him home when all is said and done is given far more weight than in canon. Furthermore, the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that is the Order of Heroes is nowhere near a well-oiled machine, with conflicts ranging from personality clashes like the serious Ayra and the fun-loving Sharena, to old grudges from home like Begnion knight Tanith and Begnion deserter Haar, to outright psychos like Fallen Mareeta. Culture Clash between the modern Kiran and the medieval characters runs rampant, and of course War Is Hell.
- Pipeline: While it's established in the game that characters die, they're given little time to grieve. This story examines not just the existence of the loss, but what happens when people have to move on from it so quickly.
- Heavy Realism is a terse, ferocious deconstruction of Heavy Rain's (optional) sex scene, and its perceived "realism", questioning Ethan Mars' physical and mental (mostly physical) capacity to perform sexually in any meaningful way.
- Ambience: A Fleet Symphony shows how the Unwanted Harem aspect of the game's dozens of characters competing for an admiral's affection quickly becomes, if examined in detail, a very complicated balancing act that leaves people hurt both emotionally and physically.
- The Greatest Generation deconstructs The Men First. Putting the welfare and lives of your troops first and refusing to throw their lives away for nothing sounds noble at first glance, but doing so does not occur in a vacuum and has consequences. Admiral Shimada chose to withdraw his girls rather than sending them on an Honorable Senseless Sacrifice of a Suicide Mission. However, because said sacrifice was intended to buy time for the evacuating civilians, which he was expected to do so, preserving his subordinates not only wins him no favors, but ends up with him being disgraced and hated both In-Universe and out.
- Those Lacking Spines starts off as a deconstruction of all the abundant cliches in fanfiction, but soon it deconstructs everything in fanfiction.net... including the authors themselves.
- A Tale of Two Rulers revolves around Zelda's efforts to end the Forever War against Ganon with Altar Diplomacy, which is mostly Played for Laughs but frequently deconstructs the more light-hearted elements of the setting.
- The comic, unlike most of the games, shows directly the civilians caught in Ganondorf's path and that his invasions have destroyed irreplaceable parts of history, such as the castle's library. Due to the death and devastation he inflicted throughout the ages, he's now the Last of His Kind as the Gerudo were seemingly wiped out in a bloody reprisal that sought to prevent his rebirth.
- Link is a Shell-Shocked Veteran due to his Past-Life Memories of generations of constant conflict, which is the reason for his Heroic Mime behavior. As a result, Zelda tries to keep his current incarnation from suffering the same fate.
- Typically Zelda and her father are the only nobles seen, but here Hyrule has an entire Decadent Court for Ganondorf to contend with.
- The Legend of Link: Lucky Number 13 deconstructs at least three tropes:
- Happily Ever After: Link/Zelda is dissolved early on and it's revealed Link's side of things were equal parts love and fear of losing her if he said something wrong or challenged her on anything.
- Ideal Hero: Hyrule sees Link as one; Link sees nothing glamorous about murder, and states that "hero" is just another word for tool.
- Happily Married: Link/Nabooru and later Link/Sepaaru's relationships are the source of most of the drama.
- Zelda's Honor imagines a Zeldaverse where Link isn't a One-Man Army, where death, rape and war have real and lasting consequences on its characters and flips the otherwise happy ending upside down.
- The self-insert Mass Vexations heavily deconstructs Angst? What Angst? as it generally tends to appear in self-insert fanfiction. Almost as soon as he realizes he's in the Mass Effect universe, Author Avatar Art begins wondering what's become of every person he's ever come to really care about, and about what they must be thinking in turn. At first, Art brushes off the angst under the pretense that he can head home via Virmire. When he tries it, it ends up not happening thanks to Shepard saving him at Virmire. After that, he realizes that he'll never see the family and friends that he knew for basically his entire life. And thanks to the cover story he made to avoid suspicion, he can't tell anyone about why he's really angsting and has to hold the real reason for his angst in. He ends up locking himself in his room so the crew won't see him cry.
- Renegade Reinterpretations deconstructs the Humans Are Special part. It takes humanity over a century to catch up with the galaxy. Oh, and they are dominated by the batarians during that century. The result is a humanity that really doesn't play nice.
- XCOM: Second Contact deconstructs this in a different way. Due to it being, well, XCOM humanity that reached to the stars, mankind is as paranoid and xenophobic as you might expect from a species that took severe losses the first time it encountered extraterrestrial life.
- Mega Man Recut likes to delve into the darker implications of all versions of Mega Man such as what kind of emotional stress the heroes would suffer from, the problems Roll would develop from always being shoved to the sidelines by Mega Man, and the abuse the Robot Masters suffer from Wily.
- Mega Man Star Network deconstructs the common aspects found in Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force, such as Free-Range Children and Heel–Face Turn.
- While a short oneshot, Why Is He So Alone? deconstructs Pico having to fight an enemy who could easily leave him traumatized, and of course, it's not pretty. It focuses on the aftermath of Pico vs Convict, and shows how Pico is downright terrified of Convict by him undergoing Heroic BSoD, especially when he recalls shooting the real Nene instead of Convict in said video. Granted, it ends on a heartwarming note, as it turns out Nene forgives him for what happened, but it really delves deep into what Pico truly thinks about accidentally hurting his loved ones.
- The Castle of Thunder and Ashes deconstructs the plot "N defeats the female protagonist and forces her to live with him". Touko is forced to live in N's castle but at no point in the story is the event treated as a good thing because the toll on Touko's mind sends her into a depression (and this is aggravated by the fact that N's Reshiram accidentally killed her Samurott in that battle) - by the last update, Touko turns into an Empty Shell. Without the reality shock he received at the end of the canon battle, N quickly develops into a Well-Intentioned Extremist that becomes more and more extreme to the point of planning the Armageddon to separate the worlds. Also, Team Plasma's takeover of Unova is depicted as a military coup and a violent civil war and it succeeds because Team Plasma captured legendaries using Zerg Rush tactics.note
- Crossing the Boulder deconstructs the Broken Bridge trope by having the kid who bugs you to fight Brock apply to everyone, being treated as a government-approved law. This creates a situation where people end up being stuck in Pewter City with no way out unless through having a Boulder Badge, something that, thanks to the law having Brock use Pokemon he'd normally have for more experienced trainers as well as having a bouncer kick anyone who don't have water and/or grass types out, is easier said than done. This leads to food shortages, forging fake Boulder Badges, dealing with Pokemon smugglers, and even assassination attempts. There's also a small jab at the Anime having Ash obtain badges through doing favors as well as the Pokemon Center not being a hospital for humans.
- Jessica explores the existence of Pokémon inside their respective game cartridges... particularly, what happens when a cartridge is physically destroyed.
- Pokémon False Red rips into the
Copy Cat Sue/Possession Sue concepts in that Fire is instantly recognized for not belonging to their world and that he's a copy of Red. The fact that Fire is repeating Red's journey and is also completing the Pokedex is mocked as it's seen that Fire has no unique accomplishments or It's Been Done. - Pokémon Strangled Red addresses several things within Pokémon video games, especially Red and Blue:
- How can the computer systems involving the storage, transfer, and trading of Pokémon be seamless if computers (especially at the time when the first Pokémon games were made) can crash? And if a computer crashes while handling a Pokémon in one of these ways, what would the consequences be?
- Why was there no defending champion to challenge when Blue beat the Elite Four?"The answer was right there. The previous champion just gave up."
- The infamous Missingno glitch is given a sinister role toward the end of the story as well.Steven: [thinking] IT can bring her back... IT can do anything...
- Pokemon: The Unknown Continuum rips apart many aspects of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. For example, it points out the Guild's insensitivity to sending recruits on life-threatening missions and underpaying them; it shows us what suddenly being thrown into another world in an alien body against your will would likely do to a person; it points out the Fridge Horror of the concept of "explorations" of places where almost constant fighting is required for survival and the psychological effects it would have on Guild members. This is established early in the story, where Floyd and Serge's first mission results in the latter suffering nasty wounds from acid, and Floyd later makes it clear that he is not very fond of this. Also, Chatot, who was only strict in the games, is presented as a callous, manipulative Bad Boss whom a big chunk of the guild secretly hates.
- Seen and Not Heard deconstructs Red's Kid Hero status. Despite his attempt to confront Lance on the League's secret association with Team Rocket, Lance easily shuts him down. Everyone in power is either part of the League or benefiting from the League, so Red has no potential allies. If Red doesn't act as a Puppet King, Lance threatens to send the League full-force against him. Being the strongest trainer doesn't triumph against skill and number.
- The backstory of Troubled Waters has Team Rocket having previously brutalized and assaulted Red when he got in their way. While Red survived the experience and did take them down, Red is implied to have been heavily traumatized by the experience. Lance tries to keep Ethan out of infiltrating the Team Rocket base in fear the same will happen to Ethan.
- N's habit of using local Pokemon in battles and releasing them is deconstructed in the Uninvited. An abused Purrloin that N freed, who would have willingly joined N's cause, feels horribly betrayed when N releases him. Even though the Purrloin has found a loving home in Touko, he resents N's abandonment and is quick to call him out on it.
- Fallen Angel is centered around the glossed-over aftermath of Sonic Adventure. Perfect Chaos left the city in disarray. Thousands died and millions more were left without homes in the aftermath (Amy included). The fic also deconstructs Amy's character by portraying her as a friendless orphan who tries to keep the illusion of being social in order to keep herself together.
- There's a Fine Line similarly addresses the dark implications of both Adventure games' world-building, with military organization G.U.N. slowly becoming the shadow government of the world. Eggman is pushed into a corner, and Sonic is constantly on the run from G.U.N. who want to use him for their own ends. The whole story feels like a deconstruction of Sonic as a character, watching what happens as he's put into positions of powerlessness where he has to choose between his morals or the lives of people he loves across variations situations including shacking up with very shady paramilitary resistance group aimed at impeding G.U.N.'s progress at world domination. The story effortlessly transitions between more game-accurate light-hearted adventure and viscerally grim and emotional moments that feel all the more powerful in relation to the light ones.
- The Middle of the Night and Burn, Xenon Burn, play up and brutally point out the horrific aspects to the series' plots, which are Played for Laughs in the canon, by using the same tropes Played for Drama.
- Forgotten deconstructs the Continuity Reboot by having Spyro wait in some strange void after his first life in the Insomniac Games trilogy each time he's about to reincarnate as that continuity's incarnation of himself. He compares the different versions of his friends like Sparx, lampshades the Jerkass behavior of his Insomniac to Skylanders versions compared to his Legend of Spyro personality, and laments what he's lost in his transitions.
- The Mercenary deconstructs Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage/Gateway to Glimmer.
- Aimless deconstructs many of the common tropes seen in a lot of The Legend of Spyro’s Trapped in TV Land fics.
- The oneshot Best Friends deconstructs Harvest Moon DS Cute's Japanese-only "Best Friends" system, which allows you to become 'special friends' with any of the four Special Bachelorettes and essentially marry them. Forget-me-not Valley is so backwater that they barely have electricity and barely count as a town. The villagers are either too ignorant, too in denial, or too homophobic to notice that Claire and Keira are lovers, not "best friends" who room together. This all makes Claire very upset and uncomfortable with her relationship. Things get worse when the Harvest King "blesses" the couple with a son, without either consenting to it.
- Diamond in the Rough deconstructs what Spaztique and Stevothehuman have dubbed the "Gappy Stu," in which some random kid (often an Ordinary High-School Student) ends up being gapped into Gensokyo by Yukari for no reason, lives a pampered lifestyle, falls in love with one of the characters, winds up becoming ridiculously powerful, and single-handedly resolves an incident, reducing Reimu and Marisa to background characters. Here, Yukari's offer has Faustian undertones, Gensokyo is portrayed as a Death World, the girl the kid falls in love with is desperate for love and constantly teased, he has little control over his powers (especially since they're sentient beasts and not morally stable), and the incident is portrayed as unglamorous, brutal, and violent.
- There is a Deconstruction Crossover fic of "outsider in Gensokyo" that works in the other way (the outsider is too dangerous for Gensokyo) named Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness, in which Coop, Jamie and Kiva land in Gensokyo. With all the collateral damage of having a giant robot, especially with someone like Coop piloting it, Reimu and Yukari can't wait for them to leave. Different from the other examples, it's a light-hearted Deconstructive Parody with Original Flavor from both series.
- Imperfect Metamorphosis is a Deconstructor Fleet not only of the games themselves (such as the Fantastic Racism and Gensokyo being filled with distrustful, violent megalomaniacs) but of nearly every popular Alternative Character Interpretation in the fandom, from Eirin as a Mad Scientist to Yukari being a Manipulative Bastard to Rumia having a Superpowered Evil Side, all wrapped up in the Fandom-Specific Plot of "a powerful new threat comes to Gensokyo requiring all the main characters working together to defeat it". The result is a horrifying clusterfuck as the main characters pose more of a threat to each other than the villains, who continue unimpeded.
- Touhou Tonari greatly deconstructs Yuyuko's Bad Powers, Good People in her backstory and shows just what kind of life she must have had and what lead to her eventual suicide.
- The fic Kodachrome Memories deconstructs the Trapped in TV Land core to the series (which arguably was already done with Captain Blue's backstory) through the eyes of Alastor. Alastor being a movie character makes him effectively immortal with Captain Blue Jr.'s aging extremely slowed down if not stopped since he stays in Movieland over the years, while Joe and the rest of the cast in the Real World live their lives as they age (with Joe and Silvia getting married and having children). Captain Blue dies in his sleep, Joe and Silvia bring their children into Movieland with Alastor helping fill them in on Joe's past adventures (with Alastor bothered at how Joe and Silvia's memories are slipping), then we learn Jet is gone and Silvia passes away too. Alastor laments over how his rival grows weaker over the decades, meets him one last time, and after a talk agrees to hold onto Joe and Silvia's V-Watches so that they can be passed down to future heroes who need them. Later, Joe's death finally comes with Jr. (who gets older since he now has to play a different role to fill the gaps left by Blue and Joe), Rachel, Alastor, and the three Jadow members (Charles The Third, Hulk Davidson, Gran Bruce) mourning him. Alastor falls into a slump, but during a talk with Sprocket on the same beach he last spoke with Joe he has an air of hope around him from getting to carry out Joe's last request.
- The Higurashi: When They Cry fic Higurashi: Broken Chains Arc deconstructs the self-insert character, particularly in a series as dark as this one. The main character, a (minor Marty Stu) foreigner from the UK, is almost immediately treated with suspicion by the police for his insight into the case, as well as playing up Hinamizawa's distrust of strangers.
- Redaction of the Golden Witch takes a harsh look at the In-Universe Witch Hunt fandom. Part of the story is set in 1996, viewed through the eyes of an older protagonist who finds the antics of their younger companions distasteful. They're so wrapped up in the mythos and speculation surrounding the Rokkenjima Incident that they appear to have lost sight of the fact it was a real tragedy, with real victims.
