Genre Deconstruction / Web Original

• The Flash games "You Were Hallucinating the Whole Time" and "Video Game Morality Play" attempt to deconstruct games that make heavy usage of You Bastard!, such as Spec Ops: The Line, by showing how such games often get their points across by railroading the player or making use of Ass Pulls.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a deconstruction of the classic Superhero vs. Supervillain conflict, as follows:
  • The villain is the protagonist, a shy, nerdy guy who wants to Take Over the World because he sees it for the Crapsack World that it is and wants to improve things... on his own terms. He also wants to get a date with the girl at the laundromat, whom he's too shy to talk to.
  • The hero is the antagonist, a Smug Super, Jerk Jock womanizer who believes that, because he is superpowerful, he's better than everyone else and is only too happy to display it. He further believes that only people who are like him can be heroic, and anyone who's nerdy or unpopular is a potential supervillain. It's strongly implied that this behavior is what drives people like the villain to become evil in the first place.
  • The Love Interest is a genuinely good person whom the villain wishes to impress with his evil deeds, failing to realize that she's very unlikely to actually respect that. She gets caught in the crossfire between the two, ends up ignored as they fight their climactic battle over her, and dies tragically as a result.
  • The Nigh-Invulnerable super hero is only brave because he's never had to experience pain in his life. When he does, he has a Heroic BSoD over it.
  • The villain finds that his victory: the hero defeated, entry into the Evil League of Evil secured by his Love Interest's murder, comes at the price of his humanity.
• ONE. is a deconstruction of Object Shows. Its cast of Anthropomorphic Objects are forced against their will to compete in challanges by an invisible apathetic host, they actually have real names but are forced to be called after their objects. Their sanity is shown slowly taken heavy tolls due to their traumatic experiences in dangerous challenges and going through gruesome deaths only to be resurrected over and over again.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition takes apart the very concept of Let's Play. It starts by creating a game that gradually gets more insane and bizarre as time goes on, adds a narrator who spits out random nonsequiturs, all while parodying 90s pop culture. Then it starts playing with the Fourth Wall by having the narrator get in a conversation with an in game character, and making it unclear whether it's the narrator or the player character itself who's talking. The final boss fight consists of the player jumping on the word "logic" while the narrator says "Check it out! It's the last piece of logic left! ...Screw that noise."
• Stardestroyer.net, as mentioned above in Fan Fic, deconstructs the seemingly utopian Star Trek universe, pointing out holes.
• Sailor Nothing loves showing just how jarringly, horrifically, nightmarishly different the characters' lives are from Magical Girl anime. Several of them even watch an exaggerated, stereotypical version of such shows; the main character actually watches it to escape her life.
• Mario: Game Over was one of the first remarkable deconstructions of Super Mario Bros., being made in 2007, and asked the question of "how would someone like Mario fare in the real world?". The short answer is not good: he's stuck in a loveless marriage with Peach, his use of Super Mushrooms is treated akin to a drug addiction, and his experiences lead him to hallucinate real people as Bowser and his minions.
• Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles takes many first person shooter tropes and twists them. Everything from capture the flag, to why there are two bases in the middle of a box canyon with no strategic value, and Respawn.
• Furry Fandom works frequently portray an entire world as furry. I Wish I Was Furry! shows what would happen if we woke up one day and the world actually was furry. The main character is even a human furry fan^note also a plushophile, like is typical for transformation stories. A furryized world, as it happens, is dark and brutal. "Nature, red in tooth and claw" and all that.
• Sonny Gets Mad Scienced is the "humourous" type of deconstruction. It revolves around two central ideas; telling a Mad Scientist story from the perspective of one of the nameless subjects experimented on, and being Genre Savvy doesn't always help.
• This video from The Onion sends up the idea of video games becoming progressively more realistic by taking it to a logically deconstructive extreme with a "ultra realistic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3". It mostly involves sitting around and waiting.
• Similar idea is expressed in this Cracked article by David Wong, "The Ultimate War Simulation Game", complete with a close look at the inevitable numerous and horrific screw-ups the player would have to face, the reluctance of your country to back you up, and the endless stream of criticisms from naive pacifists and sensationalist/partisan media.
• The Whateley Universe is a deceonstruction of the classic superhero/supervillain tropes, with mutants who have to obey real physical laws, some supervillains like Dr. Diabolik who are pretty far from the classic villain, and even some supers who are far from the classic hero.
• This video is a deconstruction of Pokémon. Yes, Pokémon. It is mostly played for laughs but there is a point about half-way through where Pikachu is bleeding as he's strangled by a Bulbasaur and it's played straight.
• The Sex House series does this quite brutally to Immoral Reality Shows. Not only are the contestants much deeper and complex people than the shallow stereotypes the show desperately try to portray them as, the producers' "indicatives" to cut corners on the budget and ensure sex and drama in order to get the precious high ratings rolling in, soon starts to take a massive toll on their sanity and health.
• Funny Business deconstructs both the trope of a small child having godlike power and the most common way of doing so. The main character is quickly revealed to be a Reality Warper, but she seems nice enough and doesn't appear to abuse her power all that much. It is eventually revealed that when she was a child, she acted more or less like Anthony Fremont, causing people who annoyed her to disappear. However, this is only because a toddler doesn't have the mental or moral development to act unselfishly, and when she grows older ^note we're talking three years old, here she is disgusted with herself for having been an Enfant Terrible and develops a major Guilt Complex over anything.
• Girl-chan in Paradise is a vicious parody of Cliché Storm Shonen Anime, particularly those with bad animation and corny dubbing. The characters all fit into some sort of archetype, with the title Girlchan being a Satellite Love Interest and a Ms. Fanservice who had absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot (nor is she actually in Paradise).
• The Flying Man is a deconstruction of the Flying Brick Ubermensch-type superhero, basically looking at what would happen if Superman decided that the ends justified the means from the word go.
• The Salvation War: A destruction of Biblical apocalypse. The apocalypse is resisted by most of humanity, with only a minority choosing to accept the end. The unstoppable Demon hordes, while individually physically more powerful than the average human, are annihilated by modern weapons, and their extreme evil and backwardness means cooperation and experimentation hamper them constantly. Angels are hardly better off, their only major advantage being their ability to keep humanity out of Heaven. But they soon lose that advantage, and God is brought down by an angel himself. The seven bowls are damaging at a societal scale, but not enough to completely annihilate civilization. Heaven itself is not-so-wonderful, due to the medieval mindset of most angels meaning it only provides what was considered plentiful in a medieval society: crops, shelter, and protection from bandits, but it contains none of the technologies or political ideals that modern people enjoy.
• In Service Of Nothing: What If? James Bond never became George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan or Daniel Craig, but stayed Sean Connery, eventually getting old, shunting into a desk job, and finally forced into mandatory retirement with a meagre pension, now even having to pay for sex, in a world that has passed him by?
• Takotsubo: The story of a superhero is a massive deconstruction of the superhero genre's lack of racial diversity. It follows the Chinese-American Cord Cai, a gangster who'd be a stereotypical villain in much of American media. While he goes through the classic Superhero Origin story by losing his fiance Roland Fujii in a botched carjacking, it's played as Cord's Despair Event Horizon after a long list of family hardships, racism, and homophobia, and he shoots the murderer in revenge after the police fuck up on Roland's case. Cord knows perfectly well that he's feeding Asian-American stereotypes, but he thinks he's not good enough for anything else. However, while he views himself as a failure and a stereotype, his gang works with the police to clean up Oakland's street crime and numerous people ask him for help as they would a superhero.
• An AlternateHistory.com story, Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72, viciously deconstructs several themes in alternate history.
  • During the ITTL 1970s, the two party system slowly shatters. But rather than leading to more efficient, responsive government, it leads to political chaos, as the political system has not been reformed to deal with the change. Due to a third party run by George McGovern and George Wallace, the 1972 election results in there being no winner in the Electoral College, leading to a political clusterfuck that allows Spiro Agnew to slither into office. As the political and economic problems of the 1970s persist, new political parties form, but they create further confusion, since the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system of American elections turns them into spoilers that result in unexpected and unwanted results: Spiro Agnew, for example, becomes Mayor of New York because of the divisions between left-wing parties, and Harvey Johnson, a liberal black man, is able to become a Mississippi Senator due to a division between right wing forces. In 1980, Donald Rumsfeld, without winning the most popular votes, manages to win the Electoral College due to this same political division between Democrats and the left-wing We The People party. In 1984, he is able use this same division to get away with rigging the election and drive the Democrats into the ground.
  • ITTL, the US is able to win the Vietnam War, that is to say, secure South Vietnam's independence. While this does to lead to celebration, it results in the US government, secure in the idea of foreign intervention, adopting a more bellicose and interventionist foreign policy. By the 1980s, the US is expending resources and lives invading and propping up anti-communist regimes, and Donald Rumsfeld's anticommunist drive is so lunatic, he alienates Western Europeans who want detente with the USSR, leading to the collapse of NATO.
  • Per Word of God, the sequel is largely a Deconstruction of hard-right Tea Party conservative social and economic ideas being put into place. During the 1980s, these policies turn America into an authoritarian hellhole and international pariah under the presidency of Donald Rumsfeld. By the tail end of his term, his deregulation of the economy has done so much damage, the corporate figures that initially backed him support his impeachment.
  • The Christian Values Party explores the idea of a political party that claims to "govern through God" if given power. Their belief in Christianity is a shallow scam, as they quickly align themselves with Rumsfeld, hoping to wreak benefits from his destructive policies. After Rumsfeld is overthrown, they use their ill-gotten resources to gain power, and turn America into a fascist state and kills and imprisons anyone they consider to be a Satanist. Their policies plunge America into open civil war, complete with the CVs nuking rebellious cities, and drive other states to secede from the Union.
• "Extreme PRANK OFF (Father VS Son)" by RackaRacka does this with the "prank war" genre of YouTube prank videos, with a father and his sons carrying out an Escalating War of pranks that starts out harmless but very quickly turns dangerous. Eventually, the father gets badly maimed and kills his sons and wife as a result — and one of the sons still thinks it's a prank even after his dad has started shooting while wearing a creepy pig mask.
• The Penumbra Podcast serves as a deconstruction of the Hardboiled Detective. Juno Steel's mannerisms - depression, abrasiveness, excessive drinking, a tendency to work alone, his Dark and Troubled Past - are portrayed not as eccentricities that make him a better detective but rather as genuine issues for which he needs serious mental help. He's caught in a spiral of self-destructive bad decisions that lead him to bungle his cases and hurt the people he cares about, and he only becomes a better detective after he starts processing his trauma and actively trying to better himself.
• The Witch of the Invalides tears every common power fantasy Self-Insert Fic and Isekai trope a new one and then some by showing it from the perspective of the former love interest of the protagonist.
  • To start, it shows that the mindset behind many male-dominated fantasies as not something to be lauded but to be reviled or pitied. The self-insert stand-in, Jayce, is portrayed as an amoral sociopath at best and actively malicious at worst and is the main antagonist of the first three arcs. His rise to power mostly involves imperialism, war crimes, and rampant human rights abuses, with the peace being enforced by a Police State. In addition, the male power fantasy’s undertones of fascism come to light, with many minorities and indigenous peoples actively oppressed and disenfranchised. The Imperial Center is mostly unaware of this, being where the heart of the propaganda machine is located.
  • The Well-Intentioned Extremist and Utopia Justifies the Means are also viciously shredded, with many nominal allies starting to look elsewhere when The Emperor Jaakobah's actions become more and more extreme, their victories come at steeper costs, and he generally turns into more of a liability than an asset. It’s also shown how the concept of a Utopia is inherently subjective (“One man’s heaven is another man’s hell”), with many characters having different ideas of what constitutes one.
  • The Harem Genre takes one of the biggest hits.
    • To wit, it shows exactly what kind of person would be a Harem Seeker, the lack of emotional maturity it entails, and how unhealthy a dynamic it would be if they did gain a harem. The Emperor treats his harem not as equal partners but as objects, and the emotional depth of their relationships is shallow at best. Alexis recalls that he was always "busy" when it came to their emotional needs, but when it came to their sexual ones, "his schedule was clear".
    • Top Wife also takes a hit as it shows how much unrequited emotional labor it takes to reach that position, and how it’s simply a hollow title at best, as you can quickly be demoted at a mere whim. Alexis, the protagonist and former Top Wife of Jaakobah, compares it to being treated more like a favorite toy than an equal partner and outright calls it a pyramid scheme. The infighting and jockeying for this position is also depicted as a means to distract the women from realizing how abusive their mutual lover is. Not to mention the way it's written makes it sound eerily like a Cult.
    • Double Standards are also explored, as it shows how unequal a relationship where only one partner is free to have other relationships is. Alexis recalls when Sella (one of the youngest former haremmettes and someone she considers a younger sister) posed a question about this to Jaakobah. She didn’t know the specifics of his answer, as she wasn't there, but it ended with Sella leaving the room in tears.
    • The worst part? They can’t even leave Jayce without either facing social ruin or worse. When Alexis escapes in the beginning, she has to face obstacles such as ostracization, slander, and assassination attempts in the Faedra Arc while she’s trying to rebuild her life. Take away all the fantasy and political intrigue, and what you have is a woman fleeing her Domestic Abuser, who happens to be a powerful figure who can make her life hell.
• Season 2 of Inanimate Insanity deconstructs the Immoral Reality Show ala Total Drama by pointing out just how damaging a game show that regularly threatens its contestants' safety and encourages them to turn on each other would be to their psyches. Needless to say, the contestants collectively end up becoming The Mentally Disturbed.
• Ella's Emergency Makeover is a video that deconstructs the very nature of Flash makeup games, which shows the graphic and realistic depictions of the removal of 'unattractive' face features (mainly the braces), texts that body-shames and humiliates Ella, showing how Ella was physically and mentally saddened by the pressures, and the aftermath of the entire ordeal with Ella deciding not to go to the prom because she feels like she isn't pretty and good enough despite the efforts.

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