Basic Trope: After a Trope, premise, or work is analyzed and taken apart, during which its underlying assumptions and problems are revealed, its assumptions are challenged, its questions answered, and its problems fixed.
- Straight: A Trope's underlying assumptions and problems are addressed in order to make it work again.
- Exaggerated: Inverting one of the following Deconstruction-related tropes:
- Deconstructor Fleet: A work goes out of its way to correct the flaws of an entire genre.
- Discredited Trope: A work reconstructs a trope, genre, premise, or work to the point where no one will think of ever trying to deconstruct it ever again. Alternatively, re-crediting a Discredited Trope.
- Downplayed: A Trope's minor problems are addressed in order to make it work again.
- Justified: The Trope, genre, premise, or work is really popular, but has been deconstructed, but the viewing audience likes it too much to accept the deconstruction, so it is reconstructed.
- Inverted: Deconstruction
- Subverted: A trope at first seems like it’s being reconstructed, only to then be deconstructed…
- Double-Subverted: …after which it’s then reconstructed.
- Parodied: The problems of a trope are addressed in a humorous way, such as Anti-Gravity Clothing being deliberately designed to be that way by the designers, who spent hours going over how in excruciating over-the-top detail.
- Averted: A trope, genre, premise, or work is left deconstructed.
- Enforced: “Okay, so our deconstruction didn’t go over very well. Let’s reconstruct it to bring the audience back.”
- Lampshaded: “Wow, they’re really going all out to make it up to us after ruining that thing we loved.”
- Invoked: Bob, after analyzing some tropes and seeing how they work, proceeds to improve upon them by showing what else they can do.
- Exploited: Bob keeps moaning about how sad he is that he can’t enjoy his favorite tropes anymore after Drake deconstructed them. Drake realizes that this is actually worse than Bob going on and on about them before (and also feels a little guilty), so he writes another work that reconstructs Bob’s favorite tropes.
- Defied:
- “No. This trope was really problematic. It’s better to just let it die and move on from it.”
- The audience is not in the mood to see their favorite tropes put back together again in a long, detailed explanation, so the next work simply plays the tropes straight again without addressing the issues pointed out in the deconstruction.
- Discussed: “What’s that thing doing there? I thought this thing was problematic.” “Doesn’t look like it. They must’ve ironed out the kinks.”
- Implied: Some tropes are usually known to be problematic, but those flaws seem to be taken into account.
- Deconstructed:
- The problems of a trope are addressed, but the audience finds the solution either leaving a lot to be desired or just as flawed as the trope itself, causing the reconstruction to fail because it raised more questions than it answered.
- The audience and makers of the work live in a period of great change for their society where certain attitudes, traditions and institutions are revealed to be too problematic to salvage. Certain tropes thus come off as endorsing these attitudes through their assumptions, souring the audience on them to the point that attempting to address these flaws comes off as either endorsing the problematic attitudes behind the trope or otherwise extremely tone-deaf in its execution. Put simply, the audience has soured on a trope so much that no reconstruction can save it.
- An example for both of the above: A Shonen protagonist who lives in a ninja village where ninjas accept missions for jobs, which occasionally brings them into conflict with other villages, discovers the world of the work is revealed to be dependent on war to make money. Thus, the protagonist becoming the village leader and trying to make the system better than it was only comes off as “the same, but nicer,” which the audience finds lacking as a solution.
- The audience simply does not care for either the trope, its deconstruction, or its reconstruction.
- Reconstructed:
- While the initial reconstruction failed, the questions it raised are easier to answer than those it answered. Answering those questions generates a discussion in which people realize how the reconstruction could’ve been done better. One such person goes on to create a work that reconstructs the trope using this method, thus reconstructing the initial reconstruction by proxy.
- The reconstruction is Vindicated by History:
- Just as attitudes toward the trope have turned against it, they turn back to it in time after the audience looks back on the trope and its reconstruction with clearer, cooler heads and engage with it in a way informed by the wisdom gained in the intervening years. Through this new insight, they find the reconstruction adequately addressed the trope’s issues; they just felt it didn’t as their views were guided by the cultural climate at the time.
- The generation after the initial audience have a different attitude towards the attitudes, traditions and institutions than the older one did, and are able to engage with the trope and/or its reconstruction in a way the older one didn’t, and while they agree with the older audience that the original trope was problematic, they feel the reconstruction addressed the trope’s problems in a way that worked.
- Played for Laughs: Addressing a trope’s problems in a humorous way, such as the long-term consequences of Amusing Injuries themselves being funny.
- Played for Drama: Addressing a trope’s problems in a dramatic way, such as a playboy who has a daughter making a serious effort to be a good father to any additional daughters he may have had other than the initial one.
