• When In Doubt, Blame the Eldar is one for Commander Self-Insert Fanfiction: While Commander Black may be, in his own words, "a brutally efficient self-replicating mechanism of war", he's in a universe where everyone else has been fighting non-stop for at least 6000 years, with no signs of slowing down. Often, he finds himself losing many battles.
  • Furthermore, unlike other Self-Insert protagonists, he's frequently unable to fix the problems in the Warhammer 40,000, because most of those problems are built on longstanding issues between the warring factions that have involved all sides crossing the Moral Event Horizon several times. If anything, his actions end up making the 40K universe worse.

• Brand New Idol Society, or BiS for short, was an Idol Singer group built from the ground up by leader Pour Lui, who then proceeded to mercilessly deconstruct the manufactured pure-heartedness image associated with the genre with violent, hypersexualized, and often disturbing imagery and lyrics. This was most obvious with their album, IDOL is DEAD. Aside from the self-explanatory title, they also pulled a Bait-and-Switch with their single, "IDOL", advertising it as a typical idol song while encouraging fans to buy the same single over and over again. The actual song turned out to be hard rock, with its music video featuring wota being enslaved and tortured while the group was paraded as martyrs on crosses. Another song, "MURA-MURA", references the infamous head-shaving punishment one of AKB48's members inflicted on herself for being caught dating. Even the Lighter and Softer revival has its first music video show Pour Lui alone in an abandoned factory, scared for her life as it explodes. While idol music continues to live on and thrive, the group is credited for expanding the boundaries of what an Idol Singer can be, and it became the Trope Codifier for the alt-idol genre that which mixes Idol Singer tropes with metal music in various ways. Even traditional Idol Singer groups (several who were friends of BiS) have paid homage to the group.
• Green Day's seminal rock opera American Idiot is a deconstruction of the punk movement as a whole. The protagonist, Jimmy (styling himself Jesus of Suburbia and later St. Jimmy) starts out as a drugged-up slacker who gets bored with his life and decides to run away to the city to become a punk. But because he's a rebel without a cause or goal, he just sinks even deeper into drugs and becomes lonely and depressed, eventually leading to him returning to his old life.
• Kool G Rap was this to Hip-Hop’s more transgressive subgenres, particularly Hardcore Hip-Hop, Mafioso Rap, and Gangsta Rap. This likely explains why G Rap's rapping was so appealing to a new wave of East Coast rappers in The '90s invoked who followed his lead. While N.W.A and Eazy-E depicted incredibly violent narratives, much of it was tempered by one-dimensional characters, Black Comedy, and cartoonish violence that provided a certain levity to the subgenre. Contrasting this, G Rap took gangsta rap to darker, more profound depths, exploring uncharted territories within the genre. He crafted raw, gritty, introspective and macabre stories centered on tragic, complex characters grappling with the perpetual violence of New York City streets. While G Rap certainly glorified money, power, luxury, and violence (a common tropic in Glam Rap), his lyrics very often delved into the psychological and social consequences of this lifestyle.
• Kendrick Lamar's second album good kid, m.A.A.d city could be considered a deconstruction of 90's Gangsta Rap made popular by groups like N.W.A. This album contains many of the normal elements of west coast hip-hop at the time (heavy gang violence, drug use, working with the homies), but changed it by having the character change with the events of the story (getting paranoid about violence during "m.A.A.d city", stopping after his brother dies in "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst", etc.) and the story ends with him becoming the Kendrick Lamar he is today.
• Miranda Lambert's entire career is built between this and subversion of stereotypes about the image of a good, docile woman in country music and shows that women who abide by this tradition are miserable. Best shown in "Mama's Broken Heart".
• "Girl in a Country Song" by Maddie & Tae deconstruct the bro-country subgenre of the 2010s using melody, beat and even quote from the biggest hit songs from the subgenre by singing from the perspective of the women who are sick of being treated like sex objects and have their agency or decisions taken from them that is commonly presented in the subgenre.
• Sia's "Chandelier", which topped charts the year it came out, is a deconstruction of a typical pop party song (such as those sung by celebrities like Britney Spears and Kesha). The singer stays up all night drinking, partying, and sexing it up, which has serious consequences on her life. The song also states that partying only worsens the singer's existing issues of loneliness and makes her ashamed of her actions.
• Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" is a deconstruction of the usual Ode to Intoxication song. Unlike most songs where going to a bar and getting drunk is something celebratory, the narrator turns to alcohol as a way to escape from his problems and numb the pain of his dead-end life, is heavily implied to be an alcoholic, and the song ends with him getting kicked out of the bar.

• 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.

• When it opened in 1967, the Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride at Disneyland was intended to be a deconstruction of the romanticized, swashbuckling Pirate that was popular during The Golden Age of Hollywood. While still pretty lighthearted as far as deconstructions go, it does feature a pirate ship attacking a small Caribbean town, pirates dunking the mayor in the well in order to get information out of him, pirates auctioning off women, pirates chasing women, and pirates getting drunk and burning down the town... all of which is Played for Laughs. The final show scene in the attraction shows a few pirates in an armory drunkenly firing at gunpowder barrels, which they mistake for rum barrels. For good measure, the ride begins with a lengthy trek through Dead Man's Cove, which doesn't feature any living pirates, but ones that have long since been deceased, with the surrounding treasure meaning nothing to them in the present. "Dead men tell no tales", indeed. Conversely, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (which were loosely based on the ride) serve as a Reconstruction to the romanticized, swashbuckling Pirate trope that the original attraction had denounced.

• Exalted deconstructs a lot of typical fantasy tropes. You are not the beloved chosen of an omnipotent sky-father god, you are an autonomous hunter-killer weapon built to kill the creators of the world and left to run amok. You are not in charge because it is your divine right to rule or because good always prevails, but because you're the most badass autonomous hunter-killer weapon around and you killed/dominated/enslaved/subverted all the competition. You win not because you're morally right, or because you believe with all your heart, you win because you have power, you use it intelligently and you're awesome: you can always define yourself as morally right afterwards, when you gain your own personal Omniscient Morality License and propaganda machine set up.
• Unknown Armies is this for Urban Fantasy, by pointing out the various issues with human nature that would come up if the supernatural really existed in the modern day world. Violence, insanity, tragedy and anti-social behaviour is common in the occult underground.
• By the one of the same authors, John Tynes, Power Kill is a takedown of the entire medium of Tabletop Role Playing Games.
• In a more bad-tempered vein, there's Violence™: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed, a dark satire of RPGs which tears apart the whole Dungeon Crawling concept. Instead of a brave adventurer exploring a dark dungeon filled with monsters, you're a violent sociopath wandering through an apartment complex, killing the single mothers and impoverished day laborers in order to take their hard-earned possessions. The rulebook is one part game mechanics and two part Author Tract against the type of players who are drawn to hack-and-slash games.

By Author:

• Older Than Feudalism: Euripides' The Trojan Women and Hecuba portrayed The Trojan War as a human tragedy rather than a sweeping epic tale of martial valor in the Homeric tradition. In general, his tragedies are regarded as more "modern" than those of his predecessors because of their morally ambiguous protagonists, pervasive sense of anxiety and despair, religious skepticism and overall portrayal of mythologycal subjects and characters as real people.
• Various plays of William Shakespeare have been interpreted as genre deconstructions:
  • Hamlet has been read as a massive deconstruction of Elizabethan revenge dramas. Although most of them end in tears for everyone, Hamlet deconstructs the genre by having the characters react to events like the ghost's appearance like a real person would (in a standard revenge play, the appearance of a vengeful ghost was an expected part of the genre, but Hamlet doubts the ghost's reality for half the play, as a real person who saw a ghost probably would).
  • Measure for Measure might do the same for comedies. The whole thing is a source of much debate.
  • Romeo and Juliet has been interpreted as a genre deconstruction of Commedia dell'Arte. The stock characters are nearly all there, and the Star-Crossed Lovers plot, the Zany Scheme... only this time the zany scheme doesn't work, and five young people die.
    • It also deconstructs Death Faked for You. If you think this is Crazy Enough to Work, it doesn't.
  • In a like manner, Titus Andronicus can be read as a Deconstruction (or even a Satire) of revenge dramas. The over-the-top blood and gore, and the obvious mental instability of everyone, including the play's purported "heroes," have led some modern audiences to call this play the most "Tarantino-esque" of Shakespeare's works.

By Title:

• Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods spends its first act as simply a retelling of the stories of "Jack and the Beanstalk", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Rapunzel", and "Cinderella", all tied together with the story of a baker and his wife who are cursed with infertility unless they can procure certain items from all four. In the end it looks like everyone's gotten what they want and is happy, but suddenly the narrator announces "To be continued!" Act two begins with the idea that the giant was just minding his own business when Jack came up the beanstalk and killed him, with his wife now out looking for Jack to avenge his death, and just builds from there into an incredibly brutal Anyone Can Die deconstruction of fairy tales.
• M. Butterfly is a deconstruction of the Western fantasy of getting with an Asian chick in general, and Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly in particular.
• Noises Off is a backstage comedy that deconstructs a typical door-slamming sex farce, and how plays work in general, by exploring everything that can go wrong with Nothing On, a poor farce being performed by a troupe of actors. Personal relationships get in the way between cast members and ever the show's director, and by the third act Nothing On descends into a madhouse.
• A Streetcar Named Desire did not deconstruct any genre in particular, but it did deconstruct gender roles, physical relationships, and the American system of social classes in a rather harsh way.
• Urinetown deconstructs a typical Dystopia story. It has downtrodden people fighting to overthrow the oppressive system that heavily taxes and regulates their bathroom usage during a worldwide massive drought. They succeed, but they are so caught up in the "freedom" that they don't control themselves at all and end up squandering all the remaining water.
• The Yeomen of the Guard plays much like any of Gilbert and Sullivan's other comic operas, except the Deus ex Machina never shows up, so everybody gets married to the wrong person.

• Ever After High deconstructs the concept of fairy tales' endings. The characters are the children of fairy tale characters, and they are destined for the same endings as their parents are. Apple White is the daughter of Snow White hence she is sure to get a happily ever after, while Briar Beauty will also sleep for a hundred years, this means she will out live her friends when she wakes up. Meanwhile Raven Queen who is destined to be Apple's Evil Queen doesn't want to be evil and chooses to defy her destiny.

• The well-known Aesop "Be Careful What You Wish For" operates in this way. Person X makes wish Y. Wish Y is granted to person X. Wish Y then manages to have sufficiently negative unintended consequences on person X's life that wish Y now looks like a ridiculous thing to wish for. Thus, Wish Y is deconstructed.
• The trope of the Bumbling Dad came about as a deconstruction/inversion of the Standard '50s Father. The Dysfunctional Family, of which BD is usually the head, was itself a deconstruction/inversion of all those "perfect" (or semi-perfect) Dom Com families of early television.

• The visual novel, War: 13th Day, does an excellent job setting up a YA romance fit for a shoujo with Ambrosia before coldly deconstructing it in the True End. You learn this is not only Wildfire's perception of her but also her fantasy life. Think of it this way: Ambrosia's story is from Wildfire's biased observation, mixed together with her daydreams. The girl is jealous of Ambrosia and, thus, imagines that she has a perfect life. How true is that? We're not sure just yet.

• 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.
• Gameoverse (2026): deconstructs the premise of "alterate universe where videogames are real" seen in shows like Captain N: The Game Master or Wreck-It Ralph by adding real consequences. What happens if the player beats a game? Well, there's no point in playing it anymore and it just takes up space on your computer so you might as well delete it, right? The main character, Kit is a former PC who somehow survived her game getting uninstalled and broke free from the players control, now she's trying to stop the other PC's from destroying the Gameoverse by rescuing characters from near completed games and teaming up with various games final bosses to protect their video game worlds.
• 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).
• Lacey Games deconstructs the idea of media content that looks innocent and inviting to kids but is actually deeply disturbing, especially those found on the internet. Lacey, the Author Avatar of the in-universe co-creator Rocío Yani, is a deeply disturbed individual holding massive amounts of trauma about violence and sexual abuse, with the implication that Lacey's in-game experiences are just reflections of Rocío's troubled life. The series also explores how disturbing it is for children to innocently wander into websites only to be greeted with such content, as the story portrays it as the source of much controversy a la "Elsagate". The other co-creator, Grace Asop, is rightfully horrified by Rocío's content, Grace trying to distance herself from Rocío after the controversies come to light.
• ONE. (2020) 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Sonny Gets Mad Scienced takes a Deconstructive Parody approach to 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.
• Stardestroyer.net deconstructs the seemingly utopian Star Trek universe, pointing out holes.

• 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.
• Dropout: Wacky Hijinks from 80s Comedies Were Mostly Rape deconstructs the Sex Comedy based around treating raunchy behavior that would be illegal in real life as humorous, by having a trio discuss plans to prank their co-workers lifted directly from films such as Revenge of the Nerds, only for one of them to point out that they would be committing sex crimes.
• 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.
• This video is a deconstruction of 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.
• 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."
• 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.
• 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?
• 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.
• "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.

• Reductio ad absurdum is one of the major proof techniques; a style of argument that does this to its opposition. It takes the opponent's argument and logically follows it through to an absurd or indefensible conclusion.
• Subvertising, as the name would suggest, does this to the Advertising industry by using graffiti or parody ads to criticize the company trying to sell things to people. Often, this is done by revealing the ugly side of their business operations, including turning the otherwise pretty, polished advertisement into something grotesque. Other times, artists criticize advertising tactics themselves, which are perceived as propaganda, and replace them with a pointed anti-consumerist message. Since defacing or replacing ads is treated as vandalism by most cities, subvertising tends to be done anonymously and through guerilla tactics. Prominent proponents of subvertising include the Canadian magazine Adbusters (which is most famous for instigating Occupy Wall Street) and the British-originated Brandalism group.