There’s some much cynical shit these days that attempts to parody and deconstruct any and all forms of classic pop culture and its gotten really tiring which just begs the question? When are we gonna get deconstructions of these same old deconstructions, when are we gonna get something parodying people’s need to make an evil superman or to make cartoons dark and bloody.
De-deconstructions
Daniel Young
Logan Diaz
That's not really how it works. Adding more cynicism to cynicism doesn't change it.
>Evil Superman
Evil Superman, like all horror villains, are a manifestation of culture's mass subconscious fear. The current subconscious fear is that the powerful and those in authority are actively malicious and far too powerful to stop, hence evil Superman.
>Parodying needlessly dark/bloody comics
You're like 40 years too late, that's what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was
Oliver Nguyen
"New Sincerity" is the term you are looking for.
Levi Butler
I mean less needlessly dark/bloody comic and more all those kids cartoon parodies that make it adult because that’s somehow parody like “what if bugs bunny actually got shot by elmer” or “what if mario did drug” or hell, even the new chip and dale movie that just came out with peter pan as the villain, hell, that’s not even mentioning pibby or those barney and winnie the pooh horror movies currently in the making
Levi Walker
We won;t get that. The most of the writers of today don't know what a "better world" actually would entail or how we would get there. They can't visualise or put into words which would be "good".
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There is a reason why all guys like Dan Harmon does is criticise other people's work or parody it. Because he has no idea how to create something of his own.
It's the same with Evil Superman, the Boys comic, Mark Millar's comics, etc. These won't end for a long time because none of the writers coming through have no ideas of their own. The best that they can do is deconstruct the ideas of someone else and even then, they can barely do that, because again, they have nothing interesting to say beyond "Isn't X stupid, laugh sheeple!"
Brandon Ward
A better term is "reconstruction," they acknowledge the darker idea but choose to be more optimiatic instead.
Jeremiah Powell
That is... genuinely a really good question. Kudos OP!
But no, it's not exactly people parodying tropes that is the problem, it's that they're terrified of being the butt of the joke. No one wants to play it straight, so you end up in this bizarre situation that everyone is commenting on genres that don't currently exist. Japanese media will make comments on how hackneyed their story is but they seem to be doing fine.
I wonder if this got its start on Livejournal or something. I was going through the Limyaael Rants archive and I'm noticing a lot of her advice either just seems to be kneejerk reactions to overly common cliches. It's very superficial criticism without any understanding of what storytelling is.
>When are we gonna get deconstructions of these same old deconstructions
Nah, that's not how it works. You deconstruct deconstructions by making something that's pointedly, unabashedly fun.
Eli Peterson
>Japanese media will make comments on how hackneyed their story is but they seem to be doing fine.
A shocking amount of recent Western media just seems to be "I don't know a lot about this Japanese product [anime or adventure games/visual novels in particular] but I'm going to poke fun at my generalisation of it"
Evan Brooks
No I mean the Japanese creators are poking fun at their own tropes. Despite this self awareness they're not falling into whatever it is that makes post modernism shit.
Liam Bell
Smiling Freinds is doing this sort of. Their show makes fun of cynism. Remember the speech at the end of the Frowning Freinds episode? He peed himself and begged not to be killed after saying nothing mattered. That one joke completely destroyed Rick And Morty.
Xavier Rivera
Nathaniel Butler
Josiah Flores
The opposite of deconstruction is reconstructionism but reconstructionism doesn't really sell and at best is award/critic bait.
Also the best reconstructionist stuff often happens by accident.
>>Venture Brothers started out as a hyper mean spirited deconstruction of Johnny Quest but when Publick and Hammer saw that fans actually CARED about the characters, revamped the show to be a reconstructionist take on the Quest property and super villains.
>>Supreme was a generic deconstruction of Superman; what if Superman was a violent asshole. Alan Moore, who wrote the definitive deconstruction of Superman in Miracleman, was hired to write Supreme and given free reign to do whatever he wanted with the book by character creator Rob Liefeld. Instead of giving Rob a retred of Miracleman, he threw out all previous lore and remade the character into a love letter to the Silver Age Superman which has since become the definitive version of Supreme.
>>Astro City was a throwaway mini-series, NO ONE had any expectations towards that ended up becoming a huge hit in the 90s as far as being a love letter to the Silver and Bronze Age super-heroes in the middle of the Image led "Dark Age" of comics in the 90s.
>>Moral Orel was supposed to be a mean spirited parody of Davey and Goliath but evolved into an American Evangelion; a show about trauma and abuse and one boy's quest to overcome the cycle of abuse while not losing his childlike faith in Christ, in a town where religion was either the source of or a contributing factor in the miseries everyone suffered with.
Easton Hughes
Ironically a Rick and Morty reconstruction could work as a metaphor series for how society fucks up men:
>>Not-Rick rejects his son he had with a one-night stand because Not-Rick is an obnoxious anti-hero super scientist who is just self-aware enough to know he'd be a horrible dad.
>>The son (a gender flipped version of Beth for this version) grows utterly bitter and resentful that his famous father abandoned him to poverty and is a sort of self-defeating fuck up.
>>Not-Rick tries to make it up to his son by blackmailing/brainwashing his son's dream girl (Not-Beth) into falling in love with him/get her pregnant, trapping her in the marriage once the mind manipulation wears off due to the fact that her parents are super strict religious and threaten to disown their daughter if she divorces Gender-Flipped Beth).
>>Their son grows up a cowardly shit because his parents despise each other and both are raging assholes who take out their anger on their kid.
>>Not-Rick goes off planet for a while and comes back to find out that his son and his wife are in a hellish sham marriage that has fucked up his teenage grandson. So he moves in with them in exchange for financially supporting the family and has to unfuck up their lives while dealing with his shattered relationship with his son and his equally fucked up grandson.
Daniel Cooper
>reconstructionism
TTGL is very popular
Leo Johnson
I feel like the writer for venture bros just slowly started caring about the world they made more and more over time, which is why it feels so genuine despite still having being a bit of a parody at the end of the day. It really is one of the few shows on recent memory that felt like it was trying its damndest to do the best they could and put as much heart in as humanly possible.
Noah Myers
Where does something like Wander Over Yonder fall on this deconstruction reconstruction scale?
Aiden Edwards
It's a consequence of copyright being extended beyond any reasonable point, any corporation is going to keep it's intellectual property in the limelight in order for it to retain value, stories aren't told for the sake of anything other than profit, "evil superman" keeps the brand visible, and making a hundred superman stories obviously gets old, because nothing is able to be parsed into a broader cultural canon, it's just endless regurgitating of what's already there, and inevitably you see different variations on this regurgitated thing.
Henry Garcia
>There’s some much cynical shit these days that attempts to parody and deconstruct any and all forms of classic pop culture
Name three.
Liam Robinson
>De-deconstruction
Metamodernism
>Fuck deconstructions, return to monke
New Sincerity
Look up david foster wallace.
Camden Thompson
This is why the horse show struck a chord with people when it was released. Turns out creating a more traditional show free of the sarcastic, irony riddled cynicism actually results in people empathizing with your material.
Carson Nguyen
OK.
Doot do-doot do-doo.
He killed himself. That sucks.
Hmm-hmm-hmm.
>"I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems."
OK, I get this. Just replace TV with internet and it's basically the same today.
What you're getting at pointing us all towards this guy is to say we should make a conscious decision to spend less time consuming bland corporate rehash (and then regurgitating it via complaints) and more time actually looking for something thought provoking or making the content we want to see. Even if our efforts in making what we want to see turn out shitty and ineffective, we should not fear failure or ridicule and carry on in the pursuit of creating the type of stories we want to see.
Tyler Adams
Pic related kinda does that. It does the whole superhero deconstruction thing, but then adds a layer of deconstructing all the edgy superhero deconstruction stuff on top of that
Gavin Stewart
This thread is going to be filled with people bitching about postmodernism like its new without realizing postmodernism is older than the fucking 50s and that all the shit they grew up with counts as postmodernist.
Adam Ortiz
>When are we gonna get deconstructions of these same old deconstructions, when are we gonna get something parodying people’s need to make an evil superman or to make cartoons dark and bloody.
It's called moving on and making something with a purpose instead of lashing out.