I'd like to ask for an explanation of themes and trope-deconstruction. Could I get a breakdown of those terms?
I’ve been sitting on this ask for a while because I wanted to use examples that are both succinct but also meaningful. However, my brain is constantly being in 18 different directions so I should just do it while I have a brief aside of focus. If I get too ‘teacher-mode’ in any of this, please let me know.
Theme, of course, refers to the central message or subject in a creator’s narrative or media. It, however, does differentiate from the notion of ‘What is this thing About?’
Because while you can say something like ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender is a saga about a young boy who can control the elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air training to save the world from a cruel dictator from an Empire of Fire with the help of his friends and allies’, that doesn’t necessarily touch upon it’s themes of loss, friendship, growth, and communication (amongst many others).
Let’s look at something like Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon (Vanilla Version). What are the games’ narratives? You move to a tropical nation where you immerse yourself in the culture by befriending supernatural creatures and participating in the nation’s coming of age ceremony all the while said nation is currently trying to implement aspects from other nations (i.e.: creating a formal competition league) and there’s some suspicious happenings going on in the background. However, again, that summation doesn’t necessarily go into the themes of broken families, mental health, borderline colonization (I say borderline because it isn’t as egregious as it seems in Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon), and growth (amongst others).
Another way to look at theme is to think about what a creator is trying to say with their content without blatantly putting it in black and white.
Trope Deconstruction is any attempt (successful or not) at taking a well-established literary trope and subverting or rearranging it to create something new or a new take on an established set of themes.
For examples of this... I could mention Spec Ops: The Line but I don’t want my Activity to be filled with an month-long debate about that game again, so...:
-Undertale being a massive deconstruction of your typical RPG, not just with the ‘you don’t have to kill anyone’ aspect, but also with the overall meta-approach to morality.
-We also have Doki Doki Literature Club and Hatoful Boyfriend which, of course, start out as your typical, quirky visual novels but then have one turn into a psychological horror deconstruction of VN tropes and the other Deconstruct all the quirk of being a sole human in a school for birds into a thriller narrative of past misdeeds, abuse, and political espionage.
-One minute but still poignant example would be in Mattel’s now-defunct series Ever After High. While the entire series could be labeled as a Deconstruction of the Tropes relating to classic fairy tale characters, one example that people remember is a certain scene near the end of the Thronecoming special. Apple White, daughter of Snow White, is put into the same sleep that her mother was put under.
In a mad dash of tears and fourth-wall breaks, the character Daring Charming (one of Prince Charming’s sons) comes to fill his role in kissing her awake... Just for nothing to happen. After numerous tries and murmurs of unrest and unease rolling through the student body, Daring’s sister Darling Charming forces her way through and forcibly gives Apple a very intimate bout of CPR which wakes her up immediately. This is a Deconstruction of the whole ‘Sleeping Princess Awoken by a Charming Prince’ motif.
-I’d also add in the play M. Butterfly (not Madame Butterfly, but M. Butterfly) which is a deconstruction of the themes presented in the original Madame Butterfly opera where a Japanese woman falls in love, marries, and is completely devoted to a white US navy officer who leaves back to America shortly after the wedding just to come back years later with a fancy American wife: utterly destroying our titular character to the point that she kills herself. M. Butterfly deconstructs all of this by focusing on a French Embassy worker who falls head-over-heels in love with a Chinese opera singer without realizing that in the traditional Beijing Opera field all female roles are performed by men. Said opera singer also turns out to be a spy for the Chinese government who seduced our main character to extract political secrets from him.
(Sidenote: To anyone who’s followed me for a while and knows how much the phrase ‘Remember! There is no Homosexuality in Red China!!’ makes me laugh, this is where it comes from)
The play ends with our main character, after having been humiliated and his wife back home leaving him and other characters snickering behind his back about ‘did he just... not notice a penis whenever they were having sex, or..?’, becoming a mentally broken mess who puts on his ‘Butterfly’s’ kimono and makeup and ends up killing himself.
So, yeah: I hope that this helps clear up what I was talking about when I mentioned those two terms.
