Deconstruction of high fantasy

>Of course, that wouldn't be much fun.
But you make it fun, with witch hunts and burnings.

Deconstruction of these threads, how would you do it?

We did that. The players woke up after escaping a zombie apocalypse only to find they were the characters from the game prior to the apocalypse one, and they had been in an enforced coma/dream state.

I wouldn't do it. Deconstruction is a puerile pastime for edgy faggots who want to seem clever (but really aren't).

Endless Legend?

Why is Veeky Forums fixated on beating the same fucking ideas into the ground for years on end and then preen around about how clever they are?

Deconstructions are universally lame. Who the hell wants a deconstruction of fantasy? What's the point?

So people can point at things they don't like and say "Nyah nyah, this is how things would ACTUALLY happen!".

What does deconstruction even mean?

de-construction: to destroy or tear down, the opposite of construction.

Steam power, literacy, constitution, modern agriculture and stuff like that.
Alternate: Same but with magic.

DUDE GOOD NECROMANCERS, BBEG PALADINS, AND REDEEMED SUCCUBI LMAO

The most important part of a deconstruction is to work out all minor details.
Like logistics, birth, childhood, training, core power levels, society structure.

And at some point in the details, the actual details start to show. And those details is the deconstruction.
Like how the Elves are civilized hoarding super murder hobos, or how the gods actually do their jobs.

You mean the apocalypse of a high fantasy setting?

Magic virus kills everything ala eldrazi, and the eldrazi win.

You know, it's where you put on a historical play but everybody is speaking jive and wearing high tops.

... so yeah. Just make that movie with Martin Lawrence into a campaign setting.

>Who the hell wants a deconstruction of fantasy?

This a thousand times.

The "easiest" method of deconstructing anything is to apply its internal logic to its absurd extremes.

Didn't mean to put that quote in but w/e

I won't, it's childish

> There is a lot of magic
> It's a bad thing
Good PCs must work at making the world more mundane. Things of old MUST PASS.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a good example of a fantasy deconstruction, I think. There are even hints of magic and otherworldy things in the epilogue.

Far too vague a thing to deconstruct.

Storytime?

It's when you take a genre or work and apply critical thought to it, exposing its internal logic as absurd. Or at least that's how it's used. For "real" deconstruction, read Derrida.

>Deconstruction
Take your postmodern shit out of here.

Mad reactionary spotted.

Okay so you want to write a deconstruction of fantasy? But then why? What's the point? What's the appeal? Do you really wish to examine how a high fantasy setting would really play out if done more realistically? To which I ask: would such a thing really be fun at the table?

Most people who throw in the word 'deconstruction' only know it via fucking TV Tropes, a website which is basically a breeding ground for pretentious idiotic autist who think they understand writing but only excel at grasping its bad components, generally with no understanding of how said story components actually form a good story. They just see story elements and 'well we gotta tear those apart because...um, I don't know, fight the power or some shit!' without never really understanding why these story components, or tropes, were actually there to begin with.

I'm saying 'take your shit out of here' because odds are whatever will be cooked up will be some really fucking shitty setting that think it is twenty times more clever than it actually is, most probably ran by a really pretentious autistic GM who think he's a genius but is in fact really fucking dumb. Not to mention post-modernism bring its whole baggage of bullshit, a lot of which usually end in the 'high brow' version of the nihilistic teenager who think nothing has any meaning whatsoever.

>Okay so you want to write a deconstruction of fantasy?
No, and since the rest of your post seems to be based on the assumption that I would, I see no reason to read any further.

Fair enough.

I wouldn't deconstructing classic tropes for the sake of deconstruction is pretty boring after all the previous attempts by others.

I'll just do shit the way I want and not really care how other people think about it beyond my immediate player group.

This. If you do it just for the sake of doing it, it come off as fucking pretentious. If you do it in a more natural way, taking one aspect of a fantasy setting and try to make some interesting story based on what could feasibly really happen, then odds are it might work and not just come off as some thought experiment of 'more pretentious and deep than thou'

The reason to break things down to their constituent parts is to look at them and figure out how they work and why. The reason to do that is so when you put them back together, the unified whole can work better than it did before you took it apart.

Of course, most people stop at the "taking apart step," which is universally the most boring part of the whole process.

so..
it's a parody?

By presenting everything in the world in such a way that invokes an amusement park ride with bad animatronics, where all the stuff claimed to be magic sounds hollow because everything can be seen as obviously mundane, and boring, made possible with mundane and boring things
Or at least that's how I'm trying to do it.

>Deconstruction
Define this.

Is it really deconstruction? It's a cooking pot of fantasy, 40k and sci-fi tropes pleasantly subverted, adjusted or left the same

Okay so I just thought one possible way you COULD have a completely and utterly post-modern setting, one where the philosophy (if we can even call it that) is taken to its logical extreme.

Its a scifi-fantasy-whatever setting. Humans have become so utterly indivualistic, living off their own experience with no coherent whole or truth they have basically become truly alien hyper-dimensional-whatever-the-fuck creatures who disregard reality, sanity and the laws of physics. They are the ultimate post-modern and progressive wet dream, a creature so individualistic and weird, living in its own bubble of reality, without anything anyone else can define (Gender? Bitch please, this one define itself by its transdimensional glurmok based on the axiom of colors) wtf they are. Each one is basically a god living by its own rule (and delusion). The problem is that none of these creatures can interact together as each is its own living reality. They're not even evil or misguided, they are just so crazy and weird without anything coherent to them they can't help but be a walking clusterfuck.

I guess PC are part of a group which has enough in common to interact, or the 'primitive' and 'reactionnary' humans who live like post apocalyptic cavemen in the clusterfuck of a world where these things just roam around. Instead of dragons and demons and shit, you got each of these things which was once human but is now some weirdass barely-definable thing which disregard any truth to the world. Like I said, they aren't evil so much as incoherent.

>How would you do it?
Like this:
>The reason to break things down to their constituent parts is to look at them and figure out how they work and why. The reason to do that is so when you put them back together, the unified whole can work better than it did before you took it apart
I basically applied this to my favorite D&D setting, reducing everything to it's base origins, reworking them so that everything, including the magic system made sense intuitively.
It wasn't a Fantasyland parody, it was fantasy deconstructed, then reconstructed.

>shitty people have tricked him into thinking that's what post-modernism actually is

Why do hipsters always ruin everything? Post-modernism is an actually cool and intelligent mode of thought that's had its reputation completely ruined by idiots. It's not a rejection of reality. It's a call to test your ideas against to reality to see if they still hold up, and a plea to let go if them if it turns out that they don't.

Give example And tell us about differences in the reconstructed setting?

Could you tell more of the process, please? How it went down?

Not him, but

Normal Fantasy Setting
>"We beat up the Dark Lord! Hurray, we're heroes!"

Decon Fantasy Setting
>"We beat up the Dark Lord! But the war cost a lot of people their lives, collapsed most of the neighboring kingdoms, we've destroyed more things than we've saved, and the Dark Lord was the only power keeping the hordes of other bad things from invading the world. Now everything sucks and all because we never considered talking to some of the orcs, goblins, demons and imperial soldiers instead of just assuming they were evil to a man and killing them."

Recon Fantasy Setting
>"While it may have taken us longer than we could have to beat up the Dark Lord, and we made a lot of personal sacrifice along the way, we at least took the time on the front lines to protect the neighboring kingdoms from the Dark Lord's armies instead of rushing straight to the castle, accepted small setbacks to avoid undue collateral damage, and found out about all the things the Dark Lord was keeping out before putting our all into the final offense. Maybe things are iffy right now, and we may have lost more than we've gained in the long run, but at least we have a fighting chance. Even if the war isn't over and the real fight has only just started, our end goal hasn't changed. The path will be arduous, but everyone's happy ending is within our grasp."

No, no, that's just taking a setting and turning it into "grim & mature" (i.e. edgy)

Deconstruction would start by asking what role does the Dark Lord serve in the setting, and why he needs to be taken down. This reveals the expectations and unwritten morals of the setting (that the Dark Lord is breaking because he's seen as evil). From there you question whether these are worth upholding, and which should be transgressed against. Then you come back to use these findings to make the power dynamic between the setting, Dark Lord, and the player characters more rich and believable.

> "grim & mature" (i.e. edgy)
How is "oh god we fucked up" and "well things look bad now, but they'll get better" fucking edgy?

Blood Meridian with orcs

>"We beat up the Dark Lord! But the war cost a lot of people their lives, collapsed most of the neighboring kingdoms, we've destroyed more things than we've saved, and the Dark Lord was the only power keeping the hordes of other bad things from invading the world. Now everything sucks
>Now everything sucks
Edgy, is it not?

>Could you tell more of the process, please? How it went down
>Give example And tell us about differences in the reconstructed setting

Well, the best example I have off the top of my head is the races.
I liked the various humanoid races, but their varied and vague origins bothered me.
I started with the traits of the race and their civilization and thought about what conditions would be needed to develop them.
Reducing them to core elements, it seemed unlikely they would share one ancestry.
So the divergent races made sense only if they developed in parallel or if there was design, either divine or by a precursor race.
I chose design.
So I needed creation gods.
Since I had reduced the races to about 8 main races, I chose to start with 8 gods, this matched deconstructing creation myths down to the four elements, then the para-elements.
Separating Earth from Stone helped a lot.
Then I just worked out the story of how we got from 8 gods making 8 races, to the mixed up jumble of life I wanted.
I had the end, and now the beginning , and just needed to construct the middle so it made sense.

>Dwarves:
I deconstructed what I "knew" dwarves needed to be, then I tried to determine what sort of being would eventually develop into that.
I came up with divinely crafted mole people, (so original I know. But once I found that a group of moles is called a "labor" it was over)
But to to explain a race-wide cultural focus on the secular and physical world, I needed a powerful event.
As one of most secularly focused cultures is the formerly religious, I constructed a narrative of a tightly formed, devoutly religious race of developed molemen, betrayed by their God, so they turned to hard work and industry as their salvation.

There are a lot more steps and details, but I'm typing on my phone and I think I gave you the gist.
At any point in the de- or re- construction things could have gone much differently, but each decision made sense and built upon previous ones.

As for how my dwarves are different from the dwarves they started as?
They aren't much different.
The major difference is that at no point are they a certain way, or do a certain thing "because they're dwarves."
There's always a deeper reason that can traced back to the beginning of time If needed.

What the fuck does deconstruction even mean today? Hasn't everything been turned on it's head, inverted already? It almost seems like deconstructing fantasy would to just make it as generic as possibly and invoke ALL of the cliches.

I think I'd take a look at every part and question it, both from within and from outside the setting. "Why? How? What?", that sort of thing. The main point of a deconstruction is to take a closer look at the things people just take for granted, so as to create something that might have a bit more depth even if it's not "realistic".

I'd probably try to research the origins of many fantasy monsters and the different iterations they've gone through, and come up with something using a bit of that. I'd probably need to work out a good system for magic and the higher powers too, and one that didn't make them too mundane.
It's not about turning everything on its head or inverting it, unless you're kind of lazy.

>It's not a rejection of reality.
It is when taking to its 'logical' conclusion,

Usually nowadays 'deconstruction' in literature and media means taking a setting or genre and invert them, or twist several of its tropes. Doesn't necessarily mean applying critical thought per se, since deconstruction can retain the tropes just fine and they can make as little sense as they would originally.

Examples are easiest:
- Evangelion takes old super robot anime and adds a depressing twist by having the lead character be spineless as opposed to heroic.
- Madoka takes magical girl anime and removes the "love conquers all" -element by making the cute little magical animal do faustian contracts.
- Watership Down takes an animal fable and plays it straight by having the natural world be cruel and dangerous.

If you want deconstruction that applies critical thought, a good example would be the movie Ex Machina with its robot waifu trope. Usually that's just stupid, the movie thinks about it a bit and makes it uncomfortable instead.

Dis guys alright

>Evangelion takes old super robot anime and adds a depressing twist by having the lead character be spineless as opposed to heroic.
Gundam and Ideon did it first. And this is coming from an Evangelion fan.

>Fighting on the losing side of a war is about survival rather than victory, and any survival comes at a huge cost.
>Empires regularly subsume the surrounding nations under the banner, by virtue of being empires.
>Rushing to the boss instead of fighting the war means breaking a lot of shit and preserving less shit than you break.
>The fall of an empire tends to lead to a power vacuum that is essentially a breadbasket to every sufficiently-ambitious warlord in the area.
>Edgy

Further proof that the word doesn't mean anything anymore.

You're missing something.

Evangelion is a deconstruction not because Shinji is spineless and unheroic but because he's a FUCKING CHILD BEING TOLD TO FIGHT INVINCIBLE MONSTERS INSIDE A GIANT WEAPON THAT PHYSICALLY HURTS HIM EVERY TIM IT GETS HURT.

That's what a deconstruction is. It goes "hey remember that thing we gloss over for the sake of escapism? What if we didn't gloss over it and actually pointed out how fucked up that is". In Eva's case it was looking at all those old "Little Boy pilots a giant robot and fights monsters" anime and then making you go "You realize a normal child in that situation would be TERRIFIED right?"

How can post-modern thought reject reality when by definition it relies upon reality?

Because it reject all form of truth to become nothing but individualist 'there is no truth' nonsense, where one's lived experiences and how they FEEL about it become more meaningful than the facts of reality.

See: Transgender and otherkin

I don't really like this kind of definition, since it's just kind of adding a weird spin and twist.

Your dark lord setting made me think of Chaika, that seems to do a kind of reconstruction-y thingy.

The setting had a dark lord. He was killed, and the world is at peace for the first time in quite a while. There is no grimderp apocalypose waiting at the turn of a corner, but there was a lot invested in the war. Now the alliances that were keeping the nations unified against a threat are starting to crack. There's a lot of soldiers who are now out of work and wandering the world as adventurers. The war materiel was not destroyed, A postwar restoration agency is trying to clean up all the messes around the continent. Some weird things and weird people are still being seen throughout the land.

It keeps the fantasy spirit, but is not trying to subvert it or run it to the ground. All the tropes are still there. The setting just looked a bit further on "what would happen if x or y" without trying to shit on it.

That doesn't make any sense, most because that isn't what it does. What you're describing is something else that has been mislabeled post-modernism by either you or someone else.

Transgenderism and feminist theory is heavily rooted in post-modernism, where they basically look at the order of things and go 'we have to reject it all because its ruled by white men and all creations of the white man is bad'. Then they jettison all form of science, reason or logic because those are deemed to be social constructs.

That's how I'd put it. When you deconstruct something you want to find or look at something that wasn't made apparent before. In the process you'll usually find some ideas you like, and you can take it as far as you like.

The TV tropes is strong ITT

>Madoka takes magical girl anime and removes the "love conquers all" -element

Madoka LITERALLY uses the power of love to become a god-like entity, then Homura also used it to rewrite reality so she could spend time with her waifu.

dumb troper

Tropers only recognize tropes but do not understand how they function or interact.

This is a good point. I retract my case from above, at least partially.

But I still feel a deconstruction doesn't mean something has to be critical. It can just twist one or several elements and try to think what would happen without intentionally trying to remove what was enjoyable in the tropes in the first place.

As an ignoramus, how would one begin to understand tropes and how and why they work and interact. I'm an aspiring writer and I believe that one of my faults is that I don't understand enough of what makes good stories good

What, in your opinion, was the world like before post-modernism?

>Transgenderism and feminist theory is heavily rooted in post-modernism

[citation needed]

feminism is a plague

What someone did with something and what that something is aren't the same thing. Post-modernism is the logical extension of critical thinking. It's not about rejection. It's about doubt. Like, do the people in charge of us have our best interests at heart, and if not, who can we put in charge who does? Is it possible that the beliefs and values I've been raised to have are completely out of context with reality and should they be replaced with something more relevant? Modernism was about how everything old is great and nothing new will ever be better than what we've had before, and post-modernism is about how we should seriously consider whether or not the old stuff was wrong, throw it against a wall, keep the good and discard the bad. What other belief systems or modes of thought arose from it as the result of other people's actions says more about those people than it does about post-modernism.

>"It was all a dream!"

Why are you asking me?

Postmodernism is an artistic movement and has no ideological bias in itself, apart from a general rejection of absolutes and universals.

What you're talking about is more "critical theory," which is basically Marxist concepts applied to non-economic matters. Critical theory is not postmodern in itself, and in many cases runs antithetical to postmodern thought because of its desire to explain and compartmentalize.

>I wouldn't do it. Deconstruction is a puerile pastime for edgy faggots who want to seem clever (but really aren't).
what about reconstruction?

No, wait. I'm mistaking modernism with something else. Modernism was "we have to break out of tradition and make something new, right now because what we have now sucks!" and post-modernism was all "There's nothing new under the sun, so we should take what we have already, look at it with our future-eyes and rebuild it with our future-hands so it can at least suck a little less and maybe even be pretty good."

TO EVERYONE THAT DONT KNOW WHAT A DESCONSTRUCTION OR RECONSTRUCTION IS, SEE PIC

By reading/viewing/consuming the works instead of relying on a wiki. You should be able to spot emergent patterns.

Basically going "Remember how this stuff edgy people now deem passé? Yeah it was pretty cool."

That's basically "new sincerity."

Obviously not because I'm curious.

This: while a wiki is useful, relying solely on some autistic need to quantify everything. Its one thing to have a list of tropes of a genre and another to actually see them in action, how they work and why they work.

Its like saying you understand, for example, mecha anime when you've only see Evangelion and Gurren Lagann but you've read a lot of TV Tropes entry about other show. Having read TV Tropes entries but later having watched the show which has an entry, I can tell you that reading the wiki entry is definately not the fucking same as watching a shitton of old anime. The latter is a much more enjoyable and organic experience which cannot be reduced to a mere list of tropes.

Reconstruction is realizing that even though becoming a cyborg ninja means you're no longer really human and can never really be human again, you have finally fulfilled your childhood dream of becoming a cyborg ninja, which is completely fucking awesome.

Adding to this: TV Tropes should be AT BEST something which help you further enjoy a show if you are into all this pattern stuff. Yet it is more and more used as a medium unto itself, where people converse solely in and about story patterns without actually enjoying the material itself. Even worse, sometimes it lead to a shitty form of self-referential writing which only rely on self-reference.

Its like reading only books about India without ever taking a trip to see India for yourself.

A deconstruction does not have to be the first of its kind, I believe. Watership down probably isn't the first one to do what it did either.

That's absolutely fucking retarded.
If I were one of the players, I'd feel extremely cheated.

Additionally, reading a lot is, apart from writing a lot, the only way to make yourself a good writer. You have to learn to understand what makes stories tick, and the only way to do that is to read that shit - even the ones that are boring, thick and hard.

I might sound like I'm coming from Veeky Forums, but trust me, most of the classics are classics for a reason - they did something new or better than their predecessors, and because you can't imitate inspiration, many have not been surpassed.

>You have to learn to understand what makes stories tick
Exactly, which is not something you can learn off the 'Troper' mentality. They see only bare components and what they are not what they do.

This post gave me cancer.

Seconding - if you want to be a good writer, I don't think something like TVTropes is going to help you one bit. It's more like a "spot element x" -catalogue & bingo for fans.

Just read shitloads of books. Write down the elements and things that you think made you enjoy them so that you're consciously forced to think about it. Think of how you would possibly modify these elements. When you read even more and see someone else doing what you wanted to do, you can analyze whether or not it was satisfying afterall.

Actually, just kidding.

The only way to become a good writer is to write a lot, even when you don't feel like writing, publish it somewhere and get rekt. You have to ignore the "kill urself faget" -feedback and concentrate on the people who actually point out things. The best feedback is kind of mean and makes you a bit embarrassed on the things you yourself deep down know you did like shit. Having that warm flush of embarrassment and shame will keep you from doing the same mistakes again.

You could also possibly try to read amateur fiction threads in Veeky Forums if you can stomach the board.

>boring, thick and hard
>not long, thick and hard

You had one job, user.

But seriously, this. You don't learn how stories work until you expose yourself to stories, and you can't just expose yourself to the stories you like. You should be able to learn something from every work you consume, good or bad, even if all you learn is what mistakes you should avoid.

Hey that picture made me think of a cool fantasy setting.
Probably been done alrdy but oh well.

World dominated by giants where humanoids don't have castles and fancy shit like civilization because the giants manipulate and dictate so much of the environment. Instead humans are more nomad orientated and parasitic towards the giants. Maybe they use the giants as home/transport. Magic will come from the gia... you know what dis sounds pretty gud I'm gonna write it down.