Twitter / X - The tea is piping hot today 🍵

I guess this is referring to the recent trend of parodies/deconstruction?

Maybe I haven't played enough games, but this never seemed like a problem to me. I'd much rather prefer a story that acknowledges its silly elements but still rolls with them instead of just blindly going with those silly elements. Self-awareness is generally better than nothing at all.

The issue comes with stuff that just degrades its own genre and acts superior about it. Stuff like Banjo and Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts that shits on its origins and then try to be "better" than it.

In comparison, stuff like Undertale, DDLC or MGQ deconstructs their genre yet still embrace said genre (to a degree at least). It's closer to an affectionate parody than a vile caricature.

Yahtzee said it best when he talked about the whole meta narrative thing: "Undertale had earned it by that point." And… honestly while a bit out of context but still rather close to what we're talking about here, I can definitely agree. You can't half ass this meta-stuff. You want to deconstruct or reconstruct a trope? Great! Now put effort into doing that instead of just pointing out flaws and doing them anyways. Or worse, deconstruct tropes without understanding why they exist in the first place, you might just make your example so much darker than intended that it seems more like a parody than a deconstruction.