I ask this because the other day my oldest brother who is a total normie (plus in his teen years he was busy with one lady after the next while in my teen years I was researching UFO cases, reading sci-fi and buying classic rock and RnB records) was telling me about The Boys and was shocked that I wasn't watching it. I told him that I have some of the comic book and they are fine but that at this point I am just so sick of deconstruction or subversion.
I have the the Watchmen comic by Alan Moore and his life views aside it is a great comic. The only problem is that it spawned to this day so many "what if super heroes were bad" or "dark and gritty side of super heroes" stories. My two worst cases of these modern trends are the Last Jedi because I think Rian Johnson is a typical hollywood douchebag who thinks you aren't smart if you don't appreciate his movies and I question his motivations because I don't think he would give a beloved female character the "Luke treatment". Another example would be Ayra killing the Night King in Game of Thrones because while I enjoy her character in the books I can't help but think that their motivation was girl power and to say "well everyone expected Jon to fight the Night King" is a terrible reason to not do it.
Some good examples off the top of my head are Yoda in Empire Strikes back because it was an interesting surprise to see a little green guy after hearing about a great warrior/Jedi master, but there was a lesson there. Also, in the first Ice and Fire book or Game of Thrones season 1 I didn't see Ned Stark being executed because I thought he would be the main character throughout. Granted there is a pretty sad lesson there about the consequences of doing the right thing and being honest.
What are your examples?
Your comment on Watchmen applies to all the "good" instances I can think of: mildly interesting, but overall not worth it.
DS9: critiques/deconstructs the utopia depicted in all other ST shows. While very good itself, it pulled its biggest punch (humanizing Dukat) and ultimately paved the way for the Trek shitstorm we're nearing the second decade of.
Miller's Dark Knight comics: not so much deconstruct as play lethally straight. I've always been fond on his eldritch horror take on Plastic Man.
I suppose this would qualify as a subversion of expectations, but Farscape is categorically excellent. I'd say the first two seasons are perfect television. The subversion being that, often, the status quo doesn't return after 43 minutes. Especially the, uh, thing that happens at the start of season 3.
They didn't just pull that punch, they turned it around and turned Dukat (one of the most interesting characters in the series) into a 1-dimensional sociopathic cartoon character.
I'm one of the apparently weird people who didn't even care for the Dominion war ... I never really had any sense of how well they were doing, it always just seemed like the war was going exactly as well or poorly as it needed to be for the plot to happen. And it was never clear just how relatively powerful the Dominion was to the Federation; initially even the tiny Dominion fighters were able to completely outclass the Federation forces ... but somehow they didn't just immediately overwhelm them when the war started.
I just didn't like that, despite the long story arc, I never really felt like I knew what was going on. Things just happened because they needed to happen so the writers could get themselves out of the corners they'd painted themselves into.
I think the Dominion War suffers under repeat viewings. When binged, the disjointed structure of the last two seasons is jarringly apparent.
They definitely over-powered the Jem'Hadar on introduction. There was the kamikaze run on the Galaxy class, but also the whole personal cloaking thing.
I was a huge fan of Dukat accidentally becoming the protagonist of the series. I was also a fan of Dukat's descent into madness and it would've been interesting (if not necessarily good) if disappearing into the ion storm was the last we saw of him, as they originally planned.
The whole pah wraiths thing, in fact all of Sisko's whole Bajoran conclusion, is cringe as balls. The conclusions for the rest of the cast had appropriate gravitas, but the Bajor stuff was just goofy.
Farscape was excellent. I need to read Miller’s complete dark knight. I only have where he fights Superman and I haven’t read that in a long time.
DS9 was very well written. I haven’t seen any Nu Trek but I hear Picard season 3 was good
S3 is literally the same garbage, but the references are one degree more subtle.