Construction Is Awesome

Rebuilding Earth ought to be a lot more fun than ruining it was.

—Doom 2 ending

Destruction is cool. Construction requires time, effort, planning, lots of minute stages, coordination... and there are seldom enemies and villains to defeat. The only antagonist is ourselves, our own flaws and laziness and that's not something people like to confront. A straight-up battle that ends with the destruction of evil is more entertaining and dramatic, and less self-accusatory. However, some works manage to portray creation and construction and raising as activities deserving of awe and respect, and the hard work they involve is represented as dignifying rather than demeaning.

There are various ways this can be shown, usually through;

• Architecture.
• Gaias Revenge and other Green phenomena.
• Geological formations.
• Industry, Labor, and Craftsmanship. More awesome if robots are involved. It's what they've been invented for.
• Weapon Construction: A special sort of example: the construction of tools of destruction takes some of its awe from the use the creation is intended for.
• Creating Life and Building Systems.
• ... Or something that defies classification altogether.

Occasional parodied with people building much faster than physical possible or lacking organisation having Hilarity Ensues.

Related to Creation Sequence, Hard Work Montage, A-Team Montage, and maybe a Forging Scene. Also, apparently, Building Is Welding, because it's showy, flashy, and manly.

Examples of Construction Is Awesome include:

Anime and Manga

• In My Neighbor Totoro, the Forest God and the kids magically grow a few seeds into a MASSIVE World Tree. In the morning, the tree is gone, but the seeds have germinated abnormally fast.
• In Origin: Spirits of the Past, in what is probably the most beautiful opening for an anime movie ever, the genetic engineering of super-powered plants on the moon is juxtaposed to their subsequent explosive growth to the point that THE MOON IS SPLIT IN HALF, burning reentry into Earth's atmosphere, and growing to cover all of the planet. It combines the Creation and Growth aspects of this trope with Destruction Is Cool.
• Franky from One Piece clearly puts a lot of heart into everything he builds, as do the workers from Water 7. His mentor Tom builds "With a don!"
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, alchemy makes construction (and repairs) very easy, but cool-looking nonetheless.

Comics

• The various stages of the creation of Iron Man's armour.
• Parodied in Asterix and Cleopatra where the latter task an architect with the building of a palace for Caesar in just three months. An impossible task so he hole the druide Getafix whose magic potion suddenly make the construction work much faster with the now super strong workers throwing the giant stone blocks between each other.
• Also parodied a pair of times with Boom Towns in Lucky Luke with people running around with half houses, a saloon owner building the saloon around the already waiting costumers, an entire city build without streets and so on.

Film

• Every time you see an underwater volcano surging from the ocean to become an island.
• There was that... huge... geological thing Lex Luthor used in Superman Returns.
• Some of the stuff the protagonist uses in Tron once he regains his Admin powers.
• A major theme in Tron: Legacy.
• The construction of the Death Star. The construction of the Clone Army. The construction of Lord Vader. In the latter cases may border on What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome? ("Do Not Want.")
• Flashdance has some cool welding sequences. WHAT A FEELING!. The inaccuracy of the way welding was depicted was mocked in The Full Monty.
• Kind of An Aesop in Office Space, where the hero quits his stressful, unsatisfying desk job and finds working at a construction site much more fulfilling in the end.
• The barn raising in Witness. Parodied in The Simpsons episode where they get a pool.

Literature

• In The Lord of the Rings, the reforging of the sword Narsil into Anduril, the forging of the Nine, the Seven, the Three and the One, the creation and armament of Saruman's army.
• The entire plot The Pillars of the Earth centers around the expansion/reconstruction of Philip's church into a massive cathedral.

Music

• WORK IT, MAKE IT, DO IT, MAKES US, HARDER BETTER FASTER STRONGER, MORE THAN EVER HOUR AFTER, OUR WORK IS NEVER OVER.

Tabletop Games

• The mindset of your average dwarves.
• In the lore of Dungeons & Dragons 4e, this is Erathis' paradigm.
• The Alchemical Exalted has becoming a metropolis/patropolis as their final stage of evolution. In their case, they are so Awesome, they become Construction.

Video Games

• The point of virtually all city-building games. Pharaoh has you building pyramids (sometimes more than one in a single city), while providing (by ancient standards) ridiculously high living standard for your citizens.
• Some Tycoon games, i.e. Railroad Tycoon.

Western Animation

• In Dumbo, a circus is "built". During a storm. By faceless burly black dudes. And elephants. It is awesome.
• In The Prince of Egypt, this is subverted: the Pharaonic monuments are impressive, but they are built with slave labor.
• In A Troll in Central Park, the entirety of Big Applesauce is invaded by flower plants.
• The scene in the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "Tales of Ba Sing Se", when Aang builds a new zoo compound using earthbending.
• In Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels, the Liliputians binding Gullliver and transporting him to town.
• The mice and birds making Cinderella's dress in Disney's Cinderella.
• The climax of Ferngully the Last Rainforest, in which Crysta and the other fairies cause a tree to grow around Hexus, imprisoning him again.
• Merrie Melodies short "Rhapsody in Rivets", in which a skyscraper is built to music, with the foreman acting as a Cartoon Conductor.
• Phineas and Ferb building their inventions, all the time.

Real Life

• Socialist Realism is all about this.
  • Behold, GLORIOUS MOTHER ^{[dead link]} RUSSIA!