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

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

Tabletop Games

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

Real Life

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