Modern media creators act like "deconstructing" film genres is some bold new amazing concept. Chaplin winked at the camera in 1915. Keaten climbed INTO a movie screen in 1924. The Marx Brothers told the audience to go buy popcorn in the middle of the movie. Deconstruction is nearly as old as cinema itself.

Particularly Westerns and superheroes, perhaps because they've been a major target of deconstruction of late. When's the last Western that WASN'T "deconstructed"?

Spiderman himself was originally a deconstruction of comics. For westerns, we can go back to the 1940s & 50s with Destry Rides Again and The Big Country, both of which analyzed and deconstructed the genre.

Unforgiven and Deadpool were of course also deconstructions. BUT they were also done with love for that genre, and it showed. They didn't hurt the underlying ideas behind the films. You can watch Deadpool and yet it doesn't retroactively ruin Christopher Reeves' Superman.

The difference in The Boys, Watchmen, and V for Vendetta is that these deconstructions don't (to me) feel like they were done in love. They feel like attacks, tearing down the concept dea of superheroes, and succeeding.

Compare the film Unbreakable to Watchmen. Unbreakable LOVES superheroes. Even the villain's evil is because he loves superheroes, but it doesn't change that superheroes are awesome. But Watchmen's supposed "heroes" are arrogant elitists that no one can sympathize with. The one guy everyone likes (Rorschach) is supposed to be a villain in the eyes of the creator, which shows how far off the superhero reservation he has mentally wandered.