My personal favorite for flawed reasons is Madoka because I was there for the live reactions to the infamous episode and it was magical watching everyone lose their shit. It was also my re-introduction to anime after being shamed out of it for liking sailor moon as a kid.
Since im a mecha head letme give you my favorite deconstruction of the genre,
EvangelionPatlabor. You can also argue that the original Gundam in 1979 deserves the deconstruction label much more than Eva when seen in context of the super robot genre that dominated for a decade leading to itIn general 90% of the time you hear an anime being talked as a genre "deconsturction" it really isnt and that takes nothing away from said shows. Its a buzzword at this point that was ascribed to shows by fandoms and people wanting it and them to feel intellectually more mature and superior to other stuff in the genre and is now taken as a fact. Mainly for stuff like Eva, HxH and even Madoka to a degree. It often comes from a lack of exposure or knowledge in the western fandom of the history of those genres in anime and what other stuff inspired and led to these shows .With dozens of shows doing the stuff Eva or Madoka are called "deconstructions" for but less polished or focused on them.
Subverting or breaking of from existing genre trends or focusing more on the darkest and more mature aspects of the genre doesnt make an anime a decunstruction . It usualy amounts to "<Show X> is different from other shows in its genre, little of which I have actually seen, and i have seen people call it a deconstruction so its that" and comes from other people having terminal TV Tropes brain and labeling stuff as such
If you go and suggest to anyone involved with lets say the creation of Eva , and especially my large adult son Anno, that Evangelion is a deconstruction fo mecha they would :jesse-wtf:
I think a lot of the "Eva is deconstruction of the mecha genre" discourse is due to the limited amount of mecha anime that was easily accessible at the time it initially got popular outside of Japan. People would have seen, like, Gundam Wing (lol), original Gundam, Robotech, and maybe bits of pieces of random things (I distinctly remember seeing a few episodes of old Tetsujin #28 as "Gigantor").
Now we have easy access to all the deep cuts and can see it has always been sad boys with parental issues forced into the robot (at least as long as Tomino has been around).
i think eva genuinely does have some deconstructive elements to it, but they're focused on the high school drama/romcom side of things. part of it is definitely the influence eva would have on those genres and it's hard to say just how much, but shinji's relationships with asuka and rei comes across as kind of a vicious satire on that sort of wish fulfillment high school fantasy that was starting to really take off
anno definitely wouldn't agree that eva deconstructs mecha, the mecha side of things is mostly fairly straightforward, but i bet he'd be willing to agree that it's at least partly a criticism of that sort of otaku brain.