History SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped / Literature

* ''Literature/TheLostHonourOfKatharinaBlum'': Journalists have a responsibility to report events fairly and ethically, and failure to do so can lead to tragedy, as it did in the case of the title character. Considering how often people have seen their lives ruined by this kind of irresponsible reporting in real life, that's a pretty heavy anvil.

** However, it must be noted that the novel suffers a bit from CommonKnowledge caused by AdaptationDecay. It's still Anvilicious, but a modern reader may be surprised by finding nuances like grayer character Augustine St. Claire, a sympathetic slaveowner that is almost like a snarky Liberal, but is too passive and cynical to act on his antipathy towards the institution.

* ''Literature/PeterPan'' (the original book, anyway) drops two anvils: first, when we grow up, [[GrowingUpSucks if we forget our childhoods we'll forget important qualities along with them]] (like [[TheWorldIsJustAwesome awe and wonder at the world]], for example). But second, if [[NotGrowingUpSuck we never grow up, we'll miss out on important adult pleasures, like the love between husband and wife that Peter Pan will never enjoy]].

* ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' and ''Literature/AnimalFarm'', both by Creator/GeorgeOrwell, with an anvil of "Totalitarianism is bad." You have the villains doing the horrible things they do ''literally'' ForTheEvulz. The thing is, like all examples on this page, ''it works.'' The world of 1984 is insanely horrifying and bleak, and yet disturbingly credible at the same time, with parallels that can be drawn in the real world. Which means while the world is ridiculous, we're too scared to laugh.
** Orwell's message, like "Slavery is bad" from Harriet Beecher-Stowe's ''Literature/UncleTomsCabin'' or "Hitler is bad" from Chaplin's ''[[Film/TheGreatDictator Great Dictator]]'', seems obvious today and saying so in an unsubtle way may seem somewhat silly. Not so at the time it was published. These were times that needed strong, effective propaganda against these very real evils. These unsubtle works may have done more real good than any great, subtle art. Though the point these novels were making may seem clearly obvious today, it's important to note that ''Animal Farm'' and ''1984'' were published in the 1940's, when Stalin was still regarded by a good deal of the general public in the West as a hero due to his support in World War II, and many members of the Western intelligentsia were enraptured by or at minimum genuinely sympathetic to the Communist Soviet political system. ''Animal Farm'' in particular was written during the War and initially had difficulty getting published because of pro-Soviet sentiment in Britain at the time. Also in ''Animal Farm'', [[FullCircleRevolution it's not very hard for one oppressive government to rise from the ashes of another]].
* ''Literature/TheAdventuresOfHuckleberryFinn'' has Huck's undisputed SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome drop a much-needed anvil about standing up for what you believe and [[ScrewTheRulesImDoingWhatsRight doing the right thing]]. Huck's friend, a runaway slave named Jim, has been captured. Huck intends to go save him, but - having grown up in a slave-owning society - he believes that helping Jim escape would be grand theft, and rescuing Jim would condemn his soul to Hell. Huck [[ShutUpHannibal concludes]], "All right, I'll ''go'' to Hell, then!" What's especially awesome about it, and what makes it such a powerful anvil? Huck honestly believed he would go to Hell for rescuing Jim. ''[[YouAreWorthHell Huck does it anyway]]. '' In short, it's called the greatest phrase ever in American literature for a reason.

* Chris Crutcher's young adult novels (''Running Loose, Stotan!, The Crazy Horse Electric Game, Chinese Handcuffs, Literature/StayingFatForSarahByrnes, Ironman, Whale Talk, The Sledding Hill'', and ''Deadline'') all drop anvils, but the one that appears in all these books? Child abuse is '''bad'''. Not just beatings, but verbal and emotional abuse is also given a lot of attention, especially in ''Ironman'' and ''Whale Talk''. Given how prevalent Parental Abuse is in RealLife, not only does this anvil need to be dropped, one could argue that it isn't being dropped anywhere '''near''' ''enough''.

* ''"Literature/TheLottery"'' shows us that just because something is "tradition" does ''not'' automatically make it good and right.

* Terry Pratchett's early ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' novel ''Small Gods'' deals with the difference between believing in God and believing in church. The only character who still believes in Om at the novel's start is a naive young boy, while His church controls an entire nation. The anvil is illustrated in the comparison between simple, honest Brutha and KnightTemplar Deacon Vorbis, who is ready to incite holy war with anyone and everyone, despite the fact that Om Himself states point blank that holy war was never His intention, even more so in the distant future of the ending: [[spoiler: Vorbis dies when Brutha is just a boy, but without his "belief" to guide him, waits between the land of the living and the dead for nearly a century, until Brutha also dies and leads him to the afterlife.]] The overarching message seems to be that if one twists religious scripture to suit one's own selfish desire, it becomes a completely different body of work.

* ''Literature/TheSwordOfTruth'' is a DoorStopper twelve-book series of AuthorFilibuster from the fourth book on, about the evils of extreme Socialism and of the importance of individual rights and freedom. Although the D'Haran Empire under Richard is no less of an autocracy than the Imperial Order, it is one guided by a firm sense of individual liberty championing the idea that every individual should be the best that they can be, and should be free to benefit based on the effort they put in and the skills they possess, and how this benefits society as a whole. By contrast, people under the Imperial Order are living in absolute squalor, and there is a fear of being anything more than mediocre to avoid rising above anyone else and drawing undue attention and punishment from those in power, and how this drags down all of society with it.
** It is also an [[AlternativeCharacterInterpretation excellent illustration]] of how badly [[DontShootTheMessage your point can be mishandled]] if it comes in the shape of a poorly-written, [[StrawCharacter Strawman Political]]-infected book that casts pacifists as evil, and the importance of rejecting limited, Manichean, black-and-white thinking in favour of acknowledging the complexity of reality.
* ''Literature/PeterPan'' (the original book, anyway) drops two anvils: first, when we grow up, if we forget our childhoods we'll forget important qualities along with them (like awe and wonder at the world, for example). But second, if we never grow up, we'll miss out on important adult pleasures, like the love between husband and wife that Peter Pan will never enjoy.

* ''The Jungle''. The protagonist Jurgis goes through nearly every possible disaster a working-class citizen of his time can possibly suffer, with his child even drowning in the muddy streets, and Sinclair's intent becomes quite clear in the final chapters, which attempt to set up the Socialist party as saviors. Of course, it was the depiction of what goes into meat that ended up hitting the general public and sticking with us. As Mr. Sinclair himself remarked, "I aimed for America's heart and I hit them in the stomach." The book was ''solely'' responsible for the Meat Inspection Act of 1919.

* ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' and ''Literature/AnimalFarm'', both by Creator/GeorgeOrwell, with an anvil of "Totalitarianism is bad." You have the villains doing the horrible things they do ''literally'' ForTheEvulz. The thing is, like all examples on this page, ''it works.'' The world of 1984 is insanely horrifying and bleak, and yet disturbingly credible at the same time, with parallels that we all can draw in the real world. Which means while the world is ridiculous, we're too scared to laugh.

* ''Unwind'': When a group of boys are discussing unwinding (where children between the ages of 13 and 18 can be taken apart and their parts donated to others, thus allowing life to continue) and whether or not life begins at conception or birth, one of them admits he doesn't know. Another boy points out that it's a legitimate answer and that if people could admit that as easily there wouldn't have been a war that led to the law being passed.

* AllQuietOnTheWesternFront. WarIsHell. The author basically could have said, "Allow me to spend every page of my next book tearing every damn fool idea otherwise out of your head. Let me show you utter dehumanization and depersonalization and horrible acts to make your skin crawl as I reduce human beings to numb robots with animal drives to survive. Everyone dies. Every meaningful ideal the young had is gassed, shot, and shelled to hell. Even family comes to mean nothing after too much war. And then let me unceremoniously kill everyone the protagonist cares about, leave him alone among masses of kids dying for a country that has already lost the war, and leave him to die a meaningless death. Oh, yeah, that was my life."

* ''Literature/CatchTwentyTwo'': War is insane. And the only people crazy enough to willingly participate in a war are the people far too crazy to be trusted to make their own decisions. Ostensibly about UsefumNotes/WorldWarII, but there's a reason it was immensely popular during UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar.

* Creator/PhilipKDick's ''Literature/AScannerDarkly'' has a number of {{Aesop}}s: DrugsAreBad; creating a SinisterSurveillance [[PoliceState State]] in the pursuit of a War on Drugs that results in no one trusting anyone else enough to form genuine attachments is just as bad; preying on the weak and powerless in order to profit from them is equally reprehensible. These are all delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but given that these problems continue in our society to this very day, they're a message that needs to be heard.

* In ''Literature/TheSaint in New York'', a scene where Simon Templar rescues the daughter of a Jewish financier is followed by a paragraph in which anti-semitism and Nazism is denounced in the bluntest possible terms. It's totally out of place in the novel, but remains an extraordinary (for its time--the novel was written in 1935, shortly before the Nazis actually took power in Germany) and necessary warning of the evils of Nazi Germany.

* In ''Literature/TheSaint in New York'', a scene where Simon Templar rescues the daughter of a Jewish financier is followed by a paragraph in which anti-semitism and Nazism is denounced in the bluntest possible terms. It's totally out of place in the novel, but remains an extraordinary (for its time) and necessary warning of the evils of Nazi Germany.

** Though this rather subtle (as it calls attention to an issue, instead of a moral), the poem, ''A Sadistic Choice'', brings up the idea that, for many, having to choose between two needed things (with no middle ground) is a reality. [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement Nothing more will be said on the matter]].

* Though this rather subtle (as it calls attention to an issue, instead of a moral), the poem, ''A Sadistic Choice'', brings up the idea that, for many, having to choose between two needed things (with no middle ground) is a reality. [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement Nothing more will be said on the matter]].

* ''Theater/TheCrucible'', as well as almost any other leftist fiction written during the Second Red Scare, and the height of [=McCarthyism=]: pointing fingers is ''wrong''.

* Creator/TerryPratchett's ''Discworld/{{Hogfather}}'' drops the anvil that humans need to learn stories when they're young -- that they ''need'' to believe in silly things like SantaClaus and the tooth fairy, so that when they get older, they can believe in other things that don't exist without people believing in them and acting on them -- like Justice, Mercy, Duty, and that sort of thing.

* ''Literature/TheCrucible'', as well as almost any other leftist fiction written during the Second Red Scare, and the height of [=McCarthyism=]: pointing fingers is ''wrong''.

** This is more obvious with the poem ''$900'', as, from what's implied,the DownerEnding comes from the subject being too poor to afford an ambulance trip (which probably would have saved her life). Like the abovementioned, nothing more will be said on it.

* ''Literature/{{Carrie}}'': Don't EVER laugh at the misfortune of others.

** Another anvil that gets viewed in several ways is "don't try swooping in with martial force and/or awesome cosmic power unless you also have a detailed game plan on what to do about the inevitable clean up events afterwards". Dragons may not plant trees, but Aegon I, Viseneya and Rhaerys had long-thought-out ''plans'' about planting more than trees on the resulting ash-fields when they eventually launched their invasion from Dragonstone after decades of the family brainstorming the whole thing. Daenarys certainly shows what happens when you don't know enough about how to plan around the nukes. Other, more mundane conquests also have a habit of going just as sideways when the question "AndThenWhat" doesn't get addressed before the conquest -- like with Robert's Rebellion (the consequences of the whole [[IndyPloy seat-of-our-pants]] aspect of it = the whole damned series), the Sack of Winterfell or the Shield Islands, amoug others (each and every time people have taken King's Landing by force has sprouted whole mushroom fields of clean-up problems). [[spoiler: And, then there's the Golden Company (and whoever is working with them) and how that's playing out: long, drawn-up plans that maybe don't take the full reality of place you're trying to retake totally in mind? Maybe not so good?]] Yeah: proper reconstruction is harder than bulldozers.

** Another anvil that gets viewed in several ways is "don't try swooping in with martial force and/or awesome cosmic power unless you also have a detailed game plan on what to do about the inevitable clean up events". Dragons may not plant trees, but Aegon I, Viseneya and Rhaerys had long-thought-out ''plans'' about planting more than trees on the resulting ash-fields when they eventually launched their invasion from Dragonstone after decades of the family brainstorming the whole thing. Daenarys certainly shows what happens when you don't know enough about how to plan around the nukes. Other, more mundane conquests also have a habit of going just as sideways when the question "AndThenWhat" doesn't get addressed before the conquest -- like with Winterfell or the Shield Islands, amoug others. [[spoiler: And, then there's the Golden Company (and whoever is working with them) and how that's playing out: long, drawn-up plans that maybe don't take the full reality of place you're trying to retake totally in mind? Maybe not so good?]] Yeah: proper reconstruction is harder than bulldozers.

* ''The Crucible'', as well as almost any other leftist fiction written during the Second Red Scare, and the height of [=McCarthyism=]: pointing fingers is ''wrong''.

** [[ComesGreatResponsibility strength before weakness]]: The Radiant uses his strength to protect and serve the weak, not to rule over them. All men are weak sometimes, so respect the weakness of others.
** [[ItsTheJourneyThatCounts journey before destination]]: The Ends Don't Justify The Means. What is truly important is not the goal that you strive towards, but what you will or won't do to reach it. The wrong thing done for the right reason is still the wrong thing done.

** Life before death: The Radiant values and protects life, always. If he kills, it is only because there is no other choice.
** Strength before weakness: The Radiant uses his strength to protect and serve the weak, not to rule over them. All men are weak sometimes, so respect the weakness of others.
** Journey before destination: The Ends Don't Justify The Means. What is truly important is not the goal that you strive towards, but what you will or won't do to reach it. The wrong thing done for the right reason is still the wrong thing done.