Anvilicious / Literature

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• This is Older Than Feudalism. Aesop's Fables were very straightforward, and anvilicious. Mostly the tales don't go longer than a single paragraph before the moral. When confronted with the much subtler La Fontaine et al modern novelizations, one can surely feel the weight of the aesops.
• Most books about future dystopias tend to be pretty anvilicious out of necessity. Nineteen Eighty-Four is pretty unambiguous about what Britain would look like under a Soviet-style government, and Brave New World is likewise anvilicious about the consequences of shallow materialism and limitless hedonism.
• The Adventures of Pinocchio is a big book dedicated to show that if you are a disobedient boy and/or you skip school, you will be bound, tortured and killed. While the way the morals are handled hasn't aged well, in its defense, illiteracy rates and children not attending school in Carlo Collodi's time were very high.
• Louisa May Alcott had anvils to spare in her books for children (“moral pap for the young” in her own phrase). One book had an adult directly telling the main character that it's a good thing to read wholesome books that instill good morals. Considering that bit of text was within a wholesome book obviously meant for instilling good morals, it kind of creates an illusion of infinity like you get in a mirror. Infinite anviliciousness.
• Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is none too subtle about its anti-war message, especially in portraying Fate as a crapshoot for the soldiers. This is especially clear to modern audiences, who are far more used to this treatment of war than their ancestors ever were. In Remarque's defense, this was written in 1929, four years before Germany turned to Adolph Hitler for help, and ten years before World War II rendered large-scale efforts at maintaining world peace All for Nothing.
• Many of the works of Hans Christian Andersen, who in addition to being severely depressed and self-doubting was also a devout Christian. Here's the end of the original "The Little Mermaid", with the nameless protagonist in Purgatory:
  "Unseen we can enter the houses of men, where there are children, and for every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at his good conduct, for we can count one year less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial!"
• The final arc of Animorphs makes its War Is Hell message very clear, to the point where that a lesson was the entire point of the final book. When some readers complained that the ending wasn't "cool" enough, Applegate took them to task by saying that the whole point of the series is that war isn't something to venerate or find fun. It's something that tears families apart, kills innocent people, and destroys lives forever. By the end of the final book, Jake has developed PTSD from his experiences, Rachel is dead, Tobias has shut himself off from the world, and Marco and Cassie aren't particularly happy despite being better off than they were pre-war. What makes this particularly effective is that K.A. Applegate deliberately didn't have a grand, glorious final battle with the Animorphs finally triumphing—Rachel's death takes place very suddenly, the Yeerks surrender and peace is declared through negotiation, and Jake's PTSD results in his choosing to kill nearly eighteen thousand defenseless Yeerks.
• Anita Blake:
  • Books 10-13 have the message of "It's OK to have sex outside of marriage. In fact, homosexuality, polygamy, one-night-stands, and BDSM are also totally cool, as long as everyone consents. So don't spend hours worrying about sexual ethics when someone's life depends on you having sex in the next half hour." Anita spends three books angsting over this (and a couple more about the first bit), when the intended answer is obvious. It makes sense given her Catholic background, but is extremely irritating.
  • Also, the vast anvil that is the idea of women being useless (unless of course, they're Anita Blake). Almost no other female in the books from the get-go is written as comparable to Anita in any respect: they're either disregarded as useless, emotional, jealous, fanatic, or a victim. It got worse after the aforementioned Book 10, after Anita (and the author) apparently decided to embrace a different lifestyle, which meant any female (and the emphasis can't be understated) who disagreed with Anita's sudden (and almost completely uncharacteristic) shift into a polyamorous individual was immediately written into a hag. Even Anita's best friend since Book 1. If a woman doesn't act like a man, she's a victim.
  • Not only is it O.K. to torture a Bad Guy if a good guy's life is on the line and then kill him afterward while he's still helpless, you can go on being the same person you were before that without angst, wangst, or P.T.S.D..
• Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl books often have rather jarring pauses where characters suddenly ponder the evils of humanity's attacks on the environment. A fair message, but very unsubtly dropped.
  • Verges into Clueless Aesop territory when the super awesome elves chide the humans for their "disgusting" sewage treatment. There is a very good reason humans treat sewage, namely that not treating it tends to lead to little things like "typhus" and "cholera."
  • Fairies are still using gas engines in the first book, and presumably have been for longer than the humans have, so they would be responsible for most of the pollution in the world, not humans. And fairies are supposed to be way more advanced than humans, so they have no excuse — we, at least, are starting to phase fossil fuels out.
  • An in-plot reason for some of these anvils is that Butler is very subtly trying to teach his teenage charge, Artemis, not to be a completely evil bastard.
• Steven Barnes Lion's Blood and Zulu Heart are essentially one long "HEY! RACISM IS BAD!" — Anvil — "IT'S ALSO STUPID!" — Anvil
• The Books of Ember:
  • War is BAD.
  • Organized religion is literally puppy-kicking awful, if you believe The Prophet of Yonwood.
• Beowulf isn't very subtle when it's discussing how an ideal ruler should behave. Numerous times throughout the poem, someone brings up a historical king (usually the Danish king Hermod) and proceeds to point out exactly what he did wrong and how any prospective ruler should avoid it. There's one instance where it's justified in that Hrothgar is telling Beowulf how to be a king, but most other times it just worms into the narrative on its own.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory could be renamed Charlie and the Anvil Factory, since the story generates lessons in industrial quantities. In fact the very first page, which introduces the kids, already presents morals by reducing the description of the bratty kids to their vices. And what morals the book has are hammered in with brute force, including moralising songs by Oompa-Loompas. So remember kids: Chewing gum is bad. Being fat is bad. Being greedy is bad. Watching TV is bad.^note Making for an Unintended Moment of Funny in the film versions! Oh, and horribly punishing little children for these vices is A-OK! (This is the basis for a joke in the 2013 stage musical adaptation, which turns up the Black Comedy by applying Death by Adaptation to a few characters — as Willy Wonka prepares to end the tour he notes "True, we did lose a few children along the way... but we all learned something and that's the important thing!")
• The Chronicles of Narnia started out garden-variety Trapped in Another World fantasy with very, very small (but significant) metallic impact to the reader, but by The Last Battle^note and occasionally as early as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the religious allegory and assorted related messages were about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the solar plexus.
  • Aslan sacrificing himself to save Edmund from slavery to the White Witch is hardly what you would call subtle religious allegory. The Chronicles of Narnia were intended to be more obvious religious instruction from beginning to end. They were written for children, after all. For religious allegory by Lewis that is significantly less heavy-handed, see his Space Trilogy.
• John Wyndham's The Chrysalids has some pretty non-subtle messages about religious intolerance communicated through the totally irredeemable fundamentalist Joseph Strorm.
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, at least at the end. The "punishment" that the title refers to is for Raskolnikov to be exiled to Siberia, where he rediscovers Christianity.
• H. Beam Piper's "Day of the Moron" delvers its message with all the grace and aplomb of a Thor strike: In fields that require educated, thoughtful workers, ignorance and thoughtlessness absolutely must not be tolerated in any degree.
• In the world of Deltora Quest, gambling and dishonest moneylending are very, very bad. Bad things tend to happen to those who indulge in them... bad things like one man being forced to take the place (alone!) of the now-undead pirate crew he screwed over, for example.
• The "Guns are bad" message in the Discworld novel Men at Arms comes across this way to some readers, particularly those in the United States, which has a different attitude towards gun control than most of the world. It's indisputably the case that the "religion is bad / Belief Makes You Stupid" view in The Science of Discworld 3 gets hammered for all it's worth; luckily, only the non-Pterry chapters are preachy, making them much easier to avoid. The 'guns are bad' message seemed like Crossing the Line Twice, much like the message in Soul Music. It involves the usual phrases against guns and rock music respectively that these subjects got in real life, and the critics are right, but mostly because on the Discworld the guns and rock music are both sentient and actively malevolent themselves. The also rather Anvilicious pro-gun message in Night Watch Discworld seems a lot more applicable to earth.
  • Night Watch Discworld does indeed drop the anvil "If you outlaw weapons, only outlaws have weapons, and ordinary citizens can't defend themselves" rather hard, but it is not a pro-gun message. Men at Arms is the only book to deal specifically with guns, and the message in Night Watch Discworld is confined strictly to those weapons which use human strength, such as knives, bows, clubs, etc (and in the Discworld universe, people are pretty uneasy about bows). It also drops the anvil "Sometimes, if you draw a weapon, things escalate and it ends badly for everyone" several times. Hard. The "pro-weapon" message is confined pretty much to self-defence — and even then, it is explicitly stated that it would be preferable to defend yourself "without hurting [the other party] much, if possible."
  • Snuff wants the 2011 reading public to know that colonial-era slavery is really bad. More relevant issues concerning how not understanding another culture can be used as an excuse to demonize them, or how different cultures can co-exist despite different beliefs and ideas, are eschewed in favor of showcasing a species of goblins that is so special, so magically gifted, so pathetic, and a collection of villains that are so evil for hurting and enslaving these poor goblins, that they make Commander Vimes break several laws with a I Did What I Had to Do justification, and Lord Vetinari, the poster child for stoic Pragmatic Villainy, assassinate someone even though he would gain nothing from it.
  • In the novel Reaper Man several characters are viciously attacked by shopping carts. Consumerism is bad!
• The Echo is basically an Author Tract against bullying and against siding with bullies that hammers the message in with the subtlety of an avalanche. Yet this is also what makes this story so important and standing out.
• The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: This short story goes out of its way to defy and deconstruct Who Wants to Live Forever? supremely harshly to raise awareness and declares many vastly popular works incorrect. The Grim Reaper represents The Plague in its deadliest form and an Eldritch Abomination of an unprecedented scale that holds humanity in Stockholm Syndrome. Bostrom treats promoters of accepting death as conspiracy theorists that skew priorities and hide their errors with hollow rhetoric. In the appendix, Bostrom declares stories promoting accepting death as outdated and dangerous with one sentence, meaning he had to be heavy-handed in his situation to raise awareness.
• Iron Widow is not remotely subtle in its condemnation of patriarchal societies and misogyny, with the main protagonist Wu Zetian frequently going on rants or making impassioned speeches that call out how her society mistreats and underestimates women. Considering how horribly misogynistic Huaxia is, Wu Zetian certainly makes good points, though some readers find it a bit much (usually when she expresses views that appear strongly influenced by 21st century feminist theories despite her living in a completely different setting).
• The Jungle pulls no punches in its condemnation of capitalism. 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. However, Lewis was annoyed that the aesop most people heard was "There might be a guy in your sausage. Ewwww!" which led to the passing of several food safety laws. As Sinclair once said of the public's reaction: "I aimed for America's heart, and I hit them in the stomach."
• The Last Day of a Condemned Man is about how cruel the death sentence is and lets you know in the most melodramatic way possible.
• The Last Herald-Mage trilogy had a gay protagonist. Much of his character arc was devoted towards overcoming the homophobia of his abusive family, accepting his sexuality, and realizing that it did not make him 'wrong' or 'bad' in any way, all of which the books portray at length. To present-day readers, the trilogy probably seems a little overwrought. But the books were published in 1989, a time when homophobia was much worse than it is now, and openly gay characters in fantasy were rare.
• Les Misérables:
  • Hugo treats every moral in the book as a matter of life-and-death. Literacy is not just useful, but makes the difference between life and death for several different characters. The Power of Love changes Jean Valjean from a petty crook doomed to die into a great philanthropist. Javert only cares about enforcing the law, and is driven to suicide when he finally realizes that Valjean is a more moral man than he is.
  • People can change when given the chance. And being friendly towards those in need DOES make a difference to them. While putting a Cain's mark on former convicts under parole most surely will exclude them from honest work, thus leaving them not much choice than resorting to crime again. By expecting them to break parole and treating them as criminals in advance again you're making them into criminals. Or by treating an unmarried mother as a whore and firing her you force her to resort on prostitution to provide for her and her child.
  • Also he loved to ponder about whether wars and fights are justified or not - concluding that wars are always bad and should be avoided. Unless they are necessary to bring humanity along. Still, every death is regrettable, no matter which side.
• Cory Doctorow's novels invariably include a character ranting about Cory's favorite anvils. Look for the big fat anvil in Little Brother regarding young protagonist's verbal battles with his pro-surveillance, pro-Homeland Security strawman classmate, or how the protagonist in Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town just happens to be totally into building free wifi.
• The Lost Fleet forsakes any subtlety in its message about why war crimes are never, ever a good idea and that breaking the rules "just this once because it's important" will always come back to bite you sooner or later.
• Everything Greg Egan has ever written drops the morals of “science is awesome”, “religion is bad”, and “Living Forever Is Awesome” upon its readers with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. His book series Orthogonal adds “misogyny and classism are bad” and “you shouldn’t criticize science that you don’t understand”.
• Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow series would seem to have at least one: babies are what makes you a real member of society.
  • Bean feels disconnected from everything and only reluctantly agrees to father children, but once he does he suddenly has a whole world to protect just to keep his children safe, even the unborn fertilized eggs.
  • When we first meet Anton, he is depressed to the point of suicide and dealing with a huge psychological dissonance; when we see him again he is calm and happy. What changed? He decided to get married, and have children, even though he openly states that he isn't attracted to his wife in the slightest.
  • In the sequel Shadow Puppets, we meet Ivan Lankowski, a Russian-born Muslim who serves the caliphate. Some time is taken away from the main point of the story so Ivan can wax on about how evil and lost Islam used to be (i.e. in our present day), and how nuclear bombs needed to fall on Mecca and other important centers of Islam so that its successors could "find their way" again.
• The character Clarisse in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Never mind, just count the whole book. To specify: libraries are the only good form of entertainment around and are the only thing that is keeping civilization from destroying itself.
  • Actually, if the Aesop isn't always subtle, the book acknowledge that the content is more important than the container at least once through Faber. The focus stays on literature more than anything else, anyway.
  "No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us "
  • Amusingly, it's almost always assumed that it's anvilicious towards an entirely unintentional moral — the evils of censorship.
• Give a Boy a Gun: Guns are bad. Arms dealers are bad. Violent video games/TV shows/movies are bad. Atheism is bad. Cliques are bad. Bullying is bad. Standing by and doing nothing when bad things are happening is bad. Literally every other page has a little footnote at the bottom with a factoid about gun violence, or a real-life quote about a school shooter, or a comment about school bullying or something of the sort.
• The Great Gatsby: "Chase the past all you want, but you'll never get it back." The book is not at all subtle about how pointless trying to recapture your former Glory Days truly is. Gatsby's inability to accept this and let Daisy go leads to his ruination and his death. Even the characters who make it out of the story alive are living in Gilded Cages and/or stuck in completely unhappy marriages, all while everyone around them keeps trying to grasp at something they can't have anymore. The various decidedly unsympathetic rich characters, good or bad, are shown that their lives are miserable in spite of the indulgences and money.
• Gulliver's Travels: Swift isn't shy about hiding his contempt for the English society of his day through a variety of caricature cultures, or his contempt of human beings in general through the ridiculously flawed characters that appear in the book. However, what kind of society he advocates as a better alternative (or even whether he thinks a better alternative is possible) remains hotly contested.
• The Handmaid's Tale is about as subtle as a high-velocity cinder block in its denunciation of patriarchal Christianity, but it has a highly influential and important message. The villains all quote scripture and every building is named after theological concepts or religious figures in case you don't get that they're religious, and there sexual ethic permits mass sex slavery, brutal rape, and execution of anyone who dissents from their laws in case you didn't get they were bad.
• Charles Dickens' Hard Times: If you don't get that Dickens was against utilitarianism and rampant industrialism by the end of the book then you should probably go get an eye exam because you are not reading into those smoke and snake metaphors correctly. M'Choakumchild? Yes, he's choking kids with facts.
• Thomas Hardy loves this trope. Tess of the D'Urbervilles throws every inch of its weight at establishing Tess' purity and innocence — nature goddess symbolism, symbolism of the colour white, bird symbolism, religious symbolism, all helped by the omniscient narrator reminding the reader at fairly frequent intervals that Tess is a victim and a good person (heck, the novel's subtitle is "A Pure Woman Faithfully Represented"!). Somewhat justified, however, since it would have taken an awful lot to convince conservative Victorian readers that a woman who was raped was still a pure and innocent person, as evidenced by the major backlash the novel received. It was a more innovative moral at the time, but to modern readers it can come off as symbolism and Narm overkill.
• Pretty much everything written by Robert A. Heinlein is guaranteed to be sprinkled liberally with anvils; although many critics disagree on what some of those anvils are, and the positions creating the anvils changed over the course of his writing career.
• Two children's book series entitled "Help me be good" and "Let's talk about..." are nothing but this trope. There is nothing else to them. For example, "Let's talk about fighting" is nothing more than "When people fight, their feelings and bodies get hurt" repeated over and over for 17 pages.
• His Dark Materials: Ironically, Philip Pullman falls into much of the same trap as C. S. Lewis by making his message subtle, but present at first only to ramp it up close to full-blown Author Tract territory by the end. While Pullman was never shy about his anti-religion message in the first two books, by The Amber Spyglass, the series' commentary on the evils of blind faith and organized religion becomes impossible to ignore.
• The Holiday of Disobedience is a Spiritual Antithesis to Rewind. After the children of a city collectively refuse to obey, the exasperated adults leave them and before long, the city descends into chaos and mayhem. This is then used to drive home the idea that children need to be controlled by adults, or else the society will immediately degrade into anarchy and before long the children will succumb to hunger and illnesses.
• This pops up in Card's Homecoming Saga, when two characters (a woman who was previously uninterested in children and relationships and a homosexual) decide to have children, to 'join the community' of their traveling companions.
• In David Weber's Honor Harrington series, Haven goes through a revolution (its first of three in the same few centuries) that sees a man named Rob S. Pierre head of the Committee for Public Safety, which is now running the whole country. "Rob S. Pierre". To top it all off, the capital is called Nouveau Paris. Also, every Liberal, Conservative, or anyone with anything but loyalist or centrist credentials except for one or two canon immigrants tends to be textbook Strawman Political with the subtlety in delivery of several dozen anvils. Not feeling that the point of State Sec being fascist had been made clearly enough, David Weber attempts to make things crystal clear:
  "Some of the foulest people who ever lived are wearing SS uniforms, especially the ones who volunteer for duty in concentration camps."
• The House of Night:
  • Slightly mitigated by the fact that the books largely are in her point of view, and some of them later prove to be ironic or character developing as Zoey matures, but it still constitutes bad writing when the narrative is suddenly derailed for a few paragraphs to talk about how blowjobs are only something done by skanks and means the girl is being used.
  • Pot usage gets it really bad as well. In Betrayed, there's one point where the conversation about a missing teenage boy is put on hold to talk about how un-cool he is for experimenting with pot.
  • Not to mention how Aphrodite is constantly put down for being a "slut", despite only being involved with two guys in the whole series, the second with whom the relationship is incredibly serious. Compare that to how many boys the main character is stringing along at any given moment...
• This occurred, unsurprisingly, in the Inheritance Cycle. In a scene in the second book, Eldest, has a discussion with a dwarven priest about religion. Arya, who is arguing against religion, is portrayed as quiet, polite, reasonable and ten times as rational in her arguments (even though she started the argument, pretty much just to pick a fight, in the first place). The dwarven priest, who supports religion, is portrayed as wild-eyed, fanatical, and ranty. Later, it's revealed that the flawless elves are an atheist race.
  • Of course, her argument falls flat when you realize that the series has demonstrated several times that the dwarves' god is real. If you're feeling generous, the anvil changes to a more subtle "No matter how well you make your point, you can be wrong". If you aren't, the book series can't even keep its own anvils straight.
• Stephen King addressed this issue as a whole in On Writing; he believes that to avoid this, the story should come first, and the theme should be developed and polished afterwards based on the general overtones that form naturally within the story. (He cited the sole exception that turned out well as being Animal Farm, and even there, he's not entirely sure if it is an exception.)
  • This however does not make King wholly immune from dropping a few anvils of his own over the course of his long career. The most amusing example is probably the Take That! to his critics found in the the chapter detailing Stuttering Bill's rise to fame as a horror novelist in IT. Bill delivers an impassioned speech to a creative writing class, denouncing pretentious literary types who value style and social commentary over story. Later when he sells his first story, Bill gleefully gloats to his stuck up Professor who had previously denounced his writing as "pulp crap".
• Dean Koontz has been adding more and more anvils to his works, rendering them almost too heavy to read, as he spells out how Science is Dehumanizing, Atheism is Hopeless, Molesting Children is Evil, Golden Retrievers Are A Gift Directly From God... okay, okay, Mr. Koontz, we get the point!
• German author Erich Kästner was infamous for this. In one book (Anna Louise and Anton) he even added two pages of Author Tract after each chapter.
• "The Manhattan Telephone Book (Abridged)" is based on the premise that America's phone books are lists of people who will all be dead if a nuclear war occurs. The anvil is that such a war is not survivable, much less winnable, and that science fiction "after the bomb" stories are just stories. John Varley drops it in gut-wrenching fashion by detailing a number of horrible ways that people who survive the first detonations will suffer and die in the hours and days after the attack.
• The Final Warning, the fourth book in the Maximum Ride series. The entire thing is about how Max needs to save the world by preventing global warming, and it focuses on that to the point where it doesn't even bother to give details on the villain. The book ends with Max making a speech to congress about global warming. Book five, Max focuses on pollution, though it's not as bad as the fourth.
• Millions of Cats, about overpopulation.
• A Modest Proposal equates British policies and attitudes towards the Irish with eating children in a marvelously over-the-top detailed manifesto.
• The Obituary Writer, understandably, gets unsubtle about the need to move on after a great tragedy, such as the death of a loved one. But considering how easy it would be to cross the Despair Event Horizon and lose what's left of one's life, it's a fair point to make.
  Vivian: I wasted thirteen years hoping he was alive somewhere. Thirteen years holding onto a dream.
  Claire: But shouldn’t we hold onto our dreams?
  Vivian: Not when they keep us from moving forward.
• Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" — as if any novel by Nader would be a light-hearted romp.
• On the Beach: It should come as no surprise whatsoever that Shute was concerned about the dangers of Nuclear War. You don't get any less subtle in telling exactly what an all-out nuclear war might mean for humanity. This is a good message, however, and the novel was a recognition that Nuclear weapons were a game changer in terms of the threat they posed to the world at large. Some commentators however have argued that Shute's message was too strong, and that by perpetuating the idea that nobody could survive a nuclear war, stories like On the Beach might cause harm by implicitly suggesting that countermeasures like fallout shelters and Duck and Cover are pointless.
  "Most novels of apocalypse posit at least a group of survivors and the semblance of hope. On the Beach allows nothing of the kind."
• The works of George Orwell (including Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm) leave no room for interpretation that totalitarianism is bad. You have the villains doing the horrible things they do literally For the Evulz. The world of 1984 is insanely horrifying and bleak, and though credible at the same time, with parallels that can be drawn in the real world. 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.
• Persuasion: Jane Austen almost kills the heroine Anne's romantic rival Louisa just to hammer home the message that "Stubbornness is not always a virtue" and to (unnecessarily) show off how resourceful and clear-headed Anne is in a ridiculously forced way. The complete lack of subtlety and the characters' rather absurd reactions to Louisa's accident make it one of the most widely disliked scenes of one of Austen's most popular novels.
  • Hey, you see your sister/sister-in-law/best girl apparently killed before your eyes and see how calm and collected you are.
• This is the longstanding appeal of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. Generalized, conceptual names are used for most of the characters (Christian, Hypocrisy, Envy, etc.) and locations (The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, etc.) The message is so heavy-handed that it's just as pertinent today as it was in 1678.
• Please Stop Laughing At Me. There is nothing "normal" about bullying, and the consequences for the recipients are serious. Author Jodee Blanco even states at the end of the preface that so many people saw the book's depiction of bullying as an exaggeration, and that the only ones who truly recognize it for what it is are those who've been through it. This book took only two days to become a bestseller, and is now a required part of many schools' curriculum.
• The novels of Ayn Rand, such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, are truly notorious for their unrelenting anviliciousness.
  • In Atlas Shrugged, Rand doesn't merely demonstrate an idea, she demonstrates it repeatedly, then lampshades it, then has her character give a long and detailed speech explaining the principle and its philosophical implications.
  • The Fountainhead is significantly less extreme in its dropping of anvils because it has significantly fewer and shorter filibusters. Howard Roark does have an extensive Author Tract at the end explicitly lining out all of Rand's principles.
  • We The Living has an unsubtle political message targeting Russian Communists, portraying them as brutally murdering star-crossed lovers and forcing people into prostitution to drive home that Rand thinks communism is bad.
• Redwall:
  • The Veil Sixclaw subplot from Outcast of Redwall goes well out of its way to tell us over and over again that if you're "born" evil, there is little to no hope for redemption, and you don't have a shred of kindness in your heart. Even if you sacrifice your life to save someone you love. This is especially jarring, because The Bellmaker, the book that came out before this one, proved that you can be evil, realize how awful being evil is, have a Heel–Face Turn, and be forgiven for every bad thing you've done in your past.
  • High Rhulain constantly keeps reminding us with Tiria that you shouldn't discriminate against women, and that any female can do the same things a male can do. Clearly Brian Jacques forgot that he already tried to show that with the dozens and dozens of other female badass heroes (and villains, for that matter) this series has to offer.
• Terry England's Rewind uses the plight of seventeen adults who get 'rewound' to the tender age of nine to drive home the idea that children have absolutely no rights and are utterly dependent on others to do the right thing. Most of the other adults in the series don't.
• Much of the work of John Ringo tends to be somewhat on the unsubtle side, to put it mildly, but one of his works, The Last Centurion, isn't an anvil, it's an M1 Abrams tank (about 70 tons, for the record).
• Philip Roth has a natural talent with the anvil in that he is apt to use it at the slightest opportunity and for any reason at all. This typically manifests as "Character/Narrator happens to mention [concept] in a sentence > Long, florid, Wikipedia article-length explanation of concept ensues > As many as a dozen synonyms for [concept]'s title, delivered in fragmented bursts, presumably to erase any confusion as to what [concept] is > The character/narrator diverges entirely from the plot and spends the next two pages talking about some anecdote related to the [concept] > The plot suddenly resumes and you have to go back four pages to get a refresher course on what's supposed to be going on now". The Human Stain, as an example, used ravens, augers, and the lack of clutter on a lawyer's desk as [concept]s in this exercise, among many others.
• A Scanner Darkly:
  • It does go pretty far in service of Drugs Are Bad. There's a Sinister Surveillance State in the pursuit of a War on Drugs that results in no one trusting anyone else enough to form genuine attachments; the weak and powerless are preyed upon by drug companies in order to profit from them is equally reprehensible. The horror of all of this is delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but this is understandable given that Dick was talking about issues relevant in his time and perhaps even in the modern day.
  • It also goes pretty far to point out the hypocrisy of rehab clinics and the system itself, also playing heavily on the idea that people who have been broken or tormented by drugs or mental illness are not only discarded but invalidated by their view on reality... in essence, no one would ever believe that the rehab clinic is in fact using drug burnouts to farm the drug itself. Philip Dick likes his irony.
• The Secret Garden: The book takes several Author Tracts towards the end to smack the idea of "Go outside and run around in the fresh air, and if you think you're ill it'll make you ill and if you think you're healthy it'll make you healthy, and believe in the Magic!" But then again, who can wholeheartedly argue with that kind of Aesop?
• Erin Hunter's Seekers, a series about bears, takes pains to illustrate how human encroachment is making life difficult for bears. It doesn't get really bad until later on in the first book, though, when we meet Ujurak, a shape-shifting grizzly cub. Whenever Ujurak becomes another creature he sees the world through their eyes, and all of them, from wolves to deer to eagles, think of nothing else other than the fact that "flat-faces" are ruining their lives. We have yet to see that it feels like when he becomes a human (which has happened), but odds are low that it will be sympathetic.
• The lesson from the story of Numenor told in The Silmarillion is particularly Anvilicious: death is a fate intended by God for humans, and you should not try to escape that fate.
  • To be fair, that is kind of qualified with statements like,"... by becoming utterly obsessed with overcoming death and throwing aside morality and common sense while doing so." And the Numenoreans were already living for hundreds of years. But yes, the core Aesop is that.
• A Song of Ice and Fire is definitely not subtle on a few topics: acting like the world is a fairy tale running on tropes never, ever goes well; trying to gain, listen to, follow or make prophesy happen will go worse than believing in fairy tale songs will; never forget that Humans Are the Real Monsters (even if the supernatural is more flashy); not thinking the ramifications through before doing things will lead to your stupid idea blowing itself up in your face in ways both horrific and ironic; treating others like compete dirt will get them doing that to you (and any nearby, unrelated puppies) in return, thereby perpetuating the cycle of suck... and so on. Oh, and knowingly spreading lies and rumours to obfuscate the truth to music for personal profit? Don't. Just... don't.
• Plague of Memory: Based on the Hawk/Qonja subplot and its associated drama, S.L. Viehl most likely supports same-sex marriage.
• A scene in The Saint in New York 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) and necessary warning of the evils of Nazi Germany.
• The Star Trek novel "Ship of the Line" by Diane Carey has a few Take That!s to the episode "The Neutral Zone". Will Riker argues with Morgan Bateson, who is from 90 years before TNG. When Riker says the Picard line "We strive to better ourselves", Bateson snaps back "Who do you think you're 'better' than?" Bateson points out the arrogance of 24th Century Starfleet members. Picard also gains new appreciation of Jim Kirk through some interactive historical holodeck programs, leading to a CMOA against Gul Madred.
• Slaughterhouse-Five mentions that War Is Hell anvil about once a page or so. It also really, really wants to the reader to know that enjoying (even vicariously) or glorifying war is foolish and wrong, so the characters pretty much say that explicitly.
  I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.
  ''I have also told them not to work for companies that make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we
• State of Fear is is the most anvilicious book written by Michael Crichton and is largely a vehicle for him to promote his views against Global Warming science, though several of his other books veer into this territory.
• The novel of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is partly set 20 years after a pandemic apocalypse, and beats on a little too hard sometimes about the idea of how fragile our systems and technology are, characters rambling for paragraphs remembering "the way things used to be".
• Stratemeyer Syndicate:
  • Nancy Drew was feminism delivered with all the subtlety of a Mardi Gras float. Nancy has constantly been under scrutiny for her general perfectness. However, when the series began in 1930, feminism was still only just picking up steam. The books went a long way to in helping create the idea of women being smart, tough, resourceful, and capable.
  • The Hardy Boys had a strong anti-authority message initially (easily summed up in the idea that the brothers never listened when the police told them to back off and leave the detective work to them.) This was deliberate on the part of primary ghostwriter Leslie McFarlane, who wanted to try to encourage independent thought in children, saying that cops and politicians can be just as crooked as anybody. Considering all the cases of political corruption and police brutality that have been reported on, it's not an entirely horrible belief to hold.
• The Sword of Truth novels, by Terry Goodkind, who is an Objectivist and considers Rand the most important philosopher since Aristotle. His works tend to exhibit a similar level of anviliciousness to Atlas Shrugged. It would also seem that each successive book is more anvilicious than the last; by the final entry in the series, your greatest reward is that Richard has nothing left to morally criticize.
• Ira Tabankin could fill a (small) bookshelf, just with things he's written about how Islam will eventually destroy America, unless it is destroyed first. He is even less subtle about how Obama is an evil socialist Kenyan Muslim and that liberals are destroying America.
• The 19th-century novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There by Timothy Shay Arthur delivers its "drinking is bad" Aesop with the subtlety of a sledgehammer on a landmine. As an example, town drunk Joe Morgan resolves to give up his evil drinking habit after the death of his daughter. Which is prolonged long enough to let her beg her father to give up said drinking habit. And if that wasn't subtle enough for you, her death comes about after getting hit in the head with a beer glass.
• Sheri S. Tepper's books tend to have a rain of hardline eco-feminist anvils; especially The Gate to Women's Country and The Revenants. Along with the pervasive eco-feminism, some of her work, such as the Arbai trilogy, drops the occasional anti-religion — specifically, anti-Mormon — anvil.
• There's No Such Thing as a Dragon. Saying the titular phrase only makes the dragon grow bigger. Finally, when they acknowledge its existence, it shrinks back down at the end. An "elephant in the room" Anvilicious; ie ignoring or denying a problem only makes it grow bigger.
• In Iain Banks's novel Transition one of the characters is a stereotypical, extremely materialistic hedge fund trader. At the end of the novel he sells up and moves to the Cayman Islands (to avoid tax) where a tropical storm seriously damages his villa and he ends up, in a piece of symbolism which would be heavy handed in a short story written by a teenager, being crushed to death by his possessions. The main problem is that Banks clearly considers this to be a karmic death but the character, despite being something of an asshole, is not an especially bad guy. Certainly not as bad as the designated hero (an assassin who admits he's lost count of the number of people he's been required to torture or kill over the years and who is allowed to survive) who would not have succeeded without this character's help.
• The Karen Traviss-authored Gears of War novel Aspho Fields repeatedly drops the anvil that "weapons developers = war criminals" over and over and over again. Which seems like a very strange moral for a setting in which humans are only still alive BECAUSE they have satellite lasers, chainsaw bayonets, humongous tanks and other ultra-powerful weapons.
  • Her history in writing Star Wars and Halo novels telegraphs her opinion that Child Soldiers are bad unless it's some kind of "voluntary".
  • In general, Proud warrior races are ideal societies and if you're not in the military as a frontline soldier, you are inherently morally inferior to someone who is. Pacifist or anti-war? EVIL!! Politicians = Evil. Intel = morally bankrupt. Diplomat = Fat Bastard. Journalist = waste of space. Don't support the military? Get out! Just not fit or cut out for service? You should have never been born. Everyone should have to go into the military and fight on the front lines. She makes John Ringo look moderate, if only because he doesn't push militarism as the only way to be a good person.
• Tamora Pierce writes her books, particularly in the Tortall Universe, as very Feminist Fantasy. Each series has at least one example of gender inequality and how it's terrible; two of the quartets are essentially about that with a You Go, Girl! plot. Pierce also goes out of her way to deconstruct the Real Women Don't Wear Dresses trope by having many sympathetic female characters be maids, mothers, seamstresses, etcetera, treated with just as much respect as the Action Girl protagonists, and a major part of the first protagonist's Character Development is learning that dressing up and being in love doesn't conflict with being a knight.
  • The second book of The Immortals is quite short but people in it advise Daine that she shouldn't assume that someone she initially finds offputting is evil so frequently that she hangs a lampshade on it.
• Troll Mountain really wants you to know that you shouldn't automatically believe "conventional wisdom."
• Tuf Voyaging — You think George R.R. Martin might be a wee bit against overpopulation or blood sport?
• Twelve Houses: The message of these books? Don't discriminate against anyone. Especially not minorities who live as second-class citizens in the south-eastern part of your massively powerful country which could kick the ass of all its neighbouring countries, and occasionally does. Racism is baaaad, kids.
• The Twilight Saga is made of anvils. Don't give into those base desires or you'll die! Sex before marriage will kill you! Blood equals sex equals death equals don't do it! The clearest anvil was when Edward told Bella that her number was up, the moment they meet. Before that, Bella hurt herself a lot, but she didn't have many close encounters with death. After meeting Edward, she gets a series of events that only lead to her death, being saved by Edward most of the time, until the last book when she dies but is just reborn as a vampire.
  • Considering that Twilight (2005) is essentially a long Author Tract on gender roles in relationships (with quite a bit of Values Dissonance for many people), the original cover for the paperback is a bit Anvilicious in retrospect. The publisher apparently thought that the "men are moral, women are weak" message was a little too subtle, so the cover featured an image of a woman's hands offering an apple, which of course otherwise had absolutely nothing to do with the plot.
  • There's also the huge importance Stephenie Meyer places on finding your soul mate. Almost every good character in the book finds their one true love while the bad characters either don't find one or lose their mate.
  • Breaking Dawn descends for a while into being a diatribe against abortion, with heretofore perfect soul mate Edward abruptly turning into an absurd strawman who insists on aborting his own child in the most patronizing manner possible, insisting on calling it nothing but "it."
    • The whole anti-abortion tract is actually debatable; it's more like Meyer dropped in that plot point to demonstrate how selfless and motherly Bella is for refusing abortion without actually realizing the Unfortunate Implications she had put in the story as a result. After all of the pregnancy drama is over, abortion is never mentioned again nor does anyone comment on Edward wanting to kill his own child. This is a prime example of why the Twilight series is so full of Unfortunate Implications and confusing anvils; Meyer honestly doesn't seem to realize how disturbing the series is if one looks between the lines.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, seems to be an anvilicious condemnation of slavery with its stereotypes of Southern slave traders and even sections where the (third-person) narrator speaks about how "miserable" the slaves are or how "no good characters ever seem to like slavery or the Southern slave traders". Bonus points go to the fact that it isn't clear Stowe ever saw much of slavery firsthand (though, she definitely has Shown Their Work). At the time, however, this was very much an anvil that needed to be dropped.
  • However, the slave owners are not all stereotypes and many of them, especially Mr. Shelby and Mr. St. Clair, are portrayed very sympathetically. The book was extremely effective because Stowe was much more subtle than most people think she was, by showing that even when very nice and kind people own slaves, very bad things can happen (because a common defense of slavery was to cite the kinder slave owners, saying the cruel ones were just "bad apples" rather than the evil being Inherent in the System).
• Victoria has an absolute aversion to any form of subtlety. Feminism is bad, environmentalism is bad, Islam is evil, Nazism is... still wrong, but loads better than anarchy, communism, or Islam. Computers are bad, TV is bad. Multiculturalism and tolerance are the worst, because they enable all of the above, plus a lot of other influences and bad morals that undermine an otherwise pure and good Western, Christian civilization.
• The War of the Worlds (1898) spells out Wells' message that the Martians were actually not that different from the British imperialists, who would come off very similarly to the less technological advances peoples they conquered in the 19th century. He notes that the British had already caused the extinction of the Native Tasmanians (a few of them in fact survived, although this wasn't known in Wells time-thankfully by now they have made a comeback), much like the Martians seem intent on doing in the TV series. At the time, however, imperialism was greatly popular, and it was shown as such in the TV series (possibly also needed as a reminder for modern people).
• Youth in Sexual Ecstasy with its main message: "Sex without love will ruin your life", all while promoting sexual abstinence and Pro-Life choices.

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