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The great novelist doesn’t imitate life but rather offers a kind of analogous, ideal vision of it — ideal in the aesthetic, not moral, sense. — Sam Tanenhaus
Eventually, the question you ask stops being "Who is John Galt?" and becomes "When will John Galt shut up?"
The extreme Anvilicious case of Writer On Board, where the plot stops dead in its tracks to give the author an opportunity to preach their message to the readers or audience, often very political in nature.
If this is the climax of the book, it's often a case of Talking The Monster To Death.
Character Filibuster can be a by-product. If it's the purpose of the work, it's an Author Tract. A main cause of Dont Shoot The Message.
Examples:
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Live Action TV
- When Brookside was cancelled, the show's creator Phil Redmond had his final say in a rebellious scripted rant about how ‘TV and society's not like it was’ voiced by its longest-running character.
- In Boston Legal, starting with season 4, there would be one or two closing arguments in EVERY EPISODE that were perfect examples of this. It would always be a very left leaning take on an issue of the day. It got to the point that it would be painful to watch even if the viewer fully agreed with the arguments being made.
- Lampshaded somewhat when Denny says "How come the other side always has short closings?"
- There were a very few occasions when they ended up getting totally shot down by the end of the episode, unfortunately this was phased out as the series went on.
- The West Wing, Studio 60, and anything else that Aaron Sorkin has ever done.
- Specific example of this being the rant by Judd Hirsch's character in the teaser to the very first episode of Studio 60 - that's very much Aaron Sorkin talking directly through his mouthpiece.
- Unlike other shows that portray this trope, The West Wing doesn't fit very well considering that in it's essence it is a political show. Each episode usually has several ongoing plots that deal with politics, because they work in the White House, and it's their job. Of course, since their politics inevitably tends to dovetail exactly with Aaron Sorkin's view on the situation, in another sense it fits here like a glove.
- More of a "Host Filibuster," but after learning that The Dennis Miller Show was going to be canceled, embittered host Dennis Miller began to break show format in the few remaining episodes to air his personal grievances on a number of social and political issues. His biting, humorous rants, dotted with his trademark obscure references, became the foundation for his follow-up show, Dennis Miller Live, in which he performed a scripted rant in each episode.
- The Shield season five had a major moment (Claudette Wyms being promoted to Captain of the Farmington Precinct) interrupted for an Author Filibuster in the form of Internal Affairs officer Jon Kavanaugh interrupting the meeting where Claudette gets her promotion, to deliver a foaming at the mouth rant where the character (serving as the voicebox for Shawn Ryan and the rest of the writers of the series) goes off on the Misaimed Fandom of the Vic Mackey character.
Anime
- The infamous final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are essentially an Author Filibuster on the human condition and the nature of loneliness.
- In an early chapter of the Excel Saga manga, Il Palazzo takes a few pages to rant about how he feels Christianity has had a negative influence on the world. The anime parodies this by Excel suggesting they skip that scene to avoid controversy.
- Lampshade is hung by Excel in the manga. "I think we may have just offended a large portion of the world population..."
- The original Ghost In The Shell manga's entire ending issue consists of little more than the author's existential philosophy thinly packaged in abstract screen toned "art."
- Take That?
- More like the existential philosophy was a payload cleverly hidden inside an espionage series. Anyone who didn't see where it was going after Kusanagi seeing the falling feather have only themselves to blame.
- Anyone who didn't see that Ghost In The Shell was heading for an analysis of existentialism after reading the title might want to go study philosiphy.
- A recent chapter of Hajime no Ippo includes a several page long speech about how great the environment is, how everybody should do their part to protect it, and how pollution and industrial emissions are evil. It is then shortly followed by the introduction of a new character whose entire goal is to spread this exact message to the world.
Comics
- In a 1945 Little Orphan Annie strip, Annie soliloquizes about the dreadful foster home she's been placed in. She sleeps in the attic, dresses in a cut-down maid's uniform, is allowed no friends or recreation, and has to take every irksome task from serving dinner to shoveling coal — basically she is treated as an unpaid servant — but as she observes, it could be much much worse, because at least she's not in an orphanage sponging off the taxpayers.
- As part of the legendary Creator Breakdown during the run of Cerebus, Dave Sim replaced parts of his comic with fine-print screeds detailing his legendary misogyny
 , which even diehard fans who continued to read the comic do their very best to ignore.
- About seventy-five percent of all Doonesbury strips engage in this, though it generally sets up the punchline.
- The Boondocks comic occasionally falls into this (witness the series of strips, after the 2004 presidental election, where Huey calls out and insults every state where Bush won), but it's largely an Author Tract to begin with. The animated version can't really do this do due to Animation Lead Time, which is one of the many reasons why it's disliked by fans of the comic strip.
- Steve Ditko may be a master comic book storyteller, but when he does not have a collaborator like Stan Lee to restrain him, his stories are notorious for his objectivist philosophical lectures that dominate his more personal stories. The "Mr. A" stories are by far the worst, though "The Question" could be just as bad at times.
- The comic book limited series Warrior, a licensed comic about every Professional Wrestling fan's favorite crackpot, The Ultimate Warrior, is one great big Wall Of Text after another meant to elucidate the reader on Warrior's bizarre mystical-reactionary philosophy, and paint Warrior as Jesus. Between the sheer density of the text and the preponderance of made up words (just what in the blue hell is "foke", anyway?), it confused its few readers so badly that the third issue had to open with an explanation of the previous two issues. The one issue this doesn't apply to? The Christmas special, a completely dialog-less issue in which Warrior goes to the North Pole, puts Santa in bondage, and steals his clothes. There's a reason that every wrestling fan on the planet has agreed that the guy is nucking futs.
- In the final years of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, the stories were notorious for the main character yammering about due process restrictions on the police to the point where the villains dropped dead just from this.
- Matt Fraction's first issue of the Invincible Iron Man comic has young villain supergenius Ezekiel Stane, fresh from his latest round of building and selling WMDs to genocidal terrorists, stop to spend four pages testing out his latest weaponry on the board of directors of a tobacco company, while delivering a rant on a) the evils of smoking and b) why, despite Ezekiel's long list of crimes against humanity, he is still infinitely morally superior to people who grow and sell tobacco.
- And to make it even worse, he did so after accepting a contract from them to genetically engineer a new species of tobacco that had a measurable health benefit for the smoker — it let them safely lose weight. Despite this, the idea of going on to apply his genetic engineering talents further and attempt to remove at least some of the harmful side effects of smoking tobacco apparently never crossed Ezekiel Stane's mind. Self-righteous killing sprees because "tobacco is bad", on the other hand, were entirely all right.
- Stane is a villain, that's simply making the villain unlikeable.
- And yet virtually every other comic book has found a way to do this without lecturing about politics. The filibuster was effective in making the book unlikeable though. Way to write your pilot issue, Fraction.
- Oddly enough, the Doom comic (here) did this too, interrupting the plotless violence with a rant about how radioactive waste is killing the environment. This may well be a parody of the tradition, though, assuming that the comic is a parody to begin with.
- Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, whose main character's inflammatory news articles, while only sometimes political, and definitely in-character (insofar as Spider is an homage to Hunter S. Thompson), are too long and detailed to NOT also be the author's viewpoint.
- Alan Moore responded to complaints such as these by saying something along the lines of, "There are hundreds of comics out there that aren't a didactic on magic, isn't there room for just one that is?"
- Of course, those complaints were about his series Promethea, not about Transmetropolitan which he had nothing to do with.
Film
- Overlapping with And Knowing Is Half The Battle, Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, like several other films of the era, ends with a call to Americans to enter World War II.
- Steven Seagal finished off his movie On Deadly Ground by delivering an author filibuster... the uncut, ten minute version (the release version was three and a half) which caused test viewers to walk out. Check it out.
- Charlie — sorry, Charles — Chaplin's The Great Dictator, in which the entire closing monologue is a statement of Chaplin's anti-war beliefs. Of course, Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.
- Parodied in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, in which David Shayne simply cannot help but write what he thinks he's "important dialogue", but everyone else thinks is turgid.
Cheech: "A maze beset by brutal pitfalls!" Hey, Olive, I memorized it, and I'm tellin' ya, it comes to me all the time, and it stinks on fuckin' hot ice!
- When Cheech becomes a ghost writer of the play, his natural dialogue and less pretentious playwrighting causes the play to blossom into a classic.
- In the last 10 minutes of Clerks Kevin Smith's voice hops from one character to another basically every time someone opens their mouth. In fact, this tends to be the method by which he concludes all his films.
- Kill Bill volume 2 has Bill momentarily possessed by Tarantino so he can explain his views on comics.
- Sukiyaki Western Django skips the possession part and instead features a long cameo of Tarantino talking about anime.
- Saw VI. During a flashback scene, Jigsaw is standing in the office of William, an executive at a health insurance company who had just denied him an experimental treatment for his cancer (and who is the subject of the film's main trap). This causes Jigsaw to go into a rant attacking the health insurance industry, saying that they do the very same thing that conservatives fear socialized medicine will do — namely, take life-and-death decisions away from doctors and their patients by denying them coverage. He doesn't say "conservatives" or "socialized medicine," but the message is clear, and is repeated throughout the film, especially with the way that William gets killed.
Literature
- Atlas Shrugged has the definitive Author Filibuster in "This Is John Galt Speaking," where Ayn Rand gives her Marty Stu an opportunity to lecture the reader for sixty pages on end (eighty pages in the paperback edition); the Strawman Political villains are made to sit through it for three hours of plot time. There are several shorter examples in the same book, such as the sermon explaining that "money is the root of all good."
- And John Galt gave his three-hour-long, 60-page speech over a radio network he had illegally pirated. None of the government mooks thought of breaking down the door and arresting him for that whole time.
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy parodies this with "Telemachus Sneezed", where the last hundred and three pages are a soliloquy on the importance of guilt.
- Howard Roark of The Fountainhead also gets a such an opportunity in his courtroom scene, and the last chapter of Anthem is essentially devoted to this purpose. (Ayn Rand seems to do this a lot). These examples aren't quite as extreme as Atlas Shrugged — in book form. In the movie adaptation of The Fountainhead, Rand demanded that Roark's courtroom speech be performed exactly as she had written it (the version Rand wrote for the film's screenplay was significantly shorter than the book's version), resulting in a nearly six-minute long speech, one of the longest in film.
- Louisa May Alcott admits in Little Women that she was guilty of this at one point. Her Author Avatar Jo's literary exploits include, in a backlash against Executive Meddling insisting that True Art Is Angsty, writing a book that failed because "it might more accurately have been called an essay or a sermon, so intensely moral was it".
- Robert Asprin had a bad habit of forcibly inserting these into his otherwise light-hearted fantasy novels.
- The Da Vinci Code's characters deliver lengthy summaries of various fantastical pseudohistories of Christianity, e.g. Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
- Similarly in the prequel Angels and Demons, including the main figure stating that the Christian tradition of Communion was borrowed from the Aztecs. Perhaps time travel was involved?
- In Deception Point, Dan Brown has several characters expose the pros and cons of letting NASA monopolize space exploration instead of opening it up to the private sector (though the arguments supporting NASA greatly outnumber the ones doing the opposite).
- Anthony Burgess. Just... Anthony Burgess. The Wanting Seed is a particularly bad example.
- Toni Morrison. Seriously. This troper was forced to read Song of Solomon in 10th grade. It seemed like the plot was a decent story about 2 estranged friends and looking for treasure, but it was kind of hard to tell under all the preaching and metaphors.
- Agatha Christie in her final few novels.
- Tom Clancy espoused his world view at length in Bear and the Dragon. Allegedly his other books aren't any different.
- It started to become really obvious with Executive Order
- Michael Crichton's State Of Fear left approximately half the key plot points unresolved in favor of the heroes making every rant possible on the subject of global warming.
- Crichton loves his filibusters. In Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm spends better than half of his scenes in the book making pages-long speeches about the evils of modern science, despite the fact that he is supposedly dying at the time. There is occasionally a Hand Wave, like when Malcolm is cranked out of his mind on morphine, and is just babbling whatever thoughts come into his head. These were thankfully cut down in the The Movie. Lost World is even worse.
- Somewhat lampshaded in the third movie. When Alan Grant meets Eric Kirby, they begin discussing the events of Isla Nublar. When asked what he thought of Ian Malcolm's book on the subject, Eric said "He seemed kinda full of himself." Alan simply chuckles, and says "That makes two of us."
- Wakefield by Andrei Codrescu does this over and over on a wide variety of subjects, but at least has a certain self-knowledge. Kudos for when, after the main character gives a lengthy speech about the relationship between art and money, another character tells him he's "full of shit."
- Bill O'Reilly's fiction book, from before he was really famous, Those Who Trespass, is basically one after the other, from two characters that essentially play two sides of his personality, one of which is a cold blooded killer who takes revenge on those who fired him from television, while the other is an Irish cop who blabs on about the errors he predicts in the OJ Simpson trial, which was a few months away in the book's time.
- Emmanuel Goldstein's book in 1984, plus a drunken proletarian's rant against the metric system. The story of the novel is largely a Framing Device for Orwell's vision of the Dystopia, and said book-within-a-book can be skipped by the reader without missing anything important to the plot. He also spends about ten pages near the end of "1984" driving his free-thought, anti-fascism message home, just in case the reader missed the thinly-veiled metaphor of the first hundred or so pages.
- Except that the drunken rant by the prole is also supposed to show the reader that the proles see the world in a completely different way than the Inner Party. For Winston the horror of Ingsoc is the complete loss of freedom of thought and expression; for the proles, it's the replacement of Imperial measurements with metric. (The more subtle point is that the prole is complaining about a change that makes much less difference than he thinks it does - a pint and half a litre are almost identical - probably because he resents any change whatsoever.)
- Well, a US pint is almost identical to half a litre; an Imperial pint is somewhat more.
- The plot of Moby-Dick is, basically, an excuse for myriad Author Filibusters about whaling, whaling culture, the anatomy of whales, and, of course, lots of sperm. Not to mention all the classical references.
- Then there are those that interpret the whole book as an Author Tract about religion, where Ahab was trying to kill God by using Moby Dick as a substitute.
- An Author Filibuster is about preaching some kind of political or social message, isn't it? It's true that Moby Dick is full of expository sections, but most of them are less "Objectivism/Libertarianism/Free-Love/Whatever is awesome!" and more "This is how you strip blubber off a whale." Then again, given how allegorical the book is, it's entirely possible that the blubber is meant to represent the political view of your choice.
- Vegetarians get their say in the second book of the Inheritance Cycle. Humorously, Paolini seems to have changed his mind in the mean-time, as Eragon rationalizes about eating meat in the third book.
- Seeing as Eragon is pretty much Paolini's Author Avatar, it's not surprising that he runs into wallbanger-y things like this. Paolini manages to write his own contradictions not only from book to book, but from chapter to chapter.
- Parodied in the original novel of The Princess Bride, when author William Goldman (in his guise as the alleged "editor") discusses how he cut out scores of pages of (in his opinion) boring political lectures and discussions from the "original book".
- Goldman parodies his own parody in the excerpts from Buttercup's Baby, the sequel, that are provided in some editions of the novel - he describes in detail how a major stumbling block in getting his annotation of the sequel off the ground is the fact that Morgenstern's estate took a dim view of his chopping away Morgenstern's filibustering, as they view that as an integral part of the original work.
- The final third of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a rambling treatise on the virtues of socialism. Most readers only noticed his nauseating descriptions of contemporary meat-packing practices. As Sinclair himself noted, he'd aimed for the country's heart, but hit its stomach.
- Terry Goodkind's main characters in his Sword Of Truth series frequently stop to give ranty, self-important speeches espousing a fantasy version of his Objectivist philosophy. The fact that he doesn't consider himself a fantasy writer adds a lot of weight to this one — even if the Aesops are invariably broken into little teeny pieces or completely demented to begin with.
- A milder example: At one point in Sailor Nothing, Shin bursts into a long rant about DVD regional lockout and copy protection. This is actually pretty much exactly in character for her, given the situation, but it's a little jarring and has nothing to do with the plot whatsoever.
- The structure of The Brothers Karamazov is composed mostly of monologues and dialogues, and several of the monologues throughout the book could be seen as the author punching you in the face with theology, or free will, or whatever topic he happens to be writing reams about at the time. That it all ends up playing a part in the novel's climax is only a minor consolation.
- Robert A Heinlein was fond of these. In Starship Troopers his characters deliver several lengthy monologues on subjects like the death penalty (good), conscription (bad), corporal punishment (good) and disarmament (bad), while in Farnhams Freehold he has characters offer similar diatribes on topics including cannibalism (good; er, what?!) and African colonialism in the post-WWIII remains of the USA (good). In fact, one could make the blanket generalization that this is Heinlein's Signature Style.
- In For Us, The Living, the entirety of the plot is a single lengthy aside sandwiched between the monologues on the death penalty (bad), corporal punishment (bad), and economics (complicated, but if you just do...) Note that For Us was his first book (even if it was only published after his death, as the manuscript had been lost for decades), and his tendency towards this lessened afterward — at least until he gained Protection From Editors.
- The Cat Who Walks Through Walls contains yet another example, wherein the two main characters stop what they're doing to discuss the virtues of libertarianism and how wrong-headed the alternatives are.
- Hazel Stone is an agent provocateur sent on a mission to recruit Colin Campbell to the Time Corps... which requires shaking him out of his comfortable self-centered retirement. Most of the arguing about politics is her trying to get Colin to start thinking about politics, given that he starts out as a self-centered old coot who adopted libertarianism as his political philosophy simply because it let him sit at home and not give a damn about the rest of the world. Hazel, who is a libertarian on more philosophical grounds, is trying to get Colin to actually examine and justify his point of view instead of just use it as an excuse for apolitical laziness. The rest of it is that Hazel would cheerfully take time out to argue about
politics anything with a tree stump, on her deathbed.
- "Prof" in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Oscar at the beginning and end of Glory Road; Lorenzo Smythe in Double Star; "Doc" in Red Planet.
- Stranger in a Strange Land has diatribes from Jubal about the evils of organized religion. It's not really clear whether or not Heinlein was truly advocating the type of government he depicts in Starship Troopers, but Jubal really does seem to be a mouthpiece for the author.
- Given that many of the Author Filibusters given in various Heinlein novels contradict each other, guessing which character (if any) is actually the author's mouthpiece is a mug's game. Heinlein really seemed to love playing devil's advocate for any number of related, yet non-identical, philosophies.
- There is actually a clear progression in his philosophy over time from socialist to libertarian. He should still be given credit for pointing out that even his Mary Suetopias had flaws of one sort or another.
- Heinlein is notable for actually working the filibusters seamlessly into the actual pacing of the story. The Hazel Stone/Colin Campbell dynamic above is one thing. The one in Farnham's Freehold comes about because the characters are living in a post-holocaust setting: with no radio and television, and few books, about their only available form of leisure is to sit around the campfire and have a bull session. The philosophical monologues in Starship Troopers are from the protagonist's philosophy class, while he is listening to the lecturer. Most of the filibusters in the Heinlein juveniles are from a quiet moment when the young hero has asked his wise old mentor a Serious Question About Life, and the mentor is doing what mentors do. Seldom if ever do the characters actually stop in the middle of a scene to jarringly bust out with an unrelated speech dump — there is always an actual reason within the story that the characters are taking time out for a long talk. Granted, Heinlein's works are full of long talks... he loved writing drama more than action.
- Almost any time the plot looks like it might be going somewhere interesting in Joanna Russ's The Female Man, the current plot thread is completely derailed by pages and chapter-long feminist rants. The abandoned plot threads are then promptly forgotten about when the actual characters are revisited.
- War And Peace has one of two epilogues of the novel devoted to espousing Leo Tolstoy's view of history. If you have read the entire book beforehand, there's no real need to read that particular epilogue. It's only for people who don't like reading through voluminous Doorstoppers to get to the point.
- And those people are unwilling to make the effort anyway.
- The fourth Maximum Ride novel by James Patterson. While, in the first three books, the main characters were always on the move and in danger, fighting for their lives against evil scientists, and keeping a low profile, in this one Max and the flock are brought to Antarctica to combat global warming of all things. The global warming commentary is there but not overwhelming until the last few pages of the book (before the epilogue) which has Max making a speech to the US Congress concerning global warming and even referencing the current big thing about compact fluorescent light bulbs (that if every house replaced one normal bulb with one of these, it would be "like taking a million cars off the road"). The speech also contains a lot of America-bashing (pig-headed, short-sighted, arrogant, etc). To finish it up, the very last page has 5 facts/tips about "Saving the world. Wings not required" which is more global warming / recycling commentary (and is signed "—Max").
- The only thing that may top this is book five, which many (justifiably) horrified fans have quoted official descriptions of. In a few words, the plot is that, apparently,pollution is killing fish and sinking boats near Hawaii... and Max and her buddies have to save the ocean from humanity. The title? "Max: a Maximum ride novel." Thus, James Patterson sucks. Badly.
- Lady Chatterley's Lover has several rants on how industrial growth is killing nature and humanity.
- The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker contains a lengthy rant on why Lady Chatterley's Lover is an awful book.
- Book Three of Native Son, particularly toward the end, and at its absolute worst during each of the two speeches during Bigger's trial, especially by Bigger's attorney; each of these speeches went on for over 20 pages of the book. The longest one was exactly 24 pages.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire contains a lot of Gibbon's anti-Catholic sentiments. (He blamed the Church on its fall.)
- More like Anti Christian sentiments. In fact the church of england initially disliked his book.
- Gibbon's intention was to skewer all forms of religion, Christian or otherwise. Being English, though, most of his barbs were mainly directed against the Church of England, which he saw as full of corrupt liars.
- John Ringo's Ghost takes time from saving the world from terrorists to deliver treatises on bondage, how President Bush is the best leader ever, and justify the desire to rape. A solid Wall Banger.
- To be fair, that novel (and by extension the rest of the series) was never supposed to be published in the first place until his manager made him; read John Ringo's comment to this review.
- His The Last Centurion, on the other hand, doesn't have that excuse. The entire first nine chapters are this trope, in the form of the protagonist known as "Bandit Six" (Bandit the nickname, Six the military terminology for a unit's commanding officer). The action picks up after that point, but even for those who may tend to agree with his sociopolitical views (yes, like me), it can get anvilicious.
- John C. Wright's Golden Age trilogy does this. Especially in the third book, where Phaethon and Nothing (which is, in fact, an AI trapped in a black hole) engage in a lengthy philosophical discussion on the bridge of Phaethon's thousand-kilometer Adamantium starship. This is in the middle of exchanges of gunfire using the most powerful weapons of the past ten thousand years.
- Nothing is trying a We Can Rule Together here — its thus incumbent upon it to explain to the hero at length why its POV is allegedly so superior. Phaethon could have restrained the impulse to answer it at such length, admitted.
- Robert Parker's Spenser books will come to a screeching halt every few chapters so Susan Silverman, Spenser's psychiatrist girlfriend, can deliver a labored Psychological perspective on the action.
- Charles Dickens could never resist the temptation to embellish his characters' actions via moralistic asides, sometimes lighthearted, more often disgusted. Since his books tend to contain Loads And Loads Of Characters, he does this a lot, in his later, socially-aware novels especially.
- The Executioner series of action novels was written by Don Pendleton in the 1970's in response to the anti-war and "violence doesn't solve anything" attitudes of the time. Its hero, Vietnam veteran turned vigilante Mack Bolan, spends entire chapters pondering the morality of violence and the nature of his "war everlasting".
- Geoffrey Chaucer concludes The Canterbury Tales with a long sermon by the Parson on the Seven Deadly Sins.
- This is a filibuster but probably wasn't meant to come at the end: Chaucer died before he finished the Tales. One wonders how many more filibusters he had up his sleeve...
- Considering the heavily moralistic tone of both the framing story and the tales, it's arguable that the whole of The Canterbury Tales is an Author Tract
- People familiar with the musical version of Les Miserables are certain to be rather confused by numerous dissertations on such things as local linguistics, the life of an almost random bishop, and the governance of a town in the original work.
- Parodied in Mason & Dixon, when Dixon goes on a several page speech about the mythological Lambton Worm, and by the time he gets to the end, he can't remember what his point was in bringing it up.
- In The Ethical Assassin, the title character says almost nothing that isn't Author Filibuster. The last conversation sounds like it's the assassin delivering the jacket blurb.
- In some of John Norman's later Gor novels, what little plot there is halts AT LEAST EVERY TWO PAGES for a character to go on another rant about how a woman's proper place is kneeling at his feet.
- Edgar Allan Poe had an occasional bad habit of ranting for a few paragraphs about his idea of "perverseness" as a previously uncredited motivating force behind people's actions. The Imp of the Perverse is an entire Author Tract on the subject.
- Poul Anderson's otherwise pretty good
novel collection of loosely-related short stories, The Boat of a Million Years veers into this trope. The author apparently can't help himself from launching into angry rants against liberalism and expressing the view that libertarianism is the best thing ever.
- Every Dan Simmons book takes a break from the action for at least a paragraph or two for a completely out-of-the-blue rant about how all Muslims are psychotic terrorist killers. It's very jarring.
- They do? Hyperion included a Muslim in the primary cast, and Kassad, though a soldier, definitely wasn't psychotic. In fact, he put the smackdown on some religious extremists in a Crowning Momentof Awesome.
- The character in question is a secularist of Palistinian descentn whose stated intention is to kill the closest thing that the setting has to a god. So, it's more anti-religion in general than anti-muslim.
- Don't know about his other books but This Troper stopped reading Ilium based solely on this tendency. Also, read this blatantly Islamophobic rant of his.
- He doesn't seem to be a fan of religion in general, actually. Which makes sense, he writes Sci Fi.
- In the original 1816 version of Frankenstein, during the scene in which Elizabeth and Victor are visiting the condemned Justine Moritz, Mary Shelley allows Elizabeth to go into a completely inappropriate rant against the inhumanity of the death penalty (Shelley and her husband Percy were strongly against it) - inappropriate for that dramatic moment, anyway, because Elizabeth is meant to be there comforting and consoling her friend who's just been condemned under the death penalty. This led one editor of the 1816 edition to remark that Elizabeth isn't the sort of friend you'd call up to cheer you up if you've had a bad day...
- Making History by Stephen Fry contains at least one conversation full of remarks the author himself has made in interviews. The line "Just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean science knows nothing" stands out. (Of course, you could argue that Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.) There's also the "beautiful words" sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which is all filibuster by a character who's basically a camper, weirder version of himself. He did a podcast recently where he makes many of the same points, only seriously.
- Does My Head Look Big In This by Randa Abdel-Fattah is filled with this, mainly through the main character Amal. Amal is a Palestinian-Australian Muslim girl who decides to wear the hijab (head covering worn by some female Muslims) full time. It is repeated several times that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are not representative of Islam. The first few times can be excused Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped, especially since this book is mainly read by non-Muslims, but the rest is annoying.
- Neal Stephenson does this a lot. He keeps you on your toes, too - sometimes he's just rambling about Restoration Comedy for no good reason, but sometimes the five-page demonstration of van Eck phreaking will turn out to be a key plot point.
- Jack L Chalker's books were often set in seemingly horrible societies, which he had come up with by taking a group's avowed philosohpy and taking it to it's logical extreme. As a self-described 'militant centrist', he did not really push his vision of a perfect society, preferring to point out the flaws in others.
Theatre
- Subverted in Three Sisters. Vershinin gives a big long speech about how nobody really wants to be happy; they just want to want happiness. And then Tuzenbach asks if there are any chocolates left, deflating Vershinin's entire point: Tuzenbach, at least, wants to be happy now.
- Some published versions of Arthur Miller's The Crucible (commonly used in schools) contain notes from Miller himself interrupting Act One. Most of them discuss the Real Life characters who have just been introduced, but one devolves into practically a treatise on the Red Scare.
- The entire second act ("Dan Juan in Hell") of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman is nothing but this. Many drama companies simply omit that act when performing the play. Which probably would have annoyed Shaw no end; I mean, the guy didn't like My Fair Lady, for cryin' out loud.
- So? It was another typical musical version of a classic, rather dumbed down and avoiding the more serious parts of the play. And if you're going to do a play about Don Juan, shouldn't you expect this sort of thing? Unless, of course, the author is a libertine.
- Even Shakespeare can fall to this; the middle of Hamlet is interrupted by a discussion between Hamlet and the Players that serves no dramatic purpose but to give Hamlet a chance to rant about spoiled child actors and how they're ruining the art and the business of theater today (that is, in 1601).
- And the entire "Speak the speech I pray you" Monologue is usually seen as Shakespeare's critique on the typical acting methods of the day.
- Some academics think it's also an in-joke. Hamlet has no theatre experience whatsoever yet there he stands, lecturing a roomful of actors on how to act. This troper suspects that it was a send-up of the late Earl of Essex, Shakespeare's first patron and a well-known egocentric loudmouth.
- Tony Kushner's Angels In America has a number of these, except that the rants are not about Kushner's views, they're about his character Louis's views. This might sound pretty weird—the guy is gonna waste our time with long rants that don't even say something he believes?—but it's actually a characterization device, to depict how obsessed Louis is with politics and religion.
- Of course, how much Kushner agrees with Louis is uncertain.
Porn (All links NSFW)
- Relatively brief, but frequent, bouts of this appear to be a Signature Style of the literary
propaganda porn of "SD40ka". Marvel at how Gary proves to a black guy that racism does not exist. Marvel again at how in another story Carol proves that those liberals are all just hypocritical closet racists.
- This troper saw one late-night Skinemax softcore movie where two characters showed up at a bar just as it was closing to talk with the main character bartender, and almost immediately launched into a long, somewhat pretentious speech on the virtues of swinging and how anyone who didn't have an open relationship was a fool. Since this was not immediately followed by a threesome, it made the filibuster all the more annoying.
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Video Games
- This happens a lot in the Metal Gear series. As a sly apology, more often than not it's the villains blathering on, and the protagonist greets their speeches with irreverence, frustration or bewilderment as appropriate. Not to mention that you get to beat the crap out of them once the cutscene's over.
- That said, in the final cutscene of each game, there's a character that pretty much totally breaks character to be Hideo Kojima for a while. In the
first third game it's Naomi Hunter, in the second fourth it's Snake, and in the third first it's EVA (sort of, she doesn't nearly break the fourth wall). And you never get the chance to beat any of them up, because it's the final cutscene.
- That's because the Villainous filibusters are actually Character Filibusters, with the later Author Filibuster at the end being a disagreement with it. He's generally not wanting you to agree with the villains, which is why their plans fall apart at the end and you get to cream them.
- As a side-note, Nastasha Romanenko would like you to know that nukes are bad.
- Subverted in Resident Evil 4. Antagonist Ramon Salazar starts what appears to be a long speech about the nature of terrorism, but before he can finish his second sentence, Leon shuts him up by nailing his hand to a wall with a well-thrown knife.
- Parodied in episode 4 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. Marzipan convinces Strong Bad to let her have an eight-minute spiel on saving the rainforest in Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective, but Strong Bad fast-forwards through most of it.
Webcomics
- Pastel Defender Heliotrope used its first update after the results of the 2004 presidential elections to berate the readers for the re-election of George W. Bush.
- Sinfest typically shows Tatsuya Ishida's liberal leanings both in the comics themselves and the rants.
- Considering that he's repeatedly portrayed Barack Obama as a literal superhero, "leanings" might not be the right word at this point.
- R.H. Junior, the man behind Tales Of The Questor, apparently thought that the subtle right-wing Christian elements of his comics and his very political journal weren't enough, and decided to interrupt his cutesy Narnia-like allegory about an adventuring raccoon kit with a completely out-of-the-blue ramble. He quickly stopped doing this, though, and relegated it to a separate section.
- Used in The Last Days Of FOXHOUND in this strip. In the strip's defense, Psycho's rant is decidedly in character, and it's not mentioned again.
- Subnormality, while excellent, often features a level of verbosity rarely seen in its medium. Perhaps the most filibustering example is this one.
- It's no coincidence that Subnormality's subtitle is "Comix with too many words since 2007."
- In Sluggy Freelance Kiki, of all people, breaks into an eight panel rant about how Fandoms shouldn't be upset when authors kill off beloved characters (which Pete had done quite recently). It's Lampshaded, however, when Kiki ends the rant complaining about Author Filibusters, completely unaware of the irony.
Western Animation
Web Original
- Given that the entire point behind the cartoons is the author speaking about whatever video game trope takes his fancy for five minutes and how it may or may not relate to the actual game he's reviewing, it's difficult to say that any of Zero Punctuation's long rants can fall into "author filibuster" material. However, he did spend the better part of one video pointing out that calling rappers dipshits is not racist- the fact that they're mostly black didn't even enter into it- complete with the phrase "Unfunny Soapbox Bit" scrolling in the background.
- However, any time he reviews a war game, you can generally bet on an honest-to-god filibuster about how much America sucks.
- Movie Bob likes what he likes and hates what he hates, but the onyl thing to so far trigger a REALLY long extended rant from him has been Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body- it isn't until the 2 minute mark that he starts talking about the actual film because he feels he has to get off his chest his annoyance at how overrated she is as either an actress or a sex symbol.
- Linkara has a tendency of interrupting his comic reviews to remind us of how very much he hates One More Day, and at one point adds a caption saying he will not be getting over it any time soon. However, given that the story in question is one long series of Wall Bangers, it is easy to sympathise.
- Also, he has the decency to make it funny.
- Animated web series Broken Saints, steeped as it is in political and religious themes, comes dangerously close to this several times.
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