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Author Tract
All writers put something of themselves into their stories, but some of them go just that little bit too far. For them, the real point of writing is not to shape worlds or create characters, but to express the Big Important Truths that are close to their heart.

This is certainly not always a bad thing. Done well, this can add an extra layer of meaning and resonance to a story. Done poorly, as it all too often is, it will just result in the audience rolling its eyes and giving up. Even done well, an unfortunate result of the Author Tract is that some people will dismiss perfectly good stories simply because they disagree with the author's viewpoint. Even those who agree with the author may tune out if the author begins to lay it on too thick.

These are often filled with Author Filibusters and Strawman Political characters.

Note that this only applies when the entire universe and characters have been created to put forward the author's viewpoint. If an existing fictional universe or character has been altered to create a medium for a tract, then it's due to a Writer On Board. If the author's just filling up their story with stuff they like, that's Author Appeal.

Contrast What Do You Mean Its Not Didactic. May overlap with You Fail Economics Forever.

Examples:

Anime
  • Earth Maiden Arjuna starts out as a fast-paced mature Magical Girl series. Then it quickly veers into very heavy-handed ecological preaching. Tolerable, because the animation is freaking sweet, because Theresa is really Badass and because Juna's transformation is damn cool, but the storyline is still Anvilicious to the point of being distracting, and full to the brim of very bad science about why Science Is Bad.
  • Ditto for another Shoji Kawamori recent series, Macross Zero. Macross Frontier seems to be free of it yet, but then, it isn't really directed by Kawamori.
    • In a recent, post-series interview, Kawamori stated that he deliberately left the "love triangle" unresolved because he doesn't believe that human relationships can't be solved by a single, neat choice. Then he went and said that he didn't believe in monogamy, either.
  • Kawamori loves to do this. His Mind Screw-y Genesis Of Aquarion (the one with the Getter Robo-knockoff) is all about weird New-Age hippie philosophies. The heroes are all based on pagan mythical figures (and some actually are), while the bad guys are angels who brainwash humans and steal their souls. So Yeah...
  • Mobile Suit Gundam. War is bad, m'kay?
    You soldiers can decide to live and die by any rules you want, commandant. You can play any games you want, but civilians shouldn't have to lose their lives as a result.
    • Incidentally, most of this came about of it being based off of World War II.
  • Osamu Tezuka did this occasionally, but he usually managed to pull it off well. For instance, in Black Jack, Tezuka often criticizes the current state of the medical establishment, lent some weight by the fact that he was trained as a doctor before becoming a manga artist. It rarely feels heavy handed, though because of its wonderful characterization (Black Jack himself is a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold with a convoluted Back Story) and the title character's amazing demonstrations of surgical skill that go Beyond The Impossible. His science fiction stories, including Astro Boy often discuss the dehumanizing effects of modern society & technology, but counterpoint it by showing all the good that can come of modern technology. Karma, the 4th (or 5th, depending on the localization) volume of Phoenix series is largely built around Buddhist themes , discussing Karma and reincarnation at length and lamenting the corruption of the Buddhist faith by political interests, but it is widely considered to be Tezuka's greatest masterpiece. The later (and sadly, final) Phoenix story Sun does something similar with Shinto.
    • Tezuka's science fiction book Apollo's Song did the same as Astro Boy, but touched on the nature of romance (not to mention Greek Mythology) as well.
  • Team Medical Dragon was written by Akira Nagai, a practicing doctor - and the manga basically centres around a maverick (but exceedingly skilled) cardiac surgeon and his team fighting against bureaucracy and corruption in the Japanese health services. It's particularly jarring when you realise that all the protagonists are incredibly good-looking compared to most of the antagonists, who are practically caricatures.
    • The issue with the looks is somewhat taken care of in the live-action version, with the antagonists having a fair amount of attractive people, and Dr. Asada being the only one pointed out to be good-looking.
  • Only Yesterday sometimes comes across as a tract about the importance of Japanese farming. It avoids being irritating through the sheer quality of the animation and storytelling—and it helps that the monologues are sometimes being interrupted by the character saying that he is getting too serious.
  • Most of Hayao Miyazaki's movies have at least one segment that preaches the importance of respecting and preserving nature. That is, if the plot itself isn't already completely built around the aesop.
    • Which it usually is.
  • The manga Gimmick! has a rather glaring example of this, after a flashback where Kohei takes a job to do special effects for a video game commercial, which turns out to be a government conspiracy that takes the commercial and re-edits it into a post-9/11 pro-war viral video. After the revelation that one of Kohei's friends from Hollywood joins the Iraq War because of it and gets killed, Kohei launches into a "Don't be fooled by images" rant about how Hollywood (and American media in general) is always sneaking subliminal messages into movies and commercials and such, saying how filmmakers just want to make movies, but executives keep interfering to cram their evil propaganda into every crack and crevice. I think we can all agree that executives are bastards, but not every filmmaker is an unbiased saint like Kohei paints them to be.

Comic Books
  • The works of Alan Moore frequently stray into Author Tract territory, most notably Promethea, which was a 32-issue series explaining Moore's views on the nature of magic and V For Vendetta which was very much a vehicle for his political views. In his Watchmen he created the character of Rorschach in part to comment upon...
  • Steve Ditko's comics, which attempted to mix superheroic action of a street-level variety with Aesops on various principles derived from Ayn Rand's Objectivism.
  • Reginald Hudlin in charge of Black Panther; Africans are good and genetically superior, white people are evil, marry within your race, etc.
  • Lest we forget, Jack Chick is famous for creating his "Chick Tracts", which have thin stories whose only purpose is to provide a framing story for an illustrated extract from The Bible and/or rant about how the Pope secretly rules the world and Dungeons And Dragons is a Satanic indoctrination tool.
    • "Why We're Here" is a parody tract in the style of Jack Chick's works, but instead of being based on Christianity, follows the conversion of someone to The Cult of Cthulhu, complete with supporting quotations from the Necronomicon.
      • Don't forget to listen to this while you read it.
    • This parody uses the Chick tract format to promote Marvel Comics instead of Christianity.
    • A site specifically devoted to parodying Chick tracts can be found here.
  • "The Truth for Youth" by Tim Todd are comics done in Japanese style artwork. They're like Chick Tracts, but a bit more sane. It's pretty odd to read about Japanese-style characters talk about the evils of porn.
    • I once visited that site several years ago and the stories were in Western comic book style. They obviously redid them once anime started to get big. Sad.
  • One Chick tract explains where the idea came from — Communist China found that Western children loved reading comics, so they decided that easy-to-understand comics would be an excellent medium with which to indoctrinate the people.
    • That said, basically every piece of official publication in Communist dictatorships is an example of this trope.
    • An alternate, and equally apocryphal origin story for Chick tracts, suggests that they were inspired by "Tijuana bibles" — similarly pocket-size, staple bound amateur comics of the '30s and '40s, which featured very Lawyer-Unfriendly Cameos of licensed characters engaging in pornographic acts.
  • The Invisibles was basically created as a way for Grant Morrison to explain his experiences with extraterrestrial contact and magic.
  • Warren Ellis has specifically stated that Transmetropolitan is basically him venting about his various opinions on politics and consumerism, with the main character being a sort of author surrogate. This is particularly notable in the issue where Spider Jerusalem takes on religion, which doesn't even end properly—the issue concludes with him dressed up as Jesus, tearing up a sort of religious convention in a mall (While giving a long speech about why religion sucks, of course) and getting tackled by security. No mention is made of it afterward.
    • This troper feels Transmetropolitan actually does this right, as Spider is just unsympathetic enough to avoid being a Mary Sue 'I am right, you are wrong' type of character. You are left free to disagree with his individual likes and dislikes while sympathizing with his basic humanity, as many characters within the comic itself do.
  • Preacher. Duh. "Uh, it's kind of preachy." "What part of the title confused you?"
  • Much of the work of J. Michael Straczynski's work is infused with Aesops derived from the author's political beliefs, with storylines implying that the contemporary U.S.A. is just a shade away from being a fascist state with only people like him heroically standing in the way.
    • Not just his comic work, but also the Babylon 5 TV series. It managed to overcome this drawback for three reasons. First he's a very skilled a writer and storyteller. (The Author does have his own opinions in the show but This Troper didn't know until he read online that JMS was an atheist due to how well he treated the Religious members of the cast. There is at least one clear Author Tract in and episode where Littlest Cancer Patient has a horrible ritual death and another has the mouthy AI get erased, though those are more so Author Tracts about tropes he dislikes than politics.) Second, most of the people who look for such things share his views, so it's invisible to them. Third, Babylon 5 finished 3 years before the Bush Administration came into power, which is surely where some of his current opinions about the matter, right or wrong, come from.
    • Also, Stracyinski is not afraid to have a moral he does not agree with, such as having characters forgive others.
  • One of the reasons William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman was to convince everyone to come under "loving submission" to a world matriarchy. Oh, and bondage is highly enjoyable.
  • Comically subverted by Grant Morrison when he literally shows up in Animal Man to (among other things) mention that he feels, his own, writing for the book has become too preachy and contrived.
  • Blankets is a beautifully-drawn, emotionally engaging love story which uses the backdrop of a conservative Christian upbringing as parallel to the passion of teenage love - until the last chapter, when the love interest unceremoniously disappears and the comic becomes a vehicle for Craig Thompson's personal grudges against Bible-belt conservative Christianity. It was very jarring and out of place in what was until then a tale of romance spun against alternate interpretations of the New Testament.

Literature
  • The Sword Of Truth series by Terry Goodkind is often accused by detractors of being nothing more than Objectivist propaganda, particularly the later books. Faith of the Fallen is two-fifths desperate battles and angst, and three-fifths clangingly obvious Ayn Rand soapboxing on how individuals working for themselves in a free market works far better than your broken, inevitably corrupt socialism, and will also get you the chicks. This didn't kick in at the start, though. Only the rape and bondage themes did.
  • If nothing else, however, he came by it honestly, as pretty much everything ever written by Goodkind's favorite wrtier and philosopher, Ayn Rand, is a soapbox for Objectivism, which she created (or at least formalized into a semi-coherent ethical system). Most famously, Atlas Shrugged. John Galt's "Why We're Killing You All" speech at the end goes on for sixty pages.
  • Orson Scott Card's Empire, where the characters will pause during the action to explain exactly why sweeping demonizations of the views of others are destructive. Part of it comes from the ridiculous premise — he was hired to write the backstory for a video game about a second American Civil War taking place Twenty Minutes Into The Future, with the opposing sides being strawman versions of the Democrats and Republicans.
    • Note that a number of the "villains" in the novel are military, so it's hardly fair for tropers to characterize it as condemning any disrespect for the military. But the book itself is used as a strawman by people who engage in the behaviors Card criticized as corrosive of civic discourse in the prologue, and form his true [Aesop]].
  • Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. After bubbling under the surface for the first third of the trilogy, the final volume explodes into a massive Take That against Christianity. Pullman's intention with his series was to set up an atheist response to the fantasy novels of Christian writer C.S. Lewis, whom Pullman loathes.
    • Pullman, in doing this, has ensured that he will be remembered not for writing three wonderful children's fantasy books but for ruining his final book by putting his "message" first and the story second. Indeed he will likely be remembered alongside C.S. Lewis for the same thing, who did the same with The Last Battle.
  • Lewis, of course, wrote the Narnia books, in which children go to the titular land and have adventures with Aslan the Lion, who is basically Alternate Universe Talking Animal Jesus. He generally keeps it in subtext, but makes it extremely blatant at some points, such as Aslan saying to the kids at the end of the fifth book that he is "known by another name" in their world. The final Narnia novel goes even further by having Aslan outright state that he is known as "the lamb" on Earth, and having the main characters follow him into Heaven.
    • Word Of God... ahem... in this case claims it didn't start out that way. Lewis said that he didn't set out to write the Narnia books as a religious parable, but that he had converted to Christianity (due to Tolkien!) at the time and his feelings about religion just found their way into his work. Obviously he had noticed it and was playing it up by the end, but it explains why it was more subtle early on.
    • C. S. Lewis did write deliberate Author Tracts, however:
    • The Great Divorce, an allegory.
    • Pilgrim's Regress, which is So Bad Its Good or So Bad Its Horrible, depending on your religious and literary tolerances. Lewis wrote this as a deliberate allegory when he thought his path to conversion was typical. He later found out it wasn't...
    • The Screwtape Letters. In contrast to Pilgrim's Regress, this is actually well-written, but since he deliberately used a Villain Protagonist, it's better as literature than as a tract. This is especially true due to Lewis noting in the introduction that, being a demon, Screwtape is an Unreliable Narrator.
    • The "Space Trilogy" of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, where what sets Earth apart from the rest of the inhabited planets in the solar system - and the reason why none of them have ever contacted Earth - is that Original Sin occurred there, and on the other worlds it didn't.
  • Easily topping Narnia and His Dark Materials by not bothering with the slightest subtext in the first place, the Left Behind series of novels, which are based on the idea of the Rapture (the non-biblical idea that faithful Christians will be taken to Heaven before Armageddon) actually happening. That they are horribly written, with the world's entire population described as behaving in stupidly unrealistic ways, just makes it all the worse.
    • 'Non-Biblical'? Most of the plot is pure extrapolation, sure, but not all.
    • You know you're dealing with an Author Tract when you read a women's clinic employee saying that she's sad that all the world's children disappeared... because they can't perform any more abortions now!
  • The elves of the Inheritance books (Eragon, Eldest and Brisingr) are atheist, nudist, vegan tree-huggers who impart their "wisdom" repeatedly to the main character and the reader.
  • A large part of Robert A Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land revolves around nudism and polyamory, both of which Heinlein practiced in his real life. (For Us The Living, a lost early Heinlein manuscript which was first published in 2003, contains similar themes.) Indeed, his works can largely be divided into pre-Stranger and post-Stranger, with the latter showing far more evidence of this. There's also a greater-than-average amount of incest, including a mention that in his distant future it's genetically safer in some cases for a woman to bear her brother's children than an unrelated man's — a couple's decision to have children together (or not) is based purely on their gene scans, not on consanguinity. Not that that necessarily stops them from marrying; there's a reference to a happily married couple who are raising seven children, "four his, three hers, none theirs," using donor sperm for hers and donor eggs for his because the genetic risks of having children together were too great. Apparently Hollywood Evolution leads to a world where whatever the creator thinks is hottest happens. Heinlein was probably unaware of the Westermarck Effect, or he would have been less sanguine about the possibility of genetic scans completely replacing the incest taboo as society's method of minimizing pregnancies and births marred by reinforced harmful recessive genes.
    • All of Robert A. Heinlein's heroes have the same views as he does. Some of his early writing was made solely for the purpose of Author Tract. However, even his stories that weren't solely designed for it still have plenty of it in there. It is just that he was such a good writer with good ideas that he could get away with it. He also does get you to think about the issues, as well. Starship Troopers is the most popular story of his that has been accused of being an Author Tract, with critics basically saying it is just about worshiping the military.
      • The casual reader will find much to disagree with in the book. A more careful reading will find just as much to disagree with, but will also find that many of the things the casual reader thought were there aren't.
    • Starship Troopers is an Author Tract, all right. He wrote it in protest of America signing a nuclear treaty with Russia—whom he did not believe would keep nuclear treaties. Unfortunate Implications in that Reality Subtext, but this novel is good in itself. And it doesn't have the Squick that Stranger Ina Strange Land does, which makes a difference: there are probably a lot of people who appreciate Heinlein's military politics, but not his sexual politics.
      • Or vice-versa - Stranger was well-liked by the hippie movement, for example, while they certainly weren't fans of Starship Troopers.
      • Heinlein also wrote Starship Troopers as a suggestion to take the Swiss Model of Citzenship, which was being argued at the time in some groups. In Switzerland, Citzenship required militia service, and still has universal conscription.
      • Heinlein disliked conscription (involuntary recruitment into the military), and has his viewpoint character express this dislike. But Heinlein also believed that full citizenship should require some qualification other than being old enough. Thus, the idea of requiring anyone who wanted to be a citizen to spend a few years in government service. For reference, Word Of God on the Starship Troopers setting is that someone can become a citizen by serving in a nonmilitary role.
      • Which is not made even slightly obvious in the book.
      • Flat-out wrong. The doctor giving Johnny his entrance physical in chapter 2 spells it out explicitly.
        Doctor: But if you came in here in a wheel chair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find something silly enough to match. Counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch, maybe. The only way you can fail is by having the psychiatrists decide that you are not able to understand the oath.
      • And before that, the recruiting sergeant mentions there are a number of non-military options, that a notable majority of applicants for Federal Service end up doing two years of civilian scutwork because the military doesn't want that many applicants (in peacetime, anyway), and tells Johnny that his test scores are so mediocre that he's most likely going to end up "field-testing survival equipment on Titan", and his friend Carl was a researcher stationed on Pluto.
      • Quoting particular lines that imply that service is not military doesn't erase the rest of the book; it just proves that the book contradicts itself. There's a well-known essay by James Gifford which gathers together many of the references and makes a very strong case that Federal Service, as described in most of the book, is almost all military.
  • 1984, by George Orwell, is nothing but an extremely Anvilicious Author Tract based on his vision of how Stalinist revision of history might be taken to its logical extremes. In Orwell's case, though, he never really tried to hide his message, and Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.
    • Orwell's Animal Farm is also a thinly veiled satire of the Russian Revolution, and more generally of the nigh-universal cycle of revolution and corruption.
    • Not only did the anvil badly need to be dropped, but also, Orwell was a brilliant enough writer to pull it off not once, but twice. Much Dystopia fiction is by lesser authors and is utter garbage.
    • And he dropped this anvil when Communist parties throughout Europe had widespread and vocal support, and nobody realized the extent of the horrors inflicted upon the Russians during the Soviet Union era. In other words, it's a kind of Seinfeld Is Unfunny, except with more anvils and less funny.
  • Oscar Wilde has many characters who aren't really characters, but are just there so they can say what the author deems to be witty and insightful remarks. Of course, Oscar Wilde tended to view real humans the same way.
    • Did not do the research. Reading some of his letters, especially De Profundis shows him in an entirely different light. Witty and hedonistic, yes, but also very warm and caring.
  • L. Ron Hubbard and his final novels, Battlefield Earth and the 10-volume Mission Earth. In Battlefield Earth psychiatry is what caused the evil space overlords to turn from their generally happy live-and-let-live prior existence, into amoral Planet Looters who regularly commit planetary genocide just so nobody will get in the way of their mining operations. Psychiatry is also the big-bad in Mission Earth, to the extent that every single antagonist is either a supporting the profession or a practitioner or exporting it off-world or using it to take over the world. It doesn't help that almost every character is a Strawman Political.
    • Let's not forget the evil Psychlos. This isn't a play on "psycho"—it's a reference to psychologists, who are considered evil in Scientology doctrine.
    • His earlier work Masters of Sleep promotes Dianetics and features as a villain a mad psychiatrist, Doctor Dyhard, who persists in rejecting Dianetics after all his abler colleagues have accepted it, and believes in prefrontal lobotomies for everyone.
  • Michael Crichton. State of Fear. In fact, many of his books. Starting with some of it in Jurassic Park, and it goes from there.
    • And in Next, he used a page in the book as a tract against... someone who wrote an article against Crichton's stance on Global Warming. How did he portray someone who dared disagree with him? As a pedophile with a tiny penis who raped infants, of course! The character appears and then vanishes as suddenly.
  • Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time. The title character travels to a future comprised of two societies: One is a rural utopia in which virtually the entire political and social agenda of the late sixties and early seventies radical movements has been fulfilled: free love, no class or gender distinctions, no consumerism. The only exceptions to this are the death penalty and war, which they still practice. The other is a totalitarian regime populated by rich, capitalist technocrats, who frequently make war with the utopians and harvest their organs. The book ends with the main character poisoning a group of scientists to ensure that their experiments don't lead to the dominance of the evil, technocratic faction.
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland is essentially her tract Women and Economics rewritten as utopian fiction.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky hoped to convey a new way to understand religion through exemplifying the themes of guilt and free will in writing The Brothers Karamazov. This can be seen in what many critics call the pivotal chapters of the book, which include the parable called "The Grand Inquisitor." The way in which events play out conform with the Elder Zosima's idea expressed throughout of "everyone is guilty for all and before all."
  • War And Peace was the means by which Leo Tolstoy wanted to share his view of history and historical forces. No no, the title doesn't give it away.
  • The Bill the Warthog series of children's detective stories are meant as biblical metaphors, including a whole book where the author just rips stories from Jesus's parables. Good thing the parables are in the public domain...
  • John Ringo does this sometimes fairly frequently, most noticeably in his The Last Centurion which blames the fall of American civilization due to bird flu on democrats and liberals, and the rest of the world on universal healthcare. Though this is partly mitigated by it being a first-person narrative.
    • In Through the Looking Glass, a grandmother ponders why her local Democrats can't be both liberal and patriotic. Lasts a page, but then there's a David Lynch-esque sequence that shows that an apparently minor creature that accompanied a little girl is God. Well, that, and it's part of a race that makes up part of the universe. It leads to questioning why science and religion can't co-exist. Then, after that, it turns out the US Government has left some portals that weren't closed after the final battle in the Middle East, just to get rid of all the insurgents. It's a good thing to the characters.
  • Every book Ben Elton has ever written is just a plot worked around Ben Elton's whinging about popular culture, The Industry, or whatever's on his mind at the moment. Blind Faith is practically a poorly written love letter to a form of scientific Humanism, interspersed with some bizarre, morally dissonant filibusters about women and body hair.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin's Tehanu is a prize example of this trope. A painfully radical feminist rant full of evil abusive men and helpless victim women which completely disregards continuity with the rest of the Earthsea trilogy.
    • Changing Planes mixes actual stories in with thinly disguised tracts. "Great Joy" in particular has all the subtlety of a rocket-propelled anvil.
  • The Land of Mist by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a novel-length tract justifying the author's conversion to Spirtualism, including the massive Character Derailment of having ultra-rationalist Professor Challanger convert to Spiritualism. There is a suggestion in chapter two that the deaths of "ten million young men" in World War I was punishment by the Central Intelligence for humanity's laughing at the alleged evidence for life after death.
  • Matthew Dickens spends the last hundred pages of the book Magnus telling the reader about his personal views on religious doctrines, evolution, theology, Superman Returns, etc.
  • Piers Anthony does these occasionally. One story he wrote was basically a Take That explaining why the sci-fi publishing business was worthless (Anthony having struggled against it for quite some time before learning the tricks of the trade). One supposes that subjectivity enters in over where the line is drawn between Author Tract, Author Filibuster, and Author Appeal where his other books fall, though he's never been very shy about making his ideas on sexuality (and the ages at which people take notice of it), body modesty, and other things an important plot element of his stories.
  • In Dean Koontz's more recent books (Dark Rivers of the Heart, One Door Away From Heaven, By the Light of Moon) there has been more and more main characters sagely contemplating that medical ethicists/atheists/socialists/sociopaths/"utopianists" are evil and the source of all the world's woes, and the golden retriers, Libertarianism, close family, autistic people and beer are good things.
  • The Arthur Haily novel The Moneychangers has a recurring character to filibuster about how Gold is Good. Given that he's a pundit with his own popular newsletter, and is married to one of the secondary characters, and the book is about banking, it kinda makes sense. Then, after the "real" ending, the US establishes a gold-backed dollar, and we are treated to the full text of one of said pundit's newsletters. Guess what it's about? The book ends with the lead putting the newsletter down and reflecting how wise said pundit is.
  • Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, a best-selling revisionist take on Arthurian legends, arguably can be summarized thus: "Women and paganism good, men and Christianity bad."
    • A lot of her works can be summarized something like that. Her Darkover series had, in the far future of humans colonizing other planets, women still being forced to adopt a man's name when she married him... not just the last one, either, but rather the already outdated "Mrs. Hisfirstname Hislastname", just to make absolutely and totally sure that her readers couldn't miss the fact that straight men are evil sexist bastards. Throw in some scenes of a newly married woman being treated like a newly bought farm animal, some horror stories about the rapacious nature of men, some internal musing on how truly strong, independent women are probably yearning for the true fulfillment of lesbian relationships, and... yeah.
  • John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Almost every odd-numbered chapter is an Anvilicious Author Filibuster which can be summed up in the following way: Collectivism good; free market bad. He doesn't even try to integrate them into the plot, which at times seems to only be there so that Steinbeck could market what is essentially a collection of persuasive essays as fiction.
    • To be far, a few of them do serve as explanations for the Joad family's troubles due to the farm or their jobs in California. However, most of them do have little relation to the main plot and even features characters that are for that chapter only.
  • Petrarch's unpublished final work, a poem on Scipio Africanus, was full of long Author Filibusters on how Ancient Rome was better than everything ever. Technically, this is true of all of Petrarch's work, and indeed, most things written during The Renaissance, but he took the cultural inferiority complex Up To Eleven. There's also apparently a fictitious bit where Scipio goes to see a fortuneteller, who speaks of a dark time when poetry will die out and only a man named Petrarch will be able to save it. After Petrarch died, some of his fans wanted to publish it. Then they read it, and decided that he never finished it for a reason.
  • Cory Doctorow's characters' habit of spouting detailed primers on DRM, electronic privacy, free Wifi, or any other axe he'd like to grind. This sometimes degenerates into 'interesting' choices in characterization — the teen protagonist of Little Brother invites other kids around for a party, drinks, and PGP Keysigning 101.
  • Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen has always been filled with navel-gazing philosophy (usually of the Wangsty kind), but for the first seven books it was at least the characters doing it, and sometimes not without reason. But in book eight, Toll the Hounds, we have long ramblings in omniscient voice, and it becomes painfully obvious that Erikson is trying to push his allegedly deep insights regarding the world on the reader. Perhaps the most Anvilicious example is p.617 (hardback version), where Erikson has the audacity to, in omniscient voice, use the phrase: "And this is the lesson here, dear friends."
    • The parts of Toll the Hounds where the readers seem to be directly addressed are actually told by Kruppe (who, as we know since the very first book, just loves the sound of his own voice).
  • The Acts Of Caine contain a few. Stover is, for the most part, willing to keep them to under three pages. Which is good because some of those tracts are fucking depressing.
    Deliann: Sometimes it's hard to tell existentialism apart from a bad mood.
  • Even Edgar Allan Poe wasn't immune to this, though to either his credit or his fault, he restricted it to philosophy—The Imp of the Perverse is entirely about his idea of a previously uncredited motivating force behind people's actions.
  • H.P. Lovecraft's short story Silver Key consists almost entirely of his Author Avatar Randolph Carter, who is exactly like Lovecraft except that his family didn't lose its wealth and prestige musing about all things wrong with the society. He bashes both religion and science for their obsession with order and structure, and declares that dreams are equal to reality, and that the only things worth valuing in a meaningless universe are beauty and harmony. The ending implies a romanticized view of suicide, as Carter abandons the Waking World, ironically in perfect opposite to the Aesop he was supposed to have learned in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
  • King John of Canada by Scott Gardiner, although nominally a political satire, in reality consists of one Author Filibuster after another against Natives, Quebec Separatists, environmental activists, Saudi Royals, the Asper family, American-style conservatives...in short, everyone that the author doesn't like, all stuck together by a paper-thin plot and shallow characters. Even for someone who 'agrees' with most of his points, it's painful to read.

Newspaper Comics
  • The Boondocks (also the animated TV show version). Often expresses the feelings of Aaron McGruder on race, entertainment, religion, and politics. Be warned however, that some of that is also just Huey being Huey. This is subverted, however, by Huey being the character that often voices McGruder's beliefs, making it difficult to distinguish what the character thinks, and what the author thinks.
  • Bill Watterson admitted that he wrote a lot of his troubles with the syndicate into Calvin And Hobbes, as well as his opinions on comics, film, TV, commercial and other industries, humans' role in nature, art, and general philosophy. Fortunately, he was a good enough author to not let it get in the way of characterization or humour.
    • I would imagine that writing a six-year-old would make this easier — despite his vocabulary, Calvin tended to see the world in much the same way as other children his age, with simple black-and-white answers to everything, and the notion that just because you can't prove in a debate that you're right, doesn't make you any less right.
    • It also helped that Watterson was also not above making himself the butt of the jokes - for example, much of Calvin's rambling about art was actually directed at Watterson's own beliefs.
  • Doonesbury is really just Gary Trudeau telling people what he thinks about politics day-in and day-out, with occasional asides for other things.
    • Mallard Fillmore is the same thing, only with a pro-conservative/Republican position, as opposed to Doonesbury's liberal/Democrat take.
      • Actually, in its later years Doonesbury has become as much about exploring the gigantic cast of characters' lives as it has about politics. About half the strips these days are just about the wacky adventures of Zonker, Uncle Duke, or whoever Trudeau wants to focus on this week. The other half can get quite preachy, though.
      • Mallard, meanwhile, is ALWAYS an author tract, because in contrast to Doonesbury, which has hundreds of recurring characters, Mallard only has two: the duck himself, and his liberal strawman editor. And since both of them are just representatives of opposing viewpoints, there's no real "character" there to explore.
  • After its creator's conversion to born-again Christianity, B.C. became notorious for its pro-Christian sermonizing, including one infamous Easter strip showing a menorah transforming into a cross (Word Of God (ahem) was that this was merely his way of expressing a new religion overthrowing replacing obliterating coming into its own). Which may seem weird given the apparent setting, but there was a story in around 2000 or so that puts forth the idea that the setting was not prehistoric but rather post-Rapture.
    • With the Hart's grandson, Mason Mastroianni, in the writer's seat, the preachiness been dropped and the strip has returned to gag-a-day format. There was a strip ("Hey, I found this paper from 2004...") that implies B.C. merely takes place After The End.

Live Action TV
  • Saturday Night Live sometimes has this happening, most likely because the host differs from week to week. The most obvious example this troper can think of is when Christina Aguilera hosted in the midst of her "Dirrty" phase, and about three-quarters of the sketches where she played a central role (either as herself or someone else) had her character lecturing the others on how she chose to express herself as a woman (i.e. don't call me a slut just because of how I dress or dance). Some sketches in this style were Anvilicious, others were anvilicious but got the point across with a good punchline.
  • The West Wing varied a lot over time - the writing staff was mostly Republican in later seasons, leading to things like Arnold Vinick being the better candidate in the Season 7 election, to the point where he would have won had actor John Spencer not died, forcing a last-minute rewrite.
    • Of course, The West Wing looked positively non-partisan when stacked up against Sorkin's follow-up, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. This was parodied in the early episodes of 30 Rock, with Lemon ranting about something, then getting confused about the statistics before concluding, "I gotta read more."
  • MacGyver pretty much turned into a show protesting societal wrongs after a couple seasons. The most glaring was probably the one that opened with a warning about a graphic portrayal of a de-horned rhinoceros, then spent about half its running time explaining the poaching in Africa and ended with Richard Dean Anderson as himself narrating about what can be done about it. Very Special Episode, indeed.
  • Boston Legal frequently involved the writers concocting a storyline that would allow James Spader to sue and deliver increasingly lengthy closing arguments. Frequently lampshaded.

Music
(Given the large number of protest songs and other musical agitprop, this probably should only list notable or extreme examples)
  • The album Firestorm by filk musician Leslie Fish is intended as a set of instructions for surviving after a nuclear war. Many of her other songs are author tracts on the subjects of religion, anarchism, and civil liberties.
  • System of a Down lost a lot of their fandom after their concerts became political talk-downs instead of politically charged music.
  • Rush's Rock Opera 2112 is essentially a hard-rock adaptation of Ayn Rand's Anthem, and a number of the group's other songs reference Objectivist ideals, such as Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, The Trees, and (appropriately enough) Anthem.
  • In the 2000s, it has become chic to produce remixes of existing songs (protest songs in particular) containing soundbytes from the creator's political candidate of choice. This editor recalls hearing a version of Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth mashed up with a John Kerry speech in 2004, and 2008 has seen a will.i.am-produced hip-hop remix of several Barack Obama speeches.
  • "Long Leather Coat" by Paul McCartney, issued in 1993. If you are not in animal-lib, you will get chills listening to this.
  • Several of John Lennon's works from '72 and '73. "Woman Is the Nigger of the World." There is even the Nutopian National Anthem—which is silent...
  • The entirety of Green Day's "American Idiot" album was one long Take That against the George W. Bush administration. One song on the album, "Holiday", which despite already being an Author Tract manages to still have an Author Filibuster where the song stops for the singer to Strawman Political Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Bush directly through spoken word, complete with pulling a Godwin. Kind of a shame, depending on one's opinion on politics in music, because the music itself was enjoyable enough.
    • As if the album itself wasn't heavy-handed enough, Armstrong once talked about adapting it into a movie. No kidding.
  • Much of Sinead O'Connor's early work, particularly in concert, consisted of "think of the children" laments worthy of Sally Struthers, and anti-Catholic tirades, culminating in her career-derailing destruction of Pope John Paul II's photo on Saturday Night Live.
  • "Diary of an Unborn Child" is an anti-abortion Author Tract that would possibly have been more effective had the titular protagonist not embodied Sickening Sweetness and Nightmare Fuel in equal measure, making its eventual demise more of a relief than anything. And then it starts singing.
    • Not to mention that in trying to be strawmannishly Anvilicious, the creator portrays the mother as literally quaking in fear at the very concept of her child, implying that she hates it and despises it. Of course, if your unborn fetus was chirping at you about every stage of its development in a Chipmunk-esque voice, it might scare you, too.
  • Subverted by Alice Cooper. Despite being a Republican, he is vehemently against mixing his beliefs with his songs, both because he feels that rock is the antithesis of politics and because he doesn't think people should be looking to musicians for guidance on who to vote for.
    • Likewise, this editor gained a whole new sense of respect for Elvis Presley after hearing about a reporter who asked for his opinion on the Vietnam War; The King politely replied with "Ma'am, I'm just an entertainer," and he left it at that.
  • Neal Morse left his Prog Rock band Spock's Beard after becoming a Christian. His "Testimony" album is pretty much the story of his conversion, although he tends not to be didactic and simply calls it "my story."
  • Early Chicago had a lot of these. If it's penned by Robert Lamm, expect this trope (also, expect a lot of vitriol aimed at the establishment). Exemplified by "A Song for Richard And His Friends."
  • Toby Keith's early albums were a mix of fun or melancholy country tunes, of above-average quality. Now they are mostly raucous instructions on blind patriotism, bible-thumping and how he's better than everyone. He does freely admit this, but this troper's still embarassed when people see his name in my iPod.

Video Games
  • Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series has a tendency to pause the action for long cutscenes proclaiming the danger of Nukes. Metal Gear Solid Thumbnail Theatre mocks this by occasionally substituting the name of the nuclear expert with that of Kojima:
    Hideo Kojima: NUKES ARE VEDDY, VEDDY BAD. GRRR NUKES.
    • It's pretty curious that said character disappeared completely from the series after MGS 1.
      • With the game being produced by the only country that was ever actually bombed attacked with the things, this may be excusable.
      • Technically, she doesn't entirely disappear... She is the one who provides the book, In the Darkness of Shadow Moses, which may or may not represent the sum total of public knowledge of Solid Snake. It is, however, pretty blatantly stated that she disappeared (in a more literal and in-universe sense) after its publication.

Web Animation
  • The entire online flash series, Broken Saints, is basically an enormous 12-hour long Author Tract expounding the creator's deep, Eastern-style philosophy. Oh, and the writer makes no secret of his feelings about the US military-industrial complex, or about the United States' occupation of Iraq (Iraqi terrorists are portrayed as freedom fighters, whilst the American forces are all thugs to a man.) Oh, and US Corporations = Supreme Evil.
    • Which is actually a pretty impressive feat for a series that was written and began production years before said occupation occurred. Maybe the creators do have eastern mystical powers of prescience.

Webcomics
  • Fans! is a little too vehement in its defense of fanboys. Claim that they're valuable, intelligent and worthwhile human beings, fine. Claim that fanboys have the specific combination of strengths that makes them the only ones capable of defending Earth, and that the biggest, geekiest fanboys alive will be revered by future generations as heroes who made all of society possible... that's taking things a bit too far.
    • Somewhat subverted/lampshaded in one subplot which shows that being a geeky fan is now the "in" thing, and that non-fandom people are now the outcasts (and some feign fandom interests just to fit in). Your Mileage May Vary.
    • Shortpacked seems to take the opposite tack in its satire and often portrays fans with complaints of any sort as self-entitled morons. Not surprisingly, what is considered unfair and what is considered perfectly okay seems to coincide with the author's tastes...
  • Better Days started out as an author tract largely for conservatism and mild misogyny, but has gradually grown into an author tract for Objectivism as Jay Naylor discovered that particular philosophy and became a huge Ayn Rand fan. The most recent chapter of the comic is basically a long rant against abstract art or any art that "doesn't look like something", culminating with the "good" artist whose paintings "look like what they're of" being given validation first in the form of a big check from a businessman, and then discarding her own search for fulfillment to move in with the male main character, whom she expects nothing of (not even fidelity).
  • Unicorn Jelly and Pastel Defender Heliotrope, both by Jennifer Diane Reitz, both start out as (respectively) amusing and cute fantasy and science fiction stories, but the Author's soapboxes about religion, homosexuality, and transgenderism quickly overwhelm the plot.
    • To say nothing of the fact that it's revealed at the end of Pastel Defender Heliotrope that it was about anti-piracy legislation as well (which seems like an Ass Pull to boot since it only comes up in the last page or two).
  • Ozy And Millie tends to sometimes veer into Simpson's liberal viewpoints, usually with geoglobal politics boiled down to playground puppets, and famously Millie's Mr. W sockpuppet. This faded when she decided to launch her political cartoon "I Drew This". Her opinions on the Public Education system still is a strong part of the strip.
  • With The Last Days Of Foxhound, this is bound to happen when a biochemistry student writes a comic about Metal Gear Solid, but it's noticeable how he still makes it funny. Mantis is the typical mouthpiece. Dr. Naomi Hunter supplements Mantis' rants with more reasonable but obviously frustrated objections.
  • While the comic has become incredibly more reasonable about this, earlier strips of Tales Of The Questor were suffused with a certain subset of Christian theology, culminating when the author updated with rants about other belief systems. Those rants have since been moved elsewhere, but the author still provides nods towards Christianity now and again. (Though, that's not necessarily a bad thing AT ALL.)
    • Every other comic by the author, on the other hand, is still chock-full of pro-Christian, American (especially Southern), libertarian soapboxing and anti-pretty much everything else.

Western Animation
  • South Park often devotes episodes to be heavy handed over the top Author Tract, with Strawman Political.
    • And then lampshades it in Cartoon Wars. Repeatedly. Let it never be said that, whatever their views, Parker and Stone are not self-aware.
      "And if you ask me, your show has become so preachy and full of morals that you have forgotten how to be funny!"
  • Ducktales occasionally delved into this territory, although it was generally done well and in a manner that could educate kids on issues they might not otherwise learn about until they were older. Some episodes dealt with themes such as capitalism vs organized labor (showing the importance of responsible management, without totally demonizing, when Uncle Scrooge lost his memory).
    • This Troper knows multiple people who were converted to monetarist economics as small children by the money-duplicating episode.
    • This Troper still remembers the "Privledge of Working for Us" Tax so many years after the episode aired.
  • Seth MacFarlane has bluntly stated that American Dad, a show about an extremely stupid conservative CIA agent and his family, was created primarily out of his frustration at George W. Bush's re-election in 2004. However, despite its overtly political premise, it has generally been far less preachy than the Family Guy episodes that have aired during the same years.
  • Similarly to the Family Guy/Brian example, a writer for The Simpsons admitted that the creative team has deliberately made Ned Flanders, in recent seasons, less of a "turn the other cheek" Christian and more of an intolerant Moral Guardian, as a protest against the growing influence of, well, Moral Guardians in Bush's America... nevermind the Moral Guardians were lead by Al Gore's wife (and just as virulent) around the time the show started. Much of this has been viewed as Character Derailment. Flanders was de-Flanderized in The Movie, though, being portrayed as a genuinely caring guy who just has some annoying quirks.
    • A more annoying cause of Author Tracts is Lisa who, as the show has gone on, has become the focus of plots that are basically an excuse to have her take on some new world view (Buddhism, veganism, environmentalism, etc.). While the causes she supports are generally worthwhile, the fact that the plot seems to require all the other characters to become total jerkasses before eventually apologizing to her makes it harder to like them in other episodes. An obvious example is the disgusting behavior of Homer and Marge when Lisa became a Buddhist, acting as though she'd converted to Satanism. They never acted this way about Buddhism again and it barely gets a mention in other episodes. There's even a later episode in which everyone is shocked that Bart becomes a Catholic. He never thinks to remind anyone that his sister left the family church as well.
    • The family didn't treat her like a Satanist; in fact, Marge specifically defends her when Lovejoy makes that accusation. They did try to convert her back, but it was more a case of "fear of the new" than anything else (and you can't really say Lisa is being singled out here when Bart got the essentially same treatment in the Catholic episode.) It's less a case of author tracting and more a case of the generally poor characterization which has hampered the show in recent times.
    • Lisa didn't stop going, she just stopped paying attention.
      • How does THAT make a difference?
      • Because that was actually the resolution to the episode. Lisa says she will keep going to church but just not pay attention, and Marge is pleased, because at least this way the townspeople will stop talking.
      • It wasn't that she'd go and not pay attention, but that she'd continue to respect her family's Christianity by celebrating Christmas, going to church with them, etc., since Buddhism is not exclusive in nature. To her credit, she was a lot more reasonable than when she became a vegetarian.
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