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alt title(s): Author On Board 
Obvious authorial intrusion. When the characters start behaving like idiots or against their previously established characterization because the writer damn well needs them to in order to tell his story.
May also occur when a character is accused of being used just to show a particular POV, and not because he actually has it.
At best, the only difference is a rather heavy-handed Aesop. At worst, narrative is put aside so that an Author Filibuster can be conducted. When you agree what the author has to say, but feel that their method of conveyance is detrimental to the work, it becomes a case of Dont Shoot The Message.
A play on "Baby on Board".
Author Appeal is a specific form of this. See also Wall Banger and Creator Breakdown, and Idiot Plot. Compare Out Of Character Moment.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Director Hideaki Anno, who had gone through a serious bout of depression pre-production, was famously accused of this practice in regards to the later opaque parts of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- As was Gundam director Yoshiyuki Tomino, but for a different reason.
- The original English language manga Dramacon has an OEL manga artist pause to commiserate about people who think OEL works aren't "really" manga. She's immediately set upon by a representative of the opposing view: he's ten, dressed as Naruto, only able to talk by shouting... oh, yeah, and racist.
Comic Books
- Don't mention Reginald Hudlin's revival of the Black Panther comic. Just... don't.
- DC Comics writer Keith Giffen is unabashed about his hatred of Legion Of Super Heroes character Karate Kid and his "super karate", and has stated outright that any time he ends up writing the Legion comic, Karate Kid will die. Could be considered a subversion in that when Giffen did write Karate Kid's death in one run of the Legion comic, he gave the character a respectful send-off via Heroic Sacrifice, rather than simply dropping a bridge on him.
- A few reviewers have accused Giffen of trying to co-opt Midnighter, one of the only openly gay superheroes, after reading their run wherein Midnighter disbands the team, leaves his husband, Apollo, and moves to a tiny apple-pie town where he lives with a young woman named Mindy. The Reset Button was pounded so hard after that it nearly cracked.
- Since early 90s, several Marvel Comics' Editors-in-Chief (with Joe Quesada being the most recent example) have been notorious for doing whatever he could to try and destroy the fact that Peter Parker got married in the '80s. He has always had to double-back on it because the attempts are so ham-fisted and obvious that the fans completely revolt and the title's sales plummet (see Clone Saga). His most recent attempt, the much-maligned One More Day which actually went as far as having Peter Parker make a deal with the devil to erase his marriage in exchange for his Aunt May's life, actually ticked off the person stuck writing it so much that he left the title entirely.
- One of Quesada's claims was that readers' couldn't empathize with Spidey as a married man, despite the fact that they'd been doing precisely that for two decades. After One More Day, Peter Parker is a photographer with terrible luck with women who lives with his aunt and is constantly worried about money. Opinions are divided over whether this qualifies as some kind of Take That.
- Supposedly Quesada didn't want to kill MJ or have them get a divorce, because it would "age the character" too much. Making deals with a devil is all right, though.
- Quesada also nixed J Michael Straczynski's plan to resurrect Gwen Stacy as well as Harry Osborn during the reboot. Oddly, Quesada seems to think that while marriage makes Peter difficult for fans to empathize with and divorce and/or widowing Peter would only age him, having a girlfriend who died young in a horrible fashion is perfectly fine.
- And THEN, Harry Osborn pops back up in "Brand New Day" anyway!
- Well, comics sales overall have been on the decline for the past two decades. Trying to recapture the source of the high sales they used to have is a sensible action, just that they seem to be absolutely clueless about how to do it.
- Stop doing things like "Brand New Day"?
- And it's all because he worships mothers (and mother figures in the case of Aunt May) due to his dying from cancer, and hates wives, whom he claims their husbands are "more interesting" without them. Note about the only marriage not forcibly broken up is that of Reed Richards and Sue Storm, and they are parents.
- Nearly everything Judd Winick wrote for DC Comics, particularly his Very Special Issues.
- Green Lantern #154
 , in which we learn the very important lesson that Beating People Up For Being Gay Is Wrong after Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's personal assistant Terry Berg is beaten up by a group of random thugs while leaving a club with his boyfriend. Despite having lost his first girlfriend to super-villain violence in the incident with defined the Women In Refrigerators trope and seeing numerous other violations of basic human decency on a daily basis, THIS particularly display of man's inhumanity to man is so bad that it inspires Kyle Rayner to abandon the Earth in favor of wandering outer space and helping random non-human species.
- Could just be a case of... well, the same thing as taking an alien invasion (which used to be the sort of thing you dealt with in one issue and forgot about) and turning it into a crossover event.
- Lampshaded by Joe Kelly in JLA, where he basically has Kyle say I died and came back from the dead and I'm fine, but my friend gets gay bashed and I can't take it anymore?
- This was more than likely an excuse to get Kyle out of JLA to replace him with John Stewart, since Stewart was the GL in the Justice League cartoon.
- Green Arrow #44, in which we learn that Oliver Queen's adopted daughter Mia is a recovering methhead AND HIV Positive. Despite having been portrayed by Winick as an unrepentant womanizer and having been so during a time when knowing such things would be vital, Oliver is completely ignorant as to what HIV is and how it is contracted, prompting a text-book recital on how HIV is contracted and treated.
- Outsiders #17-19 (a.k.a Most Wanted), in which the Outsiders approach real-life hero and Very Special Guest Star John Walsh for help in tracking down the leader of a child slavery ring. It doesn't speak well of the team that when their leader, a Batman-trained detective (i.e. Nightwing), is unable to find any leads that his next plan of attack is "Let's get that guy on TV to help us!" This arc had Executive Meddling written ALL OVER IT.
- Green Arrow #61, in which newly elected Mayor Oliver Queen sums up his plan for rebuilding Star City with two words: gay marriage. In exchange for living in the city for two weeks, gay couples can have a free wedding on the steps of city hall - the hope being that all of these couples will stay and settle in the city, bringing money which will go into the local economy. Sadly, the plan is a bit of a non-starter seeing on how it is dependent on finding gay people who are so desperate to be legally married they will willingly move to a city that is currently divided by a massive wall built to separate the poor side of town from the rich side of town in the wake of a super-villain attack and the poor side is full of super-powered, drug-crazed zombies.
- Averted by his run on Batman, which prompted one reviewer to proclaim "What happened to the Judd Winick who's been phoning in his scripts month after month?"
- Then there is the Marvel Civil War. Even if the main writer didn't "intend" for there to be any meaning, it was there, and worse, gives the impression that the higher ups Running The Asylum at Marvel just might not even like superheroes that much, since this series was basically bashing the idea of them
- And then the writers who didn't agree with that notion naturally write their stories against it, turning this into a huge clusterfuck of writers on board.
- The idea of the government trying to get some control over all the superheroes running around would have made some sense as more than mere superhero-bashing. The idea of having the government quickly decide to rely on unreliable costumed psychos for black operations intended to force the reluctant ones into compliance... not so much.
- A somewhat humorous example: Animal Man. Grant Morrison used it to constantly pitch for animal rights, particularly stating that Humans Are Bastards and eating animals is wrong. Part of the plot was also the fact that the main character was slowly realizing he was in a comic book. In the last issue of Morrison's run, Animal Man and Morrison talk face to face, and Animal Man points out that animal rights are all well and good - but sometimes he verged on eco-terrorism. And that sharing minds with animals shouldn't automatically make you a vegetarian since half of the time you're going to be sharing minds with a carnivore. And all of this felt like Character Derailment. Morrison admits he has some good points but wonders if the next writer will take that too far and have Animal Man run down a zebra and eat it alive. As both a Continuity Nod and a Take That, the next writer had him do just that in the very next issue.
- Morrison also puts in a Take That to himself by noting that the writing had become more and more "preachy" as the series went on.
- The X Men have suffered this since the late 90's. Everytime new writers come on board, they kill or write off any new characters the previous writer introduced, and existing characters' development tends to be largely forgotten. Most egregious is how, for a long time, Emma Frost was treated like she left the Hellfire Club for the X-Men last week as if Generation X never happened (but considering how Jubilee is still a teenager while her former teammates are now young adults, who knows). Then they blow up the mansion and have the team go in a totally new direction. One must wonder when was the last time the X-Men had a direction that they stuck to for longer than two years. Chris Claremont is the best-known for this, leaving a title then coming back years later and picking up his old plotlines with no regard to what happened between stints. Like his tropes page says, if he didn't write it, he doesn't care.
- Considering how subsequent authors tried to revert characters like Magneto to one-dimensional cliches ignoring all of the Character Development that was fostered over the years (like disusing himself as a member of the X-Men, shooting a team-member, enslaving New York City, and inexplicably killing a cosmic entity), one might not blame him for such an attitude.
- Your Mileage may be varied, but Jeph Loeb. This troper thinks that every time he takes over a book certain characters just get ... devolved. His rendition of the Ultimate / Supreme books, was. Well. Shit. Him taking over Ultimates turned Quicksilver and Wanda into fullblown incestous as opposed to Millar's bit more subtle approach. Hawkeye turned into a suicidal hardcore twat, and his Hulk speaks in third person despite Ultimate Hulk not talking in third person after his initial showing. Worst? Thor suddenly goes from I speak like a normal person to Thou art Shakespearian like his 616 counterpart. And that's one book.
- Let's not forget Pyro. Apparently nobody told Loeb that Ultimate Pyro is a heroic X-Man and horribly burned because he's not immune to his own powers. The version that turned up in Ultimates? Classic Brotherhood villain mook Pyro, with a slice of rapist on the side...
- This troper has actually started wondering if Loeb has suffered a minor case of Creator Breakdown after his son died, considering his Ultimates V.3 and especially Ultimatum seemed to be getting Darker and Edgier, to the point where Ultimatum has such moments of sheer Squick and horribleness as The Blob eating the Wasp's corpse and Hank Pym biting the head off Blob in retaliation. Let's think on that. Too characters who has NEVER been portrayed as cannibals are EATING other characters.
- IDW's Transformers comics have probably suffered this with the advent of the All Hail Megatron series. Before, their comic continity was a rather interesting variation of G1, with many characters getting redesigns to reflect technological advances (the Seekers, for example, became F-22s rather than F-15s). Of course, then Shane McCarthy and All Hail Megatron came along, reverting designs back to G1 and pretty much creating a buttload of errors and inconsistancies thanks to the story becoming, essentially 'Decepticons kill people'.
- He's a good explaim, Starscream up until then wanted to get rip of Megatorn because he's forgot what the Decepticons where fighting about (they were freedom fighters) now it's because they're Proud Warrior Race Guys
Film
- Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, wherein Christopher Reeve was given creative control of the story, is a thinly-veiled veneer for his anti-nuclear, anti-corporate media philosophies. In one particularly jarring scene from the movie, Superman saves the passengers aboard a runaway subway car, then gives a speech to a crowd of pedestrians about the benefits of mass transit. Richard Pryor doesn't seem so bad now, does he? In all fairness, Reeve admitted the movie was horrible (and it does have a certain entertainment value).
- The biggest failing of the film Lady in the Water was that it was just two hours of M. Night Shyalaman rubbing his self indulgence in our faces. The movie is pretty much centered around inspiring a writer (not surprisingly, played by Shyalaman himself) into writing a book that will change the world for the better at the cost of being martyred in a Heroic Sacrifice. He also includes a Take That against the film critics who gave his earlier movies negative reviews by putting in a film critic character who is an arrogant, unlikeable man who dies a horrible death.
- The film critic is supposed to represent people who are incapable of finding anything good about life and are thus inherently destructive to people around them—note that the heroine almost dies because they ask the Critic for help, and his advice is influenced by his own nihilistic world views. If he were meant to represent Shyalaman's critics, he'd probably have had more lines about egotistical directors instead of talking about how there's never anything new.
- Please. Shyamalan = hero, Film Critic = bad guy - how the hell is that not self-indulgence?
- The film adaptation of V for Vendetta took an Author Tract and aimed it in a different direction. (Hollywood hates pure anarchy.) It's ham-handed in its message, which took the book's examination of anarchism vs. fascism and transformed it into a parable about the current political debate in the US about government power and civil liberties in the war on terrorism. Just in case you couldn't tell who was supposed to be right, they also turned the government, which was already a Neo-Nazi technofascist cabal in the books, into the perpetrator of the terrorist attacks they were supposedly trying to stop.
- In Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, Leonard Nimoy preaches his pro-environmental views and gives a nonsensical justification for it. Yet by not putting those views front and center, and keeping the movie strong on character and humor (also thanks to the screenplay by four skilled writers), the trope is barely noticeable when watching (and is largely considered the second best of the Trek films).
- If you think Trek IV falls into that trope, you haven't seen Star Trek V (or you might have filed it away under Dis Continuity). Shatner wrote and directed the movie, and it shows. While humor in Trek usually involved laughing with the characters, in V all the costars are put in situations to be laughed at (brilliant navigator Sulu getting lost in the woods, Scotty banging his head on an overhead pipe after claiming that he knows the ship like the back of his hand, etc.). Basically, everyone except Kirk fucks up and / or get ridiculed. His original screenplay even had Spock siding with Sybok, for crying out loud (luckily both Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley flatly refused to take part in such blatant Character Derailment).
- Any Quentin Tarantino film usually has a scene that is obviously a theory or pet peeve of Tarantino's shoved into the mouth of one of the characters.
- Sometimes even by playing the character himself.
- Naked Gun 2 1\2 arguably did this when the main villain goes on about his plot to suppress environmentally-friendly tech. In an action comedy.
- Given the movie's tone, this was more a parody of the use of "villains who hate nature" than commentary on it.
- Annie Hall parodies it, by having Alvy Singer write his failing relationship into a play he's working on. In real life, Singer and his girlfriend break up, but in the play he delivers a poorly-written speech about how their relationship was far too superb to end in a hell-hole like Los Angeles. Singer lampshades it by turning to the screen and saying, "What do you want, it was my first play."
Literature
- Any story by Christopher Paolini will likely go on and on about how much he hates every religion known to man, taxes, non-vegetarians, anyone who'd dare risk everything for the good of their children...really, anyone who isn't Christopher Paolini.
- Karen Traviss when she writes Star Wars. Her abuse of Jedi and conspiracy theories make the Living Force cry...
- Which is nothing compared to her obsession with Mandalorians.
- Bardan Jusik/Gotab being the perfect example of both her abuse of Jedi and Stu-ification of the Mando'a. The troper would like to banish the former-Jedi turned Mando to the furthest depths of the Netherworld/Chaos/Hell.
- The Gears Of War novel Aspho Fields that she wrote pretty much beats the reader about the head with the idea that "weapons developers = war criminals."
- Traviss' Mandalorian "super tribal warrior" fixation carries over into the novel as well, with its hyper-competent, misunderstood, absolutely perfect Pesanga warriors, who are pretty much Mandalorians with machetes.
- The Sword Of Truth series by Terry Goodkind is often accused by detractors of being nothing more than Objectivist propaganda. Faith of the Fallen is two-fifths desperate battles and angst, and three-fifths clangingly obvious Ayn Rand soap-boxing 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. Goodkind does, admittedly, come by it honestly: pretty much all fiction by Ayn Rand is a soapbox for Objectivism—most famously Atlas Shrugged.
- The Da Vinci Code has been criticized for having a protagonist with no personality, who simply "serves as a mouthpiece for Dan Brown's theories." In other words, taking this trope to its extreme.
- Not just the protagonist, either; Dan Brown repeatedly pauses the plot for Author Filibusters that would give Ayn Rand a run for her money, if not in length or research, then certainly in obviousness.
- Orson Scott Card's Empire, where the characters will pause during the action to explain exactly why any disrespect for the military whatsoever is unpatriotic and therefore evil.
- We'll grant that this is an exaggerated description, but he does compare An Inconvenient Truth to the Unabomber Manifesto.
- Orson Scott Card does seem to have a habit of doing this. It's happened in both of the Enders Game series, and also creeps in elsewhere.
- An exactly opposite case occurs in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. After an army officer gives a speech about how "We'll always need an army, and may God strike me down were it to be otherwise," God does just that.
- Card's Mormonism is made blatantly obvious in his Homecoming Saga, which is essentially just a re-telling of the Book of Mormon.
- And in his Alvin Maker series where the main character is basically a Marty Stu version of Joseph Smith. With magical powers yet.
- From This Troper's perspective, all of the above fall heavily under Your Mileage May Vary, since most of his stories are complex enough that multiple interpretations can seem plausible, and to be fair, most people he's heard criticize Card's use of Mormon myth (something as valid as Biblical lore or any other religion's mythos to base a story around) are themselves influenced by a deep-seated dislike for the religion.
- In one very uncharacteristically blatant and unmistakable example, though, several characters near the beginning of his recent book Ender in Exile espouse the (anthropologically incorrect) view that monogamy is the only and best successful means of human society, using the exact same phrasing consistently enough to put conservative pundits' talking points to shame. Thankfully, he drops this act soon enough to make the book as a whole still enjoyable, but it's quite a Wall Banger when compared to his usual style.
- Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. After bubbling under the surface for the first two-thirds of the trilogy, the final volume explodes into a massive Take That against Christianity. Pullman's admitted intention with his series was to set up an atheist response to the fantasy novels of Christian writer/philosopher C.S. Lewis.
- Lewis, on the other hand, kept it under control until the The Last Battle, wherein satan-worshipping Arabs take over the world and the subtext rather becomes the... text.
- So both series lost control in the last novel...such a shame HDM is so much shorter.
- Actually they're about the same in comparison. The HDM books are much longer, which makes up for the fact that CS Lewis wrote 7 Narnia novels.
- The Tash worshipers were based more on the fantasy stereotype of Arabs. Not that it really helps.
- Anthony Burgess' famous English novel, A Clockwork Orange, is so generally believed to suffer from Writer On Board in its last chapter that until 1986 its US editions left out the offending chapter- and even now, come with a preface explaining the cut. The classic movie version also changed the ending, as did a 1990 play written for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
- For the movie version, Kubrick didn't know about the original ending.
- Ursula K. LeGuin's so-called sequel to the Earthsea Trilogy Tehanu definitely qualifies, being a gender-feminist screed that totally disregards continuity and characterization established in the earlier books.
- And the follow-up short-story collection Tales From Earthsea is, if anything, even worse. Women created all the magic, and these evil, rotten, worthless men stole it!
- After his own conversion to Spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a novel titled The Land of Mist to explain and justify his beliefs, including having his ultra-rationalist hero Professor Challenger (from The Lost World) become convinced of the rightness of Spiritualism and convert.
- The early works of lesbian author Katherine V. Forrest fall victim to this. Curious Wine has a man raping a woman (who, by this point, has fallen head-over-heels in love with her future girlfriend). Daughters of a Coral Dawn is the most extreme, having men (who are suffering from one giant inferiority complex) outlawing some Applied Phlebotinum that renders them redundant in the act of procreation. It Runs On Nonsensoleum (and the precise nature of the phlebotinum is never explained). Fortunately, Forrest appeared to have toned it down by the time she started on the Kate Delafield books.
- There is a lot of this in The Time Paradox by Eoin Colfer. The entire book is about rescuing a lemur from being killed by the Extinctionists. Artemis' having sent this lemur to its death is continually treated as a horrendous act, even though he did it in an attempt to save his father. There is virtually no disagreement on this point. Holly is horrified (as are the other fantasy creatures present), Artemis is filled with remorse, and even Artemis' younger self feels a twinge of guilt that apparently never bothered him during any of his other countless criminal escapades. The sheer magnitude of the overreactions of the characters when they learn that Artemis sent the lemur to die makes this an Author on Board.
- Keep in mind, Artemis is only rescuing the lemur because he thinks his mother will die if he doesn't. The Extinctionists are actually being controlled by Opal Koboi, and the Fairies are usually extremely cautious about nature.
- Since 2001 or so, if the particular Alternate History setting allows for it, Harry Turtledove will always make sure to include some kind of analogy to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. No problem on the surface, as analogies are standard stock-in-trade for alternate history stories. The problem came when, in a timeline where the South won the American Civil War, he chose Mormons for this role. Many fans believe that he's crossed the line from "Broken Aesop regarding repression of religious expression leading to violence" into outright bigotry.
- In the same work, he also turns Canadians into Irish separatist terror bombers, blacks into Communists and Mexicans into Nazi satellite state collaborationist.
- The Man with The Iron Heart takes this to extremes about his feelings on the Iraq War. Reinhard Heydrich lives to run a partisan campaign. Body bags are showing up as everyday Germans become radicalized and engage in terrorist acts. It's subtle as a brick when you have mothers of dead soldiers acting just like a certain famous protester and it leads up to the republicans winning control of Congress and getting us out from the democrat's war. The Wallbanging hurts on this one, especially with how the soviets meekly accept the acts. Let alone how lacking the cooperation of the Germans, the Marshall plan would not of been enacted. Leading to either the plan that loots all machines and important tooling as well smashing the infrastructure, or the one that called for the castration of all German men. These were real plans...
- The late Michael Crichton tended to do this a lot, albeit that he was somewhat more subtle about it as the characters whom he boarded were created more or less for the purpose of espousing a philosophy central to their characters. He also did it a lot because his modus operandi was to take a source of public fear/apprehension/paranoia and then base a novel around it. Fear of computers/robots: West World. Fear of genetic manipulation: Jurassic Park. Fear of the Japanese: Rising Sun. Fear of sex discrimination: Disclosure. Fear of the media and flying: Airframe. And so on.
- except for Next, arguably, but as pointed out elsewhere on this site, it's arguably to lampoon the magic Lego Genetics therapy that the public is enamored with. From another troper whose name I couldn't get: "It's most fun to read it if you imagine Crichton screaming 'Genes do not work that way!!!!!!!!!' all the way through."
- The Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell gives us the impression that Mr. Cornwell really, really dislikes Army officers and aristocrats, particularly when the two are combined in one person.
- In several of his novels, Neal Stephenson has his characters voice an interest in the arts and complain about how most of their scientist/techie acquaintances think that the arts are useless. Stephenson is an MIT graduate (and obviously) a novelist. Also, it's possible that Stephenson doesn't agree with the sentiment, but in both Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, a character gives a lecture to the effect that some cultures are superior to others and that those who are wealthy deserve to be that way.
- Moral relativism also gets a bit of a kicking in several of his books, notably Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age (again).
- This trope is Older Than Steam: Molière's plays often were whole essays against the hypocrisy and vulgarity that went rampant in French society, as well as tirades against doctors (medicine was horrible back then, and many docs were VERY ignorant). Tartoufe, once of his most well-known plays, was censored for years because of this.
- H. Beam Piper's Terro-Human Future History novels were essentially on the hard side of Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness. On the other hand, one of his Paratime novels essentially gave reincarnation a free pass. To his credit, that story spent a fair amount of time discussing the social effects of universally-accepted reincarnation, such as a casual attitude towards death and suicide.
- Common in Tom Clancy novels, which are naturally packed to the gills with Straw Liberals. Potentially his most Anvilicious work is Executive Orders: Jack Ryan, using his everyman common sense and American spirit, solves The Arab Israeli Conflict in about a week and takes time out from a major terrorist attack to completely reform the US Tax Code.
Live Action TV
- Most Star Trek episodes penned by the Berman/Braga team, as they have the opinion that the future is going to be a bad place, taking the Star Trek franchise away from Gene Roddenberry's vision of hope and optimism. While it has sometimes worked when taken as a whole (the latter seasons of Deep Space Nine, for instance, were quite good—and Braga had nothing to do with the series), taken individually many of the episodes are rather dark, depressing, and pessimistic. Not quite downer endings, but definitely not the "Let's explore space and have fun!" endings that Roddenberry's episodes typically possessed.
- And as hinted above, the writers of Deep Space Nine (who later went on to write The 4400 and the 2003 revival of Battlestar Galactica) really, really loved the Cynical side of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism; though to their credit it was sometimes for the better.
- It wasn't so much that the future is a bad place, but that sometimes good people have to do bad things. The heroes are cast in a pretty good light, or at least, shown to have chosen the most successful course. Oddly enough, Deep Space Nine also included section 31, who committed worse crimes than anyone on DS 9, but also for the good of the Federation (at no point does it appear that Section 31 does not believe in the ideals of the Federation: they merely believe that sometimes you have to break them in the short term, to keep them in the long term), who were cast in a pretty bad light. Apparently, even moral ambiguity has its standards. That said, one can't deny that the number of traitors, personal agendas and maquis sympathizers within the Federation seemed to grow somewhat rapidly at that time. It didn't make the future a bad place, but it certainly didn't make it any better either.
- Gene Roddenberry himself may also be listed here. He was the one who made The Federation a Mary Sue Topia, although there is some doubt as to whether he did it to deliver a message or just because he preferred writing about that sort of thing.
- The Doctor Who episode "The Two Doctors", written by vegetarian Robert Holmes, is a thinly-disguised parable about the evils of meat-eating. Also, the two-parter ending with 'The Poison Sky' is quite literally about gas from our cars leading to extinction (with an assist from the Sontarans).
- Aaron Sorkin often used Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip as a soapbox to air his thinly-disguised personal grievances, particularly to vicariously lecture his ex-girlfriend. This also happened in The West Wing when internet critics hurt his feelings. The West Wing at least had the advantage of being pretty spot on, and quite funny, with political beliefs getting aired at least making sense in context. Studio 60... not so much. On the other hand, Studio 60 appeared aimed to a be a Red State/Blue State love story, so political rants and banter were to be expected.
- Much of Series Two of Extras - in particular, the parts dealing with Andy's sitcom - seemed to be Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant explaining in great detail how their naturalistic style of comedy was infinitely superior to anyone else's.
- Gervais and Merchant elaborate that the show is not about saying that broad comedy is bad; if you have grand ambitions, you shouldn't settle for less and let people meddle with your ideas. Do what you want to do. They don't portray either camp in a sympathetic light, as many more successful actors and writers in the show are intensely arrogant, elitist and pretentious. The entire last half of episode 2.2 displays this in the club where Andy is humiliated by just about everyone there. Episode 2.4 also has Stephen Fry belittling and patronizing Andy after Fry wins the BAFTA over him. Even Andy himself act very pretentious and two-faced, hiding his celebrity status but later using it to try and get his way whenever it suits him.
- Gervais and Merchant even admit that Andy's sitcom When the Whistle Blows does indeed make them laugh, even if it is not very intellectual.
- Producer Frank Mancuso Jr. was promoted to producer on the second season of the cult TV series War of the Worlds. He took a promising concept (the aliens left over from the 1953 invasion living among us), and destroyed it. How? He turned the present-day setting into a rundown, "Almost Tomorrow" setting that is never explained; half the main cast were killed off (the two visible minorities!); the villains of the first season were exterminated to make way for a new group of aliens from the same planet; and several plot threads from the first season (most notably, an alien who helped the main characters defeat the aliens in the first-season finale, and promised to bring reinforcements) never showed up again.
- Pretty much the last three years of Law And Order. In particular, Jack McCoy's vendetta-like attacks on defendants who use religion as a defense. It is stopped just short of being completely anvilicious by being well within his character and having him regularly being called out on it.
- Since Jack accepts virtually no excuses for murder if there is mens rea, whether this is a case of Writer On Board is debatable.
- Also, those who disagree with him are not portrayed as being wrong at all (unless they're the defense lawyers, sometimes).
- Curiously subverted in Law And Order: SVU where Elliot Stabler enjoys his rants about how violating his morals is evil and horrible (which often times it is) but he typically comes off as borderline psychotic.
- In an instance that might be called "Actor On Board", Law And Order Special Victims Unit has Detective Sergeant John Munch, whose utter devotion to the civil liberties of every human being stops rather abruptly at the right to end one's own life... this character is played by an actor (Richard Belzer) whose own father committed suicide.
- The character's father committed suicide as well, justifying Munch's views on the subject. Of course, it's highly likely that the sole reason for this was in order to justify the opinion, so this still counts as an example.
- Babylon 5 had a minor version where any and all Cute Kids And Robots were killed off in a very blunt and mean-spirited way.
- A very early episode of Stargate SG-1, "Emancipation", was centered on Samantha Carter becoming a Blithe Spirit on a planet where women were oppressed in every way possible. While Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped, the feminist message was conveyed with all the subtlety of a naquadah explosion, and it wasn't exactly the show's best episode. The events from it were never mentioned again.
- And by 'early', we mean the third episode of Season One. It may have been a deliberate and/or necessary way to define the series as different to other cookie-cutter Science Fiction series. IE No Prime Directive
- Most episodes of Boston Legal involve at least one case where the Crane, Poole & Schmidt firm takes on The Government / Mega Corp over a Ripped From The Headlines controversial scandal or policy. Guess who always wins?
- Numb3rs suffered from this with the eco-storyline and the minority-treatment arc at the end of last season. Nothing like a good Green Aesop to pull the handbrake on a perfectly decent whodunit.
- Pretty much the entire sixth season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer had the characters (particularly Buffy and Spike) changing opinions, morality and emotions depending on whether or not Marti Noxon was writing the episode that week. For example, one week Buffy is shown to be trapping lovelorn Spike in an abusive relationship. Then next, he's preying on an emotionally damaged Buffy...
Tabletop Games
- When the setting information for a Tabletop Game includes slaves, the authors quite often feel the need to throw in an aside about how bad slavery is/was in the real world. This is presumably in case anyone is thick enough to read "here's a fictional country that practices slavery, like countless civilizations in Real Life history" as "let's all keep slaves". Dungeons And Dragons works dealing with it go out of their way to say that, according to the game's Character Alignment system, slavery is always and only an evil act. A supplement for Exalted on the economy of the setting took this to its logical extreme by opening with an Author Filibuster about how great it is that we don't practice slavery anymore. A notable aversion is Requiem for Rome, set during the Roman Empire, where slavery is presented as just part of the setting without any hand-wringing (even though it's noted vampires are brutal to their slaves). Given the flack some supplements, such as Charnel Houses of Europe, received, this may not be unreasonable behavior.
- GURPS provides detailed rules for owning slaves including possible slave personalities which range from "fanatically violent hatred of being a slave" to "unable to think for himself". Of course, laws about slaves are presented (realistically) as equally wide ranging and remains totally quiet on the morality of owning slaves.
- Except, oddly, that Time of the Twins expressly draws attention to a lawful good society that owned slaves.
- In the Living Greyhawk RPG, the "River of Blood" event featured bumbling villains who were kidnapping children in order to perform "Raxivort's Orgy" which was described as a wild party in celebration of their god. Individual judges across the country re-interpreted the party as a sexual orgy involving the rape of the kidnapped children. Even though it was not the author's original intention, the more offensive version was so prevalent that Wizards Of The Coast issued an apology and re-edited the event.
Webcomics
- Better Days. It's bad enough that the entire main cast is perched on the same moral and political wave length as the creator. But whenever a new character shows up who opposes those views they are swiftly cut down by the "good" characters. Worse yet, the poor opposing party is never seen again making it seem like the main cast can do no wrong. Even if the other side has an argument, the reader never gets to hear it because Naylor's characters out talk them or leave before they can say anything. It's always been like this, but lately it has gotten worse. The main character, Fisk, is a Gary Stu stand-in for Jay Naylor. However, he was somewhat more 'round' when he was younger (and Naylor was a religious fruitcake rather than an Objectivist one). Young Fisk was an anti-social Gary Stu, yes, but there were hints that he had a lighter, more vulnerable side that was hidden by the fact that he was the 'man of the family' in a traditionalist Southern household. However, after Naylor's conversion to Randian Man-God, that side of Fisk was removed in favor of an increasingly sociopathic cardboard cut-out, whose grunting, monosyllabic comments were enough to have multiple women spontaneously change their personalities and seek nasty, unemotional sex with him. Fisk not only has all the features of a Gary Stu, but the traits of some kind of Roarke rip-off.
Western Animation
- Since being condescending and outspoken about her beliefs was partly built into her characterization, Lisa Simpson has frequently been used as a mouthpiece, though she is frequently acknowledged as being annoying to those around her.
- Hey Arnold! "Eugene, Eugene!" demonstrated this and Adaptation Decay with a Show Within A Show, by having a a guy who's just been spurned by his girlfriend direct a production of a musical, and completely changing its ending to reflect his own life.
- Transformers: Beast Machines. The author outright admitted that he deliberately ignored aspects of the prequel series Beast Wars because he wanted to "tell his own story", as opposed to, for instance, an actual Beast Wars story. The result wasn't pretty; near-universal Character Derailment is just the start of the problems. For the most part, he acted as if this was a completely new series, and not a sequel to another.
- Though it's undoubtedly a fact that Bob Skir derailed almost all of the Beast Wars characters, the matter cannot be entirely blamed on him alone. On his website, Skir admitted that Hasbro specifically hired him because he had no prior experience with Transformers and they even ordered him not to watch Beast Wars. Bob Skir receives the most flack for Beast Machines because out of all the writers and producers on the show, he was the one who made himself the most accessible to the fans(which resulted in him having to cancel a Botcon appearance due to death threats). Others such as Marty Isenberg and many other writers on the show received no such backlash from the fandom, even though they played an equal part in making Beast Machines what it is.
- Family Guy, especially post-revival, has many cases of this. Brian is frequently a mouthpiece for Seth MacFarlane's liberal political views, and other characters occasionally fill the role as well. Characters with dissenting views — conservative Christians, pro-lifers, Republicans, people who practice abstinence, radical feminists, etc. — are frequently portrayed as being dumber than dirt.
- Brian is also repeatedly displayed as having some repulsive views - in particular, his blatant racism. So this effect is balanced out by the fact that Brian is as bad as anyone.
- Don't forget his alcoholism, his ridiculously overconfident narcissism when it comes to his own creative talents (writing, singing) and his total inability to hold a relationship together due to his toxic knee-jerk sexual attraction to women who who are unavailable (Lois, Seabreeze) or whom he holds in contempt intellectually (Jillian, Seabreeze). So no, totally not a stand-in for Seth MacFarlane... or IS he?
- This isn't a trope that can be "balanced out" by making the character look bad. It's a simple "is the character used as a mouth piece for the writer's Po V?" Whether or not he's used as a stand in for said creator is irrelevant. You're probably thinking of Author Avatar, where the author actually makes one of the characters into him, instead of just giving them his opinions on subjects. Yeah, Writer On Board characters are usualy perfect Mary Sues, but it's not a necessity.
- Or in one episode, imposing his own views on others (Mayor West) at gunpoint.
- Though in the episode FOX-y Lady, Brian's flaws are pointed out perfectly. Lois was ordered by her new employers at Fox News to expose Michael Moore's (theorized) homosexuality. When it is discovered Rush Limbaugh is (possibly) his lover, the expose is cut. Brian is repulsed by Fox News avoiding the truth to protect a fellow conservative, but urges Lois to do the story anyways to nail Limbaugh. Lois asks why this is any different than Fox trying to discredit Moore. Brian stammeringly claims it is OK because he is admitting his hypocrisy.
- The show parodied this trope in an early episode, when Lois is directing The King and I at the community theater. When she makes Peter producer, he proceeds to rewrite the script several times until finally the story is about a post-apocalyptic future world where the lead character is a robot ninja. It drives Lois crazy, but everyone else loves it.
- Then there was the episode dedicated to explaining why legalizing weed was the best thing in the world. And another episode where Meg becomes a bigot soon after finding religion.
- South Park has, in later seasons, become nothing but a vehicle for Trey and Matt to dispense whatever magical wisdom they feel obliged to share with us. But hey, a lot of the time it works really well...and then of course sometimes it doesn't.
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