Anvils That Needed To Be Dropped - Television Tropes & Idioms

A number of EC Comics in the 1950s, most notably:
- "Judgment Day", which features an astronaut from Earth refusing to allow a planet of robots whose society is segregated along color lines to join a coalition of civilized species. The anvil is then hammered into the ground when the astronaut takes his helmet off and the reader discovers that he is black. Its necessity was later proven by the Comics Code Authority when the story was being anthologized, as they tried to tell EC editor Bill Gaines that the hero could not be black. Read it and get goosebumps.
- "Master Race", about a German immigrant to America after World War II who is driven to near-madness because he believes he is being stalked by someone from the war. As the story unfolds, it is slowly revealed that the man was a commander at Bergen-Belsen, and the man following him is a Jew he had tortured who had vowed revenge. The story is shot through with accurate descriptions and depictions of what occurred in the Nazi concentration camps, and was one of the first pieces in American popular culture to address the Holocaust at all. The complete story is available online.
  - What's quite masterful is the fact that whether the stalker is real or imagined is left ambiguous.
- EC in general (and Mad magazine more specifically) worked anti-smoking elements into their features quite frequently. Keep in mind, this was the '50s, when doctors would appear in cigarette TV commercials telling people how healthy they were.
V For Vendetta, specifically the "Valerie" chapter, about a woman who had been a successful actress before the fascist regime slowly and cruelly destroyed her life, which ended in a concentration camp medical experiment, all because she was a lesbian. The narrative would not be half as effective if Moore had been subtle with it.
- The movie gets a lot of flack, but it handles the "Valerie" sequence perfectly.
Transmetropolitan #40, "Business", is a stark look at child prostitution and the failings of underfunded social services. Despite the comic's post-cyberpunk setting, the story rings far too true. But the conclusion/anvil that the story comes to:
Why are your kids selling themselves on the streets? Because you completely fucked up the job of raising them.
- This was especially effective in that the whole story initially seemed like a buildup for finding some evil bastard responsible for all this abuse, and then we reach the conclusion which is that no one person, or even an abstraction like the lack of social services, or basic necessities is behind it - it's the fact that people don't care enough about their own children.
Captain America once was used quite often to address social issues. This tends to involve numerous misinformed people being led on by a few evil people against a few unfairly persecuted people, and Cap trying to resolve things.
- Also, Cap tends to get really pissed off by blind patriotism. He doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk. Many storylines state that his Unobtainium shield is reinforced by American righteousness as opposed to ''self''-righteousness.
  "Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world - "No, you move.""
  — Captain America
Most of Grant Morrison's comics (most notably Final Crisis and Flex Mentallo) are tracts speaking against the Dark Age of comics, specifically that comics should mirror real life in their violence and morally ambigous attitudes.
- Morrison's takes on Superman and Batman are extraordinarily optimistic and straight-forward; Superman is often shown as a borderline God (especially in All Star Superman) who tirelessly works toward the betterment of mankind, while Batman represents the peak of human ingenuity and intelligence, who can break free from any trap and defeat any villain. The whole thing is a stark and welcome contrast to the Frank Miller ideal of the tortured outcast Batman, and the ultimately ineffectual government puppet Superman.
The Green Arrow storyline where he discovers his sidekick is addicted to heroin. During a time when the title had turned into a rather anvilicious series, this particular arc was exceptionally well done and considered a turning point in the character, the series and even to some extent comics in general being a transport for serious issues. Several anvils are dropped, not just drugs, but Green Arrow's sense of betrayal of responsibility for his friend and his relationships with other superheroes. It's a remarkably deep arc during a time when most superheroes were wearing spandex tights and going "POW" at the villains.
In the "Forever" story arc of Powers, Christian Walker goes to show his abilities to Albert Einstein, to ask what they are and where they came from. In their conversation afterwards, Einstein delivers an astoundingly good speech about the nature of the scientific attitude, and afterwards...
Walker: I thought — I thought maybe my story would upset you. I thought that I might be upsetting some of your theories of the—
Einstein: Listen to me, my new friend. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. Someone who can no longer pause to wonder, and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.
A meta example is the Spider Man comic book arc, "Green Goblin Reborn!", where Spidey encounters the negative effects of drug abuse, with his friend Harry ODing on pills. Despite this, the Comics Code Authority refused to approve the story for having any depiction of drug use — even when it was peppered with Anvilicious anti-drug messages. Stan Lee decided to publish the stories without the CCA seal of approval, and the ensuing public support prompted the CCA to relax its overly-restrictive guidelines.
Punisher: Max's darkest story arc, The Slavers, includes a lot of information — including a lecture, with slides — about the sex slave trade. Probably the only way to not be horrified by the facts is to believe Garth Ennis made it all up. He didn't.
The two issues of Zot! in which Terry comes out to herself and Woody pens an editorial about the recent attack on a young man presumed gay.

Close Comic Books

All Quiet on the Western Front. The people on the other side of war are just as human as you are.
While its main moral about being aware of blood diamonds fits this well (although its presented in a somewhat Anvilicious way), Blood Diamond also emphasizes a message that even people who have engaged in evil have the potential to consciously choose good and redeem themselves. This is shown in the film through a real-life home for former child soldiers who through kind treatment, gives them a chance at a normal life.
Brokeback Mountain for emphasizing that gays are just as capable of romantic love as any straight, and for depicting the very real threat of hate crimes gays (especially men) face.
Arguably many films made during World War II, with Casablanca being a good example of a work which is explicitly patriotic yet never stops being entertaining.
In The Dark Knight the story was mostly taken from the famed comic "The Killing Joke," where the Joker wants to prove that everyone can have a bad day and turn into someone like him. The comic rides on the aesop that personal choice and free will is an individual trait, that the actions of one person is not something that everyone would do in the same situation. The Dark Knight even adds that while one person can become a symbol, whenever you try to force moral change, people will fight you. For Batman, the mobs resisted his war against them. For the Joker, civilians and criminals alike refused to play by his "social experiment."
- And the even more obvious message that: you do NOT bow to terrorists. Everytime Gotham goes along with the Joker's demands, something terrible happens. Everytime they resist him, the outcome is a good one. They even CALL The Joker a terrorist in the movie for the love of God.
There is nothing at all subtle about the original The Day The Earth Stood Still. The entire film is an indictment against trigger-happy paranoia; at the conclusion, Messianic Archetype Klaatu delivers An Aesop in no uncertain terms. There is no irony, there is no ambiguity, there is only sincere, earnest urgency — and it works.
- Notably, Ed Wood's Plan Nine From Outer Space, the "worst movie ever made" has an identical aesop but fails because of incredibly bad presentation, among numerous other flaws.
- The remake tried to make lightning strike twice—this time by making it about environmental destruction. Critics weren't nearly so kind. Mostly because it made no damn sense. So, Klaatu's people want to kill everybody on Earth because we're mean to the environment...only to unleash something that does far more damage than we could ever hope to accomplish.
District9: Refugees and minorities deserve respect. Racism is 'bad. Apartheid is monstrous.
Let's not forget Dr Strangelove, which showed us that the "arms race" may as well be a bunch of sexually-frustrated men trying to outdo each other. And for that matter, the "missile gap" is about as silly as a "Doomsday Gap" or a "Mineshaft Gap."
The anvil in Enchanted is easy to spot: On the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, idealism wins out. Especially when it comes to The Power Of Love. Then again, considering how much media these days focuses overmuch on it being a Crapsack World, if not a World Half Empty, several of our own editors don't believe this anvil is dropped nearly often enough.
Glory is accused of laying it on thick, but that doesn't stop it from being an excellent movie.
Good Night And Good Luck... portrays its villain as an unspeakably corrupt madman who will stop at nothing to ruin his enemy's lives. Of course, the villain is McCarthy himself, who is played by archive footage of himself. You can't argue with an anvil that falls out of a story that actually happened. Although the incredible performances, especially from McCarthy, help.
- What's amusing is some test audience members seemed to think that the "actor" "playing" McCarthy was too over-the-top.
Its A Wonderful Life might be pretty heavy-handed with its message, but it remains a classic Christmas film.
Secondhand Lions takes time out for Robert Duvall to expressly give a monologue on the moral of the story... this would be a Wall Banger moment if the speech wasn't Just That Good:
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
The original ~~Godzilla~~ Gojira derives a large part of its power from its explicit and not remotely subtle anti-nuclear-weapons message. Keep testing nuclear weapons in the ocean, and what happens? You wake up an ancient monster that goes on a rampage and destroys Tokyo, that's what. Considering that it was made in 1954, a mere nine years after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aiming for subtlety would have been pointless. The following year, Akira Kurosawa's I Live In Fear was released with a similar message (and similar Anviliciousness), but no monsters.
- Likewise, the film Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack makes it VERY clear that we should NEVER forget the past.
- Despite its blatant cheesiness, Godzilla VS Hedorah provides the very straightforward message that pollution is a huge danger to not only humans, but all life as well...And that we must all work together to stop it.
John Q raises questions and messages about whether or not health care in the country is truly a service to help the sick or a business just out to make money. It lays it on thick, but it's something that needed (and still needs) to be pointed out, and is an amazing movie.
Charlie Wilsons War is about how Charlie Wilson, a playboy Representative from Texas, started and escalated a secret war in Afghanistan to drive out the Soviet Union's troops. The anvil gets dropped after Charlie successfully tricked Congress into letting that war be fought, and after America wins; Charlie is unable to get Congress to fund a reconstruction effort even though it cost far less than the secret war. Oh, and this film is Based On A True Story and was released well after 9/11...
- Pretty sure the anvil in that movie was: "Look how much this parallels America's efforts in Iraq. Do you really want to pull out without fully funding a reconstruction...?"
- I think it was more than that. It was about what happens if you use people, as the USA used the Afghan people to bleed the USSR, and then as soon as the Soviets were driven out, left Afghanistan (and the mujahideen, including the Taliban) to fend for themselves.
  - To be fair, around the time that the Soviets were driven out, the Warsaw Pact collapsed, then the Soviet Union proper fell apart (which had, among other things, very large quantity of nuclear weapons and an attempted coup.) The US had their hands full, and that's not counting the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The brilliant anti-war film Johnny Got His Gun is clear, blatant and obvious in its message from the very first scene. It could not possibly be improved, certainly not by anything remotely resembling subtlety.
- Notably, Metallica's "One" was based on it to such an extent that the music video is essentially an abridged version of the movie, with the song as the soundtrack. Heavy metal doesn't do subtle, folks.
- The book is no subtler.
The Day After showed in explicit detail what would happen to the survivors of a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. The message was impossible to miss: There is no such thing as a survivable nuclear war. It would be impossible for civilization to recover. And it worked! Soon after The Day After (and an equivalent film in England) was released, various nations started talking seriously about disarmament, instead of making more ridiculous plans to "win" a nuclear war.
- Ronald Reagan sent the producers a note after the 1985 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed, stating "You caused this to happen."
- Actually the final caption of it is "The catastrophic events you have witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States". Also, ABC censors severely toned down numerous graphic scenes in order to reduce the body count of corpses and severe burn victims.
- The "equivalent film in England" is Threads, and it makes The Day After look like a cheerful springtime romp in a flower-filled meadow. If you've got a strong stomach, it's still required viewing.
  - Not to mention The War Game (not to be confused with War Games, below) which did its job of warning about the horrors of nuclear war a bit too well - it was banned for twenty years because it was considered likely to panic the public.
  - Ironically, 'The War Game' was originally commissioned by the BBC to drop another anvil entirely - namely that "Britain Can Take It!"
The entire plot of War Games is about how the only way to "win" a nuclear war is to not start one. Of course, it doesn't go so far as to have an actual war occur, but it gets fairly close, making it pretty effective. It doesn't get much more Anvilicious than having "The only way to win is not to play" right there in the script...
The 1988 animated English film When The Wind Blows, about a retired couple living in the country, who survive a nuclear attack. They do everything they've been told to (largely the equivalent of tarps and duct tape) while waiting for someone in authority to come to their aid while they slowly die. It's the most haunting, chilling film I've ever seen.
- Based on the comic book of the same name by Raymond Briggs, which is similarly effective.
Hairspray (both versions) comes with An Aesop about racial tolerance and how anyone can achieve their dreams if they're plucky enough to Be Yourself that's so subtle-as-a-speeding-Mack-truck that it borders on parody. And yet, it comes off as refreshingly optimistic and upbeat and makes the show thoroughly enjoyable.
The Shawshank Redemption repeats the basic message—that hope is a really good thing—about a billion times over, but that doesn't stop it from being fantastically well done.
The Chinese film Wait 'til You're Older pretty much hammers home the point that life is a one way journey and that people should value the time they already have. This is achieved by having the protagonist take an aging potion as a fast track to adulthood, only to find out it will only give him a life span of only a few days and his overwhelming need to resolve his family problems before his time runs out.
Many Western animated productions have suffered for Anvilicious Green Aesops, but leave it to Pixar to give us a bearable one in WALL-E.
- WALL-E also gave us a few other memorable anvils like "Get off your ass and DO something" and "Corporate culture should not tell you how to live your life".
- The messages about personal responsibility, laziness, and thinking for yourself are so Anvilicious they sometimes border on Author Tract. See our first introduction to the people on the Axiom, the scene where The Captain connects with the plant, and The Reveal regarding the Big Bad for some of the most blatant. They're all still effective and entertaining scenes anyway.
- However, Word Of God states that his original message was that over reliance on technology will make humans complacent to the point of near-extinction and the best way to combat it is through The Power Of Love. Environmental damage and other negative human factors are merely side effects of humans refusing to form personal connections with each other.
October Sky: Knowledge, especially education, plus determination and hard work, can enable you to accomplish any dream, no matter how far-fetched it may seem. (Doesn't hurt that it's a true story, either.)
At its core, Serenity is an attack on do-gooding government social engineers. The first scene even has River, one of the movie's protagonists, stating that the Unification War which decimated the rim planets was the result of government meddling. Word Of God says that the Independents were fighting for "the right to be wrong"—the right to have their own way of doing things.
Silent Running. The natural world is valuable and important, and worth the effort to protect and preserve.
- Even if you have to MURDER people to do it.
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. Actually much less cheesy than it sounds, it's a very solid (and at times brutal) statement on war, and the difference between being a person and being a sheep. McCarthy-era panic just makes an extra-good backdrop to it.
- After twenty-plus years of "Russians are all soulless killer commies", it also was one of the first to drop the "no, they're just people like us" anvil.
While RENT tends to get called over-hyped or dated in its extremely optimistic point of view, it wouldn't have made such an impact if it wasn't about a group of broke and starving and (for half of them) HIV/AIDS-positive friends. In spite of everything going wrong, they still manage to have fun and hope for whatever's left of their future.
While being a kickass action-comedy, The Incredibles has some major messages on both the strength of family and the individual vs. a homogenizing society.
- Most Disney-Pixar flicks have some sort of underlying, Anvilicious message.
Its hard to name Charlie Chaplin film which doesn't drop one or more. The Great Dictator is probably one of the oldest films to drop such a colossal anvil It involves someone else with that same moustache...
In Stand By Me the major moral lessons are the importance of friendship and family, that you should believe in yourself and follow your dreams no matter what anyone else says.
Prayers For Bobby drops the anvil hard on those intolerant of homosexuals. The fact that it's a true story makes it all the more powerful.
The Ox-Bow Incident is one of the first serious Western films made, and it's anvilicious in a big way. But its anvil is a critical one, maybe even more now than when it was made. In a time when the words "vigilante" and "hero" are seen as synonyms, even while DNA testing gives us a hint of just how many people might be wrongly accused, The Ox-Bow Incident tells a simple, inevitable story that movies like Death Wish and The Brave One wouldn't dare get into: what happens when the righteously outraged vigilante heroes, claiming the law's failed and trusting their own instincts instead, kill an innocent man?

Close Film

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale — a sci-fi fable about patriarchal society and religious fundamentalism — is about as subtle as a high-velocity cinder block, but highly influential in certain circles.
- Similarly, The Rising Of The Moon by Flynn Connolly, in which an Irish woman returns to Ireland after having spent fifteen years in self-imposed exile so that she could teach actual Irish history instead of the redacted version authorized by the government. Anvils include, but are not limited to, "Freedom of Religion," "Freedom Isn't Free," "Equal Rights," "Sexism Works Both Ways," "One Person Can Make a Difference," "Those Who Cannot Remember the Past," etc.
Empire, by Orson Scott Card, is not the least bit subtle about the problems of the current political system in the United States. The bad guys aren't "the Democrats" or "the Republicans." It's not the right or the left, it's a few people at the top on both sides, with extremist views, who could pull everyone else along with them into a second civil war. (And the unanswered question posed by the ending is even creepier...)
- Enders Game also rejects subtlety and symbolism, and is all the better for it.
In A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, Charles Dickens drops many anvils, but perhaps the most powerful is this one:
"This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased."
- A lot of Dickens falls under this heading. He gets away with his anvils because they're never based on the idea that Readers Are Morons and need lessons in basic decency: they are always motivated by genuine passion, fury against real injustices, and a need to increase word count.
- Though A Christmas Carol gets special mention for how it changed common perception of Christmas, even its working title was The Sledgehammer. At the time Scrooge was stereotypical of upper-middle class men.
Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist is the book responsible for abolishing workhouses as a placeholder for orphans.
Ben Elton's High Society makes some very important points about the harm created by drug prohibition and the power wielded by sensationalist tabloid media, and still manages to be a thoroughly entertaining read.
The novel Momo by Michael Ende. The book's message about how we need to make time for each other and all the things we love in our lives is really obvious — and you couldn't imagine the book being nearly as good without it.
Tom Godwin's famous science fiction short story "The Cold Equations" is famous for pegging the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism all the way to the cynical side and holding it there, all the way through to the Downer Ending. But the reason it's such a heavy anvil is that most of its contemporaries were just as firmly on the other end of the scale.
- Rather than see it as Cynicism, it can be seen as realism, as the idea is that your beliefs can't change the laws of physics. Or in other words the opposite of the unnamed Bush staffer claiming that "...when we act, we create our own reality." Wish Fulfillment can work when you write fiction, but physics doesn't care what you think. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
- Unfortunately, "The Cold Equations" is also famously polarizing. Many readers find it absurd that an act that carries a mandatory death penalty is defended by a simple "Employees Only" sign without even a locked door. While the anvil that "wishing doesn't make it so" may be deservedly dropped on idealist science fiction, the situation as presented in the story shows a corporation that is criminally negligent, rather than an innocent life destroyed by random chance and mathematics.
Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein drops some sort of anvil about military service. Opinion seems to differ on exactly what that anvil is, whether it needed dropping, or if it was dropped well.
- This Troper never had a problem figuring out that the anvil was "If you want to participate as a citizen, you have to quite literally fight, even die, for the privilege. And it is a privilege, not a right." If this book doesn't epitomize An Anvil from beginning to end, I don't know what does. (I claim the ~~right~~ privilege to refuse to say whether I agree with - or even liked - the book or not.)
  - I don't think you have that quite right: from various sources, including quotes from RAH and the book itself, I'd have thought it should be "If you want to participate as a citizen, you have to serve your country, up to and including being prepared to quite literally fight, even die, for the privilege..." A small(?) but important difference. Add that to the fact that the MI and the Navy are a relatively small proportion of the people who do Federal Service and become citizens (which I think is canon, or can at least be inferred from the text) and you have something more like what Heinlein postulated in the book.
- The tragedy with this anvil is it drops on the other one so hard that people don't really notice it: An all-volunteer army that's well trained, well equipped and knows the value of the individuals that serve in it trumps an army that treats its infantry like so many potatoes to be thrown at enemies even if the latter greatly outnumbers the former. The political system that gets the spotlight is more like an incentive to get enough volunteers to defend a galaxy spanning Federation than the main point Heinlein was trying to get across (Compare, for instance, his favorable depiction of near anarchy in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).
- The bit where Dubois talks about the inappropriateness of the term "juvenile delinquent" and how children of the late X Xth century had become really bad because their parents had spared the rod and spoilt the child(ren). Maybe.
- Not to mention the part of Dubois' rant where he derisively brings up that people in the 'Unlimited Democracies' tended to think they could get whatever they wanted by just voting for it, with no consequences and at no cost. Of course, that never EVER happens in reality.
- This Troper has been fond of the Anvil that "violence never solves anything" is wishful thinking. To clarify, yes, it is preferable and best that you look for a non-violent solution to any given problem and very good for you if you can find one. But at the same time, you have to recognize that sometimes that simply isn't going to work. Insisting on avoiding any violence once it's clear a compromise can't be reached is dangerous in itself. (See the buildup to World War II.)
Brave New World wouldn't have been half as effective if Aldous Huxley had been even the least bit subtle.
Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth drops the learning-is-fun anvil pretty early on, and keeps picking it up and dropping it again. This strategy would not work if the book were not also funny as hell — it reads like a combination of Shel Silverstein, James Thurber and Douglas Adams. Kudos to Norton Juster for also throwing in enough Parental Bonus moments to keep the book funny and relevant.
Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. Enough said.
"Atticus, he was real nice..." His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them." He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.
1984 and Animal Farm, both by George Orwell. If these books weren't overblown, they wouldn't be nearly as effective in conveying how truly fragile and precious the ideal of freedom really is.
- It's a shame nobody these days understands what 1984 was really about...
Terry Pratchett's Young Adult Discworld novels drop anvils labeled "take personal responsibility" so often you think you're being attacked by an anvil-wielding 82nd Airborne. But it works.
Terry Pratchett's Hogfather drops the anvil that humans need to learn stories when they're young, need to believe in silly things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy so that when they get older they can believe in other things that don't exist — like Justice, Mercy, Duty, and that sort of thing.
Though all of Ayn Rand's novels are Anvilicious, the unsubtle political messages in We The Living come off more acceptably than those in her later works, because it targets Russian Communists rather than generic Strawman Political equivalents.
- Interestingly enough, this book was made into a movie in Fascist Italy and was also shown in Nazis Nazi Germany for being anti-communist, but was pulled from theaters a few weeks later when the fascists realized that We The Living was not just anti-Communist, but anti-Fascist as well. Apparently, they didn't get the memo about Ayn Rand.
- The same arguably qualifies for Howard Roark's Author Tract at the end of The Fountainhead. Regardless of whether you agree with its content, it's passionately written, very moving and completely devoid of subtlety.
John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath. Lots of anvils, many of which needed dropping.
- When they made the film version, the director sent his staff out to determine if Steinbeck had portrayed the migrant worker camps accurately. They came back and told him conditions were actually worse.
- Which didn't stop Executive Meddling from demanding the film be toned down and it was.
Uncle Tom's Cabin basically consisted of Harriet Beecher Stowe gathering together a whole bunch of stories of actual people who were actually enslaved, then changing the names and adding in a plot to tie it together.
- The plays then proceeded to dilute the crap out of the message.
Gullivers Travels as a tract against human self-importance in general, and English society in particular.
- And of course the final anvil dropped in that book — that misanthropy isn't always a good attitude to take toward the failings of humankind.
A Modest Proposal, also by Jonathan Swift, took on the British policies and attitudes towards the Irish by proposing that the Irish sell their children to the aristocracy as food in a marvelously over-the-top detailed manifesto. Sadly, some people took him seriously.
- Well, that's the risk with any satire. No matter how blatantly satiric you are, there are still going to be Too Dumb To Live morons thinking you're serious and then lambasting you for it.
  - Even worse? If they think you're being serious and support you. That probably didn't happen with A Modest Proposal seeing as it was about breeding and eating babies but still.
The Crucible, as well as almost any other leftist fiction written during the Second Red Scare, and the height of McCarthyism.
The Jungle, the book solely responsible for the Meat Inspection Act of 1919.
- Notably not the anvil Sinclair meant to drop - protagonist Jurgis goes through nearly every possible disaster a working-class citizen of his time can possibly suffer, with his child even drowning in the muddy streets, and Sinclair's intent becomes quite clear in the final chapters, which attempt to set up the Socialist party as saviors. Of course, it was the depiction of what goes into meat that ended up hitting the general public and sticking with us. As Mr. Sinclair himself remarked, "I aimed for America's heart and I hit them in the stomach."
Between the refugee camps and the "planet assassins," The Holy Land never even tries to be subtle with its satire. Whether it's a good book or not depends largely on your political stance.
In Les Miserables, literacy is not just useful, but makes the difference between life and death for several different characters. The Power Of Love changes Jean Valjean from a petty crook into a great philanthropist. Javert only cares about enforcing the law, and is driven to suicide when he finally realizes that Valjean is a more moral man than he is. And it's often called the greatest novel ever written.
Catch-22: War makes you crazy. Ostensibly about World War Two, but there's a reason it was immensely popular during The Vietnam War.
- The book also has a deeper anvil dropped about the individual's responsibility for the evils of the modern world. Almost every character death could have been prevented by Yossarian, had he actually done anything, and his friends continue to die around him until he finally balls up and sticks it to The Man.
''A Person Paper on Purity in Language'' by "William Satire" (actually Douglas Hofstadter) attempts to argue that words like "chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupwhiteship, straw white, whitehandle, and so on" are not racist. It comes off as being so unbelievably racist that it's nearly unreadable... which is the point.
If you will recall, whis words were: "One small step for a white, a giant step for whitekind." This noble sentiment is anything but racist; it is simply a celebration of a glorious moment in the history of White.
- Do be sure to read the Post Scriptum after the text.
The essay "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" was a not-very-subtle jab at both anthropology and American culture ("Nacirema" is "American" backwards).
Many of these in The Lord Of The Rings, but this one in particular:
Gandalf: Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Then do not be to eager to deal out death in judgement, for not even the very wise can see all ends.
- And he is, of course, proven to be right, as the character whom Frodo had referred to as deserving of death ends up saving the world.
  - ...Accidentally.
  - ... by dying.
One Sherlock Holmes story (The Sign of Four) had Dr. Watson blatantly chastising Holmes for the dangers of his cocaine habit. Although it's often thought that having a character give this lecture was either prescient or a lucky guess, in reality it was not: doctors already knew cocaine was dangerous when used as a recreational drug, but the idea that drug sales could and/or should be restricted had not yet been imagined, let alone implemented. (When the idea was suggested some years later, Doyle was among its strongest supporters.) At this point in time it was perfectly possible to buy arsenic or strychnine at the apothecary's without any formality greater than signing a book, and there was no doubt that both of those drugs were pure poisons.
- Be careful what you read into stories. While Watson disapproved of Holmes' cocaine "poisoning", don't be so sure that Doyle felt the answer was to make it illegal. After all, Holmes in prison isn't going to be able to stop crime, is he? Watson, being a doctor, is more interested in treating Holmes than having him imprisoned. Disapproving of something does not mean you think it should be outlawed.
- The Adventure of the Yellow Face contains a remarkably progressive anti-racist message for its time. The client hires Holmes to find out why his wife keeps asking him for money and not revealing what it is for. He also spies her making visits to a cottage and spots someone with a hideous jaundiced and deformed face from the window. He suspects a blackmailing plot, but when Holmes enters the cottage and confronts the yellow-faced individual, it is revealed to be a young black child wearing a mask. Turns out the wife was previously in an interracial marriage before her husband died, and she has been hiding their child out of fear that her current husband will leave her if he finds out she was married to a black man. The story ends with the client picking up the child, kissing it, and saying "I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being."
The New Testament. Jesus wasn't all parables and allegories. He said some pretty blunt things about hypocrisy and following the commandments.
Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. Though there's some question as to what the Anvil actually is: Is Seuss speaking against logging, environmental destruction, or greed and short-sightedness in general? Given that he himself removed the line "I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie" when informed that Erie was no longer a dead lake, this troper is inclined to the second and third.
- How about all of them?
Your Mileage May Vary on this one, but this troper thought that His Dark Materials' condemnation of repressive institutions (Word Of God says it isn't only condemning religion, although whether Pullman came up with that later after the backlash is debatable) and messages promoting secularism and the need to improve this world rather than hoping for paradise in an afterlife wouldn't have been nearly as effective if they had been subtle, mostly because these ideas weren't as widespread at the time (and especially not in young-adult books).
- Your Mileage May Vary indeed, this troper found it to be pure Narm.
Frankenstein. Be careful toying with the natural order of things, because who knows what it'll lead to.
- Not to mention the strong message of "Take responsibility for what you create."
- Arguably, though, that moral can and has been applied to hundreds of classic stories, from almost 90 % of all Aesop's Fables, to Dr. Jekyll& Mr. Hyde, to Dr. Faustus, to Godzilla...and so on.
- "Projecting things onto your children is wrong." Misaimed Fandom
  - To be fair, the Misaimed Fandom has a point. I haven't actually read Frankenstein, but from what I understand of it the Aesop is ridiculously broken. The "monster" is portrayed as a gentle, poetic soul who after being treated as a freak and abandoned by his creator, and left to several rounds of Break The Ugly merely for his ghastly appearance, finally snaps and makes a Face Heel Turn, attempting suicide after his crimes. The Aesop is that he should never have existed, but in the narrative his existence was never the problem, but the self-fullfilling prophecy of treating him as a monster when he started with benign intentions. Seriously, his creator freaked the MOMENT he awakened simply because of his appearance. How shallow is that? As was said, "take responsibility for what you create" was a much better Aesop than "science is evil," and I can actually stomach that one.
  - Most of the story is narrated by Frankenstein and he might be less than objective in its telling.
- "Men should not eliminate women from the process of creating life." - Mary Shelley's mother was essentially the grandmother of feminism, and unlike some movements within 20th-century feminism, 19th-century feminism believed woman should have a public voice because they were different from men.
On The Beach, by Nevil Schute. Oh my God, On The Beach... Noted how Threads and other films depicting horrors of nuclear holocaust in the film section of this page demand strong nerves from the viever? Well, compared to this book (and the films of it), they are downright optimistic. As one critic said: "Most novels of apocalypse posit at least a group of survivors and the semblance of hope. On The Beach allows nothing of the kind." You don't get any less subtle in telling exactly what an all-out nuclear war might mean for humanity.

Close Literature

The Masters Of Horror episode Homecoming is a brick-through-plate-glass rant against needless wars, and government corruption and duplicity. It doesn't just drop an anvil on the viewers, it drops a railroad car full of pig iron — and it only works because the message isn't hidden. Unfortunately, it spawned a Misaimed Fandom that were screaming about how Ann Coulter wasn't eaten by zombies...
- This tropers has read reviews of that episode asking whether the message was supposed to be the obvious one, or "only a brain-dead zombie would vote for a Democrat." Misaimed Fandom, indeed.
The basic premise of Scrubs means that Aesops are going to occur every episode but that doesn't stop episodes like "My Old Lady", "His Story", "My Screw Up", "My Life in Four Cameras", "My Way Home" and "My Musical" being widely loved.
The Twilight Zone is essentially a series of anvil drops, with some of the most didactic, moralistic writing you can imagine. And it almost always works. One of the best is "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street". Anvilicious? Yeah. Still amazing though? Hell yes. Rod Serling's bit at the end is especially moving.
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own; for the children, and the children yet unborn.
The Twilight Zone episode "He's Alive!" - in which Adolf Hitler comes back from the dead to 'mentor' an American fascist - can seem like Narm by modern standards... but when it first aired, the episode promped more hate mail than any other episode - 4000 people wrote in protesting the show's depiction of Adolf Hitler as a villain. So Yeah. There's a reason Rod Serling called that episode the most important one he ever made.
- The sad thing is most of that hate mail was coming from racists, calling Serling a "Jew loving commie" and other, much worse things.
- Rod Serling was especially worried about Nazism, and history's gone on to show that he had good reason. The Twilight Zone episode "Deaths-Head Revisited" not only gives a former concentration camp captain his just reward, but also ends with what seems like an anvilicious closing statement - but the surge of holocaust denials since then has proven that this anvil can't possibly be dropped too hard.
  There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.
Can we possibly omit "The Eye of the Beholder"? Oh, so many anvils—one of which is in the title itself.
Now the questions that come to mind. Where is this place and when is it? What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm? You want an answer? The answer is, it doesn't make any difference. Because the old saying happens to be true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence, on this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned...in the Twilight Zone.
In the classic Star Trek: TOS episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", Kirk and co. pick up the last two survivors of a wartorn planet. Bele is an extraterrestrial cop who has been pursuing Lokai for thousands of years. When a perplexed Kirk questions Bele for the reason of their intense racial hatred, Bele replies, "Isn't it obvious? Lokai is white on the right side. All his people are white on the right side." Not subtle at all, but in 1969, an anvil that needed to be dropped, and hard.
- Similarly, there are only two usual reactions to the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Who Watches The Watchers?": You either love it or you hate it. No matter which side you choose, it will likely be because of the episode's morals: Religions should be disproven wherever possible. Controversial? Yes. But for those for whom it works, it only works because of the anvil.
  - Amusingly, Star Trek Voyager had a lot of episodes dealing with religion from the perspective that secularists attempting to treat the entire thing like a game were severely insulting the intellect of actual religious people. Furthermore, that whether true or not....religion has a very important role in society.
  - This seems to be a trend in most TNG episodes dealing with moral or social issues, since virtually every story is an allegory to modern day Earth. That said, it often does it very well.
  - Generally speaking, the way in which religion is handled in the ST universe depends on whether an episode was written before or after the death of Gene Roddenberry. Does that factor detract in any way from the aforementioned episodes? Absolutely not.
  - For example, the two part TNG episode Chains of Command. The brutal physical and psychological tortures inflicted on Picard during this episode were advised upon by Amnesty International, and its Anvilicious nature makes it one of the most powerful and meaningful episodes of the series. Quite frankly, this Troper dares you not to cry or freak out. Or both.
  - Also the episode Measure of A Man which puts Data up in court to prove his rights as a sentient being. Having Whoopi Goldberg deliver the message as bartender Guinan makes this especially anvilicious. But extremely well done.
    Guinan: Consider that in the history of many worlds there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that nobody else wants to do because it's too difficult or too hazardous. And an army of Datas, all disposable... You don't have to think about their welfare, you don't think about how they feel... Whole generations of disposable people.
    Capt. Picard: ...You're talking about slavery.
    Guinan: I think that's a little harsh.
    Capt. Picard: I don't think that's a little harsh, I think that's the truth. But that's a truth that we have obscured behind a... comfortable, easy euphemism: Property. But that's not the issue at all - is it?
- "Muse" is basically a plea for understanding from the writers of the oft-criticized series Star Trek Voyager, showing how they're pulled between the desire to create meaningful works of art, the need to satisfy those paying their wages, and the demands of the audience for action and romance - all told through the point-of-view of a struggling poet on a primitive world trying to create a play from the logs of a crashed Voyager shuttlecraft.
- Heck, Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) said to Gene Roddenberry (creator), "Star Trek is just morality tales" and he replied, "Shhh, don't tell anyone".
M*A*S*H might have been a simple dark comedy/dramady set in the Korean War if not for the fact that the show ran during the Vietnam War. Alan Alda and the other producers said that they never wanted the show to be a contemporary commentary, but they wanted it to be about all wars, how it is supposed to be a miserable experience. The Vietnam conflict only made the feelings stronger.
- The Introduction of Col. Sherman Potter dopped the "it's about all wars" anvil even harder. Potter has fought through WWI, WWII and Korea. He reminesces often about his experiences In one episode he mourns his friends, the first died in World War One, the War to end All Wars, the second died in the war after that...
The last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth dropped the same who-would-notice-if-you-were-mad-in-war-because-all-generals-are-equally-mad anvil as Catch 22, but because it dropped it on the entire cast, mere minutes after the last joke, it achieved an epic anti-war message with its famed Downer Ending.
Law And Order Special Victims Unit: Olivia Benson's speech in the episode "Babes" about why teenagers shouldn't have babies is as anvilicious as they come. However, since the plot was Ripped From The Headlines about a club of teen girls who all wanted to get pregnant together, some viewers thought it a desperately needed anvil. (This was less true after the revelation that those headlines were false, the "pregnancy club" never existed, and the whole thing was made up by an assistant principal with an overactive imagination.)
- Very similarly, the first season Law And Order episode Life Choice in which ADA Ben Stone prosecutes religious pro-life zealot Rose Schwimmer for bombing an abortion clinic and killing several people — including Mary Donovan, a teenage girl seeking an abortion who unwittingly carried the bomb into the clinic (having been working with Schwimmer's pro-life group, Schwimmer saw Donovan as a perfect patsy after learning she wanted an abortion). After Schwimmer proclaims on the stand that she believes murder is wrong and that abortion is a form of murder, Stone counters her ranting and raving with arguably the best line in the show's history: "If abortion is murder, then no matter how you feel about Mary Donovan, aren't you guilty of the murder of her unborn child?" Schwimmer's face goes from a confident smile to a look of pure "Oh, shit" as she realizes just how badly Stone owned her. It's one of the best episodes of the entire L&O franchise, one of the most controversial episodes, and show creator Dick Wolf's favorite episode out of the entire series.
  - Although given that thanks to the number of times L&O has used anti-abortion zealot murderers as criminal antagonists in their stories, there are actually more fictional cases of it in the show than have ever been prosecuted in real life, that last entry may no longer qualify for this trope.
  - The defintion of painfully accurate timing: immediately after reading this example, this troper decided to hope over to yahoo and check his mail. The headline on yahoo? "Abortion Dr. Killed in Church." Shot and killed while serving as an usher.
- Another good anvil was dropped in an SVU episode, "Doubt", where the entirety of the case is a he-said/she-said... the actual verdict was omitted (filled in by a poll conducted among viewers and made canon from that), to highlight just how tricky some cases really are - particularly sexual crimes where the victim and the accused have known each other for a long time.
Quatermass and the Pit. "We are the Martians. And if we do not learn how to live together, this will be their second dead world". In the FIFTIES!
Supernatural: For some reason, some people like to whine about the episodes that feature flashbacks ("Something Wicked," "A Very Supernatural Christmas," "In The Beginning," and "After School Special"), claiming that they're too depressing, but if you pay attention, the flashbacks are actually quite fascinating and moving.
- And the moral is?
  - Yes, their lives really sucked that badly?
Titus, like Christopher Titus' stand up material, works to make every episode have some sort of moral to it. But it is never a Happily Ever After ending, they don't make any disposition to paint the world as anything but a crapsack kind. But if everything is going wrong, sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh. And if you are so primed and ready to get upset over every little problem then what has your life become? One of the best examples of that comes in "Deconstructing Erin" where Erin returned to her soul-sucking family because Titus returned to drinking. He quit drinking and tried to get her back and she tore into him about how his behavior ruined her life. He snapped back that you can't blame someone else for your problems and if the person you love screws up you throw them in a sack and kidnap them. You don't let them become self-destructive and destroy you in the process.
- Another is "Tommy's Not Gay" that dealt with gay bashers and hate crimes. They hit everything from peer pressure to Matthew Shepard to Stupid Sexy Flanders moments to the social ramifications of coming out of the closet. By the end Titus was explaining that everyone's a racist and we'd all prefer if the people we feel uncomfortable around were seperated into their own little groups pointing out "over there and over there and over there" eventually mimicking the Nazi salute. "You see how this can get out of hand."
  - The producers said that they took that responsibility seriously because gay bashers don't watch Will And Grace.
Judge John Deed's episode "Popular Appeal" is very little other than one giant middle finger aimed at Big Brother (and shows of it's ilk) and the perennial media circus that surrounds it. The BBC frequently airs repeats of it up against the Big Brother finale. The final summing up is what makes the episode, in which the producers of a reality show called Dungeon are made to face manslaughter charges after a contestant is killed on-screen (it's made fairly clear that that was the the producers' hope - Dungeon seems to amount to a more calculated version of the Stanford Prison Experiment). They were found guilty.
Deed: Celebrity! The pursuit of the talentless, by the mindless. It's become a disease of the twenty-first century. It pollutes our society, and it diminishes all who seek it, and all who worship it. And you must bear some of the responsibility for foisting this empty nonsense onto a gullible public.
- And then he lays into the newspapers for devoting too much time and space to this sort of stuff, and not enough to actual news.
Extras took on the "celebrity is bad" Aesop as well, but in a different way. The finale special is pretty darn heavy-handed in telling us that being a celebrity isn't worth it, if you've betrayed the only people who cared about you, celebrity or not. Making fun of Big Brother and their ilk in the process? Just bonus, my friends.
Full House teaches us that any problem can be solved by talking it through, that your friends and family will be there for you no matter what, and that any situation can be improved by a hug.

Close Live Action TV

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. "The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection, and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow." - Washington Irving
- And then, there's the main anvil of the story - Believe in your friends, who believe in you. Believe in you, who believes in yourself. Kick the reason to the curb, and go Beyond The Impossible! There's basically nothing you can't accomplish if you set your mind to it and have the will and courage to back it up! In a world of pessimistic stories, belief that Good Is Dumb (avoided in TTGL by good being marginally less dumb than evil) and Anti Heroes, TTGL's anvils feel really refreshing to see out of a mecha series.
G Gundam did the same. Coming right after the depressing Victory Gundam, it showed even in a Crapsack World where world peace is maintained only through a tournament -which people still die in... a lot- that one could fight to defend that which is close to you, win the respect of those you fight, and still come out on top in the end.
- Possibly the purest expression of optimism in the series: "Humans aren't that foolish; there truly is NOT anyone stupid enough to do what they know will cause the destruction of everything"
- There is another lesson that's pretty clear even though Master Asia learned the hard way. Try to justify your motives all you want but siding with a genocidal madman is rarely ever a good idea.
Noein's key message is that people need to recognize and care about each other instead isolating themselves.
- This is hidden under a hundred layers of incomprehensible quantum physics, not Anvilicious... though it's quite blatantly spelled out in the last episodes.
Saikano knows no subtlety whatsoever. It's also one of the most powerful works of anti-war fiction ever. Go figure.
Paranoia Agent, a series about accepting reality as it is, features in its final episode an unspeakably creepy town made of cardboard cutouts that one of the characters smashes to nothing in six swings of a baseball bat. The absolute unambiguity of it makes the anti-escapist message feel clear, clean, and right.
Great Teacher Onizuka: Do your Best, Be Independent, Be A Man (even if you're a woman...)
- And it's better to try and fail than to refuse to try because of uncertainty.
Devilman starts out as a generic Super Hero manga with a religious bent. It ends as the single most Anvilicious criticism of militarism and argument for world peace ever... and it's a masterpiece.
Pet Shop of Horrors drops Anvils about animals in general, but a particularly roundabout one was dropped with the chapter "Dreizehn". A young woman named Karen goes to Count D's shop for a seeing-eye dog with experience in protection as well, after a fire that killed her parents and traumatized her so much she went blind. The titular Doberman chosen for this purpose not only looks human, but feels human, too—to Karen's shock. After she gets used to it, a slightly awkward conversation ensues in which he agrees to let her "see" him by touching his face; after several panels, she comes across his ears. Prior to this Dreizehn had not been shown as a dog, and as a human his hair covered his ears—which had been cut into sharp points. Horrified, Karen questions this and brings to light the practice of cropping dogs' ears from a dog's perspective, made even more disturbing when Dreizehn assures her that since it was done when he was young (a puppy!), "It doesn't hurt anymore." To drive home the Anvil, there is a short passage in the back reflecting upon the fact that some people refuse to acknowledge Dobermans with natural ears because they don't look like real Dobermans.
- Pet Shop also has a lot to say about humanity, particularly in the final volume of the first series, at the end of which Leon manages to make his way onto the Count's ship only to be told that "humans have not yet earned the right to be on this ship" before being pushed off the side, only to wake up unharmed.
The Macross franchise; The Power Of Love and the beauty of human culture (mainly personified by Jpop) shall overcome all, even the unstoppable marauding alien death fleets that were designed only for war, or at the very least distract them long enough to give humanity an opening to use reaction weapons.
Full Metal Alchemist. There are numerous scenes in the anime where characters pause mid-battle or delay combat in order to stand around preaching their own philosophies at each other — notably Ed and his pro-science stance. And, somehow, not only does it work, but the story would fail without it. The manga does this with more subtlety, but the tone and stories of the two are quite different.
- It helps that the morality is not especially anvilicious, as the characters struggle to figure out what morality is right at all.
- Their are three major themes in the manga, Tolerance (notably in the 15th volume, which deals with the horrors of the Ishval Massacre. Especially a scene where King Bradley mocks the Ishvalans for believing in God), the Cycle Of Hatred (the Ishvals flat out state that while they hate Amestris for what they have done, they can't sink to the level of Revenge, and must endure the hatred), and the fact that the military is for the protection of the people (almost all grunts are good, with the villains being the upper ranks of Central who believe that they are the chosen people who will lead the world, and that the sacrifice of the people was worth it)
In Sailor MoonS, the entire series is essentially one long Aesop on expedience vs. morality: Doing what is easy, and possibly justifiable, versus doing what's right. No points for guessing which side of the debate the show comes down on.
The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance pre-emptively drops quite a few anvils in favor of granting sentient machines civil rights. Comparisons are made to other civil rights struggles, like the Amistad, Those Wacky Nazis, the Chinese democracy movement and even ancient Egypt.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has one really good anvil that it keeps dropping consistently: it doesn't matter what someone's background is, it doesn't matter how they were born, it doesn't matter where they came from, it doesn't matter what they're fighting for, and hell, it doesn't even matter if they're not, technically, classifiable as human. Everyone is a person, with just as much potential to be good as anyone else, and no matter what else they deserve to be treated with compassion and love.
- And firepower.
Grenadier has the message that one should always try to find a peaceful solution to conflicts, whenever possible. The series is largely about Rushuna's inner struggle to find out where the line should be drawn.
Neon Genesis Evangelion probably not the anvil that was meant to be dropped but Psychiatry and counseling are very important. Without them this could be you.
- It also has the Aesop that people shouldn't isolate themselves from one another and very bad things happen when they do that, what with the whole pain caused by your AT Field thing.
- I got two vibes. One was "be nice to people." The other was "don't do acid Sunday morning." I think the last one wasn't intentional....
Grave Of The Fireflies War is bad. Also, if you can watch this movie without tears, you should be disqualified from the human race.
Nationalism and religious extremism are not legitimate ideologies, they are cheap propaganda ploys used by demagogues to gain and retain control over the people. While most of the show retains a Grey And Gray Morality the SmugSnakes are either nationalists leaders or fundamentalists leaders who do not believe a word of what they say and feel nothing but scorn toward their followers. If that's not enough, the story shows us how a young republic who managed to fight toe to toe its much older, bigger, dictatorial neighbour collapses because its citizens elected nationalists politicians, and on top of that, the narrator, and sometimes even Poplan, of all people will spend some time to hammer it again and again and again. That did not not some watchers to completely miss the point and believe that the show Aesop was that Democracy Is Bad
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni has one in Tsumihoroboshi-hen: Everyone has embarassing secrets that they want to hide, and that's okay. In fact, there's nothing to accomplish by confessing some of them.
- Don't forget the number-one anvil of the series! Well, two of them, really. First, trust your friends, talk to them, and don't take all your problems onto yourself, or things will quickly spiral out of control. Second, surprisingly, is pretty much the same anvil as Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann; namely, no matter how hopeless things seem, determination can get you through them.
Cowboy Bebop: "Don't leave things in the fridge."
Samurai Champloo uses the character Isaac to address both weaboo idealization of Japan, as well as Japan's own tendency to gloss over the past. Isaac is a Dutch ambassador who loves Japanese culture, and as a Straight Gay, he can practice his sexuality there, which during this time would be punishable by death in Europe. However, Issac needs to disguise himself when out in public in Japan, as this was a period where foreigners were prohibited outside of a small "safe zone" (note the series' related discussion of the persecution of Japanese Christians during this era). Isaac ultimately comments that both Japan and the West have screwed up features, albeit in different ways.

Close Manga & Anime

In Francis Child's collection of ballads, the annotation for "Sir Hugh, Or the Jew's Daughter" (Child #155), one of the trope originators of the "blood libel" is a lengthy explanation of how this belief is wrong and has had horrible consequences for numerous innocent people as recently as when Child compiled the collection in the late 1800s. Given that some people still believe in the blood libel, this was probably an anvil which needed to be dropped.
As this is a subjective trope already, I add The Last Of The Great Whales by The Dubliners. It features this killer of Empathic Environment: This morning the sun did rise crimson in the north sky. The ice was the color of blood and the winds, they did sigh. Obviously it's a song against whaling. That's a cause that usually makes me go "Ohh, poor whales, don't we have other problems?" This song made me teary eyed. I think it's because it sounds so sincere in its directness.
The Eagles
- Life in the Fast Lane
- Lyin' Eyes
- New Kid in Town
- Desperado
Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. This normally cynical troper loathes un-subtle protest songs, but good God this is one of the most beautiful, effective songs ever written.
Handlebars by the Flobots.
The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Stan by Eminem. The core Aesop? "Maybe we should act as though everything we do changes someone's life, because maybe it does" (And the weird thing is that it's Marshall "Refuge In Audacity" Mathers who's saying it!)
- This troper thinks it works because it's Eminem saying it. If it was someone nicer, it would have been ignored. But it was Marshall "Refuge in Audacity" Mathers.
- Eminem is, all things considered, very good at this trope. His album Relapse drops the anvil of 'Drugs will fuck your life up, and it takes a lot of work to fix it' like an A-Bomb. And the track Beautiful says in no uncertain terms that you should never let anyone tell you your worth as a human being; everyone is beautiful in his or her own way, and everyone else can go hang.
Gordon Lightfoot's "Ode to Big Blue" is as clear as can be in its condemnation of whaling, which at the time of the song's original release had driven many species to the edge of extinction — and driven some past it.
- Also "The Canadian Railroad Trilogy" which is a commentary on how many people died for the sake of "progress" during the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and how many of them were Chinese migrants who were paid much less then their Caucasian counterparts.
- Yet another Gordon Lightfoot song is his 1968 "Black Day In July", about the 1967 Detroit race riots. Radio stations in 30 states banned the song, fearing that it would incite further violence.
  Why can't we all be brothers?
  Why can't we live in peace?
  But the hands of the have-nots keep falling out of reach...
"I Was Only Nineteen/A Walk In The Light Green" by Australian folk rock protest band Redgum and recently covered by the Herd managed to completely explain the horrors of the Vietnam war and the stupidity of war in general to this troper.
- It might or might not be relevant, but "I Was Only Nineteen" was mentioned in World War Z by an Australian who'd spent most of it in orbit, and it works perfectly.
Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" is an extraordinarily powerful anti-war song, not at all subtle in its message.
- Similarly, his song "No Man's Land" (covered by, among others, Dropkick Murphys as "The Green Fields of France").
No one would call "Christmas in the Trenches" subtle, but this troper has seen grown men driven to tears by it.
"And on each end of the rifle we're the same"
- Jona Lewie's Stop The Cavalry has pretty much the same message, but people hear it as a cute Christmas song.
War. Huh. Good God, y'all, what is it good for?
- Absolutely nothing!
  - Say it again now!
- Okay, history and human nature shown there can be some good outcomes, but that doesn't make all of it right.
- When was the outcome ever good? War wouldn't exist if our natures weren't so bad.
- Freeing slaves? Defending yourself from totalitarian aggresor? Creating a new, democratic society?
  - The point here is in an ideal world, all of these things could have been done without killing thousands of innocent people.
  - Yes, but we don't live in one. We live in the real world, and I'd argue that "Sometimes you just have to fight for what's right," is an anvil worthy of dropping as well, but that's neither here nor there.
War Pigs wouldn't gain anything by being subtle.
- Subtlety? From the band who brought you Sweet Leaf? Definitely.
Rise Against isn't a very subtle band, but that's the point.
Michael Jackson - "Man in the Mirror" [1987]. It even hangs a lampshade:
"I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer,
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and make a change"
- Too bad he didn't take his own advice.
  - He did change, just not in a good way.
- The lyrics and especially the videos for "Earth Song" and "They Don't Really Care About Us" also qualify.
Pagan Altar's "Armageddon", "The Interlude", and "The Aftermath", meant to be listened to in sequence, describe a nuclear war that obliterates human civilization.
"Chariots of fire rode roughshod through the world,
Men of vision stood ridiculed, seen but never heard.
Cries of disillusionment were drowned by man's desire
And the need for mass destruction
Fueled the raging fire."
John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"
The Cranberries "Zombie"
Bob Marley - "Redemption Song."
Franco De Vita's "No basta" has the anvil "Isn't enough satisfying your offspring's material needs and wants, you also must care of them and give then moral guidance and emotional support before they get it other places (or substances) and before they become too old to even consider hearing at you". It's like an Very Special Episode in 4 minutes, but it's also one of his bests songs, and, given that the song is very obviously directed to fathers (which in Latin America tend to be the biggest absence in many a kid's upbringing, even if they are living with the mother), that anvil is a very needed one.
Folk songs.
So join in the Folk Song Army,
Guitars are the weapons we bring
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice.
Ready! Aim! Sing!
- Tom Lehrer, The Folk Song Army
- Only when the songs themselves aren't totally anvilicious to begin with.
U2 aren't at all subtle about their beliefs and opinions, although the actual songs are usually too subtle to be called anvilicious, in that there's usually some room for interpretation. Not always, though:
- "Sunday, Bloody Sunday"
- "Rejoice" ("I can't change the world / But I can change the world in me")
- "Silver and Gold"
- "Mothers of the Disappeared"
- "Peace on Earth"
- "Love and Peace or Else"
- "Original of the Species"
- "Crumbs From Your Table"
This list wouldn't be complete without The Legend of Billy Jack, aka One Tin Soldier. Peace on Earth, indeed.
Bruce Hornsby's The Way It Is, and it's equally good remake by Tupac Shakur

, retitled Changes.

Hornsby's version:

They say hey little boy, you can't go where the others go

Cuz you don't look like they do

Say hey old man, how can you stand to think that way

Did you really think about it before you made the rules

He said Son

That's just the way it is, some things will never change

That's just the way it is, oh but don't you believe them

Tupac's breakdown:

We gotta make a change...

It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes.

Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live

and let's change the way we treat each other.

You see the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do

what we gotta do, to survive.

While political punk music basically is this trope, Propagandhi do it particularly well. They manage to sum up their entire ideology in a couple of lines at the end of the two-minute song Resisting Tyrannical Government:
And yes, I recognise the irony: the system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds. That's exactly why priveliged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream - until everyone has everything they need.
Queen was no stranger to this. And their most perfect Anvil that needed to be dropped was Is this the World we Created? Especially in their Live Aid performance.
Kenny Chesney's The Good Stuff.
Australian Hip-Hop band The Cat Empire has the song The Chariot:
"this song is written 'bout my friends
it's engraved into this song so they know I'm not forgetting them
Maybe if the world contain[s] more people like these
The the news would not be telling me 'bout all our warfare endlessly..."
- Hip-hop? The Cat Empire is a ska band.
The Phil Collins solo effort "Another Day In Paradise".
Taylor Swift's "Fifteen". When every song on Top 40 radio or Radio Disney is a Silly Love Song about finding the boy that you'll be with for the rest of your life (when it's not about having sex), hearing a song telling girls not to look for love in high school comes as quite a shock. It's a message that a lot more girls in middle and high school should be paying attention to.
Elvis Presley's song "In the Ghetto" is a clear condemnation of the cycle of violence and poverty of the ghettos, and of the apathy the problems of those communities receive.
The film Dreamgirls had a segment in which Jimmy and the girls "tried to do something new", and recorded a quasi-protest song over the Vietnam war. Curtis, however, was quick to prevent the track's release because it was a "message song".

Close Music

Who on earth could forget The Mikado?
South Pacific had a great moment in the song "You've Got to be Carefully Taught." Hate doesn't come naturally, it gets drummed into people in their youth. When some Southerners asked to cut that song, Rodgers And Hammerstein said "If you cut that song, you might as well cut the whole musical."
Bertolt Brecht's play Saint Joan of the Stockyards is extremely anvilicious - and utterly brilliant.
- You could say the same about ALL of his plays. Dropping anvils on things was what Brecht did best - he created a whole style of theatre based around it that is still used today.
  - Except sometimes the wrong anvil gets dropped — The Threepenny Opera, which is supposed to be dropping communist anvils, is much more effective at dropping decentralization anvils. (This troper points to the Fridge Logic of saying the best way to fight government corruption is to give the government more power.)
Notably, Shakespeare - as well as his rival and contemporary, Christopher Marlowe - were wont to shove anvils into quite a lot of their plays, on subjects such as War (Henry V, Tamburlaine), Meta-Fiction (Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Prospero in the finale speech of The Tempest), and moral ambiguity (Richard's opening in Richard III, Don John's first speech in Much Ado About Nothing) - although, quite often they would only be able to make political points by disguising them as the opposite argument and then having them played so that the audience sympathised with their point - Feminism in "The Taming Of The Shrew", Humanism in "Dr. Faustus" or Anti-Anti-Semitism in "The Merchant Of Venice".
- It's worth noting that the anviliciousness of some of these bits is contested - some claim that it's more so modern people seeing what we want to see than it is Shakespeare dropping anvils.
Everyone's a little bit racist, so chill out and we'll all get along better. Charity feels good.
- It's ok if you don't live up to your dreams right now. You've got your whole life ahead of you, so enjoy it.
"If you were gay
that'd be okay
I mean cause hey
I'd like you anyway"
We Will Rock You pretty much lives of the 'Don't be like everyone else' Aesop.
- Which is kinda funny when you consider how easily it is to get a bunch of people stomping and clapping along to the song We Will Rock You.
Wicked's 'skin colour shouldn't matter,' aesop couldn't actually be hammered home any more heavily than it is, and yet it works remarkably well.
- Skin color? How about, "Don't accept moral compromises, especially not from your leaders," "go out there and fight for what you believe in" and "throw popular opinion out the window"?

Close Theater

Call Of Duty 4: The part where you play as a soldier crawling around just before dying from the aftereffects of a nuclear explosion.
- The Co D games in general love smacking the player in the face with an anvil labeled "war is hell."
Final Fantasy VII dropped a clearly environmentalist anvil by literally showing a company sucking out the life out of the planet to use as a fuel source. All the over-the-top additions, such as a corrupt president, the repetition of the phrase "the planet is dying", and even a botched public execution to try to throw off the blame only added to the message.
The Aesop of the entire Metal Gear Solid series basically boils down to "people need to fix their problems today instead of handing them down to the next generation", An Aesop strengthened by the number of former Child Soldiers among the characters in the series.
- And nuclear weapons are bad, bad, bad.
  - Everywhere, even in the subtleties. Look at RAY when you fight it using REX in Guns of the Patriots. See a tail on it? Interesting that the original Metal Gear RAY, the only non-nuclear Metal Gear, the Metal Gear designed not to launch nuclear weapons from any point on the globe, not to defend bigger nuclear-launch platforms like it's production-model knockoffs, but to destroy those weapons of mass destruction, is unaccounted for and spared the fate of every other Metal Gear ever seen; destruction.
- The sheer, sheer weight of the anvil is a large part of why this works, too. The message of the series isn't just about people fixing their problems, it's about the individual, each person in the group of people, taking personal responsibility instead of sloughing blame off onto anything convenient. Sons of Liberty is particularly genius in this, where Solidus Snake spends a good ten minutes monologuing in dramatic fashion about his plans to throw off the yoke of the Patriots, questionably making him seem sympathetic even though he was just a few minutes ago waxing nostalgia about being responsible for many of those child soldiers, the player's character included. He dies soon thereafter, and what's one of the things Solid Snake tells Raiden in the end? "The Patriots are a kind of ongoing fiction too, come to think of it." Explored further in Guns of the Patriots, where an individual's sense of self is am important theme; the B&B Corps receive no sympathy from Snake, he even expresses annoyance that Drebin insists on telling him their backstories and how they were mentally broken. Life can be horrible, but after a certain point, this stops being an excuse for your actions, and you will never truly have absolution unless you confront your own problems instead of blaming them on others. Contrast with Otacon, who was sexually abused by his stepmother, among other things, but has turned out as Snake's best friend. Ho Yay aside, they're close in a way that Snake, as a soldier, has probably only ever known with other soldiers. It's no coincidence they first meet because Snake's old best friend, a soldier turned traitor, was trying to kill Otacon at the time.
- "War is bad", especially in MGS 3. War turns two of the series's biggest heroes into villains mostly because of petty politics. Not to mention the part where every human being and animal you killed comes back from the dead to haunt you. This troper tried killing no one and eating nothing but fish during a replay and even the apparent miles of fish made him sick with himself.
  - Actually, the animals you killed don't appear. Animals don't have souls, after all, except fish. The buzzards only appear when you eat them after they've eaten a dead soldier (thus creating a nightmare fuel turkducken), because...like, that's how souls work. So yeah.
Bioshock: A game that's all about dropping an anvil onto Atlas Shrugged.
- An anvil with the phrase "HERE'S WHY OBJECTIVISM DOESN'T WORK" laser-etched on the side.
- Seriously people - you owe it to yourself to play this game.
  - So Objectivism is bad because it leads to undersea utopias where genetic experiments are performed on little girls. Sorry, but just because you agree with it doesn't mean it's all that effective.
  - No... it is that Objectivism is doesn't work because it is self-destructive. That for all of Ryan's attempts to be "free from the supressionist government(s)", he has become one himself. That to allow everyone to be "freed from restrictions in science and the arts", he let experiments that violated human decency to occur and to allow a crazy man to become even more unhinged in his attempt to get the "perfect masterpiece". That making everyone "truly equal citizens of Rapture", a small few become almost as powerful as the man who created their city (not to mention those scientists taking little girls to become living experiments and allowing a highly addictive substance to become accessible to the general public to cause violence to get it). That's what the anvil is.
  - Funny thing is, Levine doesn't really hold Bioshock as an attack on objectivism so much as a commentary on the human capacity to enshrine ideology. This Troper found http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=539 this link]] to be highly enlightening.
  - I think you seriously misunderstand Objectivism, mate. Sure, there would be a Suchong that did that sort of thing, but what you are forgetting is that because Rapture is an isolated place(Which, hurr, happens to be extremely counterproductive to a free market) there is no Anti-Suchong who people might be more comfortable purchasing from.
  - It is interesting to note that Libertarians are always coming up with grand isolationist plans that make Rapture seem downright quaint, from a sea-going vessel the size of a city all the way to a space station colony at the Lagrange-5 point (see L5 Foundation)
  - A more subtle anvil (can such a thing exist?) is dropped through Fontaine's emphasis on how "someone still needs to clean the toilets" in a city like Rapture. The idea being that, it's all well and good to try creating a society without limits placed upon the individual, where anyone can achieve anything... but someone is always going to be at the bottom, and if the system does not account for their needs — nay, regards them as a parasite — then there are going to be problems.
Midway's The Suffering has an extremely powerful message about capital punishment that wouldn't be nearly as effective without its over the top elements.
Persona 4's theme is about how finding the truth is never easy or simple. At first it starts off with lots of misunderstandings, loose threads, and possibly a hasty and disastrous decision on your part, but crosses into Anvilicious toward the end when the whole population of Inaba seems obsessed with looking to TV to feed them all the answers. Considering how much of their conversation resembles exchanges of empty, baseless ideas on too many internet message boards, this is a pretty relevant Aesop. Likewise, if you went through the game without finding the true ending, perhaps the anvil didn't get dropped on you hard enough.
It's strange that Psychonauts isn't a children's game, because it has the perfect Aesop for one: "Parents are people too. And you know what? Sometimes the stuff they say is 'for your own good' really is for your own good, and they do make mistakes, but you know what? They still love you."
Your Mileage May Vary on this one, but Kingdom Hearts could not hammer home its message that as long as you stay loyal to your friends, you'll always be okay any harder, and although it does become Narm on occasion, it can still be touching, and that anvil should probably be dropped as often as humanly possible, because, yes, good friends do make it possible to survive anything.
The World Ends With You has CAT's "Do what you want, wherever you want, whenever you want."
- That's Neku's attitude at the game's beginning, but by the end, the anvil that keeps getting dropped is "trusting in people is a really, really good thing." Mr. Hanekoma even tells Neku that his world will only extend as far as he wants it to, and if he stays a shut-in his whole life, he'll always be miserable.

Close Video Games

The Gargoyles episode "Deadly Force" is anything but subtle about its message, but is generally considered one of the best episodes of the series for treating its subject matter with respect, and instead of using the easy Aesop, "guns are bad," they opt for the more mature and reasonable, "Guns are dangerous, and need to be treated with respect." Also notable in that the Aesop sticks with the two central characters: Broadway spends the rest of the series destroying any gun he comes across, and Elisa is shown putting away when she has company, and locking up her gun rather than leaving it loaded and lying around.
Though Captain Planet as a whole was Anvilicious in a negative way, the episode If It's Doomsday, This Must Be Belfast is a remarkable exception, delivering a very clear Aesop that long histories of violence and bloodshed are complex, difficult problems without clear "good guys" or "bad guys" or quick, easy solutions, and a secondary one that nobody can win a nuclear war.
- Your Mileage May Vary. This Northern Irish troper found that the episode was a much better example of the extreme Narm that comes with attempting to condense such a complex history into a short and understandable version for children, complete with lots of exposition, mangled Scirenglish accents and Wheeler as the embodiment of America Saves The Day. The abridged version of the episode is still a popular funny video over here.
South Park, the episode "Trapped In The Closet," and the views of the destructiveness and nonsensicalness of Scientology. They were willing to alienate a long-time cast member and fan favorite to get the message out.
- Although, as I understand it Isaac Hayes didn't want to leave the cast; he was pressured into it by Scientology and was in tears when he went to Matt and Trey to break the news. He had enough of a sense of humour to say "they've done that to every religion"; Scientology did not.
- South Park is fantastic for not only having Anvilicious episodes, but having that Anviliciousness most often being completely justified and absurdly hilarious. Sometimes they remind celebrities that their egos are outstripping their talents or that they have gone too far (Fat Butt and Pancake Head, The Biggest Douche in the Universe, Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset, The China Problem, and Fishsticks), how absurd some trends are (South Park Is Gay! and Smug Alert!), or just how crazy we are as a society (Freak Strike, I'm a Little Bit Country, Butt Out, Douche and Turd, Follow That Egg!, Britney's New Look, and The Ring). Of particular note is the two-parter Cartoon Wars with the message that using the threat of potential terrorism to get people to do what you want is also terrorism. This needs to be repeated time and time again.
  - And let's not forget the (AWESOME) movie, where 139 F-bombs are just about enough to remind people that there are far worse things in the world than swearing - a message that ties in nicely with It Hits The Fan, which shows that some swear words become completely meaningless if you use them 162 times.
  - Especially since, ironically, when the movie came out, allot of people were complaining about it, and they were acting EXACTLY like Kyle's mother. Trey Parker and Matt Stone aren't bad at predicting the behaviour of conservatives.
  - The Movie, amidst all the uncensored swearing, has a few big ones: violence can be just as bad as swearing, and the "blame the media for your children's bad behavior and lobby to censor it" approach to taming unruly kids is a very bad idea.
  - Unfortunately, South Park's Anvilicious nature has also had something of a negative effect: while both Matt and Trey want to encourage their viewers to think for themselves, a number of fans have taken to adopting the viewpoints on the show just because it's South Park saying it.
Disney's Pocahontas is very Anvilicious in the way it portrays conflict between the two conflicting peoples, particularly during the final scene when Pocahontas makes her speech about what the evils of hatred have brought them to. To This Troper, knowing the TRUE story of what happened to the Native American Indians, and the reality of the characters, just made her words all the more significant.
- And the "Savages" song just hammers the anvil further down.
Martin Luther King's speech on The Boondocks.
- The entire series exists to drop Anvils on the black community, about how apathy to your lot in life is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
While tracking down Norman's nemesis via his trail of destruction in Mighty Max, they arrive at a house whose occupants were slaughtered. Norman was the only one to see the carnage and absolutely refused to allow Max to enter. Max tried to reason that he has plenty of experience with violence on television. Virgil responds with a very clear, "Real violence has real consequences." It makes it clear that there is a difference between entertaining action shows and how it would actually affect the real world.
- You're missing the part where Max actually does enter the house... and proceeds to run out and lose his lunch. That's where the aesop is properly delivered.

Close Western Animation

Broken Saints is loaded with these, most notably about the treatment of third world countries by Western industry.

Close Web Animation

The Whateley Universe is chock full of these, since the stories revolve around ideas like tolerance for people who are different. They're mutants. But most of the protagonists are also Transgender or otherwise LGBTQI, so there's less of a Space Whale Aesop than usual. Several of the main characters, like Phase and Diamondback, have been treated horrifically by their own families since they 'came out' - as mutants.

Close Web Original

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