Character Filibuster

"For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who — [32,000 words of pure speech later] — will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

— John Galt, Atlas Shrugged

This trope happens when a character has started talking and just... won't... stop. Discussing and ranting for far longer than any normal person who's not a college sophomore would, they launch into well thought-out and outlined philosophical essays, complete with introductions and supporting points. Something any normal person might take weeks to write, rewrite, and organize before presenting, this character seemingly makes up off the top of their head.

Not only is the length of the speech generally unrealistic (provided that the scene is not in court or during a speech, when it is usually acceptable, or in a situation where a character's only viable option is to stand up and just keep talking), the audience is amazingly quiet: never interrupting or leaving, and even remembering specific points during their speech. Bonus points if no real time has seemed to pass (for example, it is still before breakfast when the discussion has ended, when it easily took over an hour to read). In literature, this is indicative that the work was probably written in the Victorian era.

When the character is explaining the author's views, it's also an Author Filibuster. Compare Speech-Centric Work for works which feature a great amount of dialogue or monologue, and which may feature not just one but several of these. See also Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic and Talking Is a Free Action. And God help you if this trope overlaps with Motor Mouth. When a character is filibustering for an in-universe reason, they are Holding the Floor. Usually becomes a Wall of Text if used in a comic. Can be a Fridge Logic result of a story having an orally-based Framing Device — "Wait, is he still telling this tale to the guys round the campfire? How did he pronounce the chapter breaks?"^note One way would be that this would be a break for the storyteller/listeners to go to the bathroom, sleep, eat, etc., or that that was simply the amount of story told each evening — so the first campfire we see and the last are 30 chapters/days apart.

This trope is often considered to be a writing pitfall, but not always. After all, the opinion any specific reader has of any Character Filibuster is usually ("usually" being the key word here) a product of whether or not the reader agrees with the point being made, whether the speech itself fleshes out the character in an engaging way, or if the point being made is petty enough to be funny.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z. While he isn't the voice box of Akira's personal beliefs, he is known to wax on and on about his Saiyan heritage and his grudge against Goku. The obvious example would be during his second fight with Goku as Majin Vegeta. Twice in that same fight he goes on a long-winded speech about why Goku has humiliated him, shamed him, etc. He even gets one more speech in during the final battle with Kid Buu as he explains to himself (and the audience) why he now can finally admit that Goku is better than he.
• Excel♡Saga: Subverted in episode 12; Il Palazzo is about to rant about Christmas (and, by extension, Christianity), but Excel suggests he spare the audience his views and just move on. Il Palazzo agrees.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Itsuki's long speeches usually add some context to a particular arc or story subplot. However: if you get a badly translated copy (Japan to english) of the light novels, you are, to put it delicately, completely screwed. Lampshaded when Kyon slips into the theater to watch Itsuki's performance during the culture fair. Itsuki's droning monologue, punctuated with the usual hand gestures, keeps Kyon's puzzled attention for a few minutes before he nods off.
• Sgt. Frog: Sergeant Keroro gives one of these about how kids can't deal with the cold in one of the manga chapters. Before he begins Fuyuki groans that they're about to lose fans as the manga has only just been turned into an anime (at the time the chapter was written). When he's done (2 pages later) he finds Fuyuki and Natsumi have stopped listening to him and snuggled back under their kotatsu.
• Happens at least Once an Episode in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, with Itoshiki's ramblings about the episode's theme. Usually punctuated at some point with his catchphrase about how whatever he was rambling about "has left [him] in despair".
• Darker than Black: November 11's first appearance is marked by a rather lengthy address on the dangers of second-hand smoke. It gets an Ironic Echo later on.
• Professor Itsuki of Moyashimon sometimes goes off on lengthy and philosophical speeches about science and fermentation processes. Justified by the fact that he is a professor lecturing to his seminar students.
• In Hellsing, The Major's famous speech in which he details how he loves every last aspect of war. The version in the OVA clocks in at more than six minutes long. Tends to be tolerated (if not outright enjoyed) due to how awesome it is.
• The main character of Gimmick! launches into a long rant about the evils of propaganda after his backstory is revealed, in which he's tricked into helping create a propaganda ad for the War on Terror, which convinces one of his friends to join the army and end up dead.
• Gugure! Kokkuri-san's Kohina delivers several, mostly about cup noodles which just drives home how much of a Trademark Favorite Food they are to her.
• The Case Files of Jeweler Richard's titular character delivers much of his dialouge in the form of a well-educated lecture.

Audio Plays

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who story Caerdroia, there's a particularly odd example: the Doctor gets a Literal Split Personality and, bothered by the phrase "safe as houses", his Cloudcuckoolander side explains that it probably comes from a 19th-century economic depression, in which only real estate didn't lose its value. In other words, houses were a safe investment. Now you know. It comes across as particularly silly because he's speaking in a slow, Erudite Stoner-type voice (without all the Erudite Stoner uhs, likes, and mans), is freshly separated from two-thirds of himself, and just popped out of a weird time-space portal thing. But he's apparently too Sidetracked by the Analogy to notice he's literally beside himself.

Comic Books

• In Chick Tracts, there's always Uncle Bob or Lil' Susy, to helpfully preach how you are a sinner and you are bound to Hell, and the only way to avoid it is Jesus.
• Used painfully straight by the Mexican political cartoonists Rius and El Fisgon, using the characters Gumaro and La Beba Toloache in their respective works. Rius actually lampshades it in one strip: the cops from Trastupijes go to Gumaro's house to ask him for help, Nopaltzin is the one who greets them and out of nowhere he starts talking about the "real" figure of Jesus, the cops puzzledly look each other and ask him why he is telling them that, Nopaltzin answers that it's because Gumaro made him memorize that, as a reprieve for getting drunk again.
• In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem is prone to these, but the way he delivers them is entertaining. Some of it is him writing, or possibly dictating for what he will write up later.
• A relatively short one is made by Foggy Nelson, in Daredevil #26, defending the practice of representing masked (or other obviously guilty) criminals as a necessary part of the American legal system. Since it is very short by the standards of this trope, and he is a lawyer it actually is a fairly realistic piece of dialog.
• Steve Ditko's Mr. A, a harder-edged version of The Question, who loves to give long self-righteous speeches about black and white morality as defined by Objectivism.
• Marshal Law has the excerpt from Lynn's thesis on the evil of her universe's "heroes", which is also a metafictional denunciation of the superhero genre, laid in as text boxes over the climactic fight between Law and the Public Spirit at the end of the original "Fear and Loathing" story.

Fan Works

• A rather impassioned rant from Calvin - though Garfield said almost the same exact thing in his Guide to Everything, an official release - about movies in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series:
  "Who cares? It's disgusting that they'll put out just anything these days. It used to be a high standard, but now everything is driven by test audiences and marketing. Citizen Kane, one of the greatest films of all time, probably couldn't get made today. The studios would want to make the main character a teenager, add some car chases and cleavage, toss in a few explosions, and maybe even Jackie Chan! …I'm not saying he's bad; he just wouldn't fit into that type of film."
• Child of the Storm has this from time to time, in part because the author admits that he's a bit too fond of the sound of his own voice. One example is Dumbledore's Motive Rant regarding his bitterness over the stultifying culture of the Wizarding World that discorages intellectual advancement and exploration. Later, this is usually done by Stephen Strange, though in his case there's usually the saving grace of the fact that a) he needs to explain quite a few things, b) what he says when he deigns to elaborate is often a matter of life or death (or worse), and c) people don't tend to interrupt him because they're too busy listening very carefully to exactly what he's actually saying rather than what he may seem to be saying.
• Lita's "I Was Never A Diva!" speech from the WWE story, Taking It Back, in which she rants about the decline and fall of WWE's women's division, how they gave up on great female wrestling talent in favor of the untalented Barbie-doll Divas they've become known for. Noteworthy as Lita was never known for her promo skills when she was an active wrestler.
• Berry Punch in The Chase gives quite a long speech defending polygamy:
  Berry Punch: “A mare should have the right to assemble with like-minded mares and form a herd. Present a united front. Engage in collective bargaining. Have the right to assemble. We deserve the power of committee. We deserve to be able to divide our labour and lighten our loads. We have a right to have motherhood as a unified group effort because it takes a herd to raise a foal. We have a right to collect and assemble mares from different backgrounds together so our foals will grow up with the broadest possible knowledge base to work with. What I know is limited, what another mare knows might also be limited, but together, we can teach all of what we know to our foals and have them prosper, and then when they have foals, that collection of knowledge can be passed on to their foals, each generation starting off a little better than the one before. I have a right to be a good mother, and share my motherhood experience with my best friends, those I love, and my fellow herdmates within marriage. And nopony has the right to take that from me. Motherhood is sacred. It is the foundation of our society and the privilege of every mare to do her part, and she shouldn’t be forced to endure this task alone, bearing the heavy brunt of all this labour on her shoulders. We deserve to be empowered!
• Harry gets pretty bent out of shape about environmentalism in Dream a Dream. Afterwards Dean quips that he should get off of the soapbox.
  Harry: They knew [plastic] didn't degrade and couldn't really be destroyed. It just breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces and it's there forever. They used to sell milk in reusable glass bottles. It cost them money to clean and sterilize them after every use, and they were heavier, you constantly had to worry about breakage. Plastic jugs can break, but it isn't guaranteed like with a glass one. Convenience was a big part of why they started making plastic in such quantities, but mostly it was greed. One-use plastic bottles—cheaper to make, they don't have to worry about sterilizing them so they can be reused—they make more profit on every sale. People used to bring their own basket or what not when they went shopping to hold their groceries. Start supplying cheap plastic bags at the market—if you're out and didn't bring your basket with you because you weren't planning to go shopping, but just remembered the last of your potatoes went bad and you need more for dinner tonight—it's no problem! The shop gives you a bag to carry them in! Sell them to every store on every continent and BOOM! Big money all around. Money. That's what it was all about. It was making them big bucks, so what did they care that the landfills started piling up—just cover it over and start a new one! That one filled up just as fast? Who cares? We're rolling in it. They saw a chance to make big money and didn't care how it would impact later generations, or the world or the animals or the ocean. So many products are made with petroleum too. I think I was told it was like, 6000 different things. The muggles are using it up like it isn't all going to vanish one day. It took millions, if not billions, of years to make all those oil reserves, and they're draining them dry like they're going out of style, again because of greed. Muggles keep trying to research renewable energy sources, but the oil barons keep blocking those initiatives when they can because they want the world to remain dependent on them and their products for as long as possible, because they're all filthy, filthy stinking rich because of it. They don't care if they leave the world a ruin, or if there's nothing but ruined dregs for their grandchildren, because they got theirs and to hell with anyone else.
• In My Huntsman Academia, Izuku has a tendency to drop impassioned speeches off the top of his head whenever asked about his motivations. He is also able to give excellent You Are Better Than You Think You Are speeches and waxes philosophy on what it means to be a Huntsman. He acknowledges this and apologizes when he starts rambling, with his friends sometimes asking for a straight yes-or-no answer.

Film — Animated

• The Case Closed Non-Serial Movie used both recurring Little Miss Snarker Ai and one-off Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds Hiroki to filibuster over the hereditary nature of Japanese society. It is sometimes quite jarring to see Hiroki filibustering at around 30-35 minutes into the movie, while for the rest of it he was an extreme woobie.
• In Madagascar, Melman goes into unnecessary details about leading up to an important discovery until Alex tells him to get to the point.
  Melman: You know I have that bladder infection and I have to get up every two hours? Well, I got up to pee, um, and I looked over at Marty's pen, which, you know, I usually don't do. I don't know why, but I did. And this time, I looked over...
  Alex: What Melman? What's going on?!
  Melman: It's Marty! He's gone!

Film — Live-Action

• The movie 12 Angry Men is full of these — although some characters do show a few signs of semi-realistic dialogue when their speeches break down.
• Parodied in Billy Madison. Billy is required to give one of these describing how a work of literature reflects the changes the Industrial Revolution had on the modern novel as part of the climactic general knowledge quiz. He elects to compare the Industrial Revolution to a children's story called "The Puppy Who Lost His Way", and the scene cuts to the ending of the seemingly inspirational and well-informed monologue he gives on the subject. Then Billy turns to the headmaster to find out how he did, and this is the response:
  Headmaster: [completely deadpan] Mr. Madison, what you've just said... is one of the most insanely idiotic things I've ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
• Kevin Costner gives a rather epic off-the-cuff speech in Bull Durham when asked, "well, what do you believe then?", though unlike most such examples it's very ribald. It's also Hilarious in Hindsight, because one of the things he says in the speech is "I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone."
• In Don Juan DeMarco, the title character has a couple speeches explaining what it takes to be the World's Greatest Lover (it's very much to Depp's acting credit that he manages to deliver these convincingly.) His analyst Dr. Mickler does a more tongue-in-cheek one, complete with playful fake accent, about being the World's Greatest Psychiatrist.
• Played for laughs in Down with Love. The protagonist, a best-selling author, delivers the extremely long speech she's been saving up for years. What really makes it is the way it's all done in one shot followed by a cut to Ewan McGregor with an absolutely priceless look on his face. (A transcript of it at the IMDb has 22 lines!)
• Unsurprisingly, the film version of The Fountainhead, adapted for the screen by Ayn Rand herself, has several of these.
• Gods and Generals was filled with monologues, but one from Col. Chamberlain is especially in line with this trope. He normally tends to shoot from the hip in his speeches, but at one point a casual remark from a sergeant about "darkies" leads Chamberlain to replay with an eloquent speech about how it doesn't matter whether or not the South is correct about their rights being violated as long they hypocritically deny these same rights to their black population, and thus the North has just cause to prosecute the war.
• Good Will Hunting features a long rant from the eponymous character about possibly working for the NSA.
  Will: Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the NSA and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot, just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were all pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there takin' shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from, and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price — and, of course, the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices; a cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe they even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's walkin' to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids; and meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure, fuck it; while I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.
• The protagonist of the Bollywood film Guru has one of these at the end justifying his rapacious business practices. It wins over an initially hostile crowd, just like Howard Roarke's similar speech in The Fountainhead (both book and movie).
• In the execrable Horror of the Red Planet/The Wizard of Mars John Carradine appears at the end as a literal Talking Head. Which he does For about fifteen minutes of screen time, interrupted perhaps twice by questions from the remarkably dim cast. Proving once again that Money, Dear Boy triumphs over Art.
• Do not mention politics to Winston Churchill in Into the Storm (2009) . He has a lot of things to say about the Labor Party, in specific.
• Peter Graves' speech at the end of It Conquered the World. Became a running joke on MST3K after they riffed the movie. "He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature..."
• It's based on a true story, but we don't know how much is real: during the Clay Shaw trial in JFK, Jim Garrison talks for 8 minutes in final summation (that brought Kevin Costner to real tears).
• A Matter of Faith: In the debate, after Portland takes over, he completely dominates it by a stream of long-refuted points against evolution, with the moderator just letting him do it. Kamen does not even attempt to answer them later when he's done.
• Seth MacFarlane's character has quite a few of these in A Million Ways to Die in the West. The title speech is a few minutes long.
• In The Mole People, John Agar just will not shut up. Probably would have been more tolerable if they'd spread the speeches around more among the characters, instead of making one the know-it-all.
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has an actual character filibuster in the senate. Never before has a political filibuster been so dramatic.
• Paddy Chayefsky was in love with this trope. Howard Beale's multiple-page rants in Network are the best example.
• Jet Li's portrayal of Wong Fei Hung in Once Upon a Time in China and America shows him to be a sleep-inducing public speaker. (It doesn't help that his audience are miners just coming off a long shift, but still...) At the end of the movie, he offers to make speech at a dedication and is quickly turned down.
• Infamously done during On Deadly Ground, when Steven Seagal goes on a 15 minute environmental speech at the "climax".
• In Red Rocket, Mikey is a down-and-out former porn star who constantly has these rambling tall tales and excuses about why he got into trouble, went broke, or how his life was ruined by someone other than himself.
• Played for laughs in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, where Robin of Loxley has a habit of filibustering, and gently lulling the townspeople to sleep in the process with his Winston Churchill impression. Then Ahchoo wakes them up again with a Malcolm X impression.
• In Sabrina (1954), when Linus is fed up with David's disparagement of his work ethic:
  David: You're going into plastics now. What will that prove?
  Linus: Prove? Nothing much. A new product has been found, something of use to the world. A new industry moves into an undeveloped area. Factories go up, machines are brought in, a harbor is dug, and you're in business. It's purely coincidental, of course, that people who've never seen a dime before suddenly have a dollar, and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their teeth fixed and their faces washed. What's wrong with a kind of an urge that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds, and movies on a Saturday night?
• Parodied in Scary Movie when Ray states that "Watching TV shows doesn't create serial killers. Cancelling TV shows does!" He then states how The Wayans Bros. was a good show that didn't get a proper final episode while repeatedly stabbing Bobby with a knife.
• In a Running Gag, Mr Smith of Shoot 'Em Up tends to rant about minor things that annoy him. In this case, it's excused for three reasons: One, either his rants or what he does after them tend to be funny and/or awesome; two, other characters frequently note that they neither know nor care what he's talking about; and three, it sets up his awesome verbal smackdown of the villain at the end.
• V from V for Vendetta manages to not only ramble on a lot, but do it while using a lot of words that start with V.
  "Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose..."

Literature

• in Adachi and Shimamura, during Volume 5, Adachi, after spotting Shimamura with her old friend Tarumi at a festival, calls Shimamura. Since Adachi is quite attached to Shimamura, she goes off on a rant that is several pages long and, unlike most examples, is a rambling stream of consciousness in which she demands to know who Tarumi is to Shimamura and what she can do to become closer to Shimamura.
• Perhaps the ultimate example of this comes from Atlas Shrugged, as the page quote indicates. Including a full quote would be impossible, because John Galt's entire speech goes on for sixty-three pages, and weighs in at more than 32,000 words. In-universe he talks for three hours straight; most Youtube renditions of the speech are closer to three-and-a-half.
• The Fountainhead shows remarkable restraint, by Ayn Rand's standards, in that you only have to listen to Howard Roark for nine pages.
• There are long speeches explaining the Marquis de Sade's nihilism and justifications of selfishness and cruelty in almost all his works, the most famous being Justine, Juliette and Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man. Rarely does anyone interrupt or dispute their claims either.
• General Jerima Precklesdough in Felsic Current speaks in nothing but filibusters. His run-on sentences tend to be so convoluted that none but the most astute and intellectual of listeners (and readers!) can keep up with him. This makes taking orders from him a particularly grueling challenge for his troops. He's also been known to lose himself within the mazes of his own verbal meanderings, to his great amusement.
• This was the main point of ancient philosophical dialogues, where the setting and characters were present only to lend the appropriate framework (and often authoritative weight by placing the words in the mouths of well-respected and conveniently deceased classical scholars) for one (sometimes more) to outline an entire philosophical argument.
• Older Than Feudalism: The Iliad cycles between speeches that go on for over a hundred lines, often in the middle of a pitched battle, punctuated by someone's skull being splattered.
• Plato's Symposium consists of many long speeches on the nature of love in between people getting happily drunk and Alcibiades explaining how Socrates broke his heart.
• Played for Laughs in Don Quixote, as the title character will frequently give long, unprompted speeches about topics such as The Golden Age of Chivalry, the debate between arms and letters, or really whatever crosses his mind at the moment, much to the annoyance of the people who have to listen to his rambling.
• This happens quite frequently in The Last of the Mohicans and the rest of The Leatherstocking Tales. In fact, Hawkeye's introduction in Last of the Mohicans has him doing one of these. Then Chingachgook joins in the fun.
• Anything by Fyodor Dostoevsky. That includes Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Lampshaded in Notes from Underground, where the unnamed narrator is described as talking "like a book".
• In Stephen King's fourth Dark Tower novel, Wizard and Glass, Roland tells the story of his becoming a gunslinger, his first love, and the beginning of his quest for the Tower, an epic tale that spans months and takes up three-fourths of the seven-hundred-page-plus novel, in a single evening, without pausing. It's implied that, due to the wonky nature of time in Mid-World, that the universe itself obliged Roland's need to share the information.
• Frankenstein
  • A quarter of the prose is the creature's monologue.
  • Most of the prose is supposedly the speech of Frankenstein dictating to a ship's captain. That's including the creature's monologue.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley decided to improves his wife's prose by inserting monologues of his own personal philosophy into the book. This results in page long essays on Mr. Shelley's complaints of New Media Are Evil inserted into a university professor's lecture, or his political views inserted into letters between friends.
• Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a pretty interesting period work right up until the socialist characters start to talk. The book practically ends with a character discussion group...
• Uncle Tom's Cabin. One lazy afternoon Augustine St. Clare delivers a monologue about his upbringing, his twin brother, the differences between him and his brother, and his dislike of slavery in general (though he still owns slaves). It goes for pages and pages, but his cousin never interrupts. The annotator of the annotated edition even confesses that it makes his eyes glaze. But if your eyes don't glaze over, it can be quite beautiful even though it's improbable.
• In War and Peace, Prince Andrei gives a long speech about why who's commanding what army doesn't really matter before the Battle of Borodino. This also applies to any time a letter by one of the characters is featured in the story.
• Characters in the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind often do this, as a result of being used by the author as mouthpieces for his personal philosophy. Given that Goodkind was converted to Objectivism by reading Ayn Rand's books, this shouldn't come off as surprising. Notable examples come in Naked Empire, where Richard convinces the completely pacifist Bandukar to take up arms at his side against the Imperial Order soldiers through a series of lectures that take up much of each chapter where they appear.
• Some of the later Discworld books feature at least one of these:
  • The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents features a brief rant from Malicia about how stupid and childish the Mr. Bunnsy books (Discworld's equivalent to the works of Beatrix Potter) are. But since Malicia is an unlikeable, Wrong Genre Savvy know-it-all (not to mention she doesn't care that she's inadvertently dispirited a rat who regarded Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure as a Bible for rats), it comes off as a Take That! towards the people who have that sort of attitude towards children's literature.
  • Mr Nutt, from Unseen Academicals, speaks in multi-paragraph lectures. There's even a bit of an explanation for why Talking Is a Free Action: people tend to get a bit dazed by it.
  • Lord Vetinari gets a few big speeches himself, like his discussion with Drumknott on the nature of freedom ("Freedom may be the natural state of mankind, but so is sitting in a tree and eating your dinner while it's still wriggling.") in Going Postal.
  • William de Worde goes on one or two of these in The Truth, usually about how important serious 'news' (as opposed to 'olds', stuff that people expect and know) actually is. At one point, Sacharissa calls him out for sneering at 'olds', and people caring about little things (such as proper classification of budgies vs parrots) rather than big things, like politics, in part because while he's self-consciously estranged from his Blue Blood family, his relative poverty etc is by choice and he's from a family that's used to running things. His retort is that someone has to care, because while most people don't care about Vetinari/don't think he does much, the important thing is that what he does is "not a lot of harm", and the city has had far worse rulers than him in living memory (later shown in Night Watch with Lords Winder and Snapcase). If no one cares and no one does anything, then they'll get another just like that. Interestingly, both are shown to have a point - William is right that the truth is important (because there is a conspiracy by some unpleasant figures to replace Vetinari with someone pliable), but as he eventually concedes, Sacharissa's right in that he's an arrogant aristocrat at heart (at the end of the book, he learns how to use it for good).
  • Granny Weatherwax gets one in A Hat Full of Sky, going on about how Miss Level helping people in need even when they're stupid and ungrateful is what witchcraft is all about, and not Mrs. Earwig's "wizard magic in a dress". She even admits afterwards she got a bit carried away.
• Jean-Paul Sartre often did this in his novels. The Reprieve has a notable example.
• Subverted in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The book begins with the eponymous yankee telling his story orally as a Framing Device, but after about a chapter he gets tired and hands the listener his journal to read instead.
• The Count of Monte Cristo has multiple examples, including a lengthy speech from Abbe Faria about how he learned about the treasure, a long explanation of a minor character's Backstory by a Roman innkeeper, and a history of the downfall of Ali Pasha by his daughter Haydee.
• Early in The Culture novel Use of Weapons, protagonist Cheradenine Zakalwe confronts an "Ethnarch" on a primitive planet who has been subjecting other ethnicities to forced relocation by train and mass executions by sneaking into that Ethnarch's bedroom at night. While holding the Ethnarch at gunpoint, Zakalwe breaks into a long explanation about why this is bad, who the Culture is, and what they do to people who indulge in such abuses, and how he should Beware the Nice Ones. The Ethnarch attempts to shut him up with a pistol hidden in his bed, but Zakalwe had already removed all the bullets from it. He continues to explain that the Culture will only subject him to a comfortable imprisonment rather than death. This turns out to be only Zakalwe invoking a long-winded Hope Spot for the Ethnarch, saying that he went freelance years ago, then shooting him in the head.
• John C. Wright's The Golden Oecumene trilogy does this. Especially in the third book, where Phaethon and Nothing (which is, in fact, an AI trapped in a black hole) engage in a lengthy philosophical discussion on the bridge of Phaethon's thousand-kilometer Adamantium starship. This is in the middle of exchanges of gunfire using the most powerful weapons of the past ten thousand years.
• In The Spellmonger Series, any time Penny gets more than two lines of dialogue, prepare for 15 pages of grade-school-level politics or economics punctuated by the protagonist basically providing an "uh, huh" or a "what then?" every second or third paragraph. Since a lot of her communications are via telepathy, you get the vague impression that Min pulls out a deck of cards and starts dealing a hand of solitaire off-screen every time she starts up.
• In the Star Trek Novel 'Verse, Federation Councillor Bera chim Gleer of Tellar is infamous for these. According to one novel, Star Trek: Articles of the Federation, he's never had a speech on the council floor go shorter than forty-five minutes...and that was when he had a cold. Usually it's twice that, minimum.
• The Vampire Chronicles:
  • Roger in Memnoch the Devil.
  • Lestat does this from time to time, the worst example being all of Chapter 16 in Blood Canticle, wherein he stops the plot to explain why he's in love with a character despite their complete lack of chemistry. Lestat also takes time in the preface of Blood Canticle to complain about the fans' reaction to Memnoch the Devil, saying more or less that he gave them a glimpse into the mysteries of Heaven and Hell and all they wanted was "the fancy fiend" with glamorous leather and heavy motorcycles. He assures them that there's plenty of traditional badassery to go around but that he'll get to it when he's good and ready. Then again, that might be a full-on Author Filibuster, as well as Chapter 7 of the same novel, which has nothing to do with the plot or the series, but is a three page rave about the new Pope and some Saint in Mexico.
• Mary Malone does this in the third book of His Dark Materials about her life from living as a (moderate) nun to her deconversion. However, contrary to what some may think, her rant about atheism is actually her own opinion, not Pullman's.
• Spider Robinson's short story "God Is an Iron" ends with the main character going on an impromptu very eloquent rant about the ironic nature of the world. Lampshaded when the character listening says: "you talk good on your feet".
• All of Psmith's dialogue is in oratory, despite the fact that he regards himself as "a man of few words". It's Played for Laughs, as very rarely is he ranting about anything serious.
• Ishmael's pseudo-encyclopedic knowledge of whales and philosophical rants make up half of Moby-Dick.
• In Harry Potter, Voldemort at his return in Goblet of Fire and Dumbledore on several occasions. Umbridge uses this whenever she can get away with it in Order of the Phoenix as a sign of her power over the school.
• Hugo's Les Misérables has multiple examples in addition to the digressions in Hugo's voice. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, Marius' grandfather, goes on at length about multiple topics such as the monarchy and matrimony. Marius gets a whole speech that is essentially extolling Bonaparte as a conqueror. Thenardier vents off on how society has been "unfair" to him while he is trying to get under Jean Valjean's skin during an ambush. Enjolras gets a whole chapter's worth of speech at the barricades, explaining a Utopian vision of what the revolution is about.
• David Weber often has characters in his Honor Harrington books go into (usually wholly mental) digressions on the evils of socialism, education policies which seek to "validate" students rather than actually teach, and many other topics, depending on the plot.
• A Song of Ice and Fire contains a number of these due to its Doorstopper length. Tropes Are Not Bad, as characters often use the time to explain motives that otherwise might have gotten lost in the shuffle or express views that readers will probably sympathize with to help prevent the story from being too unbearably dark. Septon Meribald's 'Broken Man' speech (about military deserters) in A Feast for Crows is a notable example.
  • A Feast for Crows has an example in the chapter where the Ironborn gather to choose their new king. One of the candidates, Dunstan Drumm, makes a long speech about the history of his house and all the great deeds the Drumms have done throughout the centuries. It bores all the attendees and his support evaporates— especially when they see the meager offering of treasure. Thankfully for the reader, the speech is summed up and not written out, except for the beginning.
• Mr. Chatterbox and his sister Miss Chatterbox from the Mr. Men and Little Misses are known for talking a lot of stories and never stop talking about them.
• Out of a hundred cantos, The Divine Comedy has only one entirely taken up by character dialogue, Paradiso Canto 6. Specifically, the canto consists of the Blessed Emperor Justinian provide a divine account of the Roman Empire, explain how people can be different in Paradise, and extol the virtue of a man named Romeo in a 142-line monologue.
• Post-apocalyptic Victoria has some, notably by William Kraft. The ultimate one is his speech on democracy late in the book, where he argues against those of his overzealous followers who want to scrap democracy in the Confederation and enshrine his principles in law by emphasizing his faith in the good moral sense of the common people.
• Stephen R. Donaldson has admitted that his characters often don't so much talk as take turns speechifying at each other. It's not quite as bad as some other examples, but having a character spend multiple paragraphs (and occasionally pages) explaining the complete background of the current situation or the full details of their opinions and what they are based on is commonplace in all his works.
• This is one of the trademark traits of Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung stories, set in ancient China. Nobody ever speaks concisely; every single character will spontaneously deliver flowery speeches, full of self-abasement, politeness and euphemisms.
• Starting with Little Myth Marker, the Myth Adventures shift from humorous caper novels to character pieces marked by long speeches, either from one character to another or from the first-person narrator to the reader. In Marker the speeches do fit into the plot (Aahz talks about parenthood after Skeeve accidentally adopts a child), but in later novels it sometimes seems like the speech was written first and a brief "adventure" was dashed off the justify it.
• There's a reason that the episodes of Katanagatari are twice as long as usual — it's so they have time to cram in all the lengthy speeches basically every single character makes, either about how they feel, what they're going to do next, or even just exposition.
• Haruhi Suzumiya:
  • Itsuki Koizumi constantly, constantly explains complex philosophical/metaphysical (or sometimes physics or math) theories without any reason. Usually, this is made rather creepy, not only because of his smile, but also because the stuff he talks makes you feel uneasy. But all in all this is actually awesome because the person he typically tells it to, Kyon, doesn't give a crap. And if Koizumi really does make Kyon feel uneasy about it, he will just say "Just kidding, that's not what I really think, at all." Even in their home-made movie he lapses into this, taking up almost a minute of screentime.
  • Kyon himself also slips into this at times, though usually when he's the Character Narrator rather than in his actual actions.
    • Inverted by Kyon himself in one of the later novels where he wishes he could instantly come up with a massive speech to make Mikuru feel better about how useless she is, but he cannot think of a thing to say that will not spoil the future. She thanks him for the effort, though, and cheers up.
    • Defied at one point. Koizumi asks Kyon to relate the events of a particular day, and has to stop him when his paragraph about how cute Kyon's sister's classmate was started getting a bit too long.
• Baccano!: Victor Talbot often employs these when he has the chance, such as when he's Perp Sweating, although his filibusters are less eloquent on-the-spot speeches than they are angry, profanity-laden rants.
  Huey: Brash and one-sided as ever, I see.
• Durarara!!: Izaya counts, but more so in the light novels. In the anime, when it's revealed Earthworm did indeed capture him, he goes on a monologue to taunt her. In the light novel, he spends almost the entire book without a single line, and once he finally starts speaking, he doesn't stop and goes off on random tangents. One of the reasons he hired Namie was to have someone to tell all his plans to.
  • This also happens to run in the family. Online, Kururi often hits the word limit in the chat despite usually being silent in real life, and the opposite for Mairu, who is a complete chatterbox.
• Area 51: Several times necessary information is explained by a person giving a long lecture on some topic. This is justified as they're usually scientists or other experts explaining this to a lay person, and they react in a realistic way through expressing annoyance at unnecessary verbosity or asking that the scientific terminology be dumbed down for them.

Live Action TV

In General:

• One Japanese variety show once had a segment in which a couple of highschool students did a movie parody of Charlie's Angels. One of the students was so impressively good at this trope that at one point the camera (an industrial, movie-business type of camera, mind!) literally stopped working before he stopped.

Creators:

• David Mitchell launches into these on most comedy panel shows he appears on.
  • "I've missed your angry logic, David!"

Series:

• 7th Heaven. Once an Episode? Try once between every commercial break. Characters tend to alternate Character filibusters combined with That Makes Me Feel Angry, in which they analyze their own and others' emotions ad nauseum.
• Babylon 5:
  • Londo once asks Vir if he believes in fate. He has to interrupt about a minute in to Vir's rather complex philosophy on the subject to demand a yes or no.
  • In the Season 1 episode "Infection", Commander Sinclair gives a long philosophical speech during a fistfight with a deadly alien.
• Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory is prone to this if anyone mentions something he has even the most remote knowledge in; more so if he does know. And when he tried to teach Penny physics...
• Boston Legal, Once an Episode, as you might expect from a show in which characters are constantly giving speeches in court. That said, nearly every case in the last series features the judge telling the filibusterer to Get On With It already.
• Cheers: Diane Chambers and Frasier have this in common, which might have helped them get together. Diane herself frequently made long-winded speeches, novels, and even answering machine messages.
• Community - Britta proudly announces to the study group that she has a lesbian friend – actually a straight girl who thinks Britta is her lesbian friend. Everyone expects Pierce to make a comment - he tells them he has a prepared statement, pulls out a thick pile of notebook paper, full of writing on both sides, and starts in just as the opening titles roll.
  Pierce: [after titles]...and in summation, good luck, and Bon appetit.
  Jeff: Many, many paragraphs of that were oddly supportive!
• Steve's legendary rants in Coupling on subjects such as cushions, locks on bathroom doors, and lesbian porn.
• In an episode of Cracker, forced by the court to attend Gamblers Anonymous, Fitz gives a self-justifying rant as the reason he is a compulsive gambler:
  Fitz: I'll tell you why. Because when I win, when I'm holding my winnings in my hand, it proves one thing: that I WAS RIGHT! The teachers who said I would never amount to anything, the employers who told me I was lucky they let me have a job at all, the wife who belittled me for not earning as much as the man next door AND THEN SLEPT WITH HIM, they're all wrong, and I'm RIGHT! All those tut-tutting puritans who criticise you for having a bet, they're just gutless SHITES who don't have the spine to take a risk, who play safe and make a virtue out of their own COWARDICE, they're wrong and you're RIGHT! It's not us that has a problem, it's THEM!
• A number of interviewees have tried to use The Daily Show as a simple podium for their ideas, talking down to or completely ignoring their comedian host. It never goes well.
• Julia "Terminator" Sugarbaker on Designing Women is this trope personified. She does this on an almost Once an Episode basis, preaching her liberal views to the other characters and the audience. Ironically, she was played by Dixie Carter, a staunch Republican who got so fed up with it that she cut a deal with the producers: every time they made her rant about something she didn't agree with, she got to do a musical number.
• Doctor Who: Invoked in "Vincent and the Doctor", when the Doctor gives art expert Dr. Black an opening for a speech about his love of Vincent van Gogh and his work. It's neither boring nor out of place, being delivered in a context that makes perfect sense: An art historian hosting an exhibition who is clearly relishing a chance to gush about an artist whose work he truly loves. And the actual Vincent Van Gogh, who at this point in his life had been struggling with self-doubt and money troubles, gets to hear the whole thing.
• Frasier: Frasier Crane loves doing these, which is subject to a lot of parody and lampshading. His biggest one has got to be the time he spent an entire episode parked at the exit of a parking garage refusing to pay the $2.00 fee because he didn't actually park after entering it, while bending the ears of the ticket guard's and the angry crowd behind him about stupid rules. Niles, who is stuck in the car with him, calls him an idiot for fifteen minutes before Frasier finally realizes that maybe he's wrong, and he should stop feeling the need to filibuster all the time, leading to this priceless exchange:
  Frasier: You know, we wouldn't be in this mess if it weren't for you and your ridiculous birdcage!
  Niles: *look of indignant outrage*
  Frasier: Oh come on, I can only change one character flaw at a time!
• Friends: Joey talks about the wonders of thongs in the Cold Open of "The One with All the Thanksgivings". He's still talking about it by the end of the opening credits.
• In the zany British sitcom The Goodies Tim Brooke-Taylor's character often goes off into bombastic rants about British greatness, accompanied by the soundtrack to Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance Number 1" ("Land of Hope and Glory" as it is better known).
• One episode of Top Gear's Spiritual Successor The Grand Tour has a segment in which Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond travel through an airport terminal while Clarkson rants, at length, about how much he hates travelling through airport terminals. While it's not quite the "twenty minutes" Hammond claims it is when introducing the segment, it does go on for several minutes, almost without pause. It's tolerable because a) it sets up the actual point of the segment, which is making airport travel more bearable by whizzing around on motorised luggage cases; b) much of what Clarkson says is either humorous, relatable, or both; and c) Hammond is shown growing increasingly bored and exasperated as the rant goes on.
• Parodied on Green Acres. Oliver would sometimes go into a long winded speech about how great America is and/or how it was great because of farmers accompanied by a fife playing either "Yankee Doodle" or "Battle Hymn of the Republic". At one point, everyone just got bored and left, even the unseen fife player.

• The entire run of How I Met Your Mother is one long character filibuster of a 51-year-old Ted Mosby insisting upon telling his son and daughter the whole story of how he met their mother. Which means not just telling them how they were introduced and how they fell in love, but all the backstory for his character development up to that point: why did they fall in love? To answer that, Ted paints a picture of his personality and life, and in order to do that, Ted takes it upon himself to not describe, but demonstrate, through Show, Don't Tell, all the events important to his development, all the backstory explaining the events, all the unrelated events that are essential to understanding that backstory, all the character traits of his friends that explain those unrelated events, and all the even more unrelated events that illustrate the character traits that explain the unrelated events that explain the backstory that explains the important events that constitute the character development that led Ted to her. All of which is played out in explicit, detailed, semi-chronological, tangent-filled story-form. Luckily, the comedy, the sitcom format and the mysteries makes it interesting and entertaining to us, but the poor kids...
• M*A*S*H: Hawkeye Pierce is occasionally prone to these. One episode in particular, simply titled "Hawkeye", features him as the only appearing regular from the cast and is essentially a 25-minute-long Character Filibuster (albeit justified in-universe, since he's sustained a concussion in a jeep accident and is babbling to keep himself from falling unconscious).
• The Masked Singer: Panelist Ken Jeong has become known for his rambling deductions of the performer's identities. At one point, his explanation for who he thinks a contestant is went on for so long it put the contestant and the other panelists to sleep.

• In the Travel Agent sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus, Eric Idle plays a customer named Mr. Smoketoomuch, who goes into a long, rambling filibuster about how tired he is of typical bus tours, with their bad food and boring attractions and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and rude fellow tourists who drone on and on and on about nothing, etc., etc. etc......
• MythBusters: Jamie Hyneman often delves into his various strange occupations, which might actually be quite interesting if they weren't cut out for time.
• In an episode of Parks and Recreation, a character played by guest star Patton Oswalt engages in a political filibuster that consists of him offering his thoughts for the plot of future Star Wars films- which basically consists of a Massive Multiplayer Crossover with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While the speech was significantly shortened for the actual episode, a full length version (which goes on for almost 9 minutes) was released on the internet prior to the episode, and went on to become somewhat memetic. This is particularly notable because Oswalt improvised the entire thing, making it a good example of what a realistic filibuster sounds like.

• Sherlock's long and extremely detailed speeches of how he's figured something out take up a large portion of the show's running time.
• Judd Hirsch's character's rant in the teaser of the first episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Justified, though.
• Top Gear. Presenter James May is basically the Character Filibuster made flesh. He often goes on rants so long-winded or into such meticulous detail about physics, they've actually Lampshaded it by fading out between scenes, coming back later to find that he is still talking.
• A literal example on The West Wing (in an episode aptly titled "The Stackhouse Filibuster"), where a senator filibusters in order to delay voting on a crucial health care bill so that he can add on a provision for autism care and research.

Professional Wrestling

• Manager of The Midnight Express, Vader and others, Jim Cornette, was known for this. Observe this interview he highjacks in Jim Crockett Promotions.
• Ultimate Warrior's WCW debut promo ended up derailing the show when he talked twenty minutes past the time limit he was given.
• Despite being called "Total Nonstop Action", TNA has frequently been criticized for diatribes overtaking any other kind of action. As Wrestling News World reporter Kendra Bunyan put it "How About A Little Wrestling With Your Talk Show?"
• Delirious delivered not only a long but a very high speed filibuster to CM Punk during their fourth IWA Mid-South match that caused CM Punk to leave the ring in frustration.
• Fans of the North West Wrestling Alliance have been known to chant "We Don't Wanna Hear You" when some wrestlers or managers get a little too long winded(which is much more polite than what you'll get from CZW or WSU crowds). Frequent offenders in Ring of Honor such as Roderick Strong have been greeted with "Please Don't Talk".

Theatre

• Parodied in the play Sheik, Rattle and Roll where the Prince keeps launching into 'inspirational' speeches at the drop of a hat, which generally either bewilder his audience or send them to sleep.
• Used in Charles Mee's Wintertime repeatedly, each time with a different character. What makes it even worse is that he fancies himself a poet, and all these speeches are in [poorly written] verse....
• The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice has two scenes in which one character does practically all the talking: the opening scene, in which Mrs. Zero talks on and on to her husband; and the court scene, in which Mr. Zero's rambling defense of his crime and his miserable way of life is interrupted only once, by twelve voices shouting "GUILTY!" in unison.
• William Shakespeare does this a lot, as expected, usually justified, but occasionally to show a character is a pompous windbag, or to expound upon subjects close to him, like theater. For example, see Hamlet, where the eponymous character launches into a lengthy rant about various forms of crappy acting, including Milking the Giant Cow, after waylaying a group of players arriving to perform at the royal court.
• Lucky's Suddenly Speaking monologue in Waiting for Godot.

Video Games

• The Metal Gear series has a lot of these, usually by the villains. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has three in one Cut Scene (admittedly, it was broken up by a boss fight, at least), one of which was an Author Filibuster also.
  • Quietly self-parodied by Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, where the lead villain's crazy MGS superpower is his ability to talk endlessly.
• Played for Laughs in Tales of Symphonia. Raine's lectures are treated as a Fate Worse than Death, and in one scenario you don't have to listen to her. Her lecture will loop in the background until you find two guys trying to blow up the ruins they're visiting.
• In Sam & Max: Freelance Police, Sam frequently uses this, turning it into a running gag.
• BioShock features a number of these from Andrew Ryan, as one might expect given that he's a parody of the equally-wordy Ayn Rand. They're intentionally meant to be provocative. Since you're hearing them over a radio or via audio tapes, you are free to do other things while they're going on, which helps make them palatable.
• Poor Medoute gets saddled with delivering a lot of these in Blaze Union, since as the Cool Big Sis of the team, the writers seem to have decided that she should always explain and summarize the Aesop of the day. This gets obnoxious after the route divide, where her heritage is dealt with using a nearly-identical speech every time.
• Parodied in episode 4 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. Marzipan convinces Strong Bad to let her have an eight-minute spiel on saving the rain forest in Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective, but Strong Bad fast-forwards through most of it.
• Anachronox: Grumpos has this as an ability called 'yammer'. He will just keep on talking and talking and talking until an NPC finally gives in. It's done as a minigame where you have to keep inflating one or the other of his lungs to let him keep going.
• Mass Effect 2: There's that one Krogan during Mordin's loyalty mission who decides it'd be a good idea to proclaim his own and his clan's superiority instead of killing Shepard on sight. This encounter might also "coincidentally" be that one time where Paragon players activated a Renegade action prompt. (Though it helps that not doing it provides no benefit to Paragon players whatsoever and just makes the player also fight the ranter in addition to his allies after he's done)
  Shepard: You talk too much.
• In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Heimskr, a fervent priest of Talos in Whiterun, will stand before the statue of his god outside Dragonsreach and Jorvaskrr and shout a constant, unending sermon extolling the virtues of Talos and maligning the Thalmor who tried to ban his worship. Since you're likely going to be constantly running back and forth between Dragonsreach, Jorvaskrr, and your house in the city, you'll be hearing him a lot. He's also not particularly important, so a lot of players just kill him.
• After freeing the Shinto gods in Shin Megami Tensei II, Amaterasu proceeds to go on a fairly lengthy rant about how the vain, grasping "Hebrew gods" (literally Hebrew gods, straight from the Japanese script, not an invention of Aeon Genesis) tricked some of the kami into locking others up and then turned on the conspiring kami themselves. To anyone outside of Japan, it comes across really uncomfortably.
• Anarky in Batman: Arkham Origins after being beaten goes on a rant for four minutes straight about why Gotham has become the way it is, why Batman is a part of the problem, how he can help Batman, and why he doesn't want to help Batman, contradicting his own opinions with each new topic. If only the gameplay allowed you to punch him...
• Whenever you die in Ultimate Custom Night, the character who did you in will say a quick sentence or two to mock you. When Mr. Hippo kills you, he starts rambling on and on for at least four minutes, apologizing for killing you, explaining his philosophy on The Problem with Fighting Death, and then segueing into a barely-related anecdote about his friendship with Orville the Elephant that often subtly pokes fun at fans who over-analyze the game's lore. He even says during one of these stories that nobody wants to listen to someone ramble on and on without ever getting to the point.
• Ulysses in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Lonesome Road cannot and will not shut the hell up when he addresses the Courier. Making it worse is that he's very clearly voicing Chris Avellone's viewpoints on the setting and most of his rants can't be skipped.
• Vernon Tripe from Psychonauts. He will literally talk about his dog forever if you let him. Even on his Character Blog, his "About Me" is the longest of them all and it's a rambling tangent about his storyteller ancestry.

Visual Novels

• It may be important exposition, but it's confusing and it never ever stops, so the rallying cry of many Fate/stay night players on the third day has become "SHUT UP, KOTOMINE."
  • This continues throughout the game as necessary. In particular, at the end, Kotomine talks about the nature of good and evil, but at that point the "Shut up, Kotomine" changes in nature a little.
  • It gets lampshaded in an early Tiger Dojo (one of the ones for making a Too Dumb to Live choice) where Ilya claims to have been using the ctrl key to fast-forward through all the exposition, and Taiga says that it may be boring, but you do need to listen to it, sadly.
  • Further lampshaded in Heaven's Feel, the route in which Kotomine has the most active presence. Both Rin and Shirou complain about his long-winded speeches at different parts of the story.
• Mercurius from Dies Irae really likes to run his mouth for long stretches of time. At one point he even lampshades it in a prose laden tirade that can basically be summarized as "I talk too much".

Webcomics

• In Jack, characters often go on multi-page rants, usually combining their own backstory with a rationale for their personal worldview and why they're about to do/already did something horrible to someone.
• Darths & Droids identifies this as the defining characteristic of the Big Bad.
• Used and parodied in this Sluggy Freelance strip.
• Gene Catlow uses this with distressing frequency, often doubling as an Info Dump.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Zippobic the Dragon finally calls Voluptua out for her tendency to do this here. He's a Beleaguered Bureaucrat who works for her, as well as a giant fire-breathing dragon, and he is dangerously sick of listening to her pontificate.
• Psycho Mantis' rants in The Last Days of FOXHOUND against the completely ridiculous ideas about Mendelian genetics that were used in the original Metal Gear Solid series that the comic is based on. Hilarious in Hindsight, since "Liquid had no idea what he was going on about" is the exact explanation Hideo Kojima later used to excuse the bad science.
• The Order of the Stick: This strip features a pair of these going head-to-head. Justified in that both speakers are trained lawyers, and lampshaded in standard OOTS fashion.
• About half of all Subnormality strips are this.
• Cerana Foral from A Complete Waste of Time is this, but with text instead of speech!
• Dae of Domain Tnemrot can do inner monologues and has a hatred for the rich after living a life of extreme poverty. It's only a matter of time.
• Parodied with Kankri Vantas from Homestuck, whose speeches (in one of the only instances in the comic) are generally unimportant to the plot, instead being long analyzations on social issues in Beforus troll society, which is actually quite nice compared to Alternia, making Kankri's concerns seem trivial. At one point, his text actually gets smaller and unreadable.
  • There is a thread on MSPA Forums applying quirks of one person to another person's speech. Naturally, someone wrote out John Galt's speech in Kankri's quirk.
• Lightbringer's archnemesis Darkbringer has a tendency to do this. In his first appearance he took up an entire page talking about his moral philosophy.
• In El Goonish Shive, Nanase and Susan sometimes launch into this.
• Sonichu has at least two points where Chris-Chan appears and takes up an entire page to rant about whatever issue is at hand. The fact that both of them consist of unending walls of poorly-formatted Comic Sans wrapped around a hilariously misproportioned Chris make them even harder to read.

Web Original

• Dropout's Brennan Lee Mulligan is a master of this, both utilising it to great effect as both a tabletop GM and a player on Dimension 20 to allow off-the-cuff characters to give impassioned speeches about almost any topic, and also invoked frequently by both Game Changer and Make Some Noise by their host Sam Reich, where prompts he gives for Brennan are often just an excuse to get him to immediately pull out one of the extended rants.
• While technically it's The Nostalgia Critic's job to rant about whatever annoys him, sometimes he'll go on long, vitriolic rants like on how awful it is when parents put pressure on their kids or how dreams don't always come true. As his childhood sucked hard, it's pretty clear that they've hit a nerve in him.
  • In one of Doug Walker's special videos, he is followed all around a convention by Kyle Hebert, who is constantly doing his Dragon Ball Z narration.
• Ryori Holloway in The Gungan Council. Some Jedi been bad? Here's this humongous monologue for ya...
• The Cry of Mann has Tank Mann and his tapes, which contain nothing but long, philosophical monologues about life, and each speech lasts a good, long while. He can't be interrupted, either, because the messages are pre-recorded.
• In Artificial Ace Attorney, a series of Ace Attorney trials written by AI Dungeon, Franziska von Karma sometimes goes off on minutes-long speeches. "The Historical Turnabout" is almost solely Franziska telling an entirely fictitious account of The American Civil War. Meanwhile, "As The World Turnabouts" has Franziska telling the story of how one Mrs. Fey murdered her daughter, married and divorced multiple times, then finally settled down with a woman who had the same name as one of Mrs. Fey's many aliases.

Western Animation

• The whole Animaniacs episode "Chairman of the Bored" is a perfect illustration of this trope, with the Warners having to put up with a dullard who keeps following them around in order to tell them a rambling anecdote.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Key To My Ed", Edd annoys Eddy with a rambling lecture worrying about whoever might have lost the key the Eds found.
  Edd: Maybe that's the kind of world you wish to live in, Eddy, where the unyielding and the indifferent supersede the benevolent. I say...
  Eddy: Shut up, Double-Dee!
• Foghorn Leghorn. All the time. On at least one occasion, he's forcibly delayed the Iris Out just to get the last word in.
• Brian from Family Guy (before he just full-on became the writers' mouthpiece).
  • Quagmire also had one of these in an episode regarding why he hates Brian.
• When SpongeBob SquarePants is made hall monitor, he gives an acceptance speech so long (he even quotes a long speech from another hall monitor) that class is over by the time he's finished.
  • Furthermore, he acknowledged that he overdid the speech again, implying this happened before, which was hinted by Ms. Puff's hesitance on giving it to him.
• The eponymous detective on Duckman was known to do this on occasion, the most memorable probably being his lengthy rant about the insanity of modern life in the episode "A Room with a Belleview".
• Pathological liar Staci from Total Drama Revenge of the Island will constantly talk about her ancestors and their supposed contributions to society
• The Boondocks has one delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., after he's revealed to have survived his assassination and was just in a coma the whole time. When he tries to give a speech later in the episode, he's horrified at his stereotypical black trailer trash/ghetto audience and how much of an embarrassment they're being, before launching into a long n-word-laden Take That! rant against them, eventually wandering off into other topics like BET and Soul Plane.
  • It probably doubles as an Author Filibuster as well, seeing as BET and Soul Plane are frequent targets on the show.
• In the South Park episode "Crippled Summer", we see Cartman using an intervention for Towelie to give an incredibly long hate speech about Jews. By the time he's finished, the papers he read the speech from are stacked to nearly his height.
• In the King of the Hill episode "Flush With Power", Hank filibusters a town council meeting by reading out all of Peggy's musings in order to convince them to rethink the new low-flow toilet mandate in Arlen. The council members change their decision after getting up to use the bathroom during the filibuster and seeing just how many flushes it takes to get their waste completely down the drain.

Real Life

• Dictators. Think Fidel Castro.
  • Extending on that - virtually any politician, really. Although Fiddy probably does hold a record or two, what with that notorious seven-hour speech.
  • Che Guevara's own account of meeting Fidel Castro for the first time involves Che's then-girlfriend asking him an off-the-cuff question and Fidel's answer taking four hours.
• Hugo Chavez was known for making seven hour speeches fairly often. Chavez not only had his own talk show, but he also randomly interrupted other radio programs to broadcast his views.
• There's also Muammar Gaddafi's speech at the United Nations. It went on for over 90 minutes and his translator collapsed from the strain of translating the ramblings.
• While he was running for Parliament, French-born English writer Hilaire Belloc was giving a speech, when a heckler called out, "Who won Waterloo?" Belloc, a military historian among other things, proceeded to give him a rundown of the precise role played by each of the commanders on the winning side. Fair to bet that particular heckler ended up wishing he hadn't opened his mouth.
• Politics:
  • Filibustering is a well known parliamentary method used as far back as Ancient Rome. In an attempt to delay the passing of a piece of legislature a representative gives a speech that goes on... and on... and on...
  • Sometimes they aren't even real speeches. Frequently they're nothing more than a senator reading every single entry of a phone book.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic in the United States at least. Rules are in place that with a sufficiently large minority, a party can just invoke the filibuster without ever having to actually stand up there and talk. Many people feel this completely defeats the point of the whole thing by writing a loophole into the rules to make it easier to simply obstruct passage or prevent any debate. Others believe it prevents a tyranny of the majority, preventing a small majority from enacting legislation nearly half the country (or their elected representatives at least) disagree with. Which side you're on often depends on whether your party is currently the majority or the minority.
  • A Character Filibuster can take place in the U.S. Senate, however, when the Senator currently speaking simply does not stop, and no rule can make them as long as they continue talking and remain standing, which is useful when those opposing a piece of legislation cannot muster the votes to force them to yield. Senator Strom Thurmond holds the record for the longest such continuous solo filibuster at 24 hours and 18 minutes. (Thurmond was filibustering against the Civil Rights Act of 1957; while southern leadership in the Senate had made an agreement not to filibuster in exchange for substantially weakening the bill's scope and power, Thurmond didn't want any of it passed, and while he may not have expected his filibuster to prevent the bill's passage, it certainly made clear his displeasure with his fellow southerners and his enmity toward Black voting rights.)
  • Kentucky Senator Rand Paul spoke on the Senate floor for just shy of 13 hours; he was asking for clarification on exactly how far the government's authority extends concerning use of drone attacks against American citizens.
  • When the senate in Texas tried to push through a bill to shut down abortion centres, Wendy Davis spoke for 13 hours. The rules of Texas are much more strict than those of the US Congress - she had to stay on topic, remain standing throughout - not even allowed to lean on anything - and was not permitted bathroom or meal breaks.
• A formation of enlisted men is a captive audience that some NCOs and officers just can't resist. There's probably also some "Let's see how long they can stand there" sadism behind it, but the content usually amounts to "See, I'm not such a bad guy!" or "I'm your worst hardass nightmare!"

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