Basic Trope: A creator's body of work starts out fairly neutral, but then it turns into a long Author Filibuster about some real-life topic.
- Straight: Midway through Chronicle Quest Genesis, the heroes are suddenly prevented from continuing their mission by the Corrupt Church of Crystal Dragon Jesus. The story shifts focus to the main characters disproving religion and having the church shut down, with the original ending being more of an afterthought.
- Exaggerated: Soon after the church intervenes, every character is retooled as either a Straw Character or "one of the correct ones".
- Downplayed: The church's interference is a minor subplot that only occurs late into the book.
- Justified: One of the heroes is a Single-Issue Wonk on the topic of religion and refuses to let the plot carry on until everything is sorted out.
- Inverted:
- As the book goes on, it gets Denser and Wackier and drops any serious symbolism it may have had.
- The book starts out as a political diatribe, but the Church eventually picks up enough unique, non-allegorical characteristics to feel like a neutral fictional invention.
- Subverted: The church turns out to not be so bad after all, removing the political subtext.
- Double Subverted: And then the story turns into an aggressively pro-Christian story.
- Parodied: The author ends the story in the middle of a sentence with the intent of devoting the next 500 pages to explaining why Religion Is Wrong and detailing the various ways in which he'd like to decapitate religious leaders. However, he instead writes one paragraph before he gets bored and decides to "go yell at some of them carolers."
- Zig Zagged: The author had no political intent and just thought the church would make a cool villain. The logical step to tear a villainous church down would be to make its followers question their devotion, which incidentally gives the story an anti-religious tone. The author begins to realize this and, wanting to avoid
Unfortunate Implications, later introduces a splinter sect who comes across as much more reasonable and wants to help the protagonists. Except it later turns out the splinter sect is also corrupt and only wants to help so they can take over the main branch, which turns the religion-critical tone of the story more ruthless than ever, until towards the end of the story the heroes begin to think that there might actually be something to their teachings, it's just that neither the main branch nor the splinter sect has been actually following them. - Averted: Denouncement of religion is the underlying theme throughout most of the book, the church showing up only makes the message more clear.
- Enforced:
- The producers demand the writer include more political messages in his work.
- The author's issues with the church began developing while he was writing the work, making it a semi-reliable indicator for how it progressed.
- Lampshaded: "Why do we care about this church all of a sudden?" "I dunno."
- Invoked: A Meta Guy decides that the story needs to have a "message" and deliberately steers the protagonist into conflict with the church.
- Exploited:
- In-universe, the church officials see that the heroes are utterly obsessed with going to extreme lengths to tear down anything to do with them, and realize they can use that to make them Blinded by Rage and, thus, vulnerable.
- Out-of-universe, another creator uses the Author Tract qualities of Chronicle Quest Genesis to Demonize it and promote their competing book as The Moral Substitute.
- Defied: One of the characters manages to calmly convince the church officials that what they're doing is right.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
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