Anvils You Needed To Be Dropped

After reading the Anvils That Needed to Be Dropped page on Sugar Wiki I got to thinking:

What anvils subtle or obvious do your works drop? Remember Anvils Are Not Bad in this thread.

I noticed the big one that stands out in Endless Conflict is that "The difference between friend and enemy may only be the banner one rallies behind". This is evident in the prose as I do not portray either the Preyarans or the races of the Starlight Alliance (though the perspective focus is mainly on the Terrans) in an inherently evil light. For example, sure the Preyarans love war and battle, but they express genuine concern for their people's safety and security indeed even their very needs. Neither side are all saints, neither side are all sinners.

This expands heavily in my plans for the second and third books.

An additional anvil can be found in the core philosophy that persistence and determination to work towards your goals are the greatest assets in your disposal. In the books this is exemplified by the main characters and even the Terrans as a whole that through sheer force of will they throw themselves headfirst into a conflict that turns nigh apocalyptic in scope yet they see it through til the end, the end goal being a galaxy free of the era of endless conflict.

Hell in my other work currently in pre-production Towards the Valley of Flowers, a similar anvil is the prime lesson. The lesson being that "There is always a reason to keep going."

So which anvils do your works drop that needed dropping?

edited 24th Nov '11 2:17:08 PM by MajorTom

Slavery is bad. Really bad. Other than that, I don't think many of my writings ever have a strong moral to teach. If people want a moral in a story, they'll find it themselves.

Never judge a book by its cover. Every significant character has hidden depths, and the apparent Big Bad and Big Good essentially...well, not quite swap places, but certainly shift in each other's direction on the sliding scale between angelic and demonic, as the redeeming features of the former and flaws of the latter become apparent. Granted, it's too early to say how heavy handed that comes across, but I really don't care if it does.

edited 24th Nov '11 2:45:24 PM by CaissasDeathAngel

The greater good and the wellbeing of individuals are not mutually exclusive.

Violence initiated requires violence to defend against. Not so much an explicit message, as the sort of basic underpinning and assumption of everything I ever write.

Popular ones:

Have the courage to stand for what's right, even if it's unpopular.

There is good in everyone.

Prejudice/slavery etc are bad.

Not so popular ones:

Self-control, and at times repression of emotions and desires, can be a good thing.

Faith and obedience are virtues, not flaws, even if they can be difficult.

Morality is objective, not subjective.

I don't think I've ever done a story about an anvil that absolutely needed to be dropped (and to be honest, most of the posts so far sound like unnecessary anvils as well), but I have done stories that dropped an anvil, for better or worse. In particular, almost everything I write has some underpinning of Dark Is Not Evil, meaning at minimum a dark Worthy Opponent, and at maximum a Character Filibuster on the subject.

I don't believe that Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped. Even someone as anti-didactic as myself believes there are messages that need to be delivered, and I have done so on occasion. But I don't think there is ever a need to be Anvilicious about it.

For instance, while I have made use of a War Is Hell theme (though not so much in the anti-war sense as in an observational one), I have never tried to beat the reader over the head with it nor can I think of any reason that I would ever need or want to do so.

edited 24th Nov '11 5:14:25 PM by nrjxll

Being Good Sucks. It requires sacrifices, self-control, and a lot of the times people will very vocally hate you for it. But if you don't step up to the plate and do the right thing, sometimes nobody else will.

Shit happens. The device you've been relying on to get you through your journey breaks down, your hometown gets razed to the ground, you develop feelings for one of your traveling companions halfway through the story. Trying to fight it will make things worse. Learning when to accept it and move on, and when you can actually do something about it is an integral part of growing up.

Don't be a pushover. If people see an opportunity to use you, they will take it.

I guess "being bitchy is bad". And anvils about the environment every now and then.

When I drop anvils, I prefer to do it on the subject of writing.

Jordan Eats Normally Now drops the anvil again and again that cosmic horror, insanity, and the nature of the eldritch are incomprehensible. They're supposed to be impossible to figure out for our minds. You can't just explain everything in a first-person cosmic horror story, at least not with only the narrative's context. It also drops the anvil that, for a realistic first-person blog-based narrative, it's gonna be vague and long. A realistic blog where things go horribly in the person's life would not consist of "Oh here's every single little detail that happened today, here's my replies to every single thing you're wondering, and here's what I plan on doing now" for every entry. Just two little things that have really irked me about the recent surge of blog-based narratives.

OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING drops a tiny little anvil again and again: The slender man in the original Something Awful thread was not named "the slender man;" that was just a description. So you can call him "the slender man" or "slendy," but "Slender Man" and "Slenderman" are just ridiculous. And he was said to have branches. >_> Furthermore, the original Wooden Girl was said to be a costume, not an actual marionette. And one more thing, related to the previous two: If you're gonna take liberties with a work, keep all the original details and add to them. Don't just change it, unless you're also going to say it's technically a different creature/work.

Dark Chao Adventures, during the seventh and now eighth seasons, dropped the anvil that sometimes, the villains are absolutely right. Sometimes the villains win. Sometimes they have to. This is more of a meta anvil, but then again, the series went ridiculously meta in the seventh season anyway.

My stuff is really more character study type things, they don't have a lot of anvils. Personally I find anvils to be, not inherently bad or anything, but extremely over-used. I don't need everything I read to have some kind of moral message, and yet every piece of fantasy or science fiction I read tries to shove something down my throat that was already shoved down my throat by the last one. I just want some freaking variety, is that too much to ask?

But anyway, anvils, um...

I think a rather subtle Anvil that you can get from all of my stories is that you are a better person than you think you are. You have that goodness and greatness inside you, you just have to exercise it, to believe in your personal capacity, and you can grow into that person you want to be, there's nothing stopping you but an imaginary perception that nothing can change and you are messed up. No one is as strapped down as they think by what they perceive as their inherent personality or identity.

A lot of my protagonists, actually pretty much all of them now that I think of it, have certain character flaws that alienate them from other people, like a temper, immaturity, selfishness, bossiness or excessive pride. Seriously detrimental things that make people dislike them and make them feel terrible, because they are constantly making their lives difficult and lonely through their own actions. But through an understanding of that flaw, the immature person finds they do have a capacity to act maturely, the selfish person can be selfless, the prideful person can become humble. It's about them recognizing that it's this flaw that is making them unhappy, and making people dislike them, and them choosing to exercise their own will power and decide not to be that person, instead of just saying nothing can be done because it's just the way I am. And in the end, they realize they had everything within them to be that person they wanted to be all along.

I'd like to again raise my point from earlier - "message" does not equal "anvil". There are reasons to put messages in your works, but there is no reason why they ever need to be anvilicious.

^ Not all anvils need be Anvilicious. The anvils in this thread being the messages themselves not just us writers being Anvilicious.

edited 25th Nov '11 6:27:32 AM by MajorTom

No, Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped is specifically about anvilicious messages. Thence the "anvil" in the title.

For all of my work (even my Literotica stuff and my brand-new idea I'm still hashing out in my head for a children's book): Violence Really Is the Answer. Sometimes, a problem has to be solved permanently. Sometimes, a Jerkass can't be talked down, they have to be beaten down. Never turn your back on an opponent who is still alive. You get the idea.

(The children's book in question is about cats. It's stated, but not shown in any detail, that they eat their opponents after defeating them. Cats are predators in Real Life, and it's an educational piece about cats as well as a fictional tale of a cat training to be a ninja.)

As for my other anvils:

The Mythology 101 Cycle states several times that monogamy is the moral equivalent of slavery, even going so far as to have one character tell his romantic interest, "Do as you wish. You are not my property." It's also stated that the Elves, who were the first race to reject monogamy, did so for another reason as well: They don't experience jealousy like humans, but they do feel other emotions much more deeply. This meant that almost every time an Elf heard the word "no", they would commit suicide or something else equally undesirable. So in order to allow people to say "yes" more often, monogamy was abolished. Basically, I'm saying that monogamy is an inherently evil system because it fosters heartbreak. Some of my other works promote free love too, but not to the same extent.

There are also numerous Green Aesops scattered throughout my work.

Music City covers Dark Is Not Evil with Wang Chung's "Use evil to fight evil" mantra.

In my current work, "Too much suspicion and too little suspicion are just as bad as each other."

I find that this is a good message to remind yourself of. It can easily stop you from becoming gullible or untrustworthy of others.

edited 25th Nov '11 10:39:18 AM by Collen

"He Who Fights Monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." Indeed, my story's Bigger Bad, underneath a Lovecraftian mask, is really the Anthropomorphic Personification of the cycle of bloody revolution, thoughtless vengeance, and unchanging oppression, playing both sides against each other to ensure a continuing flow of souls and suffering to feed upon.

I don't about dropping an anvil but if I had one it would be, "do everything in moderation, you can have too much of a good thing." Maybe this is an anvil, "There are limits to what can do, you must work within those limits to get what you desire and you need to know what you can or cannot do."

Must be legal adult or older in order to believably save the world.

I guess my stuff doesn't really count as an anvil. I tend to dislike anvils as a rule. Mostly because it's trying to teach me stuff I already know or agree with.

Definitely a message I can get behind... but how exactly would you go about making it in a work of fiction?

edited 25th Nov '11 9:32:43 PM by nrjxll

Making what in a work of fiction?

Oops, I didn't even notice I was ninja'd - that was meant for Leradny. Clarifying it now.

edited 25th Nov '11 9:32:54 PM by nrjxll

Pretty easy. I set all of my character's ages above 21. And the only character below that age, at 16, is clearly out of his depth.