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So the world must listen to me
Filibuster vigilantly
My name is Blue Canary
One note, spelled L-I-T-E
My story's infinite,
Like the Longines Symphonette
It doesn't rest They Might Be Giants, "Birdhouse in your Soul"
Eventually, the question you ask stops being "Who is John Galt?" and becomes "When will John Galt shut up?"
The extreme Anvilicious case of Writer On Board, where the plot stops dead in its tracks to give the author an opportunity to preach their message to the readers or audience.
If this is the climax of the book, it's often a case of Talking The Monster To Death.
Character Filibuster can be a by-product.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- When Brookside was cancelled, the show's creator Phil Redmond had his final say in a rebellious scripted rant about how ‘TV and society's not like it was’ voiced by its longest-running character.
Anime
- The infamous final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are essentially an Author Filibuster on the human condition and the nature of loneliness.
- In an early chapter of the Excel Saga manga, Ilpalazzo takes a few pages to rant about how he feels Christianity has had a negative influence on the world. The anime parodies this by Excel suggesting they skip that scene to avoid controversy.
- The original Ghost In The Shell manga's entire ending issue consists of little more than the author's existential philosophy thinly packaged in abstract screen toned "art."
Comics
- In a 1945 Little Orphan Annie strip, Annie soliloquizes about the dreadful foster home she's been placed in. She sleeps in the attic, dresses in a cut-down maid's uniform, is allowed no friends or recreation, and has to take every irksome task from serving dinner to shoveling coal — basically she is treated as an unpaid servant — but as she observes, it could be much much worse, because at least she's not in an orphanage sponging off the taxpayers.
- As part of the legendary Creator Breakdown during the run of Cerebus, Dave Sim replaced parts of his comic with fine-print screeds detailing his legendary misogyny
 , which even diehard fans who continued to read the comic do their very best to ignore.
- About seventy-five percent of all Doonesbury strips engage in this, though it generally sets up the punchline.
- The Boondocks comic occasionally falls into this (witness the series of strips, after the 2004 presidental election, where Huey calls out and insults every state where Bush won), but it's largely an Author Tract to begin with. The animated version can't really do this do due to Animation Lead Time, and the fact that animation is really expensive.
- Pastel Defender Heliotrope used its first update after the results of the 2004 presidential elections to berate the readers for the re-election of George W. Bush.
- Similarly, Sinfest typically shows Tatsuya Ishida's liberal leanings both in the comics themselves and the rants.
- Steve Ditko may be a master comic book storyteller, but when he does not have a collaborator like Stan Lee to restrain him, his stories are notorious for the philosophical lectures that dominate his more personal stories. The "Mr. A" stories are by far the worst.
- And, appropriately enough, he's an objectivist — the same philosophy that the first person on this list founded, and to which Terry Goodkind (also above) ascribes.
- Webcomic example: R.H. Junior, the man behind Tales Of The Questor, apparently thought that the subtle right-wing Christian elements of his comics and his very political journal weren't enough, and decided to interrupt his cutesy Narnia-like allegory about an adventuring raccoon kit with a completely out-of-the-blue ramble. He quickly stopped doing this, though, and relegated it to a separate section.
- The comic book limited series Warrior, a licensed comic about every Professional Wrestling fan's favorite crackpot, The Ultimate Warrior, is one great big Wall Of Text after another meant to elucidate the reader on Warrior's bizarre mystical-reactionary philosophy, and paint Warrior as Jesus. Between the sheer density of the text and the preponderance of made up words (just what in the blue hell is "foke", anyway?), it confused its few readers so badly that the third issue had to open with an explanation of the previous two issues. The one issue this doesn't apply to? The Christmas special, a completely dialog-less issue in which Warrior goes to the North Pole, puts Santa in bondage, and steals his clothes. There's a reason that every wrestling fan on the planet has agreed that the guy is nucking futs.
- In the final years of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, the stories were notorious for the main character yammering about due process restrictions on the police to the point where the villains dropped dead just from this.
- Matt Fraction's first issue of the Invincible Iron Man comic has young villain supergenius Ezekiel Stane, fresh from his latest round of building and selling WMDs to genocidal terrorists, stop to spend four pages testing out his latest weaponry on the board of directors of a tobacco company, while delivering a rant on a) the evils of smoking and b) why, despite Ezekiel's long list of crimes against humanity, he is still infinitely morally superior to people who grow and sell tobacco.
- And to make it even worse, he did so after accepting a contract from them to genetically engineer a new species of tobacco that had a measurable health benefit for the smoker — it let them safely lose weight. Despite this, the idea of going on to apply his genetic engineering talents further and attempt to remove at least some of the harmful side effects of smoking tobacco apparently never crossed Ezekiel Stane's mind. Self-righteous killing sprees because "tobacco is bad", on the other hand, were entirely all right.
- Rare to see this in a non-political comic strip, but Jef Mallet's Frazz once took a strip to have the characters exchange pithy conclusions on why gift cards are a sucky gift idea that nobody likes getting.
- Oddly enough, the Doom comic did this too, interrupting the plotless violence with a rant about how radioactive waste is killing the environment.
- This may well be a parody of the tradition, assuming that the comic is a parody to begin with.
- This editor became disillusioned with Alan Moore after reading Promethea, because all the characters seemed to do after the first volume was expain the mysterious Kabbalistic/tantric/etc. events to the reader AT ALL TIMES, so they could be getting sucked under by a magical undertow and saying something like "The emotions—they're sucking me in!". I'm sure it was all very symbolic, but did it have to be so symbolic as to cut out character development?
- Alan Moore responded to complaints such as these by saying something along the lines of, "There are hundreds of comics out there that aren't a didactic on magic, isn't there room for just one that is?" So, I guess, it did have to cut out character development, if he was going to fit all that Tarot magic stuff in.
- I think the correct answer to Moore's question is, "No. No, there isn't."
Film
- Deliberately done in Fight Club. During one of Tyler Durden's nihilistic monologues, he turns to the camera, apparently talking straight at us. There are then some fake flaws in the film where it seems to slip to the side and buckle slightly. This is to make it as clear as possible that these lines were written to be heard by us, and that we're here to listen.
- Also, there are usually one frame insets of porn in those scenes (hence the shaky video). Go on, turn on the frame by frame, I'll wait.
- Overlapping with And Knowing Is Half The Battle, Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, like several other films of the era, ends with a call to Americans to enter World War II.
- Steven Seagal finished off his movie On Deadly Ground by delivering an author filibuster.
- How could we possibly forget Charlie — sorry, Charles — Chaplin's movie The Great Dictator, in which the entire closing monologue is a statement of Chaplin's anti-war beliefs? Of course, Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.
- And despite this, he was still reviled by many in the US, who thought it was a pro-Hitler pro-Nazi movie even with Charlie spelling it out for them. Some people are just immune to having an anvil dropped on them, apparently...
- This troper heard the version that it was some German-Americans, Italo-Americans and fans of Adolf Hitler who thought the movie vilified Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
- Agent Smith's "Humans aren't mammals" monologue in The Matrix. While it could come off as a kind of Hannibal Lecture, considering that Humans Are Bastards seems to constantly lurk in the background of the series (the history of the Human/Machine conflict in The Animatrix basically says the humans are fully to blame), this may be the Wachowskis chastising humanity.
- But wait, aren't the Wachowskis humans themselves?
Literature
- Atlas Shrugged has the definitive Author Filibuster in "This Is John Galt Speaking," where Ayn Rand gives her Marty Stu an opportunity to lecture the reader for sixty pages on end; the Strawman Political villains are made to sit through it for three hours of plot time. There are several shorter examples in the same book, such as the sermon explaining that "money is the root of all good."
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy parodies this with "Telemachus Sneezed", where the last hundred and three pages are a soliloquy on the importance of guilt.
- Howard Roark of The Fountainhead also gets a such an opportunity in his courtroom scene, and the last chapter of Anthem is essentially devoted to this purpose. (Ayn Rand seems to do this a lot). These examples aren't quite as extreme as Atlas Shrugged — in book form. In the movie adaptation of The Fountainhead, Rand demanded that Roark's courtroom speech be performed exactly as she had written it, resulting in a nearly six-minute long speech, one of the longest in film.
- The script for Arthur Miller's The Crucible contains an eight-page treatise on the Red Scare, sandwiched within the stage directions.
- Michael Crichton's State Of Fear left approximately half the key plot points unresolved in favor of the heroes making every rant possible on the subject of global warming.
- Crichton loves his filibusters. In Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm spends better than half of his scenes in the book making pages-long speeches about the evils of modern science, despite the fact that he is supposedly dying at the time. There is occasionally a Hand Wave, like when Malcolm is cranked out of his mind on morphine, and is just babbling whatever thoughts come into his head. These were thankfully cut down in the The Movie.
- Believe it or not, Lost World is even worse.
- Nevermind the fact that he himself is a scientist involved with one of the more advanced and complex aspects of modern mathematics.
- A non-political example would be how in The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas opens the section with Franz and Albert in Italy with a long description of Italian culture.
- Similarly, Victor Hugo was prone to stopping the plot of his novels to discourse on various topics. If you need information on the battle of Waterloo or the virtues of composting toilets, you'll have far better luck with Les Miserables than the people who were actually reading for the plot.
- This troper read the unabridged book, and told people "I'm reading Les Miserables! It's 1100 pages long! there's a whole chapter about feces!"
- Bill O'Reilly's fiction book, from before he was really famous, Those Who Trespass, is basically one after the other, from two characters that essentially play two sides of his personality, one of which is a cold blooded killer who takes revenge on those who fired him from television, while the other is an Irish cop who blabs on about the errors he predicts in the OJ Simpson trial, which was a few months away in the book's time.
- He should drop the latter side and stick with the former. I mean come on, who doesn't wish there were less TV executives in the world?
- Emmanuel Goldstein's book in Nineteen Eighty Four, plus a drunken proletarian's rant against the metric system. The story of the novel is just largely a Framing Device for Orwell's vision of the Dystopia.
- The plot of Moby-Dick is, basically, an excuse for myriad Author Filibusters about whaling, whaling culture, the anatomy of whales, and, of course, lots of sperm. Not to mention all the classical references.
- You forgot the color white. One whole chapter devoted to nothing but describing the implications and aspects of the color white. Coincidentally, that's when this troper gave up.
- Then you shouldn't, because the color white is mentioned just once. Had you kept on, and you'd see the two chapters dedicated to the analysis of the heads of two different whales. An entire chapter for each.
- Then there are those that interpret the whole book as an Author Tract about religion, where Ahab was trying to kill God by using Moby Dick as an expy.
- Parodied in the original novel of The Princess Bride, when author William Goldman (in his guise as the alleged "editor") discusses how he cut out scores of pages of (in his opinion) boring political lectures and discussions from the "original book".
- One constantly repeated theme of the novel is Goldman apologizing for his little "digressions" and personal anecdotes that he inserts into the story of the novel whenever he "butts in" to chop out some unnecessary part of the narrative. These digressions are, indeed, incredibly long and rambly, and would never have survived the editing process if Goldman really was just leaving editor's notes in an abridged novel — indeed, the book ends with what seems to be a twenty-page-long Author Filibuster ranting about Goldman's own failed life and how it totally sucks compared with the book he's editing for us right now. (If you, the reader, actually skip over these author rants because you consider them extraneous to the novel's plot, you've completely missed the point of the book.)
- Whereas this troper clings desperately to the hope that she wasn't the only one who kind of wanted the (imaginary) "unnecessary details" to have been left in — come on, I would totally read six pages about Florin court etiquette or the Princess Norina's hats.
- Not to mention that one of the "cut" scenes is described as actually being extremely interesting and adventuresome, but that Goldman was forced to cut it because it was too "Oz-like". While no doubt this was an Author Filibuster about editors who Did Not Do The Research or who Just Didn't Care assuming Viewers Are Morons and doing Executive Meddling, it actually winds up coming off as a huge cop-out of just saying "Oh, there's some action here, but it's too much work to actually write it."
- Louisa May Alcott admits in Little Women that she was guilty of this at one point. Her Author Avatar Jo's literary exploits include, in a backlash against Executive Meddling insisting that True Art Is Angsty, writing a book that failed because "it might more accurately have been called an essay or a sermon, so intensely moral was it".
- The final third of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a rambling treatise on the virtues of socialism. Most readers only noticed his nauseating descriptions of contemporary meat-packing practices. As Sinclair himself noted, he'd aimed for the country's heart, but hit its stomach.
- Notably, those half-a-dozen pages of descriptions of contemporary meat-packing practices led to the creation of the US Food & Drug Administration.
- Terry Goodkind's main characters in his Sword Of Truth series frequently stop to give ranty, self-important speeches espousing a fantasy version of his Objectivist philosophy. The fact that he doesn't consider himself a fantasy writer adds a lot of weight to this one — even if the Aesops are invariably broken into little teeny pieces or completely demented to begin with.
- A mild but still somewhat jarring example: At one point in Sailor Nothing, Shin bursts into a long rant about DVD regional lockout and copy protection. This has nothing to do with the plot whatsoever.
- This troper thought the rant seemed entirely in character, though.
- The structure of The Brothers Karamazov is composed mostly of monologues and dialogues, and several of the monologues throughout the book could be seen as the author punching you in the face with theology, or free will, or whatever topic he happens to be writing reams about at the time. That it all ends up playing a part in the novel's climax is only a minor consolation.
- Robert A Heinlein was fond of these. In Starship Troopers his characters deliver several lengthy monologues on subjects like the death penalty (good), conscription (bad), corporal punishment (good) and disarmament (bad), while in Farnhams Freehold he has characters offer similar diatribes on topics including cannibalism (good) and African colonialism in the post-WWIII remains of the USA (good). In fact, one could make the blanket generalization that this is Heinlein's Signature Style.
- In For Us, The Living, the entirety of the plot is a single lengthy aside sandwiched between the monologues on the death penalty (bad), corporal punishment (bad), and economics (complicated, but if you just do...) Note that For Us was his first book, and his tendency towards this lessened afterwards — at least until he gained Protection From Editors.
- The Cat Who Walks Through Walls contains yet another example, wherein the two main characters stop what they're doing to discuss the virtues of libertarianism and how wrong-headed the alternatives are.
- This troper would be hard-pressed to think of a Heinlein book where this doesn't happen at least once (and I've read 'em all). "Prof" in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Oscar at the beginning and end of Glory Road; Lorenzo Smythe in Double Star; "Doc" in Red Planet; and on and on.
- Stranger in a Strange Land has diatribes from Jubal about the evils of organized religion. It's not really clear whether or not Heinlein was truly advocating the type of government he depicts in Starship Troopers (this troper doubts it), but Jubal really does seem to be a mouthpiece for the author.
- The Da Vinci Code's characters deliver lengthy summaries of various fantastical pseudohistories of Christianity, e.g. Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
- Neal Stephenson is fond of holding forth at length on a number of topics that are tenuously connected to the novel they are in (at best). For example, the multi-page rumination on the proper technique for eating Captain Crunch in Cryptonomicon. The majority of people who enjoy his books don't seem to mind, and indeed some rather enjoy the semi-random asides.
- It's questionable whether Stephenson's little rants count as Author Filibusters. They're almost never preachy, and many are even rather ambiguous: readers still can't make up their minds over whether Snow Crash supports or condemns capitalism. Some of them (e. g. "The Correct Way To Eat Captain Crunch") may even be subtle parodies of the trope.
- Almost any time the plot looks like it might be going somewhere interesting in Joanna Russ's The Female Man, the current plot thread is completely derailed by pages and chapter-long feminist rants. The abandoned plot threads are then promptly forgotten about when the actual characters are revisited.
- War And Peace has one of two epilogues of the novel devoted to espousing Leo Tolstoy's view of history. If you have read the entire book beforehand, there's no real need to read that particular epilogue. It's only for people who don't like reading through voluminous Doorstoppers to get to the point.
- The fourth Maximum Ride novel by James Patterson. While, in the first three books, the main characters were always on the move and in danger, fighting for their lives against evil scientists, and keeping a low profile, in this one Max and the flock are brought to Antarctica to combat global warming of all things. The global warming commentary is there but not overwhelming until the last few pages of the book (before the epilogue) which has Max making a speech to the US Congress concerning global warming and even referencing the current big thing about compact fluorescent light bulbs (that if every house replaced one normal bulb with one of these, it would be "like taking a million cars off the road"). The speech also contains a lot of America-bashing (pig-headed, short-sighted, arrogant, etc). To finish it up, the very last page has 5 facts/tips about "Saving the world. Wings not required" which is more global warming / recycling commentary (and is signed "—Max").
- The only thing that may top this is book five, which many (justifiably) horrified fans have quoted official descriptions of. In a few words, the plot is that, apparently,pollution is killing fish and sinking boats near Hawaii... and Max and her buddies have to save the ocean from humanity. The title? Water Wings. I Am Not Making This Up.
- For a Fan Fic example, check this out. A full (though small) chapter of a Self Insert Fic devoted to giving the protagonist a chance to muse in-character on how he's not a Mary Sue, and explain to the readers why, coming this close to breaking the Fourth Wall. After this, the character never seems to consider the possibility/likelihood/fact of his fictionality again. (Note that he has mysterious powers, has pretty consistently been the one to keep his cool and think up a solution to whatever the current crisis is, and is engaged to Nabiki by this point.)
- Even the best authors can fall to this; the middle of Hamlet is interrupted by a discussion between Hamlet and the Players that serves no dramatic purpose but to give Hamlet a chance to rant about spoiled child actors and how they're ruining the art and the business of theater today (that is, in 1601).
- Lady Chatterley's Lover has several rants on how industrial growth is killing nature and humanity.
- Book Three of Native Son, particularly toward the end, and at its absolute worst during each of the two speeches during Bigger's trial, especially by Bigger's attorney; each of these speeches went on for over 20 pages of the book.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire contain's a lot of Gibbon's anti-religious sentiments. (He blamed Christianity on its fall.)
- The Whateley Universe has a lot of fans who want to construct (or deconstruct) the physics of the Whateley world. This has led to a lot of Fan Wank about how Warper powers work, or how magic works, or things like what 'cold iron; means and how it affect mages. One author stopped "Boston Brawl 2" in the middle of a massive heroes vs. villains super-battle to explain how the size-changing 'giant' superpower worked in the Whateley world, just to deal with this issue. The same fans complained about the jarring nature of the inserted material.
- The entire second act ("Dan Juan in Hell") of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman is nothing but this. Many drama companies simply omit that act when performing the play. Which probably would have annoyed Shaw no end; I mean, the guy didn't like My Fair Lady, for cryin' out loud.
- Greg Keyes' Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series is somewhat like a shorter Song of Ice and Fire: a long, involved fantasy epic with multiple viewpoint characters tending towards the Realism side of the Sliding Scale Between Idealism And Realism. However, Keyes often interrupts the flow of the stories to have the priest Stephen Darige talk about linguistics and the languages of the series' world. These are both relevant to the plot (Stephen figures out a lot of clues by translating names and words from one ancient language to another) and this troper actually rather likes how Keyes does it, but it's still a strange thing to focus on.
- John Ringo's Ghost takes time from saving the world from terrorists to deliver treatises on bondage, how President Bush is the best leader ever, and justify rape. A solid Wall Banger.
- More that it justifies the desire to rape, Word Of God is that its more to establish the character as very much the anti-hero than anything else. He also never intended to actually publish it.
- In God's Debris, the Avatar and the delivery man have a conversation that takes up the entire text and then some. Even ignoring the topics glossed over in the narrative ("We talked about this, and that, and that other thing..." etc) it's safe to say they discuss pretty much everything.
- John C. Wright's Golden Age 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.
- From beginning to end, Adiamante, by L.E. Modesitt Jr, is nothing but an Author Filibuster. Bonus points for the only "villainous" character to hint that she might become anything but a Strawman Political breaking down into tears because the protagonist's civilization is so perfect.
Western Animation
- Family Guy has done a lot of this in its post-revival episodes to express Seth Mac Farlane's generally left-wing views, usually without any self-parody. There is one example of a parodical usage in the episode "Boys Do Cry", however. The message itself is completely sincere, but the way it's delivered is comedically heavy-handed, infused with Reality Subtext:
"Like, for instance, if you're watching a TV show and you decide to take your values from that... you're an idiot. Maybe you should take responsibility for what values your kids are getting. Maybe you shouldn't be letting your kids watch certain shows in the first place if you have such a big problem with them, instead of blaming the shows themselves. [long pause] Yeah."
- Zero Punctuation reviews often hit this level of preaching, at least, to some. Five minute long motormouth rants on whatever gaming-related subject of the week has offended him, or on his caricature of Americans, or..
Video Games
- This happens a lot in the Metal Gear Solid series. As a sly apology, more often than not it's the villains blathering on, and the protagonist greets their speeches with irreverence, frustration or bewilderment as appropriate. Not to mention that you get to beat the crap out of them once the cutscene's over.
- That said, in the final cutscene of each game, there's a character that pretty much totally breaks character to be Hideo Kojima for a while. In the first game it's Naomi Hunter, in the second it's Snake, and in the third it's EVA (sort of, she doesn't nearly break the fourth wall). And you never get the chance to beat any of them up, because it's the final cutscene.
- Though this troper has never played four, he has read enough spoilers to guess the Kojima-expy is Big Boss, who also doesn't break the fourth wall. (Supposedly though he has had at least one other cameo as "Voice of God" in the game.)
- As a side-note, Nastasha Romanenko would like you to know that nukes are bad.
- Subverted in Resident Evil 4. Antagonist Ramon Salazar starts what appears to be a long speech about the nature of terrorism, but before he can finish his second sentence, Leon shuts him up by nailing his hand to a wall with a well-thrown knife.
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