Author Filibuster

This is a comic about fighting the legions of hell in space, by the way.

"Eventually, the question you ask stops being 'Who is John Galt?' and becomes 'When will John Galt shut up?'"

— Unknown origin, regarding Atlas Shrugged (referring to Galt's 56-page long speech explaining the novel's theme and Ayn Rand's Objectivism)

An Author Filibuster is the unwholesome offspring of Writer on Board and Info Dump, where the plot stops dead in its tracks to give the author an opportunity to preach their message to the readers or audience, often very political or ethical in nature.

This can annoy the readers, especially if:

• The in-universe situation is a bad parallel to whatever real-world situation the author is trying to discuss
• The characters have better things to do than to make a long-winded speech (particularly if they're in the middle of some emergency), and
• The reader disagrees with the content of the filibuster.

If the author's opinion is the purpose of the work, it's an Author Tract. When delivering filibusters gradually overtakes the plot, it's Issue Drift for a single work or Filibuster Freefall when it happens to most, if not all, of their creations. If this is the climax of the book, it's often a case of Talking the Monster to Death. If a character is delivering the rant, it's also a Character Filibuster. A main cause of Don't Shoot the Message.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • The infamous final two episodes are essentially an Author Filibuster on the human condition and the nature of loneliness.
  • The Movie End of Evangelion was the same, just not taking place on a "big blue ball", and was even more confusing.
• In an early chapter of the Excel♡Saga manga, Il Palazzo 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. A lampshade is hung by Excel in the manga: "I think we may have just offended a large portion of the world's population..."
• The original Ghost in the Shell manga had an ending consisting of little more than the author's existential musings thinly packaged in abstract screen toned "art". However, this philosophical payload was cleverly hidden inside an espionage series, and anyone who didn't see where it was going after Kusanagi beheld the falling feather have only themselves to blame.
• This is a common feature in all of Shirow Masamune's manga. He is famous for including extensive commentaries at the end of volumes, the 30-page commentary in Ghost in the Shell being the most famous example. He will also often break the fourth wall by adding his own personal comments in the margins, ranging from the technical aspects of gadgets included in the story to subjects like the nature of human souls and the organization of Japan's military. These commentaries will often only have a loose connection to what actually goes on in the story. Ghost in the Shell II is probably the best example, as ~1/4th of all pages have some sort of commentary in the margins.
• A chapter of Hajime no Ippo includes a several-page-long speech about how great the environment is, how everybody should do their part to protect it, and how pollution and industrial emissions are evil. It is then shortly followed by the introduction of a new character whose entire goal is to spread this exact message to the world.
• The manga Gimmick! has a rather glaring example of this, after a flashback where Kohei takes a job to do special effects for a video game commercial, which turns out to be a government conspiracy that takes the commercial and re-edits it into a post-9/11 pro-war viral video. After the revelation that one of Kohei's friends from Hollywood joins the Iraq War because of it and gets killed, Kohei launches into a "Don't be fooled by images" rant about how Hollywood (and American media in general) is always sneaking subliminal messages into movies and commercials and such, saying how filmmakers just want to make movies, but executives keep interfering to cram their evil propaganda into every crack and crevice.
• Hidekaz Himaruya tries to avoid this in his work. Although the closest he gets to this trope can be found in an Hetalia: Axis Powers arc which bemoans Japan losing elements of his traditional culture, which is more in context of the changes brought about by Westernization rather than Nostalgia Filter.
• Green vs. Red has Lupin... Lupins chasing The Ice Cube, which turns out to be a source of nuclear power, and the creators use it to condemn the proliferation of nuclear weapons. All this seems out of place in a Lupin film until one remembers that Hayao Miyazaki has a similar anti-war, anti-nuclear stance.
• A significant portion of a late Fire Force chapter is dedicated to battling what the mangaka perceives to be the Slut-Shaming of Reluctant Fanservice Girl and Base-Breaking Character Tamaki, framed as a debate between a young boy who is an obvious author mouthpiece and his Moral Guardian mother. To remove any doubt that this trope is in play, the boy literally calls his mother a nameless character who only exists for exposition, which causes her to disappear.

Comic Books

• Hellblazer:
  • The series has always been quintessentially British, and as such is usually penned by authors from the isles. Starting with writer Jamie Delano and including Garth Ennis and Mike Carey, all the authors the series has had usually ended up using the series as a vehicle to criticize and point out the worst aspects of British politics, economics, and popular culture. Many storylines cover Margaret Thatcher's economic policies and her handling of The Falklands War, for example, and the general woes of British society are firmly analyzed and represented as equal or worse than any supernatural threat the protagonist himself faces.
  • The series also had a running theme of questioning authority, probably best exemplified by Constantine's infuriated monologue at the end of the "Dangerous Habits" arc.
• As Johnny the Homicidal Maniac goes on, more and more text begins appearing that deals with the main character's philosophical doubts, to the point that the panels usually carry more text than drawings.
• As part of the legendary Creator Breakdown during the run of Cerebus the Aardvark, 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.
• Steve Ditko may have been a master comic book storyteller, but when he did not have a collaborator like Stan Lee to restrain him, his comics became notorious for the Objectivist philosophical lectures that dominated his more personal stories. The Mr. A stories are by far the worst, though The Question can be just as bad at times.
• The five-issue-long 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 "Destrucity", anyway?),^note The comic actually does provide a definition for the word, but somehow it causes the word to make even less sense than before. it confused its few readers so badly that both the third and the fourth issues had to open with an explanation of the previous issues with the recap on the fourth issue being a footnote and unreadable due to being black text on black paper. The one issue this doesn't apply to is the Christmas special, a completely dialogue-less issue in which Warrior goes to the North Pole, puts Santa Claus in bondage, steals his clothes, and possibly rapes him. There's a reason that every wrestling fan on the planet has agreed that the guy is nucking futs. It's bad enough to mess with the space-time continuum!
• Matt Fraction's first issue of Invincible Iron Man 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.
• Oddly enough, the Doom comic (here) did this, interrupting the plotless violence with a rant about how radioactive waste is killing the environment. Played for Laughs. Probably.
• Transmetropolitan: Spider Jerusalem's inflammatory news articles, while only sometimes political and definitely in character (insofar as Spider is an homage to Hunter S. Thompson), are too long and detailed to not also be Warren Ellis' viewpoint.
• Alan Moore responded to complaints about Promethea 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?"
• In Universal War One #5 and #6, various characters expose the author's political view on "American capitalism".
• Garth Ennis can get into this. While it works in the context of the stories — Preacher having the protagonists discuss how any God who made the world must be evil, The Punisher MAX having characters talk about the horrors of war, and The Boys featuring long-winded Take That! dialogue towards DC and Marvel Comics-style superheroes — there are also random, out of nowhere ones. In Preacher, Cassidy raves at Jesse about his distaste for the word 'insecure'. The Boys also has a scene where Butcher claims that every straight man is homophobic and anyone pretending otherwise is just lying.
• Rick Remender had Havok give a very controversial speech in Uncanny Avengers, essentially criticizing the issue of identity politics and echoing support for viewing all races as simply "human." Due to the controversial nature of the subject matter, and likely also due to his response to many people who took offense with it (namely, by telling these people to go 'drown in hobo piss'), Remender then stops the plot dead in its tracks for three pages in a later issue, just to have two characters debate identity politics, and Havok's speech in particular. He uses the Scarlet Witch as his Author Avatar, with her being portrayed as levelheaded and reasonable, while Rogue, who represents those who don't like the speech, is snippy and blinded by emotion. As you'd guess, the Scarlet Witch is portrayed as being correct, which didn't go over all that well considering Wanda's current position as The Scrappy among many X-Men fans.
  • All-New X-Men by Brian Michael Bendis has Kitty Pryde rant about the subject in response, siding with those who don't like the speech, although she's much more accepting of those who do agree with it.
• The 1990-91 Foolkiller miniseries, appropriate as it was written by Steve Gerber himself. He considered this his opportunity to really expand on what the character is all about, especially since he seemed to be little more than a cheesy character (albeit one with a cool name) that most people remember for the Zorro-like outfit and his battle with Spider-Man.
• The last issue of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) (Issue #155): "A Letter From Snake Eyes". Larry Hama is in full force and pulls no punches as this is the first time we ever get into the mind of the most mysterious Joe of all. Hama, being a former soldier, knows what he's talking about when he says that War Is Hell. This is definitely considered one of the better uses of this trope, given the high value of this issue in the collector's market.

Comic Strips

• 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 (she is treated as a slave or unpaid servant). However, she observes that it could be much much worse, because at least she's not in an orphanage "sponging off the taxpayers".
• About seventy-five percent of all Doonesbury strips engage in this, though it generally sets up the "punchline".
• Bloom County has done this as much as Doonesbury in its long run, criticizing topics like South African Apartheid, politicians, music and religious controversies, the comic strip industry itself, and corporate America.
• The Boondocks is often used as a vehicle for the views of Aaron McGruder, who has a vehement hatred of the George W. Bush administration and countless black celebrities.
• 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.
• For Better or for Worse: Given that the character is the creator's Author Avatar, it's not hard to hear all of Elly Patterson's old school preaching, like how she doesn't like computers or malls taking away downtown commerce, and believe that it's Lynn Johnston speaking.
• Bill Watterson would sometimes do this with Calvin and Hobbes. It was better-executed than most versions, in part because the themes were frequently apolitical, in part because Watterson went after multiple targets, and in part because of Watterson's innate storytelling skills. It also didn't hurt that Watterson occasionally engaged in Self-Deprecation and made himself the target of the occasional filibuster.
• Mallard Fillmore started as a mostly apolitical comic before eventually turning into the right-wing counterpart to Doonesbury. Even then, it began with numerous liberal Straw Characters for Fillmore to bounce off of, but they all quickly got dropped, and the vast majority of more recent comics are just Fillmore speaking directly to the audience as the author's mouthpiece, with minimal attempt at storytelling.

Fan Works

• Ultimate Sleepwalker: The New Dreams has a one-scene filibuster that illustrates the author's hatred of the C-List Fodder trope, as well as the frequent depiction of C- and D-list characters as losers or otherwise ineffective in the official comics. A villain who's considered an A-list psychopath in the official comics gets into a fight with a villain who's a D-list loser at best, and the scene throws traditional expectations out the window by having the D-lister win. The D-lister then points out to his dying opponent that a character's ranking on "some glorified pecking order" doesn't necessarily reflect their true potential.
• Part of the Troll Fic nature of Those Lacking Spines. Until it stops being a troll fic, but the author continues to tell the readers how they think fanfic shouldn't be written.
• The Windy City arc of The Great Alicorn Hunt is a long rant about how the author thinks "anti-ableism SJW's" are "infesting the medical profession with their wrongheaded ideas".
• In With This Ring, this is Played for Laughs when OL goes over defending Guy Fawkes Night with Zatanna. He then shortly start criticizing about the American Revolution (as "complete nonsense you lot get taught about British colonial policy") until being interrupted by Kid Flash.
• Team StarKid have done this a few times.
  • Holy Musical B@man!: Batman gives Superman a pep talk that enthuses about just how awesome superheroes are and defends less serious characters like Robin that tend to get a lot of bashing from fans.
    Batman: ... Some people think that Robin's stupid. But those people are pretentious douchebags because literally, the only difference between me and Robin is our costumes! Robin's cool. Krypto's cool. Ant-Man is cool. The Atom is cool! Plastic Man... uh! Gloves, capes, masks... oh, superheroes are cool, man! Helping people is cool. And you? You're goddamn great at helping people.
  • A Very Potter Sequel: Harry gets a speech that uses Hogwarts as a metaphor for the whole Harry Potter franchise.
    Harry: We spent time here, we made friends here, and that's a part of us. 'Cause Hogwarts is bigger than us, it's bigger than any of its founders. And it's gonna be around long after we're gone. Maybe we'll see our kids come here one day. That's the thing about Hogwarts: no matter how long you're away from it, there's always a way back.
• In My Little Pony: Totally Legit Recap:
  • DWK the creator and narrator of the series will regularly drop the jokes to point out when the show he loves to make fun of does something that he finds genuinely touching or to explain why he loves and respects certain characters.
  • The entirety of Season 6, Episode 17 is one of these, with DWK explaining in excruciating detail why he doesn't like Discord's character, saying his redemption arc is unbelievable. Though this is also meant as a playful jab at people who think of him and his show as an analysis of MLP, even though he insisted that it is not.
    DWK: There, I made an analytical video, and as you know, having just watched it, it was shit.
  • Played for Laughs at the beginning of "Gauntlet Of Fire", when DWK goes on a long and sincere tangent about why he loves Rarity for about one and a half minutes... only to realize at the end, that it's a Spike episode and he just wasted a good chunk of his time.
• In Episode 228 of The Pokémon Squad, the plot is completely halted in the middle of Chapter 9 in favor of a thinly-veiled rant about all of the grievances the real Rayquaza Master has against the games since Pokémon X and Y, accompanied by jabs at the expense of Junichi Masuda.

Films — Animation

• The LEGO Movie: Directly invoked in the story itself. When discovering his kid's creations and the climactic confrontation between Emmet and Lord Business, Finn's dad asks him to tell him what Emmet would say to the villain. Cut back to the LEGO world, where Emmet gives his speech asking Business to change his mind.

Films — Live-Action

• 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... the uncut, ten-minute version (the release version was three and a half) which caused test viewers to walk out.
• Above the Law (1988): Seagal's character spends the finale battling corrupt government agents, then after all is said and done, just before the end credits, he gives a short voice-over about how even in real life, the further up the chain of command you go, the more people you find that think they're... above the law.
• Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, in which the entire closing monologue is a statement of Chaplin's anti-war beliefs, though it is very appropriate (and moving) in context.
• Parodied in Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway, in which David Shayne simply cannot help but write what he thinks is "important dialogue", but everyone else thinks is turgid.
  Cheech: "A maze beset by brutal pitfalls!" Hey, Olive, I memorized it, and I'm tellin' ya, it comes to me all the time, and it stinks on fuckin' hot ice!
• In the last 10 minutes of Clerks Kevin Smith's voice hops from one character to another every time someone opens their mouth. In fact, this tends to be the method by which he concludes all his films.
• During a flashback scene in Saw VI, Jigsaw is standing in the office of William, an executive at a health insurance company who had just denied him coverage for an experimental treatment of his cancer (and who is the subject of the film's main trap). This causes Jigsaw to go into a rant attacking the health insurance industry, saying that they do the very same thing that conservatives fear socialized medicine will do — namely, take life-and-death decisions away from doctors and their patients by denying them coverage. He doesn't say "conservatives" or "socialized medicine," but the message is clear, and is repeated throughout the film, especially with the way that William gets killed. The message would be a lot more compelling coming from someone who wasn't a Serial Killer that forced people to make brutal life and death decisions himself with his various traps.
• Black Hawk Down suffers from this at points, where all of a sudden, one character or another will give a little speech to whoever's around justifying "why we're here", which is no doubt because it was Backed by the Pentagon.
• Birdemic twice brings all other activity in the film to a dead stop to lecture about environmentalism. These are just the densest clumps of the movie's almost relentless "message".
• The sequels in The Matrix film franchise, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, were heavily criticized for being full of lengthy philosophical pontificating by several characters, including Councillor Hamann, The Oracle, The Merovingian (twice), Agent Smith, and Morpheus. And the Architect. He talks for SO LONG. Parodied by George Carlin and Will Ferrell.
• Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which was ostensibly a backstage drama about a season at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, keeps interrupting itself with various segments that have little to nothing to do with the characters, including unself-conscious circus performances (with many, many in-universe audience reaction shots that tend to undercut the fourth wall) and pure documentary scenes showing what carnival workers do, the latter of which are accompanied by verbose and frankly pompous descriptions by a "voice-of-God" narrator. The movie, in general, can't seem to decide what it wants to be, making it a fine mess. And yet it won Best Picture.
• The Man from Earth: John lapses into his thoughts on religion in a monologue what can only be interpreted as the author explaining his own beliefs. John describes the Old Testament as full of fear and hatred, while the New Testament is full of love and peace, though it's been warped over the years by centuries of mythology and superstition. John speaks very highly of Buddhism and explains that everything that's good in Christianity is just Buddhism.

Literature

• Ayn Rand is very fond of using her protagonist as a mouthpiece for her Objectivist beliefs.
  • Atlas Shrugged has the definitive Author Filibuster in "This Is John Galt Speaking," where Ayn Rand gives her protagonist an opportunity to lecture the reader for sixty pages on end (eighty pages in the paperback edition); since he's taken over all channels, 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 "If money is the root of all evil, then what is the root of all money? Virtue is the only thing that can give money any value. Is virtue the root of all evil?" In an example of artistic license,^note and not the first or last such example Rand claims John Galt's radio monologue is only three hours. No one has ever been able to read, clearly and distinctly, the entire monologue aloud in less than six hours.
  • Howard Roark of The Fountainhead also gets such an opportunity in his courtroom scene,
  • The last chapter of Anthem is essentially devoted to this purpose.
• The Illuminatus Trilogy parodies the filibuster in Atlas Shrugged with Telemachus Sneezed, mentioning that the last hundred and three pages are a soliloquy on the importance of guilt.
• 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". There's also a multi-page plea to accept and respect spinsters (one of whom Alcott was herself) and several digressions on appreciating and loving the "angels of the home" while they live (brought on by Alcott losing Beth's namesake, her sister, very young), among other authorial musings. And in her book Jack and Jill, Alcott includes the death of a young man who is a relatively minor character as an opportunity to break the fourth wall, noting that some people believe that books intended for children should not include such sad events despite the reality that many children will face the death of playmates and friends.
• In Deception Point, Dan Brown has several characters expose the pros and cons of letting NASA monopolize space exploration instead of opening it up to the private sector (though the arguments supporting NASA greatly outnumber those against it).
• Jack Ryan:
  • Tom Clancy espoused his world view at length in The Bear and the Dragon.
  • It started to become really obvious with Executive Order.
  • In a Tom Clancy book, John Clark thought to himself that a movie, implied to be Air Force One (which in reality did pretty well with critics), was a stupid movie that makes airport security overly diligent. This is most likely an indirect Take That! at Harrison Ford, whom Tom Clancy had hated as Jack Ryan.
• Also in the genre, the protagonist in the W.E.B. Griffen book, The Hostage, Charley Castillo, thinks to himself that he likes Mel Gibson movies, and goes into detail about why, which has no relevance to the plot. It would come off strongly as product placement if Gibson was a product.
• Michael Crichton:
  • Jurassic Park (1990): 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 (and a scientist himself). 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.
  • The Lost World (1995) contains long philosophical digressions.
  • State of Fear:
    • The book leaves approximately half the key plot points unresolved in favor of the heroes making every rant possible on the subject of global warming.
    • There was also a huge Big-Lipped Alligator Moment where one character has to babysit some guy who begins espousing social and media theories that have nothing whatsoever to do with global warming or anything else in the rest of the book (yet end up being what the book is named after).
    • At the end of the book, Crichton gives up all pretext and includes a section literally just ranting about his personal views without even bothering to put them in the mouth of a character.
  • Next warns of the dangers of Big Genetics, hamfisting the point in at every available opportunity, with an epilogue followed by a didactic author's note, just to make sure that the subtlety of his point could, in fact, cause a concussion.
    • While not a filibuster as such, this book contains an odd and rather distasteful Take That! at one of the critics of State of Fear by including a suspiciously similar character: a child raper with a small dick.
  • At disconcertingly regular points, Micro veers out of the limited third person to inform us that this person is an expert in that field; now, here's a random factoid about that field.
• Wakefield by Andrei Codrescu does this over and over on a wide variety of subjects but at least has a certain self-knowledge. Kudos for when, after the main character gives a lengthy speech about the relationship between art and money, another character tells him he's "full of shit".
• Bill O'Reilly's fiction book, from before he was really famous, Those Who Trespass, can be bolied down one filibuster 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.
• Emmanuel Goldstein's book in 1984, plus a drunken proletarian's rant against the metric system. The story of the novel is largely a Framing Device for Orwell's vision of the Dystopia, and the book-within-a-book can be skipped by the reader without missing anything important to the plot. He also spends about ten pages near the end of 1984 driving the message home, just in case the reader missed the thinly-veiled metaphor of the first hundred or so pages.
• The plot of Moby-Dick is an excuse for myriad Author Filibusters about whaling, whaling culture, the anatomy of whales, and lots of sperm-wringing. Plus all the classical references. 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 a substitute. It's worth pointing out that author Herman Melville was paid by the word, so it's likely that all these filibusters are there just to pad Melville's wallet. Commentary on the book at the time of its release indicates that the main appeal of the book was the depiction of whaling, with the plot and symbolism regarded as distractions.
• Inheritance Cycle:
  • Vegetarians get their say in the second book. Humorously, Paolini seems to change his mind after this, as Eragon rationalizes eating meat in the third book. The anti-religion message is just as bad or worse. It looks like it's forced in — plot going on, scene change, random out-of-nowhere scene where Oromis makes some relatively basic atheism arguments that are treated as fact, scene change, back to the story's actual plot. And then Eragon changes his mind about that as well.
  • Elves tend to be a lot wiser and more attuned to nature than any other creature because of the nature of their magic that bound their whole race in their blood oath with the dragons. As a result, they can't eat meat any more than a person could eat their own hand because they can feel the emotions from all the life around them, and if a creature dies, it feels like they themselves are dying along with it. They sing^note they speak in the ancient language combined with a flow of magic. The singing part is just their own artistic flair. to the trees to harvest fruits and vegetables that grow all the nutrition they need, so there's no need to butcher animals. With all their needs taken care of, the elves don't fight wars and most are content to keep to themselves and pursue whatever they fancy, be it writing, painting, or being a fish. However, when pressed, they will rise up together to fight off whatever force threatens them.
  • Dwarves, on the other hand, have their central religion and set of customs and traditions that probably vary between the clans and deep dwellers and can get very riled up if their beliefs are challenged, but they also have the most marvelous and luxurious empires in the entire continent, and as a social collective, they seem to have a lot more fun in life than the elves. On top of all this, dwarves might actually be right about their religion; in Brisingr, Eragon actually sees what could very well be their god.
• 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 boring political lectures and discussions from the "original book". A big part of the metaplot is that it's the fun, pulp fantasy-esque parts from a very long, terribly grownup novel that included a detailed description of the contents of Princess Buttercup's massive closet as a joke that only someone with a PhD in History would get. Goldman parodies his own parody in the excerpts from Buttercup's Baby, (the sequel) that are provided in some editions of the novel - he describes in detail how a major stumbling block in getting his annotation of the sequel off the ground is the fact that Morgenstern's estate took a dim view of his chopping away Morgenstern's filibustering, as they view that as an integral part of the original work.
• 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 missed and hit it in the stomach.
• 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. The later books feature pages-long speeches seemingly every other chapter, and often those who are being preached to put up only token objections before quickly converting to the espoused views, even if they went against some very old, ingrained belief systems. It wouldn't be so bad if the topics covered weren't what they just said.
• Robert A. Heinlein was fond of these, using them in quite a few of his works. Some readers actually enjoy them. Not all of course.
  • Starship Troopers has characters waxing eloquent on why citizenship should be earned and its responsibilities, why war is necessary for a culture's survival, and sermons on the topic of "spare the rod, spoil the child."
  • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has several long rants on subjects ranging from tyranny and revolution, to limited government, to polyamory. The last was also a frequent topic in his later works as well, to the point that the group marriages in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress seem rather tame by comparison.
  • The last third of Glory Road is essentially a long libertarian diatribe.
• 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 book beforehand, there's no real need to read that particular epilogue. The majority of Tolstoy's output is this trope. One of his earlier, shorter works is a Take That! Fix Fic to a woman who rejected him (oops), while Anna Karenina turned from a straightforward bit of realist fiction to an epic due to Tolstoy's decision to add a second plot complete with an author avatar to expound on the joys of mowing.
• Maximum Ride goes this direction in The Final Warning. 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 book, Max and the flock are brought to Antarctica to combat global warming. The 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 (a literal filibuster) concerning global warming and 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 protagonist of this series was the subject of kidnapping and human experimentation but goes out of her way to state that global warming is worse than those things. The speech also contains a lot of America-bashing (pig-headed, short-sighted, arrogant, etc).
• Lady Chatterley's Lover has several rants on how industrial growth is killing nature and humanity.
• The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker contains a lengthy rant on why Lady Chatterley's Lover is an awful book.
• 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 longest one was exactly 24 pages.
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire contains a lot of Gibbon's anti-religious sentiment (he blamed its fall on the Church.)
• Charles Dickens could never resist the temptation to embellish his characters' actions via moralistic asides, sometimes lighthearted, more often disgusted. Since his books tend to contain large casts of characters, he does this a lot, in his later, socially-aware novels especially.
• The Executioner series of action novels was written by Don Pendleton in the 1970s in response to the anti-war and "violence doesn't solve anything" attitudes of the time. Its hero, Vietnam veteran turned vigilante Mack Bolan, spends entire chapters pondering the morality of violence and the nature of his "war everlasting".
• The last published part of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales with a long sermon by the Parson on the Seven Deadly Sins. While there may have been more later on, thanks to his dying before he finished the Tales, it's left to speculation.
• People familiar with the musical version of Les Misérables are certain to be rather confused by numerous dissertations on such things as local linguistics, Hugo's thoughts on convents, the life of a side character bishop, the governance of a town, the Battle of Waterloo, and the Paris sewer system in the original work so that the filibustering seems to take up more space than the actual storytelling.
• Parodied in Mason & Dixon, when Dixon goes on a several page speech about the mythological Lambton Worm, and by the time he gets to the end, he can't remember what his point was in bringing it up.
• In The Ethical Assassin, the title character says almost nothing that isn't Author Filibuster. The last conversation sounds like it's the titular assassin delivering the jacket blurb.
• In some of John Norman's later Gor novels, what the plot halts quite often for a character to go on another rant about how a woman's proper place is kneeling at his feet.
• Poul Anderson's otherwise pretty good collection of loosely-related short stories, The Boat of a Million Years veers into this trope. The author apparently can't help himself from launching into angry rants against liberalism and expressing the view that libertarianism is the best thing ever.
• A short story that Dan Simmons posted onto his website is a rant on how Islam will destroy the world if left unchecked.
• In the original 1818 version of Frankenstein, during the scene in which Elizabeth and Victor are visiting the condemned Justine Moritz, Mary Shelley allows Elizabeth to go into a completely inappropriate rant against the inhumanity of the death penalty (Shelley and her husband Percy were strongly against it) - inappropriate for that dramatic moment, anyway, because Elizabeth is meant to be there comforting and consoling her friend who's just been condemned under the death penalty. This led one editor of the 1818 edition to remark that Elizabeth isn't the sort of friend you'd call on to cheer you up if you've had a bad day... Frankenstein has no fewer than three separate narrators (even more if you count the letters from family members that Victor quotes verbatim), and all of them to some degree deliver little sermons on topics that are only tangentially related to the novel's theme. Oddest of all, the story proper is recounted in the form of a series of letters written by (fictional) Arctic explorer Robert Walton, whose ship is trapped in ice as the novel begins (which, for modern-day readers, must amount to the greatest Fake-Out Opening in history). Mary, in fact, began writing her story with the creation of the monster itself but was encouraged by her husband to expand it to full length, belatedly adding Walton and all the rest.
• Stephen Fry:
  • Making History contains at least one conversation full of remarks the author himself has made in interviews. The line "Just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean science knows nothing" stands out. There's also the "beautiful words" sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which is all filibuster by an Author Avatar character. He did a podcast where he makes many of the same points, only seriously.
  • In the category of "anvils that definitely should have stayed where they were," The Hippopotamus has a lengthy passage on the idea that women don't enjoy sex and only say they do because they need to be in a relationship. This is something Fry said in at least one TV interview about twenty years ago.
• Neal Stephenson does this a lot. He keeps you on your toes, too - sometimes he's just rambling about Restoration Comedy for no good reason, but sometimes the five-page demonstration of van Eck phreaking will turn out to be a key plot point. Stephenson's filibusters tend to be less telling us about his political views and more about his almost obsessive desire to show his work (think the long discussion on Sumerian religion in Snow Crash).
• Terry Pratchett succumbed to this in later Discworld books, as he began to use the series to express his views on the world. A major example is the argument between Sacharissa and William in The Truth on the true purpose of news media, in which William may as well be holding a card that says "VIEWPOINT OF TERRY PRATCHETT". Pratchett was an atheist and a humanist, something that won't surprise anyone who has read Small Gods or the exchanges between Granny Weatherwax and Oates in Carpe Jugulum.
• Like so many other things of the literature scene, this gets heavily satirized by Walter Moers in many of his books through his Bunny Ears Author Avatar Hildegunst von Mythenmetz (Optimus Yarnspinner in the English translation). The plot of the books is actually a story inside a story, that is told by Hildegunst who is constantly breaking the fourth wall (which is in fact, an in-story fourth wall) to comment on the story he is currently writing down. Moers hangs a giant lampshade on it by having Hildegunst invent the Mythenmetzian Tangent, a literary device in which the author stops telling his story and instead talks about something entirely else. Be it the interior decoration of his study, or a rant directed at his most hated critic, or just entire pages of the word "Brumli". Hildegunst does, however, fail to explain the purpose of this device, which is completely intentional.
• Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito is entirely made out of this trope. The fact that the author attempts to justify this via the protagonist complaining about how depressed or scattered he is feeling is embarrassing at best and infuriating at worst.
• Don Quixote: Parodied and lampshaded by Cervantes. The critics said that the chivalry books were plagued by a lot of lengthy discourses from a lot of different abstract themes, immobilizing the action and discouraging the reader. Cervantes was a great writer, so maybe his intent at author filibuster could not be boring, but the reactions of the people who listen to them are very realistic: Don Quixote talks for nearly two pages in the "Discourse on The Golden Age", Part I, Chapter XI, and for almost six pages in the "Discourse on Arms and Letters", Part I, Chapter XXXVIII. The first filibuster is lampshaded: "All this long harangue (which might very well have been spared) our knight delivered because the acorns they gave him reminded him of the golden age; and the whim seized him to address all this unnecessary argument to the goatherds, who listened to him gaping in amazement without saying a word in reply." and in the second the action really never stops, because all the other characters have their dinners while Don Quixote talked... for 6 pages and 2 chapters!: "All this lengthy discourse Don Quixote delivered while the others supped, forgetting to raise a morsel to his lips, though Sancho more than once told him to eat his supper, as he would have time enough afterward to say all he wanted."
• The Silver Skates devotes lengthy chunks of the book - including a long side-story only little related to the main plot - to facts about the country of Holland, its culture and history, and why it is just completely awesome.
• The Left Behind series has this in spades. Each of the 16 books brings the narrative to a full stop on at least one occasion to provide sermons that are several pages in length. The final book, Kingdom Come, is especially bad as it spends a chapter retelling the stories of 3 Old Testament figures.
• The Children of the Last Days series by Michael D. O'Brien is essentially a very conservative Catholic version of the above, with a hefty dose of New Media Are Evil and Take Thats against the modern world.
• Similar to Left Behind, the Christ Clone Trilogy has some serious author fillibustering. There's hardly any in the first two books, but the third book, Acts of God, frequently gets bogged down in Christian sermonizing.
• Professor Michael Murphy in the Babylon Rising series frequently lectures his students, friends, and acquaintances on the correctness of his conservative Christian views. It just so happens that Murphy's creator, Tim LaHaye (of Left Behind fame) is a conservative Christian.
• In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa Loompas' poem about Mike Teavee is almost entirely devoted to a lengthy rant about how too much TV is bad for kids, and that everyone should get rid of their television and install a bookshelf in its place. Mike Teavee himself is only mentioned in a post-script.
• John Varley's Gaea Trilogy frequently lapses into this trope, whenever the characters get preachy about sexual politics and/or religion.
  • There's also a weird lecture in Demon about how the "real" rock-and-roll genre of music died out in the disco years, and how '80s-era rock (i.e. music from when Demon was written) was sold-out overhyped garbage. As this digression is uttered by an alien centaur from the 22nd century, and one who's performing brain surgery at the time, it's about as out-of-place as this trope can get.
  • Red Thunder has a long speech about how the space program was ruined by Kennedy's challenge to reach the moon before 1970 and how space travel should have progressed.
• Anne Rice is simply magnificent at this trope, especially in her The Vampire Chronicles series. It's obvious when it's happening because a conversation between two characters (usually involving religion) can span chapters (Lestat and Marius' conversations near the end of The Vampire Lestat spring to mind), and often go over the same points over and over and over again. Lestat does this quite often, especially in the later Chronicles books; the worst example is when he 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. Chapter 7 of the same novel has nothing to do with the plot or the series but is a three-page rave about the new Pope and the canonization of Juan Diego, the first indigenous American saint.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • The book Night of the Humans is essentially one long rant about how awful and evil every single religion is.
  • The Last Dodo is a similar rant from earlier in the series about preserving endangered species.
• Every time someone is mentioned as using pot in The House of Night series the plot gets temporarily derailed so Zoey and her friends can rant about how doing pot is so uncool and stupid. In Betrayed, we find out that Neferet specifically chooses students to feed to the red-eyed vampires just because Zoey ratted them out to her as having used pot. When the police confront Zoey about the deaths, Neferet tries to blame it all on the victims falling in the river after being high, which sounds uncomfortably like "they were asking to die a brutal death!" And while Neferet is the bad guy, Zoey in no way ever contradicts or debates that argument, and since younger generations tend to have a more liberal attitude about pot (with most thinking that while it may not be good, you can do worse things to yourself) it comes off as even more dissonant.
• Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: Well, this series has gone into this trope a number of times. The book Payback portrays a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) as the scum of the earth who suck up your money like leeches, use that money to pamper themselves, and will simply stand back and not lift a finger to help you as you die of a life-threatening illness. The book Vendetta portrays China as a Crapsack World that cheerfully brings Yellow Peril wherever it goes! The book The Jury has one character Nikki Quinn tell the other characters about the vicious cycle of abuse between spouses. The book Fast Track portrays the World Bank (particularly its president) as a money-sucker that will leave poor countries to rot and die. The book Under the Radar portrays a polygamist sect as a cult made up of a Small-Town Tyrant, rapists, and pedophiles hiding behind religion and treating women as a Baby Factory.
• Mat Coward's Success... And How to Avoid It is a funny book about being a freelance writer, which periodically breaks off the jokes to talk about how Margaret Thatcher was out to ruin Britain and referring to her time in office as the "Time of Evil".
• David Weber does it sometimes in Safehold, especially in later books. Sometimes war-ridden, fast-paced narrative come to halt and we are treated to a chapter that is nothing but yet another Maikel Staynair's lecture on the evils of Corrupt Church.
• John Ringo is known for these:
  • The wild adventures in the Council Wars novels at one point come to a screeching halt as they're sitting around a fire and Edmund explains how humans in the late 20th/early 21st centuries were just so damn silly for believing in a clearly absurd thing like human-caused climate change (while getting the cause of it wrong).
  • In John Ringo's Troy Rising series, much of the third book is about how South Americans are lazy and entitled to the point of suicidal negligence. It's also brought up near the climax that Afghani citizens are taught to make explosives at their grandfather's knee, and are second to none when fighting in caves.
  • In Princess Of Wands, a hunt for a soul-eating demon is interrupted so that the main character can lecture a Straw Liberal about how awful abortion is and how it should be banned, based on her religious views. China gets cited as a country with "mandatory abortions" that's still overpopulated (ignoring that China's extreme population control measures are the result of its overpopulation, not the cause), and that the main character is supposed to be Episcopalian, which as a Christian denomination has aligned strongly pro-choice.
• At the end of the classic Dutch novel Max Havelaar, the author himself takes the stage, shoos his characters away, and delivers a rant which Anviliciously rams the point of the book - that the people of Java are being sorely mistreated - home.
  "Shut up, you terrible product of filthy avarice and blasphemous pseudo-friendliness! I created you... you grew up to a monster under my pen... I find my own creature disgusting: choke on coffee and begone!"
• In Joseph Heller's novel Good as Gold, the narrative stops dead for about forty pages while the author delivers a massive rant about Henry Kissinger, how he's a lying, murdering scumbag and how, worst of all, he isn't even really Jewish.
• In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Doctor Copeland delivers an author filibuster promoting Marxism. Carson McCullers, like many American intellectuals of the time, embraced Marxist ideas.
• Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) is a psychological thriller masquerading as an African adventure story, but even before the psychological element takes center stage, the novella's protagonist, Charlie Marlowe, veers away from pure narrative at times to talk about his spiritual awakening (or spiritual death, as the case may be) while in the Congo. For several pages at a time, we come upon extensive philosophical treatises that were considered long-winded and dull even in Conrad's time. Partly justified by the fact that Marlowe is actually, in-story, speaking to a group of friends on a boat, and it is an unnamed first-person narrator listening to Marlowe who both opens and concludes the whole thing.
• Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes usually doesn't have much, except for Charles Halloway. Four pages that's nothing but a lecture.
• The Marquis de Sade was quite fond of this trope, interposing his famously depraved sex scenes with just as many, if less famous, lengthy rhetorics about the pointlessness of morality in a Godless universe and the glories of hedonism. Philosophy in the Bedroom is probably the most blatant example. Though this is actually something of a subversion: in De Sade's day, the word "philosophy" in a book title used to be code for "porn". The title (and his then-already-infamous name) capitalize on this — only to show readers a woman walking into a brothel, picking up a pamphlet lying on the piano... which is then given in full length, eclipsing anything else in the story. Even in 120 Days of Sodom, which was allegedly written to be a catalog of different "passions", he can't help his philosophizing and the first part of the book (the 400 pages that were actually written, as opposed to just notes researchers have found) intertwines "tame" (for De Sade, that means water sports/scat, by the by) non-penetrative sexual scenes with why the four main characters are justified in their future torture and murder of their captives. Some have interpreted this as a Stealth Parody of the day's aristocracy and those who they share power with (and an example of how an Overly Long Gag can still be Author Filibuster).
• While it's probably impossible to ignore the subject completely in a book specifically centered on Real Life serial killers, The Profiler author John Douglas spends a little too much time in Mindhunter telling the reader that he is an avid supporter of the death penalty and that anyone who isn't, should be.
• A good deal of Petr Beckmann's A History of Pi is, by word count, rants against the Soviet Union. In a book about mathematics. It isn't quite as misplaced as you'd think: Beckmann viewed the Soviet Union as the benchmark for anything and everything irrational, so whenever he would discuss cranks who try to "square a circle" or some such, he would inevitably compare them to official Soviet policy (a bit hypocritically, as Beckmann was a major crank himself.)
• An early chapter of Flashman and the Redskins has the protagonist encounter a group of well-off liberals discussing the ill-treatment of Native Americans. Flashman spends the next five pages or so haranguing them on why they are idiots for entertaining an absurdly romanticized view of the American West.
• Dutch children's book De Griezelbus ("The Spooky Bus") involves an author of scary stories telling a number of his stories to a class of schoolchildren on a bus. (The author later turns out to be a werewolf who intends to eat the children.) At one point, one of the children asks him why doesn't tell real scary stories, like those movies his brother watches in which "body parts are flying around". The author replies, and is presumably channeling the author of the book here: "That's not scary, that's disgusting!"
• The storyline of the print-on-demand historical novel The Alsatian stops in the middle for a two-chapter synopsis of the causes and early campaigns of World War I. The author considered deleting it, but decided that a thorough knowledge of the conditions at the time was necessary for the audience to understand why the protagonist shoots himself in the foot to escape from battle.
• Stephen King:
  • He takes a fair bit of page time at the end of the first act of 11/22/63 to have his protagonist internally monologue about how great the year 1958 is and how bad 2011 sucks in comparison. Justified in that the character believes himself to have become trapped in the year 1958 and may simply be trying to talk himself into being okay with it. He also tries to soften it later on by admitting that 1958 has its downsides, in particular, the outrageous levels of racism that are still common, and asking the reader to remember that the next time he starts gushing about how much he loves the time period. He further admits that he's personally exempt from one of the greatest drawbacks of living during the Cold War - he knows that there won't be a nuclear war, whereas other characters have to live in fear of it.
  • In The Tommyknockers, Gard goes on a lo-o-o-ong diatribe about the evils of nuclear power when he overhears a power company bigwig (or so Gard assumes) extolling the virtues of it and downplaying the Chernobyl disaster. Partially justified in that Gard is blitzed out of his skull and is also said to be obsessive about the subject.
  • Holly is a borderline Author Tract with how much the story stops to let you know that King hates Donald Trump. The story establishes the title character’s heroicness and appropriate political opinions by having her recount events so traumatic that she cries in recollection - Trump, the election, and oh yeah there was that shapeshifting, child-murdering Eldritch Abomination that attacked her. All very similar situations.
  “And bonus! Trump's gone.” Leaving behind a country at war with itself, Holly thinks. And who's to say he won't reappear in 2024? She thinks of Arnie's promise from The Terminator: “I'll be back.”
• Near the end of Robots and Empire, Isaac Asimov put in an Anvilicious and story-derailing diatribe against nuclear fission power. It is stated that the Three Mile Island accident forever turned the world against its use, to the extent that humans would rather burn oil or coal instead. Even the name of the place is taboo to mention centuries afterward. This doesn't bear any resemblance to the real world even when the book was published (in 1985, six years after the accident).
• The English Dragon: "Our Freedom is being eroded. Those bastards in government are taking it from us stealthily and insidiously. Our culture is being eroded. You can't be English anymore. They'll make it illegal. '1984' said it all" says Oliver. More still when Oliver imagines himself as Dante in Hell: "Oliver reserved the first circle for the writers of novels who censored their own work so as not to fall foul of politically correct editors... The second circle would be reserved for the editors and publishers who were scared of anything that wasn't politically correct... In the next circle, he put cowardly politicians... In the next circle - always getting tighter and fouler he put the television presenters who voiced only one point of view... Oliver thought about the next circle [and] [p]eopled it with social worker busybodies".
• The Town Of Babylon is basically a lecture series masquerading as a novel. The lectures are on the author’s political and social views, which are for the most part standard-issue American academic leftism, with just enough story and characterization to get from lecture to lecture.
• Karen Traviss does this in her Halo novels (Glasslands, The Thursday War, and Mortal Dictata) regarding Dr. Halsey and the SPARTAN-II program. This is usually done from the viewpoint of Margaret Parangosky, the head of ONI, and Serin Osman (one of the Spartan-IIs whose augs failed). As far as Parangosky (and Traviss, of course) is concerned, Halsey is Dr. Mengele for having abducted innocent children and replaced them with clones that got sick and died shortly after. Traviss expects the readers to believe that Parangosky, who claims to know everything that goes on in both the UNSC and her own ONI, somehow had no idea that Halsey was planning on using clones instead of simply abducting children (NOTE: she was perfectly fine with abductions, it was cloning that was a problem) for the program. Even Chief Mendez suddenly decides that he has always thought that Halsey was a monster, even though in Ghosts of Onyx (different author) he was glad to see her. Interestingly, Traviss has no problems with the SPARTAN-III program because the kids for that program were not abducted but were merely orphans. Just to be clear, Traviss doesn't have a problem with using child soldiers, as long as they're given a choice. What she fails to point out is that these children had recently lost their parents to the Covenant, and ONI was basically telling them "Wanna avenge your Mommy and Daddy? Just sign here." Also for reference, the S-IIs who survived augmentations went on to have a fairly high survival rate (with most of them surviving into adulthood), whereas the S-IIIs, which Halsey had no involvement with, were basically cannon fodder who were designed to be cheap and expendable (with most of them dying in their early teens). A good number of Halo fans hated Traviss's books because of this, and even 343 Industries have somewhat distanced themselves from the most contentious elements of Traviss's novels. Her books in the Star Wars Legends Expanded Universe also contain a number against the Jedi and in favor of the Mandalorians which were equally unpopular with many readers.
• In Cold Days, the 14th book of The Dresden Files, Harry and Titania suddenly have a discussion on Harry's thoughts on gay people, where Harry says that he has no problem with them and doesn't care what they do behind closed doors. While an agreeable message, a number of readers have commented that it feels shoehorned in.
• The First Battle devotes its entire last chapter to tell the reader why war is Objectively Wrong, and the characters are horrible people for fighting (even to preserve their own lives). It's made even more jarring when the murderous Big Bad is suddenly totally convinced by proto-StarClan that he should give peace a chance- despite violently opposing the idea a day ago.
• Spectral Shadows got this with Serial 11, which serves as a vehicle for the author to do various "Take That!"s to, well, anything they didn't like. Somewhat of a subversion in that, while the author does use the plot and characters to express her viewpoints the story doesn't grind to a halt. The closest you get to the plot stopping are characters discussing ideas for a few minutes of plot time.
• In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the narrator takes time out to give his opinions on the Catholic Church, the rich, and colonial governments. (He's not a fan of any of them). On one occasion, the headman of an Indian village delivers a page and a half long sermon on the futility of seeking gold and the value of good company, good farmland and good livestock.
• Early in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen takes a few paragraphs to rail about anti-novel snobbery that held novels to be low and trashy. In particular, she was irritated by scenes in novels where the heroine shows herself to be sophisticated and intellectual due to... her hatred of novels.
• Lauren Beukes' Broken Monsters has five point-of-view characters. Four of them focus on the main plot, centered around bizarre serial killings that may be supernatural in origin. The fifth point of view character is almost entirely focused on a side plot about cyberbullying and how New Media Are Evil. To boot, guess which of the five characters gets the most time in the spotlight?
• Even the greatest authors are not immune to lapsing into this trope—Jules Verne's early "lost novel" Paris in the Twentieth Century dedicates an entire chapter to explaining why Richard Wagner and his imitators had Ruined Music Forever with their edgy and angsty new style.
• Alfred Noyes's The Last Man (1940) has a lot of lengthy passages where the narrator dwells on how corrupt and godless the contemporary elites are (or rather, were).
• The climax of The Silver Chair features a Kirk Summation about the value of faith. Even if Aslan and the surface world aren't objectively real, Puddleglum asserts, his belief is far more meaningful than the villain's bleak so-called reality. The speech still manages to be rather impressive; it helps that it's not too long-winded as far as Author Filibusters go, and that Puddleglum manages to verbally kick ass even after conceding to everything the Big Bad said.
• ML Lanzillotta sure doesn't like psychiatrists or the war on drugs.
• The Dance By Suzie Carr interrupts the plot more than one to go on at length about how wonderful bees are and what a threat their dying off is.
• Frank Herbert had a tendency to do these, especially in Chapterhouse: Dune, his final Dune novel. His characters think about various topics for pages and pages, often about things that have nothing to do with the story. (For example, his Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother protagonist reflects that the partial suppression of drugs at the border only romanticizes them. There are no borders shown in the Dune universe on the sub-planetary level.)
• Babylon has a few examples of this, but it's no more apparent in the final half of the second novel/eleventh episode of the anime, where the world leaders at the G7 Summit take up pages discussing how the concept of human morality and good and evil are essentially meaningless and all boil down to mankind's most base animal instinct to keep existing.
• The Reluctant King: Jorian's stories go on for pages in many cases, but he always finds a very willing audience long enough to deliver them fully. There is always a specific moral, with it being fairly obvious they're de Camp's views.
• Dragaera: Parodied in the works "written" by Paarfi of Roundwood, who dramatizes historical events in his world. Amongst his other narrative eccentricities, Paarfi is prone to lengthy digressions to shamelessly rant about his pet subjects, usually historical fiction. He will also take obvious shots at various rival historians with whom he's feuding.
• In America (The Book), Jon Stewart referenced Mallard Fillmore's use of this trope, in the form of a parody strip◊ with the punchline "Ooops! I forgot to tell a joke!"

Live-Action TV

• Very common in American TV cartoons and sitcoms during the 1980s and well into the '90s, with the characters (or, sometimes, the actors portraying them) Breaking the Fourth Wall at the end of the episode to advocate on behalf of a cause with which the episode had fictionally dealt. For more on this phenomenon, see And Knowing Is Half the Battle or check your local library.
• When Brookside was canceled, 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.
• In Boston Legal, starting with season 4, there would be one or two closing arguments in every single episode that were perfect examples of this. It would always be a very left-leaning take on an issue of the day-even those who agreed with the viewpoints found them a bit much. Lampshaded somewhat when Denny says, "How come the other side always has short closings?"
• Dan Schneider, the creator of iCarly: one episode of the show portrays shipping and shippers in a bad light, then finally stops the show so Carly can tell them that the point of the show is comedy, not who is dating who.
• Aaron Sorkin:
  • Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: The rant by Judd Hirsch's character in the teaser to the very first episode of the show - that's very much Aaron Sorkin talking directly through his mouthpiece (and lifting from Network as he does).
  • The Newsroom often has characters deliver rants about Sorkin's opinions on politics and the state of journalism. For example, one scene has Olivia Munn deliver a short lecture criticizing Bill Clinton for repealing Glass-Steagall.
• More of a "Host Filibuster," but after learning that The Dennis Miller Show was going to be canceled, embittered host Dennis Miller began to break show format in the few remaining episodes to air his personal grievances on a number of social and political issues. His biting, humorous rants, dotted with his trademark obscure references, became the foundation for his follow-up show, Dennis Miller Live, in which he performed a scripted rant in each episode.
• The Shield season five has a major moment (Claudette Wyms being promoted to Captain of the Farmington Precinct) interrupted for an Author Filibuster in the form of Internal Affairs officer Jon Kavanaugh interrupting the meeting where Claudette gets her promotion, to deliver a foaming at the mouth rant where the character (serving as the voicebox for Shawn Ryan and the rest of the writers of the series) goes off on the Misaimed Fandom of the Vic Mackey character.
• Parodied in Garth Marenghis Darkplace, which frequently had awkwardly inserted scenes about such diverse topics as how great it would be for someone to make a school for psychic children, or what an underappreciated writer Garth Marenghi is. Most fitting the trope was the episode where numerous characters discuss at bizarre length the necessity of buying name-brand batteries from a reputable retailer. Seriously, they spend a whole scene on it.
• Early episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street would often have the characters monologue at length about the writers' political opinions. The series got much better about it by the end of Season 1, and began spoofing it by having characters occasionally burst into impromptu monologues much to the bafflement of everyone else in the room.
• The leviathan arc in Supernatural was basically one long rant about the evils of big business. The show's writers had done minor political Take Thats before, but this was the first time they'd let it take over the entire season. Supposedly these monsters are worse than anything the Winchesters have ever faced.
• Parodied in MADtv (1995)'s recurring "Funkenstein" sketches; normally simple, cheaply-made Blaxploitation monster movies, each stops dead in its tracks by the end for one of writer/director Tinsley Thornhill's speeches about the evils of the CIA and importance of black pride.
  Dr Funkenstein: ... We are in the part of Egypt which is called "Sphinx". In olden times, [Pause] the black slaves did all of the work in building it.
  Funkenstein's Monster: [Looks directly at the camera and frowns] Sound FAMILIAR?
• The Doctor gives one about the evils of war at the end of the Doctor Who episode "The Zygon Inversion." Although this is rather appropriate given that they had previously established his anti-war philosophy.
• Dragnet became famous for the lengthy The Reason You Suck speeches that Detective Joe Friday would occasionally deliver to perps who emblematized something about modern society (hippies, druggies, liberals) that Jack Webb disliked.
• NUMB3RS: In Money for Nothing, the plot stops dead in its tracks for five minutes so Charlie and a guest star can lecture Colby on the wonders of microcredit.
• Supergirl (2015): In "Far From The Tree" Maggie's father says "they're building a wall to keep us out, because to them we're nothing but rapists and murderers!" Remember that in this world, Olivia Marsden (who is secretly an alien of the extraterrestrial kind) is the US President and Cat Grant is her press secretary. It would be extremely out of character for them to advocate for building a wall to keep out Mexicans. This was very clearly shoehorned criticism of President Trump's statements and plans to do just that when this had aired, no matter how unrealistic in the show.
• Kamen Rider Saber: Saber is primarily a show about its various heroes navigating The Conspiracy while learning to communicate and rely on one another to protect people as a cohesive unit. Storytelling is a Recurring Element throughout the show but is heavily-downplayed as device; contributing more to the gimmick rather than being a major plot-point on its own merit. The show's last two episodes reverse this to be a commentary on how originality is relative as long as it's impacting the reader, complete with an elaborate spectacle of real-world people talking about their favorite stories via various Imagine Spots to fuel a World-Healing Wave. While the message that "originality is not the be-all-end-all of a story's worth" isn't inherently a bad one, it's completely separate from what the show's been^note The primary Aesop has been to learn to rely on others and trust your friends, but Storious' motive to destroy the world because his stuff being recorded in the Book Of All means nothing produced can be original and Touma deciding none of that matters as long as a story works comes completely out of left field.; so disconnected from the primary themes of Saber that it feels less like the epilogue to a show about bonds and more like a side-special that diverts from its source-material to decry fans that want everything to be "original" as sticks in the mud.

Radio

• Fit the Eleventh of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978) is largely a filibuster about — of all things — the fact there are too many shoe shops around, and the shoes they sell are all rubbish, suggesting that eventually, we will reach the Shoe Event Horizon, where it will be economically impossible to make or sell anything except ill-fitting shoes. Apparently, Douglas Adams wrote it after failing to find a decent pair of shoes in Oxford Street.

Tabletop Games

• Rifts: Kevin Siembieda enters Author Filibuster mode regularly. He instructs gamemasters in "the only right way" to run their games. It ranges from core game mechanics ("There are no neutral alignments") to ethical matters ("Faction A is intrinsically evil because..."). Most players just ignore these statements and run things their way, which only fuels further Author Filibusters.
• Similarly, the Old World of Darkness books were infamous for being full of sidebars lecturing the reader about how the themes of the game were Serious Business and complaining about how often roleplayers would completely miss the point by playing the games as campy supernatural slug fests instead of focusing on the important human drama that they were meant to inspire. Fans generally ignored them.

Theater

• Tony Kushner's Angels in America is an interesting example, in that Kushner will often halt the action so that one character can deliver a lengthy rant about their political or religious views, which you might assume represent Kushner's own views, but then he will sometimes allow another character to go on a second, equally impassioned rant about why the first character is wrong. This particularly happens a lot between Louis and Belize.
• Some published versions of Arthur Miller's The Crucible (commonly used in schools) contain notes from Miller himself interrupting Act One. Most of them discuss the Real Life characters who have just been introduced, but one devolves into practically a treatise on the Red Scare.
• William Shakespeare:
  • 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 in the day. This is a reference to Boy's Theater, a form of English theater that was outside the legal restrictions that made Shakespeare's company one of only two legal companies in England. So Shakespeare's dislike of Child's Theater is understandable, given that they were his chief competition next to bear-baiting.
  • In Hamlet, the entire "Speak the speech I pray you" monologue is usually seen as Shakespeare's critique on the typical acting methods of the day. It could also be an in-joke about patrons of the arts giving notes to artists while having no background themselves. Shakespeare may even have been lampooning the late Earl of Essex, his first patron and a well-known egocentric loudmouth.
• Subverted in Three Sisters. Vershinin gives a big long speech about how nobody really wants to be happy; they just want to want happiness. And then Tuzenbach asks if there are any chocolates left, deflating Vershinin's entire point: Tuzenbach, at least, wants to be happy now.

Video Games

• This happens a lot in the Metal Gear 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. You get to beat them once the cutscene's over.
  • In the final cutscene of each game, there's a character that always espouses for Hideo Kojima for a while. In MGS1 it's Naomi Hunter or Otacon depending on the game's ending conditions, in MGS2 it's Snake, and in MGS3 it's EVA. And you never get the chance to beat any of them up, because it's the final cutscene.
  • 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 a rather "special" fate he's got planned for Leon, following a brief quip about terrorism "(being) a popular word these days", but before he can finish his second sentence, Leon shuts him up by nailing his hand to a wall with a well-thrown knife.
• In Deus Ex, JC can match wits with a Hong Kong bartender who has a lot to say about the nature of government and the consent of the governed. The monologue of the NSF leader met in the Statue of Liberty also qualifies.
• The sole purpose of the Botfinder General in RuneScape is to deliver these against bots, constantly ranting to everyone present exactly why and how much autoers suck.
• Kreia in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has plenty of long-winded complaints and deconstructive analysis of everything from the morality of the Star Wars universe to role-playing mechanics themselves. Chris Avellone has a philosophy degree and consumed the entire EU before writing the game. He uses Kreia to rail about the things that irritated him, namely the constant Happy Ending Override and everything being attributed to "the will of the Force." Your character's potential counter-arguments, offered as dialog options, are uniformly weak and poorly-reasoned.
• Ulysses from Fallout: New Vegas Lonesome Road DLC, who spends most of his on-screen (and off) saying how he wants to "wipe the slate clean" by nuking NCR (which will also destroy the Legion in due time, due to them no longer having a strong enemy to fight). It's basically Chris Avellone projecting his ideas of how the series is straying away from what he would prefer: a desolate wasteland, which no larger law to govern it.
• Earthworm Jim: The Special Edition's Easy Mode credits poke fun at this. There is a brief moment where Doug TenNapel (a believer in Creationism) briefly starts to complain about evolution, then catches himself, and tries to handwave it away by saying that Shiny Entertainment is not affiliated with his Creationism, Evolution, or whatever would get them into more trouble.
• At first glance, one might think 'Member the Alamo?'s offensive content is simply edgy South Park-style humor. However, the final level is preceded by an 18-minute long unskippable cutscene where, after a living gun sings "Amazing Grace", a character delivers a sermon preaching the views of Catholic, far-right, anti-Semitic writer E. Michael Jones, pushing conspiracy theories claiming that the COVID-19 Pandemic was engineered to control the masses and that pornography is used to dismantle organized religion, among other things. All of this is delivered completely straight, without any hint of comedy, and it includes a plug for one of Jones' e-books.

Webcomics

• 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.
• Venus Envy did much the same thing, with the Author Avatar not only berating the readers but also sobbing and collapsing in a heap, along with the equivalent of "How could yoooou?!" at the end of the rant.
• Sinfest typically shows Tatsuya Ishida's liberal leanings both in the comics themselves and the rants. In particular, after the 2004 election, he posted a rant about how he "knew" George W. Bush had stolen the election because there was no way he could have won fair and square. And then he went from "liberal leanings" to "hardcore feminist," and the levels of filibuster increased abruptly. Then one step further into full-on TERF-dom, and the comic became nothing but.
• Monster of the Week does it twice, once straight and once for laughs, using Shaenon's Author Avatar.
  • In Small Potatos Shaenon doesn't show anything of the episode, instead sitting on the couch and telling the readers her feelings about it.
  • In Firewalker she engages into a lengthy lecture on the implausibility of killer fungi, only to be thrown into a volcano for her troubles.
• 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 - presumably, too many people complained. Also happens in his other comics Nip and Tuck and Goblin Hollow.
• The Last Days of FOXHOUND is a bit different from these. Instead of a moral dilemma and controversial subject, Decoy Octopus goes on a rant for a whole page about... why the Red Sox suck. And this, about the 2004 national elections: this strip.
• Subnormality often features a level of verbosity rarely seen in its medium. Perhaps the most filibustering example is this one. (If you don't want to read the whole thing, here's a summary: "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem".) It's no coincidence that Subnormality's subtitle is "Comix with too many words since 2007."
• In Sluggy Freelance Kiki, of all people, breaks into an eight-panel rant about how Fandoms shouldn't be upset when authors kill off beloved characters (which Pete had done once). It's Lampshaded, however, when Kiki ends the rant complaining about Author Filibusters, completely unaware of the irony.
• VG Cats has the infamous Nerd Rage◊, and several others almost equally non-subtle.
• Penny Arcade had one, noteworthy for being "too urgent" to wait for the regular update and drawn only on lined paper, featuring nothing but a melancholy Tycho lecturing the audience.
• Ozy and Millie was often interrupted by its author so she could rant on various subjects and air her left-wing opinions. What makes this odd is the fact that the author also had a political comic running around the same time with which to do this.
• Better Days. The Chess chapter is nothing but. Subverted in the same author's Original Life: the Lord of the Flies arc- picking up from a rather different one- was shaping up like this. Then it abruptly turned out to be All Just a Dream and wrapped up with a Stock Aesop about not stealing. Played straight in the later muffin arc, with little kids spouting out long speeches about justice right and left.
• This strip of Something*Positive, which contains a lengthy Take That! against Iran and ends with a call to action and a hotlink.
• One El Goonish Shive strip interrupts some exposition involving the effects of a particular bathroom's design on the events of the previous scene so that Dan can rant about why all bathrooms should be designed like that (summary: People are Goddamn disgusting). While he's dead serious, the way he presents the rant, with comic!Dan nearly foaming at the mouth, makes it an amusing aside rather than a truly jarring interruption.
• Schlock Mercenary has a moment where Kevyn starts on a rant about the evils of government bureaucracy, only to be caught by Schlock who mentions that "He senses an author's message incoming" and making Kevyn realize what he just said. The narrator steps in to wash his hands off the event, and the strip carries on with its usual brand of Comedic Sociopathy.
• Sonichu, especially during the troll-influenced issues, usually have the eponymous character or the Author Avatar complaining about stuff the author hates, mostly trolls and homosexuality - that is, when the aforementioned characters aren't talking about the plot instead of showing it for several pages at a time. Issue 10 is the worst of the bunch, with at least three filibusters and, at one point, Sonichu even tells Chris to stop and get on with the story!
• In early chapters of Lightbringer, Lewis Lovhaug would often have the titular hero espouse his opinions taking up a good chunk of each page particularly on his belief of an objective morality. Lovhaug has since expressed regret at using the comic to soapbox.
• Nerf NOW!! has had these, especially prevalent post 2012. Early strips were cutesy things and game humour, but a lot of later strips were the author giving his opinion about something in the form of some political cartoon, or even adding some particularly Anvillicious commentary.
• Least I Could Do has a few arcs where protagonist Rayne will lecture other characters (and usually the audience) about how he's right and anyone who disagrees is wrong; probably the most infamous example is an arc set at a convention where he outright says "Webcomics suck", mainly because most webcomic artists don't/can't keep a consistent release schedule. The fact that nobody can ever debate Rayne, and that onlookers usually treat him like a genius, does nothing to help the perception that Rayne is Ryan Sohmer's Author Avatar Gary Stu character.
• Planet Zebeth had multiple times where the story would pause in place for political rants, some that would go on for weeks or even months. It got bad enough to where the creator outright apologized and swore the comic would go back on track to being just the Metroid parody it was originally intended to be.

Web Original

• A mild example occurs in Sailor Nothing when at one point Shin bursts into a long rant about DVD regional lockout and copy protection. This is actually exactly in character for her, given the situation, but it's a little jarring and has nothing to do with the plot whatsoever.
• Zero Punctuation:
  • Yahtzee has spent the better part of one video pointing out that calling rappers dipshits is not racist– the fact that they're mostly black didn't even enter into it– complete with the phrase "Unfunny Soapbox Bit" scrolling in the background.
  • Whenever Yahtzee's reviewing a Nintendo game, expect at least one-and-a-half minutes of bashing the company itself, not because the game was awful, but because he feels the need to remind us that, yes, he does hate Nintendo.
  • Yahtzee has taken this stance against the Sonic the Hedgehog series by taking time out of his review of a Sonic game to remind viewers that Sonic is beyond the point of saving and how Sega should just put Sonic out of his misery.
  • If it's any sort of shooter game (usually involving the American military, but that's not a hard and fast rule), expect a rant about how the American military is imperialistic and mean and sucks.
• Moviebob:
  • He has a REALLY long extended rant on Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body- it isn't until the 2-minute mark that he starts talking about the actual film because he feels he has to get off his chest his annoyance at how overrated she is as either an actress or a sex symbol. It should probably be noted that Bob's ranting about Megan has since become an Old Shame of his.
  • His Star Trek review also included a long rant against the Tyler Perry cameo.
  • Bob got a column at the Escapist. He gleefully announced in his first video that the new series would just be his personal soapbox.
• Linkara:
  • He has a tendency of interrupting his comic reviews to remind us of how very much he hates One More Day, and at one point adds a caption saying he will not be getting over it any time soon. He has the decency to make it funny.
  • He tends to also go off on political/social rants sometimes in his videos. A good example of this is the lengthy tirade about nuclear weapons in the Superman IV review. Some of it's justified given the movie's Clueless Aesop but it still comes off as Anvilicious at certain points.
  • He also gave a rant about blatant and/or inappropriate Fanservice in modern comics to start off his Athena #1 review. He cited examples such as Vicki Vale's ass shot, a Wizard magazine outright saying women should be drawn sultry, and a shot at Stephanie Brown's ass when she was being tortured by Black Mask (among others) as examples.
  • Averted in his review of Action Comics #592-3^note The one where Superman and Big Barda are mind-controlled into filming a porno, where instead of ranting about the use of rape as a plot device he links to a website that already has one (the source of the page quote for Gratuitous Rape) and recommends that people read it instead.
  • However in his review of Frank Miller's Holy Terror, he gives quite a moving one about how people in power should treat others well and compassion isn't a weakness, in reaction to the methods used by the Designated Hero of the book and the very unfortunate implications in their treatment of Islam.
• Animated web series Broken Saints, steeped as it is in political and religious themes, comes dangerously close to this several times.
• Alpharius from P*R*I*M*A*R*C*H*S spends a chapter doing this at the end of the 2nd arc. Not only is this lampshaded by the stage directions (Alpharius...Alpharius again...Alpharius still isn't shutting up) but the chapter itself is titled "I Think This Qualifies As An Author Filibuster"
• They Made Me Watch This videos end with long written rants, although he's noted that's the time people can turn the videos off if they want to.
• Todd in the Shadows' review of Chris Brown's "Turn Up The Music" was about 30 seconds of an actual review, and the rest a long rant about why Chris Brown and Team Breezy sucks. He's also stopped to explain why he hates "White guy with acoustic guitar" songs so much on occasion.
• Regular Car Reviews episode about Dodge Challenger Hellcat. In the 7 minute video, there are maybe a few offhand sentences about it being a very good and fast muscle car. The rest is mostly a rant about Chrysler spending its bailout money pursuing high-end, low volume muscle cars instead of trying to make a mass-market car that could actually make them money when they need it the most. Other videos feature Mr. Regular going completely off keister for some time, if not for most of the review. It's a source of much of the series humor and appeal.
• Given that Froghand is a blog, as evidenced by hovering over that link, Froge has ample opportunity to express his opinions, including The 10X Rule Review where he talks about what it means to be a great person, yet still staying within the scope of the review instead of going completely off the rails.
  I realise this review isn't too funny. It is, however, important. If by some chance you wish to earn some charity titters, please insert a joke somewhere in it. Look, I'll even fill in the blanks for you. Here's a section! *Section labeled "insert jokes here" with five empty lines* Alright, are we good? Let's move on.
• In the middle of his The Force Awakens review Davis Aurini gives a long-winded, rambling, barely coherent rant about how feminism is wrong, women shouldn't be allowed to fight in battle, men invented everything significant, women are too slutty, etc.
• The Hard Times frequently parodies the tendency of Hardcore Punk musicians to interrupt their shows with long, political rants:
  • Frontman's Perfectly Nonsensical Political Rant Ruined by Short Bursts of Music
  • Jello Biafra Sells 45-Minute long Politically Charged Birthday Wish Video on Cameo
• Mario Party DS Anti Piracy's Grand Finale has Joey Perleoni turning into an angel and delivering a grand speech about how Digital Piracy Is Okay, since Mario Party DS isn't even being sold in stores anymore, so Nintendo isn't losing anything from it being pirated. It doesn't convince DJ Hallyboo, who just kills him.
• In Critical Role Matt is so annoyed when Chetney says RTA means Reecognize the Alpha, representing Alpha and Beta Wolves, that he hops out of frame on his chair. He comes back in moments later, then has Imogen make an Intelligence check so he can say that the idea of an "alpha wolf" is based on flawed science that has long since been debunked.

Web Video

• Critical Role: Played for Laughs in Campaign 3, when Chetney tells the party that his tattoo, "RTA", stands for "Recognize the Alpha", and is based on the mentality of Alpha and Beta Wolves. Dungeon Master Matt gets so frustrated that he has Imogen make an extremely low DC Intelligence check just so he can explain to the audience that the idea of alpha and beta wolves is based on completely debunked science and certainly doesn't apply to people.
• Just A Pancake does this in his 'in a nutshell' of Dream Drop Distance.
  Ansem: Darkness within darkness awaits you
  Pancake: Okay, time out! Who the hell wrote these scripts? I mean, really! Darkness within darkness? Darkness within freaking darkness?!
• Moonkitti has a sketch where Ashfur details all the problems with labradoodles and goldendoodles (their constant need for attention and exercise, a refusal to breed and socialize them properly, owners who don't take proper care of them, etc.) to an extremely uninterested Squirrelflight. Moonkitti previously worked as a dog groomer and hated it, so she's clearly working through some stuff.

Western Animation

• Played for Laughs in Batman: The Brave and the Bold: the first Bat-Mite episode cuts away to a comics convention where Bat-Mite explains to the audience that this series' lighthearted and goofy version of Batman is just as valid a use of the source material as more grim adaptations of the character, in reference to fans who have been complaining that Brave and the Bold should be more like Batman: The Animated Series. The episode was written by Paul Dini, who was the head writer for B:TAS.^note He even takes a playful jab at himself by inserting himself into the episode as a Cross Player dressed as Harley Quinn (Dini's frequent collaborator Bruce Timm appears standing next to him in Joker cosplay, BTW — and responds to Bat-Mite's speech with a grumpy "Meh.").
  "Batman's rich history allows him to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. To be sure, this is a lighter incarnation, but it's certainly no less valid and true to the character's roots than the tortured avenger crying out for mommy and daddy."
• Archer seems to do this when Archer and Krieger discuss the former's use of his medical marijuana. Archer, for no reason, goes on about how he endorses and encourages the use of it. Subverted when Krieger asks if he's talking about its medicinal properties, something Archer didn't even know about. later parodied at the end of a seventh-season episode where, after Archer and Cyril have undertaken (and barely survived) a dangerous job in hopes of getting Sterling's daughter a letter of recommendation to an exclusive private pre-pre-school program, Archer gives a considerable speech to Lana about how, if a child is truly dedicated to their studies, a public-school education can be just as good as a private-school one... then admits, that, really, he just doesn't want to get stuck carpooling their daughter to and from the private school.
• Family Guy has done a lot of this in its post-revival episodes to express the writers' 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."
  • "The Juice is Loose" spends its entire runtime defending OJ Simpson. In the closing scenes, there's an explanation about how it's wrong to judge others... then it ends with OJ stabbing three people. The same episode has a literal filibuster, where the writers used up three minutes of their show to... play a Conway Twitty music video. The DVD commentary for that episode gleefully announces that they put the whole thing in there because people would assume that Fox was just not playing Family Guy.
  • Parodied in "Road To Germany", when Stewie mocks Brian after he makes a low-hanging Take That! towards the war in Iraq.
  • Quagmire's (in)famous "The Reason You Suck" Speech toward Brian in "Jerome is the New Black" seems to be a Lampshade Hanging and a calling out of the many times Brian has been used as an author mouthpiece.
  • "8 Simple Rules for Buying My Teenage Daughter" has Stewie launch into a long and vitriolic tirade about The Simpsons, particularly the "Mr. Plow" episode. It makes almost no sense in context (which is quite a feat, considering the show's long history of Big-Lipped Alligator Moments) and comes off more as something said out of bitterness and jealousy.
• South Park. Although sometimes with mocking, many episodes are about what Trey Parker and Matt Stone find wrong in the world.
  • This has become increasingly apparent in later seasons. In a scene from "Whale Whores", the in-universe Larry King breaks character and diverts attention from the scene just to talk about how much he (that is, Matt and Trey) hates the host of Whale Wars. A previous episode had a scene that made fun of Ghost Hunters by repeating the same joke over and over again, that did not contribute anything to the plot of the episode and was a throwaway gag for something like five whole minutes. In other words, South Park's instances of author filibuster have not only become more jarring and (even) less subtle, have become increasingly focused upon more minor topics (such as currently-popular TV shows or trends).
  • Ironically, South Park's actual morals are usually sarcastic and insincere, lampshaded in several episodes where the characters predict and rant against an upcoming moral following a series of misadventures. The sappy music as one of the characters (usually Stan or Kyle, though Cartman and other characters are sometimes given the moral for purposes of comedy and irony) lectures the entire town on some topic underscores the further aversion of this trope. It's possible that due to South Park's increasing reliance on themed episodes and their extremely rushed work schedule, this formula may just be a reliable way to end episodes.
• As it's gone on, Rick and Morty has made a habit of going on elongated rants disguised as jokes about religion being a sham, a scam or easily debunkable. Oftentimes stopping an episode for a minute or two to make sure the audience picks up on the message. One example would be the "Never Ricking Morty" where Story Master tells Jesus that Christianity is possibly based on a bunch of different Sumerian deities rolled up together.
• In the 2005 Ninja Turtles episode "Sons of the Silent Age," Donatello goes off on a rant about nuclear power and how awful it is. At one point he even makes a comparison between the Purple Dragons and a nearby power plant (which they destroy during the episode). Meanwhile, there is a guy on Mirage staff who is very much an environmentalist and has mentioned working some of his views into scripts in the comics and cartoons. This may very well be an example. The writer in question, Steve Murphy, was responsible for both the cited episode and the original comic from which it was adapted.
• One episode of Teen Titans Go! has Beast Boy search off to find his spirit animal. The entire episode plays up the "search" for a spirit animal like entering into a four-year college to get a diploma. The issue of having BB enter a two-year technical school to find his spirit animal is brought up as a plot point. In the end, BB finds his spirit animal and is handed a piece of paper certifying it after all the hardships he endured. The episode finishes out with Cyborg giving a rant about how pathetic our educational systems are to try and validate hundreds of thousands of students by giving them a piece of paper and throwing them into an empty economy and job market, and force them to spend the rest of their lives with financial debt that they in all likelihood will never get paid off.
• Scooby-Doo! and the Curse of the 13th Ghost and Scooby-Doo: Return to Zombie Island use Velma to give the writers’s pretty obvious stance on the real monsters and magic used in The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island: that they think real monsters and magic is a betrayal of the franchise, and they are now trying to “fix” it by retconning the supernatural phenomena with mundane explanations. This caused no shortage of divisiveness in the fandom since the original Zombie Island in particular is held in high regard for its refreshing Darker and Edgier take and legitimately helped save the franchise from extinction in the late 1990’s. As a result, reception of the latter film is very mixed since the film bills itself as a legacy sequel of the original film, but spends most of its time tearing down what it built in favor of a Lighter and Softer approach more akin to the original series. This stance against real monsters is also notably held by Derrick J. Wyatt, leading Art Director on Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, who campaigned against the show’s Myth Arc that had a genuine supernatural presence during production (for the record, he also hates Zombie Island, but likes 13 Ghosts in a So Bad, It's Good way).

Real Life

• From the annals of the United States Supreme Court:
  • We have Justice Harry Blackmun's seven-page paean to the sport of baseball opening his majority opinion in Flood v. Kuhn, 407 U.S. 258 (1972),^note Note to baseball fans: This decision indirectly led to the development of free agency in baseball. after which the whole thing becomes quite technical.^note To summarize: Justice Blackmun says, basically: "As I noted for seven pages, many baseball players have been repeatedly screwed over by the antitrust exemption, and really, baseball doesn't really deserve to have it, but we don't have the usual ways to get out of stare decisis, so we're just going to have to uphold the stupid old decision that established the exemption in the first place. Sorry, ballplayers; you'll have to go to Congress to fix your problem." Everyone thought that this was unbecoming of a major judicial decision. The justices who joined in Blackmun's opinion explicitly noted that they did not join in the opening seven pages. Blackmun defended himself by saying that he intended to show how baseball players were affected by the issues in the case and that the Court had started to take itself far too seriously and needed to lighten up a bit and show some humanity. Later in life, Blackmun said his only regret was that he left Hall of Famer Mel Ott out of his list of great baseball players.
  • A more serious filibuster is found in Davis v. Ayala, 576 U.S. 257 (2015), in which Justice Anthony Kennedy (in a case that was otherwise about the contentious but rather dry issue of whether a criminal defendant's lawyer has to be in the room when the judge is hearing a prosecutor's explanation for using a peremptory challenge in jury selection) wrote a five-page concurrence that started by noting that the man in question had been held in solitary confinement for about 25 years (which as any lawyer will tell you is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand in that case), and went on to explain in great detail that solitary confinement is an issue the court should really, really, really, really want to consider, and came just short of begging someone, anyone to challenge solitary confinement so the court would have an opportunity to deal with it. Unlike Blackmun's opinion in Flood, Kennedy's concurrence was generally met with serious consideration, if not outright approval.
• In Canadian court, one noted case was Meads v. Meads, 2012 ABQB 571, in which Justice J.D. Rooke ostensibly could have wrapped up the case in a neat bow with a few pages, but instead reached the breaking point and delivered, before the final verdict, a diatribe of well over a hundred pages, documenting what he calls 'OPCA ("organized pseudo-legal commercial argument") litigants'^note In other contexts, these may be more well-known as 'Sovereign Citizens' or 'Freemen on the Land', of whom the defendant was one. This wasn't intended merely as a diatribe against a growing flood of futile, annoying, and wasteful litigation; it was also designed to be a convenient compendium of commonly raised OPCA arguments and explanations of why they are (preposterously) wrong in law. The goal was to relieve counsel and other judges of the need to scour the jurisprudence for refutations of these arguments, as well as to provide a sort of very long explanatory pamphlet that can be given to self-represented litigants to dissuade them from trying to use OPCA strategies. As a result, the Meads decision has been used as precedent for many other cases, but some have noted that its confrontational and often dismissive tone has led to other Justices treating such cases more harshly than would otherwise be the case.
• Roger Waters already delivers enough political messages in song or between songs. But in the Us + Them Tour, there's a whole 20 minute intermission with no one on stage (Waters and the band rest, the technicians ready both the flying pig and the elaborate recreation of the Animals factory) while the big screen shows messages of resistance against whoever Waters opposes.

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