Discussion Main / AuthorTract

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Complaining, started by Abodos on May 18th 2012 at 7:49:22 AM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Just like Stoogebie & johnnye said, why this trope exist? Imo, this trope is just An Aesop but written poorly.

Edited by SeekerSS

Removed these because they sound like examples of Author on Board rather than an entire work being made to push a viewpoint:

• He was also critical of the Japanese feudal system, as shown in Seven Samurai when samurai wannabe Kikuchiyo vents out his rage to the samurai about why the farmers are so deceptive and mean.

• Jonathan Demme was reluctant to direct The Silence of the Lambs because he didn't want to glorify the FBI, who he regarded unfavorably because of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wiretapping Martin Luther King. Never mind that Hoover had been dead for nearly 20 years. You can see his anti-FBI stance in his previous movie Married to the Mob where Michelle Pfeiffer's character is secretly bugged by the FBI and they are viewed as just as big villains as the mob. Pfeiffer even has a line after she's forced to be a witness or go to prison, to the "You and the mob, you're just the same!" In Silence of the Lambs they mention Clarice asked her boss about Hoover's illegal wiretapping when she was a student and he was lecturing at her university.

Would adding Rampage 2:Capital Punishment be alright? From what i'm hearing it seems like a bit of a tract from Uwe Boll.

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Removed:

• And in Next, he used a page in the book as a Take That! against someone who wrote a critical review of State Of Fear examining his views on global warming. On said page, he devotes a paragraph to mentioning a character with the same name as the reviewer, who just happens to be a child molester with a small penis. The character appears and then vanishes as suddenly.

This doesn't seem to be an author tract. It's a single character in a single paragraph on a single page.

Removed this from the Starship Troopers bit.

• Also, the novel is very pro-military in general, but it was more about Heinein's ideas of how the military should be (as well as the associated political/philosophical ideas being pushed) than being pro military.

It's very pro-military, but actually it's not so much pro-military per se... I'm sorry, what?

Wanted to add a passage to the description:

If you want to write an author tract, staying near the lighter ends of the morality spectrum — White-and-Grey Morality, White And White Morality — will help the message go down easier, and minimize the feeling of skeptical readers that you're stacking the deck.

But I want to run it by other people first. If it's not the sort of thing that belongs, I won't put it in.

The child is father to the man —Oedipus Hide / Show Replies

What's so wrong with this trope? It really sounds like anyone who dares to put in An Aesop to give their work some extra meaning are pathetic zealots who just want to preach! Would it be fair to say that any work of fiction that has a sort of underlying message (particularly if it doesn't fly with some people) would pretty much be this? I'm just saying...

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I'm confused over the idea that the universe needs to be created in order to do this. "Note that this only applies when the entire universe and characters have been created to put forward the author's viewpoint. If an existing fictional universe or character has been altered to create a medium for a tract, then it's due to a Writer on Board (Author Filibuster is an extreme example of that)." How does this affect interpretations of the real world, where authors predict or stress a certain possibility? Most examples seem to me not to be separate universes. Point in case: H. G. Wells has written numerous novellas with predictions of how civilization will destroy itself. It's ideological science fiction, but does not always create new worlds so much as describes possibilities for the real world. Examples: The Time Machine, The World Set Free, The War in the Air, etc. The narrator often explains why things will happen/happened like this. Is this then closer to Authoron Board?

Depending on the circumstances, you should be hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing as water, or as empty as space.

Deleted the Moral Dissonance bit from the Naruto example. Does not apply.

Removed:

• The Narnia books, in which children go to the land and have adventures with Aslan the Lion, who is basically Alternate Universe Talking Animal Jesus. He generally keeps it in subtext, but makes it extremely blatant at some points, such as Aslan saying to the kids at the end of the third book that he is "known by another name" in their world. The final Narnia novel goes even further by having Aslan outright state that he is known as "the lamb" on Earth, and having the main characters follow him into Heaven.
• Word of God... ahem... in this case claims it didn't start out that way. Lewis said that he didn't set out to write the Narnia books as a religious parable, but that he had converted to Christianity (due to Tolkien!) at the time and his feelings about religion just found their way into his work. Obviously he had noticed it and was playing it up by the end, but it explains why it was more subtle early on.

I don't think putting religious themes in your books automatically makes it an author tract. This is a trope about the author lecturing you to convince you to come around to their point of view. The other bullet point about the Hollywood Atheist in one of the Narnia books fits because it's obvious that Lewis is making a statement against atheism.

Reading through the examples, there's something I noticed. If the example is right-wing, they're complained about and their portrayals of the other side are claimed to be over-the-top, but if they're left-wing, Tropes Are Not Bad is stressed and they're portrayed positively and their negative portrayals of the other side aren't decried, no matter how preachy, Anvilicious, inflammatory, and over-the-top.

Edited by doomsday524 He who has a why to live can bear almost any how -Neitzsche (I know) Hide / Show Replies

• Steven Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen has always been filled with navel-gazing philosophy (usually of the wangsty kind), but for the first seven books it was at least the characters doing it, and sometimes not without reason. But in book eight, Toll the Hounds, we have long ramblings in omniscient voice, and it becomes painfully obvious that Erikson is trying to push his allegedly deep insights regarding the world on the reader. Perhaps the most Anvilicious example is p.617 (hardback version), where Erikson has the audacity to, in omniscient voice, use the phrase: "And this is the lesson here, dear friends."
  • The parts of Toll the Hounds where the readers seem to be directly addressed are actually told by Kruppe (who, as we know since the very first book, just loves the sound of his own voice).

I removed this because the comment below it seems to contradict the entry. If someone knows this series and thinks that it's an example, could you please convert it to a single entry?

Are you sure Duck Tales really gave an Author Tract about unions, or is it just someone's interpretation of the episode?

Edited by doomsday524 He who has a why to live can bear almost any how -Neitzsche (I know)

• "The Truth for Youth" by Tim Todd are comics done in Japanese style artwork. They're like Chick Tracts, but a bit more sane. It's pretty odd to read Japanese-style characters talking about the evils of porn.

Oh TV Tropes, sometimes you say the funniest things! What about the outrage over how not All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles?

"Instead of creating fiction for its primary purpose (entertaining people)"

Interesting statement - surely the primary purpose of fiction can only be determined on a per-instance basis? Generalizing over such a broad scope of works isn't usually very useful. Also, negative tone of the line does contradict with Tropes Are Not Bad.

Edited by Shados

• El Goonish Shive does this in regards to homosexuality, public nudity, and related issues.

I'm not sure whether this is an example. It is certainly heavy enough to chase readers who disagree away from the comic (myself included) early on, but I don't know if this changed significantly later on.

Any help?

Dropped these comments from Better Days — it's better if individual examples don't wander off into discucsions of whole sub-genres or other works.

• Better Days is a 'furry' comic, and they do tend towards Author Tract. Jack, anyone?
  • True, but take a good furry webcomic, like 2kinds. It's a statement against racism with loveable characters overcoming differences and becoming friends. Better days basically turned from a mild Author Tract about conservatism (actually pretty interesting) into a massively wanky self-inserted-fantasy-persona.

Edited by Camacan

I don't really know anything about Doctor Steel, but I find the example listed rather dubious. I highly suspect that this is Not An Example.

Fanfiction I hate.

I can kind of see why Avatar's page got locked now. Apparently, people have put a license to whine ahead of explaining.

Edited by 94.9.139.139

Mmm. You know, I'd say that, for instance, Jingo is much more obviously an Author Tract than Nation. Or, hey, if we want to talk about Pterry's view of religion, how about Small Gods? But honestly, it never occured to me religion was even a major theme of Nation (despite Mau's Pterry/Simony style "angry at God for not existing" atheism), let alone that it was a tract on the subject.