Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped/Headscratchers


 * Sometimes I see links to this trope when most people would agree with the anvil being dropped. In which case... why does it need to be dropped? People clearly already get it.
 * Because sometimes just "agreeing" with something isn't enough; it's about reminding people why they agree with these anvils. It's easy to forget the "why" part. For example, most people would probably agree that, say, the Nazis were bad, and they'd probably be able to give a solid answer why. But it probably wouldn't be a very emotive answer, because for most people the Second World War and the Nazis are by now something remote and distant and hard to connect with. Write a novel wherein the characters these people are able to relate to are suffering directly at the hands of the Nazis, however, and you can bring it closer to home exactly why we view the Nazis as being evil, more than you necessarily could just by reading a more abstract history on the subject.
 * Actually no, it's because of trope decay, because as mentioned above, it has nothing to do with whether people agree with the message. It has to do with how it works In-Universe. People say J. K. Rowling's stance on racism made her story more effective. Almost everyone agrees racism is bad. Hence: some anvils need to be dropped (for the record, that page is desperately in need of a name change).
 * And in some cases, to avoid Do Not Do This Cool Thing. For example, Pleasantville was quite blunt in its message of "The good times you felt in your childhood were not as great as you think they are." This is because if it weren't obvious, a lot of its audience would see the idyllic 50s Suburbia Sitcom setting as something to strive for because life is so peaceful and innocent, rather than the sterile, meaningless, and stagnant world that it was.
 * That's you're opinion. The '50s may be portrayed too nostalgically, but right now can be described as crude, shallow, meaningless, and (if the entertainment industry is any indication) increasingly unimaginative (read: boring as hell).
 * Here's the thing: it didn't work. Yes, Pleasantville was blunt, but if the intention was to keep people from thinking the fifties were great and feeling nostalgic for them anyway, well, some did that anyway and just complained the movie got it wrong. That's exactly why this trope is so pointless... you can turn your point into a giant anvil and smash people in the face with it all day long, but if they were going to get it they didn't need the anvil, and if they weren't going to get it the anvil's not going to work anyway.
 * It mostly depends on how relevant it is to the real world and/or how strongly people feel about it. Oh, and how many people feel strongly about it.
 * It's essentially intellectual masturbation. "I like this anvil! I agree with this anvil! So it was so important that it be dropped!" Generally, not really. Most of the uses of this trope on the wiki apply to differences of opinion or issues that are decades or even centuries out of date. It's basically the tropes opinion of a tumblr reblog saying "This is so important you guys".
 * Sometimes, yes. Often, no - dropping the anvil makes the message clear in a way that no amount of sugarcoating can. See the Second World War discussion above for one example. For another, consider the residential schools that natives were forced to attend in Canada: yes, we all know that taking children away from their parents and raising them in a different culture is wrong, but we don't know how wrong it was and how much damage it did (and is still doing decades after the program was ended) without having the anvil dropped on us.
 * I'm pretty sure we are perfectly capable of knowing and/or learning that without someone shoving it in our faces and going "THIS WAS BAD, M'KAY?!" As someone once said, there's a reason the Wikipedia article for Adolf Hitler doesn't start out with "Hitler was a very bad man." Either you can look at the facts presented and come to that conclusion yourself, or you're not bright enough/too evil to do so even if you're told directly. Part of the shallowness of support of this trope comes from the binary viewpoint that the only two ways to deal with a subject are by extreme subtlety (which the viewers are surely too stupid to comprehend afterall) and the emotional equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb on someone. You could, for example, show the impact that residential schools have had on various people, have them discussing their experiences, and reveal the sort of abuse and intolerance that went on in them. That would all serve perfectly well to demonstrate the problem without tacking on, say, ten minutes of people wailing, weeping, and children screaming "MOMMY! MOOOOOMMYYYYYY!" If you couldn't get the point without the emotional manipulation, you probably aren't going to care with it.