Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped/Anime and Manga

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Examples of Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped in Anime and Manga include:

• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
  • "The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection, and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow." - Washington Irving
  • The main anvil of the story: believe in your friends, who believe in you. Believe in you, who believes in yourself. Kick reason to the curb, and go do the impossible! There's basically nothing you can't accomplish if you set your mind to it and have the will and courage to back it up! In a world of pessimistic stories, belief that Good Is Dumb, and Anti Heroes, TTGL's anvils feel really refreshing to see out of a mecha series.
  • Another important one is that you can't run away from your problems. All of the antagonists are simply people that are dead scared of something -- the Anti-Spiral for Lordgenome and Rossiu, and the Spiral Nemesis for the Anti-Spiral, and think that locking people away will prevent the problem. Also, Simon's first reaction to danger at the beginning of the story is to dig a hole and hide. All of this never works, and it usually causes a lot of unnecessary(?) pain and suffering. As Kamina first, and Simon later, demonstrates, the best way to deal with your problems is to face them.
• G Gundam did the same.
  • Coming right after the depressing Victory Gundam, it showed that even in a Crapsack World where world peace is maintained only through a deathmatch tournament that one could fight to defend that which is close to you, win the respect of those you fight, and still come out on top in the end.
  • Possibly the purest expression of optimism in the series: "Humans aren't that foolish; there truly is NOT anyone stupid enough to do what they know will cause the destruction of everything."
  • There is another lesson that's pretty clear, even though Master Asia learned it the hard way. Try to justify your motives all you want, but siding with a genocidal monster is rarely ever a good idea.
• Gundam Wing: "War Is Hell, no matter for what reason you fight."
  • Endless Waltz: "Don't hold out for a hero", if you want peace you have to do something about it yourself."
• Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket: "War is not a game, and good people on both sides of it can be forced to kill each other."
• Gundam 00: "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
• Gundam SEED: The show's messages about racism and conflict escalation just wouldn't hit as hard if they didn't show the effects of Cyclops and Genesis on the human body. And even if one group of people were innately more capable than the rest, racism still wouldn't be okay.
• Gundam X: There is no fate, but what we make for ourselves.
• Turn a Gundam: Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
• Digimon Adventure: If you and other people have ended up in a very dangerous place, miles away from the nearest civilization, you all have to quickly learn how to work together as one and put all grivences aside in order to survive, or all of you are gonna get fucked. It's even more importent if half of your group have some psychological issues and There Are No Therapists around.
• Digimon Adventure 02: Sometimes, you have to use lethal force for the greater good, and to save innocent lives. The "If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him" mentality is just suicidal naivety at best and suicidal naivety with genocidal consequences at worst, and your enemies will gladly take advantage of it anytime they can if you don't grow up and see the reality.
• Digimon Tamers: Life is life, regardless of whether it's organic or virtual.
  • And internet censorship is stupid and wrong.
• With the Light all but screams to the world, "Autistics are not sick! They can become honest, hardworking members of society, and they will! They don't need a cure, they need to be encouraged and loved!" It took an entire society (one classroom of students, several teachers, a few social workers, and a big family) to get Hikari into middle school, and it certainly wasn't easy, but it had nothing if not a positive impact on those near him.
• Paranoia Agent, a series about accepting reality as it is, features in its final episode an unspeakably creepy town made of cardboard cutouts that one of the characters smashes to nothing in six swings of a baseball bat. The absolute unambiguity of it makes the anti-escapist message feel clear, clean, and right.
• Great Teacher Onizuka: Do your Best, Be Independent, Be A Man (even if you're a woman...) And it's better to try and fail than to refuse to try because of uncertainty.
• Pet Shop of Horrors drops Anvils about animals in general. In general, there were a number of heavy-handed Aesops about human/pet relationships and how people need to see their pets as companions to be loved rather than stupid animals to be exploited or abused, as any animal rescue show can attest.
  • A particularly roundabout one was dropped with the chapter "Dreizehn". A young woman named Karen goes to Count D's shop for a seeing-eye dog with experience in protection as well, after a fire that killed her parents and traumatized her so much she went blind. The titular Doberman chosen for this purpose not only looks human, but feels human, too — to Karen's shock. After she gets used to it, a slightly awkward conversation ensues in which he agrees to let her "see" him by touching his face; after several panels, she comes across his ears. Prior to this, Dreizehn had not been shown as a dog, and as a human, his hair covered his ears — which had been cut into sharp points. Horrified, Karen questions this and brings to light the practice of cropping dogs' ears from a dog's perspective, made even more disturbing when Dreizehn assures her that since it was done when he was young (a puppy!), "It doesn't hurt anymore." To drive home the Anvil, there is a short passage in the back reflecting upon the fact that some people refuse to acknowledge Dobermans with natural ears because they don't look like real Dobermans.
  • Pet Shop also has a lot to say about humanity, particularly in the final volume of the first series, at the end of which Leon manages to make his way onto the Count's ship only to be told that "humans have not yet earned the right to be on this ship" before being pushed off the side, only to wake up unharmed.
• The Macross franchise; The Power of Love and the beauty of human culture shall overcome all, even the unstoppable marauding alien death fleets that were designed only for war, or at the very least distract them long enough to give humanity an opening to use reaction weapons.
• Fullmetal Alchemist.
  • There are numerous scenes in the anime where characters pause mid-battle or delay combat in order to stand around preaching their own philosophies at each other—notably Ed and his pro-science stance. And, somehow, not only does it work, but the story would fail without it. The manga does this with more subtlety, but the tone and stories of the two are quite different. It helps that the morality is not especially anvilicious, as the characters struggle to figure out what morality is right at all.
  • There are three major themes in the manga: tolerance, the Cycle of Hatred, and the fact that the military is for the protection of the people. The basic aesop is "Genocide is bad". All the more powerful because much of the traumatic scenes are based on testimony from Japanese veterans and the persecuted Ainu.
  • Also, ordinary people are capable of doing horrible things in the right circumstances, but can also redeem themselves and make up for their mistakes.
  • And "redemption is not death": you can always do the right thing, no matter what wrongs you've committed in the past. Scar lives through the series, even though any other series would have killed off a death seeking serial killer out for revenge. Hohenheim's offer to sacrifice his life for Al is turned down, and he gets to die a (more or less) natural death. Mustang both wants to change the country and wants to be tried for war crimes.
  • Another big anvil was the lesson that Scar and Winry learned, and that's the difference between enduring evil deeds and forgiving evil deeds.
  • "Keeping moving forward."
• Sailor Moon S is essentially one long Aesop on expedience vs. morality: Doing what is easy, and possibly justifiable, versus doing what's right.
  • Sailor Moon R's one long Aesop: Your family bonds are important (obviously this lesson does not apply to people who actually have parents who abuse them or something, it's just a general Aesop). Trust your family even when there's a conflict; Diamond didn't trust Sapphire until it was too late, and lost his brother as a result. Chibi-Usa resented her parents both for not helping her up when she fell as a child and in general not being around sometimes and leaving her lonely; unfortunately she let this fester instead of directly asking her parents what motivated them to act as they did, and Wiseman turned that to his advantage to brainwash Chibi-Usa into Black Lady. Mamoru didn't trust Usagi to be able to protect herself after Mamoru was shown a vision of Usagi's death, and Mamoru chose to handle it by breaking up with Usagi without trusting her with the truth about why he was doing it. This almost made Usagi vulnerable to being brainwashed by Wiseman when he tried to trick her into thinking Mamoru loved Black Lady instead, but Usagi's own ease to trust her loved ones overcame the brainwashing and it didn't work.
• Mushishi delivers a striking overall theme: all life is fundamentally equal. There is no 'evil' in nature, only living things doing what they have to do to survive. The whole message of Grey and Grey Morality and naturalistic beauty is sent with surprising subtlety. Even creatures that seem horrible (invasive fungi, scavengers, parasites, etc.,) are still living things, and should be respected as such. There's no evil in nature, only a collection of organisms doing what they were born to do.
• The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance pre-emptively drops quite a few anvils in favor of granting sentient machines civil rights. Comparisons are made to other civil rights struggles, like the Amistad, Those Wacky Nazis, the Chinese democracy movement, and even Exodus.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has one really good anvil that it keeps dropping consistently: it doesn't matter what someone's background is, it doesn't matter how they were born, it doesn't matter where they came from, it doesn't matter what they're fighting for, and hell, it doesn't even matter if they're not technically classifiable as human. Everyone is a person, with just as much potential to be good as anyone else, and no matter what else, they deserve to be treated with compassion and love.
• Grenadier has the message that one should always try to find a peaceful solution to conflicts, whenever possible. The series is largely about Rushuna's inner struggle to find out where the line should be drawn.
• Grave of the Fireflies:
  • War has awful consequences, even on those not actually fighting it.
  • Honor Before Reason is a bad idea when you're in a city with no infrastructure that almost burned to the ground.
• Legend of Galactic Heroes:
  • Nationalism and religious extremism are not legitimate ideologies, they are cheap propaganda ploys used by demagogues to gain and retain control over the people. While most of the show retains a Grey and Gray Morality, the smug snakes are either nationalist leaders or fundamentalist leaders who do not believe a word of what they say and feel nothing but scorn toward their followers.
  • The story shows us how a young republic who managed to fight toe to toe with its much older, bigger, dictatorial neighbour ultimately collapses because its citizens elected nationalist politicians. On top of that, the narrator, and sometimes even Poplan, of all people, spend some time to hammer it again and again and again.
  • In the case of Nationalism, it's not so much love of country that is rebuked; indeed, many characters on both sides show patriotism to their respective countries and ideologies. Rather, it's on the more hardline, destructive forms which formed part of the reason why the war began in the first place.
• One Piece has three for the price of one:
  • "The "Justice" is defined by the winners", iterated by one of the villains, Donquixote Doflamingo.
  • "The dreams of men will never die!", again literally said word-for-word by future Big Bad Blackbeard.
  • One especially for the shippers, "There is NO way that the innocent, naive hero will EVER take an incredibly hot Amazonian empress as his lover... but it's sure as hell funny to see her try!"
  • Also, take care of your friends. One of those things that just cannot be repeated enough, especially in the shallowness of the modern world.
  • The "Fishman Island" arc shows the consequences of letting hatred fester in society.
• Higurashi no Naku Koro ni
  • In Tsumihoroboshi-hen: Everyone has embarrassing secrets that they want to hide, and that's okay. In fact, there's nothing to accomplish by confessing some of them.
  • Also, trust your friends, talk to them, and don't take all your problems onto yourself, or things will quickly spiral out of control.
  • And, like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, no matter how hopeless things seem, determination can get you through them.
• Cowboy Bebop:
  • "Don't leave things in the fridge."
  • "Bruce Lee is the baddest mother that ever lived."
  • Don't give up your new home to chase the ghost of your old home.
• Samurai Champloo uses the character Isaac to address both weaboo idealization of Japan, as well as Japan's own tendency to gloss over the past. Isaac is a Dutch ambassador who loves Japanese culture, and as a Invisible to Gaydar, he can practice his sexuality there, which during this time would be punishable by death in Europe. However, Issac needs to disguise himself when out in public in Japan, as this was a period where foreigners were prohibited outside of a small "safe zone" (note the series's related discussion of the persecution of Japanese Christians during this era). Isaac ultimately comments that both Japan and the West have screwed up features, albeit in different ways.
• Irresponsible Captain Tylor: "Life is too short to live by someone else's rules. Do what you want to the way that you want to."
• Bigger than and encompassing its more famous Green Aesop, Tokyo Mew Mew has "Even if it isn't your fault and it isn't fair that you're involved in the first place, don't ignore or write off the injustice that you see; take responsibility for fixing it, because no one else will."
• The Mahou Sensei Negima series as a whole seems to have the message "Don't dwell on the past; keep moving forward".
  • The Mahorafest arc ultimately boils down to "You can't always be sure that you're doing the right thing, but you need to give it your all anyway or you'll never accomplish anything, good or bad." Alternately, "Sometimes, you just have to stick to your guns even if you aren't sure you're right."
  • "I will... continue to step forward!"
• Tokyo Babylon: The manga drops more than a few anvils directed at Japan (at the time the manga was written) specifically, relating to how Japanese society handles bullying, the mentally ill, rape victims, and immigrants. They don't really propose solutions all of the time, but the idea is put out there.
• School Days: Sleeping with someone under the guise of a relationship and then proceeding to ditch them without any warning for another person is not cool at all.
• School Rumble. The first person you fall in love with will not be your last. Hell, the person you fall in love with now might lead you to the one you will love for the rest of your life.
• Ah! My Goddess:
  • Emotional maturity is awesome. Two people who trust each other will have no problem finding happiness.
  • Also, Urd's line: "My sister's not a doll, Keiichi. She has emotions, including that one."
• Trigun. Killing is wrong. Even when it's necessary, its still wrong. You just have to accept the stain on your soul.
• Now and Then, Here and There: War Is Hell for civilians and children. Especially when the children are the ones fighting the war. There is a very good reason why this series is listed right up there with Grave of the Fireflies in terms of tear jerkers and gut-wrenching child cruelty.
• You can pretty much sum Death Note up with two words: "Power corrupts". Or four: "Absolute power corrupts absolutely".
• Future War 198X can be summed up with "War and nukes are bad." It also completely broke the Nuclear Weapons Taboo, and its distribution in East and West Germany was all the more fitting back in the tensest times of the eighties.
• Naruto: Under its Fantastic Aesop about not creating a Laser Guided Tykebomb, there is a very strong message about the need for parental figures in a child's life.
  • And the Cycle of Hatred, particularly in Sasuke's story.
  • And there's also the fact that you have to always believe in yourself. If the world says you're stupid, don't stop studying; if the world says you're weak, never stop getting stronger; if the world says you're a monster, become a hero. There is a constant dichotomy between Naruto and those he inspires, and those who give in to the hatred, loathing and darkness... And a truly inspiring message that, no matter how far you may have fallen, if you're willing to try you can still find the light again.
  • And that it's an extremely scary thing that the generation that has seen the horrors of nuclear weapons being used against people is dying off, because humanity may forget how terrible they really are and use them in the next war.
• Tanaka Yutaka's stories show how communication, honesty and trust in a relationship works, and the lack thereof doesn't.
• Elfen Lied: To sum it up: "Love your neighbor as yourself".
• After it's Genre Shift, Kinnikuman continually attempts to burn in the message that "Friendship is a really good thing." Even the villains value friendship in the series.
• Monster teaches that Forgiveness is always important, even in the face of someone as unspeakably evil as Johan Liebert. It also makes clear that it is never too late to start anew, which is displayed by the number of people attempting to atone for past sins, or people like Nina, who has been through such horrible trauma, yet puts the pieces of her life back together and attempts to live a normal life.
• Shugo Chara. Love and compassion are very much important, and it acknowledges this too. (Especially within the second season, particularly near - by the end.) However, having fun and doing what you want to do, are equally important, rather than just doing as others say, or proving their judgements of you and what they tell you you can do. Also, afore - said loving other people should not be done just because it's accepted within general, but because you actually want to help and believe within them, and because it just isn't right to make harm towards personages.
  • Also, within the second season, it is 'not' a good piece to keep your problems from others, even if you think it's better for them, due towards the fact that doing so is never going to help 'any - thing', let alone them. Amu, Ikuto and gozen become the prime targets towards this, within ascending order of severity. Although, if it's really, 'really' probable that going some - where involved within as such is going to potentially harm them/some - one other involved as said as such, and not due towards some annoying fear, then it may be best to not do so.
• Barefoot Gen: Nuclear weapons and war are bad. To get the point across, allow us to traumatize you for life. There is more in the manga about the following occupation and the treatment of the nuclear attack survivors, too. And all of this is based on the author's own life. All of this horrifying shit really happened.
• Kyo Kara Maoh: No matter how different two groups are or how much bad history they have between them, it IS possible for them to live together peacefully.
• Uchuu Senkan Yamato/Star Blazers: No matter how necessary a war may be, people are going to suffer. Turnabout isn't fair play; killing is and always will be wrong. There often isn't a clear difference between the good guys and bad guys, in the end. Revenge is a slippery slope that will never, under any circumstances, make you happy.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Everyone desperately needs to be loved and accepted, from their families, their friends, and the people around them. Otherwise they'll end up as screwed up as these people.
  • If you know yourself you can take care of yourself.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Making other people happy often requires you to sacrifice your own happiness in exchange and doing selfless acts for selfish reasons will usually backfire.
  • Also, Read the Freaking Manual before you attempt to fix something.

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