Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Examples of Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped in Real Life include:

  • The "It Gets Better" series of YouTube videos to prevent gay teen suicide.
  • Iris Chang's book The Rape of Nanjing, exposing atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in WWII. To say it's anvilicious is putting it lightly—it may be one of the most horribly biased and flawed books on history ever written. But it did happen, and her book has opened the floodgate.
  • Some person was kind enough to post a great Patrick Stewart Speech in the Real Life section here.
  • Anything dealing with proper Gun Safety.
  • The Bible is, pretty much by definition, preachy (especially when used by preachers), but some messages like "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." is about as blunt as you can get, but it's hard to argue against love for others. Jesus used plenty of parables, metaphors, and symbolic language, but there were times when something needed to be stated in simple and plain English (well, Aramaic).
    • The Passion episode alone is full of these, and these are shown rather than told: "What matters is not that you fall down, but that you get up again", "Herd mentality will lead to unfortunate consequences", "The ability to feel pain is a good thing", and most important of all, "Good will always triumph over evil".
      • This is also in turn equally applicable to the other two holy books of the Abrahamic faiths.
  • The growing campaign against drinking and driving can be rather over-the-top (especially the commercials), but if it gets more drunk people to stay off the road, more power to them.
  • The "Give A Damn" campaign, similar to the "It Gets Better" series mentioned above.
  • Cleopatra's Nose. An anvil that can't be dropped hard enough: You don't need to look like everyone else to be beautiful. You have to look like you to be beautiful.
  • Sex Education.
  • Losing the Race by John McWhorter is about how some African-Americans' attitudes of self-victimization, blaming white people and glorifying ignorance are leading poor black Americans to fail before they even start to break free of poverty. While the book does feature a few Author Tract moments, the message of "stop blaming everyone else for your lot in life and work hard to improve it, no matter what" cannot be stated enough.