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Filibuster Freefall
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Art tends to draw extreme personalities. Regardless of their politics, creative types usually have their ideas and stick to them. Sometimes these ideas are central to the work; sometimes they're more subtle or peripheral. There are some cases, however, where their ideas start out subtle or peripheral, only to later become central. Suddenly, you're cracking open the latest book in a fantasy series and there's a hundred page section on how people wearing funny hats on Sunday should be sentenced to death by firing squad. Where once there was just military action, there are now long sections on the moral failings of the Clinton administration. Something has changed, and the author has ended up firmly in Filibuster Freefall. Remember that Tropes Are Tools; sometimes this change can be a good thing, or even the Growing the Beard moment for the series as a whole. In some cases, creators can find inspiration that was lacking before by diving into political, religious, and cultural issues that they are passionate about, and produce work that's interesting where it had once been growing dull, precisely because it is offering bold takes on these subjects. These changes do, however, often result in backlash, particularly if fans preferred the work the way it was before or if the newly-central ideas and politics are particularly divisive. The phenomenon was first noted by author James Nicoll on the rec.arts.sf newsgroup and dubbed "The Brain Eater" (not to be confused with the trope about eating brains). It can be the result of Protection from Editors, which allows the author to freely enter Author Tract territory or spout off on their views without fear of repercussion. For interest of clarification, it does not apply to authors who have always discoursed on their political positions in their works or which began as an Author Tract. For Filibuster Freefall to apply, there has to have been a change - a point where the author's ideas or politics suddenly became central when they previously were not. If this is limited to one work or series rather than the author's entire body of work, the work has undergone Issue Drift. This may be the reason for Seasonal Rot. Franchise Original Sin is a related trope, in which various elements (including the plot turning into an Author Tract) that were manageable before start to take over a story to its detriment. See also Audience-Alienating Era and Overshadowed by Controversy. |
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Marville went from an unfunny Shallow Parody to an even more unfunny Author Tract about evolution and the comic book industry, or something. No one thinks the change was for the better, even though no one actually liked what came before. | |
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The Weekly Planet and its sister video series Caravan Of Garbage has always had a running gag of host James (Mr. Sunday Movies) going off on rants, but as time has gone on, the podcast/video has been more and more willing to outright yell about its fairly progressive leanings, well-aware that the whole Youtube commentator/comic book fan crowd often pushes back on anything considered "woke." This is lampshaded in the podcast by the effectively summarizing the situation as getting large enough and being asked his opinions enough that he's willing to "shed some listeners" to share his opinions, and in particular a Youtube video that was just a frothing screed telling people to get the COVID-19 vaccination. | |
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Better Days was a furry comic that started off as a story about the constant struggles of a family of anthropomorphic cats. While it did have some strange themes (including an incest storyline), it was all Played for Drama and dealt with the fallout in a realistic manner. Then, author Jay Naylor's Objectivist viewpoints took over the comic partway through, and main character Fisk Black went straight into God-Mode Sue territory as the one who acted as Naylor's mouthpiece. When the comic ended, Naylor created a Sequel Series called Original Life, which he promised would be Lighter and Softer compared to Better Days. But Original Life went straight into the Objectivist themes again almost immediately (most notably during the infamous "Muffin Arc"), along with doses of the author's anti-religious viewpoints. | |
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Meanwhile, the sixth book, 2022's The Ink Black Heart, is about the creator of a popular children's webtoon who gets murdered after a Loony Fan leads a vicious, grossly disproportionate Internet Counterattack against her, including accusations of ableism and racism. Given Rowling's increasingly controversial public persona and her background as the author of a popular series of children's novels, many critics read the book as a particularly mean-spirited Roman à Clef for the backlash that she herself had received for her transphobia. | |
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Google Translate Sings started out as just being a place to play with "Blind Idiot" Translation, but towards the end of The New '10s, things began to take a turn, first towards venting personal frustrations about matters like Donald Trump, climate change, and the COVID-19 Pandemic, first in the "Honest Christmas Song" videos, then that venting slipping into the translations — an egregious example being the translation of Hey There Delilah, in which the phrase "What's wrong with you" pops up numerous times, each accompanied by text listing people supporting these frustrations. | |
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The Daily Show during the tenure of Jon Stewart is often regarded as a positive example of this. Starting out as a basic News Parody program, the show took a turn towards political commentary in the wake of the 2000 US Presidential election and especially after 9/11. Far from derailing the show, this shift is often cited as when it came into its own, transforming from lighthearted fluff into a stinging satire of American politics and culture, one that helped make Stewart into a household name and the show into a destination where politicians and pundits would engage in actual (albeit still comedic) policy debate. | |
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Sinfest started out as an adult-oriented, gag-a-day humor strip, albeit one that nevertheless commented on a variety of political and social issues. In the early 2010s, however, it shifted to a second-wave feminist theme that was highly critical of pornography and sex work in particular, a shift that alienated much of its audience, which leaned strongly towards the sex positivity of the rising third-wave feminist movement. In 2019, it added extreme anti-trans and (to a lesser extent) anti-surrogacy views to the mix, which it followed up in 2020 by tilting hard into "anti-woke" right-wing culture war politics and conspiracy theories that served as a sharp 180-degree turn away from the progressive politics it used to support. The strip's creator Tatsuya Ishida being a poster boy for a Reclusive Artist, the reason for these changes remains unknown. Grey Carter goes into more detail here, describing Sinfest as a case of a "passionate person [who] gets ass deep in [a] pet issue to the point it alienates everyone around them." By February 2024, Sinfest had become unrecognizable with the introduction of antisemitic themes, the strip's message having reached what can only be described as a final frontier. Where Tats' direction will go from here is yet to be seen. | |
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Minna Sundberg's first two major works, A Redtail's Dream and Stand Still, Stay Silent, were apolitical fantasy stories steeped in Scandinavian culture and history. However, Sundberg became a born-again Christian while working on the second webcomic, leading her to announce its abrupt conclusion because it no longer reflected her new religious values. Her third webcomic, Lovely People, heavily reflects this change, railing against political correctness, consumerism, atheism, and having the ultimate lesson that only complete devotion in God and Christ can lead people to salvation. Her following webcomics also followed this same type of strict adherence to evangelical Christian beliefs and storylines. | |
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JP Sears started his career as a self-described "spiritual as fuck" comedian in 2014, his main shtick being an Affectionate Parody of New Age spirituality and wellness culture. His politics trended broadly libertarian, but often weren't the main focus and weren't outside the ordinary for internet humor in the mid-late 2010s. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, however, Sears became better known as an activist against the public health measures taken to control the spread of the virus, particularly vaccines, and by 2021 his material became increasingly focused on promoting anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and quack cures for the virus. | |
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While the Silent Hill video games haven't gone through this, their main fandom wiki experienced a case of it. In late 2015, the administrator of the wiki known as AlexShepard (after the protagonist in Silent Hill: Homecoming) developed an obsession with circumcision, viewing it as part of a Satanic/Illuminati plot and the games as having been devoted to exposing this great evil in society. As such, he started rewriting articles to add his Epileptic Trees, presenting them as though they were the canonical interpretations of the games. Since he was the admin, the other users and moderators couldn't do a thing about it without seeing their edits reverted and the pages protected, with AlexShepard lashing out at anybody who protested by claiming that they had been brainwashed by The Illuminati. As news of the meltdown spread across the internet, it threatened to stain the reputation of the entire franchise. The rest of the wiki eventually had to appeal to the administration at hosting platform Wikia itself in order to get AlexShepard stripped of his admin powers and permanently banned from the site. | |
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Shad of Shadiversity started his career examining historical weapons, armor, and buildings, fantasy weapons in light of Historical European Martial Arts, and many science-fiction and fantasy tropes; all his videos made little, if any, mention of his conservative stances. Over time, Shad became more open about his conservative leanings and freely expresses this on Knights Watch, his spin-off channel (he tends to keep his main channel apolitical and focused on medieval history, weaponry, and fantasy and only expresses his views if he finds them relevant to his commentary). For example, Shad has a strong stance on how girls who can fight are portrayed in media, stemming from his traditional stance on women, like how women on average tend to be physically weaker and more expressive about their feelings than men. He faults Captain Marvel for her lack of emotional vulnerabilities, saying that it gives her the personality of a stump of wood. On the other hand, Alita is just as capable of fighting, and yet her moments of vulnerability make her a more "human" and relatable character. Likewise, Shad made a video touting He-Man as a symbol of "Virtuous Masculinity" who is worthy of imitation. | |
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One of the most infamous examples in all of comics-dom, Cerebus the Aardvark. Starting as a look at the life of an aardvark hero and his brushes against society as a whole, the comic took a noticeable change in direction after author Dave Sim underwent a nasty divorce. From that point on, there was a lot of Abrahamic fiddling and angry rants about how anything with a vagina drains the warmth and creativity from the world. | |
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The Onion's politics were always generally left-leaning, but they were even-handed in their satire and jabs, being as willing to make fun of politicians and activists from the Democratic Party as they were the Republicans. That changed in the late 2010s, however, when they became outspoken supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders and his brand of left-wing populism, portraying him as the Only Sane Man in American politics and frequently embracing his talking points while attacking his rivals, especially those within the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. A good portion of this shift came from a belief that they'd gone too easy on Vice President Joe Biden during the Barack Obama administration, and that the "Diamond Joe" persona they'd created of a lovable "cool" uncle who embraces stereotypically lowbrow culture (strippers, beer, Dave & Buster's, Trans Ams, '70s/'80s Hard Rock) enabled his rise to become the frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic primary while his actual policy positions went ignored. Scott Dikkers and Tim Keck, two of the co-creators of The Onion, in turn stated that they felt the site was going too easy on Sanders. This article by Derek Robertson for Politico goes into more detail. | |
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This was pretty much Harold Gray's oeuvre: Though he had long been something of a populist (and the strip reflected it), the New Deal and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration prompted a change in his personal politics, and he began to include more and more lectures on the benefits of economic conservatism into his work, sometimes regardless of whether it seemed out of place or not. This reached a head when Daddy Warbucks melodramatically passed away following Roosevelt's election to fourth term, stating that he wasn't "wanted" anymore — the metaphor being that the New Deal was literally killing capitalism; after FDR himself died, Gray then wrote a series of widely criticized strips where Warbucks revealed he was back, saying he felt the "new climate" was much healthier for him. When Gray tried to apply for extra gas credits during WWII so he could tour the countryside scouting for new material and storylines, the O.P.A. clerk, a man named Flack, refused, and a hearing into the matter requested by Gray upheld Flack's ruling that his strip was not of vital importance to the war effort. The whole incident provoked an extended petty tirade in the strip against "bureaucratic restriction and waste" where Annie would cluck her tongue at "Fred Flack", a nepotistic, hypocritical official; the sequence got a lot of angry letters, and Gray stopped only because the real Flack threatened a lawsuit. |
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The Boondocks was always political, but it started out poking fun at a variety of subjects relating to black identity and culture in the US. Then around 2001, out of a belief that post-9/11 Patriotic Fervor was making people afraid to criticize the George W. Bush administration, the author Aaron McGruder used the comic to do pretty much nothing but criticize the Bush administration (except when John Kerry was running for President in 2004 and also deemed fair game for running an inept campaign), something that only required two members of the cast, the cynical would-be revolutionary Huey and his more optimistic foil Caesar. Most notoriously, a series of strips after Bush's reelection were literally nothing but Huey insulting each of the "red" states by name. The Boondocks is also an example of a work clawing its way back from this. Bush's falling approval ratings in his second term made the rest of media less fearful of the federal executive branch, while a much-unwanted invitation from the Green Party to run for President in 2004, even though he was five years too young to do so, caused McGruder to realize that many people saw him as the political voice of the left-wing counterculture in Bush-era America, a responsibility that he felt restricted him. Slowly, more of the comic strip's cast returned, new characters were introduced, and the original discussions of what it means to be black in America found their way back, with a stated goal of the animated adaptation being to stick with "life, love, and lawnmowers". | |
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A similar process in the other direction befell the Babylon Bee. The site was originally created in 2016 as a Christian version of The Onion that affectionately parodied American evangelical culture. As one might expect, its politics were generally socially conservative, but they weren't afraid to mock absurdities on their own side. In 2018, however, the site was sold to the right-wing businessman Seth Dillon who took its politics into the ultra-conservative, with Donald Trump treated as a Sacred Cow and liberalism, vaccines, transgender people, and anything else that goes against its politics treated as the devil. Jim Swift, writing for The Bulwark, described the site after its shift as "not the Churchy Onion so much as low-rent John Oliver", its humor more interested in driving home the author's point and confirming the readers' worldview than in making them laugh. | |
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The second book, 2014's The Silkworm, featured as supporting characters two trans women who are presented as mockable, one of whom Cormoran threatens with Prison Rape and outing. The third book, 2015's Career of Evil, had a subplot involving an online subculture of people who wish to become physically disabled that read as a metaphorical criticism of various online transgender communities. This community's existence is presented as a Berserk Button for the titular protagonist Cormoran, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who lost a leg in combat. | |
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The Cormoran Strike Novels by J. K. Rowling (under the Moustache de Plume Robert Galbraith) always had a degree of queerphobic and anti-transgender subtext to them. The second book, 2014's The Silkworm, featured as supporting characters two trans women who are presented as mockable, one of whom Cormoran threatens with Prison Rape and outing. The third book, 2015's Career of Evil, had a subplot involving an online subculture of people who wish to become physically disabled that read as a metaphorical criticism of various online transgender communities. This community's existence is presented as a Berserk Button for the titular protagonist Cormoran, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who lost a leg in combat. However, it wasn't until the fifth book, 2020's Troubled Blood, that it fell fully into this. In the year before its publication, Rowling had become an increasingly outspoken anti-transgender activist, and Troubled Blood is largely a vehicle for these views, right down to its plot about a Creepy Crossdresser Serial Killer that was rooted heavily in stereotypes of trans women as "men in dresses" who would rape women in public restrooms. While past books had kept it subtextual, here the plot frequently slows to a crawl so that Rowling can lay out her views on how feminism peaked with the second wave in The '70s and lost its way when it embraced trans women and sex workers. Meanwhile, the sixth book, 2022's The Ink Black Heart, is about the creator of a popular children's webtoon who gets murdered after a Loony Fan leads a vicious, grossly disproportionate Internet Counterattack against her, including accusations of ableism and racism. Given Rowling's increasingly controversial public persona and her background as the author of a popular series of children's novels, many critics read the book as a particularly mean-spirited Roman à Clef for the backlash that she herself had received for her transphobia. |
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TSSZ News was one of the most prominent Sonic the Hedgehog fansites, reporting Sonic-related news and occasionally gaming-related news. In its final years, the site and its social media accounts were used by creator and owner Tristan Oliver as a platform for his personal views rather than Sonic news. The freefall ended in May 2020, when Oliver retweeted pro-Black Lives Matter protest tweets on the TSSZ News Twitter account. Oliver attempted to defend the act by comparing the movement to the events of Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Forces, and then shutting down the entire site after backlash, which was seen as a non-apologetic tantrum. (Thankfully, the site was archived by a former TSSZ staff member.) | |
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The fourth Maximum Ride novel takes a pretty sharp turn into environmentalism, with an Author Filibuster at the end that lasts several pages. | |
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Saw VI has a plot that's oddly more political than the rest of the Saw series, including following films. The opening trap has a pair of loan sharks as its victims, and the plot's series-typical origin storyline (which serves as the base for the film's main game) is about how the Jigsaw killer John Kramer was outraged that his health insurance company denied him access to a potentially lifesaving treatment and destroyed his life. This reflects the United States' political situation in 2009 (the year the film was released), when the foreclosure crisis and healthcare reform were at the top of the American political agenda. One scene even has John rant about how politicians who claim that healthcare decisions should be in the hands of doctors and their patients are dishonest because it's actually the insurance companies who make all the decisions. | |
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Tales of the Questor is an interesting example where this happened to a spin-off comic while surprisingly not touching the core comic. Tales of the Questor is a fantasy comic with Christian themes, but relatively light ones, an agenda promoting science over mere occultism, rational thinking, and a focus on a star who is heavily flawed. Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger has a relatively flawless protagonist, though still with a comical air, whose worst mistakes were caused by either ignorance, or just being put in a bad situation. That said, his biggest screw-up is one that he still loses sleep over. However, it also has as antagonists deconstructions of various concepts, moving from Star Trek, to The Cold Equations, to Space Pirates, to Warhammer. The third strip, the Probability Bomb, has, as an enemy, a Mad Scientist who wants to prove evolution, since everyone knows Intelligent Design is the only option, that the Universe is clearly young, that Earth is only 6,000 years old... and includes a plan solved by libertarian economics. | |
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Film analysis show Brows Held High teetered very close into a freefall, but swerved away at seemingly the last second. While host Kyle Kallgren has always been open to discuss sociopolitical issues as they pertain to media, discussion ramped up immensely following the 2016 US election (in particular, rants against fascism), with some criticizing his newer work due to his politics overshadowing the actual films he's ostensibly talking about. He took note of this and compromised by starting a subseries in 2019 called Cinema Antifa which would separately cover such uncomfortable topics, but it only lasted 2 episodes within a few months due to persistent targeted harassment from fascist apologists, leading him to cancel the show, remove its content, and declare the whole endeavor a mistake. Brows Held High itself has continued since then, and Kyle has since resettled in a toned-down approach to politics akin to his pre-2016 material. | |
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Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould's work had always had somewhat right-wing leanings, but they weren't particularly strong during his first few decades writing the strip. However, starting in the early 1960s, Gould grew frustrated at court decisions regarding the rights of the accused, and his strip took an increasingly condemnatory tone in regards to those decisions and the changes that resulted, with Tracy's efforts being frustrated by legal technicalities and characters going on lengthy speeches on how the legal system should operate. This would only stop with Gould's 1977 retirement. | |
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The Billy Jack series, like the Living Dead Series, is another example whose journey into this trope started positively (with very similar ‘70s politics, in fact) but turned sour with later sequels. The 1967 film The Born Losers, which started the series, was a fairly non-political action film about a half-Indian Vietnam veteran fighting outlaw bikers in a California beach town. For the 1971 sequel Billy Jack, writer/director/star/producer Tom Laughlin had his titular hero fight a corrupt hick and defend a hippie school in a small Arizona town, in a story that ran heavily on the anxieties of the left-wing, anti-authoritarian counterculture of the early '70s (especially the emerging Native American civil rights movement). Audiences ate it up and made it the second-highest-grossing film of the year, and it stands to this day as a Cult Classic of both '70s action and hippie-era cinema. However, with his follow-ups, Laughlin went all-out on politics. 1974’s The Trial of Billy Jack was nearly three hours long and devoted to nothing but politics and Indian Vision Quest scenes, and while his committed fanbase loved it, reviews were far more scathing and box-office returns were substantially lower. 1977’s Billy Jack Goes to Washington, as its title suggests, was a loose remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington that was almost as long, dropped the action entirely to focus on Billy Jack giving speeches to the Senate, and was so bad that it didn't even see a wide release. Laughlin devoted the rest of his life to activism and his interest in psychology, all while attempting to get a fifth film off the ground. At one point, his planned film had a title that said it all: Billy Jack's Crusade to End the War in Iraq and Restore America to Its Moral Purpose. | |
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Inverted and Zig-Zagged with Gaturro. Gaturro was initially created as a supporting character on the Political Cartoons of his creator Nik, but over time he became popular enough to spawn his own comic strip. Despite that, Nik still uses Gaturro as a mouthpiece for his political views in his political cartoons to this day, just like when he was first conceived. As a result, it can be somewhat strange to see Gaturro, a character for children who talks about how beautiful love is and that it is good for children to read, harshly criticizing Argentine politicians. | |
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid has an in-universe example with a comic strip in Greg's school newspaper, Wacky Dawg. As Greg himself admits, the comic strip in question apparently used to actually be pretty funny when it first started getting published in the school newspaper. But after a while, its cartoonist Bryan Little started using the strip less as a vehicle to tell jokes and more as a means to express his opinions and handle his personal business. And as a result, he gets the axe and has his position as school cartoonist left open for a replacement. | |
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Last Man Standing started out as a Spiritual Successor to Tim Allen's previous sitcom Home Improvement, albeit with the twist of Allen's manly-man sitcom dad living in a household that was otherwise all-female. Midway through the first season, however, the original Show Runner Jack Burditt left due to a family tragedy, and new show runner Tim Doyle, together with Allen, retooled the show around the start of the second season to focus the humor on the political divide between Allen's vocally conservative lead character (an Author Avatar for Allen himself) and his liberal wife and daughters. Again, this helped the show hit its stride creatively, quickly coming to be seen as a Spiritual Successor to All in the Family more than anything else, and helped it build its fandom. | |
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B.C. started as a gag strip about cavemen. In 1984, however, creator Johnny Hart became born again, and he started incorporating increasingly heavy-handed (and, given the prehistoric setting, anachronistic) Christian themes, to the point where some newspapers pulled the strip or moved it to their religious sections. When he passed away in 2007, his grandchildren took a meat cleaver to the hardcore religious content and made it a gag strip again. | |
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South Park's creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have always been known as fairly staunch libertarians politically and philosophically, but sometime in the '10s, political commentary began to take over the show. The tipping point for many viewers was season 19, which was built around a season-long Story Arc about political correctness (personified by the school's new principal) taking over the town, and which split the fanbase right down the middle. On top of the debates over whether or not the switch to a story arc (versus previous seasons' Negative Continuity and gag-a-day humor) was a good or a bad thing, some fans declared that Stone and Parker, after years of being the countercultural voice of Generation X, had finally 'gotten old' and were doing little more than ranting at the politics of the millennial generation, while other fans loved season 19 for precisely that reason. Season 20 got hit even worse, as in that case, they had to hastily rewrite the arc they'd spent a whole season building up when real life wrote the plot.note The story they had planned hinged on Hillary Rodham Clinton winning the 2016 election, as most people predicted she'd do. When Donald Trump won instead, all of that was thrown up in the air. Parker and Stone themselves would eventually conclude that the greater focus on political humor had sent the show astray, with season 21 notably putting far less emphasis on it. | |
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David Willis in many of his later works like Shortpacked or Dumbing of Age included a lot more heavy handed themes about gender, sexuality, and the dangers of reactionary right-wing thinking (drawing heavily from his own fundamentalist upbringing). It can range from "changing characters who were straight to LGBT in order to include more people" to "mocking fan-artists who draw with a religious bent". His penchant for Dear Negative Reader only furthers the divide. | |
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On AlternateHistory.com, the story New Deal Coalition Retained started out as a What If? about the political coalitions of the post-World War II eranote The Democratic Party's "New Deal coalition" from 1933 to 1980 was a mix of working-class populists, Northern liberals, and white Southern conservatives, while the Republican Party's coalition during that time was a mix of rural Midwestern/Western conservatives and libertarians, middle-class suburbanites, and business owners surviving into The Present Day. The story seemed to have a generally conservative political lean, but it still tried to play fair and be plausible in showing the different development of the various ideologies at its core. Eyebrows were raised, however, when the story started to get into the '70s and '80s, as historical far-right figures like Gerhard Freynote A West German businessman who was active in far-right politics in that country, serving as the main financial backer for the Deutsche Volksunion. In NDCR, he softens his image and develops a right-wing, anti-Nazi ideology called Freyism, and eventually becomes the West German Chancellor., George Lincoln Rockwellnote Founder of the American Nazi Party, which he led until he was assassinated by a disgruntled ex-member. In NDCR, he lives into The '80s and, after renouncing his Nazi past, becomes a conservative pundit who embraces an American take on Freyism., George Wallacenote A segregationist governor of Alabama who fought tooth and nail against desegregation in his state, and in 1968 and 1972 ran for President on a right-wing populist third party ticket. (To be fair, his support for segregation was motivated by political opportunism; he ran for governor in 1958 as a moderate on race with the endorsement of the NAACP, which made him unelectable among the segregationists who dominated Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He later renounced his support for segregation after becoming born again.) In NDCR, he wins the Democratic nomination and later the Presidency in 1968, and serves two successful terms as President. and Yukio Mishimanote A Japanese writer and actor whose ultranationalist views ultimately led him to stage an attempted coup to restore Japan's pre-World War II political system, then commit seppuku when it failed. Here, he starts a political party that adheres to a Japanese variant of Freyism and becomes Prime Minister. became prominent political figures and pundits in their countries, often with only a Hand Wave about how they had been reformed from their far-right pasts, while dictators like Augusto Pinochet instead became democratically elected leaders of their respective countries. The tipping point for many readers was when it culminated in a conventional, non-nuclear World War III being fought in the late '80s, one where Frey brought a notorious Nazi soldier and war criminal out of retirement to lead the West German forces. The ensuing controversy surrounding the story made it into a magnet for moderator actions, and eventually caused its author to end it. | |
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The Anita Blake series is another famous example of this. Unlike the Merry Gentry series (which pretty much started off as porn), the Blake series initially started as the adventures of a professional necromancer who alternatively hunted and enjoyed sexual tension with the creatures of the night. Then around book six, the sexy times got ramped up to the point where they devoured the book, leaving little space for the actual plot. Many consider the breaking point to be author Laurel K. Hamilton's divorce from her husband. | |
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Li'l Abner had always been in part a vehicle for social satire, but creator Al Capp slowly became more ultra-conservative in the 1960s until almost every strip was openly griping about hippies. While a lot of younger readers were turned off by this shift, other longtime fans complained that the feature's humor went downhill with it, and the strip had become much more mean-spirited and unfunny; the "Peewee" arc, where Capp blasts Charles Schultz as an untalented neurotic◊, is seen as an all-time low. | |
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However, it wasn't until the fifth book, 2020's Troubled Blood, that it fell fully into this. In the year before its publication, Rowling had become an increasingly outspoken anti-transgender activist, and Troubled Blood is largely a vehicle for these views, right down to its plot about a Creepy Crossdresser Serial Killer that was rooted heavily in stereotypes of trans women as "men in dresses" who would rape women in public restrooms. While past books had kept it subtextual, here the plot frequently slows to a crawl so that Rowling can lay out her views on how feminism peaked with the second wave in The '70s and lost its way when it embraced trans women and sex workers. | |
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The Purge Universe: The first film is a home invasion horror film with a dystopian edge set in a near-future where, for one day a year, all crime is legal. The film hints that the New Founding Fathers, the Fictional Political Party that created the Purge, had darker motives in doing so and that the Purge exists primarily as an excuse to Kill the Poor, but this is mostly background material, with the film using the premise largely as an excuse for why the police aren't stopping the villains. Starting with the sequel The Purge: Anarchy, however, the series leans a lot more heavily on politics, portraying the New Founding Fathers as the series' Greater-Scope Villain and framing them as specifically right-wing plutocrats and ultra-nationalists while the heroes are broadly multiracial, working-class, and coded as left-leaning. General opinion on whether this was a good thing is mixed, though generally more positive than not. For fans of the series, the shift to a more overt political angle was for the better after an underwhelming first film, which was criticized for a shallow plot that didn't explore the full implications of its unique premise, and that it helped the series come into its own as a topical satire of 2010s American radicalism. Among those who don't like it, though, the opinion is that it was a lateral shift from one extreme to another, from an empty treatment of politics that had nothing to say, to heavy-handed and simplistic "Us vs. Them" agitprop. | |
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John Norman's Gor novels were originally Sword and Sorcery potboilers firmly in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but then his male-supremacist views came to the fore and took over the series, turning it into porn focused on sexual slavery. | |
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