The Terry Pratchett Thread: For the sake of prisoners and the flight of birds

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Devorum: Jul 30, 2005

I always kind of saw Vetinari as a satire/critique of Plato's Philosopher King and the idea of Benevolent Dictators in general.

It's not that Vetinari is always right, it's that it takes a person with so many near-supernatural qualities to make it even sort of work part of the time that the very idea becomes absurd.

# ? Aug 2, 2021 05:14

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# ? May 19, 2024 05:34

IBroughttheFunk: Sep 28, 2012

Devorum posted:

I always kind of saw Vetinari as a satire/critique of Plato's Philosopher King and the idea of Benevolent Dictators in general.

It's not that Vetinari is always right, it's that it takes a person with so many near-supernatural qualities to make it even sort of work part of the time that the very idea becomes absurd.

I also read Vetinari as kind of broken in his own unique way - a man who has become an expert at ruling his city because that is quite literally all he does, to the point where it's not even quite clear when he actually sleeps.

# ? Aug 2, 2021 12:05

bunnyofdoom: Mar 29, 2008; I've been here the whole time, and you're not my real Dad!

IBroughttheFunk posted:

I also read Vetinari as kind of broken in his own unique way - a man who has become an expert at ruling his city because that is quite literally all he does, to the point where it's not even quite clear when he actually sleeps.

Plus, and I read this, he is stressed as poo poo over who will succeed him, hence in the later books, his serious attempts to really groom Moist into the role, and also Vimes, while also hoping Carrot doesn't have a change of heart over that termite eaten chair.

# ? Aug 2, 2021 12:20

Bruceski: Aug 21, 2007; The tools of a hero mean nothing without a solid core.

I love rereading Pratchett because there's always something new to notice. Small one today, but in Small Gods when Om is turned over in the sun his panicked thoughts are "I'm on my back and it's getting hotter and I'm going to die!" Jump ahead to the climax of the book where he's hearing Brutha's thoughts and it's the exact same line. I'd gotten the parallels before, but I'd never noticed the echo.

# ? Aug 2, 2021 18:51

toasterwarrior: Nov 11, 2011

Devorum posted:

I always kind of saw Vetinari as a satire/critique of Plato's Philosopher King and the idea of Benevolent Dictators in general.

It's not that Vetinari is always right, it's that it takes a person with so many near-supernatural qualities to make it even sort of work part of the time that the very idea becomes absurd.

Yeah, this was always my take on both Vetinari and Vimes; namely that authoritarianism works only when the guiding hand of the state and law are pretty much inhuman in their qualities pertinent to authority and the law, to the point that both would technically qualify as absolutely insane in their degree of devotion. Kinda funny with Pratchett being a humanist and all

# ? Aug 3, 2021 10:36

Jedit: Dec 10, 2011; Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Pterry was also a great subscriber to the Into The Woods school of thought. In the book that accompanied the musical, the Witch argues that Jack should be given to the Giantess who seeks revenge for the death of her husband as it was him who cut down the beanstalk. She then says "I'm not nice, and I'm not good. I'm just right."

This is the philosophy of both Granny Weatherwax and Vetinari. Their business is giving people what they need even if it's not what they want, and they recognise that often this requires being neither nice nor good.

# ? Aug 3, 2021 10:59

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

Jedit posted:

Pterry was also a great subscriber to the Into The Woods school of thought. In the book that accompanied the musical, the Witch argues that Jack should be given to the Giantess who seeks revenge for the death of her husband as it was him who cut down the beanstalk. She then says "I'm not nice, and I'm not good. I'm just right."

This is the philosophy of both Granny Weatherwax and Vetinari. Their business is giving people what they need even if it's not what they want, and they recognise that often this requires being neither nice nor good.

�I do not know what the people want but I know what they need". Sure, that attitude worked out well for IRL leaders.

# ? Aug 3, 2021 13:17

Mikl: Nov 8, 2009; Vote shit sandwich or the shit sandwich gets it!

https://twitter.com/BadWritingTakes/status/1422531556061716483

It's great when anti-trans opinions get posted in national newspapers without any scrutiny, really.

Mikl fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Aug 3, 2021

# ? Aug 3, 2021 13:45

Trin Tragula: Apr 22, 2005

Xander77 posted:

�I do not know what the people want but I know what they need". Sure, that attitude worked out well for IRL leaders.

In one country I could mention, it led to the abolition of capital punishment and the decriminalisation of homosexuality at least 30 years before a majority of public opinion would have supported either of those things. "Leaders should abide by the will of the majority" is just as much a double-edged sword as "leaders should follow their own conscience".

# ? Aug 3, 2021 15:29

BizarroAzrael: Apr 6, 2006; "That must weigh heavily on your soul. Let me purge it for you."

https://twitter.com/thetallulahhh/status/1422487507413917698?s=19

# ? Aug 3, 2021 16:24

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

Vetinari is essentially "What if Machiavelli's Prince, but genuinely interested in the well-being of the polity," at least at the start. By the end, you can see that while he technically wields the powers of a tyrant, he does not generally function like one.

Jingo is a partial exception, but the vast majority of the time, Vetinari is not the reformer himself, but the cause of another character or characters stepping up to do whatever Vetinari wants done. A genuine tyrant distrusts allowing anyone else the power to implement his directives, because such a person becomes a potential threat.

Vetinari is an expert game player. He understands that you ultimately win the game by playing the other players, not the game itself. His breakthrough as leader is that he usually doesn't need to play the game: Vimes, or von Lipvig, or someone else, will get the job done. Hell, in Feet of Clay he solves part of the mystery himself and deliberately refrains from tipping Vimes off, trusting that he'll work things out on his own (though prepared to provide hints if he doesn't).

I'm hard-pressed to find an example of a real-world "Dear Leader" who doesn't insist on taking the full credit for everything good that happens, including things they have no control over at all. In Vetinari's case, he can just start a process going, let someone else see it through, congratulate them on success, and publicly refuse to accept any of the credit himself, and still have everyone thinking "that wily Patrician, we all know he's responsible for what just happened."

He's sometimes shown to be in a position of precarity that gets ignored by the end because so many protagonists are working to prop him up. Unseen Academicals makes fairly clear that he's in deep peril if other people don't work everything out for him, and it's ultimately the appreciation of many of the other people that things work out right with him still in charge that keeps him in his place. In stories where events are beyond his knowledge or influence, he's a non-factor: Thief of Time, for example, sees the world potentially end, and Vetinari plays no part whatsoever in saving it.

# ? Aug 3, 2021 19:18

High Warlord Zog: Dec 12, 2012

Outrage bait is the MO of the author of the crap "who can say whether Terry would or wouldn't be a TERF?" article

https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/1422584415738335234

# ? Aug 3, 2021 22:03

radmonger: Jun 6, 2011

Narsham posted:

Vetinari is essentially "What if Machiavelli's Prince, but genuinely interested in the well-being of the polity," at least at the start. By the end, you can see that while he technically wields the powers of a tyrant, he does not generally function like one.

I don�t see him as being unusually benevolent so much as unusually competent.

It�s like if you have a feudal landlord who is a heavy gambler, it�s good for you if he knows his cards. As he loses less money, then the amount you have to work harder to fund his losses drops.

Similarly, Vetinari easily wins power struggles. And so has no need to impose the cost of difficult struggles on the powerless.

Note that this only works because he is not merely smart, but smarter than everyone else. At least locally; that one vampire lady he corresponds with is clearly his peer. If they ever seriously clashed, you would not want to be in the vicinity.

# ? Aug 4, 2021 13:16

IBroughttheFunk: Sep 28, 2012

https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1421572967335489537

https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1421734846209032198

It's so baffling to watch these people argue so fanatically with the family, and close friends of a man who passed away just a few years ago and tell them that they somehow have no idea what they're talking about.

Also, a question from an American - why do TERFs seem to primarily be a British phenomenon?

IBroughttheFunk fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Aug 4, 2021

# ? Aug 4, 2021 14:39

Imagined: Feb 2, 2007

This opinion piece in the NYT goes into some of the history https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html

It is interesting. It's definitely not that there aren't PLENTY of American transphobes. In America they just tend to be people who self-identify as right wing and/or religious. It's the seeming incongruity of ostensibly left-wing or liberal Brits being vocally and rabidly transphobic that confuses Americans. There are plenty of American libs who are homophobic and transphobic (witness how long it took the boomer generation in the Democratic party to get onboard with even the most basic human rights for LBTQ folks), they just tend to keep their mouths shut to avoid being shouted at by those to the left of them.

thetoughestbean posted:

Can someone with a subscription please give a summary? There�s a paywall

Open it in an incognito window.

Imagined fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Aug 4, 2021

# ? Aug 4, 2021 14:53

thetoughestbean: Apr 27, 2013; Keep On Shroomin

Imagined posted:

This opinion piece in the NYT goes into some of the history https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html

Can someone with a subscription please give a summary? There�s a paywall

# ? Aug 4, 2021 14:56

IBroughttheFunk: Sep 28, 2012

Imagined posted:

This opinion piece in the NYT goes into some of the history https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html

Thank you, much appreciated!

thetoughestbean posted:

Can someone with a subscription please give a summary? There�s a paywall

I got a subscription through work, here you go!

quote:

Last week, two British women stormed onto Capitol Hill in Washington for the purposes of ambushing Sarah McBride, the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.

Ms. McBride, a trans woman, had just been part of a meeting between the Parents for Transgender Equality National Council and members of Congress when the Britons � Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who goes by the name Posie Parker, and Julia Long � barged in. Heckling and misgendering Ms. McBride, the two inveighed against her supposed �hatred of lesbians� and accused her of championing �the rights of men to access women in women�s prison.�

Ms. Parker, who live-streamed footage of the harassment on Facebook, contended that she had come to Washington because �this ideology� � by which she presumably meant simply being trans � �has been imported into the U.K. by America, so, to stem the flow of female erasure, we have to come to its source.�

If the idea that transphobic harassment could be �feminist� bewilders you, you are not alone. In the United States, my adoptive home, the most visible contemporary opponents of transgender rights are right-wing evangelicals, who have little good to say about feminism. In Britain, where I used to live, the situation is different.

There, the most vocal trans-exclusionary voices are, ostensibly, �feminist� ones, and anti-trans lobbying is a mainstream activity. Case in point: Ms. Parker told the podcast �Feminist Current� that she�d changed her thinking on trans women after spending time on Mumsnet, a site where parents exchange tips on toilet training and how to get their children to eat vegetables. If such a place sounds benign, consider the words of British writer Edie Miller: �Mumsnet is to British transphobia,� she wrote �what 4Chan is to American fascism.�

The term coined to identify women like Ms. Parker and Dr. Long is TERF, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In Britain, TERFs are a powerful force. If, in the United States, the mainstream media has been alarmingly ready to hear �both sides� on the question of trans people�s right to exist, in Britain, TERFs have effectively succeeded in framing the question of trans rights entirely around their own concerns: that is, how these rights for others could contribute to �female erasure.� Many prominent figures in British journalism and politics have been TERFs; British TV has made a sport of endlessly hosting their lurid rudeness and styling it as courage; British newspapers seemingly never tire of broadsides against the menace of �gender ideology.� (With time, the term TERF has become a catchall for all anti-trans feminists, radical or not.)

The split between the American and British center-left on this issue was thrown into sharp relief last year, when The Guardian published an editorial on potential changes to a law called the Gender Recognition Act, which would allow people in Britain to self-define their gender. The editorial was headlined �Where Rights Collide,� and argued that �women�s concerns about sharing dormitories or changing rooms with �male-bodied� people must be taken seriously.� Some of The Guardian�s United States-based journalists published a disavowal, arguing that the editorial�s points �echo the position of anti-trans legislators who have pushed overtly transphobic bathroom bills.�

A curious facet of the groundswell of TERFism in Britain is that, in fact, the phenomenon was born in the United States. It emerged out the shattered remnants of the 1960s New Left, a paranoid faction of American 1970s radical feminism that the historian Alice Echols termed �cultural feminism� to distinguish it, and its wounded attachment to the suffering-based femaleness it purports to celebrate, from other strands of women�s liberation.

The movement crossed over to Britain in the 1980s, when cultural feminism was among the lesbian-separatist elements of antinuclear protest groups who saw themselves as part of a �feminist resistance� to patriarchal science, taking a stand against nuclear weapons, test-tube babies and male-to-female transsexual surgery alike.

Ms. Parker and Ms. Long may not know it, but they�re likely influenced by the legacy of the British �Skepticism� movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, which mobilized against the perceived spread of postmodernism in English universities as well as homeopathy and so-called �junk science.� Hence, the impulse among TERFs to proclaim their �no-nonsense� character; witness the billboard Ms. Parker paid to have put up last fall dryly defining a woman as an �adult human female.� Such a posture positions queer theory and activism as individualistic, narcissistic and thus somehow fundamentally un-British.

It�s also worth noting that the obsession with supposed �biological realities� of people like Ms. Parker is part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial �other� as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it�s not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of �other,� and �biological realities� as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain�s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)

But perhaps the biggest factor in the rise of TERFism has been the relative dearth of social movements in Britain over the past three decades. It�s telling that Ms. Parker thinks it was the United States that exported �political correctness� and ideas like �gender identity� to Britain; it might even be fair to say that she�s right.

In other parts of the world, including America, mass movements in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s around the effects of globalization and police brutality have produced long overdue dialogue on race, gender and class, and how they all interact. In Britain, however, the space for this sort of dialogue has been much more limited. As a result, middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have, and thus, their perspectives retain a credibility and a level of influence in Britain that the Michigan Womyn�s Festival could have only dreamed of.

Curiously, Ms. Parker and Ms. Long�s trans-Atlantic jaunt has led to a split in the ranks. Over the past few days, large segments of British TERFism have disowned both of them on social media for their Washington stunt, calling it an �ambush,� and them a �liability.� Whether Ms. Parker and Ms. Long went too far for a movement that, to date, seemingly has yet to hit a low, remains to be seen.

It is revealing, however, where Ms. Parker feels she still has friends: On her same trip to Washington, the woman claiming to be a feminist, standing up for the rights of lesbians everywhere, made sure to drop by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

# ? Aug 4, 2021 14:59

Mikl: Nov 8, 2009; Vote shit sandwich or the shit sandwich gets it!

thetoughestbean posted:

Can someone with a subscription please give a summary? There�s a paywall

This Vox piece by Katelyn Burns (herself a trans woman) explains it well. To wit:

quote:

TERF ideology has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK, helped along by media leadership from Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings along accusations of �silencing women� and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are �parasites,� language that sounds an awful lot like Trump speaking about immigrants.

According to Heron Greenesmith, who studies the modern gender-critical movement as a senior research associate with the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, gender-critical feminism in the UK grew out of a toxic mix of historical imperialism and the influence of the broader UK skeptical movement in the early aughts � which was hyper-focused on debunking �junk science� and any idea that considered sociological and historical influence and not just biology. Those who rose to prominence in the movement did so through a lot of �non-tolerant calling-out and attacking people,� Greenesmith said, much like gender-critical feminism. �Anti-trans feminists think they have science on their side. It is bananas how ascientific their rhetoric is, and yet literally they say, �Biology isn�t bigotry.� In fact, biology has been used as bigotry as long as biology has been a thing.� (See scientific racism, eugenics, and the justification for slavery that black people were intellectually inferior to white people.)

Also, there's the fact that transphobes in the UK have the mainstream media's ear (see the above Ditum piece, which was published in the loving TIMES), while trans voices go fully ignored.

# ? Aug 4, 2021 15:09

thetoughestbean: Apr 27, 2013; Keep On Shroomin

It was influenced by nu-atheists? Well that explains a lot

# ? Aug 4, 2021 15:11

Imagined: Feb 2, 2007

thetoughestbean posted:

It was influenced by nu-atheists? Well that explains a lot

Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, but it does seem to come from the same place as Sam Harris and loving Richard Dawkins being shitheads.

# ? Aug 4, 2021 15:12

Alhazred: Feb 16, 2011

Narsham posted:

Vetinari is essentially "What if Machiavelli's Prince, but genuinely interested in the well-being of the polity," at least at the start. By the end, you can see that while he technically wields the powers of a tyrant, he does not generally function like one.

His mime laws are a bit harsh though.

quote:

Thief of Time, for example, sees the world potentially end, and Vetinari plays no part whatsoever in saving it.

..that we know of.

# ? Aug 4, 2021 17:46

DACK FAYDEN: Feb 25, 2013; Bear Witness

Alhazred posted:

..that we know of.

Without his generous small-business-friendly taxation policies there may not have been a single milkman servicing the entire city, and if Soak wasn't there he couldn't get found and then who knows what would happen?

# ? Aug 4, 2021 18:55

thetoughestbean: Apr 27, 2013; Keep On Shroomin

Pratchett wasn�t that bullish on democracy, was he? The few times he depicted it it was obviously satirical, and he definitely seemed to prefer a sort of philosopher-king style person in charge who knew better than you

# ? Aug 4, 2021 20:28

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

thetoughestbean posted:

Pratchett wasn�t that bullish on democracy, was he? The few times he depicted it it was obviously satirical, and he definitely seemed to prefer a sort of philosopher-king style person in charge who knew better than you

He doesn't really want to talk about it. Pratchett is generally 'ideology beyond 'be nice to people' leads you to bad places'.

There are bits of his stories where he very much takes shots at populism and rule by 'the mob', but there's equally many moments in the books which are about the fundamental sensibleness of ordinary people who just want to get on with their lives (and aren't being riled up by some ideologically motivated populist).

# ? Aug 4, 2021 20:37

citybeatnik: Mar 1, 2013; You Are All
WEIRDOS

Lancre's basically the ideal version of that I think. There's the King and they're okay with that as long as he doesn't really bother them. There's also the Tyrant in Small Gods that gets elected and ignored for the most part.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 13:50

mind the walrus: Sep 22, 2006

IBroughttheFunk posted:

It's so baffling to watch these people argue so fanatically with the family, and close friends of a man who passed away just a few years ago and tell them that they somehow have no idea what they're talking about.

Only if you take the TERFs at face value, which is tempting because they are loving moronic in most ways.

It's a red herring. Being a shithead about Sir Terry drives engagement with their toxic platforms and compels their opponents'' attention and focus on "putting those TERFs in their place." That's a lure that CHUDs have known how to use for a long, long time.

And it's a feint. I'd honestly be on the lookout for any anti-trans legislation or other big movements coming through that the TQ+ supporting crowd would find objectionable.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 14:37

A Moose: Oct 22, 2009

I always thought Vetinari was kind of a play on the belief that most people subconsciously have, that somewhere, there's someone in charge that knows everything that's going on. Whether its the president, or a shadowy international cabal, or the CIA or whatever. People believe that someone like him exists, so it makes sense that in a fantasy setting, someone like that would exist.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 15:21

Kesper North: Nov 3, 2011; EMERGENCY POWER TO PARTY

mind the walrus posted:

Only if you take the TERFs at face value, which is tempting because they are loving moronic in most ways.

It's a red herring. Being a shithead about Sir Terry drives engagement with their toxic platforms and compels their opponents'' attention and focus on "putting those TERFs in their place." That's a lure that CHUDs have known how to use for a long, long time.

And it's a feint. I'd honestly be on the lookout for any anti-trans legislation or other big movements coming through that the TQ+ supporting crowd would find objectionable.

At the broad scale, it's a coordinated media campaign dreamed up by Tory political consultants to move the nation further along the path to outright fascm; this falls under Identification of Enemies As A Unifying Cause and Rampant Sexism. The US gets a lot of this crap from the Republican thinktanks with vast PR budgets too. Anti-trans sentiment is a prominent component of pro-fascist campaigns in Hungary, Poland and pretty much every other nation in Europe and the Americas.

# ? Aug 6, 2021 00:20

angerbot: Mar 23, 2004; plob

I just can't imagine anyone thinking "hmm yes, Terry Pratchett would hate someone because of an immutable property of their being."

It's just... the antithesis of what he'd think.

# ? Aug 6, 2021 02:18

Jables88: Jul 26, 2010; Tortured By Flan

Alhazred posted:

I honestly thought that the "I watch the watchman" speech at the end of the book was Vimes kicking out the Summoning Dark and was really confused when it showed up in later books.

This seemed 100% clear to me, and he even references the scar the Summoning Dark makes as it LEAVES is body. Was baffled, and disappointed, to see it return in Snuff. Feels like PTerry just kind of forgot about how he'd written it originally, which naturally breaks my heart.

# ? Aug 6, 2021 09:08

YggiDee: Sep 12, 2007; WASP CREW

Look, if Sam Vimes can recruit A. E. Pessimal to the Night Watch, he can recruit a quasi-dimensional thing of pure vengeance.

# ? Aug 6, 2021 09:37

bunnyofdoom: Mar 29, 2008; I've been here the whole time, and you're not my real Dad!

All this terf poo poo just made me re-read Monstrous Regiment.

Also my wife just started reading Discworld. Started her off with Guards Guards. She somehow thinks Colon is competent

# ? Aug 6, 2021 10:58

Jedit: Dec 10, 2011; Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

bunnyofdoom posted:

All this terf poo poo just made me re-read Monstrous Regiment.

Also my wife just started reading Discworld. Started her off with Guards Guards. She somehow thinks Colon is competent

The chance of that is a million to one, so she might be on to something.

# ? Aug 6, 2021 11:39

SirSamVimes: Jul 21, 2008; ~* Challenge *~

Colon is very competent at the specific task of avoiding work.

# ? Aug 6, 2021 12:00

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

mind the walrus posted:

And it's a feint. I'd honestly be on the lookout for any anti-trans legislation or other big movements coming through that the TQ+ supporting crowd would find objectionable.

It was indeed a feint. The sequence of events was:

* Christa Peterson tweeted a thread about how grossly antisemitic the "gender critical" movement is
* Laurie Penny retweeted it
* Neil Gaiman amplified that
* then some transphobe claimed Pratchett would have agreed with them and it was all-in on the Pratchett angle.

The original thread about transphobe antisemitism was more or less buried. So it's a good one to amplify.

divabot fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Aug 6, 2021

# ? Aug 6, 2021 12:01

Gravitas Shortfall: Jul 17, 2007; Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.

SirSamVimes posted:

Colon is very competent at the specific task of avoiding work.

Colon is extremely good at listening to the street, which is why Vimes keeps him around.

# ? Aug 6, 2021 15:14

Beachcomber: May 21, 2007; Another day in paradise.; Slippery Tilde

The world would be better if police mostly just walked around ringing bells and running if it looked like there might be trouble.

# ? Aug 7, 2021 04:52

SirSamVimes: Jul 21, 2008; ~* Challenge *~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjnubfRy8Ws
Here, have a good video that lays out just how bullshit the idea that Pratchett was gender critical is.

I mean that fact is obvious, but this video goes into it and at the end has an interesting look at how Pratchett uses pronouns with regard to Sergeant Jackrum in Monstrous Regiment.

# ? Aug 14, 2021 09:02

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

I made a note to post in the thread about Vimes and the Summoning Dark when I reread Snuff and I am finally doing that.

In my hardback edition, page 120: Stinky the Goblin is clinging to Vimes and asking for just ice:
"Not panicking now, the goblin pointed a claw at Vimes's left wrist, looked him in the face, and said 'Just ice?'"

Goblins live in the dark, of course, and Stinky pointed to the Summoning Dark scar. He's not just asking Vimes for justice here.

Page 121:
"And again Vimes remembered the darkness and the thirst for vengeance, in fact vengeance itself made sapient and hungry [ie. the Summoning Dark]. And the litter bugger had touched him on that arm. It all came back, and he wished that it hadn't, because while all coppers must have a bit of villain in them, no copper should walk around with a piece of demon as a tattoo."

So the goblin first invokes the Summoning Dark, and, called, it returns to Vimes and is with him later when he walks into the darkness. That's perfectly consistent with the ending of Thud! and it makes sense that the Dark comes to think of Vimes as a sort of partner following their encounter in that story.

# ? Aug 16, 2021 19:57

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# ? May 19, 2024 05:34

RoboChrist 9000: Dec 14, 2006; Mater Dolorosa

The only thing I feel like Pterry maybe drops the ball a bit with is that there could probably be a bit more characters of color in the AM stories, given how cosmopolitan that setting is supposed to be. It would be nice if we had a major Watch character who was Klatchian or something.

Regarding Vetinari; I feel like the books do a pretty good job pointing out that while benevolent dictatorship is arguably the best and ideal form of government, it has the obvious problem of there being no way to control for the quality of your dictator and you have no guarantee that you will get a dictator who is both benevolent and competent, and that between every named predecessor in AM and all the foreign dictators we see, it's pretty clear that he's an exception that proves the rule, and the fact that the last few books have him grooming Moist for leadership positions and more importantly rebuilding and restoring AM's institutions and whatnot, it's pretty clear that Pterry was probably building towards Vetinari stepping down and leaving AM with some more democratic form of government., or something.

Or maybe he was a Vampire after all.

# ? Aug 16, 2021 20:05

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Terry Pratchett Thread: For the sake of prisoners and the flight of birds

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