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Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

my favorite thing about Corporal Carrot is that he’s a romantic hero plopped right in the middle of the greediest cesspit of a chaotic neutral city ever to debase the pages of literature, and yet instead of having his shining idealism destroyed by an uncaring reality, he makes reality embarrassedly put down the weapons and agree to make nice, and then mutter an awkward “Good morning” whenever it passes him on the street.

And conversely, Vimes is a noir hero in a noir setting (Ankh-Morpork) but instead of an acceptance of the unstoppable awfulness of people in power, these are stories about Vimes dragging them in by their neck and saying, I’ll arrest you, yes, even you.

Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.

Every year May 25th comes around and every year I have the need to put into words just why this book stayed with me for so long. But mostly it comes down to this: despite Night Watch’s sudden shift to a darker, heavier tone, it avoids being unnecessarily cruel to its characters just for the sake of plot. And of course, this is true of all the Discworld books, people striving to be better, to do better, but I think it’s significant in context of how dark this book is - especially since going by chronological reading order, this is the bleakest book we encounter up until this point.

This Ankh-Morpork that we’re submerged in is so alien at that point in her timeline, it’s gruesome and cruel and oppressive because it’s under a gruesome, cruel and oppressive tyrant. Yet despite that, there is still kindness in the heart of the book - it values old Vimes’ mercy and young Sam’s innocence, it values the fact that Vimes wants to avoid undue violence, to save as many as he can, and shield people from the tyranny for as long as he can.

It’s such an emotionally charged book and there is a lot of darkness in the story itself- a blood-thirsty serial killer, power-hungry men, ruthless paranoia, and the awful, inhumane underbelly of a regime - but where most other books would have done so, it avoids traumatizing its characters just to establish that. Darker shifts in tone so often entails that the narrative doles out meaningless suffering and trauma just to establish itself. Night Watch ultimately avoids that, because it uses other means to make the text feel heavy and oppressive. Part of it is from the plot itself, in that Vimes knows what happens behind closed doors, he know what Swing is capable of and the knowledge of that threat is high-risk enough to let readers know of the stakes.

The main emotional conflict instead comes from Vimes battling with himself, reconciling with wanting to go home versus, well, Sam Vimes being Sam Vimes, which means doing his best at saving everyone, history, timeline and causality be damned. We know that young Sam will become cynical and bitter and drunk somewhere down the line, we know that half the Night Watchmen will die, we know that the city will remain cruel despite this Hail Mary attempt at revolution. Which is why the narrative is so intent on telling us that Vimes’ kindness matters - in mentoring young Sam, in getting the prisoners off the Hurry-Up Wagon, in preventing undue riots and undue brutality, in keeping the fighting away from Barricade as long as possible. The city’s going to hell in a hand basket, might as well make people’s lives easier.

Vimes can’t save Ankh-Morpork from history taking its due course, but the powerful emotional catharsis is seeing him coming to the decision to try and save everyone anyway – simply because he can’t envision himself not doing it. So he digs his heels in and makes whatever difference he can in the moment.

Because Night Watch in an inevitable tragedy - only one of the two stories can have a happy ending and in order for Sam Vimes to go back to the present, to his wife and his son and his Watch and his city, the revolution has to fail or else that timeline ceases to exist. There is no way for him to save both his men and his future but he’ll be damned if it doesn’t try - he wouldn’t be Sam Vimes otherwise. Every time it I re-read it still feels like he’s that close to succeeding.

It could have so easily been grimdark and ~gritty~ but ultimately it avoids because it centres on a few basic themes that forms the core in the story. The heart of it is about camaraderie of a handful of men too weird and incompetent and ugly, the tentative hope in the uprising, and the sheer bloody determination of Sam Vimes’ refusal to give up on the people around him.

oh fuck internalized too much lotr as a kid, actually believe there’s good in the world or some kinda shit

oh fuck internalised too much discworld as a kid, actually believe there’s good in people and that i have a duty to contribute towards increasing the amount of good in the world

Happy Glorious 25th of May!

Here’s Vimes-as-Keel de-escalating the riot attempt at the Treacle Mind Road Watchhouse. Such a great scene, where our hero shows himself to be far more heroic by working to avoid violence than by fighting.

happy 25th of may everyone

“‘What will it matter in 100 years time?’

‘It matters now.’”

~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“Here and now, we are alive”

-Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“We are here, and this is now… Vimes understood it to mean, in less exalted copper speak, that you have to do the job that is in front of you.”

~ Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Terry Pratchett, Nightwatch (via yodas-yo-yo)

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

in the words of the great Elizabethan wordsmith William Shakespeare, in Hamlet Act IV Scene V, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” or, in the words of the great Twitter wordsmith @Horse_ebooks,

this is 1947 Cincinnati Enquirer erasure

please do not forget your smash mouth

“The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as “Things just happen. What the hell”.” ― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

He may be gone but his words never lose their relevance.

Support the people doing the job they didn’t have to do, and not just with catchy slogans and clapping.

GNU Terry Pratchett.

Has to be one of the best passages of a book I’ve read in a long time

​it’s not an understatement to say I think about this all the time

Protect them! Save them!

I tied down two of the Discworld animations I did last year! Here’s Vimes having a moment of peace and a cigar, and a little dragon trying to do a jump

love these animations by Lho Brockhoffs

Terry Pratchett - Witches Abroad (via aeshnacyanea2000)

- Terry Pratchett - Small God’s