heliophilia

I love how Discworld introduces Granny Weatherwax.

She is introduced as a witch, but it's not actually clear if she can do any magic for quite some time. At first all she does is herbal medicine and Headology, aka make-believe, mind tricks, placebos and basically tricking people.

Even when it becomes clear that she flies around on a broomstick and can project her mind into other living things, it's still not obvious if she can do any magic beyond that.

And then she and her buddies magically move an entire country 15 years into the future, and it becomes very clear that she's not only very much capable of doing magic, but she's one of the strongest, if not the strongest magic user in the entire world who can do stuff like summon death himself with nothing but a candle, and I am not even sure she really needs the candle.

Compare that to the wizards. The first impression you get of them is that they're powerful magic users, I mean they are wizards in a fantasy world, people fear them for their magic, and they got a whole magic college, so they must be powerful, right? They even look down on witches because they "don't use real magic"... and because they're usually women.

Granted, the very first (and best) wizzard we're introduced to can't even do any magic, but he seems like an outlier. Then you hear more and more about the magic college and other wizards, and it becomes clear that most wizards are arrogant and lazy fucks who can't do much magic beyond basic fireballs, turning people into frogs and maybe teleportation. Even the head-wizard of the college was completely helpless after running out of juice from a single teleportation spell.

Even when all the wizards become incredibly powerful, thanks to circumstances beyond their control, all they use their magic for is building really tall wizard towers and raging wars against each other. Wars which are ripping holes into reality, which threaten to release unspeakable horrors from the unspeakable horrors dimension.

Like... the books used most reader's assumptions and expectations, aka 'Headology', to make them underestimate Granny Weatherwax while overestimating the Wizards.

Just *chef's kiss* world building.

Something I love about Terry Pratchett's books, and why i love the ankh morpork books so much, is that he also loved civilisation.

And i don't mean "force technological progress, all hail harsh and unforgiving bureaucracies, plow down everything that was before", i mean that when a bunch of people live together, then you need to organise The Public to make their lives good. And not against, but in service of the people living there. The small minded, unpleasant, nosy, selfish people. All of them.

And civilisation needs tireless small acts and work to build something that is larger than the sum of it's parts, and it's annoying, and sometimes hard to see the big picture, and you cannot do it alone.

But, when you don't forcibly stop them, many many people will look at a bunch of resources at their disposal, and say "so how can we organise them so that they help people the most efficiently, that we can make life easier for all people".

And that's why i weep with joy when i see this happening in real life, whenever there is something structured with the goal of people living there (and not just existing and being wrung dry for the benefit of others).

And i feel like Terry Pratchett felt the same.

And while you can also see it in the witch books, and very clearly at that, many people like to idealise rural life and write off urban life as hollow. And that's why i singled out the ankh morpork books, because ankh morpork has all the things people claim as negative about city life, and still says "look at the beauty of humanity and being alive".

The utter beauty of the postal service, of bureaucracy, of maintained streets and the white chalk horse. Of streets so old they burrowed into the ground, of canalisation, of records maintained since thousands of years.

Discworld Heritage Post

potentially controversial opinion incoming

sam vimes’s natural anti-drunkenness (being knurd) is described as seeing the world the way it actually is, without all the comforting illusions people have for themselves. having a witch’s First Sight means that “you can see what really is there.” granny weatherwax says that evil starts with treating people as things, and, often but especially vividly in Feet of Clay, sam demonstrates repeatedly that he will not stand for the golems being treated as less than people, for the poor being treated as disposable by the rich and powerful, for anyone thinking that anyone else doesn’t matter. the hiver gets inside tiffany aching and reveals the Chalk in her soul. the summoning dark gets inside sam vimes and finds a city in there. and sam vimes knows how to be selfish, to claim his city and his people as his, to protect them. witches watch over people who are frequently small-minded and ungrateful and stubborn and they do it anyway because it’s what you do, because it needs to be done; and sam vimes says pretty much the same thing every time he considers the people of ankh-morpork. and you can call him mister vimes, but only if you’ve earned it.

doylist conclusion: terry pratchett knew what his taste in protagonists was

watsonian conclusion: vimes is an urban witch and ankh-morpork is his steading gods damn it

Discworld Heritage Post

I always forget just how good The Truth is until I reread it. Not just the central mystery but the themes of it! The way it marks such a sharp change from the old Ankh-Morpork to the new one we'd see in the later books, far more than any of the Watch books ever do.

And William! A character of all time. This awkward little man who believes passionately in truth because "don't tell lies" was quite literally beaten into him as a child, who then tells a lie to protect the one who did the beating. This man with very few social skills who earns the loyalty of his coworkers with his sheer passion. William who was raised to be a bigot and is fighting those instincts every step of the way.

When the dark light reveals the spectre of his father looming over his shoulder all the time! When his father threatens to kill him and he is relieved! When Otto compares William's internal struggle to overcome the lessons he was taught as a child, the racist, classist, cruel beliefs of his family, with his own struggle to not drink blood.

I adore this man. I adore how electrified he is when he's trying to solve a conspiracy, how brave, how dedicated - and it never shows up again. In all other books, from the perspective of other characters, he's a stuffy straitlaced stick-in-the-mud. Nobody else ever sees what his coworkers see of him, what his father finally sees of him.

William De Worde is important to me because the only other person who ever truly Gets It, the only character in the whole of Discworld canon who seems to understand him, is Otto. Sacharissa does a little but it's Otto who really knows him. Otto fighting not to be a bloodsucking monster, with the help of cocoa and a singsong, and William fighting not to be a metaphorical bloodsucking monster, with the help of his colleagues and their faith in him.

Okay okay, listen, Night Watch is an absolute masterpiece of storytelling. It’s done so well I want to scream. Not only do we, the readers, know that the revolution will end in tears, the protagonist of the story knows it too! Vimes goes into this with the exact same expectations as the reader of here we go, we know we’re in a tragedy, we’re know we’re doomed by the narrative. AND YET, AND YET as the story goes on, you start to hope that maybe, just maybe, something will be different this time.  Even Vimes starts to entertain the idea, but every time this happens, you get reminded (by the History Monks) that No. This is only going to go one way. This. is. a. Tragedy.  BUT STILL. These are good people and look, some things have gone better this time, maybe it’s enough? Vimes always wins in the end, doesn’t he? And so you HOPE and by hoping, you wilfully forget what you’ve been told again and again, that this is a tragedy.  AND THEN THEY GET SO CLOSE. SO FREAKING CLOSE that when it all goes wrong you feel surprised, even though you were told from the very beginning how it was going to go. It’s insane. It’s Terry Pratchett at his finest. Its’s a goddammed masterpiece.

Since it’s the 25th and all I’m gonna add something I’ve been thinking about for a while: for me one of the key elements of a good, satisfying tragedy, the thing that makes it cathartic and not just genuinely depressing, is the promise that it mattered. That you were doomed from the start but the attempt was important anyway. That you tried and you did all you could and you failed, but it still mattered.

And in Night Watch we know that they failed but also - because we return to the future at the end - we know that they mattered, we can see the evidence of it, even if only a few people still know their names. The ending always gets me because of that.

There’s also something to be said about the fact that Vimes still tries to change history, I think- I always interpreted it as the idea that, even if you know you’ll fail, you have to do something, have to try. The same idea that even if it won’t change the outcome, the attempt mattered.

What always got to me was that he did make a difference. They still failed; it was still a tragedy, as it was always doomed to be. But the attempt doesn’t just matter in a philosophical sense. It matters that he saved a few lives that would otherwise have been lost with all the rest. It matters that he kept one watchhouse working normally, doors open and lights on, and in so doing avoided a riot. It matters because those people who lived went on to live, and that is no meager thing; and it matters because it was proof that there’s another way. Revolutions always come round again but that doesn’t mean change is impossible. Vimes carves out a glow of light in the darkness and says, look. we can build a kinder world. it is hard, and it is dangerous. it takes courage. it can be done. I will show you.

And just to drive the point home, his younger self is there. Watching. Drinking it all in. Young and impressionable as clay, about to be fired in the flames of this revolution. Vimes is proving, to everyone who is there including himself, that the better world this revolution dreams of can be real.

They still fail. They still die. They still lose. But the attempt matters. Decades later, they are remembered, and those who remember them are working to build that better world. A world they know can become real, because every attempt – however doomed – is one more stone in the dam to divert the river of time to a new and brighter course.

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." from “Feet of Clay” is such a fucking baller line to drop

Angua Von Überwald really said trans rights and took her new bestie to a gay bar

in 1996.

[thru tears] yah the fifth elephant was nicq

Just started Guards! Guards! and I haven't stopped laughing. I particularly love the end of this sentence.

One of my favourites, this sentence is a thing of beauty.

Honestly, the fact that terry Pratchett has experience around nuclear power makes so much sense once you realize what magic is standing as a metaphor for in the discworld. Like, look at this fucking quote from going postal:

"That's why [magic] was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards—not "not doing magic" because they couldn't do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn't. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn't been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again."

Like... It feels incredibly obvious what he's talking about once you know the context.

Guards! Guards! was not the first Discworld book I read but it is the one that punched my angsty, edgy thirteen-year-old self in the face. I have never had a book hit me like that since. Nothing has ever picked me up by the scruff of the neck and shown me my own face in the mirror that way.

I was angsting around, all "the world is terrible" and "people are evil" and "humans are a blight upon the earth" and "everyone is stupid" and Vimes showed up and said, "Yeah, and?"

So what? So they're stupid and petty - save them anyway. So they're selfish - save them anyway. So it's all fucked and there's never going to be a happy ending - save them anyway. Do it anyway. You don't get to opt out of caring just because they're grubby and ignorant and reactionary and petty because so are you and that's all we've got.

No other book has ever changed my worldview in one blow before or since. I reckon that's something that can only happen to you when you're a teenager anyway. But I've never quite gotten over it.

Was talking with @seiya234 about Sam Vimes and the idea that seems to come up in some fan circles with some regularity that after his death, Vimes will become the 'God of Coppering' or in some other way some part of him will continue to protect the city/the Watch after his death. She mentioned that she thought the idea was kind of king-ish - the whole idea "that someone will keep swooping in and saving the day" - and that Vimes would haaaaaate that, and I agree.

However. It's true. Part of Sam Vimes will keep protecting Ankh-Morpork long after he dies.

It's the part of him he gave to Carrot, the part that Carrot uses to check himself every time he starts to get frustrated with the limitations of what he can do as a Watchman and wishes he could just - make people be better.

It's the part of him he gave to Angua, the quiet faith that of course the beast within can be brought to heel, of course it's never easy but it's always worth it.

It's the part of him he gave to A. E. Pessimal, a small dull man living a small dull life whose eyes were opened wide one terrifying night to how much of a difference one small dull man's small dull life can make to the great churning wheels of the world.

It's the part of him he gave to the grags and to Mr. Shine, the proof that the truth is worth digging for and worth hauling up into the light, that it's possible to look beyond hatred and mistrust.

It's the part of him he gave to William de Worde, the knowledge that nothing is really worth doing unless someone, somewhere, would really much rather you weren't doing it.

It's the part of him he gave to Reg Shoe, that keeps Reg believing in the necessity of fighting for a better world even when it seems absurd and impossible and foolish to try.

It's the part of him he gave to Sham Harga, who knows every now and then, a man just needs some burnt crispy bits.

It's the part of him he gave to any number of strangers in the street, a sense of what fairness and justice can look like, even in something as small as a night patrol.

It's the part of him he gave to Sybil, the very best part of himself.

And it's everything of himself that he gave to Young Sam, who has a chance now to make his own impressions on a thousand thousand lives.

It's not just A part of Sam Vimes that will linger after his death, protecting the city he loved and hated in equal parts, the city that was his. It's a thousand thousand parts, that he left behind sometimes aware, sometimes intentionally, sometimes without even realising. And it's not something inherent within Sam Vimes and Sam Vimes alone, not something special about him or that only he could do. It's what everyone does, leaves parts and pieces of themselves behind. A thousand thousand parts of Sam Vimes are still out there, still saving the city, little by little, in quiet unglamourous ways, day after day after day.

If anything can be saved by a part of someone who's gone, it's like this.

And I think Sam Vimes would be proud of that.

(And also swear about it quite a lot when he realises this also implies that technically he's a factor in the lives of crime that some of the many, many people he's arrested over his long career have gone on to lead, but alas. We don't get to choose ALL the ripples we make in the world.)

Something about the way that Pratchett writes *people* is just like... You know in I shall wear midnight when Tiffany is just choking on how jealous she is of Leticia? But even in the middle of everything with the Cunning Man and people being awful to each other and suspecting her and helping out with the wedding of the guy she once kinda sorta maybe thought she could have been marrying one day, she realizes that his bride-to-be has NEVER had the Sex Talk and like. No-one else is gonna do ANYTHING about that but her! And she could ignore it! But no she cannot because she can't *do* that to the girl, no matter how much she resents her. Because then she wouldn't like the kind of person she was being.

And so, from her rolodex of resources, she summons Nanny Ogg, like some kind of sex ed pokemon,

Tangentially related, but: I have observed that a thing a lot of a certain kind of people miss about the Sam Vimes stories is how much time in them Vimes spends:

a) Being wrong. b) Fucking up. GENUINELY fucking up. And suffering consequences of fucking up. c) REALIZING he’s been wrong. d) Trying as best he can to adjust to that.

I’ve noted before that you could subtitle every single Vimes book as “Vimes Finds Out He’s Wrong About [Blank]”. “Vimes Finds Out He’s Wrong About The World Not Being Worth It”. “Vimes Finds Out He’s Wrong About Affirmative Action.” “Vimes Finds Out He’s REALLY REALLY Wrong About Golems.” “Vimes Finds Out He’s Wrong About Klatch And International Everything”. “Vimes Finds Out He’s Wrong About Dwarfs.” “Vimes Finds Out He’s Wrong About The Past Being Better/Not Wanting To Be A Commander.” “Vimes Finds Out He’s STILL Wrong About Dwarfs, and Also Vampires, and Also Trolls”. “Vimes Finds Out He’s Wrong About Goblins and Is Really Upset About It.”

And so on. And that is actually a very important part of Vimes because if he was not both able and willing to realize that he’s wrong about shit he would just be a very bad person. A very self-righteous bad person. Captain Swing, in Night Watch, is utterly correct: he and Vimes are very, very similar people. It’s just Findthee Swing knows he’s right.

And Vimes is actually always open to the possibility he’s totally wrong, even if he’s not happy about that.

Vimes isn’t perfect. Vimes isn’t even always in the moral right - Vimes starts out Feet of Clay just as bad as anyone else in the story, Dragon King of Arms included, about golems. He starts his place in the story as casually racist, sexist and everything else ist as is standard for the society around him, and his voyage to becoming something else is through his own failures and it too is imperfect.

My absolute favourite Samuel Vimes moment is actually from Thud! but it’s not the one you think it is, probably. It’s this one:

Bolding mine. There’s some bits in the middle there where the moment moves from the duty room to his office, etc, but the important through line is that one and it’s a double-whammy: not only that in the moment of discovering the loss that faces another father, Vimes is absolutely thrown completely out of his righteous rage and resentment of days despite it being fed by a quasi-demonic force of vengeance?

But also that the narrative does that to him. That it takes us with him in a build up of days and days and days of genuinely infuriating things and GENUINELY the unfortunate enabling of Hamcrusher’s bullshit by people who didn’t speak out about it (he’s not wrong about that!) right up to the attempted murder of his baby and his wife to this moment and then absolutely yanks the rug out from under him and tells him - and us, the readers - that actually no.

No you don’t get it that simple.

They killed my son.

Where the rage had been, there was chill.

If you’re going to try to have a Vimes, as a creator, and you want them to be anything other than a self-righteous twerp in their own right, you have to be willing to do that part. To have him stumble, trip up, fall over his own feet, and be confronted by his own misunderstandings, mistakes, just … his misses.

If you aren’t, then you’re just writing another self-righteous twerp.

AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

- Hogfather, Terry Pratchett

Discworld is so delightful because you get lines like "When banks fail, it is seldom bankers who starve" except it's spoken by a 7 foot tall sentient clay statue named Pump 19 and directed to a man whose name is Moist von Lipwig

Dude this page is a lifesaver Google is really bad for working out the order to read them in

Any of the orange ones are good starting points

Just read them in release order, I don't know why this is so hard

I read them in a random order when I was a kid (basically whatever was available in the local bookstore or library at them time), but rereading them now I'm doing it by series and I'm personally enjoying that. It allows me to remember details of the previous books that involved the specific characters much more sharply.

(Plus there were novels that didn't do it for me so I'm gonna skip that series, like the Rincewind books, and also Terry himself didn't like color of magic and I think a lot of fans agree it's a weaker one? So it might not be the perfect starting point)

And most importantly, I just feel like reading it that way.

It's also incredibly easy to do that now, since the new releases and new audio books actually label them by series and number them and all that, example:

so there's probably a fair amount of people reading them that way now.