Aremo Shitai Koremo Shitai Onna no Ko ni Mietatte

one thing that i've noticed and begun to seriously appreciate upon rereading the watch novels is --

sam and sybil are not in love when they get married.

they like each other, but they aren't in love. and i think this is why sybil seems to be kind of in the background of men at arms and feet of clay, like, sure, she's his wife and he appreciates her and cares for her but he doesn't love her -- yet.

and i think it's the knitting moment at the end of jingo when it happens to him. like that john green quote about how you fall in love slowly and then all at once? i think the moment when he comes home and she's been trying to knit him socks but she's no good at knitting and so it ends up being a scarf instead of socks -- i think that's the "all at once".

and then after jingo, suddenly sybil matters more to him, appears more in his thoughts, he's so proud of her in the fifth elephant for everything she does (she is such a badass in the fifth elephant), and it's the cigar case she gave him that is what he longs for amd desperately needs to hold onto in night watch, the memory of her. she's much more important to him and his perspective in the later watch books, and yes the doylist interpretation is that sir terry developed the relationship more as he grew as a writer because he didn't feel like he was very good at writing romance, but i like the watsonian interpretation --

that sam vimes was not in love with sybil ramkin when he married her, but instead fell madly in love with her along the way.

I'd like to highlight the beginning of this especially. Sam meets Sybil in Guards! Guards! and falls into a relationship with her after. In Men At Arms, when he's coming up on his wedding, we get the following passage:

Be honest with yourself, Sam: do you care for her? Don't say 'love,' because that's a tricky word for over-forties.

In the end, of course, he does marry her; he decides that he does care for her, and that his care for her is enough to offset the parts of his life that he's willing to compromise to make a life with her. That this is something he wants, that they both want, even if they aren't madly in love.

He falls more in love with her later, but I want to emphasize that even if he never had, that would have been all right. It was enough for them to get married because they cared for each other and made a good partnership. It was enough that Sybil wanted to be married, wanted a partner to share her life and her inheritence with, and wanted Sam Vimes to be that partner. It was enough that Sam liked her and cared for enough to be that for her.

It's fine to make a life together with someone you aren't romantically, or sexually, madly in love with. It's enough that you care for one another, and that you make a good team. It's more than enough.

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.

I love a genre breaking story, and always loved that Terry Pratchett wrote them, but hadn’t considered that these break genre in two very different directions. (For those who haven’t read them, the two characters work closely together and Mr Fantasy, Destiny’s Chosen Polite Refuser of Awfulness and Destiny, really looks up to Mr Screw You Nihilism and Also The Monarchy as a shining example he will follow.)

I also love tumblr because here I can find long-form text analyses of media, either that I already love or gain new appreciation for by seeing their love. I’ve gone on sprees of meta reading on various tumblrs just to bask in that love for story, and celebration of its meaning. I’ve also been asked after panels for more exact citations of that extremely insightful scholarly article I was quoting from… I do of course direct them here. They don’t realise treasures await!

Carrot and Vimes are an especially fun dynamic due to Carrot being the One True King of Ankh-Morpork by heritage… who is happily subordinate to Vimes, a scion of a king-killer and a devoted anti-monarchist and egalitarian. Carrot doesn’t want to be in charge or on a throne, he just wants to be Some Guy Doing Good; meanwhile, Vimes gets bestowed with title upon title and as ennobled as Vetinari can possibly make him without actually bedazzling him wholesale, like an extremely grumpy cat shoved into an elaborate Halloween costume. It’s fantastic.

Vetinari gives Vimes fancy titles for safekeeping like a spy entrusting coded messages to a messenger who can’t read

I really feel like Vetinari should be discussed more as the third side to this dynamic. He's the ruler it doesn't occur to Carrot to usurp. He doesn't just reward Vimes, he actively grooms him for the role and occasionally overestimates him (his level of energy and actual willingness to stand up to authority) (like, Vimes GETS there eventually, but Vetinari put a lot of work into ensuring that happens)

Like, the in-universe "arresting Vetinari" scene is Vetinari - who is not even the Patrician for the moment, as he (temporarily) resigned - walking up to Vimes and informing him that he should arrest him for treason now. And Vimes, who had just arrested two armies on the verge of clashing for "disturbance of the peace" and "loitering with intent", actually balks at that! He doesn't think he can do that! Vetinari has to talk him through it!

Vetinari is not just background! He's a vital participant of the process!

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.

Vimes comes to understand that it’s not a choice between happy endings–past revolution or future family. As a grown man with a better understanding, he sees 1. the revolution is bound to fail, but it plants important seeds for the people to demand more from their City and 2. if he focuses on getting out alive, he won’t have a future to come back to, and most importantly, 3. not only will Sam not grow into the man Sybil falls for, who can look himself in the mirror, Vimes will have decided not to be that man.

And the revolution still fails, but it fails differently, in a way that plants more seeds for a better City, in a way that saves his future family as a side-effect, because it’s not about the future as a thing that justifies your choices, it’s about making the present you’re in count as much as it can, mucking out the torture cells, forging community from distrust, bringing another block inside the barricades. That’s what saves you, in the end.

“He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.” ... "As I recall, they used to sing it after battles," he said. "I've seen old men cry when they sing it," he added. "Why? It sounds cheerful." They were remembering who they were not singing it with, thought Vimes. You'll learn. I know you will.”

― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

and if you give me an explanation in the tags i'll love you forever

Dug around in my archive drives for Discworld fanarts. I have a lot of Feelings I can’t articulate very well soooooo I’m not going to, just enjoy the draws xD FYI Zombie Reg is still one of my favorite faces I’ve drawn of all time, ever!

MAN I just remembered how I sketched the Vimes family portrait after I read Thud! I should find that and finish it…

Discworld: Wyrd Sisters Director: Jean Flynn | Studio: Cosgrove Hall | UK, 1997

It genuinely upsets me that there are people who call this animation and voice acting bad, there’s so much heart and soul on display in just this clip alone

At first glance: ‘lol this is going to be one of those hilariously cheap animations’

30 seconds in: ‘…Oh my god this is fantastic’

“WHO DARES TO INVOKE WXRTHLTL-JWLPKLZ?” “Where were you when the vowels were bein’ handed out, behind the door??”

I love Magrat in this clip so much, you can see she dislikes this DISRESPECT but also knows exactly what makes things work regardless. Absolutely fantastic faces and body language all over, and the voice acting is not super expressive but it's VERY clear (and the expressiveness is handled by their faces really)

I've finally got around to last continent and I didn't realize before that the reason there is a sharp divide between sourcery-era early days wizards keep murdering each other at the unseen university and the now everything is chill go ahead and get attached to these same handful of named wizards mid-discworld-era unseen university is because mustrum ridcully and his hunting crossbow showed up and promptly reshaped the ecosystem like the wolves reintroduced to yellowstone

This man shows up in Moving Pictures, is implied for his presence to have just made the Bursar Like That, and terrorizes the faculty so much that no one would dare try to off him or anyone he is relatively close to because you know Damn well from his resentment towards the Dean in later books is because he values that ecosystem to an obnoxious degree, and anyone messing with it will be quick to see just how much a crossbow bolt hurts

Ok, this is a little niche, but I have a theory for all you Discworld fans. Why doesnt Carrot have a beard?

A few facts to start with:

1. All Dwarves have beards.

2. Carrot is, culturally, a dwarf. He sees himself as a dwarf and other dwarfs accept him as such. (He’s just a very tall dwarf.)

So why would Carrot NOT have a beard, if all Dwarves have beards and Carrot is a dwarf? Would he choose to shave? Why? He wouldnt, right? Is there some reason he CANT grow a beard?

Another fact to remember about Disc Dwarfs:

All Dwarves are raised as men. Regardless of their biological sex and whether they are XX or XY, they are men, they use he/him pronouns, etc. (The fact that some dwarves have begun to identify and present as women is very recent in Disc history after all, and not all XX dwarves identify or present as women)

So, follow me here- the Dwarves in the mountain find a human baby. Regardless of that baby’s biological sex, they would be raised as a dwarf boy/man, yeah?

So…. may I present the theory- the reason that Carrot, a dwarf man, has no beard is because, you following, he is biologically an XX human. The fact that he cant grow a beard doesnt make him less of a dwarf man than the fact that he is 6+ feet tall.

So what I’m hearing is Carrot should be played by Gwendoline Christie

Discworld Heritage Post

I actually started writing a fic about this in 2019, from the POV of Sally trying to grapple with the fact that Nobody Else Knows That Carrot is Trans, Including Possibly Carrot, Do We Tell Him? But it didn’t really have legs.

It did have one in-character bit of wordplay (“Vimes is not normally home to Mr Social Nuance. He’s too busy visiting the home of Mr Social Nuisance, kicking down his door”) and a fairly quirky interpretation of a dwarfish marriage contract (the fiancee’s precise physical configurations are placed under a sort of sealed folded origami addition to the contract document, which is broken open privately upon mutual consent at a specific point in the marriage negotiations around parental leave, and then re-sealed together - it’s all very romantic. The public-facing part of the contract can be displayed to all like an engagement ring.)

In lieu of posting and then orphaning a work that didn’t get off the ground (which doesn’t work well when it’s a character grappling with a nuanced social topic) I would warmly welcome anyone who wanted to adopt 3000 words that goes nowhere and work out a nice character development arc for Sally out of it.

Can we talk real quick about how beautiful Leonard and Vetinari’s friendship is thematically speaking? Like, we have a dude who’s whole deal is believing that the world is inherently evil, who’s friends with this other guy that almost sees it as his responsibility as a living thing to be unconditionally in love with the world. I’d also argue that this may be slightly present with Sybil, and possibly Carrot. Vetinari just likes people who can make him believe, even briefly, that his ‘the world is inherently evil’ philosophy is false.

Discworld Heritage Post

“The thing about angels, is you only get one,” Vetinari tells Moist in Going Postal.  But if this applied to Vetinari, well, I think we all know what the angel would be.

“He overrules them moment by moment! I think I saw a genius at work…”

WAIT.

WAIT.

If Madam was paying Nobby to keep an eye on people... have Nobby and Vetinari known each other since they were kids?

Let's go with yes. It's funnier.

Hey since it's the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, here's my favorite reading order for the Discworld books, the point of which is to read everything you need to read before you read Night Watch, which is the best one:

(I basically stole this reading order from someone's website. Thank you, person with a website.)

At that point you will probably have a pretty good idea of whether or not you want to read all the other Discworld books. I highly recommend the Witches subseries, which have a reading order as well:

Then there are a bunch of other books, some of which are (loosely) connected, and the Rincewind books, which IMO are the weakest link in the Discworld (although I do enjoy Interesting Times, because of the China jokes).

There were also like twelve other books published after Night Watch, and they're still great - Monstrous Regiment is probably my fave of those - but I do think Night Watch was the peak of the Discworld series. After so many relatively self-contained books and so much humor, I don't think anyone was quite expecting such a rich chapter of Vimes's story that also punches you right in the feels. It's so good, y'all.

As always, it's dangerous to go alone, so take the Annotated Pratchett File with you.

Just consider the fact that Vetinari wears the lilac for a second.

It’s one hell of a political statement, coming from a man who is typically all about being very subtle and understated and keeping his cards close to his chest. Just consider how much of a— aha… ballsy move that is.

He’s openly stating with each passing year that he believed in the Glorious Revolution, that he believed that Lord Winder should have been assassinated, that he believed that police brutality on that scale needs to be stamped out once and for all.

That he believed, and still believes, that unfit rulers should be overthrown.

He meets with aristocrats and the “perennial waverers” as they are termed in the book with a lilac bloom pinned to his robe. He wears a symbol of the hopes and dreams of his youth, every year.

It almost reads as a throwaway statement at the end of an incredibly emotional book, but it’s far from it. There’s so much meaning in the fact that Vetinari wears the lilac and visits the little graveyard each year under the cover of darkness. Is it any wonder that he wound down a corrupt City Watch, and is so vehemently against the prospect of war and loss of life?

Okay but so much of the character of Sam Vimes is influenced by him being a former alcoholic tho. I don’t think it’s possible to discuss his unbreakable moral code without also discussing his addiction.

There is significant parallels between how he does not touch alcohol EVER starting from Men at Arms and every other ways that he holds himself accountable in the books.

One minute late to storytime with his child would be one minute too much, because once you excuse one minute late then you can excuse five, ten, and then fifteen minutes late. -> one drink is too many drinks because one drink « tends to arrive in five glasses ».

« If you do a bad thing for a good reason you’ll do it for a bad one », « If one part of the machine breaks down it all breaks down » and « who watches the watchman? Me. » are all different ways of saying that Vimes cannot allow himself to make even one exception in how he behaves. Will not, yes, and that’s very admirable, but this will not is the result of a CAN NOT because what would happen if he did is not, in fact, unthinkable. On the contrary, he knows very well what would happen if he did break one of his many rules, and this is exactly why he doesn’t break them.

« One drink is one too many » is basically the center of his character’s moral code. And it hits so hard because he’s not being rigid for the fun of it, he’s like that because he knows. It’s a sliding slope and he’s been on it and at the bottom of it and he KNOWS how quickly it slides.

And it’s so interesting to see how he applies that core concept to all other aspects of his life, cultimating into the guarding dark.

so i finsihed Men At Arms and drew some of my favorite parts.

bonus vimes and carrot

the relationship between Vetinari and Vimes is sooo funny, because it is extremely aggravating for literally everyone involved. Like at some point they have this kind of companionship, and neither of them are really happy about it ?? they have mutual respect for each other and for both of them it's the most annoying, head-ache inducing thing in the entire world. they are besties and both of them are mad about it. it's " help my weird boss keeps promoting me against my will and teaching me the ways of Evil" and " help my commander that I employed to annoy the rich is making my city better and teaching me the ways of Good". their lives are so entangled with one another they literally couldn't be any closer. their mutual dislike is so important actually because it helps them to hold one another accountable. that little bit of mutual distrust is CRUCIAL. they are actually the epitome of love, and wow do they hate it. they absolutely loathe it. my favourite relationship to be portrayed anywhere ever.

Not how I read Vetinari At All, actually, especially after Night Watch. He knew exactly what Vimes was going to do and did not actually need any teaching. Hell, he goes off ON Vimes about the ways of Good in Jingo, as well as personally setting the precedent that the Patrician can be arrested for a crime (while Vimes was floundering and having trouble with the concept).

The Vetinari I’ve read is the most chaotic Chaotic Good I’ve ever seen, and in a typical Chaotic Good + Lawful Good way (one of typical CG vs LG ways anyway) he annoys Vimes incredibly and has an admiring respect for him back (for him but not for his mental health)