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.

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.

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.

the funniest part of night watch is vetinari's off screen adventure

Quotes from NIGHT WATCH by Terry Pratchett

Privilege, which just means “private law.” Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it.

—

“Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people,” mumbled Sam.

“Do they?” said Vimes. “Then why doesn’t anyone do anything about it?”

“’Cos they torture people.”

—

It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough-and-ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. Instead, he’d taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang.

—

Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority—everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn’t, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was.

—

One of the hardest lessons of young Sam’s life had been finding out that the people in charge weren’t in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

—

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. 

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.

—

Where was the law? There was the barricade. Who was it protecting from what? The city was run by a madman and his shadowy chums, so where was the law?

Coppers liked to say that people shouldn’t take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. But they were thinking about peaceful times, and men who went around to sort out a neighbor with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like these, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn’t be in the hands of the people, where the hell should it be?

—

“You took an oath to uphold the law and defend the citizens without fear or favor,” said Vimes. “And to protect the innocent. That’s all they put in. Maybe they thought those were the important things. Nothing in there about orders, even from me. You’re an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government.”

—

“You’d like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldn’t you, Comrade Sergeant?” said Reg encouragingly.

“I’d like a hard-boiled egg,” said Vimes, shaking the match out. 

There was some nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended. “In the circumstances, Sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higher—” 

“Well, yes, we could,” said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced at the sheets of paper in front of Reg. The man cared. He really did. And he was serious. He really was. “But…well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I’m pretty sure that whatever happens we won’t have found Freedom, and there won’t be a whole lot of Justice, and I’m damn sure we won’t have found Truth. But it’s just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg.“

I love the dynamic in the Discworld fandom on this site, I think it's mainly because there are a lot of dormant fans, if you will, who've read and loved the books for years but haven't engaged much recently, who sort of reappear whenever a fun post is doing the rounds. It's fantastic. We get the cozy small fandom vibe without the screaming matches, but also get the popular posts from time to time, y'know?

YEP. In fact for some people it’s Emotions Day right now.

To everyone tagging and commenting with some variation of “Oh, I almost forgot that it’s tomorrow!”

That’s so very meta of you.

The lilacs have been in bloom for a while so I was afraid they might have already passed before tomorrow... But no. They're still as strong and lovely as ever. It's Feelings Day tomorrow!

I did not remember the date even a little bit but from the start of May I was like “when will lilacs be in bloom... when will it be That Time”

Night Watch is such a galaxy brain move from Sir Terry. I can't believe it exists. I can't believe he came up with this. To be fair I was so overwhelmed that I was close to tears the whole way through, but I was fairly gobsmacked at the same time. INCREDIBLE premise and execution, and characters, and pacing, and all three Sams (God bless them all, especially the littlest one, though I have yet to meet him--but I love him already, too), and...... everything

it occurs to me on the heels of that excellent post that, really, every single Vimes book could be summed up with an “I am forcibly removed” snowclone 

his entire career is “I AM FORCIBLY ESCORTED FROM THE [patrician’s palace/diplomatic function/heraldry office/position of captain/my own past]”

I ARRIVE IN MY PAST

Law: On 

People: Protected

Snapcase: Out

I AM FORCEFULLY ESCORTED FROM MY PAST

I ARRIVE IN KLATCH

D’regs: impressed

71-hour Ahmed: befriended

Army: arrested

I AM FORCIBLY ESCORTED FROM KLATCH

reasons why Night Watch is my favorite pterry book

It’s a book about revolutions for people who don’t like revolution books.

It’s a book about time travel for people who don’t like time travel books — it’s the only time travel book where the hero doesn’t decide that it’s best to not meddle with the past for the sake of saving the future. Instead, Vimes learns to sacrifice the future.

It positively portrays sex workers — not only were they not tragic or over-sexualized, they were revolutionaries fighting for a cause.

It deals with police brutality and government corruption in a smart, original way.

It doesn’t have any messages about how the plucky underdog will always win if they try hard enough — its message isn’t that clear cut, because real life isn’t that clear cut. It talks about sacrifice and loyalty and power and struggle, and it feels raw and real, and it isn’t nice about it.

I know everyone likes to quote How do they rise up? but the part that makes me cry is when Vimes looks up, knowing he can’t win, and sees that overhead the lilacs were in bloom.

No other Discworld book made me cry.

…and while it did make me cry, it was also completely fucking hilarious, like every other thing pterry has written.

Sir Terry Pratchett, only you could have written this book. Thank you.

Havelock looked down at the grave. Someone had already put down a hard-boiled egg in front of the stone.

Rosie Palm, no doubt.

Keep reading

Most of the credit for this realization goes to pipuhattar but it just had to be shared

like

Can you imagine how stoked Vetinari must have been when he realized that not only does he have Sam Vimes on his side, but he has John Keel. He, by almost coincidence (and a whole lot of cleverness. i mean seriously even with the weirdness of the Disc who could GUESS it had been Vimes travelled back in time?!) finds this out and he is so fired up by this. And like he even SUSPECTED even before the events of Night Watch but then it all comes together and I can just IMAGINE  his smugness.

‘Yes. I literally have the world’s most bloody-minded and incorruptible copper on my side. Your move, world.’

That’s not even bringing up the roundaboutness of Vimes becoming Vimes. Like, in Feet of Clay, Drumknott says to Vetinari that ‘the thought occurs that if the Commander did not exist, you would have to invent him.’ and his response is, ‘You know, I rather think I did.’

And it turns out that while he may have some of the credit, the process was LITERALLY kickstarted by Vimes himself. And its obvious from Guards! Guards! that making the Watch what it later became wasn’t always the plan, but he later sees himself as steering Vimes’ natural stubbornness into the same mold as Keel. When in fact it was Vimes/Keel who prompted that decision in the first place.

Gosh, this is amazing.

I don't think it's obvious from Guards! Guards! at all? We don't know that Vetinari really did think what he was saying out loud and that he wasn't all "oh my gosh is this it??? is this it??? finally??? is this finally gonna work???" when Carrot arrived and started stirring up shit. We don't know that he didn't purposefully transfer Vimes (or pull strings so he'd be transferred) to the position where he'd had just enough authority and independence to develop into what he did develop into earlier. We know that the Watch had been cut in size ridiculously between the events of Night Watch and Guards! Guards! but Vimes stayed. We don't know Vetinari did not arrange that keeping his plan for Vimes in mind.

We do know that in Men at Arms he was very purposefully pushing Vimes towards where he envisioned his place, but underestimated Vimes' Lawfulness and how much symbols mattered to him.

We do know that in Jingo he basically personally and singlehandedly arranged the most bright spot in Vimes' carreer until then: arresting the Patrician. He basically forced Vimes to arrest him, despite Vimes being stuck on the traditions of Ankh-Morpork which said he was untouchable.

Yeah, I think Vetinari has been planning this all along.

one of the most disappointing experiences is finding out someone you idolised whose work you enjoyed actually actively hates your kind

there’s your fave is problematic

and then there’s your fave considers you subhuman and would probably enjoy seeing you suffer 

Re: Lukyanenko and that scene in the last Night Watch book I bought.

It's nice that he considers my language "a southern dialect that's easy to imitate" and my nation "will rejoin Russia, not this decade then the next" according to a wise immortal from the side of Good. But I'm not buying his books anymore.

Sam Vimes in Night Watch by Terry Pratchett (via e-hyde) Night Watch is a very good and very important book (◡‿◡✿) I will never see lilacs the same way ever again

discworld and fridging

Something that just struck me:

Do we ever think seriously about how amazing it is that in Discworld, no female character ever gets fridged for the ‘benefit’ of a male character’s story arc?

I mean, it may not seem like a big deal until you remember these are actually 40 books and how incredibly common this is as a plot device in mainstream media.

Let’s take Sybil Ramkin (also known as dragon goddess of my heart) as an example. The one time she plays damsel in the series is in Guards!Guards when the King (actually dragon, actually Queen. Or maybe not. We shouldn’t presume on their gender identity) is going to eat her, and that’s because she was knocked out stone cold by several guards. Once she’s freed, she proceeds to kick ass and take names like you would expect from a dragon breeder, and you can also appreciate the fact that she kicks off probably the most practical courtship in the history of fantasy as a genre.

(also there was that time she knocked out a werewolf with a steel bar because they were holding her captive and apologized afterwards I swear to gods this woman)

And she is never fridged. Think about how easily most male authors would just go, ‘You know what? The protagonist isn’t having enough angst. Let’s kill his love interest.’

Then, tuppence more and up goes the donkey.

And she is such a positive force in the story! We start out with Vimes seemingly as a clichéd anti-hero cowboy-cop, the kind you’ll find in anything from Lethal Weapon to The Maltese Falcon. He is an alcoholic, utterly miserable and deems himself basically worthless. And then something (a combination of Sybil/Carrot/Vetinari support/scheming and Vimes’ own barely contained rage against the universe) kicks him in the pants and he gets character development like wowza! and we end up with a Lawful Good, incredibly clever (it never ceases to sadden me how he thinks he isn’t really that intelligent) protagonist with probably the strongest moral code I have ever seen in a fictional character. I mean, it had a mental/physical manifestation, for gods’ sake.

And they have this most elusive of fictional things; a marriage free of unnecessary drama and full of mutual respect and kindness, and she does her own thing with the dragons while he solves crime (she tends to help, though) and never is she killed off to ‘advance’ his development as a character.

Because a) that would be a really gross (although frustratingly common) thing to do and b),

This is Sir Terry Motherfucking Pratchett.

What’s also really awesome is that Terry Pratchett actually uses Sybil not being killed off as character development.

There’s Carcer’s threats in Night Watch (“I can see your house from up here”), Sybil almost dying in child birth at the end of the book, the dwarves in Thud breaking into their home and trying to kill Sybil & Young Sam, Stratford at the end of Snuff (and probably several more, which I’ve forgotten) - and Vimes responds to all of these with such anger and such loyalty that they show this goodness of his, this moral code he has, so clearly that you can’t possibly miss picking up on it.

And so one of the main ways we really see Vimes’ character is through his determination that nothing, nothing, will ever hurt his family.

So Pratchett manages to further the protagonist’s character while still keeping one hella strong female dragon queen 100% alive and 100% kicking, which I think is, really, quite brilliant.