@myurbandream / myurbandream.tumblr.com
hey, uh. what the shit
“Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks round, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves.” ― Terry Pratchett, Thud!
“You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become” - Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
it’s seasonal lads
IT’S SEASONAL AGAIN LADS
I woke up this morning with the urge to post a brief and thoroughly non-exhaustive list of Discworld pun/reference names of varying levels of obscurity that people may or may not have gotten, and HERE IT IS.
Let me introduce you to the Annotated Pratchett File. More annotations than you can shake a banana at.
Arthur Chu breaks down the importance of Discworld in his farewell tribute to Sir Terry Pratchett, A Guide to Escape from Escapism (via landunderwave)
Part of why it worked was because Pratchett didn’t sneer at heroism or idealism, he showed how good intentions go bad and over the course of centuries things fossilise and need to be replaced, and most importantly, he showed the heroism of the small. Yes, he showed the other side of the coin, the darker side of the heroic and epic, but he didn’t use that as an excuse to go Martin’s way of “this is what it’s really like: murder, rape and treachery under all the fine words”.
People like Vimes who stuck to duty even in his worst hours, when he was sunk in self-loathing and alcoholism, a dangerous man who sabotaged himself half-intentionally, because it was in his bones and because (as we got to know in “Night Watch”) he also had his own ideals and idealism that he doggedly held on to, even when half-ashamed of that.
He permits honour to exist in his world, even if it’s not kings and knights in shining armour.
It may be low fantasy, but it’s never vile. Even when he’s showing us what real evil looks like.
(via tartapplesauce)
The thing that gets me the most about critics of Terry Pratchett’s novels who say they’re not important or “literature” because they’re “not realistic” is this:
By what yardstick are we supposed to be measuring “realism”?
See, I’m willing to bet that the yardstick these critics use is that oh so popular model of “the real world is really a terrible place, so the world of this piece of media is full of barbarism and grotesque cruelty.”* And Terry Pratchett never, ever fell into that dismal trope. He didn’t hunt his characters for sport. There’s no gratuitous sexual violence (no sexual violence at all, that I can think of). Even if a death or an act of evil is senseless from an in-world point of view, it isn’t random and senseless from a narrative perspective, thrown in to shock or to remind readers/viewers that “that’s reality.” The Discworld isn’t a happy rainbow place all the time. But it’s not a bleak pit of despair, either. There are bad people of all stripes, from literal torturers and megalomaniacs to regular folk who perpetuate the kind of small mundane badness pretty much every human is guilty of at one time or another. But there are good people too. And sometimes some of them die along the way, but ultimately the good people win and the world is changed for the better or at least doesn’t get any worse. Is that really “unrealistic”?
Terry Pratchett didn’t write a bunch of books about people being brutal to each other because “that’s human nature.” Terry Pratchett acknowledged–often, even–that humanity is prone to base acts. But what his books are really about, is humanity’s ability to rise above that. Terry Pratchett wrote about protagonists who are imperfect, doing good in the world often against their first instincts. He wrote about situations where it is hard to be good, but where his protagonists choose it anyway.
These are just a few of so many examples. And are they “unrealistic”? Is the idea that imperfect beings can choose to do good even if it is difficult “fantasy”? Is it really too hard to believe that maybe even if the nature of humanity inclines toward selfishness and greed and all that terrible stuff, humanity can also do better than that, if individuals choose to?
Because, wow, to me that’s an awfully uninspiring view of “reality”. It’s kind of a boring one, too, when it comes to media. If all you’re going to show me is a series of escalating cruelty for shock value, because “in the real world good people suffer” or whatever edgy thing you think is “realistic”, I’m not interested, sorry.
Give me Terry Pratchett’s world, where readers can think that if a screwup like Rincewind or someone as bad-tempered as Granny can do good maybe they, the readers, can do good too. That if Vimes can turn his life around and work for justice, and if Brutha can question authority and stand up to oppression, maybe they could help change things, too. Give me that “fantasy” any day.
That’s the kind of “literature” I want.
*Either that or they just see books where magic is real and immediately put on their “I’m a grown up, grown ups don’t believe in magic” hats and roll their eyes, sure in the knowledge of their superiority, because what value could there ever be in having a little imagination, right?
But more to the point… I mean… the Discworld is hella realistic. The world makes sense. People act like people. Imps with a good eye and perfect memory are used in cameras and watches. The clacks rapidly goes multi-national after being invented and is soon a part of everyday life. What’s that quote from Night Watch…
Reblogging especially for that second part, and yeah, seriously. I’ve never seen a work as realistic as Discworld in terms of the solidity and reality of things like “where does the food come from” and “where does the sewage go” and “what do people with no connection to the main characters do all day?” Ankh-Morpork has pencil factories and a slaughterhouse district and a garbage mogul and cloth-production sweatshops and seed salesmen and hairdressers and milkmen and stationary manufacturers and rat catchers and runway fashion designers and all-night takeaway restaurants, and at one point the top candidate for the Patricianship was a guy from the Guild of Leatherworkers who ran a sex shop. The greasy details of candle manufacturing are a plot point in Feet of Clay, as is paper availability in The Truth and the murder of a condom manufacturer in The Fifth Elephant. I’ve seen plenty of fantasy novels that talk about noble ladies having expensive cosmetics, but Discworld is the only one I’ve ever seen with a passing mention of someone who makes them.
There are guilds of thieves and assassins and beggars, yes (which started, for the record, as a parody of old-school heroic fantasy where underground Guilds of [Criminal]s would often be the only organization present in the narrative besides something like the City Guards), but there are also guilds of clockmakers and bakers and teachers and engravers and laundresses and town criers and exotic dancers. I’ve never seen anything that so well shows the scale and diversity of a society as Discworld.
What is this
it’s a comic based on a scene from a book called “the hogfather” it is a novel by terry pratchet in the diskworld series wherein santa (the hogfather) is being audited, so to keep people believing in irrational but symbolic constructs death takes over for him and isn’t very good at it, but he does his best.
@fialleril you’ve probably seen this before, but I can’t take the risk that you haven’t.
What is Hogfather?
The only holiday book that matters, tbh.
The carrier of carriers. A tribute to Terry Pratchett
Granny Weatherwax vs Yoda?
Granny Weatherwax would absolutely devastate Yoda and we would all be blessed to see it.
One way that I think she could drive Yoda absolutely nuts, is that she would be just the kind of ideologically confrontational, the exact kind of unyielding in the face of Jedi Wisdom<sup>TM</sup> that Yoda would be expecting a fight.
The last few Darksiders we see in his universe are so easy to provoque into going for their lightsabers (and she can’t be of the Light Side, can she?)
He wants it to come to a fight, because she’s not letting him bulldoze or derail her, and she’s raising a lot of deeply uncomfortable points and she won’t escalate into a fight.
…and he can’t stay the reasonable wise elder in the face of rampaging evil if he’s the one to start it. So he can’t.
So he has to debate with the….. witch.
Yet another reason I’m sad Terry Pratchett is dead is because I just know that the Discworld novel he would have written in response to recent developments in Britain and the world would be fucking scathing.
“A small but growing number of people believe we should magically summon a new world turtle and place Ankh-Morpork on its back in order to leave the Disc entirely, sir.”
“Intriguing.”
“It can’t be done, sir. Especially not the…” Drumknott consulted his paperwork. “…bit where, and I quote, Obviously we’ll leave all the foreigners behind. They seem divided on the precise definition of foreigner but it seems to include anyone who doesn’t look like them, and most people who do look like them but speak funny.”
“Ah, we’ve reached that part, where we define foreigner so we know who to give the boot to,” Vetinari sighed.
“It’s obviously not really plausible, sir, we’d lose a lot of good trade routes if there were no longer any external portions of the Disc attached to us, and having consulted with the alchemists there’s a strong sense among them that we would shortly run out of air to breathe should we leave the Disc’s protective weather systems.”
“Ah, but they can vote on it, you see,” Vetinari said. “They can campaign for it. And just knowing we ought to do it…”
He pulled a report across his desk, one in the crabbed, unmistakable schoolboy handwriting of Sir Samuel. “Crime is up, Drumknott.”
“I wasn’t aware we’d increased the Thieves’ Guild allotments this month, sir.”
“We haven’t. Nor the Assassins’ Guild. Unfortunately the crimes on the rise are of the go-back-where-you-came-from variety and there is, as of yet, no Bigots’ guild.”
“Do you think creating one would stop them, sir?”
“Not in this case, no,” Vetinari murmured. “I suspect we shall have to leave it up to human decency and the efforts of the Watch.”
Drumknott gave him the most horrified look he’d seen since the first time he suggested promoting Sir Samuel.
“Not really, sir?”
“Of course not. Good lord, Drumknott. I shall have some errands for you today, however, and you’d best fetch the Commander. And Mr. De Worde. Get De Worde here first, then bring in Sir Samuel when he’s had just enough time to get nervous in the waiting room. If Sir Samuel is at home, do bring her Ladyship along, otherwise I’ll see her at the dinner tomorrow night. Ah yes, and I believe I shall pay a visit to Mr. Von Lipwig tomorrow afternoon; please notify him of the impending surprise inspection of the mint.”
“But sir, what will you – “
“That will be all, Drumknott,” Vetinari said.
In the crevices of Vetinari’s mind, gears began to turn. Disorder, of course, was a natural aspect of any city, but unpleasantness of this sort led to much too much and the wrong kind of disorder. After all, at one time Ankh-Morpork had simply been a swampy plain; trace a family back far enough and everyone was an immigrant. The kind of thinking that led to one saying they were taking their city and leaving sooner or later led to metaphorical shoving matches over who looked a little too igneous to be allowed, or whose mother sent funny food with them to school, or who exactly was allowed to wear what kind of cloth on their head.
And the whole thing, as he knew from personal experience, could very well lead to unpleasantly large dragons.
Perhaps it was time to set some spinning tops in motion.
@copperbadge – what would we need to pay you so you could write that book … :) ??
I might already have written an outline. It includes a Star Wars allegory and the phrase “vimes joins the resistance”, also “the return of our beloved long-fingered despot”.
Any thoughts on Discworld daemons, if you don't mind me asking?
Vimes has a mutt.
There’s really not a nicer way to describe her, a bow-legged cross between a terrier and a feral sewer rat, mostly the color of dishwater. And she doesn’t really clean up—it becomes more embarrassing after he’s married Sybil, whose pygmy hippo daemon can go from placid river god to defensive bellowing ferocity in seconds flat, and might as well have stepped from the Morpork coat of arms. But even freshly cleaned and trussed in a gold ducal collar, his daemon looks like it was dragged backwards through a nasty bit of the Ankh.
she’s a patient tracker, though, and a rat-worrier and a sheep-herder and a snarling, protective beast—there must be some wolf in that mongrel of yours, Wolfgang tells him on that snowy plain, and Vimes figures it’s pretty likely, he’s got a wolf in him too.
Vetinari has a golden orb-weaver, who only occasional deigns to make an appearance—usually resting on the back of Vetinari’s hand, as if to make a point. (There are heads of guilds with enormous bull daemons who shiver in fear of that little spider, on that pale hand.)
Carrot has a frankly impressive lioness, whose presence made the whole watch-house fall silent the first time Carrot walked in. Vimes had been a little taken aback at the sight of her, gold and somehow not of their world, standing in their grubby and undistinguished midst.
(No one has ever asked Carrot about her, not even Angua, who has her own lovely wolfdog daemon.)
Moist has a mockingbird who perches on his shoulder, the same color as dust and utterly forgettable. (In his old glory days, he would sometimes bring a turtle or mouse with him, hiding her under his hat—sorry, wrong daemon is not an ironclad alibi, but it’s enough of a distraction to run away.) She gets along well with Spike’s terrifying peregrine, though she’s a little too excited by the feeling of being snatched out of the air in Moist’s opinion.
William de Worde has a hedgehog, who immediately curled up in a ball when faced with Sacharissa Cripslock’s ermine. (It took a while to get him to relax.)
Witches tend toward cats—or women with cat daemons turn out to be witches, they never quite decided that one. Granny Weatherwax has pure grey cat, utterly unremarkable in every way but that. (She has always been privately disappointed in him, for it. She would have preferred something a little more imposing, more obviously witchy—which, of course, is ridiculous, it is choosing that makes a witch, not her nature. But still.)
Nanny has a fat piebald cat whose amorous adventures with other daemons rival Greebo’s—he’s been known to slip off for days, only returning when Nanny is called out. Magrat has a cream shorthair who looks very handsome beside Verence’s—slightly excitable, a little graceless—hare. Even Susan, though technically not a witch, has a cat daemon, a sleek black thing that likes to play with the Death of Rats when he’s bored.
Tiffany is among the few witches who doesn’t have a cat daemon—hers doesn’t settle until she faces the hiver, until she ushers it through the black door to its death. Afterwards, Tiffany Aching knows herself to be a witch, and walks the downs with her sheepdog daemon at her side, her hat full of sky.
Sgt Colin has a mild, pleasant brown toad, a sit-and-see kind of predator. Something with the patience to outlast storms, and droughts, and long frosts. Something with a set territory and a bottomless stomach, something that can launch itself sudden, startling blur to become the last thing the unwary insect ever sees.
Nobby Nobbs, well— no one actually knows what his daemon is. She’s as matted and filthy and scrofulous as the rest of him, a dark, oil-iridescent clot of fur— or are those bristles? or matted feathers?— nestled in between the collar of his breastplate and the dirt-stiff rim of his shirt. Rat? Pigeon? Spider? No one wants to ask. No one wants an answer. Sometimes she will extend one scaly, brittle claw out into the open air, and he will deposit into it a sugar cube, or a coin, or a bright little shard of glass, and she— whatever she is whatever she’s named— will retreat into the comfortable hollow of his armor, purring and pleased.
She can scream like hell though, and frequently will.
Dorfl, of course, has a phoenix— when he opened his mouth to speak his first word, there she was, a scrap of flame, on his tongue.
I love roachpatrol’s thoughts. The image of Dorfl’s daemon being born is beautiful.
I think witches would have birds, like in HDM. I see Granny with a goose; Nanny with a robin-red-breast and Magrat with a corn crake. Agnes has a nightingale and Tiffany a curlew.
Through the piping lines of the Unseen University, there are bees.
No one knows where they come from. No one knows what they eat or where they keep their hive; they buzz softly but in a way that it sounds like many mechanical things clicking together, and when they rise all at once, it sounds like the beginning of a voice.
And always, they cluster near the parts of Hex; the tubing that runs through the University like a hermit crab in a shell just right for it, and a careful eye notes that their buzzing matches perfectly to Hex’s eternal noise; the clicking of the clockwork, the tapping of the keys, the steps of the ants.
The students swear they have never seen the bees more than a short distance away from Hex, and always around the senior wizards or the High Energy facility, and they move around Ponder Stibbons like a particularly noisy halo so he looks like an apiary angel.
Mr Stibbons tells the truth when he says there were never any bees until they turned on Hex. And one day, in the moving of the machinery, there arose but just one single perfect bee.
No one knows when the swarm came. Just like no one knows when Hex became something more than the sum of parts.
But when the bees fly and Hex is working, buzz and machinery a duet, it sounds like the voice of a soul.
The undead still have souls, which is why they’re allowed in the Watch, and by extension integrated into human-dominated society. Reg Shoe’s parrot is a transparent, repetitive thing with a small tinny voice, like the echo of a kitten at the bottom of a tin bath. But that’s just Reg Shoe.
Of course dwarves have souls; strange ones, but theologically undeniable. There have always been mutters that dwarves steal the souls, or that the strangely-silent animals are actually trained pets; but they do seem satisfyingly dwarvish, the sombre badgers and mole rats and burrowing owls, and they generally don’t cause trouble, and one must trade after all.
But Cheery’s pink fairy armadillo is instantly recognizable as a daemon, and a nicely dwarvish one to human sensibilities, a very small burrowing animal. Though to the dwarves, the fussy little thing with its delicate pink armor and pristine white fur is a slightly embarrassing thing to have on public display. Not only that, but the daemon speaks in public - allowing his high, breathy, querulous voice to be commonly read as male, implying that Cheery is by extension female.
At her interview for the position at the Watch, she gathers her courage in both hands and introduces the daemon to Vimes as
Roz’querkluftertz
, her heart hammering at the wrongness and intimacy of it. (Vimes helpfully points out the location of the spittoon) and she says “No, it’s, er, a kind of pink, er, rock,” and Vimes’s face goes all hollow and he sort of stares off into the distance, and she can practically hear the rusty machinery of his brain trying to process this new information on How Not To Be A Racist Prick To The New Diversity Hire into something he can make sense of.
”Is it,” Vimes says finally, the last mental gear clunking into place, where it appears to stick.
“It’s a very pretty sort of rock,” Cheery says humbly, trying to help. “But quite rare and I’m sure it hasn’t come up in conversation before.”
”Not like gold,” Vimes says sourly.
”Probably not,” Cheery says carefully, trying to avoid the pitfall trap that is talking about gold among dwarves.
Her daemon himself pipes up suddenly in his high, scholarly little voice, and Vimes looks at him in surprise: “Roz’querkluftertz is not considered valuable to dwarves at all, in the sense that gold is inherently valuable; it is,” - and here Roz’querkluftertz gives his fussy little academic cough, “considered hr’azdkha, which is to say, valuable because of its work or properties; namely, in the case of this mineral, being useful to alchemical research, as well as being beautiful, in the homely comfortable sort of way that is rarely reflected in songs. And, of course, pink.”
”Never heard a dwarf’s daemon talk before,” Vimes’s terrier says. Her voice is beautiful, deep and hoarse and husky, like a smoke-broken bar singer.
”We’re a bit odd,” Cheery says.
”You’ll do,” the terrier says.
”I’ve always liked, er, pink,” says Vimes, pitching himself courageously along the conversation, and Cheery’s heart sort of goes out to him a bit, because you can see that somewhere behind that casually hurtful sneer, in that dark and ill-kempt machine of his brain, the man is trying to be Good with a capital G, and most people don’t care that much.
”Me too,” she says, her hand curling around the little tube of Violently Pink Like The Blood Of Thine Enemies lipstick she’d bought in the market that morning. “I’ve always liked pink.”
Ankh Morpork recreated to resemble Google Maps. #ankhmorpork #discworld #google #maps
Okay but where’s the drop down feature I want to walk around and find Sam Vimes flipping off the Hex-Imp Car.
It wasn’t a decision that he was making, he knew. It was happening far below the areas of the brain that made decisions. It was something built in. There was no universe, anywhere, where a Sam Vimes would give in on this, because if he did then he wouldn’t be Sam Vimes any more.
&
He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew… then it was too high.
&
‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Your grace.’
‘I know that one,’ said Vimes. Who watches the watchmen? Me, Mr Pessimal.’
‘Ah, but who watches you, your grace?’ said the inspector, with a brief smile.
‘I do that too. All the time,’ said Vimes.
&
When people are trying to kill you, it means you’re doing something right. It was a rule Sam had lived by.
&
‘Ramkins have never run away from anything’ Sybil declared.
‘Vimeses have run like hell all the time,’ said Vimes, too diplomatic to mention the aforesaid ancestors who came home in pieces. ‘That means you fight where you want to fight.’
&
‘Taking a force there now could have far-reaching consequences, Vimes!’
‘Good! You told me to drag them into the light! As far as they’re concerned, I am far-reaching consequences!’
Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett (via teapiratebesides)
Every time I recommend Discworld to someone, I get asked “where should I start?” There are several reading order guides floating around the internet, but they just give the order of each series, they don’t give you any information on which to base a choice of starter novel. For that, use this handy (and very biased, okay, I admit it) flow chart!
For everyone one who has been asking ME where to start (I’m sorry I don’t reply to you all I get asked this so often) this is an exceedingly good chart.
With a screenplay by Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of Terry Pratchett, we’re finally going to see an adaptation of The Wee Free Men.
The Wee Free Men introduced Tiffany Aching, the young witch who starred in several of Pratchett’s last Discworld books. It also features a group of Discworld characters who seem absolutely perfect for a Jim Henson movie: the Nac Mac Feegle, a community of foul-mouthed and gleefully violent gnomes.
I’ve been indisposed for most of the day but yes! I saw it on Facebook and promptly lost my shit for a good few minutes. I am very excited to see how this turns out :)
Excite! Also:
“The Discworld series offers a wide range of genres and characters, and the Ankh Morpork City Watch books (a series of law enforcement adventure stories) are probably the most obvious choice for a Hollywood adaptation. Unfortunately, the humor and absurdity of the Discworld series just doesn’t fit with the expectation that adult fantasy stories should be dark and gritty, likeLord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Warcraft.”
…Who’s gonna tell them?
It’s my honest opinion that Hollywood couldn’t handle Discworld at it’s darkest.
It would want to take Sam Vimes and either make him into their kind of Good Hero (who are generally neither), or it would make him into the Villain, because they wouldn’t know what to do with a character like him. They wouldn’t know what to do with a man who is cynical and dark and terrified of his own thoughts and so filled with rage he becomes a beacon of light and hope instead.
They wouldn’t know what to do with Lady Sybil other than make her into a jolly fat woman who dotes on her “barely-tolerating-husband” and has an eccentric hobby in breeding dragons. They wouldn’t make her tall and fat and so sure of herself you could bounce a nuclear missile off her self confidence. They most certainly wouldn’t allow Sam and her to have a sex life, or if they did they’d kill her in childbirth because that’s “Realistic™”, right?
They wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like Granny Weatherwax without making her lament her spinsterhood, or twisting her magic into something dark and fueled by loneliness. They wouldn’t know what to do with an old baggage like Nanny Ogg without turning her into pure comedic relief for Granny’s darkness, when what she actually is is incredibly complex and powerful in her own right because Nanny’s power is not having to use magic at all.
They’d take Tiffany Aching and make her “spunky” and a rebel, when in fact all Tiffany wanted to do was make sure no one ever got hurt for being different ever again.
Brother Brutha would become a fated prophet when all he was was a simple man who believed in being kind and changed an entire religion and culture simply by being so.
Vetinari would become a monster, an evil man who controlled the city with an iron grip, not because he loved it, but because he can, when Vetinari never wants power, not really. He’s a tyrant yes, but only because the world is so profoundly messed up that it needed someone to get to the top and say “No, no more…” and sometimes the world needs good men to do bad things, because as much as Hollywood might want to make us believe, bad men rarely do good.
Death would either become cold and uncaring or tragic, when he is in fact neither. Death is not justice and he knows this, Death is just death, so he tries to be kind and do his job as efficiently as possible because at the end of the day, that’s what is required of him. Susan would become this hard nosed bitter “don’t talk to me” bitch with the powers of Death and would constantly suffer the urge to use it on “bad people” because that’s what Hollywood does to women with any kind of power, when Susan is actually the Goth version of Mary Poppins and also considerably kinder because she takes the fear of children and teaches them how to make it into a weapon against the thing that frightens them. She knows they don’t need to be told there are no monsters under the bed because there are, what she does instead, is show them that monsters can be beaten. She empowers them in a way children rarely are, and she does it without a spoonful of sugar because that shit will rot your teeth.
Carrot would become the fallen King, banished from his realm and forever longing for a throne he can never have when in fact he chose, he chose to carry a lantern and walk the streets at night because the night might well be dark and full of terrors, but it doesn’t have to be.
Hollywood wouldn’t know how to handle Discworld at it’s darkest, because at its darkest Discworld is so overwhelmingly human in its need for hope it hurts. And Hollywood doesn’t deal with human, it deals with tropes, and that’s what is wrong with the majority of mainstream media at the moment. People are not tropes.
As for the whole idea of “the world is dark and terrible so we all must be grim faced and stoic”, like have you been to a funeral? Do you know how many people laugh at funerals? Do you know how many people smile, and hug and kiss and cling to each other with such profound love because that’s what humans do? We look at the darkness and we follow the sunrise. Grief might be the price we pay for love, but that doesn’t make love a weakness.
And Jim Henson understood that. His family, understands that. And it makes me happy that it’s them who are involved in this adaptation of The Wee Free Men.
Vimes wakes up in the shadow of a barricade and immediately assumes the worst. But then it turns out this Enjolras lad’s got all the good parts of Ned Coates and Reg Shoe with very little of the bad, and his second-in-command reminds him a little of Dr. Lawn, and it’s funny, but he gets the feeling this revolution might work out after all.
Javert, meanwhile, finds himself drawn quite against his will into a discussion of the finer points of the law with one Captain Ironfoundersson…
(You can blame this thread for the nonsense above! Don’t ask me how the timeline works, it went all wibbly-wobbly for comedic purposes, okay. ALSO LOOK, A CROSSOVER THAT DOESN’T END IN TEARS!)
