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[sirterrypratchett]

The first batch of requests by @drunkenfangschrecke, @summoningraziel and @jellymish-art.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[sirterrypratchett]

Granny Wheatherwax and Nanny Ogg on the street of Ankh-Morphork, commission for Becky ♥

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Discworld is an interesting beast in the age of ACAB. Like, the city watch books are a story about police and the way in which a good police force can help and protect people. Which would make it copoganda. And I'm not going to say that the City Watch books are completely free of copoganda, but they also do something interesting that fairly few stories about heroic police officers do, and I think it has a lot to do with Samuel Vimes. A lot of copoganda stories like, say, Brooklyn 99, are perfectly capable of portraying cops as cruel, bigoted, and greedy, but our central cast of characters are portrayed as good people who want to help their communities. The result is that the bad cops are portrayed as an aberration, while most cops can be assumed to be good people doing a tough job because they want to help protect people from the nebulous evil forces of "Crime". The police are considered to be naturally heroic. Pratchett does something very interesting, which is provide us with Vimes' perspective, and present us with an Unnaturally heroic police force. In Ahnk-Morpork, the natural state of the watch is a gang with extra paperwork. It's the place for people who, at best, just want a steady paycheck and at worst want an excuse to hit people with a truncheon. Rather than be an army defending people from the forces of Crime, the Watch is described as a sort of sleight-of-hand, big burly watchmen in shiny uniforms don't stand around in-case a Crime happens in their vicinity, they stand around to remind people that The Law exists and has teeth. The Watchmen are people, when danger rears it's head, their instinct is to hide and get out of the way. When faced with authority, their instinct is to bow to it out of fear of what it might do to them if they don't. Carrot is a genuine Hero, but his natural heroism is presented as an aberration. Normal Cops don't act like Carrot does. The fact that the Watch ends up acting like a Heroic Police Force is largely due to the leadership of Sam Vimes, but Vimes himself is a microcosm of the Watch. The base state of Sam Vimes would be an alchoholic bully of an officer, one who beats people until they confess to anything because that makes his job easier. Vimes The Hero is a homunculous, an artificial being created by Sam Vimes fighting back all those instincts and FORCING himself to behave as his conscience dictates. Vimes doesn't take bribes or let his officers do the same because, damnit, that sort of thing shouldn't happen, even if doing so would make things a lot easier. Vimes doesn't run towards sounds of screaming because he WANTS to, he forces himself to do so because somebody needs to. It's best summed up in Thud “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? 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 little smile. “I do that, too. All the time,” said Vimes. “Believe me.”

In the hands of another writer, or another series, this exchange would be weirdly dismissive. To whom should the police be accountable to? Themselves, shut up and trust us. But from Vimes, it's a different story. Vimes DOES constantly watch himself, and he doesn't trust that bastard, he's known him his entire life. The Heroic Police are not a natural state, they're an ideal, and ahnk-morpork only gets anywhere close. Vimes is constantly struggling against his own instincts to take shortcuts, to let things slide, but he forces himself to live up to that ideal and the Watch follows his example. Discworld doesn't propose any solutions to the problems with policing in the real world. We don't have a Sam Vimes to run the NYPD and force them to behave. We don't have a Carrot Ironfounderson. But it's at least a story about detectives and police that I can read without feeling like I'm being sold propaganda about the Thin Blue Line.

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This makes me so sad and also I'm trying to remember if any of the Discworld books dealt with late stage capitalism

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happy glorious 25th of may

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“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!”

- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

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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.

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He knew about concerned citizens.  Whoever they were, they all spoke the same private language where ‘traditional values’ mean 'hang someone.’

Terry Pratchett, “The Truth”

[sirterrypratchett]

I saw a post talking about how Terry Pratchett only wrote 400 words a day, how that goal helped him write literally dozens of books before he died. So I reduced my own daily word goal. I went down from 1,000 to 200. With that 800-word wall taken down, I’ve been writing more. “I won’t get on tumblr/watch TV/draw/read until I hit my word goal” used to be something I said as self-restraint. And when I inevitably couldn’t cough up four pages in one sitting, I felt like garbage, and the pleasurable hobbies I had planned on felt like I was cheating myself when I just gave up. Now it’s something I say because I just have to finish this scene, just have to round out this conversation, can’t stop now, because I’m enjoying myself, I’m having an amazing time writing. Something that hasn’t been true of my original works since middle school. 

And sometimes I think, “Well, two hundred is technically less than four hundred.” And I have to stop myself, because - I am writing half as much as Terry Pratchett. Terry fucking Pratchett, who not only published regularly up until his death, but published books that were consistently good. 

And this has also been an immense help as a writer with ADHD, because I don’t feel bad when I take a break from writing - two hundred words works up quick, after all. If I take a break at 150, I have a whole day to write 50 more words, and I’ve rarely written less than 200 words and not felt the need to keep writing because I need to tie up a loose end anyways. 

Yes, sometimes, I do not produce a single thing worth keeping in those two hundred words. But it’s much easier to edit two hundred words of bad writing than it is to edit no writing at all.

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I love reading Discworld books bc when having a philosophical/political discussion with someone, I can crack my book open and read a relevant quote from it like it's the goddamn Bible.

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The main thing that struck me about Thief of TIme is how it (more than any other Discworld book, I think, which is saying something) just casually tosses out clumps of the most fantastically unhinged worldbuilding physics*, and you're just supposed to accept them.

And you do! Because they make sense! More or less! Somehow they fit neatly into the parts of your brain that agree that this is how things should work, that even though officially you know better, on some level you still believe they could be true.

A lot of science fiction could take a lesson or two from the fantasy of Discworld in general and Thief of Time in particular. Don't overexplain, don't overcomplicate, just present your world as a given and make it easy to swallow. Harder than it sounds, of course, but Sir Terry was an expert at it.

Anyway, people have been messing around with time ever since they were people. Wasting it, killing it, sparing it, making it up. And they do it. People's heads were made to play with time.

-- Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

*As evidenced by the title, most of the unhinged physics in this book has to do with time. Some of my favorites below the cut (spoilers):

Portable "spinners" allow you to carry time on your back, like a diver carrying an air tank, in case you're in a situation where time could stop (you never know!).

Once, a major time catastrophe unmoored the fastenings that connect the past to the present, and the History Monks had to stitch it back together however they could, so that's why history doesn't always make sense if you look closely. But generally people don't notice (we're pretty unobservant).

The Monks can move time around, pulling it from somewhere that it isn't being used efficiently and putting it somewhere that extra time is needed, or if there's a time leak they can dump surplus time over the ocean or somewhere that it won't make a big difference (not a lot happens in the ocean that people notice).

Yetis can save their own lives like a video game before going into a dangerous situation, and restart from the saved point if anything happens to them (useful!).

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i felt that pun in my whole chest.

[sirterrypratchett]

Sir Terry Pratchett looking at something from an unexpected angle, as per usual.

Suppose you'd watched the slow accretion of snow over thousands of years as it was compressed and pushed over the deep rock until the glacier calved its icebergs into the sea, and you watched an iceberg drift out through the chilly waters, and you got to know its cargo of happy polar bears and seals as they looked forward to a brave new life in the other hemisphere where they say the ice floes are lined with crunchy penguins, and then wham—tragedy loomed in the shape of thousands of tons of unaccountably floating iron and an exciting soundtrack...... you'd want to know the whole story.

— Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

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I took some liberties drawing it

I wanted it to look more dog like 🙂

[sirterrypratchett]

“Good evening, gentlemen!” said the vampire. “Please pay attention. I am a reformed vampire, which is to say, I am a bundle of suppressed instincts held together with spit and coffee. It would be wrong to say that violent, tearing carnage does not come naturally to me. It's not tearing your throats out that doesn't come easily to me. Please don't make it any harder.”

― Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment