#anghammarad

[grimviolin]

GENERALLY PEOPLE LIKE TO MOVE ON, Death hinted. THEY LOOK FORWARD TO AN AFTERLIFE. “I Will Stay Here, Please.” HERE? THERE’S NOTHING TO DO HERE, said Death. “Yes, I Know,” said the ghost of the golem. “It Is Perfect. I Am Free.”

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

[luffysfakebeard]

not Anghammarad 😭😭😭

[stellarmeals]

Idk who remembers this but theres a scene in Terry Pratchetts “Going Postal” (spoiler alert) that made me cry. It was when the ghost of Anghammarad the golem lost his clay and was standing in the sandy abyss talking to death. I want to paint the burning fiery figure of Anghammarad sitting in the abyssal desert with “YOU HAVE REACHED THE PLACE WHERE THERE ARE NO MORE ORDERS” underneath the image. Sorta the abyssal dessert in blue and Anghammarad in fiery yellow red.

[worrywrite]

In the month I've been offline, I've read a fair bit more Discworld. Namely Going Postal and Equal Rites (currently working my way very slowly through Small God's).

These are my thoughts on Going Postal.

Going Postal, like much of Pratchett's work, is a lot of things. Most succinctly, and most prominently, it's a good story.

Less succinctly, and less prominently, it's a story about stories that need to be told by people who don't have the words to tell them. It is also about one man with only words and no story.

I find Moist to be an incredible character. Not because he is a good character--though he is very well written and I can only imagine the precision it takes to write the actions of Moist in one line and any other character in the next. Moist, is by all accounts, a man who is good at lying; and throughout all of the book, that is about as much as we know or need to know about him. And it is spectacular that the story balances on the wings of his hat when he is so nondescript beneath it. He has a history, sure, and it shows it's face in a few moments. But his charm and his skill is in being a nobody. In this way, he is the perfect everyman who is both nobody and everybody--whoever he needs to be and whoever he can be. It is an excellent way to write a conman and it is surprisingly difficult to do.

What is more beautiful, however, than characterization is the work of words. Letters are stories that must be told. The mail must be delivered. But it is not the letters themselves that matter and this is not some self congratulatory remark about the work of an author acting as the conduit for their contrived narrative. There are several groups of persons whose stories must be told. There are the postmen themselves, a tradition of people left behind by the developing world after they themselves were carried away in what they did. There are the golems, which I have many thoughts about and a great deal of love for, many of which literally have no voice but an immense amount of history to convey. And there are the dead men in the overhead, who are kept alive in name only.

And that last part, I think, is the most important. It is where the story begins, it is where the heart of Going Postal's narrative lies, and it is where the plot hinges. It is, also, perhaps what few people really think about when they inevitably type GNU into the tags or in their header or at the bottom of any post or web page.

The dead men in the overhead are, by all accounts, *there*. We don't see Death come for John Dearheart. I don't think Pratchett would have included that scene at the start of the book, but I think it's worth seeing it that way; it's worth thinking about it in that way, that Death didn't show up. John is murdered, in the prologue, and in such a way that we understand exactly what happens by the end of the book. But we only see Death come for Anghammarad in the novel. And while Death does not, necessarily, come for every dead character in a book (not even all the "important" ones), he appears only once in Going Postal. I'm getting carried away.

The story begins with two people. Anghammarad first, many years before, and then John Dearheart. Both are dead before the end of the novel, and Death comes only to one of them. Because John is still in the overhead. How literal that is is up to you, but I think it's actually pretty literal.

And while John and the rest are in there, constantly traveling along the clacks with their names and becoming one with the cryptics that make up the function of a telecommunications network, no one is telling their stories. Their lives and, perhaps more importantly, their deaths must be told. Their names are a message in the system, but the message is never truly delivered. It just goes on, just as much in storage as the letters in the post office. A letter must be delivered, it contains a story that must be told.

And so, Moist must tell the story. He is the storyteller, by trade and function in the novel. He plays his winning gambit in the standoff with Gilt by telling the story of the dead men in the overhead and signs it with their name. And while he sees this as a horrible betrayal of their memories, it really isn't. It's not a lie. The only lie in Moist's message is who signed it, and it works because no one could bear it if it was a lie. And in a way, it isn't.

I would like to carry on, but everything else I want to talk about for this book is about the golems or how cool I think Adora Belle is, and I don't think I've seen enough of them to really articulate what it is about them that is so beautiful. So more on them later probably.

[dearsamvimes]

Just me over here getting emotional about Anghammarad

Almost 19 thousand years old

Existing just to be a messenger

An angel, if you will

Waiting for the universe to reset so he could deliver his message to the people he failed

Only to be killed by the dropkick of a man who wanted to make a quick buck

And all he wanted after death

Was respite

[sparkly-angell]

Tittle: Going Postal

Author: Terry Pratchett

Year: 2004

Rating: ★★★★★

Favourite quote: “There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.”

Thoughts: Simply amazing. Moist character development was fantastic. Also Miss Dearheart pegged him, I'm sure. The book had many amazing quotes and passages that made me pause and think about life in general. Public VS Private. A nice critics of the decaying capitalism and the monopoly of big companies but also with a few criticisms of tyranism. The idea of freewill and how that works out in a society. Vetinari's monologue about it really makes you think. Gilt's character is super interesting, and how, in the end, he chose freewill, even if that meant death. The Golem's fight for freedom (the book's subtheme) is nicely done. Anghammarad's death made me cry a lot. His conversation with Death, when he asked Death if he needed to do something, and how Death only answered with 'No, you don't have to do anything.' and how he sat down and said 'so I'll sit here, forever. Enjoying my freedom.' It still gets me. The GNU Terry Pratchett got me sobbing in the bus. Moist has a huge impostor syndrome, which does makes sense because of his past, but in the end, when Dearheart said 'you're the only one who doesn't believe in yourself' made me smile, because slowly, slowly Moist became the person he was faking to be, because he wanted to be better, because he got the opportunity to be better, even if it was forced at first. TUMP TOWER.

Fire? Yes

Pegging? Yes, no doubt, there are also some great fics too

Library? Yes

Others: Small Gods // Mort // Going Postal // The Truth (coming soon)

[monstrous-tournament]

P'tang P'tang-deity (Supernatural)

Anghammarad-golem (Ankh-Morpork)

Gladys-golem (Ankh-Morpork)

Wee Mad Arthur-gnome/Nac Mac Feegle (Watch, Ankh-Morpork)

Buggy Swires-gnome (Watch, Monstrous Regiment/IR?)

Leonard of Quirm- human (Ankh-Morpork)

Cuddy-dwarf (Watch)

Tears of the Mushroom-goblin (Watch)

Willikins-butler/human (Watch)

Mrs. Upshot-human (Watch)

Of The Twighlight The Darkness-goblin (IR)

(IR=Industrial Revolution)

[firstofficerrose]

Oh no, Anghammarad!!! Ohhhh...

But at the same time, it's nice to know that Death is there for the Golems as well. I love that the universe acknowledges their lives in that way.

[carfuckerlynch]

NOOOO ANGHAMMARAD!!!!

[song-of-the-rune]

Also, damn, Anghammarad has me crying ;;

(Spoilers:)

First of all it's just. So absurdly sudden. You don't expect it. He's alive and then he's not. But then you start thinking about it and look, the golems aren't, on a meta level, perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but -

This golem has been a slave since the dawn of civilization. He was finally lucky enough to be bought out of slavery and start working for an actual wage which would've gone to buying more golems out of slavery. He plans to spend the rest of eternity working until the world starts over. And then he decides to spend his one day off stopping a fire because it's the right thing to do and all he knows how to do is feel useful and it kills him.

And when Death asks if he'd like to move on, he says no. Because no one will ask anything of him here.

Up to this point everyone keeps saying that they have to keep working, that they don't know how to exist otherwise, but that feels short of the truth and then he proves that he could want something else. By taking it. By refusing to do anything after he dies. It's such a small refusal in a sense, but it's also monumental and -- agh.

Terry why would you do this to me

[hellenhighwater]

I think these two are my favorites from Going Postal. And I think that Anghammarad needs some barnacles.

[discworldtour]

Anghammarad sat down again. Apart from the fact that there was sand rather than ooze underfoot, this place reminded him of the abyssal plain. GENERALLY PEOPLE LIKE TO MOVE ON, Death hinted. THEY LOOK FORWARD TO AN AFTERLIFE. “I Will Stay Here, Please.” HERE? THERE’S NOTHING TO DO HERE,” said Death. “Yes, I Know,” said the ghost of the golem. “It Is Perfect. I Am Free.”

-- Anghammarad finds the place of respite | Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

[endeerment]

Cinnomoroll, kiimotori, sentimental circus

Cinnamoroll: what was something that made you smile today?

I visited a friend today and her cat now has small little kitties, and they’re the cutest thing.

Kiiroitori: what languages do you know? Or which languages do you want to learn?

I know English & Greek “fluently” (and some others not so well), but I’d like to learn French and Italian.

Sentimental Circus: the item most precious to you?

The toys from my childhood, I guess? Or my books?

Cute character asks

[worrywrite]

I remembered a poem one of my college professors wrote. He never published it as far as I can tell, so the actual contents are beyond me (even though it was short and he'd often challenge people to memorize it and recite it within 10 minutes because it was short). But it was about a vase in a museum. Nothing fancy or expensive looking, more like a "pottery fragment 105" sort of vase. The kind of thing early civilizations actually *used* for things like storage and transporting fluids.

And it made me think of the golems in *Going Postal*. Their civilizations are long dead, their original purposes are likely far from what they find themselves doing. They're like living artifacts on display. No one quite understands them, just that they aren't people in the same way that other sorts are people. They're made with purpose, given a design with their form, often only given the tools they need to accomplish their task.

These are living things, not classically, but still alive and they have attained person-hood. But they're still treated like artifacts on display at museum about as equally as they are treated like tools to accomplish specific tasks. Maybe I'm still a little sad about Anghammarad, but in retrospect, his death is kind of a relief. He dies by having his clay vessel explode. He shatters. His clay is broken and there is nothing left of him. He finds peace in the void, partly because there is no longer anything left for him to do, but I also think because he is no longer on display. He was a vase full of ancient power, of the fire of creation, and then he was the fire itself in the afterlife. He wasn't the clay, the clay was just what he was stored in.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Maybe I'd have had a better thesis for this though if I'd been able to find the poem. (It's not even that great of a poem.) But it's just really beautiful to me that the golems are more than clay. The clay is sort of what defines them as tools, the shape they were given and the remains of the peoplf that made them. But what the clay contains is what they are.

[latveriansnailmail]

Discworld Asks

Adora Belle Dearheart: What's your vice? Why do you need one?

Agnes Nitt: How would you rather be and what's stopping you?

Anghammarad: How old are you and how long have you been on Tumblr?

Angua von Uberwald: How have you turned a disadvantage into an advantage?

the Bursar: How's your mental health?

Carrot Ironfounderson: What was intended for you and what did you choose instead?

Cherry Littlebottom: You got, like, some kinda gender or what?

Cohen the Barbarian: What job have you had the longest?

DEATH: How do you want to go?

Death of Rats: How do you NOT want to go?

Detritus the Troll: How hard can you hit and why don't you?

Foul Ol' Ron: What's something disgusting that's happend to you?

Gaspode the Wonder Dog: Have you ever been famous?

Granny Weatherwax: Do you know your own mind? Do tell.

Havelock Vetinari: What city do you identify with?

Leonard of Quirm: What's an idea you've had that you wouldn't put into action?

the Librarian: If you could be any animal, what would you choose?

the Luggage: What was your first Discworld book?

Lu-Tze: Tell an interesting history fact.

Magrat Garlick: What do you believe in that most don't?

Moist von Lipwig: What are you running to?

Mustrum Ridcully: What is your leadership style?

Nanny Ogg: How big is your family?

Nobby Nobbs: Not to be impolite but what exactly are you?

Otto Chriek: Post a favorite picture.

Ponder Stibbons: What would you like to learn about?

Quothe the Raven: Trot out a favorite quote.

Rincewind the Wizzard: What are you running from?

Sam Vimes: How do you challenge injustice?

Susan Sto Helit: What lesson do you have to teach?

Sybil Ramkin: Talk about your favorite pet.

Tiffany Aching: Be honest and be selfish. What is truly yours?

Two Flower: What's the most interesting place you've visited?

the Wee Free Men: What happens when you die?

William de Worde: Spill some truth.

[paragonrobits]

Death: GENERALLY PEOPLE LIKE TO MOVE ON. THEY LIKE TO LOOK FORWARD TO AN AFTERLIFE.

Anghammarad the ancient golem: I Will Stay Here, Please.

Death: HERE?

Death: THERE'S NOTHING TO DO HERE.

Anghammarad: Yes, I Know. It Is Perfect.

Andhammarad: I Am Free.