#does? girl who actually ASKED?? or that you learned whatever and whatever from vetinari?? no one gives a FUCK dude i am so embarrassed for

[p4nishers]

truly insane just how MUCH vimes thinks about vetinari when he's not around. like literally every 50 pages or so girl just cant help himself and always thinks some gay shit like 'hmmp. wonder if vetinari feels like This all the time" like hello? disc to vimes? u r down bad my guy

[squadron-of-damned]

⭐ - for the fanfic ask

Yes okay, my pick. that’s the tough part. Hmm… I’d say I’d like to talk about Black Garb, but frankly, I think I have said everything I wanted to say there.

So instead let’s talk about The Long-Awaited Sequel. The name itself is supposed to be a tie-in with the previous work from the Basketville series, because that one is called The Last Chapter, so there is a book theme supposedly going on and also it focuses on the new life Downey and Vetinari have in Basketville, so it is “a brand new book” which everyone has been long waiting for.

Fun fact: Originally the “main hero” whose POV is followed was supposed to be Christian Agate, the renown paperback author who is definitely not the Discworld incarnation of Agatha Christie. While this idea got scratched, the book theme remained just as the concept of Basketville being “the countryside village to which old (male) literary heroes retire to have a cottage, bees and their best companion to whom they aren’t married (but only because it isn’t legal yet).”

Part of the fun with this bodyswap fic was that Vatinari and Downey know each other well enough to actually pull off they are the other person while nobody really knows them enough to notice if there is something wrong. That means that I as an author (and subsequently you as the reader) didn’t have to focus on the “comedy effect” of the bodyswap when they are “this close to being caught,” because let’s serve us clean wine: I don’t like this trope. No, what I wanted to explore was how the physical differences in a body affect the individual.

Let’s start with Downey. In the book Night Watch it is implied that he might have a problem reading long words (although it is possible Vetinari meant that as a very ugly joke) and over the time this implication evolved into a headcanon that he has dyslexia and possibly dysgraphia as well. (I know that they aren’t one and the same, but my two childhood friends have them both and when thinking about one I find it quite difficult not to connect it to the other.) And since you specifically Napoleon are asking this, you are the one who’s assigned that man synethesia as well. I believe that it isn’t addressed in this fic, but originally it was supposed to be and the only reason it isn’t there is because I didn’t figure out a simple way to make AO3 format work with colours.

There is the poem:

This is now all of my wit:to love loud turmoil of the fight,to penetrate girls’ dreams in night,to be in debt a little bit,to whistle as my mouth is shaped,to wash away worry with wine,to squander fast this life of mine,to gain nothing, same to forfeit.

It is my translation of František Gellner’s To je teď celá moudrost moje and in the fic it has scattered bolding and italicizing which is supposed to represent how it is seen through Downey’s eyes. Originally the whole text was heavily colourized, all the alike sounding parts done in the same or similar colours, so it looked like a very bad acid trip. (I was quite angry when the colours didn’t make it in because I spent about an hour colouring that damn thing for nothing.)

Here is the fun part: Why does Vetinari experience these conditions when he is in Downey’s body while he doesn’t get to deal with Downey’s short-fused temper? Because according to some very smart article which I have read and lost and can’t be bothered at the moment to find again, things like dyslexia or introversion tendencies are bound to brain. In fact this article which focused on the fact that people are born either more extroverted or introverted and they can’t do anything about it because it is a physical condition just like the solidness of your bones or blood type is what inspired this particular fic.

Do Vetinari, a known book worm, finds out that there are people who are literally physically incapable to enjoy a book without getting a horrible headache. He also finds out that there are people for whom being around other people is not energetically draining. I can’t remember if he has to deal with Downey’s absolute musical hearing. I think he doesn’t.

Downey on the other hand is mostly reliant on his people skill, on the fact that he is good at being around people and in the only moment that he is supposed to use it (the variation of the PTA gathering), it fails him because of Vetinari’s brain introversion. There is also a minor deal with haywire colourvision which I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to explain. That is a headcanon of mine which doesn’t affect anything and hasn’t got any real backing by the actual lore, but through Vetinari’s eyes Downey can see colours which he previously couldn’t see. The word itself doesn’t get actually used, but Vetinari has tetrachromatic vision instead of the human usual trichromatic one.* Yes, I am aware that the cone cell pigment genes are bound to the X chromosome, thus making tetrachromacy a thing found in the XX 23rd gene combination, but consider: tetrachromacy has actually been found in men, Discworld genetic is strange, magic can apply, no one is saying that Discworld human genes are like ours, no one is saying that Vetinari is cis, also I don’t care because this is a work of fiction not a research paper so if you have a problem with Vetinari having a trait predominately found in human females, it is a you-problem and you have to deal with it somehow (probably by not reading that fic for a start). He also has to deal with chronic pain in leg which I believe Vetinari is more or less used to, but Downey isn’t.

Speaking of chronic pains. Both of those guys have been through some serious shit. Both mentally and physically. In case you haven’t been here for my writing, Downey’s time in Ankh-Morpork during Snapcase’s regime was not a walk in a rosy garden. Or maybe it was a walk in a rosy garden but he was forced to take it through the thorny bushes. He was interrogated, he was tortured for information and there had been at least one attempt to execute him which is implied in the fic. Downey says that he loves Vetinari “Enough for a lack of eloquence to be considered of virtue” just the moment after some very old scars on Downey’s body are mentioned. I don’t know if this reads clearly for you, but it has always been clear to me (and that is why I cannot describe it better): “They tried to physically force me to tell them everything about you and I didn’t say a word.” Until today I am convinced that this particular line is one of the… strongest that I have ever written.

There is a very strong reference to Kafka in this work, namely the very hideous tattoo on Downey’s back which says VerboIncooperativus Testi (verbally uncooperative witness, although the translation is a shared effort of mine and Google Translator, though Discworld Latatin is a bastart language, so whatever). All I can say to that is this: In the Penal Colony.

That brings me to the side characters. Some of them have only a little impact on the story, such as Papermould. Some of them are long time dead like Offer Littlegood to whom I would like to dedicate a short work on his own because he is the Discworld’s constructor of the horrible tattoo-execution machine, which might or might not be clear from what is written about him and implied in other parts of the work. I have a lot of thoughts about Offer Littlegood. I am a loud about being from Czechia, so here is a linguistic joke for you: a rather archaic/fairy-tale sounding euphemism for an executioner (and torturer, stories like to pile these two jobs into one) in Czech is “mistr málodobrý” which translates to English as “mister (or master) littlegood.” That is where Littlegood’s name comes from, to me he is an executioner and torturer by name.

Then there is July Mendahorse. For a starter: I love July Mendahorse. She isn’t pretty and she is the perfect noir femme fatale and she is an important character in The Graveyard Shift. In this story there are featured three people who look a lot like Vetinari: Vetinari himself, Constantin Meserole who is his cousin and a mirror thirty years to the past (he is far mor like Vetinari in his mind than he realizes and he would hate himself a lot if he had ever learned that), and then July Mendahorse (who is actually also a lot like Vetinari, but she lacks the upbringing and education). The opening line about her section is a lowkey reference to the song The House of the Rising Sun (this gets more played on in The Graveyard Shift). When Downey and Vetinari are talking about their exes, Downey recalls briefly dating July (without naming her) who happened to look a lot like Vetinari and speak with his accent. I am not sure if I want to work with it in The Graveyard Shift or give Downey/July their own fic in the original timeline but I want to clear up one thing for you here: Downey actively conditioned July to erase a whole a lot of differences between her and Vetinari. Some of that were good things, like giving her education or taking her to see culture, some of that were… less nice. Not exactly abusive, but… Look, folks, don’t try to forge a girl you’ve found on the street into your unreachable partner of your dreams, alright?

Since we have Vetinari-alike people here, let’s give a paragraph to Constantin Meserole, shall we? If Constanting had a dollar for every time someone called him Havelock, he’d be a very rich man. He looks like Vetinari at that age. He is very actively trying to difference himself from his cousin, but he fails to realize he is doing it in the most Vetinari-like (or Constantin-like) way possible. He is more psychology oriented than Vetinari, but he is also more fed up with his situation. Vetinari’s (and Downey, Sybil and Vimes’s) generation could be compared to those people who were children and teens during the 70′s and 80′s (speaking from a country which used to be a part of the communist block at that time: fucking bloody normalization, so with the Wint/Snapcase’s regime it is twice as accurate), while Constantin (and Lus Twinkle and all their classmates) are those who are growing up right now. They don’t remember that era but they grew up with people telling stories what it was like and they see people actively trying to make history repeat itself and they are feeling like AAARGH! Oh, and Constantin and Twinkle’s relationship is a mirror to Downey and Vetinari’s relationship in the sense “Okay, whit if they weren’t absolute idiots, but only a little bit idiots?”

There are retired fictional characters: Blatantly obvious Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson except they are dwarves now (and are actually both girls), Captain Tramain who is from Wizardry 8 and I’ve always had a soft spot for him. There is aforementioned and not entirely fictional Christian Agate.

There is Helen Foxglove. I have a friend who has just writhed herself out of an abusive marriage. This fic was written before she actually made it and at the time I felt that the most I could do for her aside from coming over every here and then and helping her out was to give her a fictional happy ending. This is that happy ending where she got out with her children and her dogs, and her piece of a shit husband got a dagger through his skull. Maybe some time in the future Helen Foxglove will get together with a witch who might and might not be a version of my mum. Look, I’ve always thought that those two should get together ever since I was, like, four and knew what ‘get together’ was. I’ve always saw her son as a brother, so you know.

I like writing about Basketville but I also find it terribly difficult. Terry Pratchett said that Ankh-Morpork is a fantasy city which still functions after the story ends. In the same way, Basketville is the happy ending retirement countryside village which still functions after the story ends. Everything that happens in Basketville is an epilogue to some story, but it is important to realize that there are people whose whole lives were other people’s epilogues. That is both difficult and amazing to write.