#lord dracula is perfect and everything against him must be destroyed

[ask-hector-and-isaac]

Isaac. Does Dracula like you insulting his son? Do you tell him Adrian is a snotty spoiled brat?

Do you take me for a fool? I know when to keep my mouth shut, you know - my head wouldn't still be on my neck otherwise.

It's not my fault if the Prince keeps undermining his father's authority and acting as if he's a senile old man. It's that behavior I cannot stand. And I do wish Lord Dracula put him in his place already, instead of allowing His own son to disrespect Him. But aside from aiding my Lord in everything He needs, there is nothing I can do when it comes to how He raises the Prince. Now let me vent in private.

[redorblue]

Book 30/2017 - Witches abroad by Terry Pratchett

One might think this book was a classic fairytale with a clear-cut set of obviously good and bad characters because there are so many elements out of fairytales in this book - fairy godmothers, Dracula entering through a window, a wolf in the woods out to eat the grandmother, a handsome prince and a beautiful, poor servant girl etc. Except that this isn’t a fairytale but rather a subversion of one where the guy better not get the girl, and since everybody and their dog keeps insisting that they’re the good guys, someone must be wrong. And it takes the entire book to find out whose actions have the best outcomes, if not necessarily the best intentions.

I’ve already talked about two other novels by Terry Pratchett this year, so I’m going to skip the part where I gush about his gorgeous writing and refer interested someones to the posts about Hogfather and Guards! Guards! (except for one thing. Why do these books always have to be so confusing in the beginning? I always need to reread the first few pages once I’m done because I stumbled through them like a Neanderthal through Cairo, and I don’t want to be reminded of my bad memory for names. The first few times I thought I was just too unfamiliar with the discworld, but I’m beginning to sense a pattern. He’s out to confuse me.) Sorry, back to business. But what this book did was introduce me to someone who has the potential to become one of my favourite characters in existence: the glorious witch Esme Weatherwax. She’s absolutely perfect for me, she has everything I could ever want in a character: she’s very capable (and sometimes scary), she can be funny in her own salty way, she’s very proud and collected and pretty hard to know, but once she likes you she’s incredibly loyal, she’s a pragmatist who gets things done and doesn’t waste her (and my) time complaining how things should be, and (here comes the slightly problematic part) she can get pretty ruthless and manipulative to get what she wants. I adore her. I love Death and Lord Vetinari, too, but I think she might just have stolen the top spot.

Now that I’m at it... I love how he writes his characters in general. They could all be such clichés: the dashing prince, the lovely servant girl, the fairy godmother who wants to get them their happily ever after and the evil old witch who tries to keep them apart... But they’re not. They’re clichés turned on their heads and given a personality and wishes and fears. And not just the few main characters, but also the secondary ones, and even for those who just show up for a couple pages he somehow manages to squeeze in a few hints of their personality. This way, as with all well-written characters, there is no purely evil villain and no saintly hero/ine. And I think this is the issue that this book is pondering (one of them anyway): the nature of good and evil, how to distinguish the two sides, and how to assign people to one or the other (Spoiler: you can’t, not conclusively. But the book puts it a lot more eloquently). In this book, there’s three sides claiming to be the good guys, and not one to laugh villainously off stage about the heroes’ stupidity and be happy about their own evilness. There’s the classic candidate for the good side - the fairy godmother - who unfortunately doesn’t care much whether your own wishes for your life match those of the people in fairytales or not. As long as everybody lives life as in the fairytales, they have to be happy by default, which is a good thing, and if a bit of extra personal power for her comes out of it, too, even better. So although her motives might be mostly good and she honestly just thinks that she’s working toward the greater good, hers is the proverbial way to hell that is paved with good intentions. Then there’s the alternative, the adversary to the fairy godmother, who acts admirably (if only with slightly dubious methods) to save the city from the fairy godmother’s meddling, but who does it mainly out of hatred for her enemy and not because of a genuine desire to save lives. So there we have it: candidates 1 and 2 for the good side have (mainly) good intentions, but bad methods, or (mainly) good methods, but bad intentions. Difficult, huh?

And if that wasn’t bad enough, candidate no. 3 for the good side, three witches, just appears so... ill-suited at first glance. There’s the grumpy old one who hates people (sorry, dearest Esme), the silly old one who drinks a lot, and the naive young one who’s so insecure and unexperienced that it hurts to watch. But once you’re in a few pages more, they start to reveal things about their characters that you didn’t expect, they form these really sweet bonds of friendship (Esme and Nanny Ogg) and mentoring (both with Magrat) and they show what makes them the best-suited contenders for the good side against all odds. Esme, for example, really doesn’t seem to care at all for the good of an individual or the community, and in the end we learn that she has a lot of bad urges that would make her a very scary villain if she ever acted on them. But then she has this very moving scene where she empathizes deeply with an abused wolf who was made to think he was human, and then fiercely defends an old woman who is left in the woods all alone... And in the end she does put everything to rights and saves the city without even killing anyone because she thinks it’s the right thing to do (fortunately, she’s right). So... even the most reluctant, unlikely and grumpiest people can be the heroes, and no one is ever exclusively good or evil. Intentions, methods and outcomes all come into it, and in the end it’s very subjective anyway.

The other thing I want to remark on in this novel is the way it both uses and makes a point about stories, in particular fairytales. It has many elements taken directly from European fairytales, but it asks how the characters who actually live them feel about them, and what effect fairytales have on people’s personality and actions. It states a causality between these stories and people’s actions, explaining that people make fairytale-like stories come true because they act how characters in fairytales should and thereby reinforce the grip these stories have on shaping reality. Because people in fairytales are always happy in the end, right? So the fairytale has to come true, no matter what. No matter if it’s not in the wolf’s nature to behave like a human being, eat the grandmother whole and then put on her nightgown. No matter if the frog-turned-prince is really just a frog with a pond and flies in his room and the social graces of... well, a frog. And no matter if the girl actually wants to marry the prince, ascend to the throne at his side and make him babies. With the greater good in mind, namely universal happiness waving at the end of the story, people who believe in the innate goodness of these stories tend to lose focus of what the other actors actually want as individuals - ending up like the fairy godmother in this one, destroying the lives of the inhabitants of an entire country in pursuit of happiness. I think the point this book is trying to make is that stories might be good as inspirations, but as soon as they are taken too seriously and projected onto real life, they become very, very dangerous.