I’m sure you understand this very well and don’t need me to tell you, but I also need to somehow express my appreciation for the fact that “a perplexed, slightly worried and completely enthralled expression of an entomologist checking up on his favorite bug and finding it doing tax returns on a little calculator” is an objectively completely hysterical way to describe the facial expression of any human regarding another, and an especially hilarious way to describe Havelock Vetinari when looking at Sir Samuel Vimes in particular.
he even stopped shaking the container to just watch the lil bastard for a change !
thank you sm, I’m very pleased yall are having fun with this <3
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #Discworld #fanfic #(I poked around and this is apparently a thingy in the style of Disco Elysium) #(with Tumblr polls voting on which response option Vimes takes next) #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
You once said that Carrot Ironfoundersson as an anti-monarchist royal is the true essence of the Good King. Could you care to elaborate?
Well, I first elaborated on it here way back when I was a youngun, but I can do a short version here:
Carrot is, at a direct metaphysical level, the True King of Ankh-Morpork. He’s got the Magic Sword, he’s got the Prophecy, he’s got a Destiny that can literally bend reality around it.
And yet, he chooses not to become king, to permanently stop anyone who tries to make him (or anyone else) king, to literally bury the evidence of his birthright. Because “Mister Vimes wouldn’t like it,” and Carrot Ironfoundersson has imprinted on Sam Vimes as the Avatar of Justice (not law – he’s got the book for those – but justice) like a baby duck.
And what does Sam Vimes tell him about monarchy?
“But that’s not right, see? One man with the power of life and death.”
“But if he’s a good man—” Carrot began.
“What? What? OK. OK. Let’s believe he’s a good man. But his second-in-command—is he a good man too? You’d better hope so. Because he’s the supreme ruler, too, in the name of the king. And the rest of the court…they’ve got to be good men. Because if just one of them’s a bad man the result is bribery and patronage.”
This only becomes clear when you extrapolate beyond Guards, Guards to Men At Arms, where it becomes clear that Carrot knows, that he’s willing to make use of it for the best interests of the city, but that he’s decided that Vetinari as Renaissance overlord is in the best interests of the city so long as Vetinari is occasionally willing to have polite chats over tea about Watch staffing issues.
Hence, anti-monarchism as the true essence of the Good King.
In my humble opinion, Discworld’s anti-monarchism is SEVERELY undercut by the development of Vetinari from “comically authoritarian dictatorautocrat OKAY FINE let’s call him Renaissance overlord” to “comically authoritarian autocrat who is somehow the best option, I mean he’s not a good man but he does have the best intentions for Ankh-Morpork, and besides he gets shit done, right? right?”
However, the above opinion is NOT informed by the sum total of Discworld books (I still haven’t read a bunch of them), so it’s entirely possible I’m off here. Honestly, I’d love to be proven wrong. And I don’t care about spoilers, so if anyone wants to argue, please go ahead and enlighten me.
Oh, I have so many thoughts on Vetinari (I wrote fanfic about them), so I hope I’m semi-coherent this early in the morning (it’s not early in the morning, it’s 3:30pm, but it’s the holidays).
The thing with Vetinari is that he is, in fact, a tyrant. An explicit one, who outright says so. And that is because Vetinari has a thesis and a project on governance. If a system has been autocratic for centuries, and the people under it believe in autocratic power, then to change that you do in fact need at least one last autocrat. Because he can change things, and no one can stop him, because he’s a tyrant and that’s pretty much the definition.
This shows up best in Night Watch, and Jingo, and a bit in the Moist Lipwig books. But if you take the Ankh Morpork books as a whole and watch what he does throughout the whole decades-long arc, you get a picture of his plan for the city.
Night Watch is particularly good because you get to see, through the marvels of time travel, what started him. The system he was coming from. The old Patricians and what they were like, and the endless cycle of revolution that just put new ones on the throne. The King Patrician is dead, long live the King Patrician. None of the engines of power around them were changed, so the Patrician himself could be good or bad or dire and all it would do is change the number who directly died of them, and not much else.
Then we get Vetinari. And we get to see what he does.
(Keep Reading because this got so long on me, I have Thoughts TM):
me every night when I sit in the dark stabbing my charger into my phone until I find the socket: don’t think of that post,don’t think of that post—
Evry damn time, but then I also remember the cure:
“Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!”
― Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
Every once in a while a post comes back to smack me in the face all over again with how goddamn wonderful Sir Pratchett really was
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(why *not* think about that post though?) #BBC Sherlock #Discworld #(you know on reflection I don’t think I was even thinking of *that* post per se) #(I was thinking of the ”y’all ever mess up putting your phone charger in your phone completely sober just to flex on sherlock holmes” one)
Sam “held a burning hot coal until it nearly took the skin off his hand while maintaining perfect calm and eye contact with the asshole in need of intimidation Just Because” Vimes? Sam “sitting on the stoop with a mug of cocoa and a cigar, cautiously aware of every inch of the scene he’s building” Vimes? Sam “could just tear his sleeve to show the mark of the Summoning Dark but instead tears off his whole goddamn shirt” Vimes? A drama queen? Reaching a bit don’t you think
Yep, certainly doesn’t seem to describe Sam “pretends to eat poison as a power move” Vimes. Not Sam “buries an axe in the table in the Rats Chamber” Vimes.
I mean are we really talking about Sam “yes a whole room full of candles with wicks dipped in holy water is the best way to beat this vampire” Vimes, here? Sam “has fought bad guys on top of a speeding train AND a riverboat during a flood” Vimes, really? Definitely Sam “nearly gets shot in the head by a crossbow bolt that shatters his shaving mirror and then uses the bolt to prop up a shard of said mirror to finish shaving” Vimes we’re discussing here?
vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork
vimes is a drama public employee
Tags:
#Discworld #overly literal interpretations #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #injury cw
We all want to be Granny Weatherwax but in reality we are all Rincewind.
Nah, I’m absolutely Rincewind and I embrace that.
That’s why I like him so much: in any other story he’d be a villain or at best an obstacle, and it’s so refreshing to see a character who values his own life portrayed sympathetically.
So I was just thinking about those posts you get in the Discworld tag about the way belief works on the Disc and how Vetinari and/or Vimes is so integral to the way Ankh-Morpork works that they might just sort of… not ever die.
You know, the ones like ‘Vimes is going to become a god of policemen and he’s going to hate it”.
Well. What if it happens to both of them? There are two parts to the city, after all. ‘Proud Ankh’ needs taking down a peg or two (or seven) by Sam Vimes, and if anyone can terrify ‘pestilent Morpork’ into being better then it’s Havelock Vetinari. And they can drive each other mad with stealth puns for centuries, if they want.
Also, this would potentially make them literally Law And Order, and that just seems very fitting in a way that would probably annoy them both.
My favourite sort of riff on this is the idea that they aren’t there ALL the time, but if someone who’s taken over their authority or whatever starts fucking up, they become Active.
Sort of like Carrot’s comment in Men At Arms: when you need them, you REALLY need them, but when you don’t, best if they just go away and get on with things (in their cases, being dead). So when things are going all right it’s very quiet and ordinary.
And then when things start going WRONG suddenly you have things like the current patrician waking up to a Very Angry Manifestation of the Late Duke of Ankh, proceeding to remind him or her (would it be matrician, then?) about How Things Are Done (By Law).
Or the abusive Commander of the Watch coming into his or her office to find a calm man, thin man like a predatory flamingo there to discuss the virtues of temperance and accountability and not having his/her Watch-house and/or personal lodgings being literally struck from on high by a meteor (can’t be lightning, Vimes and Io can’t even exchange a civil sentence, but Vimes has always been good at getting around these things).
And yes in the mean time when things ARE quiet, they can watch everything and get on each other’s nerves and it’s basically like Colon’s office except instead of for old street monsters it’s for ancient legends of civil justice who can’t quite stand to even fade away and still have enough people believing and invoking them that they can stick around and growl when people get out of line.
Everyone knows when Vimes appears. There’s a scent of heavy tobacco in the air, a feeling like a thunderstorm that builds and builds and builds as he (his specter? his presence? whatever you want to call it, it’s terrifying to those who are unjust) stalks down the hall towards whomever requires a prod buttock.
Vetinari? No one knows when he’s coming. You’ll just walk into your office, and he will simply be there. The silent, black-clad figure, sitting in your chair, waiting for you (occasionally, there will be another, silent, black-clad figure, one with a smile and a scythe, waiting for you. DEATH, more than anyone, understands duty, and he and Vetinari exchange greetings whenever their paths cross). And the manifestation of the Patrician will nod to a chair, and the perpetrator will sink into it, unwillingly, and be subjected to-something, no one can ever remember quite what happens during these moments, only that they will be sweating afterwards and the chair behind the desk will be empty.
There’s either no sexting on Discworld because all faster-than-postal communication must be manually encoded by a human (or other species) person, or there IS sexting and some poor clacks operator midway to Pseudopolis is out here Suffering like, broo…not again bro… just send her a letter, bro… a letter in the —ing mail…
Tags:
#Discworld #headcanons #nsfw text? #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
Ever since reading Jingo, I’ve been wondering what happened in the other leg of the trousers of Time.
All we really know is that the Klatchians attack Ankh-Morpork, take the city, and a bunch of people die.
Carrot dies. Littlebottom dies. Reg Shoe dies…more, or again, or something. Dorfl and Detritus both die, within minutes of each other, which makes me reallycurious about what kind of firepower the other guys had. Vimes dies.
Vetinari presumably gets killed or captured, which means captured, which means he’s fine. And pity the poor invaders who have to occupy a city that contains Sybil Ramkin. I can never keep track of what order the books happen in, but if Moist was in the city when the army was arriving he proceeded to manage not to be. The wizards will notice that the city fell when they miss the next daily delivery of a week’s worth of food.
The thing is, though, this isn’t all that destabilizing. I mean, mass death, bad, but the city has a procedure for this. When the bodies have been carted away and buried or tossed in the Ankh to make it that much cleaner, the first Morporkian voice you hear belongs to the most Morporkian person there is.
“Meat pies! Sausage inna bun! Hot dogs! Onna stick!”
Because when the invaders are battering down the walls, you open the doors and sell them things and before you know it they’re as Morporkian as you are. There’s most of a national anthem about it. Ankh-Morpork the province of Klatch is going to be worse than before. Most of the Watch and a lot of bystanders are dead, and Vetinari can’t keep the Guilds handled until he gets back in power. But it’s still Ankh-Morpork. And even with half our favorite characters gone, well, the Turtle moves.
Can’t think of any, but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere. Anyone else know?
someone…someone really needs to be doing this…
Tags:
#(September 2015) #conversational aglets #(unfortunately this *does* appear to have been the end of the thread; there were no responses with recs) #Discworld #death tw #story ideas I will never write
Brinens and Things 