"likes Mean Nothing On Tumblr" You're Sending Me A Little Heart. That's Not Nothing It's Your Heart.

"why can't they just be friends" not in the homophobic way but in the "their platonic relationship in the source material is far more dynamic and complex than the sanitized personalities they gain as a result of shipping" way

You are a monster!!

And you a lawyer, "nobody is perfect" 🩸🦇

its true yall

Damn, I love Death’s facial expressions here… Even he didn’t want it to happen…

My very delayed response to Terry Pratchett’s death a few weeks back. Not going to lie, it wrecked me. I wanted to make something right away but had no idea what would be appropriate, and kept running out of free time.  

I feel like everything I have to say about him and his work and world has already been said a million times over, I don’t have a lot to add to it. I’ve yet to read all of Discworld, and at this point I’m probably going to purposely drag my feet just to delay the end as long as possible.   GNU Terry Pratchett

Do you guys ever think about how Vetinari believes that all people are inherently evil, but then he does things like:

Giving people others would deem irredeemable second chances (Lipwig, the other thief too, he even regretted the death of Lupine Wonse, the guy who summoned a dragon and tried to kill him); spends time with ppl who see only the good in everything (Carrot, Leonard); treats and values ppl like individuals and actually cares about them (that scene in Jingo where he tells Vimes that it’s good that people didn’t get killed in the war).

So I thought,

What if he doesn’t want to believe that everyone is evil. What if he had arrived to that conclusion just from his actual life experience with the assassins and guild leaders, because that’s all he had seen other people do. But he tries to spend time with good people and give criminals second chances because he wants to be proven wrong. To be proven that his philosophy is actually wrong and “there is some good in the world and it’s worth fighting for.”

los pollos hermanos christmas party

Pros and cons of being in the Discworld fandom

Pros:

Discworld is amazing

It’s like Tolkien but modern

You will chuckle so hard you’ll have to have to have little breaks to breathe

Small fandom so it’s easy to make friends & discuss things

Really awesome if you like series because there are 40 books

But there are actually 5+ series within that & several stand alone books so you don’t have to read all of them (although by the time you finish one series you might want to read all the rest)

The world is flat & sits on four elephants who are for some reason standing on a giant turtle and I don’t think anyone is really sure why

Easy to find a cool Discworld-related url

Range of female characters (so you know the Joss Whedon Marvel/Steven Moffat syndrome of all the main females being kickass, skinny, kickass, perfect in everyway, kickass & pretty much the same character? that syndrome is stomped into the ground, cut up into tiny pieces & mocked)

Canon lesbian characters

Some super cute tv adaptions with cameos from sir pterry himself

Deep shit reflecting on life the universe and everything, the rise and fall of political systems, the power of words, the prevalence of evil, the nature of humankind, human relationships and beliefs, and so, so much more

Super silly bits where you’re like ye gods pratchett did you really just make that pun

Ships ranging from teenage fluff to middle-aged fluff to damn hot af

Characters who oppose their society’s gender binary & nice friendly badass werewolf woman lends them dresses

Badass moments which make your insides do hoola hoops

The fucking puns

Really awesome large characters who either just don’t give a flying fuck or have to deal with fat shaming and prove that they are infinitely better, kinder, cleverer people than the fat shamers and often use their size to help them as they save lives/fight evil etc.

There’s this book called Monstrous Regiment and it’s basically 400 pages of fucking up sexism, xenophobia and gender binary

There’s a character named Adora Belle Dearheart and her partner (to clarify: she’s not his wife, he’s her husband) is called Moist what more do you want

A Christmas/winter festival book which will leave you warm and happy and philosophically questioning

Do you like funny footnotes?? So many funny footnotes

Characters getting over & challenging internalised prejudices & beliefs

Destruction of racial stereotypes 

Characters call even the protagonist out on their assumption of roles which fit a white supremic system 

Really good model of police/civilian relationship where the commander of police force fundamentally does not agree with the police/civilian model because “what was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? once policemen stopped being civilians, the only other thing they could be was soldiers.” - or put more simply “a watchman is a civilian, you inbred streak of piss”

young teenage witches coming to terms with their own strength & power, middle-aged witches who write cooking sex books and are as kind as can be, old witches who are canonically ace/aro spectrum and never regret that for a moment and just so fucking smart

so many witches

and there are wizards, and female wizards too

Death is a character and he’s adorable and he really really likes cats and he has a granddaughter who looks after children and hits monsters with pokers and has amazing hair

Super talented fandom who do art and fics which break your heart

Very good realistic characters and protagonists which are far from perfect aka recovering alcoholic picked up out the gutter by a (6 foot) dwarf and a woman who is large and kind but perfectly capable of looking after herself and the recovering alcoholic and a garden full of swamp dragons - and the old witch? she is only a goodie because everyone else is too busy being bad - and there’s an ex con artist who spent his life ruining others’ bc he found it fun and is only now a ‘goodie’ because he’s being blackmailed - and the person in charge is a tyrant but he’s really a very reasonable one - and there’s a guy who literally just runs away from things the entire time I’m not even exaggerating that’s like the entire plot of his books he just runs away from things

Have I mentioned the puns

Cons:

There are no cons

Discworld is amazing

I will lend you the books

This just happened to me today… again

Except that it wasn’t even a lyric, it was just a vibe

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.