It’s my honest opinion that Hollywood couldn’t handle Discworld at it’s darkest.
It would want to take Sam Vimes and either make him into their kind of Good Hero (who are generally neither), or it would make him into the Villain, because they wouldn’t know what to do with a character like him. They wouldn’t know what to do with a man who is cynical and dark and terrified of his own thoughts and so filled with rage he becomes a beacon of light and hope instead.
They wouldn’t know what to do with Lady Sybil other than make her into a jolly fat woman who dotes on her “barely-tolerating-husband” and has an eccentric hobby in breeding dragons. They wouldn’t make her tall and fat and so sure of herself you could bounce a nuclear missile off her self confidence. They most certainly wouldn’t allow Sam and her to have a sex life, or if they did they’d kill her in childbirth because that’s “Realistic™”, right?
They wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like Granny Weatherwax without making her lament her spinsterhood, or twisting her magic into something dark and fueled by loneliness. They wouldn’t know what to do with an old baggage like Nanny Ogg without turning her into pure comedic relief for Granny’s darkness, when what she actually is is incredibly complex and powerful in her own right because Nanny’s power is not having to use magic at all.
They’d take Tiffany Aching and make her “spunky” and a rebel, when in fact all Tiffany wanted to do was make sure no one ever got hurt for being different ever again.
Brother Brutha would become a fated prophet when all he was was a simple man who believed in being kind and changed an entire religion and culture simply by being so.
Vetinari would become a monster, an evil man who controlled the city with an iron grip, not because he loved it, but because he can, when Vetinari never wants power, not really. He’s a tyrant yes, but only because the world is so profoundly messed up that it needed someone to get to the top and say “No, no more…” and sometimes the world needs good men to do bad things, because as much as Hollywood might want to make us believe, bad men rarely do good.
Death would either become cold and uncaring or tragic, when he is in fact neither. Death is not justice and he knows this, Death is just death, so he tries to be kind and do his job as efficiently as possible because at the end of the day, that’s what is required of him. Susan would become this hard nosed bitter “don’t talk to me” bitch with the powers of Death and would constantly suffer the urge to use it on “bad people” because that’s what Hollywood does to women with any kind of power, when Susan is actually the Goth version of Mary Poppins and also considerably kinder because she takes the fear of children and teaches them how to make it into a weapon against the thing that frightens them. She knows they don’t need to be told there are no monsters under the bed because there are, what she does instead, is show them that monsters can be beaten. She empowers them in a way children rarely are, and she does it without a spoonful of sugar because that shit will rot your teeth.
Carrot would become the fallen King, banished from his realm and forever longing for a throne he can never have when in fact he chose, he chose to carry a lantern and walk the streets at night because the night might well be dark and full of terrors, but it doesn’t have to be.
Hollywood wouldn’t know how to handle Discworld at it’s darkest, because at its darkest Discworld is so overwhelmingly human in its need for hope it hurts. And Hollywood doesn’t deal with human, it deals with tropes, and that’s what is wrong with the majority of mainstream media at the moment. People are not tropes.
As for the whole idea of “the world is dark and terrible so we all must be grim faced and stoic”, like have you been to a funeral? Do you know how many people laugh at funerals? Do you know how many people smile, and hug and kiss and cling to each other with such profound love because that’s what humans do? We look at the darkness and we follow the sunrise. Grief might be the price we pay for love, but that doesn’t make love a weakness.
And Jim Henson understood that. His family, understands that. And it makes me happy that it’s them who are involved in this adaptation of The Wee Free Men.
