I had this thought in mind when the cast photos for the Watch series were first making the rounds, but never got around to writing it up. Now that it seems to be making the rounds again, here it is.
Thin!Sybil is Bad for reasons that have nothing to do with representation
The narrative heart of Guards! Guards! is built around the thematic parallels between Sybil, the Dragon and to a great extent Ankh-Morpork itself on the one hand, and Vimes and Errol on the other hand. And Sybil being Large is a huge (no pun intended) part of that. Sybil is Large is, to a great extent, what the book is about.
Here is Vimes’ introduction on page 2 of the novel. It’s not quite the beginning, but it’s the second thing introduced after the dragon(s) themselves:
“The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing. Woman. Thass what it was. Woman. Roaring, ancient, centuries old. Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, with her, then kicked you inna, inna, thingy. Thingy, in your mouth. Tongue. Tonils. Teeth. That’s what it, she, did. Whe wasa…thing, you know, lady dog. Puppy. Hen. Bitch. And then you hated her and, and just when you thought you’d got her, it, out of you’re your, whatever, then she opened her great booming rotten heart to you, caught you off bal, bal, bal, thing. Ance. Yeah. Thassit. Never knew where where you stood. Lay. Only thing you were sure of, you couldn’t let her go. Because, because she was yours, all you had, even in her gutters.”
And here is the end of Vimes’ part of the book, two scenes from the end, almost a perfect bookend:
“And then it arose and struck Vimes that, in her own special category, she was quite beautiful; this was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at. She couldn’t do worse, but then, he couldn’t do better. So maybe it balanced out. She wasn’t getting any younger, but then, who was? And she had style and money and common-sense and self-assurance and all the things that he didn’t, and she had opened her heart, and if you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city.”
Guards! Guards! is a love story. It’s a love story between these too, but it’s also a love story between the dragons, and these are not different things:
“But it – she’s a magical animal,” said Vimes. “What’ll happen when the magic goes away?”
Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.
“Most people seem to manage,” she said.
I also want to point out Sybil’s introduction, just for funzies:
“The door opened. Something dreadful loomed over him.
“Ah, good man. Do you know anything about mating?” it boomed.
Hehehehe. But also, note the emphasis on the size difference between them. Again, here:
“Even shorn if her layers of protective clothing, Lady Sybil Ramkin was still toweringly big. Vimes knew that the barbarian hublander folk had legends about great chain-mailed, armor-bra’d, carthorse-riding maidens who swooped down on battlefields and carried off dead warriors on their cropper to a glorious roistering afterlife, while singing in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. Lady Ramkin could have been one of them. She could have led them. She could have carried off a battalion. When she spoke, every word was like a hearty slap on the back and clanged with the aristocratic assurance of the totally well-bred. The vowel sounds alone would have cut teak.”
Sybil’s introduction is all about her size and nobility, by contrast to Vimes’ which is all about his wretchedness. Draco nobilis vs Draco vulgaris;
“Draco nobilis. The Noble Dragon. As opposed to these fellows – Draco vulgaris, the lot of them. But the big ones are all gone, you know. This really is a nonsense. No two ways about it. All gone. Beautiful things they were. Weighed tons. Biggest things ever to fly. No one knows how they did it.”
Size. And nobility. Let’s look at Errol, and his utter wretchedness:
“Total whittle, Vimes thought. He wasn’t sure the precise meaning of the word, but he could hazard a shrewd guess. It sounded like whatever it was you had left when you had extracted everything of any value whatsoever. Like the Watch, he thought. Total whittles, every one of them. And just like him. It was the saga of his life.”
“It’s a girl,” translated Lady Ramkin.
“But it’s sodding enormous!” said Nobby.
Vimes coughed urgently. Nobby’s rodent eyes slid sideways to Sybil Ramkin, who blushed like a sunset.
“A fine figure of a dragon, I mean,” he said quickly.
It’s also worth noting that, because of her size, it doesn’t really occur to anyone that Sybil might be in danger. They’re imaging the sacrifice to be “some slip of a girl,” and even the arresting guards are hesitant about her because she doesn’t fit their image. They’re just going of the letter of things:
“Bloody hell,” he said, in a voice of mixed horror and respect. “And the dragon wants to eat her?”
“Fits the bill,” said the captain. “She’s got to be the highest born lady in the city. I don’t know about maiden,” he added, “and right this minute I’m not going to speculate. Someone go and fetch a cart.”
Sybil’s non-traditional femininity is an ongoing theme across the book, and literally endangers her life because nobody expects her to be a target. And it deliberately parallels the fact that nobody interprets the dragon as female except her love interest – even Sybil, who should have known better. Because it’s Really Big. That’s the Big Twist of the whole book – that the dragon is a lady to be wooed, not a monster to be slain. Sybil is likewise consistently portrayed as almost monstrous – but that’s exactly what’s likeable about her. Later books talk about how being the Big Girl among her peers is part of what drives her compassion, her care for small broken things, and her Great Personality (see also: Agnes Nitt). Sybil is large and in charge and not used to performing femininity in the same way Vimes is not used to performing anything other than Lawman. But this is why we like her. The conclusion of their story specifically calls up her common sense and self-assurance – her presence and practicality. That’s why she and Vimes can be on the same side even though she’s fabulously wealthy.
Sybil is big because Sybil is the dragon, because Guards! Guards! is a love story between a giant terrifying woman and a tiny and outwardly worthless man, played out in parallel between the human protagonists and the dragons. If you make Sybil thin, you’ve gutted the whole literary structure of the work.
(But again, Sybil is terrifying but also kind, and that’s also super important. I don’t feel like looking for quotes in other books, but they’re there. She is not Strong Female Character ™ though – and that seems to be what they’re making her in the series.)
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