Every time Sean Astin makes a statement on whether or not Sam and Frodo were indeed gay for each other in lord of the rings heās always like āwell we have to acknowledge that attitudes around sexuality have changed dramatically over the past several decades and since authorial intent is only up to speculation, the story is open to multiple readings, some of which might have different significances for different groups of people also they kiss on the lips because I said soā
Rosie: "This is my husband Sam, and that's his husband, Frodo. Frodo is my husband-in-law. I'm not into him, he's he's a bit too 'elfy' for my taste, but Sam likes him, and that's fine with me. As far as I know, Frodo can't give Sam children, but Frodo looks after ours all the same, so I don't mind sharing Sam if it means another pair of eyes on the wee ones. In all honesty, our family tree is right simple compared to some hobbits. Yes, I'm referrin' to you Lobelia, over there pretendin' you ain't eavesdroppin'. Still bitter you ain't got either of my boys or their house, eh?"
Tbh it's canon that Frodo invited Sam and Rosie to move in to Bag End after their wedding and they all lived there for a couple of years until Frodo went to Valinor, so yeah. Running with it.
And once Rosie dies, Sam says his goodbyes and disappears after him.
whatās funny is people assuming that rosie would somehow be too dim or naive to KNOW that sam loved frodo, instead of looking at a guy who would loyally follow a beloved friend to hell and then help carry him home again, and not be like āoh i canāt not fuck that.ā
Polyamory, specifically polyandry, would be an interesting solution to the oddball population of the Shire.
The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; theyāre resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seemsā¦ demographically balanced? There certainly isnāt a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; thereās no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.
What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.
Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you donāt climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your fatherās loverās lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)
Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husbandās. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. Itās expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So sheās just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, theyāre all hers. Yes, thatās fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? Thatās really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her houseā¦ er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, thatās correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..
In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.
When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.
Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, theyāre all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Samās kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.
No outsider ever parses hobbit genealogy well enough to understand this except for Gandalf, who never explains anything either.
Since āpledgeā kinships are multidimensional and can occur in different directions, hobbits can form - and formalise - family bonds simply because they choose to. Gandalf doesnāt tell anyone that the formation of Thorinās Company, the Fellowship of the Ring, and Belladonna Tookās Accidental Troop of Mercenaries* are legal formations of pledge-siblings, a hobbit family structure usually claimed to increase social class and prestige (as high numbers of pledge-kin confer distinction on a hobbit, being a sort of popularity vote/endorsement that adds greatly to their social power. Incidentally, this is partly why Bilbo was both controversial and successful in his pledge-claim of Frodo; outsiders mistook his ābachelorā status as someone living outside of heteronormativity, while the Shire was bewildered and increasingly annoyed by his rejection of pledge and hearth commitments. By rights Bilbo had too few pledge-kin, and too little parenting experience, to claim rights to an orphan, especially one from Brandybuck hearth; but conversely, his social status was high enough that his belated bid for his very first pledge-son couldnāt reasonably be denied by anybody.)
In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. Itās free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)
Gandalf never explained.
* see the post about the Old Tookās āenchanted diamond cufflinksā that obeyed the wearerās commands; which were probably, given the general state of things, two lost silmarils recovered by his Remarkable Daughters and gifted to him because things stay small and safe in the shire
Only through Boromir while Boromir was alive! Pippinās familial claim through Boromir technically dissolved on Boromirās death, as Denethor hadnāt been privy to it, and those bonds rarely stretch to a stranger when the person in the middle has died before introducing them; although Pippin, who was well-brought-up, perfectly and politely rectified the problem at once by simply swearing himself as Denethorās pledge-son. but through his blood-cousinship to Frodo, who was older than Boromir, his status as the Took double-primarc (donāt ask) and the proximity-enhanced status-doubling effects of having a five-way cousin in Merry, Pippin was demonstrably higher status as a pledge-sibling and was also his own father-in-law and approved of himself. As such, he would have significantly raised Boromirās social status and marital prospects in the Shire.
Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits donāt recognise kingship so it wouldāve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippinās vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .
Ironically, the events in which Pippin realized this made Faramir his own hearth-son - so Pippin won in the end and took a great interest in ceremonially approving of Eowyn. Gandalf never explained
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
I just went looking for the post on X and got a message that it didn't exist
I searched for Guri Singh and got search results showing his account existed, but when I clicked on it I got a message his account did not exist
Does anyone know if he made his account private or if he got nuked by Elon? Or do I just suck at X (because I never go there)?
Sometimes Iām looking for something online - often āhow toā articles - and I want to filter for - like - a website that was clearly built in 2010 at the latest, which may or may not have been updated since then, but contains a vast wealth of information on one topic, painstakingly organized by an unknown legend in the field with decadesā worth of experience.
I donāt want a listicle with a nice stolen picture in a slideshow format written by a content aggregator that God forgot. I want hand-drawn diagrams by some genius professor who doesnāt understand SEO at all, but understands making stir-fries or raising stick insects better than anyone else on this earth. I donāt know what search settings to put into Google to get this.
search.marginalia.nu is the search engine you want!
The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.
This is in a sense the opposite of what most major search engines do, they favor modern websites over old-looking ones. Most links you find here will be nearly impossible to find on a regular search engine, as they arenāt sufficiently search engine optimized.
āIt is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didnāt even know you were looking for. If you search for āPlatoā, you might for example end up at the Canterbury Tales. Go looking for the Canterbury Tales, and you may stumble upon Neil Gaimanās blog.
If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, youāre on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?
I donāt expect this will be the next ābigā search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.ā
i clicked around for a few minutes searching various things and I now have two fourteenth century pie crust recipes and an apple filling recipe i want to try, so thanks!
it has been twenty minutes and I am deeply in love with this search engine.
INCREDIBLE. I *do* want to know how to test Windows 95 for Y2K Compliance and I am glad that someone is still hosting step by step instructions for that.
tl;dr: search.marginalia.nu for the old or old looking and just plain serendipitous stuff that google or Duck duck go are gonna not find/bury on the 20th page. For perfectly good reasons, but ā¦
My absolute favorite part of having made this post - other than causing people to be introduced to this site - are the people in the tags/comments talking about their interests and stuff they found about their hobbies.
Good luck out there surfing the cyberweb, you crazy cats. I love the shoelace website too - Ianās Shoelace Site [link], unless thereās another. My personal favorite old-school site is Alysionās string figure collection [link].
i'm breaking the author's silence to address these tags directly, because i've seen similar responses a few times. your context is part of you. you like your favorite band because you found them somehow. you speak the languages you speak because somebody else taught you. you feel the way you feel because you have memories and experiences. shaving off pieces of yourself will not reveal a truth at the center, and will only make you feel less like a person worth being. you will never shed your context or influences, anymore than you will ever become younger or undrink a glass of water. but you are free to create as much additional context as you like. build yourself outward instead of digging for yourself at the center. trying 100 new things will give you 100 more data points on what you like, don't like, think, believe, feel. it might begin to reveal an image of yourself that you can recognize, respect, and love. your life is not an object to be kept clean, it is an ongoing action that you get to control. also that's starlight glimmer not rarity.
Every so often I catch a glimpse of the book drama going on over on the Insta/Threads sphere of the Internet, and it makes me so glad Iām considered too Tumblrina to sit at their tables.
What do you mean an author is railing against people using libraries/the Libby app because itās āfreeā (itās not. you as the author get money from the library purchasing the digital lending license) and meanwhile their book is on Amazon for free to try and get readers??? Hello????
I am staring directly into the camera like Iām on the Office in Librarian. Libraries are literally an authorās best friend. We get books to people they never would have known about otherwise, & create Fans out of disinterested bystanders. And! Libraries are often paying MORE for a book than the average user, at least for digital editions, because it is expected that the library will lend it to more people, so theoretically we need to pay more to compensate the authors! (This is not I think how it works in practice, it more often just benefits the digital lending company instead of the actual author but. Greed is ever thus). Also, in some countries (sadly not the US, boo hiss) authors get paid for every checkout of a book. So, you can literally get royalties on those āfreeā books. (Also, theyāre not free, theyāre paid for with tax dollars for the good of everyone). How some fool can think temporary freeness on Amazon Kindle is superior to libraries I cannot fathom. Like, how does this person even manage to function in the real world?
Anyway. Authors. Love your librarians. We love you and seek only to help you get more readers so you can write more books. We have a symbiotic relationship, each needs the other.
I have been saving screenshots kind people send me of All Hail Chaos having many library holds with glee. This is all beyond my comprehension. The library is where I found Terry Pratchett. The library is my friend.
Although not going by the term "asexual" yet, asexuality was spoken about alongside homosexuality as far back as the 1890s. Asexual history is just as vital to queer history as any other term and I'm so tired of watching us being treated like a new thing
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesnāt sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. Sheāll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crewāelite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldnāt read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didnāt get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldnāt pay the electric bill. Music wasnāt a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a jobāfactory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boysā āWouldnāt It Be Niceā? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of āThese Boots Are Made for Walkināā? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to āLa Bambaā? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent yearsādecadesātrying to crack the secret of the Beach Boysā gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When āYouāve Lost That Lovinā Feelināā hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didnāt fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musiciansā anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard āGood Vibrations,ā āRiver Deep ā Mountain High,ā the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generationās youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. Sheās now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the āBeach Boysā were, in fact, Carol Kayeās.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last weekās big superhero fight. A hero died right where youāre sitting. The whole areaās been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually itād be done by now but no oneās willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.
Itās a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.
āHow much?ā
The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldnāt be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you donāt.
You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.
āI said,ā the Hero says, voice tightening, āHow. Much.ā
Thereās the sound of gravel crunching now. Theyāre wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means itās not their blood.
You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacketās inner pocket. āI donāt take money.ā
āThen what do you take?ā The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isnāt. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. āIāve got land. A house. You can have it.ā
Night Watch is one of Sir Terryās most hopeless novels - and, by the same token, because of the same things, one of his most hopeful.
Itās a parody - and I use that word very loosely, because thereās really nothing funny about it - of Les Miserables. Itās about a failed revolution, and a barricade, and the people who fought and died there for nothing. Nothing changes. Politics with a capital P goes on, and even the most pure and noble of intentions only becomes food for the pit of snakes who pull the strings. The powerful remain powerful, the powerless, despite their solidarity, their desperation, their violence, their hope, remain powerless. Their little lives donāt count at all. Things continue exactly as they always have, minus a few faces in the crowd.
It is also, I think, where we see Sam Vimes at his lowest. Sure, Thud! does similar things in stripping him down, but that is under an outside influence, and he has his family to think of. He has something to fight for.
In Night Watch, though, all of that is taken away. Sam Vimes, eternal cynic, for once has Cassandraic knowledge that his cynicism is absolutely founded. He knows how this will end, and thereās no Corporal Carrot to make the world magically better around him, no Sybil and Young Sam to push through for, no city to protect. The absolute best that he can expect is to succeed, and lose that family, that future, forever. The absolute worst? He dies. Everyone he cares about here dies. And itās all in vain.
Sam Vimes is an alcoholic. Itās something that we tend to bring up when weāre talking about how amazing he is, how much heās overcome, but gloss over otherwise. Which is a little sad, because itās fundamental.
Sam Vimes faced this exact dragon, years ago. Sam Vimes saw there was no way to slay it. He saw the ants eating at the heart of every hope, every effort. He saw the first man he really knew as a good and kind and just - but never passive, never weak - man die, horribly, slain for no reason but petty grudge and Politics. He saw John Keelās garden wither and die in its bed. He saw the hope of a better, brighter Ankh-Morpork squelched, and the sacrifice of a good man wasted. He saw the world, in all of its rotting, miserable, pestilent despair, spoiling every good thing that dared show its face, its only ordering principle the slow decay of entropy.
Young Sam Vimes had no anchor. Young Sam Vimes had nothing left to turn to but the bottom of a bottle and the smelliest part of an Ankh-Morpork gutter.
Sam Vimes, as of the events of Night Watch, is back there. Not only physically temporally displaced. He has nothing. There is no reason for him to stand up, to take on the role of John Keel, to take responsibility for the barricade, to try to bring Carcer back to justice. To fight the doomed fight. There is nothing between him and finding a quiet seat at the Broken Drum, ordering himself a pint, and giving up. There is nothing between him and despair.
But he gets up anyway. He intervenes anyway. He tries to help anyway, even when he canāt believe it will make any difference. And it doesnāt, in the end.
Except that people lived who, save for the actions of John Keel, would have died. Except it quite literally meant the world to them.
And thatās where the hope is hiding, in this hopeless, bleak, despair of a book. There is no glory. There is no revolution. There is no good thing that cannot be corrupted. There is no point. Except.
The Disc turns on the āexceptā. Always has. Always will.
The hope across the whole arc of Discworld is that things can, if good people try very, very hard, go from extremely awful to only very awful, and thatās worth it.
Overall, the Discworld series is very hopeful about the grand scheme of things and the effect people, no matter how small, can have on it. But Night Watch is not about that. Night Watch is about what happens when āthingsā donāt get better. When the grand scheme of things isnāt impacted at all, either way, by the actions of individual people. Night Watch is about what happens when the hope runs out. When the āworth itā runs out. When all thatās left to do is save what little you can, because you can.
Thatās why there are no monuments to the Glorious Heroes of Treacle Mine Road. In the grand scheme of things, nothing they did mattered. But they are remembered, because they need to be remembered. Because sometimes what we do does not matter.
And when that happens, all that matters is what we do.
All the little angels rise up, rise up.
All the little angels rise up high!
How do they rise up, rise up, rise up?
How do they rise up, rise up high?
They rise heads up, heads up, heads upā¦
oh! Also I should take this opportunity to air my crack theory about Night Watch, to wit: Ned Coates is a time-traveling grown-up Young Sam.
My evidence:Ā
Ned is the only other Watchman who is new to the squad, and new to Ankh-Morpork.
He is supposedly the only person who knew the real John Keel, but he never calls Sam out for it.Ā If there ever was a real Ned Coates, and he really knew John Keel, we only have Nedās word for it.
When he and Sam spar, he fights just as dirty as Sam does, and claims John Keel taught him the tricks Sam uses himself.Ā
Heās protective of Vimesy, moreso than other Watchmen though heās known them all for the same length of time.
He is clearly up to SOMETHING; Sam thinks heās one of the real revolutionaries plotting to overthrow Winder, but none of the other revolutionaries interact with him or seem to know him that I can recall.
When Sam admits heās a time traveler, heās unfazed; his questionĀ āFrom how far back?ā would make perfect sense asĀ āfrom how far back in my timeline, where you are my dad?ā
He supposedly dies in the last fight, but Sam doesnāt see it, and Sam supposedly died in that fight too.
Lu-Tze is 100% good enough to have two time-travelers operating at the same time without breaking the timeline; he does, however, worry about the unusual strain heās creating.
So, letās say an adult Young Sam has a time-travel accident. Possibly after some sort of major falling-out with his dad, one thatās got him still pissed off at him. And now heās stuck in a vastly more shitty version of the city he grew up in, and the versions of his dad he has met so far are a) a dumb kid and b) kind of a dick. He is not having a great time. He really, really wants to go home, but first he has a revolution to see through.
āYou took an oath to uphold the law and defend the citizens without fear or favor," said Vimes. "And to protect the innocent. That's all they put in. Maybe they thought those were the important things. Nothing in there about orders, even from me. You're an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government.ā
-- Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
kianamaiart
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
baratheonpilled
romaincrisis
titsay
izzy806
yousharknotpass
