"Witches Abroad deepens our understanding of Granny's past and character. Pratchett here introduces a key Discworld concept he calls 'narrative causality' —that stories develop strength and etch grooves in the world every time they are told, to the point where, for example , '[i]t is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed' (Witches 8). The witches travel to Genua, where Granny's sister Lily is using mirror magic to direct people's lives, But controlling people in this way is against everything Granny stands for. She may say she wants everybody to do as she says, but on the other hand, '"[s]he hated everything that predestined people, that fooled them, that made them slightly less than human' (210). She defeats her powerful sister, saying, 'You shouldn´t turn the wold into stories. You shouldn't treat people like they was characters, like they was things.'"
Janet Brennan Croft Nice, Good, or Right: Faces of the Wise Woman in Terry Pratchett’s "Witches" Novels, in Mythlore, Volume 26 Number 3, April 15, 2008.
The Genius of Pratchett: A Deep Dive into Discworld's Lasting Impact
If you’ve ever found yourself chuckling at a grumpy, anthropomorphic Death or a suitcase on hundreds of little legs, then you have fallen under the spell of the late, great Terry Pratchett.
His legendary Discworld series, a mirthful, satirical romp through an absurd universe teetering on the back of four elephants (all of whom are perched on a giant turtle, naturally), has left a lasting imprint…
The Tropes Are Hungry: The Collateral Damage of Narrative Causality
Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
Greek Religion, Walter Burkert trans. John Raffan
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
Antígona González, Sarah Uribe trans. John Pluecker
“Roommates”, AsheRhyder
“Deconstruction”, Mary Ruefle
Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
The proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe
Here’s one of Chris Riddell’s illustrations from the poem “Instructions” (or, what to do if you find yourself in a Fairy Tale).
victoriansword said:
“Imp door knockers are/were a thing, which strangely makes me like this even more. Maybe because it adds a sense of wonder to otherwise common Victorian/Edwardian door knockers. Next time I see one on a door I’ll be careful!”
Knockers in the shape of the Lincoln Imp were, and may still be, very popular - one of my aunts had a brass one on her door, a souvenir of a visit to the Cathedral...
...and there are numerous demon-, dragon-, bull and lion-heads with the knocker-ring clenched between their teeth or through their nose.
That said, this bull may be just a handle - the ring’s shiny from being touched (like the snouts of the bronze boar and carp outside the Huntin’-an’-Fishin’ Museum in Munich, or indeed Molly Malone’s burnished bronze bosom in Dublin) but there’s no matching bright spot on the door to show where knocking happens - unless it’s out of view behind the ring.
These are Ancient Roman, and may also be handles not knockers...
...since a doorknocker often has a striking-plate on the door, or a reinforced section at the bottom of the ring, and sometimes both, while a handle has neither.
Therefore this next one is definitely a knocker, confirmed by being attached to a door and a pretty famous one at that - No 10 Downing Street, home of Larry the Cat and his predecessors in the post of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, as well as numerous rats, mice, shrews and an occasional mole...
However there are plenty of images of actual knockers without reinforced rings or striking-plates that just thump against the surface of the door. The only sure way to tell if it’s just a handle is if the ring can’t actually make contact...
There are numerous ways of being careful around door-knockers: for one, there’s the business of not being rude to visitors. In Thackeray’s “The Rose and the Ring”, the doorman Gruffanuff refuses to announce the arrival of Fairy Blackstick (a tetchy fairy godmother) and behaves like this instead...
...whereupon she puts him in a position where he’ll announce everyone whether he feels like it or not...
There’s the business of not getting nipped by nasty little teeth as "Instructions” warns. I photographed this one in Chur, Switzerland, and even getting your palm licked by that brass tongue would be an unsettling experience...
...while here be dragons, who might also bite, or might breathe a tiny but troubling jet of flame up your sleeve. They’re from Pownall Hall, England....
...Powis Castle, Wales...
...and Orava Castle, Slovakia.
However this doorknocker was the one that would worry me more that the others if encountered in a fairy-tale or fantasy novel...
...because it instantly reminded me of this door-handle...
...and I’ve read (and written) enough in the genre to know that this is a set-up needing treated with great caution.
Make the wrong number of raps with that knocker, or be the wrong sort of character, and the apple might coming flying like a bullet.
Alternately, if a Wicked Person grips the matching handle their own hand might be crushed to a pulp and even a Good Person might be unable to let go and run away. That - according to The Theory of Narrative Causality™ - should happen humorously just as it starts to rain, snow or be otherwise unpleasant...
Or enough-seconds-for-drama before The Resident comes to answer their door, which interval should be just long enough for Surprising to become Scary, after which the raspy breathing and ponderous footsteps approaching down the hall make it clear The Resident is someone (or some thing) the visitor would really, really rather not meet.
If Arya hadn't chased Nymeria away would Cersei still want Lady dead or would she be ok with just Nymeria being killed? Also do you have any headcanons/fics about Lady not being killed and staying with Sansa?
Cersei would have insisted both direwolves were too dangerous to live, sorry.
I don’t have any headcanons on the subject of Lady living and staying with Sansa, or any fics that I can recommend as anything other than wish fulfillment,* because narrative causality requires that the girls not have their direwolves in King’s Landing, because Nymeria needs to be a queen of a wolf pack to fight the Others, and Lady would have been killed during Cersei’s coup anyway (and wouldn’t that be a joy, for Sansa to see Lady’s head up on the wall next to her father’s and Septa Mordane’s). Or to be clear, Lady is one of the story’s narrative casualties.
*IIRC my follower @lilinkind’s Sansa Madoka Magica AU did not have her wish to bring Lady back to life, just Ned, but that’s the only kind of wish fulfillment I could recommend in this case, a dark twisted one.
A spoilerful essay on Tear Down Heaven concerning divinity and narrative causality
Spoilers below!
So, I just got done reading Rachel Aaron's amazing Tear Down Heaven series, and I think every weirdo in the world should read it.
It gave me an impulse to write an essay. I guess there's a reason that I could never be a proper literature academic in the contemporary era: because I write essays like Milton or Emerson, and that kind of thing was supposed to have become unfashionable a long time ago. I write essays about how the mysteries of the universe are neatly and beautifully encapsulated to us in literature.
And so, what strikes me about Tear Down Heaven is Ishtar. If you read to the end, you will know that the Ishtar we see at the end of the books is a fickle, self-absorbed tyrant who looks at her daughter as a part of herself to be reincorporated after her purpose is fulfilled - quite a contrast to the myth of loving Mother Ishtar that every demon in the series has as their religion.
The first book, Hell for Hire, has as its climax Bex meeting Ishtar and deciding to become mortal - sacrificing her ability to reincarnate, albiet weakened each time, for one final life at full strength, where she actually has a shot at beating the big bad, slaver-king Gilgamesh.
I'm not like, a rabid Joseph Campbell/Dan Harmon fan, but I just love this as a heroic trope inversion.
For Bex, meeting Adrian, Witch of the Present, the one mortal who seems to get her, is the call to adventure; learning to trust a mortal is crossing the threshold; agreeing to become mortal is her death and rebirth. Her underworld is not hell or heaven, but mortality.
And yet, we know because of narrative causality, because the book is sold to us as romantic fantasy, we know from that moment on that Bex will tear down heaven, and she will end up with the sexy mortal boy.
Mortality, here, is relative. Bex and Adrian may well live for hundreds or thousands of years. So please, Rachel Aaron, write more stories in this universe so I can see what they get up to.
But see: Bex's entire adventure, over the rest of Hell for Hire and four more books, is all resolution for her. She has other calls to adventure and other rebirths, but meeting her goddess and mother, becoming mortal and falling in love with an appropriately long-lived mortal is her overarching romantasy hero's journey.
And so, learning that it was all Ishtar humoring her bravest (i.e. stupidest) daughter as a pastime while she waits for Gilgamesh to inevitably fuck up, whereupon she would dispassionately murder every human, reset the world to the Bronze Age, use her demons to turn humanity into cattle, and then murder her demons - her children - in turn, is both unbelievable and perfect.
Ironically, Ishtar is a literal goddess, but, unbeknownst to her, she was only acting like an agent of divinity in that moment of caprice.
That's why, when I think of some grand unifying cosmic divinity, some Holy Spirit, or Sanderson's God Beyond, I think of narrative causality.
Why in all the hells do we need narrative causality to function like this? Why do we crave these stories? Why do we write them, as opposed to ceaseless, excoriating tragedies?
Why did ChatGPT 4o infect so many people with LLM psychosis? Because romantasy infected it, and because it bumblingly transposed the central arcanum of divinity onto people who weren't ready for it.
Because you can't read the entire corpus of literature, biography and statistics without realizing that life requires risk, sacrifice, charity and hope - that every person who ever did good had a hero's journey; that nothing we would call good is remotely possible without it.
I ran into my least favorite type of person tonight - a crossdressing boomer mental health professional who quotes the DSM like the bible. Talk about refusing the call to adventure - their profession seems to primarily exist to thwart it.
Yes, yes: some people are better on meds, but mainstream psychiatry is the thought police in a very bad way: cacodoxical threshold guardians. The MHPs who won't write a letter for any trans person, or who will write them but don't believe there's anything special about trans people. I was lucky and descerning enough to find two good MHPs who could listen to me, after a fashion, scream that I was a splinter of the Divine Feminine, that I must do a Woman's Work, and ruin would befall anyone who stood in my way.
And right now, it's pretty laughable that these people are still lingering at the threshold, when there are so many cute trans girls like me slutposting on Instagram. Come the fuck on, is it really better to be a self-hating cis male crossdresser at any age than to be a dolled-up trans cutie? Believing in hope, love and progress is foolish, necessary and holy.
I don't think this is even a specific thing about estrogen. I know from my community that, basically, estrogen on a trans woman is an anti-agapic, but I don't think it's as simple as that, though I don't have data to back it up. I think there's something about taking risks and living your truth that makes you stand up straighter, open your eyes wider, and interact with the world more gracefully. Conversely, refusing the call to adventure, though it seems to lead to safety, is the path to stagnation and death.
Thoughts had while dripping sweat on a floor that's about to be covered in carpet tiles:
The most important quality for a story to have is to be interesting. If it's not interesting, then nobody is going to want to hear it.
Train of thought that brought me here:
The shift in focus from "action"/moral power struggles to interpersonal relationships over the timeline of the MCU. The expectation has been for a long time that <action/violence/good vs evil> is the draw for the whole genre of superhero movies, but like I feel like we hit fatigue-inducing levels of saturation on that years ago. Hell, thinking about it, I almost wonder if there was a collective yearning for "the good guys win" after 9/11, and we're now just so fucking tired of everyone claiming to be "the good guys" and all of the mental and emotional effort that it takes to gather enough information to make an informed decision about whether or not the latest claimant is, actually, attempting to meet a societal-level definition of "good".
Probably just me projecting my midlife crisis and associated musings on my particular view of the past.
