Only the wee free men. Oh but I love them. There’s this one scene where the nac mac feegle are teaching the cat not to go after little baby birds. I kid you not I laughed so so so hard the whole time
and the books are really funny witty and they seem like a real life practical girl yk?? The vibes hit just right.
"I hate things that try to take away what you are. I want to kill those things, Mr. Anybody. I want kill all of them. When you take away memories, you take away the person. Everything they are."
Another commission for SkelemanWizard of Tiffany Aching from Discworld (specifically as a teen in The Shepherd’s Crown)! I'm still getting the hang of digital painting in contrast to my usual simple-shading approach—multiple layers are great for being able to make changes to one thing without affecting other parts of the art, until you find something you want to change and can't figure out which layer(s?) it's on 😵💫
"Then there is the dress. It has been owned by many sisters before her and has been taken up, taken out, taken down and taken in by her mother so many times that it really ought to have been taken away. But Tiffany rather likes it. It comes down to her ankles and, whatever colour it had been to start with, is now a milky blue which is, incidentally, exactly the same colour as the butterflies skittering beside the path."
I just finished reading "I shall wear midnight" and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to think about the book. Maybe my expectations were too high as it's one of the later Disworld novels and the only one of those I've pretty much never heard anything negative about, so I expected it to be great. But having read it now, it's very "eh" to me. Not bad, it's still Discworld and I had fun reading it, but it's pretty middle of the road as far as Discworld books go, maybe even more toward the lower half. There was honestly very little that really blew me away about it or really got to me on the kind of emotional level Discworld books often do. There were some great scenes, but there was definitely some oomph missing.
The Cunning Man honestly disappointed me as a villain. I heard that he was such a dark and scary villain, but honestly the Hiver and the Wintersmith were a lot more eerie and creepy to me. It didn't feel like the Cunning Man really did much that was all that threatening or terrible. Tiffany and Co always just get away when he shows up and he does poison the minds of people, most notably those in the castle, but then he only gets to those that are already thinking ill of witches and others anyway (like the Duchess or the nurse or the cook or a literal murderer so horrible the hangman doesn't want to hang him) and we get multiple examples of people doing horrible stuff without any influence from him (Mr Petty and the villagers lynching the old woman and her cat) so it doesn't feel like he makes that much of a difference on the whole. And I get why that is because you can't exactly argue that people are perfectly nice and only do horrible things because of some evil malevolent influence, but then you're in this weird situation where the oh so horrible villain isn't allowed to accomplish anything scary. We get some vague hints towards the lynching of innocent women becoming more frequent, but that's far away from the main characters and kinda pales in comparison to the evil ordinary people are capable of all on their own like Mr Petty which has far more time spent on it.
In general, the morality of the book feels kind of weird. We get a wonderfully dark intro sequence with the aftermath of Mr Petty beating his young daughter so hard that she loses her child and Tiffany protecting him from the mob, not for his sake but so decent people don't become murderers and his wife and daughter don't have to see him getting torn apart at the limbs. That's an incredibly visceral and intense scene. But then he gets to just come back and Tiffany feels sorry for him because he tried to hang himself and made a little grave for the lost child (that he killed) and the last scene we get of him is him awkwardly showing up to the wedding with his still-wife (that we know he also beats up). It feels like the book kind of shrugging at the situation going "well, we can't just kill him that would be bad(TM), but we can't punish him any other way either for some reason so he just gets to continue as if nothing happened, that's just how it is(TM)". I get the humanizing aspect of it, he's not just an evil wifebeater who does and thinks nothing but evil throughout his life, but that changes nothing about how evil his actions are because he still did them. If there is no law in the land to stop this situation from continuing (which noone suggests that there is, so I assume there isn't) then I actually think him getting lynched by mob justice is the preferred outcome. The villagers already stoned the cat and killed the old woman for having done nothing wrong and we just kinda have to accept that, so them killing someone who deserves it for once would be an improvement.
In this context I also side-eye the Cunning Man making the murderer kill his canary a little because the narrative calls it "somehow a worse crime" but takes pains never to specify what the oh so horrible criminal actually did that not even the hangman wanted to hang him. Something like, Idk, raping and torturing a bunch of children in his basement for years and years would actually be a much worse crime than killing a canary imho. I think the sentiment that ordinary people are surprisingly capable of what one might consider unspeakable evil is important and that people who do evil aren't just mustache-twirling villains that you can spot from a mile away, because otherwise you become blind to the possibility that people you consider perfectly nice and moral can and have done very evil things. But you can't go and run with that sentiment to then concluding that, therefore, all of these things are just an ordinary part of life because ordinary people do them and you shouldn't or can't do anything against them, which I feel like this book, unintentionally, slips into. Yes, the world is unjust and sometimes no good outcome or choice is possible, but that doesn't mean you just accept all this ordinary evil and don't try to fight against it and try to prevent it from happening (again) when you can. Yes, good people can do evil things because people are flawed and believe rumours and lies and mob mentality is a thing etc. etc., but sorry, that doesn't apply to "yeah, he beats his wife/daughter sometimes but, really, deep down he's not that bad a guy, honest". There are evils that no morally sound person would even consider or "accidentally" do.
I also don't really understand the process of the villagers' mentality here. They apparently know enough about Mr Petty beating his wife and child that they descend on his house to lynch him, but when he suddenly comes back the only focus is on the rumour that Tiffany "almost killed" him and later in the book everyone has collectively forgotten all about anything Mr Petty ever did, including the narrative because it never gets mentioned again. Neither do Tiffany's parents who talked about wanting to take in/support Amber and/or her mother, but I have absolutely no idea if they actually did or not because we have no indication of that (rather the opposite with Mrs Petty still being by her husband's side). But why would they suddenly change their minds? (And don't come at me with "oh, but she wants to stay so there's nothing they can do", because a lot of the witches' books (and other Discworld books) have them helping people against their own better judgement because they're "too stupid" to realize what they should do to help themselves, so why should it suddenly be different in an abusive situation like this?) If anyone does anything to protect Amber and Mrs Petty from Mr Petty now, fucking show that and don't just completely drop the question with a mental shrug. And if nobody does anything, why the fuck not? And wouldn't that make the kelda mad given Amber is apparently under her protection now? (And don't give me "oh, him trying to kill himself and setting up the grave for the child he killed shows that he regrets his actions and will do better" because feeling sorry for himself and acknowledging that he maybe went a little too far this time doesn't actually show that he learned any kind of lesson or repents in any way.) On that note, I just don't believe that the Cunning Man couldn't find a host closer to the Chalk than that one murderer in AM given that Mr Petty was right there or even the nurse. (Him possessing Mr Petty would also conveniently avoid having to answer any of these questions.)
On the one hand, the Cunning Man is specifically the hatred and prejudice towards witches, but on the other hand, he's also kind of representative of the hatred and suspicion of ordinary people towards anything they don't understand or know and can conveniently blame for things going wrong. So far so good, but then he gets also equaled with any kind of hatred and evil people have and do, like Mr Petty's which Tiffany names in her speech when she defeats the Cunning Man. But there are different kinds of evil and this in particular is a false equivalence. Mr Petty didn't beat up his daughter because of some random sense of evil or because he falsely blamed her for something or believed lies about her. The comments from him and Mrs Petty make pretty clear why he did: Because he's incredibly controlling and resorts to violence when his wife or daughter do anything that he doesn't approve of (and knowing your typical abuser, there will always be something he doesn't approve of when the mood strikes him). Combining the two really muddies the message and what the Cunning Man is supposed to represent.
Apart from the lack of scariness/creepiness, the "Cunning" Man also feels like a misnomer because he doesn't do anything all that cunning. Tiffany basically wins with the first "trick" she tries against him and doesn't really come across all that desperate either, the stakes don't feel as high as they did with all her previous books. There should've been one or two times where the Cunning Man actually shows his cunning and puts Tiffany on the backfoot.
This one might be due to some time having gone by since I read the previous books, but Roland just felt like a completely different character to me. And yeah, he's gotten older but unlike Tiffany he was unrecognizable as supposedly the same character anymore. That also made it difficult to like the way the relationship drama was handled in the book. I kinda saw the separation between the two coming simply on account of Roland's position interfering with Tiffany's, but Roland's supposed love for Letitia felt arbitrary and not genuine, just like Preston's introduction felt like he was entirely written in just to be Tiffany's convenient forever-love to replace Roland. It didn't feel organic at all. I like the individual characters for what they are but their relationships are just "?" to me.
In the same vein, there were several lines of thought that were just completely dropped, unusually many. Like Tiffany saying that Letitia has to do something to fix the mess she created, but she does next to nothing of the sort and the only contribution she makes to Tiffany's plan is by sheer coincidence and required almost zero effort of her own. It feels kind of messily written, similar to Making Money, in that a lot is happening in many different scenes but it doesn't really come together as a whole with the individual parts all contributing something. They're just kind of there and left dangling.
