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--- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

The introductory description of Lady Sybil changed my life. I cannot recall reading a description of a female character anywhere near this ballpark, which is a damn shame, but also doesn’t particularly surprise me. As a not-that-tall but broad-shouldered and barrel-chested woman* I feel deeply affirmed every time I revisit this passage.

Here it is to live on my blog and yours forever:

Even shorn of 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 self-assurance of the totally well-bred. The vowel sounds alone would have cut teak.

Vimes’s ragged forebears were used to voices like that, usually from heavily-armored people on the back of a war charger, telling them why it would be a jolly good idea, don’tcherknow, to charge the enemy and hit them for six. His legs wanted to stand to attention.

Prehistoric men would have worshiped her, and in fact had amazingly managed to carve life like statues of her thousands of years ago.

—Guards! Guards! by Sir Terry Pratchett

artbypontpilat

Someone recently asked me what costume I chose for Moist von Lipwig. This one. As far as I remember, I've already been told that the costume isn't canon. Maybe so, but I always draw Discworld characters based on my own inner vision.

mercuriobebop

quote by Vacholierette

dimity-lawn

Goodbye Year of the Luminous Lemur, hello Year of the Curious Squid!

adi-fitri

“IT’S A SWORD, IT’S NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.” My favourite scene from The Hogfather.

eggboy1187

thank you death who speaks in all caps gothic bold font

gcballet

Discworld Textposts III

[<-] Discworld [->]

blacjaq1

meelonsquid

ourgh discworld is still so good

tellmesoiknow

Terry Pratchett forever 💚

why-and-or-bother

Snuff- Terry Pratchett

some-israeli-guy

The night was as black as the inside of a cat.

- Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters, Discworld

rubyleaf

One thing I really appreciate about the City Watch books is the recurring theme that even total bastards deserve to be treated by the book, because it showcases just how easily any of us could be tempted to go full vigilante under the right circumstances. Carcer is probably the best example of this. He's an absolutely horrible, despicable, awful person, and we just want to see him go down. Many other stories would have the hero killing him at the end, brutally, and we as the audience would be cheering. Because sure, you're not supposed to kill people, but he was awful enough to deserve it, wasn't he?

But that's not where the story goes. Carcer is awful, but he's still a person, and Vimes is still acting in his duty as a policeman, and that means certain rules have to be followed. And so he doesn't execute him on the spot, but arrests him and hands him over to the authorities. And Carcer will probably end up dead anyway—executed—but we as the audience never see it. It doesn't matter. He can't do harm anymore. The happy ending isn't the catharsis of seeing his miserable end, but the knowledge that Vimes stood in the face of becoming judge, jury and executioner and resisted it. And we, the audience, felt the temptation too and know we can and must resist it as well.

Something something "if you do it for a good reason, you'd do it for a bad one."

a-ramblinrose

“A literate human can look at a sequence of letters and spaces and decide whether it constitutes a story; they know how to ‘read’ the code and work out its meaning, if it’s in a language they understand. They can even make a stab at deciding whether it’s a good story or a bad one. However, we do not know how to transfer this ability to a computer. The rules that our minds use, to decide whether what we’re reading is a story, are implicit in the networks of nerve cells in our brains. Nobody has yet been able to make those rules explicit.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II