the turtle moves

this is a Terry Pratchett blog now | formerly to-saunter-vaguely

[smallpotatoes-dandelions]

I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".

[sulkybender-retired04042026]

*fishes this absolute treasure from the tags*

[geeoharee]

People keep telling me Pratchett is fatphobic and what they mean is "he mentions fat women having feelings and it makes me uncomfortable". None of them are fat.

[sailor-cerise]

[ID Tumblr tags from athymely reblogging i-believe-in-u

#This!!! #If you're going to spend time on someone's size as an element of their character #Then do it like Terry Pratchett. #I will forever remember when in snuff it describes Sybil rolling over in bed and everything shifts towards her #and it's just a fact of life related to her size but also this really loving moment and I fully cried about it. #also #'Prehistoric men would have worshipped her and in fact had amazingly managed to carve lifelike statues of her thousands of years ago' #And #'Her bosom rose and fell like an empire #and #'If you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city' #And also one that has made me cry so many times: #'It was probably something to do with being a...a big girl. She tried to make herself seem small #and by default that made those around her feel bigger. #Acknowledging how she was treated for her weight and how it impacted her character-crying sobbing weeping on the floor #1 relate to her in so many ways #and seeing her be so loved and worshipped by vimes in her own body not in spite of her size but in part because of it#I love her so much

/End ID.]

[lancrewizzard]

"Are you telling me that your university has practicing homosexuals on staff?"

Rincewind stammered. "I. I don't think so. Professor Macarona is so good at it he doesn't need to practice, I'm too nervous to ask, and Ponder doesn't have the time with all his other jobs. I suppose the more senior wizards might be practicing homosexuality." He thought back to some scenes in the Uncommon Room. "They certainly need the practice," he added.

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[enemiestorivalstolovers]

[thetiptoeingtulip]

sam vimes and mark baum (big short, 2014) have the same energy

[rainbow-bear]

A king has no sons, no daughters, and no queen. For this reason he must decide who will take the throne after he dies. To do this he decides that he will give all of the children of the kingdom a single seed. Whichever child has the largest, most beautiful plant will earn the throne; this being a metaphor for the kingdom. At the end of the contest all of the children came to the palace with their enormous and beautiful plants in hand. After he looks at all of the children’s pots, he finally decides that the little girl with an empty pot will be the next Queen. Why did he choose this little girl over all of the other children with their beautiful plants.

[ademigodgirl]

The seeds were all dead (burned, fake, etc.).  The other kids cheated and got different seeds and planted them.  The little girl didn’t cheat and was not able to grow anything because the seed was dead.  She was the only one who didn’t cheat.

[lizthefangirl]

damn

[zorascreation]

Nothing like original fairy tales! 

[roachpatrol]

i get the moral it’s trying to convey but that king is an idiot and the kingdom’s doomed. you don’t appoint an honest kid who will forthrightly admit a failure like that to leadership of a country, you put that kid in charge of like… the army, or something. the department of agriculture. 

i’d send out dead seeds, then appoint the kid with the biggest and most beautiful plant anyway. ideally the same kind of plant as the dead seeds were from. and ideally a kid with a really good pokerface. that kid knows:

a) how to perceive failure early (a well developed second plant means they knew how soon the first seeds should sprout and didn’t fuck around when they didn’t) 

b) how to fix the situation (a second plant of the same species means they got someone to help them identify the seeds and plant more, or are observant enough to do it themselves)

c) how to get the best people for a job in to do it (kids aren’t great gardeners. a beautiful science project probably means mom did all the work— just what you want from a child ruler and their regent)

all around, that kid (or their mom) is the kind of devious results-oriented bald-faced liar you want to go toe-to-toe with the lords of your country and the rulers of your neighbors. not a little kid who admits defeat so early and in a situation with such high stakes. ‘whoops i didn’t grow a plant’ sounds a lot less sweet when you phrase it like ‘i give up on ruling my country’. 

you know, i think i’d also send agents out to encourage the kids to destroy each other’s plants. let’s see who’s good at seige warfare, too.

[incorrectdiscworldquotes]

Did Lord Vetinari write that post?

[p4nishers]

one out of the many things i really love about discworld is how deeply unlikable the watch is in non watch books. that might seem a strange thing to say but if you've read the books you know what im talking about. its such a simple yet effective way of showing the multitudes any organization has, but especially one that's enforcing a system or law. i mean, think about it, when reading the watch books the only people you're rooting for is the watch themselves, everyone loves sam and carrot and angua, they're all our favorites!! but when you come to face w them in other books like, say, the truth or going postal or unseen academicals, you're suddenly not as keen on them. because why are they interfering w william, who's just trying to do the right thing and why can't they just leave moist alone, who's just trying to survive (albeit by not always lawful means, but if you choose to read a terry pratchett book im sure you've already gotten over that) and why are they so distrusting of trev, who was really just trying to save his friend? well, obviously, because it's their job. and when they're doing that job in the watch books it all seems justified and necessary, but when seen through civilian eyes, they're just annoying bastards with bad case of entitlement issues. and terry MEANT for you to feel that. lets look at another example. we like william very much in his book, he hasn't got the best background but he spends the whole book and after making up for it. but when we meet him in, say, monstrous regiment, he's kinda just pretentious and posh and when moist mentions him in making money he doesn't seem to be universally liked. terry is not precious with his characters, he doesn't coddle them, and thats what makes them so real.

[madseance]

“You bloody fool!” said the struggling figure in black. “What the hell are you playing at!” He pushed at Vimes, who nevertheless tightened his grip.

“That, sir, is Assault Upon A Watch Officer,” said Vimes.

“I’m a Watch officer, too, you damn flatfoot! From Cable Street!”

“Where’s your uniform?”

“We don’t wear uniforms!”

“Where’s your badge?”

“And we don’t carry badges!”

“Hard to see why I shouldn’t think you is a common thief then, sir. You was casing that joint over there,” said Vimes, happy in the role of big, thick, but horribly unshakeable copper. “We seen you.”

—from Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

[xerxes-is-a-geeky-metalhead]

Imagine writing a God of death so good that chronically ill people wish that one is the one they meet when they die

[incomprehensiblelentils]

HE DID IT FOLKS, HE DID THE THING

[edenfenixblogs]

I genuinely love how this man wrote the most effortlessly, breathtakingly universal truths I've ever read and then will just...dad joke all over the place.

"A sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. That's what sin is."

and

"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters."

Breathtaking. Life altering. Simple words given to the most complex facets of human existence.

But also...

"Tiffany [Aching] was Aching all over"

and also...

"Bjorn again"

and also...

“A -ing wizard. I HATE -ing wizards!” “You shouldn’t - them, then”‘ muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes."

and also...

"It was gilt by association"

and fucking..

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”

But then...

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”

...and also!

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”

...and don't forget!

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

...and furthermore!

“There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.”

The one-two punch of something like...

“Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck"

...and then the utter, truthful, poetic simplicity of...

"When in doubt, choose to live.”

Not many writers ever manage to swing so fully between the poles of absurdity and veracity with such success on both ends of the spectrum. What a gift he was and is to all of us.

[i-am-the-guarding-dark]

i just think it really says something about Sir Terry's view of the world etc. that every time he puts a character in front of you and posits them as The Good One, it's never the character who always thinks good things. it's the one who has grit in their soul and thinks bad things but never lets the inner bastard win.

Carrot is a force for good without a doubt, but he is not the Good Man in Ankh-Morpork. Vimes is. Vimes who is deeply suspicious of just about every group in the city, Vimes who constantly has to reexamine his beliefs and prejudices, Vimes who really really wants to kick the shit out of the bad guys but never lets it happen. If you'd do it for a good reason, you'd do it for a bad one.

And it happens again with Granny Weatherwax - the one who wanted to be evil, who can feel the evil nagging at her every day, who nevertheless holds the line.

idk something about how being a good person doesn't mean being perfect or idealistic or even particularly nice. it's just about doing The Right Thing, over and over again. it's about who watches the watchmen? that would be me. ah, but who watches you? I do that, too.

[fialleril]

Granny Weatherwax vs Yoda?

Granny Weatherwax would absolutely devastate Yoda and we would all be blessed to see it.

[grand-duc]

One way that I think she could drive Yoda absolutely nuts, is that she would be just the kind of ideologically confrontational, the exact kind of unyielding in the face of Jedi Wisdom^TM that Yoda would be expecting a fight.

The last few Darksiders we see in his universe are so easy to provoque into going for their lightsabers (and she can’t be of the Light Side, can she?)

He wants it to come to a fight, because she’s not letting him bulldoze or derail  her, and she’s raising a lot of deeply uncomfortable points and she won’t escalate into a fight.

…and he can’t stay the reasonable wise elder in the face of rampaging evil if he’s the one to start it. So he can’t.

So he has to debate with the….. witch.

[fialleril]

#When’s the last time Yoda had to debate someone?

#someone that he hadn’t taught in the creche

#someone who wasn’t awed by him

#someone who’s unimpressed by his bullshit but also not an enemy

#so he can’t dismiss her

This is everything I want tbh.

[two-bitoutlaw]

fialleril: #yoda hasn’t been challenged in literally centuries#he’s that very worst kind of person in power#the kind that’s complacent and genuinely believes they’re doing what’s best for everyone#the kind of powerful person granny weatherwax despises most tbh#this would be glorious

[underwaterfraulein]

I have just listened to a podcast series where two glorious nerds dissect the Star Wars prequels in painstaking detail, and based on the prequels, this characterization of Yoda is EXACTLY correct.

[fialleril]

can you imagine Granny Weatherwax allowing EMPEROR GODDAMN PALPATINE to come to power can you imagine a single universe where she would meet him and not IMMEDIATELY see through him THAT’S CORRECT YOU CANNOT 

Oh but she’d let him think his plans were going off without a hitch. She’d let him think he had her completely duped. She’d let him think he knew her every thought and motivation. She might even let him think he’d tricked her into supporting him. Right up until the very end.

“I ain’t been Sithed. You’ve been Weatherwaxed.”

[lianabrooks]

“Do or do not,” Yoda said. “There is no try.”

“Hmph.” The old woman across from him, withered from age and skinny as a garden rake, crossed her arms. “Seems to me that a body that ain’t tryin’ ain’t learning. And thems that don’t learn, don’t grow.”

Yoda blinked. “Try one does, and fail. Frustrations this leads to. Hate. The dark side.”

“Only if one is sillier than Magrat around a baby bird,” muttered the old woman to herself. She shook her head. “You try, you fail, you try again. You try better and fail better and you learn. And learnin’ never led to any darkness. That comes from selfishness, from removing yerself.”

“The Jedi must be removed.”

“Or your wand gets wilted?” The old woman sighed and stood. She was dressed like a crow, a scruffy, dusty crow in mismatched black. With piercing blue eyes she looked at his Jedi robes. “Seems to me that the best fix for your problem is get up and get yer hands dirty. Nothing wrong ever came from doing a little honest work.”

“Yes. Work hard a Jedi must. Serve the order.”

“Serve the people. Order finds its own way or it don’t, it makes no never mind. You’ve got to look to the small things.”

“Think of the many, a Jedi must!” Yoda felt the old temptation to fall into anger. The dark side tempted him as he stood against this woman, dressed like no Sith or Jedi he’d ever known.

She lifted her chin. “Thinking of the many is what lost you the galaxy. You took children and stripped them of the first thing they ever loved. Told them never to hold to anyone. You can’t protect what you can’t love.”

“A distraction, love is. Leads the mind from the ways of the Force it will.”

“If your Force requires you to leave all you love, and love only yourself, it’s no force of good at all.” She pulled a shawl of faded black around her shoulders. “Now, I suppose you ought to try learnin’ now. Perhaps after you do some tryin’ you’ll grow up a little.”

Yoda stood, leaning on his cane. “When nine hundred years you reach-”

“I won’t reach ninety and I’ll still be wiser than you!” the old woman snapped. 

Only practice calmed the inner rage that he was close to succumbing too. “Wisdom you speak, perhaps. A name you have?”

“Granny,” she said. “Thems that knows me well call me Granny Weatherwax.”

[fialleril]

Having read this, I can now die happy.

[onlyinankhmorpork]

#tho tbh i’m pretty sure she’d make yoda call her ‘mistress weatherwax’ #since he probably ranks about as highly in her esteem as mrs. earwig #but otherwise yes #pretty much my entire dash right now is commentary on granny weatherwax schooling various fictional mentors #it’s amazing

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[junorsky]

One very friendly watchman

[thestuffedalligator]

The wizards said the orangutan would be able to lead them back to the dungeon in a couple days.

What a sentence, Chilchuck thought. It seemed to him that he’d been saying a lot of things with full sincerity that weeks ago would’ve been total gibbering nonsense.

The others had wandered off into the city like tourists. Laios was spending the day in some kind of pet shelter for dragons. Senshi had mentioned bringing Izutsumi to check out the local dwarven cooking. Rats were apparently involved, to his total lack of surprise.

He had decided to hole up in the nearest bar that would accept a fistful of foreign coins. He was at the stage of buzz that felt as though someone was wrapping a woollen blanket around his head, and it was loosening his tongue.

“And he’s a good kid,” he was saying. “He’s a good kid, he’s even a good fighter, but he’s got all the social skills of a dead donkey. This is a guy who hears that he has to eat part of his sister, and the first thing he says is-”

THE EGG IS PLACED ON TOP OF THE BACON?

He paused mid-ramble and blinked stickily at the stranger seated next to him. “Sorry?”

WHAT STRUCTURAL SUPPORT DOES THE BACON OFFER THE EGG?

He blinked again. “It’s for,” he tried. “You know. So you can eat the egg and bacon at the same time.”

INSTEAD OF CONSUMING THE ELEMENTS OF THE BREAKFAST SEPARATELY.

“Right.”

BUT IN THIS EXERCISE, YOU WISH TO REMOVE THE EGG FROM THE BACON.

“Right — right! The idea is if we take away the half of Falin that’s a dragon, we can resurrect the human half of her.”

THUS UNFRYING THE EGG.

He screwed an eye shut and tried to make out the face of the stranger through the three images swirling in the hot, lightheaded haze. It looked like a very skinny face.

“I’m starting to lose the food metaphor,” he mumbled. “My point is, the further we go to fix this problem, the worse it gets. And it’s not that i have a problem with resurrection — have you ever been resurrected?”

NO, BUT I HAVE BEEN WITNESS TO PART OF IT.

“Some people are weird about it. Senshi’s weird about it too, but he’s the one who suggested it. Anyways, it’s not that I have a problem with resurrection, I just don’t like the idea of eating an old coworker.”

Another sentence that would have been nonsense barely a week ago. He tried to shrug and missed. “I guess they say, ‘Eat to live, don’t live to eat.’”

A STRANGE THING TO SAY. A PARADOX OF SOME KIND, I’M SURE.

He was beginning to feel a slight headache. “No, it means, like — treat food as a fuel, a necessity, don’t get fussy about the experience of eating it.”

THEY ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. The stranger plucked a paper umbrella out of their drink. They twirled it thoughtfully between very skinny fingers. I WOULD RECOMMEND A CURRY, they said. I’VE ALWAYS BEEN FOND OF A CURRY.

[foldingfittedsheets]

I cannot overstate how fucked up I am today. I’m operating on almost no sleep and I’m pound for pound more fatigue than person. But we needed cat food.

So I went in and the worker did a little shudder as she’s finishing up with the last customer.

“I had one of those days yesterday,” I commiserated.

“No, it wasn’t them, I was just- it’s kinda heavy.”

I waited.

“My coworker just passed a way,” she admitted. “I just saw her name on a receipt, it hit me kinda hard.”

I nodded. I was painfully aware how little energy was in my tank, and empathy uses so much, but this is not the kind of thing I am capable of brushing off. “Have you ever read Terry Pratchett?”

She looked very confused by the apparent non sequitur. Shook her head.

“He’s a really famous fantasy author,” I told her. “Very funny. But in one of his books he has a system kind of like telegrams. And if someone dies while operating that system, their name is put into it. Their name goes back and forth across the line forever, and he posits that people aren’t really gone as long as we see echoes of them and remember their names.

“That’s what it’s like when you saw her name on that receipt, right? It’s her memory, still going.”

Her eyes got wider as I went on. When I finished she gave herself a little shake. “That’s. That’s really beautiful, thank you for that. I. Wow.”

I smiled over my mask and left with my cat food.

[your-average-mess-on-all-fronts]

Honestly, the fact that terry Pratchett has experience around nuclear power makes so much sense once you realize what magic is standing as a metaphor for in the discworld. Like, look at this fucking quote from going postal:

"That's why [magic] was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards—not "not doing magic" because they couldn't do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn't. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn't been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again."

Like... It feels incredibly obvious what he's talking about once you know the context.

[patricianandclerk]

A take

Vetinari? Chaotic Good masquerading as Lawful Neutral.

Drumknott? Actually Lawful Neutral, and trying desperately to keep up.

[cakesandfail]

This makes complete sense, yeah.

As Patrician, Vetinari has to be seen to be sticking to the rules, both in terms of the laws of Ankh-Morpork and what’s expected of its aristocracy and politicians. He has to be strict on that at all kinds of levels and not seen to have any preference for particular people or organisations in his city. Law and order comes first, and if that means making your crime organised, fine.

What’s really happening is that since he can’t be seen to be making huge changes himself, he just sends unpredictable people like Sam Vimes and Moist von Lipwig to shake things up instead. His chaotic good alignment works through Vimes’s goodness and Moist’s chaos- sure, Vetinari and Vimes expect people to abide by the laws of their city, but when those laws aren’t working they get them changed based on what’s morally the right thing to do rather than just shrugging their shoulders and moving on. And if it takes a glittery disaster genius boy in a stupid hat to show that things aren’t working first, Vetinari is just fine with that.

[catharsis-in-a-bottle]

vetinari is fascinating because the patricianship really does not work with anyone else. like. it IS a seat of absolute power. he IS a tyrant. but he genuinely has the objective interest of the city at heart. he can hardly be self-serving as a leader because to him being self-serving means serving the city (insert that one post that theorized that vetinari was like the anthropomorphic personification of ankh-morpork, i can't remember who the op was). he's manipulative, he's an Assassin, he's purposely threatening and he has almost no true friends, AND he can also push the city in the right direction with such self-sacrificing directive that it shifts from the ankh-morpork of night watch to the better ankh-morpork of going postal (or the 'present' of night watch; idk, i think going postal is the latest version of AM i've read so far). in the hands of anyone with even a fraction of a percent more selfishness, the patricianship becomes a true tyranny. but because vetinari is such a weird bastard, what's broken starts to be fixed, rather than be built into something that consolidates his power. si non confectus, non reficiat, but also whatever the latin is for i'm on an altar for this monster of a city