Guards! Guards! has one of the first Big Deal Discworld moments for me, and I’m not very good at articulating what that means.
The moment I’m thinking of is the dragon’s speech to Wonse – “we were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But…we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.” That’s a passage that always makes me stop and reread it a couple of times. And it’s a small moment – it’s the only time we hear the dragon speak at all, and it’s a speech that has no bearing on the rest of the story. It could have been taken out of the book entirely and nothing would feel like it was missing. But the fact that it’s there is a Big Deal moment. The great big monstrous antagonist’s judgment of humanity is unavoidable in its accuracy.
And the Discworld series is full of moments like that. Sometimes it’s just one line, sometimes it’s a full scene, and most of the book is so full of shenanigans coming so quickly one after another that you don’t always see the Big Deal moments coming. We think of Pratchett as a humor/satire writer and yes, the books are hilarious, but in between the jokes are these Big Deal moments that casually rearrange our perspective and stick with us even after we think we’ve forgotten.
Then there are the other Big Deal Moments, that are Emotional Meteorite Strike Moments (e.g. the phrase “that is not my cow” can now instantly put me in the fetal position) but I’m having a hard enough time describing this one as it is so I’ll probably go on a tirade about those ‘round about that One Part in Feet of Clay. (You know the one.)
Suggestion: Reblog this with your favorite Big Deal Moment.
YES. It’s so fun hearing everyone’s Big Deal Moments! (although choosing just one is so hard…)
I think my favorite one changes, but right now it’s in Feet of Clay:
The vampire looked from the golem to Vimes.
“You gave one of them a voice?” he said.
“Yes,”
said Dorfl. He reached down and picked up the vampire in one hand. “I
Could Kill You,” he said. “This Is An Option Available To Me As A
Free-Thinking Individual But I Will Not Do So Because I Own Myself And I
Have Made A Moral Choice.”
“Oh, gods,” murmured Vimes under his breath.
“That’s blasphemy,” said the vampire.
He gasped as Vimes shot him a glance like sunlight. “That’s what people say when the voiceless speak.”
All my Discworld books are packed, and usually I’m a City Watch guy, but the first moment like that for me, and still I think my favorite, was in the first Discworld book I read, Small Gods, where Didactylos the Ephebian philosopher is brought before the militant evangelist Omnian priest, Vorbis.
Vorbis demands that Didactylos recant his claim that the world travels through space on the backs of four elephants who stand on the back of a giant turtle (which in Discworld is true). Vorbis insists that Didactylos agree that it is a sphere, as the Great God Om intended.
To all appearances, Didactylos easily and happily recants, saying something like “Sure, let it be a sphere” and Vorbis – for whom this is as much about humiliating Didactylos as it is about what’s “true” – decides to let him go. Didactylos gets all the way to the doorway before he turns, throws the lantern he carries into Vorbis’s face, and yells “NEVERTHELESS…THE TURTLE MOVES!” before legging it.
I was thirteenish at the time and wrestling with religion, and I was familiar with Galileo and eppur si muove, but it’s never as satisfying for there to be a myth of a whisper when you want there to be a legend of a roar. Didactylos bashing Vorbis on the head and screaming the truth before beating feet was much, much more satisfying. And as someone who has never borne fools in power easily, it was an object lesson in how to do the thing.
There is so much I sympathize with, when it comes to Moist Von Lipwig, but if I had to cite a “big moment”, it’s when he’s deconstructing the idea of currency.
“But what’s worth more than gold?“
“Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren’t you worth more than that?”
When you get your head around the idea that something’s worth is based on a subjectively agreed upon set of standards, it can rock your capitalist-based worldview right to the core.
He was also the first character to articulate what has kind of become a guiding philosophy for me:
“Make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”
There are so many for me, but the one that jumpstart out is death and Susan talking at the end of hogfather about the importance of believing in morality and goodness.
“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”
I want to add one more, because I just finished reading Raising Steam.
The bit where Moist literally throws himself under a train to save a pair of children had me in absolute tears.
A lot of that book is really good to be honest. This line is also really good. “That’s the trouble, you see. When you’ve had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don’t know how to spit it out.”
One of the top ones for me is one that crops up a couple times and a quote/comment that I use in conversation frequently. I always remember it from in I Shall Wear Midnight;
‘What was it Granny Weatherwax had said once? ‘Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.“
But of course it’s also in this conversation in Carpe Jugulum
Granny Weatherwax: “…And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?” Mightily Oats: “Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin. for example.” Granny Weatherwax: “And what do they think? Against it, are they?” Mightily Oats: “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.” Granny Weatherwax:“Nope.” Mightily Oats: “Pardon?” Granny Weatherwax: “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” Mightily Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that–” Granny Weatherwax: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” Mightily Oats: “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–” Granny Weatherwax: “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
•People as things•
I always loved the line from the Hogfather mentioned above, but one that usually sticks out more to me from the same book is Susan’s reminder that “Someone should do something” isn’t at all helpful if you’re not gonna end it with “and that someone is me”
because nothing gets done if everyone just sits around thinking “someone should fix this” but no one actually gets up and tries to fix it
I’ll also add another one of my favorites from Feet of Clay which is “Someone’s got to speak for them that have no voices” [I’m probably misquoting slightly but that’s the core of it] and on a larger scale is that the same book gives a voice to one of those voiceless- instead of JUST speaking for [over] them, one of the voiceless gets a voice of their own and a platform to speak from which is so important on so many levels
“A watchman is a civilian, you inbred streak of piss!’
Just like that, in one angry line, Commander Sam Vimes defines what a police officer is and by extension how they should act. A watchman is not a soldier, and therefor can (should) never act like one.
As a very, very young transgender person who didn’t quite understand what he was, this line from The Fifth Elephant stuck with me:
“But they at least shared one conviction—that what you were made as, wasn’t what you had to be or what you might become…”
It’s from the scene where Lady Margolotta is at the vampires’ society. Now there are a LOT better lines about trans-ness—–that are actually ABOUT trans-ness, and not self-destructive behavior—–but… well, I was always pretty literal.
Also a line from Snuff. I don’t remember it perfectly and I can’t find my copy, but it’s where Vimes is conversing with the Dark about the goblins.
“The hated have no reason to love!”
Again, it’s not a line explicitly connected to queerness, but I relate pretty heavily to it considering the amount of hatred queer people get.
I’m quite tempted to say the entirety of I Shall Wear Midnight, because really, that book hit home in so many painful and wonderful ways for me. But I think the pieces that really stood out the most to me, if I had to pick them – was this:
“The
cook has told me that you are a very religious woman, always on your knees, and that is fine by
me, absolutely fine, but didn’t it ever occur to you to take a mop and bucket down there with
you? People don’t need prayers, Miss Spruce; they need you to do the job in front of you.”
Of course the brown-haired quote:
“ But she had seen what they had not seen; she had seen through it. It lied. No, well, not
exactly lied, but told you truths that you did not want to know: that only blonde and blue-eyed
girls could get the prince and wear the glittering crown. It was built into the world. Even worse,
it was built into your hair colouring. Redheads and brunettes sometimes got more than a walk-on
part in the land of story, but if all you had was a rather mousy shade of brown hair you were
marked down to be a servant girl. “
And this one:
“Poison goes where poison’s welcome.
And there’s always an excuse, isn’t there, to throw a stone at the old lady who looks funny. It’s
always easier to blame somebody.”
That one hit me the heaviest, I think. There were times reading it when I had to stop because it hit so close to home.
hands down my biggest Big Deal Moment is from ‘Jingo’ where vimes arrests the army for attempted murder.
pretty much the entirety of Thud!, especially the very end – you cannot make vimes kill an unarmed man. Witches Abroad – granny Weatherwax putting the wolf out of his misery. Night Watch – when Vimes burns the cable street station – and then goes back in to save the torturer. Tbh, most of vimes.
(The knowledge that Vimes has darkness in him, has the Beast in the back of his mind, caged and always ready to break out – but he /can/ cage it, and that needing to doesn’t make him less of a hero, has been incredibly important to me.)
Probably my top two of all time are “Words in the heart cannot be taken” and “Sin is when you treat people like things.”
But there’s also this one from Unseen Academicals. At first glance it looks like just a pun, even if it follows on some heavy stuff, but there’s so much going on here:
“I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilized behavior,” said Ladyship coldly.
[Nutt] appeared to consider this. “Yes, of course, I think that would be quite possible,” he said. “And who would you send to teach the humans?”
There was a brief outburst of laughter from Vetinari, who immediately cupped his hand over his mouth. “Oh, I do beg your pardon,” he said.
“But since it falls to me,” continued Nutt, “then, yes, I shall go into Far Uberwald.”
“Pastor Oats will be very pleased to see you, I’m sure,” said Margolotta.
“He’s still alive?” said Nutt.
“Oh, yes, indeed, he is still quite young after all, and walks with forgiveness at his side. I think he would feel it very appropriate if you were to join him. In fact, he has told me on one of his all too infrequent visits that he would be honored to pass the rate of forgiveness on to you.”
“Nutt doesn’t need forgiveness!” Glenda burst out.
Nutt smiled and patted her hand. “Uberwald is a wild country for a man to travel in,” he said, “even a holy man. Forgiveness is the name of Pastor Oats’s doubled-headed battle-axe. For Mister Oats the crusade against evil is not a metaphor. Forgiveness cut through my chains. I will gladly carry it.”
There’s so much here that’s important to me. The way Nutt calls out Margolotta’s reference to “civilized behavior,” Glenda’s insistence that Nutt, as a victim of violence and conditioning, doesn’t need to be forgiven, and Nutt’s subtle implication that the struggle against evil means liberation and the breaking of chains.
I really loved the development of Mightily Oats’s character in Carpe Jugulum, and the first time I read Unseen Academicals I was wonderfully surprised to catch this glimpse of where his journey ultimately takes him. Nutt was kept chained up for years, because everyone knows that orcs are unthinking monsters – until Oats, a man who now spends his life battling with monsters, cut him free.
Sometimes PTerry manages to pull off a sentence that’s both a groan-worthy pun and a Big Deal moment. “Forgiveness cut through my chains” is one.
Whenever Death tries to understand the living (usually humanity) and/or act like them. He can’t quite get it, but he tries.
In Men at Arms, when characters hold the ‘gonne’ and feel compelled to use it, or like the gonne wants to used. There’s a line that’s something like ‘having a deadly powerful weapon makes you more likely to want to use violence.’
Mine is, and will always be, this part from the end of Wee Free Men:
“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!”
“I have a duty!”
This quote is incredible to me. Because in almost all fairy tales, the heroine must be selfless and giving and always do the Right Thing because it is Right.
Tiffany is on the quest to rescue her brother and save her land. She doesnt particularly like her brother, or even her village. But they are hers, so she is going to protect them, because she has to.She is selfish, like all humans and especially children are, and she uses that as a strength. It doesnt matter if she likes these people, they are her people and she cant have them.
Sam spends most of the half-hour meeting raging at Vetinari, to such a profound degree that Sybil—who hasn’t raged at Havelock since they were both sixteen, and he balked at kissing her at her coming-out party—thinks it might not be fair play. Havelock can stand a lot of being-raged-at (it’s novel, given the…tyranny) but even Havelock has limits.
“Sam,” she says, and Sam ignores her in favor of raging some more. She wishes she did not find that so endearing.
He’s inconvenient, that’s the trouble. She’d already made-over her bedroom in pastels and devoted herself to elderly dragons; told Mr. Slant to divert funds to charities, in anticipation of a dowager-hood to come. Unmarried women closer to forty than thirty plan ahead; they know what they’re doing. She was a single approaching-middle-aged woman in possession of a great fortune, with a tendency towards the maudlin. She’d prepared herself for fortune hunters and dandying con-men, not—Sam.
Samuel Vimes thinks about streets, and boots, and tea, and also Justice, and The City. He’d never been married, as far as she knew. Corporal Colon told her; he’d never seemed to be looking. But Samuel Vimes had looked at her—Sybil Ramkin, who had child-bearing hips despite bearing not children, and whose wigs hid a fine shaved head, who liked muck; uncompromising, unstinting, and he’d went ahead and liked her for it.
She’d never been liked before. Even Havelock had skipped over that, in favor of thinking her as a co-conspirator and valuable piece on his Thud board. (It was a compliment, of a kind, just not the kind that a romantic young girl looked for in the only male member of her set who didn’t bore her silly.)
Havelock is looking at her now, his left eyebrow raised just a hair higher than the right.
He would stop this, Sybil knows, if she asked. It is a kind of favor, from Havelock to Sybil, as good as a kiss even if it’s—too many years later, and in the absence of liking. (She knows Havelock likes her too, but it’s in his own cool and complicated way, on his own terms. Not hers. It’s frustrating in such a small way, she’s chosen to let it go. Let it ease away, and disappear, like the hope of being liked, being kissed.)
Sybil smiles slightly at Havelock, and the left eyebrow lowers, mollified.
“Sam!” Sybil interrupts sharply, and he finally falls silent, scowling. Sybil can feel Havelock looking at them both, a twist to his mouth that on another man, might have been called a smile.
“Commander Vimes,” Havelock says, steepling his fingers. “As tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, I have decreed it. To not obey such a decree would be treason.”
“I know,” Sam grits out, and oh, even Vetinari has to grace to look surprised when Sam takes out the crumpled leaflet from his pocket and slams it down on Havelock’s desk. “But why did I have to hear about my own damned wedding from a poster!”
For her part, Sybil had thought the announcement satisfactory; it listed all her names in the right order—thanks to Mr. Drumknott’s fact-checking, she was sure—and she quite liked the idea of a fall wedding. The notice itself was attractive enough, with a border of roses around the edge, and a minimum of spelling errors. But then…Willikins had brought her a placard with her morning tea, and she’d had the benefit of privacy to grapple with the news. Sam had found out when Nobby Nobbs turned up at Pseudopolis Yard just before lunch, clutching a tattered copy and asking if this meant Sam would be a lord.
That sort of nasty shock would prejudice a man towardsa public decree announcing the marriage of Her Grace, Lady Sybil Deirdre Olgivanna Ramkin-Vimes, The Duchess of Ankh, to Captain Samuel Vimes of the Watch. Especially when he had not been informed himself.
“Most public decrees are always announced this way, Commander Vimes.”
“My life isn’t a public decree! You can’t order me to marry someone!”
“Commander Vimes, I’m sure you do not need a reminder of the definition of tyranny.” Vetinari’s left eyebrow is creeping up again, and Sybil bit back a sigh when she realized that the novelty was wearing off. “Or perhaps it is Lady Ramkin you object to.”
“Wha—no, of course it’s not Sybil, she’s—she’s—” Sam goes furiously silent, clearly torn between embarrassment and fury at being so caught out. Sybil, despite herself, finds this endearing as well.
“I’m just not the marrying kind,” Sam mumbles. “And certainly not…”
He says this softly, an apology, and she knows he means: nobility, first daughter of Ankh-Morpork, the cream. He does not mean: Sybil. She has to keep these things straight. Or else Sam could break her heart. (He could do that anyway, but she appreciates his tact.)
“Well then, what possible objection could you have?” Havelock says. His hands are folded together, but the knuckles have gone white. Sybil wishes she weren’t so exhausted by their back-and-forth, that she could properly appreicte the compliment each of them is doing her, in their own way. But she can feel the beginnings of a headache building at her temples.
She’s tired. Sybil Ramkin is liked and it’s unexpected, in its joy, but she doesn’t want to be a Thud piece between two men who theoretically like her. She’s Ankh-Morpork’s first daughter, no one relegates her to the very edge of this city’s narrative.
(She wonders if the stroppy heroines in her romance novels ever had to grapple with balancing the political and personal in quite this way—but then, The Cocky Uberwaldian Duke had decided its dragon-breeder heroine didn’t know that late summer was kindling for juvenile dragons. An oversight, but also one that had made Sybil snort and disapprovingly dog-ear the page for discussion with the other ladies in her circle.)
“Enough, both of you,” Sybil interrupts before Sam can let loose of what is obviously a string of curses only a particularly experienced watchman could know.
“Sam,” she says, turning to him first, because—she likes him as well, skinny and short and angry, always angry. Angry for the sake of something only he can see, a Justice, an Ankh-Morpork that she only catches sight of in the corner of her eye. She likes who she is with him, even more than him. (And she likes him quite a bit. Has, since he first introduced himself, and some animal, female instinct, long buried beneath knitting and refusal to hope, sat up straight and went, OH.)
“Do you want to marry me?” she asks, and tries not to blush at the question. “Apart from—the spectacle, should or not, do you…if we went down to the temple of Blind Io right now, and…would you marry me?”
It’s gratifying, how little time he takes to answer, “Yes.”
Sybil turns to Havelock. She still loves him, in an abstract sort of way. She suspects they will always understand one another in a way no one else will—the two misfits of Ankh society; the decidedly unlovely, unsilly heiress, and the assassin determined to supersede the gods. Sybil will always look at Havelock and think of that evening when Havelock snuck into her room with a bottle of Agatean wine and they stayed up until the early hours of the morning, talking about the future of Ankh-Morpork. (He’d been so far gone as to gesture with his hands as he spoke, it was extremely endearing.)
Sybil holds out a hand, and after a moment, Havelock takes it.
“Thank you,” she says, squeezing his fingers. He flinches, a little. but she has a point to make. “For your offer to underwite the ceremony.”
She will give him credit, Havelock blinks and then nods. “Of course.”
“And the reception where there would be food and drink and entertainment enough for all of Ankh-Morpork—as they have been invited through public decree to celebrate the joyous occasion,” Sybil continues, and Havelock’s expression doesn’t change except for the light flaring out in his eyes.
“Of course,” Havelock drawls, the faintest edge of poison in his voice.
“And then the honeymoon to Ephebe.”
Havelock looked pained, and it would be a lie to say Sybil did not take a certain amount of pleasure in it. “Djelibeybi,” he replies faintly. “There is—the matter of current alliances to considered. Ankh-Morpork is on very good terms with the Pharaoh
Ptraci.”
“Done,” Sybil said, squeezing Havelock’s fingers again. When she sits back, Sam is staring at her in open incredulity. “You don’t mind seeing pyramids instead of the ruins, right?”
To his credit—his enduring credit, and also how much she likes him—Sam’s first instinct is to laugh.
“Not all men” you’re right. Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh-Morpork, Commander of the City Watch would never do this, and he’d arrest every single bastard who would.
He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.
“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”
GNU Terry Pratchett and happy Glorious 25th of May!
—
Every year I tell myself that I’m going to make something for the Glorious 25th and every year I run out of time. This year I told myself I definitely do not have time and here this is…
Anyway, I can’t think of a single creator who has influenced me and my work more than pterry. I wish I could have met him while he was still alive and kicking ❤️
The thing about Discworld, you see, is that it’s a very hopeful form of cynicism. It doesn’t just tell you that the world is crap, it says, well, yes, of course the world is crap, but that’s why you should be hopeful, and helpful, and kind, and why you have to be good, because maybe you can make it a little less crap.
look, I’m not a vet/vimes shipper at all (I only ship vetinari with being alive and healthy. he and margolotta are tyrant bffs) but I had this stupid idea about the three biggest smokers on the disc being forced to take an awkward smoke break together at some fancy party, and as we know from fifth elephant that margolotta basically considers winding up vimes a personal hobby, so you can’t tell me she wouldn’t 100% take this opportunity if it presented itself…
adora’s just there for the #gossip (she marries MOIST VON FREAKIN LIPWIG, there’s no way she doesn’t secretly thrive off The Drama)
LATER:
(adora’s incredible fearlessness combined with her total lack of a self-preservation instinct is gonna give moist a heart attack one day)
Raising Cain 2: Electric Boogaloo 