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Got the missus hooked on Discworld started with a 8hr flight and now her family is loving them too. Theyve all started with Mort
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Mar 7, 2017 15:02
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precision posted:No matter what you think of Going Postal, it was still better than Back in Black. Casting an actor to play Terry was a bad idea, but it might have worked if they had picked someone who was any good at it. If you watch it, just fast-forward all those parts (which is unfortunately about 90% of the drat thing). I liked him better as Dennis Pennis and Thoros of Myr, but thought his Terry was okay.
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Mar 9, 2017 18:57
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Quote-Unquote posted:Thoros of Myr Stone me! I didn't even recognize him.
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Mar 12, 2017 19:07
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Reading this thread, it seems like I made a bad move, because I love every book in the Guards series EXCEPT I got bored of Night Watch almost immediately and skipped it to get to Thud!, which I also loved. Now I'm seeing that a lot of people like Night Watch best of all. Would it require spoilers to tell me why? I thought the villain was incredibly lame and uncompelling, and likewise the idea of Vimes In Time so we can have double the Sam and none of the characters that we've just spent all these books developing. I figured it wouldn't be very fun to see them bumbling around wondering where Vimes is in the present or piling into a time machine and following him to the past, which are the only ways I can imagine it going, beyond just dropping the modern watch for that one book. I'm definitely not interested if that's the case. Am I totally wrong and should go give it another chance And while I'm revealing bad opinions about Terry Pratchett books: I really loved Equal Rites and I was sorta demotivated to find out the rest of the Witch books deviate from it w/r/t Granny's character. I'm having trouble getting into Wyrd Sisters because I just don't really... care about the other two witches, Nanny Ogg and the maiden one, who just sort of pad out the triad, and it doesn't seem nearly as snappy as the first one. Like it's taking too long for things to start happening. I'll give it a try some other time and I'm sure I'll feel it more.
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Mar 13, 2017 06:13
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You have some really weird opinions, mainly about Nanny Ogg, who is quite frankly The Best. Edit; Wyrd Sisters is very much a Shakespeare parody, so YMMV
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Mar 13, 2017 10:53
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Cobweb Heart posted:
Re: Night Watch: You should probably read most of the books published before it, before you read it, particularly any that take place in and around Ankh-Morpork, but especially Small Gods and probably the Death series. If you've never watched Les Mis, remedy that immediately. Probably also a good idea to watch Terminator 1 & 2 and Back to the Future, but not essential. (Why wouldn't you want to, though?  )Carcer is a violent sociopath who will kill you as soon as look at you. So is Vimes. The difference is that Vimes restrains himself through sheer force of will, his Inner Copper. Vimes has always talked a good talk with his anti-tyranny mindset. Night Watch cuts off his support network and basically asks "Is Vimes a Bad Enough Dude to save his future?". How far can his twisty mind and dirty gutter fighting get him? His shoes are tied, the band has started, and now its time to see if he can dance. Third, its a pretty good look at what a shitshow AM was before Vetinari. Re: Witches Wyrd Sisters starts a little slow and is probably my least favorite of them all. Try to power through it, because everything after that is 100% prime Granny. I totally recommend reading " The Sea and Little Fishes" when you get there, and also the Tiffany Aching books except Shepherds Crown.
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Mar 13, 2017 11:19
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...I JUST got the Terminator bits. drat these books are layered.
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Mar 13, 2017 11:46
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I liked Night Watch a lot mainly because I like Vimes a lot. But I found the actual plot with the secret police and the revolution incredibly compelling - and in places the darkest I've seen Pratchett go. I don't even think of the time travel (although I love some of the tension it creates re: Vimes's assumed identity) when I think of the book.
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Mar 13, 2017 11:53
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Cobweb Heart posted:Would it require spoilers to tell me why? I thought the villain was incredibly lame and uncompelling, and likewise the idea of Vimes In Time so we can have double the Sam and none of the characters that we've just spent all these books developing. I figured it wouldn't be very fun to see them bumbling around wondering where Vimes is in the present or piling into a time machine and following him to the past, which are the only ways I can imagine it going, beyond just dropping the modern watch for that one book. I'm definitely not interested if that's the case. Am I totally wrong and should go give it another chance Without getting into specific spoilers, because I do think it is one of the better Watch books: 1) While you don't get to see newer characters like Carrot or Angua etc, you do see things like young Nobby/ Colon, so it can be considered further development because you get to see how these characters have changed over the years. 2) It focuses entirely on Vimes in the past. At no point does it cut to scenes of modern day characters wondering where Vimes went. So yeah, it basically does drop the modern Watch for most of the book, but i still think it's worth reading because Vimes as a protagonist is constantly thinking about the modern Watch and how much things have changed. In the Watch books, Ankh-Morpork is almost a character in it's own right. I would think of Night Watch as a book that fills out some backstory for AM in a pretty exciting way. Then again i think it is pretty weird to like Equal Rites more than Wyrd Sisters. If you really hate it you could jump ahead to Witches Abroad, which moves a little quicker iirc.
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Mar 13, 2017 14:42
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Beachcomber posted:Carcer is a violent sociopath who will kill you as soon as look at you. So is Vimes. The difference is that Vimes restrains himself through sheer force of will, his Inner Copper. There is a point in the Fifth Elephant where VImes straight up murders a guy. He's also perfectly aware about the fact that he committed murder and the only reason he can live with himself is that he didn't make a snappy one liner.
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Mar 13, 2017 17:53
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Alhazred posted:There is a point in the Fifth Elephant where VImes straight up murders a guy. He's also perfectly aware about the fact that he committed murder and the only reason he can live with himself is that he didn't make a snappy one liner. To be fair, he followed the rules to the letter, if not the spirit, and Wolfgang was on a killing spree at the time and Vimes had no other way to stop him. Vimes did intend to kill Wolfgang, but if circumstances were different then Vimes would have found some other way.
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Mar 14, 2017 03:27
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I think what I took away from Night Watch is that it is more explicit than any other Watch book about just how much Vimes is a noir protagonist. He has, deep down in his heart, the makings of a monster. He's ridden and driven to drown in a bottle by the futility of trying not to be... but is hanging on my his fingernails to at least the semblance of a conscience. It's part of why the modern Vimes is such a hard-rear end about his Watch. He wants an Ankh-Morpork where a copper doesn't have to decide between their duty and their life every day.
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Mar 14, 2017 07:19
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e:nm
Alhazred fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Mar 14, 2017 |
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Mar 14, 2017 20:02
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Help me out here- I'm having trouble spotting the Terminator bits in Night Watch! (Beyond a time-travel based plot...) But yeah, Vimes is absolutely a noir character. It just sank in that there isn't actually a "mystery" in Night Watch at all, but the sheer force of Vimes' internal contradictions is enough to keep the story humming along nicely.
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Mar 15, 2017 02:08
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Tree Bucket posted:Help me out here- I'm having trouble spotting the Terminator bits in Night Watch! (Beyond a time-travel based plot...) Just the time travel part, being found naked in the street, lightning, etc. I mean, you could argue the whole thing re Carcer trying to capture and corrupt young Vimes and Sam trying to stop him could be an allusion to Kyle Reese and the first terminator, but it's just a minor reference.
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Mar 15, 2017 11:56
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All the big Terminator references were in Feet of Clay, this is just throwing in one or two extra.
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Mar 15, 2017 14:30
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YggiDee posted:All the big Terminator references were in Feet of Clay, this is just throwing in one or two extra. But Feet of Clay is also RoboCop.
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Mar 21, 2017 23:02
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Cobweb Heart posted:I thought the villain was incredibly lame and uncompelling Take that one literary critic who read Small God's after the Internet pestered him to read some Discworld - one of the bits that most stuck out to me from the review was his criticism of Vorbis, "a man without a single redeeming feature or any back story to explain how he became so utterly inhuman". My initial response was to go "but there are a ton of well rounded humanised characters in the series like Vimes and the Witches and Death and..." but then I realised something interesting: there are plenty of well-rounded heroes. Villains are harder to come by. The explanation is probably that for Pratchett, "well-rounded villain with humanising qualities and an interesting backstory" is pretty much one of his definitions of "hero" anyway - heck, many of his most popular heroes start out by taking a typical fantasy villain (witch, guardsman, Machiavellian politician who outright believes he's a villain and so is everyone else, freaking Death) and going "what's their story?" You could ultimately say that for Pratchett, being well-rounded is a virtue in itself, and the minute any of his villains pick it up they start turning into heroes (we see the full process of this with both Vetinari and Death). Possibly it comes from a liberal humanist point of view that doing evil itself is this mysterious thing that cannot be understood. I dunno. It's interesting to think about though.
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Mar 28, 2017 08:39
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Most of Pratchett's heroes are defined by the fact that they aren't actually very nice people by nature, and are trying to be better people than they are. So I guess it's logical that the defining characteristic of his villains is that they aren't trying at all to not be total shits.
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Mar 28, 2017 14:19
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Thud! had some good villains because they were religious true believers, not psychopaths.
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Mar 28, 2017 14:54
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Rand Brittain posted:Most of Pratchett's heroes are defined by the fact that they aren't actually very nice people by nature, and are trying to be better people than they are. The only character that can be characterized as "a good guy" is Carrot. And, as the Fifth Elephant shows, even he can be scary.
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Mar 28, 2017 17:33
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Alhazred posted:The only character that can be characterized as "a good guy" is Carrot. And, as the Fifth Elephant shows, even he can be scary. Subsequently, he is also one of Pratchett worst characters.
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Mar 28, 2017 17:40
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I think you've all forgotten unquestionably good dog Gaspode the wonderdog.
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Mar 28, 2017 21:34
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I just finished Small Gods (again) and I think Vorbis may be one of the more nasty villains in Discworld, up there with Teatime for sure.
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Mar 28, 2017 21:41
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Paul.Power posted:
It's worth noting Jonathan Jones is an art critic and a massive, massive wanker. For example: No one should censor far right art which followed his previous column about Russian art should be censored or This verbal poo poo fest about Obama smiling or This psueds masterpiece about David Hockney redesigning The Sun's logo The man is a total rocket..
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Mar 28, 2017 22:29
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Flipswitch posted:I just finished Small Gods (again) and I think Vorbis may be one of the more nasty villains in Discworld, up there with Teatime for sure. That honestly really fits with what we've been discussing, because the worst thing about Vorbis is the way he enjoys making other people do things they think are wrong.
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Mar 28, 2017 22:55
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TerryCheesecake posted:It's worth noting Jonathan Jones is an art critic and a massive, massive wanker. I'm glad someone agrees with me. While his review made a few good points, it reeks of "heh, fantasy? You should try reading real books, plebian"  and even if I wasn't a Pratchett fan I would have thought him a pretentious dick.Not every single character of every single book needs to be rich with nuance and backstory and sympathetic qualities. Vorbis, in this instance, is as much an idea as he is a character -- he is repression and cruelty and broken faith personified, everything that is wrong with the Omnian faith in one man. He isn't a "psycho" as Jones put it; he is incredibly, disquietingly sane. His pleasure at making others commit atrocities isn't just sadism, it's the pleasure at knowing what he is doing is right, that he is honoring his god and honoring his faith and Doing What Must Be Done -- something that has been done since the concept of religion came about and is done to this day. Vorbis is evil, but he isn't the cackling madman Jones claims, but instead a living example of how a man can become everything that goes against what it means to be faithful. If Vorbis is two-dimensional, it's because he scourged away any further dimensions for being unnecessary and sinful. And he neglects to add that Vorbis isn't utterly without sympathetic points; he languishes in the desert for -- to him -- an eternity as he finally understood his sins. Vorbis is as much a victim of his church's faith as any of his own victims; he was raised not to question, to seek out dissent and stamp it out before it grows, to show his love for his fellow man with heated knives. Teatime, however, is just a loony and that's fine, because really, who makes plans to kill the Hogfather. GodFish posted:I think you've all forgotten unquestionably good dog Gaspode the wonderdog. "Story of my life."
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Mar 29, 2017 00:20
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Teatime is easily my favorite Pratchett villain, and brings up something I love about his books; the tendency to give characters completely nonsensical-by-way-of-mundane names (Reg Shoe, Moist, etc)
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Mar 29, 2017 02:21
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Rand Brittain posted:That honestly really fits with what we've been discussing, because the worst thing about Vorbis is the way he enjoys making other people do things they think are wrong. Yeah I had a quick scroll up and was quite pleased(?) how that lined up.
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Mar 29, 2017 05:27
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precision posted:Teatime is easily my favorite Pratchett villain, and brings up something I love about his books; the tendency to give characters completely nonsensical-by-way-of-mundane names (Reg Shoe, Moist, etc)
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Mar 29, 2017 06:23
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My Lovely Horse posted:Incidentally, this is something that completely and utterly fails to work in translations. I'm told Portuguese translations are Pretty Good but since I don't actually speak/read Portuguese there's a splash of telephone game going on here.
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Mar 29, 2017 07:20
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Paul.Power posted:This is actually a thought that's been percolating in my brain for a while. Not Carcer specifically, but a lot of Pratchett villains, while entertaining, are quite flat, and frequently straight-up psychopaths or sociopaths with little no real explanation or motivation. I think that's the defining characteristic of Pratchett's true villains. They are psychopaths or sociopaths. Look at Reacher Gilt, for example. He puts on all the airs of being a silent-film Evil Rail Baron/Pirate, but those are all a cover over a character who down at the base is an amoral corporate raider with zero concern for the lives of others except as they benefit him personally. I mean, you have to remember the setting. The Discworld is not a nice place. Ankh-Morpork is probably the most progressive place on on the Disc, and it still keeps the Assassins around and has wretched poverty and street crime on the level of Victorian London at best. Even the Unseen University was still doing Dead Man's Shoes promotion within a decade or two. Hell, it's only since Vetinari and Ridicully took over their respective posts that the semblance of civilization has really been hammered into the city at all. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 11:40
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I think it's also worth remembering, too, that, you know, sometimes people are just amoral, self-absorbed, monsters. I mean, history in general and modern American politics in particular will provide you no dearth of characters who would probably get that sort of criticism levied against them were they characters in fiction. Some people are just monstrous. It's kind of why I always felt when similar critique was put forth against Iain M. Banks' stuff that it didn't hold. When I was a young child, I often thought the villains on Captain Planet were hamfisted and one-dimensional. As an adult, now, and having seen American politics over the last decade or two, I can honestly say they were nuanced in comparison in many ways. Some people are just self-absorbed monsters, and I don't think its a coincidence that both in life and in the works of Banks and Pratchett we see these people going into careers that are well suited to such monstrous outlooks; theocrats, dictators, businessmen, etc. I will say, though, I felt Carcer was pretty weak, all things considered. Although I actually think Nightwatch, while fantastic, is somewhat overrated. Fifth Elephant or Thud! are probably my favorite of the Watch series.
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Mar 29, 2017 12:56
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Screaming Idiot posted:I'm glad someone agrees with me. While his review made a few good points, it reeks of "heh, fantasy? You should try reading real books, plebian" I like this post. Thank you.
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Mar 29, 2017 13:08
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Canuckistan posted:I like this post. Thank you. I like your posts too! Another thing I forgot to mention was that Brutha and Vorbis are in a way mirror images of one another -- had Brutha never made contact with Om, Brutha could eventually have become like Vorbis. It's easy to imagine a young Vorbis as malleable and amenable to Omnian indoctrination as Brutha, whose intelligence and stubborn and powers of unthinking doublethink would work to elevate him, especially since the Quisition values those who reserve their questions only for their prisoners. There but for the grace of Om and all that.
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Mar 29, 2017 13:21
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That critic also put me off, especially this bit:quote:Pratchett’s deflationary jokes, like his Plato parody, are often funny in isolation, but taken together, they result in a determinedly unambitious, unexciting style. He seems to love handling clichés as if they were shiny pebbles: Am I misreading this, or is he seriously complaining that Pratchett uses common expressions or clichés? Is "The sky was blue." a cliché now? am I going insane?? This seems like complaining that he uses the word 'said' too much. Some expressions are common because they're useful and get the point across, you don't need to reinvent the wheel on every sentence. The guy concludes his article saying "I prefer writing that rubs up against the real world", yet he's put off by pterry using writing that is "warm and friendly, like a normal chat with a normal bloke". I don't know, he seems to be framing the whole article as "well he's fine but he's not like REAL art, is he?" which seems like a pointless distinction to me. Maybe if the book covers had more urns, and women in the nude...
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Mar 29, 2017 14:43
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Wasn't he one of those pretentious wankers in that brief painfully cutting TV review clip in the recent Back In Black Biodocu? What a bunch of cruel tossers.
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Mar 29, 2017 15:29
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Cicadalek posted:That critic also put me off, especially this bit: That guy's favorite modern writer is Michel Houellebecq (he says that's "the only" writer he bothers rushing out to buy new books by, which is just, haha dude there are a lot of good writers out there these days). So you can safely ignore every opinion he has.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:12
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I will say, though, I felt Carcer was pretty weak, all things considered. Although I actually think Nightwatch, while fantastic, is somewhat overrated. Fifth Elephant or Thud! are probably my favorite of the Watch series. Night Watch was absolutely the best Watch book and your failure to understand that has turned me to robot satan. That being said, Carcer was easily the worst part of the book. Fortunately it had Findthee Swing to provide an example of a much better villain.
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Apr 1, 2017 07:05
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I'm amazed at how wrong a person can be about Small Gods. It was the first Discworld book I ever read and is still my favorite. The ending still makes me tear up every time I go back for a re-read. The apparent inability to understand what the book was about on a basic level and how beautifully Pratchett put the story together right up to the last paragraph just kills me.
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Apr 2, 2017 06:44
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