It’s time to meet the Ankh-Morpork City Watch! Well, what’s left of them. Let’s call on some Guards! Guards!
Summary
The Supreme Grand Master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night tells his order of a plan. With a little bit of leading he gets them all to agree that they are oppressed and unhappy with the way things work in Ankh-Morpork, and that things would be better if it went back to olden times when the city had a king instead of a Patrician. But to do that, they need a king to show up, and to do that, there must be a dragon to slay. They can summon said dragon with a book of magic that the Supreme Grand Master had stolen on their behalves, but they must all agree to this course of action. In fact, the Supreme Grand Master wants to do this to install a puppet king in the city and rule it himself with rules that he approves of. He believes his order to be populated by idiots, and would like to associate with the better class of people, smart but not too smart. At the same time as they begin to enact this plan, Carrot Ironfoundersson comes to the city, while City Watch guard Sam Vimes sits in a gutter and thinks sadly on a fallen comrade.
Carrot is a human who was raised among dwarfs and only very recently learned that he wasn’t a member of their species. His father, their king, talks to a human named Varneshi, who’s the one who comes up with the idea to get Carrot employed by the City Watch, as it’s a good opportunity for him to be among humans, and a good steady job. His father sends a letter to the city Patrician about getting him the job, the application is accepted, and he sends Carrot off with a woolen vest and an unremarkable sword (it is not the least bit magical, but they found it with him amongst the destroyed caravan that had been set upon by bandits). Mr. Varneshi gives him a codpiece and a book of the laws and ordinances of the city that belonged to his great-grandfather. He tells Carrot that he’ll need to know the laws to be a good officer—which Carrot takes literally, of course, because dwarfs are literal.
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Defekt
The Elucidated Brethren use magic to summon a dragon, but it only appears very briefly, and vaporizes a thief with fire. (Death comes to collect the man, suitably surprised himself.) They reckon that they need more magic to sustain the dragon’s appearance. Carrot sends a letter home to his father about his first days at the Watch, not realizing that he’s spent the night in a brothel (he saved a woman from being robbed, and she invited him back, but he just fell asleep) or that the Thieves Guild is simply part of how the city runs. The President of said Guild goes to the Patrician after Carrot arrests him and walks him bound through the streets. Lord Vetinari tells his secretary, Lupine Wonse, to see to the matter, not wanting it to interfere with the delicate balance he’s created for the city. Wonse calls Vimes in—they’ve known each other since childhood—and tells him to fix this problem immediately.
Outside of new recruit Carrot, there are three members of the Night Watch: Vines, Sergeant Colon, and Nobby. Colon brings the daily reports to Vimes and tells him that he sent Carrot out with Nobby, which Vimes thinks was probably a bad idea, so they set out searching for them. Nobby is busy asking Carrot why he had to become a member of the Watch, asking what terrible things he might have done. He lands on the possibility that he “got a girl in trouble”, which Carrot figures must be accurate because the girl he liked back home (Minty) always got yelled at by her dad whenever he came around their home. Misunderstandings ensue. Carrot tries to bring up the book of laws he was given, but Nobby doesn’t want to hear about it. They come across a dwarf bar where there’s fighting going on; Carrot is understandably shocked. He wades in and tells the lot of them off for fighting and carousing, and tells them they all probably ought to write to their mothers. Then he tells them that he’ll be back every night to check on them, and that they should behave themselves.
Nobby tells Carrot never to do anything like that again and drags him into the Mended Drum where Carrot proceeds to take notes. He sees the librarian of the Unseen University having a drink there, asks to see the landlord, and informs the man that he’s under arrest for selling alcohol so late and having a monkey in the tavern. This is taken about as well as one can expect, and by the time Vimes and Colon show up, they find Nobby outside, mortified at the fight going on inside. After making awkward small talk, they eventually decide they should go check on things, quite carefully. Carrot is standing in the middle of the floor as he recites a slew of citations against the entire bar and then promptly collapses. Vimes tells Nobby to give all the felons cautions and they leave. Meanwhile, the Elucidated Brethren prepare to do another ritual…
Commentary
I kept thinking about this book coming up, and precisely how I was going to tackle its discussion. Because the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is sort of a parody of the clichés around British policing. And in recent years it’s become even more glaringly obvious (on my end, coming from a place of privilege as a white person) that positioning cops as inherently “good guys” is not helping us societally. There’s just too much corruption and exploitation surrounding policing systems, and we also use the police for tasks that they have no business being called for. Even the British police, which Americans will often cite as a “better version” of the system America has, are riddled with many of the same issues. The clichés that Pratchett cleaves to here are a fantasy in and of themselves. He’s ultimately parodying something that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I’m not saying that he’s unaware of the issues here entirely; the makeup of the City Watch that Carrot enters is a fairly good representation of the sort of people who often populate bodies of law enforcement. Colon, who’s largely in it for the paycheck and the desk work, and shows himself within the Discworld series to be prejudiced against anyone too “foreign”; Nobby, who is a lot smarter than he seems, but whose trauma and sense of self-preservation makes him unwilling to throw himself into danger; and Vimes, who is a self-described set of bad habits swimming in alcohol. Then you add Carrot, the new wrench in their crew, who essentially winds up embodying the cliché of the “good British cop”—the Nicholas Angel type, obsessed with regulation and doing the work right. Taken at face value, you could perhaps argue that it’s pro a very specific type of policing.
However, it’s still possible to engage with this story for how its characters occupy their society, and what they are actually fighting against. The City Watch has very little function in Ankh-Morpork because the city Patrician has organized crime to the point where it has quotas and allowances. Cops have very little use in a system like that, which clearly bothers Vimes because he doesn’t believe that everyday people should harassed for quotas in that manner, but you won’t catch him saying so because speaking up has already gotten him bitten one too many times. It’s not that Vimes is a “good cop”—it’s that he would prefer (somewhere deep down) to be a useful person, and the system he’s currently enmeshed in doesn’t allow for that. Carrot doesn’t care about being a good cop because he believes policing is some grand calling or honor—he just cares about following rules and doing what is expected of him.
I’ll have a lot more to say on that going forward, but to start: Carrot occupies a special place in my heart for being one of the few “Lawful Good” (as the D&D parlance goes) characters I genuinely like. As an alignment, I’m mostly against it, partly due to my own chaotic leanings, but also because it’s difficult to find examples of that type who don’t make the concept of lawfulness distasteful. Being down with authority is not an attribute I’ve ever personally prized, but Carrot comes by it honestly—because it’s a matter of literalness, not belief in the “goodness” of law.
Carrot is called what he’s called because of the shape of him, and that is particularly bemusing to me because these days, all I can think of is the discourse around Chris Evans being shaped like a Dorito when he’s got his Captain America uniform on. (This was a thing, for ages, but particularly after the release of the first Avengers film, and it will always come back to me in odd moments.) Apparently this is just the thing for characters like this.
I do have some questions about Pratchett’s building of dwarf culture in these books because I think he may have contradicted himself a little, but that might be the point? I was thinking about Hwel making the comment that dwarfs aren’t supposed to be able to read, but Carrot’s people certainly do, so the question becomes—was Hwel misinformed on that? Internalized prejudice maybe? And there’s also the extreme literalness of Carrot’s people, which isn’t technically an attribute we’ve seen before. My assumption is that he needed dwarf culture to work a certain way for Carrot, so he had to then find workarounds to explain what he’d already written. (Hence his reasoning here behind the dwarf bars being all night brawls and so on.)
Asides and little thoughts:
- Dwarfs use “he” pronouns to indicate both men and women because gender is optional for dwarfs, according to the footnotes. Granted, she pronouns are also used, so I guess you can use them if you want? I actually kind of wish Pratchett would get into this system more, rather than just tossing it in as a joke, because I kind of love the conceit.
- Love the little cameo by Magrat Garlick, telling them how to stop spelling recommendation. (Which I admit to often having trouble with myself because which are the letters you double up on, and why not just double up on all of them?)
- There’s this thing here about Vimes thinking that he hasn’t mastered ambition, it’s a thing that happens to other people, and I feel that deep down in my soul, honestly.
- There are film noir-ish touches all over Vimes, and then then City Watch’s motto which does not actually translate to “To protect and serve” but to “Make my day, punk” aka Dirty Harry. Which, I know there’s one artist who always drew Vimes to look like Clint Eastwood but that is emphatically not the vibe I get from the character.
Pratchettisms:
They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly and proud and arrogant.
The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
It wasn’t eye contact, because the Supreme Grand Master had made sure the Brethren’s hoods shrouded their faces in mystic darkness, but nevertheless he managed to silence Brother Doorkeeper by dint of sheer outraged silence.
The gutters of the city gurgled softly as the detritus of the night was carried along, in some cases protesting feebly.
It’s a terrible thing to be nearly sixteen and the wrong species.
Yes, they’d both started in the gutter. But Wonse had worked his way up whereas, as he he himself would be the first to admit, Vimes had merely worked his way along. Every time he seemed to be getting anywhere he spoke his mind, or said the wrong thing. Usually both at once.
Nobby had long ago been told about fighting fair and not striking a fallen opponent, and had then given some creative thought to how these rules applied to someone four feet tall with the muscle tone of an elastic band.
Next week we’re going up to “And awoke to the sound of a mob.” See you then!
Why can’t there be different cultures among dwarves? It doesn’t make sense that fantasy always has different human cultures but other species are only allowed to have one culture.
I feel like Sir Pterry is very pro an idealized version of policing. What we were raised to believe it is rather than what it, well, actually is. All that “if you did it for a good reason you’d do it for a bad one” talk.
Weird by the way, despite the show on BBCA having “the skeleton of Pratchett, but entirely different meat on the bones”, I already can picture that actor as Vimes.
@1 – we haven’t gotten there yet, but we will.
Regarding dwarves and their pronouns: it comes up in Feet of Clay, and is pretty important to The Fifth Elephant.
Because this is one of my favorite books, and because Vimes is one of my favorite characters, this set of essays is likely to be one of my favorites. I’m really looking forward to the rest.
As others point out, we see lots more about Dwarven gender in later books.Is this book where we see the Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of poverty for the first time? I know it’s when we first see Vimes in his cardboard-soled boots.
@1, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Dwarf communities are scattered all over the place. It just makes sense there would be some variations.
The City Watch is my very, very favorite Pratchett series. I love Death, I love the witches, but I love Sam Vines and his Sammies best of all.
I read this book in the years immediately following a massive inquiry into police corruption here in Australia (the Fitzgerald commission, if you want to look further) so the idea of Carrot being an idealistic officer with the urge to do some good was of interest to me as it had some local context. In this first part, he is believable as a young man who wants only to serve the Law, but being exposed to corruption. In a realistic drama we would see him running afoul of his superiors and either being set up and drummed out of the force himself, or bowing to the inevitable and becoming part of the problem. The idea that he becomes – as we see hints of here early on – a lens through which Vimes sees what the Watch could be, is unrealistic but there is a real conflict beginning here between Carrot and the city that you think can only end badly.
On a lighter note, the Elucidated Brethren are the funniest secret society ever put to paper.
“domesticated animal”, not “monkey” — Nobby is smart about that, at least.
Hwel is a dreamer, not a writer of practical letters; ISTM possible that he’s abnormalby general dwarf standards — possibly even less than sane (cf Nessus in Ringworld.) And note that we’re told that the writing of a letter is an uncommon event; maybe the ~king is the only literate one, at least in this group? wrt variations among dwarf clans, we are told later (in Monstrous Regiment) that dwarf tunnels are very extensive; it’s possible there’s more mingling among dwarfish clans than among surface-dwellers. Or that might just be more revision/retconning.
Back when I was still working as a software engineer, I brought this book in to work so I could wave the complex-passwords scene at someone I thought was trying to be far too complicated about security. There’s a difference between being secure against hacking, and being baroque (and quite possibly insecure, as we see a few pages later) about user access.
A few Pratchettisms:
The UK spelling in the above is from the first US pb; I don’t remember whether previous books used US spelling.
Describing Nobby as resembling “a chimpanzee who never got invited to tea parties” sounds like a Hitchhiker reference.
Re: Vimes appearance
Pratchett wrote that he always pictured Vimes as “a younger, slightly bulkier version of Pete Postlethwaite”
“They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, ’round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film), to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No-one ever asks them if they wanted to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.”
That’s the dedication at the beginning of this book. But also, Vimes and his few colleagues were designed to be foils for Carrot, the expected protagonist, as Granny Weatherwax was created to support Esk. As so often happens in Discworld, these expected one-offs blossomed into longtime favorites, and the City Watch surpassed its fantasy origin to become a powerful and modern-world-esque police force. Its moral complexity is explored, most sharply in the especially-dark Night Watch, but indeed it’s generally framed as positive, with occasional protagonist-centered morality of the rather self-aware “It’s good if I do it” variety.
The Elucidated Brethren’s first meeting (plus the two rounds of passwords at doors) is among my favorite Discworld scenes. I just love watching Discworld characters bicker. And the Supreme Grand Master’s POV is a perfect window into this bicker-fest, showing both his careful manipulation of the chaotic process and his suppressed exasperation as they meander through it, plus his misuse of random obscure words. There’s pointed satire in the men believing they’re “oppressed” by those who give them petty personal annoyances, a mindset shared by some in our world. (Though if I had a tuba-playing neighbor, I would be the one feeling oppressed, by these standards. And I would want to summon a dragon and have it eat them. It was bad enough when one of my apartment-building neighbors spent two days playing Minuet in G Major nonstop on an unidentified wind instrument for hours at a time.)
I love a great many Discworld characters, but Nobby Nobbs and Havelock Vetinari are both in the top tier, though their charms are not evident at this point in the reread.
@6: No, that’s in the next Watch book, Men at Arms.
Assorted notes:
The Supreme Grand Master didn’t steal the book. Brother Fingers did.
Sardines are scaly. And huge, to tiny plankton. And might be proud and arrogant. Therefore, sardines are dragons to plankton. :-p
I expect Carrot wasn’t “carrot-shaped” when the dwarfs found him as a toddler, so I don’t know why they named him that. And it’s weird that his father kept his hair short “for reasons of Hygiene” when other dwarfs probably don’t do that, given their beards.
Ankh-Morpork citizens are often literal-minded as well. But they haven’t turned it to the purpose of law-keeping for a while.
Carrot’s letters home are adorable.
Codpiece, heh. Last year, I saw packages of fish fillets labeled “cod pieces” at a grocery store. I snickered.
Carrot’s speech at the dwarf bar, and its effects, reminded me strongly of Tomjon’s bar scene. The cause was different, though — Carrot speaking their language and culture, Tomjon being magically eloquent. And I wondered why Carrot didn’t try to arrest the dwarf bar’s proprietor for serving alcohol etc. Maybe he believed it would go out of business after he told the patrons to mend their ways?
I love Charlie recalling a “learning curve” as a “bendy educational thing.”
Call-forward:
Carrot writes that a man had broken a patella on his codpiece but Mrs. Palm said “I needn’t pay for a new one.” Body-part replacement is not as readily had in Ankh-Morpork as it will be when Igors start showing up.
Pratchettism of the day:
The drinkers were the usual bunch of heroes, cutthroats, mercenaries, desperadoes, and villains, and only microscopic analysis could have told which was which.
@10
The bit about Nobby being like a chimp who never got invited to tea parties is a reference to the, frankly abhorrent, practice by some zoos of raising money by dressing chimps up in clothes, seating them at a table with cutlery and cakes on, and charging people to watch as they acted out a twisted version of an afternoon tea. A practice that, thankfully, is very much on its way out, and was so even when Pratchett was writing.
Newsreel footage, CW animal abuse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPD_m2laITc
And
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyTM5P-xihE
Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzees%27_tea_party
The line about having to hand it to the Patrician or he’d send someone to take it, is a reference to a[n apocryphal] anecdote attributed to Dean Martin about Frank Sinatra. Dean is reported to have said, at a party or in some otherwise unrecorded interview, that “you had to hand it to Frank, if you don’t he’ll send the boys around to come and get it”, in reference to Sinatra’s supposed ties to the mob. It almost certainly never happened, but almost everyone believed it did. Of course these days, fewer and fewer people have even heard of Martin and Sinatra, and the mob certainly isn’t what it used to be.
Describing Nobby as resembling “a chimpanzee who never got invited to tea parties” sounds like a Hitchhiker reference.
It’s most obviously a reference to the popular and long running but now abandoned “Chimps’ Tea Party” series of ads for Typhoo Tea. ( This article explains the background and why not inviting a chimp to a tea party is actually doing it a favour…)
I too like the City Watch books the best. And the overall arc of the books will address so many of the issues that still plague us today.
Thoughts:
The Night Watch – I think this stems from an idealized version of early 19th century English policing when locally organized watchmen and then Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police attempted to keep order. Peel famously said “The police are the public and the public are the police.” That sounds like Pratchett’s philosophy.
Vimes – The overriding thought to always keep in mind is that Vimes thinks of Ankh-Morpork as his city and his job is to preserve it.
Dwarfs – Dwarfs are not only literate but they place great stock in words. Not to give anything away but “blackboard monitor” is significant in a later book. I view Hwel’s comment as referring to the human prejudice that dwarfs can’t read.
Carrot – his name in human refers to him being six feet tall and about as wide at the shoulders, i.e. carrot shaped. His dwarf name translates to Head Banger because he often banged his head in the mines. It is unclear when dwarfs are given their first name but given some we know it does not appear they are named at birth.
@10: A Wikipedia “stub” article-ette says that “The chimpanzees’ tea party was a form of public entertainment [for us more than for them, perhaps] in which chimpanzees were dressed in human clothes and provided with a table of food and drink. [Hopefully suitable.] The first such tea party was held at the London Zoo in 1926.” And the last in 1972.
I don’t recall if this is what’s featured on screen in the television “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” with caption “This Never Happens”. It was on radio first, of course.
Chimpanzees from Twycross Zoo also acted in human clothes in advertisements for “P.G. Tips” tea.
After all that, the catch is that they probably have to go back to being chimpanzees and now they are not so good at that.
Gah, sorry about the messed-up fonts in Comment 12. I was copy-pasting notes and forgot to clear all their formatting before moving them hear. I’ve revised it and sent it back to the moderation queue.
On the Chimpanzees and Tea, yes I think Pratchett is most likely referencing the PG Tips ads, which were still playing widely when this books came out. They started in the late 50s and ran through to 2002.
@9: ISTM that Carrot has the advantage that the Night Watch is practically nonexistent; structure stolid enough for an idealist to break their head against requires some number of people already going-along-to-get-along. The existing watch (Nobby particularly) are resigned to impotence, but they’re all individuals — and not enough to overwhelm Carrot’s enthusiasm.
@15: I was trying to be intelligible about Peel last night, gave up, and deleted; thank you for the clear summary. (I was thinking particularly of a couple of scenes of early Peelers in Fire, Burn! — they are arguably imaginary, but represent what an English police supervisor would have aspired toward even as late as Pratchett’s childhood.) There’s a meme going around that US police forces were developed as slave takers; even if it’s only fractionally true, I suspect it’s a darker beginning than English policing.
@many: today I am among the 10,000; I was indeed thinking solely of the TV version of HHG, and did not know the long, sorry history.
What’s that bit about being four feet tall and elastic? Is that a reference to something?
What is the actual current purpose of the Watch? Wouldn’t the Patrician have gotten rid of it entirely if it had none?
Why is Carrot so good at fighting? We know he’s 6’6″ and strong from mine work, but he’s not been trained in combat and he shouldn’t be able to handle, on his own, a bar full of presumably competent fighters.
@21 – I see Vimes as Lawful Neutral in contrast to Carrot’s Lawful Good. In his overall arc we see that he is willing to take bend or ignore rules (and rulers) in pursuit of what he sees as the right thing to do. I’d say Colon is Chaotic Neutral but Nobbs’ arc (in later books) is more Chaotic Good but the emphasis for both is Chaotic.
To be honest, Carrot reminds me of no one so much as Constable Benton Fraser.
@22: Because he’s the returned king of Ankh-Morpork, that’s why.
@24: Yup, that’s a pretty solid comparison IMO. Due South is the best adaptation of Guards! Guards! ever put to film :)
Carrot is not so much 6’6″, he’s 6×6. His fighting skills can be summed up by The Fantastic Four’s Thing – “it’s clobberin time” although he reminds me more of Marvel’s Hulk but with control over his personality.
The reality is that Carrot rarely fights, not just here but in any of the books. He normally doesn’t beat people into submission, he talks them into submission. Like Tomjon people naturally like him and his words have power. He does what Pratchett wishes his own words would do.
Carrot, Vimes, and yes, Vetinari are all lawful good characters. However, Carrot is rare in that he is a lawful good paladin–a character type that can be extremely hard to write as likable unless they are comically stupid.
Carrot is simple, but he is not at all stupid. He is very naïve when we first meet him, but he neither remains that way, nor does he lose his innocence. Others have created likable paladins–Captain America springs immediately to mind, but I can’t think of too many funny paladins besides our beloved Carrot.
@25 If the King is the Fount of Justice, then the Ideal King will bare a remarkable resemblance to the Ideal Policeman. Which is what I imagine Pterry was thinking when he conceived Carrot.
Keep an eye on Dwarven gender politics- I don’t think Pratchett had it entirely worked out here, but it’s going to develop into one of the more interesting through-lines in Dwarven culture.
@25, @28 – You’re getting ahead of the read but I will say in Pratchett’s defense that he, like Vimes (and Granny), has definite views on kings and ‘ideal’ doesn’t figure into them.
@29 – I wholeheartedly agree. At this point in the books, all we know is that dwarf females dress as, act as, and take the roles of males which sounds an awful lot like our define of trans. The development of this arc in later books is fascinating (and another character’s development is so unexpected that I won’t spoil it).
@30: is this trans, or simply a lack of gender-or-sex differentiation? I’m wondering whether Pratchett was making the same sort of move/slip that Le Guin did in The Left Hand of Darkness, using male signifiers (either out of laziness or to avoid losing too much of the audience). ISTR that we learn more later (and some even here) that dwarfs do pair up (although there’s a remark somewhere about the pairing starting with delicate questions about each others’ sex); it’s not clear to me that anything is specifically male in the eyes of dwarfs (although other species on the Disc may be making assumptions).
@30: Sure, Pratchett wasn’t a monarchist by any stretch, but the particular story he’s telling here (and reinforces in Men-At-Arms) specifically requires that all the qualities of the fairytale returned king be present in Carrot, then torqued somewhat. So Carrot is able to whale on an entire barful of presumably-good fighters, up to and including Detritius (who’s clearly able to handle even other trolls, as later seen) because the noble fairytale returned king is, also, personally able to execute anybody who argues about them being the noble returned king. And/or slays dragons :v
@31 – We’re many books away from The Fifth Elephant but we will find that there are specifically male aspects in dwarf culture.
@32 – Not only Pratchett but also Carrot and Vimes want nothing to do with Monarchy for reasons that will later be elucidated. A fairytale king is willing to fight and wins fights with his sword. One cannot imagine Arthur and Mordred in a fist fight. Carrot rarely gets into fights, has never used his sword in a fight, and has never executed someone. I believe that in all the books he has only killed one person and that by accident. Fairytale policeman, yes, fairytale king, no.
@33 –
Carrot does use his sword to execute Dr. Cruces in Men at Arms.
@28 –
Angua reflects upon Carrot’s character in very much these terms towards the end of The Fifth Elephant.
@12:
Is that in some Pratchett interview I don’t remember? I don’t know how much he was thinking in terms of foundations of later threads, but ISTM that ~”a set of bad habits marinated in alcohol” provides a lot more room for stories — even arcs — than a Lawful Good (almost Lawful Goody-Goody). ISTR that we learn that Carrot isn’t as … focused? … as he seems, but I can’t imagine him being (e.g.) as effective in Monstrous Regiment as Vimes was.
@36: I don’t remember where I first read about that. I most recently saw it on the book’s TV Tropes page:
“Decoy Protagonist: Carrot. Actually an unintentional example: Pratchett intended to make him the protagonist, but needed a voice in the city before Carrot arrived, threw the character of Vimes together out of clichés as a stop-gap, and he ended up taking on a life of his own.”
It might also be in any Discworld reference book(s) where Pratchett talk about Colon and Nobby as intended one-off characters. The Art of Discworld, for one, describes Nobby as originally “a bad copper invented in a hurry from raw materials hollowed by time.” (That excerpt was in a comment on Mark Reads The Fifth Elephant, which I just rewatched; it’s been years since I read any of the reference books.)
@34 – I apologize. You are absolutely right about that. It had entirelyslipped my wossname.
OTOH, I still think you’re wrong about the fairytale king. I think Pterry’s thoughts might best be summarized by Dennis from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
“Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”
@38 –
no need to apologize, that scene stuck in my mind because it featured clues that Carrot was descended from the old kings of Ankh-Morpork.
And that wasn’t my opinion on people who are destined to be rulers – it was Angua’s, and as I recall she wasn’t thinking that Carrot was entitled to be a ruler, but that his character was that of a mythical king who ruled justly, drew out the best in his subjects by his own example, lived simply and was first among equals.
@40 – The Fifth Elephant (which is where Angua and others will play key roles) will make for an interesting discussion when we finally get there but we should probably drop it for now so as not to spoil too much for newcomers.
I know this post is a year old, but I think it’s important to note that Lawful Good alignment isn’t about law or authority. It’s about order; the opposite of chaos.
Being lawful just means being organized and valuing structure, which is certainly what Carrot does. But he’s not looking to do good so much as follow the rules, so I don’t know that he’s good aligned so much lawful neutral.
I think the misuse of lawful alignment comes from people associating it with human law rather than natural order like it was intended.