regshoe

Originally posted here on Tumblr.

(Shepherd’s Crown spoilers below)

…So about that, one of my (many, many) favourite things about the Discworld books is the way that Terry Pratchett respects and cares for his characters. It’s part of his humanism, I think – his main characters are complex and imperfect and struggling and he is always on their side.

When I think about books I didn’t like, and in particular books with endings I didn’t like, an awful lot of them basically come down to this: I feel that the author treated a character unfairly and gave them an ending that they didn’t narratively deserve. They built up this character and gave them potential and possibility, acted like they mattered, and then threw it all away for a pointlessly horrible ending that achieves absolutely nothing.

This isn’t a simplistic sort of ‘the good guys should get happy endings and the bad guys shouldn’t’ thing – there are plenty of books I can think of where the main character dies or things otherwise don’t end well for them, but in the context of the story that’s the right thing to happen, and it isn’t a lack of respect for the character at all. Tragic endings are a problem when they’re gratuitous and unnecessary. The (admittedly few) main character deaths in Discworld are not like that, and Granny Weatherwax’s death is about as far from it as you can get (he dedicated the book to her). Discworld endings tend to be fairly open – they’re not horribly tragic but neither are they neat happily ever afters, which I suppose was partly to leave the stories there for more books about the same characters – but the characters change and grow and are always becoming better, always striving, and it’s always so beautifully right.

(Incidentally, just because a character does get a happily ever after ending doesn’t mean that it’s a good one, either – look at Witches Abroad, and there have certainly been books where I was annoyed at ‘happy’ endings because it wasn’t the right thing for the character).

This applies to the main characters – Esme Weatherwax who tirelessly makes the best choices she can, fights the stories of the Good and Bad Witch, and shoes the unicorn all her life; Death the anthropomorphic personification who becomes human through eating curry and keeping pet cats and loving his adopted family and who (in a slightly meta example) always cares for the harvest; Sam Vimes who creates the Guarding Dark and watches the watchman and acts for justice no matter what. It also applies to minor characters, even those who are less sympathetic: Annagramma Hawkins’s storyline, the redemption of Myria/Unity and the Elf Queen/Nightshade, Brutha going back for Vorbis in the desert. The only characters who really don’t get any sympathy are the ones like Teatime and Carcer who see other people as nothing more than things.

The Discworld books are wonderfully silly and serious at the same time, sometimes about the same things. Terry Pratchett often mocks his characters when they’re being silly, but he is never cruel, and he always takes these characters seriously when it matters (my blog-namesake Reg Shoe is a good example of this). Reading his books, you know that it isn’t always going to be bright happiness for everyone, but you also know always that the characters – the people – are important, and he as the author will not let them or you down.

Tags: this post is a mess, i love these books so much, so much, aaaaaah