maniraptorans

Recently, I’ve been rereading a lot of the Discworld books, particularly the City Watch books—I have some of my grandma’s old copies of them, but I realised, a bit ago, I was missing two, and was able to borrow them from the library. Libraries are awesome and you should use your library. Let’s start off like this: I’m incredibly fond of Pratchett’s writing. The City Watch books are very interesting to me, in what they do and what they don’t, and I want to write about them because I enjoy them. You might disagree with me—this is very much a biased reading based on my own far-left politics, that focuses around abolishing power held in society, such as the monarchy and the police. If that hasn’t turned you away from this, uh, gay portfolio blog, then let’s keep going.

Pratchett has a complicated legacy. You might say he was progressive for his time, or, more accurately, you might say he was progressive for White male fantasy authors writing in the 80s & 90s, but I think it’s accurate to say, at least in my experience, that there’s still a vision of him as a progressive but privileged fantasy writer in a time where that wasn’t in the mainstream. There are writers who were working around the same time or earlier who were making far more interesting art about leftism and bigotry (I adore Ursula K Le Guin and will point to her at any moment I can), but Pratchett combined that with what was mainstream, which was fantasy shlock with eye-catching ugly-charming cover art. 

It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That - Misogyny, Sexism and the failures of subverting stereotypes

The core of Discworld is a deeply affectionate parody. I think it’s clear to see that Pratchett harbours a deep love for the fantasy he’s mocking, and the reason why Discworld works is that he has so much knowledge to subvert. But this is pulp fantasy of the 70s and 80s, and in playing with it you’re going to butt up against a series of constant, upsetting stereotypes, and Pratchett’s response to these is to play with them, turn them around and over and, sometimes, create something new out of them. 

Pratchett is especially known for how he wrote female characters, which, in my opinion, stands up incredibly well to this day—but I’d argue that’s unrelated to what he did with the stereotypes of the genre. If you’ve spent any time in circles that discuss feminism in writing, I’d bet you’ve seen this excerpt before, from The Light Fantastic, the second ever Discworld book:

Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, thighboots and naked blades. Words like 'full', 'round', and even 'pert' creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and lie down. Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer. Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling's Oriential Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword. All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.

This is a funny segment! I like it! (It’s also ironic, contrasted with the original Josh Kirby cover art, which is… well…) (Note: this is from the second ever Discworld book, and I think the way Pratchett writes female characters improves over time. It’s not representative of all of Discworld, but I thought it was good to represent how Pratchett is perceived.)

But it gets passed around as an example of how Pratchett is good at writing women, when it doesn’t represent the fullness of what he does with his female characters, it represents his sense for comedy and self-awareness. The strength of Pratchett’s writing of female characters is when it goes beyond the stereotypes it plays with, when it takes them out of that realm into fully formed people. That’s the fundamental ur-stereotype of any marginalised group in fiction, that they are paper cutouts that can exist in a limited variety of forms and do limited things. It also is how you write a good fictional character.

Take Sybil Ramkin. Pratchett, throughout Discworld, pokes and prods at the idea of the archetypical fantasy hero, who needs an archetypical fantasy love interest, and this is where Sybil comes in, and she is not the archetypical fantasy love interest. She is a spinster (older than about 25), fat, and has hobbies, specifically dangerous and involved ones. This is how we first see Sybil, as our ‘hero’ Sam Vimes’s unlikely love interest, and she fills that role wonderfully, but where Sybil shines is where she acts of her own accord, outside of those stereotypes.

Although she sometimes gets reduced to a fretting/nagging wife character in the later books in a way I dislike, she still acts with agency and feeling—one of my favourite Sybil moments is in The Fifth Elephant, where, in order to plead with the dwarves to side with them, she bursts out into dwarf opera. Other female characters like Angua and Cheery continue in this stead, of starting from concepts & subversions and progressing into fully formed characters as the series continues.

But this is a strategy that isn’t always perfect. These characters are still fundamentally based in those stereotypes, even how far Discworld goes to subvert them. When we look at Sybil, the thing that’s taken away, first and foremost, is ‘this isn’t what a conventionally desirable woman is’, which functions as a kind of cage that Sybil can’t quite escape from. Despite the initial subversion, it still centres those stereotypes.

Although Pratchett’s female characters still stand out as well-written, I would argue his non-white characters largely fail. Many of Discworld’s non-white characters, distinct from his fantasy ‘races’, don’t receive the same kind of fleshing-out that allows them to function as characters and not as props, regardless of how subverted the stereotypes might be.

Take 71-Hour Ahmed, the antagonist for the most part of Jingo, who is eventually revealed to actually be only pretending to play into all of the Orientalist tropes he’s simply been framed in for large parts of the story—this is hinted at, and is a fairly predictable twist, and I think the idea of having to play into stereotypes as a tool is an interesting one, it’s just, as I said earlier, Ahmed never quite gets out of the cage. It makes him & the other Klatchian characters in Discworld feel distinctly uncomfortable. When you set out to write work that’s representative of often erased experiences, you’re juggling reflecting a culture or situation that you don’t experience, but at the core, you still have to write a character, not a prop.

But I also think there’s deeper aspects to that in the way Discworld handles racism and misogyny. Let’s look at Monstrous Regiment. Monstrous Regiment is a book all about misogyny, and at every turn I was surprised by how it handled gender performance and expression in  a way I didn’t expect it to with such grace and cleverness. It also reveals something crucial—I think it shows awareness of misogyny as a system as opposed to actions by individuals, and that’s why it comes off so tactfully.

On the contrary, in Discworld, racism is largely portrayed as an act of individual stupidity or personal failing, a lack of logic. Vimes is casually racist (Men At Arms being the book with the most of this I can think of), but this is placed as a character flaw, and in Jingo, Nobby and Colon’s racism towards Klatchians is idiocy played for comedy. 

The occlusion of systems, of racism in Discworld and, as I’ll discuss later, policing and power, are dangerous. It’s important to remember that racism and misogyny aren’t just products of individual or even widespread stupidity, they are crafted tools of subjugation. Framing these systems in this way obscures the power and spread of bigotry, and gets in the way of fully comprehending bigotry and thus being able to tackle it.

Why is this? I think it’s as simple as, Pratchett was, well, a white man writing in the late 20th and early 21st century. There’s a kind of perception I’ve seen among many Discworld fans that Pratchett, as a person, is progressive, and if not progressive, he possesses an inherent kindness and empathy that led so much of his writing. As much as I love Pratchett and have found immense comfort in how he writes, I think it does a disservice to deny that significant parts of his work were led by bias and prejudice, from Jingo to Small Gods to Interesting Times.

Policing & Power in Ankh-Morpork

The City Watch books, on their journey to dismantle the idea of the typical fantasy hero, develop a complicated relationship with the idea of power. They take a lot of inspiration from the noir/detective tradition, and with that comes the dangerous ground of a police setting, and a shifty but morally righteous hero.

In Ankh-Morpork, power is a necessary evil. Vetinari, for all of his scheming and manipulation, is one of its least tyrannical leaders. In Night Watch, when Lord Winder is deposed in favour of Lord Snapcase, Vimes looks back on people celebrating a new ruler who will eventually turn out to be just the same as the old ruler. Vimes’s ongoing battle with his desire to turn to violence to do the right thing is a key topic of Men At Arms and Night Watch. Ultimately, he decides against it at the conclusion of Night Watch:

When we break down, it all breaks down. That's just how it works. You can bend it, and if you make it hot enough you can bend it in a circle, but you can't break it. When you break it, it all breaks down until there's nothing unbroken. It starts here and now. He lowered the sword.

This quote frames policing as something utterly necessary for a functioning society, that there needs to be a crime for which laws can be made. And although Vimes can act within the spirit and not the letter of the law to advance righteousness and order, as he does in Jingo, there’s still a central construct of order that needs to be enforced.

Something interesting about Vimes gets revealed here, and over the course of the City Watch arc—as much as Vimes has his heritage as a kingslayer, he functions as a kind of unappointed arbiter of what is right. He has his character flaws, but ultimately he remains framed as righteous, even when he strays slightly from his own path. Vimes is often above the conflicts of the City Watch books, in that he acts as an unbiased observer who makes decisions on what he judges to be right, (especially in Night Watch) and doesn’t pick a political side, beyond the rule of law and basic human decency. 

Pratchett can’t help but tie Vimes to the role of the hero. Particularly interestingly, his casual racism isn’t redeemed, but there’s no true exploration of the consequences of it, just as there aren’t explorations of the consequences of wider police corruption in Ankh-Morpork that we only really are told, not shown.

There’s a reading of Vimes that brands this as copaganda: Vimes is a good apple in a barrel of rotten ones, who successfully breaks through and changes the system, and since his actions outside of the law lead to the right outcomes, he is right and by extension his position in the police is just and correct. (Many people have written about copaganda in much better ways than I have, but in summary, ‘copaganda’, cop propaganda, is media that pushes the idea that the police are indispensable, heroic, and their actions outside of the law are correct and they should be allowed to continue in that fashion.)

And again, this occlusion of the system comes up. Ankh-Morpork is fairly transparently London, something I realised embarrassingly late given it’s my city of residence. There’s  a historical reputation of crime and police presence, a city that absorbed together various smaller towns and continues to be a site of multiculturalism, and gained power from being a port on an incredibly stinky river. There’s a quote from Night Watch, again, that stuck with me:

Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed… …and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city.

While colonialism, as suggested by this quote, exists in Discworld, like policing, we never are shown, not told, the underbelly of it and the people who it only hurts. Colonialism is just another cog in the machine of Ankh-Morpork, just as many people would like you to feel about the history of London, colonialism is a one-way system where the dark side is hidden from view.

I think Pratchett is very aware of the harm unjust use of power causes. There are moments where Discworld feels as if just the right person, someone who can be trusted to make the right decisions that are best for the world, gets placed in power, then things will turn out fine. With Vimes leading the watch, finally, we have someone who can be trusted to make the right decisions. But I don’t think it’s that simple—Carrot, after all, never becomes king. Vetinari remains a tyrant, no-one is truly, truly, incorruptible, even by their own feelings. There are times when Discworld feels pessimistic, unable to imagine a better world, whether that’s by the trappings of fantasy convention, or by the conventional organisation of society. Discworld is hopeful for a better world, but following the lines of fantasy and detective stories that rely on the hierarchy of royalty and police respectively, perhaps it’s unable to imagine it.

Conclusion

There’s an ongoing pattern in online fandom and general appreciation of the sci-fi/fantasy genre to want things we’re comfortable with and already integrated into the status quo to represent our own beliefs & be kind and compassionate pieces of art, when maybe they’re not. The Colour of Magic was released in 1983, which is considered the official year of birth for the internet, and the landscape of fantasy literature was a very different place. Now, it’s never been easier to find something to read that might just surprise you. Discworld won’t ever be something it’s not, which is what made it so special in some ways, but it’s unfair to make Pratchett out as a paragon of inclusivity when there’s thousands, millions of other voices saying what you wish Discworld would say.

Thanks for reading my silly little essays! More things like this coming soon.

GNU Terry Pratchett.