The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 26: Guards! Guards! Pt.1 (The Flamey Flame)

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan-Young and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 1 of our recap of “Guards! Guards!”. Guards! Guards! (Also heroes, villains, mundanity, secret societies, wonderful words and dragons)Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail] to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Pratchett World Cup (Twitter thread)Hypallage/Transferred epithetThe Elements of Eloquence, by Mark ForsythJeeves & WoosterHag stonesMeet the Man Who Started the IlluminatiBrioche - Bread or Viennoiserie?Detroit Style PizzaDragon physicsFrank WhittleMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

I made you a spreadsheet. I have not looked at the spreadsheet. So someone on Twitter and we'll link to the thread in the show notes is doing a Pratchett World Cup with a bunch of polls. All of Terry Pratchett's works, not just the disc world. Most of them are seriously like obvious winners. Yeah, like diggers versus which is abroad, which is abroad is at 94%. I really want to do the truckers diggers and wings at some point though. We should do a bonus month. Yeah, the Bramiliad trilogy is the closest one. I did pick which is abroad. Yeah, no, me too. The closest one is Jingo versus Thief of Time. Yeah, I went Jingo. I'm guessing. Yeah, I went Jingo. Jingo is one of my favourite watchbooks.

The Long Earth is not doing well in any of them. No, I voted Long Earth over more. Oh, really? Yeah, I fucking love the Long Earth and I like more. I think it's possible. More is very fresh in my mind because it's not that long since we talked about more and I haven't read the Long Earth series for a really long time. That's another one. We should do bonus episodes on it at some point. Yeah, we'll get so many complaints though. People really hate the Long Earth for some reason. Like if you go on any of the Pratchett's Reds talking about it, everyone's a little bitch first. Well, I think it's because it's co-written. There's as much Stephen Baxter there as there is

Terry Pratchett and people don't like that because it means they're not Terry Pratchett books. But I enjoy that. I do think they're good books. I mean, I think they dropped off of it the last couple. But I've only read those last two once, whereas the first two I've definitely read more than once. Yeah, the first one sticks very heavily in my brain. I couldn't really summarise the plots of all the others. But I found it interesting looking at the Pratchett World Cup. One of our Twitter followers, Hi Andy, was like, well, Night Watch is the best. It's one of the best works that Fisher never created. So, you know, why bother with the poll? And while I agree, Night Watch is definitely one of the absolute best. It's in my top five,

which my top five are in no particular order because I refuse to choose and you can't make me. But what I thought was interesting, bearing in mind, this is all of Pratchett's stuff and not just Discworld. Night Watch as a work of fiction is definitely one of the greatest works of fiction ever written, 100%. But within the context of the Discworld, it's arguably not the best one. Because there are other Discworld books that are equally as good, but they're only that good because you have the full context of the Discworld behind them. I would be very surprised if the final didn't come down to Night Watch versus Nation. I don't know about Nation. I don't know about Nation. Similarly, on Facebook groups, I've seen

what more mixed reactions than from the Long Earth, which was pretty solidly negative. But there's quite a lot of people who just aren't into anything that's not Discworld. Yeah, yeah, which is a shame because his non-Discworld books are amazing. They are. I liked Dodger. I didn't like it nearly as much as Nation or the Long Earth. I don't remember enjoying Dodger particularly, but again, I've only read it once and I think that might be one that's really worth a reread, which again. Yes, I'd say it is definitely. I've read it a couple of times and I enjoyed very much this good book, but it's not like a sit into my brain forever book.

Yeah, Nation on the other hand is very much like, oh God, okay, that lives here now. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a lot of anger. Goodness me. That is a rage field, but at some point we'll do a Nation month and a Dodger month, and this will all have something to do with shifting everything around so that we can hit Hogfather in December. I'd love to do that, but then we realise I've overshot and somehow accidentally pushed Hogfather to January, which is definitely something I do because I'm very bad at remembering how time works. You'll just make me release two episodes a week for that month. Yeah, I will. I want to say, I'm sorry. I mean, we definitely won't hit Hogfather this

Christmas. I haven't actually checked where we're at. Eric is August, Moving Pictures September, Reaper Man October, which is a broad. I want to get to Reaper Man so badly. I know, a bit of me was like, oh, maybe like we should do a month on something other than the Discworld books after Moving Pictures because Moving Pictures is 10, but A, I really want to get to Reaper Man B, it's October, which is Halloween month. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then Which is Abroad. Resurrect that picture of me in Build Door. I will not be resurrecting the pictures of me. It's most fun, Litwick.

Top tip, kids. Don't buy cheap blue contacts off the Internet. Yeah, you were crying that night. I was crying. I have blue eyes anyways. The thing like that was a highly unnecessary purchase. So in theory, we're going to do small gods at Christmas. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. That's what's the real meaning of Christmas is not to highlight the absurdity of theological belief. But unless we have lots of breaks from Discworld next year, I suggest that maybe after Reaper Man, we do a month on something else. Okay. Like maybe we could do The Dark Side of the Sun or Strata.

Yeah, because I haven't read those. I've got them, but I haven't read them yet. Yeah, I got them not long before we started this and I just haven't felt like shoehorning another project book into my project schedule, which is now a thing. Yeah. So this was a weird thing. So I realised since we started the podcast, because my method for episode planning is to go through the book and fill it with serial killer levels of post-it notes and then to go through and use those post-it notes. Yeah, all right. Minimulate. I took out all the ones I didn't put in the plan, because I kept getting confused trying to turn to the right ones.

I thought about doing that, but I love the post-it filled. Oh, yeah. I mean, you need to keep doing it like that now. So this is our record of how the podcast is made. This is still being a museum one day. Definitely in a museum. Once we're rich enough to buy our own museum, yes. In our lighthouse. I like how somehow that's a more realistic prospect to me than one of our ordinary setting up in a museum. Well, be very wealthy eventually. Yeah. So normally that's how I do it. And I realised I was kind of missing out

on the experience of just reading the book. So this time I read the whole book first and then went through and did all the post-its and then went back through to find the episode. So it's had three reads. Let's make a podcast. Before we start, the earthworm smiles at April rain. Ah, yes. But revolving turnips sound the gong. Barely. And the daughter of the night is wearing big knickers. A spirit suppress shall never, um, I forgot. Can we just start the podcast? Don't know about that. How do I know who you are?

Oh, the red otter flies at midnight. Hello and welcome to the Two Shall Make He Threat, a podcast in which we're reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series one at a time in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagen Young. And I'm Francine Carroll. And today we're talking about guards, guards. Guards, guards. The eighth Discworld novel. Are we going to pronounce the exclamation point every time? I'm going to commit to that and then forget about two thirds of the way through the episode. Okay, cool, cool. That's optimistic. I like that.

Yeah. Well, it was when we were doing pyramids, I was going to call you bastard. You bastard every time and that thing very quickly. I don't think I even got through the summary. So yeah, this is a spoiler light podcast. Obviously spoilers for the book. We're on guards, guards. But we will try and avoid discussing any major future events in the Discworld series. And we are avoiding any and all discussion off the shepherd's crown. The final Discworld novel until we get there. So you dear listener can come on the journey with us. Right on the back of a dragon, if you like. I wouldn't like that. Quite scary and big.

Gallup across the desert on a camel mathematician. That's however you like. Just join us on this journey. Journey. I'm leaning into it now. 26 episodes in. God, it's 26 episodes. We should have. About 26 plus bonuses. We should have done something for our 25th. Yeah, I thought that as I was naming the file, but never mind. Bit late now. If anyone wants to send us balloons and cake and congratulatory what's

it's then do we have anything to follow up follow up follow up. I didn't look at the documents. So let's say no. Cool. I don't remember having homework. If we did have homework, I didn't do it. I'm not going to lie. One of our bits of homework from the first episode was to read Gorman Garst. And I don't know about you, but I'm still not read Gorman Garst. Well, I mean, well, I fell at the first hurdle because I went to Waterstones and the only version of it they had was the entire trilogy in one book, which I do not want to read a book that injures my wrists.

And B, I didn't want to commit to a 20 quid book when I hadn't even read a chapter of the bloody thing. Yeah, that's fair. God, remember going to bookshops? Yes. No, not in my dream. And it's open again now, but I'm still not doing non essential shopping. Yeah, yeah, it seems. Well, the whole thing is like, you're not meant to touch the books anymore. Like they have to put the books in quarantine if you touch them.

And like, I don't want to be, I don't want to turn book shopping into a stressful thing. I'd rather just wait until this damn pandemic is over. This damn pandemic. Francine, would you like to introduce us to Guards, Guards? Guards, Guards was published in 1989. It's the first of the Ankh-Mawpork City watch arc. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're not talking about future books, but like also this is the beginning of a story arc

and we're very hyped to be here. Yeah, this is one of the like core entry points if you're going to recommend Discworld someone if they're not super into wizards or feminism, in which case, why are we talking to them? But yeah. We know that isn't into wizards or feminism. But yeah, so it introduces some of the core characters of the Discworld, because of that.

So you've got soundbinds, got similar ranking, colon knobs, carrot. And like that Nari, have we seen him before possibly? We have. He was a lizard for most of Sorcery. That's right, yes. But we haven't hung out with him. Yeah, so yeah, not only is he kind of introduced here, he is, his whole philosophy is fleshed out.

And like because of that, when it was published, it was recognized as a bit of a turning point for the Discworld, like into serious topics, especially for that little monologue at the end. Oh my God, yes. Yeah, I read the whole two pages out aloud to Jack last night. I'd say this is one of the, we talked about like where he shifts away from straight up fantasy parody to parodying other things like with weird sisters. He was parodying fairy tales, but also Shakespeare.

I think this is the first one where it's a big like, it's the hero's journey parody, but it's as much about the city existing and it moves away from fantasy even more. Yeah, it's commentary as well as parody, isn't it? Although the references are very heavy-handed to the point that even I recognize some cop movie references and I'm not very into that genre. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to say now, like I can't be bothered to mention most of the

movie references throughout this. That's possibly a job for another podcast. I pointed out a couple. They did make me chuckle a couple of them, like just because he puts them in a funny way, but like, let's... Yeah, the way they're put in, but we'll get to those, we will. But yeah, I didn't realize this is 1989, this is around the time he was writing Good Omens as well or very close to, which is interesting because there's lots of

aggressively interrogating the human condition. Yes. Which is how one enjoys spending a Tuesday. Personally, yes, very much. Yeah. Never on a Wednesday. So do you want to summarize the first section? Where do we go up to?

Page 106, right? We've split it into the standard three sections. There are handy asterisks that split the book into three sections and we've followed them. Did you see the little also bio in the start of this one? Oh, yeah. Insert for a quiet life, he got a job as a press officer with the Central Electricity Generating Board just staffed at Three Mile Island, which shows his unerring sense of timing.

It also slightly from book to book. They do, they vary also. Well, they alter from publication to publication. That would make sense too. Which the first time I saw a spreadsheet book where the author bio had the past tense, like broke me. Yeah, fuck this reality, to be honest. I went down the wrong trousers.

The wrong trousers leg of time. Right, I'm summarizing, aren't I? Yeah, yeah, in theory. Cool. So we open on Dormant Dragons playing Sardines, which I think is the first time we've not opened on a soaring view of the disc. I think you're right. We can probably double check that, but I believe you are correct.

Cool. Let's just believe me. So I don't have to get up and check because I'm stuck in a blanket foot. So cool. A drunken vines rambles in the gutter. The librarian snoozes through nefarious library footsteps and the elucidated brethren get together on a rainy eldritch night. Brother fingers of the elucidated brethren has stolen a book.

The brethren decide dragons are in order and luckily they have a handy, if charred, book. We meet a handsome carrot making his way to Angkor-Pork and learn that vines has just attended Gathkins funeral. Carrot learns he isn't just a very tall dwarf, but is in fact adopted. He's been sent off to Angkor-Pork to join the watch. Books of laws and ordinances and a special protector in hand. At the next meeting of the elucidated brethren,

they prepare their magical bits and bobs to summon a dragon and the grandmaster finds himself full of fire. A thief makes a singy end as the grandmaster celebrates his success. Carrot writes a letter home having arrived in the city, found a lovely place to stay with Mrs. Parm and her daughters and arresting the head of the Thieves Guild fire a visit to a drunken vines. Vines is called to veterinary's office to deal with his wayward recruits actions, but gets away with a chat loop and wants veterinary secretary.

Nobby takes Carrot on his first royal patrol and teaches him the correct volume for 12 o'clock and all's well. Carrot gets a culture shock and a dwarf bar before arresting the landlord of the mended brum and mended drum. I can't do the accent or I'd make a really good joke at this point. He starts an epic bar brawl, eventually gets a bit of assistance from vines, colon and knobs and they celebrate coming out of the brawl alive with a quick drink or 11. The brotherhood attempts another dragon summoning as the drunken watch stumble home through

the shades. The summon dragon handily takes out some nefarious unlicensed thieves, terrifying the pissed up watchmen but leaving them unscathed. Scaped. And what? Unscathed. Unscathed. Lord Fessinari visits the scene of the fiery crime and narrowly escapes being arrested by

Carrot. He remains skeptical on the subject of draconology and vines start sleuthing. The librarian discovers a book has been stolen. Vines sends Nobby and colon out in plain clothes to elicit into the word on the street and heads off to visit a dragon breeder leaving Carrot in charge. The librarian reports a horrific crime to Carrot. The dragon, genus Draco Nobilis, returns surprising colon and nox as Sam meets Sibyl, a well bred dragon breeder.

Carrot goes to the university library and learns about the missing book. Big fuck off dragon does the flamey flame. Vines plans to sleuth but has a drink instead and wakes up to learn that a copy of how to summon dragons has been stolen from the university. Good work, Joe. Some of those consonants were in the right place. Yeah, all right. You're so tired, god bless you.

It's been a long week. Yeah, it sounds like it. Oh, well. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Do you want to do your... No, I'll do mine quote first because mine comes first. Yeah, there are no helicopters or loincloths but there are dragons.

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm just... My eyes have started skipping over that line because it is so incredibly pointless but... Thank you. Thank you. Is there one book even where there's both? How did this start? Can't remember.

But it's become the hill I'm dying. I mean, fine. I'm not going to assault the hill but... Look, I'm expanding the distance metaphor. I'm expanding the definition of helicopter to include dragons so it feels relevant. Okay. Go on, tell me your quote. Yeah, sorry.

So page 70 in ours anyway. Up in the darkness of the rafters, the librarian scratched himself reflectively. Life was certainly full of surprises. He was going to watch developments with interest. He shelled a thoughtful peanut with his feet and swung away into the distance. I picked that one out because it's got one of my favorite little literary tricks in it which is called the transferred epithet. Um, which is when you apply an adjective to the wrong noun.

So like he smoked a nervous cigarette or I walk a lonely road, something like that. All right, well now I've got green day in my head. Yeah, sorry. And I'm assuming that Pratchett, and I'm sure I know this already, is a fan of, was a fan of Woodhouse. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, there's no way it wasn't, right? And PD Woodhouse is well known for like taking that trick to the extreme,

which is why I picked this. I just want to excuse, talk about it. Like his, this is from the elements of eloquence again, because this is the book I am apparently going to reference at least once per Discworld Book. PD Woodhouse was a great master of the technique. His transfers are just a little too ridiculous to work. I litter rather please cigarette is just a bit too much as is I balanced a thoughtful lump of sugar on the teaspoon.

But Woodhouse's best for my considered money was his eyes widened and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp, which I agree is an incredibly pleasing. That's marvelous. I love Woodhouse. I know, I think I might reread a little. Cheese and Worcester. Oh, we watched a little tease and Worcester, possibly.

What was your quote, Joe? Hopefully more relevant to the book. We're actually in rather than a thinly veiled excuse to talk about Woodhouse. I found it really difficult to pick just one because I could quite happily just read this whole. Like there's a difference between when we talk about a book like Pyramids that neither of us really die hard loved. But it's full of cool little quips. But it's fun of cool little quips.

And we could go really into the mythology of it all and the philosophy to this one where we love the book so much that it's very hard not to just record two hours of isn't it good though? Yeah, it's hard to pull threads out of it. Yeah. So this is Vime's and Sibyl seeing Draco Nobileus fly over. One egg breed the breeder. Just let me get my hands on one egg. Vime stared at her in genuine astonishment. It dawned on him that he was very probably a flawed character.

And I really like it because it does so much character work in two lines. What do you think that meant exactly? Because I saw it on the plan and went back and read it and I didn't quite... I kind of read it as spoilers for the full book. But obviously there's a whole thing between Vime's and Sibyl. And this flirtation has started something so dashing about a captain. And there's something so dashing about Lady Sibyl. Not so much about Vime's these days.

Yeah, I love Lady Sibyl. Right, we'll talk about Lady Sibyl. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I love her. Anyway, so they've just met. This is their first meeting. She's flirted a bit but the book's already talked about the fact that... Actually, I don't know if it has yet.

The book will talk about the fact that she's sort of resigned herself to not having romance in her life. That's mentioned once Vime's wakes up in her bedroom. So I think... Oh yeah, so we're not quite there yet. Again, spoilers for Sibyl. That sounds like a massive spoiler, but it's not. It's really not. But it builds something of this relationship early.

And the fact that Sibyl the Dragon Reader sees this huge vicious terrifying killing machine and really wants one of its eggs. And Vime's goes, oh, there might be something wrong with me. I kind of read as a, God, why do I like this woman? Okay. Like, I think they've spent just enough time together for him to start liking her.

And then she says that and he's sort of a, wait, she wants that. What's wrong with me for being in... And it's the fact that... To me, it was almost that he was going, she's seeing this cool scientific phenomenon. And I'm seeing a flying alligator as he put it. Yeah, but I mean, Vime's is also seeing a criminal.

Like that's how his mind works. This dragon is running around killing people. But it's the fact that he doesn't think there's something wrong with her. He thinks there's something wrong with him. Like I said, I think it's just an amazing amount of character work that you immediately see Sibyl as someone who sees dragons as this joyous thing and sees something she could learn from first. And Vime thinks there's something wrong with him for not necessarily...

Either thinks there's something wrong with him for being attracted to her, or thinks there's something wrong with him for not thinking like she does. Either way, his first thought isn't God, she's mad. Yeah, they're in very different moments in that one moment. Yeah, but because of who they both are, I thought it was a really lovely little moment. And I like how much of their characters you get in that. And so with that, on to characters, let's talk Vime's.

Vime's, Vime's, Vime's, Vime's flying in a gutter on... Yeah, I forgot how upsetting Vime's is in this first book. Yeah, we have mentioned it before. We talked about the fact that this book is one of the big entry points in the beginning of the story arc. And the reason people love this is Vime's is a really cool fucking character. Like spoilers for the rest of the series, but he comes back a lot. We like him, we hang out with him.

We love him, but he does start off fairly depressing, lying drunk in the gutter. But the big three line with him I want to talk about in this book, and I'll talk about this probably during all of the books that feature him, is his anger. He's a very angry character. And so I was rereading that Neil Gaiman thing about Terry Pratchett being a very angry man.

Yes. The sort of two big characters even Pratchett, which we're relating to the most were Vime's and Granny Weatherwax. Yeah. And in Vime's case, he has this absolute fury in him. And it's just completely directionless at the start. Just a diffuse kind of... everything anger.

Yeah. And you see, when he's sober and he's really trying to sort this out, Keps and Vime's found he didn't like the idea of citizens, even of the shades being turned into a mere ceramic tint. And they've been done in front of the watch, as if the watch didn't matter, if the watch was just an irrelevant detail, that was what rankled.

Yeah. He's very angry and he's proud to a certain extent. And he's not happy that he's found himself in this position of being in charge of an organisation that sort of was a joke. Yeah. And right from the beginning, you can see the roots of the kind of pride in the city itself and like his role in it, even if it's not a real role at the moment.

Like when he's always talking about, he's burning down my city. Yeah. These are our citizens. This is... There's a big devotion to Ankh Morpork that he really carries. Yeah. Even if we don't take the slightly hideous metaphor of Ankh Morpork as a woman,

it's got all rivers and stuff in it. No, I didn't say it wasn't a big woman, be fair. I love that introduction. But yeah, so I'm happy to be spending time with him. I love how much he cares because it's not just he is particularly devoted to Ankh Morpork. He's devoted to people, even shit people, even thieves that are about to rob him.

He didn't want to watch them burn to death in the street. Yeah. And he really believes in people. Like he knows they're bastards, but he believes they're capable of more. Yeah. Fimes has the natural personality I wish I had. I feel like I've got a lot of Fimes's bad sides

and not a lot of his good sides. Realistically, I'm more of a knobby knobs. I thought you were going to say veterinary. Where's your ego gone, Joanna? Have a fucking snack. Have a snack, as you're not arrogant enough. You get all self-deprecating when you've got low blood sugar. I'll go and grab some chocolate if we do a coffee break

and I can get out of the fort. Okay, so Fimes, Fimes, Fimes, we're going to continue to check on him and his anger and our love for him as we work through the book. I said that I'm going to mention now at some point, and I'm not even sure if it's going to be this book or the next guard's book. I'll talk about the drinking side of it

and his character and how that affects it. But I feel like that peeks in another book. So I think I'll mention it briefly at some point. Yeah, no, that's cool. And obviously content warnings for when we do talk about it. Because I know it's not easy for some. Yeah, to be less horribly vague about it, Fimes's alcoholism will be a topic at some point,

but not today, if you're worried about that. But yeah, so Fimes begins a fabulous character arc from the gutter. Yeah, he's as good a springboard as any librarian. Yay. I'd like to say he can only rise, but that's not entirely true. There are sewers. Right, the librarian. The librarian is having a lovely snooze.

Yeah, is he explained in this book? We said we'd keep an eye out for that, and I didn't. OK, cool, cool. He is. The change was brought about by a magical incident. Always a possibility when so many books are kept together and you're considered to get off lightly, have got off lightly. So yeah, I'm pretty sure every time we hang out

with the librarian, he's explained. But we will keep watching for it. Yeah, it's nice. He's kind of inserted himself into this storyline. I'd forgotten. And how much he was in it. Yeah, especially in the second and third sections. And this one, he is the victim of our most horrible crime.

And we do worry about him. Yes, we do. We like the librarian. Oh, and he's in the bar as well, isn't he? Yes, he's in the bar. Yes, because someone almost uses the M... Oh yeah, that's part of why Carrots are resting the landlord because of the ape that's hanging around.

Yeah. But he manages to knock on a monkey. So we've got the elucidated brethren. What, the actual full title? Miscellaneous. Elucidated brethren, common miscellaneous. Yeah, they are. They really are the actual codes they've got.

The actual what? The actual... The significant owl hoots in the night, yet many great lords go sadly to the master's men. Oh yeah, yeah. Hooray, hooray, the spinster's sister or something. Yeah, to the Axeman, all supplicants of the same height. Which, fair.

So we've got brothers, doorkeeper, fingers, watchtower. I think there's a couple more, but I think they're the main named ones. Did you know some page 11 when Brother Fingers goes to the wrong door? He goes to the brethren of E. Yes, which we talked about the lost city of E last week, didn't we? So a little callback there. Whereas this gang of the elucidated brethren

of the Ebon Knight. Very important to know the difference. And yes, we've got the grandmaster, obviously, but I love some of the stuff he's doing with these characters. I just want to find... They are gorgeously mundane. They are. There's amazing stuff about mundanity and bloody-mindedness.

There's a whole thing about, are the people next door oppress me all night long? I need time to learn to play the tune. Yeah, it was very much help, help. I'm being oppressed. Come and see the subjugation of the masses. Because people do this. People act like they're being oppressed.

It's like the people who say, oh, you're taking away my free speech. And it's like, am I or am I just calling you a dick for saying something? Yes, you have the right to free speech, not speech without consequences. If you're being a dick, I'm going to call you a dick. It's an interesting illustration of... Kind of the wrongly directed anger towards an unequal system.

So he's got the idea that the fact X, Y is there to have so much more than the common person is a bad thing. But instead of being cross at the system, that's allowed that he wants to burn down a vegetable shop. Yeah, he's very angry at the producer. It's very popular stuff. It's fun. Probably run on that platform and get the next Prime Minister job.

Yeah, it's amazing the sheer power of mundanity. Who'd have thought that their weakness could be a greater force than strength, which is the Grand Master thinking about them. And the fact they're so easily manipulated. Oh, yeah, he does crab bucket very well, does Pratchett. He might have even been the one to coin that as the metaphor, the crab bucket metaphor, pulling people back in.

Yeah, it's much, much later. I think that's from Unseen Academicals. Yeah, yeah, possibly. But the concept is throughout the books, isn't it? I think it's something Pratchett noticed and got cross about in society. And it's done particularly well in this book. So we also meet Carrot.

Lance Constable Carrot currently. Lance Constable Carrot. I keep wanting, this is the other problem, is I don't really understand how ranks work and what orders they get, what do they go in. And obviously, some characters change ranks as the books go on. I keep wanting to refer to everyone by the wrong title. Yeah, Lance Constable Carrot we can do.

I'm pretty sure Nobby and Colon stay their same ranks throughout, Caught from Knob's Sergeant Colon. So we're safe there. Colon is Sergeant through and through. Absolutely. Because his name is Carrot, I always imagined he was ginger and never noticed the line, he's not called Carrot because of his hair.

It's because of his shape. Because he's very broad-shouldered. Do you not think he has red hair as well, Lance? Now I'm picturing him with dark hair because if I picture him with dark hair and that shape, then I can picture him as Henry Cavill, which means I can just picture Henry Cavill and I really like doing that.

I approve because he's from Jersey. But he is a beautifully moral character and that remains throughout, even if he starts picking up a bit of common sense by the end of the book. He's still very... He's still very... He's still very moral.

Yes, he cares. He wants to do a good job. He does. And he does a good job. He does a very good job for very... Not his fault, no one told him about it. There's a really nice little moment when, next character, when they're writing to Ankh-Morpork

to ask if Carrot can have a job in the watch. And this letter writing doesn't happen in the Dwarven Mines often. His sister had been sent down to the village to ask Mistress Garlic the witch how you stopped spelling recommendation. So, tiny little cameo from Maghram. Ah, little callback.

Little call forward to a future joke as well. I shall say no more. Mistress Garlic. You never hear her call that in the witch's books, but written down. But she is Maghram Garlic. That's a nice, excessive word. It is.

Mistress Garlic. But this is something this book does really nicely in general. Because we're at Book Eight of the series now, you can really see where he's built enough of a world that he's starting to really play in it. The first few books are very world-building and going back to the wizards and playing with them more and then world-building and world-building.

Like, we're introducing stuff. So much of the world is built, but he has a huge sandbox where he can think, oh, actually dwarves, so they're mining, so they're up in the mountains, which means they probably would be near, I can pull a witch in. And there's a couple of other little things like that.

I'll point out as we go along, because I really enjoy it. Now that it's becoming a bit of a thing. So yeah. You're right. I think he probably had a lot of fun with this. You can really feel the joy coming off the page in this one. This feels like it would have been a really satisfying

book to write. So Death is... The most recurring character of all. Yep, we still haven't had a book without him. I'm still looking out for it. That sounds like a general metaphor for death, doesn't it? Yeah. Like death or taxes.

The most recurring character. Death. But I like pointing out that we have a visit from the Grim Reaper. When does he come in? So page 38. He's there when someone gets flamed. Oh, of course. One of the thieves.

Yes. Oh, I wouldn't like to have thought I suffered. Very lovely little chat. Kuro. Okay, let's get on to one of the big ones then. That's sort of a tenari. A tenari, yes. I don't know why I'm trying to sping all of these.

Because we really hope to be hanging with these characters. So as we've said, we have met Vessenari before. We talked way back in Color of Magic that there was a patrician character, and it was a proto version of this. Obviously changed a lot. And when they did the TV version of Color of Magic, they based it more off this than the patrician described in the books. With me seeing Lord Vessenari, the patrician of Aikmur book,

who like said, we did meet in sorcery, but he spent most of the book as a lizard. He is talking to Van Pew, the head of the Thieves Guild, who Carrots attempted to arrest. And when the patrician is done with the conversation, he says, don't let me detain you, which is where we got our sign off for the episodes. I said, do not let me detain you, didn't he?

Or something like that. Like, it's slightly different from how we were. Yeah, it's more of a do not let me detain you. Yeah. But yeah, it's the thing. It's the thing we do. It's come up in the book that we're reading. It's the thing, it's the thing.

It's the thing. As I'm increasingly doubting, but if anyone is genuinely reading along with us instead of rereading, what a moment. This must have been so exciting. It's definitely a mild marker on your journey. Journey. All right, now I'm starting to hate it.

We're keeping the hang of it. Yes, turn it around. But yeah, veterinary is fucking incredible. Wonderfully, it's not nihilistic. It's misanthropy, possibly, but he doesn't hate it either. He just had a really fucking low opinion of people. Like his mind and how he rules is fascinating. I like the small threat thing

where he's talked about like forming the guilds and then sort of summons them and, oh, I know who you are, where you live, what kind of horse you ride. I know your wife has your hair done. I know you're lovely children. How old are they now? My doesn't time fly.

I know where they play. Don't forget what we agreed. And he is, he's fascinating. He's Machiavellian ruling. Do I mean Machiavellian? I always felt like, yeah. There's a great line about how, just the fact that he makes Aunt Maupork operate,

he makes the city function. He really hates mime artists. Now, this is interesting. I meant to write this down and I didn't. It feels like Aunt Maupork has this bit of history that's never explored, where everything was a lot more organized. Like just Carrot's law book seems to hint at this time

and it's almost like Aunt Maupork then went into the dark ages and is now coming out in Renaissance. I blame the wizards. Yeah, it'll be them, won't it? But I like the way the patrician, he's juggling all of these things to make everything work perfectly

by making everyone compete with each other rather than rising up against him. He disliked the word dictator. He never told anyone what to do. He didn't have to, because they sort of do it. And I like the fact that he's founded a lot of the groups that are seeking his overthrow.

Yeah, that was funny. Interesting. I love everything, obviously, about all of the Discworld books ever, but I really enjoy the guild system as a way to design a city that runs. And I'll talk about this when we get to the last episode on Guards, Guards,

but the fact that to have a character as intelligent as veterinary who makes everything work, the writer has to be that intelligent. Yes. And it's such an insight into how amazing Pratchett's brain was. And I'm very glad he never turned to evil.

Yeah, so we were talking about the other week, isn't it? Like, he was genuinely a genius. It's not just like, we like his books. It's the more you learn about him. It's like he was an extraordinary mind who wrote funny books.

Yep. And look, yeah. We're all very grateful. He never decided to become a supervillain. As far as we know, he didn't. Once. Once. The character, not the past tense.

Once with a wha. Squiggle, sec, PP. Talking about once, like the fact him and Vimes grew up in similar gangs in the shades. And once was the person who was always stood sort of near the gang leader, coming up with the clever ideas,

and that was his natural place in the order of things. As opposed to Vimes, he was just one of the sort of grunty yes men. It gives, it doesn't even quite give him a sympathetic background because that's not a character anyone wants to relate to even if they do.

No. But it does give him a source for the kind of anger he has. Yeah. Because the person who has always stood a bit near the leader coming up with things and being allowed to stay despite being pell and scrawny,

will always be a bit bitter and really want to have something to do with actual leadership. Yeah. And the person like Vimes, who's always been a middle ranking grunt who then becomes an adult and finds themselves still kind of in the gutter,

will again be bitter, but they'll want to be better rather than destroying something else if that makes sense. Yeah. Again, it's really nice character building in that it's just, it only takes a couple of lines

about what gangs they were in as children to really give you everything you need to know about that person. The night watch you've put down as its own character, so justify yourself. I wasn't really sure where to put this in, but I wanted to talk about the night watch

because where we're talking about the fact this is the beginning of a lot of arcs, the arc is centred around the night watch as a part of Anke Morpork's existence. And so I decided characters because it's not quite location because it shifts location by the end of the book. Yeah.

And it's more than just a talking point, it is very much a thing that then runs through the books. And at this point in this book, it's an organisation that's, it's thought of back in Dwarves and what people remember from Varnesh's grandfather's day

as quite a noble thing. They were heroes, but in now modern day Anke Morpork, it exists of whispered 12 o'clock and all as well. Very little done about actual crimes because the crime is dealt with by the Thieves Guild, the Assassin's Guild and the Palace Guard.

Yeah, and it looks like the day watch has gone entirely by this point. Yeah, the day watch kind of doesn't exist and that's something that gets a bit retconned in later books. Like there is a day watching it. Is it's own functional thing? Yeah. Look, you can't really look at...

But it's quite clearly retconned as in its existence isn't necessary for this point in time to be. Yeah. Only the night watch left. It is very much just this tiny scruffy thing and this idea of having to be nocturnal for work works very well for Colon and his wife

who communicate entirely through letter writing but they get it when the rest of the world is going to bed. They spend their whole time in damp dark streets in a world of shadows and it attracts the kind of people who are inclined to that kind of life. But it's interesting when you look at who the members of it are at this point,

that three of them is you have Vines who's pretty much resolutely put himself in the gutter, Colon who wants to be told what to do and doesn't want to see his wife and Nobby who has been disqualified from the human race for shoving. Also, I want to point out, we're talking about the movie references

that the Latin over the door says fabricati dm pvnc make my day punk but Colon says it says to protect and serve which I'm not going to start. Yeah, which is the American slogan which is now just ironic. And yes, let's not start on ACAB today. Let's get into that next week because I've yeah.

Yeah, I have I have got thoughts on it but I do also think that you can definitely separate what the Night Watch is in Antmoor Pork in the beginning of Guards Guards too. Yeah, I mean, if anything, it's a nice demonstration that completely defunding and the police allows you to rebuild it from the ground up. Yeah, Colon.

Colon, yeah, as I said, one of life's sergeants. He was a sort of man who if he took up a military career would automatically gravitate to the post of sergeant or would be a butcher or something otherwise. He's very big and very red faced right at the beginning or right in colour of magic. I talked about there was a big red faced watchman who I don't know if he was ever named

but he's very much a proto colon. Yeah. And he is this sort of and he's lovely. Like he's one of those characters who is a bit of a dick and thinks a certain way and that's it. But he's he's very likeable and you've just accept him for years and he's a joy to read. Yeah, yeah.

And he's never so set in his little bigger trees that they can't be easily dislodged. Yes. And he unlearns all of them very quickly as the book goes on. Yeah. He's like the nice version of the commoner that the weasel grubby hallucinated brethren. Like he's a he's still got the slightly small minded focus

but he's got just an inherently good heart behind it. So it never gets bitter like that. He's accepted what his place is within the society he's functioning in. Yeah. And he's gone with that. He's not bitter. Yeah.

He's he's opportunistic. But he's not bitter. And I really love when they put into plain clothes and knobs is sort of slash doublets and flog frogging and flared pantaloons. And I just realized is that actually he's a bit of a peacock and has this whole life outside of his work. I really enjoyed the description of Nobby's

behind the ash tray. Always docking. Elephant's graveyard. So yeah. So but Colin and the knobs as well. It's just a great double act. Yeah. It is.

Yeah. There's a pair of lazy opportunists with enough character difference to make them really play off each other well. And I'm glad they are core members of the watch. Right. So Lady Sibyl fucking Rampkin to give her her full title. Yeah.

Because Lady Sibyl fucking Rampkin is the fucking best. Yes. Look. Do you have any idea how much restraint I'm practicing by not making this entire episode about how much I fucking love Sibyl Rampkin who is the best? It must be a lot of restraint because you know I wouldn't actually argue.

Her very first line in a Discworld book is, ah, good man. Do you know anything about mating? I feel like a class traitor for loving her so much because she's very much a posh. She's a lady as in she is titled. She lives in this huge, very expensive house. But she's brilliant.

She never looks down on others. She looks for the best in all of them. She thinks an awful lot of money into charity. She loves her dragons. She's somewhere between the horsey people I've known and the dog people I've known. Yeah. And it's not naive, but there's kind of a humidity.

She knows she is very well off and has a certain position. Yeah. And rather than thinking that she is innately better than anybody else because of that, she knows it might make people uncomfortable. So she very much tries to put them at ease and find something nice to say. Yeah, yeah.

She's a born diplomat. And she's fiercely intelligent as well. She's not actually stupid enough to think that, I don't know, knobby is really the cream of humanity. No. But she's willing to find the good in him. And I think she's good enough to convince herself that this is the trait I should focus on.

She's, everything about her is fantastic. She is clever and she's funny. And she gets a really lovely story in this book and as the books go on. But I do want to talk about one of the descriptions of her prehistoric commend would have worshipped her and in fact had amazingly managed to carve lifelike statues of her thousands of years ago.

She had a massive chestnut hair, a wig because dragons. And I'm going to talk about this more as we go through the next two parts of the book. But the descriptions aren't always flattering of her. And as much as I love her character and I love how this book onwards, how she's written, she is written as a fat woman. And there are some jokes about how she's wealthy

but she's not really very attractive. And the book almost pokes fun at vimes for being attracted to her. Yeah. I feel like I might have just missed a couple but I feel like the descriptions of her size more in the vein of the one you liked, of the Duchess. And yeah, no, they're not all on flattering.

And I don't think it's unflattering to call someone fat but sometimes the book sniggers at it. And I said, I'll talk about that a lot more in the second and third book. There's a really great bit about it in Tansy Rainer Robert's book that I've quoted before, The Precious Women Essays. Oh, yeah. But I wanted to point out that description here

because it'll be a theme as it goes on. But also having just read Pyramids, which almost every female character who was sexualized in some way, it is nice to have a female character who's very front and center in the book where her appearance isn't put first. Yeah, it's very, very personality.

Yeah. Yeah. It's much more about her personality than her appearance but it's upsetting then that when it is her appearance it's with some sniggering. Yeah, I guess. Oh, very upsetting. But it's, you know, I don't get to see larger people

in the media getting to be heroes and brilliant very often, which is why as much as I was going to try and be very open-minded about the watch series that's happening, like the fact that Sybil is young and skinny is a bit frustrating. Just let there be a larger older woman on screen being badass because their fucking should be. Right, locations.

Should we talk about locations? Yeah. So obviously we're spending the entire book in Inkmore Book, uh-huh. Apart from a quick visit to Carrot's Family, mine. So on the Keeping an Eye on Is There Ever a Discord Book where we don't go to Inkmore Book, we're not there yet. Yeah.

I really like Vimes' drunk description of the city, the first one on the very first page. The city was a thing, woman, that's what it was, woman, roaring ancient centuries old strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love with her and then kicks you in a thingy, thingy in your mouth, tongue, tonsils, teeth. Yeah.

And Vimes genuinely does love this city in a not very healthy way. I think we get so much, like, you don't really have Inkmore Book and how it functions as a city until you get to the watchbooks. You have some vague idea of that there are guild systems and there is a patrician and there are wizards. Yeah.

But all the books we've had so far that have taken place in Inkmore Book mostly have been wizard books. I think the fact that Vimes like personifies Inkmore Book so much leaves him open to a lot of her. Yeah. From it, because you've got, at the end of the day, like, it's a fun mess for and Inkmore Book is almost a character, but you can't expect a city

to treat you as a human would. And I think he never quite grasps that. He always feels personally affronted when something goes wrong with the city. I think he does more in later books as he develops a relationship with somebody. I think it's better, but he never quite lets it go. No.

He doesn't let anything go. Let's say it's a couple of little location moments. There's a reference to the High Energy Magic Building at the university. It is just a little reference, but I think it's the first time that's been pointed out and we will be spending time in the High Energy Magic Building as we go on.

Yeah, that's just a fun little joke here as like a science parallel. Which is where the callbacks and call forwards in this one is you can really start, like I said, seeing him play and it's really fun. And then, yeah, obviously Carrot's Mine, which is up in the mountains, and I assume is somewhere near the Ramtops.

Also, shout out Mended Drum. We have a bit of a watch seeing whether it's the Mended or Broken Drum this week. It's the Mended Drum at the moment. They have a troll working there as a splatter called Detritus. Now I wonder if we'll see him again. I hope so, because I've now learned how to say Detritus

and stopped saying Detritus. How long did that take? I don't want to talk about it. Okay, cool, cool, cool. So little things. Talk to me about eye-watering words, because I'm assuming you got very into looking at eye-watering words.

One of the Supreme Grand Master is making his Minion Swerinos. He uses words such as Figan, Welchit, Mool, the dictionary of eye-watering words which includes things like Welchit, a type of waistcoat worn by certain clockmakers. Point is, it's fun to find words

that sound eye-watering, but actually mean something very mundane. Footnotes in general in this book are great, but I do really like that Figan gets translated as a nice Patreon, and then Figan's, then I'll keep featuring in the book. I tried to look it up, by the way, and it looks like Pratchett made it up.

But anyway, yeah, now we're in a secret society. I thought you could probably swear the oath to make you a proper member. Joanna, if you would please repeat after me. I solemnly swear that I shall not divulge the secrets of this order. I solemnly swear that I shall not divulge the secrets of this order.

Lest I be kicked in the results. Lest I be kicked in the results. And see my gozzard torn apart by wild dogs. And see my gozzard turn apart by wild dogs. My malkin burned on a ceremonial flame. My malkin burned on a ceremonial flame. And my skrog pruned with righteous secateurs. And my skrog pruned with righteous secateurs.

Excellent. Now, do you know the actual meaning of any of those? I know Russell's is a food one, and I don't know that because I'm a chef. I know it because of the episode of Blackadder series three with the actors, where they're plotting what to do about how they're going to kill the servant and eat him.

And they say servant results when our supper be. Ah, very good. Yeah, basically it's a little meat patty and pastry or breadcrumbs. Oh, sounds good. Gozzard is a goose herder. Yes. Which I pity the person with that job because geese are digs.

Yes. I may be basing that on the entitled goose game. I got bitten by a goose when I was a toddler, so. Swans are our souls as well. Fucking dickheads. How about malkin? This is possibly also related to your profession. Is this another food thing?

I don't know malkin. No, it is a knife. A mop. Bundle of rags fasten to the end of a stick, especially be cleaning out a baker's oven. I was about to say that's why I don't know it because I have people to do the mopping for me. But because of fellow and only one person in the kitchen at a time,

I now don't have people to do the mopping for me. Especially not mopping the oven. It's very rare I mop the oven. The end, do you know how one would go about pruning a skrog? No. How does one prune a skrog? Much like anything else. It is a stunted bush.

I thought that one sounded particularly eye-watering, skrog. It is eye-watering, but if the bush is stunted, why does it need pruning? Well, even stunted plants need pruning to encourage fresh growth. Well, I live in a flat. That sounds like a metaphor, but it's not. It's just horticultural advice. I need a horticulture, sorry.

And I'm now in a – what have I actually said in O4? Am I in a secret society with you now? Yes, I haven't decided what yet, but now I've got that on record. I can apply it to whatever society I decide to start. If our listeners at home could say the oath along as well, and then we're all in the same boat, that'd be great. Yeah, yeah.

We are, like, the whole point of having a podcast was to form a cult, wasn't it? Yeah, I think so. I think that was the end of the idea. Um, yeah, where are we? Stones with holes in. Oh, I'm sorry. Stones with holes in. Yes.

And now, I think this comes up again in the Tiffany Aking book. But I've been on the lookout for a nice stone with a hole in prages. In this book, it's talked about as kind of the vaguely magical items that are brought in to power the dragon summoning. And practically quite likes the idea of them, and I quite like the idea of them. Unfortunately, we live in flint and chalk country, and the stones have to have a knaffle hole in them,

which is pretty difficult to achieve with either of those. But they're known as hagstones or adder stones, most commonly. Yeah. And legend tells that an adder stone is the hardened saliva from a huge tangle of the snakes, which is a bit gross, but I still want one. And then I think they make, like, the holes with their tongues. I don't know.

These are pretty. I'm assuming a hagstone is something to do with witchcraft. Yeah, yeah. So some folklore says they're keys or gateways into the fairy realms, which seems a little unsafe with my memory of future books, says Newell. But oh, in Russia, Russia, the, the, the stones were inhabited by chicken guardians. Like their spirits called, should have given this one to you.

Korinibog. So they're placed in farm yards. I said, I'm going to start keeping an eye out for stones with holes in. Yeah. A final note was something that made me laugh while I was researching this was, one of those Google suggested searches was hagstones wholesale, which sounds very anguophone. It's your hagstones.

That's all I've got to say about stones with holes in. You'll be pleased to know. On page 46, in this sort of links to the formation of guilds and things, but there was a strange foreign word that had come into Angmar, pork lexicon in sewer ants. We've seen that before. We've got the legacy of two flowers prospered in the city and insurance is very in now. So yes, I enjoyed that little throwback.

I like when they think that when the watch are drunk and they've ended up in the shades and they're starting to think about praying and vines is wondering if there's a god of coppers saying there's a beggar's god and a horse god and a thief's god and an assassin's god, but there probably isn't a god who'd look kindly on hard press, fairly innocent law enforcement officers who are quite definitely about to die. Yeah, it's not very romantic, is it? No. And that's the point that practically it's because obviously there are gods for almost

everything. And as the books go on, there ends up being like a goddess of things stuck in drawers who is my favorite discord deity. So I was off low, but you're a very close second. I really love the whole nature of swamp dragons because I don't think they've even been mentioned in any of I know they have the swamp dragons have definitely been mentioned. Yeah, but not when we met when we met dragon dragons because we have met dragons before. We have, although they were at the Wernberg, they were imagine they were imaginary dragons,

which I can't do in this economy. You know how much imagination costs the rounds at the moment. Jesus. I love the names of the swamp dragons like Dewdrop, Maybelline, Talonthrust the first and Gahart, Talonthrust of Ankh. This is what I mean about it having the fun parallels to people being posh around horses. Horses have ridiculous ones like we say we had when I was a kid and my family had shares in a couple of horses.

We had like fantasy crusader who we all called George and fantasy believer who we all called Beaver because I was very young. I nicknamed him Beaver and didn't know that there were any dirty conversations. Beaver the horse. Yes, Beaver. George and Beaver, they were the two and El. Is it El? Ella was one who, because that was, I can't remember what name she ended up running over,

but it was very fucking Ponzi. But Ella was because the woman around the stables where she was born's favorite ballet dancer was Ella something. And this horse had very beautiful legs. She was a very, she was a beautiful, beautiful horse. She was lovely. Anyway, before I become a total fucking horsey wanker. The measurements are fun because like the measurements for horses are weird.

They're all hands and hands. Do you know what Matt Locke's meant to be the parallel obviously thumbs instead of hands because the dragons are so small, but I have no idea. I don't remember how they were measured. But then you've got the weird names for the ages as well. So you've got cobs, hens, dams, which again with horses, you've got like gilding, stallion, mare. There's so many different weird ones for like if it was born on a rainy Tuesday after the

third of August or yeah. Colts are very young male horses. A gilding is a male horse that's had its bits done. And then a stallion is obviously an older male horse, but there's also other stuff in between there. And for female horses, there is a lot more to it than just mares. Cool. If anyone listened, there's no more about this because I'm obviously talking at

completely out of my arse. Feel free to let us know. I'm a bit scared of horses. So I love horses. They're very big and easily panicked. So, you know, great combination with my flinchy personality. Yeah, there is a lot of height and weight and not a lot of brain controlling it. They are big, beautiful and really fucking dumb.

I always forget how big they are as well. Like when I come across a horse in a stable, I'm like, your head is as big as me. This is ridiculous. Stop saying you're so big. You don't really realise until you see them up close. Obviously, I'm saying everything with caviar. I'd get now that like horse racing is not great and animals shouldn't be used for sport, but it's like grew up with it when I was a kid.

And they are like, you get used to them really quickly if you're young. Yeah, I'm sure I am. Had a couple. But if you don't get used to them really quickly when you're young, then of course they're fucking terrifying because they are massive and really stupid. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway, Swamp Dragons are fucking great.

Yeah. Yeah, the nature of Swamp Dragons, the ridiculous names and how they breed and the fact that they are just chemical factories. Orbited by posh women. Yeah. Properly posh, not. Properly posh enough to look like they're in poverty. Yeah.

And insanely self-confident. Insanely self-confident. But in a sort of, but again, not in a dickish way. So onto the bigger stuff, talk about secret societies. Oh, I will. I have a lot about secret societies in fact. I figured you would. And so I saved myself a rabbit hole.

Yes. So secret societies are mocked in lots of types of media. Like what springs to mind to you as the real world example? I always think of like freemasonry type things. Yeah. And to a, it's not a secret society, but the kind of weird on one leg pan shaky, like the KKK definitely has some background in the same weird.

There's some vibes. And it's secret to the point where the, the identity of the members was. Yeah. The society itself isn't secret, but the nature of what's going on and who is doing it is a secretive thing. That's cool. Okay. So I'm going to take us back a few hundred years for Comstax.

Um, now I'm going to try and pronounce some German names. So my fear apologies to any German. Amazing. So Adam Weishaupt was born in 1748 in Bavaria. He's got a proper protagonist backstory. So he was orphaned as a young child and taken in by his rationalist godfather, Johann Adam Freyher von Eckstad. Let's call him Johann.

Johann. Even though Eckstad is a very fun word to say, he was a professor at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria. He was actually a colleague of Adam's father before father passed away. And young Adam in this new environment kind of devoured all the latest books on philosophy that were in his godfathers library. Um, do you know Christian Wolf? No, not personally.

It was basically. Yes, it was the Somerset Wolves. Basically he was the big dog in philosophical circles until. Wait, so you just said Christian Wolf was the big dog? Genuinely unintentional but very pleasing. Sorry. He was the bee's knees in philosophical circles. I can't think of any non-animal ones until Kant barged in

and did the whole. Fucking Kant. Fucking Kant. He was a real percent. Very rarely stable. But, uh, Wolf was very into like the practical applications of philosophy. So how one could take these concepts and use them to be a good person within the world we're in. Whereas high-minded Kant and the Enlightenment followed.

Oh no, we're in the Enlightenment now, aren't we? You know, all of this anyway was a bit shady in 18th century per barrier because it was hardcore, conservative, Catholic, which as we know isn't the best environment for free thinking. But despite all kind of this early education and philosophy, Adams seemed to follow a fairly outwardly conventional path. He went to the university's godfather workshop. He graduated at 20 with a doctorate of law and then became a professor of law and then got married. But in 1784, when Adam was 36, the Bavarian state got its hands on some writing.

They got the rulers super worked up. Turns out, Weishaupt was running a super complex, super seditious, super secret society called the Illuminati. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah, so turned out, he'd founded the Illuminati a little while back in 1776. When I say 1776, it's just very disco. Let's imagine everybody in flares, but he became a member of the Freemasons basically

and used his membership to recruit what he would call illuminated Freemasons at the time. And apparently, basically, he'd noted humanity's propensity for enjoying these shadowy organizations and making a game from it and just being weird about it and decided to use it for good. To quote, he wanted to promote freedom from all religious prejudices, cultivates the social virtues and animates them by great, feasible and speedy prospect of universal happiness, which sounds a bit naive, but at least well-intentioned. The hope being that if his members became prominent in society, so they became educators

or lawmakers later, they would take these kind of egalitarian teachings and change the world slightly for the better. Things sped up a little bit because Adam kind of snagged a former Freemason called Baron von Tnig. It was way better known and more socially in there already and more naturally inclined to this sort of thing, basically. So he introduced the things like code names and rituals and 13 levels of hierarchy and all of that kind of nonsense, but it worked because the Illuminati expanded to hundreds

and hundreds of members fairly quickly and took on the structure of operating in various cells that weren't known to each other and reporting to superiors whose identities were also secret, which is the structure used since in a lot of real and fictional secret societies. And this is kind of where it started. But anyway, wise help in the Baron fell out eventually. Baron left the Illuminati and around the same time, another ex-member basically narked on the society to the perfect Catholic government, adding in a few embellishments to make the

Illuminati seem more evil. Evil, the Illuminati was banned, many members arrested and wise help eventually had to flee the very own tally. But I mean, during the arrest, they got a load of documents, soft people were arresting. The most heinous crimes they managed to pin on them were pretty heinous by their standards, but I mean, I'll let you judge. They were the defense of atheism, a plan to create a female branch of the order, medical instructions for abortions, you know, pretty much what we'd have in a secret

of that. If we were forced to operate under Catholic rule, pretty much exactly how you guessed membership then became punishable by death. Right. Like conspiracy theories now about the Illuminati. Yeah, exactly. Yes, that's the weird thing. So the Illuminati, I don't think I even knew it actually existed.

But at the end of the day, it lasted like eight years. I knew it existed because the Illuminati was a big part of those really bad down brown books that everyone was obsessed with, like the Da Vinci Code and stuff. Yeah, so I never read those. I kind of assumed you'd taken them. I'm jealous of you. I'm very jealous of you. In this time in my life, I'll never get back.

But so I looked it up then to see how much of it was based in reality and the Illuminati was. Because a lot of people thought like the Da Vinci Code was legit and formed actual conspiracy theories around it. Yeah, that was a problem. But because of some of the embellishments people gave the story of the Illuminati at the time, it just really sunk into culture and kind of rooted in all these conspiracy theories. I mean, a bit like the Templars, except they were just nowhere as important as the Templars have been.

So I had, as it's quite funny, the conspiracy theories about secret societies pulling leaves of government in the shadows are quite so perpetuating. Because in reality, organizations pulling leaves of government do so pretty openly, like lobbying and other forms of legal bribery. Let's just look at the finance in the Brexit campaign and then cry. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just not as fun to write bestselling novels about. But yeah. Yeah.

So heroic tropes. Trope me up. I don't have loads for the first section. This is something I want to keep looking at as we work through the book. Ongoing talking point. Ongoing talking point. It's fun at each book what it parodies in this book. By the time we were at the third point, it's parodying Clint Eastwood movies,

police procedurals, and these big hero stories. The big hero tropes are the one I look at. And it starts with a dedication. He's sort of saying, you know, the palace guard or the city guard. Their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is around chapter three or 10 minutes into the film to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time and be slaughtered. And no one ever asked them if they wanted to. And the book is dedicated to them.

But it's this lovely idea of, you know, we are summoning a dragon so a king can slay it and we will have a king and we will have chivalry. And stories go a certain way. And it's the same thing like with weird sisters. This is the way the story is supposed to go. And therefore this is how it's going to happen. Yeah. And the book really plays with that.

And it does it really nicely in this, like starting with that dedication, but looking at it as it goes through. Anyway, yeah, dragons, slaying dragons being heroic. That's more of a brief mention of the palace guard dedication and what it means to be a hero. And we'll keep looking at that as we go through the book. Cool. Now you've, sorry, cryptically written down things were better when dot dot dot.

Well, this is another one of the fun running themes through the book. And this is the hallucinated brethren's motivation is, yeah, if we've got kings, then we'll have chivalry and they'll make sure everything's better. Things were better when we had kings. Children didn't talk back to you and knew their P's and Q's. And there is this fucking blurring nostalgia. And it exists in life, it exists in the, in the UK. Obviously we do have royalty still, but you know, people always look back and think,

well, things were better when we, I don't know. Astalgia for a time that never was. Yeah. Things were better when we didn't have all this LGBTQIA nonsense. It's like, well, no, no, things might have been easier for you, but it was definitely horrific for people who were getting chemically castrated. I think you can tell there's something inherently wrong with the British attitude that we seem to fetishize blitz spirit like that's a time we want to go back to when

people were being bombed in their homes. People sheltering in the underground is the biggest example of that. The underground was never meant to be used as a bomb shelter. And in fact, people were locked out of the underground during early air raids, because that's not what it was for. And they were supposed to be purpose built shelters, but those shelters never got built. So eventually people broke the locks on the underground. So they had somewhere to go.

And then photographs were taken and it was used to promote the blitz spirit. Yeah. Is that my, my friend's grandma lived through the blitz in London as a young teenager. And yeah. Happy to do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. She's like, I mean, yes, we carried on with things because you had to, because you needed to eat.

But everybody was terribly scared all the time. We weren't just stoicism. Yeah, it's so weird. And it's a propaganda. It's a propaganda nostalgia. Oh, propaganda. Sorry. Yeah.

Not proper. Gandic propaganda. Like, I think I just made that word up. I'm going with it. We're keeping it. I like Gandic, which is like a gander, like a goose gander. Yeah. So it's a lot like geese.

And that is an asshole. But the chivalry one makes me laugh because chivalry comes up a lot when people are talking about feminists. Oh, you don't want men to be chivalrous for you then. You don't want them to open doors. It's like me. I want people to open doors for me and pull out chairs for me. It doesn't have to be men.

I like not having to open doors. I like sitting down. Nothing to do with feminism. Oh, but you don't, you can't do that for women anymore. She'll get offended. It's like, will she or she get offended when you put your hand on her waist to guide her through the door or, you know, when you sexually harass her? Oh, but the reason I pointed this out is because it's a thing that continues on from

the last book, Pyramids. Pyramids was all about keeping in this particular time because this is when things are best and we don't want things to change or move on. And you can see where sort of project started with an idea there and he's brought it through to this book and gone, well, things have moved on. But what happens to the people who are so determined to go back to the past? In the Supreme Grand Master's case, it's kind of hard to see his motivation. Does he want, he doesn't want to go back to kings because he thinks chivalry and stuff

will be better. He's looking for power for himself and sees this as the way. Yeah, it's never explained in depth how he intends to change society, just that he would do a better job. Yeah, it's that he wants power for power's sake thing as opposed to wanting power because he thinks he can make things better, which is always an interesting villain motivation. Yeah, and it kind of went along with the easy dismissal of the fact that Malachite had written the original summoning book had clearly come to a charlotte end.

Yes, because it didn't fit in with his narrative, so he sort of ignored it. And he's obviously all about the narrative because he's looking to summon a dragon and then have it face a hero. Yeah, and he knows how to exploit the nature of narrative. Yes, which is I think whenever these books does a parody thing of like the witches and the witch stories and fairy tales and then the heroes and stuff, there are characters who look to exploit that narrative power and it's always very fun. Yeah.

Anyway, speaking of narrative dwarves. Yeah, what? Well, dwarves are in stories. True. I don't like my polite baffleman to stop you. I love Discworld Dwarves specifically, and this is the first book we've really hung out with the dwarves beyond Mild. There was some stuff in Color of Magic and Life Fantastic, but it kind of gets, again,

reckoned massively. Those books are just guidelines and not much more. And they're not, apart from appearance-wise, they're not particularly tropey or particularly parody of tropey. There are bits of it. Yeah. They're mining. There's obviously elements of the Tolkien-y dwarf there.

Yeah, everyone has a beard. Yeah, I feel like the dwarf thing has faded out of pop culture a bit more than the elf thing has. Yeah, I think partly because it's difficult not to be offensive. Yeah. Like, outside of Tolkien-y stuff, it's still there in some fancy stuff. And like, actually, the Dragon Age games I was talking about have dwarf characters and a whole dwarf society based around mining, and it's very well written. But I do love the dwarves here.

You've got the whole... It doesn't really stick to it in this, but it will become much more of a thing where dwarves are all him because they're all short and beardy and wear lots of clothes, and gender is more or less optional. I'm very there for gender being more or less optional because... Absolutely. Gender. But then immediately refers to Carrot's adopted mother as mother and her...

Yeah, I did notice that. But it could just be, you know, gender is optional, but these particular characters have chosen to have genders. Yeah. Or will refer to them like this for your ease of consumption. The translation stuff is really fun. Like, the whole idea of Carrot's father being the king, but it really translates more as mind supervisor.

Yeah, every mind has a king. Yeah, that's a nice thing. And they don't... Like, metaphors don't really work because if you're working in a mine, you have to be very literal-minded. Yeah. Just a lovely thing of Vanessa saying, Oh, and Bob's your uncle.

And after a long thought, even she says, Well, surely beyond strong in the arm is my uncle. Yeah. And Carrot tries to do metaphors and doesn't do very well. Bless his cottons. But so he sort of explains something and then says, And beyond strong in the arms, your uncle. This all kind of comes into why I love Carrot because he's very...

He is clever and you get to see more of his intelligence in the later books, but he's very simple from this woven upbringing and this lack of metaphors. Yes. Uncomplicated is the word you've used to avoid simple, I think. Yeah. But when you get to Carrot shouting at people in the dwarf bar, you've got these translation moments that are really fun. That's your favourite.

Well, there's... What I like is that Pratchett translates it and then does a literal translation. Listen sunshine and then in brackets, literally the stare of the great hot eye in the sky, whose fiery gaze penetrates the mouth of the cavern. And there's another one where it's... Okay, literally translates as all correctly beamed and propped. And then like, good day, good day.

What is all of this that's going on here in this place? Which is the sort of Velo Lo, what's all this then? So he manages to do the police jokes and stuff. But the translation stuff and the king things is fun because there aren't necessarily direct translations between languages. And what we learn when we learn language is a direct translation isn't. And I saw a great example of this recently on Reddit and it was on one of the foodie subreddits.

And it was an argument about Pam as in PAIN, the French word for bread. Oh, sure. Yeah. But I'm in a subreddit called breadit for people making bread and someone posted a brioche and then everyone's going saying, well, that's not bread. And he said, the French don't treat it as bread. The French call it cake, not bread. So you can't post it in here because this is a bread subreddit,

not a cake subreddit. And basically, pa refers to a subsector of baked goods in French. The same way bread refers to a subsector of baked goods in English. And it's not quite the same subsector. They just overlap enough that it's the best translation. But brioche apparently does not fall in that subsector in French where it does in English. But people have to be asked about it because Reddit.

Yeah. But panochoccal and panorazan do fall in that subsector whereas they definitely don't in English. So it's like there are these things that overlap but there are bits sticking out either edges and brioche is on the wrong side of those bits. Poor brioche. Poor brioche.

I feel bad for brioche. I'm going to have to make some brioche to make it feel better. But brioche is a cake, not a bread. And it was literally just a misunderstanding of how French translation works that led to a French person kicking off in a bread subreddit about a picture of brioche. Hey, fucking cats.

Oh, mate, don't. I'm sort of stupid. I bet there's a lot of stuff to make one angry if one is a French bread enthusiast on Reddit. It's not quite as good as Italian's angry at food or the guy I saw today who posted a picture of some Detroit-style pizzas he'd made in our food and like one person, one...

Lots of... Most people in the comments were really nice and said they look great. And by the way, I didn't... What's a Detroit-style pizza? It involves baking a big flat base almost like a focaccia and the whole thing is covered in cheese and sauce and the cheese goes down around the edges

and it gets crispy. I haven't tried... I haven't tried... They're very in at the moment. They're really fashionable. I haven't tried making one yet. Fashion pizza. Well, that sounds pretty good.

It does. But the edges of one were burnt because his customer had asked for it and it said pros like chef because you have to say if you're a pro when you're posting an outfit. And almost everyone was really nice about it and like one person was like,

oh, that's a little burnt for me and the guy lost it. The chef. Like, yeah, the chef like lost it. And then he posted the same pizza in the pizza subreddit and the shitty food porn subreddit saying like, our food said this was burnt. What do you guys think?

Like, I don't feel welcome in our food now and it's like, dude, like... But people in those reddits were like, oh, yeah, no, people in our food are nob. Sorry, mate. Pizza looks great. If your customer asked for a hard shot, brilliant. And like this guy was responding to every comment being...

And then eventually so many shitty food porn was like, dude, I saw you're posting our food. No one was a dick to you. Why are you throwing your toys at the crowd? That's it. Like, if you go into one of the more chill food subreddits saying something like that, you can... Everyone is going to go live for the post.

Yeah, you can imagine people having piled on to him if he'd caught it at the wrong time of day. So you'd be some pathetic, but if you then click through to look at the drama as you would, you've got one person, not quite 100% agreeing with you, that counts as a win. There was something massively wrong with this dude, but it was hilarious. So that was my...

I'm trying to find that. Was that today? I'll link you to one of the posts. Cheers. Awesome. So yeah, so dwarf and culture. Oh, yeah. Pizza, Detroit won't go backwards.

Bread. Translations. So I enjoy the difference between a translation and a literal translation because you get those massive differences, like the difference between sunshine and poor brioche gets left out. But it's like the idea of a dwarf bar.

Which is this combination of an idea of running away from tradition, because dwarves in the mines that traditionally wouldn't drink and would be quite sedative come to these bars and they're giving themselves stupid names and cover themselves. But it's running away from tradition and towards caricature. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the dwarven culture that gets expanded upon

is kind of tied up in this, the watch story arc anyways. So we'll often revisit dwarves at the same time we revisit the city watch and that's quite cool. And it's interesting because you get these parallels of, you know, what is cultural dwarfism and then what is being genetically a dwarf. Yeah. There's some, you know, probably some interesting

around world parallels with Jewishness and I need to learn more about antisemitism. Yeah, yeah. So dragon physics. Is this about like it shouldn't be able to fly? Yeah, yeah. I like this for a couple of reasons. So this is on the same page actually is your favorite quote.

But it's when Vime spends a little bit of time being annoyed about the impossibility of the bloody flying alligator setting fires with city. But this is for a couple of reasons. And first of all, it's kind of a nice illustration of Vines' inherent state of conerd. Of like, he's a few steps below sober. Because Pratchett puts it in this bit.

Part of him was marvelling at the sheer beauty of the site but an insistent weasley little group of brain cells from the wrong side of the synapses was scrolling its graffiti on the walls of wonderment. And like that's his brain cutting through the comfortable blurring of reality. But Sibyl is standing next to him demonstrating by going, ooh, dragon.

But Vimes is like, well, this doesn't fucking work. Look, what? But anyway, second, I like rabbit hole that's let me down because unsurprisingly, quite a lot better. He's on dragon physics. Nerd's gonna nerd. I love nerds. Most of them are on how stupid it is

and like how the Game of Thrones dragons can't fly and how they're... It's all to do with like the size and wingspan ratio. Yeah, yeah, basically. It's the same reason like humans couldn't fly because the... We're too heavy. We need very big wings. Yeah.

But I enjoyed one of the less skeptical ones by Nat Trollish on Medium. I'll put a link. The author kind of had a play around with the idea of like the intense dragon heat changing the air density and like looked at some of the pterosaurs that reached 11 meter wingspan, which is, you know, not Game of Thrones,

throne size, but pretty bloody big. That's pretty fucking big. Yeah. I mean, if you consider a wandering albatross, which is the biggest flying thing now, it's about three and a half meters. Yeah. So if you imagine almost three albatrosses.

Yeah. Albatroy. Albatrisis. Albatropods. There's no cheeses for us. Albatrisis. Oh, God. I mean, obviously the point is that practice dragon is like

clearly a massive lump of lizard that couldn't fly. Like there's no... Like that's the point. There's no... Oh, maybe it's flying on the air thermals. It's created and it's not a... It's not a svelte pterosaur. It is a big, bloody lump of lizard.

Yeah. But it's still a fun thing to read about. And there was an infographic showing the size of different graph dragons and chascales. That's actual flying things. And yeah, I enjoyed it. It's... I've definitely seen infographics about like the Tolkien dragons before

and how much they don't work and how small is actually one of the smallest dragons in that universe, which I just forgot the name of. Midler. Midler. Jesus. How did I forget that? Oh, this is a cool thing.

You asked me this earlier when I extend this question out to our listeners. If you could live in any fantasy world, listeners, what fantasy world would you live in? And you can't say discworld. Discworld is an okay answer, but you then have to specify another one because otherwise it's very boring.

Yeah. Because otherwise, I assume you're all going to just respond with discworld. We know you want to live in discworld, but apart from discworld, and I thought this because the only one I could think of where I wouldn't definitely end up a downtrodden peasant would be living in the Shire. Oh, it's scouring.

When Frodo's defunded the police. That's it. It's like if you get to pick your station in life, then the choice expands a bit, but wouldn't that be... Being a witted noble in Robin Hobb's books are after the witted people stop getting genocided. Well, like I said, I think I'd want to live in Traders Bay,

but I'd keep a lover in Buckkeep, but I'd visit possibly once a year. A witted lover. How much time have you spent on votes? I've spent enough time to know I don't get seasick. Okay, you're fine then, yeah, go for it. Yeah, I quite like sailing. Anyway, sorry.

Oh, sorry. Obscure reference for Neil Frontier. Oh, it's me again, yes. Yeah, Obscure reference for Neil is what page did I say it was on? Page 19. 99. Talking about the dragons,

talking about Errol specifically, or Good Boy. Yes, he's not been named yet. Yes, what's his breeding name? Good Boy, Bindle, Featherstone of Querm. Yes, and Sibyl, well-describing him, said, one just has to put up with the occasional total whittle. But it's rather a clever joke, Joanna. Is it?

Actually, yeah. Actually. Because... Clever joke in a discworld book. You did. What will they think of next? The inventor of the turbojet engine was a Mr. Frank Whittle.

And Errol's flying is powered by a jet mechanism that he burns the fuel and puts the energy out one end. And, you know, this is really good engineer speak here, thanks. Could have written down some of these words. Couldn't you pass me twat? I was about to apologise. All I've got is whittle jet. He's so professional.

Yeah, so that's my skill reference. So I think that's everything. So we'll be back next week to talk about Guards, Guards, Part Two. Guards, Guards. We'll be going from... Can we actually get to Yell it in the book? Is the name of the thing in the thing in second? Or are we waiting for the first?

I think it's in the first. So we're going from in the Corby paperback, page 107, to page 207, exactly 100 pages. There are asterisks between the beginning and end of these sentences. Sentences to actions. 200, do you say? There you go. 107 to 207.

So, yeah. So Part Two starts with the elucidated brethren were nervous, a kind of fear crackled from brother to brother, and ends with someone had eaten into that too. All that was left was a few shards of glass. And then a few... But we'll find out. We'll find out next week.

In the meantime, you can follow us on Instagram at the True Show Mickey Frat. You can follow us on Twitter at Mickey Frat Pod. Join in the Civil Fan Club. Join the Civil Fan Club. Join us in voting on the Pratchett World Cup. You can find us on Facebook at the True Show Mickey Frat. You can email us your thoughts, queries, castles and snacks.

And Albatross is the True Show Mickey Frat Pod at gmail.com. Actually, no, Albatross is because I already got one, and this necklace is like super heavy. Please let us know what fancy world you'd like to live in. In the meantime, dear listener, don't let us detain you. Every time I listen back to our podcast, I want to shout nerds at us so badly.