I Thought That Making The Cats Powerpoint (tm) Would Free Me From My Anguish To Focus On, Idk, Usual

i thought that making the cats powerpoint (tm) would free me from my anguish to focus on, idk, usual stuff again. instead it has apparently freed a part of my brain that needs Something to Be Unhinged About and which has therefore flung itself back into tamora pierce's novels. for the first time in years it has occurred to me that i could, theoretically, write emelan fanfiction if i wanted to. like. i could just do that. i might start making a powerpoint about why keladry of mindelan is best character of all time. it is sunny out and i am going to take my kindle to the park and reread terrier.

Every time Terry Pratchett makes me laugh, I always hope he can hear me from whatever afterlife he inhabits

Night Watch is one of Sir Terry’s most hopeless novels - and, by the same token, because of the same things, one of his most hopeful.

It’s a parody - and I use that word very loosely, because there’s really nothing funny about it - of Les Miserables. It’s about a failed revolution, and a barricade, and the people who fought and died there for nothing. Nothing changes. Politics with a capital P goes on, and even the most pure and noble of intentions only becomes food for the pit of snakes who pull the strings. The powerful remain powerful, the powerless, despite their solidarity, their desperation, their violence, their hope, remain powerless. Their little lives don’t count at all. Things continue exactly as they always have, minus a few faces in the crowd.

It is also, I think, where we see Sam Vimes at his lowest. Sure, Thud! does similar things in stripping him down, but that is under an outside influence, and he has his family to think of. He has something to fight for.

In Night Watch, though, all of that is taken away. Sam Vimes, eternal cynic, for once has Cassandraic knowledge that his cynicism is absolutely founded. He knows how this will end, and there’s no Corporal Carrot to make the world magically better around him, no Sybil and Young Sam to push through for, no city to protect. The absolute best that he can expect is to succeed, and lose that family, that future, forever. The absolute worst? He dies. Everyone he cares about here dies. And it’s all in vain.

Sam Vimes is an alcoholic. It’s something that we tend to bring up when we’re talking about how amazing he is, how much he’s overcome, but gloss over otherwise. Which is a little sad, because it’s fundamental.

Sam Vimes faced this exact dragon, years ago. Sam Vimes saw there was no way to slay it. He saw the ants eating at the heart of every hope, every effort. He saw the first man he really knew as a good and kind and just - but never passive, never weak - man die, horribly, slain for no reason but petty grudge and Politics. He saw John Keel’s garden wither and die in its bed. He saw the hope of a better, brighter Ankh-Morpork squelched, and the sacrifice of a good man wasted. He saw the world, in all of its rotting, miserable, pestilent despair, spoiling every good thing that dared show its face, its only ordering principle the slow decay of entropy.

Young Sam Vimes had no anchor. Young Sam Vimes had nothing left to turn to but the bottom of a bottle and the smelliest part of an Ankh-Morpork gutter.

Sam Vimes, as of the events of Night Watch, is back there. Not only physically temporally displaced. He has nothing. There is no reason for him to stand up, to take on the role of John Keel, to take responsibility for the barricade, to try to bring Carcer back to justice. To fight the doomed fight. There is nothing between him and finding a quiet seat at the Broken Drum, ordering himself a pint, and giving up. There is nothing between him and despair.

But he gets up anyway. He intervenes anyway. He tries to help anyway, even when he can’t believe it will make any difference. And it doesn’t, in the end.

Except that people lived who, save for the actions of John Keel, would have died. Except it quite literally meant the world to them.

And that’s where the hope is hiding, in this hopeless, bleak, despair of a book. There is no glory. There is no revolution. There is no good thing that cannot be corrupted. There is no point. Except.

The Disc turns on the ‘except’. Always has. Always will.

Hey, everybody! I have a new book out today! It’s a fantasy novella called THORNHEDGE and you can pick it up wherever you get your books!*

It is very sweet and only has a few dead bodies in it and the heroine is a very anxious little were-toad.

This has been your shameless promotion for the day and I will now go back to reposting memes and interesting bug photos.

*unless, like, you only read books that are dropped in your lap by crows or slipped under your pillow by ragged claw-like hands in the night. I don’t have a distribution contract with those guys.

When the Russian Mafia Learned Not to Mess With Artemis Fowl II

I've been an Artemis Fowl girl (not the movie) for a long time, and while I think the first book in the series is literally a perfect first book, it's not my favorite in the series. That honor goes to book two, Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. And I think that the key points that really make this my favorite book are the shift from brilliantly executed archetypes to genuine characters, the fact that a 12-year-old absolutely OWNS the mafia, and the expansion of the worldbuilding in Haven and the Lower Elements generally. Oh also, this is where we get Opal Koboi for the first time. *Screes in best villainess ever* Let's Talk Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident.

There will be light spoilers below the break, as is pretty standard for all books second and later on this blog, so be warned.

First of all, in the first Artemis Fowl book, the characters are--with the exception of Artemis and Holly--largely archetypal. That falls apart here, because the story isn't trying to be a fairy tale or a heist so much as it is Opal Koboi and Briar Cudegon trying to start a war that Artemis has to stop in order to get fairy help to rescue his father from captivity by the Russian Mafia. Book 1 Butler is your standard bodyguard with a heart of gold, Commander Root is a standard grouchy police chief, and Trouble Kelp is basically ye olde marine. Briar Cudgeon is power hungry, and that's about it.

By book 2, Bulter is getting more personality and a low-key understanding with Holly and Root because they're all "old soldiers" in his book. Root gets to actually have some personality and is a damn good field commander--can we just take a sec to appreciate how much he cares (gruffness notwithstanding) about Holly and the fact that he super did not care that the sealed acorn was blasphemy because it worked!? He becomes more than just a hardass vaguely sexist archetype, and I have SUCH a soft spot for Julius Root. We also get some more of Trouble and Grub Kelp. Briar Cudgeon stays pretty simple, but that's fine because we have Opal goddamn Koboi for a more complex and also very classical villainess--she is LOVING being evil and frankly she is never not a joy to watch. Opal knows how to lean in to sheer joyous villainy.

I'm also just a fan of Artemis actually running into the real world with his planning. Our boy can absolutely sketch out an on-paper plan that is brilliant, but then you get things like gaps in train tracks, fairy politics, dwarf reflexology, and humans reacting in weirdass ways and suddenly Artemis has to get his hands a bit dirty and he has to improvise. Our boy grows and STILL hands the Russian Mafia its collective ass on a radioactive submarine hatch. Artemis Fowl's character growth in this book is great.

Book 1 was very limited to Fowl Manor and its grounds. We got a bit of Haven and the Lower Elements in book 1, but book 2 is mostly in the Lower Elements and Russia, and the expansion of what Haven is like, what shuttleports are like, what Koboi Labs is like, what Howler's Peak is like, is incredible. We get more fairy lore, fairy life, and more LEP. This keeps expanding in later books, but this is our first really close look at the world beyond what was strictly necessary for the kidnapping and rescue plot of the first book, and that's very fun.

I know I've already mentioned Opal Koboi and her gleefully unhinged joy at her seemingly imminent rise to Empress, but honestly I love her to little tiny peices. She is too samrt for her own good, she girlbossed her own father into literally insanity, and her college-era feud with Foaly is just peak "the smartest kids in class have extremely different skillsets and they hate each other for it". Opal starts off very evil kitten, but kitty has claws and she's just waiting for a chance to unsheath them.

The Artemis Fowl series is improbably good, and I cannot recommend it enough. Especially this fozen, slightly radioactive entry in the series that is very much my favorite book.

I need to take a moment to address something absolutely incredible in Tamora Pierce’s Briar’s Book/The Healing in the Vine from her Circle of Magic Quartet.

While Pierce, as a rule, doesn’t back away from some of the gross thoughts humans have, I think she was incredible during the scene where Flick’s fever is growing worse and worse and Briar - for the briefest of moments - just wishes she would die already.

We don’t see a lot of caretaking in fantasy - sure, there are healers and such, but nothing remotely long term. In this situation Briar is in a forced quarantine because his friend was patient zero in an epidemic, and he’s healthy enough to continue caring for her and the other individuals who were initially diagnosed. And he HATES it. He likes Flick, but being stuck there taking care of her grates on him. Even when the disease reaches full outbreak in the city, he’s still not allowed to go home because the blue pox hasn’t reached the temple city yet. So he’s stuck. And tired. And at one point he thinks that her dying is preferable because then he’d at least get to sleep.

And then he hates himself for it.

I just… I think this is so real, and I love that Pierce let’s him sit with this intrusive and uncharitable thought. And even when he chastises himself and knows it’s not totally true, he also knows that it partly is.