Sam Vimes - Tumblr Posts
There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called "The People." Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness, And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.
-- Night Watch
You should be nicer about Sam
Dragon babysitter
I like to imagine that Sam Vimes, instead of dying properly, instead got minor godhood. All watchmen at some point thank him for his actions, his actions a ripple across the Disc. There's precedent in the Duchess of Borogravia, and in his arc. He keeps getting promotions, and hates each one. What higher status could he be unwillingly raised to than divinity, eternally watching the watchman?
Anyways, that's just a headcanon i've got
Vote yes or face the consequences
the consequences are being WRONG
#this is possibly my fav theory abt discworld ive ever seen and it made me an lil emotional
Glad ya liked it!
I like to imagine that Sam Vimes, instead of dying properly, instead got minor godhood. All watchmen at some point thank him for his actions, his actions a ripple across the Disc. There's precedent in the Duchess of Borogravia, and in his arc. He keeps getting promotions, and hates each one. What higher status could he be unwillingly raised to than divinity, eternally watching the watchman?
Anyways, that's just a headcanon i've got
Thank you, thank you, and thank you again for this beautiful work!
Everyone, come praise this!
I like to imagine that Sam Vimes, instead of dying properly, instead got minor godhood. All watchmen at some point thank him for his actions, his actions a ripple across the Disc. There's precedent in the Duchess of Borogravia, and in his arc. He keeps getting promotions, and hates each one. What higher status could he be unwillingly raised to than divinity, eternally watching the watchman?
Anyways, that's just a headcanon i've got
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. [...] The thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms
hi pls read guards! guards! by terry pratchett
happy glorious 25th of may
y'know having read them multiple times i don't understand why people say that Night Watch is the darkest City Watch book when Thud! is right there.
like, Night Watch is pretty grim when you focus on the inevitability of it, but throughout the book the whole like... THING of it is "being told something is inevitable, and fighting it anyway." it's a story about hope and inspiring it in others even when you're not sure you're going to make it through either way. right up until the final melee with Carcer, Vimes does what he can to forestall the inevitable, and for most of the book, he *wins.*
Thud! on the other hand is about fighting against the weight of deep ancient grudges, and the outcome of it SEEMS inevitable. Koom Valley Will Happen Again, and throughout the book there seems no way to stop it. the resolution comes right at the very end, although the book 100% earns the reveal. but it's one man and a small team fighting against bigotry and hatred and figureheads stoking war.
that's not even TOUCHING on the actual Events in the book, which include a hit squad armed with flamethrowers very nearly torching Sam Vimes' infant son to fucking death. then there's the whole thing with the Summoning Dark which keeps trying to push Vimes' rage to the point of murder, there's the part where it *succeeds* and drives him into an unstoppable berserker rage, there's people dying slowly in dark tunnels, and the Vurms which feasting on putrefied corpses.
it's also the first time we've seen Vimes in an actual Murderous rage. every time beforehand he's been angry but it's been "oh i'm gonna arrest the SHIT out of you. i might put the boot in for good measure but you're coming with ME, sunshine." but no, this time he's literally chasing down a hitman screaming "i'll kill you" over and over again.
Thud! is a properly dark book. and yet despite it's unrelenting horribleness... Love Still Wins. Love for your fellow "man." Love wins in all Pterry's books, you can tell, it shines off the page when you read them just how much that man loved humanity, warts 'n' all, but in this one it feels like it's the most optimistic ending. it's the one that goes "in spite of it all, the bigots and warmongers and the narrow minded Will Lose, because there are always people willing to go to the ends of the earth for Love, Love of one another."
i think that's why it's my favourite book in the series.
Vimes and 71 hour Ahmed just really have.... something in jingo. The conversations he has with Ahmed where they're comparing their approaches to policing and Ahmed points out that vimes experience in the city is very different from his own.... the way they both struggle with the scope of what they can do vs what Ahmed calls being part of a big crime..... the way vimes's conversation with Ahmed changes him/reveals himself to himself, his dream that he can chase the big crimes and do something about the bigger more systemic crimes.... I don't think vimes really has a relationship like his one with Ahmed elsewhere in the series. Ahmed is his peer and an established officer on his own right. It's just interesting
my BRAAHND!
was talking to another author friend who said that I really should focus my blog on my brand more and less reblogging cat videos. but like... she doesn't have any experience with Tumblr. She's only been on FB, Insta, and Twitter. I feel like the social media platform's demographic is sufficiently different that reblogging things I enjoy with occasional bursts of "hey, read my thing!" works better? after all, people on Tumblr aren't going to care much about me ranking my OCs on their fuckability unless they _know_ my OCs.
speaking of knowing my OCs.
I reached 1000 views on Tapas! Check out Soulless Prince.
One reader told me Reed reminded them of Sam Vimes from the Diskworld series. :D
I'm still not over that.
when i find myself in times of trouble
terry pratchett comes to me
whispering sam vimes once arrested a motherfucking dragon
you are capable of literally anything
I’ve started rereading Guards! Guards!, and you know that funny feeling, when you watch Star Wars Episode I or reread first Harry Potter, and it’s kind of painful to see all this innocence and almost happiness when you know what crap will happen? Well, it’s like this, but in opposite direction: it’s weird to read about Vimes in that state and I constantly want to give him a blanket and tell, that everything’ll be alright, but I read that part, when he speaks not even with Vetinari himself, but with his secretary, and feels uneasy and kinda afraid of him, and then I think about that peculiar understanding Vetinari and Vimes will reach and their almost-equality, and it makes me happy in advance.
Tangentially related, but: I have observed that a thing a lot of a certain kind of people miss about the Sam Vimes stories is how much time in them Vimes spends:
a) Being wrong. b) Fucking up. GENUINELY fucking up. And suffering consequences of fucking up. c) REALIZING he's been wrong. d) Trying as best he can to adjust to that.
I've noted before that you could subtitle every single Vimes book as "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About [Blank]". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About The World Not Being Worth It". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Affirmative Action." "Vimes Finds Out He's REALLY REALLY Wrong About Golems." "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Klatch And International Everything". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Dwarfs." "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About The Past Being Better/Not Wanting To Be A Commander." "Vimes Finds Out He's STILL Wrong About Dwarfs, and Also Vampires, and Also Trolls". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Goblins and Is Really Upset About It."
And so on. And that is actually a very important part of Vimes because if he was not both able and willing to realize that he's wrong about shit he would just be a very bad person. A very self-righteous bad person. Captain Swing, in Night Watch, is utterly correct: he and Vimes are very, very similar people. It's just Findthee Swing knows he's right.
And Vimes is actually always open to the possibility he's totally wrong, even if he's not happy about that.
Vimes isn't perfect. Vimes isn't even always in the moral right - Vimes starts out Feet of Clay just as bad as anyone else in the story, Dragon King of Arms included, about golems. He starts his place in the story as casually racist, sexist and everything else ist as is standard for the society around him, and his voyage to becoming something else is through his own failures and it too is imperfect.
My absolute favourite Samuel Vimes moment is actually from Thud! but it's not the one you think it is, probably. It's this one:
The dwarfs were clustered nervously by the duty officer's desk. They had that opulence of metalwork, sleekness of beard and thickness of girth that marked them out as dwarfs who were doing very well for themselves, or who had been right up until now.
Vimes appeared in front of them like a whirlwind of wrath.
You scum, you rat-sucking little worm eaters! You heads-down little scurriers in the dark! What did you bring to my city? What were you thinking? Did you want the deep-downers here? Did you dare deplore what Hamcrusher said, all that bile and ancient lies? Or did you say "Well, I don't agree with him, of course, but he's got a point"? Did you say, "Oh he goes too far but it's about time somebody said it"? And now, have you come here to wring your hands and say how dreadful, it was nothing to do with you? Who were the dwarfs in the mobs, then? Aren't you community leaders? Were you leading them? And why are you here now, you ugly snivelling grubbers? Is it possible, is it possible, that now, after that bastard's bodyguards tried to kill my family, you're here to complain? Have I broken some code, trodden on some ancient toe? To hell with it. To hell with you.
He could feel the words straining, fighting to get out, and the effort of restraining them filled his stomach with acid and made his temples throb. Just one whine, he thought. Just one pompous moan. Go on.
[...]
"Gentlemen," he said, keeping his eye on the grag but talking to the room at large, "I know all of you, you all know me. You're all respected dwarfs with a stake in this city. I want you to vouch for Mr Bashfullsson, because I've never met him before in my life. Come on, Setha, I've known you for years, what do you say?"
"They killed my son," said Ironcrust.
A knife dropped into Vimes's head. It slipped down his windpipe, sliced his heart, cut through his stomach and disappeared. Where the rage had been, there was a chill.
"I'm sorry, commander," said Bashfullsson quietly. "It's true. I don't think Gunder Ironcrust was interested in the politics, you understand. He just took a job at the mine because he wanted to feel like a real dwarf and work with a shovel for a few days."
"They left him to the mud," said Ironcrust, in a voice that was eerily without emotion. "Any help you need, we will give. Any help. But when you find them, kill them all."
Bolding mine. There's some bits in the middle there where the moment moves from the duty room to his office, etc, but the important through line is that one and it's a double-whammy: not only that in the moment of discovering the loss that faces another father, Vimes is absolutely thrown completely out of his righteous rage and resentment of days despite it being fed by a quasi-demonic force of vengeance?
But also that the narrative does that to him. That it takes us with him in a build up of days and days and days of genuinely infuriating things and GENUINELY the unfortunate enabling of Hamcrusher's bullshit by people who didn't speak out about it (he's not wrong about that!) right up to the attempted murder of his baby and his wife to this moment and then absolutely yanks the rug out from under him and tells him - and us, the readers - that actually no.
No you don't get it that simple.
They killed my son.
Where the rage had been, there was chill.
If you're going to try to have a Vimes, as a creator, and you want them to be anything other than a self-righteous twerp in their own right, you have to be willing to do that part. To have him stumble, trip up, fall over his own feet, and be confronted by his own misunderstandings, mistakes, just . . . his misses.
If you aren't, then you're just writing another self-righteous twerp.
![A Reddit post to r/relationships from user ThrowRAlanternissues
title reads: My [26F] Boyfriend [28M] is Obsessed with a Lantern He Found at a Flea Market and It getting weird. How do I approach this?
post reads: Hello,
So, my boyfriend (28M) and I (26F) recently went to a flea market, and he found this old-style lantern that he absolutely fell in love with. He bought it on the spot, and I thought it was a cute little vintage decoration for our apartment. But now, things have taken a strange turn.
Ever since he got the lantern, he's become super attached to it. He keeps it by his bedside and even gets up in the middle of the night to walk around the apartment with it, pretending to be an old-timey watchman. He'll say things like "All is well!" or "The night is dark and full of terrors," and he really gets into character.
At first, I thought it was kind of funny and endearing as he always had an eccentric style of humour, but now it's starting to annoy me. He does this almost every night, and it's disrupting our sleep. I've tried talking to him about it, but he just tells me that he takes his watchman duties very seriously and that it's important for our safety. This issue is, I genuinely cannot tell if he’s joking.
Has anyone else experienced something like this? How do I get him to tone it down without hurting his feelings or making him feel like he can't enjoy his quirky interests?
Thanks for any advice!
TL;DR: Boyfriend is obsessed with an old lantern he found at a flea market and now pretends to be a night watchman, which is disrupting our sleep. How do I address this?](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c5517d1b456785f23e3396e8c83b34df/fad0484f177e2757-7b/s640x960/efe8d34ddeaaedbd3b80fcd99ab495a75890cbb0.png)