#and then go home and stop thinking abt it. how do i apply the stupid bullshit i decided to study? i should have done Ecosystem restoration

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[lovenona]

Hello. I'm Nat. I'm not on this app but I lurk sometimes and I'm an absolute W H O R E for Sukuna. Anyways. House husband Sukuna convincing you to "take some time off work" coz you've been working your ass off since the year begun. Just a short break, 5 working days, he says, as he lifts your drooping head up by your chin with his forefinger and thumb, frowning at your dark circles and eyebags. So you listen, you apply for the days, and he spends them fucking you stupid to calm you down.

no because househusband sukuna cares so deeply abt ur wellbeing... he knows ur a hard worker, loves ur dedication and ur passion (it’s one of the many reasons he married u....) but he also knows that u can get very swept up in it, that it’s easy for u to slip into unhealthy habits (read: never sleeping, never resting, always working, always stressing) because ur not one to half ass anything ... so what does he do when he realizes ur not going to stop anytime soon?

well, he says, in that deep voice u can’t resist, he thinks u need a vacation. just a few days, just you and me, no obligations, no emails. and how can you disagree when a large and handsome man says he’s going to take care of everything, that he’ll do your laundry and cook whatever you ask him for? well, you sigh, you can’t. 

and sukuna knows, even as you stay home that first day, that your mind is still elsewhere, on those unfinished projects at your desk, at the emails that must be piling in your inbox, on the world that must be ending because you’re not at work. so he takes things slow. 

first, it’s making sure you don’t set a sinfully early alarm when there’s no reason to. then, it’s making you breakfast, the kind you really like, and sitting beside you while you eat all it in your pajamas. it’s logging you out of your work email and dragging you for a bike ride or a walk or even a movie on the couch because it’s been too long since you afforded yourself the pleasure of doing something you enjoy. 

(he holds your hand tightly on that walk around the block, enough pressure to make you aware of the physical contact you’ve been missing.) 

and later, when dinner’s cleared away (another masterpiece by Chef Sukuna), when the new puzzle’s been finished and you’re tired of television, he strikes. sukuna knows it’s been haunting you all day – the warmth of his tender hands, the harrowing anxiety of not working, the desperation to try and relax – and he knows how easy you’ll crumble. 

it’s easy to make you beg at that point, and househusband sukuna is more than willing to give. it’s almost sweet how fast you fall apart for him and how desperate you are to be closer and closer and closer like you’ve never been in love before. he gives you whatever you ask for and then some: orgasms until you’re sobbing, kisses until you forget how to speak. 

(he repeats this, day in and day out, morning and night, until he reckons he’s fucked the corporate anxiety and the capitalist nightmare right out of you.) 

the best part is that every day of your makeshift vacation ends with you together in the shower or the bathtub with househusband sukuna dutifully doing your skincare like the aftercare king he is. he’ll wash your hair and help you into your pajamas and listen to your sleepy and fucked-out ted talk about your animal crossing island as if it were the greatest thing he’s ever heard. he’ll hold you against his chest and let you steal all the blankets and won’t even complain: because, for the first time in a thousand years, you seem peaceful and happy again. 

[butgilinsky]

meant to be // np

warning; stress/anxiety, mentions a toxic ex but doesn't go into detail abt it, fluffy nolan, i think that's it?

summary; when you go MIA, Nolan makes sure you're okay. based on the song meant to be by bebe rexha & florida georgia line

word count; 2.8k+

a/n; this is a part of my yee haw series (all fics are stand alones, so don't worry about that) if you have any interest in checking those out too! until then, enjoy fluffy nolan

add yourself to my nhl taglist!

You were usually pretty good at telling yourself that you were blowing things out of proportion. It didn’t always stop you from doing so, but it usually talked you off a ledge. This week, it seemed that there was no talking yourself off of the ledge.

Other than the fact that you were five pages into your portfolio that you were submitting to Temple in an attempt to get into their MFA program, one that you’d been wanting to go to for years at this point, your ex had made a recent appearance in your life. As if the stress from applying to grad school wasn’t enough for you to handle, you had run straight into your ex on your way home from grabbing coffee.

It would’ve been enough if you had just run into him, if you had to exchange pleasantries with the same person who shattered your heart into so many pieces you were still recovering two years after the break up. The same person that traumatized you enough to have to put your current relationship on a speed so slow that you were sure a sloth would have moved faster.

Nolan had been patient with you, which you were beyond thankful for. He was fine with things going at a snail’s pace, given that you weren’t the only one between the two of you that had a rocky past with romantic relationships. It wasn’t news to anyone that you were together, but it had been confusing for just about everyone outside of the two of you.

There wasn’t a label on it, neither of you needed one to know where you stood. Both of you had an understanding that you were just as damaged as you were interested in each other, and working slow without any labels or the need to structure your relationship in society’s idea of normalcy was your middle ground. It allowed the two of you to breathe, without leaving a lingering doubt about how the two of you felt about each other.

People pestered the two of you about it, why you wouldn’t wear a WAGs jacket or introduce Nolan to your parents when they were in town. They didn’t get it, but they didn’t need to. You and Nolan communicated very well with one another, and if the two of you knew what was going on with everything, then nobody else needed to. Neither of you needed anyone else’s validation to be content with where the two of you stood.

But then you ran into your ex. Your shoulder collided with his on the street and while you thought you were piecing yourself back together from everything he put you through, the mere sight of him sent you down a spiral that you had avoided for as long as you possibly could.

It’s not that you missed your ex, because you didn’t. You didn’t miss him or the way he spoke to you, nor did you miss the lack of communication and being left in the dark more often than not. Seeing him made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, but everything he put you through came to the forefront of your mind, and you were unintentionally overwhelmed with the worry that you’d end up in the same scenario with Nolan one day.

You didn’t think that Nolan would hurt you, not the way you’d been hurt in the past. You trusted him more than you’ve ever trusted anyone, and he proved that he deserved that trust. It wasn’t the thought that Nolan would become the person your ex had been, but the thought that there would be a day where Nolan was your ex.

It was scary and deafening, and the reason you couldn’t finish your portfolio. You’d been writing for hours, or trying to. The chair you were sitting in had grown uncomfortable in the first hour, and you had migrated around the apartment to look for a place that didn’t hurt your ass or your back. Unfortunately you couldn’t find one, opting to sit on the floor in between your couch and your coffee table. You’d been so lost in thought that you had spent six hours without responding to anyone, not even realizing that time had gone by that quickly until you got a call.

The only reason you even saw the call was the fact that the notification popped up on your computer. You knew he knew something was up because he rarely ever facetimed you without asking if you were free first; though, if he had texted you first there was no way of you knowing with your phone in a completely different room. He only ever facetimed you unannounced when you didn’t answer your phone for a while. He knew you could answer facetime calls on your laptop, and while you weren’t always in the mood to talk to him at that moment, it was enough to get your attention and let you know that he was worried about you.

But you answered it today, regardless of the fact that you looked a mess and felt even worse. You answered because you needed him to ground you, to pull your head out of the clouds and silence the thoughts that had been buzzing in your mind for over 24 hours.

“Hey.” you forced a small smile to your lips before reaching behind you to turn on a lamp, unaware of the darkness you were encased in until now.

“You okay? You’ve been MIA all day.” you rolled your eyes gently, a playful smile playing on your lips.

“It hasn’t been all day.” you tried to assure him that he was being slightly over dramatic, but the look in his eyes told you that that was not the case.

“Y/n, it’s midnight.” that it was, though it was the first time you were realizing that. You had no idea what time it was, and sitting in front of your computer for the past six hours had not helped that fact. “What happened? Talk to me.”

“This portfolio’s just stressing me out.” he hummed, unsure that was the full reason. He could tell in the way that your forehead creased and your eyes narrowed slightly that there was more than just a little stress going on. You’d been stressed about this thing for weeks, there had to be something else that was going on with you.

“So you’re not going to tell me what’s wrong?” you sighed softly, unsure if you wanted to unpack all of that right now. “Alright. Be ready in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes? Nolan I can’t get ready in ten minutes-”

“Just put a pair of sweats on and go stand outside. I’ll be there in ten.” he hung up then, not giving you much of an option but to do as he said.

Nine minutes after Nolan hung up on you, you were standing outside, teeth chattering lightly while you bounced on the balls of your feet. The familiar car pulling up in front of you made you smile, and when you stepped up to the door you heard the lock click.

You pulled yourself into his car quickly, sighing out in relief at the warmth that encased you. Your eyes found his, a warmth spreading through your chest as you leaned over the center console to kiss him softly. He hummed against your lips, chasing you for just a moment when you pulled back. The next one lasted just a second longer, noses bumping against one another softly.

He pulled back then, moving to kiss your cheek before sitting back in his seat and moving the gear shift into drive. His right hand found its home on your thigh, the warmth from his palm radiating through your sweats and into your skin.

“Where are we going?” your voice was soft and peaceful, like the sound of home on a cold winter evening that Nolan wished he could live in forever.

“Nowhere.” he shrugged, glancing over at you for a moment to smile at you. He didn’t have a destination in mind, just driving around the city for the night. It wasn’t the first time the two of you had done this before, and you doubt it’d be the last.

These nights were your favorite; Nolan driving absolutely nowhere with his hand on your thigh and his ear offered up to you. Sometimes you didn’t talk for hours, just listened to whatever playlist the two of you chose and drove until one or both of you got too tired to continue. Sometimes you ended up hours away from home, which got the two of you (usually Nolan) into trouble from time to time.

“What’s up, what’s rotting your mind?” you leaned your head onto his shoulder, wanting to be close to him more than anything right now.

“It’s stupid.” you whispered gently.

His hand moved up from your thigh to cup the underside of your jaw. He moved towards you, eyes still locked on the road while his lips pecked yours softly. It was cheesy and a bit awkward, but it wasn’t the first time he’d done something like that. It was meant to soothe you, and it did. Nolan wasn’t a man of many words but his actions always spoke loud enough for you to hear him clearly.

“It’s not stupid if it’s bothering you.” his voice was as gentle as his heart, something you loved dearly about him. He wasn’t pushy or demanding, rather patient and gentle.

“I ran into Kai yesterday.” his muscles tensed, along with his hand gripping your thigh just a little tighter than it previously had been. It wasn’t a huge change but you picked up on it, along with the way his jaw clenched and he sighed through his nose.

Nolan had never met Kai, and you hoped he never would. Not because you thought Nolan would kill him or anything, but because you wished that nobody in your current life had to ever interact with people from your past. Kai knew a completely different person than the one Nolan knew, and you didn’t want to be the person you used to be. You didn’t want Nolan to be subjected to hearing about her or the life she previously led.

“Did he say something to you?” you didn’t expect much different from him. He’d always been a safe amount of protective. He wasn’t the type to run out of the house at the first sound of danger and pummel everyone into the ground, he just wanted to make sure you were alright. He wouldn’t put a bounty out on Kai, but if he did or said something that was still bothering you, he’d do everything he possibly could to make you feel better.

“I mean yes, but not in the way that you’re thinking. It wasn’t what he said it’s just,” you sighed, one that made your cheeks puff out and your eyes flutter shut for a moment.

“It’s just that now you’re scared that that’s how we’ll end up.” you lifted your head off of his shoulder, looking at him with narrowed eyes and a furrowed brow.

“How’d you learn how to read minds? That’s a pretty cool party trick, you know?” he laughed gently and tapped the inside of your thigh while shaking his head at you. You always tried to lighten the mood by making small little jokes out of things and while some people found it to be unbearable, Nolan loved every single second of it.

“I wish I could read your mind, it’d make things a lot easier most of the time.” you rolled your eyes but laughed, finding truth in his words.

“I just don’t want history to repeat itself, you know? I’m just scared that the things I’ve been trying to avoid are inevitable. What if they happen anyway? What if everything I’ve been working for is useless and everything i’ve run from is my destiny?” Nolan sighed softly and pulled into a parking garage, one that you weren’t familiar with.

“Everything you and Kai went through, stays between the two of you. I’m not him, and I’ll never be him. I won’t say we’ll never fight, because I obviously can’t guarantee that. We’ll fight, everyone does, but we’ll get past it. We’ll survive it all. That, I can assure you. I can promise you that I would never treat you the way that that douche did.”

He doesn’t promise you the world, nor does he promise to shoot for the stars. He doesn’t promise that things will always be alright, but that’s what you love about Nolan. He doesn’t set unrealistic expectations. He doesn’t tell you what you want to hear just to make you feel better. He’ll do a lot of things to make you feel better, but lying to you isn’t one of them.

“If it’s meant to be, it’ll be, you know? You just have to let it be, which you’re not entirely skilled at.” you punch his arm softly just as he parks at the top of the parking garage that’s almost completely empty.

“What if what it’s meant to be isn’t what I want it to be, though?” Nolan shook his head gently and turned towards you, a soft smile sitting on his lips.

“It won’t be at times, but that doesn’t mean it won’t ever be. If people could write out their lives exactly like they wanted them to be, nobody’s lives would align. You have to let things play out, baby, and I know that’s the scariest thing about life itself, but it’ll work out. If it’s meant to be, I promise it’ll be.”

Your lips move before your mind can catch up. You’re so immersed in him, neck deep in whatever he’s cooked up for you, but you don’t try to get out. He’s everything you’ve ever wanted and more. You didn’t think that anyone could be so perfectly hand crafted, treated with such care that even his flaws were beautiful. You didn’t plan on telling him you loved him, didn’t plan on saying the words that have done nothing but haunt you for the last few years.

“I love you.” it comes out in a breath, like it’s lifted a weight off of your shoulders.

He can tell you didn’t mean to say it, because your eyes blow wide open and your lips part in a way that he can tell you’ve spoken out of impulse rather than preparation. Your cheeks are hot and your hands shake just enough for Nolan to reach for one of them and hold it tightly in his own.

He’s smiling, which is as confusing as the small laugh that he lets out. It’s confusing and almost angering, but you don’t have time to ask because the second your brow furrows, he’s tumbling out an explanation for his reaction.

“I love you too. Have for a while, probably always will.” it melts your heart that’s sunk into your stomach. You’re not sure what you did that made the universe gift you with Nolan, though you believe it to be something between adopting a child in a past life or buying a woman’s order at Taco Bell when she forgot her wallet at home.

He expects you to say something else, maybe ask if he’s joking or not, but you don’t. You’re frozen in your spot, tears building up in your eyes that make Nolan meet you over the center console and pull you into his chest. He doesn’t know exactly why you’re so emotional, but he has a feeling it has to do with your traumatic past and the fear that others have installed in you. He just wants you to be happy, especially if he gets to stick around to make it happen himself.

“I love you so much, and it’s fucking terrifying.” he kisses the top of your head, his hand moving up and down your back in the most soothing pattern he can come up with.

“I know, and I’m scared too. Maybe we always will be, but we can’t spend too much time worrying about it or else we won’t get to experience it. We’ll ruin it for ourselves, and I don’t want to do that.” you shook your head, your silent way of telling him that you don’t want to do that either. You wanted to let yourself cherish falling in love with Nolan.

“If it’s meant to be, it’ll be, right?” he smiles down at you, one of the widest smiles you’ve ever seen him present. You store it in your memory, hoping you’d never forget the sight of him smiling at you like you were the only thing that mattered in the word.

“That’s right, baby. And I have a pretty good feeling about us.”

-

nolpat taglist; @extratragic @babytkachuks @teenagekook @stfukie @kiedhara @sadcupofcoffee @sidscrosbyy @rebel-without-care @baby-cat-nol-pat @creator-appreciator @aasimarr @bucky-ish @immmbabyyygraceee @neenaw-neenaw @shawnsreputation @pierreslucdubois @yungbeezy @tortito @dmonchld @beauvibaby @honeybearbarzal

[juchumice]

ive been thinking abt this avatar au for SO LONG!! i know some other exists but i still really wanted to put my spin on it and make them younger so it could be a bit more contextually different, so they’re roughly 14 during the au!

AIZAWA: aizawa’s a waterbender from the northern water tribe. initially, many believed he was a nonbender as it took quite awhile longer for his bending to reveal itself than the other children. he has zero talent concerning waterbending, none at all. in fact, he was absolutely terrible at it initially. but, if there was one thing he was certain about in youth, it was being an excellent waterbender. when first applying to waterbending classes, he was considered far too inexperienced to join. the instructor was a stern type. he told aizawa that he had, “no potential,” and should focus less on waterbending and more on hand to hand combat to waste less time. instead of listening, aizawa practiced terribly. everyday, every moment, he would be waterbending from dusk to dawn till he stumbled from lack of sleep. he even founded his own method, drenching his scarf of spongey material in water and bending it as a weapon. after further practice, he finally got accepted into the course with pure hard work. the issue was that everyone in his class was younger than him, talented and brilliant. none of them worked as hard as he did. they all were children just playing around. as the bending moves increased in difficulty, aizawa began to fall behind again, so his whole day would be absolutely swallowed in practice, practice, and practice. he would be beaten constantly by his peers: during spars, general displays of moves, and learning, so he couldn’t rely on his own power, instead focusing on strength in addition to strategy and observation. it was this adjustment of tactics that led him higher in his studies. he was able to graduate the minor classes, but his instructor thought it was best to get more experience in bending rather than continually relying on his other strengths, so he was sent away from home to study abroad among the other kingdoms and view their bending techniques.

YAMADA: yamada is an air nomad, but he is one of the very few who does not appear to be capable of bending. due to the spiritual nature of the air nomads, there are very few who are unable to airbend, and yamada is one of them. but, everyone else was very supportive even without his bending. he was able to have many friends, however couldn’t join in their air bending games. that’s where he learned his talent for announcing. as the other kids would play their games of air ball and pie toss, he’ll be there on the sidelines, narrating every single thing with his peculiar flare that led to his popularity among the northern air temple. though, even with everyone’s supportive nature, yamada was unhappy with his position. ever since he was but a toddler, he really wanted to be an airbender, streaking across the sky on a glider and riding on air scooters, only to be sorely disappointed. sure, he was able to ‘fly’ with his flying bison’s, baito’s, help but it just wasn’t the same. after a bit, he ran from the northern air temple, sick and tired of living in such a small space. with far too many fantasies on his mind, yamada wished to explore the other nations. it was then he stumbled across the fire nation. they were fascinating. their own fierce power, their sense of fashion, their culture, everything drew yamada closer. he would watch their shows with undisguised excitement, even announcing for a couple of them. while announcing for one of the firebender shows, yamada was required to choose a volunteer from the crowd, which just happened to be aizawa. this led to the beginning of their interactions.

so that’s it i guess! my main ideas for the avatar au! yamada has a glider, but he uh... stole it. just carries it around a lot to ‘feel like an airbender’-- and it’s a great umbrella when it rains!

the au itself takes place before the 100 year war so no worries abt any firebenders just yet!! i might develop it more but this is where its at so farrr

also i wrote a lil small thing while i was playin with the idea: 

...

“You know… I always wanted to bend,” Yamada said. He kicked up the dust with a shoe, frowning at the cloud that billowed around his feet as if it could disappear with a simple scrutinizing look. But, it didn’t. Merely floated to and fro without a care of his whims. 

Aizawa examined him carefully. There was no sound made, just an invitation to continue.

Yamada blew at several pieces of hair that loosened from his bush that he called a hairstyle. “Yeah. Sounds ‘crazy’! But, it made total sense! Look, look, look, I would be an EPIC airbender. You have to admit. I mean, look how cool my poses are!” He proceeded to strike several different ‘airbending poses’ that neither suggested coolness nor airbending. 

“You’ve watched too many firebending shows,” Aizawa replied. 

“But that’s what makes it so cool! The fire just exploding into the sky like Pompeii, but you can only see these red sparkles and nothing goes wrong… Imagine doing that… Imagine…” He chuckled mirthlessly. “Being a bender must be fun, huh…” His staff loosened from his fingers to slide and clatter to the floor. “Don’t even use this DUMB thing! I dunno why I keep it all the time… Maybe, oh! Maybe every time I hold it I get a 1% increase in being an airbender or something! Yeah… tough luck. You know? You know how stupid it is when EVERYONE in the temple’s an airbender and you’re stuck being the only kid around-- believe me they’re all super nice about it-- BUT ME?? THE ONLY ONE!! Don’t feel bad for me or I’ll strangle you or something, but it still freaking sucks. Man, air scooters? I totally would’ve invented those if I was an airbender…”

On and on he jabbered. He could have done this if he was an airbender, or maybe he could have done this!  Aizawa was unsure what to respond with. He never understood. Sure, he understood hardship and running raggedly through the critics and holding one’s goals to heart. A waterbender who couldn’t bend water for crap? That’s what they called him, might as well give up they had said, but he powered through and became skilled with pure hard work. No luck, no cheats, and no talent. Yamada was the opposite case, full of supporting faces and ancient smiles, but just no bending in general. How could someone so hopeful be met with such a grisly fate? Yet, all that Aizawa could offer was a tongue-in-cheek, “Sorry.” 

Yamada stopped talking abruptly. “Huh?”

“I said sorry.”

“Oh. Yeah. Don’t say sorry, man! What’s the fun in that, too gloomy Aizawa, waaaay too gloomy. Y’know, it is what it is! I got a sweet gig going on anyway, I don’t need anything as stupid as airbending. Only saps use airbending, they probably think it’s cool or something, but it isn’t haha. Waterbending, firebending, earthbending, that stuff’s cool! Airbending’s just some playing around with wind or something.”

[lovelyisadora]

ALSO marcia hcs bc u said u don't get sick of me asking abt her 😌😌 angst angst angst angst but also maybe,, younger marcia

ok so this isnt angst heavy but i do have lots of younger marcia! and you're right i dont tire of marcia hcs i love her so so much:

· her father is magyk, her mother is not. they move around a lot when marcia is a child, never staying in one place too long. the notable exceptions to this are the eastern snow plains, where they live for a few months until her father is blamed for the disappearance of the youngest princess, and then the castle

· her father is the one who first teaches her magyk and marcia loves it. she wants to be just like him, but she doesn’t necessarily want to be an advisor to a bunch of snotty princesses. he tells her that their new country’s extraordinary wizard is far cooler than snotty princesses, and that she’ll be at the top of the tower one day

· her father does suddenly die from an illness when she is seven and her mother immediately implements a no magyk rule because she’s certain magyk had something to do with his death. marcia knows what death is, she just didn’t realize that it was a word that could apply to her beloved father. And she can’t understand why she can’t have magyk, because baba loved it

· she absolutely fights her mother on the no magyk rule, and their relationship is strained from then on out. as soon as she’s old enough she starts skipping her classes so she can go to the magyk ones, or she stays late for the magyk ones. by the time she’s thirteen though her mother puts a stop to that. when she is seventeen, a teacher that doesn’t like her tells her she is never going to get an apprenticeship or get into higher education, and so marcia decides she’ll be what they think she is and makes some incredibly stupid decisions

· she meets endor in that year and endor is the one who takes her to the wizard tower, because marcia’s mother finally has the money to move them back to their home country and marcia does not want to go, but she has nothing to convince her mother to stay for. so endor takes her to the wizard tower and declares they wont leave until marcia has an apprenticeship. marcia thinks this is silas heap levels of stupid and goes on a rant about how stupid wizards are because they never take risks on people they don’t know, and thanks to her mother she’s never been a part of this community. She fails to notice endor’s eyes get wider and wider, until a throat is cleared behind her and oh fuck, the extraordinary wizard is standing right behind her

· “she meant no disrespect sir,” endor says for her, but marcia is incapable of being dishonest even when it kills her and is a terrible liar. “I absolutely did mean disrespect, sir,” she says miserably. to her surprise, she’s offered the extraordinary apprenticeship. to everyone’s surprise, the first words out of her mouth are no. “no, I mean, yes, I mean—I have to tell mama.” it was going to be hard enough to convince her mother to stay for an ordinary apprenticeship. this one is going to be damn near impossible

· she doesn’t know what to think of the crown princess cerys. cerys likes to break rules and to be fair, marcia does too, but the last rule she broke had her mother leaving her here and returning to their home country without her, so she’s reluctant to break more. but she can’t tell cerys no—everyone who meets her falls in love with her—so she has to get her out of trouble a lot. thankfully cerys isn’t a snotty princess, but oh boy did marcia not want to do this with her time.

· cerys is her first kiss. they sort of have a thing, but it’s a homoerotic friendship more than anything

· milo and cerys are good friends too but the only reason they get together is because marcia has a nervous breakdown after her darke week and stops speaking to both of them, ending the relationship, and soon after that cerys’s mother the queen dies. before cerys’s coronation the two of them are drinking and well, the rest is history, and of course milo is going to do the right thing. it’s not like marcia is ever going to speak to him again anyway.

· alther is very worried for her and not just because of her nervous breakdown. he suspects that the apprentices lost to the queste have something to do with tertius fume, and marcia has made herself extremely disliked by him. the last day of her apprenticeship he knows that something bad is going to happen. he expects her to be dragged away kicking and screaming the way syrah syara was years ago. he isn’t expecting to instead, while assisting the queen in the aftermath of her child’s birth, hear a gunshot and marcia’s shriek and spin around only to see the queen dead, her infant wailing, and marcia with a gun aimed right at her head. alther doesn’t even think—he just jumps in front of her

· marcia has no memory of how she made it out of the palace that night, or how she came upon silas heap, or even how she came back to the tower. all she knows is that she shut the tower down for the safety of every wizard inside it, and she’s terrified to leave it. if she leaves it, that’s the end of it (and her), so she doesn’t leave the tower for ten years

· alther speed racers his way over to the tower once he’s able to leave the throne room. he has no idea if marcia is alive, or what happened to the infant princess. the supreme custodian isn’t smart enough to not discuss his plans in the throne room, but marcia was never mentioned by name. he barrels into his old apartment to find her sobbing into her hands and marcia shrieks when she sees him and forgets he’s a ghost, passing right through him. he isn’t supposed to appear to her—it’s not what they do as extraordinary wizards. but how could he leave her?

· in the aftermath of it all marcia has no idea what she’s doing where jenna is concerned, but not one queen will appear to her and give her advice and it isn’t for lack of trying. she yells at the empty halls of the palace when she can’t take it anymore. “I understand you hate me but please, fucking tell me what to do.” only then does cerys appear to her, just long enough to remind marcia that she is dead, and everyone would do well to remember that. “figure it out, marcia,” cerys snaps at her, and then she is gone

[zontiky]

okay so i tried to save this ask as a draft and it got deleted because tumblr is just such a functional website like that <3 but the prompt was “the hargreeves as ghosts in the apocalypse with five” or something like that i’m going to scream

this is SUPER long so i’m putting it under the cut hfkjsd

pre-five: the hargreeves siblings are dead. wait i feel a drabble coming on ooh

The Hargreeves siblings are dead.

Ben isn’t very aware of this at first. He’s been dead since 2006 -- he’s quite used to it, by now. What he is aware of, first, is light. Blinding white light. And Vanya, in the middle of it. He doesn’t close his eyes because he can’t feel pain, but if he could he thinks she would have made him blind. There’s light, and heat, and power, and then he closes his eyes anyway because the ceiling is collapsing around him and it’s instinctual.

When he opens them again he sees ash. Ash -- and Klaus.

He’s gotten used to Klaus, too. Klaus has a memorable sort of face; even if he didn’t, Ben has seen it every single day for almost twenty years. He doesn’t know if it’s actually been twenty years, for him. He doesn’t know how time moves for ghosts. Klaus has assured him it moves the same as it does for the living. Ben isn’t sure Klaus, stoned out of his mind, bleeding sluggishly from his arm, knew what he was talking about.

Anyway.

Klaus.

He’s wearing the coat he’s been flaunting around for the past week. His shirt is see-through, with little stars on it, like a pale imitation of the sky. Ben remembers his pants had laces on them, he’s sure they did not a minute ago, before the brightness that threatened to wipe out his very soul -- his soul is all he has left, really. His gaze drifts down anyway, to check.

Yes. Klaus’ pants have laces up the sides.

“No,” Ben says. Klaus is laying in a heap on the ground, his fingers curled like his tendons have been cut.

His lips feel numb because they always feel numb. Because Ben can’t feel at all. He takes a step. “No,” he says again, louder, surer. “No!”

Klaus looks up at him. His makeup is smudged, like it tends to be. His lips are bitten raw, like they tend to be. His hair is a mess, like it tends to be, and like it will be, always, because Klaus isn’t breathing.

Klaus is lying in a heap on the ground. Klaus is standing above his own body. Klaus is reaching for Ben like he’s hoping to touch him for the first time in years. Just when Klaus’ cold, dead, fingers brush his face, a voice from behind says, so quietly, dripping with disbelief: “Ben?”

Ben shuts his eyes and wishes desperately he could cry.

He feels a hand on his shoulder, for the first time in so, so long, but he also doesn’t feel it at all. He feels-but-doesn’t-feel someone turn him around, until they are saying, “Ben? Ben!” and he has no choice but to open his eyes and face the music.

Diego is gripping his shoulders like he is a dying man and Ben is the answer. Behind him, Luther and Allison watch them, stunned silent. Allison’s hands are pressed to her mouth. She looks like she wants to cry. 

And Vanya. Little Vanya, painted white. Her head is hung as her shoulders shake with the weight of the destruction she has so inevitably caused. (Ben would say he always knew she was destined for great things -- but he can’t, because he didn’t.) (Nobody ever said great things had to be good.)

The Hargreeves siblings are dead. Their bodies are strewn across what is left of their childhood home, smouldering and burning, and Ben is very aware of that fact.

righto anyway. so they have an emotional reunion but its also kind of bitter? id have to actually write this for it to make sense so lets skip it for now lol

five shows up

he cannot see them obviously bc theyre all ghosts

god if i did write this it would be such a monster of a fic and would take me like 2 years to finish i already know fhkjdsk

somehow ?? they manage to influence the world around them maybe? idk maybe now that klaus is dead hes sober

or maybe hes high for all eternity?

for the purposes of this au lets say he died sober or in the late stages of withdrawal, and bc ghosts cant feel pain in action hes sober

so EVENTUALLY they figure out how to corporealize bc klaus is like blam wham ghost powers

asdlfk that sounds so stupid im sorry

he would say that tho imho,,, it sounds like something hed say,,,

if i DID write this it would be alternating povs also,,,

ok so out of all of them klaus and ben have the most experience homeless

and while being stuck in an apocalypse is not at all the same thing as being homeless it does help to have some knowledge

five doesnt eat the twinkie!! good for him

dammit okay. theres 2 options we can take here. in the comics five couldnt get back bc he fucked up his math and spent 15 years doing the wrong thing, but if u apply that here, with 6 other ppl checking his work this could be avoided and they end up skipping the whole assassin shtick and just hopping straight back to 2019, ready to prevent the apocalypse

OR five still gets hired for the commission but the sibs are tagging along

i think bc five isnt completely alone in this au unfortunately dolores doesnt exist :((

for each other the 2 paths tho theres also options?? bc they (ghosts) can go back in time and inhabit their past selves bodies? OR they could just,,, cease to exist

IM JUST NOW REALIZING HOW MANY PATHS THIS COULD TAKE,, AAH FUCK

okay gonna split this into parts. this is gonna be so long brace yourselves.

1) they go back in time because math checking and the ghosts swap out for their past selves

after multiple years of being stuck in an apocalypse together i think they would learn to get along with each other. like at least a little bit

which would make it easier for them to prevent the apocalypse

bc theyd:

trust each other more

already know abt the apocalypse and not have to wait for five to grace them all with his knowledge

are working as a team from the very beginning

have open lines of communication

yeah uh. so there

vanya is also already aware of her powers so the whole harold goading her into turning against her family and snapping to wipe out all life on earth thing? yeah that doesnt happen

oh and harold wouldn’t know how to do that in the first place because klaus wouldn’t throw out reggie’s journal! this solves so many problems wtf

there’s still commission issues bc they (and by they i mean five) are on the commission’s radar

so there’s still dope fight scenes sdlkfd pinky promise

okay idk. they stop the apocalypse and everything is okay the end hfkjd

2) they fix the math but only five can go back and the ghosts cease to exist

this is just sad! it would be sad okay! im sad! lets move on

subset of the past one: ben CAN go back with five because he was already dead and time travel affects them differently or something idk

aaaaaa

five & ben dynamic duo would be dope as shit BUT five would not be able to see him... so they use klaus as a middleman fjsdsfd

is there 2 bens? is one ben deleted in favor of the time-traveling ben? i dont know! i dont know my brain is melting

either way shit is happening yall!! obviously klaus is clued in, directly or indirectly it doesnt matter but he is on board the ‘don’t let the entire world end in flames’ train

3) they join the commission and then when five goes back in time they all go back

this is fun because now five is a highly trained assassin who is also lowkey a complete marshmallow for his siblings and once again TEAMWORK WOO

basically the first path but now five has a gun fhsdjk

4) they join the commission but five has to leave them behind and they cease to exist

five with a gun but hes sad now

i didnt go into how much losing his siblings would suck in the prev path but like. it would suck so much. he’s already lost them once if you think about it when he time traveled the first time and yeah he found the adult ghost versions but,, its different

and now suddenly hes stuck with these strange adult versions of the people he knows and he KNOWS them but also he doesnt? at all? they dont have all the years of shared experiences together? and theyre all grown up from the first ‘set’ of siblings he had which for five was like 40+ years ago??

SCREAMS

i have losing my mind disease (self-diagnosed)

subset: five has to leave them behind but they still exist because the commission is out-of-time kind of? idk but they’re still floating around somewhere and come back to impact the plot later or something

yeah idk. literally just wrote them down bc i didnt want them to die^2 hfkjwehd

subset: they still exist but instead of being just Somewhere they’re specifically at the assassination of JFK onwards because thats where five left them and they either go on ghosting and make an appearance in s2 OR they cease because them-wise they havent died yet but that doesnt make sense because ghosts can time travel so nevermind

i dont have the brain energy left to explore this one aaaa

okay jesus christ i think that’s all

I DON’T KNOW. i don’t know. i might write some more of this because honestly it is a very fine flavor of angst + hurt/comfort <3

[kingsofneon]

ayyy its me coming in here!!! i have no requests off the bat but uhhhh ok ok hear me out. acesabo but with like. a finger kink or something? like, long pretty fingers fingering the hell out of each other or just sensually sucking on it, idk, i'll let you decide. OR, more expansion on robinkoalasabo, blease?

look okay look im just. vibing with sabo/ace rn so i gotta talk abt them but real quick i love argumentative best friend/enemy / qpp koala/sabo and both of them liking robin, LMAO !!!!! bitch!!! that shit’s hilarious. robin i think would be uhh....unused to such honest attraction? yah sabo’s a lying liar but there’s a difference in his...sarcasm vs his “I’m telling a lie so you don’t know the truth I dont want to tell you”, is what i think. so idk in what i set up i guess we have ko/ro first and Kinda girlfriends (im.....ded for fro/bin tho soz so absoLUTE we have not-yet-together-kinda-feelings-but-complicated-bc-trauma robin/franky + bc theyre not together the...flattery + enjoyment of koala’s personality and company...) friends w/ benefits didn’t-really-date but like each other a lot. and koala so sunny and happy buuut also spending Lots of time with robin - just hanging out but also sexy fun times - and sabo’s like “no I’m not sulking shut the fuck up” (but he’s totally sulking because he Liked robin too, she was someone he respected highly and she! knows! luffy! he doesn’t say anything to her about it bc he’s guilty as fuck but. boii wants those strawhat stories and he can’t sneak them out of her with koala taking up all of her attention.) 

koala picks up on his grumpy mood but just figures he’s being a dick abt smth, but robin’s like nah look, pattern, and koala’s like oh. OH? 

idk what they do but w/e we be vibing with nsfw, which is sabo’s. sabo’s fucking fingers man. the tensile strength. BUT ALSO he’s not very delicate, not very good with flexibility, so robin,,ho fuck boi. when against koala the dichotomy of the roughness vs that clever stroking, but then also bRO im thinking about sabo viewing masturbation etc. pretty clinically and also Be Careful Of Strength, ain’t gotta lot of time to jerk off when you’re running the revolution u know.

so like the first time robin tops im fucking laughing. koala’s probably just as rough/efficient as he is but robin...robin can unlace him in like a minute flat and figures out real quick that sabo likes being edged. the first time robin touches his prostrate..........boi. 

anyway omfg that was longer than i thought so hand kink + sabo/ace

FIRST 

if you haven’t read.......second chances (https://archiveofourown.org/works/15495015?view_full_work=true).........what are you doing. look at this shit:

“You want to watch me jerk it like this?” The buckle rattled with Ace's gesturing, and Sabo's eyes immediately fixated darkly on the belt. “Then I uh, I get to make a weird request too.”

“If you must,” Sabo replied, sounding the exact opposite of beleaguered as he discretely wiped the spit off his palm. Ace cleared his throat.

“Put on your gloves.”

Ace refused, refused to look away from the devious delight spreading across Sabo's stupid face.

“Oh Ace,” he purred, those damn fucking gloves appearing in his hands out of nowhere (did he have them tucked in his pockets this entire time?). With deliberate motions, Sabo smoothed the leather over every finger, and flexed, like he was about to whip out one of his ryusoken moves. “Are you sure you just want me to jerk off in these?”

“Well if you've got any lube tucked away,” Ace shot back, “now's the time to pull it out, put on a good show.”

Sabo's consequent exhale was nowhere near the flippant-and-suave chuckle he had clearly been aiming for. Smugly, Ace counted a point in his own favor before dropping onto his back and finally—finally—undoing his pants. As his own belt fell with heavy thumps to both sides, Ace brushed aside all the pesky cloth, and applied pressure in earnest with a sigh of pleasure.

and this

And boy was it a view. The gloves were incredibly well-worn, molded so tightly to Sabo that Ace could see the full articulation of his fingers' every curve, every bend. The buttery leather, lighter in color at the fingertips, glided over Sabo with the barest whisper of friction. Ace could see his grip change, pressure shifting as he held himself tighter and tighter, grunting in frustration.

“Can I take these off?” Sabo finally requested with a hint of a whine. Ace suddenly thought of Marco, and how he might smirk at that tone, if he was here. “It's not working for me.”

“It's working fine for me,” Ace did his best to leer, thoroughly enjoying his own bare hand's capacity for friction. Sabo made another sound of protest, and Ace gave in with a snort. “Fine. Just one hand.”

“It's all I need.” The right glove disappeared as fast as it came, and Sabo arched high and satisfied into his own hand, now skin-to-skin. He obligingly let the gloved hand remain in play though, skimming teasingly up and down, grinning sharply at Ace's open mouth. “Hey,” he ordered, “go faster.”

AND THIS!

“Anything you want,” was Ace's breathless answer. He didn't stop, even sped up, gripping hard and fast and chasing that finale. “You can have it from me.”

“I would chain you down,” Sabo snarled, practically a threat, only the blade was turned wholly inward toward himself. Like he was daring Ace to give him absolution. “I would bend you 'til you're ready to break, and keep you there for hours. I would make you beg for release, but deny you anyways. I would see your skin dark with my bruises, I would, I would—”

Ace's hands twisted hard against his binds, wanting genuinely to be free of them for the first time since they started this—and Sabo's reaction was instantaneous. A flex of haki into his fingers, and Sabo was slicing through the leather of his belt, letting Ace loose with an expression of terror.

And Ace dragged himself across the bed until he could cup Sabo's cheek in his clean palm and pull Sabo into a biting, filthy kiss. He was still hard as sin, and thrust forward into Sabo's hands to let him know—

“Anything,” he panted into Sabo's mouth, meaning it with every fiber of his being. He didn't mean for Sabo to cut open the belt; he had just wanted, so badly, to feel Sabo's touch. “You have me.”

bitch. bitch. 

idk just gonna write some prompts bc this looks long

sabo + jerking ace off while wearing his gloves + barely washing them (to ace’s embarrassment) bc he claims he likes having evidence of ace. they’re usually kept for when he’s at home tho, sabo’s gross but not that gross ;p (and ace would probably die LMAO)

 SORRY BUT THE POST I JUST REBLOGGED ABT HOLDING YOUR THUMB DOWN TO HAVE NO GAG REFLEX UM. Ace says he wants to try it but it feels weird so sabo’s like. ;) okay and runs his fingers over ace’s mouth, tapping and instructing him to hold his thumb down. tracing his teeth and teasingly not dipping his fingers down low enough, till ace glares at tries to argue smth like “this is not testing the trick” but that’s when sabo presses on his tongue, down his throat, and ace half-chokes on it. sabo just like ‘not like you have much of a gag reflex anyway’

was thinking abt this the other day but ace doing sabo’s nails and then being like dont ruin them! no touching until they’re dry but sabo’s like but idk when they’ll be dry???? bc he’s never used nail polish before and ace is like :) better not touch then as he teases sabo

ace ofc painted them gold and red bc theyre His Colours and the next day when they’re dry and pretty sabo spends ages running his hands against ace’s skin, fascinated and worshipping of how pretty ace is

before they started dating and when they were bad at handling alcohol, sabo kissing ace’s knuckles made that boi CATATONIC, his wrist would also make ace bolt bc Horny, he’s fucked when sabo kisses his wrist it’s just too...intimate. 

 headcanons, headcanons, they’re both pretty calloused in different ways...ace is like rope burns and shit, longer across his palm and knuckles, sabo has palm base bc of his pipe, but they’re confined, and then on his fingertips bc of dragon claw. AGAIN thinking about mr fast fuck brutality here like the STRENGTH in that boy’s hands wtf

ace’s hands have more scars, sabo has more callouses/micro-deposits bc he knows hand to hand/doesn’t start with a DF. 

idk where im going with that last one guess it’s just headcanons abt hands.  

that’s all fox, i like the number eight and i have so many other asks to do lmao

[forcedsense]

People always get so offended when I tell them that I’m allowed to call myself an idiot/dumb/whatever but theyre not allowed to call me that and then get mad at me if i call them out on it while playing games oe whatever (not abt the rpc this is abt the rl ex friend lol) and im just like;;; we might share autism but heres the thing, I’m allowed to call myself an idiot bc i live with myself. You’re not allowed to insult me because a: its rude, and b: you’re literally calling me an idiot due to my not having a sense of direction and play styles due to my disabilities.

The very fact people STILL dont understand why insulting someone for their disabilities, or flat out saying ‘your lack of attention just proves youre the worse xx player ever!!’ is literally just ableism and offensive is why i have trust issues and am tired of other people. I am allowed to joke about my problems because I have to live with them, and in manyways yes I am just an idiot, like how I was an idiot for not realizing that a grown ass man one month younger than me always relying on me to pay for shit to do w him, guilting me out of things i want to do because he decided it was stupid, insulting half the shit i liked saying it and anyone who enjoys it is stupid, regularly using the R-slur when something dumb is done/happens (ableism aGAIN), refusing to get a license because he ‘doesnt feel like it’, doesnt even try to get a job anymore after a few rejections (which, I’ve applied hundreds of places and never even received a rejection, so im starting to wonder the validity of those statements too) and saying its because his mother wants to force him into one, abusing his siblings by screaming at them and gaslighting them constantly, but I’m the idiot and the asshole because I’m disabled, or I don’t always think first before soing things (which has led to my doing shitty or stupid things, but I have the remarkable capability of admitting when I was wrong unlike these fuckheads who, when you flat out explain in detail what they did wrong, claim youre gaslighting and abusing them when youre telling them its inappropriate and wrong to guilt trip, be ableist, insult others intelligence, and ignoring when people ask you to stop, and all the times he joined my streams and would use my birth name after I asked him not to and to use my pen/alias, always accounting it to ‘forgetting’ but after 30+ times of being told, its no longer forgetting, like thats just putting unnecessary risk and ignoring personal preferences. I won’t even go into all the bitchfits about ‘gender discussion’ or anything because it still makes me sick and gave me severe imposter syndrome for my body dysmorphia.

Respect the disableds wishes, We should not have to explain this to you. Basic human decency should just be a given, and someone telling you in detail why what youre doing is wrong, and ignoring it and repeating it again (I’ve told him before that insulting me, calling me names, and otherwise hurt my feelings and I don’t want to risk any relapses. He ignored these and continued, he’d screencap my making mistakes and putting bad things in the wrong chat, and when I would apologize for what I did when I was wrong, he’d still hold it over my head and claim I suicide baited when I didn’t. I say whats happening and assume its fine since i was always there for him when he needed me, even after he actualy suicide baited me by claiming my using a joke on him he repeatedly used on me made him suicidal and that i owed him an apology, ive literally been walking on eggshells for years and finally not having him in my life has actuallybeen so much more freeing than I ever thought it would be. )

Disabled people are very often the centerfold of abusive relationships because we’re so used to the mistreatment that its almost a fucked up comfort, we feel like our complaining about mistreatment is us ‘overreacting’ because the able bodied constantly convince us it is. That we’re always the problem whether we make mistakes or do something bad and that our apologies are always fake and wrong, but when people do horrible things to us we’re not owed an apology, rather we always owe them. It’s fucked up and wrong, and honestly exhausting. We’re not punching bags to make the able bodied feel better about themselves. Whats fucked up is hes also autistic, and should know better, but is so self possessed that all the friendships hes lost and regained over the years have never been his fault, he was always ‘being abused’ by everyone, everyone somehow is always in love with him and gaslighting him, and ive come to terms with the fact its a mental fuck up of a self centered individual so narcissistic that he cant handle the idea hes ever in the wrong.

If I talkedabout this to people, they would claim I was in the wrong for not worrying about his feeings more or ‘putting up with it because it helps him feel better, he goes through a lot at home’. Being treated shittily doesnt give you a free pass to abuse your supposed friends. His dads a piece of shit and his mom (who honestly was an amazing person as far as I saw and his siblings would talk about. but he personally always claimed she’d turn into a monster randomly for saying he should get a job or try to succeed in life, and for applying for jobs for him that e purposefully failed the interviews for. These are the exact reasons he’d bitch about her, and occasionally because he’d overhear hee claiming he was wasting his life, which is horrible to hear but still does not excuse insulting your friends, belittling their success, insulting them for their disabilities, and going through your friends for supply and then dumping them and ‘accepting them back after they apologize’ whenever you need more validation. My family life is fucked to high heaven and I still try to be kind to people, I still try to educate people, and I still do my best even if I fuck up. And when I fuck up, I own up to it and apologize. Something people always ignore and pretend never happened, because to them the disabled are incapable of apologies.

Stop talking over us, stop treating us like shit, and stop purposefully hurting us, our feelings, insulting us, and using us to make you fee better. We are not punching bags, we are real people with real issues and all your shitty behavior does is add to it.

[rainywritingsx]

i saw you on a diff blog so i thought i would ask for a scenario of (kaminari, bakugou, kirishima) talking abt how fem!reader can be annoying sometimes & they overhear and their feelings are hurt so when they confront the boys teary-eyed, the boys make it up to them by letting them paint their nails and doing face masks! :D

Thank you so much for this request anon, I absolutely love the idea lmao. The 1-A girls should just do a whole skincare routine for the boys, imagine that lol. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this! I did my best trying to write everything as good as I could, and if it’s a bit out of character I’m sorry. Feel free to give me feedback! xxx

Kaminari Denki

He was just being an airhead like he’d often be and he did not even for a second realise that his girlfriend was actually in the room next door and that the door was wide open, so she was able to hear every part of the conversation he was having.

“She’s sweet and all, but she’s so annoying sometimes.” He complained to his friend, Ashido. She just nodded slowly, not really knowing what to say. Kaminari leaned backwards to lie down in his bed and looked up at the ceiling.

“Like I know we’re a couple but she always wants to do hang out with me after school and she always texts me.” He groaned which made his companion frown slightly. Sure, couples have their ups and downs and all but she didn’t think he should tell her this.

“Denki, I don’t think you should just say stuff like that..” she said to him.

Both of them had no idea that y/n could overhear every word of their conversation. So there she was, in her room, with tearful eyes as she tried to process the things her boyfriend had said about her, trying to understand his complaints.

Was she really that annoying? Why didn’t he tell her if she really was? Did he not trust her enough? Did he think she wouldn’t take it into consideration?

She stopped thinking when she heard her boyfriend say goodbye to Ashido. Maybe she should confront him about this... that would be the best thing to do, right? They could just talk it out. She slowly got up and took a deep, slow breath before walking to the room next door. The door was open so she didn’t even bother knocking.

“D-denki?” The blond haired boy smiled when he heard her voice, but soon his face changed into a frown upon seeing her teary eyes and pouting lips. He got up and walked over to you.

“Hey, what happened?” He asked, gently resting his hands on her waist. She told him about what she had heard and his eyes widened. Before she knew it, a billion apologies and hugs were thrown at her and she chuckled softly.

“You know I can be really stupid sometimes... will you forgive me? I’ll do anything!” He said. At first she just poured, but then her face changed into a small smirk.

“Anything?” She asked him sweetly, hiding her hands behind her back. He just nodded, making her giggle.

“I didn’t think you meant this.” He whined as he looked at his girlfriend’s concentrated face.

“Stop moving! You don’t want your nails to look ugly, do you?” She just said as she held his hand a little tighter.

“Just don’t tell my friends about this.” He mumbled, making y/n laugh softly.

“Its not that bad. Taking care of yourself is normal, soon your skin will shine even brighter like a cool hero!” She said as she finished painting his pinky finger.

“And?” She said as she showed him his fingers. Y/n had decided to paint them yellow and make small black lightning bolts to decorate them. The face mask he was wearing was a pickachu sheet mask (probably doesn’t exist but let’s pretend it does).

“You look lovely!” She said happily as she clasped her hands together and nodded in satisfaction. Kaminari just sighed softly.

“The sheet mask isn’t that bad actually.” He muttered, making her smile softly.

“So, am I forgiven now?” He asked his girlfriend. She pretended to think deeply for a while before looking back at him and nodding, a smile plastered on her face.

“Totally. But don’t you ever dare say stuff like that before talking to me. I want you to be honest with me.” He nodded softly.

“It was stupid and I didn’t even mean it. You know im an airhead.” She softly hit the back of his head.

“That doesn’t mean you can just say stuff like that.” She chuckled.

“I know I know, I’m sorry babe, it won’t happen again!” He smiled brightly, making y/n’s heart melt. Who could ever be angry at this sweet guy?

Bakugou Katsuki

Surprisingly to some people, Bakugo was often really nice to y/n, even in public. Yes, he still had his bad days sometimes but he had a super soft spot for her. Now this didn’t mean his personality took a whole turn but his gestures always clearly showed he cared about his girlfriend a lot.

But sadly, today was one of those bad days. He was talking to Kirishima and basically all he did was rant and complain about anything that was on his mind.

At one point, the subject he was ranting nonsense about was his girlfriend, and Kirishima just let him be since he knew he didn’t mean any of his words and she wouldn’t hear it, since she was hanging out with some of her friends.

Or that’s what they thought.

It turned out that some girls weren’t feeling well- uraraka had trained way too much yesterday and seemed like she could throw up any second, Yaoyorozu had tried making a meal which wasn’t exactly the best, so the girls decided to go to their own homes and meet up when everyone’s health was better.

So the two guys didn’t know that Mistuki let in y/n. At first she didn’t really know what they were talking about, but she could sense that her boyfriend was in a bad mood. She took off her shoes and hung her coat on the hanger and slowly walked up the stairs to his room. She froze however, when she heard her name slip past his name a few times, along with some big complaints.

Now she was aware that her boyfriend was a hothead, but that didn’t give him an excuse to be like that to her. Sure, he had days where he was just angry but he’d never ever insult his girlfriend. She slowly started tearing up but tried to stay strong by clenching her hands into fists.

At first she thought of just leaving him alone for now until Kirishima left, but she didn’t want to do that. A soft sigh escaped her lips before she knocked on their door. She didn’t even bother saying who it was and opened the door.

“Mom I told you-“ Bakugo stopped when he saw you standing in the doorway, eyes glossy with tears. He gasped softly and immediately put two and two together. Kirishima smiled at you awkwardly and slowly got up.

“I should go... uhm.. yeah... talk to you tomorrow Bakugo.” Before he left he quickly muttered something about his friend’s actions not being manly.

“Y/n..” was all he said. His girlfriend sighed softly and sat down in his bed, next to him. Panic took over him as he saw the first tear roll down your cheek.

“Okay okay don’t cry.” He said and sighed softly. “I didn’t mean it... i was just pissed today because of that half and half bastard...” he stopped when he didn’t hear you say a word. I’ll tell you what, we can do whatever you want to do alright?”

“Can it be anything?” She asked hopefully, and although Bakugo could sense that y/n was planning something he wouldn’t like at all, he nodded.

“I didn’t think you meant this.” Bakugo grumbled as you continued to apply pink nail polish on his thumbnail. You giggled and looked at him.

“You look lovely and the mask is good for your skin! Maybe I should also do your hair like Best Jeanist did..”

“WHAT?!” He exclaimed making y/n laugh loudly. After a small silence Bakugo spoke up.

“Are we good now?” She chuckled and nodded

“Yes but if you do shit like that again I swear to god I’ll kick your ass to Jupiter.” Bakugo smirked and nodded.

“I’d like to see you try.” He replied cockily, making her roll her eyes.

“I’m serious, Katsuki. Don’t do it again.” The girl said as she looked him dead in the eye. “Just talk to me next time instead of complaining to Kirishima.” He nodded and suddenly pulled her closer before kissing her deeply. Y/n knew Bakugo wasn’t the best with words and this was his way of apologising. Yes he had become a lot softer for her but there were still some things he should work at.

“You’re forgiven.” Y/n spoke softly when the blond haired guy pulled away. He smiled and then looked at her face in confusion before laughing loudly. The girl frowned at his reaction.

“What?” She put her hands on her face and then stopped when she realised part of the liquid of the face mask was on her face. She sighed softly and then grabbed the jar which contained the liquid and smirked at her boyfriend.

“Ah, I think you need some more. Or if it doesn’t work we should do it again...”

“WHAT?!”

Kirishima Eijiro

He had a long day at UA. He lost in a training battle, got a low score on his English test and he just wasn’t feeling great. His girlfriend, y/n, had noticed his mood but didn’t think too much of it, since Kirishima often had his bad days but got over it and kept his temper.

Today was different. He was talking to his friends during lunch and kept ranting about everything that happened that day. Little did they know his girlfriend was just walking by when he started talking about her.

As his friends all silently ate their food-bakugo hadn’t arrived yet, hence the silence, as the irritated redhead complained about anything, not even bothering to think about his words.

“-and don’t even get me started on y/n! That woman literally drives me insane! She’s so annoying, I want to feel like a man for once but that won’t happen if she continues babying me!” A soft frown appeared on y/n’s face as these words hit her like stone bricks. Was this really how he felt about her? Why didn’t Kirishima just tell her if it bothered him this much?

“Sometimes I don’t even know why I asked her out, ah... every second of the day she asks me how I am, if I’ve eaten, how this went how that went- it’s tiring!”

“I think it’s more tiring for her.” Ashido mumbled as she dragged her fork through her food, annoyed by her friend’s attitude.

As the conversation went on, y/n stood in silence, reflecting on everything she did and how she acted around her boyfriend. Was it that bad?

But why didn’t he tell her? If he was all about being manly, he should’ve manned up and told her right?

She needed answers because this wasn’t like him at all. This wasn’t the kirishima she knew. So she took a deep breath and put her plate down on the table where he was sitting. The force caused a loud sound which made Kirishima whip his head around. He was about to go off when he saw his lover’s tearful eyes piercing into his own.

“Y-y/n...” she didn’t utter a word as she suddenly grabbed his wrist and pulled him with her to a more private place. She did not want to cause a scene in the middle of the school.

“What was that for?” She said in a shaky voice. Kirishima sighed softly, looking down in shame. He knew exactly what she meant by ‘that’ and he felt bad. Seeing her made him realise how dumb his words are. He was just being an idiot and didn’t think about his words.

“I’m sorry.. it’s just- I had a horrible day and I took it out on everything and everyone, b-but I know that it isn’t an excuse for it.” She huffed and crossed her arms against her chest, eyebrows furrowed in anger as her lips were formed in a small pout. Usually he’d find her adorable but knowing that she was angry, Kirishima decided to keep his mouth shut.

“Okay, will this make up for it? We can do whatever you want for the whole day and I won’t complain, I promise. I don’t care what it is, even if it’s not manly I’ll do it.”

“Okay, lets go to my house after school.”

“Does that mean I’m forgiven?”

“Just do as I say.” She said before turning around and leaving. Kirishima chuckled as he shook his head.

Okay, when Kirishima told y/n they could do anything, he didn’t think they’d do this.

“You okay babe?” Y/n asked her boyfriend teasingly as she continued to decorate her boyfriend’s white nails with pink flowers. He was about to talk when she stopped him.

“Don’t talk. You aren’t supposed to talk with this face mask on, or it won’t work!” She said as she held up a finger against his lips. He sighed and poured childishly, making y/n giggle softly.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about this unmanly thing.” She chuckled and tried to hold in her laugh when she saw his facial expression relax immediately.

“But you know, if I made these flowers red you’d look good with them. And a real man has great skin.” She teased, meaning it as a joke but Kirishima actually agreed, which he showed by nodding. He then looked at her with puppy dog eyes as if to ask if he was forgiven. She smiled and pecked his lips quickly.

“Of course you are. But if you ever talk like that about me again I will not hesitate to tell everyone about this.” Kirishima nodded quickly at this before y/n continued decorating her boyfriend’s nails. He’d never admit it, but he actually quite liked this. The face mask was nice and the nails wouldn’t be too bad if they were more masculine colours. But of course he would never say that to y/n, or she wouldn’t leave him alone. He was just glad that his girlfriend forgave him, because losing her was one of the last things he wanted.

[wvrmtails]

(  and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?  )

( keiynan lonsdale, twenty one, agender ) my goodness, is peter pettigrew back? it’s been a few years since the halfblood has been around the castle, but i’d recognize he/they anywhere. rumor has it the seventh year spent the past few years aligned with the order. they’re stillallocentric & cunning and obsessive & passive, though. and the gryffindor still reminds me of ketchup stains on band shirts, an incomprehensible minute long string of curses, tracing the veins in your wrist, the smell of breakfast and fresh coffee, card tricks at three in the morning. well, then, i guess some things never change. 

links:  playlist.  pinboard.  stats. 

triggers: child abandonment, eating disorder (specifically bed/bulimia), depression, anxiety, weed. there’s a heads up before every bulletpoint!

history.

child abandonement mention |  peter grew up in glasgow, scotland and was raised by his mother, a halfblooded witch called daraja pettigrew. his dad wasn’t in the picture, hadn’t been from the moment his mum had told him that she was pregnant. | end of mention

which meant peter learned how to be alone from a young age. his mother worked a lot, after all, so she could pay the rent of their small flat and give peter the bare minimum, the things he needed. peter delved into fictional worlds: he read books. comics, mostly, but also a lot of roald dahl. he also watched a lot of telly, because tv is the bomb.

went to muggle elementary, where he was kind of? an odd one out. his clothes were always a bit lumpy, his words a bit jumbled, his eyes shifty. was an outsider on good days, a target on less good ones. he spent many lunch breaks eating alone, and most of the time he didn’t mind — being alone meant he could let his mind wander.

still, it fucked with his self esteem. no kid likes feeling alone, or like an outsider.

and then hogwarts rolled around and! friends! marauders! peter felt so at home! oh my god okay listen. he loves the marauders so much and he was so hyped and happy to be part of this little group and there was a Lot of hero worship there, esp in the early days?

peter always loved heroes. he loves comic books and people who save the day and get the girl and do it all. i think he kind of … projected that onto james and sirius especially? did not know how to do this friendship thing as an 11 year old tbh, was a mess, was blinded by their amazingness damn

also. re: being sorted into gryffindor! peter admires heroism and bravery and chivalry, and it’s your values that get you sorted some place. and he does try to be brave, and he IS, because he becomes a damn animagus for his bud! i mean! he was not a hatstall btw  — i choose to ignore that stupid bit of post canon. it took a while for the hat, sure, but no more than two minutes. 

pete was & is a shit student, not bc he was dumb, but just because school was not. his thing. his jam. the system was just not for him. deadlines? exams? homework? no thank you. anyway, peter’s skills flourished a lot more in different settings, like … using charms for convenience. or becoming an animagus for his bff. making potions against hangovers. etc.

becoming an animagus for remus was ! important ! to peter ! he did it for remus, not because of peer pressure, or anything else — he did it because it was right, and his friend deserved it and ! he did it, too, because he could. sure, his transfig grades may have been more than poor, but the kid did have some skill. he just needed motivation, which mcgonagall didn’t give (bc. she scared him.) and this situation? motivated the hell out of him. 

peter would be lying if he said he wasn’t taken a bit aback when he learned about remus’ lycanthropy — not because he was scared of him, to be honest, but he was just ? shocked ? he was more scared for remus, and so sad? so fucking sad for him? : (

collects chocolate frog cards like it’s his damn job. i mean, he did it before hogwarts, but once he arrived and there was more opportunity to trade and a whole club dedicated to it, peter grew more and more driven to complete his collection, lmao. peter also really likes playing gobstones and is pretty good at it? same with chess & card games — he loves games!!!! so much!!!

weed & anxiety tw | peter started smoking pot in the summer between his fourth and fifth year, and never really stopped. it made him slack more at school, but also eased his anxiety, which had started to develop in his fourth year. as months passed, peter became more and more of a stoner, which made him both more relaxed and funnier, but also ... a whole of a lot lazier. | end of weed tw

peter had always been a bit ... fidgety, easily on edge, a bit nervous, but he’d never really known anxiety until around fourteen years old. his insecurities grew, as he started comparing himself more to his friends and finding nothing but things he lacked in comparison to them, and questions as to why they put up with him. | end of anxiety tw

so his schooldays mostly looked like ... doing nothing, playing games, having fun with his mates, getting high, forgetting his homework, stressing about homework, and somewhere, in a tiny corner of his being, worrying about the war. whenever those worries started coming up, though, he was able to push them away, because the war was not yet there, not for him at least. there was graduation to worry about first, and once that was done, then he could worry about the war.

and then the war came to hogwarts. peter was shocked. peter had been in denial about the war and how close it could hit him, because in his mind he and his friends would be safe at hogwarts, would be safe until at least graduation, and then that was all gone. peter didn’t do much during the battle. i can imagine that he just hid, that he tried to stay out of trouble, that a side of him showed itself that he did not like at all. he worried about his friends, hoped they were safe, but didn’t go looking for them, didn’t try to protect them: he clung to safety and hid. like a fucking coward. he prayed, for a moment, and then cursed god to hell and back. probably smoked a few cigarettes, too.

post battle & currently.

peter is ashamed. ashamed of his cowardice, ashamed of his passiveness, of his incapability to stand up and fight, like so many of his friends did. a disgust grew in his chest for himself, and yet he was glad, somewhere, that he had hidden. he’d not seen as much as others had. he’d not gotten hurt. he had not died.

he did join the order, along with his friends, in an attempt to make up for his earlier lack of bravery, but he finds himself incapable to do much. he’s not good at dueling and while he’s able to be strategic and cunning, his mind seems to shut down whenever he tries to apply himself. he’s terrified, frankly, and he’s angry, because he should just be at fucking hogwarts. 

that idea i mentioned earlier, that the war wouldn’t be real until after graduation, and then graduation being postponed significantly, kind of froze peter up. rather than dedicating himself to the order in his own ways, as he would do in a canon verse, or eventually deciding to walk over to the death eaters, peter just became passive. i think peter hung around hq a lot, cleaning up and cooking food and making sure there was always enough tea/coffee/beer/liquor around for when there were meetings. would rather clean a dirty toilet than go on a mission. The Order’s personal MAID! 

depression & weed & eating disorder (bed/bulimia) tw | peter feels useless. he feels like a shitty person. he feels like he’s a burden. he hates himself. peter starts secluding himself, hiding in his mother’s home. he smokes more pot. he sometimes goes a week without seeing someone besides his mum. he watches too much telly and reads comics and drowns in fictional worlds and he becomes depressed. he sinks into it without noticing and can’t come back from it. his eating habits ( which have always bordered on unhealthy ) turn worse; peter binges, and then restricts, falls into a cycle. it’s the only routine he has.

when he’s around his friends, he lives up a little. he cracks jokes and wants to play games and laughs and feels a bit more alive, but he always craves his time on his own. that’s his new way to feel safe: to stick to his newly found routine, hidden in his room, away from reality. | end of tw

and then, finally, he was able to return to hogwarts. the three years spent away from school feel like a blur, if you ask him now, a useless blur, and peter’s laughing when he steps on the train. he’s glad. he’s glad. he can return to his plan to graduate and then, maybe, find the power in himself to face the war, rather than still, kind of, deny it. peter just wants to return to his last year and make the most of it, and return to the way life once was. ( that that’s kind of impossible is, well, yet another thing he’s in denial about. )

random facts & ramblings.

peter parker is his favourite superhero just because ... they share a first name and because peter parker is a bit of an underdog too and peter is just like! amazing! he named his owl parker.

he hates cats. used to love them --- he was allowed to take the cat from home with him to hogwarts when he was eleven, but he brought him back home after an unfortunate incident where his cat nearly ate him while he was in his animagus form. “sorry ma, i don’t love him any more. here. have him.” 

peter is actually a solid cook. this is because he learned to make some basic food when he was still a kid, first with his grandma, and later on his own. he liked doing it for his mother and he was. .. good at it? peter is also just passionate about food and finds comfort in cooking. breakfast food and baked goods are Prime Food Categories. 

he is asexual af, panromantic. has kissed both guys and gals and nb pals but did not like it??? confused. does not understand sexuality and all that jazz but tries not to think abt it because like! he’s got enough stress! doesnt need to think abt this!

peter is also agender, but i think he’s a lot less aware about this, because it’s confusing and so he just tries not to think about it. he does feel okay with he/him pronouns, but just doesn’t feel connected at all to being a boy/man

peter has abandonment issues because his dad, well, never even bothered to be there. not even for a second. he’s just constantly scared that people will leave and it’s funny, because he will probably end up abandoning all of his loved ones KDJFHSDF.

peter is quite non confrontational but also not ... meek? he just avoids it, either by physically staying out of people’s way or by dismissing most of the things said and getting out of there. a Passive Kid. will, however, defends his friends honour, because damn it, he loves them so much.

he’s such a fucking dork i swear to god. but he’s funny! peter is really funny. i deeply believe in this. he makes great puns and is able to just come out of nowhere and make a comment that just. hits the nail right on its head. 

peter curses a lot and has a scottish accent and sometimes he will have a minute long cursing session that no one rly understands.

listen i have such a wide array of hc’s im not going to list them all here just ask me

possible plots.

tutors. someone help peter graduate bc that is like. something he does want to do. he’s taking his newts in transfig, potions and herbology.

fellow collectors. please trade chocolate frog cards with peter and help him finish his collection before he loses his gd mind.

let’s play a game! peter rly likes playing games and tbh he’s usually in for one ( though it does depend on who you are, lmao ) so! maybe your character and peter just like hanging out and playing some Games.

i will add more im just so tired of typing rn KSDFHSJKDFHKJSDFKDSFH

[lookwhatilost]

24

i. i must’ve passed out unintentionally at some point. im not happy abt it. I didn’t take my makeup off yet. my teeth aren’t brushed. I do this a lot and I worry abt how damaged they must be getting, jst bc I’m stupid and drink too much. I dnt think I drink that much, I mean maybe in general, but not last night. I had, what? the flights at area two, the spiked seltzer and Moscow mule at cityside, the two beers when I got back to the apartment—wait, no, that actually is kind of a lot. im not sure when I got so desensitized. I check the clock—2AM—so i actually haven’t been knocked out for as long as I thought. two hours, probably. it could be worse. the cat is still awake and still being credulous with me. he’s warming up to me again, but it’s a little disheartening to redo this dance with him each time I see him. remember me, dammit. i remember you. I dnt think I’m being entirely fair to him, though. he’s a cat. i can’t rly apply my human understanding of anything to his behavior. either way, he’s waiting outside the bathroom for me when I go in to attend to my teeth and makeup. he follows me. he falls asleep next to me. i feel a little bit validated. part of me thinks being the kind of person that animals like effortlessly is the mark of some inherent goodness, but I know it’s illogical and this took effort. i want to jst believe there’s goodness here, and in my absence of any real examples, I’ll assign depth to something like this. sometimes it’s all you can do.

ii. the sun doesn’t have any business being up at five-something, but it is, and I dnt think there are shades in this room. well, I’m not sure, maybe there are, but I didn’t have the foresight to look for them or close them. llewyn has moved, he’s in his actual bed now, but he seems to have taken notice of the fact that I’m awake. I try to rest my eyes a little bit. i know i won’t be able to sleep with the sun in my eyes, but it’s restful anyway. I have a long day ahead of me and i want to ease into the morning. i think i drifted back off but I can’t tell. llewyn has moved again. it seems like he wants to cuddle now. impeccable timing, as always. ive heard ian’s alarm go off a few times in the other room but they’ve still not come out of it. i have to leave soon. i wanna actually physically say goodbye but I’m worried they’re avoiding me. the last time we had a goodbye moment, i kissed them on the cheek and that probably made them rly uncomfortable. I’m not even sure why I did that. i think they’re the only person im comfortable showing any kind of affection towards but that doesn’t make that action any less weird. especially given... i dnt want to think abt that shit anymore, actually. i can’t without feeling ashamed and very, very stupid. it’s not like that anymore, but i wonder how much has to happen and how much time has to elapse for something like that to not actually matter anymore. i wonder if it ever won’t. it’s probably not personal. not everything that affects me is abt me, sheesh.

iii. the iced coffee at cumberland farms tastes the same as the iced coffee everywhere else, but i can’t get it here often, and it’s very inexpensive. it can’t help but occur to me that 24 ounces of coffee is 7 calories, and the calorie counts are printed on the packages of the food I got—250 for the sandwich, 150 for the hash browns. i marinade on the thought for a little bit before deciding what to do with it. I eat my food and drink the coffee and try not to remember. I do anyway. I’m trying to think of different numbers. this is a pretty substantial takeaway breakfast for $3 and change. better than what i probably could have got at mcdonalds. the sandwich is kind of soggy but it’s not bad. the hash browns are better.

iv. five hours in the car fly by my nose and im back home, kind of. i think I’m still trying to figure out what “home” means. this place is familiar. it’s where i live. my roommate’s dirty dishes from yesterday morning are still in the sink. mail that the cat knocked off the counter on my way out is still sitting on the floor. 24 hours have passed since I was last here, but it looks like nothing has been touched. I may as well have just stepped out for a cigarette.

v. very rarely does anything change in a days time, but when enough of them pass, everything is suddenly different. i slept on this couch more times than I could count before i was even on the lease, like I’d known I’d someday live here and wanted to warm myself up to it. and I’ve lived here for a while now, going on 8 months to be exact, but it simultaneously feels much longer than that, and as though it hasn’t actually been that long. a lot has happened in that time, but mainly to evan. ive witnessed many things that he’s done but have branched out very little myself. i transferred at my job abt a year ago but im still doing the same work I’ve been doing since i was 19. i still have the same friends but i see increasingly less of them. i get into the same car and travel the same roads that take me the same places. i still drink jst as much.

vi. my body has changed a lot, but the things I’ve always hated abt it are still there and the changes have jst given me more to resent. i look in the mirror when I get out of the shower and it’s all the same. the face with the perpetually stupid, bovine look plastered on it, the same masculine jaw, broad shoulders, breasts that are too far apart, more noticeably so since they’ve gotten smaller, the laparoscopy scar on my navel, the clusters of freckles that are jst pigmented enough to make my skin look blotchy, the perpetually inflamed hair follicles on my thighs, the knobby knees, always covered in bruises, the leg that’s slightly shorter than the other. the counter in the bathroom is high enough that I can’t see my labia but I know they’re there. I want to go a day without debating whether to cut them off with the sharpest knife I can find. it’s not today. the weight loss did little to make me feel better abt the way it all looks—the size of my jaw and shoulders is more apparent now that they are less hidden, my eyes bug out, it’s hard to contort so that my ribs aren’t visible somewhere, my hipbones poke through my clothing. I dnt think I’ve ever looked so bad in my life. Im going to cover up.

vii. I look at the date on my phone and saw that it was the 24th and for some reason identified that this was the last time I’d see that number on a calendar before I turned 24 myself. It doesn’t seem to make sense that I’m that old now. I know it’s not old, too, but it doesn’t seem like that should be me. I still think I behave like a child in a lot of respects, and the thought conjures a memory of my old therapist insulting me, saying that I had the mental tendencies of a child in grammar school. when she told me this initially, I replied to her sarcastically: “well, shit. maybe I should see a therapist abt that” and she told me not to come back to her practice. I cried on the way home despite how cognizant I was of the absurdity of the situation. “grammar school”—who even calls it that? it stuck with me nonetheless. it’s hard to have a therapist fire you, even with the knowledge that the therapist in question was not very good, without wondering if you’re a basket case, if help will always be lost on you.

viii. my job isn’t the worst but the labor feels pointless and it rly intensifies my feelings that I’m fighting never ending monotony to wring out very little in the way of satisfaction. i think you rly have to love this job to do it as a career, or maybe you need to have a specific personality type that makes it easier to engage w. im not very good at socializing and i think im getting too old to keep making excuses for myself abt that. meg and ash are always nagging me to sell more but i dnt feel comfortable enough to make small talk w these people, let alone sell them stuff. i feel like i sound so stupid when I speak aloud. i use a lot of fillers in my speech and it’s rly hard to talk abt hair without sounding like a bullshitter. something is very insincere abt the language that’s involved. i know i know what im talking abt but I dnt know how to sound like i know what I’m talking abt, and it’s hard bc the latter is a lot more important.

ix. I can’t tell if people sincerely aren’t making sense today or if im foggy bc i kept waking up and going back to sleep. this guy keeps saying that the last woman who cut his hair used a 5 on the sides and a 9 on the top but she cut it all w scissors. that definitely doesn’t make sense. i dnt think they even make a 9. why would she be using clipper settings to describe a scissor cut? the top here is at least 3 times as long as the sides and back are. im not going—oh my god, i can’t deal w kids who scream during their haircuts—insane, right? stuff like this makes me rly doubt myself, too, like there are bigger gaps in my knowledge than—wow he rly jst is not tiring himself out w this screaming, huh—i feel there are. what if this actually is a coherent way to describe a haircut? maybe he rly is jst stupid, but I also think that when you write people off as “stupid” all the time, it reflects—god, why is his baby sister screaming now too? nothing is even fucking happening to her—worse on you than it does on them. it’s always the biggest idiots who are so self-satisfied to think that. but im not self-satisfied at all, im very insecure and it’s constantly apparent, but everyone is insecure abt a lot, and that doesn’t doesn’t equal intelligence. I wish I had a sounding board. and i rly wish that kid in Niya’s chair would stop crying.

x. everyone in the salon today seems like they’re in a bit of a weird mood, it’s not jst me for once. the phone is annoying me a lot more than usual today. i feel like it’s ringing every 20 minutes. niya is always very avoidant when it comes to taking haircuts, but meg is lagging today which is unusual. it was busy, too, but i keep getting shafted where tips are concerned. most of my regulars who were due to come in around this time came earlier this week, and usually they’re the ones who tip me the best. the radio station that’s on is very weird too, distractingly so—it’s gone from bowie, to panic at the disco, to nirvana, the police, florence and the machine, neil young, lord huron, rhcp, crowded house. it’s not intolerable, but i can’t seem to follow any sort of genre or time period theme and im paying more attention to figuring this out than i am what im supposed to be doing. it’s that point in the night where people generally stop coming in and I know I haven’t made very much. I’ve counted... $24. weird. are they playing “brick”? that’s a throwback.

xi. i remember my ex being rly into mystics despite not understanding them very well. i forget what he was doing w my natal chart, but he told me once that 24 would be a rly significant year for me. i asked him why and he said that’s all he could figure, there was nothing in the way of further details that he provided. i know I said something back to him abt hoping that id be married by 24—so stupid. granted, i would have been 18 or so at the time and 24 seemed very distant at the time. but that was 6 years at the time, now it’s less than 3 weeks. ive changed a lot, mentally at least, but my circumstances haven’t rly. maybe on superficial levels. yeah, i support myself financially and i have a job in a field i could realistically work in for the rest of my life if I wanted to do that. but im still jst as unsure abt what I want and what’s going to happen to me. i feel like I’m more “sought after” in a few ways, but my phone is jst as dry as it’s always been. i was hoping the move would have been good for me but im very scared abt doing it alone. and i might still do it, i jst dnt know what the timeline is going to look like and there’s no promise of me turning over a new leaf for real and finding my inspiration jst bc my scenery has changed. every time ive moved when I was younger, it jst dug me deeper into loneliness. but i was a child and it wasn’t my choice. but there’s no way for me to rationalize asking my actual lived experiences. maybe that’s the big thing that’ll happen to me at 24? or maybe instead of getting married, I’ll break a marriage up. i know that’s not going to get that far, you know, w kenny. i probably shouldn’t joke abt it, though.

xii. it looks like Evan is home from friday’s already and i rly dnt want to be around him right now. im still feeling rly hurt abt him pulling the plug on the massachusetts move without making any effort at all to sort his finances out or secure some additional income that wasn’t the precarious extra dollars he’s been getting from porn. he keeps sinking all of his money into bar tabs and impulse purchases and takeaway food. and his cars. i wish he would jst be honest w himself abt the cars already. he needs to sell the honda and be done w it before he has to replace the engine and drop another two grand on repairs. i dnt know why he never listens to me. im rly growing to dislike him, but we’re in this together whether i like it or not, and im not going to lead him astray when his financial problems are dragging me down w him. i think i am going to be a hypocrite and go out alone tonight. kenny’s bar is doing that bottle opening thing tonight, right? but i dnt rly want to be around kenny right now. but he might not be there. but i also get a weird satisfaction from being around him I’ll bet it’s going to be a madhouse there, too, and i rly hate crowded bars. but it’s something to do. maybe i will get lucky and someone will talk to me and we’ll have a decent conversation and I’ll never see them again after. why is that my ideal?

xiii. god, running out the last hour on the clock is always hell. no one ever seems to come in, so it feels like a huge waste of time, but when people do come in, i get very irritated. so I’m not sure what i actually want from my time here. i think im jst too fixated on how being stuck here until close almost every night is hurting my ability to expand myself socially. but what would i even be doing if i wasn’t here? i think i would jst be finding a way to waste time. id be sinking hours into doing nothing like I do all the time. i have a lot of time on my hands, in the grand scheme of things. i have literally no idea where it all goes. i drink a lot of it away bc i am generally too uninspired to participate in my hobbies, and i think that feeds the darkness bc they make me very happy. at least w cooking, yknow, i have to eat. i have an organic need to engage w that one. all else has been falling through the cracks, though. i dnt think ive picked my bass up in 3 weeks.

xiv. Kenny’s bar looks like it’s absolutely mobbed and I’d be upset if I went all the way out there only for me not to be able to sit down anywhere. it looks like Evan went back out. that works. i have beer at home. I’d be smarter to save the money anyway. i want to support kenny and the rest of the guys, even though I dnt have a lot of nice things to say abt him. his brewery is cool. it’s cool to have something with so much potential come out of your home town, even if i dnt entirely identify w that place as being my home town. but it’s better than saying that im from alabama, even though i feel like my childhood is more tethered to mobile. i think people would make weird assumptions abt me if I said that. people are rly unfair to what the south is actually like. i dnt know. but their growth has been nice to watch. seeing something you’ve supported since the beginning grow to the degree it has makes you feel pride even if it has nothing to do with you personally. and ive had so many good moments there, w ian, w my family, in general. i met justin there and im happy abt that, even though i dnt know what’s going on w justin. i dnt think justin knows what’s going on w justin. 

xv. looking at my shelf of ian souvenirs is making me miss ian, even though we were jst together, even though we’re seeing one another again in 2 weeks. I wish I could engage w them in a more stable way. seeing them reminds me of being a teenager and breaking into the apartment i used to live in on governor’s island. and since the base went out of commission not long after we moved, i was the last person to live in that apartment. i went back into my first bedroom and the evidence that it used to belong to me was still apparent, but the floorboards had been warped and the wallpaper was very faded out. i felt weird being back, nostalgia and warmth pitted against the instinct that i wasn’t supposed to be there. i wasn’t supposed to see it—a rosy memory colliding w irrefutable proof of the passage of time. ive been very unfair to them, ian, in so many respects but it’s all very mixed and complicated. i look at this person, and i see so many years worth of history, but the familiar messy gold hair is framing a slightly different, slightly fuller face. they talk abt people i dnt know very well, stories set in a city ive spent very little time in. it’s disorienting. i feel like when im here alone, im always confronting their ghost, in places we used to go together, in things we used to talk abt doing but never did—a final hike on a trail that closed before we got the chance to go together, their name scratched in the wall of a dive bar, things they’d always point out on the side of the road, small pieces of their essence scattered across a place they are no longer a part of. i wonder what I did to deserve any preservation, too. i see this person who I truly am proud of, who i rly do think is going places, and that respect gets interpreted into feelings of inadequacy. that there’s no way someone like this can look at me and see anything other than an unstable failure. i dnt think any other person knows me more fully, for better or for worse. worse is dominant. i know it is. my intuition is always screaming at me that they hate me, that they left bc they wanted to get away from me. literally none of that makes sense. i know they dnt lie to spare my feelings, but i feel like they almost have to be. i wonder why i can’t trust that im cared for. i wonder why I can’t have an evaluation of another person that i dnt immediately relate back to myself.

xvi. it took two beers for me to realize that I haven’t eaten anything since i was in boston. i need to stop doing this shit, but im still getting my calories if im drinking them, right? i feel like it doesn’t make sense for recovery to be as difficult as it is, but my emotions have always interfered w my hunger cues, and my body is so accustomed to constantly being hungry that it’s not something i even notice that much anymore. I’ve been getting weird pins and needles feelings in what I’m assuming are my intestines as I’ve upped my intake and I’m afraid of them rupturing and me bleeding out internally when I’m home alone. such a pathetic way to die—having your own blood and bile and shit poison you. I doubt I’m on my deathbed, i think my system is jst on the slow path to returning to normal, but i wasn’t expecting physical symptoms aside from weight gain, which on its own, i could live w. my ednos was never as restrictive as it was until somewhat recently. my problem was generally concerned w binge eating and compensatory behavior, usually fasting or short periods of restriction or exercise. all punishment based. i can’t help but find it ridiculous that i ended up w an eating disorder despite never caring abt my weight. even when I was a high school freshman and overweight, i didn’t care. i think it’s because i dnt outwardly self harm anymore, and that self-destructive need has translated into other conduits. the scars this leaves are much more socially acceptable than what I was left w when I was younger and carved “dumb whore” into my thigh. i can’t believe i did something so stupid. im glad that finally isn’t visible anymore. i can’t believe that i’m almost 24 and still, to some extent, do shit like that.

xvii. i still have that vacation time that I took to look at apartments in massachusetts, and since that isn’t going to happen, i want to take a poorly planned solo vacation. i looked at places to stay in DC, in chicago, in nashville, but i left discouraged. nashville is too far, Chicago is too expensive, DC seems too dangerous. i think my perpetual anxiety prevents me from taking full advantage of my freedom. and I can be free. 24 hours ago, I was in Boston and I didn’t have to tell anyone I was doing that. I’ve navigated a strange place on my own. I lived to tell the tale, but I also wonder what the point is of stuff like this if I have no one to share it w. No one to reminisce w. it feels like a waste of money. almost nothing feels worth what I spend on it––time, money, calories, stop thinking abt calories.

xviii. i open another beer, basically on an empty stomach. i need to stop drinking like this, it’s not even negotiable anymore. i know this is a problem. i need to stop. i dnt know if I want to stop. i want to drown in bliss but I feel none. alcohol amplifies everything I feel, and when I’m feeling good, it’s generally very good, but when it’s bad, it gets very bad. i feel weird now so it’s amplifying the negatives. they do not need that. no, i dnt need that. i know this is an addiction. im scared, but not scared enough to do anything abt it.

xix. i still have Rebecca on social media despite everything. she’s moved, she’s no longer in my proximity, but i still have her on things even though I have no motivation to keep any sort of peace with her. I remember when things happened, when i was too drunk to stand up and she insisted on forcing herself on me anyway, after the fact she kept saying all this stuff to me abt how she wanted me to be her girlfriend and i jst sort of laid there and said nothing. i had nothing to say. i wasn’t processing what’s happened, i jst kept thinking “this is bad. that was bad” to myself. and then she never rly follows up, a small acknowledgment of culpability, maybe, but she’s moved in w some boyfriend now. it’s weird that people can do awful things to you and move on like nothing happened, and you have those moments stuck in your head, keeping you stunted, keeping you away from living uncorrupted, uninhibited, the way you should engage w it. i think of how demoralizing it is to have your perception shattered by a 30-something woman who still laughs at nyan cat shit. i think of how most discussions of sexual assault in the mainstream act as though only men are capable of it, as though it’s only ever happening in heterosexual contexts. i think of how everyone who bullied me in high school probably does not even remember it. i think it’s absurd to compare the two things but I dnt laugh.

xx. i want to talk to Justin but i have nothing to say. i dnt know what I should talk to him abt. i dnt know how you’re supposed to do this stuff. im comforted by the fact that, since he was w someone for 10 years, he’s rly out of the dating loop, and he have no idea what he’s doing either. but it’s a red flag, you know. I think we’re jst friendly. and I’m okay w that, I need friends. i want friends. i never see fati anymore these days. things w evan are polluted. ian is very far away. it occurred to me that i know very little abt him, aside from us getting along, but do we actually? how would I know? it’s not uncommon to have good conversations, for most people. but he knows more abt me than I do abt him. i dnt think i could name a single one of his interests if prompted. he probably couldn’t name one of mine that isn’t “drinking”. I’m not sure if I’m willfully ignorant of reality or if im jst assigning negativity to something without a lot of basis. i wonder why im incapable of living in the moment and not thinking too deeply abt what happens to me. i figured out what I’m doing w all the time on my hands.

xxi. everyone has been telling me lately that i should try to monetize my cooking and I dnt know if I believe them. i can’t imagine I’m as good at it as people say. i dnt trust it. im not even sure if it’s a passion, rly, i think my eating disorder has corrupted my relationship w food and i have to push harder to be interested in it normally, and this is how i cope. i might jst be on a kick. and if it actually is a passion, do i want to ruin it by making it into a living? i didn’t feel one way or the other abt hair when I went into it. it was a neutral activity. to grow to hate it is not a loss. i only care abt being good at it bc directly dealing w people makes my failures feel very personal when they happen. i know good food is something you can’t fake. i made ian spring rolls yesterday and they insisted I not watch them eat. i respected the request, but i needed to see the look on their face. I’m annoyed I didn’t. everything was eaten, I know they wouldn’t have done that if they hated them. but I only have my family to go off otherwise, and they would definitely lie to me. so i dnt know. i feel like support is untrustworthy. i know the people who won’t be honest w me, i dnt entirely trust praise from the people who I know who aren’t shy to say “it’s not my thing, I’m not crazy abt it”. i dnt know why i can’t accept that I’m good at anything.

xxii. there’s no reason for my scale to be out when i’m “trying” to “recover” but i will not put it away. i step on it anyway, and it looks like i’m 103lbs, fully clothed, stomach full of beer. i know it’s bad, but i get a weird amount of gratification from seeing it. it’s very hard to maintain a weight that low, so it feels like an accomplishment, even though it isn’t one. it’s been months since i had a period, and that adds to the sense of satisfaction. but it’s not good. obviously. it’s really getting in the way of me wanting to work out and actually improve my body. i’m fatigued. i’m foggy. i know the fact that i’m depriving myself is partially responsible for my terrible mood. i know i already had a heart problem, why on earth would i make that worse for myself? i’ve been having a few normal eating days, so i still won’t admit to myself that i’ve relapsed. i had a lava cake 5 days ago! there’s a quarter stick of butter in that! and an ounce of chocolate! i didn’t care, so obviously i’m doing something right. i know i’m not, entirely, but i’m staying positive. either that, or i’m extremely in denial. there’s still chocolate in the cabinet. no, of course i am not going to eat it.

xxiii. meg scheduled 6 people on tomorrow, so it looks like i’m not going to make any goddamn money again. my aunt is coming in, so i’ll get a little more from her, but the cash i take home there is so very inconsistent. i feel like the more money i save, the more i worry abt it, like i should have more by now. like i’m going to struggle forever. the stuff i’m buying now won’t matter in a few days, but that anxiety is always going to be over my head. i need a career change. i know that. i keep forgetting that pete gave me money for college, so my “i dnt want to be in debt” excuse is a lie. i keep telling people i’m considering going to college again but i know i never will bc i haven’t actually gotten any better at managing my time and being disciplined. i think i’m better at pretending i am, but i’m not. even if i seriously wanted to, i wouldn’t be motivated enough to actually take the steps required to re-enroll. it’s all too overwhelming. i feel like that feeling alone is a sign i’d fail.

xxiv. I’ve been saying this thing to myself a lot lately to self-soothe: “god’s in his heaven” and i dnt rly know what I mean by that. i dnt know if i believe in stuff like that, I dnt have any reason to believe that there’s any kind of order or force that presides over anything. is that what I’m talking abt? we’re all preoccupied w our own things, attending to our own futures, making our own peace to the best of our abilities? maybe? am i saying that we’ve all been abandoned, ignored? then why do I find it comforting? i dnt think my inner monologue makes a lot of sense, but i only ever talk to myself these days. maybe I’m talking abt myself in an idealized way, but I look back on the past 24 hours and see my good mood i woke up w descend, the 900 calories I’ve consumed today, the $24 I’ve made, the singular text thread I have w ian, the nothing I’ve done in the handful of hours I’ve been home, the three empty beer cans. i know i’m constantly in my own head, constantly picking myself apart, picking everything else apart. it accomplishes nothing. it’s useless self-flagellation. i’m constantly raking myself over the coals for shit that doesn’t matter, constantly agonizing over situations that aren’t actually that deep. i think that’s a way in which i lie to myself. i spend all day beating myself up over the inconsequential while never giving due attention to my actual flaws. even if i was, saying that i’m useless and stupid all the time still does nothing. it’s abt meaningful action, and i’m so bad at that, and i’m doing this exact thing again. i think i do it so i have something to point to, to say “i’m working on myself” when i’m jst being mean and self-righteous abt it. where has it gotten me? what do i want from it? do i think i can bully myself into change? do i rly think it will make me do anything other than resign to complacency? 24 hours, and a lot has happened, but i’ve still gotten nothing done. another will pass, and nothing will change. then enough days will pass, and i’ll notice everything is different, and i’ll still feel jst as stuck. i will be meaner to myself abt it. and that’s what i’ll do. over and over, until the end of time. Evan jst got home. he said something abt how sad i looked. he asked me what was wrong. i wish i had the guts to say any of it to anyone’s face, let alone his. it’s fine, it’s fine, i tell him, God’s in his heaven. whatever it is i actually mean by that.

[glitterdustcyclops]

so tumblr, what incredibly petty, ridiculous things are you fully planning on literally dying mad about? cuz for me, there are two very specific incidents in my life that i have actually out-loud sworn to still be bitter about while lying on my deathbed, both of them involving food establishments that have wronged me

okay this post got wildly out of hand (i am a dramatic bitch) so the rest is under the cut

first, the Saga of the Medium Dipped cone. so a few years back when i still lived in vegas, a brand new dairy queen opened up a few blocks away from my house which was personally like a gift from the heavens. idk if u know this abt me, but literally one of my favoritest things on this earth is a chocolate-dipped vanilla soft serve cone, and honestly tbh nobody does it as good as my queen of dairy do. so i was excited to have such unfettered access to my supplier so wonderfully close to my abode, and as soon as i noticed they were open, i begged my dad to take me one day. now, i may love a dipped cone but i’m not an animal, so when drivethru dude asked what size i wanted for my frosty chocolate treat, i said medium. sensible, i thought. not pathetically tiny, but not complete hedonism either. a reasonable amount of chocolate-shelled cream to apply directly to my face parts, or so i thought.

cuz what i in fact received from drivethru dude was a giant fucking cone,literally almost a foot of that fuckin sugar styrofoam nonsense  (easily the worst part of the ice cream cone experience we are all in agreement, right?) with maybe abt a half an inch of soft serve on top, hastily slathered in some chocolate shell. and y’know, i understand mistakes can be made sometimes, so i asked my dad to double check the sitch, because that didn’t seem like my previous experiences with a medium dq dipped cone. so my dad is like “this was supposed to be medium?” and this guy, this fucking guy, looks my dad straight in the face with his cold, lifeless demon eyes and goes “oh, well, it’s just the cone that’s larger.”

THE CONE. THAT IS LARGER. JUST THE CONE. JUST THE CONE. *deep breaths* i like to think i’m a reasonable person, esp when it comes to exhausted retail/food service workers. we’re all just trying to get that bread, i understand. but yall. YALL. i about leapt over my father into that fuckin window and pummeled this dumb motherfucker. THE CONE. the fUCKING CONE IS LARGER.

i came home actually, literally, ranting about how the fuck this fuckin guy thought he could get away with giving me a “medium” dipped cone that was literally just a small ice cream in a giant ice cream package. i ate the cone, of course, and it turned to ashes in my mouth. my heart grew as icy cold as the pathetic amount of soft serve i consumed, and merely a moment later, it was gone. and my mom, my beautiful perfect precious mom was just like “next time you go, just get a small cone, and proportionally it will be more ice cream!” which honestly, is just a portal to madness at that point.

so anyway, me and the moms went back a few weeks later and i thought surely, surely they wouldn’t try that shit again, right? it was just a fluke? just a single, cruel person who hadn’t known love or joy and was too fuckin lazy to make my ice cream properly, but this time, surely, it would be different. dairy queen could redeem themselves! i believed in the power of redemption!! second chances!! so i, like an idiot, ordered a medium. dipped. cone.

AND GUESS WHAT I FUCKIN GOT. GUESS. GO ON. YOU’LL NEVER GUESS. because it was actually, somehow, less ice cream than last time, still on a medium-sized cone. like which demon thought when i ordered a medium-sized ice cream cone what i was really hoping for, what my truest heart’s desire, was a medium-sized empty-ass cone to eat. ice cream, guys. ice cream is what you serve, ice cream is what i thought i was ordering what is WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE. i was livid.

and from that day forth, i actually and literally swore that i would go to my literal and actual grave still seeking vengeance upon this establishment that had wronged me so egregiously. every time i go to a diary queen now i order a medium dipped cone, almost spitefully, and wait to see what they give me. thus far no one else has been dumb enough to try the “oh it’s just a larger cone” bullshit on me, and i haven’t had to try and nuke the entirety of dairy queen as a brand from orbit. for now.

my second story isn’t quite as dramatic but definitely still just as petty and ridiculous. this is The Sushi Incident, and it goes like this: when we first moved to utah, me and mom were shopping around for a sushi restaurant. our expectations for the food culture in this state had been already thoroughly disillusioned by this point, and after a few too many 4-star yelp reviews that surely must have been posted sarcastically led us down some dark, dark paths, we were desperate for anything approaching edible at this point. and so we hit up a pretentious looking place near where i worked, and it was busy and loud and took forever for us to get a table, but i was trying to be positive here. and i was looking over the menu and it actually kind of all looked terrible but-positive, i’m trying to be positive here, so i was searching for something that sounded good. and i noticed- under the basic sushi rolls, there was something missing. my number one, go-to staple sushi order. my version of the cheeseburger. my safe haven, that thus far not even the worst restaurant has managed to ruin for me. the rainbow roll. (yes, 95% of the reason i order it is because it’s called a rainbow roll, and therefore, it is the gayest sushi option).

so i asked the waiter, innocently, curiously, oh, do you guys not have a rainbow roll on your menu? and this monster, this eldritch abomination in the shape of a white guy (it’s always fuckin white guys, isn’t it) stared at me, like i’m fucking with him. complete blank face. like i was veering wildly off menu here, some demanding spoiled brat asking for herculean tasks in my honor. the fuckin grocery store makes rainbow rolls. this is entry level bullshit. i tried halfheartedly to explain-y’know, it’s a california roll, but it’s got slices of raw fish on top. like, c’mon dude. it’s the ham-and-cheese sandwich of the sushi rolls. and he just shrugged awkwardly and wandered off.

i don’t remember what we ended up ordering that night, i think i blocked the traumatic experience from my memory. but i do remember appending another black mark to my Record, and one day i know that i’m going to be old and withered, in a hospital somewhere surrounded by generations of my family, my wife beside me holding my hand. and i’m going to beckon towards one of my great grandchildren, and i’m going to pull them close, and i’m going to whisper they didn’t fuckin know what a rainbow roll was and then my heart is going to stop beating. those will be my last words.

so, like, pls, tell me i’m not the only one with these ridiculous stupid petty grudges against things?? pls???

[shinwnn]

i said i love you (&. yoongi)

(inspo) five word prompts “i said i love you”

you and yoongi have always been close

like you’ve never known a time in your life where he wasn’t more than a 15 minute drive away from you

& he’s always taken care of u in an endearing older sibling sort of way, even though he was only a year older than u

in hs while you guys were applying to colleges, you figured you’d just maximize ur chances by applying to any college in the city

but yoongi wouldn’t let u and instead went through each place on ur list and crossed out anywhere w in the general vicinity of a crime committed within the past 5 years

“yoongi stop it i’ll buy some pepper spray or something”

and while he’s laying on ur bed looking up each school he says, “pepper spray? u think that’s going to keep u safe? it’s just better if ur somewhere closer to me so i can keep an eye on u”

to which u replied with a teasing smile: “oh i see. so u don’t want me to go far bc ur gonna miss me right? bc ur life would be empty without me?”

yoongi looks up from the laptop and sees how content u are with urself (ur eyes lit up, ur cute smug smile) and his heart almost jumps the slightest bit

but without skipping a beat, he shoots back, “i hope u and ur stupid pepper spray get married far away from me”

neither of you have really let yourselves think abt the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two of you bc things seem so perfect with you guys being best friends that neither of you wanted to even think abt the possibility of change

it’s there though - there’s love in the way you guys look each other and think abt each other when the other person isn’t there and eat dinners with each others families

u end up going to school nearby yoongi’s at a college that he found  for u bc he knows the programs ur interested in and atmosphere that u like, and mostly bc he knows ur far too lazy to do any of the research urself

you’ve been going there for about two years now and you don’t see yoongi everyday, but you guys make it a habit to meet up every weekend no matter what

sometimes you go out for adventures on the town, but honestly with yoongi, most of the time it’s just lazy saturday nights on the couch with blankets and good music playing in the background while u guys tell each other abt ur weeks

and it’s just such a cute, wholesome friendship

recently, yoongi’s skipped out on some of these weekend hangouts bc an executive from an entertainment company heard some of the songs he writes in his free time & want him to try composing music for them

so yeah, he’s been busy writing draft after draft of the same demo

and you are so !! happy for him bc you know this has always been his dream

but you’re also worried bc you know how hard he can be on himself and how he always forgets to take care of himself

for the past few weeks you’ve been sending him periodic text messages checking up on him and letting him know what youve been up to, but all you receive in return is a sticker and, once in a while, a :~)”

and you’ve been trying to support him and you give him his space and time so he can write his best but you can’t lie that youre a little disappointed that he’s not making any effort to talk to you

so this weekend you decide to bring him dinner bc he said he’d be in working all night and , quite simply, you just really miss ur best friend

u make him kimchi jiggae bc u know how much he likes ur cooking & u pack some rice & side dishes and head over

but when u show up at his apartment and u realize he isnt home ur a little disappointed and kinda like ??? :/// where is he

you wait around a bit but he’s not answering his phone and after a while its pretty clear that he won’t be back anytime soon so you just hang the bag of food on the door handle with a little note saying “you must miss me a lot right? eat well buddy!!”

and you hang around for 5 more minutes bc ur hopeful but eventually you decide to start home

you remember that there’s a cafe nearby that yoongi would always take you to, so you decide to grab something before you head home

when you walk in the first thing you see is none other than ur best friend sleepily looking at his laptop & ur about to walk over excitedly

but when you look a little longer you notice he’s sitting across from a girl and they’re sharing a dessert & when she says something they both laugh happily

and you can’t explain it, you’re not even sure if it really happened, but you think your heart may have dropped at that moment

you also can’t explain why you turn around and walk out of the cafe when you make eye contact with him

you also can’t explain why you linger outside the cafe just long enough for him to come out and look for you

and when he does come outside you’re a little embarrassed bc you dont know why you did that, but when you look back inside and remember how happy he looked to be ditching your technically unsaid plans, any trace of embarrassment faded into anger

“we haven’t seen each other in weeks and you don’t come over and say hi?” he says playfully with a small smirk

you’re completely taken aback by how he’s acting bc ?? does he not even realize

“oh i am SO sorry!” u say w a violent sarcasm, “i didn’t think you would’ve recognized me seeing how you haven’t bothered to reply to any of my messages”

the soft smile that was on yoongi’s lips fades away quickly as he’s realizing that you’re not joking with him

he looks completely lost and he’s searching ur eyes to try and figure out what’s happening, and he looks like he’s about to say something when you cut him off

“it’s just nice to know that while i’ve been worrying about you, you’ve been out enjoying yourself”

his eyes darken a little with worry “hey,, hey” his voice is soft “i’m sorry i haven’t replied, but you know i’ve been busy. i thought you did at least. where’s all this coming from?”

you break eye contact and look down, you don’t want to say anything bc you don’t know either

you don’t know why you’re suddenly feeling protective over your friend

you dont know why you’re so hurt that he’s hanging out with some other girl,,, he’s allowed to after all

he reaches out to tug on ur jacket bc he wants to get ur attention (but also it’s just a habit of his to tug on ur jacket)

& it’s weird but when u look up to meet his sad eyes and something abt having him there, even when you’re upset at him, is so comforting that, for a moment, u feel every feeling you’ve ignored the past 10 years

u feel how much u completely and absolutely love this boy bc u know that he cares about u SO much & how comfortable and warm he can make u feel even when ur angry and it’s freezing cold outside & u feel that more than anything else, yoongi is home to u

but you can’t say any of that to him so instead u just look down again and say, more softly this time “i’m sorry just,,, go back inside okay? don’t worry about me” and you offer him a weak smile

but to him it’s just completely unconvincing

&when you start to leave he’s completely intending on taking you home and telling you how much he’s sorry bc after all he did kind of ditch u

but he can’t just ditch the girl inside so instead he waits with u by the bus stop

& while youre waiting no one says anything which is funny bc all youve wanted to do these past few weeks is talk to yoongi

"by the way, that girl is in one of my music theory classes. she was helping me polish the song i’ve been working on.”

at this point, you’re feeling a little embarrassed again about the way you’re acting (like a jealous girlfriend)

but you’re stubborn so u just make a sound of acknowledgement

“hey, i’m sorry i haven’t been messaging you. i’ll do better. sorry for making you worry. when i finish my demo track, i’ll take you for dinner ok?”

you nod and see the headlights of the bus coming so you stand up

you feel yoongi link arms with you and you look up to what might possible be the cutest little pout

“please don’t be mad at me” there’s a slight whining in his tone and u cant help but wrinkle ur nose at him, sings of amusement clear on ur face

“good night yoongi” you through him one more weak smile bc you can’t find it in u to offer anything more

he goes back inside after you get on the bus but he can’t focus the rest of the time bc when he was supposed to be thinking about how well certain harmonies complemented each other all he could think about was .... how cute you looked when u were upset?? and how come he though you being angry at him for being w another girl was adorable??

so anyway, the last few adjustments he makes to his track suspiciously has characteristics of a love song

when you get home, u roll around ur bed for a while trying to figure out everything you were feeling before you hear your door ring

when u go to answer it ur surprised to see that it’s yoongi, carrying the bag of food you had left for him ...and another bag from your favorite bakery

when he got home and saw the food you had prepared for him he knew immediately that he shouldn’t have let you leave earlier in the first place, so he figures the next best thing is coming with a bag of apology pastries

“miss me? it’s been a long hour right?” he says before shoving the bag he brought you into your hands “eat with me!”

as he makes his way towards ur small dining table, the weird tension that followed you two earlier dissolves almost completely

and ur enjoying it so much that you don’t even notice that you’re not even eating but instead staring fondly at yoongi

and when he looks up at u curiously, putting down his spoon for a moment and tilting his head bc he can tell there’s something you want to say, you take the opportunity

“sorry for being so weird today, i dont know it was weird i was being weird i shouldn’t have done any of that sorry if i ruined ur night or made you uncomfortable or made that girl u were with uncomfortable i dont know whats wrong with me i had expire yogurt for lunch yesterday maybe that’s it and ur still so nice to me even though i was being so weird and im sorry -”

the words are coming out of ur mouth at a mile a minute bc you’ve been thinking a little 2 much and now that ur finally vocalizing the thoughts, you’re finding it a little hard to stop

thankfully, yoongi also had a little time to think on the way over

and so he doesn’t hesitate to shut you up by leaning forward and placing the softest kiss on your lips before leaning back into his seat, smiling at you like he’s proud of what he did

and you can’t explain why it feels so natural when you kiss & why ur heart feels so warm, but then again you’ve been having trouble explaining a lot of things today

“i love you”

“what?” ur still a little in shock (and the fact that u feel like there are a thousand butterflies in ur stomach isn’t helping)

“i said i love you”

“ok idiot i heard u, but ... what?”

“i love how much u care about me and i love how you get mad at me and i love how happy u can make me and i love how many texts in a row you send me even when i don’t respond and i love-”

this time it was your turn to stop him, in the same way

u can feel him smiling into the kiss and u think to urself that this explains everything youve done today

bc you like him and u always have

“okay, i love you too”

[mikhailsbluecarnation-blog]

Red Elegy

(It is neutral pair, safe for anti blmatsu. I try to make it as cheerful as possible)

It was a red red evening,

Todomatsu hummed a bit while walking on street, he just bought some body care products, he spotted Karamatsu across him, eating chocolate. "Karamatsu nii san!!" He cheerfully said while waving his hand, giggling, Karamatsu smiled and ran to Todomatsu.

"Todomatsu! What are you doing here?", Karamatsu warped his arm around him while laughing, "I just bought some beer for Osomatsu, he is upset because he is not drinking all this week". Todomatsu laughed and nodded, "Good idea. He got big beer belly and it sucks to look at it, Ichimatsu-nii san loves to play with it though", he shrugged it off.

"Let's go back home".

---------

Choromatsu pouted when he opened the door, "Hey!! You two!! It is already late!! Do you drink our beers? Like come on, Osomatsu nii san give our money to you? Right Osomatsu nii san?", Ichimatsu glared at Karamatsu and pouted, "Osomatsu nii san will get angry, he said. Although he spend a lot of our money" Ichi pouted and hid behind Choromatsu.

"True", Jyuushimatsu nodded, "Osomatsu nii san he can't play baseball with me, can you do it, Karamatsu nii san?", Jyuushimatsu jumped and hugged Karamatsu. He smiled and whistled, "Alright alright. Tomorrow Ichimatsu wants to give food to cats tomorrow, so don't play too long okay?".

"I wonder if Osomatsu will help me for house chores" Karamatsu hummed, Jyuushimatsu laughed, "He will!! I can do it though! Then we join Ichimatsu nii san feeding cats! Then we go bathe with Todomatsu, he just bought some lotions and such"

Todomatsu puffed his cheek, "There is no way I will share it with you, also who is buying dinner food?"

"Not me! I thought it Osomatsu's job? Ughh, irresponsible older brother. I will do it then" Choromatsu folded his hands and walked to the door. "I will go to market, anything you want to buy?".

Jyuushimatsu raised his hand, "Canned fish!! Meat!!" He held Ichi's hand and smiled. "Also some milk for after bath! Osomatsu likes it the best!"

Karamatsu looked at them and took deep breath, "Anyway I, Karamatsu wrote an elegy!". Choro laughed a bit as he opened his can of beer, "Elegy?"

"Hahahhaa Karamatsu nii san? Why elegy? Is not that for dead person? Will Ichimatsu or anyone murder someone tonight?" Todomatsu laughed until he got teared up. Choromatsu sighed and turned his head to Karamatsu, "Honestly, it is not funny".

"It is because I am serious, we just can't be like this all the time, right? Imagining crazy and impossible stuff while staring at ceiling while laughing at ourselves, eat then sleep" his voice turned cold and he took out a piece of shabby-looking paper with messy writing.

Jyuushi covered his face with his sleeves, "Jyuushimatsu does not want to escape yet!! Osomatsu nii san will catch you if you read that!". Choromatsu glared and kicked Karamatsu on his cheek, "We have talked about this! He is with us!! Osomatsu is with us!!"

"You mean was? It was 10 years ago since he sleep and eat with all of us! Yet, you all still pretending he is not away for the longest time. We are all adults and I don't think it is good anymore!" Kara slapped Choro and looked down. "Let me buy some cigarette".

"Escape!? You just gonna escape after that?" Todomatsu stomped his feet, "We make a deal not to grow up for the sake of him!!!". Jyuushi sighed, "True true true." he got up sluggishly and ran to Karamatsu with dark emotions. "We made a deal not to forgot".

Karamatsu sighed, "We won't have any future you know, if things going on like this", he opened his paper and took deep breath ...

"If you are here please answer us;

Stone with your name can't answer

We are lost without you but,

We will make our own way

And won't forget you as we grow up

Leaving what is with yours behind"

Karamatsu teared up as he opened the door, running to a certain place where he felt his heart crushed to pieces. He dashed to a stone with 'Osomatsu' name on it,

------

"Osomatsu I am sorry I am sorry!! He hugged the stone tightly, "I don't and won't forget you!! It is a promise!!" Karamatsu wailed and crying until nearly evening.

A child with similar face with Karamatsu tugged his clothes, "Sir!! Sir!! Do you know where are my brothers?" He chirped and hugged his waist, "You looks like him!!" The boy have gray saturated colors all over. Karamatsu stroked his hair, "What is your name?".

The boy smiled, "Osomatchuuu~" he cuddled him, "Warm!! Osomatsu is often cold!! Because Osomatsu is dead right? Osomatsu miss his family, I lost count how many years passes" he played with Karamatsu until evening. "I often try to search the house but everything is so unfamiliar, it makes me scared" Osomatsu added before yawning.

Choro dashed on the street and looking at him, "Who is that with you?" Choro sighed, "Let's go home". Oso beamed and hugged Choro's legs, "Choro right?? I am Osomatsu. You grow so big!!" He jumped up and down, "Can you makes me go to home too? I can't sleep because I often heard things done under my name. I am still the eldest you know!!". Choro looking up, "I don't know what are you talking about. Osomatsu is a grown up, not a child..definetly" Choro stopped and crying, "Does our delusions and imagination come to haunts us??" He whispered in confusion. Karamatsu sighed, "Don't be like that, let's say our proper goodbye so Oso can have a good sleep, okay?".

Osomatsu climbed his waist, "Nii san wants to sleep. Give me a good smoochiee!!!" He pouted and hugged him like a koala, Choro phoned Todo so they came here and do proper goodbye.

Todo was a bit upset with others but he came, amazed with the little boy with saturated colors infront of them, they hugged him.

Osomatsu hugged his brothers and teared up, "My younger bros grow up cool!! I am happy!!" He jumping around, his colors begin transparenting,

"It is time for Osomatsu nii san to sleep, I try so hard to call some of you but you seems call 'osomatsu' that never exist and blame things on empty air. That is stuuuuuupid" He pouted and gave others one last hug on legs. "Be a proper adult for my sake okay??? Yaayy!! If I grow up, I won't be a plain, basic and obscure person like Ichimatsu said!"

Ichimatsu blushed in embarassment and covered his face, "I am sorry. I will be a proper grown up"

The others cries while nodding and they hugged him until nothing left, "it is a promise!!"

Karamatsu took deep breath when he could not longer sense his presence.

"Todomatsu, phone. Let's take a photo". Todomatsu handed it then Karamatsu told others to lined up.

Karamatsu and others lined up with their numeric born orders and they looked cheerful, "Let's go to this place once a week. Maybe a picnic will be okay. And...Ichimatsu, if you lost your money, don't blame it to Osomatsu nii san, he felt guilty" Kara giggled at Ichi. Ichi just pouted.

"So, Karamatsu nii san, what is your plan?" Choromatsu dusted off his ankles, "Getting a job? Or applying for courses for jobs? Osomatsu literally said we should grow up".

Kara put his glasses, "Heh no plan", Todomatsu elbowed him and they all laughing,

"Okay but let's get a job. Let's secure our future properly!!" Karamatsu laughed and hugged his brothers.

Choro and others raised their hands, "Secure it properly!! For Osomatsu nii san!!"

From today and onwards, there is only five of them.

(( @dat-voneja @akimonochan @berry-momma all))

((Auth. Note: So yeah this is a HC abt what if Osomatsu dead and othera just in denial and said it under Oso's name when they are up to something stupid and shaming him over cluelessness and plainess))

[b00ksandcleverness]

Honestly just poly rangers anything if u r taking prompts. Something abt the family's of each of them? Like Zack and Billy's moms and Trini's fam and Jason's fam and Kim's fam and idk what this is, I just rly like poly rangers

POLY RANGERS IS LYFE

Ok so before I get on with writing this, here are my poly ranger sexual/romantic/platonic pairing headcanons to stave off some questions. Trini is exclusively sexual with Kim. Her relationships with the boys are platonic, but she loves cuddling with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Kim is very occasionally sexual with Jason, but is platonic with Billy and Zach. Sometimes she just likes to kiss whoever is nearby, as does Zach. Jason and Billy are also mostly exclusively sexual with each other. Sometimes, when the mood strikes, Zach joins in with Jason and Billy, but he’s not often bothered with sex. I feel like Zach is a huge cuddle monster and him and Trini can usually be found cuddling somewhere.

I’m not too ready to add Tommy in yet simply because she isn’t developed, but  I love Tommy as a girl, and in my headcanons she’s definitely pan or bi and super flirty with literally everyone. She’ll punch your lights out if you even think her full name (Thomasina). She won’t be in this fic, but if people want to see more of her with the other 5, send me prompts!

Feel free to come yell about your headcanons with me! Ok, here we go...

----

The first parental unit they tell is Billy’s mom. 

Well, it’s more that Billy blurts it out during one of his babble fests they all adore, and they all hold their breath wand wait.

She’s so happy that Billy is happy and accepted and understood that she doesn’t blink twice before welcoming them all to the family and asking if they like cookies and apple juice. She has an avalanche of questions later, but they know she’s just trying to learn and they all answer her questions happily 

Zach’s mom figures it out by herself. She chatters at Zach for a solid 20 minutes in Chinese while the others stand and wait apprehensively for the yelling to start, for them all to be kicked out, but then Zach hugs her as tightly as he dares and they all let out a sigh of relief and laugh as she tells them about all the polyamorous couples in Chinese mythology. They promise they’ll study them for her, and these lessons become a normal weekly occurrence that just makes Zach even more proud to have her as his mom.

Jason’s father yells. A lot. He doesn’t kick them out but he tells them they’re just kids and how could they be so naiive, how could they think this is okay, how could they think about flaunting this in public, what would people think, how could they not think of their futures, and on and on and on. Their shoulders don’t slump but Billy and Kim both start to shrink as the yelling gets louder and finally, finally, and maybe surprisingly but really not, it’s Trini who speaks up first. She gets right up in his face and tells him to shut up and to stop bullying the people she loves.

It’s quiet for a long time after that, and Billy straightens and Kim just breathes and they lean in to Jason and Zack while Trini stares down Jason’s dad until he turns and leaves the room. She harrumphs and turns back to her partners and coaxes smiles from all of them while she trembles with adrenaline. Later, back at Billy’s house, she snuggles into Kim who’s sandwiched between her and Zach and allows herself to relax and remember that she has them and she has Billy’s mom and Zach’s mom and dreads what her parents are going to say next.

Jason’s dad surprises them all when the next week he invites them all over and tells them he’s been doing a lot of research. That he loves Jason and he doesn’t understand yet, but he’s going to try and to please give him a second chance. He apologizes to Trini and Kim and Billy, and shakes Zach’s hand. Jason tells them the next day that he’d gotten the first hug from his dad he’d had in 5 years. They have hope.

Trini tries to introduce them slowly to her parents. She’d told them all that her mom was overbearing and that her dad was just oblivious and that neither of them had reacted well to her coming out - obviously. First, she brings Zach. Because Zach is a boy and Zach can be polite and winning when he wants to be. Trini’s brothers love him and her parents are suspicious. Next is Kim, who adults absolutely adore. Well. Most adults, because apparently Trini’s mom really doesn’t like Trini hanging around with pretty girls. Trini’s dad gives her an encouraging smile and Trini helps Kim escape before the barrage of questions beats down on her shoulders. 

Jason and Billy come as a package, and Billy is sweet and Jason is charming and he’s Jason Scott and her mom seems to give in a little when she sees that these 4 odd kids keep coming around. But one day they’re all studying in Trini’s living room and they’re supposed to be alone so they’re not watching themselves and Trini’s mom walks in on Trini cuddling with Zach and Kim while reading her book for AP Lit and Kim just happens to be stealing a kiss from Jason while her arms are still wrapped around Trini, and Billy’s head is in Jason’s lap and it’s all wrong, all to fast, and Trini thinks she actually witnesses her mom’s head explode with the shout of her name.

“Trinity Maria Alverado! What the hell is going on in my house?!”

Trini’s mom is the first to kick everyone else out. They all tell her behind her mom’s back that they’ll be close, that they’ll come if she needs them, that they love her and all she can do is watch them close the door behind them. 

Her mother calls her father while still screaming at her, demands that he come home early to deal with this. 

Trini’s count of how many questions her mom asks has reached two hundred and sixteen without enough breath for her to even answer one by the time her father gets home. 

“Trini, your mother says you’re sleeping with 4 other people?!”

Trini closes her eyes and prepares to explain to a brick wall. She really wishes her partners were there, but she has a faint connection to all of them and she caresses them in her mind. 

“No, papí, I -”

“Don’t you dare lie to him, Trinity! I saw what was going on in this room! I saw -”

“You saw Kim kissing Jason. Because Kim likes to kiss people. I like to cuddle, and so does Zach. And Kim is the only one I’m, like, you know. With. So she cuddles with me too. And Jason is with Billy, so he’s really the only one that Billy is ok with touching a lot. And we all love each other, mamí, but it’s not wrong, it’s beautiful.”

“What do you mean, Kim is the only one you’re ‘with’? Are you having sex, Trinity? You are far too young to even be considering sex, and you’re not even married. Are you still pretending to like women? You know your father and I don’t support that, Trinity, I thought we’d come to an agreement! What I saw today...”

It goes on for hours. Trini tries explaining that there’s nothing sexual between her and the boys. Just Kim, even if they don’t ‘believe’ in her being gay. She tries explaining that yes, they’re all in a relationship because no matter how scared she is she’s not going to hide them like some dirty little secret. She’s proud of them and their relationship and maybe it’s stupid of her but she’s not backing down and she’s not moving again. She tries explaining 50 different ways but no matter what she says they don’t change their questions, they don’t change their minds. They send her to her room with a final “We are so disappointed in you, mija.” and the moment her door closes she’s out the window, running. She doesn’t have a destination in mind, but apparently her partners know her better than she knows herself because when she finally finds herself on top of her rock, they’re all sitting there. Waiting. With open arms and soft words and hot chocolate and music. She doesn’t go home for 2 days.

Trini’s parents tell her they’re moving a week later and Trini threatens to apply for emancipation. She’s not taking this shit any more. They don’t move, but for 2 months the only members of Trini’s family that talk to her are her little brothers (who understand much more easily than adults ever will. Who love their cool big sister no matter what. Who still love to cuddle with her if she promises not to tell any of their friend ever. Who don’t understand why their parents are mad at Trini, so she tells them it’s big people stuff and they’re lucky they’re still kids).

Kim’s parents are never around. She’s avoided talking about her family for so long with her partners that they knew something wasn’t right. She tells them over e-mail and doesn’t receive a reply. She stresses and worries and agonizes over what will happen when they’re both home again, but when they finally are it’s the usual false platitudes and nightly shouting match and absolutely nothing about the e-mail. 

One time, they’re all at her place and her father comes home early (parents coming home early seem to be their downfall). He tells her politely that her friends should probably leave for the night. That it’s late, and dinner would be soon, even though it’s not even 5pm. Trini’s the one who spots her tensed shoulders, her quickened breathing, and asks if she needs Trini to stay. Kim shakes her head - she’s dealt with what’s coming before, and this time she has them all there for her after. 

Kim’s dad shouts too. It’s worse than Jason’s dad, because his words are shaped to cut on purpose, not out of ignorance. She shrinks as she always does, trying to give the words less of her to injure. He tells her that she’ll never bring them over again, that they’ll never mention the subject within a mile of their home ever again, that it will be forgotten. The next day her parents leave on another trip and she hugs Zach’s mom and Billy’s mom and Jason’s dad so hard because sometimes, she just really wants a parent who cares.

Angel grove whispers about them, they know it. It’s a small town, where everyone knows everyone, and where gossip spreads faster than wildfire. But they have each other, and they have 4 parental figures who love them and accept them. They have Zordon and Alpha 5 and their purpose. They have music and adventures and really, what else would they ever need.

--

dunno what this turned into, but hope you liked it!

[marsreds]

a not-at-all short introduction to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (with quotes and without spoilers)

Sooooo this is a thing. That has happened.

Before we begin, a few notes:

This thing is loooong. Like super long. Like 29.2k words long.

It is an actual spoiler free introduction, meant for people who know nothing or very little about the series.

It is split into three parts: 1) Me summarising and quoting individual books (except the last three, on account of not having read them yet) 2) Me talking about how and where to start for maximum reader satisfaction (based on my personal preferences) and 3) Miscellaneous (Adaptations, Fandom, etc.)

The quotes are there to give you a feeling of the writing, and were chosen either because they’re spoiler-free or require context to count as spoilers. (This means that some of the most memorable were left out.)

The quotes that are from the specific book that I am talking about at the moment are both blockquoted and in italics. Other quotes are merely in italics.

If/when I have something I wanna say during a quote I’ll put it in {}

Alright. First the bare bones:

Discworld’s a series of 41 books written by English author Terry Pratchett. They take place on the titular Discworld which is a flat world that sits on the backs of four elephants that stand on a turtle, Great A’Tuin.

While technically most of these books are self-contained, the whole of the series is usually divided into sub-series that follow a recurring set of main characters and share themes.

The sub series are:

Rincewind (and the wizards),

The Witches,

Death (and family),

The City Watch,

The Moist Von Lipwig series,

The Tiffany Aching series,

Stand-alones

Continued under the cut.

The books

-The first book, The Colour of Magic, was written in 1983 as a straight up parody of The Standard Fantasy Novel. It introduces us to Rincewind the “Wizzard“ (bc he can’t spell. God I’m still angry abt this) and sets the formula for his books. Which is, more or less: Rincewind does NOT want to be a hero. Fate and the Universe do not care. Rincewind tries to run away. Just runs into waaaay more trouble. Somehow, by accident, manages to save the day anyway. I don’t... actually care about Rincewind? I find his books repetitive, so the best I can do is point you towards @bookhobbit​ in general, and this post in particular.

This book also introduces Twoflower, the Disc’s very first tourist, his man-eating, walking Luggage, Death (although he doesn’t actually come into his own until later) who TALKS LIKE THIS, and the city of Ankh-Morpork, while it’s burning to the ground.

There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.

By now the whole of downtown Morpork was alight, and the richer and worthier citizens of Ankh on the far bank were bravely responding to the situation by feverishly demolishing the bridges.

… if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet armour and shouting “All gods are bastards”.

Rincewind opened his mouth to reply but felt the words huddle together in his throat, reluctant to emerge into a world that was rapidly going mad.

‘I assure you the thought never crossed my mind, lord.’ ‘Indeed? Then if I were you I’d sue my face for slander’.

… what he didn’t like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

The Watch were always careful not to intervene too soon in any brawl where the odds were not stacked heavily in their favour. The job carried a pension, and attracted a cautious, thoughtful kind of man.

-Then Pratchett realised that that one didn’t really have any plot, so he wrote a sequel—the only actual direct sequel in the series—The Light Fantastic. I don’t actually remember much of this one: we’re still with Rincewind and Twoflower, we meet Cohen the Barbarian and with him the “Survival is a matter of practice” school of thought, and things from the Dungeon Dimensions try to get out.

Introduces Death’s (adopted) daughter and we learn that Death’s horse is named Binky.

When light encounters a strong magical field it loses all sense of urgency.  It slows right down. And on the Discworld the magic was embarrassingly strong, which meant that the soft yellow light of dawn flowed over the sleeping landscape like the caress of a gentle lover or, as some would have it, like golden syrup.

 …fake fossil bones put there by a Creator with nothing better to do than upset archaeologists and give them silly ideas.

It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

 It is said that the opposite of noise is silence. This isn’t true. Silence is only the absence of noise.

 It is well known that things from undesirable universes are always seeking an entrance into this one…

The Disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailors who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world.

The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see. You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.

- Equal Rites is the first book in the Witches series, but also considered apart from it since the only witch they share is Granny Weatherwax (who isn’t yet herself here).

The story follows Esk, a little girl who, due to a mix-up, ended up with a wizard staff. in a world where magic is strictly gender-segregated.

However, it is primarily a story about the world. Here it comes now. Watch closely, the special effects are expensive.

…no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed.

…magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.

‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.

‘They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.’

…Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph.

A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them.

The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Milk,’ said the child, still focusing furiously. ‘You get it out of goats. You know?’ Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats.

‘If you were a boy I’d say are you going to seek your fortune?’ ‘Can’t girls seek their fortune?’ ‘I think they’re supposed to seek a boy with a fortune.’

Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer’. They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.

…she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.

‘I didn’t have white hair in those days,’ said Granny. ‘Everything was a different colour in those days.’ ‘That’s true.’ ‘It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.’ ‘The sunsets were redder.’ ‘There were more old people. The world was full of them,’ said the wizard. ‘Yes, I know.  And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really. I mean, you’d expect it to be the other way round.’

Also relevant to the above is this essay titled: Why Gandalf Never Married.

Equal Rites also gives us the first instance where Pratchett shows that he Understands the value of “women’s work” [Granny and Esk hit the road to get Esk to Unseen University, to get proper wizard training, on the way they meet another witch]:

The council have tried to run me out once or twice, you know, but they all have wives and somehow it never quite happens. They say I’m not the right sort, but I say there’d be many a family in town a good deal bigger and poorer if it wasn’t for Madame Goatfounder’s Pennyroyal Preventives. I know who comes in my shop, I do. I remember who buys buckeroo drops and ShoNuff Ointment, I do. Life isn’t bad. And how is it up at your village with the funny name?

- Mort is the first novel in the Death sub-series.

Death gets an apprentice, then goes on holiday. It goes about as well as you’d expect. Also solidifies Death’s job and character.

‘But you’re Death,’ said Mort. ‘You go around killing people!’  I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT’S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT’D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN’T IT?

Something like a small blue supernova flared for a moment in the depths of his eyesockets. It dawned on Mort that, with some embarrassment and complete lack of expertise, Death was trying to wink.

WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN? 'How many drinks have you had?' FORTY-SEVEN. 'Just about anything, then,' said the barman and, because he knew his job and knew what was expected of him when people drank alone in the small hours, he started to polish a glass with the slops cloth and said, 'Your lady thrown you out, has she?' PARDON? 'Drowning your sorrows, are you?' I HAVE NO SORROWS. 'No, of course not. Forget I mentioned it.' He gave the glass a few more wipes. 'Just thought it helps to have someone to talk to,' he said. The stranger was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said: YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME? 'Yes. Sure. I'm a good listener.' NO-ONE EVER WANTED TO TALK TO ME BEFORE. 'That's a shame.' THEY NEVER INVITE ME TO PARTIES, YOU KNOW. 'Tch.' THEY ALL HATE ME. EVERYONE HATES ME. I DON’T HAVE A SINGLE FRIEND. 'Everyone ought to have a friend,' said the barman sagely. I THINK — 'Yes?' I THINK . . . I THINK I COULD BE FRIENDS WITH THE GREEN BOTTLE.

'And what was your previous position?' I BEG YOUR PARDON? 'What did you do for a living?' said the thin young man behind the desk. The figure opposite him shifted uneasily. I USHERED SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD. I WAS THE GRAVE OF ALL HOPE. I WAS THE ULTIMATE REALITY. I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK WOULD HOLD. 'Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?' Death thought about it. I SUPPOSE A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF EXPERTISE WITH AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS? he ventured after a while. The young man shook his head firmly. NO?

WHAT IS IT CALLED WHEN YOU FEEL WARM AND CONTENT AND WISH THINGS WOULD STAY THAT WAY? 'I guess you'd call it happiness,' said Harga. Inside the tiny, cramped kitchen, strata'd with the grease of decades, Death spun and whirled, chopping, slicing and flying. His skillet flashed through the fetid steam. He'd opened the door to the cold night air, and a dozen neighbourhood cats had strolled in, attracted by the bowls of milk and meat – some of Harga's best, if he'd known – that had been strategically placed around the floor. Occasionally Death would pause in his work and scratch one of them behind the ears. 'Happiness,' he said, and puzzled at the sound of his own voice.

{and then you cry for years and years about a seven-foot-tall skeleton}

- Sourcery. Rincewind’s back. So are the Dungeon Dimensions. And all he’s got is a half-brick in a sock.

Deals with themes of identity and self-determination and can a wizard be a wizard if he can’t spell? (if u think i’ll ever let that one go, u are Wrong)

NOTHING IS FINAL. NOTHING IS ABSOLUTE. EXCEPT ME, OF COURSE.

‘I meant,’ said Iplsore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile?’ Death thought about it. ‘CATS,’ he said eventually, ‘CATS ARE NICE.’

YOU’RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said. ‘That’s what being alive is all about.’

When it comes to glittering objects, wizards have all the taste and self-control of a deranged magpie. …senior wizards tended to look upon actual magic as a bit beneath them. They tended to prefer administration, which was safer and nearly as much fun, and also big dinners.

 …to say that wizards are healthily competitive by nature is like saying that piranhas are naturally a little peckish.

It takes more than a bit of magic and someone being blown to smoke in front of him to put a wizard off his food.

…‘to call his understanding of magic theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice.’

This was the type of thief that could steal the initiative, the moment and the words right out of your mouth.

‘Sorry. I don’t know why, but the prospect of certain death in unknown lands at the claws of exotic monsters isn’t for me. I’ve tried it, and couldn’t get the hang of it. Each to their own, that’s what I say, and I was cut out for boredom.’

 ‘Quick, you must come with me,’ she said. ‘You’re in great danger!’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I will kill you if you don’t.'

- Wyrd Sisters. The second Witches book.

The king is murdered. His son is sent away with a theatre troupe. Also Shakespeare. So much Shakespeare like you cannot believe.

Really introduces Granny Weatherwax, as well as the rest of her coven: Nanny Ogg, Granny’s best friend since childhood, matriarch of the Ogg clan, has been married three times, last husband died thirty years ago. Youngest child is in his late teens. No-one dares question this. And Magrat Garlick, a new-age hippie, wishy-washy sort of witch.

Sets up the central theme of the Witches series which is the Power of Stories. And how everyone has a role, but that doesn’t mean you have to fulfill it and it does so by example because if there ever was a typical Evil Witch it’s Granny Weatherwax—except that she refuses. She refuses to be anything less than Good, and she doesn’t want to but there’s no one else around to do it so she must and if there’s one thing Esme Weatherwax knows about being a witch is that being a witch means Getting Shit Done (but this doesn’t mean that she’s gonna be nice about it).

(“What’s empowerin’ about witchcraft anyway?” said Granny. “It’s a daft sort of a word.” “Search me,” said Nanny. “I did start out in witchcraft to get boys, to tell you the truth.” “Think I don’t know that?” “What did you start out to get, Esme?” Granny stopped, and looked up at the frosty sky and then down at the ground. “Dunno,” she said, at last. “Even, I suppose.” And that, Nanny thought, was that. -From “The Sea and Little Fishes” , a Discworld short story)

The night was as black as the inside of a cat.  It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which the gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate.  In the middle of the elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye.  It illuminated three hunched figures.  As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked:  ‘When shall we three meet again?’ There was a pause. Finally another voice said in far more ordinary tones:  ‘Well I can do next Tuesday.’

Unlike wizards, who like nothing better than a complicated hierarchy, witches don’t go in much for the structured approach to career progression.  It’s up to each individual witch to take on a girl to hand the area over to when she dies. Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders. Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have.

‘I hate cats.’ Death’s face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant. I SEE, he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat-haters.

‘Something comes,’ she said. ‘Can you tell by the pricking of your thumbs?’ said Magrat earnestly. Magrat had learned a lot about witchcraft from books. ‘The pricking of my ears,’ said Granny.

She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.

Granny Weatherwax didn’t hold with looking at the future, but now she could feel the future looking at her. She didn’t like the expression at all.

It was one of the few sorrows of Granny Weatherwax’s life that, despite all her efforts, she’d arrived at the peak of her career with a complexion like a rosy apple and all her teeth. No amount of charms could persuade a wart to take root on her handsome if slightly equine features, and vast intakes of sugar only served to give her boundless energy.  A wizard she’d consulted had explained it was on account of her having a metabolism, which at least allowed her to feel vaguely superior to Nanny Ogg, who she suspected had never even seen one.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact,’ said Granny.

Like most people, witches are unfocused in time. The difference is that they dimly realise it, and make use of it. They cherish the past because part of them is still living there, and they can see the shadows the future casts before it.

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one. Some people are even more unfortunate.They get them all.

There was plenty of flat ground in the Ramtops. The problem was that nearly all of it was vertical.

It’s not much using being a witch unless you look like one.

‘Actors,’ said Granny, witheringly. ‘As if the world weren’t full of enough history without inventing more.’

Granny subsided into unaccustomed, trouble silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theatre worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her to control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.

‘I’d like to know if I could compare you to a summer’s day. Because - well, June 12th was quite nice...’

Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger is one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard steam of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

Magrat knew she had lost. You always lost against Granny Weatherwax, the only interest was in seeing exactly how.

- Pyramids. Stand-alone.

Heir to the throne of an ancient Egypt rip-off gets a modern education. Inherits throne. Tries to figure out why is there an ancient Egypt type place when everywhere else is late medieval/renaissance. Turns out there’s a reason. It involves gods.

"Therefore I will have dinner sent in," said the priest. "It will be roast chicken." "I hate chicken." Dios smiled. "No sire. On Wednesdays the King always enjoys chicken, sire."

- Guards! Guards!  The first City Watch book. According to Pratchett, the first time he wrote the jokes to fit the story and not the other way around.

Young Carrot, having been raised by dwarves, goes to the Big City to join the Watch and learn to be a Man. The city is Ankh-Morpork. It actually does not go as you would expect. At the same time Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night are trying to overthrow the Patrician. By summoning dragons. That one does go as you’d expect. And Sam Vimes really, really, really wants a drink.

Introduces us to:

The (initial) members of the decaying and downtrodden Ankh-Morpork City Watch:

Captain Sam Vimes (the main-est character of the Watch books) an angry (so, so, so angry), cynical, noir detective-type man who has spent the better part of the last thirty years looking at the world through the bottom of a bottle. And yet, still strives to be Good. Strives and struggles and pretty much drags himself kicking and screaming into the light—

(”Who watches the Watchman?” “I do, always.”)

Gets one of the most satisfying character development arcs over the series, like words cannot describe how satisfying it is to watch Sam Vimes grow.

Carrot Ironfoundersson, raised by dwarves. Genuinely believes that everyone is actually really the decent sort, and, really, we should all get along. Has an extremely ordinary sword.

Sargent Fred Colon and Corporal Nobby Nobbs. Those two guys. You know the ones. The first one is the quintessential man from the street and the second needs official papers that prove he’s actually human.

Guards! Guards! also properly introduces Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, the man responsible for making Ankh-Morpork what it is.

And, of course: Lady Sybil Rampkin, richest woman in Ankh-Morpork, tall, bald, in her forties, breeds swamp dragons.

Also, since I forgot him before: The Librarian of Unseen University, real name unknown and unimportant, who due to a series of magical mishaps ended up as an orangutan, then promptly decided that it is far easier to enforce the rules of the library when you are a hundred kilos of muscle, and refused all attempts to turn him back. Also L-space. Just L-space.

“Oh, the caged whale. You want the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night. Three doors down.” “Who're you, then?” “We're the Illuminated and Ancient Brethren of Ee.” "I thought you met over in Treacle Street,'' said the damp man, after a while. “Yeah, well. You know how it is. The fretwork club have the room Tuesdays. There was a bit of a mix-up.” “Oh? Well, thanks anyway.” “My pleasure.” The little door slammed shut.

Now pull back briefly from the dripping streets of Ankh-Morpork, pan across the morning mists of the Disc, and focus in again on a young man heading for the city with all the openness, sincerity and innocence of purpose of an iceberg drifting into a major shipping lane.

People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."

All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

{this is a joke here, but keep it in mind, it’ll come back}

Fabricati diem, Pvnc.

-The motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch

One of the Patrician’s greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalizing of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, at least it should be organized crime. And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life. And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes … I know who you are, he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn’t time fly, I know where they play. So you won’t forget about what we agreed, will you? And he smiled.

‘I shall deal with the matter momentarily,’ [the Patrician] said. It was a good word. It always made people hesitate. They were never quite sure whether he meant he’d deal with it now, or just deal with it briefly. And no-one ever dared ask. 

The thief shuffled out.  It was always like this with the Patrician, he reflected bitterly.  You came to him with a perfectly reasonable complaint. Next thing you knew, you were shuffling backwards, bowing and scraping, relieved simply to be getting away.  You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly.  If you didn’t, he sent men to come and take it away.

One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorised crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it.

He was vaguely aware that he drank to forget. What made it rather pointless was that he couldn’t remember what it was he was forgetting any more. In the end he just drank to forget about drinking.

{Oh, Vimes}

Sergeant Colon owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs. Colon worked all day and Sergeant Colon worked all night. They communicated by means of notes. He got her tea ready before he left at night, she left his breakfast nice and hot in the oven in the mornings. They had three grown-up children, all born, Vimes had assumed, as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting.

The only reason you couldn’t say that Nobby was close to the animal kingdom was that the animal kingdom would get up and walk away.

His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there a few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls!  And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people. The fresh rain glistened on the panorama of towers and rooftops, all unaware of the teeming, rancorous world it was dropping into. Luckier rain fell on upland sheep, or whispered gently over forests, or pattered somewhat incestuously into the sea. Rain that fell on Ankh-Morpork, though, was rain that was in trouble. They did terrible things to water, in Ankh-Morpork. Being drunk was only the start of its problems.

... laws governing the animal kingdom did not apply to the Librarian. On the other hand, the Librarian himself was never very interested in obeying the laws governing the human kingdom, either. He was one of those little anomalies you have to build around.​

Vimes knew that the barbarian hublander folk had legends about great chain-mailed, armour-bra’d, carthorse-riding maidens who swooped down on battlefields and carried off dead warriors on their cropper to a glorious roistering afterlife, while singing in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. Lady Ramkin could have been one of them. She could have led them. She could have carried off a battalion.

He couldn’t help remembering how much he’d wanted a puppy when he was a little boy. Mind you, they’d been starving – anything with meat on it would have done.

{Oh, Vimes}​

‘A book has been taken. A book has been taken? You summoned the Watch,’ Carrot drew himself up proudly, ‘because someone’s taken a book? You think that’s worse than murder?’

The Librarian gave him the kind of look other people would reserve for people who said things like ‘What’s so bad about genocide?’​

The Guild of Firefighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire. Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients’ houses in groups, making loud comments like ‘Very inflammable looking place, this’ and ‘Probably go up like a firework with just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?’

​It was the usual Ankh-Morpork mob in times of crisis; half of them were here to complain, a quarter of them were here to watch the other half, and the remainder were here to rob, importune or sell hot dogs to the rest.

... Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler, purveyor of absolutely anything that could be sold hurriedly from an open suitcase in a busy street and was guaranteed to have fallen off the back of an oxcart.

{Another reoccurring character, and that up there is all you need to know}

It always amazed Vimes how Nobby got along with practically everyone. It must, he’d decided, have something to do with the common denominator. In the entire world of mathematics there could be no denominator as common as Nobby.

...when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.

For a moment the rank felt as though they had just returned from single-handedly conquering a distant province. They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was definitely several letters of the alphabet away from how they normally felt.

Say what you like about the people of Ankh-Morpork, they had always been staunchly independent, yielding to no man their right to rob, defraud, embezzle and murder on an equal basis. This seemed absolute right, to Vimes’s way of thinking. There was no difference at all between the richest man and the poorest beggar, apart from the fact that the former had lots of money, food, power, fine clothes, and good health. But at least he wasn’t any better.

People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

‘Might have just been an innocent bystander, sir,’ said Carrot ‘What, in Ankh-Morpork?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘We should have grabbed him, then, just for the rarity value.’

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.

{Oh, Vimes}

Colon didn’t reply. I wish Captain Vimes were here, he thought. He wouldn’t have known what to do either, but he’s got a much better vocabulary to be baffled in.

Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn’t make an issue of it because a man angry enough to lift 300 lbs of orangutan without noticing is a man with too much on his mind.

‘I believe you find life such a problem because you think that there are the good people and the bad people,’ said the man. ‘You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.’ 

A couple of women were moving purposefully among the boxes. Ladies, rather. They were far too untidy to be mere women. No ordinary women would have dreamed of looking so scruffy; you need the complete self-confidence that comes with knowing who your great-great-great-great-grandfather was before you could wear clothes like that.

That was how you got to be a power in the land, he thought. You never cared a toss about whatever anyone else thought and you were never, ever, uncertain about anything.

And eventually, under siege, you did what Ankh-Morpork had always done – unbar the gates, let the conquerors in, and make them your own.

- Faust Eric Rincewind again.

Was first an illustrated novel, then became a novel-novel. Rincewind gets mistaken for a wish-granting demon. Hijinks ensue.

- Moving Pictures Stand-alone, sort of.

Hollywood has come to the Disc! More film references than you could shake a stick at! Star power! Eldritch horrors! Talking dogs!

The first book to have the senior staff of Unseen University as more than bit parts. Introduces Mustrum Ridcully, the new Archchancellor, hired because they thought that an outdoorsy type would be easy to get rid of. Turns out he’s Teddy Roosevelt.

There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities. At least there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it’s wrong.  All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

…Ridcully the Brown did speak to the birds. In fact he shouted at birds, and what he normally shouted was ‘Winged you, yer bastard!’

There was always this trouble with the Librarian. Everyone had got so accustomed to him it was hard to remember a time when the Library was not run by a yellow-fanged ape with the strength of three men.

‘Students?’ barked the Archchancellor. ‘Yes, Master. You know? They’re the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we’re a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats-’

… Victor Tugelbend was also the laziest person in the history of the world. Not simply, ordinarily lazy. Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of effort. Victor has passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight through commonplace idleness and out the far side. He put more effort into avoiding work than most people put into hard labour.

Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got.

… Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end.

‘Make him a star? What’d he want a star for?’ ‘I didn’t know you could make stars… I thought they were like, you know, stuck to the sky…’ ‘I think he meant make him a star. You know, him himself. Turn him into a star.’ ‘How can you make anyone into a star?’ ‘I dunno. I suppose you compress them right up small and they burst into this mass of flaming hydrogen?’

‘What’re you supposed to be?’ he said at last. ‘A leader of a pack of desert bandits, apparently,’ said Victor. ‘Romantic and dashing.’ ‘Dashing where?’ ‘Just dashing generally, I guess.’

​Camels are far too intelligent to admit to being intelligent.

All dwarfs have beards and wear many layers of clothing. Their courtships are largely concerned with finding out, in delicate and circumspect ways, what sex the other dwarf is.

Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants. At least, that’s what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingeingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff.

‘Fate doesn’t like it when people take up more space than they ought to.’

​Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business. The trick was to do magic and get away with it.

According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles.

The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out yourself from the clues. And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.

​…inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

If heroes didn’t arrive in the nick of time, where was the sense in anything?

- Reaper Man. Second Death book.

Death gets fired. People stop dying. One of them is a Senior Wizard or UU. It’s a mess.

Introduces the Auditors of Reality.

Y’all know the Death and the Maiden troupe? Where Death goes and falls in love with a young woman, except it’s not a woman but a metaphor for Life? Well it’s like that, except there is no young woman, there is no metaphor, there’s just Life and Living and you continue to cry about a seven-foot-tall skeleton. Forever.

"Windle!” he said. “We thought you were dead!” He had to admit that it wasn’t a very good line. You didn’t put people on a slab with candles and lilies all round them because you think they’ve got a bit of a headache and want a nice lie down for half an hour.

It is true that the undead cannot cross running water. However, the naturally turbid river Ankh, already heavy with the mud of the plains, does not, after having passed through the city (pop. 1,000,000), qualify under the term ‘running’ or, for that matter, ‘water.’

The Shades was the oldest part of the city. If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork the Shades was remarkably like the aforesaid well-known astronomical phenomenon: it had a certain strong attraction, no light escaped from it, and it could indeed become a gateway to another world. The next one.

“I haven’t felt like this since Mrs. Cake was one of my flock.” “Mrs. Cake? What’s a Mrs. Cake?” “You have . . . ghastly Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and things, yes? Terrible hazards of your ungodly profession?” “Yes.” “We have someone called Mrs. Cake.”

He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself. It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.

Mrs Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small.

{Ah, puns}

Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can.

‘Yeah, it’s always the same,’ said Reg Shoe bitterly. ‘Once you’re dead, people just don’t want to know, right? They act as if you’ve got some horrible disease. Dying can happen to anyone, right?’

Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason.

‘It can’t be intelligent, can it?’ said the Bursar. ‘All it’s doing is moving around slowly and eating things,’ said the Dean. ‘Put a pointy hat on it and it’d be a faculty member,’ said the Archchancellor.

I’VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door.  I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG.  JUST PLACES TO STAND.

‘Oook.’ ‘You? We can’t take you,’ said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. ‘You don’t know a thing about guerrilla warfare.’ ‘Oook!’ said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn’t know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded-up remains of, for example, the Dean.

There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another - language was just there to hide their thoughts.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

I HAVE RECEIVED THE BADLY-WRITTEN NOTE OF THE BANSHEE.

DROP THE SCYTHE, AND TURN AROUND SLOWLY.

- Witches Abroad. Witches series.

Magrat inherits a fairy godmother wand. Sets off to Discworld New Orleans to do the job. Nanny and Granny come along. On the way there pass through about 15678635 different fairy tales. Granny can’t be having with that.

Again about the power of Stories. Has one of the most heartbreaking deconstructions of the talking animal trope I’ve ever read.

Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and become the bicarbonate of history.

... it used to be so simple, once upon a time. Because the universe was full of ignorance all around and the scientist panned through it like a prospector crouched over a mountain stream, looking for the gold of knowledge among the gravel of unreason, the sand of uncertainty and the little whiskery eight-legged swimming things of superstition. Occasionally he would straighten up and say things like ‘Hurrah, I’ve discovered Boyle’s Third Law.’  And everyone knew where they stood.  But the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself – partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt. 

The waterfall was the second highest anywhere on the Disc and had been discovered in the Year of the Revolving Crab by the noted explorer Guy de Yoyo (Of course, lots of dwarfs, trolls, native people, trappers, hunters and the merely badly lost had discovered it on an almost daily basis for thousands of years. But they weren’t explorers and didn’t count.)

Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.

Asking someone to repeat a phrase you'd not only heard very clearly but were also exceedingly angry about was around Defcon II in the lexicon of squabble.

People like Nanny Ogg turn up everywhere  It’s as if there’s some special morphic generator dedicated to the production of old women who like a laugh and aren’t averse to the odd pint, especially of some drink normally sold in very small glasses. You find them all over the place, often in pairs.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

Forever didn’t seem to last as long these days as once it did.

Fairy godmothers develop a very deep understanding about human nature, which makes the good ones kind and the bad ones powerful.

‘Nothing wrong with being self-assertive,’ said Nanny. ‘Self-asserting’s what witching’s all about.’ ‘I never said there was anything wrong with it,’ said Granny. ‘I told her there was nothing wrong with it. You can be as self-assertive as you like, I said, just so long as you do what you’re told.’

‘Look,’ said Magrat desperately, ‘why don’t I go by myself?’ ‘‘Cos you ain’t experienced at fairy godmothering,’ said Granny Weatherwax. This was too much even for Magrat’s generous soul. ‘Well, nor are you,’ she said. ‘That’s true,’ Granny conceded. ‘But the point is…the point is…the point is we’ve not been experienced for a lot longer than you.’

It was one of the weak spots of Granny Weatherwax’s otherwise well-developed character that she’d never bothered to get the hang of steering things. It was alien to her nature. She took the view that it was her job to move and the rest of the world to arrange itself so that she arrived at her destination.

Greebo turned upon Granny Weatherwax a yellow-eyed stare of self-satisfied malevolence, such as cats always reserve for people who don’t like them, and purred. Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in purr.

Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government.

Infinity contains more than you think. Everything, for a start.

… people are riddled with Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up into knots. Early morning is the worst time – there’s that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from fast asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.  

‘You’d have to go a long day’s journey to find someone basically nastier than Esme,’ said Nanny Ogg, ‘and this is me sayin’ it. She knows exactly what she is.  She was born to be good and she don’t like it.’

‘You can’t make happiness ...’ Granny Weatherwax stared at the distant city. ‘All you can do,’ she said, ‘is make an ending.

Cats are like witches. They don’t fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There’s no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won’t know they’ve lost, and to be real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows it. There’s no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure.

- Small Gods. Stand-alone.

In the empire of Omnia worship of the Great God ("holy horns") Om - dominates all aspects of life. Novice Brutha just wanted to tend to the melons. Instead, he finds a tortoise claiming to be The Great God himself. Exploration of Religion, Belief and the difference between the two ensues. Also philosophy and math jokes.

If you have decided that you’re just gonna read one Discworld book ever, my advice is for it to be this one.

The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it.  Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

One of the recurring philosophical questions is: ‘Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?’ Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in the forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone.

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history … ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just … well, things happening one after another.

Many stories start long before they begin …

…there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do.

The people who really run organisations are usually found several levels down, where it’s still possible to get things done.

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose everyday and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect that would happen anyway if you were prepared to wait a few million years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine by means of grapes and time and enzymes wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time.

There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval.

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.  It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.

Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, ‘It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting’ …

Fear is a strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourishes underground.

You couldn’t put off the inevitable. Because sooner or later, you reached the place where the inevitable just went and waited.

When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror.

Words are the litmus paper of the minds. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word ‘commence’ in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say ‘Enter’, don’t stop to pack.

Brutha had never been any good at lying. The truth itself had always seemed so incomprehensible that complicating things even further had always been beyond him.

 ‘Winners never talk about glorious victories. That’s because they’re the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterwards. It’s only the losers who have glorious victories.'

‘What’s a philosopher?’ said Brutha. ‘Someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,’ said a voice in his head.

‘That’s why it’s always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it’s all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There’s No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they’re going to start dribbling one of ‘em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy’s ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles…’

People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time.

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools - the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans - and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.’

‘Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave,’ said Vorbis. ‘So I understand,’ said the Tyrant. ‘I imagine that fish have no word for water.’

The Captain frowned. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?’ ‘A bit of a poser, that,’ agreed the mate. ‘I s’pose it makes up for ‘em ... enjoying themselves all the time when they’re alive, too?’  He looked puzzled.  Now that he was dead, the whole thing sounded suspicious.

‘Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.’

‘Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place…’

And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it’s not murder if you do it for a god).

Bishops move diagonally. That’s why they often turn up where the kings don’t expect them to be.

Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection.

‘No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.’

‘You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life.’

Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE? "Yes. Yes, of course." Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.

‘I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.’

 ‘Everything happens because things have happened before. Stupid.’

- Lords and Ladies. Witches series. Plus a side appearance by the Wizards.

Directly follows Witches Abroad, (but not a sequel, everything you need to know from there is explained in a 3-4 paragraph foreword). The Fair Folk are here and well...

Also our first glimpse of the “modern“ witches.

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired* – but that’s not the start.  The play, the game, the war is just a little window on a ribbon of events that may extend back thousands of years.  The point is, there is always something before.  It’s always a case of Now Read On.

*Probably at the first pawn.

 Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before. The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods creating the universe out of the ribs, entrails and testicles of their father.* There are quite a lot of these. They are interesting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for what they say about people.

*Gods like a joke as much as anyone else.

But what we have here is not a nice girl, as generally understood. For one thing, she’s not beautiful. There’s a certain set to the jaw and arch to the nose that might, with a following wind and in the right light, be called handsome by a good-natured liar. Also, there’s a certain glint in her eye generally possessed by those people who have found that they are more intelligent than most people around them but who haven’t yet learned that one of the most intelligent things they can do is prevent said people ever finding this out. Along with the nose, this gives her a piercing expression which is extremely disconcerting. It’s not a face you can talk to. Open your mouth and you’re suddenly the focus of a penetrating stare which declares: what you’re about to say had better be interesting.

{Do you ever read something and you cringe at how relatable it is?}

He had in fact been raised to be a Fool, a man whose job it was to caper and tell jokes and have custard poured down his trousers. This had naturally given him a grave and solemn approach to life and a grim determination never to laugh at anything ever again, especially in the presence of custard.

...[he] would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it’d save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.

There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember the really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now realize you’re going to have to look at lot of people in the eye today and you’re sober now and so are they but you can both remember.

The Librarian was always up early because he was an orang-utan, and they are naturally early risers, although in his case he didn’t bellow a few times to keep other males off his territory. He just unlocked the Library and fed the books.

‘We taught her everything she knows,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘Yeah,’ said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken. ‘D’you think ... maybe...?’ ‘What?’ ‘D’you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything we know?’ ‘It’d take too long.’

Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare.

… all books, everywhere, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General Theory of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence.

‘I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,’ said Granny firmly. ‘Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.’ ‘But all them things exist,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.’

Knowing the time of your death is one of those strange bonuses that comes with being a true magic user. And, on the whole, it is a bonus. Many a wizard has passed away happily drinking the last of his wine cellar and incidentally owing very large sums of money.

The land between Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops was fertile, well-cultivated, and dull, dull, dull. Travel broadens the mind. This landscape broadened the mind because the mind just flowed out from the ears like porridge.

It wasn’t that Ridcully was stupid. Truly stupid wizards have the life expectancy of a glass hammer. He had quite a powerful intellect, but it was powerful like a locomotive, and ran on rails and was therefore almost impossible to steer.

The universe doesn’t much care if you tread on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies. Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don’t make an effort to catch them. Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years’, thirty years’, ten years’ time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.

{^^^^^!!!!!}

Strictly speaking, Hodgesaargh wasn’t his real name. On the other hand, on the basis that someone’s real name is the name they introduce themselves to you by, he was definitely Hodgesaargh. This was because the hawks and falcons in the castle mews were all Lancre birds and therefore naturally possessed of a certain ‘sod you’ independence of mind.  After much patient breeding and training Hodgesaargh had managed to get them to let go of someone’s wrist, and now he was working on stopping them viciously attacking the person who had just been holding them i.e., invariably Hodgesaargh.

…the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was successfully demonstrated to be made up of resons* or reality fragments.  Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five ‘flavours’, known as ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘sideways’, ‘sex appeal’ and ‘peppermint’.

* Lit: ‘Thing-ies’.

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

‘Glamour. Elves are beautiful. They’ve got,’ she spat the word, ‘style. Beauty. Grace. That’s what matters. If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty cruel little bastards they are.’

'Being alone isn't the same as not having other people around,' said Granny.

‘But they’re witches. I don’t like to ask them questions.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘They might give me answers. And then what would I do?’

‘You can’t cross the same river twice, Archchancellor,’ he said. Ridcully stared at him. ‘Why not? This is a bridge.’

‘Witches! Let me tell you about the witches round here-’ ‘Our mum’s a witch,’ said Shawn conversationally, rummaging in the sack. ‘As fine a body of women as you could hope to meet,’ said Ridcully, with barely a hint of mental gear-clashing. ‘And not a bunch of interfering power-mad old crones at all, whatever anyone might say.’

‘Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.’

 …Nanny Ogg was an attractive lady, which is not the same as being beautiful. She fascinated Casanunda. She was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partly because she had a mind so broad it could accommodate three football fields and a bowling alley.

She’d have to stop thinking like this. She seemed to have spent her whole life trying to make herself small, trying to be polite, apologizing when people walked over her, trying to be good-mannered. And what had happened? People had treated her as if she was small and polite and good-mannered.

Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

People remember badly. But societies remember well, the swarm remembers, encoding the information to slip it past the censors of the mind, passing it in from grandmother to grandchild in little bits of nonsense they won't bother to forget. Sometimes the truth keeps itself alive in devious ways despite the best efforts of the official keepers of information.

The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

​'Being noticed is what a witch is all about.'

The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select.

‘I love the way humans think. They think like songs.’

‘…I had to learn. All my life. The hard way. And the hard way’s pretty hard, but not so hard as the easy way.’

{Favourite favourite favourite}

All she could do for all of them was be herself, here and now, as hard as she could.

‘The price for being the best is always…having to be the best.’

‘Act your age, Gytha.’ ‘Act?  Don’t have to act, can do it automatic,’ said Nanny. ‘Acting half my age…now that’s the difficult trick.’

- Men at Arms. Watch series.

Someone wants to assassinate kill the Patrician (in this case Edward d’Eath) and resurrect the Monarchy and the Good Old DaysTM and the Watch has to stop them. a.k.a. “Sam Vimes And Put That King Back Where You Found Him Or So Help Me” Part I.

Begins and ends as a murder mystery.

Introduces Angua, Cuddy the dwarf, expands the character of Detritus the troll, and deals a bit with Troll-Dwarf relations, which will be expanded further along.

He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.

It was said later that he came under bad influences at this stage.  But the secret of the history of Edward d’Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all, unless you count all those dead kings.  He just came under the influence of himself.

‘What’s so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work’s already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place, eh?

From the back, Vetinari looked like a carnivorous flamingo.

The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.

Young Edward thinks that there is no lake of blood too big to wade through to put a rightful king on a throne, no deed too base in defence of a crown. A romantic, in fact.

A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But 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 socio-economic unfairness.

{coincidentally, Men at Arms is the point where Pratchett runs out of fucks to give}

‘Dwarfs and trolls get along like a house on fires’, said Nobby. ‘Ever been in a burning house, miss?’

Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

‘Hah! Your uniform doesn’t scare me,’ he said. Vimes looked down at his battered breastplate and worn mail. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This is not a scary uniform. I’m sorry. Forward, Corporal Carrot and Lance-Constable Detritus.’ The Assassin was suddenly aware of the sunlight being blocked out. ‘Now these, I think you’ll agree,’ said Vimes, from somewhere behind the eclipse, ‘are scary uniforms.’

…all dogs don’t talk.  Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored.

{this book was published in 1993}

The most dangerous man in the world should be introduced. He has never, in his entire life, harmed a living creature. He has dissected a few, but only after they were dead, and had marvelled at how well they’d been put together considering it had been done by unskilled labour. For several years he hadn’t moved outside a large, airy room, but this was OK, because he spent most of his time inside his own head in any case. There’s a certain type of person it’s very hard to imprison.

That was the thing about death.  When it happened to you, you were among the first to know.

… when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it’s nice to be able to blaspheme.

Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying ‘Got rocks in your head?’ to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren’t careful.

The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery...

{Probably my favourite pun}

He’d faced trolls and dwarf and dragons, but now he was having to meet an entirely new species. The rich.

The River Ankh is probably the only river in the universe on which the investigators can chalk the outline of the corpse.

No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable. It was nice to know there was someone worse off than you. Someone had to be the butt of the world.

So many crimes are solved by a happy accident—by the random stopping of a car, by an overheard remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi…

The Axiom 'Honest men have nothing to fear from the police' is currently under review by the Axioms Review Board.

{as i said, no fucks were given}

... mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true.

Klatchian coffee has an even bigger sobering effect than an unexpected brown envelope from the tax man. In fact, coffee enthusiasts take the precaution of getting thoroughly drunk before touching the stuff, because Klatchian coffee takes you back through sobriety and, if you’re not careful, out the other side, where the mind of man should not go.

The Alchemist's Guild is opposite the Gambler's Guild. Usually. Sometimes it's above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it.

The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them.

You couldn’t be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to care. And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school.

When you were a Watchman, you were a Watchman all the time, which was a bit of a bargain for the city since it only paid you to be a Watchman for ten hours of every day.

‘People ought to think for themselves, Captain Vimes says. The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to.’

Dogs are not like cats, who amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.

If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat.They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.

- Soul Music. Death series.

Rock’n’Roll is an eldritch abomination. It’s come to Discworld. At the same time Death has gone missing because [spoilers] and The Duty falls to Death’s granddaughter, his first naturally born heir.

Introduces aforementioned granddaughter, Susan, as well as Hex, the thinking engine.

Mostly music references but also, you know, the continuing saga of crying-about-a-7-foot-tall-skeleton.

But, if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is observed, it’s even more true that it changes the observer.

... she was brilliant in the same way that a diamond is brilliant, all edges and chilliness.

{about Susan}

It is said that whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It’s more interesting, and doesn’t take so long.

And, if they're said with the right passion and the gods are feeling bored, sometimes the universe will reform itself around words like that. Words have always had the power to change the world.

He liked black. It went with anything. It went with everything, sooner or later.

Miss Eulalie Butts and her colleague, Miss Delcross, had founded the college on the astonishing idea that, since gels had nothing much to do until someone married them, they might as well occupy themselves with learning things.

The question seldom addressed is where Medusa has snakes. Underarm hair is an even more embarrassing problem when it keeps biting off the top of the deodorant bottle.

Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book.

She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept trying to interfere with it.

'But alcohol debilitated the body and is a poison to the soul.' SOUNDS GOOD TO ME.

'What do you do with them?' he said. 'I bang them together.' 'And then what?' 'What do you mean, "And then what?"' 'What do you do after you've banged them together?' 'I bang them together again,' said Lias, one of nature's drummers.

You could say to the universe, this is not fair. And the universe would say: Oh, isn’t it? Sorry.

The class was learning about some revolt in which some peasants had wanted to stop being peasants and, since the nobles had won, had stopped being peasants really quickly. Had they bothered to learn to read and acquire some history books they'd have learned about the uncertain merits of things like scythes and pitchforks when used in battle against crossbows and broadswords.

‘Look,’ said Susan, ‘I’d just like you to know that I don’t believe any of this. I don’t believe there’s a Death of Rats in a cowl carrying a scythe.’ ‘He’s standing in front of you.’ ‘That’s no reason to believe it.’ ‘I can see you’ve certainly had a proper education.’

... the Hogfather is a winter myth figure who, on Hogswatchnight, gallops from house to house on a crude sledge drawn by four tusked wild boars to deliver presents of sausages, black puddings, pork scratchings, and ham to all children who have been good. He says ‘Ho ho ho’ a lot. Children who have been bad get a bag full of bloody bones (it’s these little details which tell you it’s a tale for the little folk). There’s a song about him. It begins: You’d Better Watch Out...

{guess what the next Death book is about}

The important thing, she decided, was to stay calm. There was always a logical explanation for everything, even if you had to make it up.

The Library didn’t only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’t also dangerous, just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain.

The Quirm College for Young Ladies encouraged self-reliance and logical thought. Her parents had sent her there for that reason. They'd assumed that insulating her from the fluffy edges of the world was the safest thing to do. In the circumstances, this was like not telling people about self-defence so that no-one would ever attack them.

Unseen University was used to eccentricity among the faculty. After all, humans derive the notions of what it means to be a normal human being by constant reference to the humans around them, and when those humans are other wizards the spiral can only wiggle downwards.

Parents were never young. They were merely waiting to become Parents.

'In my experience,' said Glod, 'what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.

‘Students?’ ‘Er. Yes?’ said Ponder, backing away. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, this is a university…’ Ridcully scratched his ear. The man was right of course. You had to have some of the buggers around, there was no getting away from it.

Chrysoprase had been a very quick learner when he arrived in Ankh-Morpork. He began with an important lesson: hitting people was thuggery. Paying other people to do the hitting on your behalf was good business.

Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.

‘Of course, just because we’ve heard a spine-chilling blood-curdling scream of the sort to make your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn’t automatically mean there’s anything wrong.’

There is no such thing as a whisper in Ankh-Morpork when the sum involved had the word 'thousand' in it somewhere; people could hear you think kind of money in Ankh-Morpork.

Death was used to travelling fast. In theory he was already everywhere, waiting for almost anything else. The fastest way to travel is to be there already.

- Interesting Times. Rincewind series.

Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde are attacking the Agatean Empire an Imperial China (Japan?) rip-off. Rincewind gets swept up.

Much closer in feel to the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic than the previous books and, no sugar-coating, kinda racist. Not the malicious sort, just the I-have-done-absolutely-no-research-but-I-am-still-writing-about-this sort of racist. So keep that in mind.

Fate always wins. Most of the gods throw dice but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out until it's too late that he's been using two queens all along.

When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events – the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there – that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.

‘I didn’t know they were noble,’ said Io. ‘They’re all very rich and have had millions of people butchered or tortured to death merely for reasons of expediency and pride,’ said the Lady. The watching gods nodded solemnly. That was certainly noble behaviour. That was exactly what they would have done.

‘Am I alone in thinking, by the way, that it doesn’t add to the status of the University to have an ape on the faculty?’  ‘Yes,’ said Ridcully flatly. ‘You are. We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that.’

Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.

‘How will I get back?’ he said. ‘Same way you went. We’ll find you and bring you out. With surgical precision.’ Rincewind groaned. He knew what surgical precision meant in Ankh-Morpork. It meant ‘to within an inch or two, accompanied by a lot of screaming, and then they pour hot tar on you just where your leg was.’ There was something about Cohen. People caught optimism off him as though it was the common cold.

‘… I decided to give it up and make a living by the sword.’ ‘After being a teacher all your life?’ ‘It did mean a change of perspective, yes.’ ‘But...well…surely…the privation, the terrible hazards, the daily risk of death…’ Mr Saveloy brightened up.  ‘Oh, you’ve been a teacher, have you?’

‘Luck is my middle name,’ said Rincewind, indistinctly. ‘Mind you, my first name is Bad.’

Cohen’s father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a lad, and explained to him the hero’s creed and told him that there was no greater joy than to die in battle. Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime’s experience had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the other bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your horse.

'I always live in interestin' times,' said Cohen, in the satisfied voice of someone who did a lot to keep them interesting.

But some did make it to the great melting pot called Ankh-Morpork.  They arrived with no money – sailors charged what the market would bear, which was everything – but they had a mad gleam in their eye and they opened shops and restaurants and worked twenty-four hours a day. People called this the Ankh-Morpork Dream (of making piles of cash in a place where your death was unlikely to be a matter of public policy). And it was dreamed all the stronger by people who didn’t sleep.

‘Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.’

Freedom did, of course, include man's age-old right to starve to death.

Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: ‘Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.'

No, of course, Twoflower never wanted to cause any trouble. Some people never did. Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying ‘What happens if I do this?

The best thing you can do with the peasants is leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.

A wizard would sooner go without his robe and trousers than forgo his hat. Without his hat, people might think he was an ordinary person.

- Maskerade. Witches series.

Builds of of the previous books. Mostly a Phantom of the Opera spoof though.

Introduces Agnes and Perdita.

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people.

Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha! BEWARE!!!!! Yrs sincerely The Opera Ghost

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

"What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man."

Though there may be some superficial similarities between a psychiatrist and a headologist, there is a huge practical difference. A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don’t exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick.

She could feel a future trying to land on her. She’d caught herself saying “poot!” and “dang!” when she wanted to swear, and using pink writing paper. She’d got a reputation for being calm and capable in a crisis. Next thing she knew she’d be making shortbread and apple pies as good as her mother’s, and then there’d be no hope for her.

Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong.

There was a crash from the direction of the kitchen, although it was really more of a crashendo—the long-drawn-out clatter that begins when a pile of plates begins to slip, continues when someone tries to grab at them, develops a desperate counter-theme when the person realizes they don’t have three hands, and ends with the roinroinroin of the one miraculously intact plate spinning around and around on the floor.

She could feel the auditorium in front of her, the huge empty space making the sound that velvet would make if it could snore. It wasn’t silence. A stage is never silent. It was the noise produced by a million other sounds that have never quite died away—the thunder of applause, the overtures, the arias. They poured down…fragments of tunes, lost chords, snatches of song.

A catastrophe curve, Mr Bucket, is what opera runs along. Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong, Mr Bucket. It works because of hatred and love and nerves. All the time. This isn’t cheese. This is opera. If you wanted a quiet retirement, Mr Bucket, you shouldn’t have bought the Opera House. You should have done something peaceful, like alligator dentistry.

Bergholt Stuttley (“Bloody Stupid”) Johnson was Ankh-Morpork’s most famous, or rather most notorious, inventor. He was renowned for never letting his number blindness, his lack of any skill whatsoever or his complete failure to grasp the essence of a problem stand in the way of his cheerful progress as the first Counter-Renaissance man. Shortly after building the famous Collapsed Tower of Quirm he turned his attention to the world of music, particularly large organs and mechanical orchestras. Examples of his handiwork still occasionally come to light in sales, auctions, and quite frequently, wreckage.

It is the fate of all banisters worth sliding down that there is something nasty waiting at the far end.

- Feet of Clay. Watch series.

Someone wants to assassinate dispose of the Patrician (in this case several someones) and resurrect the Monarchy and the Good Old DaysTM and the Watch has to stop them. a.k.a. “Sam Vimes And Put That King Back Where You Found Him Or So Help Me” Part II.

Begins as a murder mystery ends as an exploration of what makes a person.

Takes the joke about Lady dwarves and makes an actual wonderful compelling plot out of it!!

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they’re standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don’t look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity.

 …summer isn’t a time.  It’s a place as well.  Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

Dwarfs regard baking as part of the art of warfare. When they make rock cakes, no simile is intended.

I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. I TURN UP ONLY ONCE.

What changed history were the smaller things. Often a few strokes of the pen would go the trick.

‘Oh, well, if you prefer, I can recognize handwriting,’ said the imp proudly. ‘I’m quite advanced.’ Vimes pulled out his notebook and held it up. ‘Like this?’ he said. The imp squinted for a moment. ‘Yep,’ it said. ‘That’s handwriting, sure enough. Curly bits, spiky bits, all joined together. Yep. Handwriting. I’d recognize it anywhere.’

 Anatomy was an important study at the Alchemists’ Guilde, owing to the ancient theory that the human body represented a microcosm of the universe, although when you saw one opened up it was hard to imagine which part of the universe was small and purple and went blomp-blomp when you prodded it.

Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors or windows – sometimes it doesn’t even need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.

‘Do you want me to get a doctor?’ ‘Are you mad? We want him to live!’

Corporal Nobbs sidled in. It was another special trait of his that he could sidle forwards as well as sideways.

Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.

Vimes sighed. He was an honest man. He’d always felt that was one of the bigger defects in his personality.

When Nobby had gone Vimes reached behind the desk and picked up a faded copy of Twurp’s Peerage or, as he personally thought of it, the guide to the criminal classes. You wouldn’t find slum dwellers in these pages, but you would find their landlords. And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.

...where Nobby went wrong was thinking small. He sidled into places and punched things that weren't worth much. If only he'd sidled into continents and stolen entire cities, slaughtering many of the inhabitants in the process, he'd have been a pillar of the community.

They were men who felt that The Time Had Come. Regimes can survive barbarian hordes, crazed terrorists and hooded secret societies, but they're in real trouble when prosperous and anonymous men sit around a big table and think thoughts like that.

This always happens in any police chase anywhere. A heavily-laden lorry will always pull out of a side alley in front of the pursuit. If vehicles aren’t involved, then it’ll be a man with a rack of garments. Or two men with a large sheet of glass. There’s probably some kind of secret society behind all this.

‘It’s like that in the Watch, too,’ said Angua. ‘You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There’s no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads. You’ll soon learn the language. Basically it’s how much beer you supped last night, how strong the curry was you had afterwards, and where you were sick. Just think egotesticle.’

…Cockbill Street was where people lived who were worse than poor, because they didn’t know how poor they were. If you asked them they would probably say something like ‘mustn’t grumble’ or ‘there’s far worse off than us’ or ‘we’ve always kept uz heads above water and we don’t owe nobody nowt.’ He could here his granny speaking. ‘No one’s too poor to buy soap.’ Of course, many people were.  But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride.

What a mess the world was in, Vimes reflected. Constable Visit had told him the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve that?

People said that there was one law for the rich and one law for the poor, but it wasn’t true. There was no law for those who made the law, and no law for the incorrigibly lawless. All the laws and rules were for those people stupid enough to think like Cockbill Street people.

There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell.

‘D*mn!’ said Carrot, a difficult linguistic feat

‘The common people?’ said Vimes. ‘They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit.’

Only crimes could take place in darkness. Punishment had to be done in the light. That was the job of a good watchman...

- Hogfather. Death series.

The Auditors are back. They’ve hired an assassin to inhume Santa Claus the Hogfather.

It’s up to Death and his granddaughter to save Christmas Hogswatch. The Tooth Fairy is relevant to all of this.

(Probably my favourite summary of any Discworld book? Like, you could try to make this up, but it already exists.)

Explores the nature of Belief, Humanity, Faith and other Capital First Letter words.

Also, crying-about-a-7-foot-tall-skeleton Part-I-don’t-even-know.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. It separated those cuts who went around murdering people for money from the gentlemen who were occasionally consulted by other gentlemen who wished to have removed, for a consideration, any inconvenient razorblades from the candyfloss of life.

In fact the Guild, he liked to think, practised the ultimate democracy. You didn’t need intelligence, social position, beauty or charm to hire it. You just needed money which, unlike the other stuff, was available to everyone. Except for the poor, of course, but there was no helping some people.

Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken. Mister Teatime enjoyed himself too much. And other people, also.

Like many people with no actual morals, Lord Downey did have standards….

‘Real children don’t go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs.’

The previous governess had used various monsters and bogeymen as a form of discipline. There was always something waiting to eat or carry off bad boys and girls for crimes like stuttering or defiantly and aggravatingly persisting in writing with their left hand. There was always a Scissor Man waiting for a little girl who sucked her thumb, always a bogeyman in the cellar. Of such bricks is the innocence of childhood constructed.

Education had been easy. Learning things had been harder.

‘...and then Jack chopped down the beanstalk, adding murder and ecological vandalism to the theft, enticement and trespass charges already mentioned, but he got away with it and lived happily ever after without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done. Which proves that you can be excused just about anything if you’re a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.’

‘Sit down, will you? Assassin’s are always late. ‘cos of style, right?’ ‘This one’s mental.’ ‘Eccentric.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘A bag of cash.’

‘Well, the night is young,’ said Albert, sitting back in the sacks. THE NIGHT IS OLD. THE NIGHT IS ALWAYS OLD. The pigs galloped on. Then, ‘No, it ain’t.’ I’M SORRY? ‘The night isn’t any older than the day, master. It stands to reason. There must have been a day before anyone knew what the night was.’ YES, BUT IT’S MORE DRAMATIC. ‘Oh. Right, then.'

‘You can't give her that!' she screamed. 'It's not safe!' IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE. 'She's a child!' shouted Crumley. IT'S EDUCATIONAL. 'What if she cuts herself?' THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.

Susan had never been able to see the attraction in cats. They were owned by the kind of people who liked puddings. There were actual people in the world whose idea of heaven would be a chocolate cat.

Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles. The Weak One says, basically, that it was jolly amazing of the universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans should not only work in universities but also write for huge sums books with words like “Cosmic” and “Chaos” in the titles. The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics.

‘That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?

The path to wisdom does, in fact, begin with a single step. Where people go wrong is in ignoring all the thousands of other steps that come after it. They make the single step of deciding to become one with the universe, and for some reason forget to take the logical next step of living for seventy years on a mountain and a daily bowl of rice and yak-butter tea that would give it any kind of meaning. While evidence says that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, they’re probably all on first steps.

I THOUGHT IT WAS THE SEASON TO BE JOLLY, said Death. ‘Ah, well, yes, you see, one of the things that makes folks even more jolly is knowing there’re people who ain’t,’ said Albert, in a matter-of-fact voice.

Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It’s a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago.

Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity’s place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

‘Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.'

Humans Are Not Always Wrong

Ponder was a great believer in logic, in the face of all local evidence ...

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

IT IS ... UNFAIR. ‘That’s life, master.’ BUT I’M NOT. ‘I meant this is how it’s supposed to go, master,’ said Albert. NO. YOU MEAN THIS IS HOW IT GOES.

The wizards shuddered. They weren’t against the outdoors, it was simply their place in it they objected to.

IT WASN’T STEALING. IT WAS JUST ... REDISTRIBUTION. IT WILL BE A GOOD DEED IN A NAUGHTY WORLD. ‘No, it won’t!’ THEN IT WILL BE A NAUGHTY DEED IN A NAUGHTY WORLD AND WILL PASS COMPLETELY UNNOTICED.

Somewhere almost out of hearing, children were at play. It was always a pleasant, lulling sound. Always provided, of course, you couldn’t hear the actual words.

‘He’s had a near-death experience!’ ‘We all have. It’s called “living”,’ said the Archchancellor shortly.

IT GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN, LIFE, said Death, stepping forward. SPEAKING METAPHORICALLY, OF COURSE. IT’S A HABIT THAT’S HARD TO GIVE UP. ONE PUFF OF BREATH IS NEVER ENOUGH. YOU’LL FIND YOU WANT TO TAKE ANOTHER.

THERE IS ALWAYS TIME FOR ANOTHER LAST MINUTE.

- Jingo. Watch series.

The sunken island of Leshp rises again. Ankh-Morpork and the Arabic-like Klatch both claim it, leading to diplomacy then riots, assassinations, and eventually war.

Deals with racism, xenophobia, nationalism and the point and purpose of the International Community.

Written with particular reference to the Falklands Conflict and the first Gulf War of 1990-1.

(Probably the most currently relevant of the books, which is kind of depressing)

As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer who first sets foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot home first. If it is still attached to his leg, this is a bonus.

People live for ages side by side, nodding at one another amicably on their way to work every day, and then some trivial thing would happen and someone would be having a garden fork removed from their ear.

Why are our people going out there,” said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves’ Guild. "Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and … additional wealth in a new land,” said Lord Vetinari. “What’s in it for the Klatchians?” said Lord Downey. “Oh, they’ve gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for northern,” said Lord Vetinari. “A mastery summation, if I may say so, my lord,” said Mr. Burleigh. The Patrician looked down again at his notes. “Oh, I do beg your pardon, I seem to have read those last to sentences in the wrong order…

‘Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.’

Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He’d been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.

‘Well, there’s…’ Colon racked his brains.  ‘There’s al-gebra.  That’s like sums with letters.   For…for people whose brains aren’t clever enough for numbers, see?’

She sighed again. She was familiar with the syndrome. They said they wanted a soulmate and helpmeet but sooner or later the list would include a skin like silk and a chest fit for a herd of cows.

It wasn’t proper police work, Vimes considered, unless you were doing something that someone somewhere would much rather you weren’t doing.

And there was nothing finer than a wizard dressed up formally, until someone could find a way of inflating a Bird of Paradise, possibly by using an elastic band and some kind of gas.

'Can't argue with the truth, sir.' 'In my experience, Vimes, you can argue with anything.'

'One of the advantages of horses that people often point out,' said Vetinari, after some thought, 'is that they very seldom explode.'

... you couldn't really imprison someone like Leonard of Quirm. The most you could do was lock up his body. The gods alone knew where his mind went.

No wonder this man was a diplomat. You couldn’t trust him an inch, he thought in loops, and you couldn’t help liking him despite it.

I'm not a natural killer! See this? See what it says? I'm supposed to keep the peace, I am! If I kill people to do it, I'm reading the wrong manual!

Oh, there’s all the jokes about funny food and foreigners, but surely . . . Not very funny jokes, come to think of it.

No-one could be so simple, no-one could be so creatively dumb, without being very intelligent. It was like being an actor. Only a very good actor was any good at being a bad actor.

It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.

“Look, Nobby, when all’s said and done they ain’t the right colour, and there’s an end to it.” “Good job you found out, Fred!” said Nobby, so cheerfully that Sergeant Colon was almost sure he meant it. “Well, it’s obvious,” he conceded. “Er… what is the right colour?” said Nobby. “White, of course!” “Not brick-red, then? ‘Cos you–” “Are you winding me up, Corporal Nobbs?” “‘Course not, sarge. So… what colour am I?” That caused Sergeant Colon to think. You could have found, somewhere on Corporal Nobbs, a shade appropriate to every climate on the disc and a few found only in specialist medical books. “White’s… white’s a state of, you know… mind,” he said. “It’s like… doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, that sort of thing. And washing regular.” “Not lazing around, sort of thing.” “Right.” “Or… like… working all hours like Goriff does.” “Nobby–” “And you never see those kids of his with dirty clo–” “Nobby, you’re just trying to get me going, right? You know we’re better’n Klatchians. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

‘My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure,’ said Carrot. ‘Really?  Well, there’s eleven of them.’

…he wanted there to be conspirators.  It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy.  You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable then of going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people.  It was much easier to blame it on Them.  It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us.  If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault.  If it was Us, what did that make Me?

The Librarian shyly held out a small, battered green book. Vimes had been expecting something bigger, but he took it anyway. It paid to look at any book the orang-utan gave you. He matched you up to books. Vimes supposed it was a knack, in the same way that an undertaker was very good at judging heights.

... history was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started to follow bad orders.

To history, choices are merely directions.

…the Patrician was against printing, because if people knew too much it would only bother them.

‘Odd thing, ain’t it…you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.’

71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious.  He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans.  He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true.  He believed instead in the things that were true in which no-one else believed.

The sudden appearance of a naked woman always caused a rethink of anyone’s immediate plans.

She was aware that she had a slight advantage over male werewolves in that naked women caused fewer complaints, although the downside was that they got some pressing invitations. Some kind of covering was essential, for modesty and the prevention of inconvenient bouncing, which was why fashioning impromptu clothes out of anything to hand was a lesser-known werewolf skill.

“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”

Night poured over the desert.  It came suddenly, in purple.  In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated.  When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.

The night is always old.  He’d walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and go, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep.

‘Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque.  Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already.’

’A watchman IS a civilian, you inbred streak of piss!’

- The Last Continent. Rincewind series.

Rincewind has to save the world. This time in magical Australia.

People don’t live on the Disc any more than, in less hand-crafted parts of the multiverse, they live on balls.  Oh, planets may be the place where their body eats its tea, but they live elsewhere, in worlds of their own which orbit very handily around the centre of their heads.

We might find out why mankind is here, although that is more complicated and begs the question ‘Where else should we be?’  It would be terrible to think that some impatient deity might part the clouds and say, ‘Damn, are you lot still here?’

Light travels slowly on the Disc and is slightly heavy, with a tendency to pile up against high mountain ranges. Research wizards have speculated that there is another, much speedier type of light which allows the slower light to be seen, but since this moves too fast to see they have been unable to find a use for it.

Wasn't it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day?

Palaeontology and archaeology and other skulduggery were not subjects that interested wizards.  Things are buried for a reason, they considered.  There’s no point in wondering what it was.  Don’t go digging things up in case they won’t let you bury them again.

Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense.

Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain calibre.

‘But we’re a university!  We have to have a library!’ said Ridcully.  ‘It adds tone.  What sort of people would we be if we didn’t go into the Library?’ ‘Students,’ said the Senior Wrangler morosely.

‘…when you’ve been a wizard as long as I have, my boy, you’ll learn that as soon as you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.’

Rincewind woke with a scream, to get it over with.

Creators aren’t gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It’s men that make gods. This explains a lot.

A wizard without a hat was just a sad man with a suspicious taste in clothes.

Discworld constellations changed frequently as the world moved through the void, which meant that astrology was cutting edge research rather than, as elsewhere, a clever way of avoiding a proper job.  It was amazing how human traits and affairs could so reliably and continuously be guided by a succession of big balls of plasma billions of miles away, most of whom have never even heard of humanity

‘Haven’t you ever noticed that by running away you end up in more trouble?’ ‘Yes, but, you see, you can run away from that too,’ said Rincewind.  ‘That’s the beauty of the system.  Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.’ ‘Ah, but it is said that a coward dies a thousand deaths, while a hero dies only one.’ ‘Yes, but it’s the important one.’

It was an amazing phrase. It was practically magical all by itself. It just ... made things better. A shark’s got your leg? No worries. You’ve been stung by a jellyfish? No worries! You’re dead? She’ll be all right! No worries!

And they acted like savages*. * Again, when people like Mrs Whitlow use this term they are not, for some inexplicable reason, trying to suggest that the subjects have a rich oral tradition, a complex system of tribal rights and a deep respect for the spirits of their ancestors. They are implying the kind of behaviour more generally associated, oddly enough, with people wearing a full suit of clothes, often with the same insignia.

…the great, open ingenious purpose of UU was to be the weight on the arm of magic, causing it to swing with grave majesty like a pendulum rather than spin with deadly purpose like a morningstar.  Instead of hurling fireballs at one another from fortified towers the wizards learned to snipe at their colleagues over the interpretation of Faculty Council minutes, and long ago were amazed to find that they got just as much vicious fun out of it. They consumed big dinners, and after a really good meal and a fine cigar even the most rabid Dark Lord is inclined to put his feet up and feel amicable towards the world, especially if it offered him another brandy.

Once upon a time the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'.

The ability to ask questions like ‘Where am I and who is the “I” that is asking?’ is one of the things that distinguishes mankind from, say, cuttlefish.* *Although of course it’s not the most obvious thing and there are, in fact, some beguiling similarities, particularly the tendency to try to hide behind a big cloud of ink in difficult situations.

- Carpe Jugulum. Witches series.

The King accidentally invites a family of vampires to his daughter’s naming ceremony, and now that they’ve been invited in, they intend to make themselves at home.

Featuring the best, most scathing Twilight parody ever. Written about seven years before Twilight.

The wording began: ‘You are cordially invited…’ …and was in that posh runny writing that was hard to read but ever so official. Nanny Ogg grinned and tucked the card back on the mantelpiece.  She liked the idea of ‘cordially’.  It had a rich, a thick and above all an alcoholic sound.

In fact there are many things everyone knows about vampires, without really taking into account that perhaps the vampires know them by now, too.

When people were in serious trouble they went to a witch.* *Sometimes, of course, to say, ‘Please stop doing it.’

Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all the time and handed on the fight to their descendants. The chips on some shoulders had been passed down for generations. Some had antique value. A bloody good grudge, Lancre reckoned, was like a fine old wine. You looked after it carefully and left it to your children.

…one of the things a witch did was stand right on the edge, where the decisions had to be made.  You made them so that others didn’t have to, so that others could even pretend to themselves that there were no decisions to be made, no little secrets, that things just happened.

The people of Lancre wouldn’t dream of living in anything other than a monarchy. They’d done so for thousands of years and knew that it worked.  But they’d also found that it didn’t do to pay too much attention to what the King wanted, because there was bound to be another king along in forty years or so and he’d be certain to want something different and so they’d have gone to all that trouble for nothing. In the meantime, his job as they saw it was to mostly stay in the palace, practice the waving, have enough sense to face the right way on coins and let them get on with the ploughing, sowing, growing and harvesting. It was, as they saw it, a social contract. They did what they always did, and he let them.

She’d never, ever asked for anything in return. And the trouble with not asking for anything in return was that sometimes you didn’t get it.

Attractive men were not in plentiful supply in Lancre, where licking your hand and smoothing your hair down before taking a girl out was considered swanky.

‘But that’s just a bit of superstition, isn’t it? Witches don’t have to come in threes.’ ‘Oh, no. Course not,’ said Nanny. ‘You can have any number up to about, oh, four or five.’ ‘What happens if there’s more, then? Something awful?’ ‘Bloody great row, usually,’ said Nanny.

‘Vampires are very anal-retentive, you see?’ ‘I shouldn’t like meeting one that was the opposite,’ said Nanny.

‘Am I dyin’?’ YES. ‘Will I die?’ YES. Granny Weatherwax thought this over.  ‘But from your point of view, everyone is dying and everyone will die, right?’ YES. ‘So you aren’t actually bein’ a lot of help, strictly speakin’.’

‘You wouldn’t let a poor old lady go off and confront monsters on a wild night like this, would you?’ They watched him owlishly for a while just in case something interestingly nasty was going to happen to him. The someone near the back said, ‘So why should we care what happens to monsters?’ And Shawn Ogg said, ‘That’s Granny Weatherwax, that is.’ ‘But she’s an old lady!’ Oats insisted. The crowd took a few steps back. Oats was clearly a dangerous man to be around. ‘Would you go out alone on a night like this?’ he said. The voice at the back said, ‘Depends if I knew where Granny Weatherwax was.’

‘Once people find out you’re a vampire they act as if you’re some kind of monster.

'All it takes is a little prick-' 'It's not going to be yours, mister!'

‘There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’ ‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’ ‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.’ ‘Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes—’ ‘But they starts with thinking about people as things. . .’

He was trying to find some help in the ancient military journals of General Tacticus, whose intelligent campaigning had been so successful that he’d lent his very name to the detailed prosecution of martial endeavour, and had actually found a section headed What to Do If One Army Occupies a Well-fortified and Superior Ground and the Other Does Not, but since the first sentence read ‘Endeavour to be the one inside’ he’d rather lost heart.

Holiness is where you find it.

-The Fifth Elephant. Watch series.

Politics, diplomacy, fat mines (fat mines!!!), werewolves, vampires, Modernity and Dwarf society and religion.

And Change. The big important kind.

This book introduces the Clacks and by doing that completely obliterates one of the pillars of Fantasy: Medieval Stasis (like, tbh, it was a process that started in Guards! Guards!—but more on that in Part 2) therefore marks a sort of point of no return: from here on I’m gonna give (even more) vague summaries because this book and pretty much every subsequent builds off (far more directly) of previous developments.

It is in the nature of the universe that the person who always keeps you waiting ten minutes will, on the day you are ten minutes tardy have been ready ten minutes earlier and will make a point of not mentioning this.

Dwarf bread was made as a meal of last resort and also as a weapon and a currency.

It was so thickly forested, so creased by little mountain ranges and beset by rivers, that it was largely unmapped. It was mostly unexplored, too*. *At least by proper explorers. Just living there doesn’t count.

It was funny how people were people everywhere you went, even if the people concerned weren’t the people the people who made up the phrase ‘people are people everywhere’ had traditionally thought of as people.

‘Tell me, Leonard,’ he said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that one day wars will be fought with brains?’ Leonard picked up his cup of coffee. ‘Oh dear. Won’t that be rather messy?’ he said.

‘Can you think of any reason why someone would kill him?’ The troll scratched his head. ‘Well, ‘cos dey wanted him dead, I reckon. Dat’s a good reason.’

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.

The little flickering part of his brain that was still sparking coherent thought through the fog of mind-numbing terror that filled Colon’s head was telling him that he was so far out of his depth that the fish had lights on their noses.

Killing a stranger without malice or satisfaction, other than the craftsman’s pride in a job well done, is such a rare talent that armies spend months trying to instil it into their young soldiers.

‘…a lot of diplomacy lies in appearing to be a lot more stupid than you are.’

People in drought-stricken areas would have paid good money to have Igor pronounce ‘sausages’.

There was no such thing as a dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women's work.

‘Here, a butcher can be hanged if his sausages are not all meat, and at that it must be from a named domesticated animal, and I perhaps should add that by named I do not mean that it should have been called ‘Spot’ or ‘Ginger’…’

...there was probably an expensive problem here, so the guards were inclined to leave it to someone who earned more money than them.

‘When people say “We must move with the times,” they really mean “You must do it my way.”’

Well, he thought, so this is diplomacy. It’s like lying, only to a better class of people.

‘Dem diplomatics all want you to come for drinky-poos an’ stories about chickens,’ the troll added helpfully. ‘Cocktails, I think you’ll find,’ said Vimes...

...Sam Vimes had learned a lot from watching Lady Sybil. She didn’t mean to act like that, but she’d been born to it, into a class that had always behaved this way: you went through the world as if there was no possibility that anyone would stop you or question you, and most of the time that’s exactly what didn’t happen.

‘Ah, this must be the famous Ankh-Morpork sense of humour, yes?’ ‘No, that was just irony,’ Vimes shouted, still looking for an arboreal escape route. ‘You’ll know when we’ve got on to the famous Ankh-Morpork sense of humour when I start talking about breasts and farting, you smug bastard!’

‘It wasn’t until ten years ago that they replaced trial by ordeal here with trial by lawyer, and that was only because they found that lawyers were nastier.’

It wasn’t just that his brain was writing cheques that his body couldn’t cash. It had gone beyond that. Now his feet were borrowing money that his legs hadn’t got, and his back muscles were looking for loose change under the sofa cushions.

Now this he understood. He was never at ease with politics, where good and bad were just, apparently, two ways of looking at the same thing or, at least, were described like that by the people who were on the side Vimes thought of as ‘bad’. It was all too complicated and, where it was complicated, it meant that someone was trying to fool you.

- The Truth. Stand-alone, sort of, since it’s set in Ankh-Morpork.

Continues with the themes of Change and Modernity, this time with movable type.

Also depressingly relevant.

The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It’s also wrong. There’s a fifth element, and generally it’s called Surprise.

…the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.

"The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret"

They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted.

There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: ‘What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who has no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.

It was a puzzle why things were always dragged kicking and screaming.  No one ever seemed to want to, for example, lead them gently by the hand.

‘And these are your reasons, my Lord?’ ‘Do you think I have others?’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.’ Hughnon reflected that ‘entirely transparent’ meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all.

‘We’ve always looked beyond the walls for the invaders,’ he said. ‘We always thought change came from outside, usually on the point of a sword. And then we look around and find that it comes from the inside of the head of someone you wouldn’t notice in the street. In certain circumstances it may be convenient to remove the head, but there seem to be such a lot of them these days.’

He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where ‘traditional values’ meant ‘hang someone’.

‘People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’

Moving his hands carefully, Dibbler opened the special section of his tray, the high-class one that contained sausages whose contents were 1) meat, 2) from a known four-footed creature, 3) probably land-dwelling.

…William wondered why he always disliked people who said ‘no offence meant’.  Maybe it was because they found it easier to say ‘no offence meant’ than actually refrain from giving offence.

Truth was what he told. Honesty was sometimes not the same thing.

‘Hold on, hold on, there must be a law against killing lawyers.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘There’re still some around, aren’t there?’

When people say clearly something, that means there’s a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren’t clear at all.

‘But I’m not doing anything wrong,’ said William. ‘No, it may just be you’re not doing anything illegal,’ said Vimes.

Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It’s one of those words that describes something that does not make a noise, but if it did make a noise would sound just like that. Bliss.

Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day.

Goodmountain grinned. ‘Don’t worry too much about your father, lad. People change. My grandmother used to think humans were sort of hairless bears. She doesn’t anymore.’ ‘What changed his mind?’ ‘I reckon it was the dying that did it.’

…sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.

‘…a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on…’

- Thief of Time. Death series. Actually about the History Monks- “The Men In Saffron“.

The Auditors are back again, Susan is sick and tired of it all, and Lobsang Ludd and Jeremy Clockson are very strange young men. Basically Men in Black+James Bond+A Whole Lot Of Kung Fu Films. Also death by chocolate.

‘I have heard the heartbeat of the universe. I know the answers to many questions. Ask me.’ The apprentice gave him a bleary look. It was too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning. That was the only thing he currently knew for sure. ‘Er…what does master want for breakfast?’ he said. Wen looked down in their camp and across the snowfields and purple mountains to the golden daylight creating the world, and mused upon certain aspects of humanity. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘One of the difficult ones.’

‘Sometimes I really think people ought to have to pass a proper exam before they're allowed to be parents. Not just the practical, I mean.’

‘‘scuse me,’ said the raven, ‘but how come Miss Ogg became Mrs Ogg?  Sounds like a bit of a rural arrangement, if you catch my meaning.’ WITCHES ARE MATRILINEAL, said Death.  THEY FIND IT MUCH EASIER TO CHANGE MEN THAN TO CHANGE NAMES.

 Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available. He was puzzled that people seemed to think he was a boring conversationalist. Why, he could talk about all kinds of clocks.  Mechanical clocks, magical clocks, sand clocks, cuckoo clocks, the rare Hershebian beetle clocks… But for some reason he always ran out of listeners before he ran out of clocks.

‘Questions don’t have to make sense, Vincent,’ said Miss Susan. ‘But answers do.’

‘…as you accumulate years, you will learn that most answers boil down, eventually, to “Because”.’

‘Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.’

‘Dojo! What is Rule One?’ Even the cowering challenger mumbled along to the chorus: ‘Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men!’

‘We’re the most secret society you can imagine.’ ‘Really? Who are you, then?’ ‘The Monks of History.’ ‘Huh? I’ve never heard of you!’ ‘See? That’s how good we are.’

If children were weapons, Jason would have been banned by international treaty. Jason had doting parents and an attention span of minus several seconds, except when it came to inventive cruelty to small furry animals, when he could be quite patient. Jason kicked, punched, bit and spat.  His artwork even frightened the life out of Miss Smith, who could generally find something nice to say about any child. He was definitely a boy with special needs. In the view of the staffroom, these began with an exorcism.

‘No one would be that stu-’ Susan stopped. Of course someone would be that stupid. Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World-Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

This is true. A chocolate you did not want to eat does not count as chocolate. This discovery is from the same branch of culinary physics that determined that food eaten while walking contains no calories.

‘When in doubt, choose to live.’

Around her, historians climbed library ladders, fumbled books onto their lecterns and generally rebuilt the image of the past to suit the eyesight of today.

Of the very worst words that can be heard by anyone high in the air, the pair known as ‘Oh-oh’ possibly combine the maximum bowel-knotting terror with the minimum wastage of breath.

‘You know the secret wisdoms that everyone seeks, monk.’ The bottle-washer paused. ‘No, I even suspect that you know the explicit wisdoms, the ones hidden in plain view, which practically no one looks for.’

Lu-Tze had long considered that everything happens for a reason, except possibly football.

Susan was sensible. It was, she knew, a major character flaw. It did not make you popular, or cheerful, and – this seemed to her to be the most unfair bit – it didn’t even make you right. But it did make you definite…

‘…because in this world, after everyone panics, there’s always got to be someone to tip the wee out of the shoe.’

- The Last Hero. Sort of Rincewind, sort of Watch series, actually Cohen the Barbarian.

You know that poem? The one that goes “old age- something something- rage against the dying light“? well it’s like that x10000.

Pretty much hits you on the head with a mallet that we are no longer in the realm of Tolkienesque/Epic/Whossname Fantasy.

Actually an illustrated novel, with art by Paul Kidby and is ~~**~~*beautifuuull*~*~**~

That’s the advantage of space. It’s big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.

People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood.  It believes mere size is amazing. There’s nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there’s a big turtle is far less amazing that the fact that there is a turtle anywhere.

Most gods were people-shaped; people don’t have much imagination, on the whole.  Even Offler the Crocodile God was only crocodile-headed. Ask people to imagine an animal god and they will, basically, come up with the idea of someone in a really bad mask.  Men have been much better at inventing demons, which is why there are so many.

Their eyes said that wherever it was, they had been there. Whatever it was, they had done it, sometimes more than once. But they would never, ever, buy the T-shirt. And they did know the meaning of the word 'fear'. It was something that happened to other people.

‘The feeling stealing over me is that all these terms are defined by the hero. You could say: I am a hero, so when I kill you that makes you de facto, the kind of person suitable to be killed by a hero. You could say that a hero, in short, is someone who indulges every whim that, within the rule of law, would have him behind bars or swiftly dancing what I believe is known as the hemp fandango.  The words we might use are: murder, pillage, theft and rape.’

Too many people, when listing all the perils to be found in the search for lost treasure or ancient wisdom, had forgotten to put at the top of the list ‘the man who arrived just before you’.

‘I can read and write,’ said Evil Harry. ‘Sorry. Part of the job. Etiquette, too. You’ve got to be polite to people when you march them out on the plank over the shark tank... it makes it more evil.’

‘Some people say you achieve immortality through your children,’ said the minstrel. ‘Yeah?’ said Cohen. ‘Name one of your great-granddads, then.’

‘It doesn’t matter how you live and die, it’s how the bards wrote it down.’

What goes around, comes around. If not examined too closely, it passes for justice.

‘I’ve got a sword and it’s a good one, but all the bleedin’ thing can do is keep someone alive, listen. A song can keep some immortal.’

‘So much universe, and so little time.’

No one remembers the singer. The song remains.

- The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. Stand-alone.

A retelling of The Pied Piper story, sort of. Featuring clever rats, a very clever cat and a stupid looking kid.

First of the Young Adult Discworld books, although as far as Pratchett was concerned that’s only a matter of marketing. It shows.

Deals a lot with the glaring irony of humanity’s relationship with talking vs. non talking animals (makes sense in context).

‘Listen, Peaches, trickery is what humans are all about,’ said the voice of Maurice. ‘They’re so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.’

‘Everyone needs their little dreams.’ Maurice truly believed that, too. If you knew what it was that people, really, really wanted, you very nearly controlled them.

Cats didn’t have to think. They just had to know what they wanted. Humans had to do the thinking. That’s what they were for.

The trouble with thinking was that, once you started, you went on doing it.

‘And our lady friend, she thinks life works like a fairytale.’ ‘Well, that’s harmless, isn’t it?’ said Keith. ‘Yeah, but in fairy-tales, when someone dies…it’s just a word.’

It was very unusual for Maurice to feel sympathetic to anyone who wasn't Maurice. In a cat, that is a major character flaw.

‘If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become part of someone else’s story.’ ‘And what if your story doesn’t work?’ ‘You keep changing it until you find one that does.’

‘This is inhuman!’ said Rat-catcher 2. ‘No, it’s very human,’ said Keith. ‘It’s extremely human. There isn’t a beast in the world that’d do it to another living thing…’

Light has a smell. In the dank, damp cellars the sharp sulphur stink of the match flew like a yellow bird, rising on drafts, plunging through cracks. It was a clean and bitter smell and it cut through the dull underground reek like a knife.

‘A good plan isn’t one where someone wins, it’s where nobody thinks they’ve lost.’

- Night Watch. Watch series.

Happens nearly simultaneously with Thief of Time.

Sam Vimes, time travel, Revolution (so many Les Misérables references so many), Police brutality, totalitarian regimes, Change and Progress.

Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.

‘This is stupid. There’s barely a dozen of you. What can you do? All that stuff about “keeping the peace” – it’s rubbish, lads. Coppers do what they’re told by the men in charge. It’s always like that. What’ll you do when the new captain comes in, eh? And who’re you doing this for? The people? They attacked the other Houses, and what’s the Night Watch ever done to hurt them?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Vimes. ‘There you are, then.’ 'I mean the Watch did nothing, and that’s what hurt them.’

That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t the you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp. A much better dream, one that’d ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn’t know then.

Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

…trouble is always easy to find, when you have enough people looking for it.

One of the hardest lessons of young Sam’s life had been finding out that the people in charge weren’t in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people make instead of thinking.

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.

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

{i really love this. i really really really love this. i could write a whole separate essay on why and how much i love this paragraph}

- The Wee Free Men. Tiffany Aching series. Young Adult novel.

Introduces Tiffany Aching, a.k.a. light of my life a.k.a. most relatable character in fiction a.k.a. the hero which every little girl ever needs and deserves. I cannot even begin to explain how much Tiffany means to me:

She had decided to become a witch.

She decided okay? not she was chosen not she had to, she decided. Like, if you have a young and/or impressionable relative (or just simply need comfort on the value of your choices) give them this book. And then the next one. And then the next. And by then they should be old enough to get the next one themselves.

Also introduces the Nac Mac Feagle- tiny blue men with Scottish accents (basically Highlander extras; all of them).

And all the stories had, somewhere, the witch. The wicked old witch. And Tiffany had thought: Where’s the evidence?

Susurrus…according to her grandmother’s dictionary, it meant ‘a low soft sound, as of whispering or muttering’. Tiffany liked the taste of the word. It made her think of mysterious people in long cloaks whispering important secrets behind a door…susurrususssurrusss…

They didn’t have to be funny, they were father jokes.

They looked like tinkers, but there wasn’t one amongst them, she knew, who could mend a kettle. What they did was sell invisible things. And after they had sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but didn’t often want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t know it was locked. ‘I can’t do,’ said Miss Tick, straightening up. ‘But I can teach!’

They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travellers, and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words like ‘corrugated iron’. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the maths teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.

If you didn't find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions.

‘I would like a question answered today,’ said Tiffany. ‘Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,’ said the man. ‘No,’ said Tiffany patiently. ‘It’s about zoology.’ ‘Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.’ ‘No, actually it isn’t,’ said Tiffany. ‘Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.’

'I can see we're going to get along like a house on fire,' said Miss Tick. 'There may be no survivors.'

And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.

…if you trust in yourself…’ ‘Yes?’ ‘…and believe in your dreams…’ ‘Yes?’ ‘…and follow your star…’ Miss Tick went on. ‘Yes?’ ‘…you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye.’

There was a lot of mist around, but a few stars were visible overheard and there was a gibbous moon in the sky. Tiffany knew it was gibbous because she’d read in the Almanack that ‘gibbous’ meant what the moon looked like when it was just a bit fatter than half full, and so she made a point of paying attention to it around those times just so that she could say to herself: ‘Ah, I see the moon’s very gibbous tonight…’

That’s the trouble with a brain: it thinks more than you sometimes want it too.

‘Ye can just rush in. We always just rush in.’ ‘Aye, Big Yan, point well made. But ye gotta know where ye’re just gonna rush in. Ye cannae just rush in anywhere. It looks bad, havin’ to rush oout again straight awa’.’

‘What’s your name, pictsie?’ she said. ‘No’-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock, mistress. There’s no’ that many Feegle names, ye ken, so we ha’ to share.’

It’s amazing what a child who is quiet and observant can learn, and this includes things people don’t think she is old enough to know.

‘Them as can do, has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

‘…it was better to belong where you don’t belong than not belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there…’

Being right doesn’t always work.

No wonder we dream our way through lives. To be awake, and see it all as it really was…no one could stand that for long.

First you get the test, and then afterwards you spend years findin’ out how you passed it. It’s a bit like life in that respect.

Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!

- Monstrous Regiment. Stand-alone.

Polly Perks dresses up as a man to join the army to look for her brother. Has some of the most gratifying twists if fiction.

Talks about gender roles, gender equality, war, power of belief, you know, the usual.

Think young male, that was the thing. Fart loudly and with self-satisfaction at a job well done…

‘Look, you know what I mean. You take a bunch of people who don’t seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.’

Several copies of the pamphlet seemed to have reached every home, even so.  It was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.

‘It’s only your country when they want you to get killed!’ said Tonker.

‘…keep out of the way of officers, ‘cos they ain’t healthy. That’s what you learn in the army. The enemy dun’t really want to fight you, ‘cos the enemy is mostly blokes like you who want to go home with all their bits still on. But officers’ll get you killed.’

Polly had been soldiering for only a couple of days, but already an instinct had developed. In summary, it was this: lie to officers.

…you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.

‘Bein’ a soldier is not hard. If it was, soldiers would not be able to do it.’

There was this about vampires: they could never look scruffy. Instead, they were…what was the word…deshabille. It meant untidy, but with bags and bags of style.

‘…he might be worth listening to. Even if you think he’ll only tell us lies.  Because sometimes, sir, the way people tell you lies, if they tell you enough lies, well, they sort of…show you what shape the truth is, sir.’

It’s hard to be an ornithologist and walk through a wood when all around you the world is shouting: ‘Bugger off, this is my bush! Aargh, the nest thief! Have sex with me, I can make my chest big and red!'

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to those who think they’ve found it.

…you only thought the world would be better if it was run by women if you didn’t actually know many women. Or old women, at least. Take the whole thing about the dimity scarves. Women had to cover their hair on Fridays, but there was nothing about this in the Book, which was pretty dar- pretty damn rigorous about most things. It was just a custom. It was done because it was always done. And if you forgot, or didn’t want to, the old women got you.

The pen might not be mightier than the sword, but maybe the printing press was heavier than the siege weapon. Just a few words can change everything…

-A Hat Full of Sky. Tiffany series.

The Tiffany books are more closely related than the other series sooo...

I can say that it features magical-alien possession though.

Over the last year or so Tiffany’s mother had been quite surprised, and a little worried, at Tiffany’s sudden thirst for education, which people in the village thought was a good thing in moderation but if taken unwisely could lead to restlessness.

It’s quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.

Even if it’s not your fault it’s your responsibility. Witches deal with things.

‘It’s a bad case o’ the thinkin’ he’s caught, missus. When a man starts messin’ wi’ the readin’ and the writin’ then he’ll come doon with a dose o’ the thinkin’ soon enough. I’ll fetch some o’ the lads and we’ll hold his heid under water until he stops doin’ it, ‘tis the only cure. It can kill a man, the thinkin’.

‘AAaargwannawannaaaagongongonaargggaaaaBLOON!’ which is the traditional sound of a very small child learning that with balloons, as with life itself, it is important to know when not to let go of the string. The whole point of balloons is to teach small children this.

Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.

- Going Postal. Moist Von Lipwig series.

Set in Ankh-Morpork. Continues with the Change and Progress theme, just a lot more explicitly than before.

Introduces Moist Von Lipwig, master conman, visited by an angel.

This book is also the one where that GNU thing comes from, you may or may not have seen it used instead of RIP when people talk about Pterry’s passing.

They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.

There is a saying ‘You can’t fool an honest man’ which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men.

'Money is not a thing, it is not even a process. It is a kind of shared dream. We dream that a small disc of common metal is worth the price of a substantial meal. Once you wake up from that dream, you can swim in a sea of money.’

Women are always significantly under-represented in secret orders.

‘…this place is curséd.’ ‘That’s cursed with an extra ed?’ ‘Yes sir.  The worst kind.’

‘I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr. Pump. I may be... all those things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!’ 'No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded, And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr. Lipwig. You Have Ruined Business And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Food From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr. Lipwig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.’

‘Always move fast Mr Spools. You never know who’s catching up.’

People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered able to answer, such as ‘Is this the laundry?’ ‘How do you spell surreptitious?’ and, on a regular basis: ‘Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.’ 

‘Gods tend to be more interested in prophets, not profits, a-ha.’ There were some blank looks from his fellow directors. ‘Didn’t quite get that one, old chap,’ said Stowley. ‘Prophets, I said, not profits,’ said Gilt. He waved his hand. ‘Don’t worry yourselves, it will look better written down.’

Always remember that the crowd which applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimes the impossible was possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it had been impossible.

A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken.

- Thud! Watch series.

Troll-dwarf politics. Also demonic possession.

…as the dwarfs say, where there is trouble you will always find a troll.

It started out as a perfect day.  It would soon enough be an imperfect one, he knew, but just for these few minutes it was possible to pretend that it wouldn’t be.

…he talked about history and destiny and all the other words that always got trotted out to put a gloss on slaughter. It was heady stuff, except that brains weren’t involved.

He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted lying on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky.

‘War, Nobby. Huh! What’s it good for?’ he said. ‘Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?’ ‘Absol- Well, okay.’ ‘Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?’ ‘All right, I’ll grant you that, but -’

Vimes had never got on with any game more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks round, the whole board could’ve been a republic in a dozen moves.

‘…if dere was a PhD in bein’ fick, youse wouldn’t be able to find a pencil.’

Coffee was only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your slightly older self.

Beating people up in little rooms…he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say ‘We’re the good guys’ and do bad-guy things.

Home was where you had to feel safe. If you didn’t feel safe, it wasn’t home.

‘…and that’s why I don’t like magic, captain. ’Cos it’s magic.  You can’t ask questions, it’s magic. It doesn’t explain anything, it’s magic. You don’t know where it comes from, it’s magic! That’s what I don’t like about magic, it does everything by magic!’

Treat this as a learning experience. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. Then go spare. But with precision.

‘What kind of creature defines itself by hatred?’

- Wintersmith. Tiffany series.

The things that make a Man, Responsibility, etc.

'...I choose. This I choose to do.’ It wasn’t a spell, except in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head you couldn’t make them work at all.

And she always came. Always. But popular? No. Need is not the same as like.

Like a lot of people with big muscles, he got edgy about people who were strong in other ways.

‘We mus’ lay doon our lives for her if it comes to it.’ ‘How can ye do that when ye’re deid already?’ said Miss Treason sharply. ‘That’s a bit o’ a puzzler, right enough,’ said Rob, ‘so probably we’ll lay down the lives o’ any scunners who do wrong by her.’

It says something about witches that an old friend and an old enemy could quite often be the same person.

That was the big problem with being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it’s gone.

- Making Money. Moist series.

Economics, but with golems.

… people lower their voices in the presence of large sums of money.

… his presence was like a lead weight on a rubber sheet. It distorted the space around it. People didn’t immediately see him, but they sensed his presence.

‘My late husband always said that the only way to make money out of poor people is by keeping them poor.’

Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something to keep quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port.

… if you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared wake up.

‘There are, some like to suggest, an infinite number of universes in order to allow everything that may happen a place to happen in. This is of course nonsense, which we entertain only because we believe words are the same as reality. Now, however, I can prove my point, since in such an infinity of worlds there would have to be one where I would applaud your recent action and, let me assure you, sir, infinity is not that big!’

‘… people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.’

What the Iron Maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive, far less messy, considerably more efficient and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the Iron Maiden

‘You get a wonderful view from the point of no return.’

- Unseen Academicals. Wizards series.

Mostly about all the work necessary to keep something like Unseen University running. Also, Romeo and Juliet and football.

Nothing cleans stubborn stains like suppressed anger.

Learning had to be digested. You didn't just have to know, you have to comprehend.

'All her clothes might fall off. I am sorry about this, but it appears to be a by-product of the whole business of poetry.'

Sometimes if you wanted to go to the ball you had to be your own fairy godmother.

'And you are telling me I'm wrong. Are you?' 'I would rather you thought of me as suggesting a way in which you could be even more right.'

'And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.'

'… the more best you're capable of the more you should do.'

- I Shall Wear Midnight. Tiffany series.

Deals with Responsibility, Identity, Self-determination, etc.

Probably the darkest book of the whole series. You know, for kids!

'I have seen horrible things, and some of them all the more horrible because they were, well, normal.

… only blonde and blue-eyed girls could get the prince and wear the glittering crown. It was built into the world. Even worse, it was built into your hair colouring. Redheads and brunettes sometimes got more than a walk-on part in the land of the story, but if all you had was a rather mousy shade of brown hair you were marked down to be a serving girl.

'Poison goes where poison's welcome.'

'Sometimes what is legal isn't what is right, and sometimes it needs a witch to tell the difference.

…you didn't need to grind the faces of the poor if you taught them to do their own grinding.

…one day all of us will die but – a this is the important thing – we are not dead yet.

It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you are going.  And if you don't know where you are going, you're probably going wrong.

- Snuff. Watch series.

A copper goes on holiday. Three guesses what happens there.

Because I haven’t read this one yet, nor the remaining two, there won’t be any quotes for them. (And really, like, if you haven’t decided if the writing’s up to your tastes by now, I don’t know what to tell you).

Well, okay just one:

What should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?

- Raising Steam. Moist series.

Knock, knock! ‘Who is it?’ ‘The industrial Revolution!’

- Shepherd's Crown. Tiffany series. Last book. Published posthumously. The Elves are back. I think.

Reading order

Right.

Because every book is self-contained, you could, technically, pick up any which one and go from there. This works best if you’re especially passionate about something and you want a book about that. Like, if you love theatre start with Wyrd Sisters, if you love opera and musicals go with Maskerade, if you have a special place in your heart for film and/or eldritch horror, Moving Pictures is the way to go.

But, I think that unless you are determined to read One And Only One Discworld book ever, this approach isn’t worth it for anything published after The Fifth Elephant. Except the Rincewind books, you can read those whenever.

Like, yes, The Truth is a book about journalism written by a journalist-turned-fantasy-writer but without any previous knowledge of the Disc, you loose a lot, and I mean a lot of context as to why the things that happen in it are happening when and where they are happening. For example, Pin and Tulip’s utter horror at the state of things in Ankh-Morpork does not have the same weight if you haven’t read how they got like that.

The thing is, like, a while back I was looking at the Amazon page for The Compleat Ankh-Morpork (bc Pratchett had just died and my knee-jerk reaction was to get everything he was involved in ever), a sort of tour-guide like thing that comes with a map and details pretty much every nook and cranny of Ankh-Morpork, and someone left a one-star review saying how “Discworld was “”“ruined””“ now” and “you’re not supposed to be able to make a map of it and it’s supposed to be “”“magical”““ and vague and it loses it charm on a map~” or something like that, and I remember thinking ‘boy oh boy how can you so utterly and completely miss the point?’

Of course there’s gonna be a map at some point! You can’t write over forty (hell, over fifty if we count the supplementary ones) books about something without getting to know it very, very, very well.

The whole charm of Discworld is that with every subsequent book it gets more palpable, more “real”, so to speak.

It starts as a parody of the Standard Fantasy SettingTM and then word by word, book by book becomes one of the richest most well developed fictional worlds ever put to print.

This is why, I personally, believe it to be best to start from the beginning.

Pratchett was never a bad writer. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic actually are not bad books. A bit aimless, maybe, but not bad. It’s just that the books get so much better sometime around Guards! Guards! (or maybe as early as Mort, or maybe only after Small Gods, depending on who you ask) that a lot of people feel that having The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic as your first impression of Discworld is like eating raw dough and calling it bread: The ingredients are there, but it’s not ready.

Having said that, we are still talking about 40+ books, a large and time consuming commitment (even if you’re like me and can and do go through 400~ pages in about 14-16 hours), so here are the books people usually recommend for you to get a feel on Pratchett’s writing and decide if it’s something you wanna get into at all:

Guards! Guards! because it sets the stage for pretty much every book set in Ankh-Morpork (which is more than half of them), most of the city’s key players as well as that specific balance of fantasy and social commentary that is characteristic of Discworld. Probably best put here:

It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing.

Small Gods because it’s a stand alone novel, both temporally and geographically removed from the rest of the series, but it still has all the wit and heart and core ideas and philosophies that the other books have.

And, I’ll say it again: If you only read one Discworld book ever, make it Small Gods.

Another recommended approach (by people who are not me) is to pick a series and read it all the way through. This is the official infographic by the publisher:

The series are colour-coded.

If you decide to go with that, a few things to keep in mind:

This approach works better for The Witches and Tiffany series since they are set away from Ankh-Morpork (or the influence of Ankh-Morpork) and their stories have far less to nothing to do with the themes of international law, globalisation and industrialisation than the other books are connected by.

This approach also works for The Rincewind series since most of his books are set in “”“Foreign Parts“”“ and don’t have a lot to do with the themes of international law, globalisation, industrialisation etc.

You can pretty freely get into Tiffany without having read the Witches, but it’s less fun.

You cannot freely get into Moist Von Lipwig without having read The Truth and at least some of the Watch, you miss out on far too much character depth.

To fully understand Carpe Jugulum you need to have read Small Gods (also from Feet of Clay onwards in the Watch series, Constable Visit is way more fun if you’ve read Small Gods).

To fully appreciate Unseen Academicals you need to have read Carpe Jugulum.

The events of Night Watch are only possible because Thief of Time happened, and you need to read the latter to fully understand the former.

Everything that happens from The Fifth Elephant onwards is connected and follows a timeline and while the books are self-contained it just makes a lot more sense to read them in order.

But really and honestly: just pick one you think seems interesting. All this reading order stuff, it does help people figure some stuff out but ultimately, it’s about what you think you’d most enjoy. After all, the books are already written, and they’re not going anywhere.

Another thing to consider: Discworld has been adapted into audio books, radio plays, theatre plays, comics, and for the screen:

There are three live action adaptations (Hogfather, (with Michelle Dockery as Susan), The Colour of Magic, and Going Postal, (with Charles Dance as the Patrician)) and two animated adaptations (Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music (in both Death is voiced by Christopher Lee)).

There is also, supposedly, a City Watch TV series in the works but it’s all very hush-hush for now.

As far as the Fandom goes, I’ve yet to have a bad experience? Like, most people who I would consider part of the Discworld fandom are pretty laid-back types* -I could be horribly wrong of course, maybe I just haven’t noticed the bad parts- but in general the one thing that brings Discworld fans together in this is the ongoing crusade to make more Discworld fans - hence this... list? essay? I don’t even know.

The one thing that I feel people new to the series should know regarding the fans is that no-one really pays much attention to make spoiler warnings.

Which, okay, some of the books are 30+ years old, and they are part of the opening premise for subsequent books... But still, things that make really satisfying twists and developments are taken completely for granted. (this mostly pertains to the Watch series).

So, just keep that in mind when engaging the fandom side of things.

*I firmly believe that the main contributing factor to the lack of DramaTM is the fact that most of the cast is 40+ years old** and either asexual or married - to well developed and rounded love interests.

**Did I mention the sheer number of Middle-aged and Old People Who Do Stuff in these books? No? There are so many Middle-aged and Old People Who Do Stuff in these books. And they’re mostly women.

Well, that’s about it folks.

Thanks for joining me for this ride. Any suggestions, questions etc. feel free to hit me up.

Finally, as a sort of closing remark:

“And yet, I still feel like a fraud. It’s all been done in fun, folks. I had no big plans. I wrote the first few books for fun. I wrote the next books for fun. I did it because I really wanted to do it. I did it because I got something out of it. “

- From a speech given by Terry Pratchett at Noreascon 4 (2004), collected in A Slip of the Keyboard as “Straight from the Heart, via the Groin”