This is not exactly connected to Going Postal (either the book or the adaptation), but I read this really amazing analysis of Vetinari's character on Tumblr a few days ago, so I'm going to post it here: https://honourablejester.tumblr.com/post/63894319...

I'm really annoyed at the changes in Adora's character in this part of the movie. I already mentioned how I disliked how much she's been 'chickified' in Part 1. But in Part 2, she's even more over-the-top - she's 'too tsundere', as ShireNomad says above.

"Well, that's a bit of an embuggerance."

Ouch. That one hits harder on hindsight. :( Though no doubt Pterry chose that word deliberately.

Oh, no doubt. But still, seasons 1-4 of GoT are more good than bad, whereas the opposite is true of the later 4 seasons (frankly, there's nothing good whatsoever in season 8, except maybe Cersei's disappointment over the lack of elephants).

Lol! Still, one could say that while Charles Dance was in GoT, it was still pretty respectable (insofar as it was already the 'tits and dragons' show). In fact, the show could be said to have jumped the shark at the end of season 4 - in the very episode that Tywin dies - as it contained several major departures from the book canon, such as the lack of the Tysha reveal, Jaime choosing Cersei over his Kingsguard vows, and the lack of Lady Stoneheart.

Going Postal is my favourite Discworld adaptation (not that there's a whole lot to choose from). IMO, it captures the spirit of the book well - as Mark says, 'The people making this clearly read Going Postal and enjoyed it.' (What a pity that the same cannot be said about the makers of a certain other recent Discworld adaptation.)

That said, I don't think I'm quite as enthusiastic about it as Mark seems to be. For one thing, the main characters aren't quite so well adapted, IMO. ShireNomad has already done an excellent analysis above of how Moist is depicted, so I have nothing to add to that. As for Adora Belle ... I think she's softened up a bit too much and essentially 'chickified'. Part of the problem is the casting, I think - Claire Foy is an excellent actress, but she looks, well, too adorable. IMO, Adora should look the exact opposite of her name - with much more angular features and an overall more severe look.

On the other hand, Charles Dance as Vetinari is so perfect that I'm willing to forgive pretty much anything else. The side characters are all done well too.

The problem is, they want it both ways. If they'd made just a generic humorous fantasy show with the same characters (just different names) and premise, they wouldn't have an in-built potential audience of Disworld fans would who watch it. I mean, I certainly wouldn't - quite apart from the extreme disrespect to Pratchett's work seen in the trailer, there's nothing in it that grabs my interest at all. If the Discworld name wasn't associated with it, people like me wouldn't give it a second thought. It's possible that the project might never have even gotten off the ground.

But of course, the show-runners didn't want to actually make a Discworld TV show - they wanted to make the generic humorous fantasy show that they had written, but they clumsily stuck on Discworld character- and place-names just to attract millions of fans of the series. What they don't seem to have realized is that fans of the series aren't fans of the names, they're fans of the actual characters. A character who is called 'Sam Vimes', but who looks like an off-brand Jack Sparrow and who literally sticks his middle finger up at the ruler of his city, has no connection whatsoever with the Sam Vimes we know and love (who figuratively sticks his middle finger up at the Patrician quite often, but never literally).

*Sigh* I've seen a bit of The Colour of Magic adaptation, but I just couldn't get very far into it. The problem isn't with it as an adaptation, but rather the fact that I simply don't like The Colour of Magic (the book). In fact, I had the same problem when trying to reread the book. It's not so much that it's a bad book (it's not), but rather that it reads like a mediocre canon-divergent AU fanfic of the Discworld series - all the stuff that I love about the rest of the series is either absent or present in a distorted/unfinished form. Of course, given that it's the first book in the series, it establishes the canon, and technically it's the rest of the series that could be said to be canon-divergent. But nonetheless, that's what it feels like when trying to reread the book or watch the TV adaptation after becoming thoroughly familiar with the rest of the series. At least, for me. :(

Yikes, that is hideously awful. Quite apart from every other atrocious aspect, I just can't figure out why Vimes is wearing a metric ton of eyeliner under his eyes. Like, what's going on? Why does Vimes need to look like Jack Sparrow? What do the two characters have in common at all, either in terms of personality or situation?

Ugh, there's no way I'm going to watch this atrocity. It's not even worth pirating. :(

I enjoyed this book a little more than the other two in the trilogy, though that's at least partially because the 'trilogy' isn't really one - it's one long novel published in three parts. So this book was the only one that had any real ending - the other two just sort of ended abruptly and provided no closure.

The other reason was that I liked Nassun's story a lot in this book (actually, I liked it in The Obelisk Gate as well), and the descriptions of the places she travels through. The Syl Anagist chapters were good too, at least until they turned into yet another morality tale about how Oppression Is Bad.

Essun's story was the only one in this book that felt a little flat to me. It wasn't bad, though, and it wound up satisfactorily.

In fact, 'satisfactory' is a good word for this book. Not in a negative or faint praise sense, but rather, it felt good when the various story threads left dangling in the previous two books came together and were tied off neatly in the last few chapters of this one. So many authors fail to stick the landing in the final book of their series (*cough*Deathly Hallows*cough*). Or even when they manage to write a decent ending, they wind up losing almost everything that made the series interesting in the first place (*cough*Mockingjay*cough*). The Stone Sky was one of the few final books in a series where I felt that the author had done justice to their own work.