Solarn87

Solarn87

94p

22 comments posted · 15 followers · following 0

4 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Unseen Aca... · 1 reply · +8 points

Ah, but do you also detest sausages?

4 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Unseen Aca... · 8 replies · +19 points

Unseen Academicals was the first Pratchett book that a lot of his fans hated, and most of it came from the lefty contingent of the fandom. In their eyes, it advocated for abandoning class identity and getting out of the working class by any means, essentially a "fuck you, I got mine" mindset, instead of staying and organizing the working class against the predator classes as is good and proper.

I always considered it a very surface-level reading of the book, one that relies on identification of the working class with poverty, squalor and ignorance (conditions forced upon it by the unjust system it exists under), and therefore leaving those behind would be the same as becoming a class traitor. But I could never really articulate a rebuttal to it, because I'm not a very eloquent person.

But on rereading the book along with you, I noticed that the crab scene is basically a direct rebuttal already. Glenda doesn't keep the crab as a pet or try to relocate it somewhere else where it wouldn't be held back by the other crabs. She shows it that there's another way to do things, and then lets it back to its habitat, in the childish and absurd, but earnest hope that with its unique experiences, it will be able to bring change to the rest of the crabs and stop them from holding each other back.

5 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Making Mon... · 1 reply · +19 points

There's also the fact that Gladys's gender was literally defined by others, because Miss Maccalariat didn't want a "male" golem cleaning the female toilets at the Post Office, and then the various girls/women working at the Post Office adopted her as one of them. So in Moist's mind, Gladys is still a genderless golem, just one that was told to do the job of "be a woman" and then had that misinterpreted by others as actually being a woman.

Also, the Post Office girls gave Gladys an old etiquette book to learn how to be a "proper woman", and Gladys, being a golem and thus valuing writing above all else, even more than a dwarf, took the words in that book as sort of almost a holy writ of womanhood and uncritically adopted it wholesale.

5 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Making Mon... · 0 replies · +3 points

If you like stealth, you'll absolutely love at least the first two Thief games. They use basically the same engine with II improving on places where the original was somewhat janky, and while they definitely show their age, the stealth mechanics are still perfectly functional and the fact that you're playing in a medieval-ish setting with no supernatural powers or high tech wizardry still makes them uniquely challenging compared to other stealth games.

5 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Wintersmit... · 0 replies · +3 points

It's interesting to see how, once Paul Kidby started doing the UK covers for the Discworld books, the rest of the covers rose in quality as well. In the Kirby days, you had maybe one good cover per book (generally the UK collector's edition one), but for this one, I can find maybe two bad ones (the boring cover and the one with Tiffany's head cut off and the Feegle that looks like a bad 3D model).

5 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Thud!': Pa... · 2 replies · +10 points

Think of it this way: it's better than letting them kill each other and then arresting and prosecuting the survivors for murder, which was the other option, and what the best of the actual police forces in existence would have done (the worst would have joined in on the side of whoever they felt was more like them and arrested the survivors of the other side).

5 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Going Post... · 1 reply · +12 points

A minor observation, not really relevant to the overall themes of the book at all: there were three instances of someone getting a second chance referencing the angel thing: Vetinari's deal with Moist, Moist's deal with the Upwright brothers and the actual angel at the end when Moist tried to run away. Did you notice anything about them? The first case is just Vetinari offering a deal, and the angel is said to appear to change the recipient's ultimate fate after everything's already done, which is different than how it happens in the end, where the angel appears just before Moist meets his end and offers a redo of the bad choice that led him there. Which is the same way Moist used it with the Upwrights, where he managed to spin a story so convincing that they actually believed it had happened before he pulled them back to the present. Which happened after he became an avatar of the god of the Post. Now I"m not saying I'm certain that Moist actually acted in his official capacity as an angel (a messenger of a god) there, but the evidence is pretty compelling, don't you think?

5 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Going Post... · 6 replies · +3 points

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5 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Re-Reads 'Monstro... · 5 replies · +15 points

Um... no? He literally acknowledges that they were, right in the part you quoted?

5 years ago @ Mark Reads - Mark Reads 'Monstrous ... · 0 replies · +5 points

Now I just want to know what the proprietor(s) of that lesbian bookshop thought when this old guy with a bushy white beard and black fedora came into their store and said "I'd like to write a book about the patriarchy, could you please suggest relevant literature?"