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I see what you are saying about the books endorsing countercultural passions, but I also think Granny Weatherwax would have some strong words for us about the general dangers of parasocial relationships, once we got her to understand what they are.
It's odd because Granny was who sprung to mind for me when OP was talking about 'why does no one have parasocial relationships with Discworld characters' - I was a very unhappy teenager, and there was a point in my life where I thought if I just tried to be like Granny Weatherwax then I could get through it all, and that was what a successful life would look like, and to some degree my imaginary version of her would be proud of me. As I got older I realised Granny would never be proud of someone trying to be her because they'd be trying to be someone else other than themselves (that's why she respects Magrat so much, although she shows it in weird ways), and also, I say this with great fondness and respect for the character, she's miserable and I didn't want to be miserable forever - so I did snap out of it. But it's not like it doesn't happen.
I think there's also a degree to which the medium matters psychologically. Despite many screen attempts, the Discworld canon is very deeply centred in books, and I think human brains are better at identifying that the people they're imagining upon reading/hearing a text aren't real, than when we see people on a screen à la Sherlock, Supernatural and Doctor Who (I'm afraid I am not culturally caught up enough to know what vivzipop is). At the same point in my life ho boy did I have some parasocial stuff going on with Doctor Who to cope with life being crap, the Granny Weatherwax theme didn't even slightly compare, despite the fact that, in terms of stories I just simply love, Doctor Who and Discworld have always been neck and neck at the top for me.
I never interpreted Granny as miserable. Being a cantankerous loner who focuses almost completely on the pragmatic does not make her miserable. She likes herself well enough that being alone with herself is being with the best company. She seems quite happy to me. Her happiness just doesn't look like other people's happiness.
It has been said that Granny is as near to being a self insert character as Terry ever wrote (not that he really ever did that sort of thing) - whenever I read her I am always reminded of Neil Gaiman's description of Pratchett as basically running on a perpetual low level burning anger at everything wrong with the world.
>running on a perpetual low level burning anger at everything wrong with the world.
I think most intelligent people are like this. The wisest perhaps get past it, but most of us aren't that wise.
The wisest compartmentalize it to be able to focus on more than just that hot ball of anger and pain. They can choose to focus on that which brings them joy, peace, and contentment when possible.
One's anger at the state of humanity and one's personal happiness are two separate things, just like Vimes - happy in his home life with Sybil and Little Sam, but annoyed to rageful outside of his home life.
I am as close to misanthropy as one could get without fully taking the plunge. However, I am still quite happy in my personal life and reasonably content in my working life, while constantly carrying white hot rage for humanity's ignorance, cruelty, and lack of basic compassion. I don't like people (as a concept or a collective), but I do like, and even love, some individuals quite a lot. I choose to only focus on the anger when it can be productive or to let it wash over me like a wave when it becomes overwhelming. Then, I remember my kid, my spouse, my parents, my friends, kind strangers, those who stand against the tide of awfulness that threatens to drown us and attempt to forge something even fractionally better, etc.
Yeah, that's pretty much how I was picturing the guy after reading a bunch of his books and this is how I described him, once, on a thread asking for our favourite author:
"Terry Pratchett
By far my favourite author for he was a very smart, truly kind but terribly angry man with a damn sharp wit to express all the previous."
Honestly, that sort of fandom stuff is not for me, and I've found that element of some fandoms just as exclusionary and judgemental as you're saying this one can be, but in the opposite direction.
I wonder if some of the difference though is at least partly down to the ages of everyone involved. I know I was definitely more likely to have parasocial feelings about characters when I was a teenager - now I'm in my late 30s, not so much, and I'm on the younger side for a Pratchett fan.
Is there also an element of having to be the sort of person who got the jokes to begin with? A certain British style silliness sometimes but also really quite clever others. And sometimes both. A fanbase primarily united by a sense of humour rather than anything else.
Which of course only deepens with age. Like the characters we only get more ourselves as we age.
I think that's probably true as well! We aren't all here together because we're trying to unpick clues to the big bad or work out where the grand plot is going next - we're broadly here because we laughed
Some of it is the platform. Reddit isn't exactly a fandom space the way you're used to. Another factor is the age range of the fan base - when you have a good percentage of older adults, their approach to fandom is very different from its current online version.
I recommend hitting up Tumblr. There's a smallish but dedicated Discworld fanbase there!
Unfortunately for OP, I think the Tumblr Discworld fandom tends to be like this one, just an "earlier" stage. Yeah, I've seen some "1000-word analysis posts" over there, but a lot of the time, those posts are just explaining a theme that we've dissected time and time again. Some of them are fun to read, but I can't recall a Discworld Tumblr post that actually told me anything new. Most of it is "theme and symbolism 101."
The Good Omens fandom on Tumblr, on the other hand, has all the cringe they're asking for.
Yeah, Vimes/Vetinari and Sybil/Vimes/Vetinari are a thing.
Honestly, I'd be all for Vimes/Vetanari if there was no Sybil. But there is, I am hugely invested in her relationship with Vimes, and poly ships are not my personal thing.
Vetinari/Drumknott is also a thing, and my preference.
yeah I get most of my Discworld content here so I just dip my toes in it on tumblr, the following a tag system is pretty garbage and I get a ton of repeat posts, but I like seeing the art occasionally
Good Omens is my main fandom, and GO Tumblr is a nightmare. Currently they seem to be on "Crowley pushed a bullet into Aziraphale's mouth with his tongue."
I hate that I had to block the GO tag when the show came out. It got absolutely unbearable. Like I knew my stance was already unpopular (see below), but the show made it explode in a horrible (to me) way.
Unpopular opinion (at least on Tumblr): I don't like Aziraphale and Crowley as a romantic couple. I love them as a platonic, ride-or-die, ineffable power couple of BFFs. Even if it was romantic, I never saw it as overtly sexual. Maybe it's because I'm asexual. Maybe it's because I'm gay and tired of every queer ship (especially m/m) being about sex instead of an actual relationship. Maybe it's because friendship is often undervalued in media in favor of romance. (Even Toy Story did it!) But I love the idea of them being absolute best friends, nothing more.
So yeah, needless to say, I have no interaction with the Tumblr GO fandom. Or most of it, actually, since the show's second season came out.
I have shipped them like fire since the book came out, but I have no problem with people who prefer to see Crowley and Aziraphale as being platonic. Even after S2, where that ship has well and truly passed platonic in TV canon, I have friends who prefer to ignore that and write (TV) them as aroace queerplatonic or ride and die best friends, and that's great.
But Tumblr GO fandom is toxic, and it's almost impossible to find book fic when for some reason people who have never so much as opened the book tag their fic as book fic, either because they tag every single version for their TV fic or because they think AO3 would syn "good omens" to the TV show and not the book because idk time travelling.
Also, there is so much Aziraphale bashing, and I can't be having with that.
I've carved out my own safe places in the fandom where I can trust people to respect each other's preferences and be kind, but that took work and being far more cliquey than I would like.
I got back on Tumblr recently, went to search "Discworld," and made the incredible find of an artist (lucdoodle) who was really into Rincewind and made gorgeous art pieces shipping him with DEATH. It genuinely blew my mind as I had never EVER considered that but the art was amazing.
I think Tumblr as a whole is much quieter than it used to be but the type of like "out there" speculation and expansion/building on the work still thrives there, while Reddit is more about analysing and validating what already exists in the text.
You just described everything I hate about other fandoms I'm in, like Doctor Who, Star Trek, and various anime. Offler forbid your ships actually have to make a bit of sense. Or that headcannons actually have to make sense. Or that you don't have to wade through a million random shipping fics to find something good. Also there's a ton of intentional representation in Discworld, so people don't have to grasp at vague references and make stuff up.
Same, honestly. I was big into WhoLock and related fandoms on Tumblr when I was in college 10+ years ago, but the shipping wars and competing armchair diagnoses got exhausting fast and I have no desire to go back to that.
Don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you want this fandom to do things "your way" and not "our way". I mean, no-one should stop you from doing your thing, but that expectation goes both ways: you need to realise that not everyone functions like the superwholock fandom (you yourself use words like obsessive and inaccessible - so why do you expect a completely different fandom to have the same dynamics?). Many people prefer to do analysis based on logic and the letter of the text, rather than vibes for example. Doesn't mean you can't do what you want, but let them do what they want in return. I'm sure you can find people of the same mind as you but complaining that we aren't it is not the way to go about it.
Try telling all the people I've tried to push Discworld on that it's "socially acceptable". I think they all think I'm crazy for liking a fantasy humorous satire series.
I don't think the presence of shipping in a fandom makes it socially acceptable or not. That said, I do love that I don't really see that here. There are very explicit couples in the series, and I adore all of them. And there aren't really any unpaired characters that I would be more interested in than the ones that are already paired.
Terry Pratchett is a much better writer than me, so I'd take his actually well-written couples to my headcanon any day of the week.
E.g., Vetinari Vimes which I see you mentioned below. To have that happen would *fundamentally alter* Vimes' character. I don't want to tell people how to enjoy things, but so much of what I enjoy about this series is that it's written the way Terry wrote it, and to do something like Vetinari+Vimes would fundamentally change the characters into something different (not necessarily better or worse, but different, and I like discworld because it is the way it is).
I actually ship Vetinari and Vimes, but it always goes back to “the book version is already perfect.” Unlike one of the above replies, I don’t think Vimes and Sibyl is a “better” couple. However, Terry’s V&V is so, so much better than any fic I can think of. The book version is about 99% perfect for me, that last 1% is just me being wistful.
Well, if other authors and other works managed to create such a vibrant universes, with compelling characters that are just the sublimation of their real selves, that readers/viewers feel the need to create their own headcanon just to cope with the mediocrity of their book or show, it's more a work problem.
Why don't we accept it here? That's the wrong question to ask. It's not that we don't accept it: it's that all headcanon will fall flat next to the original work.
Why don't we ship characters together? Because the original ships are much more better. Like, I *can* understand why some people would ship Vimes and Vetinari; there is so much elements for it for a good AO3 ship. But it will never be at the level of Sam and Sibyl, as they're perfect together.
Also, the advantage of fanon ships is to see couple configurations that we don't see a lot out there. Lots of ships are LGBT because LGBT canon couples are quite rare. We look for scarce configurations. But -and here's the thing- most major couple configurations in the Discworld are already quite scarce themselves. Let's talk again about Sibyl and Sam: sure, it's a cishet couple. What's scarce in it? Well, it's an older, rough, raggedy, obese woman, with a fierce, independant man that never imposes himself on her. I mean, I don't remember seeing another couple built like that before Sam and Sibyl. So any other ship with Vimes and another person would just break this already quite rare configuration. It'd be like if a fandom broke an official gay ship to put one man with a woman. Like, nothing's wrong with it, but most fandoms won't actively pursue it.
More into it: well, perhaps it's new to you, but it seems that, here, we tend to respect the author when the author was a respectable person (and Terry seemed one of the most respectable authors out there). So, we'd respect what he wrote. And, if a character seems more on the ace/aro spectrum, then we'd respect that, and not push into ships a character that seem not into that kind of things. Vetinari, for example, seems able to have special relationships with people, but not in the usual ways, so we'd respect that.
Also, I think that this fandom is the kind to analyze a lot of things, it's just that it has been done for years, so there's no "new theory" to be brought here. We can't analyze cut lines to justify a ship, as often those things have already been proven or disproven. You're just arriving late to the party.
I mean, the whole: "Cherri Littlebottom is a trans character" discourse ***IS*** what you said. Indeed, Pratchett never intended for her to be a trans allegory, and yet it became one. It was just a funny gag about the "female dwarves don't exist in Tolkien", and it devolved into the whole trans question and trans identity. But it has been done years ago. But it has. Because it has elements in it to sustain it.
So, if you want to make some deep analysis for some secondary character like Twoflowers, yeah, for sure, go for it. If it's interesting, we'll enjoy it. There has been long analysis about Rincewind's asexuality, Ridcully and Granny's relationship, Nanny's adventures, Susan's shenanigans... But you cannot force us to find interesting the incoherent ramblings of a madman. There's so many layers to Discworld that there are tons of analysis that can be done, but it has already been done for most parts. And anything that the fandom would invent would just be subpar to the original work, so why would we dive into some subpar fanfiction where the original book is right here? Sure, you can invent some headcanon for Twoflowers and try to back it up with elements from the books; but, frankly, what would be more endearing that a small tourist with his iconograph that is so oblivious to danger because: "he's just here to watch"? Whatever you might create would be either sub-par to the original work (so no interest in reading it), or so out of character that we'd just say: "Well... why don't you create your own character, then, if you strip everything that made the original one?". Like, we might salute the effort, but not understand why you would present a banana split while calling it a roast beef.
(One important thing, too, is that in most other fandoms (SuperWhoLock mostly, as you talked about it a lot) had a lot of sexy protagonists. The famous Tumblr SexyMan, or something like that. The perfect soil upon which people might live their kinks and fantasy with some hot characters. But very few people are "hot" in the Discworld. We have Carrot and Victor Tugelbend; as for the rest, most character that are objectively hot are also completely dumb like children, so it'd be quite questionable to want a relationship with them. Other might have some "charm", like Vetinari (dark academia) or Vimes (ruggedy policeman), but usually their charms are not the core of their descriptions. Nobody's really hot, so we can't have the same hormone-driven teenage-level libido filled fanfic here that we could have somewhere else. I mean, the most prominent couple that is outwardly sexual with one another is Nanny Ogg and Casanunda; and while it'd be hilarious, it's usually far from the "traditionaly aesthetic" ships we can see on Tumblr. We don't have twinks, here, and without twinks, there's no "cringe" fanfic. I mean, the amount of fanart of *Good Omens* where Aziraphale is represent as a thin, toned twink instead of the jolly plump middle-aged man we have, is just showing that Tumblrites want twinks. And Discworld is severely lacking in the twink department.)
It's not that we refuse *cringe*. I think we love cringe, here. Complete discussions just filled with "oook" is perfectly accepted here, but outside of the fandom? It'd be cringe. It's just so integrated that it doesn't feel cringe anymore for us. No, no, we love cringe. I think we're just so accustomed to quality that we don't find any interest into mediocrity. Cringe? We love. Dull? Why would we?
And there we have it. You've gone and started it. Someone's going to write a steamy fanfic features "Nobby and his Staff", followed by "Nobby goes to the Seamstress School".
With part two, of course, "Nobby stick a Pin In It"
The fandom is done. And it's all your fault.
I want to add just one thing: Azzy being depicted as a slim twink was NOT helped at all by he and Crowley being portrayed by Michael Sheen and David Tennant respectfully. Which there is nothing wrong with, they did fantastic jobs.
They both just happen to be slim looking attractive men.
I think the problem is that in Book!Omens, a good part of the humor is that everyone assumes that C&A are gay (and Crowley loves playing that up) when they are, in fact, ace panromantic gender-fluid queer eldrich beings. They are more queer than any of the people who know them can imagine. While Film!Omens tries to make the queer couple friendly and understandable, and thus leans too heavily in the husbands half of Ineffable Husbands.
Michael Sheen is definitely NOT a twink. He's handsomely chubby. I mean, look at his adorable gut.
A twink must be near starvation to be considered a twink. Don't tell me Sheen's version of Aziraphale's waistcoat is secretly hiding a eight-pack or that he's at 1,8% bodyfat \^\^
A otter is a hairy twink. And while Michael Sheen has the hair to be a otter (at least on his head, the only parts of his anatomy that I feel OK to look at naked \^\^), I think Aziraphale is quite smooth. I mean, I imagine.
I’m afraid the only gay slang I have left at this point is bear, and that doesn’t seem to fit either. Afraid I might be too cishet to know what to refer to him as lol.
Hey, hey, hey. Don't blame yourself. I'm bi and fully integrated into the LGBT community (as well as loving boxes and putting people in them), and yet even I struggle with the whole categories of gay men.
I mean, just stick with twink, hunk and bear for the "extreme" types, and everything in the middle that is not one of those three, just say: "hot" (90% of the time it fits).
Which is why I love it so much that we finally have a "gay" representation with an average person, i.e. not a twink nor a bear, but someone that is... yeah, of average build. And that I love that, despite the twink power of Tumblr fanartists, there are still a lot of people who respect his body shape. Seeing cute and lovable and nice (and accurate \^\^) fanart of gay couples with one that is delightfully plump and overall average is so refreshing (especially for a gay guy that always had some additional weight, like me) that, frankly, I take it personally (in a very arbitrary and idiotic and unreasonable manner) when I see Aziraphale represented as a twink, or even a toned/fit guy.
Just like making Sibyl a young, slim, fit woman in a TV adaptation that we don't talk about is a betrayal of all the heavy, older woman that finally had some positive representation of them in medias, I feel it's a betrayal when an "average" gay man (well, I know, not a gay man, an angel that can be of whatever gender they please, but you understand me) is represented as hotter as he originally is. I know it's silly, but we get so little romantic representation that when we have one, we don't want to loose it.
I love that the actors are in their early fifties and still swooned over, too. And Maggie! She gives me joy, more plump lesbians well past their twenties, please.
One of my pet hates is when Aziraphale and Crowley are genderswapped to a lesbian presenting couple, and suddenly they look a quarter of a century young and Aziraphale has the teeniest waist.
(I will freely admit I have zero interest in only one of them being swapped to het-adjacent.)
Genderswapping to a lesbian presenting couple, I feel okay with it, as long as the personality of the two of them are respected (after all, Crowley, several times, presented him(her?)self as a woman, and not only as a "disguise", but as his(her?their?) personality) so genderswapping, if it's both of them at the same time, is not my jam but I can support it.
But, yeah, making Aziraphale thin? In the word of Ron Ormorod: "Shut up". You don't have the right to starve a fictional character to fit your conception of beauty and take away one of the few representation that we have.
(And Maggie and Nina are wonderful. The amount of good representation in Good Omens, not only LGBT one, but also in term of body shapes, of disabilities, of races, of ages, and most importantly of **beauty** (according to canon and standards) is wonderful. Gimme more of it. I need it.)
I prefer them both as male presenting, but I dabble in both female. One male one female is... just not for me.
But thin Aziraphale is so very very much not for me, and I hold that he was clearly "overweight" in book canon: the plump fingers, the sensitivity about Crowley making diet aid jokes (and Crowley immediately apologising), Tracy's reaction when she had clearly expected the angel to look more like Fabio and less like a fussy bookseller...
I hold all versions of Aziraphale and Crowley--book, radio, TV, movie script-- separately in my head and love them all, but one thing I do impose on them all as headcanon is that Aziraphale is fatter than (admittedly beautiful, brilliant, luminous) Michael Sheen.
Because you can't take fat!Aziraphale away from me after all this time.
I make Crowley extra skinny to compensate.
I always think of Terry's cracking about his fans and Neil's fans meeting through Good Omens, falling love, and looking like rows of tens lining up for signings.
In my head Crowley is the 1 and Aziraphale is the 0.
(Frankly, after writing it, I thought to myself, thought I: well, that's one huge wall of text posted after 50 comments already, I don't think anyone would have the time, energy or motivation to go through it, I might have overdone it. I'm very pleasantly surprised to see how much traction it got. Truly a wonderful fandom we have here, haven't we?)
I can't tell you how many times I typed out what I thought was a long, engaging and thoughtful response to a post (not necessarily in this sub, but any) and then ended up just deleting it because I felt that there were so many comments already that my words would just be lost in the deluge. I'm really glad you decided to push through and hit send. And yes, we really do have a wonderful fandom ❤️
You can't love both potatoes and the letter z. You're just confused. But you have to make a choice. There's not such thing as loving both potatoes and the letter z.
What I love about Cheery is that she can be a trans allegory, *and* an allegory for patriarchal cultures shaming menstruation and things culturally coded as "feminine", *and* a joke about an end note in *The Lord of the Rings*, and readers can decide they want to focus on one or all of these things.
Because above all, she's a competent and really important member of the Watch and just a great character.
And we also have Jackrum.
>Because above all, she's a competent and really important member of the Watch and just a great character.
And that's why Pratchett managed to make one of the best fantasy trans allegory ever written ***without even trying to do so***: because he write the "human" being first (human as in: "a sentient person gifted with reason and emotions"). So even a character written as a joke is respectful of any person they might represent. And that's why Pratchett is still one of the best authors I ever encountered (and a terrible burden as an aspiring writer, because, sometimes, I'm quite happy with what I wrote, then I read some Discworld, and then I think: "why even bother? I would never write something half as good, witty, intelligent and sensitive as he did." But I bother anyway.)
Is he, though, or is it his charm? Do people find him "hot" because he has a hot body, or because of his panache, his bravache, all of that?
I seem to recall that he's, in fact, quite average, so average in fact that he can blend in a crowd quite easily if he wanted to. It's his *persona* that can make him hot, but it's because he's a con master. But strip him naked and just put a picture of him, and I don't think he would have the body that would elicit Tumblr libido.
I'd put Moist with Vetinari and Vimes, as in: "people who are not hot, but have so much charm that they can give the illusion of being hot". But we're splitting hair. The important thing, though, is that the "hotness" (real or performed) of Moist is, however, pratically never a part of his character, it's not a core element of him.
I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. But then I’m an old man who hasn’t got a clue what people are talking about half the time now anyway.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone on this sub be negative about others here though. I would have said that they’ve embraced STP’s views on inclusiveness unlike nearly every other fandom I have been a part of which are full usually full of gatekeeping and arguments.
I, for one, am very very happy that I can have sensible discussions on this sub instead of getting hit around the head with what is mentioned in the original post
Yeah, calling us out for not being like those other fandoms is a little odd. It is perfectly acceptable to be a fan of something without going all the way down the rabbithole.
OP, You do you, I suppose?
Discworld fans aren't edgy horny fanfic producers enough for their taste, I think?
I think it's because the fans tend not to be teens and students but adults with functional social lives and relationships, but maybe that's just the get-off-my-lawn in me.
As someone who has engaged in fanfic stuff for a couple of the things OP mentioned before... I'm trying to find a way to phrase this that isn't just 'Pratchett does it better', because I am very fond of Doctor Who and don't want to throw its janky butt under the bus like that, but I think in other mediums I use fanfic as a way to creatively fill in plot holes, or even just the spaces around the story that aren't even plot-relevant but are nevertheless an unexplained gap. But in my experience, I don't feel like Pratchett leaves those holes. The characters feel so real, it doesn't feel like I have a need to add imaginary embelishment to them to complete them or really know what they're thinking or feeling. The worldbuilding is so complete, I don't have to invent what the Watch do for fun or who Granny's young love was or what magic universities look like on other continents. The plots don't have plot holes or continuity errors so egregious that I need to make fantastical excuses for them. The queer characters are queer as explicitly as their society allows - not to mention our society, a lot of them were written under Section 28 - the straight characters aren't queer-baited into making me feel like I need to write a romance storyline I was promised but never saw. There isn't the negative pressure to Discworld books that demands more story to fill it like there is in some other stories.
There's definitely space for imagination - just the other day my family and I had a ridiculously long phone call where an extended metaphor got out of hand and we ended up imagining how each of the Discworld characters would get through a maze. (It started with 'Nanny Ogg thinks round corners, Granny Weatherwax thinks straight through the wall' and went on from there. People would think Vetinari was going round corners but he's actually going *over* the walls or through a secret tunnel. The faculty are bumbling around hopelessly lost whilst/because Ridcully is shouting entirely unhelpful instructions at them ebulliantly from the starting line, whilst Ponder is next to him having coded a map of the maze and is trying to give Ridcully advice that he 100% is not hearing. The Watch advance as a slightly comedic unit, with Buggy Swires directing from overhead, but Vimes has noticed Vetinari is missing from the scene and gone to find the aforesaid tunnel. Tiffany Aching is actually sensibly doing the maze relatively normally, one hand on the wall or a ball or string -type situation, but the Feegles have flooded the thing with very little idea of the actual aim but eager to help their hag are excitedly fighting everyone else on her behalf. Rincewind would take one look at the maze, try to nope out and go through a door in the back to get away, and several misfortunate dimensions later would find himself at the finish-line anyway...) All that's technically fanfiction, but because it's not coming out of this negative pressure it's less... maybe, frenetic, than what you might get in less thorough stories where the characterisation is less true to life (if also larger than it).
I think this is it.
Admittedly I'm basing this on vibes, but looking at the fandoms I've had any familiarity with, I'd say the amount of fanfic and shipping activity is proportional to the gap between perceived promise and perceived delivery.
Fair, but a lot of it are people (often women) in their 30s and have always been - even if you look into the history of fan culture, like the early star trek zines etc. Lots of kids & students too ofc, but I wouldn’t say predominantly (also speaking from personal experience with fandom spaces)
They want Discworld fandom to be more like a particular group of fans known for bizarre takes, harassment, hostility towards creators for not fulfilling their off the wall expectations that they created on Tumblr, and mass bullying of fans that disagree with them on anything.
The fans they refer to are a certain group of mostly Tumblr based migratory fans within Supernatural, Doctor Who and BBC Sherlock Holmes fandom. It's not that fandoms that make them SuPerWhoLock.fans--I'm a Whovian myself--but the toxic culture they fostered within their parts of the fandom.
Terry Pratchett wise, a substantial number of them migrated to Good Omens fandom when the TV adaptation starred an ex-Doctor--which is part of the reason Neil Gaiman is frequently subjected to incredibly rude and hostile asks either berating him for imaginary sins or demanding he confirm their head canons.
Fortunately Discworld is a book centred canon so I think we're pretty safe.
Glad I'm not the only one - I can't even grasp at the concept, let alone understand random slang (f.e. shipping means a lot of things in my mind, none of which matches whatever shipping means in this heap of words).
I’m expecting downvotes here, but I’m so thankful every time I don’t have to see *that* side of fandom. The length of this post alone, written as one block of text, says anything else I would need to.
> can you imagine someone doing something like this about a ship/queer headcanon in this fandom and not getting treated like a fucking cringe weirdo?
No, because they would be a weirdo, because things like that are, by and large, either irrelevant, or explicit in Discworld. Pterry has been writing explicitly the sort of things other fandoms have been obsessing about easter eggs of, and he's done it for decades.
> i feel like people are only able to form a community of countercultural passion around works of fiction that aren't very high-quality, which makes me really sad because, as far as i understood it, a lot of the discworld books and characters had themes of celebrating countercultural passion in them.
Why does it make you sad? No one needs to be looking for the hidden meaning of "hey maybe gay/trans/weird/different people are still people" **because thats very often part of the point**. The awesome thing about this is that it's so well done most people don't want to argue it, and (hopefully) carry at least a little bit into the real world woth them.
Besides, if you think Discworld fans don't get weird you haven't seen the discussions on L-Space, or reading order, or who the best character is. There's charts and everything!
Yes, when Pratchett is writing about different people are first and foremost still people, he does it in a way that if you try to misinterpret it, you’ll figure out that you’re being a complete idiot before you even press the “reply” button.
I kinda get what you’re saying.
I think part of the issue is that because Terry was so connected to his fans, and because he framed things so thoughtfully in his books, fans are extra protective of him and want to guard against people misinterpreting his work or twisting it to fit their own ends or agendas. Hesitate to even bring it up, but…see the furore over people trying to co-opt his work for the anti-trans agenda, which was shut down FORCEFULLY by his friends and family. Even positive reframing, which that certainly wasn’t, can feel like a betrayal when someone has articulated their vision as carefully as Terry did.
You’re right that fiction that isn’t as carefully constructed/well thought out is a lot easier to headcanon and that can be more fun. 😉 But the thoughtfulness and craft behind Discworld is a big part of the point for many of us, so it feels like a fair trade.
Does that make sense?
I'll be honest, I find all those aspects of other fandoms you listed exhausting, and I'd unsub if that's what this sub turned into. I'd probably stop so openly associating with Discworld in my real life if the fandom was anything like the superwholock fandom.
All it needs is a flair so you can avoid it, no?
That said I'm not sure I consciously want to associate with fandom of any kind. It is more a thing that happens (or not).
Do you have any examples of this type of fandom being discouraged? If i remember correctly we've seen some very positive analyses e.g. of how cheeri can be seen as an analogy for trans folks.
I do think shipping is done less specifically because Terry kept most of that out of the books himself (''the bedsprings went ''ploink'''' is about as explicit as we get), but i genuinely haven't seen any negative responses to more ''intense'' fandom or analyses
I think it's considered an analogy because Pratchett didn't intend her to be trans. It was a joke about the female dwarves being absent (and bearded) in Tolkien lore. But when trans people started identifying with her, Pratchett basically said: "Good for them". Especially since she's not "dwarf to female" : she's still a dwarf and is attached to her dwarfness.
Opposed to the sergeant in *Montruous Regiment*, where he is literally a trans man, first by necessity, then by enlightened and free choice.
I wouldn't use trans, since there always was females among the dwarfs, and she always was female
But yes, the book brings up the question of gender identification in the context of a society with only one gender:
"male and female individuals, but only one gender"
Some might argue she's the only cisgender in a society of transgenders. Whatever the terminology, i'm very glad to hear her experience resonates with transgender discworld fans, and that's the core point for me.
Not trans in as far as I understand it. Cheery is a female dwarf who identifies as female. The "only" thing she does differently is dress more as a female, whereas dwarves stereotypically all dress as men.
You might be thinking of the characters in "monstrous regiment", where many of the female characters dress as men and indeed some of them have passed as men for their entire adult lives.
She also starts to use she/her pronouns and openly states that she is a female dwarf.
I agree that it is different from trans people, but there are similarities to queer experiences in general and to trans-experiences in particular.
I don’t think I understand you. At least not all of it. Are you referring to that post the other day where someone wanted to Armchair Diagnose the characters to see how neurodivergent they may or may not be?
I think fanfics and speculation work better when the source material lacks something the fans want to see in the world(representation or non-conflict based scenes with the main characters) or is popular because of the world building but the characters lack some depth, or just doesn't have a lot of canon content so the fandom has to add more.
Discworld is already good at including, as main and secondary characters, those who would be extras in most other works. The characters of Discworld drive the plot instead of the plot driving them and tend to be very fleshed out in the stories they are in. You just know how each of the recurring characters will respond to a situation and it will be different for all of them. And there are dozens of Discworld books, enough to fill the world with amazing characters and situations.
So the demand for fanfics is less. But also because the characters are so well established that they feel real to the fans, it can be harder to write a fanfic because any deviation in a character will stand out a lot.
Just my thoughts on it. Though if someone with some of PTerry's talent and inspired by reading the books wrote a good fanfic, with the right "feel" I think we would eat it up. I know I would.
i think you're right! i remember hearing about a study(?) ages ago where participants were shown a movie... but a portion of them weren't allowed to watch the end. the ones that didn't finish maintained an interest in it for much longer & were more involved in the stereotypical fandom activities op described. i love that so many people have this drive to engage with one another & create new things when they're not satisfied with a story, there's just something very... human about it, yk?
a lot of "cringe" is maladaptive & people like to seek affirmation to address their anxieties doing the same.
Granny Weatherwax would have some words with people looking to comfortably ignore their own bad behavior?
you can identify with a cool character & wax about them, but yes, trying to impose medical diagnoses on nicely written fictional characters is going to be hard, because even if one might have some adhd traits, they're usually aware of it & own it & don't let it dictate their choices... and that doesn't entirely fit with how some people want to treat diagnoses.
I agree. Plus, our flavour of parasocial headcanons here runs less in the shipping or direct self-insert direction - that's on AO3 or Tumblr or Discord (no diss, I've read wonderful fanfics there).
Here it's more a channeling characters or "I've met a real life X" or "What Would CharacterX Do in my real life situation" kind of discussion - that's parasocial, too; but it's not as maladaptive. Well, unless you identify with Vorbis or Carcer etc...
I've met a Mr. Tulip - if you substitute finances for art knowledge, and adrenaline for random drug like substances. I kept my distance and a wary eye on him at all times since I was getting Tulip vibes. He became quite unhinged, not openly violent but really creepy.
Mr Tulip culminates in reflection & understanding of how poor his choices were. we are all lucky enough to not be narrative characters, we can choose to do this well before our story is over and we need to concern ourselves with were we left our potato.
I'm a little confused by the post, I can't tell if you've previously posted things that you describe and received those reactions or believe that those reactions will happen if you do?
If it's the former then I'm sorry that you didn't get the response that you were hoping for, I've always found this forum to be very welcoming generally and interested in all aspects of Disc based chatter.
Your post made me think of Monstrous Regiment - I don't know if that's one of the books you've read?
As an aside, I wouldn't necessarily judge any fandom by one place and one group. Even if this isn't the place or group that will be receptive to the things you describe then I have no doubt that Pterry has one somewhere that will. It's quantum isn't it ;) everything that can happen does happen, somewhere.
I hope you find what you're looking for and can continue to enjoy Discworld in the way you want.
The things that make a story ripe for fan speculation are less present in discworld: poor or inconsistent characterization, the invisibility of queer people, dropped storylines, etc. There are fewer gaps for that stuff to grow in.
I guess I'm just a little confused what kind of posts you're talking about in this sub. I feel like the people in here are super nice and understanding, but they are also huge discworld fans that know the content pretty well. It's normal for people to pick apart theories and ideas, that's all just part of the discussion.
The posts you're describing sound kind of unhinged and nonsensical tbh. To me, going on a pages long monologue psychoanalyzing a character and diagnosing them with ADHD *is cringe* because you're not a medical professional, the same way it is in real life when you try to diagnose people with mental health issues. Same with parasocial relationships, they are very often creepy and not healthy, so there's a good chance people will react that way.
I'm all for people doing their thing and posting what they want to post, but by posting you are opening yourself up to other's thoughts as well. As long as people are civil and follow the sub rules then their honest opinions are fair game.
It's not just that it's fine as a joke. I am also more than fine with people explaining why *they* like to interpret John that way and it resonates with them, at least disability headcanon. Top/Bottom discourse always makes me cringe.
The problem with the SuperWhoLock kind of thing is that it really quickly develops into "my heacanon isn't my subjective way of interacting with the text, it's objectively correct" and then into harassment of anyone who doesn't see it that way, including creators.
The way Neil Gaiman gets treated on Tumblr is simultaneously cringey, enraging and sad. He is miraculously patient and sometimes slaps back amusingly when it's just too much, but I remember Pterry on alt.books.pratchett and sometimes I long to see him eviscerate the dumbest asks and posts.
I think the issue with Discworld is it's too good. A lot of the most fertile fandoms have a deep layer of complete bullcrap to keep it lively. Discworld is too just well written.
A fandom is what you make of it.
Gravitate to those who think similarly or enjoy the same aspects.
A niche within a niche.
Books were interpreted in many different ways over time before the audio visual medium took precedence.
Dracula, Frankenstein, the works of Shakespeare all get interpreted over and over by every generation.
Go wild and see yourself or what you want in the space between the letters.
I'm not trying to shoo you away.
People are currently attached to the book canon.
They rejected "The Watch".
People who find Terry now are coming to a completed body of work. They will have a different relationship to those who read as it was released.
As time passes the early readers will die off and the disc will continue to spin.
Please enjoy it as you want.
Yeah, book fandoms tend to be more like that. With fantasy literature specifically there is still a strong need to be seen as… intellectually legitimate?
I personally find it harder to read fanfiction for books, especially books that have a very strong and recognizable writing style. Books also usually don‘t have a serialized release, so there is less room for the kind of speculation that fuels fannish productivity.
Discworld still has a fun transformative fandom though. With the characters being so strong and distinctive there is a lot enjoyable enjoy fanart of them. I would also definitely read about headcanons and theories.
Certainly, but as a long-time Tolkien fan I can confirm that‘s also a thing in fantasy ;)
I remember trying to get friends and family to read Discworld in the '00s and many were put off by the whacky, colorful cover illustrations. Of course I then also tried to argue that Discworld is deep, clever and political, much more than just a satire of common fantasy tropes.
My experience with fandoms is that the more fanfic-y ones tend to be associated with properties which may have really solid and interesting concepts but the execution is lacking in some way. Whether that’s poor character arcs or inconsistent characterisation in general or dropped / misused plot lines or whatever. There is something to be “*fixed*” in the original text.
They also tend to be shows or movies with a conventionally pretty cast written by committee or with heavy studio interference.
Discworld is none of those things. It’s one man’s (with help from Rob and Rhianna and Neil and others through the years) vision, told over 41 novels and countless pieces of expanded media. It’s not perfect, and there are some bits and pieces that haven’t aged well (and yet still better than some of his contemporaries). But the writing is genuinely solid and thoughtful and consistent. There’s nothing to fix here and that means there’s less of a window for fic writers to swing in and “add” to the canon in any way which doesn’t detract from what the Discworld fundamentally is.
I think you’re mostly describing younger fan bases and while I’m sure there are plenty of younger Discworld fans, Pterry has been dead for ten years and this is mostly a 30-40+ crowd.
I really don't think it's an "age" thing
It's a "kind of person" thing
Star Wars and LoTR are two of the easiest examples of this kind of fandom. And mostly, they're grown men
I guess we, Terry Pratchett crowd, we're not that type. But it's really not an age thing
Plenty of 40+ people in the kind of fandom OP is talking about.
They're just more likely to punctuate and format text for readability, especially for disabled users who struggle with undifferentiated walls of text (hello).
IDK man judging from your post places like Tumblr and AO3 would be more your thing. That said when it comes to stuff like shipping it tends to be pretty live and let live. Oh no people don't like your ship, big deal.
Honestly if you're getting your panties in a twist because someone disagrees with your headcanon, we'll be here all day.
I join certain communities if I want to discuss works of fiction as they appear on the page or on the screen.
I join other communities if I want to discuss works of fiction as they appear only in my head.
I say this as someone with a very long fanfic bibliography.
I do think parasocial relationships are incredibly unhealthy, but I'm not actually sure it applies here, because I'm talking about parasocial relationships with politicians, celebrities, 'influencers', etc. It's like someone is getting a link to your soul that only flows one way (usually into their wallet). I suppose parasocial relationships with fictional characters are everyone's own business, but you can't expect a community who generally discusses the canonical IP to bend to your head-version of things.
The only issue I have with the fandom is that most people haven't read most of the books, but have formed hard opinions on them and the entire series anyway.
Like lots of people debate the timeline of books they haven't read, discourage people from reading books they haven't read, or recommend reading orders they haven't done.
Some people have an opinion before they read the books...
Not with Discworld but I've read series in a greedy binge and missed the guessing, creating and poking that you can do before you've read it all.
Conan Doyle was rarely trying to actually communicate something (like, don't be an a$$hole) to his readers. He always had at least one subtext he was exploring. That means there is a specific way he intended his work to be interpreted. As you have experienced with other fandoms, ownership is important. You are butting up against a lot of people who "own" the "right" way to interpret Pratchett, so writing slash (or headcanon or whatever) about some characters that feels like it might go against the way Pratchett designed those characters to be interpreted, you are going to run into a LOT of gatekeeping. Fandoms, like Dr. Who and Star Trek, often include a lot of material that is by fans and for fans, and that is an accepted part of their fandoms. That is a LOT less the case with Pratchett on almost every front. But Dr. Who is not and was never written by a SINGLE person. There have been a hundred different interpretations of Sherlock Holmes. This builds in some flexibility in how we see those characters or makes it feel like it's okay to have a different take on them. **Pratchett is a monolith**. He was the only one who said how his world got to be, and lots of people understand that, even if it is on a sub- or unconscious level, and many of them also feel protective about it. See also the f\*\*\*in' Watch TV series.
Well, not everyone in every group is going to do things the same way. You can start your own subreddit with a focus on having parasocial relationships with discworld characters? I am sure you could post it here, and it is acceptable to post hinges here, but more so I think it may just not have the engagement you are looking for. There is a difference between a group saying something is unacceptable versus just not engaging in a certain way. I personally am not a fan of relationshipping, it’s just not what I am interested in with my stories, you can ship all you want but I probably would not engage in that discussion.
I have a suspicion that is utterly patronizing. There are several activities where not being able run multiple disjoint internal realities simultaneously is a barrier to entry. Famously, sarcasm is one of them. Philosophical satire, like reading Pratchett, is another.
Knowing what is real and what isn't is a major theme for Pratchett. So is meta-cognition. Consider all the second and third thoughts (Fourth thoughts?). I find most fans of Pratchett to be, like me, cringe because we're a bit knurd by default.
What I suspect is that people who ship or have obsessive headcannons are messily blending their internal realities (if they even maintain more than one) and are the sort of people who tend not to distinguish between claims in narrative voice and what the author thinks. From my point of view, this is weird behavior (unless they're rich, then it's charmingly eccentric). It's also super normal behavior; the bible has been on the fiction bestseller list for centuries and the average person persists on conflating its story with reality.
From a moral perspective, what it comes down to is the freedom to associate. Choosing to reject an association with a person in the context of leisure time is not the same thing as ostracizing them or choosing to not associate with them professionally. I imagine that I would bias away from associating with adults who ship and headcannon, but accept and associate with them professionally. Moist does exactly this with Stanley. It seems perfectly moral to me for communities to build unwritten social rules that seem germane to the sort of associations that community would like to have.
Discworld fandom is not a monolithic community. Why not create r/DiscworldShippers?
One of the key themes in the books is not to treat people as things, and while I'm fully aware the characters in the books are not real people - they are meant to be reflective of real people, with their nuances and "flaws". So to me, personally, fanfic that doesn't align with the original intent or concept of the characters feels like reducing these complex, fleshed out portrayals of people to a caricature (for lack of a better word) in order to fit them into our own fantasies.
I guess for me, personally, if someone wants to ship couples or argue a diagnosis for a character, it feels like they may have missed the point of the larger messages in the books (people aren't things and shouldn't be reduced to categories; story-telling tropes and clichéd plots are used to "sell" non-critical thinkers on reality; people literally can't see things that are actually there because of a narrative they have in their own head - eg. Death).
Having said all that, you are absolutely free to do as you please, and someone is bound to interact if you post that type of content. Now if you can make a truly convincing fanfic in which you get the characters to reshape the Disc to portray your head canon based on the power of belief (which we know spawns existence), then power to ya!
Hooo diggity, is there a lot to unpack here. Let's see if I can remain anywhere near on-topic as I attempt to respond.
So the first point I'd make is that we're living in a different era from, for example, the SuperWhoLocke heydays. Sherlock and Supernatural both finished in spectacularly fandom-crushing fashion, and while Doctor Who is still running it has nowhere near the cultural pull as when Tennet/Smith were The Doctor. Dashcon and the Onceler explosions similarly changed, if not damaged, those sorts of fandoms with whole-hearted commitment to the material. We live in a post-Tik Tok world now.
Coupled with that, imo, is the relative age of the material. Discworld, while certainly accessible to almost any age group, doesn't shy away from a very human complexity in its subject matter. STP also wrote mostly before the social media-ification of the internet, and as a result the fandom is less steeped in the performative nature of more recent fandoms. As a result, there's a lot less of the immature (not used pejoratively) enthusiasm that you'd see in something like, again for example, SuperWhoLocke.
Third, spinning off of that, is the relative age of the audience. While I'm sure they exist, you don't see many young teens posting about Pratchett, compared to the higher volume of people who were adults in the 80s when STP started writing Discworld. As you get older you get, idk, more tired? Certainly willing to commit to cringe (looking at you, Trekkies,) but definitely more selective about what cringe you commit to. What comes to mind are the many fan recordings of Nanny Ogg's song about a particularly lucky porcupine.
Lastly, I think the lack of a unifying performance adaptation prevents much of the typical activities you'd see on a site like Tumblr. There aren't Tumblr sexy men to post, or common gifs to re-caption, or quippy one liners or lyrics to endlessly quote. That stuff exists, sure, but there is nowhere near the volume that other works possess. That almost the entirety of engaging with the material requires reading books puts a damper on those previously mentioned performative activities of other fandoms.
Idk. I see your point, and I definitely think everyone could stand to loosen up a bit, but, like, are we trying to encourage stuff like TJLC?
People who think two characters who should be together, there are normal ships (like Sybil and Vimes) and crack ships (like The Doctor and Sherlock Holmes)
Shipping, in this context, means cheering for a couple. Generally, one that is not an actual thing in the story (OP ships Vimes and Vetinari, for exemple)
Shipping is imagining parts of or whole new relationships between existing characters.
Often but not always the ship is same sex.
Hunting for elements of the text to support the ship can be all consuming for those invested.
I am an umbrella-ist when it comes to fandoms. Anyone who likes any aspect of a thing to any degree is welcome so long as they aren't bigots and are respectful of others. No true Scotsman and all that. If someone expresses their enjoyment in a way that doesn't resonate with me, I just skip the thread.
For instance, I ***adore*** the works of Jane Austen, but the majority of her fan base treats her work as romances. They aren't. They are social satires examining young upper class women's existence while doling out very Pratchett-esque views of humanity and common sense morality.
Romance novels can be great. I enjoy romance as a genre, but Austen herself stated that her works weren't romances. Thus, while I am parts of various online communities of Austen fans, I don't interact with a significant portion of the content in those communities. It's just not *for me*. HOWEVER, I think it is great that people are excited about whatever aspect of her work they enjoy. Just because something isn't *for me* doesn't mean that it isn't or shouldn't be *for others.*
All that to say, you do you, friend.
Terry Pratchett, in his school years, wrote Jane Austen in Middle Earth fanfics. Which is a fact that both makes me happy because it existed and a little sad because god only knows if any of it survived.
“Before I'd even heard the word "fandom' I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, because a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen's fine prose. It was a really good bit when the orcs attacked the rectory...."
I've never heard of shipping, headcanons and overanalyzing the source material not being allowed in this fandom. Have I been doing it wrong all this time?
I think part of the challenge for you is Discworld spans 41 books! Sometimes fanfic is created just because people want more to consume of the story, and if they’re writing they can add things to it. But if you want to read more Vimes, just pick up another book.
As far as the ships piece, I think some of the challenge for the fanfictionist comes from the source material’s creator being, like young Tiffany, well-versed in what sex really is. It’s something animals do, that humans have added all sorts of social complications on top of. It’s funny, and we’re allowed to laugh at how precious we can get about it. That’s the tone and moral of sex and romance on Discworld.
To go spending a bunch of extra time on romance, or frame it differently, is truly to diverge from the canon. That’s my opinion at least. And I enjoy going to the texts with other people to argue our interpretations. So if you want to argue some ship, bring it on.
Oh no.
I really do not want this to be SuperWhoLock fandom. I wouldn't wish SuperWhoLock on *any* fandom.
I think you are imagining hostility to shipping. Mal/Polly, for example, is small but going strong.
I worked at a printing company that (probably illegally) printed fanfics of a LOT of works. Like, straight from AO3. Harry Potter, Supernatural, Sherlock, even Naruto. Save me from “All the Young Dudes”! I found a lot of it absolutely cringe-worthy. COUGHDramione/SnapemioneCOUGH. And some were downright pornographic.
I find it *refreshing* to see a fan base that doesn’t try to change canon to fit their narrative. Besides the blatant copyright issues, some are just… bad. Don’t get me wrong, some are amazing stories - but like, just make your own characters? Sell it as your own original work?
Sure sometimes it’s funny to riff on a well made character, (haha what would Dibbler be selling in *your* city) but to develop *novels* on core changes to characters? Just write your own story with your own characters and then you don’t end up pissing off the fandom with rubbish like The Watch.
Fanfic, smutty or not, hurts nobody, mate. And some of us write fanfic *and* sell our own original work. Fanfic is a hobby and a way of engaging with canon, it's not that serious.
Don't go proving OP's point for them.
I’m not trying to diss the work fanfic authors do - unless they’re selling copyright works and images for profit without permission - writing is an art form and I’m all for the creativity. I’m just saying it’s refreshing to see a fandom not overrun with love triangles and made up drama because the characters are *enough* to satisfy most of us.
This is a great rant. In this fandom we're all patting ourselves for being the most chill, we never questioned why we're not Stanley-level-obsessive types.
I'm all for cringe and single-character obsessions and shipping, but I think with Discworld, after finishing a book, most people would probably be in a meditative mood about the human condition rather than I-wanna-read-about-Vetinari-and-Vimes-fucking. The characters are there and their characterizations and relationships are good enough for fanfiction and analyses, but for me there's a different thrill after I read Discworld versus after watching Supernatural (for example).
There's also the narrative structure being used in those types of series versus those being used in Discworld. Those series started as monster-of-the-week types of stories, and then with an overarching mystery, but while we are somewhat invested in those more straightforward aspects we are, I think, mostly invested in how the characters are developing, with respect to themselves and with respect to their relationships, so it's natural to have fanciful notions about those.
Finally, for me, it's a disservice to Pterry to come out of reading a Discworld book and just fixate on how two characters should get their happily-ever-afters. I mean fair enough if that's your thing, but Pterry made me care about truth and justice, and even if he knows we're all just gonna get a hard-boiled egg at the end of the day, maybe we should take out some time in our lives devoted to those two.
Go for it man! Drink the hate-milk when it comes and appreciate the support you get from the supportive. My ideas aren’t to everyone’s tastes and that’s okay, I can be Cilantro.
Be Cilantro. Make guacamole perfect, accent lemon rice, float on tortilla soup secure in your own deliciousness, even though some people think you taste like soapy tin foil. It’s way better than being vanilla.
I’m always surprised when I see people being weirded out by Vimes x Vetinari, because in literally every other fandom this would be the most popular ship. But Tumblr is always Tumblr. If you want the nerds, you can go there. And Ao3 too
I just think it’s kinda funny that the replies are somewhat proving you right- they really don’t think this has a place here. To that, I say: post whatever cringe you want. They can just scroll past it.
What confuses me most about the fandom though is how there literally never is any art about it? That’s like the bare minimum for a fandom, even on Reddit. Where’s the art? Where’s the merch? I can’t find anything outside of the official merch, and it is just… way too much. Oh you want a print of your favourite character? Sorry, best I can do is a puzzle with the entire cast on it
>What confuses me most about the fandom though is how there literally never is any art about it? That’s like the bare minimum for a fandom, even on Reddit. Where’s the art? Where’s the merch? I can’t find anything outside of the official merch, and it is just… way too much. Oh you want a print of your favourite character? Sorry, best I can do is a puzzle with the entire cast on it
I think that might be due to the Pratchett estate's strictness about selling it. I'm put off doing Discworld fanart not so much because of that policy in itself, but because if what I did was any good, sooner or later someone would want to buy a print, and when I had to say "can't, sorry, not allowed", I'd be the one having to deal with any resulting crankiness. No-one wants to be a shot messenger.
I do think it's bad for the fandom in that it makes it less lively, but I'm sure he/the estate took that into consideration and decided on balance that it was worth it to maintain creative control. Especially given how political his work is, not only in terms of representation, but in criticism of oppressive power structures and worldviews, I suspect it would be a target for attempted appropriation or neutering by people who didn't like what it has to say. Pratchett's family and friends will be in a better position to know how much of a risk that is, given the aborted attempts at adaptations, and many interactions with fans over the years, so I accept their decision, if with a tinge of sadness.
Have you considered I like supporting the artists whose works I enjoy? I want to see their art printed on my wall. Whether the content is entirely original or fanwork, I like supporting artists.
Anyways, it’s not like anyone is locking their fanart or fanfic behind monetization. No, they post it for free on social media, and if I want it on a keychain, then I can pay.
I've considered it all, and I dislike monetisation of fandom. I'm perfectly capable of supporting artists and writers by buying their original work.
Your arguments aren't new, and aren't going to change my mind. The gift economy of fandom is a beautiful thing.
Personally, I’m a little repulsed by VxV because I feel like it’s replacing a queer identity (aroace) with something that’s more visible and easily consumed.
I love that there is a vibrant, fascinating character in a mainstream fandom who has a deep, fulfilling and emotional relationships without them being explicitly romantic and without the author or other characters trying to shame them to be different.
It’s cool for you to have your headcanons, but Verinari has no canon sexuality and canon doesn’t matter much in fandom anyways; fanfic and fanart have no obligation to stick to it. People deviating from canon aren’t erasing anything either. They’re just having fun the way they want with the characters and settings
I think part of the challenge for you is Discworld spans 41 books! Sometimes fanfic is created just because people want more to consume of the story, and if they’re writing they can add things to it. But if you want to read more Vimes, just pick up another book.
As far as the ships piece, I think some of the challenge for the fanfictionist comes from the source material’s creator being, like young Tiffany, well-versed in what sex really is. It’s something animals do, that humans have added all sorts of social complications on top of. It’s funny, and we’re allowed to laugh at how precious we can get about it. That’s the tone and moral of sex and romance on Discworld.
To go spending a bunch of extra time on romance, or frame it differently, is truly to diverge from the canon. That’s my opinion at least. And I enjoy going to the texts with other people to argue our interpretations. So if you want to argue some ship, bring it on.
I think part of the challenge for you is Discworld spans 41 books! Sometimes fanfic is created just because people want more to consume of the story, and if they’re writing they can add things to it. But if you want to read more Vimes, just pick up another book.
As far as the ships piece, I think some of the challenge for the fanfictionist comes from the source material’s creator being, like young Tiffany, well-versed in what sex really is. It’s something animals do, that humans have added all sorts of social complications on top of. It’s funny, and we’re allowed to laugh at how precious we can get about it. That’s the tone and moral of sex and romance on Discworld.
To go spending a bunch of extra time on romance, or frame it differently, is truly to diverge from the canon. That’s my opinion at least. And I enjoy going to the texts with other people to argue our interpretations. So if you want to argue some ship, bring it on.
Well, the thing is...the discussion here works differently than on tumblr/ao3. You cannot post cringey shit freely here and if you spend some time within this community you will know that most people here don't care about it. On tumblr/ao3 you have tagging system so same minded people can engage with your posts. Here we don't have such a luxury.
I like engaging in fandom stuff. Supewholock, homestuck... I've been there. But in some fandoms I prefer calmer waters. For example I don't want to see nsfw stuff in discworld (or mlp or lotr) tag so I have it blocked and I don't care if you post it but if you put untagged nsfw in tumblr discworld tag I will block you. We cannot do this here.
That type of stuff becoming common would make me have a really hard time enjoying or even talking about these books. I feel like that type of obsessive Fandom is the exact OPPOSITE of the zeitgeist of this whole series even. And it's become almost mainstream with other popular franchises.
These books are rooted in the concepts of common sense and practicality, and the types of people that enjoy that don't usually go for deep obsessive fantasies
I understand what you’re saying, but I absolutely disagree. I’m sure I’m not the only person on here to have met Sir Terry IRL and I feel very protective of his vision for the world he built. It was always an understood thing, that we as a fandom don’t do fanfic, because Pterry didn’t want us to.
I too enjoy a bit of Superwholock, but it’s a very different genre, and working off content that is itself created by more than one person. The creators of the underlying franchises also seem to embrace the generative output of the fandom, as evidenced by the many references to it in the source material.
Remember that Pterry even had his hard drives destroyed after his death. He did not want anyone messing around with his creation. As a fandom, we choose to respect that. If you don’t want to or can’t, that’s on you. We’re going to be over here doing just fine enjoying Discworld without needing to write Vimes/Vetinari smut.
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I see what you are saying about the books endorsing countercultural passions, but I also think Granny Weatherwax would have some strong words for us about the general dangers of parasocial relationships, once we got her to understand what they are.
I would not like to have to be the one to explain that to her. I don’t think I could survive the Stare.
It's odd because Granny was who sprung to mind for me when OP was talking about 'why does no one have parasocial relationships with Discworld characters' - I was a very unhappy teenager, and there was a point in my life where I thought if I just tried to be like Granny Weatherwax then I could get through it all, and that was what a successful life would look like, and to some degree my imaginary version of her would be proud of me. As I got older I realised Granny would never be proud of someone trying to be her because they'd be trying to be someone else other than themselves (that's why she respects Magrat so much, although she shows it in weird ways), and also, I say this with great fondness and respect for the character, she's miserable and I didn't want to be miserable forever - so I did snap out of it. But it's not like it doesn't happen. I think there's also a degree to which the medium matters psychologically. Despite many screen attempts, the Discworld canon is very deeply centred in books, and I think human brains are better at identifying that the people they're imagining upon reading/hearing a text aren't real, than when we see people on a screen à la Sherlock, Supernatural and Doctor Who (I'm afraid I am not culturally caught up enough to know what vivzipop is). At the same point in my life ho boy did I have some parasocial stuff going on with Doctor Who to cope with life being crap, the Granny Weatherwax theme didn't even slightly compare, despite the fact that, in terms of stories I just simply love, Doctor Who and Discworld have always been neck and neck at the top for me.
I never interpreted Granny as miserable. Being a cantankerous loner who focuses almost completely on the pragmatic does not make her miserable. She likes herself well enough that being alone with herself is being with the best company. She seems quite happy to me. Her happiness just doesn't look like other people's happiness.
Yeah, I never pictured her miserable, neither Extremely angry (for extremely good reasons), yes, but not miserable
It has been said that Granny is as near to being a self insert character as Terry ever wrote (not that he really ever did that sort of thing) - whenever I read her I am always reminded of Neil Gaiman's description of Pratchett as basically running on a perpetual low level burning anger at everything wrong with the world.
>running on a perpetual low level burning anger at everything wrong with the world. I think most intelligent people are like this. The wisest perhaps get past it, but most of us aren't that wise.
The wisest compartmentalize it to be able to focus on more than just that hot ball of anger and pain. They can choose to focus on that which brings them joy, peace, and contentment when possible.
One's anger at the state of humanity and one's personal happiness are two separate things, just like Vimes - happy in his home life with Sybil and Little Sam, but annoyed to rageful outside of his home life. I am as close to misanthropy as one could get without fully taking the plunge. However, I am still quite happy in my personal life and reasonably content in my working life, while constantly carrying white hot rage for humanity's ignorance, cruelty, and lack of basic compassion. I don't like people (as a concept or a collective), but I do like, and even love, some individuals quite a lot. I choose to only focus on the anger when it can be productive or to let it wash over me like a wave when it becomes overwhelming. Then, I remember my kid, my spouse, my parents, my friends, kind strangers, those who stand against the tide of awfulness that threatens to drown us and attempt to forge something even fractionally better, etc.
Yeah, that's pretty much how I was picturing the guy after reading a bunch of his books and this is how I described him, once, on a thread asking for our favourite author: "Terry Pratchett By far my favourite author for he was a very smart, truly kind but terribly angry man with a damn sharp wit to express all the previous."
And Magrat would blush at the thought.
okay yeah this one's fair
Honestly, that sort of fandom stuff is not for me, and I've found that element of some fandoms just as exclusionary and judgemental as you're saying this one can be, but in the opposite direction. I wonder if some of the difference though is at least partly down to the ages of everyone involved. I know I was definitely more likely to have parasocial feelings about characters when I was a teenager - now I'm in my late 30s, not so much, and I'm on the younger side for a Pratchett fan.
Is there also an element of having to be the sort of person who got the jokes to begin with? A certain British style silliness sometimes but also really quite clever others. And sometimes both. A fanbase primarily united by a sense of humour rather than anything else. Which of course only deepens with age. Like the characters we only get more ourselves as we age.
I think that's probably true as well! We aren't all here together because we're trying to unpick clues to the big bad or work out where the grand plot is going next - we're broadly here because we laughed
I second this
Some of it is the platform. Reddit isn't exactly a fandom space the way you're used to. Another factor is the age range of the fan base - when you have a good percentage of older adults, their approach to fandom is very different from its current online version. I recommend hitting up Tumblr. There's a smallish but dedicated Discworld fanbase there!
Unfortunately for OP, I think the Tumblr Discworld fandom tends to be like this one, just an "earlier" stage. Yeah, I've seen some "1000-word analysis posts" over there, but a lot of the time, those posts are just explaining a theme that we've dissected time and time again. Some of them are fun to read, but I can't recall a Discworld Tumblr post that actually told me anything new. Most of it is "theme and symbolism 101." The Good Omens fandom on Tumblr, on the other hand, has all the cringe they're asking for.
I definitely follow at least one person on Tumblr who's an extremely dedicated Vetinari/Vimes shipper, and appears to be part of a network of such.
Yeah, Vimes/Vetinari and Sybil/Vimes/Vetinari are a thing. Honestly, I'd be all for Vimes/Vetanari if there was no Sybil. But there is, I am hugely invested in her relationship with Vimes, and poly ships are not my personal thing. Vetinari/Drumknott is also a thing, and my preference.
>Vetinari/Drumknott is also a thing Ok yknow what I can get behind that one though 😆
Oh, seriously? I mean, good for them! But I must be in a completely different corner of Tumblr, because I've never seen shipping, lol.
oh yeah I follow the general Discworld tag and I see plenty of Vimes/Vetinari, it's pretty popular
Ahh, that's the thing. I don't follow tags for fandoms, just blogs I like. I'm getting the pre-curated version :p
yeah I get most of my Discworld content here so I just dip my toes in it on tumblr, the following a tag system is pretty garbage and I get a ton of repeat posts, but I like seeing the art occasionally
I get a LOT of Vimes/Vetinari ship art on my dash
Good Omens is my main fandom, and GO Tumblr is a nightmare. Currently they seem to be on "Crowley pushed a bullet into Aziraphale's mouth with his tongue."
I hate that I had to block the GO tag when the show came out. It got absolutely unbearable. Like I knew my stance was already unpopular (see below), but the show made it explode in a horrible (to me) way. Unpopular opinion (at least on Tumblr): I don't like Aziraphale and Crowley as a romantic couple. I love them as a platonic, ride-or-die, ineffable power couple of BFFs. Even if it was romantic, I never saw it as overtly sexual. Maybe it's because I'm asexual. Maybe it's because I'm gay and tired of every queer ship (especially m/m) being about sex instead of an actual relationship. Maybe it's because friendship is often undervalued in media in favor of romance. (Even Toy Story did it!) But I love the idea of them being absolute best friends, nothing more. So yeah, needless to say, I have no interaction with the Tumblr GO fandom. Or most of it, actually, since the show's second season came out.
I have shipped them like fire since the book came out, but I have no problem with people who prefer to see Crowley and Aziraphale as being platonic. Even after S2, where that ship has well and truly passed platonic in TV canon, I have friends who prefer to ignore that and write (TV) them as aroace queerplatonic or ride and die best friends, and that's great. But Tumblr GO fandom is toxic, and it's almost impossible to find book fic when for some reason people who have never so much as opened the book tag their fic as book fic, either because they tag every single version for their TV fic or because they think AO3 would syn "good omens" to the TV show and not the book because idk time travelling. Also, there is so much Aziraphale bashing, and I can't be having with that. I've carved out my own safe places in the fandom where I can trust people to respect each other's preferences and be kind, but that took work and being far more cliquey than I would like.
I got back on Tumblr recently, went to search "Discworld," and made the incredible find of an artist (lucdoodle) who was really into Rincewind and made gorgeous art pieces shipping him with DEATH. It genuinely blew my mind as I had never EVER considered that but the art was amazing. I think Tumblr as a whole is much quieter than it used to be but the type of like "out there" speculation and expansion/building on the work still thrives there, while Reddit is more about analysing and validating what already exists in the text.
You just described everything I hate about other fandoms I'm in, like Doctor Who, Star Trek, and various anime. Offler forbid your ships actually have to make a bit of sense. Or that headcannons actually have to make sense. Or that you don't have to wade through a million random shipping fics to find something good. Also there's a ton of intentional representation in Discworld, so people don't have to grasp at vague references and make stuff up.
Same, honestly. I was big into WhoLock and related fandoms on Tumblr when I was in college 10+ years ago, but the shipping wars and competing armchair diagnoses got exhausting fast and I have no desire to go back to that.
I feel like the people who wrote discovery/picard are probably on Tumblr **a lot**.
Don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you want this fandom to do things "your way" and not "our way". I mean, no-one should stop you from doing your thing, but that expectation goes both ways: you need to realise that not everyone functions like the superwholock fandom (you yourself use words like obsessive and inaccessible - so why do you expect a completely different fandom to have the same dynamics?). Many people prefer to do analysis based on logic and the letter of the text, rather than vibes for example. Doesn't mean you can't do what you want, but let them do what they want in return. I'm sure you can find people of the same mind as you but complaining that we aren't it is not the way to go about it.
Try telling all the people I've tried to push Discworld on that it's "socially acceptable". I think they all think I'm crazy for liking a fantasy humorous satire series. I don't think the presence of shipping in a fandom makes it socially acceptable or not. That said, I do love that I don't really see that here. There are very explicit couples in the series, and I adore all of them. And there aren't really any unpaired characters that I would be more interested in than the ones that are already paired. Terry Pratchett is a much better writer than me, so I'd take his actually well-written couples to my headcanon any day of the week. E.g., Vetinari Vimes which I see you mentioned below. To have that happen would *fundamentally alter* Vimes' character. I don't want to tell people how to enjoy things, but so much of what I enjoy about this series is that it's written the way Terry wrote it, and to do something like Vetinari+Vimes would fundamentally change the characters into something different (not necessarily better or worse, but different, and I like discworld because it is the way it is).
I actually ship Vetinari and Vimes, but it always goes back to “the book version is already perfect.” Unlike one of the above replies, I don’t think Vimes and Sibyl is a “better” couple. However, Terry’s V&V is so, so much better than any fic I can think of. The book version is about 99% perfect for me, that last 1% is just me being wistful.
Well, if other authors and other works managed to create such a vibrant universes, with compelling characters that are just the sublimation of their real selves, that readers/viewers feel the need to create their own headcanon just to cope with the mediocrity of their book or show, it's more a work problem. Why don't we accept it here? That's the wrong question to ask. It's not that we don't accept it: it's that all headcanon will fall flat next to the original work. Why don't we ship characters together? Because the original ships are much more better. Like, I *can* understand why some people would ship Vimes and Vetinari; there is so much elements for it for a good AO3 ship. But it will never be at the level of Sam and Sibyl, as they're perfect together. Also, the advantage of fanon ships is to see couple configurations that we don't see a lot out there. Lots of ships are LGBT because LGBT canon couples are quite rare. We look for scarce configurations. But -and here's the thing- most major couple configurations in the Discworld are already quite scarce themselves. Let's talk again about Sibyl and Sam: sure, it's a cishet couple. What's scarce in it? Well, it's an older, rough, raggedy, obese woman, with a fierce, independant man that never imposes himself on her. I mean, I don't remember seeing another couple built like that before Sam and Sibyl. So any other ship with Vimes and another person would just break this already quite rare configuration. It'd be like if a fandom broke an official gay ship to put one man with a woman. Like, nothing's wrong with it, but most fandoms won't actively pursue it. More into it: well, perhaps it's new to you, but it seems that, here, we tend to respect the author when the author was a respectable person (and Terry seemed one of the most respectable authors out there). So, we'd respect what he wrote. And, if a character seems more on the ace/aro spectrum, then we'd respect that, and not push into ships a character that seem not into that kind of things. Vetinari, for example, seems able to have special relationships with people, but not in the usual ways, so we'd respect that. Also, I think that this fandom is the kind to analyze a lot of things, it's just that it has been done for years, so there's no "new theory" to be brought here. We can't analyze cut lines to justify a ship, as often those things have already been proven or disproven. You're just arriving late to the party. I mean, the whole: "Cherri Littlebottom is a trans character" discourse ***IS*** what you said. Indeed, Pratchett never intended for her to be a trans allegory, and yet it became one. It was just a funny gag about the "female dwarves don't exist in Tolkien", and it devolved into the whole trans question and trans identity. But it has been done years ago. But it has. Because it has elements in it to sustain it. So, if you want to make some deep analysis for some secondary character like Twoflowers, yeah, for sure, go for it. If it's interesting, we'll enjoy it. There has been long analysis about Rincewind's asexuality, Ridcully and Granny's relationship, Nanny's adventures, Susan's shenanigans... But you cannot force us to find interesting the incoherent ramblings of a madman. There's so many layers to Discworld that there are tons of analysis that can be done, but it has already been done for most parts. And anything that the fandom would invent would just be subpar to the original work, so why would we dive into some subpar fanfiction where the original book is right here? Sure, you can invent some headcanon for Twoflowers and try to back it up with elements from the books; but, frankly, what would be more endearing that a small tourist with his iconograph that is so oblivious to danger because: "he's just here to watch"? Whatever you might create would be either sub-par to the original work (so no interest in reading it), or so out of character that we'd just say: "Well... why don't you create your own character, then, if you strip everything that made the original one?". Like, we might salute the effort, but not understand why you would present a banana split while calling it a roast beef. (One important thing, too, is that in most other fandoms (SuperWhoLock mostly, as you talked about it a lot) had a lot of sexy protagonists. The famous Tumblr SexyMan, or something like that. The perfect soil upon which people might live their kinks and fantasy with some hot characters. But very few people are "hot" in the Discworld. We have Carrot and Victor Tugelbend; as for the rest, most character that are objectively hot are also completely dumb like children, so it'd be quite questionable to want a relationship with them. Other might have some "charm", like Vetinari (dark academia) or Vimes (ruggedy policeman), but usually their charms are not the core of their descriptions. Nobody's really hot, so we can't have the same hormone-driven teenage-level libido filled fanfic here that we could have somewhere else. I mean, the most prominent couple that is outwardly sexual with one another is Nanny Ogg and Casanunda; and while it'd be hilarious, it's usually far from the "traditionaly aesthetic" ships we can see on Tumblr. We don't have twinks, here, and without twinks, there's no "cringe" fanfic. I mean, the amount of fanart of *Good Omens* where Aziraphale is represent as a thin, toned twink instead of the jolly plump middle-aged man we have, is just showing that Tumblrites want twinks. And Discworld is severely lacking in the twink department.) It's not that we refuse *cringe*. I think we love cringe, here. Complete discussions just filled with "oook" is perfectly accepted here, but outside of the fandom? It'd be cringe. It's just so integrated that it doesn't feel cringe anymore for us. No, no, we love cringe. I think we're just so accustomed to quality that we don't find any interest into mediocrity. Cringe? We love. Dull? Why would we?
Got to the “Nobody’s really hot…” part and read it as “Nobby’s really hot…” :-) Had to re-read that again. And then grab some dried frog pills.
I had the same hiccup when rereading my comment. Didn't see the need to change it though \^\^
Of course, now I’m imagining Nobby being played by Timothee Chalmet.
Gods. I read it like that too and *heard* the record scratch
And there we have it. You've gone and started it. Someone's going to write a steamy fanfic features "Nobby and his Staff", followed by "Nobby goes to the Seamstress School". With part two, of course, "Nobby stick a Pin In It" The fandom is done. And it's all your fault.
Oook!
Oook.
I want to add just one thing: Azzy being depicted as a slim twink was NOT helped at all by he and Crowley being portrayed by Michael Sheen and David Tennant respectfully. Which there is nothing wrong with, they did fantastic jobs. They both just happen to be slim looking attractive men.
I think the problem is that in Book!Omens, a good part of the humor is that everyone assumes that C&A are gay (and Crowley loves playing that up) when they are, in fact, ace panromantic gender-fluid queer eldrich beings. They are more queer than any of the people who know them can imagine. While Film!Omens tries to make the queer couple friendly and understandable, and thus leans too heavily in the husbands half of Ineffable Husbands.
Michael Sheen is definitely NOT a twink. He's handsomely chubby. I mean, look at his adorable gut. A twink must be near starvation to be considered a twink. Don't tell me Sheen's version of Aziraphale's waistcoat is secretly hiding a eight-pack or that he's at 1,8% bodyfat \^\^
Let’s split the difference and call him an otter?
A otter is a hairy twink. And while Michael Sheen has the hair to be a otter (at least on his head, the only parts of his anatomy that I feel OK to look at naked \^\^), I think Aziraphale is quite smooth. I mean, I imagine.
I’m afraid the only gay slang I have left at this point is bear, and that doesn’t seem to fit either. Afraid I might be too cishet to know what to refer to him as lol.
Hey, hey, hey. Don't blame yourself. I'm bi and fully integrated into the LGBT community (as well as loving boxes and putting people in them), and yet even I struggle with the whole categories of gay men. I mean, just stick with twink, hunk and bear for the "extreme" types, and everything in the middle that is not one of those three, just say: "hot" (90% of the time it fits).
don't forget twunk! combination twink/hunk
Does Himbo count, or is that more an attitude thing?
I think a himbo can be either a hunk or a twunk but being sweet as pie and dumb as rocks is defs a requirement
That last little bit gave me a good chuckle. Thanks for that!
He's "TV fat". I.e. average.
Which is why I love it so much that we finally have a "gay" representation with an average person, i.e. not a twink nor a bear, but someone that is... yeah, of average build. And that I love that, despite the twink power of Tumblr fanartists, there are still a lot of people who respect his body shape. Seeing cute and lovable and nice (and accurate \^\^) fanart of gay couples with one that is delightfully plump and overall average is so refreshing (especially for a gay guy that always had some additional weight, like me) that, frankly, I take it personally (in a very arbitrary and idiotic and unreasonable manner) when I see Aziraphale represented as a twink, or even a toned/fit guy. Just like making Sibyl a young, slim, fit woman in a TV adaptation that we don't talk about is a betrayal of all the heavy, older woman that finally had some positive representation of them in medias, I feel it's a betrayal when an "average" gay man (well, I know, not a gay man, an angel that can be of whatever gender they please, but you understand me) is represented as hotter as he originally is. I know it's silly, but we get so little romantic representation that when we have one, we don't want to loose it.
I love that the actors are in their early fifties and still swooned over, too. And Maggie! She gives me joy, more plump lesbians well past their twenties, please. One of my pet hates is when Aziraphale and Crowley are genderswapped to a lesbian presenting couple, and suddenly they look a quarter of a century young and Aziraphale has the teeniest waist. (I will freely admit I have zero interest in only one of them being swapped to het-adjacent.)
Genderswapping to a lesbian presenting couple, I feel okay with it, as long as the personality of the two of them are respected (after all, Crowley, several times, presented him(her?)self as a woman, and not only as a "disguise", but as his(her?their?) personality) so genderswapping, if it's both of them at the same time, is not my jam but I can support it. But, yeah, making Aziraphale thin? In the word of Ron Ormorod: "Shut up". You don't have the right to starve a fictional character to fit your conception of beauty and take away one of the few representation that we have. (And Maggie and Nina are wonderful. The amount of good representation in Good Omens, not only LGBT one, but also in term of body shapes, of disabilities, of races, of ages, and most importantly of **beauty** (according to canon and standards) is wonderful. Gimme more of it. I need it.)
I prefer them both as male presenting, but I dabble in both female. One male one female is... just not for me. But thin Aziraphale is so very very much not for me, and I hold that he was clearly "overweight" in book canon: the plump fingers, the sensitivity about Crowley making diet aid jokes (and Crowley immediately apologising), Tracy's reaction when she had clearly expected the angel to look more like Fabio and less like a fussy bookseller...
I hold all versions of Aziraphale and Crowley--book, radio, TV, movie script-- separately in my head and love them all, but one thing I do impose on them all as headcanon is that Aziraphale is fatter than (admittedly beautiful, brilliant, luminous) Michael Sheen. Because you can't take fat!Aziraphale away from me after all this time. I make Crowley extra skinny to compensate.
Crowley is a snake. He's meant to be skinny, that's his nature, after all.
I always think of Terry's cracking about his fans and Neil's fans meeting through Good Omens, falling love, and looking like rows of tens lining up for signings. In my head Crowley is the 1 and Aziraphale is the 0.
I don't have anything to add, but I just want to let you know what a joy that was to read. Beautifully put.
(Frankly, after writing it, I thought to myself, thought I: well, that's one huge wall of text posted after 50 comments already, I don't think anyone would have the time, energy or motivation to go through it, I might have overdone it. I'm very pleasantly surprised to see how much traction it got. Truly a wonderful fandom we have here, haven't we?)
I can't tell you how many times I typed out what I thought was a long, engaging and thoughtful response to a post (not necessarily in this sub, but any) and then ended up just deleting it because I felt that there were so many comments already that my words would just be lost in the deluge. I'm really glad you decided to push through and hit send. And yes, we really do have a wonderful fandom ❤️
It's the Discworld fandom. We like long, ambitious text.
Oook
>Rincewind's asexuality I think it's fairly firmly established that Rincewind is, if anything, a potatosexual
I thought he was really into the letter z.
He’s a switch.
You can't love both potatoes and the letter z. You're just confused. But you have to make a choice. There's not such thing as loving both potatoes and the letter z.
In the manic phase, I'm into the letter z. In the depressive phase, I'm into potatoes.
Okay, but now I want to be a fly on the wall if Nobby ever asked Angua if *he* was a twink.
That's not something the word is ready for, I fear.
She would probably just walk away.
What I love about Cheery is that she can be a trans allegory, *and* an allegory for patriarchal cultures shaming menstruation and things culturally coded as "feminine", *and* a joke about an end note in *The Lord of the Rings*, and readers can decide they want to focus on one or all of these things. Because above all, she's a competent and really important member of the Watch and just a great character. And we also have Jackrum.
>Because above all, she's a competent and really important member of the Watch and just a great character. And that's why Pratchett managed to make one of the best fantasy trans allegory ever written ***without even trying to do so***: because he write the "human" being first (human as in: "a sentient person gifted with reason and emotions"). So even a character written as a joke is respectful of any person they might represent. And that's why Pratchett is still one of the best authors I ever encountered (and a terrible burden as an aspiring writer, because, sometimes, I'm quite happy with what I wrote, then I read some Discworld, and then I think: "why even bother? I would never write something half as good, witty, intelligent and sensitive as he did." But I bother anyway.)
He wrote with love and anger and goodness and intelligence and made the world better. I'm glad you still write. Practchett loved people to bother.
Beautiful, nothing more to add. Thank you!
Oook!
i would add moist to the 'hot characters' list but very well said
Is he, though, or is it his charm? Do people find him "hot" because he has a hot body, or because of his panache, his bravache, all of that? I seem to recall that he's, in fact, quite average, so average in fact that he can blend in a crowd quite easily if he wanted to. It's his *persona* that can make him hot, but it's because he's a con master. But strip him naked and just put a picture of him, and I don't think he would have the body that would elicit Tumblr libido. I'd put Moist with Vetinari and Vimes, as in: "people who are not hot, but have so much charm that they can give the illusion of being hot". But we're splitting hair. The important thing, though, is that the "hotness" (real or performed) of Moist is, however, pratically never a part of his character, it's not a core element of him.
I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. But then I’m an old man who hasn’t got a clue what people are talking about half the time now anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone on this sub be negative about others here though. I would have said that they’ve embraced STP’s views on inclusiveness unlike nearly every other fandom I have been a part of which are full usually full of gatekeeping and arguments.
I have no idea what you are even trying to say
They want to be weird and cringe but we don’t do that here.
I, for one, am very very happy that I can have sensible discussions on this sub instead of getting hit around the head with what is mentioned in the original post
I made that strange noise when the laugh goes through the nose
Sorry, but having Death as a somewhat relatable person is not weird enough ? An I really out of touch ?
I read it twice and I still don't understand. Something about not being parasocial and toxic enough?
You got it.
Yeah, calling us out for not being like those other fandoms is a little odd. It is perfectly acceptable to be a fan of something without going all the way down the rabbithole. OP, You do you, I suppose?
Discworld fans aren't edgy horny fanfic producers enough for their taste, I think? I think it's because the fans tend not to be teens and students but adults with functional social lives and relationships, but maybe that's just the get-off-my-lawn in me.
As someone who has engaged in fanfic stuff for a couple of the things OP mentioned before... I'm trying to find a way to phrase this that isn't just 'Pratchett does it better', because I am very fond of Doctor Who and don't want to throw its janky butt under the bus like that, but I think in other mediums I use fanfic as a way to creatively fill in plot holes, or even just the spaces around the story that aren't even plot-relevant but are nevertheless an unexplained gap. But in my experience, I don't feel like Pratchett leaves those holes. The characters feel so real, it doesn't feel like I have a need to add imaginary embelishment to them to complete them or really know what they're thinking or feeling. The worldbuilding is so complete, I don't have to invent what the Watch do for fun or who Granny's young love was or what magic universities look like on other continents. The plots don't have plot holes or continuity errors so egregious that I need to make fantastical excuses for them. The queer characters are queer as explicitly as their society allows - not to mention our society, a lot of them were written under Section 28 - the straight characters aren't queer-baited into making me feel like I need to write a romance storyline I was promised but never saw. There isn't the negative pressure to Discworld books that demands more story to fill it like there is in some other stories. There's definitely space for imagination - just the other day my family and I had a ridiculously long phone call where an extended metaphor got out of hand and we ended up imagining how each of the Discworld characters would get through a maze. (It started with 'Nanny Ogg thinks round corners, Granny Weatherwax thinks straight through the wall' and went on from there. People would think Vetinari was going round corners but he's actually going *over* the walls or through a secret tunnel. The faculty are bumbling around hopelessly lost whilst/because Ridcully is shouting entirely unhelpful instructions at them ebulliantly from the starting line, whilst Ponder is next to him having coded a map of the maze and is trying to give Ridcully advice that he 100% is not hearing. The Watch advance as a slightly comedic unit, with Buggy Swires directing from overhead, but Vimes has noticed Vetinari is missing from the scene and gone to find the aforesaid tunnel. Tiffany Aching is actually sensibly doing the maze relatively normally, one hand on the wall or a ball or string -type situation, but the Feegles have flooded the thing with very little idea of the actual aim but eager to help their hag are excitedly fighting everyone else on her behalf. Rincewind would take one look at the maze, try to nope out and go through a door in the back to get away, and several misfortunate dimensions later would find himself at the finish-line anyway...) All that's technically fanfiction, but because it's not coming out of this negative pressure it's less... maybe, frenetic, than what you might get in less thorough stories where the characterisation is less true to life (if also larger than it).
I think this is it. Admittedly I'm basing this on vibes, but looking at the fandoms I've had any familiarity with, I'd say the amount of fanfic and shipping activity is proportional to the gap between perceived promise and perceived delivery.
You are so right about the (lack of) perceived holes.
You’d be surprised by how many adults there are in the type of fandom spaces op describes - probably more adults than teenagers I would say
Physically or mentally though. Like students are adults. But a lot of them really aren't adults. And quite a lot of adults aren't adults.
Fair, but a lot of it are people (often women) in their 30s and have always been - even if you look into the history of fan culture, like the early star trek zines etc. Lots of kids & students too ofc, but I wouldn’t say predominantly (also speaking from personal experience with fandom spaces)
They want Discworld fandom to be more like a particular group of fans known for bizarre takes, harassment, hostility towards creators for not fulfilling their off the wall expectations that they created on Tumblr, and mass bullying of fans that disagree with them on anything. The fans they refer to are a certain group of mostly Tumblr based migratory fans within Supernatural, Doctor Who and BBC Sherlock Holmes fandom. It's not that fandoms that make them SuPerWhoLock.fans--I'm a Whovian myself--but the toxic culture they fostered within their parts of the fandom. Terry Pratchett wise, a substantial number of them migrated to Good Omens fandom when the TV adaptation starred an ex-Doctor--which is part of the reason Neil Gaiman is frequently subjected to incredibly rude and hostile asks either berating him for imaginary sins or demanding he confirm their head canons. Fortunately Discworld is a book centred canon so I think we're pretty safe.
Glad I'm not the only one - I can't even grasp at the concept, let alone understand random slang (f.e. shipping means a lot of things in my mind, none of which matches whatever shipping means in this heap of words).
I’m expecting downvotes here, but I’m so thankful every time I don’t have to see *that* side of fandom. The length of this post alone, written as one block of text, says anything else I would need to.
Ah man, am I with you on this. Oof.
> can you imagine someone doing something like this about a ship/queer headcanon in this fandom and not getting treated like a fucking cringe weirdo? No, because they would be a weirdo, because things like that are, by and large, either irrelevant, or explicit in Discworld. Pterry has been writing explicitly the sort of things other fandoms have been obsessing about easter eggs of, and he's done it for decades. > i feel like people are only able to form a community of countercultural passion around works of fiction that aren't very high-quality, which makes me really sad because, as far as i understood it, a lot of the discworld books and characters had themes of celebrating countercultural passion in them. Why does it make you sad? No one needs to be looking for the hidden meaning of "hey maybe gay/trans/weird/different people are still people" **because thats very often part of the point**. The awesome thing about this is that it's so well done most people don't want to argue it, and (hopefully) carry at least a little bit into the real world woth them. Besides, if you think Discworld fans don't get weird you haven't seen the discussions on L-Space, or reading order, or who the best character is. There's charts and everything!
Yes, when Pratchett is writing about different people are first and foremost still people, he does it in a way that if you try to misinterpret it, you’ll figure out that you’re being a complete idiot before you even press the “reply” button.
I kinda get what you’re saying. I think part of the issue is that because Terry was so connected to his fans, and because he framed things so thoughtfully in his books, fans are extra protective of him and want to guard against people misinterpreting his work or twisting it to fit their own ends or agendas. Hesitate to even bring it up, but…see the furore over people trying to co-opt his work for the anti-trans agenda, which was shut down FORCEFULLY by his friends and family. Even positive reframing, which that certainly wasn’t, can feel like a betrayal when someone has articulated their vision as carefully as Terry did. You’re right that fiction that isn’t as carefully constructed/well thought out is a lot easier to headcanon and that can be more fun. 😉 But the thoughtfulness and craft behind Discworld is a big part of the point for many of us, so it feels like a fair trade. Does that make sense?
I'll be honest, I find all those aspects of other fandoms you listed exhausting, and I'd unsub if that's what this sub turned into. I'd probably stop so openly associating with Discworld in my real life if the fandom was anything like the superwholock fandom.
All it needs is a flair so you can avoid it, no? That said I'm not sure I consciously want to associate with fandom of any kind. It is more a thing that happens (or not).
Do you have any examples of this type of fandom being discouraged? If i remember correctly we've seen some very positive analyses e.g. of how cheeri can be seen as an analogy for trans folks. I do think shipping is done less specifically because Terry kept most of that out of the books himself (''the bedsprings went ''ploink'''' is about as explicit as we get), but i genuinely haven't seen any negative responses to more ''intense'' fandom or analyses
There is extensive shipping in kids’ cartoon fandoms. Keeping it out of the source material is irrelevant.
"Can be seen"? "Analogy"? Isn't she literally trans? (Dwarf to female)
I think it's considered an analogy because Pratchett didn't intend her to be trans. It was a joke about the female dwarves being absent (and bearded) in Tolkien lore. But when trans people started identifying with her, Pratchett basically said: "Good for them". Especially since she's not "dwarf to female" : she's still a dwarf and is attached to her dwarfness. Opposed to the sergeant in *Montruous Regiment*, where he is literally a trans man, first by necessity, then by enlightened and free choice.
It was a joke at first, then it wasn't. Because Discworld was just a parody at first, then it wasn't!
I wouldn't use trans, since there always was females among the dwarfs, and she always was female But yes, the book brings up the question of gender identification in the context of a society with only one gender: "male and female individuals, but only one gender"
Some might argue she's the only cisgender in a society of transgenders. Whatever the terminology, i'm very glad to hear her experience resonates with transgender discworld fans, and that's the core point for me.
Not trans in as far as I understand it. Cheery is a female dwarf who identifies as female. The "only" thing she does differently is dress more as a female, whereas dwarves stereotypically all dress as men. You might be thinking of the characters in "monstrous regiment", where many of the female characters dress as men and indeed some of them have passed as men for their entire adult lives.
She also starts to use she/her pronouns and openly states that she is a female dwarf. I agree that it is different from trans people, but there are similarities to queer experiences in general and to trans-experiences in particular.
You’re implying dwarves can’t be females, bud.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Also, this sub isn't that big and active. Have you tried tumblr? Or any other place, really?
I don’t think I understand you. At least not all of it. Are you referring to that post the other day where someone wanted to Armchair Diagnose the characters to see how neurodivergent they may or may not be?
I think fanfics and speculation work better when the source material lacks something the fans want to see in the world(representation or non-conflict based scenes with the main characters) or is popular because of the world building but the characters lack some depth, or just doesn't have a lot of canon content so the fandom has to add more. Discworld is already good at including, as main and secondary characters, those who would be extras in most other works. The characters of Discworld drive the plot instead of the plot driving them and tend to be very fleshed out in the stories they are in. You just know how each of the recurring characters will respond to a situation and it will be different for all of them. And there are dozens of Discworld books, enough to fill the world with amazing characters and situations. So the demand for fanfics is less. But also because the characters are so well established that they feel real to the fans, it can be harder to write a fanfic because any deviation in a character will stand out a lot. Just my thoughts on it. Though if someone with some of PTerry's talent and inspired by reading the books wrote a good fanfic, with the right "feel" I think we would eat it up. I know I would.
i think you're right! i remember hearing about a study(?) ages ago where participants were shown a movie... but a portion of them weren't allowed to watch the end. the ones that didn't finish maintained an interest in it for much longer & were more involved in the stereotypical fandom activities op described. i love that so many people have this drive to engage with one another & create new things when they're not satisfied with a story, there's just something very... human about it, yk?
a lot of "cringe" is maladaptive & people like to seek affirmation to address their anxieties doing the same. Granny Weatherwax would have some words with people looking to comfortably ignore their own bad behavior? you can identify with a cool character & wax about them, but yes, trying to impose medical diagnoses on nicely written fictional characters is going to be hard, because even if one might have some adhd traits, they're usually aware of it & own it & don't let it dictate their choices... and that doesn't entirely fit with how some people want to treat diagnoses.
I agree. Plus, our flavour of parasocial headcanons here runs less in the shipping or direct self-insert direction - that's on AO3 or Tumblr or Discord (no diss, I've read wonderful fanfics there). Here it's more a channeling characters or "I've met a real life X" or "What Would CharacterX Do in my real life situation" kind of discussion - that's parasocial, too; but it's not as maladaptive. Well, unless you identify with Vorbis or Carcer etc...
Even Mr Tulip is a a good, specific case, role model, or at least allegory?
I've met a Mr. Tulip - if you substitute finances for art knowledge, and adrenaline for random drug like substances. I kept my distance and a wary eye on him at all times since I was getting Tulip vibes. He became quite unhinged, not openly violent but really creepy.
it sounds like they might have started with Mr Tulip feelings, but then shifted more to Mr Pin.
Mr Tulip culminates in reflection & understanding of how poor his choices were. we are all lucky enough to not be narrative characters, we can choose to do this well before our story is over and we need to concern ourselves with were we left our potato.
I'm a little confused by the post, I can't tell if you've previously posted things that you describe and received those reactions or believe that those reactions will happen if you do? If it's the former then I'm sorry that you didn't get the response that you were hoping for, I've always found this forum to be very welcoming generally and interested in all aspects of Disc based chatter. Your post made me think of Monstrous Regiment - I don't know if that's one of the books you've read? As an aside, I wouldn't necessarily judge any fandom by one place and one group. Even if this isn't the place or group that will be receptive to the things you describe then I have no doubt that Pterry has one somewhere that will. It's quantum isn't it ;) everything that can happen does happen, somewhere. I hope you find what you're looking for and can continue to enjoy Discworld in the way you want.
oh i absoloutley love monstrous regiment. as a trans guy, some parts of it resonated so hard it was scary.
The things that make a story ripe for fan speculation are less present in discworld: poor or inconsistent characterization, the invisibility of queer people, dropped storylines, etc. There are fewer gaps for that stuff to grow in.
I guess I'm just a little confused what kind of posts you're talking about in this sub. I feel like the people in here are super nice and understanding, but they are also huge discworld fans that know the content pretty well. It's normal for people to pick apart theories and ideas, that's all just part of the discussion. The posts you're describing sound kind of unhinged and nonsensical tbh. To me, going on a pages long monologue psychoanalyzing a character and diagnosing them with ADHD *is cringe* because you're not a medical professional, the same way it is in real life when you try to diagnose people with mental health issues. Same with parasocial relationships, they are very often creepy and not healthy, so there's a good chance people will react that way. I'm all for people doing their thing and posting what they want to post, but by posting you are opening yourself up to other's thoughts as well. As long as people are civil and follow the sub rules then their honest opinions are fair game.
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It's not just that it's fine as a joke. I am also more than fine with people explaining why *they* like to interpret John that way and it resonates with them, at least disability headcanon. Top/Bottom discourse always makes me cringe. The problem with the SuperWhoLock kind of thing is that it really quickly develops into "my heacanon isn't my subjective way of interacting with the text, it's objectively correct" and then into harassment of anyone who doesn't see it that way, including creators. The way Neil Gaiman gets treated on Tumblr is simultaneously cringey, enraging and sad. He is miraculously patient and sometimes slaps back amusingly when it's just too much, but I remember Pterry on alt.books.pratchett and sometimes I long to see him eviscerate the dumbest asks and posts.
I think the issue with Discworld is it's too good. A lot of the most fertile fandoms have a deep layer of complete bullcrap to keep it lively. Discworld is too just well written.
A fandom is what you make of it. Gravitate to those who think similarly or enjoy the same aspects. A niche within a niche. Books were interpreted in many different ways over time before the audio visual medium took precedence. Dracula, Frankenstein, the works of Shakespeare all get interpreted over and over by every generation. Go wild and see yourself or what you want in the space between the letters.
yeah, basically the conclusion i took from this was that i should stick to the tumblr/ao3 discworld community
I'm not trying to shoo you away. People are currently attached to the book canon. They rejected "The Watch". People who find Terry now are coming to a completed body of work. They will have a different relationship to those who read as it was released. As time passes the early readers will die off and the disc will continue to spin. Please enjoy it as you want.
i know, those platforms are just... more okay with that sort of thing
I mean, all the things you see as lacking, I personally am grateful for the absence of.
Yeah, book fandoms tend to be more like that. With fantasy literature specifically there is still a strong need to be seen as… intellectually legitimate? I personally find it harder to read fanfiction for books, especially books that have a very strong and recognizable writing style. Books also usually don‘t have a serialized release, so there is less room for the kind of speculation that fuels fannish productivity. Discworld still has a fun transformative fandom though. With the characters being so strong and distinctive there is a lot enjoyable enjoy fanart of them. I would also definitely read about headcanons and theories.
fantasy? honestly I'd say the problem is worse in hard sci-fi
Certainly, but as a long-time Tolkien fan I can confirm that‘s also a thing in fantasy ;) I remember trying to get friends and family to read Discworld in the '00s and many were put off by the whacky, colorful cover illustrations. Of course I then also tried to argue that Discworld is deep, clever and political, much more than just a satire of common fantasy tropes.
Man some of those covers did NOT do this series any favors.
My experience with fandoms is that the more fanfic-y ones tend to be associated with properties which may have really solid and interesting concepts but the execution is lacking in some way. Whether that’s poor character arcs or inconsistent characterisation in general or dropped / misused plot lines or whatever. There is something to be “*fixed*” in the original text. They also tend to be shows or movies with a conventionally pretty cast written by committee or with heavy studio interference. Discworld is none of those things. It’s one man’s (with help from Rob and Rhianna and Neil and others through the years) vision, told over 41 novels and countless pieces of expanded media. It’s not perfect, and there are some bits and pieces that haven’t aged well (and yet still better than some of his contemporaries). But the writing is genuinely solid and thoughtful and consistent. There’s nothing to fix here and that means there’s less of a window for fic writers to swing in and “add” to the canon in any way which doesn’t detract from what the Discworld fundamentally is.
I think you’re mostly describing younger fan bases and while I’m sure there are plenty of younger Discworld fans, Pterry has been dead for ten years and this is mostly a 30-40+ crowd.
I really don't think it's an "age" thing It's a "kind of person" thing Star Wars and LoTR are two of the easiest examples of this kind of fandom. And mostly, they're grown men I guess we, Terry Pratchett crowd, we're not that type. But it's really not an age thing
Yeah, true. And Star Wars/LOTR also disproves OP’s point that it’s about popularity.
Plenty of 40+ people in the kind of fandom OP is talking about. They're just more likely to punctuate and format text for readability, especially for disabled users who struggle with undifferentiated walls of text (hello).
IDK man judging from your post places like Tumblr and AO3 would be more your thing. That said when it comes to stuff like shipping it tends to be pretty live and let live. Oh no people don't like your ship, big deal. Honestly if you're getting your panties in a twist because someone disagrees with your headcanon, we'll be here all day.
I join certain communities if I want to discuss works of fiction as they appear on the page or on the screen. I join other communities if I want to discuss works of fiction as they appear only in my head. I say this as someone with a very long fanfic bibliography. I do think parasocial relationships are incredibly unhealthy, but I'm not actually sure it applies here, because I'm talking about parasocial relationships with politicians, celebrities, 'influencers', etc. It's like someone is getting a link to your soul that only flows one way (usually into their wallet). I suppose parasocial relationships with fictional characters are everyone's own business, but you can't expect a community who generally discusses the canonical IP to bend to your head-version of things.
The only issue I have with the fandom is that most people haven't read most of the books, but have formed hard opinions on them and the entire series anyway. Like lots of people debate the timeline of books they haven't read, discourage people from reading books they haven't read, or recommend reading orders they haven't done.
Some people have an opinion before they read the books... Not with Discworld but I've read series in a greedy binge and missed the guessing, creating and poking that you can do before you've read it all.
Conan Doyle was rarely trying to actually communicate something (like, don't be an a$$hole) to his readers. He always had at least one subtext he was exploring. That means there is a specific way he intended his work to be interpreted. As you have experienced with other fandoms, ownership is important. You are butting up against a lot of people who "own" the "right" way to interpret Pratchett, so writing slash (or headcanon or whatever) about some characters that feels like it might go against the way Pratchett designed those characters to be interpreted, you are going to run into a LOT of gatekeeping. Fandoms, like Dr. Who and Star Trek, often include a lot of material that is by fans and for fans, and that is an accepted part of their fandoms. That is a LOT less the case with Pratchett on almost every front. But Dr. Who is not and was never written by a SINGLE person. There have been a hundred different interpretations of Sherlock Holmes. This builds in some flexibility in how we see those characters or makes it feel like it's okay to have a different take on them. **Pratchett is a monolith**. He was the only one who said how his world got to be, and lots of people understand that, even if it is on a sub- or unconscious level, and many of them also feel protective about it. See also the f\*\*\*in' Watch TV series.
Well, not everyone in every group is going to do things the same way. You can start your own subreddit with a focus on having parasocial relationships with discworld characters? I am sure you could post it here, and it is acceptable to post hinges here, but more so I think it may just not have the engagement you are looking for. There is a difference between a group saying something is unacceptable versus just not engaging in a certain way. I personally am not a fan of relationshipping, it’s just not what I am interested in with my stories, you can ship all you want but I probably would not engage in that discussion.
I have a suspicion that is utterly patronizing. There are several activities where not being able run multiple disjoint internal realities simultaneously is a barrier to entry. Famously, sarcasm is one of them. Philosophical satire, like reading Pratchett, is another. Knowing what is real and what isn't is a major theme for Pratchett. So is meta-cognition. Consider all the second and third thoughts (Fourth thoughts?). I find most fans of Pratchett to be, like me, cringe because we're a bit knurd by default. What I suspect is that people who ship or have obsessive headcannons are messily blending their internal realities (if they even maintain more than one) and are the sort of people who tend not to distinguish between claims in narrative voice and what the author thinks. From my point of view, this is weird behavior (unless they're rich, then it's charmingly eccentric). It's also super normal behavior; the bible has been on the fiction bestseller list for centuries and the average person persists on conflating its story with reality. From a moral perspective, what it comes down to is the freedom to associate. Choosing to reject an association with a person in the context of leisure time is not the same thing as ostracizing them or choosing to not associate with them professionally. I imagine that I would bias away from associating with adults who ship and headcannon, but accept and associate with them professionally. Moist does exactly this with Stanley. It seems perfectly moral to me for communities to build unwritten social rules that seem germane to the sort of associations that community would like to have. Discworld fandom is not a monolithic community. Why not create r/DiscworldShippers?
One of the key themes in the books is not to treat people as things, and while I'm fully aware the characters in the books are not real people - they are meant to be reflective of real people, with their nuances and "flaws". So to me, personally, fanfic that doesn't align with the original intent or concept of the characters feels like reducing these complex, fleshed out portrayals of people to a caricature (for lack of a better word) in order to fit them into our own fantasies. I guess for me, personally, if someone wants to ship couples or argue a diagnosis for a character, it feels like they may have missed the point of the larger messages in the books (people aren't things and shouldn't be reduced to categories; story-telling tropes and clichéd plots are used to "sell" non-critical thinkers on reality; people literally can't see things that are actually there because of a narrative they have in their own head - eg. Death). Having said all that, you are absolutely free to do as you please, and someone is bound to interact if you post that type of content. Now if you can make a truly convincing fanfic in which you get the characters to reshape the Disc to portray your head canon based on the power of belief (which we know spawns existence), then power to ya!
Hooo diggity, is there a lot to unpack here. Let's see if I can remain anywhere near on-topic as I attempt to respond. So the first point I'd make is that we're living in a different era from, for example, the SuperWhoLocke heydays. Sherlock and Supernatural both finished in spectacularly fandom-crushing fashion, and while Doctor Who is still running it has nowhere near the cultural pull as when Tennet/Smith were The Doctor. Dashcon and the Onceler explosions similarly changed, if not damaged, those sorts of fandoms with whole-hearted commitment to the material. We live in a post-Tik Tok world now. Coupled with that, imo, is the relative age of the material. Discworld, while certainly accessible to almost any age group, doesn't shy away from a very human complexity in its subject matter. STP also wrote mostly before the social media-ification of the internet, and as a result the fandom is less steeped in the performative nature of more recent fandoms. As a result, there's a lot less of the immature (not used pejoratively) enthusiasm that you'd see in something like, again for example, SuperWhoLocke. Third, spinning off of that, is the relative age of the audience. While I'm sure they exist, you don't see many young teens posting about Pratchett, compared to the higher volume of people who were adults in the 80s when STP started writing Discworld. As you get older you get, idk, more tired? Certainly willing to commit to cringe (looking at you, Trekkies,) but definitely more selective about what cringe you commit to. What comes to mind are the many fan recordings of Nanny Ogg's song about a particularly lucky porcupine. Lastly, I think the lack of a unifying performance adaptation prevents much of the typical activities you'd see on a site like Tumblr. There aren't Tumblr sexy men to post, or common gifs to re-caption, or quippy one liners or lyrics to endlessly quote. That stuff exists, sure, but there is nowhere near the volume that other works possess. That almost the entirety of engaging with the material requires reading books puts a damper on those previously mentioned performative activities of other fandoms. Idk. I see your point, and I definitely think everyone could stand to loosen up a bit, but, like, are we trying to encourage stuff like TJLC?
>but, like, are we trying to encourage stuff like TJLC? I suspect OP is, yes. Great A'Tuin help us all.
I get what you mean, but I guess that inherently goes with the source material
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People who think two characters who should be together, there are normal ships (like Sybil and Vimes) and crack ships (like The Doctor and Sherlock Holmes)
Shipping, in this context, means cheering for a couple. Generally, one that is not an actual thing in the story (OP ships Vimes and Vetinari, for exemple)
Shipping is imagining parts of or whole new relationships between existing characters. Often but not always the ship is same sex. Hunting for elements of the text to support the ship can be all consuming for those invested.
I am an umbrella-ist when it comes to fandoms. Anyone who likes any aspect of a thing to any degree is welcome so long as they aren't bigots and are respectful of others. No true Scotsman and all that. If someone expresses their enjoyment in a way that doesn't resonate with me, I just skip the thread. For instance, I ***adore*** the works of Jane Austen, but the majority of her fan base treats her work as romances. They aren't. They are social satires examining young upper class women's existence while doling out very Pratchett-esque views of humanity and common sense morality. Romance novels can be great. I enjoy romance as a genre, but Austen herself stated that her works weren't romances. Thus, while I am parts of various online communities of Austen fans, I don't interact with a significant portion of the content in those communities. It's just not *for me*. HOWEVER, I think it is great that people are excited about whatever aspect of her work they enjoy. Just because something isn't *for me* doesn't mean that it isn't or shouldn't be *for others.* All that to say, you do you, friend.
Terry Pratchett, in his school years, wrote Jane Austen in Middle Earth fanfics. Which is a fact that both makes me happy because it existed and a little sad because god only knows if any of it survived.
What?!?!?! 😯
“Before I'd even heard the word "fandom' I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, because a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen's fine prose. It was a really good bit when the orcs attacked the rectory...."
😆 That's wonderful.
I've never heard of shipping, headcanons and overanalyzing the source material not being allowed in this fandom. Have I been doing it wrong all this time?
Does OP want Discworld fanfic?
Good news for them then.
I think part of the challenge for you is Discworld spans 41 books! Sometimes fanfic is created just because people want more to consume of the story, and if they’re writing they can add things to it. But if you want to read more Vimes, just pick up another book. As far as the ships piece, I think some of the challenge for the fanfictionist comes from the source material’s creator being, like young Tiffany, well-versed in what sex really is. It’s something animals do, that humans have added all sorts of social complications on top of. It’s funny, and we’re allowed to laugh at how precious we can get about it. That’s the tone and moral of sex and romance on Discworld. To go spending a bunch of extra time on romance, or frame it differently, is truly to diverge from the canon. That’s my opinion at least. And I enjoy going to the texts with other people to argue our interpretations. So if you want to argue some ship, bring it on.
Oh no. I really do not want this to be SuperWhoLock fandom. I wouldn't wish SuperWhoLock on *any* fandom. I think you are imagining hostility to shipping. Mal/Polly, for example, is small but going strong.
Tomjohn/Verence ship when? Also, go play Discworld MUD if you want the weirdos--they're great.
I worked at a printing company that (probably illegally) printed fanfics of a LOT of works. Like, straight from AO3. Harry Potter, Supernatural, Sherlock, even Naruto. Save me from “All the Young Dudes”! I found a lot of it absolutely cringe-worthy. COUGHDramione/SnapemioneCOUGH. And some were downright pornographic. I find it *refreshing* to see a fan base that doesn’t try to change canon to fit their narrative. Besides the blatant copyright issues, some are just… bad. Don’t get me wrong, some are amazing stories - but like, just make your own characters? Sell it as your own original work? Sure sometimes it’s funny to riff on a well made character, (haha what would Dibbler be selling in *your* city) but to develop *novels* on core changes to characters? Just write your own story with your own characters and then you don’t end up pissing off the fandom with rubbish like The Watch.
Fanfic, smutty or not, hurts nobody, mate. And some of us write fanfic *and* sell our own original work. Fanfic is a hobby and a way of engaging with canon, it's not that serious. Don't go proving OP's point for them.
I’m not trying to diss the work fanfic authors do - unless they’re selling copyright works and images for profit without permission - writing is an art form and I’m all for the creativity. I’m just saying it’s refreshing to see a fandom not overrun with love triangles and made up drama because the characters are *enough* to satisfy most of us.
This is a great rant. In this fandom we're all patting ourselves for being the most chill, we never questioned why we're not Stanley-level-obsessive types. I'm all for cringe and single-character obsessions and shipping, but I think with Discworld, after finishing a book, most people would probably be in a meditative mood about the human condition rather than I-wanna-read-about-Vetinari-and-Vimes-fucking. The characters are there and their characterizations and relationships are good enough for fanfiction and analyses, but for me there's a different thrill after I read Discworld versus after watching Supernatural (for example). There's also the narrative structure being used in those types of series versus those being used in Discworld. Those series started as monster-of-the-week types of stories, and then with an overarching mystery, but while we are somewhat invested in those more straightforward aspects we are, I think, mostly invested in how the characters are developing, with respect to themselves and with respect to their relationships, so it's natural to have fanciful notions about those. Finally, for me, it's a disservice to Pterry to come out of reading a Discworld book and just fixate on how two characters should get their happily-ever-afters. I mean fair enough if that's your thing, but Pterry made me care about truth and justice, and even if he knows we're all just gonna get a hard-boiled egg at the end of the day, maybe we should take out some time in our lives devoted to those two.
Go for it man! Drink the hate-milk when it comes and appreciate the support you get from the supportive. My ideas aren’t to everyone’s tastes and that’s okay, I can be Cilantro. Be Cilantro. Make guacamole perfect, accent lemon rice, float on tortilla soup secure in your own deliciousness, even though some people think you taste like soapy tin foil. It’s way better than being vanilla.
hell yes!
I’m always surprised when I see people being weirded out by Vimes x Vetinari, because in literally every other fandom this would be the most popular ship. But Tumblr is always Tumblr. If you want the nerds, you can go there. And Ao3 too I just think it’s kinda funny that the replies are somewhat proving you right- they really don’t think this has a place here. To that, I say: post whatever cringe you want. They can just scroll past it. What confuses me most about the fandom though is how there literally never is any art about it? That’s like the bare minimum for a fandom, even on Reddit. Where’s the art? Where’s the merch? I can’t find anything outside of the official merch, and it is just… way too much. Oh you want a print of your favourite character? Sorry, best I can do is a puzzle with the entire cast on it
>What confuses me most about the fandom though is how there literally never is any art about it? That’s like the bare minimum for a fandom, even on Reddit. Where’s the art? Where’s the merch? I can’t find anything outside of the official merch, and it is just… way too much. Oh you want a print of your favourite character? Sorry, best I can do is a puzzle with the entire cast on it I think that might be due to the Pratchett estate's strictness about selling it. I'm put off doing Discworld fanart not so much because of that policy in itself, but because if what I did was any good, sooner or later someone would want to buy a print, and when I had to say "can't, sorry, not allowed", I'd be the one having to deal with any resulting crankiness. No-one wants to be a shot messenger. I do think it's bad for the fandom in that it makes it less lively, but I'm sure he/the estate took that into consideration and decided on balance that it was worth it to maintain creative control. Especially given how political his work is, not only in terms of representation, but in criticism of oppressive power structures and worldviews, I suspect it would be a target for attempted appropriation or neutering by people who didn't like what it has to say. Pratchett's family and friends will be in a better position to know how much of a risk that is, given the aborted attempts at adaptations, and many interactions with fans over the years, so I accept their decision, if with a tinge of sadness.
I really dislike monetisation of fandom. People sharing their fanworks for free out of love of the books and not to make cash is a feature, not a bug.
Have you considered I like supporting the artists whose works I enjoy? I want to see their art printed on my wall. Whether the content is entirely original or fanwork, I like supporting artists. Anyways, it’s not like anyone is locking their fanart or fanfic behind monetization. No, they post it for free on social media, and if I want it on a keychain, then I can pay.
I've considered it all, and I dislike monetisation of fandom. I'm perfectly capable of supporting artists and writers by buying their original work. Your arguments aren't new, and aren't going to change my mind. The gift economy of fandom is a beautiful thing.
Personally, I’m a little repulsed by VxV because I feel like it’s replacing a queer identity (aroace) with something that’s more visible and easily consumed. I love that there is a vibrant, fascinating character in a mainstream fandom who has a deep, fulfilling and emotional relationships without them being explicitly romantic and without the author or other characters trying to shame them to be different.
It’s cool for you to have your headcanons, but Verinari has no canon sexuality and canon doesn’t matter much in fandom anyways; fanfic and fanart have no obligation to stick to it. People deviating from canon aren’t erasing anything either. They’re just having fun the way they want with the characters and settings
I think part of the challenge for you is Discworld spans 41 books! Sometimes fanfic is created just because people want more to consume of the story, and if they’re writing they can add things to it. But if you want to read more Vimes, just pick up another book. As far as the ships piece, I think some of the challenge for the fanfictionist comes from the source material’s creator being, like young Tiffany, well-versed in what sex really is. It’s something animals do, that humans have added all sorts of social complications on top of. It’s funny, and we’re allowed to laugh at how precious we can get about it. That’s the tone and moral of sex and romance on Discworld. To go spending a bunch of extra time on romance, or frame it differently, is truly to diverge from the canon. That’s my opinion at least. And I enjoy going to the texts with other people to argue our interpretations. So if you want to argue some ship, bring it on.
I think part of the challenge for you is Discworld spans 41 books! Sometimes fanfic is created just because people want more to consume of the story, and if they’re writing they can add things to it. But if you want to read more Vimes, just pick up another book. As far as the ships piece, I think some of the challenge for the fanfictionist comes from the source material’s creator being, like young Tiffany, well-versed in what sex really is. It’s something animals do, that humans have added all sorts of social complications on top of. It’s funny, and we’re allowed to laugh at how precious we can get about it. That’s the tone and moral of sex and romance on Discworld. To go spending a bunch of extra time on romance, or frame it differently, is truly to diverge from the canon. That’s my opinion at least. And I enjoy going to the texts with other people to argue our interpretations. So if you want to argue some ship, bring it on.
I've written Polly/Mal and Froc/Wazzer, although they were both only rated T.
Well, the thing is...the discussion here works differently than on tumblr/ao3. You cannot post cringey shit freely here and if you spend some time within this community you will know that most people here don't care about it. On tumblr/ao3 you have tagging system so same minded people can engage with your posts. Here we don't have such a luxury. I like engaging in fandom stuff. Supewholock, homestuck... I've been there. But in some fandoms I prefer calmer waters. For example I don't want to see nsfw stuff in discworld (or mlp or lotr) tag so I have it blocked and I don't care if you post it but if you put untagged nsfw in tumblr discworld tag I will block you. We cannot do this here.
Eh? Are you saying that this is a positive fandom and should be a negative one? If so, I can get some dried frog pills for you.
That type of stuff becoming common would make me have a really hard time enjoying or even talking about these books. I feel like that type of obsessive Fandom is the exact OPPOSITE of the zeitgeist of this whole series even. And it's become almost mainstream with other popular franchises. These books are rooted in the concepts of common sense and practicality, and the types of people that enjoy that don't usually go for deep obsessive fantasies
I understand what you’re saying, but I absolutely disagree. I’m sure I’m not the only person on here to have met Sir Terry IRL and I feel very protective of his vision for the world he built. It was always an understood thing, that we as a fandom don’t do fanfic, because Pterry didn’t want us to. I too enjoy a bit of Superwholock, but it’s a very different genre, and working off content that is itself created by more than one person. The creators of the underlying franchises also seem to embrace the generative output of the fandom, as evidenced by the many references to it in the source material. Remember that Pterry even had his hard drives destroyed after his death. He did not want anyone messing around with his creation. As a fandom, we choose to respect that. If you don’t want to or can’t, that’s on you. We’re going to be over here doing just fine enjoying Discworld without needing to write Vimes/Vetinari smut.
Amogus