In the ninth part of Night Watch<\/i>, Vimes has an unnerving confrontation with the Unmentionables. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld<\/i>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Vetinari<\/b><\/p>\n
I JUST WAS NOT READY FOR THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF VETINARI IN THIS BOOK. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know why I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t assume that he would be absent from the past, but in hindsight, Vetinari has always<\/i> been super mysterious. His inclusion here wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t obvious, and even as I read about the silent, calculating assassin who was bullied by his peers, my mind didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t jump to Vetinari. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d know any<\/i> of these people! I assumed someone was going to be revealed to be the one hired to go after Vimes. LOOK, wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that be funny?!?!?!?! WHAT IF EVEN IN THE PAST, PEOPLE WERE TRYING TO KILL VIMES???<\/p>\n
I am absolutely uncertain how Vetinari plays into it. NOT AT ALL.<\/p>\n
The Unmentionables<\/b><\/p>\n
I WAS NOT READY FOR THE SECOND PLOT TWIST IN THIS DAMN SECTION EITHER. Hey, SPACE THESE OUT and GIVE ME SOME ROOM TO BREATHE. But y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, this makes this struggle all the more important. Vimes turns on one of the Unmentionables, and he does so with his younger self assisting him. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s vital, of course, because Vimes has to teach by example. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of the best ways to help someone learn, right? (It certainly worked for me.) And sometimes, that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153example\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is messing up. I loved<\/i> this particular passage:<\/p>\n But when you got older, you found out that you now<\/i> wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you <\/i>then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This resonated with me in a number of ways. I often think about my own journey as a writer. A lot of my peers here in New York are much younger than I am, and get tese brief moments of jealousy or envy because it took me so damn long to write a book. But I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t equipped to write a novel a decade ago. I had the ideas and the drive, but I had none of the discipline. My politics were messy. My knowledge of things like plot, characterization, and pacing weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t what they are now because I hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t spent nearly a decade unraveling all of those things for this site.<\/p>\n And the same goes for what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve believed in and what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve supported. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been involved in social justice since I was a young teenager. (Indeed, I had<\/i> to be because of my circumstances; I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have much of a choice. But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another essay I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d love to write some day.) Looking back on some of the things I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve said and done, even with positive intent, is an act of humiliation for me. It should, of course, because we should evolve. We should constantly be trying to examine the world around us and our part in it. So, sometimes I read some of my older non-fiction, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cringe-inducing. Anti-black. Classist. Appeals to the wrong sort of person. Sloppy. Hell, even some of those original Harry Potter <\/i>and Twilight<\/i> reviews are just\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 not good? (Which is why I was glad I went through and got them edited by a bunch of lovely people!) Same with my thoughts on The Book Thief<\/i>, which I think are just grossly ignorant of how that book came across to Jewish people. In order to grow, we have to be twerps sometimes. We have to apologize when we hurt people, and then we have to actively work to be better.<\/i><\/p>\n So what does that look like in Night Watch<\/i>? How does Vimes repair a past that is so locked into brutality and violence? We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen him go after some smaller things and a couple bigger ones. Here, though, he takes a huge risk by arresting one of the Unmentionables. The mere act of arresting another cop is absolutely unfathomable to these people, and GUESS WHAT. IT IS TO MOST COPS IN AMERICA, TOO. So I knew this was going to be a tense, uncomfortable thing. That did not prepare me for the cruel twist that Pratchett dropped on me:<\/p>\n Carcer<\/i> is now a sergeant with the Unmentionables.<\/p>\n AND HOW DAMNING IS THIS LINE:<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Funny how things work out, eh? Turns out I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m prime copper material, haha.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n SO, A SERIAL KILLER IS PRIME COP MATERIAL. Good gods<\/i>.<\/p>\n Even worse, Carcer discovers that the younger version of Vimes is alongside Future Vimes, and NOW I HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. Is Carcer going to use this knowledge as leverage? Probably! He certainly tries to here, but for the moment, Carcer and his men back down, insisting that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll play by the rules\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 for an hour. And it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not like I feel comforted by this. THIS IS SUPER FUCKED UP, Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ALL.<\/p>\n Surprise: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m enjoying this book a lot<\/i>.<\/p>\n https:\/\/youtu.be\/W97hrWX7w1k<\/p>\n Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n – My YA contemporary debut, ANGER IS A GIFT<\/a>, is now available for pre-order!\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>If you’d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the ninth part of Night Watch, Vimes has an unnerving confrontation with the Unmentionables. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451],"tags":[463,541,248],"class_list":["post-4471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-mark-reads-discworld","tag-night-watch","tag-terry-pratchett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}