{"id":4787,"date":"2018-11-29T05:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-11-29T13:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=4787"},"modified":"2018-11-28T05:28:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T13:28:16","slug":"mark-reads-thud-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2018\/11\/mark-reads-thud-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads &#8216;Thud!&#8217;: Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the second part of <i>Thud!<\/i>, the anniversary of the contentious Koom Valley battle looms over Ankh-Morpork. Intrigued? Then it&#8217;s time for Mark to read <i>Discworld<\/i>.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><b>Trigger Warning: For extensive talk of racism, violence.<\/b><span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Oh, NO.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>This is perhaps the quickest that dread has settled over a <i>Discworld<\/i> book, though I&#8217;m reminded of the opening of Night Watch in the opening pages of this book. For a while now, Pratchett has detailed the struggles and successes of Ankh-Morpork\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s growth as an urban center of the Disc. So th is is already a fitting follow to <i>Going Postal<\/i>, which provided us an understanding of how golems continued to seek out their own place within the greater society. They were still met with violence, hatred, and prejudice. So what of the dwarfs and trolls, who have now long been a part of the city?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Pratchett, of course, complicates matters because there is a greater conflict between those two species that&#8217;s been around for seemingly forever, so it&#8217;s not just an issue of assimilation and cultural specificity. And I want to be careful about talking of this because I&#8217;m not quite sure yet what sort of tradition Pratchett is writing in. Throughout this series, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153species\u00e2\u20ac\u009d has often been equated with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153race.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d My hope is that there&#8217;s not a false equivalency later in Thud!, that these species are meant to represent actual racial groups. That would be particularly troubling once you consider that these fictional races are all immigrants to Ankh-Morpork. And while there certainly are ethnic conflicts that exist throughout Roundworld\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history, I worry about the implications of this metaphor.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But at this point, I don&#8217;t know what, if anything, is analogous here in terms of Pratchett\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intent, so I&#8217;m going to just keep this in mind as I read. As it stands now, this book places the troll\/dwarf conflict on center stage, and the threat of greater violence is everywhere. The murder at the open of the book is absolutely why both Fred and Angua sense that something <i>else<\/i> is happening with the dwarfs, and with this sort of entrenched prejudice in these two cultures at work, it feels inevitable: the dwarfs are going to retaliate for the murder of one of their own. But did a troll <i>actually<\/i> do it? A troll \u00e2\u20ac\u0153saw\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the murder, but this is a <i>Discworld<\/i> book. Something is going to be subverted or flipped around here!<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Even before we get to this, though, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mr. Pessimal. I feel like as is usually the case with Pratchett, this is a trope that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s being invoked specifically because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not going to turn out like I expect. At least here in America, the role of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153government\u00e2\u20ac\u009d inspector, particularly one who interacts with a law enforcement agency, is meant to be seen as a nuisance. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re preventing the good and dutiful officers from doing their jobs! Not only that, but all these damn rules are making it so <i>hard<\/i> for the agents to stop <i>real crimes<\/i>, and if only they were able to do whatever they wanted, they could truly be the best police officers possible! At the very least, Mr. Pessimal <i>is<\/i> annoying, and I can already tell that Vimes is not going to have it easy. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m also willing to see <i>why<\/i> Pratchett is doing this. Why at <i>this<\/i> time? How will this subplot intersect with the Koom Valley Day conflict?<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of that, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll repeat what I said on video: COULD I PLEASE NOT READ SOMETHING WRONG YEARS AGO THAT IS UNFORTUNATELY RELEVANT TO 2018. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been surreal enough with <i>Babylon 5<\/i> talking about war and fascism, or <i>Going Postal<\/i>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s incredible commentary on public services and libertarians\/capitalists. But now we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got Grag Hamcrusher, and THIS IS TOO FUCKING REAL. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just gonna quote this part first:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>They were \u00e2\u20ac\u0153grags.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Vimes knew just enough dwarfish to know that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153grag\u00e2\u20ac\u009d meant \u00e2\u20ac\u0153renowned master of dwarfish lore,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but Hamcrusher had mastered it in his own special way. He preached the superiority of dwarf over troll, and that the duty of every dwarf was to follow in the footsteps of their forefathers and remove trollkind from the face of the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Why is it that I can read this and my brain goes, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh, wow, this is such a perfect commentary on the current crop of white supremacists and neo-Nazis we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got all over the world,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and then my soul immediately leaves my body because this is not what Pratchett intended at all and we know that because it is IMPOSSIBLE, and yet! And yet here we are!!!!! But oh, this book is not done with me or us or this fucked up, terrible world because:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Young dwarfs listened to him, because he talked about history and destiny and all the other words that always got trotted out to put a gloss on slaughter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now, I know what Pratchett was doing: completely nailing how it is that radical extremists recruit men to join their ranks. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that he could predict the future; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that he knew how this shit happened because it almost always unfolds in the same way. Still, look at this! It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 2018, and this book is painfully relevant to the wave of young white men who have been told about their history and destiny as white men.<\/p>\n<p>THIS BOOK IS GONNA FUCK ME UP, I KNOW IT.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=a9IAVFyF2W4<\/p>\n<p><b>Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <strong>My YA contemporary debut, <a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/AngerIsAGift\">ANGER IS A GIFT<\/a>, is now out in the world!\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><strong>If you&#8217;d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, <a href=\"http:\/\/eepurl.com\/ey636\">sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the second part of Thud!, the anniversary of the contentious Koom Valley battle looms over Ankh-Morpork. Intrigued? Then it&#8217;s 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":[495,248,554],"class_list":["post-4787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-mark-watches-discworld","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-thud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4787","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=4787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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