{"id":4790,"date":"2018-12-03T05:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T13:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=4790"},"modified":"2018-12-02T06:18:20","modified_gmt":"2018-12-02T14:18:20","slug":"mark-reads-thud-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2018\/12\/mark-reads-thud-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘Thud!’: Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the fourth part of Thud!<\/i>, Vimes interviews a new recruit, then learns some horrible news. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld<\/i>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, no. No, this is bad. This is gonna be SO bad.<\/p>\n

The Interview<\/b><\/p>\n

Vimes\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 tried? He did! And when it came down to it, he couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t deny Sally the opportunity to become a member of the Watch. Which isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t to say that he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t dislike the entire process, as it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clear that Vimes figured there were a number of easy ways to trip up Sally. And I imagine this interview would have gone differently if it hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t started as it did:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be frightened,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Sally. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s any help, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like this any more than you do.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Oh, Vimes did not like having the truth spilled so graciously before him. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not wrong; like Angua, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be able to sense\/smell this, and Vimes CLEARLY resented this. The interview itself was about as uncomfortable as I expected it to be, too. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got two people who don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t particularly enjoy talking to one another here, and Vimes is trying his hardest to assert himself, too. And in his words, you can still see an insidious logic at work.<\/p>\n
For example: at one point, Vimes brings up the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fine traditions of the Watch.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And while it is a response to Vetinari\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quote in the Times<\/i>, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still a very subtle attempt by Vimes to let Sally know that she probably doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t and won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fit in. I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exactly the same thing, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m reminded of the phenomenon you often see in hiring practices in terms of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153culture.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I saw it happen (and experienced it, too!) when I was trying to get a job in San Francisco years and years ago. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s such a weird thing to be told that you have the qualifications for a job, but the hiring manager is convinced you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not a good fit for the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153culture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at a job. I suspected then that this was a safe way to weed out people like me. I know plenty of other people of color, queer folks, and women (and many combinations of those) who have similar stories. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know a single white man who has been told this during the hiring or interview process. So, is Vimes trying to filter Sally out of this? Well, as much as he can without outright denying her, I suppose. He may not even be doing it subconsciously, despite that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been very open about his dislike of vampires. But as I said before, how can he actually<\/i> deny her a job in the Watch? She wants to be there, and she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got some skills that would make her a good cop. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they need<\/i> them? (Though I have a slight counterpoint to the notion that people \u00e2\u20ac\u0153need\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to see cops during times of conflict. I get why Vimes says this, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d argue that for many people, increased policing has the exact opposite<\/i> effect.)<\/p>\n
Nobby<\/b><\/p>\n
You know what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s satisfying? Every time Fred Colon says something shitty, Nobby casually disproves it or challenges it, and then Colon gets flustered. Take this exchange:<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153All this scrapping over something that happened thousands of years ago! I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know why they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get back to where they came from if they want to do that!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Most of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcem come from here now,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d observed Nobby.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Fred grunted his disdain for a mere fact of geography.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nobby has been doing this a lot in this book. I AM ENJOYING IT. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a beauty in watching this unfold, and it also allows Pratchett to counter some of these toxic thoughts and remarks right there on the page.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Hamcrusher<\/b><\/p>\n
Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, this was basically handed to me, and yet I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t put two and two together. At this point, I bet a lot of dwarfs have been hurt by trolls in this conflict, but what would make the dwarfs react more dramatically than they ever had before? Well, if one of their beloved deep-down trolls was murdered\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 yeah, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll do it. So, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a re-occurrence of the same cultural issues we saw in The Fifth Elephant<\/i>, for example, though it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cropped up in other books. The deep-down dwarfs are more conservative in many respects, but Hamcrusher was more extreme than a lot of what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen. That worries me; what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the reaction going to be like among the dwarfs?<\/p>\n
As it stands, we know that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re trying to keep the murder a secret from the humans, which only pisses off Vimes even more. And when Vimes is angry, sometimes he says things he wish he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say, like he does here when he makes that comment about how deep the law extends in Ankh-Morpork. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about to meet people who don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe he has the authority to help them. How do you approach a situation like that<\/i>? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m hoping that Vimes has earned some<\/i> respect from the dwarfs for his past actions, but bringing Detritus along with him? Yeah, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bit provocative.<\/p>\n
(And I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wait to see what happens.)<\/p>\n
https:\/\/youtu.be\/PtVRw-kH9NQ<\/p>\n
Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n
– My YA contemporary debut, ANGER IS A GIFT<\/a>, is now out in the world!\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 fourth part of Thud!, Vimes interviews a new recruit, then learns some horrible news. 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":[463,248,554],"class_list":["post-4790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-mark-reads-discworld","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-thud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4790","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=4790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}