Men At Arms: (Discworld Novel 15) (Discworld series)

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The story of Fingers-Mazda stealing fire from the gods, here a one-off footnote joke, forms the basis of the plot of The Last Hero.

The counting scene between Detritus and Cuddy is very similar to "If I have two more beans, and I add two more beans, what do I have?" "Some beans." The "Fun" in "Funeral": The Fools try to do this with the funeral of Brother Beano, but their rote approach to all humor takes all the joy out of it. Ashes to Crashes: Beano's mortal remains are cremated and then poured down another clown's trousers. The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theoryIt’s the beginning of the most awesome epic encounter of all time (or at least all afternoon), in which the fate of a city—indeed of the universe itself!—depends on a young man’s courage, an ancient sword’s magic, and a three-legged poodle’s bladder. I Am the Trope: When some young Assassins see Vimes in their guild house and one asks who he is, the by now quite angry Vimes yells "The Law, you sons of bitches!" Vimes is very outspoken in his disdain for kings and seems to be well versed in how Ankh-Morpork got rid of them. In Guards! Guards! he was surprised to hear that Ankh-Morpork ever was a kingdom. Possibly justified in that it’s possible that the events in that book (and the encouragement of his soon-to-be-wife) lead to him developing those traits. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the book—perhaps as much as everyone told me that I would. Now, my Pratchett experience is limited. I tried The Color of Magic when I was younger (I’ve since learned that it is a poor representation of the series) and have read Good Omens (which was brilliant, and which ultimately led me to give Discworld another go.) Take That!: Quirke's thoughtless level of stupid evil is noted to be less like actual evil, and more something that merely tarnishes the soul of all who comes near, "like British Rail."

There’s a thematic echo here, where Pratchett reuses a line that we last heard coming from Granny Weatherwax, this time giving it to Carrot after Vimes asks about his desire for revenge against Cruces for killing Angua: “But personal isn’t the same as important.” And it’s beautiful because both Carrot and Granny are good people—but really Good with a capital ‘G’—yet they’re different in how they go about their goodness. Being good is innate for Carrot; he doesn’t know any other way to be. Being good is hard for Granny Weatherwax, but she manages it, even when she’d rather not. But they both arrive at the same conclusion. Colon worries that, as ranking officer once Vimes retires, he's "well and truly up the Ankh without a paddle". Red Herring: It turns out Edward d'Eath, despite all the foreshadowing surrounding his unstable mind and, you know, family name, only ever killed one person during the story, and that was quite by accident.

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Fantasy Gun Control: Analysed. Vimes muses that gonnes would change the world because, instead of simply storing the power of your own muscles like crossbows, they 'give you power from outside' - the comparison to magic is obvious, and just as wizards try to restrict the availability of magic, assassins hate the gonne as it would make killing so easy. So there are forces actively keeping gonnes from becoming available. One of which is the Gonne itself, which wants to be THE Gonne. It murders the dwarf who fixed it so he couldn't make more of them. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.” Sam Vimes is set to leave the Watch after his impending nuptials to Lady Sybil Ramkin, the noblest and richest woman in Ankh-Morpork ( “The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery, whereas Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving.”). All while the Watch expands and diversifies - now they employ a troll, a dwarf, and a w- .... ummm, let’s just say a woman - while a string of suspicious murders with a strange new weapon eventually known as a gonne occur - and ethnic tensions between dwarfs and trolls intensify, including in the Watch, and someone needs to sort it all out. It'd help if it could all be sorted out by noon, because that's when Captain Vimes is officially retiring, handing in his badge and getting married. Roundworld's hermit crab (which can be found on islands like Bermuda) behaves similarly: it has no protective shell of its own, so it utilises the shells of dead land snails. The reason why the hermit crab is one of the sadder species in our world as well is given in Stephen Jay Gould's essay 'Nature's Odd Couples' (published in his collection The Panda's Thumb): the shells that form the crabs' natural habitat are from a species of snail that has been extinct since the 19th century. The hermit crabs on Bermuda are only surviving by recycling old fossil shells, of which there are fewer and fewer as time goes on, thus causing the hermit crab to become, slowly but surely, just as extinct as the snails. And someone armed and dangerous has been getting ideas about power and destiny and lost kings, committing a string of seemingly random murders across the city.

How Many Fingers?: After being forced to turn in his badge, Sam Vimes gets so drunk that the only answer he can give to the question "How many fingers am I holding up?" is "Bleargh". When Carrot follows it up with "How many hands?", Captain Vimes manages to guess "four". Colon: Forward, Lance-Constable Angua. Tell me, Lance-Constable, do you think you could kill a man? To me, Men at Arms has always been a bit different from your usual Pratchett’s City Watch books. You see, as Ankh-Morkpork City Watch subcycle progresses, from Guards! Guards! to Snuff, the spotlight gets focused more and more on Sam Vimes, the Watch Commander and a noble by marriage, coming from humble beginnings and (often literally) the gutter, the sarcastic and gruff and unfailingly just, with all illusions about the world stripped away by life, leaving deep cynicism and excellent understanding of the small unpleasantnesses that drive human nature. But Men at Arms, the second in the Watch series, is a bit different from the rest. It’s not much of a Vimes book. No, it’s Captain Carrot’s book, his moment in the sun. When beginning his investigation, Vimes was about to leave the Assassins' Guild, but then turned around because he had a question he almost forgot to ask.Edward d'Eath, an Assassin and son of a down-and-out noble family, becomes convinced that the restoration of the Ankh-Morpork monarchy will solve the social change in the city which he blames for his family's humbling. He researches the history of the royal family and determines that Carrot Ironfoundersson is in fact the rightful heir to the throne. In the Style of: Cuddy writes his police report in the style of a Norse saga (because Our Dwarves Are All the Same) but mixes in stereotypical police terms like 'eventuated' and 'proceeding'.