Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

i think a lot about Angua ad Carrot’s personal arcs in Feet of Clay, and as part of how the book seems a lot about identity or claiming your identity via Dorfl and Cheery (Dorfl being declaring that he OWNS himself, and Cheery being the first Discworld dwarf to say ‘I am She’, and both of them starting cultural revolutions by simply saying “I am who I am”)

and the relevant point is that they start out on opposite sides of sympathizing.

Carrot’s reactions to Cheery speaks for itself. And they’re bad, and worse for the fact that it’s Carrot doing it. He comes off as very much the tradtionalist dwarf he was raised as, with quietly acidic comments like ‘I’m pretty sure my mother is a woman but at least she has the decency not to show it’ and other, even nastier things. It might not have been written as transphobic but it sure as hell reads like it. Most notably, it actually gets Angua pretty steamed, given that she keeps things close to the chest and conceals her feelings. It gets her genuinely pissed. It’s unsettling, like his Men At Arms bigotry towards the undead.

But. Carrot is the only one, throughout a large chunk of the book, to treat golems as people. Everyone else considers them mindless machines, and even Nobby and Colon, who are usually totally harmless, flat out try to use Detritus’ crossbow to kill Dorfl when he is offline; nobody trusts golems, who can do nothing but endlessly labor forever and suffer in silence, deprived of even a voice for themselves, and no one admits they are alive. And as Vime later thinks, that the real reason people are so scared of them is that they know they would deserve it if the Fantasy Robot Revolution came for them, after the way they mistreat the golems.

Carrot is the one to believe in Dorfl, to fight for him, and who believes that what is happening to the golems is wrong.

Angua is Cheery’s only friend at first. She’s the one who helps Cheery accomodating herself to more feminine things that are extremely new for a dwarf, she’s even protective of Cheery and desperately hides that she is a werewolf, knowing that Cheery hates people like her. She inspires Cheery towards what becomes the bedrock of the dwarfish openly female-presenting movement, and its a very humanizing and good thing from their friendship.

She’s also, put bluntly, a vicious and even cruel figure whenever golems are around. She openly regards them as non-sentient machines, hates them effectively because it helps her to have someone to look down on as an undead, and she rationalizes their horrific treatment and endless servitude as ‘being accepted’. She even gets mad at Carrot for empathizing with them and not her, specifically, though she does note that she is asking him to be unfair.

Much of their respective character development in Feet of Clay is their subtle growing over the worst aspects of themselves in this particular book. Carrot grows into less of a traditionalist with knee-jerk reactions, and Angua grows to empathize with the golems and view them as people.

Perhaps most relevant is the capstone to both their character arcs?

Using the pronouns Dorfl and Cheery prefer.

I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"

Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.

Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :

They make a hateful, fascist statement

Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong

We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process

We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go

They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.

Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.

Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)

Anti-trans group admits bathroom predator myth is made up

Empirical research shows bathroom predator concerns are baseless.

“Our side concocted the ‘bathroom safety’ male predator argument as a way to avoid an uncomfortable battle over LGBT ideology, and still fire up people’s emotions.”

COLOUR ME FUCKING SURPRISED

My cat is so helpful...

if you're just joining us, george takei is having to educate jk rowling on holocaust denial

im in love with her

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett

28 April 1948 - 12 March 2015

G: Send the message on to the next Clacks Tower.

N: Do not log the message.

U: At the end of the line, return the message.

“A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken.” ~ Going Postal

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31careypricefan1:

I am Dave! Yognau(gh)t and I have the balls! Repost if you’re a Yognaut or Yognaught!

Dear people crying over the Red Wedding

Welcome to the fandom. Sincerely, People who’ve read the books already.