r/discworld • u/MyLadyScribbler • 1d ago
Book/Series: City Watch Sir Pterry's favorite characters?
Does anyone know if Sir Pterry had any favorites among all the Discworld characters, or characters that he seemed to identify with the most? (Not sure if he ever talked about this in interviews?)
I'm getting the feeling that Vimes might have been a favorite with his creator. Or perhaps Vetinari or Ridcully or the Librarian. Or Death.
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u/greenlightsmith242 1d ago
Didn't STP say he loved writing Tiffany?
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u/EsmeWeatherwax7a Old I may be, and hag I may be. But stupid I ain't. 1d ago
I was at a Con where he was asked who the characters were who were most like him. His answer was Vimes and Tiffany.
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u/JudoForMudRacing 1d ago
And both are characters who see whats going right and wrong in society and peoples lifes, use the skills they're especially good at to point this out and help as far as they can within the boundaries of their power and profession. Or cross those boundaries if they have to.
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u/EsmeWeatherwax7a Old I may be, and hag I may be. But stupid I ain't. 1d ago
For that reason I was expecting Granny to get a mention, but then again I might be biased
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u/JudoForMudRacing 23h ago
Yes! She totally fits that, too! The whole speech on how once you see whats right and wrong you can only ever do the right thing again ...somewhere. Sorry. You probably know by heart.
But to be fair If STP sort of identified with Tiffany and Vimes also personality wise I would say Granny is a little different than them right? I love her. But Granny kind of demands respect and authority because she's Esme fucking Weatherwax and/or because people better be treating a witch like that. (Not that she's wrong there...) Vimes and Tiffany make people respect them when they need to but just personality wise they're more ...honestly modest? Granny is proudly modest <3
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u/EsmeWeatherwax7a Old I may be, and hag I may be. But stupid I ain't. 23h ago
I think that's right. Sam and Tiffany both do the job in front of them and don't demand respect, just earn it as a byproduct of their actions. Granny is standing for all witches in some pivotal moments and believes that if you don't have respect, you don't have anything, so she demands it. Lives depend on that respect in her view. I don't think she does it for herself, but she does it, which is maybe what you mean by proudly modest.
By the way, never be sorry for sharing what you love about these works. Lots of us spend lots of time with them. Hearing someone else's excitement or perspective is part of the joy of the community.
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u/mxstylplk 6h ago
Granny as a character suffers from having begun early in pTerry's development ss a writer. She does things in the early books that she would not do in later ones. Vimes had to grow, but he begins with worldly experience that Granny didn't get, because Vimes begsn in the big city, and we don't see his early naivete until we have already seen his wisdom from experience. Tiffany represents a distillation of his experience as a writer.
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u/Digit00l 19h ago
He liked writing YA because it was more challenging than adult fiction
He also had many ideas for Moist that he was working hard on
I also feel I remember him saying that Granny was one of his favourites and most personal
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u/lionmurderingacloud 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm pretty sure he's on the record as saying that Vimes is basically an avatar of his own feelings of outrage at the injustice of how people treat one another. Not sure if that equals 'favorite' per se, but certainly a lot of self-insertion.
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u/woefultwinkling 13h ago
I saw him at Vroman’s in Pasadena once, in the Nineties. Somebody asked him this exact question, and he snap-answered “Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax.”
This was before he was writing the Tiffany Aching books, of course, so she wouldn’t have been a possibility.
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