LogFAQs > #911712516

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I do have the feeling that Ent is the best resource on the subject, hence my summoning. I'm pretty sure Entity has literally read them all so I'm just going with what I regard as the final word on the subject.

You do realize that I've also read all of the books multiple times, right?

I forget the exact timing of things, but I rented the Discworld point-and-click adventure game in the mid-90s, which led me to start tracking down the books. I kind of jumped in around the middle (I think I read Soul Music and Small Gods and maybe another book or two before going back to the beginning and reading them in order), but after I was into it I read each new book as it came out.

I've also read some of his other books, like Strata and Good Omens. And I've got The Discworld Companion. And the Discworld RPG. Both books.

I'm definitely not going to argue that my having read all the books means I definitively know more about the subject than anyone else, or imply that my opinion is inherently better than anyone else's solely because of it, but it's not as if Entity is the only one who's read them.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Personally, I don't really think Pratchett was trying to take the piss on the whole fantasy thing anywhere near as hard

The first couple books literally feel like he just made a list of every fantasy cliche he could think of, and then wrote something to make fun of it. Whether he's riffing on LotR, or making fun of the Anne McCaffrey Pern novels (the Wyrmberg), or the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories (Ankh-Morpork basically starts out as a thin copy of Lankhmar, and characters called Bravd and the Weasel show up at one point), most of Color of Magic and Light Fantastic is straight-up parody. He even admitted that it was the sole reason he started writing the books in the first place.

It's not until Mort that he really starts moving away from that sort of mentality, and I'd argue that Guards! Guards! is the book where the series really fully becomes its own thing and leaves a lot of that parody behind. The books still occasionally make fun of fantasy tropes, but after that they're almost entire devoted to telling really strong stories in the setting first, and the parody becomes more of an afterthought.


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