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[skygiants]

Lords and Ladies, oh gosh, Lords and Ladies. A reasonable proportion of the Pratchett books I've been trucking through have pleasantly equalled my expectations, but I think I had literally forgotten how good Lords and Ladies was. Not that I didn't remember it as good! I just didn't remember it was that good.

Here are the top ten things that are great about Lords and Ladies:


10. Once again, all of the important battles and shifts in power dynamics happen between women. That's just HOW THEY ROLL in Lancre.
9. That being said, Shane Ogg the Perennially Ridiculous and Jason Ogg the Somewhat Less Ridiculous both get to be legitimately awesome.
8. On a related note, Ridcully is unhelpfully soppy and lovestruck and it's taken exactly as seriously as it deserves. (I am actually really sad that Ridcully and Granny never get to meet again in the series, I would read a million books in which they fight crime, or possibly each other, while having belligerent sexual tension. YES I WOULD. You can't judge me, YOU TOTALLY WOULD TOO.)
7. And he got the Librarian to Lancre by telling him they had shelves and shelves of UNCATALOGED BOOKS! THIS HURTS THE LIBRARIAN IN HIS PRESERVATIONIST SOUL.
6. Being engaged to a king doesn't have to be about sitting around doing embroidery, and being kind and sort of soppy doesn't have to mean being weak.
5. Nanny and Granny are the best of teams. The challenge in the square! That may well be my favorite scene, hands down.
4. Granny Weatherwax IS A STONE COLD BADASS
3. Nanny Ogg is a SEXY badass.
2. Magrat Garlick is a soppy, kittens-loving, ARMOR-WEARING ELF-SLAYING BADASS QUEEN
1. No, actually, even after Magrat put on her shining armor, hoisted her weaponry and went charging off to rescue her prince, Granny Weatherwax is STILL THE MOST BADASS OF THEM ALL, FOREVER AND ALWAYS

Guys, I am excited for Maskerade and for Carpe Jugulum, I know that these are books I also love enormously, but right now I'm just sort of like how does it get BETTER?

Comments

[skygiants]

Yeah, I think it was actually really amazing especially reading all the Witch books in close succession, because you can see the development happening -- you see more and more what happens when you back Magrat into a corner, you watch Nanny and Granny growing into balance with each other and Granny growing even more into HERSELF. And Lords and Ladies is kind of the moment when all that growth from the previous books bursts into action -- it is, which I forgot to mention, the only book so far where Terry Pratchett feels it necessary to explain that there's been development before this, that it's a continuing story, and these people have been and are growing. AND GROWING INTO BAMFS.

(Me too! And this is such a perfect example of that. I also love people who are far more amazing than they think they are . . . and that's Magrat.)

[campkilkare]

And speaking of the prologue--I feel like there is some unarticulated connection between Granny extricating herself from the mirrors, as Lily couldn't, and Granny's "torture of infinite alternate selves" in this book. I am not sure I can put it into words--did that experience prepare her to do what she does here? are they somehow the same event, in some abstract narrative way? is Lily out there in that infinite matrix of Weatherwaxes, desperately running from life to life looking for the "real" one--but there's... something.

And it is funny, viewing the books in relation to each other, that a common theme is "right authority"--the witches decide to replace the king with their own chosen figurehead in WS, then depose Lily who did the same thing in WA, then stop the elves from doing the same to Lance in LL, then Granny comes down with a serious case of self-doubt when it is time for her to play kingmaker/kingpreserver again in CJ. Witches can't rule, but they can involve themselves in deciding who will, and that's a very, very dangerous activity. All of which goes back to MacBeth.

Maskerade... doesn't quite fit that pattern, but then Maskerade is not so much about three witches as about Agnes-on-her-own plus Nanny-and-Granny-minus-Magrat, which turns out to be "how Nanny keeps the increasingly powerful Granny from losing it without the usual three-witches-business." Actually with Granny's pose as Dame Weatherwax in Maskerade, she skates verrrrry close to Lily's "Lady Tempscire".

It also implies that the kingship/queenship thing was a Magrat storyline under it all, interestingly enough.

So.... that was a lot of babbling, but I feel like there's a throughline here, right? Just... I can't put my finger on it.

[campkilkare]

--also, both WA and Maskerade end with Granny doing something impossible (sticking her hand in the fire without being burned, grabbing a sword without being cut). But in Maskerade she says there is always a price, and you can decide when and how to pay it. But she never articulates that in WA, where the trick was she channeled it into the voodoo doll of Lily, since they're so similiar. So maybe that was the price--as long as Lily was around Granny "had to be the good one" and could act fearlessly knowing she was in the right, but getting rid of Lily opened her up to the potential of going to the dark; of becoming Lily, in fact.

[skygiants]

In a weird way I think they are the same event, now that you bring it up -- I think maybe the connection has something to do with the difference between illusion and reality. Esme Weatherwax doesn't have any problem with figuring out what's real. But in Lords and Ladies she has to accept that the Esme she is now is not the only one that's real -- that there are other possibilities for who she could be.

Esme Weatherwax is all about the difference between story and reality, but reality has always been more complicated than she likes to see it. In Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad, they thwart the story. But then in Lords and Ladies, Magrat uses the story. And Esme spends a lot of time rejecting Ridcully's nostalgia as a story, but then has to admit that in some world, some way, it's true.

This isn't quite a complete throughline either, but . . .