skygiants | (no subject)

I was really excited to get to Men at Arms in my Discworld reread! I . . . did not realize how conflicted I was going to end up feeling about it.

Because -- okay, here's the thing. All the Guards books are about class and race and the other kinds of complicated unhappy -isms that exist in a city; we've talked about this already. And Discworld can do class great, it can at least make a decent effort on sex and gender, it is fantastic on 'war is crap' and general sentiments of the 'wouldn't it be great if people would stop killing each other over stupid things' variety. But Men at Arms is the Book About Racism like no other, and . . . it's not good enough.

(I'm going to leave aside the fact that the Discworld books always do that super-problematic fantasy novel thing where they conflate speciesism with racism because I don't have anything new to say about it, but that's the first issue, so. Anyway I'm just gonna go on talking about racism instead of speciesism because that is what the book's about and we all know it.)

So here's the thing: I think I could deal with the plot of the human members of the Watch starting out racist and learning their valuable life lesson about becoming less racist. I mean, I think our lovable characters in the Watch should be shown to be horribly racist and it should shock us, because they are based on a police force that is very often horribly racist. That would be great! . . . if we got to get into the heads of the actual people who were affected by that racism, and those people got a chance to get angry and properly call them on it.

But every time Carrot or Vimes says something that's terrible, either no one else is around to get mad, or we don't see it, or -- you know, it's Angua, and she gets hurt because Carrot says terrible things about the undead and she's crushing on Carrot; she gets hurt, but she doesn't get mad. Which would be fine if there were other times we saw people getting their righteous anger on, with narrative support, but we don't see that. We don't see that righteous anger directed at our favorite characters, not when they're being terrible. Dwarves and trolls get mad at each other, sure, but it's written into the plot that nobody ever gets mad at Carrot. Angua gets sarcastic about Vimes, and then Carrot gets all snitty and proves to her that she's Wrong About Vimes and Angua apologizes and stammers that she didn't know -- and Angua shouldn't have to apologize for thinking Vimes is a dick. I love Vimes a lot and you guys all know that, but he is a racist sexist asshole on top of his overall misanthropy, and the fact that he's nice to widows and orphans and will generally deep-down do the right thing doesn't mean that people aren't allowed to think he's a dick for that.

But of course, I'm forgetting -- there's Cuddy! Cuddy gets mad! Cuddy even gets mad and sarcastic at humans! Cuddy even gets to be a POV character sometimes!

So of course Cuddy is the character who dies tragically.

Don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of things to love about Men at Arms. Cuddy and Detritus' epic friendship is great! It's Angua's first book! Lady Sybil is in it!... although really Lady Sybil gets the incredibly short end of the stick in this book, but that's another rant that would take a whole other post. The Patrician is in fine form all around!

But in terms of what the book is, at heart, about . . . it's not good enough.

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I would say Vimes gets angry about racism at first because it messes up his city, but in time because it makes him uncomfortable about being human and having the privilege he has had sort of pushed on him by the course of events, and then ultimately in the latest books because it enrages him in a fundamental way; all his repressed anger and class guilt have been mapped onto species prejudice, to the point where it has turned into a giant red button for him.

I think the absence of non-human POV characters, and the reason everything has to be filtered through the empathy or reactions of a human, stems from the larger problem of "species = race" that Becca alludes to. I mean, non-humans make difficult POV characters, because they... aren't human, and all of your readers are. Which then has very unfortunate implication when you equate it to race, and if that is the ONLY way you are writing about race, allows you to indulge lazy habits of thinking and talking about race. In a sense, the real problem is that by mapping race "away" onto nonhumans, you make a world where the human POV is necessarily a white POV.

The characterization and motives of the non-POV non-human characters do get more complicated and... correctly alien, over time, though! In that sense Men At Arms is a very transitional book in terms of taking non-humans seriously as "people". It is not good enough, in retrospect, but it is the turning point where it's stated outright that the way nonhumans had been appearing had never really been good enough, and they begin to slowly shaded in, in a process that is not and never will be over.

It's explicitly highlighted in... I think it's Thud, when Vimes realizes that the first time he ever saw Detritus he was chained to a wall as a possession, essentially, of the Drum. And now he is... well, doing all the stuff Detritus does in that book, to keep things short.

In some ways I think the books tend to be written from an unarticulated, generic human Morporkian POV, even when the narrative explicitly criticizes the deficiencies in that POV. Trolls are a bit dumb and violent, not the kind of people you want to spend time with, and dwarfs are all kind of weird and obsessed with gold, and God knows what goes on behind those loincloths, but of COURSE they're people; of course you can't buy and sell them or just shrug if they get killed. Just... not quite. And every so often the story being told inside that narrative breaks open and it becomes clear that things are a lot more complicated than the narration has acknowledged...

(The most obvious one I can think of is in The Truth, when Otto steps in to save William and clarifies that, no, this guy we have been riding around on the shoulder of all book doesn't really get it! He's actually kind of a racist twerp! But he's trying, and when you are surrounded by racist twerps you have to side with the one who's trying, at least. And then we swerve right back to William's POV.)

Oh, William de Worde. I have such a soft spot for him, you don't even know.

it is a Simon-Tam-headvoice-shaped soft spot

Trolls are a bit dumb and violent, not the kind of people you want to spend time with

This is a bit of a sidebar, but I forgot to talk about in my review how RIDICULOUSLY TRAGIC the story of the trolls suddenly becomes in Men at Arms and how that tragedy is played off as a joke. You have to come to the big city to send money back, but the climate's wrong and you literally lose your ability to think properly! This may be a metaphor for immigration and cultural and language barriers and all, but it is also horror on the level of the worst of Stephen King, when you think about it. Speaking of things that are more complicated and terrible than the narration acknowledges!

(Also you are 100% correct on everything to do with mapping species to race and the problems thereof.)

Yeah. I think that is a much overlooked part of the saga of Detritus--he didn't just get his dignity back because people handed it to him instead of chaining him to a wall, he earned it back one slow, grinding thought at a time. He slowly and painfully learned to be smart with a brain that could never reach "clever" outside of a blizzard. The whole clever-cunning-smart thing is a recurring motif, but I never really thought of it in that light.