Rereading Guards Guards and I realised even though Lady Sybil is often described as huge, it’s almost always in a posotive way.
Just something I thought was really interesting, when Terry describes Sybils size its almost always to emphasize her power and pressence not just a joke about her being fat. I’ve seen a few people talk about fatphobia in Terry books and while thats a bigger discussion I think his descriptions of Lady Sybil are a great example of how a character just being “fat” is not an insult to them in any way.
Even shorn of her layers of protective clothing, Lady Sybil Ramkin was still toweringly big. Vimes knew that the barbarian hublander folk had legends about great chain-mailed, armor-bra’d, carthorse-riding maidens who swooped down on battlefields and carried off dead warriors on their cropper to a glorious roistering afterlife, while singing in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. Lady Ramkin could have been one of them. She could have led them. She could have carried off a battalion. When she spoke, every word was like a hearty slap on the back and clanged with the aristocratic self-assurance of the totally well-bred. The vowel sounds alone would have cut teak.
Lady Ramkin drawing herself up haughtily was not a sight to forget, although you could try. It was like watching continental drift in reverse as various sub-continents and islands pulled themselves together to form one massive, angry protowoman.
A furious vision in padded leather, gauntlets, tiara and thirty yards of damp pink tulle leaned down toward him and screamed: “Come on, you bloody idiot!”
“Where’s he off to?” boomed Lady Ramkin, emerging from the mists dragging the horses behind her. They didn’t want to come, their hooves were scraping up sparks, but they were fighting a losing battle.
It had been dragged into the center of the plaza, and Lady Sybil Ramkin had been chained to it. She appeared to be wearing a nightie and huge rubber boots. By the look of her she had been in a fight, and Vimes felt a momentary pang of sympathy for whoever else had been involved.
In fact all of them just paint the picture of a woman who could command armies with her voice and wouldn’t bother launching ships with her face since her hands would do just fine.
In fact a lot of her descriptions are only offensive if you think that a person being overweight is inherently something to be ashamed of. Lady Sybil is huge; she’s tall, fat, bald, wears old boots and mucky aprons, and is about as far from the typical fantasy woman as you can imagine. But that doesn’t stop her from being a sensible, iron-willed, powerhouse and one of my favourite characters on the disc.
sherlock girl trying to hit on me: hey ;) i noticed the thin indentations calloused into your fingertips. you a bassist? me: that? oh thats from opening pistachios
“Samuel Vimes distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!”
Some PTerry quotes that feel especially salient at the moment:
“He asked you to shoot at people who weren’t shooting back,” growled Vimes, striding forward, “That makes him insane, wouldn’t you say?”
“They are throwing stones, Sarge,” said Colon.
“So? Stay out of range. They’ll get tired before we do.”
- Night Watch
Odd thing, ain’t it… you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.
- Jingo
It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was “policeman.” If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.
- Snuff
The poor devils. They thought a king would make them free.
- Feet of Clay
Beating people up in little rooms…he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say “we’re the good guys” and do bad-guy things. Sometimes the watching watchman inside every good copper’s head could use an extra pair of eyes.
Honestly, y'all, I’m begging you. Take the time to think and learn for yourself. Even if it’s just something casual like knitting or cooking. Exercise your brain. It’s important.
