Irene Being A Dominatrix In BBC Sherlock Pisses Me Off For So Many Reasons, Not The Least Of Which Being

A customer contacted our team with questions, and then finished their email with: "I am daunted by the complexities and unknowns." I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

people will be like “don’t worry it’s all in your head!” like babe… yes… that’s the problem… how do i get it out of there…

Discworld is an interesting beast in the age of ACAB. Like, the city watch books are a story about police and the way in which a good police force can help and protect people. Which would make it copoganda. And I'm not going to say that the City Watch books are completely free of copoganda, but they also do something interesting that fairly few stories about heroic police officers do, and I think it has a lot to do with Samuel Vimes. A lot of copoganda stories like, say, Brooklyn 99, are perfectly capable of portraying cops as cruel, bigoted, and greedy, but our central cast of characters are portrayed as good people who want to help their communities. The result is that the bad cops are portrayed as an aberration, while most cops can be assumed to be good people doing a tough job because they want to help protect people from the nebulous evil forces of "Crime". The police are considered to be naturally heroic. Pratchett does something very interesting, which is provide us with Vimes' perspective, and present us with an Unnaturally heroic police force. In Ahnk-Morpork, the natural state of the watch is a gang with extra paperwork. It's the place for people who, at best, just want a steady paycheck and at worst want an excuse to hit people with a truncheon. Rather than be an army defending people from the forces of Crime, the Watch is described as a sort of sleight-of-hand, big burly watchmen in shiny uniforms don't stand around in-case a Crime happens in their vicinity, they stand around to remind people that The Law exists and has teeth. The Watchmen are people, when danger rears it's head, their instinct is to hide and get out of the way. When faced with authority, their instinct is to bow to it out of fear of what it might do to them if they don't. Carrot is a genuine Hero, but his natural heroism is presented as an aberration. Normal Cops don't act like Carrot does. The fact that the Watch ends up acting like a Heroic Police Force is largely due to the leadership of Sam Vimes, but Vimes himself is a microcosm of the Watch. The base state of Sam Vimes would be an alchoholic bully of an officer, one who beats people until they confess to anything because that makes his job easier. Vimes The Hero is a homunculous, an artificial being created by Sam Vimes fighting back all those instincts and FORCING himself to behave as his conscience dictates. Vimes doesn't take bribes or let his officers do the same because, damnit, that sort of thing shouldn't happen, even if doing so would make things a lot easier. Vimes doesn't run towards sounds of screaming because he WANTS to, he forces himself to do so because somebody needs to. It's best summed up in Thud “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Your Grace.” “I know that one,” said Vimes. “Who watches the watchmen? Me, Mr. Pessimal.” “Ah, but who watches you, Your Grace?” said the inspector with a brief little smile. “I do that, too. All the time,” said Vimes. “Believe me.”

In the hands of another writer, or another series, this exchange would be weirdly dismissive. To whom should the police be accountable to? Themselves, shut up and trust us. But from Vimes, it's a different story. Vimes DOES constantly watch himself, and he doesn't trust that bastard, he's known him his entire life. The Heroic Police are not a natural state, they're an ideal, and ahnk-morpork only gets anywhere close. Vimes is constantly struggling against his own instincts to take shortcuts, to let things slide, but he forces himself to live up to that ideal and the Watch follows his example. Discworld doesn't propose any solutions to the problems with policing in the real world. We don't have a Sam Vimes to run the NYPD and force them to behave. We don't have a Carrot Ironfounderson. But it's at least a story about detectives and police that I can read without feeling like I'm being sold propaganda about the Thin Blue Line.

The Auditors: We just need everyone to stop moving so we can get on with the paperwork! How are we meant to get the filing done when humans are running around all the time causing fresh chaos?

Rufus Drumknott: Skill issue.

I love this, I want this to be true

I like to imagine that Sam Vimes, instead of dying properly, instead got minor godhood. All watchmen at some point thank him for his actions, his actions a ripple across the Disc. There's precedent in the Duchess of Borogravia, and in his arc. He keeps getting promotions, and hates each one. What higher status could he be unwillingly raised to than divinity, eternally watching the watchman?

Anyways, that's just a headcanon i've got

This has definitely happened somewhere in Discworld.

I once dreamt of several detective stories. Like, saw them in my dreams at night. I don’t know if they were good or bad, but there were actual detective plots and plot twists. And I don’t remember them entirely. Only some details.

While dreaming, I was watching them like a movie, but thinking that I was reading them in some book. I wondered how I had gotten through it so fast, and only then I realised that it was no book, but something my brain had made up. Then I thought that I should write them down, and maybe after some work they’ll make sense as actual detective stories. But I woke up, and I didn’t remember practically anything. Not even the key plot points.

Reblog and put in the tags how you would die if your URL predicted your death