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#johnseavey

Roland Mauricerolandmaurice
2025-10-17

Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he'd thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins, orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist's sword. Much of the urgency in Pratchett's last few books seemed to be related to them. There's only one true evil in the world," his characters said ‘And that's treating people like they were things ’ In the last of his grown- up Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people. They do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. The only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don't even understand how pathetic they are grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. — John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (excerpt)

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