Summary: In the bustling city of Ankh-Morpork, a murder has taken place. Not especially unusual, but such a case happens to be the first for a new recruit to the City Watch; a working-class boy from the Ramtops called Ron Weasley.
(This is my first time writing for Discworld characters and my last writing for HP characters, so hopefully I haven’t messed up any characterisations too badly)
It was ingrained into humanity, a distant memory from the time where a fire in a cave was the only safe harbour from the things that lurked beyond. Things with teeth and instincts that came canine-in-canine with them.
Ankh-Morpork at night was roughly similar. Except the creatures in the dark took your wallet as well.
“‘Anyway, I’m a wolf living with people, and there’s a name for wolves that live with people. If he whistled, I’d come running.’ Vimes tried not to show his embarrassment. Angua smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Vimes. You’ve said it yourself. Sooner or later, we’re all someone’s dog.’”
Thinking about discworld at this point is just *brain making teakettle noises* but the way vimes sees himself as a grungy pathetic crotchety suspicious bastard AND YET the way the first few stories end with him kicking himself for his own blind prejudice! like!!!!!! his whole genre-aware hardbitten detective act is played for funny haha but, like literally everything else in discworld, that’s not all - vimes is aware that he’s grumpy, and sarcastic, and apathetic, and in some ways mean and small-minded, but he is alwaysready to learn.
not happily. not necessarily willingly. a lot of his more negative traits are learned through repeated exposure to terrible things (vampires) or just because for so long he’s been fighting this slog against the worst of humanity. but he learns despite himself.
he doesn’t just say “well, this is just who i am, it’s too late to change and what would be the point anyway,” he just thinks himself around to overcoming his prejudices one at a time and is immediately ashamed (privately, not performatively, not as a martyr) of the way he behaved - a way that he, himself, does not approve of behaving. the very moment he accepts golems as “alive,” he thinks about how he’s been saying that “you can’t take away something they haven’t got,” and he thinks that that’s exactly the way that rich people, powerful people, the people that show up in books for owning streets of slums, the people that he fucking hates, think about everybody below them. that’s one of the key reasons whyhe hates them, that they can look at another human being and say “well, why not take away their life, their livelihood, their comfort, their safety? they can’t miss what they haven’t got”
vimes knows he’s not a person with the moral high ground. that is something, i think, that i love the most about him. he doesn’t have it, he doesn’t pretend to have it, he doesn’t agonize over not having it, he doesn’t faff about in mangst about it when he takes another quiet - or not so quiet - step over his own ignorance.
most importantly, he doesn’t need it. he’s an officer of the law. the law comes up through his boots. nobody is outside the law, it’s just that some people are out of his reach for now. it doesn’t matter how dirty or dingy or battered he is, some things are just wrong, and some things he can make right. if some of those wrong things are in his own head, he’s going to fix them and carry on because he has work to do.
Something something vimes and carrot as foils the descendant of kingslayers and the descendant of kings the man who sees clearly the truth of evil and the man who sees clearly the truth of good the man who’s being pulled up from the gutter and the man being pulled down from his near miss with glory and both of them being made better for it the man whose apathy covers deep personal care versus the man whose boundless kindness covers personal disconnection the man who lives so mired in the world at it is and the man who lives almost entirely in the world as it could be the way they could never understand each other and the way they understand each other better than anyone else
He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew… then it was too high. (…)
What else had the old monk said? History finds a way? Well, it was going to have to come up with something good because it was up against Sam Vimes now.
There are a lot of emotional scenes in Night Watch and this one in particular always gets me because of the Sheer Fundamental Vimes-ness™, so I had to draw it in order to mark the Glorious 25th of May. Shhhh, I know this moment actually takes place at night, but I’m new to backgrounds and daylight is easier to draw.
‘And now, it’s war… and you’re in the middle. Not on either side. You’re the stupid little band of brownjobs. You’re beneath contempt. But believe me, boys - you’ll rise.’
It’s the Glorious 25th today, so here’s a young Vimes on the barricades, doing the job that’s in front of him. I’ve got a lot of emotions about all the themes in Night Watch, but that’s one of the phrases that especially stuck with me: “You do the job that’s in front of you.” It’s what kept Vimes going when he was stranded in the past, it’s what those seven men buried in Small Gods died for, and it’s become a bit of a mantra for me over the past year when I’ve been faced with various situations that I just had to knuckle down and get through, including this whole pandemic business. Sometimes, all you can do is deal with things as they come.
‘History finds a way. The nature of events changed, but the nature of the dead had not. It had been a mean, shameful little fight that ended them, a flyspecked footnote of history, but they hadn’t been mean or shameful men. They hadn’t run, and they could have run with honour. They’d stayed, and he wondered if the path had seemed as clear to them then as it did to him now. They’d stayed not because they wanted to be heroes, but because they chose to think of it as their job, and it was in front of them-’
It’s finally the Glorious 25th of May, so here’s the final character(s) in my countdown: John Keel himself. Or rather, himselves - on the left is Vimes-as-Keel, and on the right is the original Keel. The similarities and differences between the two men were really fun to draw, and I think that’s my new favourite Vimes that I’ve ever drawn.
Night Watch is a hell of a book, and I’ve really enjoyed this little character design project to celebrate it. They’re an interesting group, the men who are remembered with the lilacs, and I hope I’ve done them all justice.
John Keel, Billy Wiglet, Horace Nancyball, Dai Dickins, Cecil ‘Snouty’ Clapman, Ned Coates and, technically, Reg Shoe. Probably there were no more than twenty people in the city now who knew all the names, because there were no statues, no monuments, nothing written down anywhere. You had to have been there.
