Portal:Discworld/Character of the day

Character of the day

The Luggage appears in the Discworld novels involving Rincewind. It is a large iron bound chest made of sapient pearwood (a magical, intelligent plant which is nearly extinct, impervious to magic, and only grows in a few places outside the Agatean Empire, generally on sites of very old magic). It has hundreds of little legs protruding from its underside and can move very fast if the need arises. It has been described as "one part trunk, four parts homicidal maniac".

Its function is to act as both a luggage carrier and bodyguard for its owner, against whom no threatening motion should be made. The Luggage is fiercely defensive of its owner, and is generally homicidal in nature, killing or eating several people and monsters throughout the books (including dragging sharks ashore and jumping up and down on them). Its mouth, the feature often remarked upon by those it is about to consume, contains "lots of big square teeth, white as sycamore, and a pulsating tongue, red as mahogany." The inside area of The Luggage does not appear to be constrained by its external dimensions, and contains many conveniences: even when it has just devoured a monster, the next time it opens the owner will find his underwear, neatly pressed.

One of the greatest features of The Luggage is its ability to follow its current owner anywhere including such places as inside its owner's mind, off the edge of the Disc, and Death's Domain. Like all luggage, it's constantly getting lost and having to track its owner down.

Character of the day

Tiffany Aching is a trainee witch whose growth into her job forms one of the many arcs in the Discworld series. She is the main character in The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith. According to The Art of Discworld Terry Pratchett has plans for a fourth novel featuring Tiffany. I Shall Wear Midnight has been given as the possible title. Tiffany is intended to age a number of years between each novel, and not be stuck in her youth, like the Famous Five.

A very young witch (13 at her last appearance), who hails from the chalk downland Rimward of the Ramtops. Her grandmother, Sarah Aching, was a shepherd, and by Ramtop standards was also a witch, although witchcraft was frowned upon on the Chalk until Tiffany's arrival. Granny Aching was a friend of the Chalk Clan of Nac Mac Feegle, (an army of tiny, blue, rowdy, drunken and vaguely Scottish ne'er-do-wells) and they have befriended Tiffany as the new "hag o' the hills". As Tiffany was their Kelda (Queen) for a short time, the Nac Mac Feegle see her as their responsibility and there is no time in Tiffany's life since then when they have not (in)discreetly watched her

Character of the day

Mustrum Ridcully was introduced in Moving Pictures as the latest Archchancellor of the Unseen University. He is also known as Ridcully the Brown, possibly as a parody of J. R. R. Tolkien's Radagast the Brown. His personality seems deliberately designed to be as opposite to Radagast's as possible.

At the time he became Archchancellor, he had not been seen at the University for forty years, having become a Seventh Level Wizard (there are, naturally, eight levels of wizardry on the Discworld) at the exceptionally young age of twenty-seven, before leaving the university to look after his family's land. The wizards, knowing he lived in the country, assumed he would be a "roams the forests with every beast his brother" type and easy to deal with. In fact, Ridcully turned out to be more like a typically bluff country squire, fond of huntin', shootin' and fishin'. He owns several hunting crossbows and is much given to using the corridors of Unseen University as a shooting range.

He is not stupid, and in fact has a mind like a freight train, but finds it very difficult to deal with unexpected information, and generally ignores it until it goes away or becomes someone else's problem. He holds the view that if someone is still trying to explain something to him after about 2 minutes, it must be worth listening to, and if they give up earlier, it was not worth bothering him with in the first place. Usually, the person doing the explaining is Ponder Stibbons.

Character of the day

Sam Vimes is head of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. His full name and title (after his unwished-for promotion to the aristocracy) is His Grace, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes. Other titles include His Excellency, Ambassador for Ankh-Morpork, as well as Blackboard Monitor Vimes (The Fifth Elephant, Thud!). He first appeared in the novel Guards! Guards!. While no detailed description of his physical appearance shows up in any of the Discworld novels, Pratchett says in the companion work, Art of Discworld, that he has always imagined Vimes as British Actor Pete Postlethwaite.

Sam Vimes is the Commander of the City Watch, the burgeoning police force of the Discworld's largest city, Ankh-Morpork. His rise from drink-sodden, hopeless street copper to respected (if unwilling) member of the aristocracy, and the growth and development of the Watch under his command, have together been one of the major threads of the Discworld series. Born into poverty, he is now a highly reluctant member of the nobility; both a knight and a duke, and married to Sybil Ramkin, the richest heiress in the city.

Character of the day

Rincewind the Wizzard is failed student at the Unseen University for wizards in Ankh-Morpork, often described by scholars as "the magical equivalent to the number zero", and spends just about all of his time running away from various bands of people who want to kill him for various reasons. The fact that he's still alive and running is explained in that although he was born with a wizard's spirit, he has the body of a long-distance sprinter.

Rincewind is most frequently seen wearing his hat with the word WIZZARD emblazoned across it in sequins (this may be a reference to Roy Wood's rock band Wizzard) and his Luggage, which has hundreds of little legs and follows him everywhere, generally attacking anything it perceives as a threat to Rincewind.

Over the course of his adventures, he has turned his cowardice into a fully fledged philosophy of life. He believes that, when running, "to" is never important, what matters is "from". When it was pointed out that running just lands him in more trouble his response was "Yes, but you can run away from that, too." Many of his companions have noticed, however, that Rincewind manages to survive everything that happens to him, and suspect that there's a deeper purpose behind this, although he himself insists it's just a coincidence. Rincewind apparently believes in karma, however. From his point of view, he has pre-emptive karma--if it even looks as if something good will happen to him in the future, his karma will ensure that something bad happens immediately, and continues happening so that the good things never come around.

Character of the day

The Librarian of Unseen University is one of the most popular characters in the Discworld series to the extent where pin badges bearing the legend Librarians rule Ook are now available. The character appears or is mentioned in most books in the series.

The Librarian first appeared in the second novel of the series, The Light Fantastic, in which he was transformed into an orangutan as a side effect of a powerful magic spell. Discovering that being an orangutan has certain advantages for a librarian, he refused to be transformed back into a human, and has remained an orangutan ever since. Most of the grimoires are highly dangerous to people, and sometimes the books even consume them, but the Librarian is no person, and he no longer requires a ladder to reach those tricky high-up shelves. He retained his position as librarian despite his condition because "he's the only one who knows where all the books are" and the fact that he could screw a man's head off with his feet. The other wizards have gradually become used to the situation, to the extent that "if someone ever reported that there was an orangutan in the Library, the wizards would probably go and ask the Librarian if he'd seen it." (Night Watch).

Character of the day

Esmerelda "Esme" Weatherwax is a witch and member of the Lancre coven. From the triple nature of a coven (maiden, mother and "the other one"), Granny Weatherwax is the other one. In fact, it has been suggested that she embodies all three, but the Crone is the most obvious (she has difficulty matching the classic appearance; despite her best efforts, she still has perfect skin, not a single wart and all her teeth, although she has picked up a penetrating stare and plenty of worry lines). In the books, the triple nature of the coven is always referred to as "the maiden, the mother and... the other one" in her presence.

She a very powerful witch, and is reckoned to be more powerful than the most well-known witch on the Discworld, Black Aliss (real name: Aliss Demurrage) who is responsible for any number of witcheries in fairy tales, such as putting a castle to sleep and getting pushed into her own oven by naughty kids. It does seem that her teacher's teacher's teacher's teacher was Black Aliss. ("I learned my craft from Nanny Gripes, who learned it from Goody Heggety, who got it from Nanna Plumb, who was taught it by Black Aliss..." – Granny, in Lords and Ladies).

Granny Weatherwax's reputation even extends beyond species barriers – the trolls of the Ramtops call her Aaoograha hoa ("She Who Must Be Avoided") and the dwarf name for her, K'ez'rek d'b'duz, translates to "Go Around the Other Side of the Mountain" (Maskerade).

Character of the day

Discworld's Death is a parody of several other personifications of death. Like most Grim Reapers, he is a black-robed skeleton carrying a scythe and, for royalty, a sword (It's the rules, he once told Mort). Unlike many of them, he has a personality beyond this.

Death is one of the most popular Discworld characters and makes an appearance in every Discworld book except The Wee Free Men. His steed is a great pale horse called Binky who is very much still alive. His hollow, peculiar voice is represented in the books by unquoted small caps; it is peculiar because since he is a tall skeleton, he has no vocal cords to speak with, and thus, speaks through other means. In The Colour of Magic (the first Discworld novel), and in Faust Eric, all direct written references to Death are proper nouns, thus, for example, "he" is written as "He". This is usually reserved for the Discworld gods and is not featured in any of the other novels.

Death is not invisible. Most people just refuse to acknowledge him for who he is, unless he insists. Under normal circumstances, only those of a magical disposition (e.g. witches and wizards), children and cats can see him, or allow themselves to see him. Death can of course ignore things like walls or magic spells that stand between him and his object: this is because he's much "realer" than they are. A castle might stand for centuries, but Death has existed for billions of years: to him, the walls of the castle are less substantial than a cobweb. However, he can only go where people can die, as shown in Hogfather.

Character of the day

Cecil Wormsborough St. John "Nobby" Nobbs is a corporal in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, first appearing in the novel Guards! Guards!.

Nobby Nobbs is the kind of person who joins the army to loot corpses. It is said that there's a field-marshall's baton in every footman's knapsack; Nobby's Army kit generally consists of two warehouses, complete with said batons, other armies' uniforms, golden teeth, other petty valuables and several kilos of boots, some of them still occupied. Despite his kleptomania, he is honest about the big things (at least, the ones too big to steal) and is described as someone that you can trust with your life, although you'd be daft to trust him with half a dollar. Sgt Colon also remarked in Jingo that he had heard of places where the generals looked at which side's uniform Nobby wore at the moment to learn the situation of the battle.

He is described as untidy, smelly, and despite being human, about the same height as a dwarf, and carrying a certificate signed by the Patrician to prove that he's a human being. The text of this note can states that on the balance of probability, he is a human being. A running joke is the inability of others to believe this, despite — or even because of — the evidence. In fact, in Hogfather, even Death himself was unable to discern Nobby's species. He always seems to have a cigarette butt about him, normally stowed behind his ear, which has been described as a nicotine graveyard. Cigarettes quickly become butts in his presence, and stay as such for an apparently infinite amount of time.

Character of the day

The Auditors of Reality are godlike beings, and are one of the major recurring villains in the series. The Auditors of Reality are supernatural entities and the celestial bureaucrats. They make sure that gravity works, file the appropriate paperwork for each chemical reaction, and so forth. The Auditors hate life, because it's messy and unpredictable, which makes them fall behind on their paperwork; they much prefer barren balls of rock orbiting stars in neat, easily predictable elliptical paths. They really hate humans and other sentient beings, who are much more messy and unpredictable than other living things.

The Auditors are not gods in the Discworld sense, as they do not derive their existence from human belief. Indeed, the Auditors find belief inherently repulsive. Belief and imagination are the ultimate mess: They shape and reform the physical world in almost infinitely varied and complex ways. Where the Auditors see a fragment of carbonaceous chondrite heated by the friction of atmospheric entry, imagination sees a falling star. Where the Auditors see a random cleft in granite, imagination sees a dark cave haunted by monsters. To the Auditors, this is infuriating; after all, how can one catalogue or quantify a dragon, a basilisk, poetry or Justice? The Auditors existed long before humans and would be quite happy to exist long after them.

Fortunately for humanity and every other living thing, the Auditors can't simply wipe out life, because that's against the Rules; the Auditors can't break the Rules because, in a certain sense, they are the Rules. Unfortunately, a loophole exists in the Rules which allows the Auditors to influence humans into doing what they cannot do directly; in several of the Discworld novels, the Auditors hire humans to perform tasks that will make the world less "messy", paying them with the gold they created out of thin air using their abilities to manipulate reality.

Character of the day

Gytha Ogg (usually called Nanny Ogg) is a witch and member of the Lancre coven. The character of Nanny Ogg is based on the Mother stereotype of the Triple Goddess myth, and probably influenced by the character Nannie Slag in the Gormenghast series. She's had 5 husbands and been married to three of them and has fifteen children who survived their early childhood (one was born some ten years after the death of her last husband). She has as well innumerable grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but that's incidental; what makes her the Mother is her mentality. People go to Granny Weatherwax for help when they have no choice, but they go to Nanny for advice all the time. Granny is respected, but Nanny is actually liked.

Nanny Ogg has a talent for getting along with people and fitting in. As described in Maskerade, people, after knowing her for fifteen minutes, feel like they have known her all of their lives. Granny Weatherwax knows about this ability, and recognizes its use, and wonders sometimes if it would have been worth acquiring it. She's a lot wiser than Esme (Weatherwax) in some ways, and certainly wise enough not to show it. Gytha Ogg is seen as "one of the people" in a way that Esme isn't. While Granny thinks there's no point in competing if you aren't going to win, Nanny reckons the sympathy you get for being a good runner-up is much better. Granny comes across as judgemental, whereas Nanny has a mind so broad she could tie it under her chin. She appears to be kinder than Granny, but is equally prepared to make tough decisions if necessary.