Dividing up the allegorical and real

[GrownUp]

Originally Posted by Space Monkey

Possibly not Weatherwax, but Nanny Ogg could be very real - I've known a few Nanny Oggs.
Mort is my brother - at least he was when he first met Death and 'couldn't find his arse with both hands'. (And walked like he had more than one pair of knees!)
Umm, apart from the metaphysical abilities, Susan Sto Helit is very real too - her unnerving attention to detail and the scary level of no-nonsense is someone we all knew.

Yep, I agree with you. Susan's mum, wife of Mort, also, nice and real. Even her brief psycho-ness in, um, The Light Fantastic, was it? ...was the sort of psycho-ishness you get in scary films and suchlike here.

And Sybil Vimes is recognisable in this world too. She could live in the New Forest somewhere.

What about Angua? Very much of what she says and does is truly understandable, she's written so well, but does that sympathetic writing make it easy to forget how much of her human character is influenced by her werewolf mentality? Or is she being written as a sympathetic protaganist who happens to be a wolf sometimes, everyone has their peculiarities? So in that case in this world she might be the same except she'd be a weekend morris dancer or something.

[Eye of the Beholder]

Originally Posted by GrownUp

I still don't know about Granny Weatherwax. I reckon the wizards at the University could swap magic for Philosophy, Theology, The Classics, as long as they still had offices and power and could be cantankerous, but not her, I reckon. The sort of advanced logic she uses is only part of her. I don't reckon she could sit in her house and use her empathy to imagine what other people and things are feeling in a real world. Magic and - the exchange - are integral to her.
In fact, that is her great problem. Being an ordinary person as well having this real great power and ability. If she was an ordinary wise woman as you would get here she would be better off. Less conflicted, I reckon.

But Granny Weatherwax hardly ever uses magic anyway. She's a psychologist and a chiropractor. I think she'd be well able to fit into our world. She might miss Borrowing, but i think she'd still be just like the granny we know and love.

[rogerrabit]

yeah well come to glastonbury and u will meet plenty of old rons dwndrgn lol

[ommigosh]

I think most of the characters in Pratchett books works so well because we easily recognise them as the genuine people types which are all around us. Even the ones who couldn't exist in this world (Reg Shoe the zombie, frinstance) have characteristics which we can see in real people all the time (bolshy activism for a particular cause in Reg's case).
Pratchett has the happy knack of usually making his characters into convincing personalities, even if they are zombies, trolls, vampires and such like which don't exist in the real world.