Desperate Times And Measures And So Forth, To Be Fair, But If The Entity Living In My Eyeballs After

Seconding the recommendation for the Critshow, but to give some more mainstream examples, there's also Jack Harkness from Doctor Who and Torchwood, Hob Gabling from Sandman, and a character from Misfits whose name I can't remember because it's been years.

immortality through not being incapable of death but by coming back to life after you die no matter what is such a cool power like it’s just so fucking metal. you can rip me apart if you want, i’ll rise from my own viscera and all you’ll have done is piss me off

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

WIP of Jayce and Viktor levitation

Reminder that Jeffrey Combs is the #1 top Vorta apologist

Today's bird is this white breasted nuthatch!

Granny Weatherwax

This is Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise speaking. We’ve entered the orbit of a planet not terribly unlike our own… save that it is exclusively populated by petty old queens.

While I generally agree, I am going to go against type and share one thing that did always bug me about the Discworld: a lot of the ordinary protagonists turn out to be scions of important families. Vimes is first introduced as an alcoholic cop, but by Feet of Clay he's the descendant of the man who led the revolution against monarchy and killed the last king. Angua is an "ordinary" werewolf in Men at Arms but the daughter of one of the three most important families in Uberwald by The Fifth Elephant. Even the Weatherwax family is several times referred to as one with a lot of innate power (I am excluding Carrot from this because the fact that he is The One True King was always the joke).

It doesn't mean that there aren't characters who are, in fact, common folks. Or that these changes aren't very interesting directions for the characters. But it's definitely a pattern.

I think that the real reason that Terry Pratchett is my favourite fantasy writer is that he’s the only one who really centres working people in his stories. I mean, Game of Thrones is almost entirely about the antics of rival aristocrats; Harry Potter is heir to two family fortunes and the subject of a prophecy and goes to an elite boarding school; even the Hobbits (save Sam) in The Lord of the Rings are minor gentry. Meanwhile, who are the main protagonists in Discworld? A recovering-alcoholic cop; an old peasant woman who lives in a cottage; a conman who was forced to take over the post-office. Pratchett writes entire novels about classes of people that other writers treat as background characters. He’s not condescending in his depictions; he’s willing to show enlisted soldiers as people, rather than arrow-fodder; and he’s aware that even ‘simple peasants’ know detailed information about things that wizards and knights can’t be arsed to care about; that everything about the world takes a hell of a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes and that most people never see, And he makes sure that you know this, too.

Spotted in the wild yesterday.