Thread by @aliettedb

I'm still super upset at #TheWatch trailer, a thread
I've said many times that Terry Pratchett was foundational for me 1/?

I discovered him when the Discworld video games came out, at around the same time that the books in Pocket SF (the silvers covers with the detachable cardboard cover art inside!) showed up at my local bookshop. It was a French translation, but I DEVOURED it 2/?

They were not being released fast enough for me, so after Wyrd Sisters I switched to English (I basically taught myself to read English so I could read Ursula K Le Guin, Terry Pratchett and Elizabeth Peters). I'd ask relatives to bring me books 3/?

When we moved to the UK, I discovered there was an ENTIRE SHELF of Terry Pratchett novels, and I set about to slowly and meticulously buy them all. I got £20 of pocket money a month. That was 2.5 books. It took me a year 4/?

I loved the Watch. It was policing and ethics and community, and moral questions of justice and who got to administer what justice, and how good people could try to function in a world that had misguided people, evil people, and indifferent people 5/?

In retrospect, I'm really glad that teenage!me imprinted on the morals of Terry Pratchett and David Gemmell, and not Terry Goodkind (another thing I read obsessively at the time and later... got over, lol). 6/?

The Watch books are fast paced, laugh-out books, but underneath it all they ask very serious questions about what it means to be moral, what it means to be fair, what it means to be part of a community, which community gets policing. And Night Watch is FREAKING BRILLIANCE 7/?

(I'll save my feels about Night Watch for another time, but suffice to say it confronts the complicity of the police in dictatorships, revolutions and darkness, and just deepens the choices the main characters make) 8/?

I love Vimes and his anger and his crystal-clear feelings about who gets to pass justice, and his confused feelings about other things, I love Carrot and his innate goodness, I love Angua and how she gets to be the strong one and deal with her own messes, I love Cherry

I love the complex relationship between Vetinari and Vimers, Vetinari and Carrot, Vetinari and the Watch, and the way Sybil Rankin just becomes this amazing character who steals every scene she's in

The Watch got me through my teenage and early twenties, and I still reread the books from start to finish every couple of years

I see absolutely NOTHING of the books in the trailer. I see vigilantism (which Vimes ABHORS) being justified. I see pretty!Sybil being armed (which is not at all what Sybil does, her strength is weaponising social niceties, and it should be enough)

Most of all, I see Vimes as some kind of funny, incompetent seeming policeman, and that is NOT what Vimes is about. Vimes is drunk. Vimes is angry. But Vimes is never anything less than sharp

So anyway this is a long thread to just say that I feel someone took my teenage years and just repeatedly trampled them while setting them on fire

I'm a big fan of remixing things and adapting them, and I don't expect any adaptation to be faithful in the sense of rigidly following books. But... you cannot take the core of what makes the story, remove it, and then change every single character and still call it the Watch

This is why I am super disappointed and this is why I won't be watching the BBC Watch adaptation. I saw that @Narrativia_Ltd and @rhipratchett were involved with other Pratchett adaptations--these are the ones I'll be saving my viewing time for

Addendum that this thread is getting a lot of traction, and I want to draw your attention to this from @D_Libris

https://twitter.com/D_Libris/status/1315239456274706433?s=20

Worth remembering that among all the changes they made is a major breakthrough in non-binary rep in a mainstream TV series which is important

So hmmm if you liked this thread, I should probably plug my books?
Queer sapphic retelling of Beauty and the Beast aliettedebodard.com/dragonpalace
Alt gothic postcolonial Paris aliettedebodard.com/bibliography/n…
Mystery heist in space with sentient spaceship
subterraneanpress.com/seven-of-infin…