Something I think about sometimes from Discworld
So in The Truth, William de Worde is this cool protagonist guy, writing all the news, kickstarting the newspaper industry, exposing sinister plots, meeting new friends and loved ones.
But then, when he shows up again in another book as a cameo, Pratchett does something kind of neat that I feel like I don’t see very often. The protagonists of that book (I forget which it was - maybe Monstrous Regiment or Making Money?) see him and describe him as a silly, stuffy, self-important kind of man.
Granted, Discworld’s ability to do something like this has to do with its structure and how it tells a lot of different stories with a lot of different viewpoint characters. But I’d like to see this done more often because at times it’s really meant a lot to me.
In short, it’s the idea that the world isn’t divided into cool, magnetic, universally-likeable people who everyone wants to be around and awkward downers and disappointments who nobody does. You can be the hero of one person’s story and the mildly-unlikeable background character of another’s. And that’s really important - especially for someone with a big, hot pile of social anxiety and internalized self-loathing over trans and autistic stuff.
arcticflakes
