Cimorene

My continuing project to collect the significant bits of Ponder/Ridcully canon, although I should have most of it by now, if not quite all. Follows the post with the quotes from Hogfather.

1. The Last Continent: Rincewind brings The Wet to FourEcks and Ridcully, Ponder, and the Senior Wizards (plus Mrs Whitlow) arrive by way of a dimensional portal in the office of the long-lost Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography... on a tiny desert island inhabited by an atheist creator god whom Ponder teaches about evolution and Mrs Whitlow teaches about sex. They get to FourEcks, via organic boat and then shipwreck, in time for Rincewind to save the day, and take him and the Luggage back with them. ( Read more... )

2. Night Watch: Night Watch is nearly exclusively a Vimes book, in fact, with a very occasional thread of Vetinari as per usual in a Vimes book, but it's framed with the wizards, because it's magic that accidentally catapults Vimes back in time. ( It also catapults Ridcully, in the bathtub, out into the yard. )

3. Unseen Academicals: Obviously this book's main thread is the wizards, although its primary protagonists are two non-wizard employees of the university, Nutt and Glenda, the respective best friends of Trevor Likely and Juliet, a dim-witted Discworldian recasting of Romeo & Juliet in hereditary supporters of rival footie teams. Nonetheless, it's pretty much the entire book that is relevant to Ponder/Ridcully, but I've picked out the most significant bits, at any rate. ( Read more... )

The reason that I actually started rereading old Discworld books was because of Vetinari/Drumknott. As I mentioned before, I was converted to a Vetinari/Drumknott shipper at Yuletide this year despite not having thought about the pairing before, and was dismayed to find that the recipient of both (gen, UST, short) pieces, kindkit, was also the only person writing it. She's also made a resource post-cum-manifesto for the pairing that referred to several passages particularly in the Social Improvement of Ankh-Morpork books, which inspired me to reread Going Postal, Making Money, and The Truth.

But as I mentioned a few days ago, after the epiphany begun in The Last Hero, which reached its tipping point in Unseen Academicals, those three re-reads appeared to me in an entirely different light! Suddenly it was "I see Ponder/Ridcully!" left and right. I still don't know exactly how I feel about this: I like the pairing, okay, and I want crave to read it (glurk), but I am (1.) opposed to them actually having sex, not so much because it would be gross (I don't mind old man pairings per se: old people can have sex, that's fine with me!) as because I can't really reconcile the thought of them as sexual beings with canon; and (2.) a little put off by the fact that Ridcully is basically 100% my grandfather, which is intermittently very unnerving.

After The Truth I turned my attention to books with high Ponder/Ridcully content and reread:

1. Soul Music. The book in which Hex is first introduced, and contains a sub-plot with the senior wizards getting addicted to Music with Rocks In and Ridcully and Ponder's attempts to investigate and deal with it. Cute, but the pairing would have to be at an infantile stage. They are more familiar later.



2. Hogfather. The wizards investigate the random appearance of new occult personifications, starting with the Verruca Gnome, following the excess of belief provided by the Hogfather's temporary disappearance. Hex has grown fairly large and the wizard subplot is about half sock monsters and cheerfulness fairies and half computer jokes (Anthill inside!). Hex, of course, means Ponder.
   
   ( LET THE QUOTAGE BEGIN )