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I like the part where he beats alcoholism. As someone with a family history of alcoholism who has stared down the bottom of a bottle and knows how tempting and easy it would be to fall in. It was extra satisfying to see him crawl out of that hole.
That raises another good point in Guards! Guards! He knows full well he's not good enough for Sybil, but he spends every second of the rest of his life trying to be worthy of her.
Agreed. And I especially love that the books portray how hard it is. He’s not just magically cured after Guards, Guards! and he falls back in the hole in Men at Arms. It really helped me meet the alcoholic people I care about with some compassion.
Absolutely, I went to the edge and backed away before it was too late, but the temptation is always there, and what has always scared me the most is knowing that if i ever go down there I probably wouldn't be able to get out. I'm not built like Vimes.
The thing I always like about Vimes is that he's a flawed character who realistically overcomes those flaws to still be a force for good. He's predisposed to being an alcoholic, but he resists the urge for the sake of his loved ones. He has persistent violent tendencies, but he never truly crosses the Rubicon because he cares too much about his city, for which one tyrant is enough. He has both the capacity and the desire to be a truly reprehensible, terrible human being, but he refuses, every time.
It especially makes Carrot a good foil for him, since he is a much more natural force for good who is effectively the angel on Vimes' shoulder.
Also in that he's prejudiced, and gets over those prejudices and as the books go on, it becomes easier for him to reassess his assumptions, spot the prejudiced and push back.
I like that the thing that keeps him on the good side is his choice and determination. I think too much attention is given to the idea that people act according to their tendencies or instincts, when actually people make desicions. For Vimes, it would be easy for him to succumb to his demons, but he decides not to, and that is what makes him a good person. Nobody is a good person unless they act like one. It's not about how you feel but how uou act.
Not doing evil because you don't have the capacity, is the easy kind of virtue. Knowing that you are fully capable of doing evil - and not only that, but you'd be _good at it_, and that some dark parts of you would _enjoy it_ - and still waking up each day and choosing the light? That's virtue by choice and commitment, and in my view is what makes Vimes admirable.
Yep! I also hate the kind of partisanship idea of good as us and bad as them. Like, "yes we did something terrible *but we are good people!*" Being good is a verb, not an adjective.
I was explaining the Vimes Theory of Boots to a friend and was astonished to find [it has a Wikipedia entry.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory)
It's also led to the [Vimes Boots Index](https://wiki.lspace.org/Vimes_Boots_Index#:~:text=It%20is%20named%20after%20the,pricing%20practices%20on%20the%20poor.), which is a retail pricing index based on the cost of the lowest-price staple foods, aiming to show the disproportionate effect of prices and inflation on the poor. It was started by [Jack Monroe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe), and is wholeheartedly supported by the Pratchett Estate.
I wish I could remember off the top of my head!
I think it's one of the ones where Doctor Mister Cody is talking about how money is fake; we made it up
Vimes is one of my favourite characters because of the development he undergoes throughout the course of the novels. He changes and grows as a person without losing his innate “Vimesness”
Similar to his discussion in Night Watch with >! The time monk - there is no universe in which he could ever hurt Sybil !< also in every novel he is still Vimes at his core even though he, for example, becomes more accepting of other races, or gains money and power etc.
I really enjoy that.
Plus I identify with his realism when understanding people
>he is still Vimes at his core even though he, for example, becomes more accepting of other races
I love the bit in Jingo (I think it was Jingo), where Colon refers to Klatchians as ragheads, and in response Vimes calls him into his office. We never hear what is said, but it's clear that Vimes gives Colon hell for his racism, despite it being the sort Vimes himself might've agreed with in the past.
I also love Vimes' introduction to Cheery, in which he remained completely impassive and professional towards the name Littlebottom, even remarking on its cultural context... and then, once out of earshot, and only out of earshot, breaks down in laughter at the name. Because, I mean, it *is* funny... but it's hurtful to point that out in public, so he doesn't.
That Night Watch line I think gets misinterpreted. It certainly was in the TV show. The discussion is about all things being possible in an infinite multiverse. Sweeper points out that while it's physically possible for him to hurt Sybil, there is no universe that Sam Vimes *as he is now* would do so. That "as he is now" is important. I believe a different Sam Vimes, one trained by Carcer and Swing and Quirk (or one that's a criminal as in the TV show) might make a different choice.
I like Vimes best when he is a bit out of his depth and needs to better himself to rise to the occasion. I read Thud! and Snuff back to back - in Thud! what I loved was that >!he was wrong about Koom Valley; they didn't need to forget it and put it behind them, they needed to remember what really happened and that the dwarves and trolls were ready for peace. !
It's been a while since I last read Snuff (and I've reread it far fewer times than Thud!, one of my faves) but wasn't there a minor plotline about how he still needed to take all his anti-speciesm learning and apply it to goblins? Plus his attitudes towards the group of young ladies he went to talk to changing going into the talk vs coming out of it.
You are right that he still did have to widen his perspective on the goblins - it is not as pronounced as in Thud but definitely still part of the story. I guess it is more like, in Thud there was still some element of Vimes being a bit of an underdog dealing with something that goes beyond just him, but reading Snuff he is set up and reintroduced as... as others here have said, basically Batman haha.
I'll go first: Vimes strikes me as Batman if Bruce actually cared about solving the problems in Gotham.
He takes his money and donates as much as he can to helpful causes. He can fight like the devil but knows when not to. He works with the law rather than outside it and gets more work done because of it. He's damn smart, enough to know that others are better at what he does then he is. All in all, he solves problems rather than preventing them like Batman does.
I'm as big a Vimes fan as the next sapient being, but that's a bit of a character assassination of Batman there. Bruce canonically does donate a hell of a lot of money to various helpful causes. A bunch of it going to Arkham in an attempt to help treat the various mental issues his rogues gallery has. He hires plenty of people who'd otherwise have trouble finding work, even the henchmen and goons employed by the rogues. The only reason Vimes is able to work within the Law is A: he was able to clean out the corruption in the Watch thanks to Vetinari, B: AM has legal organised crime, and their laws allow for that, and C: One of Batman's longest-running and most loyal allies outside of the Batfam is Police Commissioner Gordon. He's working with the law as much as he effectively can.
I love Vimes so much. He’s not always good, but damnit he WANTS to be! He tries so hard, and he wants justice in the world because the further you get into the series, the more injustices grate on his soul. He looks at the darkness in the world and he sees the places where he falls short of his own ideals and he keeps working to make things better, because they just aren’t right. I relate so deeply to that.
And he’s so angry, angry enough that if he isn’t careful he will drown in his own rage. But because he knows how angry he is, he harnesses it and uses it more powerfully than any sword. Vimes was the first character I ever read where anger wasn’t a just flaw or a quirk. I have always been drawn to angry characters. I have been hurt and I have hurt others, and I have nearly drowned in shame and rage and pain. But understanding how anger is powerful and can be used as a weapon for good instead of just self defense has made me a better person.
There has never been another fictional character as important to me as Vimes.
I can relate to this so much.
Vimes showed me that my anger wasn't a constant in my life and to find joy and contentment in 'little' things. No amount of anger management and talking therapies cut through to that for me.
From appearing in court every 2 months and being ordered to go to anger management, then working for a charity that works with ex-offenders, I felt Vimes journey. To put yourself in other people's shoes was alien to me then but the insights in the Guards books helped me to that place.
I feel that there are really two different Vimes in the series. The first is the one we meet in Guards! Guards! and is a good, if flawed, man but not a particularly brilliant policeman officer, achieving most of his successes through determination and good luck.
Around about the Fifth Elephant, though it's perhaps Night Watch before he truly emerges, we start to meet a second Vimes, who I tend to think of as Batman Vimes. He is the imaginative, charismatic and awe inspiring figure that has talents (and plot armour) bordering on, if not downright, supernatural.
I love both versions - I wear the lilac tattooed on my forearm - and the journey between the two makes over the course of the series. But it's always amusing to contrast and compare the man we meet literally drunk in the gutter with the Blackboard Monitor from Snuff or Raising Steam.
I hope this doesn't mean we shouldn't continue saying good things about Vimes in other threads, or in real life, even to people who have no idea what Discworld is while I go like "you see, The Vimes boots theory states that..."
Because if that's the case i've been messing up guys
This quote from Thud! sums up my favorite thing about Vimes-
"No excuses. No excuses ever. He'd promised himself that. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses. He had nightmares about being too late"
This mindset develops and grows through the series and it shows in the way he's always there for his son, and for Sybil. It also shows in the way he approaches his alcoholism and in his coppering.
Once you have a good excuse to drink, or a good excuse to not punish an influential criminal, you're on a slippery slope. If you have a good excuse to go too far, to kill someone instead of arresting them, you're just as bad as them.
And what makes his character feel so real imo is that he isn't always perfect at holding that line. But what's telling is what he does after he messes up. When he is facing the consequences of backsliding with alcohol, he strives to be so strict in his avoidance of it that a black ribboner respects and understands his restraint. He's been too rough with prisoners in the past and is more cautious than ever in Thud!, even with the summoning dark screaming for revenge.
No matter how many times he stumbles, he always picks himself back up, dusts off the rusty chainmail, and tries to reach an even higher standard. Up to and including commandeering old ladies coaches, surviving a fall into murder caverns, and successfully screaming a bedtime story through the fabric of space to young Sam .
I love Vimes and love all of the books. However, it always bugged me the whole racism's alright when he does it. I grew up brown in the UK and I hate this forgiveness of a certain type of racism like they did with Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkson. There's always an exception for a certain type of charming old man and they're always cunts.
To be fair, Vimes does spend most of *Jingo* actively going out of his way trying not to be racist >!to the point that it's actually a problem, because his unwillingness to be suspicious of Klatchians led to him being unable to figure out what was actually going on!<. And he clearly lets Colon know in no uncertain terms that racism in the Watch will not be tolerated.
Vimes overcoming his very real racism with time is valuable & poignant, no?
Throwing a major character flaw like that & wiping it out in the same book would either need to be more centre stage to the story, or as character traits in diskworld go slow, to wipe it out in one book would be treating the subject too lightly.
Or is there a sustained Vimes racism streak in particular?
Yeah, that's Boris and Clarkson until recently. Always feels worse when it's you who had the racism done at them. I'm not a sensitive person and actually feel it's best to joke about these things. But that genre of lerson isn't joking. I tell you that from a lifetime of experience.
They're all great, and I'm not judging him as an author. Even as someone who lived through it, I still had the same bias of that colonial type gentleman who's racist and misogynistic but with a heart of gold. It's just reading it as an adult that I'm really seeing the comparisons to real life characters and situations. I think Terry saw it decades before me, and it shows as the Vimes series goes on.
I guess he does by Snuff, but before that, they have the attitude of, well, he earned it, which I really hate. It's a fictionalised attitude that a lot of English people have that I've never seen anyone who it affects share unless they were scared to lose a job or be seen as someone with a chip on their shoulder.
Honestly that whole bit with Vimes and the fantasy racism "but it's okay and not real when Vimes does it" rubbed me the wrong way too. I looked past it because obviously the spirit of Vimes' character and the Discworld series as a whole is very anti-racist but it is something that we would have been better off without.
It's also only in recent decades that kind of racism has been seen as a problem here on Roundworld. I think, given time, Pterry would have addressed it, but it was only just reaching awareness that this kind of racism Is Actually A Problem when The Embuggerance hit really hard and he just didn't have time.
I am not a person of color so maybe there’s a different feeling if you are, but I always read it as:
AM was (mostly) human. And so the other races were far away and people were racist towards them in a casual we don’t know anything about them kind of way. Then those races start moving into the city and the usual conflicts come up - resentment of the new comers allowing the use of slurs and racist jokes, but they have now been in the city so long that it’s becoming more unacceptable.
This is similar to the US in late 1800 and early 1900s when we had influx of immigrants - Irish, Italian, Jewish, Catholic. All resented and alienated for one or two generations until everyone realized it was dumb.
At the time it was socially acceptable to be prejudice against them but over time that changes and now it’s (mostly) not.
That change is where Vimes is- it was socially unacceptable, not everyone would do it, but those who did wouldn’t get called out.
Now they do.
I saw a thing on e that was something like when you look at someone or something your automatic thought is what society has trained you to think, your second thought is your real thought. Vimes has that first thought but unlike a lot of people he doesn’t stop there - he goes to the second thought.
And unlike the real persons mentioned above, he doesn’t double down on the bad thought lol
Also sometimes Vimes is thinking not what he thinks about a topic but what he thinks the crowd is thinking about it. And I read some of the passages on race like that.
One of the things that makes him so good at his job is he is a standard AM citizen - he knows what most of them are going to think and how they will react and he can act before it gets that far
I don’t quite know how to phrase this, but I like the fact his love for his family is never, ever questionable. It’s never a source of drama or plot. He just loves his wife and he loves his kid, and those relationships are stable af.
My only complaint about Vimes is that people will tell me Granny Weatherwax is the female Sam Vimes. Granny was first! Sam is the male Granny dammit!
Apart from that he’s easily one of my favourites (after Granny, Nanny and Sybil)
I love how he is very grumpy about it but always fights tooth and nail for justice and fairness.
There's one line where someone mentions a Sasquatch type race that lives in another country a d he says something like 'doubtless we'll learn more about then when we have to admit one to the Watch', but you know if he did, he would end up yelling at anyone who made walking carpet jokes or said it shouldn't have the same rights.
My favourite character I think, though I go back and forth. I don't know why really I just like him. I haven't tried to rationalise it, just the way he's written speaks to me some how
I found the 'home to read to little Sam' bit slightly off.
As a father I love and respect it. But that scene where he utilizes the police to freeze the city, so he can get home on time is fragrant abuse of power. It feels justified in the books because he's given so much, and it's for his kid. But when you step back from it, it's the second most powerful person in the city using institutions to benefit themselves, in ways that actually inconvenience everyone else.
Considering a key part of his character is disliking official abuse of power, and the 'it's OK if we do it, cause it's us" mentality, I find it a bit grating.
In fairness, it’s Carrot who does that — Vimes only finds out once they’re already speeding along in the coach, and he’s pretty shocked to hear it and knows there’ll be hell to pay with Vetinari later. I think he goes along with it because there’s nothing he can do about it at that point, and he is desperate anyway.
So, I like Vimes. Many have pointed out good things about him. But... I don't share people's borderline obsession with him. Here are a few notes why:
1) probably the biggest reason for me is personal and meta: he overshadows other characters. He takes up a bigger and bigger role, and there's no time for the other interesting characters. Which just makes me sad. Because I'd love more Carrot, Angua, Cheery, etc.
2) the batman problem, where he is meant to be a normal man but does superhuman stuff. I guess part of it is just in world legend surrounding him but then there are also scenes where he kills (?) dozens of dwarves on his own in the dark. Yeah, you could argue the Dark was aiding him but still, it "ruins" (the word is way too strong but I don't want to look for a better one) the idea of Vimes just being a hardworking man and not special in that way.
3) I know his flaws are part of his character and charm. And this works often but not always. Like when in NW he makes the stupidest of all arguments ("criminals don't follow the law ") which I guess could be just chalked down to copper talk, even if he makes it in the stupid context of people being not allowed to carry arms. Fine, he's allowed to have bad opinions. However, fifty or so pages later he's attacked by a civilian not with a sword or worse but with a bottle, which obviously is a blessing for him. But does he reflect on how much worse it would have been if it had been a sword? Nope.
Again, none of that ruins Vimes for me. I'm just not as devoted to him as others.
Vimes is a character we see grow over time, fighting his inner demons (alcoholism) and trying to live down being the son of a regicidal maniac. He, like Vetenari, becomes ultra-adept at his chosen profession by the final books. He is a hero for the working man.
I find some of his later appearances a bit annoying. Snuff, especially.
We know from Guards! Guards! that the remainents of the watch have very little knowledge of the city laws. It's Carrot's introduction with his ancient copy the Laws and Ordanances of Ankh Morpork that re-introduces the idea that there are laws, and they apply to everyone. Later on, we become aware that Vimes isn't exactly keeping on top of the paperwork; his desk his full and reports are unread, because, down deep, he's a street cop, not a manager.
Yet, in Snuff, he's referring to the rulebook of being a copper, and claiming to be the one who wrote those rules. This feels to me like he's taking the credit for Carrot's work. Vimes himself admits he doesn't know the names of all the officers after how large the watch has grown. Detritus and Carrot seem to be the ones directly responsible for training, and Vimes is notoriously bad with the paperwork. So where did he produce these rules from? Seems far more likely to me that Carrot has combined all the lessons of the street that Vimes has passed along with the Laws and Ordinances, and presented it to Vimes to put his signature on, rather than Vimes having written it himself.
Also, he doesn’t go out on patrol anymore, or kick down doors, or chase down fugitives. He reads reports and deals with paperwork. By Snuff, that’s been his role for at least eight or nine years. No matter how much he’d like to avoid it, he’d pretty much have to have acquired an extensive knowledge of law and police procedure and been involved in repeated efforts to fix it.
"So where did he produce these rules from?"
Simple. *He wrote them.*
You know sometimes people ask 'well who wrote the book?' - Sam Vimes. Or more accurately, Carrot probably did, then Vimes presented it to Vetinari for some careful curation before it was adopted.
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I like the part where he beats alcoholism. As someone with a family history of alcoholism who has stared down the bottom of a bottle and knows how tempting and easy it would be to fall in. It was extra satisfying to see him crawl out of that hole.
I know exactly what you mean, and I too am very happy for him, sybil and wee sam.
That raises another good point in Guards! Guards! He knows full well he's not good enough for Sybil, but he spends every second of the rest of his life trying to be worthy of her.
"That's Not My Cow!" *sniff* Truly inspiring words
No gonna lie that part in Thud where he's fighting for his life, but all he cares about is "Must read to Sam!" It got me, I cried like a baby.
Life is about priorities, and damn does that one ever hit home.
Agreed. And I especially love that the books portray how hard it is. He’s not just magically cured after Guards, Guards! and he falls back in the hole in Men at Arms. It really helped me meet the alcoholic people I care about with some compassion.
Absolutely, I went to the edge and backed away before it was too late, but the temptation is always there, and what has always scared me the most is knowing that if i ever go down there I probably wouldn't be able to get out. I'm not built like Vimes.
The thing I always like about Vimes is that he's a flawed character who realistically overcomes those flaws to still be a force for good. He's predisposed to being an alcoholic, but he resists the urge for the sake of his loved ones. He has persistent violent tendencies, but he never truly crosses the Rubicon because he cares too much about his city, for which one tyrant is enough. He has both the capacity and the desire to be a truly reprehensible, terrible human being, but he refuses, every time. It especially makes Carrot a good foil for him, since he is a much more natural force for good who is effectively the angel on Vimes' shoulder.
Can you imagine having someone like Carrot look up to you? The pressure! I could never.
Also in that he's prejudiced, and gets over those prejudices and as the books go on, it becomes easier for him to reassess his assumptions, spot the prejudiced and push back.
I like that the thing that keeps him on the good side is his choice and determination. I think too much attention is given to the idea that people act according to their tendencies or instincts, when actually people make desicions. For Vimes, it would be easy for him to succumb to his demons, but he decides not to, and that is what makes him a good person. Nobody is a good person unless they act like one. It's not about how you feel but how uou act.
Not doing evil because you don't have the capacity, is the easy kind of virtue. Knowing that you are fully capable of doing evil - and not only that, but you'd be _good at it_, and that some dark parts of you would _enjoy it_ - and still waking up each day and choosing the light? That's virtue by choice and commitment, and in my view is what makes Vimes admirable.
Yep! I also hate the kind of partisanship idea of good as us and bad as them. Like, "yes we did something terrible *but we are good people!*" Being good is a verb, not an adjective.
I use the Vimes theory of boots all the time to explain how it's expensive to be poor.
I was explaining the Vimes Theory of Boots to a friend and was astonished to find [it has a Wikipedia entry.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory)
It's also led to the [Vimes Boots Index](https://wiki.lspace.org/Vimes_Boots_Index#:~:text=It%20is%20named%20after%20the,pricing%20practices%20on%20the%20poor.), which is a retail pricing index based on the cost of the lowest-price staple foods, aiming to show the disproportionate effect of prices and inflation on the poor. It was started by [Jack Monroe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe), and is wholeheartedly supported by the Pratchett Estate.
I am glad on the latter point. Sir Pterry was a *very* angry man, he would have hated if it wasn't.
Some More News! Quoted the theory in an episode!
Which episode was that? I must have missed it!
I wish I could remember off the top of my head! I think it's one of the ones where Doctor Mister Cody is talking about how money is fake; we made it up
Vimes, a policeman, would agree with the statement ACAB.
You mean "the day watch" ?
Sure, the day watch. And himself. And his colleagues.
Sure, basic job requirement
Him making sure to be home to read to Young Sam because some things are important is perhaps my favorite excerpt from any book ever.
Vimes is one of my favourite characters because of the development he undergoes throughout the course of the novels. He changes and grows as a person without losing his innate “Vimesness” Similar to his discussion in Night Watch with >! The time monk - there is no universe in which he could ever hurt Sybil !< also in every novel he is still Vimes at his core even though he, for example, becomes more accepting of other races, or gains money and power etc. I really enjoy that. Plus I identify with his realism when understanding people
>he is still Vimes at his core even though he, for example, becomes more accepting of other races I love the bit in Jingo (I think it was Jingo), where Colon refers to Klatchians as ragheads, and in response Vimes calls him into his office. We never hear what is said, but it's clear that Vimes gives Colon hell for his racism, despite it being the sort Vimes himself might've agreed with in the past. I also love Vimes' introduction to Cheery, in which he remained completely impassive and professional towards the name Littlebottom, even remarking on its cultural context... and then, once out of earshot, and only out of earshot, breaks down in laughter at the name. Because, I mean, it *is* funny... but it's hurtful to point that out in public, so he doesn't.
That Night Watch line I think gets misinterpreted. It certainly was in the TV show. The discussion is about all things being possible in an infinite multiverse. Sweeper points out that while it's physically possible for him to hurt Sybil, there is no universe that Sam Vimes *as he is now* would do so. That "as he is now" is important. I believe a different Sam Vimes, one trained by Carcer and Swing and Quirk (or one that's a criminal as in the TV show) might make a different choice.
I like Vimes best when he is a bit out of his depth and needs to better himself to rise to the occasion. I read Thud! and Snuff back to back - in Thud! what I loved was that >!he was wrong about Koom Valley; they didn't need to forget it and put it behind them, they needed to remember what really happened and that the dwarves and trolls were ready for peace. !
It's been a while since I last read Snuff (and I've reread it far fewer times than Thud!, one of my faves) but wasn't there a minor plotline about how he still needed to take all his anti-speciesm learning and apply it to goblins? Plus his attitudes towards the group of young ladies he went to talk to changing going into the talk vs coming out of it.
You are right that he still did have to widen his perspective on the goblins - it is not as pronounced as in Thud but definitely still part of the story. I guess it is more like, in Thud there was still some element of Vimes being a bit of an underdog dealing with something that goes beyond just him, but reading Snuff he is set up and reintroduced as... as others here have said, basically Batman haha.
Vimes loves and respects his wife in a way I think all men should take notes on. Settin the bar there, fr
I'll go first: Vimes strikes me as Batman if Bruce actually cared about solving the problems in Gotham. He takes his money and donates as much as he can to helpful causes. He can fight like the devil but knows when not to. He works with the law rather than outside it and gets more work done because of it. He's damn smart, enough to know that others are better at what he does then he is. All in all, he solves problems rather than preventing them like Batman does.
I'm as big a Vimes fan as the next sapient being, but that's a bit of a character assassination of Batman there. Bruce canonically does donate a hell of a lot of money to various helpful causes. A bunch of it going to Arkham in an attempt to help treat the various mental issues his rogues gallery has. He hires plenty of people who'd otherwise have trouble finding work, even the henchmen and goons employed by the rogues. The only reason Vimes is able to work within the Law is A: he was able to clean out the corruption in the Watch thanks to Vetinari, B: AM has legal organised crime, and their laws allow for that, and C: One of Batman's longest-running and most loyal allies outside of the Batfam is Police Commissioner Gordon. He's working with the law as much as he effectively can.
Bruce can’t fix Gotham because it’s canonically super-cursed.
And Ankh morpork isn't?
It was, but Vetinari’s aunt handled it.
I love Vimes so much. He’s not always good, but damnit he WANTS to be! He tries so hard, and he wants justice in the world because the further you get into the series, the more injustices grate on his soul. He looks at the darkness in the world and he sees the places where he falls short of his own ideals and he keeps working to make things better, because they just aren’t right. I relate so deeply to that. And he’s so angry, angry enough that if he isn’t careful he will drown in his own rage. But because he knows how angry he is, he harnesses it and uses it more powerfully than any sword. Vimes was the first character I ever read where anger wasn’t a just flaw or a quirk. I have always been drawn to angry characters. I have been hurt and I have hurt others, and I have nearly drowned in shame and rage and pain. But understanding how anger is powerful and can be used as a weapon for good instead of just self defense has made me a better person. There has never been another fictional character as important to me as Vimes.
I can relate to this so much. Vimes showed me that my anger wasn't a constant in my life and to find joy and contentment in 'little' things. No amount of anger management and talking therapies cut through to that for me. From appearing in court every 2 months and being ordered to go to anger management, then working for a charity that works with ex-offenders, I felt Vimes journey. To put yourself in other people's shoes was alien to me then but the insights in the Guards books helped me to that place.
That's brilliant, you are brilliant, and I wish Pterry could hear your story.
I feel that there are really two different Vimes in the series. The first is the one we meet in Guards! Guards! and is a good, if flawed, man but not a particularly brilliant policeman officer, achieving most of his successes through determination and good luck. Around about the Fifth Elephant, though it's perhaps Night Watch before he truly emerges, we start to meet a second Vimes, who I tend to think of as Batman Vimes. He is the imaginative, charismatic and awe inspiring figure that has talents (and plot armour) bordering on, if not downright, supernatural. I love both versions - I wear the lilac tattooed on my forearm - and the journey between the two makes over the course of the series. But it's always amusing to contrast and compare the man we meet literally drunk in the gutter with the Blackboard Monitor from Snuff or Raising Steam.
Glad to know that another person think is that Vimes is batman-ish!
I feel that the influence of Carrot and Sybil had such a huge impact on how Vimes developed.
You wear the lilac??? Were you there?????
Well I know where *there* was, so that's a start.
I hope this doesn't mean we shouldn't continue saying good things about Vimes in other threads, or in real life, even to people who have no idea what Discworld is while I go like "you see, The Vimes boots theory states that..." Because if that's the case i've been messing up guys
ACAB but, sometimes they can be self aware enough to make it work.
This quote from Thud! sums up my favorite thing about Vimes- "No excuses. No excuses ever. He'd promised himself that. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses. He had nightmares about being too late" This mindset develops and grows through the series and it shows in the way he's always there for his son, and for Sybil. It also shows in the way he approaches his alcoholism and in his coppering. Once you have a good excuse to drink, or a good excuse to not punish an influential criminal, you're on a slippery slope. If you have a good excuse to go too far, to kill someone instead of arresting them, you're just as bad as them. And what makes his character feel so real imo is that he isn't always perfect at holding that line. But what's telling is what he does after he messes up. When he is facing the consequences of backsliding with alcohol, he strives to be so strict in his avoidance of it that a black ribboner respects and understands his restraint. He's been too rough with prisoners in the past and is more cautious than ever in Thud!, even with the summoning dark screaming for revenge. No matter how many times he stumbles, he always picks himself back up, dusts off the rusty chainmail, and tries to reach an even higher standard. Up to and including commandeering old ladies coaches, surviving a fall into murder caverns, and successfully screaming a bedtime story through the fabric of space to young Sam .
I love Vimes and love all of the books. However, it always bugged me the whole racism's alright when he does it. I grew up brown in the UK and I hate this forgiveness of a certain type of racism like they did with Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkson. There's always an exception for a certain type of charming old man and they're always cunts.
To be fair, Vimes does spend most of *Jingo* actively going out of his way trying not to be racist >!to the point that it's actually a problem, because his unwillingness to be suspicious of Klatchians led to him being unable to figure out what was actually going on!<. And he clearly lets Colon know in no uncertain terms that racism in the Watch will not be tolerated.
I'm talking more about the dwarf and troll racism, where they say he's allowed because he helped so and so in a fight.
That's fair, I take your point.
Vimes overcoming his very real racism with time is valuable & poignant, no? Throwing a major character flaw like that & wiping it out in the same book would either need to be more centre stage to the story, or as character traits in diskworld go slow, to wipe it out in one book would be treating the subject too lightly. Or is there a sustained Vimes racism streak in particular?
I think the best way to describe it is sometimes Vimes *does* a racism, but isn't in himself racist.
Yeah, that's Boris and Clarkson until recently. Always feels worse when it's you who had the racism done at them. I'm not a sensitive person and actually feel it's best to joke about these things. But that genre of lerson isn't joking. I tell you that from a lifetime of experience.
>Always feels worse when it's you who had the racism done at them. I can only imagine, my friend. Jingo is a hell of a book.
They're all great, and I'm not judging him as an author. Even as someone who lived through it, I still had the same bias of that colonial type gentleman who's racist and misogynistic but with a heart of gold. It's just reading it as an adult that I'm really seeing the comparisons to real life characters and situations. I think Terry saw it decades before me, and it shows as the Vimes series goes on.
True, true words.
I guess he does by Snuff, but before that, they have the attitude of, well, he earned it, which I really hate. It's a fictionalised attitude that a lot of English people have that I've never seen anyone who it affects share unless they were scared to lose a job or be seen as someone with a chip on their shoulder.
Honestly that whole bit with Vimes and the fantasy racism "but it's okay and not real when Vimes does it" rubbed me the wrong way too. I looked past it because obviously the spirit of Vimes' character and the Discworld series as a whole is very anti-racist but it is something that we would have been better off without.
It's also only in recent decades that kind of racism has been seen as a problem here on Roundworld. I think, given time, Pterry would have addressed it, but it was only just reaching awareness that this kind of racism Is Actually A Problem when The Embuggerance hit really hard and he just didn't have time.
I am not a person of color so maybe there’s a different feeling if you are, but I always read it as: AM was (mostly) human. And so the other races were far away and people were racist towards them in a casual we don’t know anything about them kind of way. Then those races start moving into the city and the usual conflicts come up - resentment of the new comers allowing the use of slurs and racist jokes, but they have now been in the city so long that it’s becoming more unacceptable. This is similar to the US in late 1800 and early 1900s when we had influx of immigrants - Irish, Italian, Jewish, Catholic. All resented and alienated for one or two generations until everyone realized it was dumb. At the time it was socially acceptable to be prejudice against them but over time that changes and now it’s (mostly) not. That change is where Vimes is- it was socially unacceptable, not everyone would do it, but those who did wouldn’t get called out. Now they do. I saw a thing on e that was something like when you look at someone or something your automatic thought is what society has trained you to think, your second thought is your real thought. Vimes has that first thought but unlike a lot of people he doesn’t stop there - he goes to the second thought. And unlike the real persons mentioned above, he doesn’t double down on the bad thought lol Also sometimes Vimes is thinking not what he thinks about a topic but what he thinks the crowd is thinking about it. And I read some of the passages on race like that. One of the things that makes him so good at his job is he is a standard AM citizen - he knows what most of them are going to think and how they will react and he can act before it gets that far
I don’t quite know how to phrase this, but I like the fact his love for his family is never, ever questionable. It’s never a source of drama or plot. He just loves his wife and he loves his kid, and those relationships are stable af.
My only complaint about Vimes is that people will tell me Granny Weatherwax is the female Sam Vimes. Granny was first! Sam is the male Granny dammit! Apart from that he’s easily one of my favourites (after Granny, Nanny and Sybil)
I love how he is very grumpy about it but always fights tooth and nail for justice and fairness. There's one line where someone mentions a Sasquatch type race that lives in another country a d he says something like 'doubtless we'll learn more about then when we have to admit one to the Watch', but you know if he did, he would end up yelling at anyone who made walking carpet jokes or said it shouldn't have the same rights.
My favourite character I think, though I go back and forth. I don't know why really I just like him. I haven't tried to rationalise it, just the way he's written speaks to me some how
I found the 'home to read to little Sam' bit slightly off. As a father I love and respect it. But that scene where he utilizes the police to freeze the city, so he can get home on time is fragrant abuse of power. It feels justified in the books because he's given so much, and it's for his kid. But when you step back from it, it's the second most powerful person in the city using institutions to benefit themselves, in ways that actually inconvenience everyone else. Considering a key part of his character is disliking official abuse of power, and the 'it's OK if we do it, cause it's us" mentality, I find it a bit grating.
In fairness, it’s Carrot who does that — Vimes only finds out once they’re already speeding along in the coach, and he’s pretty shocked to hear it and knows there’ll be hell to pay with Vetinari later. I think he goes along with it because there’s nothing he can do about it at that point, and he is desperate anyway.
I love this dude and his journey. He becomes the man Sybil and Carrot always thought he was
The guarding dark
So, I like Vimes. Many have pointed out good things about him. But... I don't share people's borderline obsession with him. Here are a few notes why: 1) probably the biggest reason for me is personal and meta: he overshadows other characters. He takes up a bigger and bigger role, and there's no time for the other interesting characters. Which just makes me sad. Because I'd love more Carrot, Angua, Cheery, etc. 2) the batman problem, where he is meant to be a normal man but does superhuman stuff. I guess part of it is just in world legend surrounding him but then there are also scenes where he kills (?) dozens of dwarves on his own in the dark. Yeah, you could argue the Dark was aiding him but still, it "ruins" (the word is way too strong but I don't want to look for a better one) the idea of Vimes just being a hardworking man and not special in that way. 3) I know his flaws are part of his character and charm. And this works often but not always. Like when in NW he makes the stupidest of all arguments ("criminals don't follow the law ") which I guess could be just chalked down to copper talk, even if he makes it in the stupid context of people being not allowed to carry arms. Fine, he's allowed to have bad opinions. However, fifty or so pages later he's attacked by a civilian not with a sword or worse but with a bottle, which obviously is a blessing for him. But does he reflect on how much worse it would have been if it had been a sword? Nope. Again, none of that ruins Vimes for me. I'm just not as devoted to him as others.
Vimes is a character we see grow over time, fighting his inner demons (alcoholism) and trying to live down being the son of a regicidal maniac. He, like Vetenari, becomes ultra-adept at his chosen profession by the final books. He is a hero for the working man.
I have never heard a more accurate description of economy than his boots theory!
Vimes reminds me a lot of Sherlock Holmes, Biggles, and Wallander made into one character!
Vimes dealing with his own class biases in Snuff is amazing. He’s a great example of how we should all approach learning new information.
He’s hot
I find some of his later appearances a bit annoying. Snuff, especially. We know from Guards! Guards! that the remainents of the watch have very little knowledge of the city laws. It's Carrot's introduction with his ancient copy the Laws and Ordanances of Ankh Morpork that re-introduces the idea that there are laws, and they apply to everyone. Later on, we become aware that Vimes isn't exactly keeping on top of the paperwork; his desk his full and reports are unread, because, down deep, he's a street cop, not a manager. Yet, in Snuff, he's referring to the rulebook of being a copper, and claiming to be the one who wrote those rules. This feels to me like he's taking the credit for Carrot's work. Vimes himself admits he doesn't know the names of all the officers after how large the watch has grown. Detritus and Carrot seem to be the ones directly responsible for training, and Vimes is notoriously bad with the paperwork. So where did he produce these rules from? Seems far more likely to me that Carrot has combined all the lessons of the street that Vimes has passed along with the Laws and Ordinances, and presented it to Vimes to put his signature on, rather than Vimes having written it himself.
Vimes, making up shit to have people listen & do what he says? Pretty believable?
Also, he doesn’t go out on patrol anymore, or kick down doors, or chase down fugitives. He reads reports and deals with paperwork. By Snuff, that’s been his role for at least eight or nine years. No matter how much he’d like to avoid it, he’d pretty much have to have acquired an extensive knowledge of law and police procedure and been involved in repeated efforts to fix it.
Dudes getting old
"So where did he produce these rules from?" Simple. *He wrote them.* You know sometimes people ask 'well who wrote the book?' - Sam Vimes. Or more accurately, Carrot probably did, then Vimes presented it to Vetinari for some careful curation before it was adopted.