the-tao-of-fandom:

But yeah, as I went on about at great lenght, the parallels between Angua and Vimes are just astounding, once you start pay attention (I sure didn’t, at first), but Thud! is just a bloody masterclass like

all that stuff about not giving into the Beast part of you? Who are we talking about? The werewolf who has been having a personal identity crisis for probably half a dozen years by now, or the man with the walking substitious entity of Law in his head?

And it’s no coincidence either; as demonstrated by their (unusually) short fuses during the book (largely triggered by things being outside their control); Emphasis on marked activities to remind themselves they are not said Beast (reading to young Sam, paying for chickens – going after chickens in the first place instead of people), about not making excuses, presisting in prevening themselves from treating the people they despise badly (deep-downers for Sam, vampires for both of them) and, oh, this ENORMOUS prejudice they have against, you guessed it, VAMPIRES.

Like, it’s almost funny how similar they are in their response to Sally. Angua can wave it off as being ‘a werewolf thing’, but their reasons are pretty much the same; they hate that vampires get treated as human when they are really not. And yet Angua prevents herself from pouncing on her when her instincts tell her to do so, and Vimes tries his hardest to treat her like just another copper, even when he’s three parts furious and one part terrified off her.

(the funniest part is when they, together, confront her about spying on the watch, and then refuse to allow her to resign. Like, you successfully infiltrated the Watch and fed information to our sorta-frenemies? You’re gonna be a GREAT copper, even if we don’t like you personally.)

But the clincher for me is that, in the end, it’s Angua who brings down Vimes just as he tries to stop himself from giving into the Beast and killing any more deep-downers. In her werewolf form.

Like. I’m sure I don’t need to rattle on further on just how symbolically relevant that is.