Guards! Guards! Discussion Group

[=Tamar]

Interesting. Do a little people have negative comments about her girth or Pterry's description of it?

Nobby makes a comment about the dragon that "it's sodding enormous" and then blushes and changes it to "wide, egg-bearing hips" and "statuesque", obviously catching the implications possible with Sybil and thereby giving the reader the "little man" observation. Sybil is definitely large in all ways. But I don't see her as not being pretty, just that she is large, even as, much later, Agnes Nitt is large.

I kind of see Sybil in GG as being kind of that stereotypical large-bodied, breeder-hipped aristocratic women you often see in the novels of PG Wodehouse of other English drawing room authors. [...] The most important point about Sybil's physical appearance is that Sam Vimes is physically attracted to Sybil in spite of it or perhaps because of it. Certainly enough to father a son and have a romantic scene with her in Snuff.

I can easily believe that Vimes would be attracted to Sybil at least partly because of her size. Sir Terry makes the point with Agnes that Ramtops women were often courted for their strength, not their slenderness. This can be demonstrated historically on Earth. My father was born in 1903. He used to try to get us to eat by saying "Don't you want to grow up to be big and fat like me?" He was not fat at all, by the way. A friend of my sister's once visited the house; she was large like Sybil and Agnes. Later, my father referred to her quite sincerely as "that beautiful, beautiful blonde."

[DreadfulKata]

Interesting. Do a little people have negative comments about her girth or Pterry's description of it?

Nobby makes a comment about the dragon that "it's sodding enormous" and then blushes and changes it to "wide, egg-bearing hips" and "statuesque", obviously catching the implications possible with Sybil and thereby giving the reader the "little man" observation. Sybil is definitely large in all ways. But I don't see her as not being pretty, just that she is large, even as, much later, Agnes Nitt is large.

No, I haven't heard people explicitly having a problem with Sybil being fat. It's more something that seems to arise when casting suggestions are made. Names come up of actresses who are about as fat as Betty Page. Or people draw fanart where she's barely heavier than, say Angua.

[Dotsie]

I felt that it was Terry who had a problem with her size - he seemed to change from descriptions of her being fat, to more like "strapping".

[Dotsie]

People who work with animals - vets and so on - care so much about animals they dedicate their lives to helping them. but they'll still put a dog to sleep without a flicker of sentimentality (and not just sick dogs - some shelters euthanise dogs they can't rehome etc). So to me there was nothing jarring about the implication that Sybil might put Errol to sleep.

I completely disagree that people who work with animals can put a dog to sleep "without a flicker of sentimentality". Of course they care, and it will definitely bother them, they just have to put this aside to be able to do their job. And a vet euthanising an animal is completely different to a breeder doing it, just because the animal can't be bred from. It's jarring to me because she runs supports the sunshine sanctuary for sick dragons (also in G!G!), keeps a dragon in the house that's old and smelly and has no teeth, and presumably isn't bred from (again, also in G!G!), and later 'rescues' a dragon that was being used to light a forge (forget his name - he was in MAA). This isn't a woman who would say a dragon was for the choppy chop just because she couldn't mate from him, so the inconsistencies are an error on the part of Terry, or just show Sybil to be more sentimental than she wants people to know.

[DreadfulKata]

People who work with animals - vets and so on - care so much about animals they dedicate their lives to helping them. but they'll still put a dog to sleep without a flicker of sentimentality (and not just sick dogs - some shelters euthanise dogs they can't rehome etc). So to me there was nothing jarring about the implication that Sybil might put Errol to sleep.

I completely disagree that people who work with animals can put a dog to sleep "without a flicker of sentimentality". Of course they care, and it will definitely bother them, they just have to put this aside to be able to do their job.

I'd draw a distinction between sentimentality and caring. I'm sure no vet is unmoved when they're putting an animal to sleep, but they would never let sentimentality get in the way of doing the job.

But you're right, there's a difference between that situation and a breeder/keeper who is apparently talking about killing healthy animals. I can see that people take issue with this coming from a character who is later (and at other points in this novel too) extremely kind and big-hearted.

I think I also associated Sybil with the horse-and-hound set, the sort of (often posh) person capable of complete soppiness about animals in one sense, but utterly ruthless in others. The people who (used to) hunt foxes had justifications for why it was in the countryside's best interest to hunt foxes, and why it was just sentimentality to protest. I could imagine the Sybil of G!G! being similarly pragmatic about dragons.

I don't think the Sybil of T5E or T! would act in quite the same way, but the Sybil of G!G! is a rather more strident version of the character.

You're probably right, that this is a bit of Early Instalment weirdness for Sybil and is best ignored. All I'm really saying is that I'm able to read G!G! without that leaping out at me as particularly jarring for her character...


... Unlike some other bits. As we know, some of Terry's characters on first appeareance are a bit... different to how we know them later: Lord V, Granny etc.

G!G! isn't much of a case of this, I don't think; all the characters are fairly recognisable. But it;s funny to reread it and notice some anomalies, particularly with Vimes. Remember when Vimes had no very strong feelings about monarchy, and it was actually Colon who was enraged by the very concept? And that one time Vimes left a fellow officer to fend for himself in a barfight?

Ah, the relentless march of Character Development.

[raptornx01]

Don't forget that the time Sybil was making those comments she was doing so infront of someone she didn't know. And the issue of aristocrats and image comes up quite alot, especially later. This could be part of that.

As for the physical, Honestly, I never pictured her as being particularly fat. not like Agnes, but more of an amazon type. Big in general, not just around the waist.

[Dotsie]

Nobby called her a "big fat party", which seemed a bit harsh.