FF Tuesday November 22

Silvia Obando

We began the class by discussing the life of Terry Pratchett and the series of Discworld books. We talked about how secondary world of Pratchett was very different from other secondary worlds in that it was put on the back of four elephants riding on a turtle. For the ‘In- Class’ writing portion I described the chief traits that are portrayed by Magrat. She was a new witch that was surrounded by Granny and Nanny, it was obvious that she was very wary and judgmental of them. Her being a new young witch, caused Magrat to come off as cocky and overly confident for example she prides herself in knowing how to make potions and doing it well where as she is very critical towards the methods used by Nanny and Granny: “Nanny tended to put a hot poultice on everything and recommend a large glass of whatever the patient liked best” (91). This shows that she does not have a lot of faith in Nanny and she thinks that she likes the attention. Magrat seems to be misunderstood a lot of the time, she does the extra work and criticizes her examples because although she learns what to do from them, she also learns how not to act. Pratchett uses, obviously, many different fairy tales and adds his own twist to each one to try and convey a message to the audience. One of the stories is “Sleeping Beauty” where he adds a bit of comic relief to the sleeping castle when the witches walk in, the language used: “Bony Fidy travelers seeking sucker!” (132) said by Nanny when they were first trying to enter the castle, then upon searching the sleeping castle they noticed that everyone was asleep “There’s even mice asleep in the pantry!” We learn something important about Lilith at the end of the “Sleeping Beauty” episode; she creates the fairy tales in an unfair way by forcing them to have a happy ending for the good of everyone. The class discussion ended with the analysis of Lilith. Lilith has the appearance of a fairy god mother, she is dressed in white and has magical powers. Like the class had discussed earlier, she thinks she is helping the community by creating the ideal situations in fairy tales in real life. Although she may think from the depth of her heart that she is in the right, that does not excuse the punishment she uses for the characters who do not fall in line with the characters of her fairy tales. In comparison to Mrs. Coulture and the White Witch I would say Lilith falls in the middle. She has good intentions but she also knows that she is not appreciated by her people. Lilith was influenced by the stories and the power got to her head when she controlled all the mirrors.