Content warning 38/
What if she's supposed to be seen as a stereotype, either because the antagonist's abuse of story magic has made her so, or she's changed her behaviour to evade arrest? Sorry, but if Pratchett intended that, he would've made a great, red blinking point of it.
Content warning 39/
He would've written something to suggest this, that this is bad, and that we should take the side against it. "Getting away with it" is too shallow to hold such deep subtext.
Content warning 40/
On the way to Genua (a cross between Oz's Emerald City, Disney's Magic Kingdom, and New Orleans), Granny and Nanny come across an ordinary, unmagical wolf that's been anthropomorphised through story magic.
Content warning 41/
But it's still a wolf. It's not a werewolf, as it can't change its appearance. Besides which, werewolves are neither human nor wolf. But in stories, π¦π·π¦π³πΊπ°π―π¦ expects the Big Bad Wolf to act human - they don't expect him to act wolf. Or werewolf, for that matter.
Content warning 42/
If story magic dictated that all black Genuan women working in service must look and act like a Mammy or Aunt Jemima, just as innkeepers must be fat and have a big red face, or just as the wolf must act human against his own nature, then πΈπ¦ π΄π©π°πΆππ₯ π©π’π·π¦ π£π¦π¦π― π΅π°ππ₯.
Content warning 43/
Instead, we got the footnote. And the footnote is all the evidence you need to know what sort of craft choice this was. We learn little about how Mrs. Pleasant changes in the story, if at all. She's just a name.
Content warning 44/
That wolf gets more character development in one scene than Mrs. Pleasant gets in two or three.
Content warning 45/
In the nicest of ways, when Pratchett falls short in Witches Abroad, it's in those moments where it's painfully clear that Discworld was being written by a white, middle-class bloke from Beaconsfield.
Content warning 46/
Beyond this footnote, racism is, in fact, a problem in Discworld. Just not in this book.
Content warning 47/
Outside the other forty novels that make up the Loreβ’, #DavidGraeber once noted that, when demi-human species are introduced to any fantasy universe, and cannot be unified under a cohesive social, legal, or political order, "racism is actually true:"
Content warning 48/
> β¦There actually are different stocks of humanoid creatures who can speak, build houses, cultivate food, create art and rituals, who look and act basically like humans, but who nonetheless have profoundly different moral and intellectual qualities...
