Tangentially related, but: I have observed that a thing a lot of a certain kind of people miss about the Sam Vimes stories is how much time in them Vimes spends:
a) Being wrong.
b) Fucking up. GENUINELY fucking up. And suffering consequences of fucking up.
c) REALIZING he's been wrong.
d) Trying as best he can to adjust to that.
I've noted before that you could subtitle every single Vimes book as "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About [Blank]". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About The World Not Being Worth It". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Affirmative Action." "Vimes Finds Out He's REALLY REALLY Wrong About Golems." "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Klatch And International Everything". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Dwarfs." "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About The Past Being Better/Not Wanting To Be A Commander." "Vimes Finds Out He's STILL Wrong About Dwarfs, and Also Vampires, and Also Trolls". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Goblins and Is Really Upset About It."
And so on. And that is actually a very important part of Vimes because if he was not both able and willing to realize that he's wrong about shit he would just be a very bad person. A very self-righteous bad person. Captain Swing, in Night Watch, is utterly correct: he and Vimes are very, very similar people. It's just Findthee Swing knows he's right.
And Vimes is actually always open to the possibility he's totally wrong, even if he's not happy about that.
Vimes isn't perfect. Vimes isn't even always in the moral right - Vimes starts out Feet of Clay just as bad as anyone else in the story, Dragon King of Arms included, about golems. He starts his place in the story as casually racist, sexist and everything else ist as is standard for the society around him, and his voyage to becoming something else is through his own failures and it too is imperfect.
My absolute favourite Samuel Vimes moment is actually from Thud! but it's not the one you think it is, probably. It's this one:
The dwarfs were clustered nervously by the duty officer's desk. They had that opulence of metalwork, sleekness of beard and thickness of girth that marked them out as dwarfs who were doing very well for themselves, or who had been right up until now.
Vimes appeared in front of them like a whirlwind of wrath.
You scum, you rat-sucking little worm eaters! You heads-down little scurriers in the dark! What did you bring to my city? What were you thinking? Did you want the deep-downers here? Did you dare deplore what Hamcrusher said, all that bile and ancient lies? Or did you say "Well, I don't agree with him, of course, but he's got a point"? Did you say, "Oh he goes too far but it's about time somebody said it"? And now, have you come here to wring your hands and say how dreadful, it was nothing to do with you? Who were the dwarfs in the mobs, then? Aren't you community leaders? Were you leading them? And why are you here now, you ugly snivelling grubbers? Is it possible, is it possible, that now, after that bastard's bodyguards tried to kill my family, you're here to complain? Have I broken some code, trodden on some ancient toe? To hell with it. To hell with you.
He could feel the words straining, fighting to get out, and the effort of restraining them filled his stomach with acid and made his temples throb. Just one whine, he thought. Just one pompous moan. Go on.
"Gentlemen," he said, keeping his eye on the grag but talking to the room at large, "I know all of you, you all know me. You're all respected dwarfs with a stake in this city. I want you to vouch for Mr Bashfullsson, because I've never met him before in my life. Come on, Setha, I've known you for years, what do you say?"
"They killed my son," said Ironcrust.
A knife dropped into Vimes's head. It slipped down his windpipe, sliced his heart, cut through his stomach and disappeared. Where the rage had been, there was a chill.
"I'm sorry, commander," said Bashfullsson quietly. "It's true. I don't think Gunder Ironcrust was interested in the politics, you understand. He just took a job at the mine because he wanted to feel like a real dwarf and work with a shovel for a few days."
"They left him to the mud," said Ironcrust, in a voice that was eerily without emotion. "Any help you need, we will give. Any help. But when you find them, kill them all."
Bolding mine. There's some bits in the middle there where the moment moves from the duty room to his office, etc, but the important through line is that one and it's a double-whammy: not only that in the moment of discovering the loss that faces another father, Vimes is absolutely thrown completely out of his righteous rage and resentment of days despite it being fed by a quasi-demonic force of vengeance?
But also that the narrative does that to him. That it takes us with him in a build up of days and days and days of genuinely infuriating things and GENUINELY the unfortunate enabling of Hamcrusher's bullshit by people who didn't speak out about it (he's not wrong about that!) right up to the attempted murder of his baby and his wife to this moment and then absolutely yanks the rug out from under him and tells him - and us, the readers - that actually no.
No you don't get it that simple.
Where the rage had been, there was chill.
If you're going to try to have a Vimes, as a creator, and you want them to be anything other than a self-righteous twerp in their own right, you have to be willing to do that part. To have him stumble, trip up, fall over his own feet, and be confronted by his own misunderstandings, mistakes, just . . . his misses.
If you aren't, then you're just writing another self-righteous twerp.
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