Should I Try Eggnog?

NEW TF2 COMIC!!!  I laughed so hard.

WE ALL MUST REBLOG AND LIKE EVERY SINGLE CUPHEAD THING ON TUMBLR TO REVIVE CUPHEAD'S FAN BASE.

RISE.

R I S E

Susan: You’re saying that humans need fantasies to make life bearable.

Death: No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?

Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.

Susan: So we can believe the big ones?

Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.

Susan: They’re not the same at all!

Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and THEN show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet… you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some… some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what’s the point?

But knowing as we do that Pratchett wrote the Discworld fuelled by an internal anger at how wrong and fucked up the world was, we can reframe this as probably one of Pratchett’s angriest moments.

Death, in Discworld, speaks IN ALL CAPS. This is supposed to represent his voice sounding a bit like tombstones falling from a great height, but in any other context, SPEAKING IN ALL CAPS MAKES IT SEEM LIKE YOU ARE SHOUTING.

To me, there is a palpable, vicious anger behind those words. It’s the anger of someone who is grieving, because in reality death does not care and will strike without warning or mercy or justice. In reality, death is not fair. In its wake, mourners are left feeling bereft and, amongst other things, furiously angry. Angry at the universe for taking away a loved one.

I’m still processing my grief, probably will be for quite some time. Mostly, i settle on anger at the moment. I don’t express it, but at times I feel angry enough to march through the gates of Heaven and scream at God Himself.

That’s the anger that I see behind Death’s words here. That desperate, white-hot, tear-filled anger that screams at an indifferent universe “SHOW ME. SHOW ME THAT THERE IS JUSTICE. SHOW ME THE MERCY.”

And of course, as we are forewarned in Mort, there isn’t any. Not really. Justice, mercy, etc are human concepts. We created them. We have to believe in them, otherwise they cannot exist. And we can see what happens when they break down.

I think it’s one of the best facets of Pratchett’s Death that he is like this, that he is a physical manifestation of the most indifferent force in the universe and yet still cares about the job he does and the people whose souls he reaps. As he asks Azrael in Reaper Man, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?