#diskworld

I didn’t really draw a lot this year and most of it is OC stuff from this comic I’m doing, but fanart is my way of experimenting with different styles and blowing of some creative steam.

I’ve learned so much from drawing these and it’s always a rewarding experience even if I dislike a final drawing. Fanart is fun in a way that it removes me enough from my personal art that is usually work related so that I can feel inspired again to try something new, and it’s a fun way to connect with fandoms, so I hope I have more time to do this.

Job one, as I see it, is the task of not letting anyone else do magic. Mainly, this means making a lot of points about regulation, lobbying a lot, and keeping hold of information. They do pretty well at this – witches do a bit, but not much, and the way their job works makes them very good at not breaking anything.

Their second job is to prevent magical accidents. Mostly, this means looking at things, arguing about it, Ponder pointing things out, and then telling people what happened and how not to let it. Occasionally, it means the Dungeon Dimensions just got in and they need to remind everyone not to cast any spells, because that makes everything worse, until a hero of some sort arrives. I wonder if the wizards know that the disk runs on stories, and a hero will always arrive, and that they need to let them before the Things, which are from outside the story, can get strong enough to break it. Probably not. Ponder might.

Finally, there's the job they've finished doing, which is to set up Unseen University, which was excellently done. The factions, and Dead Men's Pointy Shoes, means nobody can work together on any serious magic. Individually, they're often pretty competent, with some really impressive stuff in The Light Fantastic. But they get in each other's way, and so they can't pull any of it off properly, and they wouldn't be able to pull off any impressive magic that they didn't need to do.

They are packed full with references to cultural touchstones familiar to any adult who knows anything about British culture and history. The list is endless, but let's say Shakespeare plays and history of English witch hunts, for example.

But when I first read them I was a pre-teen from Finland. I knew OF Shakespeare – I didn't know what his plays were about. I knew OF witch hunts – I didn't know women were accused of dancing naked in a Devil's Sabbath.

How do you read a parody if you don't know what it parodies? Sometimes I could tell there was a hole in the middle of the story, a common knowledge that was not said out loud but still relied on. Sometimes not. Sometimes I read it straight like this was all Terry's fabrication and not reference after reference after reference.

So what ended up happening was either:

1) reverse engineering the reference points. Assuming there must be a common myth of witches dancing naked because they keep mentioning it. Building my own understanding from Terry's reprerentations.

2) realising way later when encountering something of cultural importance that I'm already familiar with it because I had read Terry's version. Queen and King of Elves/Fairies do indeed visit a wedding in a Midsummer's dream. I know this! Terry wrote about it before Shakespeare!