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firstpuffin · 4 years

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BBC America’s The Watch characters: what’s been “reimagined” pt 1

Given my unhealthy obsession with the Discworld series and that the books following the City Watch are among my favourite, the upcoming reimagining has been on my mind a lot of late. I can’t wait for January to come along, but until then I have little to do but speculate.

I want to take a look here at the characters of the series, specifically the profiles so conveniently provided by the Den of Geek website and compare them to what we see in the books. This isn’t with a negative bias, insofar as I can unbias myself, but merely a brief comparison.

Let’s do this in the order of main characters:

Samuel Vimes, “Captain of The Watch, disempowered by a broken society that’s reduced his department’s jurisdiction to almost nothing.”

A very bare description but not wholly inaccurate. In the first book- Guards! Guards!- Vimes is disillusioned with his place in the city of Ankh-Morpork, drunken, sloven, all largely thanks to his Night Watch being a joke to the community at large.

But this description isn’t quite right: Ankh-Morpork isn’t a broken society as instead it works. Under the Patrician’s guidance the Night Watch are largely unneeded, at least ostensibly; you don’t need to catch illegal thieves when the legal Thieves Guild will do a much better job of it for you. Vimes is a broken man, but only because he hasn’t found his place yet.

Richard Dormer at least looks the part. I’ve seen official artwork that shows Vimes as neat and proper looking, but in the books he’s always described as “scruffy”. I don’t watch trailers so I haven’t seen him in action yet, but the worst thing I can say is that the decision to not give the Watch armour was a huge loss.

Lady Sybil Ramkin, “last scion of Ankh-Morpork’s nobility, who’s trying to fix the city’s wrongs with her chaotic vigilantism.”

“This is where the fun begins”. But really, where to begin? Why “chaotic vigilante”? Is middle-aged dragon breeder not bad-ass enough? In the later books we don’t see too much of Lady Sybil, but she does start appearing more, and the dramatisation can easily do this much sooner without issue.

What we really wanted from Lady Sybil was a big middle-aged woman, which would be nice representation for that demographic.

There’s not much to say about Lara Rossi in the role except that she doesn’t really look cut out for dragon-breeding.

Carrot (Headbanger) Ironfoundersson, “the idealistic new recruit, raised by dwarfs, but really a human abandoned at birth.”

Not a whole lot to say here. Carrot wasn’t abandoned so much as his family massacred by bandits, but whatever.

Adam Hugill looks big, orange and handsome, and is dressed neat enough to pass muster. I’m looking forward to watching him.

Angua (Delphine) von Überwald, “tasked with Carrot’s training and keeping the rookie alive.”

Well, this is… well it’s the reverse really. The second book, Men at Arms, has the Watch forced to take in minority officers, and being a werewolf Angua is a shoo-in. She is trained by Carrot and serves to show the reader how the people of Ankh-Morpork view Carrot’s bizarre charisma.

Marama Corlette is an interesting choice. Angua is meant to be tall and beautiful, with long blonde hair (treated with products meant for dogs), but whose werewolf side manages to come through in a disconcerting manner.

Marama is portraying her as a short, scruffy character with very short hair. She’s going to lack the disharmony that makes Angua’s beauty so much more than fanservice. Still, probably not her choice and it will be interesting to see how she deals with the werewolf inside.

Cheery Littlebottom, “the ingenious non-binary forensics expert, ostracized by their kin and finding a new home and identity.”

Probably giving Cheery a little bit too much credit here: she’s skilled, yes, but she has to learn forensics when she first appears in the third book, Feet of Clay. She’s not non-binary, quite the opposite, but I’ve already discussed that here, and neither is she ostracized as such. Given that she’s not a unique non-binary individual but just a part of the larger Dwarfish sociological problem, I feel that they’re missing a major opportunity in cultural sexual expectations here.

Going by pictures alone, I’m not even sure Jo Eaton-Kent is even playing a dwarf, but wouldn’t it be better to have an actual dwarf actor play the role? And I guess if they aren’t going to bother with armour then why bother with beards, but once again it drops a whole bunch of the nuance of the source material.

Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, “architect of the city’s normalized wrongness and ramshackle system of governance.”

Oh.

I intended to say that Anna Chancellor had some big, big size twelve shoes to fill after Vetinari was portrayed by Charles Dance, but apparently that’s a non-issue as the Patrician is now fucking incompetent!

I need to calm down. I genuinely need to take a break after reading that. Bye.

#first puffin #Discworld #night watch #ankh morpork #the watch bbc #bbc america #samuel vimes #lady sybil ramkin #carrot ironfoundersson #angua von uberwald #Cheery Littlebottom #lord vetinari #waytoomanytags #thosetagswilldofornow

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