jtrhoades said:
=Tamar said:
There's a difference between necessary harshness and unnecessary harshness because you get a kick out of it. I see Vetinari stepping over that line: "build his own rack and let him turn the screw" (p.17 US h /c), "clearly enjoying this" (p.97 US h/c), the stygium ring scene (pp.193-195 US h/c). Moist knows it, too ("tyrant... had to have some fun", p.11 US h/c)
Certainly he gets some enjoyment out of his efforts, but I always saw it more as enjoyment of successful manipulation of the situation than any outright maliciousness or sadism.
That is a reasonable explanation of the one line, but I am dubious about the other situations.
jtrhoades said:
=Tamar said:
That's Sir Terry's explanation. I don't entirely agree.
It's fairly clear by Moist's evening activities discussed early in Making Money that he has deeply ingrained criminal tendencies that he has to indulge in somehow.
The way that Vetinari manages that is by giving him a problem to actively work toward solving, that gives him something to focus on other than breaking the law.
It isn't the criminal tendencies - those are the way Moist works out the need for a kind of excitement that he refers to repeatedly as "the fizz." The need has even been found to be genetic, in round-world research: some people produce two kinds of chemicals under stress, one for excitement and one for caution. Others only produce the kind that creates caution. The difference is between skydivers and people who would never skydive. Moist is the skydiver type. They don't have skydiving on the Disc, so he does building-climbing, and, from habit, crime. It can even become an addiction - I've met people who are addicted to adrenaline rushes.
Sir Terry has said Moist isn't the type to be a Patrician but would be a good politician. As Patrician, Vetinari has used fear as his primary direct tool - fear of him, and fear of what would happen without him. Moist's style is to make people like him, and to convince them that what he wants to happen is what they want. It remains to be seen which will be the most effective manipulative tool, should it come to a direct competition.
jtrhoades said:
Also, disagreeing with an author about the personality and motivation of his characters seems a bit... silly.
Disagreeing with an author about the effect of the writing is not silly; if the writing gives me a different impression of the character than the author intended, that can be a problem for the author. Beta readers are employed just to help eliminate that kind of problem, by telling the author what they got out of the words. Readers are not mind-readers! They read what is on the page, not what the author is planning to write later or forgot to put in. Authors sometimes forget that.