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Narrative
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Note: The title of this entry is Discworld. If it says 'Disc World' at the top, somebody has made a formatting error.
Stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way round. Stories... have evolved... The strongest have survived, and they have grown fat... Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow... A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed... Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats.
-- Terry Pratchett in Witches Abroad, describing the Theory Of Narrative Causality
The Discworld, a flat planet carried by four elephants standing on the back of a gigantic space-turtle, is the venue for Terry Pratchett's long running fantasy series.
The first few books were a straightforward parody of Heroic Fantasy tropes, but later books have subverted, played with, and hung lampshades on practically every trope on this site, in every genre, and many not yet covered, as well as parodying (and in some cases, deconstructing) many well known films, books, and TV series. The humour ranges from simple wordplay to wry reflections on the absurdities of life.
While all of the Discworld books exist in the same continuity (and roughly in chronological order, with a few exceptions), many can be loosely grouped into series following some of Pratchett's recurring characters, including Rincewind the incompetent "wizzard", The Ankh-Morpork City Watch (which are usually mystery novels), the Lancre witches and Death. Some books follow one-off protagonists who may or may not appear in supporting roles in other books.
In addition to the main characters, there is a large cast of recurrers, including dodgy street trader Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler and benevolent tyrant Havelock Vetinari. Villains have included sociopathic geniuses, Lovecraftian horrors, and the Auditors of Reality, cosmic bureaucrats who consider life too untidy to be tolerated.
There are currently thirty-five books in the series, four of them young-adult, as well as several short stories. There are also Discworld calendars, diaries, maps, and compendia, each with additional background information about the Disc. All the books have been adapted for the stage, two have become animated series, and two (technically three, as The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were filmed as a single story under the former title, but the second is a direct follow-on) have become live-action Made For TV Movies.
We're not going to bother with making a list of used, averted, subverted, or inverted trope examples, as there is a perfectly good list of them on the top left of your screen. Just start with "Main Tropes Index" and keep going until you run out of pages.
See also the character sheet for details on the more major of the series' Loads And Loads Of Characters.
Discworld is the Trope Namer for:
The main Discworld novels, in order of release. Brackets denote date of UK publication and main character(s) - standalone indicates that it is not currently part of a series.
A world, and a mirror of worlds. |
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