YMMV / Unseen Academicals

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Mob football was the medieval precursor to the modern game, and it was about as violent as the Ankh-Morpork version.
• Anvilicious: The message of racial equality (as well as nods towards LGBTQ and class issues) are stronger and less subtle in this book and the subsequent Snuff than pretty much any other entry in the Discworld series. That's because Terry Prachett knew he was running out of time.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: An American distributor (apparently due to a complete lack of understanding of Morris dancing) once claimed Lords and Ladies was about a football team in its synopsis, to which Pratchett's response was that football was one subject he would never write a Discworld book about...
• Iron Woobie: Nutt, most of the time. At least before he tried auto-hypnosis quasi-Freudianism.
• Older Than They Think: If the book was intended as a subversion of Tolkien's conception of Orcs, in fact some of Tolkien's late writings move along remarkably parallel lines, considering that orcs might have free will when apart from their evil masters and being made from ruined men rather than elves. He died before he could finally decide on one definite origin story and cosmic fate.
• Separated by a Common Language: Evans the Striped's posthumous threat to make boys without their kit PLAY IN THEIR PANTS went over the heads of American readers who didn't realize he meant their underpants.

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