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1New entries on the bottom.
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3[[foldercontrol]]
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5[[folder:Draining amount]]
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7* When the Vampires gathered the villagers to collect blood did drain the people completely or just take a pint or so? Honestly, if it's the latter I can't say it's so horrible. That's assuming it's limited to the healthy in general and non-nursing women in particular along side with a once every two months restriction. At that point it just becomes an alternate form of taxation, a bit gruesome but perhaps acceptable if you're a good ruler.
8** Because it isn't a matter of taxation. It's offensive on a philosophical level. The logic behind taxation is "society (police, roads etc) needs paying for, everyone chips in". Taxes are, more or less, a way of adding to the common good of the country (in theory anyway, politics being what they are). The logic behind this is "I want a reliable source of food." No matter what the rules are it turns people into animals and what's more expects them to like it.
9** But the people were perfectly willing to restore the old Count to power despite the fact that he actually *killed* people for their blood as opposed to just draining draining limited amounts from them, I;d say that's much worse.
10** Yeah, but at least it wasn't expected that they ''like'' it, and he didn't pretend it was for their own good. The old count made it a dramatic adventure where someone got to be a hero at the end (and he didn't actually kill his victims either, going by comments the characters make), but what Magpyr did was treat them like cattle.
11** The Magpyrs didn't actually ''stop'' viciously killing people once Escrow was established. Nor did they make efforts to prevent humans being jerks to each other or make life easier for humans in any way. They were also always there, as oppressive authorities, whereas the Old Count just turned up every few decades for a few months as a villainous beastie. Different degrees of terror.
12** Even if we do accept the 'taxation' parallel, this is pretty clearly a case of taxation without representation. No one elected Magpyr or his cronies to any kind of official position, no one gave them any right or authority or mandate to demand any kind of 'tax' from the people, they just basically showed up one day and forced everyone to participate in this charade where they basically get free blood without giving anything back, and forcing them to like it as well.
13** The Magpyrs weren’t rulers, and it wasn’t taxation. It was them gathering up a community of people to feed on, and forcing them to go through with it with no appeals or salvation. Granny described the situation as “accepting the cannibal because he’s got a knife and fork”, and her forte is dealing with progressive villains who are only exploiting their niceness/sophistication to make things easier for themselves, which the Magpyrs were doing. While the old count knew he was a vampire, he never created a community of meat specifically for feeding; it's a difference of degrees of evil, not different kinds of evil.
14** Hypothetically, a tithing system of obtaining blood ''could'' work if it was set up properly. For instance, if the person was of an appropriate age of consent, as it were, the person was in good health, and certainly not sick or pregnant or about to travel, that the blood tithe was part of the taxes required to live in the area, and that there was a noticeable benefit, as in those bandits that try to rob and kill folk find themselves being captured, brought to the town square, and being forced to make a choice: face justice at the hands of the villagers and then drained of blood, be executed by the vampires and then drained of blood, or repaired/maintain the roads, collect proper tolls, go after other bandits not in service to the vampires, and pay a small tithe of blood every so often.
15* The other thing about the Magpyrs is this: Discworld vampires don't need human blood to survive. They need some blood/haemoglobin, which they can get from animals, but it's not a case of "feed on people or starve to death". Drinking human blood, for Discworld vampires, is a way to exercise power over other people and treat them like cattle, not a biological need.
16* The problem is taxation as an analogy. A better one is probably the local lord who owns the land the town is built on extracting rent, which has no expectation of giving anything in return beyond not kicking you off it.
17** To be fair, that isn't exactly uncommon - we have "slumlord" property owners even today. The difference is that the Vampyres believe humans are little more than cattle for them to feed on.
18** It's not like anyone is going around singing the praises and virtues of slumlords either, though. They're pretty widely detested as well. The parallel still holds.
19* The difference between new and old evil are in ambition and respect. Put bluntly, the old Count was content to stay a regional bogeyman, occasionally nipping out for...nipping necks, and taking breaks between slayings. The locals didn't mind him because he mostly let them get on with things. The new vampyres, though, take things to a pseudo-industrial level, harnessing whole towns to support a small army of vamps. In doing so they treat the residents as nothing more than livestock to be controlled and corraled with 'fluences and amenities, in comparison to the old Count inviting heroes over for dinner and a shot at slaying him, not unlike the old Baron from the Fifth Elephant inviting the winners of the chase over and giving them a sack of gold for beating him. In short, the old Count stuck to the old stories because a good bad guy always comes back next time, whereas the Vampyres wanted to break them to seize power, and so became such a big threat that their prey, the so-called "lesser races", needed to put them down for good.
20* (One of) The theme(s) of the book is "Treating People As Things". The new Count treated the village as 'cattle', expecting them to line up when ordered, expected to turn over 'something of value' on a schedule... The old Count took what he wanted, yes, but not only knew that people would complain (by wanting to come after him), made it ''easier to do so'' with the window curtains, easily-shapeable-into-religous-icon items, and so on; he also openly felt that vampires shouldn't get their way ''all'' of the time. (The villagers also weren't getting their way all of the time-- the Count still would come after them-- but clear what he was doing, 'in the open'.)
21* Ultimately, it's a matter of {{Hypocrisy}}. Ultimately, both the Old Count and the New Count are predatory parasites; they set up shop somewhere and leech off the local population without giving anything back. The Old Count, however, never pretended otherwise. He knew full well what he was, he knew full well that people didn't and shouldn't like it, and he accepted the risks of doing what he did in a spirit of good sportsmanship. The New Count deludes himself into thinking he's virtuous, and that people should actually be ''grateful'' to him for being a predatory parasite, while at the same time minimising every possible risk to himself because deep down he knows full well that he's actually a monstrous piece of shit and that if given the chance, people will try and stop him.
22[[/folder]]
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24[[folder:Pyramid selling system]]
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26* OK, this may sound like being purist, but, when Agnes asks Vlad whether vampirism is a "pyramid selling system", is she referring to the one selling included, or just a Ponzi scheme? I guess the latter from the context but I'm not sure...
27** I heard about "pyramid selling" only in latter context.
28** I believe it's a reference to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme Pyramid Schemes]] which are different from Ponzi Schemes. This fits relatively well with Vampirism, since Vampires can generally influence/control vampires that they create (and in turn be influenced/controlled by their sire) a Vampire bloodline would end up looking like a Pyramid scheme.
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32[[folder:Double-headed axe]]
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34* Continuity snarl here: Mightily Oats uses a double headed axe to kill Count de Magpyr. The Count has been established as having trained himself and his family in recognising holy symbols, and (just prior to his decapitation at Oats' hands) claims that an axe isn't a holy symbol. Literature/ReaperMan has a scene when the recently undead Windle Poons is being threatened with holy symbols by the rest of the Unseen University faculty, including "the Double-Headed Axe of Io". Ok, it's not an ''Omnian'' holy symbol, but holy nonetheless.
35** History Monks. They're not perfect, guys.
36** *shrug* Maybe it was an axe with a head at each end rather than the typical sort of memetic battle axe with two edges at one end? Maybe the double-headed axe of Blind Io was just a regular axe that they used as a last resort (my original assumption, from long before reading ''Carpe Jugulum'') and only said it was the ____ of Blind Io so that they wouldn't have to admit to giving up on mysticism (akin to a frazzled scientist from Roundworld saying "It's not magic, it's science I don't understand yet!")? Maybe Terry "Alternate Histories" Pratchett simply didn't remember it, or considered it pre-"stable continuity" as it was a minor comment and not a plot point in ''Reaper Man'' (or even saw it as a sort of [[InvertedTrope inverse]] ContinuityNod? Maybe Oates was wrong and lucky that the vampires missed the one symbol of Io that he happened to use against them. It could be any or none of those.
37** Or it could be that the Count was saying ''that'' axe wasn't a holy symbol, rather than an absolute statement that no axes were holy symbols anywhere. Maybe the Double-Headed Axe of Io includes some other sigil or something that defines it as Io's axe in particular.
38** Actually ''Reaper Man'' says Blind Io's symbol is a double-''handled'' axe, not a double-headed one. Just as a double-headed axe has two blades coming off a central handle, I visualised a double-handled one as having a handle on either side of a central blade ... and, therefore, no actual edge. So any axe that functions as an axe doesn't function as an Ionian symbol.
39** Huh. I (the troper who wrote the paragraph starting with "*shrug*" near the top of this section) recall that now, and I had imagined it to be a (two-edged) axe with a handle sticking out both the top and bottom of the head. The shape would be like a latin cross with the head as long as the post and the arms as blades. That does make sense, though, especially considering the style of Pratchett's humor.
40** This troper assumed that Oats's weapon was simply a battleax with both sides of its (single) head sharpened, rather than a blade on one side and a flat butt side. That's the sort of thing that would plausibly be lying around in a smith's workshop for Oats to pick up. As for Io's symbol, I'd assumed it had one head with two parallel handles sticking out of the same side.
41** Granny does say she tends to bluff with a weak hand. This troper took that to mean the Count knew the axe was a holy symbol, or at least would work on him, but was trying to convince Oats it wouldn't.
42** The Count has done a lot of research into holy symbols, but it doesn't follow that the Count can literally recognise ''every'' holy symbol. He can identify a ''lot'' of them but simply overlooked that one somehow. Simple.
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44[[/folder]]
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46[[folder:Anti-evil]]
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48* The phoenix's anti-evil flame. A great deal is made about how the early Omnian church would burn witches (or "old ladies who disagreed") and how Nanny Ogg (and Granny, to some extent) antagonizes Oats because of that. But Granny has no problem at all letting a third party -- again, the phoenix -- arbitrarily decide what is good and what is evil, and ruthlessly chase and burn the latter to ashes. While she DOES see things in shades of [[BlackAndWhiteMorality black and white-that-might've-gotten-dirty]], the phoenix's merciless persecution of the vampyres sounds just as bad as what the pre-Brutha Omnians did. And if the bird doesn't tolerate evil, does that mean the Old Count (which it spared) is the "dirty-white" kind of good instead of evil?
49** It is a phoenix. It has two points going for it: 1) They're as pure 'white' as you can get, being the epitome of goodness and light in any mythology you care to think of; and 2) They're animals, not humans, so they act on an instinct rather than trying to make a judgement of good-or-evil. I read the judgement as being Granny's problem, because when humans judge, they're thinking about it, and may (often?) get it wrong. The phoenix has an extra advantage when you consider that the vampires also aren't human, but an Always Evil race.
50** Persecution is directing violence or injustice towards someone because of who or what they are regardless of their actual behavior, opinions and actions. This is most certainly not the case of the phoenix and the vampires, who have committed quite a lot of evil, if you recall. And we're told the phoenix burns in the presence of evil, so if the vampires didn't deserve it, they would simply not burn, just like Granny and Oats do not. I'm sure that if Otto Chriek was there at the castle, the flames would not hurt him, because while a vampire, he's not evil.
51** The Magpyrs did kill at least one phoenix. It may have just recognised a threat in them and not in the Old Count.
52** Also, in addition to the above it's a lot easier to take a more neutral approach to someone's antagonism towards someone else when you're not on the receiving end of it. Nanny and Granny as witches, so it stands to reason that they'd take a person or entity's hatred towards witches a lot more personally than they would a different person or entity's hatred to another group they aren't affiliated with.
53** "Merciless persecution" is '''seriously''' overselling what the Phoenix does. Unlike the Omnians, it wasn't going around and rounding up anyone it suspected of being a vampire and torturing and killing them regardless of whether it was true or not. All it ''actually'' does is burn a bunch of thoroughly evil bastards who had killed a Phoenix already and were looking to kill it, too.
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55[[/folder]]
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57[[folder:Brandy]]
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59* The Magpyr's Igor doeth not drink... wine. He doeth, however, drink brandy like thtink. Brandy is just distilled wine, yes?
60** So what? I don't like tomatoes but I will put ketchup on my chips.
61** The implicathion is that he doethn't drink anything that's only a meathly 20 or 30 proof.
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