Awesome / Guards! Guards!

• Vetinari's luxury dungeon cell blows the mind every time one reads about it.
  Vimes stared at the door until his eyebrows ached. And then, just as random patterns in cloud suddenly, without changing in any way, become a horse's head or a sailing ship, he saw what he'd been looking at all along. A sense of terrifying admiration overcame him. He wondered what it was like in the Patrician's mind. All cold and shiny, he thought, all blued steel and icicles and little wheels clicking along like a huge clock. The kind of mind that would carefully consider its own downfall and turn it to advantage.
  It was a perfectly normal dungeon door, but it all depended on your sense of perspective.
  In this dungeon the Patrician could hold off the world.
  All that was on the outside was the lock.
  All the bolts and bars were on the inside.
  • All that's on the outside is the lock and Vetinari has the key!
  • Not just the cell itself, the rats, whom Vetinari gets to serve him by offering advice.
  • He's also got food, water, and books.
• Carrot arresting a dragon, for its own protection.
  • At the conclusion, when told to throw the book at Lupine Wonse, he obliges. As it happens, the aforementioned book weighs several pounds, and causes the head clerk to tumble backwards, and fall several stories to his death.
  • Another, earlier one, besides beating an entire bar, including a bunch of trolls, is when he was told to 'charge these men', meaning arrest them. He promptly backs away, and the reader has enough time to remember he takes everything literally... when Carrot runs, screaming, at the men, two axes in each hand, throws the axes, barely missing, and then runs at the armed men bare-handed. This is only the establishing moment of awesome, however.
  • We get an early evidence of Carrot's charisma when his speech to an entire bar's worth of drunken and fighty dwarves cause them all to realise the error of their ways, weep in shame and decide to write back home to their mums.
• Pratchett is fond of characters paraphrasing the "Do you feel lucky?" speech from Dirty Harry. It gives Vimes one of his earliest awesome moments, in Guards! Guards!.
  • Guards! Guards! has FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC engraved over the door of the Watch House, for more Dirty Harry-based fun.
• Although the Dragon was a villain (sort-of), the Dragon becoming King (or rather, Queen) of Ankh-Morpork.
• The wizards spend all night casting spells at the dragon after it takes over the city while almost everyone else is prepared to collaborate from the start. For its part, the dragon shrugs off every one of those spells.
• Vimes's Establishing Character Moment, refusing to serve the new regime out of principle:
  Vimes: You can't give me my job back. It was never yours to take away. I was never an officer of the city, or an officer of the king, or an officer of the Patrician. I was an officer of the law. It might have been corrupted and bent, but it was law, of a sort. There isn't any law now except: 'you'll get burned alive if you don't watch out'. Where's the place in there for me?
• Carrot, Colon, and Nobby try to shoot the dragon in the vulnerables. Granted, it utterly fails, but given how many close scrapes they've had already, and how obviously reluctant Colon and Nobby are, it's impressive they still had the bottle to try. Not to mention they had a pretty decent grasp of how the Discworld works.
• The swamp dragon Errol when he finally gets done rearranging his digestive tract. The dragon kennels exploded. The windows blew out. The door left the wall ahead of a great billow of black smoke and sailed into the air, tumbling slowly, to plow into the rhododendrons... Now Errol’s flame was visible, so hot as to be almost blue. The landscape rolled away underneath him at an impossible speed, and he was accelerating. In short, Errol turns himself into a jet engine.
• Sybil. You've got to admire a woman who happily works with creatures which have, at this point, burned off all her hair, and could, at any moment, explode. Similarly, her reaction to the giant dragon attacking the city isn't to run scared, but to want to get a good view of it.
  • Also, the totally practical way she handles a wounded Vimes.
  • Not to mention that when guards come to take her away to be a Virgin Sacrifice she attacks them with a broadsword.
• Vimes tells Vetinari to shut up. Twice. And the second time, he shakes his finger at him! (From earlier in the book: "The Patrician was not a man you shook a finger at unless you wanted to end up being able to count only to nine," but Vimes still has all ten.) And he's only terrified later! It doesn't work, in that Vetinari continues smarting off anyway, but Wonse seems to take that as a cue to try to kill him, and then Vimes saves his life, which Vetinari seems distinctly impressed by. ("You saved my life." "Sir?") Basically, you can see exactly when Vetinari started respecting Vimes.
  Anyway, what was there to be afraid of? He'd stared into the jaws of death three times; four, if you included telling Lord Vetinari to shut up.
• While it ends sadly, and most people are too scared to follow them, Sergeant Colon and a Red Shirt city-dweller concerned the dragon might want one of his daughters attempting to rally the crowd against the Dragon after hearing that it demands a Virgin Sacrifice.
• The dragon giving a "Reason You Suck" Speech to Wonse and all of humanity:
  You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless, and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes - we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality