Awesome / Night Watch (Discworld)

• The whole book seems a great Moment of Awesome for Vetinari. We see how much he’s changed the city, how positive those changes have been despite some questionable choices along the way (like empowering guilds instead of Watch), and probably the reason for these choices. And, most importantly, we see that he does indeed have a heart (so doubles as a heartwarming moment). Foreshadowed right in the beginning of the story where he wore a lilac in the original timeline as well.
  "I joined the fight. I snatched up a lilac bloom from a fallen man and, I have to say, held it in my mouth. I'd like to think I made some difference; I certainly killed four men, although I take no particular pride in that. They were thugs, bullies. No real skill."
  • Once the People's Republic has expanded to encompass a quarter of the city, including most of the food supply infrastructure, Vimes muses that Vetinari would NEVER have made such a logistical blunder as to neglect the unglamourous commercial districts. And adds that Vetinari's Anhk-Morpork is twice the size and quadruple the complexity compared to the city Winder ruled.
• It's also one for Vimes, with multiple people throughout the book remarking that there is far more to this Watch Sergeant than meets the eye:
  • Young Vetinari remarks in mild awe that Vimes is a thug who thinks with his muscles but in every single moment he over-rules them and (in how he handled the mobs outside the Treacle Mine Road Watch house and the Unmentionables' attack) he saw a genius at work. He also notes that despite his near-flawless camouflage skills, if he hadn't been standing behind Vimes' seat, he would probably have been seen because the man stares into the shadows.
  • Madam Meserole, Vetinari's aunt and one of his mentors, a highly skilled revolutionary, sums Vimes up as "a street-fighting man with the manner of a commander" and reckons - as her nephew will - that he'd be a shoe-in to command the City Watch (she also flirts with him a bit).
  • An unnamed and smarter than average cavalry Captain sizes him up after he takes over the barricades and correctly deduces that Vimes is most certainly not just a Watch Sergeant and is used to serious command.
  • And even Snapcase points out how quickly and efficiently Vimes brought the City to its knees, taking control of all the vital supply points and comfortably repelling all assaults with minimal casualties.
• The Watch have never needed the crude and uncertain Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique. They have the Ginger Beer Trick. (Or, as it turns out, simply fear thereof.)
• Vimes takes down a large portion of the City Guard forces with little more than some willpower, a handful of ginger, and the greatest Ass Shove in the history of literature.
• The end of the book deserves special mention when Vimes arrests Carcer (which is made awesome primarily because he manages not to murder him). Carcer, for his part, puts up a surprisingly good fight despite Vimes taking out his knee almost immediately.
• Vimes confronts the resistance at their barricade.
  "I repeat, I order you to dismantle this barricade." [Vimes] took a deep breath and went on. "And rebuild it on the other side of the corner with Cable Street! And put up another one at the top of Sheer Street! Properly built! Good grief, you don't just pile stuff up, for god's sake! A barricade is something you construct!"
  • And before that, when he stands up to, and then knocks out, Lord Rust for ordering the Watch to fire on the people behind the barricade.
• When the old, corrupt watch arrests him, Vimes almost escapes by threatening the guy in charge with his own sword, which is even more awesome because he works this into a rant about all the holes in their form.
  • This is made doubly awesome because he’s then finally arrested by a younger version of himself. Whichever way you look, Vimes comes out on top.
• The greatest Moment of Awesome in Night Watch, nay for Vimes, nay for the entire series, takes place entirely in Vimes' own head:
  He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew... Then it was too high.
  History finds a way? Well, it would have to come up with something good, because it was up against Sam Vimes now.
• At the end, after arresting Carcer, Vetinari suggests a statue for the men who died, with a plaque to the effect of 'they did the job they had to do'.
  Vimes: How dare you? How dare you! At this time! In this place! They did the job they didn't have to do, and they died doing it, and you can't give them anything. Do you understand?
  • That was even more awesome for Vetinari, because earlier in the scene Sam himself had mentioned a statue or something for the heroes, and Vetinari turned it around on him with deliberate use of the "job they had to do" phrase to make the insufficiency of a monument clear.
  • Not to mention Vimes yells at Vetinari AND GETS AWAY SCOT FREE. Though that's partially a CMOA for Vetinari as well, as he realizes at this time in this place, he can afford to allow it. But he points out to Vimes that's the only time he will.
• Vimes leads a rather bedraggled group of Watchmen into battle against a much better-armed group of Unmentionables twice their size and completely and utterly owning them. A very decent proportion of the enemy ended up just running away from "a maniac with two swords." Let's just recap real quick. The evil, dark force that is the Unmentionables was half-obliterated and then chased out of action by Sam Vimes, armed with nothing but two swords and blind in one eye.
• Ned's reply to Vimes finally owning up to being a time traveller. 'I traveled here through time.' Ned looks him over—post-battle—and has to ask 'From how far back?'.
• One we never get to see, though it gets described: Vetinari failed his stealth final in assassin school, because his instructor marked him as absent. Let that sink in for a moment.
  • His Aunt also notes his repeated reprimands for not showing up for his concealment classes in general...
• Vetinari's "assassination" of Lord Winder. He walks into Lord Winder's birthday party, takes out two miniature crossbows, shoots the bodyguards with them, and then pulls out a sword. Before Vetinari can actually use it on Lord Winder though, the man dies of sheer terror. All done in a crowded room full of witnesses, and Vetinari just walks out — with no one saying a word.
  • This becomes a neat bit of Fridge Brilliance when you notice that every previous scene had Vetinari talking about camouflage or demonstrating the correct usage thereof, only to prove in this scene that the perfect camouflage is not making people not see you, but making people not want to see you.
  • Which means it's even more of a MoA for Vetinari's aunt, who'd deftly arranged the crowd to ensure its convenient blindness, and to ensure that Winder had no allies left by the time Vetinari came to kill him.
  • Let's rephrase: Vetinari walks into a crowded room in the middle of the palace, kills the most important man in the city (and his two bodyguards), and walks back out, all without being seen or leaving a mark on his target. Assassin legends rarely do as well.
  • Nobody in a crowded room of nobles saw Vetinari... except his target. There's stealth, there's style, and there's Vetinari.
  • Bonus points for using the same technique at the very end in the graveyard, only letting himself be seen after Vimes arrests Carcer.
• Really, any time Vetinari opens his mouth counts. There's a reason why one of Sgt. Colon's greatest fears is that Vetinari will get sardonic on him. Also, when he holds flowers in his teeth. Don't ask.
• Reg Shoe. Though throughout the book he was a silly revolutionary (and in the entire series he was at best Plucky Comic Relief), when he realizes that the revolution has failed, and the ones who fought are being killed by the ones they put in power, he raises the flag and leads the attack against the secret police, refusing to fall over or stop fighting even after an enormous number of arrows have hit him, before he finally keels over - only to return as an equally revolutionary zombie.
  • And he returned as a zombie because he refused to accept being dead.
  • And because he had to keep fighting the good fight. He gave his all for the revolution, he died for the cause, he clawed his way back from the great beyond to find that the whole thing had been a joke all along and he was the punchline. Young Vimes crawled into a bottle in despair, but Reg Shoe built a new revolution, made a new cause, and kept right on fighting.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight when you realize that Reg Shoe eventually joins the Watch, fulfilling his purpose to fight for the people. And he's once again fighting under Vimes' command.
• Okay - that "Mr. Burleigh and Mr. Stronginthearm" line was EPIC, even if nobody got it but Vimes.
• So the Watch is slowly developing the various departments of a modern police service. It has detectives, forensics, surveillance, autopsies, traffic, fraud, internal investigations, all of that stuff. Now notice at the start of the book when Carcer kills Stronginthearm and hides on the University’s roof Vimes tells everyone to surround the building but not go up because he’s doing it himself… Vimes is the Watch’s (more or less) one-man SWAT Team!
  • An Alternative Character Interpretation: he does it himself because, in case Carcer somehow gets away, he only has himself to blame, and nobody else has to beat themselves up over it.
• Vimes turning around the plot to frame him for theft. You might think the stolen item would end up in the locker of one of the men who set him up, but nope. It's in its owner's safe, because Sam Vimes is incorruptible, even thirty years in the past and under an assumed name.
  • It's actually implied that he originally considered placing the item in one of those lockers, but when he found something far more damning inside he removed it to protect that man from far worse punishment. Putting the stolen item back was less because Vimes was incorruptible and more a display of how cunning he truly is: for the duration of that scene, the men who tried to frame him are reeling from uncertainty as each has his locker checked. In the end, they know that he’s aware of what they did, showed mercy on them, one realizes that his secret is exposed, and they know he knows they know that. So now everybody knows where they stand.
  • And while Vimes dislikes making Captain Tilden (a decent man in way over his head) doubt his own memory, it also frees him from command oversight for a couple days to get his authority established.
• At first it seems that the history has not changed. There are still seven graves and there are still lilacs. But when you think about it, you realise that in fact, Sam Vimes has succeeded in defeating history. He held the barricades until the morning and prevented bloodshed. His family, the Watch, Vetinari, and the cemetery are all the same, but the city might have a few hundred, perhaps even a few thousand, people more than before the storm - people who owe their lives to Sam Vimes.
  • And that's only the people present at the barricades. How many of them, over the next thirty years or so, went on to have children and grandchildren?
• Vimes defuses a Powder Keg Crowd ... by deliberately making the watch house as unthreatening as possible, and channeling all their pent up energy into tending to one belligerent young man who works himself up into a hand injury. (Every other watch house in the city has fortified itself, which to a mob mentality means 'enemy'.)
  • To reiterate, Vimes averts a riot in the making by opening the Watch House door, turning on all the lights, and sitting outside it amiably drinking a cup of cocoa, which completely short-circuits the mob's expectations. As the narration puts it, it's the first time in history a single man with a non-alcoholic beverage has been the subject of so much rapt attention. He then treats the one young man who tries to pick a fight with perfect courtesy and respect, giving the other ample rope to hang himself and diverting everyone's energy into helping out out with his subsequent injury.
• Vimes making it back to the present just in time to learn that his wife was having trouble in child birth. Vimes ran naked and bloody through the city to fetch the only competent doctor in Ankh Morpork and save his wife and child. He brought Dr Lawn, evaded a misplaced bazooka/shotgun blast, sat for the very long child birth and managed to see his son. Only then did he collapse from exhaustion and injuries.
• At the start of the book, Vimes learns that the Assassin's Guild has taken him off the register.
  • And when they did so his contract was priced at 600,000 dollars. Both the size of the bounty and the removal from the register are records only surpassed by Vetinari.
• Young Vetinari's revenge against Downey for destroying his book on concealment.
  A little later that night, Downey was walking unsteadily back to his study after a convivial time in the Prefects' Common Room, when he noticed that a torch had gone out.
  With a swiftness that might have surprised someone who saw no further than his flushed face and unsteady walk, he pulled out a dagger and scanned the corridor. He glanced up at the ceiling, too. There were gray shadows everywhere, but nothing more than that. Sometimes, torches did go out all by themselves.
  He stepped forward.
  When he woke up in his bed next morning, he put the headache down to some bad brandy. And some scag had painted orange and black stripes on his face.
• Vimes' sheer channeled fury during the Scouring of the House of Pain^note What history would call the revolutionaries' destruction of the Unmentionables' Torture Cellar is terrifying and awesome to behold, especially when he catches the clerk who kept all the notes during the atrocities that took place there and dismantles his protestations that he's not a bad person because he only wrote things down and measured people^note Captain Swing was a believer in craniometrics- the nonsensical belief that you can tell what someone is like by measuring their head and facial features, which was as good as proof to a madman like Swing with a ferocious "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  "And what does daddy do at work all day, mister? ... You're all alone here. You have no friends here. You sat and took notes for a torturer, a bloody torturer! And I see a desk, and it's got a desk drawer, and if you ever, ever want to hold a pen again you'll tell me everything I want to know-"
• Vimes using his ability to tell where he is in Ankh-Morpork by the way the street feels to find the Time Monks.
• The fight between Swing and Vimes in the Torture Cellar. Swing puts up a surprisingly good fight (an awesome moment from an otherwise reprehensible bastard of a man), but ultimately it's Vimes who walks away from the battle, killing Swing with his own steel ruler.
• Ned Coates gets a small moment towards the end when he interrupts Carcer, now his superior. Carcer goes to turn on his full Faux Affably Evil act but Ned just looks back at him. Even Carcer is made uneasy by this, making Ned the only character who manages to provoke this in him.