New entries at the bottom.
open/close all folders
Barking Dogs
- Got a problem with the barking dogs. Agatea is an expy of China/Japan/Korea. One of the things we have seen in our own world is that the Japanese have led in a drive for miniaturisation - making things smaller and more compact. This applies across the board from computers to those silly little dogs silly women carry about in their handbags. So sooner or later one of those clever Auriental minds is going to contemplate miniaturising the Barking Dogs down into, say, hand-held Barking Puppies or Barking Handbag Dogs. And so we get back to gonnes again. How will Vetinari react this time?
- The Japanese miniaturise out of necessity because the country is seriously tiny, and what land they have is mostly vertical. The Counterweight Continent doesn't have that issue. Plus it took a long time for the equivalent technological development on our world in China to reach Europe, even though the countries involved were on the same continent. Agatea is more removed from things and has, barring Cohen, a fairly slight effect on world events.
- Technically any country on the Disc could develop gonnes again. Gunpowder for fireworks is an old well-established technology. Agatea is probably one of the least likely to do so thanks to their ingrained traditionalism.
- Not to mention how they'd probably assign the task of designing one to, at best, whichever bureaucrat can write the most moving poem about the reflection of fireworks on a pond.
- Real history provides some guidance here. China did invent gunpowder, fireworks, and early cannons, but the technology did not advance very quickly. Chinese fortifications tended to be walled cities with rammed-earth defenses of exactly the same time that Europeans only later invented after they realized their forts would have to soak up cannon fire without damage. The technology of gunpowder weapons did not advance quickly, and bows and crossbows were still in widespread use in the 1700s, unlike the case in Europe where the musket had largely replaced those older weapons. Meanwhile, Japan developed its firearms technology rapidly up to about 1600 and had some of the most advanced small arms in the world... but largely neglected cannon development and for that matter largely stopped making widespread use of firearms at all during the politically stable Edo period afterwards. Korea gained a significant advantage in a naval war with Japan in the 1590s precisely because their navy made good use of cannons and the Japanese did not... but again, in the following centuries handheld firearms did not replace the bow and arrow so consistently. All in all, while it's certainly possible that the Agatean Empire will develop handheld single-shot "gonnes" as a logical outgrowth of the existing "barking dogs," there's no guarantee that this will happen soon.
Twoflower, world-traveling deadbeat
- We never get much of an explanation for why Twoflower ditched his wife and daughters to go gallivanting off to the other side of the world, for the sheer heck of it, apparently in no particular hurry to go back. The fact he never mentioned them gets lampshaded, and obviously the reason is "it was just a Retcon, don't worry about it", but it's still weird! Although it actually seems possible that they'd broken up and were Amicable Exes, so she had no particular objection to not seeing him for a while, which would somewhat clarify the situation.
- While the introduction of his family here is a Retcon to part of Twoflower's backstory, notice how timing isn't mentioned: We know he was married, he has (at least), two daughters, his wife died when some of Lord Hong's troops attacked a (random) location, Twoflower started touring the Disc.... Which happened first, the vacation or his wife's death? And how old were the daughters when it happened? Old enough that at least the oldest could take charge? She was level-headed enough to be part of a rebellion (and well on her way to thinking like a bureaucrat, on Rincewind's view).
- Hong is a fair bit younger than Twoflower, who'd originally said that he'd chosen to go traveling then because if he didn't do it soon, he'd never get the chance to. This, along with his false teeth and how he'd expected to blow many years' savings on the trip, suggest the tourist was heading into middle age at the time. If Lord Hong's fascination with Ankh-Morpork (his key motivation for taking over the world) only dates back to when he read What I Did On My Holidays after Twoflower returned, then it's entirely possible he only started sending men to sack cities in the last few years. Twoflower's wife and daughters may have been safe and sound with their extended family at the time he was playing tourist. Perhaps his wife even encouraged him to go, in the expectation that he would get the daydreaming and wanderlust out of his system before settling into a nice calm retirement; certainly her relatives might have felt that way about her head-in-the-clouds husband.
- Maybe he didn't used to have had a wife, but then the History Monks screwed up the timeline again?
