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man I’ve been listening to Guards! Guards! again, right. I was going to do Feet of Clay again but I wanted so badly to spend some time with Lady Sybil in her element, so I detoured over to the beginning. (Incidentally, Making-Money!Vetinari up against Guards!-Guards!Vetinari is one hell of a contrast. One gets the sincere impression that older Vetinari would wipe the floor with his younger self if they ever met, and then be painfully embarrassed afterward; and yet you can see the potential among the arrogance. I wrote this bit before I wrote a longer piece about that exchange, but I’ll get round to linking it in here in a moment.)
But I wanted to discuss Sybil.
The first thing you have to understand about Sybil is that she is an archetype of a certain kind of autistic person, usually a woman (or a queer man). You find them in every kind of domestic animal fancy, although Sybil is of the class and rank that generally focuses on relatively large, expensive, and impractical animals; the dragon fancy is mostly based on the dog fancy, with strong influence from horse fancies and sometimes cat or falconry fancies. It is not a coincidence that Sybil is unmarried and that most of her time is spent with other women, often middle class or upper class women, who share her all consuming interest in dragons; this has been a really common social circle for autistics, especially autistic women with independent money, into a given animal fancy since the cultural concept of animal fancies existed.
The second thing you have to understand about Sybil is that she is not at all a conventionally attractive woman. Here are the things we learn about her as Vimes does, in order: she has inherited wealth and status that she does not particularly care about; she is large–taller than Vimes himself, or at least tall enough to loom over him–and “booms” confidently and incomprehensibly at him; and even after she takes off the heavy protective armor useful for conducting a dragon mating, she’s tall and fat and (implied to be) heavily muscled under the fat. Her figure is compared to the Venus of Willendork, or perhaps an operatic Valkyrie, and she wears wigs because she is generally fairly bald, or at least singed. She’s loud by nature. She wanders around with a dragon on her shoulder creating awful smells and occasionally dribbling.
God, I love her. Speaking as another erstwhile animal fancy autistic, she’s really living the dream there. And this little Watch man shows up in her life, totally fails to understand what she’s asking for when she tries to conscript him into the easy job for the breeding she’s trying to facilitate, and then sits and asks her a bunch of pointed questions about her beloved dragons. He’s weird in his own way and a little drunk, and he really is unfortunate enough not to have any dragons experience at all, but he sits down and he asks her questions and he listens to everything she can infodump at her with, as far as I can tell, rapt fascination.
This is not an experience Sybil Ramkin has frequently had. He doesn’t try to escape or change the subject or draw her back to the pieces he cares about even a little bit. He’s clearly dazed and confused and probably, knowing Vimes, a little bit drunk, but he’s not even visibly discomfited enough to shove poor old Dewdrop Maybelline Talonthrust the First out of his lap. Sybil clearly knows that most people don’t appreciate being drooled acid on, and tells Vimes repeatedly that he can shove the old man off, but he makes no effort to do so at any point. Given that dragons are described as having a quite pervasive smell, and given all the other details of their biology, I can’t even begin to imagine how awful the old dragon must smell… and Vimes just sort of rolls with it.
(It’s a pity Pterry didn’t understand show names at all, of course; the ones we get should tell us something about the relationships among dragons and kennels, and the prefixes should be repeated, and whatever Sybil’s own kennel name is should be present in many of the dragons she mentions. Probably it’s either Talonthrust or Moonmist, but either way Goodboy Bindle Featherstone of Quirm is named entirely wrong. He’s clearly of her own breeding, so he should have a kennel prefix or suffix that aligns with hers, not a name that has nothing in common with her other dragons and implies that his dam was bred by the duchess of Quirm rather than by Sybil herself.)
He listens and he listens and he asks questions and he goes down to the kennels to look at her pride and joy and listen to her explaining what makes each of them so nice. And then he brings her an incredibly exciting present. And he expresses interest in the sweet little whittle she’s been trying to work out what to do with, who is totally not a breeding specimen but is too weird even for the sort of people who adopt dragons from the Sunshine Sanctuary. He doesn’t even try to leave until the big dragon overhead causes a big stir, and then when she has him taken to her house to recover, she finds him reading her book about diseases of the dragons with every evidence of fascination.
Small wonder she takes notice of him, really.
I meant to add onto this and forgot: I do think there’s a huge missed opportunity for hilarity in the Watch books by virtue of the fact that Pratchett sort of shoves Sybil into the background of Vimes’ stories, such that she essentially becomes a helpful sounding board and an instrument of chaos in his professional life but not really a central character in his stories. We spend almost no time with Vimes in his home or off duty, and I think that’s a shame…
… In part because look, Sybil canonically has house dragons as well as the kennel dragons. Elderly house dragons. Who are much beloved and cosseted and rather spoiled. We know from Jingo that she uses them to cook with (badly), and we know some are being trained to perch on shoulders, apparently for use as a sort of lapdog.
What I am saying here is that I feel cheated of the opportunity to see Vimes adjusting to the quirks of the house dragons: does he ever get better at staking out personal space from old Dewdrop? Do any of the shoulder dragons Sybil is working with take an unexpected and probably unwanted shine to him? Is there a particular dragon that has decided that sucking up to the littler more erratic human instead of competing with all the other dragons for the attentions of the more reliable familiar one that spends more time with them is a better way of acquiring attention and the odd snack? Where’s Errol II?
If you live with or are close to someone in an animal fancy, you tend to acquire one or two of them as pets whether you particularly want to or not, as long as you don’t actively detest the species at large. I guarantee there’s a dragon that thinks of itself, and that Sybil vaguely thinks of, as Vimes’ dragon.
(of course the Doylist explanation here is that Terry had been exposed to dog fancy and horse fancy people but had never been in a close relationship with one, but shh.)
There is also this bit from Jingo:
There was a fluttering above him. He sighed. A message was coming in. On a pigeon.
But they’d tried everything else, hadn’t they? Swamp dragons tended to explode in the air, imps ate the messages and the semaphore helmets had not been a success, especially in high winds. And then Corporal Littlebottom had pointed out that Ankh-Morpork’s pigeons were, because of many centuries of depredation by the city’s gargoyle population, considerably more intelligent than most pigeons, although Vimes considered that this was not difficult because there were things growing on old damp bread that were more intelligent than most pigeons.
It’s unclear from that text whether anyone has actively trialed a messenger dragon service or just suggested one before immediately being shut down. Either way, Sybil would have been in the middle of the entire thing. Was it her idea? Was she shooting it down immediately? Did Vimes bring her the thought? (I can’t imagine him being that inventive; he’s fundamentally a rather small-c conservative person and he doesn’t like change. Was he the intermediary between Sybil and some far-thinking Watch member like Cheri or Carrot?
There’s so clearly a story there.
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