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{{work|wppage=Men at Arms}}
{{Infobox book
| title = Men at Arms
| image = Men at Arms 3240.jpg
| caption =
| author = Terry Pratchett
| central theme =
| elevator pitch =
| genre = Fantasy
| franchise = Discworld
| preceded by = Lords and Ladies
| followed by = Soul Music (novel)
| publication date = 1993
}}
Within the week, Sam Vimes will marry Lady Sybil and retire from the Watch. At the same time, the Watch has been forced to take on three new constables from ethnic minorities - Cuddy the dwarf, Detritus the troll, and Angua the w- (oman)? Meanwhile, a penniless noble and retired assassin, Edward [[Meaningful Name|d'Eath]], spots Corporal Carrot around the city and deduces that he is the true heir to Ankh-Morpork's vacant throne. After failing to convince other nobles that they should work to restore the kingdom, d'Eath achieves full marks at the postgraduate course at the Assassins' Guild and finds a reference to a certain banned weapon...
Notable for setting up the Watch status quo that forms the setting for many future books.
{{tropenamer|page=Men at Arms}}
* [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma]]
{{tropelist|page=Men at Arms}}
* [[Absurdly Spacious Sewer]]
* [[A Nazi By Any Other Name]]: Big Fido is an obvious dog analogue of [[Adolf Hitler]] being {{spoiler|a small nervous poodle}} who nonetheless rants about the Natural Superiority of the Canine Race and how all dogs are spiritually wolves (just as Hitler was short and dark but presented tall blond Aryans as being the superior German race). ▼
** Angua, who has run with wolf packs, is amazed at how ''off'' his idea of wolves is. It's basically just a collection of traits that humans don't want to acknowledge in themselves (and wolves lack altogether).▼
* [[All the Myriad Ways]]: "In a million universes, this was a very short book."
* [[Aluminium Christmas Trees]]: The highly flammable nitrocellulose billiard balls? ''Those actually existed.''
* [[Analogy Backfire]]
* [[Anti
** Vimes (despite hating Assassins) admits that {{spoiler|Dr. Cruces}} was probably a decent man, before the Gonne took hold of his mind.
* [[Artifact of Doom]]: The Gonne.
Line 22 ⟶ 35:
* [[Automatic Crossbows]]: Frequently averted. On several occasions, the plot revolves around the fact that the crossbow has either just fired or will leave the wielder unarmed for a time if it is fired. What makes the gonne dangerous is that it lacks that disadvantage on top of being longer range and almost always lethal.
* [[Bavarian Fire Drill]]: Nobby of the Ankh-Morpork [[Beverly Hills Cop|City Ordnance Inspection City]][[Department of Redundancy Department|Audit Bureau Special Audit Inspection]].
* [[Belated Backstory]]: This is the book where we first learn that Vimes is the descendant of the man who killed the last king of Ankh-Morpork.
* [[Beware the Honest Ones]]: Carrot at the Fools' Guild.
* [[Beware the Nice Ones]]: Carrot and the [[Just Between You and Me]] example.
** Also the first book to insinuate that there may be just a little something more to Carrot's personality than meets the eye.
* [[
* [[Black Shirt]]: the Day Watch.
* [[Bluffing the Murderer]]
* [[Bold Inflation]]: Edward D'Eath.
{{quote|
* [[Bond Villain Stupidity]]
* [[Boomerang Bigot]]: Played as a gag by Detritus:
{{quote|
'''Skully:''' Who?
'''Detritus:''' Trolls. Nasty pieces of work in my opinion. }}
* [[Bothering
* [[Breast Plate]]: Angua ''doesn't'' have one, and won't until someone takes one to the armourer and has him beat it out really well ''here'' and ''here''.
* [[Brick Joke]]: Probably one of the most extreme ever written. There's a brief aside near the beginning of the book where Vimes and Carrot look at the disused Post Office building and its sign reading "NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLOM OF NIT..." (a parody of the motto on the US Postal Service building in New York). In its place, this seems to be just a typical joke about bad mediaeval spelling on the Discworld, but a full ''eleven years later'', Terry Pratchett wrote ''[[
** That ''tiny'' little thing about "cohorts", as it was Moist von Lipwig who mentioned that he used to think it was a piece of armor, and would imagine people polishing them... like the Watch did near the end.
** See [[Prophecy Twist]] below for an single-book example.
** The story of Fingers-Mazda stealing fire from the gods, here a one-off footnote joke, forms the basis of the plot of ''[[
** This is also the first mention of Koom Valley, which becomes a major plot point in ''[[Thud
* [[Bucket Booby Trap]]: at the Fools' Guild.
* [[Call Back]]: The Librarian wanting to be a {{spoiler|Best Man at a wedding}}, seeing as he'd [[
** Detritus recruits two trolls named Flint and Moraine to the Watch. Could be the same two from ''Moving Pictures'', though "Flint" changed his name a couple of times in that book.
* [[Character Development]]: Compare Vimes and Carrot here to how they appear in ''Guards! Guards!'' Right from his first appearance in the book Carrot has significantly more depth than he did in his first appearance.
* [[Characterization Marches On]]: Lord Rust here is shown as one of the more cynical and intelligent of Ankh-Morpork's nobles. In ''[[
** Possibly justified in that here, he is interacting with his fellow nobles, which allows him to come across as clever, and even kind of likeable in how he treats Edward d'Eath. When interacting with commoners, on the other hand...
** Another theory is that this Lord Rust is the father of Jingo's Lord Rust.
* [[Cool and Unusual Punishment]]: "Prickle, prickle, prickle."
* [[Cool Chair]]: The "golden" throne of Ankh-Morpork. Subverted in that {{spoiler|it's so rotten and woodwormy that it would immediately fall apart if sat on}}.
* [[Cool Sword]]: Carrot's nameless blade, which is very specifically and completely non-magical. It's just "bloody efficient" at cutting things, which is more than most Discworld swords, the vast majority of which are magical and therefore not-quite-real.
Line 60 ⟶ 73:
* [[Determinator]]: Big Fido.
* [[Department of Redundancy Department]]: Sign at the Post Office:
{{quote|
rocks
troll's with sticks
All sorts of dragons
Mrs Cake
Huje green things with teeth
Any kinds of black dogs with orange eyebrows
Rains of spaniel's
fog.
Mrs Cake }}
* [[Discriminate and Switch]]: Angua the w{{spoiler|...erewolf}}.
* [[Disney Villain Death]]: {{spoiler|Big Fido}}.
* [[Does This Remind You of Anything?]]
* [[Dogs Are Dumb]]: Subverted with the Dog Guild, but you might wish it wasn't.
* [[
** [[Don't Explain the Joke|The joke being that the easiest way to kill insects]] (most of them, anyway, but [[Attack of the 50
* [[Don't Touch It, You Idiot!]]: The gonne. Vimes warns Carrot not to touch it, but Carrot picks it up anyway. Fortunately, he is [[Incorruptible Pure Pureness|immune to its seductive voice]].
* [[Drill Sergeant Nasty]]: Colon and Detritus ''try'' to pull it off, but...
{{quote|
'''Cuddy''': How do we eat with it, sergeant? Do we use it as a knife or fork or cut it down the middle for chopsticks or what?
'''Angua''': And how exactly do we sleep with it? }}
** Whether or not the innuendo was intentional, it makes Nobby snigger.
** Subsequently misremembered by Detritus as:
{{quote|
** Along with:
{{quote|
'''Bauxite''': Slice Mountain, but -
'''Detritus''': Slice Mountain! ''Slice Mountain?'' Only two things come from Slice Mountain! Rocks... an'... an'... other sortsa rocks! What kind ''you'', Bauxite? }}
* [[Dumb Muscle]]: Detritus had previously appeared in ''Guards! Guards!'' and ''Moving Pictures'', but it's here that we start to get particularly acquainted with him and his... difficulties. Poor thing can't even read, and knocks himself out trying to salute. {{spoiler|Subverted in that when locked in a freezer, his silicon-based brain becomes a superconductor and he reaches near-godlike levels of intelligence.}}
Line 95 ⟶ 108:
* [[Exact Words]]: Carrot talks his way into the Fools' Guild with the implied threat of "If you refuse to let us in, I shall have to carry out my orders." The order was {{spoiler|to give up and leave.}}
* [[Fantasy Gun Control]]: Analysed. Vimes muses that gonnes would change the world because, instead of simply storing the power of your own muscles like crossbows, they 'give you power from outside' - the comparison to magic is obvious, and just as wizards try to restrict the availability of magic, assassins hate the gonne as it would make killing ''so easy''. So there are forces actively keeping gonnes from becoming available.
* [[
* [[Five
* [[Foreshadowing]]: After Colon and Nobby (while playing cards) have discussed the Arthurian pull-a-sword-from-a-stone legend and considered it insufficient to become king-
{{quote|
'''Nobby''': A man like that'd be an [[The Ace|ace]]. }}
** Minor example from early in the book. Angua is incredulous at Carrot's claim to likes long walks. Later on we find that it probably wasn't because she's a w {{spoiler|-oman}} but a w {{spoiler|-erewolf}}.
* [[Gadgeteer Genius]]: Leonard, of course. The only place where his genius falls down is in [[Giver of Lame Names|coming up with names for his inventions]]. (Except mechanical flying machines, which appear to be the only things that have actually maintained his
* [[Good Smoking, Evil Smoking]]: Sam Vimes.
* [[Good Thing You Can Heal]]: {{spoiler|Angua}}.
* [[Grievous Harm
* [[Heroic BSOD]]: {{spoiler|Detritus, after Cuddy is killed. Subverted with Carrot after Angua is shot; there's a different reason why he missed a wedding to stay with her. Those bullets weren't silver.}}
* [[Heroic RROD]]: In the scene where Detritus goes into low-temperature genius mode, it was ''so'' cold that he almost froze to death.
* [[Heroic Willpower]]: Vimes when {{spoiler|he gets the gonne.}}
** Carrot too, see [[Don't Touch It, You Idiot!]] above.
* [[Hold Your Hippogriffs]]: "Is the High Priest an Offlian? Does a dragon explode in the woods?" is the Discworld version of "Is the Pope a Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods?"
* [[How Many Fingers?]]: Bleargh.
* [[
{{quote|
'''Vimes''': ''(incoherent mumbling)''
'''Colon''': [[Oh Crap|I've never known him not to give a loud clear "Yes"!]] }}
* [[I'm Thinking It Over]]: "Dwarfs are very attached to gold. Any highwayman demanding 'Your money or your life' had better bring a folding chair and packed lunch and a book to read while the debate goes on."
* [[Impoverished Patrician]]: the d'Eath family.
* [[Incorruptible Pure Pureness]]: Carrot, specifically when he stuns Vimes with the phrase "Personal isn't the same as important."
** Then again, {{spoiler|he suspected that the bullets (not being silver) wouldn't be enough to kill her.}} A better example would be when he picks up the gonne, which had previously taken the minds of every person who touched it, and even those aware of its poisonous influence could not bring themselves to destroy such a perfect, unique weapon. {{spoiler|Carrot crushes it against a wall, instantly and effortlessly.}}
* [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Incredibly Lame Pune
** "He really got burned on that deal." (One gets the impression Pterry just couldn't stop himself.)
** Bjorn, the dwarf who believes in reincarnation. Meaning he'll be Bjorn-again. Made more hilarious the fact that the one making the comment is Death, and he's saying it to a race that generally doesn't understand figures of speech, puns, etc.
** On Vimes's retirement gift: "A Watch from, your Old Freinds in the Watch" (sic)
** After Cuddy explains about Detritus' brain-cooling helmet-mounted fan to Colon: "Oh, so now we've got a clockwork soldier? We're a real model army, we are". (Also a reference to Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, and Vimes' ancestor Old Stoneface is a Captain Ersatz of Cromwell).
* [[In
* [[Inner Monologue]]: Parodied. After Carrot chases a wolf out of his bedroom, his inner voice chews him out for driving away the one he loves. {{spoiler|No, wait, it's Gaspode.}}
* [[Innocent Innuendo]]: Angua pulls it off a couple of times, although ([[Deadpan Snarker|Angua being Angua]]) it's implied that she might just be winding the listeners up. You can hear the others thinking "[[Heh Heh, You Said "X"]]" from the other side of the fourth wall.
{{quote|
'''Angua''': How long will I have? }}
▲* [[The Ishmael]]: Arguably, Vimes and Angua to Carrot, as this is the most Carrot-centric story in the Discworld series. Just goes to show an Ishmael can still be badass.
▲* [[Its Personal]]: Subverted: "But personal isn't the same as important."
** Beano the clown isn't comforted when Edward d'Earth says his death was "nothing personal." In fact, that makes him feel even worse - he died for what amounts to no reason.
* [[Jerkass Facade]]: Sam Vimes
* [["Join the Army," They Said]]
* [[Just Between You and Me]]: Analysed when Vimes muses that if you're held at swordpoint, hope like hell that your captor is an evil man - because [[Just Between You and Me|he'll talk, and gloat]], and you have time to think of an escape. But a good man will kill you with barely a word... {{spoiler|which, indeed, Carrot does to Cruces at the end.}}
* [[Keep the Reward]]: subversion
Line 138 ⟶ 151:
* [[Killed Off for Real]]: {{spoiler|Cuddy}}
* [[Killer Rabbit]]: Big Fido, the psychotic Nazi-esque {{spoiler|toy poodle}}
** Note that small militaristic dogs aren't that unusual. See, for example,
* [[King in
* [[Locked in
** Interestingly, Detritus mentions he had worked in the Pork Futures Warehouse previously, but was fired for being too stupid.
* [[Lonely Funeral]]
* [[Madness Mantra]]: (In an inner monologue form) "It was like being a god".
* [[Magnetic Hero]]: Very subtly played out with Carrot, and part of what attracts Angua to him.
** It also gets [[Deconstruction|Deconstructed]] a bit too, in that Carrot doesn't really ''like'' the idea of people following his lead simply because it's ''him''.
* [[Medieval Stasis]]: Like ''[[
** The actual gonne even remains, despite [[Reset Button]], in the form of the "spring-gonne" crossbow.
* [[Metasyntactic Variable]]: Employed and then identified by name by Gaspode at one point:
{{quote|"... Clothing has never been what you might call a thingy of dog wossname." Gaspode scratched his ear. "Two metasyntactic variables there. Sorry."}}
* [[Misfit Mobilization Moment]]
* [[Mister Muffykins]]: {{spoiler|Big Fido may have been one...once. He's something altogether different now. Completely batshit, for one.}}
* [[Morally
* [[My Significance Sense Is Tingling]]: {{spoiler|Werewolf!}}Angua can tell immediately when Carrot's been hurt, even if she's halfway across the city.
▲* [[A Nazi
* [[Nice Job Breaking It Hero]]: Uncharacteristically, Vetinari's attempt to manipulate Vimes into solving the murders backfires to a nearly catastrophic degree as he actually drives Vimes over the edge into genuine retirement.▼
▲** Angua, who has run with wolf packs, is amazed at how ''off'' his idea of wolves is. It's basically just a collection of traits that humans don't want to acknowledge in themselves (and wolves lack altogether).
▲* [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero]]: Uncharacteristically, Vetinari's attempt to manipulate Vimes into solving the murders backfires to a nearly catastrophic degree as he actually drives Vimes over the edge into genuine retirement.
* [[No Indoor Voice]]: SILAS! CUMBERBATCH!
{{quote|
THAT'S RIGHT! }}
* [[No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup]]: Like most of Leonard's inventions, the Gonne is of this type. Hell, the Gonne itself takes efforts to ''ensure'' no more are made.
{{quote|
''You expect gratitude? He would have made another gonne.'' }}
* [[Noodle Incident]]: In one of the [[All the Myriad Ways|other universes]], "Corporal Carrot became Sergeant Carrot and, in the fullness of time, died in uniform aged seventy in an unlikely accident involving an anteater." And a localised hurricane painted the Watch-House pastel (as well as fixing a window and doing some other odd jobs around the place).
** A few pages later, a minor character is said to have died when an anteater fell on his head, so perhaps the same incident happened to Carrot in the other timeline.
* [[Not So Omniscient After All]]: When Vetinari is shot. Vimes' inner monologue says that he feels as though the very fabric of history is breaking up from being confronted with the invincible [[Magnificent Bastard]] bleeding at his feet.
** Vetinari ''seems'' to be considerably off his game throughout this story. Whether he actually is or not is never directly specified, though tantalising inferences {{spoiler|can be made by reading ''[[
* [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]]
* [[Offhand Backhand]]
* [[Off the Wagon]]: Still early in his resolution to become teetotaler (made at Sybil's insistence), poor Vimes falls prey to temptation in the face of his impending retirement.
* [[Oh Crap]]: When Detritus recovers from his [[Heroic BSOD]], he gets up and proceeds to the Assassin's Guild with bloody murder in mind. It is then we learn that some of the best trained killers in Anhk-Morpork have absolutely no way of dealing with a Troll... and ''they'' learn it too.
** Specifically, they have no way to fight a troll head-on. An assassin in ''[[
*** [[Fridge Brilliance]]: ''Soul Music'' happens after the events of ''Men at Arms''. The assassins probably figured out the back-of-the-neck thing because the Detritus made them realise how helpless they were against Trolls.
** When Colon orders two other Trolls to try and stop Detritus, they request time off to go to their grandmother's funerals. As one put it, "It her or me sir."
** Then there's Vetinari when he realises he's miscalculated his pushing of Vimes' buttons (previously in the book, Vimes always punches the wall outside Vetinari's office in anger after leaving).
{{quote|
* [[Only a Flesh Wound]]: Lord Vetinari attempts to [[Invoked Trope|invoke]] this trope when he is shot in the leg. He [[Subverted Trope|fails]]. (Evidence that the gonne really was a [[Game Breaker]], as Vetinari was ''never'' wounded or incapacitated before.)
{{quote|
The leg collapsed under him. }}
* [[Painting the Fourth Wall]]: Edward D'eath can think in ''italics''. Such people need watching.
** Preferably from a safe distance.
* [[Power Born of Madness]]: Big Fido.
* [[Pretend Prejudice]]: Vimes is a self-described speciesist, but with the caveat that he isn't too crazy about humans, either. But when he hears an [[
** Meta example: the reader is led to believe that Vimes objects to Angua joining the watch because she's a woman. {{spoiler|It's really because she's a werewolf.}}
* [[Prophecy Twist]]: Nobby and Colon are discussing [[Royal Blood]] prophecies such as the king being able to pull a sword from a stone. Colon argues that being able to shove a sword ''into'' a stone is a more impressive feat. {{spoiler|Then at the end, Carrot stabs his sword through Cruces as he has his back to a stone pillar, and when he withdraws it there's a perfect rectangular slot all the way through...}}
** "A man would have to be a fool to break into the Assassins' Guild," he said. (Itself a re-use or [[Call Back]] to the same [[Prophecy Twist]] from ''[[
* [[Putting
* [[Repeat After Me]]: The Watchmen's Oath. Good lord, ''the Watchmen's Oath''.
* [[A Riddle Wrapped in
* [[Room Full of Crazy]]: When Detritus is locked in the freezer, he starts working out maths problems. He gets all the way through calculus and out the other side, and was probably up to a Unified Theory of Everything when they got him out and the warmth erased all his work, which he promptly forgot.
* [[Sacrificial Lion]]: {{spoiler|Cuddy.}}
* [[Save the Villain]]: Gaspode tries this, and [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] it. He nearly winds up {{spoiler|falling to his death along with Big Fido}}.
* [[Science Marches On]]: Big Fido's "all dogs are wolves" spiel, and the other dogs' reactions to it, become particularly [[Hilarious in Hindsight]] because right about the time the book came out, dogs were reclassified from the separate species ''canis familiaris'' to the subspecies ''canis'' '''lupus''' ''familiaris'', making every dog a wolf. Yes, even a poodle.
* [[Shout
** The showdown between Vimes, {{spoiler|Cruces}} and Carrot is an homage to the end of ''[[For a Few Dollars More]]''. Vimes' watch even plays the same tune as El Indio's music box.
*** This should be noted, that with nothing but a few italicized ''bings'' Pterry managed ''to accurately reproduce musical sound in text.''
** When beginning his investigation, Vimes was about to leave the Assassins' Guild, but then turned around because [[Columbo
** [[Predator|"Detritus! You don't have time to ooze!"]]
* [[Sexy Discretion Shot]]: "After a while, the bedsprings went ''glink''."
* [[Shut UP, Hannibal]]
* [[Smug Snake]]: Captain Quirke of the Day Watch. Don't worry, he gets a hilarious comeuppance.
* [[Something Only They Would Say]]: In this case, Something Only They Would Do. Vetinari realises he's gone too far when he tries to invoke the [[Turn in Your Badge]] trope, when he notices that Vimes didn't punch the wall after he left. (Which is what he usually does when he's angry and determined.)
Line 201 ⟶ 219:
* [[Stop Being Stereotypical]]: Detritus tries to stop the dwarf/troll street fight with this.
* [[Sword Over Head]]
* [[Tap
▲* [[Throw the Book At Them]]: ''[[Door Stopper|How To Kille Insects]]''
* [[Thwarted Coup De Grace]]: {{spoiler|Vimes with Cruces}}.
* [[Tranquil Fury]]
* [[Turn in Your Badge]]: NO.
** The attempt to [[Invoked Trope|invoke this trope]] goes a tad too far and results in a [[Ten
* [[Understatement]]: Carrot's reaction to {{spoiler|losing his virginity to Angua.}}
{{quote|
* [[
* [[Wanton Cruelty to
* [[Werewolf]]: {{spoiler|Angua}}
* [[Wham! Line]]: In the narrative:
{{quote|
Then Carrot cleared the door of the carriage and flung himself across the man, which is why the next shot went through Carrot. }}
** And of course Carrot's "Personal isn't the same as important".
* [[A Worldwide Punomenon]]: As usual in Discworld, but a particularly memorable pair:
{{quote|
* [[You Get What You Pay For]]: The foundation of the "Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness".
* [[You Know What They Say About X...]] - it takes Cuddy a while to find out what they say about dwarfs, and he apparently never really understands what is meant by "well-endowed."
** When he first hears it he says it's true. Why, he himself has saved more than seventy-eight dollars!
{{reflist}}
{{The Big Read}}
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