The Medici’s of historical fame, Italian Family, ruthless autocrats. I too did not make the pun connection in a specific fashion. I automatically associated Vetinari with the Medici’s (and the Borgias) but didn’t get the ‘Medicine’ vs ‘Veterinary’ gag…Doh!
APF: I suspect they refer to the ‘Annotated Prachett File’ over at L-Space Web. Very worthy. http://www.co.uk.lspace.org/
I’m also with Shalmanese: As I was reading the musing (and before I got to Shalmansese’s post I thought Amoral is the word for Vetinari. Labelling him as good or Evil misses the simple fact that Vetinari acts outside the spectrum of good and evil. His obsession with making things work seems to have lifted him clear of those motivations.
I agree with the pragmatist aspect of Vetinari. In fact,there’s a generally pragmatic attitude displayed by most of Pratchett’s strongest characters. They all know they have a job to do and if they can do it with as little fuss and pain as possible they will. If not, they’ll do what they must to get the job done and keep things moving in the right direction.
Also remember that Vetinari is fond of his dog Wuffles and doesn’t stroke a white cat while making decisions, so he can’t be all bad, according to narrative causality.
I agree with the pragmatist aspect of Vetinari. In fact,there’s a generally pragmatic attitude displayed by most of Pratchett’s strongest characters. They all know they have a job to do and if they can do it with as little fuss and pain as possible they will. If not, they’ll do what they must to get the job done and keep things moving in the right direction.
Also remember that Vetinari is fond of his dog Wuffles and doesn’t stroke a white cat while making decisions, so he can’t be all bad, according to narrative causality.
I think vetinari is lgoical and would have no problems with moral questions like “would you kill one innocent person to save 10?”.
Think of spock without the emotion!
The one exception is his attitude to mime artists. Although we never actual see it,any mime artist performing withing the city is hung upside down in the scorpion pit with a sign saying “learn the words”!
On a wider point I think the great point of the characters in discworld is that you cannot pigeon hole them into the whole good and evil boxes.
We see a lot of Vetinari interacting with others, and aside from its being clear that his overriding ethic is the good of the city, we don’t get a lot of insight into the man.
But there is one spot where pTerry “draws the curtain,” so to speak, and we get a momentary glimpse of his inner motivations – the interview between him and Carrot at the end of Men at Arms. I won’t try to summarize it, even in a spoiler – it’s the product of a couple hundred pages of intricate plot, but it does clearly show us a bit of the man behind the image of the Patrician.
