>Discworld
/lit/ hates it because it has a humorous tone and isn't traditionalist Christian ethnostate propaganda, which is the only acceptable type of fantasy.

>>25325273
I hate it because it’s actually dogshit. I don’t mind humorous writing, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy manages to be funny without being twee. Three Men in a Boat had me laughing out loud at points. Terry Pratchett’s humor is just like prototypical Reddit jokes and it’s not funny, and he’s not a good writer either. I’m constantly amazed that his books are as popular as they are.

>>25325267
Loved them when I was a kid, but I haven’t read any in well over a decade.

>>25325267
>How does /lit/ feel about Discworld/Pratchett?
It / he is fine.

>I've read a few of them, finished Guards! Guards! recently and am reading Men At Arms now.
That seems logical. Feet of Clay next.

>I read quite a few of the later ones early on (Started with Rincewind series first though).
The first couple are not great. Mort is where he really hits his stride, as I recall. Then the last half-dozen or so are rubbish (when he was going gaga). Everything in between is pretty much on a level. But I wouldn't recommend reading them too much out of sequence because he does kinda work on the basis that the reader has been following along with him for the whole journey. The jokes get more knowing. And there is a definite thread of chronology, albeit subtle.

>Am I right in thinking a lot of it is just "What if thing that exists... Exists?"? [...]
Not really. Some of them are indeed based around one particular aspect of our world (newspapers, cinema, Ancient Egypt, Australia, Imperial China, etc). But the "idea" for a book is such a small part of the book that even in those it's not a "lot".

>Moving Pictures was dogshit.
It was great. Giant woman climbing a huge tower holding a terrified ape, how can you not like that?

>Raising Steam was dogshit.
This one wasn't great, as I recall. It's from his "going gaga" phase. Maybe his "gone" phase actually.

>I feel like there's a lot of comfort to them if you grew up reading them, but might be harder to get into now.
Well yes one normally reads them when one is thirteen or something. Not thirty-three.

>I watch Zero Punctuation/Fully Ramblomatic on Youtube [...]
No idea.

>I can't say I like the concepts or plots of Discworld that much, but I find the prose does sometimes get a "Heh" out of me.
You seem to have read a lot of them for someone whose attitude is at best lukewarm. I think his plotting is pretty good. His pacing is definitely good. He handles the drip-feeding of information and the bunch of narrative strands and the build-up to a climax very well indeed.

I've only read the first 10 so far. Guards Guards and Mort are pretty good.

>>25325267
About half of them are worth reading. He worked most of his ideas into Discworld so there’s a lot of dilution of purpose especially the industrial stuff. Sometimes he just retreads himself (the Death books). Maybe 2-3 you should rec in general. Mort and Small Gods are my favourites.

I also think people should give Dodger a chance. It’s not Discworld, it’s more of a Dickens fanfic so it helps if you already read Dickens of course.

>>25325629
>Giant woman climbing a huge tower holding a terrified ape
HOLY SHIT!
That's just like King Kong!
But... B-backwards!

>>25325267
I am very fond of it, it is very witty, and reads incredibly fine.

As I get older, I get more critical of some of Sir Terry's fedora preachiness, and of how all of Discworld's themes are built as this strawman in a fantasy land so you can't argue against it using real world examples. I notice a lot of the symptoms accumulated by the series just being way too long, it ran out of unique ideas about ~30 books in, some of the protagonists start coming across as mary sues and the villains are just way too transparently non-persons in the writer's mind. Still, these books are close to my heart. Writing 30 books of fiction and still being funny and interesting is an accomplishment.

File: johnny.jpg (75.1 KB)

Now, if we're talking kino...

>>25325277
>Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy manages to be funny without being twee.
It's actually insane that Prattchet cited Hitchhiker's Guide as his inspiration, because THAT is a book series about a boomer going through existential crisis over being a useless piece of shit and not really understanding much of anything, and trying to turn that into 'mythology', unwittingly creating a world of magical realism because he is just that retarded. You can't even call the concepts in Hitchiker's Guide strawmen, because they don't even fucking function as they are. In a strange way, it all feeds into the boomer eschatological fantasies of the world being destroyed because they just don't really get it.

I liked them as a child, and between reading them and having them read to me by my parents, I have experienced all of them. Pretty much every piece of fiction Pratchett wrote including the encyclopedias, truckers, all that, except that non-Discworld one about the world flooding.
I tried reading them again as an adult, and I really did not enjoy them. The first two are really bad. I didn't care to try the later ones.
I remember when I was a kid I had a crush that I didn't realise was a crush on the witch girl. Don't recall her name.
There: every thought I have on Terry Pratchett.

>>25325792
>The first two are really bad
They're a parody of classic fantasy literature, supposing you've read Stormbringer, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, Lovecraft, and of course Conan. The fact that we could read them as kids without knowing about any of that speaks volumes about them being a fun read, if not very deep.

>>25325792
>I remember when I was a kid I had a crush that I didn't realise was a crush on the witch girl.
Tiffany Aching I guess. I mean no-one has a crush on Magrat.

>>25325783
Discworld is solid and real. You could live there. But you could never live in the Hitch-Hiker universe. You would fall right through it. It doesn't exist; it's just one wacky scenario after another.

It's odd. Adams is certainly no less intelligent than Pratchett, and at least as good a prose stylist; and they seem to have similar general outlooks on life. But Pratchett has got something that Adams hasn't and that's all there is to it.

>>25325267
Pratchett was my author of choice when I was a child like many Brits who grew up in the 90s/early 00s, so my opinion is obviously tinted with nostalgia. With that said, I'm very fond of his work to this day and occasionally re-read one when I'm in the mood. It's all very Python-esque and if you don't like that kind of humour then you'll probably end up hating his books.

>>25325267
I read the first two with Ricewind. I liked them.

>>25325267
Do not read them as "series", read them in release order. Despite individual books offer individual themes, altogether they are about changes in society over time and at the same time show evolution of Pratchett's views and writing.
First two books differ greatly from all tye rest, another such example is Redwall, where first book just feels completely different. Reason is that first books are fully accomplished and, basically, standalone complete implementation of certain vision - while everything, that follows, are "later applied additions and changes", written by the same man physically, but not the same man psychologically.
Pratchett eventually turns more toward "melting pot" ideology, which, despite problems being depicted, is still an idealized version of reality - and this can make his "tech progress" books to look at least naive, at worst - as propaganda of ideas, that had started to show many ugly angles irl today. Of latter entries there are also Tiffany books, but they are mostly melancholic brooding on death, humanity's nature, necessity and that retardation is a part of human nature in many cases (as opposed to his own way more interesting and way less melancholic witches' books from earlier times).
Everything before roughly the last third of his books is a variety of adventures with a great amount of satire and culture references - the more you know about different cultures in general and british culture in particular - the better. Most are at least fun.
I'd like to also recommend Robert Rankin - another scottish satirical fantasy writer, albeith with more gore, horror and in several cases dystopian settings - it is also important to read him in order of release, as his books contain several settings, but even within the same setting mansy books intentionally don't acknowledge or only partially acknowledge events from other books of the same sub-setting - and most are connected through a kind of a "meta-theme" and characters - closest by structure to this would be either Final Fantasy series or Space Dandy anime. For this one extensive knowledge of 60's, 70's and 80's culture of Britain and USA is greatly recommended, although in latest books he briefly touches 2010's to 2020's.

>>25325845
>Adams
>Pratchett
>prose stylist
Wat.