Romance on the Discworld

Posting this for Garner
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"Before you read this post, please take a brief personal inventory. Are you:

Male or Female
Under 18, 19-30, 30-50, or over 50
Introverted or Extroverted
Single or In A Relationship

And lastly, for each of the above age categories you have reached, were you any of the following (select all that apply):

Popular, Promiscuous, Confident, Wise/Intelligent, Depressed, A Product of Trauma or Abuse

Go ahead and make some notes if it'll help. Take your time; the thread will still be here when you're done.

Right, got your list? Now, read on!

After 'Thief of Time' was released, someone on the old boards raised the question if Lejean's death scene might not be Pratchett's first foray into erotic writing. More than one person sensed a sexual component to someone diving naked into a vat of chocolate. Suicide by ecstatic sensation, if you will. After all, don't the French call an orgasm 'the little death'?

Now, if that scene in Thief of Time was Pratchett's first wetting of the proverbial toe in the hot steamy depths of erotic fiction, one has to wonder if Thud did not contain an entire sub-novel from that genre. We wind up with a large breasted werewolf chick and a hypersexed, hyperconfident vampire chick both meeting naked in a muddy pit. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one website devoted to that kind of fetish. Well, elements of it at least.

But it's the scene after that one that really sparks this thread. If you'll recall, Angua and whats-her-name wind up in the strip club with Nobby's girlfriend. It's that character that we'll be focusing on for now. Through their interaction, Pratchett exposits the Classic Jerk Theorem on pulling hot chicks.

The Classic Jerk Theorem states that nice or decent guys assume by default that hot chicks already have partners. By addition of the Sweet/Cute Hypothesis, we can add that the truly 'nice' guys, the shy, unassertive losers who'll be forever doomed to be 'just friends' lack the confidence to ever have approached the hot chicks, even if they're known to be single. It's up to the 'jerks', the guys who simply don't care if the hot chick is already involved or not, or who're too overconfident to ever envision the idea of failure, or just think with their dicks, these are the guys who'll go up to the hot chick and ask her out. Because they're the first guy to ask the hot chick out, the hot chick, who by now suffers lower self esteem, accepts the offer.

Now, if we examine the Sweet/Cute Hypothesis on its own for a moment, we see a slightly different take on the same ultimate scenario. The Sweet/Cute Hypothesis states, quite simply, that a woman will describe a man she is attracted to as 'Cute', but reserve 'Sweet' for men she identifies as 'just friends' or 'like a brother'. It is the curse of the 'Nice' guy to be forever considered 'Sweet' because he lacks the assertiveness or confidence to proposition the hot chicks he wants to proposition, and not even 'Nice' guys want to hit on the ugly ones.

Now, the Revised Jerk Theorem is a fairly complex development in Relationship Science. The Revised Jerk Theorem makes use of the Bad-Nice/Bad-Nice Model. The Bad-Nice/Bad-Nice Model suggests a different explaination for why 'Nice' girls and hot chicks wind up with jerks instead of 'Nice' guys. It can be illustrated thusly: A jerk asks out a hot chick, who says yes for whatever reason. He treats her like crap, and she now has 'issues'. A 'Nice' guy decides to step in and rescue her, and she eventually screws him over, turning him into a jerk who goes on to corrupt other hot chicks. The cycle is only ever broken temporarily when a Jerk and a Chick With 'Issues' wind up together because she was too hot for him to pass up. These relationships that yield offspring often produce children who develop into fully formed Jerks and Chicks With 'Issues' without ever directly participating in the Bad-Nice/Bad-Nice model before they enter the dating pool. Eventually, the parent relationship ends in failure and the original Jerk and Chick With 'Issues' reenter the dating pool themselves.

The Unified Theory of Social Ineptitude is, however, a very persuasive argument of its own, and a strong rebuttal to the various Jerk Theorems. The Unified Theory holds that everyone is pretty much incompetent at social interaction, and any man or woman, regardless of his or her background, is perfectly capable of making bad decisions in romantic matters.

So, this brings me to ask... What was up with that mudwrestling scene? And that stripper character... she was as bad as the vampire... what gives? Was this just Pratchett running low on ideas, or can we really reduce the complexities of human interaction down to 'hot girls go out with the first jerk to ask them out because the nice guys were afraid to'?

Submit your answer on an 8x10 color glossy, with your answer to the initial survey embossed with gold leaf on the back."

The answer is no.

or 42.

(Also, it may be helpful to warn before reading about minor Thud spoilers and Thief of time spoilers )

[quote:6a69a8e78b="Garner"]if they were better books, maybe... as it is, i'm not spoiling much, and that little isnt very good anyway[/quote:6a69a8e78b]
Now now Garner dear, just because you didn't like them doesn't mean you have to spoil it for other people...

I liked them both actually. Not the best of the books, no, but enjoyeable.

[quote:8b7543600e="KaptenKaries"]I liked them both actually. Not the best of the books, no, but enjoyeable.[/quote:8b7543600e]

[i:8b7543600e]Thud! [/i:8b7543600e]was so-so. [i:8b7543600e]Theif of Time[/i:8b7543600e], on the other hand, was well written and enjoyable.