There is literally nothing more powerful on this planet than taking a 15 minute walk twice every day.
Terry Pratchett really did write a book where the villains are extremely powerful and violently racist pillars of society who murder someone and try to pin the murder on a homeless, drug-addicted, extremely brain-damaged young man but it doesn't work because the Ankh-Morpork night watch noted his vulnerabilities and made sure he understood his rights and helped him sober up and the watch cares about getting things right and unlike real world cops they actually are committed to protecting the people and is suspicious about crimes that seem like they have easy and racist answers. God I love him.
and the vulnerable youth is a member of a minority group, so the Watch made sure that the youth got to a member of his own minority group to have his back during the process.
The Watch books aren't copaganda b/c of PTerry's good writing, and this is a great example. Terry Pratchett knows that people can be shitty or good, and that this is contributed to by a) a product of your environment and b) your decisions. So PTerry makes his heroes deliberately choose to do good. The Watch are good people because there's people in there choosing to do right, and they're dragging everyone else upwards by the scruffs of their necks.
i feel like the Watch books are especially good in that regard because you have a cynical man run it who nevertheless cares about people. You have the head of the police with the opinion “the natural state of police is as a negative force of corrupt individuals who find it all too easy to do violence because frankly that’s the easiest thing to do” and then he consciously and deliberately does everything in his power to ensure the Watch is there for the people and not just another tool of oppression. Even when a little bit of police violence would solve so many problems for him. Even when a different book would have “well we KNOW a little bit of corruption here would save the day” justified by the narrative, the Watch books don’t.
And its important that that head of police is an addict himself. He's an alcoholic yes because it's a classic trope of policeman characters for them to be alcoholics and Ankh Morpork is powered by trope and cliché, but Vimes is also an alcoholic because it means he intimately understands the temptation of addiction, and there's nothing more addictive than power. His alcoholism serves as a metaphor for his resistance to corruption and rule breaking. He can't let himself give in, not even once, or he loses everything.
That feel when you're not in the mood to do anything but there's still a few hours of day left in your day so you're just waiting it out until it's an acceptable time to go to bed, painfully aware that you could be using those two hours to do something, but your brain just doesn't want to. No want to do any of the options of things to do.
And then, if you’re me, you stay up way later than you should doing nothing when you could have at least got extra sleep.
the desire to engage in my hobbies leaving my body as soon as I have the day off even though I was looking forward to it all week
'I had to study you first, and make sure of you. The Enemy has set traps for me before now. As soon as I had made up my mind, I was ready to tell you whatever you asked. But I must admit,' he added with a queer laugh, 'that I hoped you would take to me for my own sake. A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship. But there, I believe my looks are against me.'
