The Annotated Pratchett File, v7a

Reverse Annotations

With the Discworld canon growing and reaching an increasingly wider audience around the globe, we are starting to see something I’m calling ‘reverse referencing’: other writers who put references to the Discworld into their books.

The examples I have had reported to me so far:

Due South

The most often remarked-upon reverse annotation of the past year or so concerns the television series Due South, which is about the adventures of a Canadian Mountie (Constable Benton Fraser), stationed in Chicago.

The similarities between Benton Fraser and Carrot are, especially in the first few episodes, indeed remarkable. Like Carrot, Benton is innocent and straight-forward to the point of being naive (but not stupid!). He is nigh-on superhuman, polite, memorises everybody’s name, works alongside cynical and jaded cops, and the first things he does are (1) take lodgings in the roughest neighbourhood around and (2) walk into a lowlife bar in full Mountie uniform shouting “Excuse me...”. And as with Carrot, his faith in human nature is almost always rewarded.

I doubt very much whether Benton Fraser is really based on Carrot (after all, the archetype that both characters are based on goes back a long way), but sometimes I wonder: Fraser’s faithful companion is a wolf, and in one episode of Due South Fraser and his partner are locked in a meat storage room and nearly freeze to death...