History Literature / InterestingTimes

*** The council of five mutually antagonistic warlords, including one amazingly competent ChessMaster with a great readiness to sacrifice the lives of his followers, is rather reminiscent of ''Literature/{{Shogun}}''.
*** The [=McSweeneys=] are probably a reference to other books in the series being about a powerful family with a Scottish name (because they're Scottish).

* ActionGirl: Butterfly, who knocks out palace guards with her bare hands/feet ("Can you ''all'' do that?")

* TheChessmaster: Lord Hong. Unfortunately for him, he and his usual opponents are so locked into this way of thinking that the Horde (who we are told think "The king and pawns rush up the board and set fire to the opposing rooks" is a good opening gambit) complete blind-sides and dominates him. He almost wins anyway, but it's due to sheer numbers after all his plans and strategies have failed.
* [[ChekhovsGun Chekhovs Cannon]]: The wizards eventually give back the Barking Dog.

**

* GiveChaseWithAngryNatives: Rincewind, pursued by the palace guard, finds himself trapped in the wrestler's quarters. He gets out of it by pointing at one of the guards, claiming he has a pork sandwich on him, and escapes as the guards are crushed in the stampede.

* HistoryRepeats: The Agateans believe history goes around in a three thousand year cycle (not the bits about the universe being created, obviously. That's just ''stuff''.)

* ImperialChina: mercilessly parodied and taken up to eleven.

* NeedAHandOrAHandjob: Right before he is magically teleported away, Rincewind is approached by several beautiful, scantily-clad women who explicitly say that all of their men have died out and they need his help repopulating their island. However, due to years of living alone on a desert island, Rincewind's mind has deteriorated somewhat and he thinks they're offering to make him some mashed potatoes. To be fair, they did promise him they'd satisfy all his desires, and at that moment, Rincewind happened to desire potatoes, having lived off coconuts and fish for far too long.

* NominalImportance {{Invoked}} by Ponder Stibbons when he notices that Hex has started to think for itself, and reflects "We should never have named you. A thing with a name is a bit more than a thing".

* PinballProtagonist: Rincewind, with LadyLuck playing the Machine against Fate. Well technically it's a dice game but still ''everyone else'' is far more proactive then Rincewind who's just trying to et away.

* RankUp

* RageBreakingPoint: Rincewind thinks about it at one point, with the oft-mentioned fate of Mad Lord Snapcase (and his figgin) coming after he made Spooner Boggis eat his own nose, which wasn't the reason the people of Ankh-Morpork hung him up, it was just the last straw after years of his madness.

--> [[spoiler:"It's the Empire".]]

* RetiredBadassRoundup: Silver Horde are the result of Cohen doing this as part of OneLastJob, all of them are his peers and in some cases his superiors in terms of martial skill, badassery and more barbarian heroing stuff.

** To ''TabletopGame/{{Clue}}'': "I accuse the High Priest of the Green Robe in the library with the double-handed axe"

--> Rincewind turned the paper over a couple of times. There didn't seem to be any mention, anywhere, of words like "compost" or "bucket" or "wheelbarrow". But presumably all this produced a better class of person than the Ankh-Morpork system, which asked just one question: "Got your own shovel, have you?".

** The council of five mutually antagonistic warlords, including one amazingly competent ChessMaster with a great readiness to sacrifice the lives of his followers, is rather reminiscent of ''Literature/{{Shogun}}''.

** Cohen is a bit literal-minded. He is told a number of times, "I would rather die than betray my Emperor!" and immediately grants what he misinterprets as a request. One Big River only survives because a) he is a bit slow to say those words and b) Teach interrupts him with exact number of guards Cohen killed immediately after uttering them.

* TemptingFate: Near the end when Twoflower stands up to Lord Hong because someone has to, "Whatever happens to them", the villain sneers "Yes, let ''everyone'' see [[SenselessSacrifice what happens]]." Hong is then [[spoiler: blown up by the Barking Dog sent back to counterbalance Rincewind, who had been whisked away by a teleport spell.]]

* AcceptableTargets: In-universe. The Horde ''like'' taxmen.

* EvilCounterpart: Lord Hong is this with respect to Lord Vetinari, having the latter's MagnificentBastard-ness and talent for AwesomenessByAnalysis, but lacking his redeeming qualities and his clear insight into human nature, at least so far as guessing how the common folk will react to him or his plans. Of course, Hong considers peasants' nature to be ''less'' than human, so never saw any need to understand them in the first place.

** Lord Hong promises an informant that he will [[YouHaveFailedMe never write or speak an order for his execution]]. He then folds an origami figure of the man... but doesn't have quite enough paper for a head.

* OffWithHisHead: The ultimate fate of Bruce the Hoon, Truckle the Uncivil's old buddy. He got decapitated trying to lay siege to a castle.

* KlingonPromotion: The Unseen University faculty still practised it the last time Rincewind was around, making some suspect that his return means it will come back. Among Agatean nobility, meanwhile, the practice never went out of fashion.

** In the complex Agatean written language (seven thousand pictograms), their version of an exclamation point is a dog passing water.[[note:Loosely based on a real exclamatory particle in literary Chinese, pronounced ''xī'' and written [[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/兮 兮]].]] So when Rincewind reads some Agatean things, it counts the number of exclamation points by saying, for example, "He spoke ill of the city ruler and the guard present ''did not disembowel him'' [urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog]. This enables a BrickJoke: Rincewind says "!" in an earlier book, and says "Oh, urinating dog" in this one (just as he gets knocked out).

* EvilCounterpart: Lord Hong is this with respect to Lord Vetinari, having the latter's magnificent bastardy and talent for AwesomenessByAnalysis, but lacking his redeeming qualities and his clear insight into human nature, at least so far as guessing how the common folk will react to him or his plans. Of course, Hong considers peasants' nature to be ''less'' than human, so never saw any need to understand them in the first place.

** There's also the soothsayer who predicts the enemy will be defeated, but neglects to mention ''whose'' enemy. Then he gets right the hell out of town in case Lord Hong figures it out. (A reference to the Delphic Oracle telling King Croesus of Lydia that 'a great empire would fall' after an upcoming battle, but neglecting to specify ''which'' empire - the answer being, of course, the one that Croesus was ruling).

* FantasyCounterpartCulture: The Agatean Empire is China mixed with Japan, and Xxxx is more or less Australia.

** The Silver Horde discussing the strange land of Four-Ecks, where one of them washed up a while back.

* FunWithForeignLanguages: Multipe:

** In the complex Agatean written language (seven thousand pictograms), their version of an exclamation point is a dog passing water. So when Rincewind reads some Agatean things, it counts the number of exclamation points by saying, for example, "He spoke ill of the city ruler and the guard present ''did not disembowel him'' [urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog]. This enables a BrickJoke; Rincewind says "!" in an earlier book, and says "Urinating dog" in this one.

** There's also a bit of Fun With [[CanisLatinicus Latatian]] when Ponder Stibbons attempts to identify the etymology of the word "teleport." "It comes from ''tele'', meaning 'I see,' and ''porte'', meaning 'to go', the whole meaning ''I see it's gone''."

* AsiansLoveTea: The Agatean Empire has a deep tea culture. The tea ceremony ("It took three hours, but you couldn't hurry a good cuppa") is one of the Great Arts that Lord Hong does perfectly, and some Agateans who talk to the barbarian ghosts from beyond the Wall are shocked to learn the world outside the Empire even has tea.

* BluffTheImposter: Disembowel-Meself-Honorably does this to Rincewind when he says he's from Bes Pelargic.

* ImperialChina: mercilessly parodied and taken UpToEleven.

* VikingFuneral: One is discussed for [[spoiler: Mr. Saveloy]], and eventually taken UpToEleven.