Awesome / Lords and Ladies

• Granny Weatherwax can Borrow and control a beehive. It's quite a strain, but it was supposed to be impossible.
• Lancre as a whole gets one when it shoots down Diamanda's claims to be a better witch than Granny: She'd challenged Granny to a staring contest. Against the sun. Midway through, one of Nanny Ogg's grandkids runs into the magic circle and falls down with a scream as the magical discharge zaps him, and Granny breaks off to check on him. The young witches say that Diamanda clearly won, because Granny looked away. Nanny Ogg and the rest of the town set them straight:
  Nanny Ogg: This is not a contest about power, you stupid girls, it is a contest about witchcraft. Do you even begin to know what being a witch IS?
  (turns to the onlookers): Is a witch someone who would look round when she heard a child scream?
  The Entire Town: YES!
  • Nanny, of course, would thoroughly deny having lured the child into the ring by use of a cunningly deployed bag of sweets at the crucial moment...
    • Or that she'd laid down the flash-producing protective circle, or arranged for Pewsey to toddle around to the far side of it and pester Diamanda's supporters for sweeties, precisely so that such a gambit could be employed if Esme needed backup.
• From when Magrat dons the fearsomely bosomy armor of the entirely fictional Queen Ynci to when she confronts the Queen of the Fairies to get her husband back. As noted by one character: "Magrat always was the nice soft one ...who'd just fired a crossbow through a keyhole." When someone was looking through it.
  • Important to note that Magrat was convinced she was channelling the spirit of Queen Ynci... but it was all her.
  • And her taking down the Queen as the Queen is hitting her with a massive mental attack.
    She was nothing. She was insignificant. She was so worthless and unimportant that even something completely worthless and exhaustively unimportant would consider her beneath contempt. In laying hands upon the Queen she truly deserved an eternity of pain. She had no control of her body. She did not deserve any. She did not deserve a thing.
    
    The disdain sleeted over her, tearing the planetary body of Magrat Garlick to pieces.
    
    She'd never be any good. She'd never be beautiful, or intelligent, or strong. She'd never be anything at all.
    
    Self-confidence? Confidence in what? The eyes of the Queen were all she could see. All she wanted to do was lose herself in them...
    
    And the ablation of Magrat Garlick roared on, tearing at the strata of her soul... exposing the core.
    
    She bunched up a fist and hit the Queen between the eyes.
• Only one queen in a hive!
• Lady Jane - KILL!
  Hodgesaargh, as Lady Jane proceeds to savage the elf that tried to get her to kill him: Sorry, she does that to me too. She's really very intelligent.
• The Librarian's approach to a cruel practical joke is quite mature.
  • The Librarian gets a few in this book, although usually because he's A. incredibly strong and B. immune to the elves' mind-control arrows. Once again, we see that the snares set to bind the spirits and entice the minds of Man are left looking pretty foolish when they attempt to bind the spirit and entice the mind of Ape.
• Magrat. Especially the cut to her right after Granny mentions how she'd love the elves.
• The Morris Dancers.
  "Jason! The accordion's melting!"
• Granny Weatherwax utterly shredding the Elf Queen in a "The Reason You Suck" Speech. The queen is pretty much left looking quite pathetic when she tries to make threats.
  Go back. You call yourself some kind of goddess, and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you. You're right. I'm older. You've lived longer than me, but I'm older than you. And better 'n' you. And madam, that ain't hard.
• Ridcully gets one when the carriage he and the other members of the UU staff accompanying him gets pulled over by bandits:
  (Ridcully points his staff at the bandit leader)
  Bandit Leader: Nice try, but Wizards can't use their magic on civilians unless it's a life or death situ...
  (Ridcully fires a burst of light from his staff and turns the bandit into a pumpkin)
  Ridcully: It's more of a guideline, really.
  • He then proceeds to intimidate the rest of the bandits into giving the wizards all of the gold on their person and four horses while the coach driver sits there dumbfounded.
• Granny saving Diamanda from her own stupid mistake and bodily hauling her back to Lancre while being shot at by elves. Made even more badass when Granny reveals that she put the girl over her shoulders and carried her not only to save her...but to use Diamanda's unconscious body as a Human Shield to avoid being shot in the back.
• Magrat taking down the elf queen is pretty cool. What's even cooler is the sentence that gets her to do it — the sentence that Granny puts telepathically in her head. "You want to be queen?"
  • And then, later on, the narration describes her that way for the very first time:
  The cook began to argue, then stopped. Magrat was looking at her down the shaft of a crossbow.
  "'Go ahead,' said the Queen of Lancre. 'Bake my quiche.'"
• "Do you want to find out how much power I have, madam? Here, on the grass of Lancre? My own turf?"
• When Magrat's holed up in the armory, the elves order Shawn Ogg to persuade her to come out. They've already broken his arm quite badly, and he knows they're going to do a lot worse to him before they get bored. But Shawn tells Magrat that the elves can't get into the armory because of all the iron. "So I shouldn't listen to them if I was you."
• From the same page, nearly: A Moment of Awesome for a cat, in seven words.
  Greebo went off like a Claymore mine.
  • And that wasn't the most powerful creature he killed in the series.
  • Contrary to popular belief, there are three states a cat in a box might be: Alive, Dead, or Bloody Furious.
• After several books and comments on how Magrat spends too much time gathering herbs and magic objects when anything works just fine with Headology, she makes a comeback. When Diamanda gets elf-shot, she's beyond Granny's help. Granny immediately goes to Magrat for help, because Granny knows that Magrat is an expert with herbs.
  The reason why Granny was a better witch was because she knew that it didn't matter which herbs she used, or even if they were just grass.
  The reason why Magrat was a better doctor was because she thought they did.
• Herne the Hunted, though utterly terrified of the elves - and rightly so - hears the prayers of a nest of young rabbits that the elves are torturing, and comes to their aid, biting through the leg of one of the elves to the bone.
  Even the blind and meek and voiceless have gods.
• Once, Greebo chased a vixen into her den. Now, Greebo is capable of scaring bears up trees, so a fox wouldn't be any issue, right? Turns out she had pups in her den. Greebo considers himself lucky that he got out of that hole alive. Even more awesome? This comparison comes to mind because of the expression on Magrat's face.
• The royal beekeeper sees a couple elves tormenting one of his beehives, so he calmly grabs his wasp-killing solution and sprays them full-force with it, singlehandedly taking them all out. After all, he knows a wasp when he sees one.
• Nanny Ogg threatening the King of the Elves into intervening in the invasion. Beware the Nice Ones indeed.
  "One day." Nanny nodded. "Yes. I'll drink to that. One day. Who knows? One day. Everyone needs 'One Day'. But it ain't today. D'you see? So you come on out and balance things up. Otherwise, this is what I'll do. I'll get 'em to dig into the Long Man with iron shovels, y'see, and they'll say, why, it's just an old earthworks, and pensioned-wizards and priests with nothin' better to do will pick over the heaps an' write dull books on burial traditions and suchlike, and that'll be another iron nail in your coffin. And I'd be a little bit sorry about that, 'cos you know I've always had a soft spot for you. But I've got kiddies, y'see, and they don't hide under the stairs because they're frit of the thunder, and they don't put milk out for the elves, and they don't hurry home because of the night, and before we go back to them dark old ways I'll see you nailed!"
  • She does the above holding one of Death's horseshoes. The realest, coldest iron in existence. When Nanny Ogg stops playing, you are DEAD.^note Word of God is that Nanny is potentially more powerful than Granny — she just doesn't work at it the way Granny does, and prefers to come across as a jolly old woman, leaving the obvious bulk of witching to Granny.