Tear Jerker / Raising Steam

• It's easy to forget (it was a lot of books ago after all) that Dick Simnel's father Ned isn't just another faceless Posthumous Character- he was a minor character in Reaper Man, the blacksmith who invented the combination harvester. It's oddly disturbing to find out that he eventually came to a messy end before his time.
• Blodwen, the dwarfish bride who was murdered on her wedding day for marrying a human.
  • Becomes Fridge Horror as well, if you stop to wonder if that's why teenaged Carrot's parents were so alarmed by his attraction to Minty...
• The two men who try to build a steam engine and end up dying horribly.
  • Made worse when you consider that lots of Real Life early steam inventors died that way, along with plenty of men who were unlucky enough to work on railways that weren't as well-tested and prudently-designed as Simnel's.
• Moist saving in extremis two kids who were playing on the tracks and almost run over. Harry King - himself a father and grandfather - is horrified to learn his railway could have made him responsible for killing someone else's babies.
• When Moist and Harry go to run the bandits out of the Maquis, they find out that not only have the bandits been killing goblins for sport, they've been eating their children.
• Moist finding the remains of the railway workers killed by the Delvers. It affects him so much that Moist finds and kills 3 of the dwarfs responsible.
  • Likewise, the Manly Tears Harry sheds for his killed employees. The fact that it's a case of Inelegant Blubbering only drives the point home.
• Biggest Tear Jerker of all: no more main-series Discworld novels.
  • Perhaps most heartbreaking, the final scene of the book evokes one of the overarching message of the series: Vetinari observes a group of goblins demonstrate a prototype for a bicycle and finds himself looking forward to whatever the future innovations of Discworld may be. While the series may end, the world of the Disc is still progressing.
  • There are numerous scenes checking in with various characters across the series which have no effect on the plot. It's clear that Pratchett was well aware he wouldn't be writing any more books and went to some effort to give the series as much closure as he could.
  • For those familiar with Pratchett's work, the poor editing and pacing of the book is a massive Tear-Jerker. A lot of scenes are out of place, which caused the race-against-time plot of act 3 to plod along leisurely. The editing phase was rushed so that he could see it published. The race against time wasn't Rhys's but Terry's.