Hi, I'm a 28yo troper living in rural Virginia with probably the worst and most depressing case of Peter Pan Syndrome.
Fun Fact: In The Blue Ribbon Day by Katie Couric, nearly every page has at least one Painful Rhyme. One of the worst examples would be:
- So the two got together the day after school.
With Miss Rigg's supervision (you know, that's the rule),
they got out their beakers and their Bunsen burners
and decided to find out if they were fast learners.
The Auditors of Reality in Discworld (copypasted from Discworld Species to save me from having to open those folders in mobile mode)
The Celestial Bureaucracy of the universe, who are trying to make less work for themselves. Unfortunately, this manifests as them being a bunch of Omnicidal Maniacs that despise creativity and individuality.- Angels, Devils and Squid: They're the Squid, but unlike below examples they hate all life everywhere and so in practice act as the Devils. Unlike gods, demons, spirits or elementals they don't want anything from humanity, only that they disappear quietly. The monks of Oi Dong have hundreds of statues of horrible creatures from throughout the multiverse and consider the Auditors to be the worst.
- Anthropomorphic Personification: Of the laws of physics, Order - and Bureaucracy. In fact, they're possibly "Taxes" - Because there are two things certain in life, and Death is already accounted for, right?
- Arch-Nemesis: To Death and Susan.
- Being Evil Sucks: They're cosmic nudniks, consider the scale though; cosmic, destroying a world is well within their abilities if they can get away with it. problem is they have no imagination, barely exist at all with any hint of growth or change or individuality leading them to sef-destruct, hints point to the enemy auditors being
- Bizarre Alien Senses: They actually have hundreds of senses, all for the purposes of gathering data. But they don't have taste.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Auditors are not strictly evil, and are a part of the multiverse just the same as Death is. But they are antagonistic and hostile to all life specifically because life interferes in their operations (though mainly only as a result of their pettiness and lack of imagination).
- Celestial Bureaucracy: Exaggerated, as they're bureaucrats who oversee the minutiae of the Magical Underpinnings of Reality they want efficiency and to save on paperwork. Unfortunately for all life, they despise anything resembling creativity or individuality, since it increases the amount of said paperwork.
- Creative Sterility: Originality and learning are not their things, possibly because of aforementioned lack of creativity. They can do it, but it takes serious effort and they can still only learn so far.
- Death of Personality: Inverted. They exist as grey soulless dull entities. For them, to develop a recognisable personality and individual self-awareness is death.
- Dirty Coward: In Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch it's stated they're all cowards, which is part of why they resort to cheating and weaseling in their schemes.
- The Ditz: A particularly dark version. They are, what with the aforementioned Creative Sterility, very stupid. Very, very stupid. Might explain some of their insane actions, and ultimately doesn't make them any less dangerous.
- To put it another way? They're stupid enough to try really bad ideas, but powerful and insane enough to pull them off.
- Elemental Embodiment: Of physics of all things and thus Murphy's law.
- Enemies with Death: Played With, as they're literally this and could count as "Death" themselves for the purposes of the trope. Being personifications of universal physical laws, similar to death, they're necessary to its function. Unlike Death, they hate all life and butt heads with him quite often.
- Enemy to All Living Things: They find life intolerably messy, their mere presence causes an increase in malignity - ordinary objects becoming more hostile to non-objects. Buttered bread becomes tripping hazards, ropes and hoses tie themselves into knots, rakes get under foot.
- When they focus on causing a bad day that leads to Necro Non Sequitur.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: The Auditors' fundamental problem is that they cannot understand basic things like imagination or individuality. Or chocolate.
- Evil Counterpart: To Death. Both are Anthropomorphic Personifications who exist to enforce some existential concept independent of individual belief. But while Death feels compassion for humanity and the Disc, these bastards just want order. Absolute order.
- Evil Is Petty: Though they try to deny it, their motives largely boil down to "we are spited by life not being ordered and will try to kill everything because we are offended by its existence".
- Expy: In many ways, they're evocative of the Men in Grey from Michael Ende's Momo. Just like the Men in Grey, the Auditors are a race of gray-clothed accountant-like entities closely monitoring the actions of all people, are stumped by encounters that seem not to follow literal guidelines, and are ultimately flouted by beauty and a childlike love of narrative.
- Fusion Dance: They have to merge in large numbers just to accomplish some mild physical action when operating on earth.
- Ghostly Chill: Variant, they aren't undead but when one is accidentally summoned by the Rite of AshkEnte a ritual meant to summon Death, which was a vacant position during Reaper Man, ice starts forming in the circle, something that never happens when Death is summoned.
- God of Order: Though not strictly gods in the same sense as actual gods in the series, they are cosmic beings who represent order, by making sure the universe works as it's supposed to. They're contemptuous of life because it's inherently chaotic and messy by their standards, making their job harder.
- Grayscale of Evil: They're constantly described as astonishingly dull grey robes devoid of colour and occupents really.
- Hive Mind: According to them, at least. They aren’t interconnected so much as they are interchangeable. Since gaining any semblance of individuality immediately causes an Auditor to cease existing, all existing Auditors must think and behave exactly like all other existing Auditors would in that situation.
- The final book they appear in suggests that it’s closer to a Hive Empathy, when a large number of Auditors become human in an attempt to quantify and catalogue human sensory experiences and the remaining pure Auditors pick up individualistic personality traits from that group, making them alive enough to die permanently through injury rather than logic and reconstitution.
- Humans Are Ugly: Variant, they do not like all those disgusting orifices life has.
- Once they start living though all the "glands and things" take over and avert this trope.
- Individuality Is Illegal: They so loathe individuality that any Auditor who uses the personal pronoun "I" tends to spontaneously vanish, to be replaced by another, identical Auditor because to have an individual personality is to be mortal, and what is mortal life compared to the infinite span of the universe? It’s implied that this form of death is itself a physical process that must be initiated by an Auditor, which is why they always gather in groups of three or more. To watch each other. In Thief of Time, a number of Auditors take human form, and their excursion to the Discworld ends in chaos and bloodshed, with the only survivor driven hopelessly insane (by Auditor standards at least) and committing suicide in a vat of chocolate.
- Insane Troll Logic: Something is only alive if it has an independent existence. All living beings die in time. Any span of time is minuscule compared to the lifespan of the universe. Therefore, if an Auditor develops signs of individual identity, it instantly vanishes.
- The book that introduced them implied that this happens because you have to be an individual to get the insane troll logic of it - and since the Auditors disappear when they realize they have an identity, they never manage to get to the point of realizing that their logic is not perfectly sound before going puff.
- Everything about them screams Insane Troll Logic. They have no emotions or physical needs, yet they hate life forms specifically because of how annoying it is to record everything they do. And don't even ask how creatures with a Hive Mind can make jokes with each other...
- Jerkass Gods: They're not gods in the same sense as the actual gods in Discworld, but they are cosmic beings that oversee the universe and they are highly antagonistic.
- Kill All Humans: And non-human sentience. And non-sentient life. All life current and in potentia, in fact. It's untidy. However, they were pleased by the evolution of humanity (inasmuch as anything "pleases" them) because humankind could be persuaded to shoot itself in the foot.
- Knight Templar: They will stand for nothing but the cessation of life, which they view as chaotic and in need of organization.
- Light Is Not Good: Not light per-se, but given that their job is to keep the universe working, one would think they wouldn't hate its inhabitants as much as they do. In Thief of Time, one of them calls himself "Mr White" and happens to be the most Axe-Crazy of the lot.
- Logic Bomb: They'll suicide if they develop a personality, they always follow directions on signs, incorrect signs cause painful dissonance to them.
- Magical Underpinnings of Reality: What they're supposed to be doing: seeing that the universe operates as per instructions.
- “They run the universe. They see to it that gravity works and that atoms spin (or whatever it is atoms do).”
- Measuring the Marigolds: They attempt to understand human conceptions of art by disassembling famous paintings molecule by molecule, and sifting through them to find the parts that are "art" and "beauty".
- Meat Puppet: They can create any substance with perfect accuracy. This includes bodies when they get down to it. They just need to insert an auditor for the "soul".
- Mirroring Factions: To the elves. Both are terrifying races of Humanoid Abominations with very hostile intentions towards mortal life. However, not only are the Auditors overall far higher on the cosmic totem pole than the elves are, but they're at the exact opposite ends of the scale of Order Versus Chaos: The elves lead chaotic existences unfettered by laws, rules and restrictions, while the Auditors have "lives" with such order and rigidity that they see gaining a personality as a Fate Worse than Death.
- Motive Decay: When they first appear in Reaper Man they're primarily concerned about Death becoming too human (not unreasonably, considering the events of the previous book) and while they do regard the concept of personality itself with disdain, they don't show the Omnicidal Maniac tendencies they would in later books. It's possible that being humiliated in front of Azrael when their plan ended up causing more problems than it solved is what caused them to believe the existence of life itself was the problem.
- Necro Non Sequitur: Known for causing this type of "inverse-miricle", in The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, they align events so that every that in every single Alternate Universe, Charles Darwin dies in increasingly unlikely ways before he can write The Origin of Species and keep humanity planet bound.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: Functionally, though they're not above breaking their own rules to get what they want.
- Omnicidal Maniac: If they could - and they're trying very hard - they'd exterminate every living thing above the level of microbes. Fortunately, their utter lack of imagination (and certain cosmic mechanisms) prevent them from doing so directly.
- Omnicidal Neutral: They don't care about good or evil or anything, in fact their antipathy to life stems in part from people putting all these different labels on things and messing about. They've been annoyed with it since life first evolved in fact. Life is messy and they'd like to keep things tidy.
- Order Is Not Good: The other part of their alignment; desiring absolute order, which, combined with their Insane Troll Logic, makes them into Omnicidal Maniacs due to life being untidy.
- Painting the Medium: In their earlier appearances, they don't speak as such. Rather, they send the words they would've said if they spoke into someone's head, represented as text.
- Puff of Logic: Thanks to a Slippery Slope Fallacy regarding time, any Auditor that comes close to thinking of itself as an individual will usually disappear in a Puff of Insane Troll Logic.
- Pure Is Not Good: In this case, their goal is pure order. Preferably lifeless.
- Reality Warper: They can effortlessly alter the world around them to achieve all kinds of things, like creating gold and causing thunderstorms. What they can't do is simply wipe away life - it's against the rules.
- Sense Freak: Every now and then, they'll step down from being lifeless concepts into living bodies, and whenever they do, they immediately discover that life is both far more untidy than they thought and more addictive than they ever could have foreseen. Their reactions to food and colours stand out. And then they discover the price one inevitably pays for living, which puts them in conflict with Death, who doesn't much care for their attempts to destroy all living creatures in existence.
- Smug Snake: Their pettiness and arrogance cement them as this.
- The Three Certainties in Life: They are taxes.
- Token Good Teammate: Myria LeJean/Unity from Thief of Time. At the book's end, when she commits suicide in a vat of chocolate, she is shown to have earned herself a soul and a spot in the afterlife, unlike all the other Auditors who took on human form.
- The Watcher: What they're meant to be; egoless observers who pin down reality so it exists essentially the Magical Underpinnings of Reality given form. Instead, they continually step outside their role for the purposes of meddling, they don't like life it makes their job more difficult.
- Weaksauce Weakness: Several. Chocolate, for one. And dreams. Hell, even being human for very long functions as Mind Rape for them, and eventually causes a Heel–Face Turn, insanity and/or death. Between these, all seven hundred that take on human form in Thief of Time die before the book ends. They're also very weak to direct instructions. They can't not obey them.
- World of Silence: Their ideal world is a variation of this. Though they'd probably find silence too noisy. Emptiness would be best of all.
