It stands to reason that no Terry Pratchett take on a fairy tale is going to be straight-forward: with a female character named Malicia Grim this is almost guaranteed... Maurice is pre- Wee Free Men, and a lot of the conventions of convention-overturning began to fruit here. Traditions of satire and spoof have wended their way through every Discworld novel, from Pyramids to Going Postal. Everyone has suffered, from Chekov to the Brothers Grimm. And we all know, in any Discworld novel, 'The trolls are stupid, the dwarfs are devious, the pixies are evil and the gnomes stick in your teeth'. But of course, to quote G.K.Chesterton, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed." (cf Carpe Jugulum)

      "Hah! Did you ever hear about that place in Klatch? They hired him to get rid of a plague of mime artists, and when they didn't pay up he made all the town's watchmen dance into the river and drown!"
      "No! Did he? The devil!" said Sergeant Doppelpunkt.
      "Three hundred dollars he charges, did you know that?"
      "Three hundred dollars!"
      "That's why people hate paying," said Corporal Knopf.
      "Hang on, hang on . . . how do you get a plague of mime artists?"
      "Oh, it was terrible, so I heard. People didn't dare go onto the streets at all."
      "You mean, all those white faces, all that creeping around . . ."
      "Exactly. Terrible. Still, when I woke up there was a rat dancing on my dressing-table. Tapitty, tapitty, tap."
      "That's odd," said Sergeant Doppelpunkt, giving his corporal a strange look.
      "And it was humming There's no Business like Show Business. I call that more than just 'odd'!"
      "No, I mean it's odd that you've got a dressing-table. I mean, you're not even married."
      "Stop messing about, sarge."
      "Has it got a mirror?"

---

"I said, what mouse don't we want to be like?" Darktan demanded.
"We don't want to be like the first mouse!" shouted the rats.
"Right! What mouse do we want to be like?"
"The second mouse, Darktan!" said the rats, who'd had this lesson dinned into them many times.
"Right! And why do we want to be like the second mouse?"
"Because the second mouse gets the cheese, Darktan!"

---

"They say, they say," muttered a rat. "They say there's a Big Rat Underground who made everything, they say. So it made humans too? Must be really keen on us, to go and make humans too! Huh?"
"How do I know? Maybe they were made by a Big Human?"
"Oh, now you're just being silly," said the doubting rat, who was called Tomato.