Editing Witch (section)

==[[Discworld]]==
[[File:Witches Dicworld.png|thumb|]]
Witches are a type of mostly rural female magic users on the Disc. They're both good and bad witches out there, but one thing that all of them have is a headstrong independent streak a mile wide. They mostly live on their own helping out their villages. They fill a variety of jobs from apothecaries to mediators to defenders against incursions by elves and other such supernatural critters when they cause too much trouble. Witches mostly wear black and pointy hats.

Among the witches are some of the most powerful magic users on the disc, but the really good ones rarely use it. Mostly they rely on guile and headology (psychology as contrived by a bunch of crotchety manipulative old women) to get their way. In this they are similar to yet different from the Discworld [[wizard]]s, who also know that magic is best used sparingly.

There are two distinct sub-series in Discworld that are Witch-centric. The Lancre Witches, the older of the two, focuses on a small coven of witches in the region of the Ramtops known as the Kingdom of Lancre, a kind of Scottish Highlands meets Balkans meets twisted faerie tales country. The second sub-series, the Tiffany Aching stories, revolves around a young shepherd's daughter in the agricultural-focused hill country known as the Chalk who discovers that she is a witch and her growing into her role in a region which has been devoid of witches for some time.

The Discworld witches are often considered to be Terry Pratchett's greatest contribution to feminism in fantasy; Pterry himself admitted a significant portion of why he wanted to write the witch-centric books was to contradict the general trend of witchly magic to presented as "cheap, nasty and inferior" to [[wizard]]ly magic - citing such examples as the Earthsea fantasy novels, where "weak as a woman's magic" and "wicked as a woman's magic" are common in-universe sayings. Some argue that the Discworld witches have actually been so fleshed out and integrated into Discworld society that they make the wizards of the Disc pretty much pointless. People who believe this haven't been paying attention though, and have somehow failed to notice that most Wizard institutions on the Disc are primarily concerned with teaching them to be too lazy to make anything explode.