The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 45: Small Gods Pt. 3 (Wake Up, Geeple)

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

 Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 3 of our recap of “Small Gods”. Tortoise! Eagle! God! Flailing! Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail] to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:/r/old_recipesCalling time on The Watch? What went wrong (and right) with the latest Terry Pratchett adaptation - By Marc Burrows A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson - Goodreads/r/retrofuturismConfessions of Georgia Nicolson Series by Louise Rennison - GoodreadsThe Annotated Pratchett File - Small Gods - the bit about steam powerThe Elder Tree - Trees for LifeGet Your Tickets For Llamedos on the Clacks!Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

I can't believe it's Thursday it's Friday shut up so uh so we're recording this on Friday so it's coming out the day after Valentine's day on Valentine's day so I'm starting with uh fantastic breakfast I have I've got smoked trout instead of smoked salmon for a little change but I'm gonna do the full English muffins and poached eggs and hollandaise fandango oh a fandango yeah but I mean technically it's sort of eggs royale but I'm going with fandango yeah because I don't think the words are used often enough no I agree and then I've got my little Sunday zoom call I do and I'm gonna I've got some lovely champagne and I'm gonna have champagne and flit about in the gorgeous gown I'm making myself and the beautiful Catherine Delish robe I bought and taken million photos

yeah of course oh yeah I might have if you have a tripod oh I've needed a tripod for ages so I finally ordered one it's coming tomorrow but I may have got one that comes with a ring light as well good because flattering and then I'm gonna make myself an excellent dinner I've got steak I've got daufe noir some seared tenderstone broccoli a little red wine sauce good grief oh oh oh and uh and I'm gonna make hazelnut not hazelnut nutella panna cotta oh fuck off oh that sounds good how am I you've made me hungry I've eaten two bowls of pasta today already I'm so excited for this panna cotta which I'm so glad that one of you guys I can't remember who why or the context but someone brought up gelatin in the group chat the other day and it reminded me I needed gelatin

for panna cotta making I posted that picture of 1950s horrifying jelly salad yeah yeah which by the way will be hilarious to make but I love um I really like I'm not sure if aesthetic quite the right word and I don't want to say vibes because I'm nearly 30 but I like the vibes of the kind of 1950s like recipes that came on the back of a packet oh yeah um that kind of thing the the old recipes subreddit is amazing for that and I've started slowly acquiring vintage cookbooks yeah I like the old recipes subreddit but they always seem to be in the middle of a craze that I can't find the source of so like how there's five posts saying I've made this recipe I'm like I don't know which recipe it is though but thanks to those crazes I tried that Armenian

Perok the cake pie jam situation yes which I then did after you modified the recipe to make it doable for me thank you and it was very ugly and delicious yours was very pretty and delicious thank you um yeah so I reread uh margarit patterns every day cooking book the other day which is like a 60s very british housewifey book and it's a whole new genre of things to buy for birthdays and christmas now then what vintage cookbooks oh yeah do it love it vintage cookbooks and vintage sewing books like the one I sent you the screenshot of yes but yeah so I'm gonna finish the gown today hopefully maybe tomorrow nice and then I need to like clean my flat because I've got a maintenance visit next week but then I'm gonna start another jacket maintenance visit that will maybe fix your

front door maybe I'm not going to get my hopes up yeah I've accepted that dystopia lux is the way forward well I'm not sure if the way forward is exactly it I was really hoping this because my back balcony is still really covered in snow and I was kind of hoping it would melt so I could take photos out there in the gown but I don't think it's going to have gone by sunday can you wear heels could but I'm not going to go out in the snow on heels because even three steps is enough for me to break myself oh my god so buffering is right now the best thing okay so famously Buffy the vampire slayer has a musical episode yes it was like the first major tv series to do the big musical episode thing I love it deeply uh buffering obviously is a recap podcast where

they do a song at the end of each episode and for the musical episode they did a musical episode so they kept randomly bursting into song through the podcast episode very good and it was amazing it was so good it came out the other day including because the women that host it together they were married when the podcast started and they split up as the podcast went on or maybe telling me yeah they're now very good friends and they did a hilarious song called you can always get divorced about Anja and Sunder I like that it was great the whole thing was great um and kind of helped me remember that I can still love the show despite the renewed stuff coming out about just how fucking awful Joss Whedon is yeah that's a thing yeah this is very I feel like tv shows and

especially things like tv shows the art I know it may have been what do you do director write it he kind of created and directed it whatever but the art is made up of all of the people yeah and there are some other people who like the actors in it obviously I love most of them there are some amazing writers like Marcy Knox and Jane Espenson have gone on to write for lots of other shows I really love as well and they're both amazing um I also like with the whole separating art from artists thing I think I look at where the money is going like Joss Whedon isn't making a bunch of money off me watching my Buffy DVDs that I've had forever whereas like something with like something like Harry Potter I wouldn't buy Harry Potter merch now I wouldn't

go to the parks or buy the game that's coming out or any of that show because that's still going straight to JK Rowling and I don't want her to get my money yeah oh JK Rowling he massive disappointment uh I'm still seeing reviews come in and out about the watch series Mark Burrow is actually just posted quite an interesting deep dive on it yeah um did you read it I did oh I thought you weren't I didn't because I thought you weren't reading them I'm not reading most of them but that one seemed like it wasn't so much a specific review of an episode it's like kind of an overview of how it got made and how people are reacting and that I don't mind so much because it's not like his deep personal reaction yeah fair enough all right I mean it is it's quite an

interesting overview we ask her I'll link to it in the show notes obviously we've still not seen it it still doesn't have a UK release date uh because of the schedule which I will have ready to publish soon I've aimed yeah I know you send me a draft I thought you told me verbally but I'm recording at the same time it's not like I'm noting it down no I thought I'd written it down and sent it to you already okay I'll do that with the months we're aiming to talk about it we may end up having to like not watch it again April yeah yeah okay so we are doing lords and ladies next month yeah okay good okay I've already got a rough version of what's going to be our bonus episode to go with lords and ladies actually oh what's that oh yeah yeah yeah yeah cool yeah I'll beep that out to uh to

increase mystique yes because we are so fascinating and mysterious yes you know lone wolves ranger type characters yeah definitely not three guinleys in a trench coat yeah I'm definitely like I'm more of a mario pippin than an aragorn let's be fair yeah all right fair I am a small I'm a small disaster gay that shouldn't be given sharp objects since I've like what am I put a load of the rings character on me you've just watched it all oh oh that's difficult I'm gonna say you've ended a song so it's not golem no you've got enough elfin vibes I think you're hanging out in rivendell somewhere

okay yeah no that's fair I want to be immortal let's be honest I'm not really going to leave the comfort of my own home if I can help it I can see you sort of wafting about some trees and something floating all right cool yeah I'm up you're not like I love you but you're not like full gladrile because no no no that's uh all all shall love me and despair is a little bit above my energy levels on a Friday afternoon I mean it's very much my vibe but in like someone can love me and get a bit worried all shall tolerate me but be mildly irked yeah I mean should we just like make a podcast otherwise we're gonna otherwise we're gonna become a lord of the rings recap podcast and no one needs that

hello and welcome to the Two Shall Make You Fract a podcast in which we are reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series one us time in chronological order I'm Joanna Hagen and I'm Francine Carroll and today is part three of our discussion of small gods small gods not doing the tagline this time see I went with a twist I went with large ideas oh nice yeah yeah that that's obviously far cooler than my one which you pooped note on spoilers before we crack on this is a spoiler light podcast obviously heavy spoilers for the book we're on small gods but we'll avoid revealing any major future events in the Discworld series and we're saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel

The Shepherd's Crown until we get there so you dear listener can come on the journey with us across a searing desert leading a terrible torture oh terrible torturer I like that oh yeah back on the alliteration bus fuck yeah right have you got anything to follow up on no well kind of but it goes into your long class watch so okay great we'll say follow up for the loincloth then in that case Francine would you like to tell me what happened previously on small gods absolutely previously on small gods the omnion delegation makes its way to a feebe where they're politely but heretically guided through a labyrinth and into a walled palace

luckily and tragically brother's memory means he can find his way back which he does wants to find philosophy and wants to reluctantly aid Vaubus in his dastardly plot the omnions attack their classical host taking over a feebe and burning down the precious library brother's memory comes to the rescue once again the regretful ragamuffin skins through the scrolls and retains as much knowledge as possible before escaping by sea with Alma's tortoise down to earth philosopher didactylos is practically minded apprentice urn and a fiery sergeant simony Vaubus takes chase in a bigger boat which is scuppered by the goddess of the sea and probably Vaubus survives brother and om also go overboard and all three wash up on a scalpy

infested shore excellent was it scalpy i wrote that from memory scalpy scalpy something like that i didn't even look up as they were real birds scalby's i also didn't i was going to do a whole bit on them and then realized that if they're meant to be corvids i might go down a rabbit hole and there's so much that's really quite important to mention in this section that i i had to stop myself on almost all the trivia i did all of my episode planning yesterday and i honestly don't remember planning any of it so i went in some weird trance of i've been doing that a lot lately pandemic rain is real yeah well at least you got an episode plan out of it i can see it it's in front of me i've somehow through hyper focus and the vague amount of disassociation

this week come with come up with an episode plan i'm nearly a whole dress right sorry so i'm i'm here i'm paying attention good and uh i'll tell us what happened i can't guide you through any kind of breakdown over zoom i'm sorry all i can do is put pixel sunglasses on my face that is the extent of my you're an excellent therapist front scene thank you oh you're very welcome uh yeah so samurai's Joanna tell us what happens this time this time on small gods brother and on wonder the desert as brother resolves to head back to omnia om initially refuses to join especially after brother finds an unconscious vorbis and carries him on his journey after a certain amount of stropping om follows along and

resolves to find water in the desert to keep his one dehydrated believer alive we learned that earned didactylosis and simonys survived the storms and they land on the omnion coast om suggests using vorbis as bait to get water from the lion's den and didactylosis confronted with a crowd of optimistic followers as the philosophers and the atheist reach omnia didactylos preaches ish and in the desert small gods tease brother with dreams of a hermit's feast he meets an unclean and angus before moving on finding the dead temple of an old god in a brief aphelion interlude we see the city retaken and the tyrant decides he's had quite enough of this omnion nonsense in the desert vorbis makes a miraculous recovery and knocks brother out as om watches

on vorbis attempts to dispose of archelonian deity but a case of mistaken identity allows om to follow as vorbis takes an unconscious brother back to the citadel a week later brother wakes in the citadel to find vorbis has been declared the new prophet and he's to be made an archbishop for his role in vorbis's ascension vorbis shows brother his latest creation huge metal turtle for roasting sinners loot z watches as brother wrestles with personal philosophy and simony and urn prepare their own vicious turtle loot z interferes with the tempering of the steel om heads back to the citadel as preparations begin for vorbis's inauguration simony prepares for the revolution as urn gives brother a heads up brother takes a sand as brother

takes a stand as simony's war turtle fails and vorbis turns the other cheek before ordering brother's death as brother lies chained to a burning turtle on grabs the eagle by the balls and intercedes his perfectly time landing brings about the end of vorbis his perfectly time landing brings about the end of vorbis and inspires a wave of belief among the omnians om rises as a great god and an unchained brother negotiates the terms of worship unfortunately they're rudely interrupted by the arrival of fleets from sort ephieb and jelly baby debla negotiates his own favorable terms with the god vorbis wakes in the desert of death and brother meets the troops on the beach and offers omniers surrender his peaceful terms are

slightly undermined by the arrival of the omnian army brother almost gives up frustrated with his fellow man om high on fresh belief visits kori celeste and demands the help of his fellow deities the god stopped the impending war as the soldiers find common ground in the end brother is the new synoviak uh simony is to be the new head of the composition and lutsi heads home 100 years later brother lives the last minutes of a good life before meeting death in the desert and he carries vorbis forward well done i've got a lot really glad i didn't have to write a summary for that i was thinking myself i'm so glad i didn't have to do a previously honor for the last part of this book because like everything happens so much happens in this section well done

i feel like i just had a little run so helicopter and loincloth watch kill yeah page 289 in my section st angulant is i tweeted this like back when i first read the budget the end of last month st angulant is wearing some sort of minimalist loincloth in so far as it was possible to tell under the beard and hair beautiful yeah uh yeah oh and also uh there's another little reference to uh it's a million chance million to one chance so it must work yeah it's a million to one chance if we're lucky yeah i think was the uh was on being picked up by eagle yeah st angulant though and he is the person that i got confused with real life in my head somewhat aptly uh who well kind of hallucinates himself a beautiful feast every day

except the god hallucinate it for him manifest it i don't really know what's happening yeah uh but he's a fun character i'm sad for the lion i'm sad for the lion i'm choosing to believe he woke up and got better yes me too i uh i definitely did not think about trying to build in lots of things where i made fun of you for your whole hermit's dream actually is from small god's bit and then i decided not to be a horrible person that's cool yeah i mean you don't want to start that kind of thing no there's a lot more for you to mock me for let's be fair that sounded more threatening than i wanted it to be i just mean we could both start picking up on this kind of thing and you know eventually we won't have time for any of the rest of the sections

we're just gonna end up bringing out episodes that are just two hours of us roasting each other in a vaguely discworld related manner yeah yeah with the utmost love and respect obviously uh so quotes quotes um i think i think mine comes first yes it does mine's right near the end yeah uh mine is when brother stands on the shore talking to the delegations from everywhere and he says and one day people will say why didn't they sort it all out back then before all those people died now the before all those people died now we have that chance aren't we lucky um which is just you can tell this whole bit is very pratchet getting annoyed about the world yeah um and kind of like a little honorable mention related quote is after this kind of

fails a couple of pages later he says everything happens because things have happened before stupid which again that is very very pratchet getting annoyed at people yeah it could like pick pick a region and look back at its history and it's this isn't it it's why couldn't they sort it out when they had the chance so it's like well everyone has the chance to sort things out now gestures broadly at the pandemic well not yeah not quite but yeah well no i mean i know obviously you're talking about much bigger concepts that's just the micro version that's very close to me right now as opposed to the larger macro what the fuck is wrong with everyone all the time yeah i mean i i feel like people are trying to sort out the pandemic at least rather than perpetuate it as a reason to

build war machines well true so far we haven't ended up with any giant armored turtles thanks to the pandemic cross fingers give it time bees anyway yours i think it's vaguely related mine is very related actually and it's slightly later in that same section so very near the end uh and it's short one this is not a game two here and now you are alive if and this is the final declaration of the gods that is brought about by om in one case twisting the thunder god's arm up behind his back yeah and i just really like it because it's very easy especially at the moment to feel very sort of disconnected everything yeah yeah and it's very nice to be confronted with this note right actually life is very much happening in front of you yeah and i'm i cried a couple

times during this last section i must admit when they when they all went up to try and grab people out the ship and they weren't sure who it was it didn't matter and yeah when they're all sort of gathered and hiding and yeah and and that i think sometimes you sort of need to be shaken and to be told that here and now you are alive yes not that this has given me some radical change of outlook and now i'm going to start living my life much better but you know it's adding another little voice in the yeah internal eternal argument yes eternal internal i'd say eternal internal argument also um not a full quote but just honorable mention to the combination of words slightly lions because that may be chausal yeah i've got that noted down as well i'm glad

you put it in somewhere because i couldn't find any way to put it in i couldn't there's why i've just chew on it in here i just really slightly lions also new band name i do yes we're slightly lions it's also just really fun to say yeah it is yeah slightly lions uh turning to drizzle by noon okay yeah so characters characters so the small god in the desert is what we have as the first character yeah uh this is alms sort of standing guard over brother when he sleeps because the small gods are trying to sort of take him and almost very no this is my belief you can't have him yes and most of these small gods are nothing more than sort of wisps of belief floating around they don't they can't articulate yeah um but there's one that remembers being a god and remembers

being worshipped yeah and it sort of ties into a lot of alms motivation obviously alms motivation is to not become one of these just wisps of belief but here it's really confronted with the what it means to be this failed god in the desert it yes it's it's very sad isn't it it is very sad it's a very sad moment this wasn't just a small god this was a small god who hadn't always been small and this god remembers temples and pyramids and sacrifices am i sorry but can't yeah i can't quite connect them into a narrative it's a just a vague sense of great things lost there's yeah um i can't remember his name yeah uh there was possibly for most more gods there's possibly the gem of hope the knowledge and belief might day you might be more

than you were now but how much worse to have been a god and now be no more than a smoky bundle of memories it's yikes so i wonder if in this hypothetical universe um one of the gods who've been a god if they got another of their million one chances and they came to believe again whether they'd have a better time of it because they knew how the story went or whether most of them are just too i mean if you look at drunken power yeah i kind of needed brother to reign in back in yeah i think they would immediately leap back to drunken power like one of the big things we learned through this book is that gods aren't clever yeah yeah not and that they sort of need that dose of humanity that like brother gives on yeah to become clever yes and dibbler helps a little bit and dibbler

helps a little bit yes uh the bit where dibbler like negotiates with om so this can you do me favour and just be in a commandment about yogurt yeah i like how om's bit was like structured as uh as a bible verse through that bit that was quite funny that whole section was great not subject like god to market forces i was trying to work out where to shoe on that line in as well because i love it uh so next is st angulant and angus who we've covered yes uh the hermit's bit as you said this is sort of the hermit's dream thing we got confused about a couple of weeks ago very generous of you so we i'm being nice i'm capable of that occasionally um yeah and angus who seems to be an imaginary friend and tally's not yeah i want to know more about angus and i know

it's just in as a silly little joke that like definitely one of those things that would never be as satisfying as the as the mystery yeah but i enjoyed that little moment the little hermit interlude yeah up on a pole in the middle of the desert as an anchor right which i again was one of those things i could have gone down a research habit hole of hermits in deserts and decided that it needed to not keep doing rabbit holes yeah so hold on i've got a bit buzzing on my microphone thing and then who's faster bench i've got this is when all of the troops are heading to ome and he's this one little guy who's been sort of caught up with the troops and so yeah yeah yeah having a lovely time he's just sort of joined in he's from a very

small tribe a small nation of marsh dwelling nomads of whose existence all the other countries were in complete ignorance uh and they all worship a newt god that we then meet at kori celeste yeah and fast bench just has a lovely time you know he meets a lot of people he learns how to cook fish he gets given some nice shiny things and then he goes home so a little adventure then so those are those are the only really new characters that are worth talking about yeah uh but checking back in with some existing ones uh loot z and i talked in the first part of small gods about his little interferences yeah and the whole point is he is there as a history monk he's just meant to observe yes and of course he doesn't

he into sort of sort of intercedes with brother and yeah talks him into taking action changes the course of history yeah i like the sort of plot twist at the end yeah i like the plot twist at the end where loot z goes back to the abbot and sort of says you know how that was sort of meant to be a hundred years of war well i sort of made it all a bit nicer yeah i would say all right fine as long as it works out yeah yeah but he's fine chess with death yes who can't remember how the horses go yes which is referenced actually in an earlier book there's uh i can't remember which one i think it's mortal reaper man it might even be one of the witches ones where um someone

talks about playing chess with death and he says yeah i hate it when they want to do that because i can never remember where the horses go yeah so i like that this has stayed and the tiny little thread that's run through yeah but yeah i like that loot say has decided to change the course of history because you can see a better outcome yeah absolutely rebel history monk we like it your word wouldn't you and then didactylos and urn uh there's just one really really good moment between the two of them which is when didactylos sees not sees but realizes the moving turtle thing yeah this big and he's sort of furious at this uh seeing and take what has until then been philosophical concepts and turn it into weapon yeah and then urn kind of has his own

moment of fury later on when simony is like well what difference does it make if brother dies this way or that way um the first way being dies as a symbol and the second way dies as part of like an attempt to rescue him and urn's like you mean you don't know and like this is realization of what maniac he's kind of tied himself to i think and what he's got himself into and basically being very well intentioned and just wanting to make stuff yeah i think urn gets it i wish we spent like just the tiniest bit more time with didactylos and urn or they had like their own book eventually yeah yeah just to see that jet that journey sorry i was trying to think of another word i don't know because i think it like it makes it

clear enough in the oh yeah i don't think it needs more i just really enjoyed reading about it yeah that's fair like i could read a few pages of them debating i guess yeah um and then yeah obviously bigger characters we've got brother brother brother goes through a bit he does he is the desert personified i think we can conclude by the end absolutely it keeps going on about it in little references doesn't he and then weird things like he did he'd been as happy as he'd ever been in god i'm fucking buzzing again god damn it i mean i can't hear anything if it helps um i'm not sure it does help because it's my record oh yeah okay i think it's his head thank god if i keep it like this it's okay so okay so yeah brother

personification of the desert yeah um like they say odd little things like he's been as happy as he'd ever been in the desert which seems very strange considering it was a horrible horrible experience um well it's kind of the simplicity of purpose yeah he has nothing to do but try and get somewhere and survive yeah i think his whole what he goes through especially with his faith in the section and what he learns about himself is fantastic he starts off the section he's so frustrated with om because he's sort of saying like if you're going to exist if you're going to be worshiped you have to take responsibility yeah and you can see this is something that has never occurred to him before that he has a role in this transaction other than just receiving

yeah that they that for it to work and for him to survive there needs to be given as well as take because om's motivation is largely survival yeah yeah brother brings up several times that everything has to be a two-way street kind of thing yeah and and he goes through this loss of faith where he there's a line about nothing means anything anymore a focus if you know a madman's going to be the snowbiark and what it brings him to is when om has this huge influx influx of belief and is the great god again brother uses his powerlessness to negotiate yeah he stands there and said i have literally nothing to bargain with but you should do this and you should do this because i have nothing to bargain with yeah and it's almost like he's come through faith and out the other side

okay kind of if you know he went from faith to belief to obviously like i know you exist because you're a tortoise and they're very difficult to not believe in which was just a line that really made me giggle something very certain about the existence of a tortoise yeah to this other side of it where it's almost back to faith again yeah but it's faith on the basis that he has given om some humanity yeah it's yeah it's almost faith in in ethics and this is the right thing to do yeah yeah yeah hmm good good old brother he's uh it's an interesting fast track character development isn't it to have somebody absorb an entire library and what that does to him yeah yeah i feel like it was skipped over a bit how mental that would have made him for quite a while

but obviously for narrative progression it did have to be rushed slightly but yeah you get the little bits of oh god this is so difficult my brain is my brain has started to process the information why do i know this about jellyfish yeah yeah i get it very yeah i mean he's he's very adaptable because he especially in the early parts of the book is so easy going and sort of just does what he's told when he starts to think for himself and take more independence and then takes in all that knowledge he continues to adapt really quickly yeah without really changing the core of who he is which is someone who does sort of want the best for things yes yeah so all of his beliefs even if it was misguided at the start was kind of around a a core of i believe this is the best

for people yes yeah yeah and and om similarly ups and downs in his dealings as any as in he's he's the down to earth cynic god for a little bit and then the great god and then is kind of dragged back down to earth and then goes and puts a proper god's armbar and it's back i enjoy his sudden influx of belief in this moment of being completely high on his own supply and then that was a very nice dramatic bit it is it's one of those it was almost off-screen action again if you like with a fee being sacked there's not this huge depiction of him rising up as a great god it's vaubus is dead everyone started believing om's a great god now yeah yeah i mean it happened in real time still it wasn't oh yeah blacked out for a week like with the

sack open hour and slight with the sacking yeah um but yes but it's a nice moment for him and he goes quite nicely descriptive actually i thought yeah i'm not i'm not criticizing how it's written i uh let me find the actual page fairly fairly fairly uh it was a revelation that does something to people watching for a start they believe with all their heart and then it's just and then a voice he is mine yeah and the great god rose over the temple yeah and it's that when he becomes the great god again his brother is still very much his believer yes he doesn't go oh i've got loads of believers now i don't need you yeah it's i like that they called back at some point i think it was during this section to his first believer they got stoned to death and how that had mattered to him

like it had been mentioned earlier and kind of skimmed over and then yeah mentioned again and it was like that did kind of suck uh yeah because it was the fact it was it was one of mine and it was a loss um yeah i don't i don't have a lot on on apart from you know i'm happy for him he's uh for all being a great god that goes through lots of character development he's quite simple he is as god i want to be he's more complex than a lot of the gods but yeah i like how he i like how he just goes up and kind of bar brawls his way through the final celestial conflict um yeah sorry this might make noise but my foot's just gone to sleep good good yep i am so professional uh so yeah simony simony good old weirdo simony

i'm not sure how to put him in charge of anything after this to be honest but probably clearly see something well i think he sees the zealotry and you know the idea of simony being the head of the acquisition is to root out all of the inquisitors and exquisitors yeah and he does hate yeah very much so and that takes the zealous passion and it's it's you've still got some of the slow burn zealotry early on which i wrote down in the stupidest possible way in my original notes oh we know you sort of that way of writing something with a descriptor descriptor so you do like an exclamation mark like you do like fem george yeah uh so i i went to write zealot exclamation mark simony but because i've been listening to lots of uh panic at the disco recently

i wrote zealot at the cinema simony zealot at the simony yep good yeah my new terry pratchett themed emo band um i'm sorry i'm trying to find that he's just got this he's furious that didactylos won't preach the way a priest would and he just stands there and tells them facts he doesn't try and convince them yeah and he's so ready to take down the church and his moment of uh thinking that brother stuff can be symbolic like he said one of things that points out is that vaubus is so evil because vaubus creates copies of himself and that simony has become yeah just as bad and it's a bit like yeah i mean simony also says things like we yeah says things very much like vaubus and that we need this kind we don't need facts we need truth which is different

yeah and he's so there's something so determined about him it's like we were saying you know om sort of likes the atheist because it's the the hate that's the other side of love on the coin it's almost the same thing yeah and when it comes to that final confrontation the omnians against sort and the aphelians and jenna babians and simony yeah simony stands there as an angry atheist and says well we've got god on our side yeah don't think you can get around this by existing yeah that was another line that made me giggle but yes as simony starts this transition into vaubus there is of course vaubus vaubus what a prick yeah but like six under words that okay you told me you had like a thousand word thesis have you managed to summarize the entire

thing into what a prick i mean no not really because he's very intro he's yeah so i've got so much here like you said you wanted to say some bits about it so why don't you start and i'll try and expand okay well the thing that i really focused on looking at vaubus's actions in the section was what his actual fucking motivation is yeah because from when he's obviously pretending to be unconscious and walking or pretending to not be there and he's walking with brother and om in the desert and he his brother talking to om as tortoise he knows om is the tortoise yes he knows that is the god he claims to do everything for yes and when he wakes up and he knocks brother out and he tries to throw on the way he literally tries to throw his god away yes so his motivation

is not the church i mean we know he doesn't really believe in om because he's become focused on the shell of it the center his brain is so closed off but theoretically his belief is still in the church and he throws the the the central part of it the actual god away he wants the god to die yeah so faith isn't his motivation but it's not power for the sake of power either no he's not a power hungry psycho it's not uh to go back to the sort of comparisons with deos from pyramids you know deos's motivation was maintaining the old ways above everything else and with all this it's not even really that no and it was something that kind of frustrated me through a lot of the section because i started to feel like maybe it's not the best written villain because there's a lack

of motivation in there until i hit a point where it talks about when he's so mad he's come through the other side of madness into this kind of cold logic and it was a thing that does it say that yeah i um sorry let me find the page i did actually write this one down casper'd formed an opinion that vorbis was somewhere on the other side of madness ordinary madness he could deal with in his experience they're quite a lot of people in the world vorbis had passed right through that red barrier and had built some kind of logical structure on the other side yes but there's another line earlier on that same page um and this is the inquisitor kind of enjoys hurting people that's why he's in the acquisition

um hurting people because you enjoyed it that was understandable vorbis just hurt people because he decided that they should be hurt without passion even with a kind of hard love yeah and i think that's the kind of central thing of his motivation well yeah no i mean yeah the fact is there is no logical answer to the question what's his motivation because it is his madness as his motivation it's all self-contained there's no there's no reasoning around it his utter conviction is that he is in possession of the truth and therefore whatever he believes to be correct must be correct um it's it's you know it's circular reasoning it's um a is true because b is true so b is true because a is true yeah um so involves his case i am holy and therefore

what i do is holy and therefore i am holy and therefore um so and the thing is someone as clever as vorbis wouldn't have any difficulty in constructing logic to support that so that logical structure you're on about um and so you see solid examples of that when he explains his version of truth to brother um and when uh he says near the beginning i think um that there was always a sign for the man who watched for them and so we all know the kind of person who well everyone does it it's it's a uh it's a human brain thing you look for signs to support your predetermined conclusion and you give away to those except confirmation bias confirmation bias thank you that's like a religious version of that um but yeah he is mad he is complete he is mad and his

motivation is that he thinks he's right and i think i think it's not just that he thinks is right though i think you know i was saying uh brother's motivation is lovely wanting the best for people i think there's a parallel to that in vorbis i think he also wants what's best for people yeah no of course yeah and that's what he's right about in his head yeah nobody like we said a million times no one's a villain in their own story vorbis is doing what he thinks is best it's he is more convinced than most people that whatever he thinks is best must be best yeah um i think it's a really good expansion on uh the duke's character from weird sisters who again had done this kind of coming through the other side of the madness but his only real motivation was

power and to keep his wife quiet i'm not sure i see many parallels between them at all apart from that one line well i mean the the way that they constructed their own version of logic on the other side of madness that's the parallel i mean so this is a more interesting version of that where the duke had the duke had done that but his motivation was power vorbis has done that but his motivation is much more murky and complex yes yeah yeah um yeah i i think this is just a much much cleverer book than i thought than i'd previously given it credit for basically like vorbis's character is really well developed for something that's quite hard then to talk about because like throughout like they're quite slight mentioned not travel brother at the center there

is truth as you travel so error creeps in and when he's referencing physical travel but you know as you read on you realize you can take it as reflective of his thought patterns as well yeah if you let in external influence you are going to corrupt the central truth of yourself and you know there's got to be a bit of subconscious itch of fear at the back there you can't risk being proved wrong because then everything falls apart exactly and it's an interesting conflict with his other main trait which is kind of scientific curiosity um yeah because he's he's incredibly closed-minded but at the same time willing to experiment to add to his knowledge i think it goes along with

that confirmation bias thing he's very curious but he has expected outcomes and will only always notice those outcomes that fit his expectations that's a good point yeah because last time we were talking about brother um and how he treated him in a way that wouldn't really make sense but vorbis wanted to see him like this and so it was fine yeah it was a faith in belief version of putting the turtle on its back and wedging stones underneath yeah yeah which actually i think when he did that there was a line that said uh vorbis would turn a god on its back yeah to see what happened which i guess is what he did with them um yeah also can we just take a moment to briefly enjoy the mental image of vorbis just fucking yeeting a tortoise across

the desert yeah poor little tortoise i feel very sorry for the tortoise but yeah um so vorbis also i don't know how much he noticed the parallels that Pratchett drew between vorbis and the eagle throughout um so i think basically his his self-belief was so strong that he brought he put himself above all else he put himself as the as the eagle or the god yeah and they're just a little bit scattered throughout so like on the in the second section somewhere there's vorbis looking out at the circle c vorbis has very good eyesight from a height is the quote um tying in with the description of the eagle's eyesight if you yeah chapters earlier and then you've got nearer the end as he's explaining kind of why he's twisting his version of the events in the desert that is

interspersed with paragraphs of what the eagle's up to at the time yeah and kind yeah and then because i feel like what he's done basically is he's believing in himself so much and in such a kind of amplifying echo that he's kind of made himself a god yeah and because the the parallels between eagle and god are also mentioned uh when on pops up there and then one other little tip that i thought might tie in with that is the fact that vorbis's eyes are completely black oh yeah what fate has and what all gods have these like solid eyes that they can't change i don't know or that might just be the fact that black eyes wouldn't reflect anything and therefore you could only look in and that's all that there is there's nothing yeah i don't know and then the other

bit about vorbis um is something that quite happily i found a listener agreeing with me about before like i even talked about it which is nice i was kind of i was i was playing with the idea that vorbis and vettanaria two sides of the same coin oh yeah i can kind of see that so in that they both have this scientific experimental mind and they both consider themselves above the populace as they rule on this completely separate level in a way where the plebs don't need to know the truth truth kind of thing yeah um i think the main difference is that vettanaria is open-minded and like willing to keen even to kind of learn from lady margolotta from Leonard of querm from vines even yeah um and he remains detached but does kind of seem to

value them as entities rather than just as data points yeah whereas vorbis feels the need to be in control of the entire populace almost he almost feels entitled to it and like i said there is this kind of hard love and creating the world he thinks is best for them because he is most totally and knows best yeah with vettanaria there is will i want to make this all work for everyone yeah and vettanaria doesn't seem to think he's better uh or more holy or a more good person he just thinks i am the best person to make this work properly yeah you know by all evidence he does seem to be it's almost vettanaria is taking on a responsibility and views it as such whereas vorbis again feels more entitled to this by right

yeah um but yeah on the subreddit um one of our listeners uh harp molly shared that to our molly commented saying that she has thoughts on vorbis capitalist uh which could be found in her post history so obviously i want to look um and yeah she also saw parallels between the two characters which was cool um and referenced uh a quote in this book that was brought up when she was reading a book later on in the watch arc which i'm going to talk about uh but where vettanaria's actions reminded her of vorbis's quote i know the breaking strain of people which sounds very much like something vettanaria would say it does sound very much like something vettanaria would say yeah um yes so i like that i will be quietly thinking about that as i'm yeah

reading vettanaria stuff yeah yeah so i've got like a whole bunch of other crap written down but i think that's all the important stuff that's if you've got anything else you want to say on vorbis before we move on no i don't think no no i don't think so i think that's enough analyzing a complete mental person for now that's not the right way to say a really like black hole echo of it's just such an interesting concept that he's managed to amplify his own thoughts to the point of being god oh and when he dies just the the grief as his mind is forcibly opened and he realized this entire belief system is nothing it's nothing yeah that moment when he breaks down that moment of him completely breaking down in the uh in death's desert yeah it's very

shout and frowd shout and frowd shout and frowd thank you and that moment when brother eventually is at the desert when he's passed away peacefully a hundred years later yeah yeah and just sort of sizing it fine come on in yeah and that like there's a quote there isn't no that vorbis is great evil or talent or something was that he changed people and then immediately after this demonstration that he did not change brother brother is still brother yeah yeah and that uh that brings me a lot of joy but yeah i hadn't i hadn't really thought about the parallels between him and the eagle actually yeah um i'll i'll mention that again later in the uh talking points just because it's it's one of the bits of symmetry i noticed but um yeah it sprung to mind when the eagle

eyesight kind of thing was mentioned and then i kind of flicked back to see if he'd yeah it kind of interspersed it throughout as i said practice is just super clever in this book it is such a clever bit but this is one of the ones that you sort of look at and go oh oh isn't it good yeah it good it good i like terry pratchett right let's try and race through locations because i've massively top heavy to this with characters yeah sorry i got really absorbed in your thesis and put down the episode plan it is to such an extent an essay that i'm i'm thinking of putting it on our blog um after editing and then i'll add your bits in as well if that's cool yeah i'll see if i can actually articulate my thoughts beyond i think so it would be quite cool there's like some

of our particularly well-ranted bits made on the blog that might be quite fun yeah uh so yeah locations there's only two obviously we don't really go anywhere new apart from the desert but there's a couple of bits that i found interesting uh one of which is the lion's den which is the temple of an old dead god which was another really good horror moment yeah and like these books aren't the most horrific of them but pratchett does occasionally write very good horror moments and this is this whole sort of uh each drop took minutes and these stalactites that have been growing the sand and rubble filled temple that must have once been a huge mighty tower there were no whispering voices here even the small gods kept away from abandoned temples

for the same reason people kept away from graveyards yeah and the horror that om feels specifically brothers you know just sort of curious about it and glad he's found water yeah he says oh do you know who was who was the god here an om is fucking horrified it's like he's come face to face with an unexpected corpse yeah and if you actually look at the parallels between that moment and brother coming across the grave in the desert oh yeah there's uh two very different kinds of horror yeah um because yeah they're both more symbolic than than just graves and they are both graves so i thought that was that was a really good moment and then obviously the other main thing is uh we'll see cori celeste which we've been to before way way back many centuries ago

in uh the color of magic probably a century ahead who can say with rinse wind uh look time is meaningless was it i said the other day time is money and both are meaningless yay and write that up in beautiful calligraphy for you one day because it's a terrible wonderful quote i love you so much uh cori celeste where the gods live but they're very elitist normally certain gods are allowed to live up there like blind eye over thunder god who's actually about 18 different thunder god's and just where's false and start is yeah it's quite cool isn't it like little reference to the fact that the half of the greek and robin gods were the same i'm guessing that must have happened loads of times for various

pantheons another rabbit hole they didn't go down well yeah and sort of religions pick and choose different gods that sound a bit fun like a febes just sort of got all of them because it's all quite entertaining for them yeah but yeah um eventually sort of strolls into cori celeste when he's got his high godness on and tells them to stop playing fucking board games i like that the newt's there i like that the newt's there and he doesn't know if 51 is a yep we've got a stake we've got 51 believers is that good is that good but it's nice i like that more of a picture is being painted of cori celeste yeah yeah and i like the like grid lines over the maps like it's some kind of

sort of dnd type board yeah or something so yeah that was the only stuff i really had on places that we go and things that we see cool all right i say yeah little bits we liked uh didactylosis theories of disc physics this has got some parallels to lots of early beliefs about how everything worked i didn't go deep dive into which greek philosopher believed what was for the best because i'm not sure what they did really no well it's kind of hard because they would write these plays where they'd put their philosopher mates in and have them agree with them so it's like did socrates say that or did playtoe writing socrates say that yeah and some of them only had their opinions written down by the apprentices who might have just you know edited

it a bit but yeah uh which is one of the other bits the belief that uh the heart is where thinking happens and the brain just happens to call the word i think that one was Aristotle and quite often these things were just like taken as beliefs for a really long time yeah because makes as much sense anything else kind of thing yeah uh people die if you get rid of this bit so but the um the who is this uh expletius proved that the disc was 10 000 miles across febrius stationed slaves with quick reactions and carrying voices all across the country at dawn so he proves that light travels about the same speed as sound uh didactrists reasons that in that case in order to pass between the elephants the sun has to travel at least 35 000 miles and

it's all every day or twice as fast as its own light yeah which means that most of you could ever see where the sun had been except twice a day where it caught up with itself and that meant the whole sun was a faster than light particle attacking on or has didactylospidate a bugger if any of our listeners want to explain quantum mechanics to me please don't just go and take a cold shower and reassess your priorities i can't take it a poor little brain some of this stuff about like working out how uh bake the earth is how much it weighs stuff like that um it's quite fun to learn about and bill brison's a short history of nearly everything has some nice summaries of like uh how she got worked out or stuff yeah um i mean obviously the

ancient greeks managed to work out quite a lot from even before that as well there were earlier civilizations that calculated things like the curvature of earth based on shadows and maths yeah quite accurately not let us to do that then was i once you know the curvature it's quite easy to work out the size hundreds of years until the frog play came out yep nothing else to do couple thousand till netflix yeah so which doesn't have the frog play what at some point i'll double check we've gone the wrong way we don't have ancient greek theater on netflix uh i'll never stop i'll never stop thinking about that picture of like what the victorians thought this century would be like walking on water powered by balloons

kind of thing i love it to be we've gone the wrong way go back you make it happen retro futurism that's the word we're thinking of yeah and that's uh it's all very fun i really like past depictions of what the future's going to be like absolutely uh fallout does that quite well then the specific uh oh i've got the term for it but the you know the atomic era yes very much so um but yeah so the dysphysics bit is quite amusing because it's then carried on as a thread that the sun is there but if didactylus is right actually the sun setting right now yeah and obviously there's some little kernel of truth in that uh the stars are so far away that by the time the light reaches us they will have already died so we're always looking at

dead stars which is a lovely thought yeah uh and he practically kind of put in a nice little slide and of course it doesn't really matter because we need to deal with this not a game right now yes there's quite a lot of other things going on but just keep in the background of your mind you had didactylus's wisdom oh yeah no that's what you were talking about right at the beginning with the characters basically didactylus saying if you build this other people will use things you didn't want it to be used for and then it's like well no it's fine i mean then we'll build a bigger one and didactylus is like i really need you to think this through lad and unfortunately he doesn't until sometime later but you know Lucy manages to fuck the iron ups that's all right

yeah there's the wisdom versus the sort of brashness of youth of i'll make it and figure out the consequences later yeah yeah whereas by the time ends made it didactylus has worked out all of the consequences like oh i wouldn't i wouldn't and this is this is actually another fun theme project plays with if something we get especially more in later books is okay what if this thing comes to the disc yeah and everyone starts playing with it before the thinking it through and then we see the consequences of it we'll see it with the semaphore and the methods of communication is a big one yeah and trains trains uh newspapers newspapers yeah all kind of way to get to that one i know he's got a fascination with steam that permeates throughout hasn't he

we've come we've had steam a couple times already yeah we have the um combination harvester back in reaper man yeah and there is some actual science behind the devices that earn is building these steam powered things yeah i looked at some of the old the old stuff that was quite cool annotated pracha is great for explaining a bit yeah yeah yeah annotated pracha has some good explanations of what the fuck earn is doing i'll link to that then i'm sure he put it more eloquently he did um oh yeah so the foreshadowing stuff i talked about this last week just really really clever pratchety writing of the way he hints at things to come and one of the moments that i noticed in this one is there is a scribe taking notes as everything happens

um and the new sort of the new religion stuff happening uh but the scribe is taking notes of what has happened especially brother approaching forbes and interrupting the sort of inauguration moment yeah and the last bit of dibbler's explanation and this is before everything has been resolved there's no truth whatsoever in the rumor that i ran away at this juncture it was just the pressure of the crowd and i've never been a friend of the physician yeah so before everything has been resolved there's this little foreshadowing moment that the acquisition will stop being the major part of the power yeah there was um oh there was sorry something else in that bit as well it was like really heavy-handed foreshadowing isn't it like for for pratchet

usually yeah uh very subtle yes yeah well when he wants to be yeah um subtle as an eagle dropping a tortoise yeah this is so unhelpful with our completely mismatched page numbers i must say but anyway yes that that was the main bit of it but i like the dibbler as a like minor prophet as well yes this version of dibbler has a lovely time actually i'm just generally very pleased for him yeah he's involved he's involved he is also a funnel pulled out for his terrible yogurt there's a fun moment where it describes him sidling as he sidel so much even crabs think he walks sideways and there is something about that sort of person who sort of

scuttle sort of has an oozy scuttle and he's got a little bit more common sense than he might give him credit for because like he can tell that the boobest brother's story isn't quite what it seems but he's like oh no it's all right yeah nods as good as a wink to a blind camel with a mule you know what i mean nods as good as a wink as nods as good as a poke with a sharp stick to a deaf camel something like that yeah which i was trying to find what the original saying is and it's nods as good as a wink to a blind horse right does that make any more sense well the idea is that he's blind so he can't tell if you're nodding or winking yeah so it's sure yeah but my brain was so sure that the line is and nods as good as a wink to a blind

badger and i realized that's entirely because of the louise reyneson the georgia nicholson books oh yeah fuck oh man god those good books yeah capitalized when we're done with this this whole just as broadly discworld thing we'll do the georgia nicholson series angus thongs and fall cancelled from this universe see you in the next life don't be late i'm away laughing on a fast camel right sorry quoting books they're probably not that relevant to us got a camel um universe coiled up yeah uh this is back on quarry celeste when we were talking about the map with the grid on it and everything i just liked oh i hadn't seen this before but he

knew what it was both a wave and a particle both a map and the place mapped if you focused on the tiny tiny glittering dome on top of the tiny quarry celeste he would undoubtedly see himself looking down on an even smaller model and so on down to the point where the universe coiled up like the tail of an ammonite just the kind of fractal geometry more physics of the universe kind of stuff actually it ties them with your one yeah the infinite regress yeah thank you i could only think of the word fractal i didn't even know what to google infinite regress good luck should have just checked our show notes from last week i forgot last week that's what i was talking about turtles all the way down

oh yeah no i do remember that now but the yeah there was a there was a cave uh but that's kind of what this thing is like the disc is there's then a smaller what version of the disc and then there's a smaller one in that and a smaller one in that and it's and it's turtles all the way down except in this case the turtles have four relevance in an entire world on their back yeah and it's like physics physicists go on about if you're given the chance in this world as well it's the no no you don't get it it's the same pattern see this is why i try not to have too many intense conversations with physicists a rule i think we should all live by yes yeah although you let them go off for a while like they

they can kind of get some knowledge into you by osmosis i think but it's quite difficult to directly understand yeah i mean that's true of quite a lot of things for me true we go through life doing the equivalent of brother with his uh scrolls in the library yeah i'll take something here i'll make sense of it one day i'm learning i'm going to put it in here in like a month later if only we had the kind of memory retention though the desert to fill up rather than the sandy sieve nice all right all right talking points let's go on to the big stuff yeah yeah that was me first it is do you want to talk to me about symmetry actually do you know what can we do yours first because i've got a nice bit to wrap up with

excellent yes let's do that let's let me ramble on about faith belief in the general nature of gods then shall we yeah yeah it's like physicists except uh it's me word vomiting about religion you're a philosopher why is your sponge fuck i meant to have a sponge and i'm gonna hold one up you're gonna laugh it's gonna be a thing never mind it's gonna be a bit never mind next week maybe next week funny things i won't be expecting it i wouldn't have expected this time but i'll expect it a bit you know all right i'm gonna put myself on mute and let you talk oh we don't even have an episode next week so i'm just gonna have to send you

i'm just gonna have to send you a picture of me with a sponge it's all getting a bit weird now okay yeah so faith and belief in the general nature of gods and the big thing that uh big sticking thing of this section is you don't need to believe in something that is there because it just is there and this thing i've brought up coming back and back to that uh postman analogy from which is abroad uh so om finds water in the desert and it's it's miraculous that he has found water in the desert but he has done it by logically digging down until he found water yeah and brothers well it's not a miracle you worked it out and i'm just like there's water in the desert it's a fucking miracle go with it mate yeah and brothers slowly

moves his belief over to ethics which becomes the big central thing he doesn't need to believe in om because he knows om exists especially in tortoise form because tortoises are so eminently believable and solid i'll not believe in the tortoise when it's right there so he focuses on this slightly more intangible thing of ethics which obviously om takes very logically and thinks of it as a country that a fee wanted to invade and that belief in something intangible is what allows him to negotiate with om who he is completely certain of because he's there being a god in front of him yeah and it allows him to bring that intangibility into it and it's it's interesting as i've talked about the parallels to atheism and this idea of

if you don't believe in punishment and divine retribution then you have to make the active choice to be a good person because you think it is for the best thing yes and this is somewhat where brother ends up on that side not atheism he's obviously not an atheist because the gods are right fucking there and he still believes in om hard enough to keep him going yeah until the rest of them join in so and he continues to believe in om them but he believes in it and kind of well of course i believe in this big physical tangible thing in front of me but his choice to be good and want the best for people comes from something much more intangible that isn't about religion or faith yeah and i think that's an interesting place for the story to end up especially when

the book interrogates why we need gods and why gods need people yeah and there's this great little sort of moment of walking and talking arguing the desert thing really kind of lets the book go into this belief in a lot more detail because there's nothing much for om and brother to do but walk talk and yeah it's dialogue and brief snake interlude and yeah so gods need people and belief is the food of gods but they need a shape and they become what people ought to be which is why you have the goddess of wisdom carrying a penguin because it was meant to be an owl but the sculptor had only ever had an owl described to him so penguin yeah which is a really bad description of an owl oh well yes the rest of the fucking owl penguin um but this is yeah

they they love the kind of hatred of atheists as well because it's atheists like simony the anti-theists is that it's so powerful it's almost a belief of its own because they're so present in those people's minds they're so conscious of these gods they are refusing to believe in yeah yeah um which comes back to simony's great line of don't think you can get around me by existing but it goes into you know that's why gods need humans they need the food of belief why do humans need gods and om sort of says something along the lines of if people have got to believe in something otherwise why does it thunder and brother has the explanation of the science behind it it accords because this happens when this is this and om says that's an explanation

it's sort of reason yeah yeah and this is a theme that Pratchett will come back to um there will be a very very beautiful thing said about this sort of thunder and the sun rising in but we talk about in december so i won't go into the quote now but it comes back to what i talked about uh back in which it's abroad with the power of story there's something that unites us and its belief is the same thing it's the why of things i need to believe in gods so i can believe that thunder happens because om is taking his sandals off yes it's an explanation for things that we don't have the explanation for and even when you've got the scientific explanation sometimes the intangible is something more powerful and meaningful to you yeah and so his brother has the exact nature of

gods laid out before him explained to him to the point where he doesn't need to believe in them because they're just there he again he finds this intangible i don't i know that there is or isn't divine retribution i know but i believe that people should be good for the sake of being good and because it is the best thing for everyone and the ethical thing yeah so i think where we started in this book with the nature of faith and where we come to is a really lovely thing where it becomes about so much more than the faith in someone with a big stick saying do the thing yeah and more the faith in the ability for someone to do the thing for themselves yeah come to come to their own conclusion yes yeah so that's that's all i'm going to say on faith and religion today because otherwise

i don't have much to add to that that was just nice good work thank you so talk to me about symmetry okay um so Pratchett very clever very clever man good writer had noticed uh tied a lot of things together in this book like way more than usual and it had me metaphorically court board string all over the place um actually god i wish i'd had a court board for this one that would have been properly madder looking yeah anyway um yeah so just a couple of the bits that i particularly liked because like if you if you read through it you can just like make yeah the drawing pin connections through so much of it but uh so i liked didactylosin ome by sending up similarly tongue tied feeling the same way in

front of crowds of their worshipers um i liked that the book right near the end of the book ome's quote i'm on my back and getting hotter and i'm going to die is echoed exactly by brother at the end of the book yeah that was quite cool um i like to bring it back to brother and baubus again that when brother is close to death after baubus hits him in the head um he's in a desert surrounded by crowds that's his dream his dream um sorry that was inverted comments you can't see listen when baubus dies he's in a desert alone but death can see the crowds so he can't yeah and say parallel images yeah that's the same that's it but brother can't no baubus can't see the crowds because you know his whole saying is he's only him yeah um

brother very much believes in other people yeah so yeah but then last but definitely not least this is when i've got my like intense conspiracy face on i'm sorry it's like the opening patchage is a summary of the entire book um now consider the torson eagle and i won't read this entire thing but the eagle is described as this powerful creature at above who can do all kinds of shit and yeah it will sit for hours and survey until it finds one small thing which will focus on leap bring it up make it feel like it's flying and then let go which is exactly what baubus does and is trying to do with brother and then this passage finishes up and then sorry then this is again but the eagle being like baubus who says um it's simply the delight of eagle's

tormentorses they're not doing it for any good reason um and then it finishes up but of course what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection one day a tortoise will learn how to fly and brother through being picked up by baubus eagle becomes the tortoise who learns to fly and then because of that baubus dies but then because of an actual flying tortoise it'll you know you know what i'm saying anyway this is kind of like a heavily veiled blurb of the whole thing um and much better than the actual like a little fable yeah yeah yeah excellent well that uh i think that wraps up the book perfectly yeah much neater than usual yeah look at us not just fading off in a name around the bridge age i don't think i've

got anything to add to that but i think that's a really good thing you've pointed out that i hadn't entirely picked up on we can thank the eagle for that because i was going back to look for eagle references and i was like wait a minute thanks eagle thanks eagle uh and yeah one minor note that what om does isn't technically possible because the anatomy of birds is not the same as the anatomy of mammals oh yeah some birds have external genitalia not eagles not eagles he checked it he all right i did check so our new excellent phrase grab the eagle by the balls is not going to take off then as it were unfortunately not no uh but to come very come full circle just as the book does back to our first episode on this uh and this idea of a tortoise being dropped

this is uh apparently what happened to a skillus ascolus the playwright yes which is how practice came up with the idea for the book kind of yes the sparks that set the fire in the tortoise in a manner of speaking we were doing so well taking it too far taking it too far sorry francing do you have an obscure reference video for me yeah uh the conversation that vorbiss and brother have after they come back from the desert takes place in a little garden in the center of the citadel just behind the temple um and practice makes a note of describing the elder tree in there which is huge and ancient quite unlike its short-lived relatives outside the garden and its barriers were ripening um an elder tree of course has a lot of folklore

and symbolism associated with it yeah but uh i seem in this sense it's having an elder near the back door is meant to ward off evil spirits and so this is the back door of the temple massive elder tree yeah an interesting side note that might also be relevant especially because it's in brewers um is that Judas is meant to have been hung from an elder and some say the cross that Christ was crucified on was made from elder although it's probably these last two things were introduced into the mythos by Christians who wanted the pagan tree to have bad connotations because it's really hard to make big stuff from elder because it's not very victory yes it's not the right sort of word for that sort of thing correct anyway i know about woodwork

awesome so i went went for a horticultural reference today which is difficult and it does it but we did it well done us well i think that's literally everything we could ever say about small gods just not true how many times in the past three weeks have we said but i didn't go down that research rabbit hole that is time is finite for us literally everything we could say considering how much of an allowance we have for how many hours of material we can really spend months yeah yeah and how many hours we can set aside to go into random obscure books dug out from underneath the coffee table look there are like eight powerpoint presentations that didn't make it into these episodes mate you are so lucky i didn't have an extra day off this week i always

you would have got a powerpoint presentation on vorbis that would have happened i thought about it i decided i did not have time but please look out for a fuller expanded thesis on the character of vorbis eventually coming up with bonus content bonus content inane running but with paragraphs might even have like a separate feed of me with the complete mad conspiracy phase on excellent and we'll do some cool just see the eagle is the bad is the god but also vorbis it's just right there in the beginning open your eyes sheeple goat goat goat people people it doesn't work people open your eyes people camille people all right well we've officially descended into madness yeah okay i think that's probably that

enough yeah okay thank you very much for listening to this episode of the two shall make you fret we're going to take a week off and wear our sanity for everyone's sanity and we will be back on the first of march with the first of our episodes on the next disc world novel yeah right uh so yeah we'll be back on the first of march uh with the first episode on the next disc world novel lords and ladies we're going to see the witches again which by the way are awesome new listener up there what was he heart molly said she was particularly looking forward to you say winner well we'll make it good we'll make it good so many power points if there's an episode that's just me reenacting the entirety of

midsummer nights dream i'm not sorry anyway in the meantime until then dear listener uh you can keep an eye out for buy tickets for and get ready for lambados on the clacks the online disc world convention happening from the third of march to the fifth of march we will link to the website for tickets etc in the show notes there's going to be cosplay contests there's going to be a radio play there's going to be panels we're going to be on a panel about disc world podcasting fifth to the seventh that's what i meant we are going to be on a panel about disc world podcasting on the seventh of march at three o'clock tickets are only 20 quid and the proceeds are all going to excellent causes like the wales ape sanctuary so more details

about that in the show notes on twitter etc uh you can also follow us on instagram at the true shall make you fret on twitter at make you fret pod on facebook at the true shall make you fret you can join our subreddit r slash ttsmyf you can email us your thoughts queries castles albatrosses and snacks the true shall make you fret pod at gmail.com very important you don't try and explain quantum to us over any of those channels i think we said this like right at the beginning yeah like we've got a lot of repeating themes quantum mostly don't try and explain quantum don't try and explain cricket yeah but never ever contact us about the rules of cricket thank you please don't forget to rate and review us wherever you get a podcast because algorithms it helps

other people find us and most importantly tell other people about us who you think might enjoy it tell thank you to the people who listened to me last week and went on facebook and reviewed us much appreciated yes thank you very much and thank you to people who've been tweeting about us and things we love you hand in the meantime dear listener death watch them walk away oh it's fun something in title open your eyes giebel yeah i like it see that or eternal internal argument which is possibly more relevant but not as funny i like both go with you go with you giebel oh i made it bad i'm sorry