Pondering the relationship between Mightily Oats's "Everywhere I look I see something holy" and Constable Dorfl's "Either All Days Are Holy, Or None Are" and Brutha's "Here and now we are alive"

What gets to me about Vorbis is that he's sincere. He's not corrupt, he's not a hypocrite; he is a pious follower of the Church of Om who obeys every rule. And yet he is one of the evilest people on the Disc.

I'm only casually familiar, but I get the feeling that there's a common plot where there's a corrupt and decadent religion that is returned to its good roots by a humble believer. The villains are often priests who put up a veneer of piety in public while they secretly hoard wealth and get drunk in violation of their religion's tenets.

Small Gods is not that plot. Brutha isn't fighting the corruption of Om's words, nor is he fighting people who use religion as a means to wealth and power. If anything, he's the one who 'corrupted' Omnianism into a religion of peace and debate.

The church under Vorbis isn't a corruption of Om's words as much as a distillation; at the very start, Om only cared about getting new followers and putting unbelievers to the sword, and now he has countries conquered in his name and heretics put to the knife. And Vorbis doesn't seek wealth or power for himself; he denies himself pleasures of the flesh, and dedicates himself entirely to his religion (or so he thinks).

When Vorbis kills the porpoise, not even Brutha can find a word in the books of the Prophets against that. When Didactylos burns the Library of Ephebe, he says it's in part a way to keep its knowledge out of Vorbis's hands, but Brutha knows that Vorbis would not read a single scroll. And the scene where Om and Brutha are eating the melon in Ephebe hits me every time; Om thinks that Vorbis is feasting, while Brutha says that he only eats stale bread. He adds that he sits and waits for the bread to get stale.

What Brutha had thought was a rock in the sand was a hunched figure, sitting clutching its knees. It looked paralyzed with fear.

He stared.

"Vorbis?" he said.

He looked at Death.

"But Vorbis died a hundred years ago!"

YES. HE HAD TO WALK IT ALL ALONE. ALL ALONE WITH HIMSELF. IF HE DARED.

[...] The black-on-black eyes stared imploringly at Brutha, who reached out automatically, without thinking...and then he hesitated.

HE WAS A MURDERER, said Death. AND A CREATOR OF MURDERERS. A TORTURER. WITHOUT PASSION. CRUEL. CALLOUS. COMPASSIONLESS.

"Yes. I know. He's Vorbis," said Brutha. Vorbis changed people. Sometimes he changed them into dead people. But he always changed them. That was his triumph.

He sighed.

"But I'm me," he said.

Vorbis stood up, uncertainly, and followed Brutha across the desert.

Death watched them walk away.

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“That was the trouble with slow people. Give him a fool any day. Slow people took some time to catch up, but when they did they rolled right over you” - Terry Pratchett, small gods

In small gods this quote always stood out to me and I think I just realized this idea is so core to the book and the general arc of the book. Like this is one of Brutha’s core traits and also kind of the primary arc of the book. I think unlike most protagonists with an arc of the sort Brutha has, as well as in comparison to the other people fighting Vorbis, he takes a long time to really seemingly leave the harmful beliefs behind. However when he does he bowls everyone else over.

This quote, as well as Brutha’s characterization in general, also made me think about what exactly slowness is. I think, at least in this case and context, slowness is taking the time in your thought. Brutha really takes the time to come to conclusions he comes to. He thinks about what he is learning, and some of it is probably partially denial, but in comparison to other characters that deal with this kind of situation there is not a lot. Instead it is more like he comes to his conclusions slowly and with consideration.

Brutha and Om

For Day 12: Forget, here's Brutha, who never does it!

"No. Men should die for lies, but the truth is too precious to die for."

Terry Pratchet, Small Gods

.............

this one is very interesting. I need to sit on this first.

Group D Round 1

[image ID: the first image is of Brutha, a boy with short black hair, wearing black robes, kneeling in front of a tortoise. he's glancing at an old man wearing similar robes to his left. the second image is of Colt, a young man with short brown hair, wearing a red and white top with a turtle neck. end ID]

Brutha

[no propaganda provided]

Colt

my beloved colt, also prbly the 1st character i headcanon as transmasc and part of my Transgender Awakening :tm: referring to colt as he/him because I'm Right. ANYWAY. literally only referred to as "coltia" by a couple ppl and tells u to call him colt. he's ur breeding assistant in game (it's. a monster breeding game. u raise and fight monsters. its cool and fun.) he has a pet toucan named joy that helps you raise the monsters, too! described on his IMa ID card as "a little bit hasty" idk he's just very likeable! he's the one that you experience p much the entire game w, so you get rlly attached 🥺 everything that happens with your monster is basically narrated and experienced through what colt says he's also in the monster rancher anime but tbh... i never watched it jgi;eajgs and we dont talk abt what they did to colt in the monster rancher ds game it just makes me sad they made him a mail carrier like ??? what happened to being a monster breeder??? i refuse to believe he would give up on that *bites the creators* anyway i love colt dearly so so much and he's trans cuz i say so

‘It’s not my fault if people misuse the—’ ‘It is! It has to be! If you muck up people’s minds just because you want them to believe in you, what they do is all your fault!’

-- Terry Pratchett- Small Gods

‘That was lucky. Million-to-one chance,’ said Brutha.

‘I never had this trouble when I was a bull. The number of eagles who can pick up a bull, you can count them on the fingers of one head.'

-from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

My physical copy of Small Gods finally came and I decided to tell a fun story about me: first time I read Small Gods, based only in the first pages (likely less than 10) I was SURE Brutha was a middle aged man.

I had this whole mental imagine of a 50/60 year old acolyte that while devotee never grew inside the order at all. With considerable body mass and sunburns for the years of manual labor and a lot of age marks. Except after he hears Om and goes running to ask for advice there is the description (from my memory so not exact): he was too old to be an apprentice (my brain: exactally he is an old man), ten years to old to be precise (my brain: oh so maybe the right age is 20 and he is in his 30s), they prefered to recruit seven year old boys (my brain: *buthra image breaking* HE IS SEVENTEEN?).

I have no idea why that surprised me at all, there is no indicator whatsoever that he is an old man and that wasn't even a revelatio it was just a sorte of introduction paragraph but it weirdly happened.

"You could have helped people," said Brutha. "But all you did was stamp around and roar and try to make people afraid. Like...like a man hitting a donkey with a stick. But people like Vorbis made the stick so good, that's all the donkey ends up believing in."

"That could use some work, as a parable," said Om sourly.

"This is real life I'm talking about!"

"It's not my fault if people misuse the--"

"It is! It has to be! If you muck up people's minds just because you want them to believe in you, what they do is all your fault!"

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

[My brutha, you are the Gustave Doré of your generation. Out of bounds.]