![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 12th, 2012 11:46 amI read Small Gods for the first time when I was pretty young - probably around ten, if I had to make a guess. I know that because it turns out that Tiny Becca left some presents in my copy for Adult Becca to discover.
( They look like this. )
(Unfortunately, Tiny Becca was not very good at drawing wings. Or skulls. BUT SHE TRIED, man, she tried.)
The thing about knowing for sure that I read Small Gods that young is that I kept coming across this idea, this idea that is basically what the book is about:
What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, more or less, turn out all right. (89)
"I think . . . you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so." (314)
That's the point of Small Gods. It's what makes the book work - the idea that there is a sense of right and wrong that humans can figure out and act in accordance with, independent of commandments or laws; that the threat of hell shouldn't be what makes people good. It's also something that I've believed for about as long as I can remember, and now I don't know: did I always think that, and is that why I liked Small Gods to begin with? Or did Terry Pratchett put that there?
(There are things about Small Gods, I realize on the reread, that don't actually quite work. Brutha, much as I love him, does not quite work. Terry Pratchett tells us that Brutha's brain doesn't work quite like other people's, that he remembers everything and thinks in very straight lines. Brutha is not stupid. The way he is described, he's also not neurotypical. Unfortunately, Terry Pratchett only writes him this way about half the time, and the other half the time he writes him like any other Terry Pratchett POV protagonist. I understand the urge! Snappy dialogue is very tempting! But it means that Brutha doesn't really come together until the desert, when he becomes almost a different person altogether.
Even thinking that, though, the desert still works, and everything after. It really does.
. . . also and completely unrelatedly, TVTropes tells me that there are people who ship Brutha/Om, which I just felt the need to share so that other people can share my ?!?!?!?! I mean, fandom has some inevitabilities, I guess, but . . . . TORTOISE!)
( They look like this. )
(Unfortunately, Tiny Becca was not very good at drawing wings. Or skulls. BUT SHE TRIED, man, she tried.)
The thing about knowing for sure that I read Small Gods that young is that I kept coming across this idea, this idea that is basically what the book is about:
What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, more or less, turn out all right. (89)
"I think . . . you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so." (314)
That's the point of Small Gods. It's what makes the book work - the idea that there is a sense of right and wrong that humans can figure out and act in accordance with, independent of commandments or laws; that the threat of hell shouldn't be what makes people good. It's also something that I've believed for about as long as I can remember, and now I don't know: did I always think that, and is that why I liked Small Gods to begin with? Or did Terry Pratchett put that there?
(There are things about Small Gods, I realize on the reread, that don't actually quite work. Brutha, much as I love him, does not quite work. Terry Pratchett tells us that Brutha's brain doesn't work quite like other people's, that he remembers everything and thinks in very straight lines. Brutha is not stupid. The way he is described, he's also not neurotypical. Unfortunately, Terry Pratchett only writes him this way about half the time, and the other half the time he writes him like any other Terry Pratchett POV protagonist. I understand the urge! Snappy dialogue is very tempting! But it means that Brutha doesn't really come together until the desert, when he becomes almost a different person altogether.
Even thinking that, though, the desert still works, and everything after. It really does.
. . . also and completely unrelatedly, TVTropes tells me that there are people who ship Brutha/Om, which I just felt the need to share so that other people can share my ?!?!?!?! I mean, fandom has some inevitabilities, I guess, but . . . . TORTOISE!)
