Small Gods/Heartwarming


 * When the god Om, who starts the book completely self-centered, realizes (in a nod to the parable of the good shepherd) that if you want to have thousands of followers you have to care about the individual ones. Asked by a mathematically-challenged god whether one follower is less than fifty-one, he replies, "No. It's the same."
 * Soldiers from opposite sides of a war begin, completely unironically, to help each other in the face of massive natural disaster.
 * Brutha in the afterlife, deciding to help out the Complete Monster of the book.
 * Made all the more heartwarming when Death tries to warn him off by telling him the kind of man he was helping, to which Brutha simply replies, "I know. He's . But I'm me."
 * In other words, on his death, the first thing Brutha does is rescue someone from hell.
 * Brutha, separated from his tiny, self-centered tortoise god and trapped in the Citadel, storms down to its enormous, immovable Great Gates and starts shouting, "I carried you in the desert! I believed all my life! Just give me this one thing! Give me a sign!" And the Great Gates, thanks to an unrelated (right?) subplot coming to its head at exactly the right moment, swing open.
 * "I. He is Mine." Gave me some serious goosebumps.
 * Om struggling his way across the land to make it to Brutha before he is killed.
 * Brutha says, "No smiting." Om, outraged, asks, "IX. You Order Me? Here? NOW? ME?" Brutha replies, "No. I ask." Om's response is, "X. That's Worse Than Ordering!" Because while he could brush aside a command from a mortal, a request from someone he cares about carries far more weight.


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