Small Gods/Heartwarming

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • 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 Vorbis. 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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