Status Updates From Total verhext (Discworld, #12)

“She threw a couple of logs into the fireplace and glared at them until they burst into flame out of sheer embarrassment.”

“Then there’s all that business with goat headed gods. Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course, they even deal with them occasionally, but they don’t *believe* in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the post-man.”

“Changing a whole country just to make a story work!”

“It takes a special kind of person to fight back and become the bicarbonate of history.”

2/2 . In this context, history is treated as a "parasitical life form" that loves to repeat itself—cycles of cruelty, ignorance, superstition, and stupidity. A person fighting back is actively refusing to allow the same mistakes, injustices, or horrors to happen again. They are rejecting the idea that "that's just how it is.

1/2 To become the "bicarbonate of history" means to be the rare individual who stands against the tide of negative events, introducing a "base" (stability/sanity) into a "seething cauldron" of acidic, chaotic, and repetitive events.

Really interesting idea about thousands of characters existing across the different planes and iterations of storytelling, like thousands of grandmas being eaten by wolves & thousands of sleeping beauties falling asleep at once, all existing parallel and simultaneously and with slight variations due to the different forms the story takes, and all based on the storyteller themselves. Mass Reincarnation

“Stories are a parasitical life form warping lives in the service only of the story itself.”

Pumpkins!