As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance
- Willikins is a pretty different man to the one we first met, mostly due to characterization marching on. But you could plausibly explain the difference. When he and Vimes first met, Sam just saw a rich family’s butler. But these days, Willikins is his valet, and (thanks to Vimes’ natural revulsion against his new social class), they’re also quite close. Especially since Vimes learned he grew up in a gang that even the kids on Cockbill Street were afraid of. So it makes sense that a) from Vimes’ viewpoint, Willikins isn’t a decrepit old fossil anymore, and b) Willikins’ tone is much more familiar, even if he never quite drops the honorifics.
- The role of the Summoning Dark in this novel is... curious. It's a quasi-demonic personification of vengeance, and it's exceedingly helpful to Sam Vimes throughout the story, providing him the gifts of Night Vision, Talk With Goblins, and key witness territory. All given freely without penalty (other than some minor itching). It only asks in return that Vimes continues to help the Goblin people, which he would've been doing anyway. So, on the one hand, you can conclude that its defeat in Thud! forced it into subservience. It can't leave Vimes, but it doesn't have the teeth to take over again. On the other hand, perhaps the Summoning Dark, realizing that saving the goblin people would take more than mere vengeance can achieve, has decided to call upon a higher power. Sam Vimes himself.Willikins: "As for your question... I think Sam Vimes is at his best when he's confident that he's Sam Vimes."
- In fact, the Summoning Dark may be working off a different trope entirely. In Thud! it is captured by the Watching Dark and imprisoned, so in reality, it is playing the Boxed Crook in a mystery drama.
- On the other hand, killing a goblin in that area is not actually illegal (even though it should be), so Vimes is not investigating a crime or enforcing the law when the Summoning Dark assists him; he's only pursuing vengeance.
- And he does his best to color within the lines in his head, even then.
- Even in Thud!, it's suggested a few times that the Summoning Dark isn't "evil": the dwarf who conjured it with his death-curse had very little hope his murder would otherwise be discovered; the real evil was striking him down and leaving him to die. It's just that there's Dark-vengeance and then there's Vimes-vengeance. He bent one into the other, and some of that stuck.
- This also continues with Vimes' theme of having the best vengeance against someone who feels the law doesn't apply to them be lawful justice. The antagonists of Snuff don't think they've done anything outright illegal, which is technically true because they've manipulated the law in their isolated area to be whatever they say it is. They made themselves above the law, which lasted right up until real law enforcement came to visit.
- Goblins make pots to house their earwax, nail clippings, mucus, and even dead infants' souls. The narrative also accounts for why they don't collect their urine, feces, teeth or hair. And yet there don't seem to be any Unggue pots dedicated to tears, despite both a major goblin character and their most precious pot type being named for such secretions. Why not? Because, based on Tears Of The Mushroom's own words, they equate the shedding of tears with their fungal crops' shedding of spores, hence may regard tears as symbolic carriers of fecundity and rebirth. You bury a goblin's other byproducts with them, because they're part of the individual now gone, but tears are permitted to fall and kindle new life. Naming the container for a deceased infant's spirit the "soul of tears" isn't solely a reference to the bereft parents' grief, but one of hope that it'll seed another child.
Fridge Horror
- Fred Colon finds, in his cigar, a pot called "Soul of Tears," a pot made by a mother goblin when, out of necessity, she must kill and eat her baby. It is later revealed that goblins are being used as a slave workforce to harvest tobacco cheaply and that the pot came from that plantation. The really horrible thing about this is not that the mother, working on a plantation, had so little food that she had to eat her baby. No, the horrible thing is that that pot, probably the mother goblin's most precious possession, somehow ended up in a cigar.
- Even worse is that the necessity of a mother goblin to kill and eat her baby is a occurrence common enough among goblins to have a specific pot dedicated for that event.
- Possibly "Soul of Tears" pots were originally used to house the souls of stillbirths, before the other races' rise pushed goblins to the brink of extinction and the dreadful algebra became all too commonplace.
- This troper assumed the pot was placed into the cigar by the baby goblin's father, because its mother had died anyway and its only hope of rebirth was to be sent back to the home continent where healthy female goblins might still exist.
- Even worse is that the necessity of a mother goblin to kill and eat her baby is a occurrence common enough among goblins to have a specific pot dedicated for that event.
- Just seeing Fred Colon, one of Discworld's long-standing comedic fixtures, reduced to a bedridden, raving victim of circumstance can be quite jarring.
