As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance:
- Vimes is bemused by the fact that the Low King is "crowned" by sitting on top of a sacred relic. But dwarfs regard things that are "low" to be better than things that are "high", so putting the Scone on his head would be treating it less respectfully than his perching on top of it.
- The dwarfish superstition regarding the Scone is that the piece of Truth in it would flash white-hot if anybody touching it told a lie. The Low King is supposed to sit on it while passing judgement. Dwarfs like to keep their kings honest. And it would, of course, lead to a conflagration in the underwear department if he told an untruth...
- Or to put in another way, any liar has his pants literally catch fire.
- Although given how much metal most dwarves wear (and the implication from Unseen Academicals that much of it is against the skin with the constant discussion about micromail not chafing), a king lying while sitting on the Scone would probably be encased in his own melting armor or having very heat-conductive parts next to a rather sensitive area.
- Also, while the Scone may not be the original, there have been plenty of books confirming how Belief is a fundamental force on the Discworld, and actually reshapes reality. So it’s dwarves' belief as much as any metaphysical properties that make the Scone work.
- Gavin and Carrot's fight with Wolfgang. Much is made of the fact that Carrot fights "by the rules"; but when Gavin jumps in, he's trying to fight fair, too. Which Gaspode notes before he jumps in to help.
- Vimes, despite his avowed loathing for kings, hits it off fairly well with Rhys Rhysson. This makes more sense when you consider that it's really the concept of hereditary kingship that Vimes finds repugnant - by his reckoning, it's a recipe for breeding power-crazed unaccountable bastards - whereas the Low King is selected by consensus of the movers and shakers within dwarf society, not unlike how the Patrician himself gets chosen.
- There's also the fact that "King" in Dwarfish really means something like "Chief Mining Engineer", so it's also rather like the selection for a new head of the Guild of Cunning Articifers.
- The Schmaltzberger dwarfs won't accept any dwarfs named Glodsson as candidates for Low Kingship. Why? In Witches Abroad, a footnote states that thousands of copies of a dwarf named Glod were created by a curse imposed upon a human king by a dyslexic god (the king was trying to wish for everything he touched to turn to gold, you see). The deep-downers probably wouldn't see their offspring as real dwarfs due to their origin.
- Vimes and Sybil both privately hold the opinion that Carrot and Angua's relationship is under strain because of their concerns about not being able to have children - or at least, not being sure what nature those children would have. This is never brought up in either Carrot's or Angua's point of view sections, and it's made pretty clear that the problem actually stems from a completely unrelated source note . While it doesn't make much sense to apply this reasoning to Carrot and Angua, it actually makes complete sense for Vimes and Sybil to think like this, since it's a projection of their own situation: Vimes is afraid that they've missed their chance to have children by marrying in middle age; and Sybil is afraid because she's just discovered that she's pregnant with her first child, and is unsure of how Vimes will react, or the effect it will have on her health.
- Additionally, in Vimes' case at least, his reasoning could go back to Feet of Clay, when Dragon King of Arms brought up this exact problem, noting that werewolf genetics are never predictable. While Vimes brushes it off at the time, he might reconsider later on that - in this specific case - maybe the Villain Has a Point.
- Also, Angua alludes to the problem of werewolf genetics in this very book when she brings up Yennorks, werewolves born stuck in one form or another, and points out that there's plenty of reason to suspect that their descendants are where a lot of stories of monsters come from - wolves with that capacity to be just a bit too human, and humans with that bit of predator inside. Family's definitely weighing on her, even if it's not explicitly her own possible future children.
- Vimes telling Detritus to blow the doors off the Baron's castle with the Piecemaker isn't just a Moment of Awesome: it also gives Vimes the satisfaction of papering over the memory of one of his previous minor embarrassments. Namely, the time in Guards! Guards! when he got carried away by Dirty Harry tropes and ordered Colon to shoot the lock off a door with a bow and arrow. Turns out all he'd needed to get that scene right was a different Sergeant wielding a big enough bow.
- Regarding the Scone's protective mechanism, the first part with the water-locks and boat could be Fridge Brilliance on the dwarfs' part. At first glance, it just sounds like another way of operating an elevator, but when you consider that vampires in Discworld (barring serious self-help training in the style of the de Magpyrs) have an aversion to crossing running water, you realize that it's not necessarily set up that way to keep out dwarf thieves.
- Vimes notes that Igors tend to walk with a limp, Discworld wiki
claims they do this intentionally, but given their tendency toward self improvement and how they're described as "good catches" there may well be an alternate explanation. - When Reg Shoe reports Sonky's murder to Fred Colon, Colon speculates that, if you made a copy of the replica Scone, you'd get the real one back. This is exactly what happens in the end.
- The popular term for the city's breakthrough semaphore-tower technology is "the clacks". This is just one letter different from the nickname by which Discworld's first sweeping technological-innovation craze, "the clicks", was known in Moving Pictures.
- Wolfgang defeats Carrot in a scrap, even though Carrot has punched out trolls in the past. Except that those trolls were citizens of Ankh-Morpork, and as the King of Ankh-Morpork Carrot has rightful dominion over them. In a world as shaped by narrative tropes as the Disc, that might make a very great difference indeed.
- Albrecht Albrechtson's testing of the 'fake' Scone of Stone. It wasn't just him giving his approval of the new Low King, it was him giving his approval of the new Scone. As the Low King says, in a few centuries one of Albrecht's decendants will be Low King so he wants to make sure that the Scone they'll sit on will be worthy of being called the Scone of Stone.
Fridge Horror:
- Carrot's alarm when he asks Gaspode if the nearby villagers had killed the wolf they captured seems like an overreaction, given that it's unlikely they'd have used fire or silver against such an animal, so if (as he presumably fears) it was Angua in wolf-form, she'd potentially walk away unscathed. But if you recall the events of Men at Arms, Gaspode's report of the wolf's capture becomes a lot more alarming: it took Angua hours to revive when she was shot in that novel, and she didn't revert back to human shape while she appeared to be dead. So if the villagers had, say, riddled her with arrows until she dropped, they might well have burned her remains or, worse still, skinned her alive before she could wake up. (She'd look like a genuine dead wolf to them, and warm pelts are valuable in such a cold country.)
- Vimes, watching the clacks at work, thinks that its inventors must be making money hand over fist. The poor fellows.
