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I finished Mort not long before you posted this, and had to show my wife this exact quote because it was just so good.

I believe Ephebe is functionally an elective monarchy, in that the people (at least those few of them who have suffrage) elect someone to the position of Tyrant, and the Tyrant seems to have absolute authority

I absolutely love this passage! Always makes me proper chuckle! 😁

One of the all-time Pratchett punchlines, that last line

Best footnote ever.

there are also similar particles for synthetic lifeforms called decepticons

there's kingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow 🎶 there's kingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off, jim! 🎶

It's superposition. Schrodinger's monarch

That’s what those big circular particle accelerators are for. Keeps em going round till needed.

The proto monarch trying to retain their throne would emit a stream of klingons. Meanwhile, the usurper, trying to remove the proto monarch would emit a stream of prions, or, more properly, pryoffs. The pryoffs and the klingons have a runoff and eventually emit a monarchon or a monarchoff.

Superposition; it's one of the weirder side effects of monarch field theory. "monarch field theory" does sound like it should involve large swaths of milkweed, though.

Wave-Parliament duality is somewhere around dog‘s pavlova in the pun sphere, good job

Killing all your rival claimants causes the wave function to collapse.

Or an abdication... Are the particles aware of the line of succession in those circumstances?

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Monarchy