Things don't just stop there, though - no, no, no. It's a well-known fact on #Discworld that Witches can go wherever they like. The three of them head backstage…

> "You!" [Granny Weatherwax] shouted. "You're dead!"

That, he was. And there, after a fake bush meets a Lancre steel-capped boot and bursts into splinters, she exposes the lie to the world at large:

> "See?" […] "Nothing's real! It's all just paint, and sticks and paper at the back."

At first, you might think this whole affair ridicules the sorts of hackneyed scenes that are ONLY (and I repeat, ONLY) possible in entertainment. One example soaps have been leaning on since we could put phones in our pocket:

> If your character is going to be killed off, you WILL show the viewer their forgetting to charge their phone, and it WILL run out of juice when they need it most.

- https://brologue.net/2023/11/05/fantasy-for-mums/

But when you think about it, Granny Weatherwax, in her own abrasive way, critically (and literally) deconstructs the secondary world that the production asks the audience to believe.

How did Mum prove to Dad that dragons aren't real? She googled for dragons and found their Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon

For the same effect, she could've looked up some behind-the-scenes videos of the actors flailing in front of a greenscreen. None of it's real.

So, what's all this simulacra and simulation business, then? When we see a White Walker or a dragon on-screen, what relation do they have to our reality? That is: what does Mum mean when she says a dragon isn't 'real?'

I'll start with something that reflects the real world, one-to-one: a photograph. If you're looking for a place to eat while abroad, you're most likely going to look at the unedited photos of food by previous patrons to know what you're getting into. If you can trust that the photo hasn't been edited at all, then it's as true a reflection of reality as we might get.

Another example might be cleaning your home for an estate agent to take photos. The state of the house in these photos does not reflect the tidiness of our day-to-day lives, because they are intended for potential buyers for whom this might be their 'forever home.' They don't want to see or imagine the dirt that life tracks around the house. That comes later.

One step further, we get a bit abstract. People say where there's smoke, there's fire. But consider the role of a smoke alarm. It's essentially a stand-in for the fire, to alert you to a danger and get you to stop whatever it is you're doing before that imaginary danger becomes real.

On the final step, there be dragons. Except, not really. No human being has ever seen a living, breathing dragon, in the flesh. There is no way for such dragons to appear before us, right now. We made them up.

Similar could be said of dinosaurs. They, too, aren't 'real.' True, we have a trove of fossil evidence that proves they existed millions of years ago. But there's zero chance that Mum will get to see a living, breathing Velociraptor in her lifetime. The dinosaurs depicted in Jurassic Park are just as unreal* as any dragon.

These last couple of examples are what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard called 'pure simulacra' - things beyond our reality that are nonetheless imposed upon it:

https://media-studies.com/baudrillard

('Unreal' in the sense that they were either computer-generated images, or animatronics. Consider, also, that at the time Jurassic Park was released, it was not yet discovered that velociraptors were feathered. For a *real* velociraptor, get back to me when science has figured out how to transport cameras back in time.)