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Don't forget that the Merlin explicitly put "genocide Red Court" on his to-do list, and was just waiting for the right time to strike. Retroactively, the Council probably framed it as a sanctioned strike by a special assault team that ended the war in a single stroke.
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Jun 28, 2019 20:54
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:That could have been compelling if not for the male-gazey stuff in the rest of the books and the way Harry himself treats it. It could have been used as something to really hammer home Harry becoming something Other, and this would have paired well with Butters' confrontation of him regarding that. Can't say I wholly agree here. Both with Lash and the Winter Mantle, Harry's been pretty solidly on the "Yeah, that's me" front for the darker temptations he's experiencing. Which I think is a strength, not a weakness. The notion that the external force isn't planting the temptations in his head, just strengthening and exposing temptations that he generally dismisses without even noticing them, ties heavily into the themes of Free Will and responsibility that have been a major theme for most of the series. You can see this in that the only times he's come close to Falling (apart from Changes) are when he started to believe that these were not really his desires.
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Jul 2, 2019 21:05
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Kchama posted:How does this even work though? How do you not have any understanding of the entire premise of the story, and yet write the entire start of the story to be revolving around that question you can't answer? Storm Front was originally a way to get past Butcher's writer's block - essentially a literary laxative that was accidentally good enough to publish. Fool Moon was written while he tried to get the first book published. It wasn't until book 3 that it was a deliberately crafted series. Coincidentally, this is widely considered to coincide with a significant increase in quality.
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Aug 10, 2019 16:58
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Zore posted:I do think its a shame Butcher's dumb steampunk airship book didn't do well because it was fun and you could tell he had a blast writing it. The next Cinder Spires book is, according to the website, scheduled for after Peace Talks.
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Aug 12, 2019 17:22
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There were also the gang members that mostly changed mentally rather than physically.
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Oct 12, 2019 18:55
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You're not wrong. It was completely gratuitous, had no lasting impact, and was resolved quickly enough that the impact was minimal at best.
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Oct 13, 2019 01:21
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StrixNebulosa posted:
It helps a lot to view Harry Dresden at the start of the series as a teenager, with book 1 and 2 as a bad phase that he grows out of.
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Oct 14, 2019 02:04
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Kchama posted:
He is - but his attitudes are closer to that of a moody teenager - which (as mentioned by everyone above) is a pretty plausible place for a lot of his attitudes to be at given his upbringing. As for the rest of your arguments, there's so little accuracy that they aren't worth refuting, but I'll try. He refuses to help his student in Full Moon leading to her death. He does so for very good reason - the containment system she is building is needed to perform acts which are probably beyond Harry's ability, let alone hers - he doesn't realize that she's simply trying to contain something that's already present, because she refuses to tell him. He think's she's trying to summon something that should not be summoned, and assumes (quite reasonably) that she's smart enough not to do so if she can't build the necessary containment. It is no different from a physics student coming up to a professor and asking for help designing a failsafe system for nuclear reactor - that student shouldn't be building a bomb at all, and the professor is completely right to refuse to help with it. After skimming Grave Peril I can't find any female fatalities at all, but there are two women that Harry goes through hell to save - one of which is just some random woman looking for help. Either you're thinking of a different book, or (more likely), you're making things up to justify your position. Yes, he did screw up by not telling Susan and Murphy (along with almost everybody else who tries to help him or intervene in the supernatural, such as the Alphas) what was going on in an attempt to discourage them from poking their nose in. This is an acknowledged character flaw and a big part of his personal growth is overcoming it.
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Oct 14, 2019 18:25
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If he hadn't been so coy and needlessly evasive before that, Murphy might have believed him.
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Oct 14, 2019 20:59
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Hub Cat posted:Harry isn't the mustache twirling villain looking for Real Ultimate Power, he is the fallen hero that damns himself in a foolish bargain because he thought he was doing the right thing. It is even engraved on his tombstone! That said, there are moments where Harry approaches a different sort of evil, where he takes pure pleasure in unnecessary violence for the sake of violence - or, at least, violence far beyond what he actually needs to do The Right Thing. The scene in Fool Moon with the pickup truck, his fight with the unnamed-but-obviously-a-xenomorph in Proven Guilty, or the scene with the ghouls in the desert are good examples. Note that in all three Harry gives himself a "What the hell was that?" speech afterward, so this is obviously intentional.
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Oct 17, 2019 01:03
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StrixNebulosa posted:Nah, I read Dresden 1 like a week ago and it sucks real hard. Love it when the protagonist makes a date-rape drug and then when his date accidentally drinks it when they're being attacked by a demon it gets played for comedy. The best. There's no defending the love potion bit. The best thing that you can say for it (which isn't much) is that he never intended it to be used, and has an explicit rule about making the things for any real purpose. Butcher seems to have done the same thing Rowling did here - included love potions because they are a pretty solid staple of legend without really thinking about the date-rape aspect of them. Which isn't a defense, but it does explain it a little.
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Oct 28, 2019 23:55
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Necrotizer F posted:How happy would we in the US be if one of our ambassadors hosed him diplomacy up so badly we ended up in a shooting war with China? Not even an ambassador, precisely. At this point in the story, Harry's only official role is to be the official invitee for functions held in his general area (not inviting someone to represent a signatory of the Unseelie Accords would be a faux pas, and an insult both to that member and to Mab). For all intents and purposes, it is closer to having some random US citizen pissing off China so bad it starts a war.
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Nov 6, 2019 23:30
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Hub Cat posted:In Blood Rite Bob says the White Court had Dracula published so that wasn't on the White Council or Butcher got them mixed up.(this is why you don't give poo poo similar names goddamnit) Looking over author statements, this wasn't an error, and the White Court was behind the extermination of the Black Court.
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Nov 7, 2019 01:05
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I might be being stupid here, but what does "being Harry to Dresden's Morgan" mean?
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Nov 17, 2019 17:51
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Ok, now I see how you meant that to be read. I simply couldn't find a way to parse it.
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Nov 17, 2019 21:44
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It is also supposed to be a semi-private journal, so it isn't wholly unreasonable that it has a different "voice" than he uses to speak to somebody he regards as a potential Sauron.
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Feb 4, 2020 22:33
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Battle Ground isn't even listed on his website. This looks like a placeholder entry that got set to "public" by accident. It is possible that he's already chewing through Book 17, but he's said before that he was going to work on the next Cinder Spires book after finishing Peace Talks.
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Mar 23, 2020 23:07
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I still suspect that it was a placeholder entry, probably on the publisher's end (obviously, bookstores are going to create entries once the publisher announces), with a preplanned release date. There's been hints that the titles and basic plots of the remaining books are already figured out, so they probably set everything up in anticipation of the release schedule remaining. The last book was released in 2014, and there was a consistent two-year window between releases, suggesting that Peace Talks was intended for a 2016 release before getting delayed (I can't find any original release announcements, so I'm extrapolating). Add in the addition of the Spires books in 2015 (which can be extrapolated for a non-Dresden book every other year, so 2017 for 2 and 2019 for 3), and the short story anthology released in 2018, and a 2020 release fits pretty good as a prescheduled date for the book after Peace Talks. Such a preplanned date could easily not have been adjusted when Butcher's life problems torpedoed the plans, and this was either on automatic announcement or else somebody goofed.
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Mar 24, 2020 04:58
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Olesh posted:That's maybe a reference to a proto-slavic "pantheon" of the gods Chernobog and Belobog. You're probably passingly familiar with Chernobog (literal translation "Black God") from various sources (maybe up to and including Fantasia), but there may* have been worshipped an equivalent-but-opposite sun diety named Belobog ("White God"). Butcher has already done the "some mythological figures are really other mythological figures swapping hats" play, so this isn't an impossible stretch, just a bad one. It's blatant Christianization of what was absolutely a limited, regional, and very polytheistic tradition from a region that practiced a heavily animist type of polytheism. This is a universe where Names explicitly have power even when you have no intent to invoke them - Dresden is warned at one point that he's already said "Mab" twice in a conversation, and a third repetition would be a very bad idea. So it is a good idea to avoid any of the dozens of names traditionally associated with that specific deity. Can't just call Him "God", because there are small-g gods running around to muddy the issue, and the other term used -The Almighty- could be unpalatable to an immortal like Mab. Christianity delves heavily into lamb metaphors (and thus an association with wool, which is whitish), and uses white in other contexts as well. That makes it as good a specifier as any.
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Mar 25, 2020 17:53
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ImpAtom posted:Nah he was rape-vampiring even when he was doing that, he just hid it from Harry. He was getting his food from his hairdresser clients in tiny harmless doses and pretending to be gay, feeding off a different kind of empathy.
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Mar 27, 2020 03:17
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Hub Cat posted:Doesn't that one short story about the Oblivion War take place before Turn Coat? I've not read most of the short stories, so I was unaware of Backup. From the summary, that seems to be a singular event, but it does make ImpAtom more correct.
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Mar 27, 2020 03:49
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StrixNebulosa posted:I'd like to put forth that Harry Potter and Alice in Wonderland are actually isekai That's a valid description of Alice, and drat close in the case of Potter. The basic concept is pretty common in kidlit of all sorts, which makes me wonder why it never got a genre name until one was taken from the Japanese.
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Mar 31, 2020 18:22
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I've been giving the Laundry Files a try. By the second book, I can't get through more than a few pages at a time without wanting to punch the incredibly smug "I look down on anyone not up to my lofty intellectual standards" protagonist in the face.
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Apr 1, 2020 18:05
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StrixNebulosa posted:I enjoyed book 1 for ending with them fighting nazis in space, but something about book 2 just kept me wincing and I've never actually read it. Are you counting the "death ray cameras" or "mind control powerpoints" as the second book?
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Apr 1, 2020 18:09
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StrixNebulosa posted:Book 1: Atrocity Archives, contains nazis in space, is fun despite its protagonist. Then you stopped pretty much where I am. (The second half of The Atrocity Archives involved a project involving the British mass surveilance system being reprogrammed into basilisk guns to fight the Old Ones when the stars are right. The protagonist's boss sets up an early deployment of the system as a bureaucratic power play. Meanwhile the plot of Jennifer Morgue seems to be something about programming Powerpoint presentations to mind control people into buying a specific brand of business software.)
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Apr 1, 2020 18:27
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There was no delay, and the publication dates were announced on schedule. So you you were the exact opposite of right.
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May 12, 2020 05:24
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It looks very much like somebody faked up a post, so their group could have a "bash Butcher" party. I'd take anything said in that thread with a literal mountain of salt.
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May 28, 2020 02:40
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gerg_861 posted:Still prefer the Hollows books all being Eastwood film references. If those are the series I think they are, I passed on them because the covers made them look like a sexfest. Is this inaccurate?
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Jun 16, 2020 02:38
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Zore posted:
Butcher's clearly taking that schedule from Revelation, but I decided to check on what happened 666 years ago. 1354 was a fairly quiet year, but 1353 was the end of the Black Death. So now I am wondering of he's going to be working that in now.
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Jul 15, 2020 05:49
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Zore posted:So best guess is that Peace Talks is set in 2013 according to trying to fudge the timeline. Well it certainly makes Harry's 'Whats this interwebz thing' make more sense I don't get what any specific date would have to do with "the guy who destroys all advanced electronics he is near only has a peripheral knowledge of the Internet".
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Jul 17, 2020 21:58
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I don't remember that being established. The death curse preventing him from feeding, yes, but not the magic immunity.
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Jul 25, 2020 23:15
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Murphy's consistently refused to take any power that might tie a string to her, because she's stubbornly independent. Her use of the Sword in Changes is emblematic of this character trait - she is furious that something else spoke with her voice.
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Aug 9, 2020 04:43
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When Michael was touched by a Red Court vampire, the vampire wasn't very happy.
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Aug 21, 2020 01:38
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Somberbrero posted:There are any number of ways to demonstrate Ivy aging without having Harry sexualize her. I don't care if she's 18, it's still gross to have a middle-aged man comment on a teenager's hips. Geez. The only people "sexualizing" Ivy in that scene are the folks in this thread that are desperate to find anything to crucify Butcher over. If you look at that passage and see "what a sexy woman" and not "my god, she's all grown up while I wasn't looking, how did that happen", it says a lot more about you than it does him.
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Sep 15, 2020 22:03
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awesmoe posted:there's nothing wrong with anything in fiction as long as you know what you're in for and it's a ride you're interested in taking Unless Mark Twain is involved. If that happens, it is not OK.
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Sep 17, 2020 04:44
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seaborgium posted:Yeah, he kept treating it like it was going to take him over or something. Like not even thinking about it because it would read his thoughts and force him to start killing. It was foreshadowed super hard that it would do something crazy once he started using it, and then it just kind of was. After finishing the book, I think you misread that. quote:It wasn't about the Spear being dangerous to him, it was about it remaining ritually pure, and hidden from the Titan.
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Oct 1, 2020 07:40
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I think Molly's super-fancy apartment lets him have a working TV along with other conviencences until the Thomas incident, but I'd have to look it up again. Even so, there's been a few instances where Dresden makes references to things he shouldn't be aware of in the series.
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Oct 1, 2020 17:22
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I actually quite liked the bit with Ferrovax. Having him forced to fight entirely from the NeverNever side because he's so powerful he'd destroy the world just by existing was fairly clever.
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Oct 1, 2020 22:26
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I doubt the second part. Murphy's death at Rudolph's hands is the culmination of a long-running story arc. Maybe it could have been a "fridging" with Murphy dying to keep him from Harry, but that would have been at odds with Rudolph's core characterization - he's a gently caress-up who's only skill is kissing rear end, and killing her with a negligent discharge is the perfect followup. I suspect this was planned for a long time.
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Oct 2, 2020 02:42
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There was a screenshot of Butcher's social media that purported to show him being skeptical of the entire thing. Despite being posted the same day it was dated for, it could not be found on any of his social media accounts.
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Oct 3, 2020 02:51
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