Dragon Quill

So apparently I’m less done with this godawful series than I was promised before, so, let’s keep going to at least get done with this book.

In games and history books and military science lectures, teachers and old warhorses and other scholarly types lay out diagrams and stand up models in neat lines and rows. They show you, in a methodical order, how this division forced a hole in that line, or how these troops held their ground when all others broke.

How does Harry know about this? He can’t play videogames and he doesn’t appear to be involved in the miniatures scene. He was apprenticed as a teenager at the oldest, so he wasn’t in high school getting lectured on history. I don’t think he’s referenced a single book he’s read, and he similarly has never referenced going to some free lecture down at the library or the local college. This all sounds a lot like it’s referring to the sort of things you see in documentaries, but Harry can’t watch TV.

Anyway, Harry’s presumably thirdhand knowledge of what other people say war is like is, he insists, totally inaccurate because, and you may need to sit down because Harry has one hell of a hot take on this, real fighting is messy, fluid, difficult to follow, and also it’s scary and people scream a bunch. Thank god Harry is here to explain this to us. (more…)

So more and more it’s hard to follow the plot of these things. We haven’t so much as had a rewrite break because there was never a point where it seemed to be clearly going in a particular direction, and now seems like the best we’re going to get. (more…)

This chapter opens with a speech about different kinds of fear likening them to metals. It’s an elaborate metaphor but I found it pretty trite. Point is, Harry is scared and scared in the live wire sense. (more…)

When last we left off, Susan appeared, had Harry insist she was being dumb, then saved Harry’s stupid dumb ass by sacrificing a bunch of her memories. Now she doesn’t know who he is! On the one hand, that means she’s forgotten she knows the guy, which will make convincing her to leave harder. On the other hand, it means she’s forgotten she knows the guy is always like “everything is super dangerous and you can’t be involved for reasons I can’t explain and which will turn out to be kind of bullshit later”, which will make convincing her to leave easier.

Harry proceeds to do a bad job of explaining anything to her, but a better job of explaining anything to her than he was just doing, so it’s still kind of a wash. (more…)

Right, so.

When last we left off, Harry had decided to go to the vampire party because the nightmare ghosty has some third party buffing it and he’s decided that the only possible place for such a person would be the vampire party. He then proceeds to aggro everyone in the place repeatedly for no reason,  guzzles drugged wine in front of them, and says his true name twice to a dragon while getting mad at it for thinking it’s stronger than him merely because it actually is. Also, still no followup on the drugged starving sick cursed child Harry let get taken by vampires, because Harry doesn’t care. At the end we discover that this entire time, he somehow missed that Susan was at the party because her outfit slightly resembled a vampire one, and Harry realizes that since he already said Michael was his plus-one, Susan does not have invite protection. (She also doesn’t have invite protection because she forged the invite, because Harry’s stupidity is catching.)

Someone else has also just noticed! Or more likely, been tapping their foot this whole time waiting for Harry to notice so they could jump in and pretend to just notice. I’m sorry he takes forever, evil monster. It must be so frustrating to be a villain in these books. (more…)