We’re presented this book with Harry repeating the same mistakes, the ones that killed people, without even a moment of hesitation. His language isn’t as overtly hateful as it was in the previous book, but the victim this book is a kid and she’s being treated even worse than any of the adult women.
So – what, if anything, could excuse this?
I think the answer lies in the magic itself. I’ve brought up before how magic seems to consume emotion and Harry uses things like anger and fear all the time to fuel it.
Does he really care about damsels in distress? Maybe. But he doesn’t have to care if he doesn’t want to. If he wakes up in the middle of the night feeling bad, he can just make potions until he’s fine again and has a bunch of cool potions, so really, net win. Harry never has to care about that nagging sense of guilt again. If he’s feeling like it, he helps. If it’s the end of the day and he’s looking forward to pub food, he says no. But he thinks he’s chivalrous, a sucker for a damsel in distress, because that’s who he remembers being.
Harry is coasting along on the person he used to be. And that might be interesting, especially because there’s been enough change in his character each book to suggest this isn’t simply backstory but happening as we watch.
If we trace the changes we’ve seen across three books, we can work backward to the early Harry, prior to Storm Front. In Storm Front, Murphy says please and Harry rambles about not being able to say no to a girl. In this book, a kid is begging Harry to do something so she doesn’t die horribly and the only emotion she can produce is lust. Fool Moon appears to be when the major shift happened – quite possibly, getting laid actually sped this up. Harry doesn’t seem to use lust as fuel, which means that was an additional subconscious push to want to be nice to (acceptable) women that Harry likely thought of as chivalry rather than what it really was.
In Fool Moon, Harry’s justification for not helping Kim is that it’s for her own good…but he isn’t particularly concerned, especially when he seems aware she’s not going to accept his warning and back off whatever it is. And he’s horrified by Kim’s body, but he bounces right back from that. In contrast, even though Linda’s death wasn’t really his fault, he ends up breaking back into her apartment to nap on the blood-soaked carpet, which suggests he’s pretty messed up by things even if he won’t admit it outright.
So if between Storm Front and Fool Moon, Harry went from someone traumatized by a stranger’s death that he might’ve been able to prevent to shrugging off a friend’s death that was completely his fault then being not too bothered by the horendous death toll that follows…what did Harry look like before Storm Front? Was he once the sort of hero he thinks he is?
It’s not too hard to see how original Harry might’ve ended up going with chivalry – his preteen years are spent with a nice father who’s quietly sad about his dead mom, then he gets a girlfriend, then she dies, then he eventually ends up on his own in a world where he’s way more powerful than most people and wants to help. So he says, “I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress,” because he was, back when he was a teenager trying out labels, where his worldly experience was pretty much “super powerful adult wizard” and “girl my age who’s not super powerful, who I love”. When put in precisely the right situation – a helpless girl, a scary predator – he starts to act out the right script, but he doesn’t care about helping her before, think much when he sees her, or remember her when the fighting starts.
This might also explain Murphy’s grudging tolerance of him, even though we never see any reason she should like him at all. When they first started working together, he wasn’t so bad. Their relationship is falling apart over the course of the three books because Harry is falling apart. Murphy’s frustration toward him is because she doesn’t know why he’s behaving like this, her forgiveness of a lot of his shit and defending him to others is because she keeps thinking it’s a temporary blip, and her eventual withdrawal of friendship is her realizing it’s not, that this is Harry now.
And that brings us to now. Harry still remembers he’s a sucker for a pretty face, but without reinforcement, the concern and guilt have withered away. There’s not much left in his reaction but lust, and perhaps that’s why he’s so adamant this time about connecting the two – he keeps insisting Lydia is evil because he found her hot. Because, he’s a sucker for girls, right? He remembers doing stuff that wasn’t in his self-interest around them before. That must be why, it’s an issue of thinking with his dick.
(This is why, of Exalted, my very favorite solar is Desus, whose social charms meant everyone loved him. No matter what he did, they loved him. Of course Desus is a monster. Anyone would be a monster. Humans finding themselves far outside operating parameters does not, generally, go well.)
Harry never has to feel real doubt or regret. And even positive emotions can easily get eaten up if he’s in a tight spot and needs that extra oomph, so emotional rewards can be short-lived. As his emotional range flattens out, his motivations tend more and more toward the few he has left. He embraces lust but he also values love – Rodrequiz is on his mind a lot, far more than the actual plot is. And he still holds to some personal connections, like with Murphy and Mikey, even as he says he’d leave a stranger in this situation to rot.
I wonder if part of why he seems more happy with Michael is that Michael sticks around long enough after the fight to talk to him and provoke some fresh emotion that he gets to keep feeling. He burns up his emotions on the ghost and his mindset afterward is wondering why he bothers, but then Michael says because babies, think about babies, aren’t babies cute? We saved babies! and Harry pictures the babies and slowly perks up.
And that is tragic. Moreover, you can argue that it’s because he was heroic that he’s fallen this far. Heroism made him push farther than others would and heroism made him care enough that he could use those emotions as fuel when doing so.
And perhaps this is really where the light/dark magic issue truly comes into play. There appears to be no objective way to tell if someone’s using dark magic. The dark magician we’re introduced to seems obviously messed up, but Morgan evidently can’t tell the difference between that and Harry. And we’re told the cornerstone of dark magic is ease and power…And we’re told the good guys have a draconian non-interferenece agreement, no matter how many people die from it.
The White Council, in truth, is “white” because they’re not involved with the workings of the world. The more involved a wizard is, the more they throw around power. The more they throw around power, the more the emotional warping happens. The normal check on this is that if you intervene a bit, then get numb enough you’re no longer invested and withdraw, you’ll end up normal enough – maybe a bit weird, but not harmful. This is why they don’t immediately come down on Harry for keeping his ties with the mortal world. It’s not harmful in moderation and it’s probably something many young wizards do – possibly even good at making sure no firebrands end up in the upper ranks. But Harry’s stayed long past the tipping point because between his own hero complex and how tightly he tied himself to the mortal world (in the phonebook, known to the police, relationships with muggles, having to pay rent) he’s still involved.
We start the book after he’s faced multiple ghosts, each of which appears to require a major expendature of magic, and having recently made an anti-ghost charm that he repeatedly says was incredibly difficult. (And we know Harry has a stupidly high magic capacity, yet he didn’t even suggest making a second one. The charm must require almost all of his magical power to create.) And after all this, a sick, homeless kid shows up…and Harry feels nothing at all.
So there you have it. Harry is not a reprehensible human being. Harry is mentally ill and getting worse with every spell. It’s precisely because he was a good person once upon a time that this is happening, but we never get to meet that Harry, only the ghost left behind.
So, what you’re saying is that every time Harry finds a new well of power within him, it’s not Mary Suism in action but him burning up another part of a person he used to be?
(Also, fun fact: DF RPG totally allows you to pull off stuff like that. Both evocation and thaumaturgy allow taking mental consequences in exchange for some extra mojo. Normally it’s stuff like magic bleeding into your mind and making you see the colors of the wind, but nothing prevents you from saying that you used so much of your emotions, you’ve lost the capacity to care. It’s a bit hard to make stick, but not impossible.)
Butcher is pretty bad at showing magic having any physical or mental consquences for Harry. Like, he typically just ends up out of breath, as if he’d be a better wizard if he just worked on his cardio.
Nasu was really good at doing the mental-overload-from-magic thing. And the mental-overload-from-death-perception. Really, Nasu just likes writing minds cracking from any strain. Aberrant weather. Stray poodles. Spicy food.
True enough.
It’s interesting to note that there are two instances of people cracking from seeing Touko (once in KnK and another time in the Witch of the Holy Night).
Which isn’t surprising since it’s Touko.
(That said, don’t diss poodles. They’re a classic visage of Mephistopheles.)
That just makes it all the more likely.
*slow clapping* Yeah, that would be really good. Like, it already sounds to me like it’s got a lot of parallels for many forms of depression.
I’d say Susan would have the same effect on him as Michael – her job means that she stays interested in him and his doings after the event proper, so he’s able to work up his dregs of emotion back to something resembling a functional human.
Bob would be the darker version of these otherwise healthy interactions. He constantly mocks and antagonizes Harry, doing everything he can to get Harry feeling angry or desperate. Unlike Michael and Susan, Bob knows exactly how wizard biochemistry works, so he’s intentionally corrupting Harry’s mood.
This would make Michael’s disapproval of Bob make sense: the Catholic stance on familiars is right, but for the wrong reasons. It’s not because it’s a deal with the devil or anything, but because familiars are usually the type of magic being that aren’t interested in keeping their wizard fit for human consumption.
Harry: You make me feel…
Michael: …Feel how?
Harry: Just feel.
And the shipping intensifies.
Silly Act, Harry’s not a 14 year-old kid. He just lusts after them.
Like, it already sounds to me like it’s got a lot of parallels for many forms of depression.
What I think is particularly insiduous is that it doesn’t completely map to it. Even if the people around him know enough about depression to think of it, which may not be true, but when they try to test the theory they won’t get expected results. (Susan: Sex? Harry: SEX!!! :D) Harry’s still got all/most of his ability to feel things based on immediate events, but longer term or more complex ones like guilt are pretty much gone. It’s sort of like he’s got anterograde amnesia for emotions.
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Yeah, very true. He doesn’t seem like he’d ever get things like PTSD, either. Also, like you said, it’s got like, this layered, fantastic element that gives it a moral question: should Harry even be trying to help people this much, at cost to himself? Is he doing more harm than good in the long run by driving himself into the ground now? Assuming there’s still vestiges of the original personality, could he come back if Harry took a sabbatical?
With that setup? I’d say he should be able to stabilize his emotions and learn to deal with them in a healthy way over time as long as he puts effort into it, but he won’t ever be the same person he once was. It’s not necessary a bad thing, though. Everyone changes, and accepting it would allow Harry to leave behind the walking corpse he is now and become an actual person.
The other questions are pretty interesting to explore, though.
ALSO: This would make Michael’s disapproval of Bob make sense: the Catholic stance on familiars is right, but for the wrong reasons.
And it would better justify it being the Catholics that are involved here than just because of how cool and shiny all their stuff is. They’re the longest-running branch of Christianity and the ones with the best chance of compiling enough data. They may have to guess at what the corrolation means, but they likely worked out that most of the guys who toss fireballs act like fellow Christians and can even help protect people when dealing with obviously demonic entities, so with how dangerous it is to fight them and how useful they can be, coexistence is the best bet…except the ones with the talking animals or objects, who either already are or very soon become frothing murder-vortexes.
Interesting idea, but I’m gonna go with the simpler explanation that Harry is a shitty pseudo-character being written by a shitty writer and shittier human being.
I’ve basically been told that the first three books can be completely ignored as outside of vague references, nothing is important and Harry gets a completely personality reboot and Butcher pretends they never existed.
Even beyond Kim never being mentioned again after Harry practically jerks off on her corpse’s tits, because she was just a revenge fantasy character, who dies in effigy for one of Butcher’s girlfriends.
Maybe between book three and four he does enough mental damage to trigger a blue screen of death, he gets dragged off by the White Council, and they implant a new personality.
Augh I think my reply was eaten. Basically, I’ve been told that the first three books or so are basically throwaways and instead the later books just act like they mostly didn’t happen or Harry’s personality was 100% different during them.
Though Kim is probably immediately forgotten after Harry pretty much jerks off to her corpse’s tits because she was just written in as wank material to get revenge on one of Butcher’s ex-girlfriends.
Am I going senile, or did this post literally update overnight?
EDIT: Having reread it, I like the additions a lot. I’d say that the White Council’s policy of non-intervention neatly explains our cultural view of wizards as weird recluses stuck in ivory towers – that’s for our own safety.
In fact, this brings to mind a complaint you’ve had since book 1: Harry lives with all of these inconveniences, like lighting candles and using actual ice to keep his food cold, when he could have just been magicking this stuff. What if that behavior is left over from an incomplete understanding he has of what overuse of magic is doing to him? I could see how wizards in a lower weight class especially would be really careful about what they actually used magic for, since it’s sanding off bits of their psyche with every cantrip. Harry probably learned that without understanding that exhausting himself in every encounter leads to the same result anyway.
Morgan probably knows how to fight because, when you’re an older wizard, you’ve learned that it’s smarter to make a strong magic sword and then fight without using magic than it is to go in staff blazing each time.
This is what was SUPPOSED TO POST, but it hiccupped and somehow reverted to the original draft from a week ago and I didn’t notice.
Yeah it seems like most of the additions are book-specific examples, so I can see how it’s a shift from an earlier draft where the main body was mostly already there. Interestin’.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
True, true. Maybe someday I’ll be senile enough to think that’s clever.
I’d say that the White Council’s policy of non-intervention neatly explains our cultural view of wizards as weird recluses stuck in ivory towers – that’s for our own safety.
Funnily enough, that’s how the Discworld novels depict magicians, especially after Sourcery: wizards are kept comfortable and overfed in a cozy academic environment where they barely suffer from any inconveniences and all their natural competitiveness is channeled into petty disputes, all because back in the day magical duels were less “duels” and more “nuclear wars”.
Well, the plural for wizard is war. In this case, though, it would be the wizards themselves understanding that they have no place among humans, and trying to fit in would be extremely dangerous for both parties.
IIRC the Ankh-Morpork gov’t played a big part in keeping wizards sequestered and funding their indolence. Here, it’d be wizards autonomously making that decision.
Ooh, that being the real reason to ban trivial magic could also mean that Harry isn’t actually the most powerfulest ever – when most wizards talk about magic capacity, they’re talking about how much they can safely draw without repricussions, while Harry’s talking the exact maximum he can wring out of his soul.
Morgan probably knows how to fight because, when you’re an older wizard, you’ve learned that it’s smarter to make a strong magic sword and then fight without using magic than it is to go in staff blazing each time.
That would also help fix up the issue that Morgan is carrying a physical weapon yet Harry makes a big point of being special for using his fists. It’s not that only Harry fights without magic, it’s that it’s uncommon for dark wizards who are usually so far gone they do everything by flinging magic at it. That’s why Morgan was taken off-guard by an apparent dark wizard fighting properly instead.
(…and what do we see Harry doing by book three? Pointlessly intimidating a guy by using magic to slam doors inside his house…and maybe that’s why his crappy bullying worked so very well, Morty knows precisely what this kind of behavior means.)
Poor Morty’s deal would be even worse in this world, potentially. He’d be living in like this vicious cycle: he’s afraid of the serial killer talking about how his onion rings with ketchup are piled up just like their father’s intestines, so he channels that fear into a shield, but when he loses that fear, he loses the ability or desire to maintain the shield. In a week he’s right back to some psycho describing the technique he will someday use to sell human ‘pork rinds’ at baseball games.
And as his powers fail him due to the cognitive dissonance, he’d have to rely more and more on raw emotions to fuel the defensive tricks he still has.
EDIT: And it even explains why the Council preemptively hates the guy: one way or another, people like him almost always go bad at some point. If not out of malice, then because they feed enough emotions to their powers to not be creeped out by serial killer ghosts chatting with them over dinner, and from there it’s all downhill.
Is posting working again? I had a post about how people told me that the first 3 books basically have been retconned out, with only basic stuff like him knowing Michael making the cut, so to speak. And the books after this basically pretend Harry had a different personality the entire time. The big thing that is turbo forgotten is Kim, because her character and fate was just revenge porn against an ex-girlfriend of Butcher’s.
Hey, Farla, remember you talked about how the next step of cosmic horror is actively hostile universe instead of an indifferent one described by Lovecraft?
I though about it recently, and I think it’s not enough. A thing about indifferent universe is that it undermines our values. It actively tells us that things we care about don’t matter, that our morality is wrong and we should embrace nihilism and kill in joy, that everything we ever do would be met with “That’s nice, now go play some other game.”
It tells us that no matter what we do, whether we’re heroic or cowardly, it’s all meaningless in the end. There is no point in caring one way or another.
On the other hand, an actively hostile universe gives us back our meaning. We’re important for the universe to notice us and want us dead, and so we can be bravely defiant and find meaning in that even if we fail.
As such, I think what’s needed for effective horror is not just an actively hostile universe but a universe that is right to hate us, a universe in which humanity is a big mistake and everything would be objectively better without us.
A universe where not only we are wrong, but someone else is right, knows better and hates us because of that.
I guess it depends on wording. A universe that’s deliberately trying to torture us is pretty awful, but yeah, at least it’s comprehensible. It’s something you can understand. But I was thinking more like, Lovecraft looked around and thought, “Oh my god the world might not revolve around us?!” But you can also look beyond the world and think about how very narrow the conditions for life are, how almost every space of the universe is impossible for us to live in. How we’re hurtling through space right now and should our solar system cross paths with another, there’s nothing that can be done to save us. We don’t merely live in a universe that doesn’t care if we live or die, but the far margins of an almost exclusively deadly one.
Then you just need to remove the only real solace of the non-theistic worldview, that by nature of our mortality all suffering is limited. Apply exactly this setup to an afterlife where death is no longer on the table – there’s some tweaks you can make to make it more awful, but it’s just a matter of touching up the lily’s colors.
Hm, so less deliberate torture and more still indifference combined with the inevitability of suffering and destruction, unlike Lovecraft’s version where you can potentially carve a little island of order in the ocean of madness?
Oh, now it works. I’ve posted about a dozen times about how I’ve been told that the first three books have basically been retconned out, with the later books pretending most of them didn’t happen AND Harry had a completely different personality during them. With the big thing forgotten is Kim, because she and her fate was just revenge porn against an ex-girlfriend of Butcher’s
Well, I wouldn’t be so sure about completely different personality. The basic issues are still very much there on the narrative level and bleed into how Harry behaves, they’re just a bit more subtle. In particular, Harry’s control kink never went away.
This is an interesting way to resolve those inconsistencies; I like it.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this, I think, is how difficult it would be to write this effect deliberately. There are so many things you’d have to balance, in order to keep them from feeling OOC at any point, I think you’d need to progress really gradually but somehow still have dramatic changes to coincide with major exertions? And there’s also the question of how much time you have to accomplish this gradual progression before explicitly revealing it (is the reader meant to figure it out, are other characters meant to figure it out and reveal it?), before the reader decides your character is just a repellent arsehole they don’t want to read about. (Though if Dresden and/or his apologists tell us anything, you have a lot of wiggle room with that last.)
Maybe the best case scenario would be for a self-aware author to realise halfway through a story that they’ve written that and start taking it into account? While this is a really interesting idea, it seems like the sort of thing that can much more easily emerge from bad/careless writing than deliberate craftsmanship… I wonder if there are other tropes like that.
I was thinking about what a real version of this would look like.
The basic mechanism wouldn’t be that hard to pull off – if the author made sure to write all the side characters consistently in personality, and had them also react to the main character’s weird mood swings, I think it’d be clear enough. Harry also tends to have sudden bursts of activity, so ideally, you’d write the character slowly getting more emotional and then suddenly going flat after each burst, but each time it’s a little more muted and what’s there is more dominated by negative, easy to provoke emotions.
The real difficulty would be the timeline I’m theorizing here. Writing a story where we never meet the “original” version of the character and have to extrapolate back to their starting personality appeals to me as an extremely clever idea but it seems like little payoff for a lot of effort.
Yeah, if one were going to deliberately write that story, they’d want to show the progression in the story they were actually telling, rather than having it start in backstory like it does here.
I do like this theory, because it does a good job reconciling the Harry we keep being told about versus the Harry we’re actually shown (if I’m reading you right, anyway; I haven’t read the DF books myself). It’ll be interesting to watch the progression, see if this still holds up as you get into later books. The fans keep saying Harry gets better but I’m honestly not seeing it.
(I’m reminded of a fanfic I wrote a couple years ago, which theorised another wizard named Harry was being constantly drugged with luck potions… what is it about wizards named Harry, anyway?)
There is an actual answer to the question. Harry is a common but distinctive and strong name, so it’s good for everyman type characters (of course, Dresden is anything but everyman, but he does try to present himself as just a bloke with the right tools for the work): it’s something that would stick in your mind without implying specialness.
Of course, Harry kinda undermines it with his middle names, but they mostly come up in the context of active occultism, so it’s not that bad.
Naturally, it’s not the only name that fits the description, but if a number of people are looking for a common name that doesn’t sound too bland, it’s not surprise that two of them would pick the same.
Oh, I know that, I meant that rhetorically. The question to my mind isn’t really why it’s used so commonly, but why they nearly always turn out self-centred arseholes.
(Of course, the answer to that could always be that I don’t have enough data points to generalise :P)
Oh, that’s because both are either YA fiction or close to it in mentality. You’re stuck with either self-righteous assholes, borderline sociopaths or complete blanks when it comes to protagonists.
Houdini.
I think what would need to be done if you want to have a separate backstory personality is have that element become an important “reveal” of its own. The character’s previous self should be important to the story. It’s the kind of story that actually merits one of those weird vague prologues; in this case, it would let you show the personality (because you have to, at least once) without giving too much away.
I’m aware of the Houdini connection, yes, I was trying (and apparently failing) to make a joke. That said, I think Dresden is the only one where the author has deliberately said they’re named after Houdini? (but I guess that may not matter, as it could easily be subliminal influence also)
Dresden is canonically named after three magicians by his own magician father. Dresden’s wizard mother was not alive to murder him for it.
Yeah, she would have totally named him Morgan.
Hm, I do agree that his old personality should be important to the narrative, but I’m not so sure about the reveal in a sense of a distinct event happening somewhere down the line. I mean, that’s what we can imagine most easily since the current story would only allow for a twist without retroactive changes, but in a rewrite I think the shock of realizing how much Harry has changed is probably not worth the effort it would take to set up.
Instead, I feel that a better idea would be either achronological story jumping between old and new Harry or a multiple POV story where we actually get to see how people view Harry and how they remember him.
It could be a strong and constant play on contrast, with the reveal instead being about why Harry has changed so much and the final question left by the story being whether it was worth it in the long run.
Yeah, I guess it’s a little trite to have it that way. The reveal being more about the factors causing the change does seem like a better one.
I think we’re all ignoring an important angle in this idea: what’s Mister’s agenda in all of that?
Well, in this world, I think we should toss the idea of Mister as a malevolent being with its own agenda (at least, any more than the average cat already is). Bob would fulfill that role by himself easily.
In fact, I’d say Bob manipulated Harry into adopting Mister back when he was alone. Familiars have learned over the years that you need to slow down a little on the wizard corruption, so he got Harry to adopt an animal. It’s something that’ll provoke positive emotions in Harry without influencing his actions too much or loading him with other emotional baggage.
The main problem with your theory here is that you have Harry’s backstory entirely wrong. This is his actual backstory:
Up until age 6, Harry lived with his father, who was a good man who missed Harry’s mother.
Then he went into the foster care system, where he was seriously abused by a series if families.
Then he was adopted by Justin, who also abused him, but Harry no longer had the ability to recognize it as abuse. (It’s explicitly stated in one of the later books that one of the reasons Harry loved Justin and wanted to stay with him was that Justin only hit him.) This is also where he meets Elaine, his foster-sister and girlfriend.
Justin spent years manipulating Harry into thinking non-wizards were beneath him (aside: a lot of what comes across as Harry’s misogyny toward Murphy is actually this–when he treats her like she can’t help, it’s usually because she’s not supernatural, not because she’s a woman) and also manipulating him into being a living weapon who would have no problem killing Justin’s enemies. He also manipulated Harry and Elaine into sleeping together so that they wouldn’t have connections to the outside world.
Then, when Harry was 16, Justin and Elaine both tried to enslave his mind, and he killed them (or in Elaine’s case believed he did) with magic. But not before he made a deal with his faerie godmother, Lea, to get more power with which to do so, since he didn’t believe that he could win on his own. Lea took this opportunity to torture him and possibly rape him, ended up giving him nothing but confidence and yet more trauma, and on top of this has spent years trying to turn him into a dog.
Then the White Council found him and basically spent years telling him that defending himself from his abuser was wrong, that it made him a monster, with a large dose of “you deserved everything he did to you, because he was a good man and you’re a monster and a villain.”
The result of this is best shown by a moment that Harry talks about in a later book: when he was 17-18, a bunch of older teens were threatening him, and his response was to think that killing them would be as much work as swatting a mosquito, so why bother?
Harry isn’t a good person who’s turning bad–he’s a traumatized person who’s been twisted to be a monster who is now (with limited success) trying to become better, but who doesn’t really understand what better looks like.
I mean, we all know that Harry being a borderline sociopath who progressively becomes even more numb to the suffering of people around him is not the intended reading. It’s just the one more consistent with the first three books.
I’m not even arguing the borderline sociopath thing, or that he’s being exposed to stuff that makes it worse–just saying that it’s not because he’s stupid or careless; it’s something that has been done to him, and which he’s fighting.
Does he, though? He gets worse over the course of three books, starting by being disturbed at a though of someone killing people with magic and ending by ogling a corpse. It he does indeed strive to be a better person, it’s a fight he’s losing.
He gets better, yes. He gets a lot more jaded about the bad stuff he sees, but he gets a lot better at caring about other people, listening to them, taking their feelings into account, and generally remembering that they are people the same as he is. (Or he’s just more aware of the problems he has with these things and gets better coping mechanisms.)
The main problem with your theory here is that you have Harry’s backstory entirely wrong
The thing about ongoing works is that Harry’s backstory as of Book 30 is not necessarily what his backstory was in Book 3. For that matter, just in these three books it’s clear the background and worldbuilding have been shifting around so they’re not fully canon with each other.
Some of it just doesn’t work regardless. Your ability to remember is based in part on continuity. Uproot a six year old and you’ve absolutely shattered their ability to remember things from the before period even in only moderately traumatic circumstances, like the death of a parent and adoption by a new family. That’s why I keep estimating he can’t have been younger than ten when his dad died.
While Harry is fucked up, his fucked-up behavior does not have good overlap with an abused kid specifically. Stuff like not reacting to people threatening him because he’s ever so badassly damaged is really unlikely as a manifestation of someone getting abused from age six onwards, as is how he has no opinion on the police force or, as far as I can tell, any other government agency. You don’t go through that and come out middle class apolitical. (Even his interaction with the WC, where he seems surprised and hurt by how they treat him, is behavior you’d expect from someone where that’s the first time they’ve been betrayed by the authorities, not when it’s in line with every other experience in their life.) There’s also no earthly way someone like that would’ve reacted to Lydia with “I bet this sexy bitch deserves it”.
The idea that his apparent misogyny toward Murphy is actual magic racism toward muggles and it just happens it’s a woman doesn’t work either, because he visibly acts different based on if he’s dealing with a man or woman. That’s why it’s getting called misogyny and not just him being an asshole.
Harry isn’t a good person who’s turning bad–he’s a traumatized person who’s been twisted to be a monster who is now (with limited success) trying to become better, but who doesn’t really understand what better looks like.
Then there’s the problem that he was best at the start. A lot of the worst stuff in the first book was misogyny built into the fabric of the world, like the idea women hate better or the ingredients for the love potion. Harry is horrified by the idea of killing by magic and comparatively has a strong emotional investment in the people around him, and much of the shit he does comes off as badly socialized rather than outright evil. We meet him in the second book and he’s a monster who won’t shut up about this cool loophole where technically he can magic-murder plenty of people-shaped sapient individuals because they’re not technically human.
So I’ll assume you missed the bit where I said specifically that he was groomed to be an enforcer/weapon, and where he was being intentionally distanced from any connection to regular people? Because so far as I can tell, the stuff you’re pointing out fits in perfectly with that.
“Surprised and hurt”? Honestly, he just struck me as really pissed off at them. Mind you, he did expect them to go after the real warlock, not keep trying to scapegoat him–but given that they’ve been justifying their behavior towards him as being because warlocks are just so dangerous, and considering that he really did kill Justin, he has good reason to be surprised that they aren’t going after this other dangerous warlock.
No, and Harry didn’t react like that at all either, so I don’t see why you’re mentioning it. Harry’s reaction to Lydia was “she’s going to manipulate me and screw me over” which is completely in line with how Lea and Elaine treated him.
No, it gets called misogyny because Harry does things like open doors for women, even when they don’t want him to. We never, in fifteen books and two anthologies of short stories, see him refuse to share information with a woman that he is willing to share with a man of comparable abilities, or refuse to bring a woman into a fight only to turn around and bring a man of comparable abilities. And yet everyone who complains that Harry’s a misogynist always goes on about him hiding things from Murphy and saying that she’s not capable of dealing with what he is, even though he treats male characters the exact same way. He’s not going behind Murphy’s back and telling Carmichael stuff, after all. Seriously, there are other examples of misogyny in Storm Front that are actually correct. This one isn’t, and every time I see it I have to fight the urge to dismiss everything that the person who claims this is saying just on general principles. (Er…sorry for the rant. I have seen this in way too many places.)
He really really wasn’t. Storm Front is actually the worst book in terms of Harry’s character. In the next two books, his actions make sense (however much we may dislike some of them).
You mean the idea Harry had that was completely wrong and thus not built into anything but Harry’s brain?
Love potion ingredients are symbolic, and furthermore that was a really sleazy love potion. It was, in fact, exactly the kind of love potion you’d expect with those ingredients, and we know that it’s not nearly the only love potion recipe because there are at least two substitutions mentioned in the text.
Harry is horrified by the idea of killing humans with magic. I don’t remember how clear this was made in Storm Front (since I don’t much like that book and don’t re-read it much) but there is a real metaphysical difference between humans and other sapient beings–humans are the only ones with souls and who have free will. The laws of the universe (ie laws like gravity) which are what the laws of magic are (mostly; they’re humans’ understanding of those laws) treat humans differently. It’s not a question of morality, it’s a question of magic physics.
He really clearly has a strong emotional investment in people throughout all the books, and it’s especially clear with Susan in Grave Peril.
I hate to break it to you, but when you’re not actively looking for ways to hate the character, this statement is true for all three of the books.
And statements like this are why I believe that you are actively looking for reasons to hate the character. I’ve read this scene multiple times, and this is not at all what happens. He’s not talking about “this cool loophole” he’s talking about a bunch of guys that just tried to murder him for walking into their place and asking questions, and after he thinks this he feels sick. He hates the fact that he even contemplated the idea.
OK, so I feel we have such a fundamental disconnect in how we view DF and approach fiction in general that I’m not sure a continued discussion would be productive.
Part of it, I think, is that you seems to approach fiction primary from Watsonian perspective: you look at how things are and whether they are internally consistent with one another (does it make sense for Harry to behave like he does in situation X given established world-building details Y and Z?) rather than asking why things the way they are.
Like, in-universe, it makes sense for Harry to have vivid rape fantasies under the influence of the Mantle and for Molly to grow a lethal vagina, but was it strictly necessary for the story? Could the story with the same overall themes and major plot beats be told without those elements present, perhaps replaced with something less objectionable? And if yes, why those specific elements were present in the story?
That said, I do find the following interesting to discuss:
It’s a world-building question, which is fun and less loaded than question of sexism and the like.
So, first of all, it’s actually not entirely clear whether vampires in particular have human souls or not. Generally, the way to determine whether someone counts as a human is to attempt to soulgaze them. If you can’t, they aren’t human. However, Harry was perfectly able to soulgaze Bianca in the first book, and her soul did not appear particularly alien or inhuman. The core of her being was, in fact, pointedly prosaic (I mean, I would take issue with giving her this particular motivation, but it certainly wasn’t monstrous). If anything, Marcone had more dehumanizing markers than she did, what with being a refrigerator tiger and everything.
(Of course, to muddle the waters farther, in the second book Harry was able to soulgaze a lycanthrope, with lycanthropes being specifically defined as people with inhuman souls.)
Certainly, vampires behave like people. Often evil and cruel people, yes, but people nonetheless, with their own motivations, dreams and ambitions, so the metaphysical distinction between them and humans seems arbitrary.
On another note, one of the best things about all good magic systems is how they can emphasize and enhance the themes of the works they belong to. The rules of magic are entirely arbitrary, after all, they’re made by the authors to suit their needs, and so can always be shaped to reflect particularly important parts of the narrative.
For example, Unknown Armies adepts are all self-destructive weirdoes because it’s a game about broken people conspiring to save the world. Seacats witches are weird metafiction beings with powers deeply tied to the mystery genre because Seacats itself is a weird metafictional story commenting on the mystery genre. A lot of shonen stuff generally follows (rather unsubtly more often than not) a “powers as a character study” paradigm: protagonists tend to have simple punchy powers, trickster characters tend to have illusions or dirty tricks, etc. And so on and so forth.
Now, thematically, DF is largely about the temptation of power: everything would be a lot easier if only Harry could turn people into newts or read their minds, but he doesn’t because that would turn him into a monster.
That by itself is fine, and I think most Laws work in this capacity: they make antagonists more dangerous, since they aren’t afraid to break them, while restricting what Harry can do and, in principle, making him fight smarter.
The issue with no-kill Law, however, is that first clarifying that it only applies to killing with magic and then farther clarifying that it only counts against humans makes it rather toothless. Harry can still kill humans, he just has to use a gun, which he conveniently owns. And he can kill people with magic left and right so long as those people aren’t human. And even when fighting humans, he can still help himself with magic, he just needs to be careful to strike the final blow with something else.
At this point, it’s just… kinda pointless. It’s not a huge enough imposition to affect Harry in most situations (and when it really should have. See the third book where he thought he’s killed a fuckton of people with magic, but it turned out to be false alarm, so everything’s good. Even though, given magic works on belief, it really should have fucked him up as if he did commit a mass murder), and it doesn’t reflect the morality of the books: the books are generally OK with murder, to the point of having a kid praise Harry for it.
So, yeah, in the end it is just a weird law of magic physics (metaphysics, if you will), as you say. And, like the laws of physics, it is athematic, amoral and arbitrary. There is no particular reason for why it exists, it simply is. Which could have been the point, but DF generally goes for a very anthropocentric, humanistic view of the universe (magic doesn’t punish you for killing humans because humans have a weird aetheric organ we’ve evolved to protect us from magical predators, but because humans matter in the way, say, fae do not), so that’s not the case.
It’s a real shame, too: a stronger taboo against murder could have been interesting both plot-wise (what do you even do with defeated villains like Victor von Onewizardindustrialrevolution when you can’t conveniently dispose of them?) and thematically (is it worth becoming a monster in order to become a monster?).
Now, thematically, DF is largely about the temptation of power: everything would be a lot easier if only Harry could turn people into newts or read their minds, but he doesn’t because that would turn him into a monster.
If only it engaged with this, it’d be a far better story.
And even when fighting humans, he can still help himself with magic, he just needs to be careful to strike the final blow with something else.
He can even still kill humans with magic. He just can’t do it directly with magical energy. Killing people with magic is a sin. Killing people with magically conjured fire is apparently a-okay.
How do the books not engage with this? The temptation of power comes up in, just offhand, books 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, and 14. And it’s arguable that it comes up in books 8 and 9 as well.
This is explicitly wrong. It’s made clear to us in the books, in interviews with Jim, and in the RPG. The answer to “if you shove someone off a cliff with magic, is that still killing them magically?” is explicitly “yes” in the Dresdenverse.
The answer to “if you shove someone off a cliff with magic, is that still killing them magically?” is explicitly “yes” in the Dresdenverse.
Don’t tell the books that. What Butcher said and what he wrote are two completely different things, then.
Just saw your post. The way I approach fiction is that I first look at something and go “is there a logical in-universe reason why this happens/things work this way?” and if the answer is yes, my general assumption is that that is why it’s written that way. If the answer is no, then I go looking for Doylist reasons.
First, Harry’s ability to soulgaze Bianca has been retconned. As of book three, you can no longer soulgaze red court vampires.
That said, it’s a really interesting issue. On the one hand, the reason as understood in-universe for the difference between humans and other beings is the soul issue. On the other hand, beings like lycanthropes and white court vampires clearly do have souls, and the First Law doesn’t apply to them. It’s an issue that’s never really resolved in the story, so fans debate it fairly regularly. People have asked Jim, but he hasn’t really given a definitive answer (he’s said things to the effect that as a law of nature, it’s completely arbitrary, but also that the White Council might not understand or interpret the law correctly).
My personal headcanon is that killing with magic is the metaphysical equivalent of cannibalism, and killing other beings, even those with souls, doesn’t register because they’re different magical ‘species.’
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the Doylist reason for the First Law is so that Harry can start the story touched by darkness and on the outs with the White Council without having done anything that readers would think was wrong.
That said, there is some evidence that Harry’s accidentally maybe killing a bunch of people in book three did have an effect. He ends up very messed up, and with more difficulty controlling his temper in later books. The problem with figuring out if that’s an effect of black magic or not is that A) black magic use doesn’t have a consistent effect on people, except that it’s negative–it could be contributing to Harry’s anger problems, or his guilt, or the fact that he never once feels bad about all the people hurt because he started a war (this one is my headcanon), or something else I haven’t thought of; and B) Harry has a bunch of other stuff happen to him to mess him up, so it’s hard to tell what’s a result of black magic and what isn’t.
But yeah, Jim kinda dropped the ball on that one. Even though there’s evidence that black magic could have messed him up from this, and logic would suggest it did, it still should have been made clear, either at the time or in retrospect.
And on “reflecting the morality of the books”: the one thing Jim has been clear on, both in interviews and in later books, is that the Laws of Magic don’t map to morality. They overlap with it in places, but that’s about it. It’s actually a recurring issue, with people treating them as moral rules vs practical ones, and people thinking they should be turned into moral rules vs the predicted consequences of doing so.
The way I approach fiction is that I first look at something and go “is there a logical in-universe reason why this happens/things work this way?” and if the answer is yes, my general assumption is that that is why it’s written that way.
That logical in-universe reason, if created to justify and explain away an incredibly problematic aspect of the text, only makes it more problematic.
As of book three, you can no longer soulgaze red court vampires.
How convenient that the canon status of the souls of red court vampires (and, thus, their ability to be killed with magic) got retconned just as Butcher needed to kill a lot of red court vampires.
And on “reflecting the morality of the books”: the one thing Jim has been clear on, both in interviews and in later books, is that the Laws of Magic don’t map to morality
They pretty much do, though. No killing, no mindrape, no fucking with the dead… Which law isn’t moral on its face?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the Doylist reason for the First Law is so that Harry can start the story touched by darkness and on the outs with the White Council without having done anything that readers would think was wrong.
And, even when they might not be, it’s because of a selective zero-tolerance interpretation of the rules that allow for the protagonist to be punished without actually having to do anything that might make the reader think he wasn’t a Capital H Hero.
Except for when he blatantly disregards the law against necromancy because Butcher had a “cool” idea. Then there’s wiggle room.
Having the laws be both completely zero tolerance and actually amoral (in its literal sense, “without moral”) would be very interesting. But then you’d be getting into fae territory.
Yeah, I figured. It’s an OK approach if you just want to relax and enjoy the story, and I wouldn’t say it’s wrong: we don’t always have the energy or inclination to dissect the text of every pulpy work we come across.
It’s just not a very helpfyl approach when it comes to critical analysis or understanding issues other people might have with the work.
Here is a good article about the Cold Equations, a classic science fiction short story about a pilot on a mission to deliver medicine to a plague-striken planet. During his journey, he notices the fuel gauge going down at an alarming rate and deduces there must be a stowaway around. Soon, he finds her: a girl who snuck into the ship to be reunited with her brother on that distant planet.
It is at this point that the eponymous cold equations are revealed to us:
The ship doesn’t have enough fuel to make the journey with the added weight of the girl.
The pilot cannot drop the cargo because then a lot of people would die.
He can’t sacrifice himself because the girl is incapable of landing the ship.
The solution, then, becomes inescapable: the girl must die. So he kills her.
What the article point out is that none of the above is actually inevitable. The Cold Equations are not laws of physics that juxt exist and cannot be denied, they’re a deliberate construct, a product of a mind of a specific person with an agenda. There were apparently at least three early drafts rejected by the editor wherein the pilot does figure out a way to save the girl, but even without them it’s possible to imagine a different story where different equations hold sway: a story where the pilot’s company provided him with more of a safety margin, perhaps, which would instantly transform a story into a heartwarming tale where the murder isn’t mentioned once, and the pilot simply bonds with the girl over shared hardships.
The question then becomes why the story was written like it was? Why was death inescapable? The article accuses the story of having a dangerous philosophy, of spreading a “moral hazard”leading the readers to be more accepting of similar arguments in real life: in a crisis, there is no place for morality or assigning blame, only for decisive authoritarian action.
Now, I wouldn’t accuse Butcher of the same. I think his fault mostly lies in not thinking about the implications of his work and how they can affect people, whether people would see themselves reflected in the characters he creates or repulsed by them.
However, the fact remains that, broadly speaking*, all stories are culminations of a series of choices, and it’s always useful (and often interesting) to ask why those specific choices were made over all the possible alternatives.
*I’d give some leeway to long-running series where the author suddenly notices that a combination of various elements introduced gradually produced a problematic element, goes “well, fuck, I guess eugenics are real there, fuck” and tries, however clamsily, to address it. Personally, I think a retcon is honestly preferable in such situations, but I get trying to preserve continuity even in the face of serious problems. It doesn’t apply here since we mostly talk about stuff from the first three books, though.
Yeah, I get it, I just think it’s not a strong enough temptation or an obstacle. “This guy really needs a killing, but I can’t kill” could be an interesting setup to explore, and it was sorta present in the first book (though undermined by the fact that guns work fine), but the series generally drifted towards fighting nonhumans and monsters, whom Harry can in fact kill with magic, so the First Law, by and large, is left as a trivia, not greatly important to the series as you’d expect.
(I also think that Harry having a talent for mind magic instead would have been more interesting. “I can solve this mystery in a minute if I were to read everyone’s mind” is a stronger temptation in a noir plot than murder, and “I can fix people if I’m OK with them not being themselves anymore” is a more interesting topic to explore. It also presents a greater range of gray actions.)
No fucking with the dead. I’m stanning necromancy, and you can’t stop me.
I mean, really, dead people don’t need their bodies anymore, so why should they go to waste? DF necromancy doesn’t even involve disturbing their spirits since it functions by stuffing unrelated spirits into dead bodies, and, judging by Bob, spirits are assholes, so really, it’s a victimless crime.
[The Cold Equations] barks at us that now is not the time for pointing fingers, because there is an emergency.
Very predictive, ironically.
and for Molly to grow a lethal vagina,
Beg your pardon?
It’s a plot point from a short story set after one of the later books. Molly becomes the Winter Lady, and part of the deal is that she must remain virginal (because of the whole Maiden/Mother/Crone imagery even though the “crones” in this case are actually called mothers), which is enforced by her powers taking over her and killing every dude with whom she tries to have sex.
Vagina dentata is not confirmed but inescapably present in your mind.
Oh, whew! That doesn’t seem nearly as bad as what I expected.
(I’m sure that if I were to actually read the story Butcher’s awful writing would screw things up somehow.)
I can just imagine Butcher writing this. A lethal vagina and a non-lethal one next to each other. One vagina always tells the truth, the other always lies. You get to make one pick-up line. How do you phrase the question so that you’ll choose the right one?*
*It’s a trick question; both vaginas will lie because that’s what women do. Turn her down as nastily as you can, like a proper Butcher protagonist.
Here’s the thing: It’s not inherently bad, from a narrative perspective, that Harry is a poorly socialized dick, or even an outright sociopathic monster. The problem is that the narrative does not treat him that way. The narrative constantly reinforces his idea that he’s a self-suffering guy who is down on his luck and always trying to do the best thing even when he doesn’t succeed.
But he’s not. All the suffering in his life is entirely the fault of his own actions, and often inflicted on the people (and especially the women) around him. The narrative doesn’t treat him like some old fuddy-duddy who was taught he has to open doors for women and lacks the social awareness to stop when its clearly bothering them, it acts like he’s a truly chivalrous man expressing the most basic of courtesy. And neither of those things are what he is, which is a person doing something he knows bothers someone because it bothers them so he can exert a degree of control over them.
Harry constantly has to be the top dog in every situation. But again, this is not treated as a character flaw that gets him into trouble. It’s not even addressed. Harry has a lot of character flaws, but none of them are intentional, and the ones we’re told he has, are either nonexistent, non-punishing, or framed in a completely disingenuous way.
And no amount of diagetic explanation for that will change it.
there is a real metaphysical difference between humans and other sapient beings–humans are the only ones with souls and who have free will
No there isn’t. It’s a fictional metaphysical difference, and one that probably exists only because the author realized he can’t have cool magic battles if there was a major spiritual penalty to killing with magic.
We never […] see him refuse to share information with a woman that he is willing to share with a man of comparable abilities
But we see him to refuse to share information with a highly competent detective specifically because he feels he has to protect her.
Harry’s reaction to Lydia was “she’s going to manipulate me and screw me over” which is completely in line with how Lea and Elaine treated him.
The narrative does nothing to indicate that this is an incorrect reaction or based on the irrationality brought on by past trauma. When he turns out to be wrong, it’s treated as surprising that she was exactly what she said she was, and the person who is punished for Harry’s mistake is Lydia.
He’s actually kind of both, and the narrative definitely shows this.
This is…how do I put it? Completely wrong. Harry’s character flaws are shown to cause him a lot of trouble. Here’s an example from book 1: Harry punches Morgan just because he needs to be in control and with Morgan he isn’t, and this is clearly shown to have consequences, in that A) Harry gets punched; and B) it removes any chance Harry had of convincing Morgan he’s not the bad guy before the big fight with Sells. What your missing is that Harry’s good traits get him out of trouble: Morgan decides he’s not the bad guy and saves his life after Harry both risks his life to take out the warlock actually doing the killings and chooses to die rather than break one of the Laws of Magic. His bad character traits (ie character flaws) get him into trouble, and his good ones get him out of it.
You do know that faeries and vampires aren’t real, right? It’s a real metaphysical difference within the Dresdenverse, which is the only “real” that matters when it comes to Harry, because he actually doesn’t know that he’s a fictional character.
No, if that were the case, Jim just plain wouldn’t have included the “killing humans with magic is spiritually corrupting” thing. It exists because one of the major themes of the series as a whole is the issue of free will and choice.
Did you not read my post or something? Because the entire point of it was “there’s plenty of evidence that Harry unfairly discounts the abilities of people who aren’t supernatural (or are barely supernatural) and that he feels he is in some ways superior to them and must protect them and that is wrong. There’s just no evidence that Murphy being a woman is why Harry refuses to share information with her, rather than it being because she’s a vanilla mortal. Not everything is sexism–there’s plenty of other forms of discrimination.
How do you expect the narrative to address this? It is first person narration, so it’s what Harry thinks about events–if he were aware that he was being irrational due to trauma, then he would have handled it differently. If you want to have stuff pointed out to Harry that he wouldn’t think of, then you need another character to point it out to him. In this case, Lydia isn’t in a position to point it out, and no other character is aware of what happened at Harry’s office.
Okay, so apparently I need to ask what mistake Harry made. Because I haven’t read this scene recently enough to be completely certain, but as I remember, what happened in the scene was that Lydia walked in and told Harry that she needed help, Harry didn’t believe her and made this clear, but ended up giving her help anyway. He gave her his anti-ghost talisman and sent her to a place that was safe from ghosts. The reason why this didn’t work was that Lydia didn’t tell Father Forthill why it was important that she not sleep: Harry was in no position to know that, and it was her sleeping that caused the problem. I might be missing something, but what was Harry actually supposed to do differently that would have made a difference to the outcome rather than just Lydia’s feelings? (And note: believing Lydia’s vision is off the table because her power specifically prevents people believing her about her visions–that’s why it’s called Cassandra’s tears.)
A) Harry gets punched; and B) it removes any chance Harry had of convincing Morgan he’s not the bad guy before the big fight with Sells.
And what actually comes of that? Nothing. He gets to hem and haw over how beat up he is for a few pages, and then has the opportunity to solo the bad guy.
No, if that were the case, Jim just plain wouldn’t have included the “killing humans with magic is spiritually corrupting” thing.
It worked to his benefit in the first book, where it was introduced, but it got a partial retcon in the second book, where it wasn’t as useful.
“there’s plenty of evidence that Harry unfairly discounts the abilities of people who aren’t supernatural (or are barely supernatural) and that he feels he is in some ways superior to them and must protect them
How convenient for him, then, that they’re all women.
How do you expect the narrative to address this?
Actual negative consequences would be a start. People with different viewpoints than Harry who don’t suffer because of those viewpoints. Basically, actually writing Harry’s viewpoint as a highly biased one, and not just continuously saying it is.
I haven’t read this scene recently enough to be completely certain
That is by far the only scene where Lydia suffers because of Harry’s incompetence. And, again, Butcher giving the woman Harry wouldn’t have believed anyway a curse where no one believes what she’s saying is still a fucking shitty thing to do. He believes her when she says she has this curse, but doesn’t believe anything else she says, even though he knows she has this curse. He doesn’t say “that ‘curse’ is nonsense, you’re just a liar” or even “I dunno, I’ve never heard of such a thing”. He knows the curse by name, he knows it’s real, and still doesn’t believe her.
You know what would’ve actually been chivalrous? If he didn’t believe her, and still did everything in his power to help her. Not just give her a token amount of help, that requires no actual effort on his part, and then passing her off to someone far less qualified to helping her. Or, hell, he could’ve went with her, to investigate her claims of supernatural trouble and verify or refute them. You know, like a detective would?
Harry made it extremely clear that he would much prefer not to be the one dealing with this guy, and was only doing it because it was that or more people, including him, would get killed. “Soloing the bad guy” isn’t an opportunity, it is a consequence–because he didn’t want to do it, and got stuck with it anyway due to his own actions.
And it couldn’t possibly have been the fact that there were no non-human beings in book one that Harry might have to kill that caused it not to get brought up then? It’s not a retcon, it’s an expansion of our understanding as we see more of the world.
So…you would prefer that there were fewer strong female characters on the good guys’ side?
I don’t know what you’re saying here. Seriously, I have no clue. Are you claiming that Harry doesn’t suffer? That characters with better viewpoints suffer because they disagree with Harry? That you didn’t read the books, and thus didn’t see the consequences of Harry’s biased viewpoint? Are we still talking about the Harry-Lydia thing, or have we moved on to something more general?
I agree with you. This is the only point where Lydia suffers because Harry doesn’t trust her, and she doesn’t even suffer all that much–she gets help and leaves.
Evidence?
No he doesn’t. He thinks “well she might have this curse, but lots of people claim to have this curse who don’t to scam people, and actually why should I believe she has this curse at all, she probably doesn’t and is just scamming me.”
He also, as I have repeatedly pointed out, knows that lots of people in the supernatural community claim to have this curse who don’t in order to scam people.
Which is, in fact, what he did.
He placed his life in jeopardy giving her his personal defense against ghosts when he knew that he was regularly fighting ghosts and that he couldn’t easily or quickly replace it, and then sent her to the safest place he knows.
So you would be happier if he let a bunch of babies be murdered, because it’s more important to help this girl who is A) very possibly scamming him, as far as he knows; and B) as safe as he can make her already. Good to know what your priorities are. Tell me, is it because you don’t know if any of the babies are female, or would you just think Harry was wrong no matter what he did in this situation?
“Soloing the bad guy” isn’t an opportunity, it is a consequence–because he didn’t want to do it, and got stuck with it anyway due to his own actions.
Diagetically, yes. But the “consequence” resulted solely in positive repercussions for Harry. He benefited from the consequence to his negative actions.
It’s not a retcon, it’s an expansion of our understanding as we see more of the world.
In the first book, taking life via magic was an inversion of what magic was. In the second book, it’s okay so long as they’re not humans. Retcon.
So…you would prefer that there were fewer strong female characters on the good guys’ side?
If they’re going to exist only for the reader to be told they’re strong female characters to gain points and then conveniently be indisposed or unavailable when strength is actually needed? Yeah, kinda. Then at least there wouldn’t be people defending this series for having strong female characters.
Are you claiming that Harry doesn’t suffer?
I am claiming that he does not suffer in a meaningful way.
lots of people in the supernatural community claim to have this curse who don’t in order to scam people
And, again, he just decides she’s doing that, with absolutely no evidence, and no attempt to gain evidence. In order to scam him into… giving her protection from something she’d only need if she was actually in danger from it? If anything, the lack of gain from her “scam” is evidence that she’s telling the truth.
So you would be happier if he let a bunch of babies be murdered
I’d be happier if the first thing that came to his mind after his escapade wasn’t “oh, shit, I haven’t fed my cat” followed by “his girlfriend’s ass”.
No. He suffered from the consequences of his negative actions. He benefited from the consequences of his positive actions which he took while suffering from the consequences of his negative actions.
I disagree.
Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t why they exist, then. Murphy saves his life at the end of Fool Moon, and Susan saves his life at the end of Grave Peril, just as examples.
I don’t know what you mean by “in a meaningful way.”
The entire point of the Cassandra Curse is that there’s effectively no way to gain evidence (certainly not in the time frame Harry has) and the whole “people disbelieve it by definition” thing means that people are going to disbelieve it.
He thinks she’s trying to scam him into giving up his defense against ghosts so he’s more vulnerable, because (he believes) she’s probably working for someone who wants him hurt. That is the gain.
Can I get a quote? Because I don’t remember this happening at all. (And for the record: even if the cat part is true, then so long as it’s not what he’s thinking while staring at her body then I’m disinclined to hold it against him because it’s the kind of thing that pops up at least in my mind at completely random intervals without much regard for what else is happening.)
Look, can someone please explain to me why my posts are getting deleted? Because the only reason I’ve been told they might be deleted is if they are not “on the appropriate Let’s Read post in direct response to actual things said” but all the posts that have been deleted were posted as replies to the correct other posts and were specifically in direct response to things actually said–and I even posted the relevant bits that I was responding to.
Is there a technical glitch?
I’m not sure how to be more clear, but again: This thread is closed. If you want to comment on what Farla has to say about this series, please go to the actual Let’s Read. If you are abjectly refusing to even approach the LR to see what she’s actually saying, you’re not commenting in good faith and your comments will continue to be held in moderation.
Sorry. I get it now: no long conversations in the comments.
That is very much not what I said, nor is it a ringing endorsement of your ability to carry on mature conversation.