Finding people is hard, especially when they don’t want to be found. It’s so difficult, in fact, that
estimates run up near seven-digit figures on how many people disappear, without a trace, every year
in the United States. Most of these people aren’t ever found.
Yeah, we’ve been through this bullshit before.
This is particularly unforgivable because Harry isn’t just some random dumbass. He’s the guy actually getting tapped for the missing persons cases.
I mean, possibly they only call him in for the bad ones, giving him a skewed perspective…but given how time sensitive the bad ones are, he really should be getting called every time.
I didn’t want Lydia to become one of these statistics.
Okay, that’s good.
Either she was one of the bad guys
jesus fucking christ Harry.
Sorry, what garbage were you trying to say?
Either she was one of the bad guys and had been playing me for a sucker, or she was a victim who was in need of my help.
It’s pretty obvious which side Harry favors given it’s first and longest, and he’s even clearer on the fact he refuses to take any responsibility for how he treated her the first time.
If the former, then I wanted to confront her-I have this thing about people who lie to me and try to get me into trouble. If the latter, then I was probably the only one in Chicago who could help her.
And then in case you missed it, here it is again! It’s clear where Mr. Chivalry’s interests lie.
Now, after she’s been gone almost a full day, Harry very grudgingly does what he claims he meant to do all along – try to figure out where she is, and in the process, make it clear just how little he ever cared about her.
He points out that she must be on foot – she had no ride at the time, and I don’t think she’d had much cash, confirming further that he knew full well what situation she was in and just didn’t give a fuck. Therefore, she’s somewhere nearby, probably around the park. Likely not as nearby as she was that morning, mind you, but who cares, this was never really about helping her.
Harry gets in his car and explains that the techbane effect gets worse when he’s emotional, so he has to stay chill.
Don’t ask me why.
You are the worst magic nerd ever.
He draws a circle encasing the local magical energies, compressing them, stirring them. Why sectioning off a chunk also concentrates it is pretty weird. I guess you could build a circle that only lets magic in, but that isn’t how it worked when described before.
Then he lays down a whole pile of exposition. His instant-use powers are evocations, and he can only do a very few and they can only do something basic. (And yet, apparently a sweeping spell is one of them.) His double penis subsitutes help focus, so he can use those evocations more safely.
Most magic is a lot of concentration and hard work. That’s where I was really good-thaumaturgy. Thaumaturgy is traditional magic, all about drawing symbolic links between items or people and then investing energy to get the effect that you want. You can do a lot with thaumaturgy, provided you have enough time to plan things out, and more time to prepare a ritual, the symbolic objects, and the magical circle.
So…you’re really good at the thing you pretty much never do.
I mean, if we’re covering summoning now it makes slightly more sense you tried to get out of the most basic research by summoning a demon, but other than that…I remember Harry used the finder-circle twice, once in each book, and that’s it. Maybe we’re covering potions here too? But that seemed like it’s just a matter of raw power.
Maybe that’s what he means. then investing energy to get the effect that you want. Harry’s infinite fire blast PP doesn’t mean much because there’s only so much fireblasting you can go in a day. Things like potions that can be done in batches and stored for a short time or talismans that appear to be good for indefinite use seem to require much more energy, so they may be beyond the capability of the average magic user. Harry can therefore claim to be good at thaumaturgy in the same way someone twenty feet tall is good at basketball.
And since Harry has the ability to make all his own magic items, that’s what he uses now – shield charm calls to protection charm. Harry finds that Lydia, or at least his precious ghost charm that he won’t stop whining about, is nearby, specifically in an abandoned building. Harry then triple checks it’s that building because it’s “spooky” and it’s not like supposedly it’s a character trait of his that he wants to rescue damsels in distress.
I would be smart to call Michael. Maybe even Murphy. I could get to a phone, try to get in touch with them. It wouldn’t take them long to get here.
Of course, it would be after sundown.
AND WHOSE FUCKING FAULT IS THAT?
This is such shitty, shitty plotting.
Say that she waited until morning and told the priest she’d be back that night. Say Michael only just got in contact with him saying there’s no sign of Lydia and they’re starting to get worried. Then this would be acceptable.
And to be clear – he’s not worried about Lydia.
The Nightmare, if it was inside Lydia, would be free to leave her then, to roam abroad. If I could get to her, exorcise this thing now, I could end the spree of destruction it was on.
Nothing about saving her at all. His concern is about losing track of the monster when it leaves her be. Doesn’t even suggest it might kill her on the way out – because really, who cares about her? Serves her right for pretending to be enthusiastic about sex with him.
Inside is a pile of suspiciousness in the form of a car.
A brand-new side-panel van, its engine still ticking, cooling off, stood parked at the far side of the loading dock
Harry again double and triple checks that this is what the bracelet points to, then edges closer very very slowly, because again, he doesn’t actually possess any character trait that makes him compromise his own best interests out of concern for women.
He finally opens the door.
A blanket-wrapped bundle, approximately Lydia-sized, lay inside the van. One pale hand lay limp outside of it, my talisman, scorched-looking and bloodstained, wrapped around the slender wrist.
My heart leapt into my throat.
Finally, some sign he kind of cares a little.
He checks and finds a pulse, then, rather than pick her up and hightail it out of there (remember, she’s not only obviously in trouble, and this isn’t just an obviously danger place that has Harry creeped out, she’s also going to get torn up by an evil ghost if she doesn’t get to a church before sundown), decides he should examine her closely to figure out what’s going on.
Her eyes were open, staring, the pupils dilated until there was barely any color left in them at all. I waved my hand in front of her eyes and said again, “Lydia.” She didn’t respond. Drugged, I thought.
You see, that flash of concern apparently wasn’t really for her. Maybe he was just worried he’d missed the nightmare ghosty, or maybe he assumed Murphy would try to arrest him when they found the body, or perhaps he just didn’t like the idea of Lydia getting out of him bullying her for information. Now that he’s verified she’s alive, time to slowly work out that the reason the bait is here is because it’s bait.
He’s then assaulted by a vampire. Remember vampires? Remember how I kept saying vampires? Vampires.
This particular vampire is one half of the vampires Harry was an asshole to earlier, so it’s quite possible this is unrelated to anything else going on. And if this guy did decide to attempt to trick and then maul a wizard powerhouse to death over rudeness and getting his outfit ruined, that’s pretty interesting.
We still don’t know what vampires actually are. Maybe they have very different cost/benefit analysis than we do. Perhaps the real reason the wizards fear the vampires so much has nothing much to do with drugged saliva – Harry can probably make a potion that kicks every addiction and whitens your teeth while you’re at it – but because vampires are hard to deter. If vampire vs wizard usually ends in the wizard’s favor but this doesn’t work to dissuade vampires from the attempt, the average wizard is still going to be pretty nervous around vampires. And if vampire vs wizard usually ends with a dead wizard and then a white council posse hunting it down, the average wizard is going to be scared shitless of them.
This would also help deal with the numbers issue. Generally you have to have very low rates of reproduction when dealing with immortal creatures, but if there’s enormous attrition due to impulsive aggression, that would produce a nice setup where there’s piles of mooks but only a few elders, those who through luck and strength but mostly self-control did better than the rest. (This is where natural selection should have stepped in, but that’s the fun thing about magic – if these aren’t being created in a manner that allows individual traits to be passed on, the success rates of chill vampires will do nothing to improve the number of baby chill vampires.) And this would seem to line up with Bianca’s behavior in the first book- she’s controlled until the instant she lunges. Older, saner vampire with self-control, but the same impulse to just maul the problem in front of you.
And now, to get back to how Harry should’ve called Bianca – does she know about this? If I’m right and vampires are kind of impulsive, there’s no reason to think they necessarily report back as part of a strict hierarchy, but if they don’t have a strict hierarchy, there’s also no reason to assume they hide what they’re doing. Quite possibly he told Bianca he was off to grab some girl for bait so he could jump Harry and chew through his stupid spine, and Bianca was just “lol k don’t touch anybody with me tho”.
Now, would Bianca warn Harry? Probably not, though it’s always possible as part of some power play. Could Harry have gotten some warning? More likely.
See, normally detective stories have the detective talking to lots of people. These people are all lying to him to some degree or another. He can work out some information from the shape of their lies.
Bianca could give him some direct hint, or she could just be weirdly agreeable and okay with him, and he realizes that’s because she’s expecting to never have to deal with him again. He probably doesn’t figure it out in time, of course, but he’d come off as a much smarter character if, when this guy attempts to pancake him, he thinks back to that and realizes Bianca knew. And if she knew, how does that affect her other actions? If she promised to look into the missing people, was that because she assumed she only had to keep Harry from saying anything for another few hours?
Of course really, she should’ve done it herself because this dumbass gets a free hit on Harry and doesn’t use it to gut him like a fish. He just tackles him like it’s football and Harry starts hitting back, aided in part by his magic ring.
The energy stored in the ring, all kinetic stuff that it saved back a little every time I moved my arm, unloaded in a flood, right in the vampire’s face, an unseen fury of motion.
I really wish the setting stuck to magic just being magic. This kind of reality hack is really clever, but it’s not in line with how we’ve seen magic be portrayed – you shouldn’t be able to use magic to interact with physics when so much of magic is telling physics to get fucked.
The raw force split his lips-but no blood flowed out. It dug into the corners of his eyes and tore the skin away, but there was still no blood. It ripped the skin from his cheekbones, all rubbery black beneath the Anglo-Saxon pink, strips of flesh flapping back in the wave of force like flags in a high wind.
…
Kyle stirred for a moment and then flung himself to all fours, his body weirdly contorted, shoulders standing up too much, his back bent at a crooked angle. Shreds of flesh dangled from his face, slick-looking, rubbery black beneath them. His eyes also had the skin torn away from them, like pieces of a rubber mask, and bulged out black and huge and inhuman. His jaws parted, showing dripping fangs, saliva pattering to the damp floor.
Oh hey, it’s a guy getting brutalized this time. Note he doesn’t get his pants torn off for Harry to comment on the size of his dick.
In fact, quick count: Harry has seen Bianca’s breasts, the breasts of werewolf lady, and the breasts of sexy godmom. Three for three! If you’re both villainous and female, Harry gets to see your tits.
“You,” the vampire hissed, his voice calm, normal, disconcerting.
Like with the bit about biting, Harry doesn’t show any sign of awareness of why that is.
This kind of thing upsets people because it means we can’t read the other person. Either the vampire has such good self-control that there’s no verbal tell here, or worse, “calm, normal” is in fact the vampire tone of voice for “so furious I’m about to chew through your larynx”. In both cases, you can’t tell what they’re feeling from what they say, and in the second, it’s possible you’ll also misunderstand other tones of voice – maybe vampires sound furious when they’re really happy, maybe vampires sound sad when they’re really hungry, etc.
Harry did say he didn’t think Bianca was a human. If they’re not human, there’s no reason to think they have that much overlap with our behaviors.
Harry asks why the hell they have Lydia.
“Lydia. Bad dye job, sunken eyes, in your van, wearing my talisman on her wrist.”
The dye job is yet another point that’s concerning – why is she dyeing her hair – while the eye thing both confirms he knows how messed up she is and yet at the same time, cares so little about it all that this is his description of her.
“Is that what she told you her name was? You’ve been used, Dresden.”
No, he’s a wizard. People don’t like telling wizards their name. This is perhaps the only time when refusing to give your name is absolutely and immediately understandable, without needing an ounce of further justification.
But this is all super confusing. From the vampire’s reaction, she wasn’t bait at all – they can’t figure out through simple context who he’s referring to, as if they had no reason to think he’d know this person, and in that case it’s a pretty bad plan to kidnap a random girl and hope Harry cares (admittedly, it was a pretty bad plan regardless, and nearly failed – had Harry taken just slightly longer, the sun would have set, then he’d have shrugged and said that she was probably already dead so whatever, why bother).
The other vampire appears.
She wore a white cat suit, clinging tight to her curves, along with white boots and gloves, and a short white cape with a deep hood. Her clothing was smudged, imperfect, spotted with flecks of scarlet, and her blonde hair in disarray. Blood stained her mouth, like smeared lipstick, or a child with a big cup of juice. A blood mustache. Hells bells.
I kept my blasting rod trained on Kelly, my left hand thrust out before me. “So you two are putting the snatch on Lydia, eh? Why?”
“Let me kill him,” moaned the female, her eyes all black, empty and hungry. “Kyle. I’m hungry.”
…
“Kyle,” the female moaned again. More drool slithered out of her mouth, dripping to the floor. She started shaking, quivering
So. First Harry wants to have sex with a young teenager, now we’re getting infantilized sexy “female”.
Also I’m starting to get concerned about this vampire. She’s bloody, so she just ate, and yet she’s starving? And her brother was saying something about a special diet. I wonder if she has some sort of vampire diabetes – eat less to starve slower. After all, I doubt vampires have much in the way of a concerned medical community looking into actual treatments like vampire insulin or whatever.
Harry decides she’s the bigger problem and aims at her, so the guy chucks a brick at his head, which distracts Harry enough that he misses and just carves open the building with his super fire of doom.
She flung herself atop me, straddling my hips with her thighs, moaning in excitement. I thrust the blasting rod toward her
There’s no point in even innuendo comments here, it’s flat out text.
She manages, apparently by accident, to get some spit on him, and then he’s instantly high and fine with her drinking blood while dry-humping him. Luckily, he already shot enough of a load that the building is coming down, and evidently the fact it was almost sundown when Harry entered doesn’t change the fact there’s still plenty of light, so she lights on fire.
I became aware of a dull pain, uncomfortable heat on my cheek, my throat, where her saliva had coated my skin.
And that’s an interesting note – the vampire/fire connection in modern stuff is often tied to the idea they’re dead and somewhat dried out, or the fire is largely symbolic and doesn’t generate much in the way of heat. Having her very spit ignite suggests they’re composed of hyperflamable substances – could you make firebombs by getting a vampire to pee in a bottle?
Anyway, vamp boy drags vamp girl to the van, gets in, and drives off. Harry is confused by the drugs and also maybe getting tossed about like a rag doll, and decides to wander back home.
Well – although it took way too long, and although Harry went into it as gingerly as humanly possible, once there was an actual guy standing in the way, Harry insisting that he wouldn’t leave without Lydia is the sort of thing I want out of our supposedly heroic protagonist. Of course, this all being empty and meaningless, because she is taken away, but who knows, maybe when the happy drug wears off Harry will feel bad and try to do something. Or maybe he’ll forget about her again.
(This is where natural selection should have stepped in, but that’s the fun thing about magic – if these aren’t being created in a manner that allows individual traits to be passed on, the success rates of chill vampires will do nothing to improve the number of baby chill vampires.)
Indeed. Other, better settings, like the World of Darkness, skip straight to artificial selection: vampires who see the desired traits in humans Embrace those humans, and that’s the end of that. Either they’re right, and they get a nice new vampire for their coven, or the human was harboring some of that delicious mortal conflict and has an adventure instead. Either way it tends to be a win for the sire.
See, normally detective stories have the detective talking to lots of people. These people are all lying to him to some degree or another. He can work out some information from the shape of their lies.
Ugh, this is why I love detective stories beyond all reason. The idea that people are always keeping something from you that you have to puzzle out from the context is so ingrained in my thought process that it hinders my daily life.
It helps that the people in detective stories also beat the protagonist, who is not already Superman-level in terms of strength.
Unless they run off to Sabbath.
I like how it’s done in Nasuverse: a boundary field prevents mana from going in or out, which means you can build a sophisticated spell without worrying that some random magic wind would interfere.
Going by RPG, no. You can invest power in a ritual gradually, bit by bit, and there is no upper limit. The only issue is that some major rituals may require so much energy, you’d have to stay and chant for, like, three days if you were to play it completely safe. Plus, each instance of drawing power requires a roll (with difficulty determined by how much power you gathered in that instance), so there are more chances to botch it and explode everything.
So, like Twilight vampires?
y’know. Harry is worried about lydia that’s pretty clear to me,he’s just ALSO worried about the nightmare said nightmare put him and a buddy of his through something traumatic yesterday it makes sense he’s worried about it. i don’t get from the text he think she not important. he only gives a short description ofher because he was startled and the vamps just showed to freak him out
Usually i’d agree with your comments on why he’s wrong for thinking she might be a manipulative bad guy. but you gotta keep in mind, harry was betrayed and abused by his foster father when he was a kid too,he was severely abused he lost everyone he cared about as a kid,he was forced to kill said foster parent on self defense. he has severe trust issues. trusting people is like chewing off his own hand for someone like him.
Ans for the female vampire,i don’t see her being infatilized here. she is talking little and drooling because she’s monstrous not childish
“Trust issues” excuse only so much, and “starving kids haunted by ghosts and asking for protection” is a bit too much to ask.
It also should be noted that they always, always target women. Like, Harry doesn’t worry that Michael secretly wants him dead over that whole consorting with demons business he did or general practice of witchcraft. Hell, he expressed more trust in Marcone of all people than in Lydia, and Marcone actually does have plenty of reasons to off him.
Also,
Did you miss this line?
Or how her general behavior screams “needy baby” rather than terrifying monster?
You know what would have been monstrous? Her standing perfectly still, no words, no asking for permission from her partner. Just intensely staring at Harry. And the moment he makes eye contact (which, let’s face it, he would), she jumps and goes straight for his throat. No hesitation, no wasted breath, no dry-humping. Just pure killing intent realized.
scaryness is subjective,gues jb thought that scene woould more tense with a crazy drool spitting monster instead of a more creepy silent reature. The former is more Evil Dead while the latter is like Amnesia,i feel like evil dead mosnter fits this series better
Ah… Evil Dead is a comedy.
In any case, the infantilism is still present. It’s not even subtext or anything, the comparison to a baby is plainly stated.
Yeah,she is being compared a child. but it’ supposed to add to the fear factor, Creepy children are an old trope. a being looking like an innocent infant and yet still trying to kill you is creepier than a straight up monster for many readers.
Yes, but the reverse is not true.
Creepy babies are scary because they’re babies that don’t act like babies. Monsters that behave like babies are less scary because babies are dumb and can’t remember you if they don’t see you.
guess i’ll have to put this argument on the ” it’s subjective pile”. I’m a huge buffy stan. guess that makes me love JB vamps too
I should note here that the argument was started by you not seeing infantilism in that scene. It’s definitely there as text plainly indicates.
Whether or not you find infantile women scary is secondary concern.
Buffy took little children and make them creepy monsters a lot more than it took creepy, adult-sized monsters and made them act like children.
Also, Buffy had creepy boys. If both of the vampires were drooling infants, I might question the effectiveness but it’d be well-protected against accusations of sexism.
The first one tried to be an horror film. It didn’t succeed, but that’s arguably more because of production values than any lack of intent on Raimi’s side.
Oh,but harry knows marcone and michael. he soulgazed them he knows that michael is 100% good and that marcone won’t kill him right now but maybe anothey day.
SPOILERS BELOW.
But yes,there is a element of sexism in there,of course there is. harry was also betrayed by the first girl he ever loved,she tried to help the evil foster father to kill him. in the next book he will find out she was mind-controlled but right now he doesnt know that. kinda explain him beng suspicious around dames
Yeah, see, the issue here is that those things don’t just happen. Like, Butcher doesn’t record actual events that took place in actual Chicago in some parallel world, he doesn’t write about real people with real relationships and issue.
Everything in the series is his deliberate choice. That Lydia is a starving girl instead of a starving boy, that Michael is a crusading man instead of a crusading woman, that Marcone is a Don rather than a Donna, that a guy vampire is relatively composed while the gal vampire is a drooling baby. Hell, even that Harry was “betrayed” by his girlfriend and not boyfriend (DF rips off Hellblazer something fierce, and since Constantine is canonically bisexual…).
Everything is Butcher’s choice.
And when women consistently get a short end of narrative treatment in those books while men avoid such fate, well, it does tell us something about Butcher.
The nightmare appeared last night, trying to kill Lydia. At the point Harry learns she’s run off, he doesn’t know what it did to Micky. He then learns that the badass ghost that tried to kill her is in fact a super badass ghost, and plans to go home and study the notes rather than look for Lydia, who, as far as he knows at this point, is the ghost’s only target.
After finding out/somehow Just Knowing the barbed wire and the nightmare are the same thing, getting a good look at exactly what she meant when she was begging him for help because of what it’d do to her, he…still doesn’t give a fuck about her and is looking for her not because she could be getting spiritually mauled like Micky but because he thinks she didn’t tell him the whole truth and thinks he might be able to ambush the nightmare to get revenge for Micky and protect other people in general.
she is talking little and drooling because she’s monstrous not childish
Why isn’t the other guy? If the point is monstrousness, surely the person who makes the first swipe at Harry should be getting a monstrous description too.
He does care about her Farla. he’s not dwelling in it you could see it as callousness,i say he’s keeping a cool head.
They’re based of Spike and Drusilla. Spike was the reasonable one and drusilla was the cuckoo for cuckopuffs one. i suppose jb could have inverted it. But then again Spike and Drussila are the great Joss Whedon’s creation. never a good idea to change the characters of one of the greatest writers of all time before using them…
Yeah, so, despite his feminism cred, Joss is not exactly immune to sexism. His works were progressive back when he started, but by now they aren’t actually that impressive on that front and can be blamed for popularizing Nice Guy behavior.
As such, invoking his name does not grant a work a protection against accusations of sexism and may actually be used as an evidence in favor of it.
In particular, reasonable man and crazy bitch are a problematic combo no matter who wrote it.
As for changing characters, of course it’s a good idea. They’re now in a completely different story and serving a completely different purpose as quirky minibosses. Unless there is a subplot later in the series about Harry restoring Kyle’s humanity and hooking up with him that was cruelly hidden from me.
Joss Wheadon is like my least favorite, not even so much for what he does so much as for what people ascribe to him that is complete and utter fabrication. Guy is your standard straight white dude with a hardon for Manic Pixies. Sometimes he makes cool movies. Not everything cool also has to be some weird morality play to justify being cool.
Ugh.
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Yeah. To be honest, I’m mostly familiar with him through osmosis. Never was a big fan of Buffy, and the only other thing I’ve seen by him is Dr. Horrible (I think it’s his, at least?). It is a pretty funny musical with good songs, but it’s so, so big on Nice Guy bullshit, with fridging as a centerpiece of the climax…
Also, that may be of interest to you: http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-cabin-in-woods-joss-whedon-doesnt.html
That’s an excellent article. I saw CITW a while ago and remember mildly enjoying it — it was well-acted and have some clever moments — but it doesn’t shock me that it flounders upon actual inspection.
Except Joss Whedon ALSO has a habit of fetishizing and infantalizing mental illness, especially mentally ill young women, so this is still gross.
Would you explain to me why do thought it was fetishizing? Because I always felt represented with whedon mentally ill characters both the heroes and villains.
I’m just gonna quote Anne Theriault’s “Mental Illness & The Male Gaze”:
“The Sexy Tragic Muse fetishizes women’s pain by portraying debilitating mental health disorders filtered dreamily through the male gaze. The trope glamourizes addiction and illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia – diseases that are distinctly unglamorous for those of us who live with them. The Sexy Tragic Muse is vulnerable, and her vulnerability is sexualized. Her inability to properly care for herself or make decisions on her own behalf is presented as being part of her appeal.
And perhaps this is the most frustrating thing about the Sexy Tragic Muse – the fact that this character type seems to be a neat way of removing a woman’s agency without the film or book or song coming across as overtly misogynistic. She occupies the intersection of ableism and sexism, and her mental illness is portrayed in a way that makes it commendable, even necessary, for others to care for her. We feel gratitude to the men that step up and save her, because she obviously cannot save herself. We feel empathy for the men that break up with her, because we see that she is difficult and volatile. We never get to see things from her perspective; often it is implied that this would be impossible, because her perspective is too confused and fractured.”
Also, making villians mentally ill isn’t all that great either, as it casts the mentally ill as violent and evil and as something that needs to be destroyed or stopped rather than as actual people that need to be helped, or even just understood and respected.
But Anne is mentioning mentally ill characters who dont do anything and only exist to be tragical and never do anything. Jose whedon’s and Jim butcher’s mentally ill characters DO things,th3y save the day they save other characters lives,they advance the plot their presence was indisnpansable in her stories. Was Anne really talking about Joss?
Just because a character punches things doesn’t mean they’re good representation for the mentally ill, dude. Even if they do do all of those things, what Anne was talking about can (and in Kelly and Justine and others cases DOES) still apply.
He’s not particularly cool – he’s terrified. He knows she’s in the building, but it’s a scary building, so he wastes time checking every other building to make absolutely sure that’s the one he has to go into. That’d be pathetic enough, but here, he’s frittered away almost all of the day and has only minutes left to find her and try to get her to safety. He repeats that inside the building. Then when he finally does see her, he doesn’t concern himself with helping her, he stands around thinking about what her obvious suffering might mean for him. Odds are, if she were conscious, he’d have just done the same thing he did with Tera, refusing to help until she answered his questions and using the time limit as leverage.
But then again Spike and Drussila are the great Joss Whedon’s creation. never a good idea to change the characters of one of the greatest writers of all time before using them…
Druscilla wasn’t just a random crazy chick. Druscilla was what was left of someone systematically tortured into insanity – we know her, we know what was done to her, we’re not supposed to see it as normal. And Spike wasn’t calling the shots around Druscilla! He deferred to her despite her indeed being batshit fucking crazy.
(Also, if you do use somebody else’s characters, it is a good idea to not outright steal but change things around if you’d going to call it yours.)
Behold!
He wore a white cat suit, clinging tight to his crotch, along with white boots and gloves, and a short white cape with a deep hood. His clothing was smudged, imperfect, spotted with flecks of scarlet, and his blonde hair in disarray. Blood stained his mouth, like smeared shave cream, or a child with a big cup of juice. A blood mustache. Hells bells.
I kept my blasting rod trained on the other vampire, my left hand thrust out before me. “So you two are putting the snatch on Lydia, eh? Why?”
“Let me kill him,” moaned the male, his eyes all black, empty and hungry. “I’m hungry.”
…
“Sister,” the male moaned again. More drool slithered out of his mouth, dripping to the floor. He started shaking, quivering
Do we actually get her name, by the way? Had to replace Kyle.
Ha! I’d love that too. but you do know about the sexy male vamp that’s gonna show up later dontcha?
Yes, and he introduces a whole lot of different issues (so much rape for everyone, not enough Exalted to wash it out), but we’ll talk about them when he appears.
Does the sexy vamp drool all over everything while begging Big Sis for supper?
He does something even more ludicrous! He dresses himself up as a butterfly! And fakes a French accent, and pretends to be a dumb person for the heck of it
You’re talking about Thomas, who even in this book is more of a manipulative ally, and sure as hell doesn’t get treated (just in this book) like Kelly here. Justine would fit that mold more, I think. And again, she’s young, mentally ill, and defined completely by her relationship with Thomas. So still gross.
And him acting dumb isn’t “just for the heck of it”, it’s a manipulation tactic that he uses to protect himself. So again, he’s still better off than Kelly here.
And, as illhousen said above, so much rape, and it’s all handled so poorly.
The dumb act he does its still sorta silly to me
But he still gets more agency and thought out into him than Kelly, or even Justine, for that matter.
And again, it’s an act, a manipulation tactic, a cover he uses to protect himself with. It’s entirely his choice, and he can drop it at any time, and we know why he’s doing it. We can’t say the same for Kelly here, or Justine. We’ll get to Justine later, though.
He does something even more ludicrous! He dresses himself up as a butterfly! And fakes a French accent, and pretends to be a dumb person for the heck of it
So…given the choice, you’d rather drool all over yourself while asking Mommy for numnums than wear a butterfly outfit and say “le” a lot?
Because personally, I’d find the butterfly outfit a lot less degrading. Also – you say he’s pretending to be dumb. Is she pretending to be this way, or is it actually what she is?
It’s fake yes,
Why is she faking drooling and being super hungry and almost getting herself charbroiled because she attacks head-on?
In Thomas’ case, it’s an act. For Kelly, it’s real.
K is right,as far I as know kelli it’s just that way thomas in the other hand fakes it, althought the both of them look silly to me
Out of the two of them only “dressing as a butterfly and pretending to be French” strikes me as silly.
‘Infantilized sex doll’ on the other hand creeps me out and not in the way the author intended.
That must be why Harry sucks so bad at it.
Bringing up Spike and Drusilla is as proof that she isn’t being infantilized is kind of dumb as Drusilla was infantilized as hell. In fact, it’s an archetype that Whedon has a fetish for, going with how every single show of his has at least one. Sometimes many!
Btw, I just noticed that we’re at chapter 16 already, but it feels like we’re, I don’t know, five chapters in? Six, maybe?
I mean, so far the plot was about learning that a super-ghost is in town, vampires are throwing a party, Harry’s godmom want him and Lydia is in need of rescue from the vampires and maybe the ghost.
In other words, it’s all a setup rather than actual story despite taking up, what, half of the book?
Similar problems plagued the previous books as well.
I feel that the reason is that the books are written as mysteries even though there is no mystery, just exposition. We don’t follow Harry’s deductive reasoning and attempts to understand what happened and what’s going on now because there aren’t any, we’re just told stuff about ghosts and vampires and godmom.
That goes back to my musings about the difficulty of combining magic with detective work, since it requires so much info you have to provide to the readers before they can even start putting together coherent theories, and I don’t think that DF’s approach of “anything mythological goes” is particularly helpful here.
The problem’s also that a huge chunk of the word count is eaten up by people trying to get Harry to do stuff or Harry avoiding doing stuff, and the events are functionally random. A more proactive character would be wasting less page count per situation, and because he was going there for a reason, we’d be drawing connections between them as we went instead of needing to do it all at once afterward.
Yeah, the information isn’t being doled out at the right pace for a mystery because it still isn’t really being sought by the detective himself.
To solve the mystery before Harry, we’ll have to use your patented method: “using the knowledge that the author is a hack” which worked so well in the first two books.
I think this is where Reconguista In G succeeded in and Dresden Files failed. It basically relied entirely on laying out the world-building in-character, but managed to find reasonable ways for it to come out in regular dialogue without so much exposition (unless it was the characters legitly coming across something entirely new and needing to be told what’s up). Hell, the story had an amnesiac and didn’t use her for exposition purposes. (Because she had oxygen deprivation brain damage and had zero memories so she acted like a little kid. It was actually a little sad when she finished recovering and her memories returned, because she didn’t act much like she use to and the girl who had been taking care of her was very caught off-guard).