Right, so.
When last we left off, Harry had decided to go to the vampire party because the nightmare ghosty has some third party buffing it and he’s decided that the only possible place for such a person would be the vampire party. He then proceeds to aggro everyone in the place repeatedly for no reason, guzzles drugged wine in front of them, and says his true name twice to a dragon while getting mad at it for thinking it’s stronger than him merely because it actually is. Also, still no followup on the drugged starving sick cursed child Harry let get taken by vampires, because Harry doesn’t care. At the end we discover that this entire time, he somehow missed that Susan was at the party because her outfit slightly resembled a vampire one, and Harry realizes that since he already said Michael was his plus-one, Susan does not have invite protection. (She also doesn’t have invite protection because she forged the invite, because Harry’s stupidity is catching.)
Someone else has also just noticed! Or more likely, been tapping their foot this whole time waiting for Harry to notice so they could jump in and pretend to just notice. I’m sorry he takes forever, evil monster. It must be so frustrating to be a villain in these books.
I turned to find Lea facing me, her hands on her hips.
Oh, it’s Lea! Hi, Lea.
Harry informs us she’s wearing a blue dress that flows like water around her hot bod. You might think this crappy metaphor is his brain dying as all the blood rushes to his dick, but no, there’s literally white foamy lace at its hem so it’s not Harry who’s lost higher thought processes here.
And then it goes on with She wore a cape of some material so light and sheer that it seemed almost unreal Wow, really, the literal magic fairy dressed in magic spells has something that “seems” “almost” unreal?
She asks if he likes the party and Harry remembers he has to pretend he has ideals so that Michael doesn’t lose his paladin powers for being around him:
“Oh, sure. Watching them drug and poison children and getting roughed up by every weird and nasty thing in Chicagoland is a real treat.”
And I guess that’s technically an objection kinda. I mean, he’s still enjoying the eyecandy of those same sexy, sexy children, and he was never going to do jack shit about it, but he’s mildly peeved about all this gross drug use happening right in front of him, especially when everything else is so unfun too.
Susan, having been thoroughly infected by Harry’s dumbassery, continues to refuse to leave. Despite this, we find out she put even more thought into her costume than we learned last time: She laid her hand over the picnic basket. “I came prepared.”
Meanwhile, HARRY’S preparation was to stuff plastic fangs into his mouth to make it more likely he flubbed a spoken spell. Betting everything would’ve been fine if he had just stayed home.
Furthering this, Lea reaches out to Harry and Harry, the dumbass who didn’t even cover his skin and eyes, grabs her with his bare dumbass hand, because he’s a dumbass. And we get more sexy godmom flashback stuff, followed by Harry talking about how he’s tired and she’s offering rest.
almost wept at the simple relief, at the abrupt release from worry, from hurt. My whole body trembled.
And this doesn’t work, which I suspect may actually get further into Harry’s issues:
It’s tough to say no to peace, to the comfort of it. All through history, people have traded wealth, children, land, and lives to buy it.
But peace can’t be bought, can it, chief, prime minister? The only ones offering to sell it always want something more. They lie.
I shoved the feelings away from me, the subtle glamour my godmother had cast. I could have taken a cheese grater to my own skin with less pain. But my pain, my weariness, my worries and fear – they were at least my own. They were honest. I gathered them back to me like a pack of mud-spattered children and stared at Lea, hardening my jaw, my heart.
This is presumably wizard training, especially given Lea is baffled by the fact he pulled this off. And think about what it says.
You basically want to invert normal reactions – to be terrified by feeling calm, to recoil from a lack of pain. And it’s not like you can’t do this to yourself – us ordinary muggles are capable of it. But surviving edge cases like that compromises your ability to function in pretty much any other setting, and I’ve seen nothing to suggest these overmen wizards have any real differences in how their brains work. Harry can’t set this to only go off in response to actual glamours. He even says it’s totally appealing, that there is nothing in there that’s false or tricky in feel.
This means it’s not just that Harry’s fed his emotions to his magic – it’s that feeding everything to his magic is the closest he can ever get to calm. If he still has functioning emotions, every time he relaxes will just trigger a jolt of panic. It’s only when he’s so numb he can’t even feel fear that it ever actually stops.
This may also explain why he appears to be so lazy. The longer he’s been in familiar surroundings doing nothing, the less likely it’s secretly a glamour trap that was sprung on him. When he’s actually moving around doing stuff, he’s either stressed or about to have a panic attack about how he’s not stressed. It would also explain why he does things in big, manic bursts.
“Broken faiths weaken you. They bind you tighter, lessen you every time you go against your given oath.” She sounded concerned, genuinely compassionate. “Godson, I beg of you – do not do this to yourself.”
I said, struggling to be calm, “Because if I do that, there will be less for you to eat, yes? Less power for you to take.”
“It would be a terrible waste,” she assured me. “No one wants that.”
Anyway, this is probably more sexy manipulative wominz, but I like the idea of fae that view us like a kindly farmer. Things that don’t mean to hurt you but are also going to kill you are way weirder than ladies who are sexy yet deathy.
“We’re under truce here, Godmother. You’re not allowed to work magic on me without violating hospitality.”
I think, at this point, we can definitively say there is no objective hospitality law getting enforced here. Violating hospitality is a binary thing. You don’t threaten to tattle if people won’t knock it off already. Pretty clearly, this is functioning the same as regular mundane agreements, where the question is if you’re willing to make a scene over an apparent breach and if anyone else is going to take your side should you do so.
With that in mind, we can say that probably neither Michael’s flesh-searing holiness or the dragon’s smackdown were actually allowed, but because neither party pressed the issue (and perhaps also both aggressors were scary enough nobody else wanted to volunteer involvement), it didn’t matter. Similarly, drugging the wine is less a clever technicality and more nobody gives a fuck what happens to Harry. Wizards who aren’t hated by both vampires and their fellow wizards would likely be provided with clean drinks.
This does have the plot hole of why Harry thinks he’s protected by hospitality law while being aware there isn’t actual objective law, but possibly he’s so familiar with the fae system that even knowing it’s not magically enforced, he just assumes people take it similarly seriously. Maybe the White Council in particular are super rules-lawyery about it when they’re running things and this is another point where Harry doesn’t know as much about vampires as he thinks.
Anyway, Lea just smugs that she wasn’t casting, then as Harry falls to bits, she explains that fairy bindings are kinda self-enforcing. Repeatedly, in greater detail each time as the humans just gawp at her blankly.
Finally we get to:
“What?” Susan said. “What are you talking about?”
Lea’s voice took on a patient, faux-sympathetic tone. “Poor little poppet. All of your efforts to learn and you still know so little. Harry made a bargain with me long ago – and broke it, once then, and once a few nights past. He swore to uphold it again, last night, and broke it thrice. Now he reaps the consequences of his actions. His own powers turn against him, the poor dear, to encourage him to fulfill his word, to keep his promise.”
Which I quote for the fact that a repeated thing throughout this has been Susan using what she knows to the fullest but being hampered by how very little that is.
I’m guessing the moral still won’t be “keeping people ignorant gets them killed” given all the time and energy being spent on how stupid, stupid Susan doesn’t realize the danger she’s in.
Anyway, despite Lea claiming that she did nothing, she does say that yeah a thing totally happened via proximity there, but that’s pretty reasonable given acceptable things happening via proximity involve Michael auto-smiting someone and a dragon slapping Harry around.
She then says that heeeeeeeeey if you’re worried, make a contract with me! ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼
“How much, witch? How much for you to make this stop hurting Harry?”
Now, if she had any idea how this worked, she could probably have a chance in hell of actually bargaining for something. But apparently Harry extra didn’t tell her anything about fairies:
“I don’t have much money,” Susan began.
So Lea suggests taking her eyes, then getting her name, then her love (interestingly, she does not specify “for Harry”, which I assume is what the book meant but actually taking all capacity for love seems way more life-ruining), then, when Susan is balking at all of this, she says well, just the memory of a year.
Which will, of course, mean she doesn’t remember her relationship with Harry, because Lea is really only doing this to mess with Harry, because wizards are the only people who matter.
“Memory for relief. Done,” Lea purred. She leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss upon Susan’s forehead, then shivered, drawing in her breath in a swift inhalation, the tips of her breasts hardening against the silky fabric of her dress. “Oh. Oh, sweet poppet. What a dear thing you are.”
So yeah, that happened.
Then she backhands Harry and fixes both the doggy lust and vampire lust.
“Witch,” Michael hissed up at Lea.
Honestly, if we must have misogyny I think it’d be tolerable if only it was ever confined to Harry as opposed to this free-floating affair. Michael knows exactly what she actually is, and even if he’s got an us vs them mentality where everything is either god or demon, he could just call her a demon. That it’s this particular word he leaps to, especially given the church’s history with women and “witches”? Not good.
Lea then defends that hey, people make choices and it’s not her fault they’re bad ones, but says the girl loves him and would give anything for him. which is really odd when ” a year of memory” is the third thing she offered because Susan turned down the first two. And without even considering it, or trying to bargain down to like, one eye instead of two. I guess that happened to establish how scary the things Lea can take are but when talking about the relationship that’s about to get wrecked the emphasis has to be on how utterly in love the two of them are so now it’s “give anything”.
Lea goes on to say hey what about getting in on the pact funtimes I know you want that sword~~
“Myself, for the Sword,” Michael said. “Done.”
She let her head fall back and laughed. “Oh, oh my, dear Knight, no. For once the Redeemer’s blade was in your hands again, you would find the shattering of our pact a simple enough matter.”
So, he can’t do jack shit to protect Harry from the deal Harry made because hey, rules are the rules, but he’s got immunity from having to hold to any bargains he personally makes. This is definitely not the Christian god we’re talking about here, and neither is he any kind of paladin. I’m not sure what he is, but it’s starting to sound like it’s more a “marked servant of allied demon” sort of thing. He /isn’t allowed/ to poach other people’s stuff, but neither are they allowed to poach him from his master.
She then adds that he’s far too … restricted, for my tastes. You are set in your ways. Unbendable.” which does bring to mind the issue sometimes levied at the idea an immunity to fear isn’t in line with wanting a “good” paladin or the act of a “good” power, because fear is a necessary thing and to carve it out of people is damaging. And it really does seem like it must be a supernatural effect because since when do fae find people with rigid codes of conduct and strongly-held loyalties that could easily be pitted against each other boring?
I don’t think we’ve seen enough of Michael, especially when we’re not in his head and Harry is verging on unreliable in his description of others, to be sure if there’s something actually wrong about his emotional range, but…he does seem to talk ethics more than act on them, doesn’t he? Like maybe he really was a good man, and he remembers being a good man, but the core that originally drove those feelings is gone. And so he says to Harry, “I cannot stand by and watch vampires murder innocents!” because he remembers how he couldn’t do that. But once inside and actually watching, well, he definitely stood by without acting, and it doesn’t seem to have even taken effort to do so.
It’d also explain that early weirdness where Harry’s gruesome methods of attacking ghosts and fae is ignored but he’s chided for lying. Pre-Sword Michael never had reason to formally articulate an opinion on ethical treatment of imaginary creatures but ran into lying all the time. Or even back at the shop when he was looking for his wife, and how he didn’t try explaining for sympathy but chose to be a looming threat – that’s a scenario that likely hadn’t come up before, so he didn’t have much of a remembered guideline on how he acts in such a situation.
It’d also explain why Michael does not, in any way, seem proud: Michael stiffened. “I serve the Lord as I may.”
I said this isn’t the Christian god, but an important caveat is that Michael does not necessarily know that. He seems to believe that whatever she’s talking about here is something only justifiable because he needed it in order to properly serve good. (This also adds a new dimension to him wanting to believe the loss of the sword meant he was done with the whole thing – he may think he’ll be allowed those parts back. It did seem rather out of character for someone who was all about being a noble hero to jump to the idea he was done with it so easily, but if there’s a lot more to it than just having to go out a lot to battle evil, it makes more sense.) I think it is fear or something like it – something along the lines of being able to decide on a course of action and be unswayed by doubt. To be impervious to other forces in the service of what you know is the greater good. You’d be immune to things like torture (both direct and by proxy), which would make you extremely boring to a fae.
Lea agrees that what he just said is about him being “holy” and, well, like I’ve said, holy power in this keeps getting portrayed as causing agonizing injuries. The thing that makes him boring is the same as the thing that empowers him with the rest of the holy effects, but exactly what it is remains unclear. The only sort of clue we get is that when Lea threatens his family and he reacts with aggression, she quotes a snippet of the bible that’s pro-vengeance, only to add that rage weakens his powers. Lea would seem to be pointing out his powers do not align with where he thinks his powers come from.
Now…why would vengeance be against his code? Why would rage? I mean, if this thing is not a good as he thinks it is, but rage and threats aren’t particularly good either, why would it have an issue? His exact words are indeed a vicious growl. “Stay away from my family, faerie. Or I will set such things in motion against you as will destroy you for all time.” which is a trifle dark, but she’s talking about going after innocent kids and he’s at least not going on about how that eventual destruction is going to require a whole lot of torture to reach.
I’m thinking perhaps it’s caring that’s the issue. Even this negative emotion is rooted in a positive one.
“Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and anyone who does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me.…”
It’s a shame we haven’t had much in the way of bible verses from him, because if he was quoting stuff like this, we could start to construct an idea about what his sect’s beliefs are from what kind of passages are mentioned and what are not.
And perhaps…I mean, his reaction just doesn’t feel very faithy, you know? When bad things are happening to him or Harry, it’s “the lord works in mysterious ways but it’ll end well somehow”. When bad things might happen to his family, he reacts with personal threats. And that suggests that whatever power this is, it’s not one that generally concerns itself with protecting the innocent, nor one that will allow its servant to put his family over obeying its orders. It’s not one whose interpretation of the above passage would include “don’t worry about your family because I’m already protecting them”.
Anyway Lea laughs and disappears. Michael asks wtf, Harry says he doesn’t even know what a self-inflicted spell is and will have to ask the rapist skull, because as a magic geek he doesn’t know there can be different kinds of spell triggers.
Michael says well, he’s still fine but it’s getting late. I’ve got a bad feeling that we’re going to run into trouble if we don’t get out of this place soon.”
One thing we may be able to deduce is that Michael’s sect apparently so anti-rationalism he can’t even point out objective facts like “Susan is completely unprotected, probably everyone already knows and if they didn’t they just figured it out by seeing the three of us together and knowing Harry could only bring one person”.
But at least he’s still able to process information. Harry, not so much:
“Susan? Are you okay? You ready to get out of here?”
We end on the stinger that oh my god the person who just got memory drained doesn’t remember him. Wow, really, how unforeseen, here I thought that the evil fairy who explicitly said her first choice was to destroy Harry’s relationship did absolutely nothing that would impact their recent relationship and eating those memories was just a completely arbitrary decision that wouldn’t matter at all.
(Incidentally – still, pretty good choice by Susan, especially given she had no idea how anything works! If you have any faith in your actual relationship, you’d assume that it’s better to forget about falling in love but still have the ability to do so again.)
This got cut off somehow.
Yup, got interrupted and then forgot it.
Man, I’d completely forgotten how stupid this party was. I had been thinking it went straight from Harry seeing Susan to Harry making some sacrifice so that she and Michael could get out clean. I totally forgot that Susan joins a long line of innocents paying for Harry’s mistakes.
Hmm… maybe a faerie took the memories from me? Thanks, faerie!
Things that don’t mean to hurt you but are also going to kill you are way weirder than ladies who are sexy yet deathy.
A lot of gods in fantasy get treatment in this vein, and I do enjoy it. Though generally they don’t kill you, just eat your soul after death. It is totally jarring to have a creature that has the kind of empathy we associate with humans simultaneously use humans for sustenance or entertainment.
This means it’s not just that Harry’s fed his emotions to his magic – it’s that feeding everything to his magic is the closest he can ever get to calm.
The ’emotions into magic’ continues to be my favorite theoretical worldbuilding fix. In addition to it making Harry’s various personality problems more interesting to explore, it also gets me curious about what it must be like to give up magic (voluntarily or otherwise), like Mort seems to be doing.
It’s a gift that keeps on giving.
And, frankly, it’s just more interesting to portray wizards who have to pay for their powers daily, becoming miserable piles of obsessions and neuroses, than it is to have them as just normal people with cool powers.
I agree. And so does Zouken Nasu. It also gives a nice layer of complexity to evil wizards, since the difference between them and the heroes can’t just be boiled down to “I’m just fundamentally a good person and they’re not.” They all react differently based on how much/what kind of magic they originally used.
We know now that Victor von Onewizardindustrialrevolution (RIP) was a workaholic who became even more manically industrious under the influence of magic. Morgan clearly devolved into zealotry from all the warlock-slaying, assuming that even is zealotry and not just a perfectly justifiable grudge against Harry specifically. Either way, I think you could categorize the two as having the same basic reaction to magic use, though Crazypants obviously went a lot further down the rabbit hole.
Harry’s reaction was pretty much the opposite: burning himself out over and over until the state of collapse becomes his comfort zone. I don’t think we’re supposed to see Harry’s increasing indolence as heroic. Like Farla laid out in the original post, we should see it as a decline from a heroic origin. At this point in the series, the big question would be how long he can keep it up.
They all react differently based on how much/what kind of magic they originally used.
…
Harry’s reaction was pretty much the opposite
What if the problem is Harry’s a generalist? Each type of magic fucks you up in a particular way, but it’ll leave the rest of you be and usually that’s enough to be functional. Some types of magic may be more dangerous than others – maybe Shadowpants the industrious’ focus on summoning/creation/empowerment ends up with you stuck on manic, while ghost stuff eats ambition and willpower (maybe to feed to the ghost to let them manifest?) and so pretty much all “necromancers” quickly become washed-up has-been fakey-fakes as they realize this is a sucker’s game.
Harry is kind of special, in that most people who try to multiclass get unbalanced on a couple of axises and self-destruct but he’s managed to pour so much of himself into his spells there’s not enough left for even that, leaving him wandering around in a daze.
I think it would contradict later lore as the White Council wizards seem to be generalists as a rule.
I’d say the issue is intensity. Normal wizards would pace themselves and move between arcane areas to counterbalance psychological damage and allow those parts of themselves to recover, but Harry specifically seems to just pour everything he has into his magic.
If we go by tragedy of a fallen hero theory, we may postulate that he did it to help people where other wizards would wash their hands and say they need to give necromancy or evocation or whatever a rest for a month, come back then if you aren’t eaten by ghosts yet. As he’s spent more and more of himself, however, he gradually lost capacity to care and became what we see now.
Victor is in a similar boat in that he went hard on magic and never looked back, causing his rapid deterioration. The focused nature of his mania can, indeed, be explained by a rather specific field he picked as his primary specialization.
Morgan is probably similar in that he doesn’t want to rest, he wants to fight evil, damn it, and he uses specific fields of magic to do so, concentrating mental damage.
Morty, on the other hand, has a problem of being a focused practitioner. Necromancy is all he has, he can’t switch between magics the way full wizards can, so as long as he’s in the game, he always spends specific parts of himself.
I don’t think the lore really does a good job of establishing wizards as generalists, though. Part of the problem is that Butcher doesn’t give characters the screentime to show that – he tells it and I’m not interested in Butcher’s telling.
The rest of what you said is probably spot-on, though. We see how, with a little more combat magic, Morgan might end up abbreviating that justic system wizards have and going straight for naked steel every time.
Morte’s a weird case in that the new system doesn’t outline how you’d ‘lose’ your powers. Butcher obviously thinks people who scam others get punished by God with impotence or whatever, because Morte clearly wants to use magic and is still within his faculties.
Maybe what happened to Morte is common to necromancers, where their body or subconscious puts on an internal block on all death-related things because necromancy makes the body think it’s dying.
That would line up with a lot of what Harry does, really. This book he’s created a ghost pendant that took a huge amount of effort for him, and that’s clearly some school of abjuration rather than his specialty. He’s constantly making batches of two potions for the sake of ‘efficiency’. What if making two potions is actually something learned wizards don’t do even though they can? Bob would know this, obviously, but Bob as established is interested in seeing Harry wring himself dry.
Then of course Harry is constantly punching above his weight class. Morgan and the White Council probably know that yeah, any wizard pushed into a corner can really throw down, which is why even an idiot like Harry is greatly feared, but if that wizard is interested in being sane, he’d better stick to picking manageable opponents.
As we’ve established in an earlier headcanon, wizards gain their near-immortality by selling out to Summer fae. It’s also canon that they court Winter fae pretty heavily.
So, yeah, I can see them being very heavy and hyper-literal on rules simply because they deal with fae so much.
It also explains the need for emotional inversion training, since glamour is an ever-present danger for them.
So, basically, Conviction 5. Excess of a virtue as a toxic flaw.
On unrelated note, do you remember an old discussion about how all wizards should shave their heads obsessively to prevent sympathetic magic shenanigans? Well, Unknown Armies provides an answer to that, as it often does:
“Hairdresser Conspiracy
Hair has always had mystical connections. It’s a part of you, but you can cut it off with no ill effects. Moreover, it grows back on its own — try that with an ear, see what you get. It’s “a woman’s glory” by no lesser authority than the Bible, but it betrays on every bad hair day. When it comes to making symbolic effigies of people, hair’s only competition is fingernail parings. Real talk here: loose hair’s a lot easier to acquire.
Cutting someone’s hair, then, lets you weaken them Samson-style or symbolically become them, or lets you make them look out of style. A fair number of adepts of various persuasions associated themselves with hair stylists in the 1940s in order to maintain a supply of this mystically potent stuff.
That, then, is the root of the Hairdresser Conspiracy. Barbers who weren’t occultists noticed the darksome meddling with their clients and they didn’t like it one damn bit. After a few attempts at direct confrontations had unexpected consequences — one Oklahoma medical museum has some absolutely ghastly images of a barber who killed himself after hair started growing on the insides of his mouth and throat — they found a subtler solution. They discovered an alchemical concoction that drew down the fixative powers of Saturn onto hair, disconnecting it from its source and rendering it magickally sterile. But how to get it onto all the hair?
The answer is that blue gunk you still see in barber shops, with the combs floating in it. Thanks to the widespread adoption of this disinfectant for razors and scissors and such, most barber hair in the US and much in Europe is magickally neutralized before it even hits the salon floor. The product’s use is reputedly mandated, by brand name, in two states.
The Hairdresser Conspiracy was so successful that most of the people coming out of beauty schools in the US have no idea of the source of the superstitions embedded in their training. They just know you gotta use the blue stuff. Whether this elixir’s powers of symbol-solvency apply to anything but hair is a matter much discussed in the occult underground.”
See, THAT is proper worldbuilding. You want hair to be magic but you want the way we treat hair to be recognizable, so you throw more magic at the problem because the point of the setting is magic!
Unknown Armies in general is a fun take of classic urban fantasy tropes, what with magick consantly changing to reflect zeitgeist, conspiracies being generally local in scope and of limited influence and the unapologetically anthropocentric nature of the cosmos.
Part of it is that the game is much more interested in exploring human failure than human success, so it tends to emphasize practical difficulties and counter responses to magick schemes that other settings would normally overlook.
I’m so happy to read a new review :D …Wait, that’s it? That’s the chapter? But this stuff could’ve been compressed in a couple of paragraphs!
>>“Witch,” Michael hissed up at Lea.
This is just so fucking stupid. First of all, as you said, Ms. Cougar is a demon, not a witch. But also, WITCH WASN’T A WOMEN-SPECIFIC WORD. In some regions the majority of “witches” executed were men. I’m so anal about this because, while I get there was a linguistic drift, these books so far has been obsessed with telling us how “true magic” is totally unlike pop culture. You’d think that this departure from folklore would at least warrant a comment.
More importantly, Dresden never explains what connotation this word carries. Is “witch” a neutral term for any female magic user (then why would Michael use it as an insult), a term specifically for female users of dark magic (then how are non-evil female wizards called) or an insult (but wasn’t it used in a neutral way earlier? also, isn’t this like calling someone “a female” as an insult)? Why is the worldbuilding so shoddy in these books, argh.
>>Which will, of course, mean she doesn’t remember her relationship with Harry
Man, Susan made quite a bargain here. I, too, would gladly lose all of my Harry-related memories at the small price of a year of my life.
>>“Oh. Oh, sweet poppet. What a dear thing you are.”
Why does this character archetype always talks like thiiiiiiiis. Who even finds it hot.
Finally, I’m in love with your lore analysis. You always take this sort of inconsistent garbage worldbuilding and characterization and refine it into something legitimately cool, compllex and even tragic.
Knowing these books? Wizardess, probably.
>>Wizadess
Tbh, you could have presented this as fact and I wouldn’t even be skeptical. These books are kiiling my faith in the genre.
Then allow me to present it to you as fact:
Wizardess confirmed.
AAAAAGH I read the review of Fool Moon but somehow managed to completely forget this. Is my brain trying to save me by frying bits of itself.
A faerie took it.
Satsuki Kurogiri is our savior.
“I got got that reference”, says Steve Rogers.
God fucking dammit even I’d forgotten that. I meant to just remind everyone Harry identified the heartsploder as absolutely definitely a witch.
But now I know again. Where are the fairies when you need them????
They are capricious folk. They steal your memories solely so you would recover them at the worst moment.
I half-forgot myself. What I did was gamble on putting “wizardess” in the DQ search bar, and whaddya know? It’s the only result.
I win this round, faerie.
Sort of. “Witch” has been used to refer to men, yes, but it was almost exclusively used to talk about women. Even the Old English word was gendered.
Finally, I’m in love with your lore analysis. You always take this sort of inconsistent garbage worldbuilding and characterization and refine it into something legitimately cool, compllex and even tragic.
When you stare too long into the abyss, it’s really boring and your brain starts hallucinating something more interesting to see instead.
I still can’t believe we’re in chapter 27. It feels like absolutely nothing has happened.
Oh, a lot of things happened, it’s just that the narrative is disjoined, so they come across as padding rather than meaningful developments (and then there is actual padding: the point of introducing the dragon in the previous chapter was to introduce a dragon. He’s not going to contribute anything meaningful to the plot).
I think the issue is that nothing Harry cares about has happened.
There’s ghosts getting riled up, but as Harry won’t shut up about, ghosts aren’t people so them doing it because they’re being horribly tortured is just a bit annoying because it means he has to run around dealing with them. There’s an endangered child, but Harry is pretty sure the little slut deserves it for being desperate enough to offer him sex for her life. Murphy was attacked and he still hasn’t seen her in a dress, but he’s more or less saved her successfully. Lots of other people are going to be/already are dead thanks to vampires, but they were totally asking for it. And Michael’s family is in the line of fire, buuuuuut hey Charity is just some nagging shrew who never liked him and the kids are just vague sketches.
Correction: one thing Harry cares about has happened. He was used as a spiritual dine-and-dash by the neighborhood Superghost. As ever and always, personal threats to Harry break through the fog of his indolence to spur action.
Ah, you make a very valid point. That not only made him actually do several things, but he also keeps referencing that it attacked him and how messed up he feels.
So yeah, exactly one thing has happened in this book.
Come on, quite a lot of things happened. This book Harry has been a sleazebag, a victim-blamer, an immature douchebag, a creep, an apathetic asshole and a complete sociopath; he also has whined extensively and murdered a whole nursery. This does count as plot, right?
This book Harry has been a sleazebag, a victim-blamer, an immature douchebag, a creep, an apathetic asshole and a complete sociopath.
Stop Press: Harry Dresden Breathed