Last time, our heroes just finished heroing it up to save a whole roomful of newborn babies – the most baby babies you can get!

Today:
Michael rested his chin in his hands and sighed. “I can’t believe we’re in jail.”

Okay yeah, but, like, noir + ignorant muggles. Of course you are.

If we’d skipped the car sequence, if Harry hadn’t whined about dumb ungrateful muggles, if it’d just started with them doing the hero thing, then this kind of reversal would work. But we already know regular people don’t believe in this, so shoving your way into a roomful of babies with your giant swords and toxic dust isn’t going to go over well.

“Look at this. Speeding, failure to obey traffic signs, dangerous and reckless operation of a motor vehicle. And here’s the best one. Illegal parking. I’m going to lose my license!”

It WAS reckless, though. It was even more reckless than they even know, because anything Harry’s driving has an increased rate of failure and contrary to what some people might think, cars fail in ways other than not going.

Years ago, I was sitting in a car on the highway, with a high wall on one side. A car a little ways in front suddenly turned at a right angle and smashed right into that wall, somehow missing the cars in the lanes between. The guy driving certainly didn’t decide that his car needed to make friends with the wall. Something just broke at a very bad time. If that had happened somewhere there were people on a sidewalk, they’d have exploded all over the hood.

And bear in mind Harry doesn’t even have power steering (invented within Harry’s limit, but not added to the first commercial car until 1951, so not on Harry’s ultra-vintage ride), so Harry’s ability to maneuver his giant speeding pile of metal is shit. I don’t care how muscular you are, you are not going to be able to turn on a dime without power steering. So even before something goes more wrong, he’s weaving through traffic in something he can barely control.

So yeah, I think dangerous and reckless operation is quite fair. If Harry wants to take his own life into his hands like this, he should get a motorcycle. It’s not even that big of a risk for him because we know from the first book that his shield charm solves all momentum issues, so the bike crapping out underneath him won’t turn him into a bloody streak on the pavement and it’s small enough it’ll do less damage smashing into everybody else.

Michael says Harry should forgive the lowly mundanes for what they can’t understand, and sorry Michael, while I’m fine with Harry getting smacked over his behavior, there’s been no sign people can’t understand, just that they won’t and that’s very different. There isn’t even the issue that understanding is bad in some way – a lot of more horrory things argue that people are better off not knowing for their own sanity, but there’s nothing intrinsically awful about magic in this one. There’s some scary stuff but also a lot of tools and coolness. People not recognizing heroism because they’re a bunch of lazy idiots is really not sympathetic, and it’s not even something I can root for the hero overcoming because it’s so incredibly frustrating I just want it not to happen in the first place.

Harry, though, after a short rant about how We don’t get paid for it despite literally making his living on doing magic for people and totally getting paid for exorcisms normally, says that okay, he’s really just upset because he doesn’t know why this is happening.

Except you do, Harry. There was barbed wire you said made the ghost mad. It seems unlikely that’s naturally occuring, both because your description sounded like someone had very deliberately wrapped the ghost (no sign of any other wire or loose ends like it’d blundered into something) and because barbed wire is a manufactured substance in the real world.

Michael half-smiled. “The Lord will never give you a burden bigger than your shoulders can bear, Harry. All we can do is face what comes and have faith.”

Now this one, maybe it’s partly me not getting faith, but – that woman who died. She didn’t even smother her child because she thought her kid would be better off dead. She was just so scared and desperate, in part because of the abuse that was already heaped on her, that it happened by accident – and this new trauma was so awful she hacks off her own hand and presumably bleeds to death. Bleeds to death with just the corpse of her husband and baby for company.

Most people will never see things get that bad, and almost no one will ever see it that close up. It’s easy to understand someone saying that everyone’s burdens can be shouldered when they’ve never seen someone’s back break under one.

But Michael just saw her. Does he think God only gave her what she could handle? That if only she’d had enough faith, it’d have worked out okay? And how many other things like that has he seen before, in all the other times he’s been out dealing with matters serious enough to need a holy sword? Does he just not think about them?

I gave him a sour glance. “I need to get myself some bigger shoulders, then. Someone in accounting must have made a mistake.”

Seriously the both of you, you just met someone whose life was a thousand times worse than getting stuck in a cell for an hour or so! I don’t care if the ghost wasn’t literally her and was just the faithful reproduction of her in her final worst moment. If you want to debate whether or not God makes mistakes when he’s handing out burdens, she should be the one you’re talking about!

Michael just says what matters is they did the Right Thing ™ and Harry’s all yeah…the babies were super cute, and I’m going to smile quietly somehow not making any connection to that woman killing her baby and the general suffering of the world. Also seriously uranium dust is incredibly, incredibly toxic.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the permissible exposure limit for uranium exposure in the workplace as 0.25 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 0.2 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday and a short-term limit of 0.6 mg/m3. At levels of 10 mg/m3, uranium is immediately dangerous to life and health.

And this is for adults. Humans actually don’t absorb metals very well…at least, adults don’t. We lose the ability as we age, and that’s nowhere as dramatic as in the first year of life. Newborns, like, say, those hanging out in the maternity wing of a hospital, are basically little sponges, and that’s before we consider that they’re also way smaller than the adult and have fewer pounds to distribute the toxins over.

Michael’s smile faded. “Charity,” he predicted, “is not going to be very happy.”
I winced. Michael’s wife. “Yeah, well. All we can do is face what comes and have faith, right?”
Michael grunted, somehow making it wry. “I’ll say a prayer to Saint Jude.”

Although we’ll be told shortly that their marriage is great and all, that just makes Michael’s behavior even worse. You don’t pray to the saint of lost causes over your spouse if you have the slightest respect for her.

Let’s back up from the standard lol-ball-and-chain jokes and actually consider this. Michael considers what he is doing important enough to lay down his life. His wife apparently does not agree with what he’s doing. That’s kind of a problem for a relationship!

And no, we don’t even get the idea that she does respect this but also worries because she loves him and questions quite how big of a sacrifice he should be making, because she’s about to chew him out over having to come down to post bail for him. This is just women not approving of men’s hobbies, which is a huge red flag in a normal relationship and absolutely disastrous when we’re talking about literally saving newborn babies from death.

A woman in a roomy dress and a heavy cardigan stood waiting for us, her arms folded over her seventh or eighth month of pregnancy. She was tall, with gorgeous, silken blonde hair that fell to her waist in a shining curtain, timelessly lovely features, and dark eyes smoldering with contained anger.
“Michael Joseph Patrick Carpenter,” she snapped, and stalked toward us. Well, actually she waddled, but the set of her shoulders and her determined expression made it seem like a stalk. “You’re a mess. This is what comes of taking up with bad company.”
“Hello, angel,” Michael rumbled, and leaned over to give the woman a kiss on the cheek.
She accepted it with all the loving tolerance of a Komodo dragon. “Don’t you hello angel me. Do you know what I had to go through to find a babysitter, get all the way out here, get the money together and then get the sword back for you?”
“Hi Charity,” I said brightly. “Gee, it’s good to see you, too. It’s been, what, three or four years since we’ve talked?”
“Five years, Mr. Dresden,” the woman said, shooting me a glare. “And the Good Lord willing it will be five more before I have to put up with your idiocy again.”
“But I—”
She thrust her swollen stomach at me like the ram on a Greek warship. “Every time you come nosing around, you get Michael into some sort of trouble. And now into jail! What will the children think?”

This is not a loving relationship. This is a “well as a Catholic I don’t believe in divorce” thing. And, given that it’s a book where magic heroes have to save babies, the moment we stop viewing this as just a hilarious gag about men being from Mars and women from Venus and isn’t it silly how they never agree, we’re left to think about the fact Charity cares more about appearances than dead babies – unless Michael doesn’t even tell her and she thinks they actually are just getting drunk and larping their way to injury, in which case now it’s Michael who’s horrible.

Anyway, once we’re done with it being funny how women yell and Harry makes a big deal of how shocking it is that this pregnant women is scary, she crumples and starts crying because, I mean come on, she’s a girl you know?

Michael held her very carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking her, and stroked her hair.

And what’s sad is that for the book, this isn’t even bad writing. He’s just copying a script here, hitting the standard beats, but the problem is so many of our scripts are awful. Women are only ever fierce out of concern for their husbands and children, and they never have any actual power to enforce it anyway, and of course they start crying right after when incredible fear and sadness are required for the threats to happen.

A much more nuanced version could get into issues of socialization – women are more likely to cry than men, after all. But characterization needs to account for the fact they’re still crying for the same reasons any person cries.

1) They’re overwhelmed by emotion. While the script suggests that they’re being angry because they’re so sad at the idea of bad things happening or whatever, just ignore, crying because you’re just so incredibly furious you’re short-circuiting is a lot more likely. And crying because you’re overwhelmed doesn’t mean you stop being upset about it and forget it ever happened until next time. If Charity’s brain just hiccuped because she’s got no other outlet for how upset she is, either she’s going to come back to the argument shortly OR their relationship is built on silence and denial that boils over every time this happens.

2) They’re being manipulative. In which case, they’re not a good or trustworthy person! Misogyny has given us the idea that this is normal and generally shitty romantic tropes have presented all sorts of horrible behavior as things you just have to put up with. If this is true, the best case scenario is that neither of them know how to communicate and Charity thinks this is the only way she’s allowed to behave. More likely situation is that she’s seeing that her other arguments didn’t work so she’s switched to sobbing and is waiting to see if that’s successful.

Either of these things being true is not only more respectful of the character as a person rather than a prop, but it would mean this scene actually mattered because it was setting up for future events.

If Charity is an actual person with her own motivations, she’s going to be doing something about this whole “going out with Harry” business. She’s either extremely upset or she’s willing to do all sorts of things to get her way, and in both cases, it seems unlikely this is the end of it. However, if Charity is just doing this because the script says the wife has to be a sobbing nag, then this is just here to check that off.

And it sure seems like it’s just there because for the script’s sake, because Harry goes on to emo about how this clusterfuck is true love and he wishes he had that whine whine so sad and alone.

how well the two of them matched one another—Michael with his quiet strength and unfailing reliability, and Charity with her blazing passion and unshakable loyalty to her husband.

“Michael, with his traits, and her, defined completely by him. #relationship goals”

While this asshole is whining about how nobody wubs him, Susan shows up. Instead of reacting to her emotionally, Harry gives her a once-over and describes how very hot she is. She also compliments the happy couple, and he explains that Michael rescued Charity from an actual dragon, which just makes her hating him doing the hero thing look even worse (and given that epic fail of a true love depiction, raises the uncomfortable fact that relationships built off life-shaking one-off events aren’t very stable).

met me halfway, giving me a long and gentle hug that made my bruised ribs ache. “You okay?”

Ironically, this actually does look like a real relationship. Susan looks at Harry and is concerned for him. She’s aware of what he’s doing and knows it’s necessary. She’s curious about what’s going on in his life.

In this case, that means she’s curious what’s up with Michael.

“As far as I know he’s a carpenter.”

Ouch.

Look – if you’re setting up for a character to actually BE Jesus, this is a clever reference, but it’s contrived if someone who’s just metaphorically like Jesus because they’re both nebulously good happens to be a carpenter.

Harry explains that Michael’s power is being a righteous man, honest, loyal, faithful. He lives his ideals. It gives him power.

And yeah, the idea of a modern paladin/the idea that paladinhood can just be an ideal, that you can have people who bend the world just by being good is a nice one.

But it’s badly out of place in noir, and like all paladin things, is pretty hard to write without inviting whining about how your character isn’t actually that great. I’ve already done some of that whining about the issue with lying and the lack of issue with pouring firedust on breasts, and I’m sure I’ll have more soon.

And then finally, there’s the issue that despite being several chapters in, this is still mostly informed attributes. We know he values “honesty” to point of caricature yet doesn’t mind speeding limits being broken. Otherwise, his main character traits are distracting Harry mid-drive to complain the guy needs to get married. He did decide to save the babies, but even Harry barely needed convincing to do that, and Harry was the one in real danger doing so, so it’s not very impressive in comparison.

A loyal person wouldn’t have been “welp, sorry Harry, you should’ve said you had a fairy deal, sucks to be you!” And perhaps you can argue that getting himself killed in defense of Harry wouldn’t be very loyal to his family, but that gets into why divided loyalties are such a problem to a paladin type. You can’t give everything you have to multiple causes.

he’s humble too,” I said. “If you asked him if he was righteous, he’d laugh at the idea. I guess that’s part of it.

Harry. He puts on a fucking white cloak before heroing. Humble he is not.

I can just barely buy humble being compatible with having a super special sword, because maybe the sword literally chose him so he doesn’t have to personally think he’s the best possible choice to wield it, but the only reason for that cape was because he thinks he’s special enough to have a cape, and the only reason to wear it into the hospital is that he damn well wants everyone else to know he’s that special.

Harry explains about how it’s one of three swords from the three nails on the cross.

one of three weapons given by God to mankind

This is getting into another issue.

A lot of Christian myths involve chunks of Jesus or demijesuses (saints) having magic power. If you think about it, it makes sense – the Christian god is a very hands-off type and his one big intervention was sending himself down stuffed to the gills with godly power. In that line are smaller interventions involving stuffing a regular human full of miracle-granting goodness in a similar way. The idea there’s lingering holy power stuff that touched that flesh works with the idea that God is very very big and very very strong and very very special. And with holy objects being established as those connected to human flesh which is connected to the divine, actually handing people weapons seems rather weird and OOC for God.

Now, you can make the argument that, say, God meant to holify the nails and did it explicitly so you could stick them at the base of a sword one day, but that’s ridiculously convoluted. Worse, it doesn’t really work with the established canon, which is that this is just an innate property of stuff that’s indirectly touched God. That’s generally why every fragment of the True Cross has incredible powers.

So the idea of a nail in a sword making a holy weapon is quite sound, but the idea that it’s God giving us the weapons rather than accepting this is human-made is absurd.

Only one of the righteous can wield them. The ones who do call themselves the Knights of the Cross. Others call them the Knights of the Sword.

Ah, the old problem of two cool titles and you can’t pick one.

Here’s the thing – you need a really good reason why people are using a different term.

The usual reason for this kind of disagreement is that there’s a huge difference between how they present themselves and what they really are. About the only reason I can see everybody else refusing to use “Cross” is that they’re competing Christian groups who dispute the idea these guys really are holy, and that just can’t be everybody. Even if every person in the world is now Christian, only a sect relatively close in belief to theirs is going to be bent out of shape by their claims enough to want to deny the whole idea in the very terms used to talk about them. And you’d think those people would be more direct and say something like False Cross or something, anyway.

If you just told me there’s Knights of the Cross who most people call Knights of the Sword, I’d think the point was to highlight their murderously stabby behavior being in opposition to what you’d expect from people presenting themselves as the good guys. Why else would everyone put the emphasis on their weapon?

Susan wants to know are we talking like, THE Crucifixion here?

I shrugged, uncomfortably. “How should I know? Michael believes it. That kind of belief is a power of its own. Maybe that’s enough.”

Here’s another religious issue – while many view things as all or nothing, there’s actually a lot more to it than just that yes, God is real and is Jesus and got crucified and then the nails were stuck in swords or else nothing was ever real and it was just a bunch of apes deluding themselves into faith powers. It’s already known that faith has power, so the sword having power

A) God is real, God-Jesus got crucified, the sword has the nails from that.
B) God is real, God-Jesus got crucified, the sword has some forged nails from the 12th century or something.
C) God is real, Jesus the man who wasn’t God got crucified, the sword has nails from that.
D) God is real, Jesus the man who wasn’t God got crucified, the sword has some forged nails from the 12th century or something.
E) Another god or some godlike power is real, Jesus a man who wasn’t God got crucified, the sword has nails from that.
F) Another god or some godlike power is real, Jesus a man who wasn’t God got crucified, the sword has some forged nails from the 12th century or something.
G) There is no god, Jesus the man who wasn’t God got crucified, the sword has nails from that.
H) There is no god, Jesus the man who wasn’t God got crucified, the sword has some forged nails from the 12th century or something.

When you start thinking about it that way, the issue of if there’s an actual cross that these nails come doesn’t really matter. A crucifixion happening does nothing to prove Christianity true, and the sword not having the actual nails does nothing to prove it false.

I just want to get back home and get some sleep.”
“No date, I guess.” She smiled up at me, but I could see the expression was strained around the edges.

And here we go. We’re established truwub requires girls nagging you about what you do, therefore she must now do this, and because the script says it’s a stupid complaint based on stupid girl feelings, it’s going to be just awful.

“I know what you’re doing is important, Harry. I just wish, sometimes, that—” She broke off, frowning.
“That what?”
“Nothing. Really. It’s selfish.”
“That what?” I repeated. I found her hand with my bruised fingers and squeezed gently.
She sighed, and stopped in the hall, turning to face me. She took both of my hands, and didn’t look up when she said, “I just wish that I could be that important to you, too.”

And of course Harry is just OH NOES BUT YOU ARE IMPORTANT!!! and not HOLY SHIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.

She isn’t saying that she wishes the world worked in such a way that Harry didn’t have to go out and do this kind of thing. That would be understandable! And she isn’t saying this about something that’s generally important but not literally saving babies from immediate death, where wishing your partner put a bit more priority on being with you would make sense.

This isn’t selfish, this is monstrous. And manipulative, because there is no way “I just wish that I could be that important to you, too.” wasn’t a wholly intended guilt-trip meant to put Harry off-balance. I don’t buy that someone who handles words for a living would be so terrible at communication she’d just accidentally say that when she really meant something more like, “I’m just sad we don’t get to have dates.”

As Harry stammers, she doubles down with “Oh,” she said, still not looking up, “it’s not that. Like I said, just selfish. I’ll get over it.”, a great way of cutting off the actual response of yes, that’s unbelievably selfish. This way, not only is Harry bad for not thinking she’s important, but he’s bad because she’s made sadder by saying it! She’s completely cut off any response other than groveling and self-flagellation.

Harry struggles to say he loves her but I’d never said them to anyone I didn’t lose and how many people has he said he loves, exactly? Yes, he has a single dead girlfriend and I do respect that trauma and all, but that’s a “last time I said that to someone, something horrible happened”, not “every time I say that to anyone, something horrible happens”. How many dead people does he have in his backstory? I’m pretty sure we nailed down his age as mid-twenties at this point, he’s never mentioned other dead girlfriends, and the only other major person in his life was his dad and his mentor. Unless he was also making out with his mentor, that’s still just two, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t manage to choke out the words before Morgan and his enormous sword left so that loss was I-love-you free.

Unable to manage words, he kisses her, and Harry, given we just established you could only have had one girlfriend, surely there’s a pretty similar ratio of you having never kissed anybody you didn’t lose. If Harry was doing the gritty string of meaningless conquests thing before now, I could buy it, but there’s no sign of that either.

Anyway kissing makes the complaining stop because that’s how you handle women and she’s back to just badgering him about a story.

Harry then heads home and finds all is not quite right.

looking around the summer night with a scowl.
“What’s wrong?” Susan asked.
“Mister,” I said. “He’s usually running right up to me when I come home. I let him out early this morning.”

Even aside from how we all know Mister is secretly something terrible, he’s actually got a solid track record of reacting to bad stuff, so yeah, that’s ominous.

Rodriguez, despite being there last time Harry was attacked at home, is all eh whatever and suggests he’s just got a date himself, because apparently she doesn’t understand that if a cat has a date, you and everyone else on the block know about it.

“What if he got hit by a car? What if a dog got him?”
Susan let out a laugh and walked over to me. My libido noted the sway of her hips in the little skirt with an interest that made my aching muscles cringe. “He’s as big as a horse, Harry. I pity the dog that tries something.”

Dammit, he’s trying to be a responsible pet owner for once, why are you discouraging this!? You can have sex with him later, it’s not like that’s a rare occurrence.

Harry is almost hypnotized by her sexy sexness…but he can’t get over how his asshole cat hasn’t knocked him down yet. And then suddenly shadowy things moving and cold energy! It’s vampires!

So now we know whatever evil faction Mister is part of it’s not the same as the vampires. Also, there are vampires about.