Last time, creating stuff. Now, let’s talk a bit more about Harry’s charsheet, since I took a second look at it and discovered some peculiar stuff.Also, the return of Tiger Soul down the line.
So, I’ve mentioned two of his aspects last time: Chivalry Is Not Dead, Dammit and Perpetually Broke. His High Concept and Where Did You Come From? aspects are Wizard Private Eye and My Mother’s Silver Pentacle, respectively. I don’t have problems with them. His other aspects, on the other hand…
His trouble aspect is The Temptation of Power, which on the surface looks solid: a character craves power, but of course it’s going to come at a cost. The GM can compel him to do evil things in pursuit of power and introduce NPCs that would propose various shady deals that would cost the character much more than he’s going to gain.
That’s what I would think the aspect was about if I were to simply glance over the charsheet (which… ah… I kinda did last time because “Chivalry” has burned far too many of my eyes to risk the remaining ones). The Mary Sue, however, hides in the details. Specifically, in the description of thought process behind choosing this aspect by a hypothetical player:
“After coming up with this idea, Jim rethinks the Doom of Damocles trouble, because defeating the dark sorcerer probably convinces the White Council of his good intentions—or at least leaves them with testimony suggesting he should be taken off probation. He decides to change his trouble to something else, and eventually settles on The Temptation of Power as a new trouble, suggesting a pattern where people offer him power he doesn’t want, but often needs.“
So, let me repeat. Harry’s Trouble aspect, the aspect that’s supposed to be a constant source of conflicts for the character to overcome, is about people giving him power which he humbly doesn’t want.
Honestly, there is not much to say. We’ve seen how well that works in the demon summoning scene. Everyone wants Harry! Everyone falls over themselves to seduce Harry to the dark side by giving him everything he may desire! But he’s just so humble and noble and so absurdly powerful that he refuses that power because of course he’s going to resolve the problem without it!
Dear Cthulhu, and we didn’t even see the most outrageous examples of it yet.
Moving on. His What Was Your First Adventure? aspect is Not So Subtle, Still Quick to Anger. The aspect by itself is fine, if a bit wordy, but again Harry is painted in the best light, which is not something he deserves:
“Jim uses the story skeleton concept (see above) as the basis of Harry’s third phase and titles it Storm Front. Harry ends up in trouble with all sorts of authorities—wizards and cops at the least—over the course of the story and ruffles a lot of feathers, insisting on getting the job done himself, his way. He settles on Not So Subtle, Still Quick to Anger as his aspect, reflecting Harry’s particularly bull-headed method of getting things done.”
The dumb way.
In here, it’s clear that our perception of Harry is vastly different from that of books’ fans. For them, he’s a ragged hero buckling rules, butting head with unreasonable authority, trying to do the right thing, but sometimes falling short because the world is just so cruel and unfair, and undermines even his noble chivalrous ideals (Murphy, you see, only hates him opening doors for her and such because she had to put up with really sexist men in her work, so now she is blind to how good he actually treats her).
They don’t see the misogyny, they don’t see the laziness, stupidity and cruelty of Harry. And it’s easy to understand why: the book doesn’t tell us about that. The book tells us about a good guy down on his luck.
It shows us something very different, but many people ignore it because it’s easier to go with the flow of the narrative and, in case of misogyny, because they can afford to ignore it.
In other words, Harry Dresden is Buck Williams without a phone. Make that his aspect, devs.
Anyway, his final aspect for Whose Path Have You Crossed? is Epic Wiseass, another nail into the small and sad coffin of the word ‘epic’. It comes from a short story I didn’t read. The summary provided in the book sounds pretty absurd, though:
“Jim ends up with the card for Shannon’s character, Karrin Murphy. They talk about what he might contribute to the story, and Jim advocates for the direct route—Harry comes in with a display of power and helps save the day. Shannon agrees.
The card for Murphy’s “Restoration of Faith” story says: “When a child is missing, beat-cop Karrin Murphy goes looking for her. But will she succeed when a troll comes into the picture?” Jim adds, “Harry Dresden gets right up in the troll’s face, trades some quips with it, and unloads on it—using its own weapon to smash it!”
Jim decides to take Epic Wiseass for Harry, as befits both the quips and the nature of his achievements.”
Note the conflict in tone and theme in the second paragraph: child missing, good chances of being dead since that’s what happens to a lot of missing children, Murphy is a beat-up cop with not many prospects for success who’s going to try anyway… Then a troll arrives, and Harry… trades quips with it? What.
Well, if nothing else, it’s a good illustration of Butcher’s style of smashing two genres together without regard to their inner workings. The first part sounds like a good setup for a modern noir: the world is shit, innocents die, one cop stands against it. The second part, however, clearly came from something like Mortal Instruments: urban snark with fantasy creatures thrown in because they’re cool.
The story in question was also written long after people insist books get good, so you may take it as an indication of things yet to come.
Oh, and here’s Harry’s comment on this section:
“Hey, “Restoration” was MY case. What gives?!”
Stay classy, Harry.
Well, that about covers it. His skills are not particularly interesting, aside from him actually being pretty poor at fighting and shooting, despite his love for his fists and gun, and the rest of the shit is fine.
Now, back to the book.
Chapter 6: Advancement
This chapter deals with character advancement throughout the game, and is pretty close to FATE core. I didn’t cover advancement in my FATE review so as not to get too wordy, so let’s talk about it here, now that such concerns no longer apply.
Advancement is tied to the concept of milestones. Milestone is basically any moment signifying upcoming change. Minor milestones typically occur simply at the end of each session, significant milestones mark the end of scenarios, and major milestones are something that happens very rarely and signifies some kind of major achievement, like resolving a big plot you followed for a dozen of sessions, or the city changing irrevocably due to a new threat, or something.
Each type of milestones gives players an opportunity to change their characters a bit. Minor milestones allow for minor adjustments, like swapping two ranks of two skills you have, renaming your aspects while remaining roughly in the same theme (High Concept cannot be changed, however) or purchasing new powers and stunts* (you can do only one thing at the time, though. They serve to fine-tune the character taking into account actual game experience. Perhaps you’ve found that a skill you liked doesn’t see much use with the party game style, so you swap it with something more useful. Perhaps you feel one of your aspects doesn’t quite reflect what you want to play, so you adjust it. It’s actually a pretty neat idea, especially at the beginning of the game when you are just testing waters in regards to your character.
*It may seem like a big deal, but it really isn’t. Most of your powers are defined by your template anyway, and most players would pick the rest before the game proper, plus you can’t remove powers from your charsheet. So, in the end, the rule is here in case you’ve decided you want these enhanced senses more than a Fate point.
Significant milestones give you the benefit of minor ones, plus one skill point. You can use it to buy a new skill at 1 rank or to upgrade one of your skills by a rank (or you can hoard it to buy a skill at a higher level later, but it feels rather pointless). The rule about skill columns still applies, however: you can’t have more high ranked skills than low ranked. For every skill at rank 2, there must be at least one skill at rank 1. As such, character progress is often limited as you would first need to accumulate enough skills 1 to upgrade one of them to 2, to upgrade some other skill 2 to 3, etc.
Here I should note one thing FATE core does better than this book: it actually specifies a time frame and recommends giving significant milestones every 2-3 sessions. Going by Dresden Files RPG alone, the progress looks agonizingly slow to me as my scenarios typically run around five sessions.
Major milestones occur every few scenarios on average and are tied to some significant events changing the characters and the setting. They grant all advantages of significant milestones, plus a point of refresh with an opportunity to buy new powers and stunts. The GM also has an option to increase the cap on skills, allowing players to purchase higher skill levels. Increasing the skill cap can be done with or instead of giving a point of refresh. In the FATE core, the increase of skill cap is actually something players do, not the GM, and they do it by simply purchasing the higher level should they be able to afford it. This was made optional in Dresden Files RPG in case you want to preserve the game as relatively low-key or to prevent characters from becoming more powerful than high-tier monsters.
Eh, I don’t know, with enough refresh you are bound to be able to afford powers that make skill levels only somewhat relevant. The game does talk about changing the setup and not giving the players certain benefits should you want to keep the game grounded, but they are kinda divorced from this particular rule. It’s a minor quibble, though.
All in all, the advancement in FATE is relatively slow and was clearly designed with a long campaign in mind. It’s not a bad thing: while the shiny new things games like D&D offer with each level-up are nice, characters changing slowly helps the immersion, and there is enough freedom granted by minor milestones to adjust your characters according to the needs of the game.
Now, let’s talk about parts unique to this incarnation of the system.
First part is mid-session upgrades. Basically, you can buy new powers at any time as long as you have some kind of narrative justification. Changelings have it the easiest as they are designed to gradually get more and more powers, and it was mentioned that White Court Virgins (again, fuck this term) can tap into the powers of their full template in moments of desperation. For other types of characters, new powers would typically mean making a deal with some supernatural force or picking up an item of power, though the GM can allow for “awakening of psychic talents” and such, should that be appropriate for the tone of the game.
Permanent upgrade costs appropriate refresh, plus the number of Fate points equal to it. Temporary upgrades just cost Fate points. Should a player lack the necessary amount of Fate points, they still can buy powers, but they would then owe the GM a number of automatic compels (typically against their High Concept, typically about consequences of new powers) equal to the number of Fate points they couldn’t pay.
Should a character push their refresh score below 1, they become an NPC, though typically only after the immediate aftermath of whatever caused it is dealt with (so, a player would still control their character for a scene or two). Basically, it’s an option to go down in a blaze of glory and remove your character from the game afterwards. As I mentioned before, it’s a good thing in FATE to provide reasons for characters to die, and it’s handled well, ensuring that such events would be meaningful.
All in all, it’s not a bad system. There is a bit of a problem with items of power: with powerful artifacts, you can easily push yourself beyond your refresh, meaning you can’t afford to keep a cool sword if you don’t want to turn your character into an NPC, which goes against all of my instincts as a player. FATE is normally pretty good at keeping mechanics close to narrative, but here we see what is clearly a game abstraction for balance purposes.
The next section is about advancement of cities. Parts of it made their way to FATE core, mostly concerning locations and recurring NPCs, but they were a bit simplified in the process, and of course they didn’t include bits dealing with city themes and such.
The gist of it is that themes can be lessened, inverted or worsened. Lessening a theme means that the PCs struck a significant blow against whatever powers are behind it, so the theme aspect changes to something less bad or outright positive (Decay and Corruption becoming Striving Towards Past Glory, for example), inverting it means the PCs struck a decisive blow, so the theme changes completely, and the old source of conflict is no longer present at large, and worsening means the situation escalated, so now the theme is more prominent and more destructive than before.
Threats are easier. Many of them don’t have aspects to begin with, and once that do are typically tied to the threat directly, so once the PCs dealt with the threat, the aspect goes away as well. Should threat manage to succeed in their goals and engrave themselves into the city, their aspect can be turned into a city theme (probably with some rewording). Of course, the removal of one threat means a new one will rise soon enough, the rules are the same as in city creation for this.
Location themes can be changed as well, under same principles. It’s just easier.
Locations can also be added to the list of statted locations in case players find themselves returning to some place over and over, and removed from play (not necessary destroyed, just marked as no longer interesting to the group). The rules for adding locations are much the same as during city creation: deciding on aspect, face, face’s relationships with other faces.
These changes are tied to milestones, though in an opposite way compared to changes in PCs: change in city aspects indicates it’s a good time for the GM to declare reaching a milestone. The game provides a list of which types of milestones correspond to which change (lessening a theme is a significant milestone, inverting it is a major one, inverting a location theme is a minor milestone, etc.), though ultimately it’s just a guideline: if it took only a session to do something that would justify inverting a city theme, it doesn’t deserve a major milestone.
Then there are rules on advancing NPCs. They are much more fluid than that for PCs: basically, the GM can change NPCs as much as the needs of the game demand. The book proposes to stick to advancement rules for PCs when it comes to rivals and nemesises, keep NPCs static when they are part of the background or when the PCs are meant to outgrow them at some point.
The book also provides some advice on replacing faces, should the old ones prove boring or when they are removed from the game otherwise. Basically, it comes down to keeping things interesting: new face shouldn’t be the same. Even if they play more or less the same role, they should approach it from a different angle. It’s a good advice: when one dark lieutenant kicks the bucket, the next one should have a different MO, even if their goals are the same. Subtle manipulation vs brute force, code of honor vs everything is permitted, etc.
Well, the chapter is not particularly interesting, design-wise, but it’s solid and I don’t have any complaints… Except for the very last part, Harry’s comments. Or, rather, Spoiler’s comments…
Harry: Oh, look, the next page has me getting my ass kicked by yet another half-naked villainess. My life is messed up.
Bob: Sexy. Deadly. Honestly, I have no idea why they flock to you as much as they do, boss. Well, the former set, at least.
Spoiler: Now that you bring it up, that is something I’ve been struggling with while getting the art together for these books.
See, Georgia has me thinking a lot about how women get portrayed in game art—and I’m trying to stay aware of that—but I’m also trying to stick close to the source material of your cases.
Fidelity to the casefiles is important to me, Harry; it’s the best source of information I have. But this also means that 90% of the time I’m just going to be showing stuff that you’re doing. And that includes getting your ass kicked by half-naked villainesses. I mean, the Red and White Court vampires and the Fae seem to be somewhat clothing averse, and they’re not alone, so it does seem like a lot of your adversaries are running around half naked .
There are a lot of strong women in your life, but often that strength comes out in conversation, not action—but action is what makes it into the art. So we’ve got Murphy kicking ass here and there, the Archive completely going to town on the Denarians…but it’s not as extensive as I’ d like. We may have to live with that, though.
See what I meant by saying Spoiler often serves as a stand-in for devs? So, what this basically amounts to is a big fat excuse for problematic elements in illustrations I’ve talked about before. The devs clearly try to sit on way too many chairs here: they acknowledge the problem, try to place the blame on Butcher’s shoulders by stating they just follow the source material, then backpedal with comment that there are totally plenty of powerful women around, their power just isn’t showing in their actions, unlike their bodies.
They are aware what they are doing is problematic, but they aren’t particularly inclined to fix it.
Oh, and the term ‘villainess’ because of course.
Chapter 7: Aspects
I’ve talked about aspects before, so I’m not going to go into details. The chapter sticks pretty close to FATE core, though it also expands on various points and provides solid advice on how to come up with interesting aspects and how they are supposed to work in the game. Several examples of aspects in play are a bit iffy, but not particularly rage-inducing. I think it’s just seeing them in Dresden Files context puts me on edge.
One example is curious for people following Farla’s readthrough, however (from section on discovering aspects in play, guessing and getting it wrong due to being deceived by the character concealing their true aspects):
“Example: Harry is in a limousine with John Marcone. Unbeknownst to Harry, Marcone succeeded in an earlier Deceit roll that let him appear to be Well-Informed and Wary About Wizards. Like all good lies, this has a grain of truth in it: Marcone is indeed well-informed, but he’s not cautious in the way Harry’s been led to believe. When Harry goes for an Intimidation ploy to try to get Marcone to back off, he meets Marcone’s eyes and spends a fate point, saying he’ll invoke Marcone’s Wary About Wizards aspect to improve his roll, with the intent of getting Marcone to back down and break the eye contact before the soulgaze (page 226) hits.
But this is exactly what Marcone wanted. He opts to give back Harry’s fate point and turns the tables, putting a temporary aspect of Trapped by the Tiger’s Soul on Harry, and taking the tag to give him a free +2 on his roll as the two enter into a sudden, deep soulgaze. Harry’s doesn’t get the benefit of invoking an aspect that isn’t actually there and has gotten suckered into a soulgaze he didn’t want—with Marcone in the superior position!”
Marcone has Harry right where he wants him: inside his cold tiger soul. Ah, Marcone, provider of a fodder for dozens of jokes, where would we be without you?
Of note in this chapter is the Invoking for Effect section. I think I’ve discussed it briefly in my FATE review, but I’ll repeat myself here: basically, it’s a compel of a PC initiated by that PC’s player that is beneficial to the PC. For example, you may compel your Perfect Timing aspect to arrive at a scene just in time.
Invoking for Effect is a form of declaration. You can declare anything as long as the GM doesn’t object, but tying your declarations to your aspects should make the GM more willing to accept it.
Unfortunately, the section is rather brief. There isn’t any talk about the possible scope of declarations beyond “different groups prefer different styles,” which, yeah, no shit, Sherlock. I guess it’s possible a detailed description of declarations is buried somewhere in the “how to run the game” section or something, but I would have liked it here, since it’s tied to aspects rather heavily.
While I focused on negative and silly stuff for this chapter, it’s mostly pretty good. Aside from Invoking for Effect, aspects and their use are described very well, there is some solid advice, and the comments are back to funny instead of enraging.
That’s it for now. Tune in next time for… ah… more chapters concerning the system. But, well, who knows? There could be other comments requiring a rant or two down the line.
Well, this is embarrassing. Marcone wants Dresden inside him? I always assumed Dresden played catcher in these sorts of things. (Although it should be said that Marcone is still “in the superior position”; in any other case one could make a point about power and dominance in sexual situations and how being the penetrative partner ≠ being the dominant partner, though this being the Dresden Files, it probably just means superior in the sense of “on top”, i.e. riding the D. Oh well.)
The temptation of power is only a flaw if the character is actually tempted. How does Butcher not understand this?
“They are aware what they are doing is problematic, but they aren’t particularly inclined to fix it.”
Equality and fair portrayals of minorities IS important to them. Just not when that might infringe on their profits in any way. Or just be more work. Imagine the effort it would take to draw clothes! Do tits make female power more palatable to the sort of man who enjoys the Dresden Files?
The term villainess is used so that no-one will expect to see a half-naked Marcone or Nicodemus or Morgan. Because everyone knows the only people who play TRPGs are heterosexual white males.
Well, Marcone is inside Harry’s soul as well, just not trapped here, so…
Harry is actually going to be tempted down the line, and it’s hilarious. Goatee is involved.
And yeah, I actually don’t think I’ve seen an illustration of not-white person in the book so far. It was brought to my attention that at least some illustrations are lifted from comic adaptation of DF, so that’s where the problem originates. But, of course, the devs shouldn’t be excused for perpetuating it.
There are actually a few illustrations of half-naked Harry. One is with him in chains even.
http://s8.postimg.org/75r6q9l45/DFRPG.png
So there is that.
No, the problem definitely originated with Butcher’s writing; http://luciazephyr.dreamwidth.org/548703.html and http://seeking-avalon.blogspot.cz/2011/07/fuck-you-jim-butcher.html
There’s, what, maybe 10 named non-white characters in the entire series?
On the one hand, I’m loath to excuse whitewashing; on the other hand, I wouldn’t trust Butcher to handle racial minorities with any sort of sensitivity or delicacy. We already have Spicy Latina Susan Rodriguez, who is sexy and enjoys sex and has caramel skin because of course she does. I don’t think Butcher means to be offensive, he just doesn’t think about these things. So I’d say this particular problem is a Butcher original, though I’m sure the comic books perpetuate the problem.
Huh, well that’s an unexpected reversal of the status quo. So Dresden being a sub is canon then? He doesn’t seem to mind the chains much. (I love how the art makes it look like he’s focusing square on her breasts. Whoever drew this has Dresden’s character down pat.)
Well, yeah, Butcher is ultimately responsible, comics just didn’t help: there is a number of illustrations depicting characters that I don’t think are from the books (or at least aren’t necessary from the books), and it would have been easy to depict them as non-white, but since it seems the game borrows art heavily from the comics, well…
As for Harry, kinda. It’s from his backstory about a deal with a fairy. She wants to turn him into her dog. Literally, with a transformation spell.
Fair point; comics unfortunately don’t have the greatest track record when it comes to these sorts of things, do they?
Oh, yeah, I remember that part. It was to keep him safe or something silly like that, wasn’t it? Credit where credit is due; iirc, that was because of his mother and the deal she made with that fairy, meaning that, for once, it’s the protagonist’s sainted dead father who is the nonentity while the dead mother’s allowed to influence his life at least somewhat.
Yeah, that’s one good thing about the books: Harry’s mother actually appears to had agency. Her portrayal is still somewhat problematic*, but at least she has a portrayal beyond saintly dead mother or deadweight useless one.
(Also, I find the idea of a femme fatale with a kid funny. Just apply the standard archetype trappings to someone trying to raise a child.)
*She basically suffers from Bene Gesserit Syndrome: she is a woman with agenda and agency, so she’s vaguely villainous and manipulative, and also it’s ultimately her male kid who matters. It was fairly progressive for 60s, not so much now.
(Also, I find the idea of a femme fatale with a kid funny. Just apply the standard archetype trappings to someone trying to raise a child.)
“Does this dress make my gams look nice? Okay, I have to go now. Be a good kid while Mommy’s away.”
As a fan of the Dresden Files, I feel the need to correct you here: Harry is seen, by most book fans, as a character who desperately tries to do the right thing, frequently f***s it up, but never quits no matter how much trying hurts him. Plenty of people, in-universe and out, point out his flaws, and it’s something he works to improve over the course of the series.
To address some specific points:
I’ve addressed the door thing in another comment. As for the rest:
Lydia from the third book is a good example. Harry sees a homeless battered teenager asking for help, spends inordinate amount of time contemplating her nipples, then decides she’s obviously a femme fatale out to ruin him. She proceeds to get kidnapped by vampires while Harry takes his sweet time getting around her, all the while suspecting her of being the mastermind behind ghost attacks.
Yeah, she’s based on Butcher’s ex-girlfriend, which tells me more about him than I ever wished to know.
Well, that’s the thing: he usually gets involved where there is money or his own skin on the line (and even then he often had to be dragged kicking and screaming to actually participate in the plot), with innocent lives being a rather distant secondary priority. It’s best if I just link to the DF readthroughs done by this blog, since it’s a pattern that emerges over long time. They also just generally go into a lot more detail about the books than my RPG reviews where I mostly just reference stuff we’ve talked about before.
Lydia is trying to sell Harry on what the narration explains is the equivalent of those email scams that try to get your banking information, with a power that explicitly prevents people from believing you when you talk about it, and is doing so at a point where the deck is already stacked against Harry (or anybody in that situation) helping her. There’s a psychological study about how to encourage people to help others that explains this: a group of people is told to go over the Good Samaritan passage from the Bible, and another group is told to go over something else. Both groups are then sent over one at a time to another building to give a talk about what they went over. Along the way to that building is a person who appears to be injured. Know what the best predictor of who stops to help? It’s the people who were told that they were going over early, rather than running late or just in time. When Lydia shows up, Harry isn’t just late for a meeting–he’s dealing with a week of back-to-back ghost fights, being short on sleep, and this also messing with his relationship with his girlfriend, and he’s trying to go home for the night. And even with all of that, Harry helps her–he gives her something to protect her from the ghost and tells her where there’s a place she can go that ghosts don’t enter.
On Kim, I didn’t know the thing about JB’s girlfriend, but Harry’s problem there is that he views anyone who’s not a wizard-level talent as weak and mostly useless–it’s something he’s repeatedly called out on and works to fix in later books.
It’s explicitly noted that Harry could make a lot more money and be a lot safer if he wanted, and doesn’t because he cares more about helping people.
I’ve tried to get through your readthrough multiple times, and every time I end up dropping it because you sound like you’re deliberately looking for the worst possible meaning of everything–and I say this as someone quite willing to acknowledge that the series and main character both have a bunch of problems.
Lydia is trying to sell Harry on what the narration explains is the equivalent of those email scams that try to get your banking information
Except she is explicitly being truthful. So it’s nothing like an internet scam. The only thing she’s trying to scam out of Harry is his assistance to her impending magical doom.
with a power that explicitly prevents people from believing you when you talk about it
And, even knowing she has this power, Harry doesn’t even give a single thought to whether it’s having an effect. The only reason she has that power is to excuse his suspicions of her. There’s no explanation for it, it doesn’t tie into the themes (magical or narrative) of the story, it’s just… entirely disconnected from everything else in the book. The woman Harry thinks is a liar just happens to have a liar’s curse. How convenient.
What I meant was that it’s explicitly stated that people claim to have this power who don’t all the time to run scams.
So you’re blaming Harry for not being immune to her power. Got it. I’m not sure why you think Harry should spontaneously be immune to her power, but at least I know where you’re coming from.
She has that power specifically so she knows to go to Harry, actually. If she didn’t, Harry would never have met her in the first place.
The Dresdenverse basically runs on “all myths are true.” Having curses from Greek gods actually be a thing makes perfect sense. Narratively, it’s yet one more example of “power has a price.” Harry is a wizard and so can’t use technology. Lydia can see the future but can’t convince anyone to believe her. Faeries have power but can’t lie or touch iron. Stuff like that.
So you’re blaming Harry for not being immune to her power.
Yes, I think that knowing someone has a curse which makes you doubt them would at least cause someone to wonder if they’re actually being dishonest or if it’s the effect of the curse.
She has that power specifically so she knows to go to Harry, actually. If she didn’t, Harry would never have met her in the first place.
That’s still a non-diagetic reason. She has the curse because the narrative required her to have the curse.
Having curses from Greek gods actually be a thing makes perfect sense.
And why does she have it? Did she also refuse to fuck Apollo?
And I’m saying that the fact that he didn’t wonder is part of the curse.
She exists because the narrative requires her to exist, the same as every other character. I don’t get your point.
Don’t know, don’t have a reason to know. Maybe.
And I’m saying that the fact that he didn’t wonder is part of the curse.
That’s not how the curse is described, and even if it was, there’s absolutely nothing stopping him from saying “I don’t believe you, but I’ll trust you”. Especially when the most she has to gain from him is… his protection from a ghost that, thanks to the curse, he doesn’t believe is actually after her.
She exists because the narrative requires her to exist, the same as every other character. I don’t get your point.
Her curse is a complete tangent from everything about her character and her role in the story. Why does her curse exist? It exists so Dresden has a reason to not believe her, and absolve him from guilt when he’s being sad when she suffers because he didn’t believe her. If only he believed her. If only she didn’t have that curse, he’d have believed her.
Harry is seen, by most book fans, as a character who desperately tries to do the right thing, frequently f***s it up, but never quits no matter how much trying hurts him.
Except there are countless instances of Harry having to be forced to do anything, let alone the right thing.
Murphy never says that she hates him opening doors for her. Instead, she and Harry race for it.
Because Murphy doesn’t want to give him the chance to exert that dominance over her.
On Harry’s misogyny: is there any point, outside of the first book, where it ends up hurting anyone but Harry?
Name a female character who comes to Harry from a position of need to ask for his help.
(And don’t bring up Kim: that’s a different issue entirely.)
Butcher’s misogyny and Harry’s misogyny are intertwined.
And if Harry were “lazy, stupid, and cruel” he would have accepted one or more of the many offers of power he’s gotten
He didn’t because none of the offers of power meshed with his own self-image of being a good and chivalrous person who tries to do the best no matter what. Harry’s lazy, stupid, and cruel, but above all that, he’s egotistical.
And I will cheerfully agree with you that Harry really ought to be more proactive, and that him not being proactive is a character flaw.
What dominance? Seriously, how is Murphy not saying to Harry, “I don’t like it that you open doors for me, so you need to stop,” preventing him from exerting dominance over her. Seriously, the two outcomes of that are A) Harry stops, which is definitely not him exerting dominance over her; and B) Harry keeps opening doors for her, which he is definitely going to keep doing if she doesn’t tell him to stop.
Meryl, from Summer Knight. Now are you going to try and show that his “misogyny” (in quotes because I don’t really consider it misogyny after book one, which is what we’re debating here) somehow hurt her? Because I’m pretty sure it didn’t.
Except there’s no evidence of Butcher being misogynistic ever, so I guess you’re saying that, since Butcher isn’t misogynistic, neither is Harry?
The issue with Kim is that she’s asking Harry to give her knowledge of something dangerous which she is objectively incapable of handling, and then lying to Harry repeatedly.
I’ll post an analogy I used elsewhere for this issue:
It’s the equivalent of this:
Person A: Teach me how to pick locks.
Person B: Why do you need to know how to pick locks? It seems like a problematic skill.
Person A: Well, I just thought it would be a cool thing to know.
Person B: Well, here’s some of the theory…
Person A: Cool! Now how do I deal with *this specific type of lock*?
Person B: Are you sure you’re just interested theoretically? You don’t have a particular reason?
Person A: I promise, it’s just theoretical. Now, where, theoretically, would I buy lock picks?
Person B: I’m not telling you that! There is no way you need to know that for theoretical reasons.
And then Person A gets mugged because she was locked out of her house all night. That’s not Person B’s fault.
Well, no arguments on the egotistical part, but if someone who is “lazy, stupid, and cruel” does their best to act like a good and chivalrous person and tries to do their best no matter what, then that person is not lazy or cruel by definition. And if Harry were stupid, he would have been tricked into taking one of the offers of power made by people explicitly trying to manipulate him into accepting, so he’s not stupid either.
Except there’s no evidence of Butcher being misogynistic ever, so I guess you’re saying that, since Butcher isn’t misogynistic, neither is Harry?
:what:
The issue with Kim is that she’s asking Harry to give her knowledge of something dangerous which she is objectively incapable of handling, and then lying to Harry repeatedly.
The issue with Kim is that Butcher wrote a stand-in of his ex-girlfriend into his book series just so he could have her die horribly due to not listening to Butcher’s own stand-in. Which makes your above statement ludicrous to the point I can’t even articulate a response to it. It’s like saying the colour of the sky is pizzas. How do you even respond to that?
Anyway, from a diagetic perspective, the issue is that Kim died because Harry refused to help her. Not just by refusing her the information she needed, but also refusing to help with the situation that she required the information for in the first place. She only lied in order to get the information she needed to not be fucking murdered by a werewolf. Because, despite all indications that she needed the information whether she could handle it or not, Harry (who was certain he could handle it), did absolutely nothing to assist her in handling it.
He just refused to give her the information she needed to protect herself… to protect her. Giving her the information couldn’t have gone more poorly than not giving her the information did. And before you said “he couldn’t have known how poorly it’d go”, she basically told him “I’m dead if you don’t tell me”. And he didn’t investigate whether or not that was true before deciding not to tell her. He didn’t even investigate why she needed it.
If you think otherwise, please provide evidence, by preference in the form of quotes by Jim Butcher.
You see, you say that, but I’ve tracked down a bunch of Butcher’s interviews, been discussing the books with people online for years, and this is the first time I’m hearing anything like this, so…evidence?
That’s not exactly true, you realize. Harry didn’t help Kim with the situation because he didn’t know about the situation. He didn’t know about the situation because when Harry asked Kim multiple times about the situation she lied to him repeatedly. Kim choosing of her own free will to lie to Harry is not Harry’s fault. Harry not helping with a situation he could not have known about is not Harry’s fault. Kim didn’t lie “in order to get the information to not be murdered by a werewolf,” she lied in order to be the one to handle it herself, since if Harry had known about the werewolf, he would have said “yeah, you’re still not capable of making this circle, but the werewolf thing needs dealing with so I’ll deal with it.”
He didn’t know that she needed the information to protect herself, because when he asked her why she needed it she lied to him repeatedly.
She could have tried using it to summon a demon demigod (referenced as one of the things this kind of circle is used for), and having one of those loose in Chicago would probably be worse than what happened.
No she didn’t. I’ll provide the relevant quotes from the book:
See? She deliberately and repeatedly says that it’s not important, and certainly never says she’ll die without the information.
He asked her, repeatedly. And then immediately after that he got involved in trying to solve the multiple werewolf murders that were happening, so he sensibly prioritized saving lives that he knew were at risk from werewolves, given that he didn’t know and didn’t have any reason to know that what Kim was involved in would kill her without the information she was asking for.
https://dresdenfiles.fandom.com/wiki/Kim_Delaney
Scroll down to “World of Jim” section to get the relevant quote. There is a link to the record of his interview with a timestamp.
Well that’s messed up. Not really proof that he’s misogynist, since JKR did something similar with Lockhart (based on a former flatmate whom she couldn’t stand) and he did say that he felt bad about it afterward, but one does wish that he’d felt bad before the book was published so he could change it.
Except JKR didn’t constantly sexualize Lockhart and then kill him off in a way that led to the POV character ogling his body which is still sexy in death. That’s what makes it misogynist.
“constant”? She was in two scenes. And as I remember it, Harry didn’t ogle her body–he went into shock and nearly broke down on the spot when he realized it had happened.
Lockhart’s magical injury is also the result of a consequence he suffered due to his character flaws. Not because he was a stupid bitch who didn’t listen to Harry.
He talked about her tits in both scenes.
I’m curious what you would consider “proof.” I suspect it’s something like a quote in which Butcher literally says, “I hate women.”
The thing about misogyny — and all culturally-imparted, internalized biases — is that literally no one sits down, twirls their moustache, and thinks, “Now I’m going to write a story to punish women!” Misogyny is ideological, something we act out precisely when we’re least thinking about it because it’s been programmed into us. Identifying misogyny — and again, this is true of similar things like homophobia as well — is about identifying patterns that take place on a large scale over a period of time.
I think why you’re struggling with our approach here is that you’re trying to pull discrete events and evaluate their Sexism Quotient (TM) one by one. But that’s pointless, because nothing has meaning outside of context. That’s why everyone here keeps talking about patterns, the series as a whole, and the way tropes play out as part of the genre. The individual here is irrelevant. Whether Butcher personally did or didn’t do something on purpose is irrelevant. What Harry does on page 15 of book 7 is irrelevant. What matters is how the trends in the series interact with larger cultural trends.
A good example of this is the trope of the “wise Asian mentor.” It’s a crappy trope because it’s a pseudo-mystical role with a very flat character given to Asian (typically Japanese) characters instead of giving them more complex roles that reflect the many different facets of Asian culture and personhood. By representing Asians only in this one way over and over, the implication is that society sees them in a certain, flat, and devalued way.
So if you have a movie where you have a “wise Asian mentor” character, that might send up some racism flags. But! You can’t evaluate just that one tiny bit of the piece on its own. You need to consider the context. Like, what if the entire cast is Asian? What if it was made in Japan? What if the larger context of the trope is one in which Asians are given full interior lives and fill many roles?
Tropes themselves are value-neutral. It’s how they interact with texts, audiences, and society that provides a means by which to examine their use. That’s what we’re getting at.
You may not want to evaluate texts that way, or at all, but you should try to understand that what art and media criticism are is precisely that large-scale analysis, and bringing discrete points into it is never going to be useful or lead to any kind of genuine conclusion, because there’s always another isolated data point to bring up.
eta: Oh, also — you may notice that one implication of the “individuals are kind of beside the point” thing is that you too are beside the point. This is actually a good thing, because what it really means is that it’s okay to like problematic works. It doesn’t make you a bad person to read or enjoy these books. You may, if you’re especially ethically minded, decide that a work is so problematic that you don’t want to give the suthor money, so you pirate or buy used, or you may decide you don’t want it on your bookselves for small children to find and be influenced by. That’s a decision about morals only you can make for yourself. No one is judging you for enjoying something that has a misogyny problem, and it doesn’t make you a bad or sexist person to get enjoying out of something imperfect (short of like, Mein Kampf or some extreme shit). Everyone has guilty pleasures and lowbrow tastes and stupid deep-seeded affections for imperfect things. It’s okay. Just don’t trick yourself into believing a text is something it isn’t.
What I would consider evidence (and not proof, since this isn’t exactly the kind of thing that you can prove without talking to the guy directly, but substantial evidence is good enough) of your claim that Jim Butcher is a misogynist would be direct evidence (ie not you saying so, but rather quotes by him or reports by people who have seen him do/say something) that Jim Butcher specifically and not his characters view women in general (rather than one specific woman who he dated and then ended up broken up with under circumstances we’re completely unaware of) as lesser in some way to men. If he routinely treated women badly at cons, for example.
Actually, the problem I have with your approach is twofold.
Firstly, I have a problem with the fact that, based on everything I’ve read of your analysis, you interpret everything in the worst possible way. You do not appear in what I’ve read from you to make any attempt to look at anything Jim Butcher has written or said in a neutral way, and that’s bad for analysis.
The second problem is that you don’t take into account context when it would make things better, only when it makes things worse. For example, your analysis of Harry’s description of Murphy is that it shows that Harry is a disgusting misogynist who objectifies women and thinks that a woman’s purpose is to wear makeup. The context that you’re not taking into account is that:
A) This is the first book Jim has ever published, and he’s acknowledged that it was badly written.
B) Sticking descriptions of people into first-person perspective writings that don’t mesh with what the character would actually be thinking in that scene is a very common problem for new writers who try to write in first person.
C) Part of the reason that Jim got published was that he had the first three books already written so the publishers didn’t have to do much work, and as a result I would be astonished if the first couple of books got much editing, if any.
D) This description in particular feels badly written and jammed in.
Taking this context into account, wouldn’t it make more sense to assume that this description is an example of Jim’s bad writing rather than an example of Harry’s misogyny? (I don’t excuse every example, of course: Harry’s insistence that the person committing the murders is a woman is misogyny, is called out in the scene, and is proven wrong at the end.)
So if you have a movie where you have a “wise Asian mentor” character, that might send up some racism flags. But! You can’t evaluate just that one tiny bit of the piece on its own. You need to consider the context.
Hell, even one of the first characters that pop into people’s heads when you think “wise Asian Mentor”, Mr. Miyagi, has a lot more depth and character to him than people give credit for. He’s by far the best developed character in the Karate Kid series. You learn exactly what in Mr. Miyagi’s life shaped him to become the man he is today.
This is actually a good thing, because what it really means is that it’s okay to like problematic works.
Thank God for that, otherwise I’d be screwed. One of the few manga I’ve ever given a 10/10 rating to is also one of the worst, most offensive manga I’ve ever read. But it is almost beautiful in how perfectly it manages to offend, and how deep its depths get. But I’m like 99% sure it was written as a political protest rooted in discontent for Shinzo Abe by a hentai manga artist, so that kind of makes sense.
it doesn’t make you a bad or sexist person to get enjoying out of something imperfect (short of like, Mein Kampf or some extreme shit)
And, even with something like Mein Kampf, you can still think it’s a fascinating look into the mind of a depraved monster. Anyone who doesn’t want there to be another Hitler should really read that book. Agreeing with Mein Kampf is what makes you a bad person.
A) This is the first book Jim has ever published, and he’s acknowledged that it was badly written.
The fact that Jim Butcher got a book published just to prove a woman wrong kinda says something on its own.
Taking this context into account, wouldn’t it make more sense to assume that this description is an example of Jim’s bad writing rather than an example of Harry’s misogyny?
I don’t think anyone’s saying it’s not an example of bad writing, but… it can be bad writing and also misogynistic. One is a technical issue, the other is a content issue.
What you’re describing is not cultural context; it’s the individual circumstances of Butcher at one specific moment. That’s precisely the thing that doesn’t matter when evaluating trends.
Also, I think you’ll find everyone here agrees this book is badly written. I’m not sure why you see “this is a bad book” as a defense of the story instead of part of the issue.
your claim that Jim Butcher is a misogynist
No one is claiming Butcher is a misongynist. No one knows him and no one really thinks his personal feelings matter. You’re stuck on the idea of this being personal. What I’m trying to get across is that examining a text has zero to do with any individual thing the author has or hasn’t done. What’s being identified are circumstances in the text that contribute to or reflect larger cultural mores that perpetuate misogynistic thinking.
Again, no one on the planet sits down to write and thinks, “Time to screw over some women!” No one is giving you that quote because no one is arguing from that premise. If that’s the only way you’re interested in thinking about art… I mean, you do you, but you’re kind of on the wrong blog.
I don’t want to assume that you think that there is nothing more important about a person than their gender, but it kinda feels like that’s what you’re saying here.
What I’m saying is that the appearance of misogyny is caused by the bad writing. If it were written better, just for a start, it would have to be pared down to a sentence or two–and I’ll bet you anything that a description of Murphy that is only a sentence or two long isn’t going to read as misogynistic (in fact, in later books where the descriptions are shorter, Murphy’s description boils down to “short, stocky, muscular, blonde hair and blue eyes”).
It’s a book. Are you honestly saying that the circumstances surrounding how it was written and published have no bearing? I’m not evaluating trends, I’m evaluating a series of books.
I’m saying that if fixing the technical issues of the book have a good chance of also getting rid of the appearance of misogyny, then it’s not misogyny, it’s bad writing. (This obviously doesn’t excuse every example of misogyny in Storm Front, only some of them.)
CrazyEd is, and that’s who I was responding to.
I’m not arguing from this premise either, actually.
I’m not evaluating trends
Yes, that’s precisely my point. We are, and it’s why you’re having so much trouble understanding where we’re coming from.
I don’t want to assume that you think that there is nothing more important about a person than their gender, but it kinda feels like that’s what you’re saying here.
What I’m saying is that the appearance of misogyny is caused by the bad writing.
How many times do we have to explain what a trend of behaviour is, homie?
He didn’t know about the situation because when Harry asked Kim multiple times about the situation she lied to him repeatedly. Kim choosing of her own free will to lie to Harry is not Harry’s fault.
She lied because this is Harry acts in situations like these. This is consistently how Harry acts in situations like these. He can’t even keep Murphy in the loop immediately after promising to keep her in the loop. Like, right after promising her, the first opportunity he had to tell her something he noticed, he did not. Over an incredibly minor detail he noticed. Kim’s only chance to get the information was to trick it out of him.
She could have tried using it to summon a demon demigod (referenced as one of the things this kind of circle is used for), and having one of those loose in Chicago would probably be worse than what happened.
How convenient for Harry it works on both regular werewolves and “demon demigods”. Whatever those are. This is what I mean. The narrative defends Harry. He didn’t suffer from this lack of trust, he had a completely valid reason. But Kim did. Because Harry didn’t even trust her to not summon an eldritch horror, and could not be trusted enough to just not be a dick for one fucking day.
he sensibly prioritized saving lives that he knew were at risk from werewolves, given that he didn’t know and didn’t have any reason to know that what Kim was involved in
So he knew the circle worked on werewolves, just got a case involving werewolves, and couldn’t connect the dots? Man, no wonder he’s the only wizard detective in the phonebook. It’s the only reason anyone would ever call him.
Well, yeah. Because according to the information that we have, Harry giving her the information would have resulted in Kim running off to build the circle, not having the skill to do it, and getting killed exactly the way she does in the book.
If she’s more interested in getting the circle fixed than in proving that she could handle it herself, on the other hand, she’d have told Harry and he’d have said “I’ll fix the circle.” Which was what I said he’d do earlier.
He spends plenty of time suffering from similar lacks of trust, and it leads to character development where he learns to trust people more.
Kim suffered because she lied to Harry and overestimated her own abilities. Kim is not a child, and her actions are her own responsibility. Stop trying to strip Kim of her agency just because she’s a woman and Harry’s a man.
Why should Harry trust her when she was lying to him? It’s like the lock pick analogy I posted earlier–she was asking for inherently dodgy knowledge, and then lying about why she wanted it. The only thing Harry did “wrong” in that situation which would have changed anything was that in the end he chose to trust Kim and didn’t try to follow her to find out why she wanted the information or report her to the wardens.
Not sure what you mean here. Could Kim not be trusted? Harry? Trusted with what? What does one day have to do with anything?
Well, given that he didn’t even know about the different types of werewolves until later, I’d say that when he was looking at the circle he couldn’t possibly have known that it worked on werewolves. And later, he wasn’t thinking about the circle on account of being distracted by the people being murdered.
Stop trying to strip Kim of her agency just because she’s a woman and Harry’s a man.
You can try to play that Uno Reverse card as many times as you want, and it’s not gonna work.
??? So far as I can tell, you are saying that Kim is not responsible for choices that she made of her own free will and without coercion. Instead, you are saying that Harry is responsible for them. If I’m misinterpreting you, please say so, but otherwise I would like to know how you justify this.
What’s “not gonna work” is you trying to convince me that Harry is a misogynist because he didn’t forcibly prevent Kim from making her own bad decisions. As I pointed out in an earlier post, even if he told her exactly what she wanted to know (which he had good reason not to do), it wouldn’t have saved her.
you are saying that Kim is not responsible for choices that she made of her own free will and without coercion
She’s not. Jim Butcher is.