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Strictly speaking she's only mostly dead since let's be honest, she's definitely an Einherjar now. Just based on ages in the books she's 31+however long it's been since summer knight
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Apr 19, 2024 05:20
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Azhais posted:Strictly speaking she's only mostly dead since let's be honest, she's definitely an Einherjar now. Yeah she's explicitly pushing 50 when she dies since Harry's in his mid-40s and she's a few years older than him.
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Apr 19, 2024 06:01
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Personally, I think after Ghost Story my interest in the Dresden Files took a nose dive. That characters I liked all seemed be getting sidelines and because of power creep they were shifting from noir mystery to the book equivalent of action movies. Fortunately, I found better urban fantasy books around that time.
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Apr 20, 2024 02:16
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Dresden files could have and should have ended at Changes. Everything after has been... Not bad, but absolutely not as good as what came before.
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Apr 21, 2024 01:51
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The world could have continued after changes but Harry should no longer have been the main character. Follow Butters, or Murphy, or Molly. Or someone new. Or the Alphas.
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Apr 21, 2024 01:55
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Let him settle down with his kid and then maybe have a book where he births his brain baby and maybe one where he deals with his stupid Cthulhu killer destiny. Butters and his magic Batman gimmick we only see glimpses of is way more interesting than 50 year old man still thinks about hard nipples.
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Apr 21, 2024 06:11
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:Let him settle down with his kid and then maybe have a book where he births his brain baby and maybe one where he deals with his stupid Cthulhu killer destiny. Butters and his magic Batman gimmick we only see glimpses of is way more interesting than 50 year old man still thinks about hard nipples. Look he has Wizard Immortality so he can be in his prime forever!
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Apr 21, 2024 15:24
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And the mantle makes him horny too so that’s cool. <— winter reference
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Apr 21, 2024 20:05
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I lost interest when the overarching storyline took over from individual stories. The "big story" is weak, comparatively.
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Apr 21, 2024 20:16
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I liked Ghost Story a lot more than most people but yeah I would have been fine with the series ending there.
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Apr 21, 2024 20:32
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:Let him settle down with his kid and then maybe have a book where he births his brain baby and maybe one where he deals with his stupid Cthulhu killer destiny. Butters and his magic Batman gimmick we only see glimpses of is way more interesting than 50 year old man still thinks about hard nipples. No you see, he's not thinking about them! That's why he has to tell us he's not thinking about them so often, and in such great detail. Especially since he's known her since she was in training bras.
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Apr 21, 2024 22:13
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I got Peace Talks and Battle Ground at the same time and never even got to BG. Peace Talks has to be the horniest book I've ever read in a weird, uncomfortable way. The whole Butters wolf threesome thing and that entire sequence with... was it Lara? In a shaft or something put me off the series for good.
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Apr 22, 2024 01:29
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I don't think you're missing anything. I've been a fan since the third book and I genuinely like Fool Moon and Peace Talks was very disjointed and weird and Battlegrounds felt like he was trying to do an Avengers style thing but also the rules are gone for reasons so everyone is just blasting with all their power all the time. I'm not normally one of those people who looks up authors because I want to support death of the author and try to divorce the work from the writer even knowing that it's not possible. Like some authors make it impossible to not dislike them. Terry goodkind is the prime example of the books informing you of the author pretty well. But the weird turn Dresden has taken really makes me wonder if Butcher has 1: really taken a dislike to women and 2: really taken an interest in young women. Because it seems like he's using Harry to work through some stuff. I really want to know where Lash is coming back. Unless Bonea is the result of that tease he made years ago. Which would be... Whatever I guess. I haven't read anything else but the first Codex Alera and I finished it and felt it was a big nothing burger. It's a real shame because nothing has ever quite hit the same vibes as the first few books. I tried Alex Versus and hate read the entire thing. I don't know why I kept at it but God drat did every part of that series just continually annoy me. I know there are a couple other series people recommend but I've heard one turn into erotica at some point and the others I've only heard mentioned once or twice so I haven't bothered. At one point I tried the Monster Hunter International books and boy oh boy did the protagonist of that first book make Dresden look saint like.
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Apr 22, 2024 02:31
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How the gently caress do you even pronounce Bonea? If it's a pun based on her living in a wooden skull (boh-NEE-uh? boh-NAY-uh?), that's the dumbest poo poo I've ever heard.
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Apr 22, 2024 02:43
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I was guessing Bonnie.
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Apr 22, 2024 02:46
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I'm definitely not as down on Dresden as the majority of (the people who frequently post in) this thread. I genuinely enjoyed the last few books. I do think it would have been cool to have Harry not be the focus after Changes or Ghost Story or something though. There could have been a time skip and have Maggie be the protagonist as she starts getting into the wizarding life and seeing Harry's old contacts from a different eye. All the while she's sporatically learning from him in between his duties; or perhaps he even becomes an antagonist. It could help reground the series from all the power creep that has happened.
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Apr 22, 2024 03:36
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Ravus Ursus posted:I don't think you're missing anything. I've been a fan since the third book and I genuinely like Fool Moon and Peace Talks was very disjointed and weird and Battlegrounds felt like he was trying to do an Avengers style thing but also the rules are gone for reasons so everyone is just blasting with all their power all the time. I keep thinking about Laurell K Hamilton and how the Anita Blake series went from "sex-heavy but interesting urban fantasy" to "lady you need therapy, stop shoving your kinks at everyone" right around the time she broke up with her longtime partner. Anita's love interest in the first books was explicitly based on the author's partner, so he got dumped from the plot and Anita started having nonstop sex with everything that moved. It makes me wonder, just a little, if Murphy was in any way based on Jim's ex.
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Apr 22, 2024 05:06
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It's been discussed before, but Butchers first wife, who he split up with after i think Ghost Story. Was heavily involved in his previous work. She was his editor, which is definitely a good way to get around the 'Too big to be edited properly anymore' problem a lot of successful authors succumb to. As well as being heavily involved as a sounding board, note she's a succesful author in her own right. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 10:05 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 09:56
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On the topic of less bad Urban Fantasy, the next Daniel Faust comes out in a few days. And the second “Inheritance of Magic” book by Alex Verus author Benedict Jacka comes out in October, looks like. The first one was decent enough but had to do all the setting details so I’m hoping number two will be better. Unfortunately Rivers of London seems to be doing the “million side projects” thing so who knows when the next one of those comes out.
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Apr 22, 2024 13:18
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Velius posted:On the topic of less bad Urban Fantasy, the next Daniel Faust comes out in a few days. And the second “Inheritance of Magic” book by Alex Verus author Benedict Jacka comes out in October, looks like. The first one was decent enough but had to do all the setting details so I’m hoping number two will be better. I was pretty disappointed in Winter's Gift, anyway. He may be running out of story ideas.
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Apr 22, 2024 13:33
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I've been making my way up the Faust series and related 'crossover' books, need to finish the third Wisdom's Grave book before I go back to the mains but I've been super lazy with reading lately. May pick up the new Jacka series, I liked Verus enough and his books tend to be on the short side. 
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Apr 22, 2024 13:47
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Edmond Dantes posted:
It's decent in the same way the Verus books were decent. A little more mechanical and by-the-numbers but also a little more explicitly anticapitalist, so  .
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Apr 22, 2024 13:51
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Deptfordx posted:It's been discussed before, but Butchers first wife, who he split up with after i think Ghost Story. Was heavily involved in his previous work. She was his editor, which is definitely a good way to get around the 'Too big to be edited properly anymore' problem a lot of successful authors succumb to. As well as being heavily involved as a sounding board, note she's a succesful author in her own right. Yeah, I don't want to read too much into personal circumstances that I know nothing about beyond the internet rumor mill, but Peace Talks/Battle Ground (Peace Talks in particular) read like maybe a second or third draft, and needed something to get knocked into shape. The storylines were fine, but the quality of writing was not what I'd expect from an experienced writer, and certainly not from the person who wrote, for example, Small Favor. Ravus Ursus posted:I don't think you're missing anything. I've been a fan since the third book and I genuinely like Fool Moon and Peace Talks was very disjointed and weird and Battlegrounds felt like he was trying to do an Avengers style thing but also the rules are gone for reasons so everyone is just blasting with all their power all the time. I'm kind of in the same boat as you, I think. My feeling has long been that Butcher's been deliberately writing Harry as an exaggerated loner nerd with some hangups about women, and that he knows that Harry's attitudes are wrong and consistently get him into trouble, but that Butcher also has some (hopefully not completely after all these years) unexamined baggage all his own that creeps into his work. It's never been enough to completely drive me away before (though it drove my girlfriend away from the books early on, and she'd been enjoying up til then) but Peace Talks had some especially bad moments, yeah. Also, on one hand, if this is the cringiest horniest thing you've ever read (universal 'you', not you the person I've quoted specifically) then I fuckin' envy you, but I'm also not nearly starved enough for reading material that I need to put up with that poo poo to get an enjoyable story about wizard superheroes (and even if I were I certainly wouldn't blame anyone for deciding differently). We'll see how I'm feeling when I'm in the retirement home and the next book comes out, but enh.
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Apr 22, 2024 14:03
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Honestly the world has also changed since he wrote the earlier books - don’t get me wrong, the creepy elements were creepy then and creepy now, but I think the skeeviness of stuff like the White Court, the Winter Knight rape fantasy stuff etc is all vastly more out of tune with the times than a couple of decades ago. It was much more common in sci fi and fantasy literature but discourse around toxic masculinity, sexual violence and consent has evolved and I think there is a wider expectation (rightly) it should be more sensitively handled these days. Basically I think a lot of Dresden has dated badly.
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Apr 22, 2024 15:45
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Urban fantasy has its antecedents, and they’re often even more problematic when it comes to sexuality and the male gaze. I think the biggest challenge in the Dresden Files is that it starts out very small-scale and dances for a long time along the lines of the kind of noir that uses the word “dames” unironically and features textual descriptions of women that do the equivalent of that archetypical “male gaze” camera move. But it isn’t just that the times changed since Butcher started writing, it’s that the genre he helped launch has undergone a lot of refinement and that makes his work look outdated. The plotline doesn’t help, as who Harry is now and what he’s doing has so radically departed from the sorts of stories he was part of at the beginning of the series. We’d expect him to be a very different person behaving in very different ways. But because of how Butcher characterized him at the start of the series, he’s trying too hard to keep him recognizably the same character. Picking “undersexed/horny” as a major character trait was suspect to start with, and it became a major plot point after Butcher opted to go all-in on the White Court Vampire thing. What’s unclear at this stage is whether this is what Butcher thinks his fans still like, or whether Butcher himself still likes it, or whether there’s some plot payoff books down the line that Butcher thinks justifies it. Maybe the larger problem is having “undersexed/horny” as one of the major character traits you assign to your characters; Molly has suffered now from the same thing thanks to her mantle, which implies Butcher deliberately wrote the mythology of his setting to protect and preserve his horny characters’ horniness. It’s been a long time since I read his Codex series and I only read the first of that aeronaut series. I recall the latter not being very horny (but cat obsessed); IIRC the former mostly confined its horniness to the teenage characters, which I suppose made it realistic but which didn’t mean it wasn’t cringey. I frankly find all the “alpha” content more objectionable. Harry’s creepy thirstiness doesn’t translate into action nearly as much as the broader toxic masculinity stuff does, and I don’t think Harry comes across very well when it does. “Men are naturally inclined to rape because alpha” is a lot more damaging than describing boobs boobing boobily, though I acknowledge that they’re usually on the same spectrum.
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Apr 22, 2024 16:18
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Blamestorm posted:Honestly the world has also changed since he wrote the earlier books - don’t get me wrong, the creepy elements were creepy then and creepy now, but I think the skeeviness of stuff like the White Court, the Winter Knight rape fantasy stuff etc is all vastly more out of tune with the times than a couple of decades ago. It was much more common in sci fi and fantasy literature but discourse around toxic masculinity, sexual violence and consent has evolved and I think there is a wider expectation (rightly) it should be more sensitively handled these days. Basically I think a lot of Dresden has dated badly. Dresden was a (and perhaps the) catalyst that invigorated the urban fantasy space. The genre existed before, of course, but there was a heavy slant towards smutty paranormal romance. I don't want to throw out hard numbers, but I feel quite safe in saying that prior to Dresden, the vast majority of what we dub "urban fantasy" was smut fiction with supernatural beings. Butcher came in and gave us something that replaced most of the smut with superheroic action sequences and brooding angst. The books were fun, approachable, and came out at a blistering pace. They sold like hotcakes and quickly spawned a whole host of similar fiction. He proved that (mostly) non-smutty urban fantasy could sell, and sell well. That makes Dresden the bridge across the gap between smutty paranormal romance and non-smutty urban fantasy, two sub-genres that are much, much further apart now than they were when Storm Front and Fool Moon were written. Since that day, other authors have crossed that bridge, and the urban fantasy space has grown and evolved on its own. Dresden, however, is still a bridge that touches both sides of the gap. Butcher could pull up those roots but has chosen not to. Maybe it's because he's got personal hangups about women. Maybe his publisher is risk-adverse and advises him to keep pandering to that audience. Maybe the world has moved on, and he struggles understanding it for some reason. Maybe it's something else entirely. It's probably a mix of stuff. Personally, he reminds me of a lot of people I know here in Oklahoma, who were raised conservative in a rural area, who generally are live-and-let live and have little-to-no hands-on experience with circumstances they have not themselves experienced. They tend to retreat to familiar (often bigoted) stances when challenged directly because they lack the emotional intelligence to work past the initial shock that comes from being challenged on a subject they don't intuitively understand. But whatever the case, I see Dresden as a transitional series that allowed the urban fantasy genre to thrive and grow past its smutty roots. Unfortunately, that makes it a series that feels out of date compared to other urban fantasy. Because it is. Edit: Hell, the noir influences are also problematic, and there's an entire lineage there that also plays into the "Dresden has its roots in some problematic poo poo, yo" that I haven't explored at all. ConfusedUs fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 16:30
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Blamestorm posted:Honestly the world has also changed since he wrote the earlier books - don’t get me wrong, the creepy elements were creepy then and creepy now, but I think the skeeviness of stuff like the White Court, the Winter Knight rape fantasy stuff etc is all vastly more out of tune with the times than a couple of decades ago. It was much more common in sci fi and fantasy literature but discourse around toxic masculinity, sexual violence and consent has evolved and I think there is a wider expectation (rightly) it should be more sensitively handled these days. Basically I think a lot of Dresden has dated badly. Wasn't there a time Murphy had to lose her jeans while trying to shimmy through a narrow place?
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Apr 24, 2024 12:29
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Dawgstar posted:Wasn't there a time Murphy had to lose her jeans while trying to shimmy through a narrow place? I’m sure Butcher thinks such things are justified as they amp up both the UST in what was clearly going to be Dresden’s only stable romantic relationship when it kicked off, as well as all the “Harry only sexes out of love” thing that Butcher made important through how the White Court Vampires function. Writing “UST” unironically reminds me of another big influence on the Dresden Files: the X-Files. I’d argue there’s some deep-seated issues with women lurking under that series and the sorts of stories that birthed it. Dresden really is a perfect storm of problematic influences and an author not best equipped to navigate them, and the genre still doesn’t have the same “default sexlessness” that you can see in some forms of Lord of the Rings-based fantasy epics. Personally, Dresden-level ick seems more tolerable than Game of Thrones-style “we’re just depicting violence against women realistically” though I admit I’d be less tolerant if I had to deal with “incel” types in my social groups or online. I don’t think Dresden fits that category at all as a character, but the vibe is present. Juvenile sexiness is a defining characteristic of the series. Either the next book will see some maturity happening as Dresden has to navigate a political marriage to a vampire, or it will be a deep embarrassment and proof Butcher just can navigate a way out of the problem. But fair enough for those who tapped out given how long and problematic the wait has been.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:36
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I don't really think there's any special reason to assume Butcher will get better about it. Like even at its absolute best the White Court Vampires are horrible rape monsters that he had to write in a "actually threesomes reset the love-o-meter" loophole just so that one of the major 'good guy' characters wasn't literally raping people all the time. He twists himself into knots to justify why the White Court are not "Harry literally explodes any single one of them on sight" and are instead someone Harry allies with. And there was a time that it seemed like that hypocrisy was an intentional character point but the series decided instead to portray anyone who could call him out as So Dumb And Goddamn Crazy. Though to be fair that could be the reason he's basically stopped writing in that he realized he wrote himself into a situation where his Spider-Man With Wizard Powers character is a rape elemental surrounded by rape elementals and that sounds like a genuinely unpleasant book to write even if you got some women issues.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:53
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