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Kchama posted:The thing that pissed people off wasn't that he was wrong about it. It had been that he was wrong and when people corrected him he basically told them it didn't matter and to leave him alone, and when they got mad his response was more or less "How dare you get mad at me?? I did nothing wrong!!!!" It's the classic phenomenon where people get upset if details about a real city are wrong even though it's occupied by a bunch of fictional fae, wizards, and monsters. When asked about the parking lot, he should have just said "a wizard did it."
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Jul 8, 2019 00:32
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Kchama posted:This was pure Butcher wanting to have his cake and eat it too with regards to having the mob but also Dresden more or less be friendly with them. If by "friendly" you mean the mob boss in question is preparing deathtraps for the inevitable showdown with Dresden and instructing his facilities to cooperate with him in order to avoid having him burn them to the ground, then yes. It's clear why Butcher got invested in Chicago as a setting: he figured out something to do with Sue the Dinosaur. That kind of thing is much more powerful when it involves something people know of outside the fiction. And the whole point of the urban fantasy genre is to set it in something resembling the real world so that your worldbuilding is much simpler. Inventing your own city isn't as trivial as it appears to be. None of that excuses Butcher's lack of research. He's on record as stating that this series began with him writing out of resentment based on a writing teacher's advice, so the "this was written by an arrogant, snotty man-child" thing is well-established. To some degree, that bled into Harry and trapped Butcher: he can't change the series style too radically for fear of losing readers (Ghost Story was the biggest departure from the formula and I gather it isn't exactly beloved). His real failure, once it came out that he had gotten details wrong, was not doing some research and having Harry complain about how the White Council agitated for a Wrigley Field parking lot because they wanted to neutralize a ley line or something like that. It is hard enough dropping as many things as Butcher does into the "real world" without completely rethinking all of human history, without adding a major fictional city. At that point you may as well be on another planet and you're writing Glen Cook's Garrett series.
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Jul 8, 2019 15:53
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Kchama posted:I just personally think his response to it was trash garbage is all. Can you point us to his response, either on YouTube or an account of it? Because you're reacting strongly to something I've never encountered or heard of.
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Jul 8, 2019 20:11
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docbeard posted:I don't really care whether there's a 'mechanical' definition for "killing this is okay, killing that is not", but seeing his violent life taking a toll on him (beyond the occasional "oh you were under supernatural influence") would be worth reading, particularly since Butcher does take a pass at making other things he does have consequences for him sometimes. Well, now I can see why some of the thread tropes were so confusing to me. I strongly disagree that Butcher doesn't show us how his violent life takes a toll on him. He may present himself as a big goof, even in the later books, but despite even his first-person narration trying to insist that he hasn't changed, he's changed massively. Where he used to have anger issues he was struggling to deal with so he wouldn't get his head chopped off by Morgan, now he's literally Mr. War Crimes but also the guy who would be in charge of punishing himself. So he doesn't care nearly as much. All the casual violence post-Winter Knight mantle is getting elided by the fact that almost everyone else he knows is also steeped in violence. I'm pretty sure Uriel's position on Dresden is that he's both useful and redeemable, but that doesn't mean Butcher has declared that Dresden is already on God's good side. The series has him as the son of a potentially evil wizard, the grandson of grumpy murder-wizard who some readers think might be Black Council, and entangled in his mom's schemes to do something to mess with the Outsider threat which may or may not mean he has some kind of direct link to the Outside. Now he's also Winter Knight, a role already established as being horrifically violent. "Parkour" or not, Skin Games sees him brooding alone on Demonreach while pretty clearly not dealing with any of his actual problems, and recognizing that the Warden role isn't too different from being another of the prisoners. I get the impression that Warden of Demonreach isn't a job you give to the serene pacifist-types. Butcher also clearly has a redemption/sacrifice theme going on that's deeply Christian. Maybe he doesn't always pull it off very well, but it's glaringly obvious. If you begin with the supposition that nothing is beyond forgiveness, then your attitude towards things like violence in your main character is going to be affected.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:54
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Proteus Jones posted:I think it would probably bother me less, and make Harry a much more interesting character, if it weren't for this. He never seems to suffer any real consequences for his lack of control and thoughtlessness. And you're right, he feels mopey and bad and briefly questions his worth and then it turns out Hey, that was actually the right thing to do after all or someone external validates his worth and says "if you just keep trying to be better it's all OK". And then it is, and we never really visit it again. No consequences? I guess beyond his girlfriend/mother of his child getting partially turned into a Red Court vampire and then killed, getting his left hand burned and his back broken, having a shadow of one of the Fallen in his head, then getting himself into so much trouble that she sacrifices herself to save him (meaning he's gotten two mothers killed), cutting a deal with Mab, binding himself to Demonreach, putting his apprentice in a situation where she's first haunted by arranging for his murder, then by failing to fill on for him, and finally turned into the Winter Lady, and getting the woman he loves injured for life. Plus I'm fairly sure Mister may have missed a few meals in there somewhere.
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Jul 10, 2019 15:31
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Kchama posted:I do notice that most of those are consequences that other people pay for Harry's mistakes. If you think that having terrible things happen to your friends and loved ones as a result of your own mistakes means you got off lightly, I don't know what to tell you. Harry as a character is explicitly written as not caring too much about direct personal harm or consequences, while being haunted by harm done to those he's trying to protect. Killing him would be letting him off lightly. In fact, he literally arranges his own death as the easy way out of facing the consequences of his actions.
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Jul 11, 2019 00:09
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:The problem with this is that 1) Let's say Harry made a colossal mistake and gets the world ended, but survives himself. That's huge consequences for his own action. Am I to understand that this particular consequence would somehow not count because the bad thing reads as Harry-centric? It's a first-person perspective series about Harry. As for forgiveness, I assume that you noticed the series is fundamentally Christian? 2) Harry's good at training new Wardens because he can reflect on all the bad assumptions he made, the times he screwed up, the ways in which he tries to do the right thing too quickly and ends up making things worse. Harry almost never tries to deflect blame. And the series is fundamentally about free will: even devils can only influence people. The words that tipped Harry's despair over the edge did not FORCE him to do anything, no more than Uriel's words did. I listed a bunch of choices Harry's made and you haven't shown how they all were not his responsibility, but let's add a few more: A. Almost every decision related to the Red Court vampires was on Harry's shoulders. I listed bad consequences related to that. If you think Harry's all "it got lots of people killed but now I am a Warden and I killed all the vampires, so it was good on balance" I don't know what series you're reading. B. Harry repeatedly and unnecessarily endangered the Archive. Yes, the series is telling us that treating Ivy as a human being is the right choice, but even that is pretty reckless and it's unclear how stable Ivy is at this point. C. Unable to grant the possibility that someone else might be able to rescue his daughter without his direct participation, Harry decides to accept the Winter Knight mantle. Nobody forced him to do so. Being the Winter Knight is a consequence. Harry has had mixed success fighting the impulses of the mantle. The series does not say it's fine that he does terrible things because of the mantle; if anything, it shows us a Harry who is so caught up with using power that he isn't thinking about how he is using it. (I believe several examples of fae brutality have been mentioned recently in relation to killing via magic.) Harry's morality is clearly getting bent and warped, and he's only partly aware of it. The whole "free will" thing is a big deal in various Christian denominations. Butcher is very clearly in the "humanity has free will and is responsible for evil" camp. One whisper into his ear no more compelled Harry to do the wrong thing than Harry's mind compelled Lash to do the right thing. Redemption isn't redemption if it is compelled, at least in this series. Butcher's obviously influenced by Spenser's Faerie Queen and Dresden reminds me of nobody in that poem more than the Red Cross Knight.
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Jul 13, 2019 18:47
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:1. I'll lead with the most glaring example: Luccio. Luccio is mind-controlled into a relationship against her will. Harry knows this, is told this, and... the following conversation with her is just Yes, Harry has serious problems when it comes to how he relates to women. The series keeps telling us that. One might almost suspect that this character flaw will matter from time to time. That it will even have... consequences. You seem to think that a character screwing up, suffering consequences, and not even realizing how badly he screwed up means that his mistake didn't have consequences and that we're meant, as readers, not to see it as a mistake at all. I'd certainly agree that Butcher tends towards instrumentalizing women: making their characters serve plot purposes without giving them the same kind of agency and characterization he gives to male characters. I see that as a separate issue from the consequences question. NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:2. Harry doesn't deflect blame because Butcher does it for him. When he gives into his bloodlust and starts slamming that alien around at Splattercon instead of helping that girl ( who dies ), it isn't his fault, it's Lash's. When he does messed up things to those ghouls, it isn't his fault, it's Lash's. When he forces his apprentice to break the laws of magic and to help him commit suicide, it isn't his fault, the devil made him do it. When he's violent and tempermental and creepy, it isn't his fault, it's the mantle. I see this claim as a fundamental misunderstanding of everything the series says about free will (which is hooked in to a long tradition of Christian philosophy I'm sure Butcher is familiar with). Let us suppose that Lash is capable of depriving Harry of agency: of making him do something he would never otherwise have done. Why not simply make him accept the coin, then? As with Luccio and her "mind control" situation, Butcher makes it clear that all such magical influences can do is just that--influence someone into doing something they might have done anyway. Every terrible thing he does in the books he does because he CHOOSES to do them. And the whole point of the second set of words whispered into his ear, the words that come from an angel and not a devil, has to do with the importance of free will. But let's look at Ghost Story page 456. Molly is getting torn apart and Uriel is refusing to intervene: quote:"She isn't strong enough," I snapped. "She can't take on that thing." Certainly Harry doesn't dwell on his mistakes, and he's too quick to excuse himself sometimes. He's also the one who warns Maeve in Cold Days that being able to tell lies means you can make the wrong choice, and that you can lie to yourself. He's a good person to teach that particular lesson. He also has oblivious tendencies. In skimming through the end of Cold Days for that reference, I noticed that he asks Demonreach to "carry the wounded inside" and it eyes him before taking Molly and Sarissa into the cottage. I think he thinks that it was considering whether or not to obey. But he's the Warden. I don't think it has that option. I think Demonreach was determining whether Harry wanted them carried into the cottage, or IMPRISONED. And then he and Mab have a little talk about how Harry has responsibility for everything that Molly became. Not that she didn't have a choice, but that the specific consequences of the choices she made were shaped and enabled by Harry himself. Cold Days page 501: quote:"You've made her life so much harder," I said quietly. I wasn't saying it to Mab, really. I was just sounding out loud the chain of argument in my head. "But so have I. Especially after Chichén Itzá." Harry's not especially introspective, and he tends to cover his feelings of guilt with black humor and bravado. But hit him in the head enough times and eventually he gets the point.
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Jul 15, 2019 19:25
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Kchama posted:I wanted to give it a second try to make sure I wasn't being unfair to it. And I thought it'd be good for discussion to see if I'm just misinterpreting things. Which things? That it gets better in book 3? That just because Harry is the first-person narrator it doesn't mean that Butcher thinks he's perfect or that we should? Dresden Files was one of the origin points for a particular kind of fiction. Of course some of the authors who followed it made improvements. They'd be poo poo authors if they didn't. Sometimes somebody has to screw something up for the first time before it becomes clear what constitutes screwing up. Jumping from that to "this author is loving horrible" is a big jump. Butcher is, for example, a much better writer in almost every way than Weber (though maybe not so much in those first two books). He can present human emotion, even when his narrator doesn't recognize it. He's synthesized a bunch of fantasy traditions into something that's somewhat coherent, though a bit of a mess. He's written several pretty strong characters, though it'd be nice if more of them were women. He's neither humorless nor is he presenting a psychopath as a hero. Let us know which of those claims I just made you disagree with and we'll see if the thread's willing to discuss.
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Aug 11, 2019 01:00
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Kchama posted:So here's the thing. The fact that he was an early urban fantasy author really has nothing to do with the things that I dislike about Dresden Files. He writes Stormfront as if he's aiming for a noir mystery. He's completely incompetent at it, but it's what he's attempting. The magic and stuff is all just a skin for it and really does the book no favors. He's trying to have this big mystery in a setup where there's no rules for the mystery. He introduces a lot of magic elements but doesn't really make it clear how this interacts with the mystery. In fact, it becomes clear that Butcher himself really doesn't understand himself, and is just making poo poo up as he goes along. Seems like you're moving the goalpost a bit here. I don't think anyone disputes that the first two books are substantially inferior to Butcher's later work. He created a setting that other people found interesting enough to want more of, which is in no way saying that he's good at puzzles or mysteries or had a coherent sense of how the world worked. (Harry Potter works much the same, except that I think Rowling starts off as better at characterization and ends up being worse at foreshadowing and little hints and clues about characters.) Doyle isn't as good a writer as Poe, but Sherlock Holmes is the one that caught on in readers' minds. Given that you don't like Dresden as a character, and you now have access to plenty of other UF worlds you enjoy more (I presume), I'm not surprised at the point of disagreement. But expecting that quality of writerly craft either is or should be the main criteria for evaluation of a book is like demanding that a writer's grammar be perfect even when it harms the sense or flow of a sentence: writing can do something well and something else poorly, and at times it's impossible to do one thing well without doing something else poorly. Kchama posted:My other major complaint over all was that Dresden is just a poo poo-head. Like, he's way worse than Honor is. You say it's good that he's not a psychopath but other people have said stuff that makes me wonder. And then there's the fact that he just won't stop being a shithead to everyone. He is constantly bitching about his own customers asking him to do things that he feels is below him because he won't say what a wizard is, despite openly advertising. And as I mentioned earlier, it's never said to be due to any kind of masquerade. He just thinks they should know, despite his own monologues about how regular people don't know about magic, even though that really doesn't make sense in such a setting. The Dresden Files also have a very strange human-oriented morality that doesn't help either. I think you have some misconceptions about Dresden, perhaps because you can't differentiate what the world is telling us from his first-person perspective, though a lot of that may be Butcher's fault for taking multiple books before he provides enough context to fully understand how Dresden is twisting things in the early books. Setting aside the psychopathy question because I'm uninterested in defining the term for you and asking you to point to all the examples that prove he only thinks of himself as an actual person (when it's obvious that his central personality traits involve the kind of guilt a psychopath simply doesn't feel): Harry was raised and trained by an evil wizard, who abused him and who he killed with magic in a world where killing with magic supposedly does harm to your soul. He has no demonstrated ability to make friends, his lack of control over his own (significant) magical power means he can barely function in modern society because tech blows up around him, and most of his knowledge of the magical world comes either from the aforementioned evil wizard, or from the Blackstaff, who among other things doesn't tell Harry that they're directly related, and who some readers suspect is himself an evil wizard. He also has big anger issues. After reading Turn Coat, it becomes clear that Morgan wasn't wrong to be watching Harry so carefully or to suspect that he was going to go full black-magic, and it's a mix of Butcher's inexperience and Harry's POV that makes Morgan into a cartoon villain in the opening books when actually it's that Harry needs to learn how to be an actual human being. Hell, part of how he learns to be a better person and to behave properly with other people is the example of his half-brother the White Court Vampire. You gotta be starting at near-rock bottom for that to happen. I agree that Butcher hadn't fully worked out how magic works in his setting in the opening novels. This is not a case of Tolkien creating a world and language and not really caring if it gets published; Butcher wanted to become a writer, wrote what he thought was disposable trash out of spite for his writing teacher, and ended up selling the thing. I think he has since worked out most of the details, and you can read him doing some of that in later books. If you want to amaze the thread with your explanation of how the boom in UF happened because of Tsukihime, go ahead. Otherwise, it's fair to say that you wish UF had been popularized thanks to a better writer, but it isn't fair to say that it wasn't. You certainly can't claim that Butcher's first book should have been better because of Tsukihime's influence. Weber isn't deserving of too much time, so I'll make two observations: 1. As a result of his success, Weber went from writing somewhat competent books to doorstops of bad characterization and combat spreadsheet reports. Butcher went from some initial crap novels and ended up writing some much better ones, even if his output has been uneven. Equating the two means refusing to acknowledge that Weber's gotten worse and that Butcher isn't as bad as he was, even if you think they both stink. 2. Weber has some deliberate and terrible habits: Honor Harrington did some bad things in the early books but unless something's happened since I quit reading them, they never lead to bad consequences later (with a few exceptions in the first three books when Weber was still trying). He happily introduces dozens of new characters, including full name, rank, one physical descriptive trait and one or two other identifying characteristics, while not bothering with things like character emotion (which instead of being displayed by actual behavior, is "read" via treecat much of the time) or importance to the plot. Gotta have enlisted to slaughter later. He also writes characters as either perfectly good or villainous in a straw-man kind of way; most of his villains have no definable agenda or perspective from which they could read themselves as heroes, they're just self-centered jerks. Butcher makes Harry's choices come back to haunt him, repeatedly. I expect it will still matter in the next book that Harry had an ill-advised relationship with Luccio: she was magically "nudged" into doing it, but he wasn't, and the aftermath hasn't resolved itself, so if she appears at all this will pose some kind of problem for Harry. Butcher is more restrained in introducing new characters, and when he does so he develops them over time; he's not always good at doing so, but even a badly written new character like Ascher gets to coexist in a story with Goodman Grey and Hades. Even Ascher has a clear emotional through-line and identifiable motivations; human characters in Butcher have a way to be read as thinking themselves heroic, even someone like Nicodemus. (Non-human characters are, as has been acknowledged, a problem.) Suggesting they are interchangeable is such an apples-to-oranges comparison that I can only guess that you find Butcher's apple so rotten for some reason that it might as well be an orange for all you care. I don't know why "tepid" translates to wanting to have a discussion here. I almost never have discussions about things I find meh because there's lots of other things to spend my time on. Are you upset that other people enjoy a thing you think is mediocre, or is there something fundamentally rotten about Dresden in your eyes that I'm missing in your previous comments? If it's the "no consequences" thing, I'm unsure how to explain better than I did in my last post on that topic that Butcher makes Harry's slow realization of his own mistakes a central element in the later books. I should conclude by saying that it's fine to hate a literary character, but there's a gap between "I hate this character" and "this is a bad character." Inviting discussion about why a character is or is not poorly written can't rely upon hating the character; that's a different thing, and not arguable at all.
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Aug 11, 2019 19:17
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Kchama posted:I'm... really not sure what Kchama posted:I don't know where you got that I like Weber and am seeking to compare Weber favorably to Butcher. I was pointing out the Weber thread because it's about how I've read the dumb-gently caress books of his and want to finally get to rant to people who aren't adoring fans. You say Weber and Butcher are both "awful at what they do" and that you could replace one of their names with another, but you never compared them? Your idea of having a discussion about Dresden Files seems to be to post in the thread that it's poo poo, claim you wanted to start a discussion when someone makes a snide comment about "it's that time again" and then act really offended when someone tries to have a discussion with you that involves disagreeing with you. Maybe I should have taken the hint when none of the thread regulars responded. But here: I agree with you that Butcher does a bad job of integrating "supernatural world is real including fae and old-world deities" and "it's the regular world side by side with all this stuff" and he actually makes that problem worse over time. Nobody in Chicago noticed anything about the Wild Hunt or wondered how all those corpses ended up littering the streets? The Council doesn't have enough people to handle clean-up after the war with the Red Court starts and the hints of government involvement suggest that it's unlikely the FBI is running the cover-up operation because it'd be a total mess almost immediately. Maybe there's a band of brownies who pick up after Dresden outside of his apartment. The idea that getting mortals involved in a magic problem is the equivalent of starting a nuclear war doesn't seem to be supported by anything we've seen on the mortal end of things, so that classic "masquerade" idea doesn't fit the circumstances at all.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:11
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Being reminded about how differently many of the posters here see things after reading through the discussions of the latest Butcher: Michael's response seemed entirely appropriate to me. He loves Harry deeply, knows just how much saving Chicago cost him, and as reward the White Council ditches him entirely? Plus, Harry loses one of the thin threads holding him to his own humanity. If you're the guy on the end of one of those threads, you can't be happy that the White Council just decided to let know of one of the others. Harry wasn't thinking about the spear point out of fear someone would mind-read him, on the one hand, and on the other hand, out of fear it would provide him support and power too soon. Recall that the huge magic battery had gotten grounded by the time Harry had to bind the Titan. That had to take some juice, and the Spear was providing it. It sounds like the Spear may have been channeling all of Chicago in the process. I suspect that Harry not using it to stab someone was also deliberate; we don't know yet what it will do. So we've been told that the rules prohibit Murphy from returning until she's forgotten. I wonder if this is one of those rules nobody can get around? I admit that I expected Murphy's ghost to be around to help out, so I'm surprised at what actually happened. I don't even know where to start on "the placard was wasted" when it was used to protect all the ParaNet practitioners. You know, the wizardly equivalent of the Za Guards? I assume some readers think Butcher wasted our time by having Dresden save folks living in his neighborhood, because what's the lives of 400 people we don't even know? They matter because of what they tell us about Harry, if nothing else. In other news, it's unclear how Marcone is using Namshiel. But there were some very strong indications in the past that either the previous bearer or the devil himself had been gotten to by Nemesis. He was definitely one of the traitors amongst the Denarians. I'd have listed Marcone with Nicodemus as "least likely to be Nemesis'ed" but that becomes less certain now. Although I do find myself wondering about Marcone's date of birth. Because what if he's one of the starborn, too? We're certainly seeing a ramp-up of their importance in the series, and I wonder if the "hey, Drakul/that spy guy is a starborn" reveals aren't meant to distract us from another obvious candidate? Drone Jett posted:Re: the Eye of Balor. That's just brilliant. I wonder if it can create as well as destroy? We've just seen that Chaos can be unpredictable, but provides raw power that can be used for multiple purposes.
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Sep 30, 2020 21:55
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ImpAtom posted:Killing Murphy off so he could write more about sex vampires made it clear that whatever Butcher wanted from the series is not what I wanted. Pah, she's obviously coming back for the ending, given that she's literally part of an army that's supposed to show up for Ragnarok.
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Apr 17, 2024 01:10
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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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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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