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I decided to reread Death Masks in anticipation of Skin Game. It's been a long time since I read an early book, and it's really interesting looking back. For example, I had forgotten how hostile Charity was to Dresden early on. It's cool how much Harry saving Molly multiple times really changed her attitude. I had forgotten that Sanya is initially hostile to Harry. I had forgotten that Nicodemus is the first one to tell Harry he is not an only child. Also, he knew and respected Margret LeFay. (What the hell is up with Harry's mom? Her associations and reputations are so dodgy that they almost make Harry, Winter Knight, look like a boy scout.) Basically, I had forgotten all kinds of cool stuff. At one point, some dark eyed woman Harry finds familiar but doesn't recognize banishes his nightmares and gives him restful sleep. (Page 150 maybe?) Do we know who this is? I want to say his mom, but that's just a guess. It can't be Lash since he hasn't touched the coin yet. Denarians are definitely the best villains. I think it's because they are the most like Dresden. It gives the banter a nice crisp feeling. Tomorrow should hurry up and arrive.
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May 26, 2014 11:07
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What a rush. That was really drat good.
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May 27, 2014 14:25
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Regarding Murphy, what was up with Michael pointing out that Harry wasn't more upset about Murphy being hurt than he would be about any of his friends being hurt? I can't tell if it was supposed to point out that Harry has stopped being stupidly sexist about Murphy in terms of combat or if it was supposed to be a hint that he isn't in love with her.
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May 28, 2014 05:42
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Considering that was speculation Butters made right before being an incredible idiot thinking he should bug his friends while they worked an ultra sensitive case, I'm inclined to think he didn't know what he was talking about and Dresden seeming to hit his limits faster being on account of other factors. (Aside, Butters basically got the sword of Faith as a result of having absolutely no faith in his friends. Weird.) One factor I haven't seen discussed here is that Harry was mentally pregnant with a 12 year old baby. Sure, he had that sweet Winter magic epidural, but still. If it is a retcon, it's dumb.
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May 28, 2014 17:54
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Who the hell was Dresden's mom? What does it mean that Dresden is starborn? Who is Cowl? Who or what arranged for the death of Dresden's parents? Who on the senior council has been compromised by Nemesis? Where is Maevre and what has she been getting up to with her absurdly dangerous Necromancy knowledge? Did Nemesis get Ferrovax? What's Elaine up to? What's up with Mac? Just some questions I'm quite looking forward to getting answers to, off the top of my head.
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May 29, 2014 13:43
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Wade Wilson posted:Dredsen's mom was Margaret LaFay, this was answered way back in the series. I know we know her name. I meant, who the hell was she as a person? We still don't have a great sense of her or her motivations, and there's no way we don't get more insight. Nicodemus knew her. She took the king of the White Court as a lover. She decided to have a kid with a random travelling magician, possibly to on purpose have a starborn kid. She mapped the ways. She knew fairy's well enough to get the third strongest winter sidhe as her kid's godmother. A friggin' reformed Nagloshi compared her to his unreformed dad. We've gotten lots of intriguing bits and pieces, but I think there's more to it. I think we'll definitely learn more about Dresden's parents now that he's decided to be a father to his two daughters. We know one small fact about what being a starborn means. It will come up in a bigger way. Where are you getting that Cowl is the leader of the Fomor? I don't think everyone is necessarily screwed if Nemesis got Ferrovax. We know a single knight can kill a Dragon. Even if he's in Mab's league, well, Harry knows Mab and she's pretty committed to fighting outsiders. Harry currently possess and uber prison and four magical weapons of mass destruction. Harry will be fighting thing's in Ferrovax's league for sure. Where did we hear about Elaine last? No way Mac stays out through the end. Given his interactions with Mab, former knight is not unlikely. If so, we'll definitely see more. Harry's going to want to give up that mantle eventually.
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May 29, 2014 15:42
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docbeard posted:I'm not sure that "a Knight of the Cross can kill a dragon" necessarily means that much; when they're on mission, the Knights are arguably the most powerful mortals on the planet, and the equalizing power of the Swords means it kind of doesn't matter how powerful the enemy they're fighting is. I didn't mean that to say anything about how strong Ferrovax is. I just meant that Harry and his allies definitely have access to enough power that they could kill Ferrovax without it being unreasonable. Given this, I wouldn't be surprised if Ferrovax's Red Court gift did just as much of a number on him as Leah's dagger did on her.
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May 29, 2014 16:54
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Not sure why you're spoiling that, but I don't want to see it. I feel the way Harry dealt with Lash was an extremely rewarding plot, and I wouldn't want to see a rehash. And Harry going evil?
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May 31, 2014 03:35
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Wade Wilson posted:Casting Lasciel with Lifetime Movie Villain characteristics is flying over a lot of heads. Now I'm imagining Dresden on an episode of I Didn't Know I was Pregnant!
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Jun 4, 2014 13:20
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AlphaDog posted:As far as Grey goes: In this book, Harry assumes that the bigfoot guy will have the same personality and attitudes as another one he's already met. It's possible that Naagloshii have free will and that Grey is, if not a good one, then a less evil one. Some supernatural things aren't as bound by their natures as (say) Faeries. Bigfoots (bigfeet?), White Court vamps, and werewolves all seem get to make choices. Even fairies get choices. Mab and Maeve's reactions to nemesis show that. Also, Toot-toot has reaped the benefits of consistently choosing loyalty to Harry above and beyond the call of pizza.
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Jun 6, 2014 09:31
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In the Q&A posted a few bits up, Butcher said the Jade Court were Chinese Isolationists so conservative that it was more accurate to call them Qing isolationists who think this whole China thing is just a fad that will pass on sooner or later. He said they're not going to be found too far from the Yangtze river, though one of their agents might show up in the apocalyptic trilogy.
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Jun 6, 2014 16:23
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I wonder what the chances are she'll show up in Empty Night.
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Jun 11, 2014 13:31
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:New personal pet theory as I work my way through the re-read: That's a horrifying, awesome idea.
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Jun 13, 2014 10:48
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What? Molly isn't human, period. Seeing her casually using a cell phone just drove that home for Harry. I would argue that she's still Molly, but she's not human. She plays be different, tougher rules now.
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Jun 14, 2014 16:26
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Wasn't her getting a coin a more recent development than her joining Binder? That is, she didn't have Lasciel with her when she approached Binder, and after getting the coin, she had more important things to work on? Also Binder isn't a total idiot.
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Jun 27, 2014 15:53
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It's more that mundane police obviously mean nothing in the face of supernatural threats. At least, it's obvious to the reader.
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Aug 15, 2014 06:25
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Butcher said somewhere that maintaining his magical tools is the equivalent of a part time job. I think time, not money, has always been the limiting factor on how many magical tools Harry has access to.
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Aug 17, 2014 03:02
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I totally agree about Marcone never being shown as evil being an annoyance. I kind of hope Marcone slips up at some point and shows his true nature in front of Harry so that Harry can smack him down hard. Marcone being completely unreasonable and dickish at the end of Skin Game gives me hope.
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Aug 26, 2014 17:32
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He is awesome. I think people are more annoyed at how Dresden goes on and on about how horrible he is without us ever actually seeing him being evil. I think comparing him to Lara actually helps make the point. Both Lara and Marcone are professional monsters who stay out of Dresden's way or aim him at unprofessional monster as suits their needs. Lara, however, has never seemed to be anything other than monstrous. I've never doubted her evil, but Marcone just doesn't seem very bad.
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Aug 26, 2014 17:59
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Butcher plotted out the 20 books+apocalypse trilogy overarching plot after getting positive feedback from his teacher on the first chapter of Dresden files. (Maybe it was more than one chapter, but it was significantly less than the full book.) He has also repeatedly and giddily said that we are now "getting to the fun parts." There is power creep, but unsurprisingly, D&D loving supernerd Jim Butcher is a huge fan of the clashing super powered entities stuff. I understand the complaint, but this has been the game plan from day one. I loved the more noir-y books from the beginning of the series too, but I think 23 books loosely arranged in an arc where Dresden saves his slice of reality at the climax is more compelling than 23 books which are all monster of the week style entries in the life of Harry Dresden, stubborn recluse wizard.  If we're sharing unpopular opinions, though, I realized the other day that I really hate Butters. gently caress that guy. He is the worst.
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Sep 18, 2014 14:58
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Butters is absolutely awful. I don't know if I'd call him a Mary Sue, but he's always at the heart of some of the most annoying parts of the book. First he sparks the most egregious "scientists are just close minded sheeple who refuse to see what's really happening" middle school douche philosophy rants from Dresden. Then he's the center of characters being angry at Dresden because Dresden wasn't around to continue tirelessly fighting evil. (Because he sacrificed his life to utterly destroy a pretty bad evil.) Then in Skin Game, he spends the entire book being a faithless, sullen asshat. This behavior puts his friends, innocent children, and an angel in serious danger. For this shittiness, he gets the sword of faith. What?
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Oct 24, 2014 00:45
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That feels a little nitpicky to me. When he decided to take up the winter mantle, he was sacrificing himself. He set up a hit on himself later to limit his sacrifice to just his life, sure. It was probably a bad decision. He was, after all, manipulated by satan into making it. But I think it's pretty pedantic to argue that he wasn't sacrificing himself to fight the red court.
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Oct 24, 2014 09:18
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Butcher has said that he wrote Butters so that he would have a character he could cosplay. Maybe that's what you were thinking of?
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Oct 25, 2014 08:22
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I would assume that Molly hasn't used her cell in front of her family. The earliest mention of Molly I can remember is her changing in the treehouse because the clothes she liked to wear wouldn't fly with her conservative Catholic mom. That is to say, Molly being good at hiding things from her family is pretty explicit.
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Nov 5, 2014 11:28
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Jim Butcher also said in an interview that magic items take maintenance. Simply keeping his magic stuff in working order is like a part time job for Harry.
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Nov 30, 2014 03:18
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General Emergency posted:The part about Harry that always bothered me was what a dick he was to everyone who didn't buy that magic is real. He is a part of a huge conspiracy to hide the whole supernatural world and could at any moment convince pretty much anyone beyond any reasonable doubt that magic was real but nah. Look at these sheeple, how can they be so blind! Ugh... Skeptics. Yeah you don't get to have that kind of an attitude when you could just fart out a few fireballs but choose not to. I totally agree. It was especially bad in the first book with Butters. I don't know if it's fair, but it made sense to to me when I learned that Butcher comes from a fundamentalist Christian background. Oh, of course he's able to simultaneously sing the praises of having faith and call people sheep for wanting evidence before they change their beliefs.
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Feb 4, 2015 03:24
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why oh WHY posted:Shut your whore mouth. I don't want to be almost 40 when the final Dresden book comes out. Given the books take progressively longer that the final trilogy is going to be extra long, you'll probably be more like 45.
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Feb 12, 2015 09:02
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Dr. MonkeyThunder posted:Are you actually complaining that this series doesn't have gay incestuous rape and that Thomas doesn't use his powers to force strait men gay? I'm sure there's some fan-fic out there for you but I doubt that's what the Dresden Files really needs. That's not the point. The point is that Butcher's handling of the white court shows his biases about homosexuality. The female court seem to be frequently or even always bi. None of the males are. Why? Because chicks making out is hot and dudes grinding is gross. At least, that's what Butcher seems to think.
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Mar 12, 2015 09:19
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Avatar also had important characters who were blind or in a wheelchair and, oh yeah, no white people. It's an insanely (awesomely) liberal series. lol at calling a bowler hat a fedora. Are all hats fedoras now? Seems like an overreaction to one lovely, pathetic group of people thinking fedoras will make them as sexually attractive as Indiana Jones.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:20
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The thing that consistently strikes me about reader complaints about writing speed is that they seem to dramatically underestimate how much time it takes to actually write a book. Gaiman is a bit out in cuckoo land when says that writers owe nothing whatsoever to their fans and any anger at missed deadlines is presumptuous. There's a core of truth there, though, in that people act like writers should be able to make the book faster by just trying harder. I once compared the writing speed of Rowling, Butcher, Rothfuss, and GRRM, and they were all pretty similar. (I used published words per year as my metric.) This makes me think that creating a book just takes a person a certain amount of time.
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May 21, 2015 11:13
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Blasphemeral posted:I'd love to see this, because there's no way GRRM is in the same category as Butcher. Butcher is a writing beast and GRRM is well known to be one of the slowest contemporary writers. GRRM, Rowling, Butcher, and Rothfuss were who I looked at. They all hover around 100,000 words per year. Wise Man's Fear was 400,000 words and took 4 years. According to my kindle, it's a little more than three times as long as Skin Game, which took about a year and a half. So similar pace. Harry Potter ended up being 1.1 million words in 10 years. GRRM is a weird case because his pace changed so dramatically half way through. At the time of Dance With Dragon's publishing, he was clocking in at 118,000 words per year (1.7 million words over 15 years), but that is obviously dropping every day. It will jump back up when he publishes another huge chunk of words, but his final pace will no doubt be lower than 118k. (A source for some numbers I used.) I didn't look at Jordan originally , but I checked now and wow. He actually wrote incredibly fast. Like, over 230,000 words per year. (I used wikipedia's word counts and publishing dates, but only for the non-Sanderson stories.) Amazing. Of course, Jordan still got a ton of poo poo for taking too long to get the next book out. I didn't look at Alera books, but given Butcher tended to publish one approximately 120k word Dresden novel a year regardless of other projects, I think that shows authors are not at all lying when they say side projects don't slow down their main series. There are definitely variations among authors when it comes to writing speed (holy poo poo Jordan and Sanderson), but I think this is not the main factor in how fast writers are perceived to be. Rowling and Butcher don't get as much poo poo for writing slow as GRRM and Rothfuss, but the writing pace isn't that hugely different. The latter, however, publish much bigger books more infrequently. They also made and broke promises about release dates. These factors seem much more important to public perception than the actual writing speed.
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May 22, 2015 15:53
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thespaceinvader posted:.Interestingly, one of the more prolific authors at the moment is the web-serialist Wildbow AKA JC McCrae. His first story was over 3 million words alone. Again, quantity =/= quality, but in this case, the quality's remarkably high for a mostly un-edited work, and whilst his second story wasn't brilliant, the one currently in progress is looking very good. Worm is 1.68 million actually. Pact was about half that. Still, two and a half million words in 4 years is well and truly nuts. It's all a first draft, really, but it's still impressive.
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May 23, 2015 12:37
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Fried Chicken posted:well that's directed rather head on in grave peril, and to a lesser extent in latter books isn't it? Harry is a "hero" who climbs to victory on a mountain of corpses. He isn't a hero; he is the consequences of others actions. It's an interesting reading, but it doesn't seem very tenable to me. Many of the books have sections where someone goes on about how noble and great he is. Harry is at his core a conservative hero. He's a middle aged white guy who feels strongly about protecting women, but also has really lovely attitudes towards women. He feels very strongly about fatherhood. He loves his guns. He distrusts and dislikes the government (White Council). His best friends are a hardcore conservative Catholic dude and a somewhat lapsed Catholic cop. He hates change. His thoughts on how the people of the world are sheeple who refuse to see the truth (of magic) could easily be written by a college libertarian. He's deeply uncomfortable with sex (though he's obsessed by it) and gay people. I think these arguments that the books are actually critiquing Dresden's personality and actions don't hold much water. If you are more liberal and reading, there is a cognitive dissonance between enjoying them as superlative popcorn novels and having problems with all the lovely stuff in the books. I think Butcher himself experiences this dissonance to some degree, but saying the books are actually critiquing the values they present seems like wishful thinking to me.
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May 24, 2015 16:16
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There was nothing that terrible about Skin Game's twist. It was foreshadowed and made sense. If anything that was really the problem with it. It was a sensible plan, and a heist should be slick. Skin Game's plot might not have been the strongest, but I think any of those flaws pale in comparison with everything involving Butters. Just, gently caress Butters. That poo poo was awful. On the other hand, I think the best parts of the book were the character interaction parts. Especially Dresden's talk with Michael. There has been so much upheaval in recent books and so little good conversation between characters. The title Peace Talks would make me really excited about seeing more conversation if Butcher hadn't already said it's the most violent book of the series so far.
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May 26, 2015 07:39
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I'm pretty sure the explanation for wizard's anti-tech fields is that human beings have changing natures, and that interacts with magic to make weird poo poo happen. It used to be bad skin and souring milk (I think), and now it's frying tech. Basically seems that wizards have a built in "be an outsider" function. Kind of serves as a nice explanation for why wizards wield so little temporal power.
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Aug 13, 2015 13:00
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Exmond posted:I think its the Hugos showing they wont consider any other nominations and has definitely tainted my impression of the Hugos. It shows that Hugo voters won't allow a radical minority sabotage the award. And this taints your impression of the Hugos?
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Aug 23, 2015 16:42
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The 5 no awards were given out to categories that were 100% puppy nominations. Puppy nominations got on the ballot because people were rallied to vote for a slate. This means that those nominations absolutely did not get on there because of people nominating stories they had read and thought were good. I repeat, most people who nominated puppy stories had not read those stories. Given how godawful those stories by and large were, this should be obvious. So I don't understand your tut-tutting of people voting no award over puppy nominations. It's totally legitimate to block nominate things you haven't read to support fascists, but if you block vote against those nominations without having carefully read and considered their value, that's bad?
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Aug 24, 2015 00:41
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Turtlicious posted:This is like bizarro world english, what does this have to do with books, the dresden files, and urban fantasy? "Puppy stories" means stuff nominated by racist, misogynistic fascists. One camp of puppies is led by a guy who derisively refers to those who write about gay people as SJWs. The worse camp of puppies is led by a guy who calls himself the voice of god and believes he is genetically superior. I guess whether or not you still consider that awesome depends on you.
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Aug 24, 2015 06:50
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Magres posted:The world definitely does seem to have become a darker place between Changes and Cold Days in the aftermath if the Red Court collapsing Correlation, not causation. The (near) extinction of the red court is nothing but a good thing. Dresden dying was what made things worse in Chicago. The fish people joining the scramble to fill the power vacuum probably makes things feel worse to everyone, but it would be so dumb if they are actually a greater threat and evil than the incredibly entrenched and widespread Red Court was.
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Sep 8, 2015 06:27
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Magres posted:I more meant that the tone of the books in the past couple books feels a little darker. Harry always came off, more or less, scot free at the end of every book previously, or better than he started. It's only really been recently that the people he really, really loves are starting to be hurt by what's going on all around him, whether it's his fault or not. I could be wrong though Oh, that's totally fair. Sorry I misinterpreted. It's probably because I get irritated by how the books act like it was really bad that a race of monsters were wiped off the face of the Earth. I understand that things got worse in Chicago, but come on. It's so weird that no one ever thanks Dresden for striking such an unambiguous victory for humanity. I was really expecting Nicodemus, at least, to bring it up.
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Sep 8, 2015 10:28
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