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mastajake posted:This is for sure true, and it seemed to come out of nowhere with me too, but I think it starts when he sees his great-granddaughter in the company of a literal incubus, and then his grandson is willing to throw his entire life away for the same one shortly after. Yeah, that's what I think too. He didn't like Dresden hanging around with him, but Dresden's an adult and can make his own choices even if they're bad ones. It's when he saw that Maggie was around Thomas that his hatred got cranked up to 11. I mean, his daughter had been killed by Lord Raith. It's not surprising that seeing Raith's son hanging out around his granddaughter drove him over the edge.
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Jul 18, 2020 23:46
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Everyone posted:As for Peace Talks, very much half a book - and not an especially interesting half. My favorite part of the book was Harry standing around invisible/unnoticed while Gentlemen Johnny Marcone got things organized. I love that character. He's what you might get if John Reese and Carl Elias from Person of Interest somehow had a kid together.
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Jul 21, 2020 02:29
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Dresden does the ghoul thing at the start of White Night, IIRC, in a flashback to Warden training camp.
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Jul 23, 2020 04:18
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Marcone accepted the weregild from the Winter Knight in front of Mab herself. I don't think he'd do that and then gently caress with them over it.
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Jul 24, 2020 03:04
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Beachcomber posted:I personally feel like a spoiler consists of two pieces of information, and if I hide one of them it's no longer a spoiler. The book title was clearly signposted and I thought that was enough. Yeah, but how are you supposed to know what book is being spoiled unless you click the spoiler? There's not enough information there to identify it. There's a lot of books with vampires in them out there and the comment you made could probably apply to a lot of them. If you spoiler tag the comment you made and reveal the title, I know when it's appropriate to click the spoiler. The other way around and I do not.
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Sep 6, 2020 00:32
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M_Gargantua posted:Because the Merlin is an rear end but not an idiot and knows there is more than one traitor on the council and kicking harry out is both a political win and a keep-our-starborn-godkiller away from a sneak attack from their own. And if they wanted him dead, this would be the absolute worst time to do it. He's the Winter Knight, Warden of Demonreach, and he soloed the Titan(as far as everybody who is not Marcone believes, anyways). Offing him right after the battle would look completely loving awful. There's also the fact that they'd have to get Eb to kill him, because Eb's the Blackstaff and killing Dresden with magic would be a violation of the Laws of Magic. And while Eb's pretty pissed at Dresden right now, I don't think he's "set out with the intention of killing my grandson" pissed with him, especially after his close call with that at the end of Peace Talks, and especially because it means that some day he''ll probably have to talk to Maggie about why he offed her dad. Way easier just to boot him now and kick the can down the road a while. See if somebody else whacks him for you now that he's not under White Council protection. If that doesn't work out for you, it gives you time to talk Eb around to it while you work out the political angles and how to nail him on a Laws of Magic violation. General Battle Ground thoughts: I liked it, overall. Some rough areas, but a lot better than Peace Talks. I think I like how Murphy went out. Not a giant heroic sacrifice for Dresden, not some death to give him determination and resolve, and it's not the point that lets him hold fast against a psychic assault. She doesn't lose her fight, she doesn't take one for the team, she doesn't die because she's overmatched and underpowered. It's just stupid bad luck and lovely trigger discipline, and it's after she successfully saves Dresden's rear end yet again. It works for me. She was always Valhalla-bound, and this is a pretty good way to go. If Eb was 'accidentally murder my grandson' pissed about Thomas being his grandson, he's really not gonna be happy about Harry's upcoming wedding plans. If anything's gonna push Ebenezer into a serious attempt on Dresden's life, it's gonna be that. Listens-to-Wind remains the best, and I suspect he's going to be the reason why Eb doesn't kill Dresden. I liked Michael's cursing at the end of the book. I've always felt like Michael's a bit too good and perfect and that his main role has just been to approve of Dresden and so lend him extra good guy points. So I like these little moments where he slips a bit. I feel like Dresden's going to save Chandler at some point and that the White Council will act lovely enough about it so that Chandler ends up siding with Dresden.
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Oct 1, 2020 08:23
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Up Circle posted:Battle Ground gave me a headache. Just too much. Not even a bad book. Just way too much, even if it had lots of individually good bits. I'm mostly a sucker for seeing the big important people do big epic things in appropriate situations. 350 pages of battle scenes was just too much though after the previous book, and the Fomor are still utterly uninteresting. Ramirez started obviously having problems with Dresden well before the Winter Knight thing. Dresden went all hellfire on the ghouls at the Warden training camp. Dresden, famous for his lovely correspondence course Latin, demonstrated to Ramirez his fluency in both the ghoul language and Ancient Etruscan. Dresden's also apparently very tight with both the White Court and Marcone, as he was able to arrange for Marcone's private army to be standing by at the Raith Deeps, after which he and Lara sponsored Marcone into the Unseelie Accords. And then you have to figure, back in Dead Beat Dresden was pretty cavalier about finding a loophole in the Laws of Magic to justify an act of necromancy. There's a lot of little things Dresden's done in his association with Ramirez that look pretty fuckin' shady when you add them all up. Not to mention the fact that Ramirez has recently been jumped hugely up in rank. Seems natural to me he's gonna be a little extra aggressive about things, prove he deserves his place in the Council and that he's not gonna side with his old buddy Dresden. Up Circle posted:
Marcone was always going to take a coin. It became inevitable as soon as he signed onto the Accords. How else is he going to get the strength to stand as Lord of Chicago in his own right? All his supernatural muscle was rented from Odin, and that's just not a real tenable longterm position. He needs some sort of real personal power to fill his role, because without it he's hideously vulnerable to the Code Duello. Without it, what happens when somebody calls him out? Is he going to send up a purely mortal guy against a wizard? Hire a Valkyrie as a champion? No, he needs power of his own and there's only a handful of sources he could get it. The only two that come to mind immediately are the Swords and the Coins, since becoming a Knight would be counterproductive to being the lord of your own territory, and the Swords are clearly out.
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Oct 2, 2020 11:47
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Deptfordx posted:Harry's always going on how JDM was training him to be his personal attack wizard though, including if memory serves, in this one. He was probably waiting until after the brainwashing was complete before he trained him in actual combat magic. Training him beforehand could have been counterproductive. Also I feel like Dresden probably picked up a lot from Eb. If you look at how they fight, it's really very similar. They block with enchanted clothing or magical barriers. They attack with either straightforward blasts of force or with long slow AOE attacks that wreck the battlefield(Dresden's gravity amplifier in Changes, Eb half-burying the fire giants.). Eb's a lot more controlled and precise than Dresden, but you can definitely see who Dresden's modeling himself after.
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Oct 20, 2020 22:08
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Cythereal posted:As for the death of Murphy, I'm conflicted. Yeah, it was probably the best way to handle it. I love Murphy as a character, but I feel like she's been out of place in this series for a long time now. She fit in just fine in the early books, but I feel like the scope of the series has left her behind and that giving her a big power-up like with Amoracchius or becoming a valkyrie or whatever would be deeply contrary to her character. If anything, I'd have expected her to join up with the men in black, who Battle Ground revealed exist - and frankly, I'm wondering what took Butcher so long. I've been expecting a group like them to turn up for a long time. I liked this bit. I think it was a good death. It's not some giant heroic sacrifice for Dresden. She doesn't take one for the team. She doesn't lose a fight because she's underpowered or outclassed. She saves Dresden's rear end by smiting a loving giant, and then she dies to one of her long-standing political enemies entirely because of bad luck and lovely trigger discipline. She goes out victorious, and instead of her death being some token that boosts Dresden's heroic courage and resolve, it loving wrecks him, to the point where Knights of the Cross have to get in his face because he's about to snap the Laws of Magic over his knee and revenge murder somebody. It's about the best ending possible for her, I think.
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Apr 27, 2021 00:08
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KellHound posted:There is a lot of talk about how Lara is worse than her dad because she has less brovado/aggroance. So it makes her more dangerous and Dresden is like whelp I'll deal with that problem when it bites me in the rear end. I mean, what's he going to do about it? They're law-abiding signatories of the Unseelie Accords and even if Dresden wanted to take them out he doesn't have nearly enough political capital to do anything about it.
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Apr 27, 2021 21:21
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Adding a new book in makes sense, though. The Battle of Chicago was huge and I feel like a book to deal with the fallout before diving into something primarily offworld like Mirror Mirror is probably a good call.biracial bear for uncut posted:I would have gone with the time Nightingale "unzipped" a brick building to make a distracting entrance before fighting the Night Witch but yeah. I love how everybody who knows anything just goes all  about how exceptional 'the Nightingale' is. The Night Witch loses to him and her main reaction is to fangirl about how he's just as good as all the stories say he is.
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Nov 9, 2021 19:58
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Artonos posted:I'm honestly not familiar with the ship of Theseus either. You've got a ship that used to belong to Theseus. Over time you need to replace the mast. Then you need to replace the decking, and then the hull planks, and the rudder, and etc etc etc until you've replaced every part of the entire ship with something new. Is it still the ship that Theseus once sailed?
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Jan 25, 2022 20:10
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I don't particularly care for Abigail as a POV character because I generally don't care for child POV characters. The occasional short story is okay, but I don't think I even made it all the way through her POV book before I dipped for something more interesting.
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Apr 10, 2022 05:20
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Xtanstic posted:Did I zone out during the exposition while listening to the audiobook? When Lynette was being debriefed, her and the dead cousin share the same mother? Is this explicitly a mistake by the Checquy? Was it not Nazi lightning guy knocking up multiple wartime prostitutes? Lynette was an orphan found in the street by the police. Nobody knew anything about either of her birth parents.
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Jan 25, 2023 08:09
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The key to the first five Craft Sequence books is that they all have a number in their title, and that number is their chronological order. So the publication order is: Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, Full Fathom Five, Last First Snow, Four Roads Cross. but the chronological order is: Last First Snow, Two Serpents Rise, Three Parts Dead, Four Roads Cross, Full Fathom Five. Past this point the number-in-the-title thing stops because they're no longer jumbled up chronologically and they happen in the order they're published in. To confuse things more, the author also did two interactive fiction games in the same setting, Choice of the Deathless and Deathless: The City's Thirst, which are canon and which, IIRC, happen before anything in the books.
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Mar 11, 2023 08:51
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 04:09 |
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wheatpuppy posted:But awhile back someone suggested thinking of them like a radio play which piqued my interest. If this is a thing that interests you, the Sandman audio dramas that Audible did are really good.
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Jul 20, 2023 18:39
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