The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
How often does Harry's withholding of information actually get people hurt...
Mira:
--- Quote ---Susan knew the supernatural was dangerous -- that's why she goes to the party with holy water and a gun. But she thought she could handle it because Harry didn't really detail how dangerous it would be, i.e., that if she was caught with a fake invitation she wouldn't just be kicked out, she'd be eaten or worse.
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First of all he didn't know until he saw her at the party that she had stolen then forged, then crashed the party.. Harry very clearly warns her, "they are vampires, they eat people..." He wasn't going to go because he felt it was too dangerous for him. She was hot to trot about the scoop and she handled the Loop etc... Yeah, she'd seen a few Dracula movies and perhaps read the book so she was prepared... How much information beyond "they eat people" do you need? Susan is a smart girl, she never asked, "what do you mean they eat people? How do they do that?" No, she was too focused on the scoop, the exclusive...
morriswalters:
--- Quote from: Mr. Death on June 05, 2019, 08:41:09 PM ---I thought Kim already had the diagram when she came to Harry.
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I stand corrected. Then instead it is too little.
--- Quote ---I had done the right thing. Keeping that kind of information out of Kim’s hands had been the right decision. I had been protecting her from danger she didn’t, couldn’t, fully appreciate.
I had done the right thing—even if she had trusted me to provide answers for her, as I had in the past, when teaching her to contain and control her modest magical talents. Even if she had trusted me to show her the answers she needed, to be her guide through the darkness.
I’d done the right thing.
Dammit.
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Where have we heard this before?
Bad Alias:
--- Quote from: huangjimmy108 on June 05, 2019, 04:22:39 AM ---I don't think so. Book 1 for example. Even if Murphy know that Bianca is a vampire, she can tore the mask open. Bianca also does not go around sucking Murphy's blood just because Murphy is annoying her. Unless someone truly touch her bottom line, the likes of Bianca will play via mortal means. Using money and political pressure to handle matters.
So even one have contact with a supernatural like Bianca, it is not that easy to actually enter the game. This is especially true during the early part of the series. The supernatural world is still peaceful at the time, and even the war with the red court is unlikely to start so early if not for Harry triggering it. Under such a peaceful times, the supernaturals tends to hide more. Later part of the series, especially after the red court is wiped and the appearance of the fomor resulted in the loosening of the veil of secrecy, but that is far from book 3. If Susan could survive until book 12 on her own, she'll would become a different person.
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Using Bianca as an example, Murphy questioning her about the death of a prostitute is nothing like Susan trying to expose Bianca as a vampire to the general public. The reason Bianca doesn't kill Murphy is because that sort of thing is likely lead to a mob burning the scary monster.
--- Quote from: Mira on June 05, 2019, 04:31:05 AM ---Really? page 35 Turn Coat...There is nothing equivocal about that statement.. Kirby chose to put himself in harm's way.. He was an adult making adult choices.. He had chosen to be part of the pack as a werewolf long before he met Harry..
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--- Quote ---Harry: I'm sorry.
Billy: [Shrugs. Portion you quoted].
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This could be taken as "yeah it is your fault, but Kirby knew that you were going to get us killed eventually." I don't read it like that, but I don't read it as "it's not your fault, Harry" either. I don't know what's more equivocal than a shrug. To "raise (one's shoulders) slightly and momentarily to express doubt, ignorance, or indifference." I think the strongest readings are doubt as to if it's Harry's fault on one end and indifference on the other.
@Kindler: Hit the nail on the head, though Morris is right that one of the exposed Alphas was dead whether or not Kirby picked up the idiot ball and ran with it. I'm not entirely sure if staying behind a threshold would be of sufficient protection. If we go by the toad demon in Storm Front, the answer is definitely no.
--- Quote from: morriswalters on June 05, 2019, 06:04:53 PM ---The whole point of the attack was about Council politics and Peabody's attempt to cover his mistakes to maintain his position as a mole in the White Council. Things that Dresden had withheld from his Mushrooms(the Alphas). They knew almost nothing of the Council or the fact that that there was an overarching plot in the works to destroy the Council by a traitor. Which is, if I may say, several orders of magnitude above any threat the Alphas had been exposed to by that point.
In the case of Susan and Kim Harry either makes too much or too little information available. In Susan's case she is a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect, she over estimates her competence, Harry would have done better to involve her more and make her aware of the hazards and the mechanics of how the supernatural world works, like the privileges of guests for example. In Kim's case if he wasn't going to help he should have never drawn the circle on the piece of paper, the same piece that triggers Murphy's attack.
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I don't see how informing the Alpha's about all that would have helped. Your point about Susan is good. Harry wasn't perfect, but he was right.
The way I see it is that these people, not the Alphas, acknowledge Harry as an expert who knows what he's talking about while they don't. They ask him questions and then ignore his answers. It infuriates me when people do this with me.
@Morris: I really think Kim is completely at fault. She had no idea what she was doing. Harry would have been completely irresponsible to tell her all about a greater summoning circle she wasn't prepared for, but was clearly planning on using. She could have unleashed some horrible elder thing on the third largest city in America. She could easily have told Harry what was going on. MacFinn could definitely afford his rates. If all the good guys had been straight with Harry in Fool Moon, Harry would have had the case wrapped up in 24 hours without much danger. Of course that would have made a terrible story.
Mr. Death:
--- Quote from: Mira on June 05, 2019, 09:11:00 PM ---First of all he didn't know until he saw her at the party that she had stolen then forged, then crashed the party.. Harry very clearly warns her, "they are vampires, they eat people..." He wasn't going to go because he felt it was too dangerous for him.
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Missing the point. It doesn't matter that Harry didn't know what she was going to do. Harry told her a pretty bare bones assessment "they are vampires, they eat people," which she didn't take seriously. He could have told her more that would have made her more wary about the situation.
--- Quote ---She was hot to trot about the scoop and she handled the Loop etc...
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She "handled" it by waiting in the van and then doing nothing but hold the camera while Harry killed it.
--- Quote ---Yeah, she'd seen a few Dracula movies and perhaps read the book so she was prepared... How much information beyond "they eat people" do you need?
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Lots of things can eat people. I know bears eat people, but I still go hiking in the woods. There's a lot more to vampires than "they eat people," and honestly putting it like that just doesn't get across the real horror of them.
--- Quote ---Susan is a smart girl, she never asked, "what do you mean they eat people? How do they do that?" No, she was too focused on the scoop, the exclusive...
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Right, and Harry -- who knows how intrepid a reporter she is -- does nothing to further inform her.
nadia.skylark:
--- Quote ---Susan for example. She is a reporter. She is looking for a scoop. The only she could keep getting into othentic supernatural news is if someone direct her into it. Without someone like Harry, she can only snoop around randomly. The likelihood she'll actually get into deep water is if she truly has rotten luck. Gotten strike by lighting on a clear day kind of rotten luck. It is possible, but unlikely.
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We have explicit canon evidence that it is easy to find out about the supernatural if you go looking for it. Anna Valmont says so in Skin Game.
--- Quote ---The average vampire will only see her as just another bag of blood and there is plenty of blood bag out there. The poor, the homeless, the desperate. why should they target her?
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Because she went looking for them. The vampires explicitly don't want the masquerade broken, and even if they didn't care about that, why would they turn down food that willingly delivers itself to them?
--- Quote ---1. when the Alphas actually engaged the Skinwalker immediately after Kirby got his throat ripped out and Andi was beaten, they successfully drove it off. They didn't beat it, or hurt it, but they put it at a temporary disadvantage long enough for it to not see enough profit in continuing the engagement. So I don't think the Alphas were defenseless.
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I'd always assumed, based on the fight at the Raith house, that the Skinwalker allowed itself to get chased off because it had done what it wanted to do there.
--- Quote ---If Harry Flippin' Dresden, Big Bad Brother Harry, as Butters calls him—the guy who the Alphas saw take down an entire group of Fae cavalry with one spell, a guy they've personally witnessed take on a pack of Hexenwulves AND a loup-garou, a guy with a reputation for being tough, competent, and extremely powerful (relative to them)—if THAT guy came to me, desperately calculating prime numbers to maintain his grip on his sanity, white as a sheet, telling me that he needed a dark, quiet place for an hour and a half before he was stable enough to function, and that whatever was after him was "really bad," my first response wouldn't be "Let's post two guards several dozen yards away from any kind of protection." It would be "Everyone come into my apartment; we're going to keep watch through the windows and guard ourselves behind a threshold, because something terrifying and powerful enough to send the most badass person we've ever met into gibbering madness is coming, and it's pretty obvious we should do whatever we can to protect ourselves without engaging it."
I mean, shouldn't Billy or Georgia have been smart enough to think, "Hey, maybe this thing could reduce us to insanity too?" And shouldn't Kirby have thought, "Hey, I not only have better senses as a wolf, but I'm faster, stronger, and harder to kill, so I should probably stay as a wolf while I know something dangerous is around?"
Yes, Harry led the skinwalker to the area. But a couple of things about that. 1. Harry didn't have much of a choice. There was, quite literally, nowhere else to go. He couldn't have made it back to his apartment where a threshold would have protected him in the state he was in. He couldn't hide in a crowd of people, because there would be too much noise or light for him to do what he had to. Billy's place was the only one that would be both safe and quiet enough for him to recover. And 2. They don't take Harry's warning seriously enough. Applying even an ounce of genre savviness would have been enough for the Alphas to have escaped without permanent injury.
Maybe you can argue that Harry should have given Billy the rundown on the greater supernatural world, but I don't think it would've done them any good. They already knew there were things like the Loup Garou out there that they couldn't handle. They knew that there were WolfWeres like Tera West that were old and powerful enough to train humans to turn into wolves, so they had to know that the supernatural was bigger, weirder, and more dangerous than they thought. And when you have the guy who sets the bar for humanity's stand against the Spooky Things in the Night come to you and tell you that something really bad is coming, you take all the steps you can to make sure that you and yours stay alive.
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This.
--- Quote ---In Susan's case she is a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect, she over estimates her competence, Harry would have done better to involve her more and make her aware of the hazards and the mechanics of how the supernatural world works, like the privileges of guests for example.
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Given that Susan was involved in the big werewolf fight at the end of Fool Moon, I feel like she had enough information to realize that, when Harry said the vampire party was too dangerous for him, it was also too dangerous for her. Also, if Harry had told her more about the supernatural world, she would have published it, and that would have been disastrous.
--- Quote ---In Kim's case if he wasn't going to help he should have never drawn the circle on the piece of paper, the same piece that triggers Murphy's attack.
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I thought that didn't draw it, but rather that Kim brought the paper with the circle on it with her.
--- Quote ---What Harry could have done with Susan--which after learning better, he does with Murphy--is recognize that she wasn't to going to listen to advice that amounted to leave the supernatural alone because it's too dangerous. Since she was never going to be sensible, he probably should have clued her enough that she understood that she needed to drastically change how she approached the supernatural.
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The problem here is that I'm 99% certain that there was nothing Harry could have done to stop Susan publishing the information if he had given it to her at that point, and that would have been disastrous.
--- Quote ---But she thought she could handle it because Harry didn't really detail how dangerous it would be, i.e., that if she was caught with a fake invitation she wouldn't just be kicked out, she'd be eaten or worse.
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Really? I'd thought that Harry made it perfectly clear that he considered going to the party tantamount to suicide.
--- Quote ---Using Bianca as an example, Murphy questioning her about the death of a prostitute is nothing like Susan trying to expose Bianca as a vampire to the general public. The reason Bianca doesn't kill Murphy is because that sort of thing is likely lead to a mob burning the scary monster.
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This.
--- Quote ---The way I see it is that these people, not the Alphas, acknowledge Harry as an expert who knows what he's talking about while they don't. They ask him questions and then ignore his answers. It infuriates me when people do this with me.
@Morris: I really think Kim is completely at fault. She had no idea what she was doing. Harry would have been completely irresponsible to tell her all about a greater summoning circle she wasn't prepared for, but was clearly planning on using. She could have unleashed some horrible elder thing on the third largest city in America. She could easily have told Harry what was going on. MacFinn could definitely afford his rates. If all the good guys had been straight with Harry in Fool Moon, Harry would have had the case wrapped up in 24 hours without much danger. Of course that would have made a terrible story.
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This.
--- Quote ---Missing the point. It doesn't matter that Harry didn't know what she was going to do. Harry told her a pretty bare bones assessment "they are vampires, they eat people," which she didn't take seriously. He could have told her more that would have made her more wary about the situation.
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I'm unconvinced that Susan would have taken anything Harry might have told her as a warning seriously enough to avoid going. Also, see above regarding the inadvisability of sharing this kind of information with someone you know is going to publish it.
--- Quote ---She "handled" it by waiting in the van and then doing nothing but hold the camera while Harry killed it.
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I think the point is that she saw how dangerous it was.
--- Quote ---Lots of things can eat people. I know bears eat people, but I still go hiking in the woods.
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Sure, but I bet you wouldn't go up to a bear that the bear expert said was to dangerous for him to get near, and try to get a selfie with it.
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