The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
Bloodlines
morriswalters:
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. So if your nature is to be a good guy then the only way to make a Choice is to make an evil choice?
g33k:
--- Quote from: Bad Alias on April 07, 2020, 02:15:38 AM --- There's a reason I chose to capitalize Choice and Free Will. I'm not talking about a choice but a Choice. An act against one's nature. One could Choose not to act, or one could not act because that is one's nature. One is an exercise of free will and the other isn't. An act of free will is a Choice. Everything else is not...
--- End quote ---
Hmm.
This is an interesting tangent!
Let's take another of Harry's choice points. He's laying in St. Mary's with a broken back, and little Maggie is going to be sacrificed soon.
So he chooses to summon Mab, and make a deal for the WK Mantle and enough power to rescue his daughter.
He could have chosen to summon Lasciel's coin.
I don't THINK he was able to do a Darkhallow -- he didn't have enough Death on-hand, enough uneasy Spirits to consume, etc. But maybe I'm wrong; whatever...
He certainly had at least two sources of Power he could call upon.
Was that a Choice that he made? Mab vs. Lasciel?
Or was it simply his Nature? His daughter needed to be rescued, and nobody else would do it, so he HAD to do it -- he had no choice (or rather, if he had chosen to let events happen to her without him, THAT would have been Free Will: not a choice but a Choice)?
Interesting analysis... Very thought-provoking!
Bad Alias:
--- Quote from: morriswalters on April 07, 2020, 03:58:02 AM ---Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. So if your nature is to be a good guy then the only way to make a Choice is to make an evil choice?
--- End quote ---
That's a bit simplistic, but yes (in the Dresden Files, whether or not free will and choice actually exist in the real world is a debate I don't care to get into because I don't see any point to me doing it). I think g33k's example would be better to zero in on they dynamics as I understand them.
Let's say Harry's nature is to save his little girl no matter what the cost. That's basically how Jim describes the story, so I think that's accurate, but let's just agree to it for the sake of argument. Once Harry's back is broken, he has options for obtaining power. Therefore his nature compels him to exercise one of those options. We could further say that Harry's nature compels him to exercise the least evil option. Harry thinks that's Mab. I think he was right. Assuming all that, Harry would have to Choose to use the Dark Hallow, summon the coin, or do nothing.
--- Quote from: g33k on April 07, 2020, 11:40:30 AM ---He could have chosen to summon Lasciel's coin.
I don't THINK he was able to do a Darkhallow -- he didn't have enough Death on-hand, enough uneasy Spirits to consume, etc. But maybe I'm wrong; whatever...
--- End quote ---
I'm not sure about either of those. Lash never showed Harry how to summon the coin. IIRC, Harry thought it would have been impossible. Maybe simply knowing it wasn't was enough for him to figure it out. I don't know. I'm skeptical as to whether or not Harry knows how to do the Dark Hallow at all. When talking about Harry's options in Changes Jim said he knew how because he looked flipped through the Word of Kemmler with his Sight open. I think it was in response to a question about whether or not he was bluffing Mab on having other options. But we know Jim is wrong. Harry used Lash.
But if Harry does know how to do a Dark Hallow, then he probably wouldn't have needed the same amount of power to assault the Red Court as the Kemmlerites would have needed to become a god. Basically, I'm suggesting he could have performed a mini-Dark Hallow.
morriswalters:
To begin with Lash knew the ritual for the Darkhallow, not Harry. Sans Lash, why would you assume that Harry could do it, not withstanding the broken back, which would seem to be a major impediment? In a similar vein, the coin could be summoned because the Shadow knew how to do it, lacking the Shadow why do you think that Harry could summon it? At that moment Harry had one choice, the Knight's mantle. There is no other effective choice.
The choices that led to his breaking his back would have been the salient ones. Uriel told him as much. The tendency is to believe we come to a point when a great choice stands before us. Which is wish fulfillment, nothing more. That final choice is the sum of many other choices that it took to get to that moment. Trying to save the other people in the boarding house would be the choice in line with his personality. He could have chose to watch them burn. Or long before that he could have chose to not to live so close to people that he would have to make the choice to save them or not. Remember the Wizard's Tower?
g33k:
--- Quote from: morriswalters on April 07, 2020, 08:26:26 PM --- To begin with Lash knew the ritual for the Darkhallow, not Harry. Sans Lash, why would you assume that Harry could do it, not withstanding the broken back, which would seem to be a major impediment? In a similar vein, the coin could be summoned because the Shadow knew how to do it, lacking the Shadow why do you think that Harry could summon it?
...
--- End quote ---
In the final analysis -- because Jim could write it that way, if he had wanted to. For Doylist reasons, this is sufficient unto itself! ;-)
But there are solid Watsonian lines of argument, too...
Grevane, IIRC, just skimmed the Word, and reported the Darkhallow as remarkably simple. Harry (not Lash) summoned Sue, so Harry may not even have needed Lash's memories to reconstruct such a "remarkably simple" process -- particularly since Harry seems to be "a natural" with Necromancy!
The canonical truth is: Lasciel, the Fallen Angel, made a great big STOMP onto Harry's mind. She filled it with her Shadow, and imbued that Shadow with a bunch of knowledge (Etruscan/Whamp & Sumerian/Ghoul languages (and likely others, at a guess), various kinds of magic, the fact (and implications) of Harry's Starborn-ness, etc etc etc), and at least a couple of mental quirks: a "photographic memory," and some musical techniques. Potentially, a bunch of other stuff Jim may have considered (but decided not to whip out of that particular diabolus ex machina).
It is equally canonical that -- once enSTOMPed -- this was all IN HARRY'S MIND, not any separate outside source. Lasciel seemed to have put up some barriers, so the Shadow would be Harry's "gatekeeper" to dole out goodies, to tempt with Easy Solutions, etc etc etc. But the Shadow itself got tempted, instead... Lash seems to have abandoned all that barrier-to-knowlege.
We know Lash left Harry some music.
We know she did NOT leave him with the exotic languages.
We know Lash left Harry with a Li'l Surprise (or maybe became that Surprise?)
In principle, Lash could have left Harry with some/all of the Word of Kemmler, or just the Darkhallow. She could also have left Harry with instructions on Coin-summoning (it's ALSO apparently pretty easy (I guess Jim thinks "Cheap Cosmic Power" is typically made pretty easy by the Bad Guys).
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