The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers

The one thing in battleground the bugged me: [BG Spoilers]

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morriswalters:
We think about this more than Jim does.  The damage should boggle your mind.

Anything on final or taking off at a Chicago Airport would have fallen out of the sky.  Everybody with a pacemaker or defibrillator would have seen  them fail.  Anybody in a ICU would have died. There are three nuclear reactors near Chicago, including, wait for it, the Dresden Generating Station. Depending on the range of the effect it would have taken them out. The damage in Japan was caused by the loss of power.

Any railroad locomotives would be dead since they are diesel electric.  Every transformer in the city would have died and it might take years to replace them. All appliances, all blood storage.  Any insulin requiring refrigeration. And almost all streetlights. Every car, motorcycle and ambulance.  Every bank and financial institution. And every water pump in Chicago.  Plus thing's I'm forgetting.

When you hex technology this is what to expect. And Jim always says it destroys, not that it stops working until the hex is removed.

TheCuriousFan:

--- Quote from: morriswalters on October 04, 2020, 11:15:10 PM ---We think about this more than Jim does.  The damage should boggle your mind.

Anything on final or taking off at a Chicago Airport would have fallen out of the sky.  Everybody with a pacemaker or defibrillator would have seen  them fail.  Anybody in a ICU would have died. There are three nuclear reactors near Chicago, including, wait for it, the Dresden Generating Station. Depending on the range of the effect it would have taken them out. The damage in Japan was caused by the loss of power.

Any railroad locomotives would be dead since they are diesel electric.  Every transformer in the city would have died and it might take years to replace them. All appliances, all blood storage.  Any insulin requiring refrigeration. And almost all streetlights. Every car, motorcycle and ambulance.  Every bank and financial institution. And every water pump in Chicago.  Plus thing's I'm forgetting.

When you hex technology this is what to expect. And Jim always says it destroys, not that it stops working until the hex is removed.

--- End quote ---
On that note Dead Beat should have been an absolute slaughterfest too since Cowl set up a sustained version of Ethniu's hex (on top of everything else).

Shift8:
This is the entire problem with this particular plot device in the Dresden files. The bulk of examples of it and characters comments about it mostly tend to suggest that it is annoying but not truly debilitating problem to technology. In other words, over the course of the series things work more often than they don't, even in the direct presence of magic. To boot, this is directly commented on by some characters in the series both explicitly and implicitly.

Then you get cases like Murphy's motorcycle where Dresden's reaction is almost like a retcon, except that it only seems to apply where Jim wants it to. It would be one thing if Harry was concerned the bike might fail. Its another thing entirely for him to be flabbergasted that it works and for Murphy to have gone to the trouble of putting up wards.

Morris Walters made some good points about the damage that would have been done if we assume that the ability to cancel electronics is as devastating as some parts of the book imply or some here think are certainly the case. The point about dead beat is also good. If magic was really such a consistent detriment to technology than the entire series would have played out differently. The super-natural would not be in hiding from mortals, it would be the other way around.


Id also like the point out that in the first few books Harry talks alot about how he can't go in hospitals because of the risk to the delicate machines there. But when Micheal is hurt he spends quite a lot of time in a hospital. He has some concerns, but clearly the risks were low enough that he was ok risking all of the people in the hospital...not to mention Micheal.

Yuillegan:
Indeed, the amount of times things in the Dresden Files should have caused more damage than they should have is a big question mark.

I very much agree that it seems absurd that the end of the book seems to be a return to mostly normal but more people are spooked. Ridiculous. I wrote in another thread how that little dust-up in NY in September 2001 changed everything. Security went to a whole new level. Wars were started that still haven't ended. Economies crashed and were made. And that was a few buildings and 3000 people.

60,000 people and 50 buildings (give or take)? No one would accept that. Not to mention when the National Guard showed up and saw all that damage and no enemies and reports of monsters...they must have seriously started scratching their heads.

So the question really becomes...how does something like the attack on Chicago get covered up? Have such events been done before?

The only plausible explanation for people "accepting" this as a mere terrorist incident (with no build-up or chatter, mind you - that's what the NSA etc spend much of their time listening out for) - would be that the US government in the Dresden Files DOES known about the supernatural and has the capabilities to cover such things up...at least to a point.

Anything less than a full-scale cover up with semi-magical resources will be completely implausible and break immersion. At least, that's my take.

TheCuriousFan:
And they didn't even use any of the nerve gas bombshells for this big assault when just dropping a few of them in residential areas far from where the accords forces were clustering would be a great way to kick off festivities for the Fomor.

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