The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
The Halloween Conjunction -- how secret, *really*?
The_Sibelis:
I don't see your point. The above context is the implication SF wasn't meant to be successful so nothing was planned out around the birthday besides I cool date to pick. So first I ponder when Harry's birthday actually came up, point out other birthday's have the same kinda consideration around their picking, like Thomas on Valentine's day. An point out the timeline between when he actually wrote the first draft and published it had a big overaching story brainstorming session. If your having trouble following along, feel free to ask.
g33k:
--- Quote from: Conspiracy Theorist on July 27, 2023, 07:57:25 PM ---I do wonder if Jim has need of crowdsourcing an answer ...
--- End quote ---
As to Harry's birth-year?
There already is one: https://www.paranetonline.com/index.php/topic,1592.0.html
(n.b. that timeline was very-much a "crowdsourced" aka collaborative project)
It really mainly proves that Jim didn't actually work this through.
The_Sibelis:
Because someone else did a timeline and noticed errors? I'm sorry, but woj is Jim's quite aware of discrepancy in the timeline as far back as his battle with Justin
--- Quote ---Regarding Harry’s first use of magic, in Proven Guilty he tells Molly the story, and in Ghost Story he reflects back on that. The stories overall are the same, but there are a lot of small details. That can be explained, but I was wondering if that was proof that changes [unintelligible] may have happened in the series?
Yeah, it’s happened several times, and I’m not going to tell you where because I’m going to use that in a book. I’m trying to write Harry as much like a person as I can, and people remember things differently, especially over time. You think you remember thigns perfectly, but a lot of the time, I’ve run into people that I haven’t seen in 20 years, and they’ll say, “Do you remember this?” and I’ll say, “No, I don’t remember that at all!” They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, you totally got into this fight and beat this guy up.” “I did?” “Well, it pretty much looked like it from where I was standing.” And I don’t remember it like that at all, I just remember helping him up off the floor. Or something like that. But the point is that we remember things in very odd ways and you can see it in the short term when an investigator goes around and tries to get all the witnesses who just saw something to tell him what they saw. And everybody saw something a little bit different and it just gets more skewed and magnified over time. So, Dresden was telling Molly what she needed to hear, mainly, because he was concerned about her. And he was more or less stating what happened, but he’s not the most reliable narrator in the whole world, because people aren’t. And that’s one of the great things about people, I think, UI don’t know if it’s going to kill us, or if it’s going to be the only way we manage to get by, is by saying, “Oh, I’m really not quite sure what happened that far back, maybe we should just move ahead.”
--- End quote ---
so it doesn't prove he didn't think it through, it proves we don't understand the timeline itself and why there are these discrepancies. An unstable time loop has been the most theorized one at this point.
g33k:
--- Quote from: The_Sibelis on July 27, 2023, 09:12:41 PM ---I don't see your point. The above context is the implication SF wasn't meant to be successful so nothing was planned out around the birthday besides I cool date to pick. So first I ponder when Harry's birthday actually came up, point out other birthday's have the same kinda consideration around their picking, like Thomas on Valentine's day. An point out the timeline between when he actually wrote the first draft and published it had a big overaching story brainstorming session. If your having trouble following along, feel free to ask.
--- End quote ---
I suspect (but do not know for a fact) that Jim Butcher's initial ideas of HBCD & DF included a vague "Chosen One" concept. That he picked "Halloween" as "a cool date."
Jim was already a RPG'er, a LARP'er. Me may have had pagan friends... and even if not, the ideas of "Samhain" and the "thinning of veil between mortal and otherworld" had definitely seeped into geek/gamer culture by then!
I don't know if he had the "Starborn" notion, or any "the stars [specifically] are right." He could have been a "Chosen One" because of his bloodline, or because of some Sacred Chrism applied at birth, or any of several other ways; AFAIK, nobody has ever sought answers from Jim as to why he picked a "Starborn" / "conjunction" origin-story for his Chosen One.
(It could as easily have been something about that liminal, All-Hallows-Eve state and just a 666-year accumulation of supernatural potential that settles on one "lucky" mortal every 2/3-millenium...)
I'm just going to assert that Jim didn't actually research that there was any "meaningful" or "significant" conjunction (in the conventional (i.e. astronomical or (more-likely) astrological senses of meaningful or significant) that happens on Halloween every 666 years, and no other times.
There is no there there.
He did a bunch of brainstorming, but I don't think he ever went back to these origin-story questions (or maybe he did... but could not discover such an astro<whatever> event, and he was stuck with some of his 1st-draft "early-episode wierdness").
g33k:
--- Quote from: The_Sibelis on July 27, 2023, 10:31:04 PM ---Because someone else did a timeline and noticed errors? I'm sorry, but woj is Jim's quite aware of discrepancy in the timeline as far back as his battle with Justin
<WOJ from some q&a session>
so it doesn't prove he didn't think it through, it proves we don't understand the timeline itself and why there are these discrepancies. An unstable time loop has been the most theorized one at this point.
--- End quote ---
Jim isn't actually addressing a "timeline" there, or specific & objective facts like birth-dates, and x-before-y-but-after-w sequences, &c.
He's talking about Harry's own memories of his life, and stories he tells about those memories, and the fact that people don't remember well, and are "unreliable narrators" (Jim repeatedly calls out Harry repeated as an unreliable narrator, to a degree that makes me suspect Jim sees Harry as less-reliable than average!).
He even states that Harry was narrating the story in ways to increase its emotional impact, "telling her what she needed to hear;" it was only "more or less what happened." It isn't really to the point of a "timeline" (or the consistency thereof).
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