The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers

True Love's Protection

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Mr. Mouse:
I thought the explanation for why Harry's protection disappeared was disappointing, sort of 'the narrative necessitates Lara be able to touch him and I don't want to bother with Harry having sex with someone else so there it is.'

A better explanation than Mab's would have been: "The protection is a feedback loop between the lover and the beloved. When one of them dies it fades quicker than if mere distance separates them." That gets Jim out of the corner he painted himself into without making it seem that ones later loves don't matter as much, which is an odd position to espouse when writing about characters with multi-century lifespans.

Mira:

--- Quote from: Mr. Mouse on January 21, 2026, 04:10:28 PM ---I thought the explanation for why Harry's protection disappeared was disappointing, sort of 'the narrative necessitates Lara be able to touch him and I don't want to bother with Harry having sex with someone else so there it is.'

A better explanation than Mab's would have been: "The protection is a feedback loop between the lover and the beloved. When one of them dies it fades quicker than if mere distance separates them." That gets Jim out of the corner he painted himself into without making it seem that ones later loves don't matter as much, which is an odd position to espouse when writing about characters with multi-century lifespans.

--- End quote ---

That really doesn't work either, Harry still burned Lara's lips in White Night five years after his split with Susan.  True, she was still alive, but he had had no contact with her at all in all those years.  To my mind, the love you feel lingers more after one loses a loved one to death than a split up, because you are still loving the memory and there is no distraction from it.  I skimmed the book before I started to read it, and when I saw that question come up, I thought was it more a quick passion than true love between Harry and Murphy?  That actually might have made things more interesting even if disappointing for both Harry and his Murphy shipping fans.

Mr. Mouse:

--- Quote from: Mira on January 21, 2026, 06:31:52 PM ---That really doesn't work either, Harry still burned Lara's lips in White Night five years after his split with Susan.  True, she was still alive, but he had had no contact with her at all in all those years.  To my mind, the love you feel lingers more after one loses a loved one to death than a split up, because you are still loving the memory and there is no distraction from it. 
--- End quote ---

Personally, I agree with you about the love lingering more after a loved one dies, especially if one is summoning the shade and playing boardgames with it every night. But narrative necessity triumphs over all.

They might not have had contact, but Harry still felt love for Susan after 5 years and hadn't been with someone else. Susan still felt love for Harry after 5 years and hadn't been with anyone else. Ergo, lack of contact alone doesn't break the protection.

The problem Jim created was that Harry burned Lara while Murphy was alive, but not 4 months later. He needed  Lara to rock Harry's world with a superkiss on Halloween which should have burned her lips off if the protection held. His excuse of "I just fed" from the first date won't hold if she is indeed feeding on him.

Second alternative, Jim could have said it was Odin's scooping her up that broke the connection.

LaraBeck:

--- Quote from: Mr. Mouse on January 21, 2026, 04:10:28 PM ---I thought the explanation for why Harry's protection disappeared was disappointing, sort of 'the narrative necessitates Lara be able to touch him and I don't want to bother with Harry having sex with someone else so there it is.'

--- End quote ---

Couldn't agree more. If self-loathing was the cause, Harry should have lost the protection when Susan got turned. And granted, Harry himself says that he never felt as bad as he's feeling in Twelve Months over Murphy, not even when Susan got turned. But come on, it just makes no sense when we have other prior lore like Lara being burned by a wedding ring.

By that metric, will the protection returns as Harry makes peace with himself? It would be logical, except Lara still can touch him at the end of Twelve Months. And what is Murphy returns? (which is likely) Will the protection return?

I felt like there was a lot of seeding doubt into Harry and Murphy's love and I felt that was unnecessary. I mean, sure Jim needed to build up the relationship with Lara, but I don't appreciate trying to soft-retcon Murphy's character or her relationship with Harry.

Not when in the same book Harry tells us that he wanted to spend his life with Murphy.

It was like seeing two completely different Harry's chapter to chapter. I dunno, this was a major disappointment for me in this book, which overall wasn't that great to begin with.

I saw one reviewer saying that the book was soft-reboot of the series, and indeed, I feel that is accurate.

I mean, Lara, who is practically Thomas' mother, now is softer and emphathetic when she was pretty much okay with him being dead a few books in the past. And we're going to play that "she's just misunderstood" game now.

There's a lot of trying to make Lara fit into Murphy's place and I'm not happy with that, yes, partially because I still think Harry and Murphy should be together, but also because it was clumsily done in this book.

CrusherJen:
Since I devoured the whole thing in one sitting, it's difficult for me to sort out if my initial reactions are fully baked or not... but yes, I agree, this doesn't hit well for me at all.

To a degree, the soft-retconning could be attributed to Harry learning more about how the world really works... but in this case I can't buy it. It's too different from what we saw Harry go through after Susan, or even the way we saw Lara get burned one book ago, and I really hate throwing doubt on Murphy's feelings after she died. We got books and books of build up between those two, it feels insincere to even imply "sour grapes" now. It's not just kicking someone when they're down, they're dead, and that just seems mean, in a way the saga typically hasn't been before.

I'm not all that committed to any ship but even if Harry winds up with someone else by the BAT, it doesn't mean that what he had with Karrin wasn't real while they were together, just as what he had with Susan was real at that time.

IMHO, any of the alternative explanations in this thread would have been better than what we got in the book.

It's one thing to have an unreliable narrator (which Harry is), but too much backtracking and retconning can damage a reader's faith in the narrative, creating distance and doubts, and that's not a good thing. Yes, maybe Lara can pull back on her power to some degree, she's probably old and powerful enough to have that much control, but between that AND the oh-so-conveniently waning protection AND Mab's catty little swipe at Murphy, it's all too much.  >:(

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