We see a lot of things in the dresdenverse Through Harry who is heavily influenced by christianity and lives in a christian country but the same world would probably look radically different but strangely the same through Gards eyes.

One of the things that is really solidly in both the Norse sagas and as I understand it contemporary Norse religion is that Odin has no qualms at all about killing humans because they have souls and will therefore go on to some afterlife or other, whereas he will go to great lengths not to kill entities without a soul because that would mean ending them forever.  I would really like to see this come up in the DV.

Oh you can not explain all evil that way. It is called the problem of evil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

Evil's only a problem that way if you assume the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God.  We have no confirmation that the White God in the DV fits these criteria.

We don't know but I suspect three apocalypses somewhat connected and all leading to the final one with the outsiders.

Nah, I think the outsiders will be the first one, the Fallen the second smaller one, and the third one will be Scouring of the Shire-scale White Court stuff.

You only do that when you are living close to each other and are locked in an a fight for survival.

Harry seems an easy sell on believing this is the case with the Red Court between GP and Changes, though.

For the red court this was not, until the final act of changes, an existential fight for survival. The real Mayan have not even been into the picture before Changes.

Harry not seeing them does not mean they weren't involved.

Do you think that if a minor Red Court functionary tried starting a war with the White Council without approval from the higher levels, the Red Court would hesitate to disown and sacrifice them ?

In that context the most logical thing for the red court to do when beaten significantly is to go back to their liars, lick their wounds and wait for better times. Both sides will somewhat recover and Winter can in the meantime concentrate on its real problems, the outsiders do not win in that scenario.

Your notion of Winter as more significant than anyone else in keeping the Outsiders out is not something I agree with; iirc one of the Mothers says that is only at this point in time and has not always been the case, which strongly suggests they are not the only entities capable of fulfilling that role.

That only changes if the outsiders have a really big influence on the reds, not just a little push in a direction compatible with their nature.

How big a push do you think pushing them into a war they can't possibly win is ?

Hades, Mab, the mothers. They have not been really touched by the outsiders schemes yet and that should happen in or just before the bat.

Have you some reason of ruling out us finding out that they have actually been seriously touched by those schemes ?

Think of how much Harry knows about now that was ongoing at the time of SF but that he had no idea about then.  Are we really in a position to rule out there being as much or more currently going on that he is still blithely unaware of ?  This is a person who has been deliberately avoiding the White Council as much as he possibly can, so is set up to be less informed about the supernatural world than most of his peers.  (Which makes sense at a meta-level for JB to pace us learning about stuff along with Harry.)

It seems that way. He is full of shit and when he loses the duel he cheats again. Ortega is a lying manipulator on the level with Nicodemus in some respects.

When you say "again" there, what are you referring to as him having cheated before ?

I see no reason to think Ortega lies.  I think that when he is put on the hot seat, he is willing to go a very long way to stop this pointless war.  Including cheating in a duel, which he knows full well will bring the full weight of the Accords down on him and probably get him killed.  The guy is willing to sacrifice his own life that way in order to kill Harry and stop the war.  That does not look like a liar to me, it looks like someone dedicated and self-sacrificing for the interests of his people.

Harry has the possibility to become that unique person but he was not the only one. But he becomes more and more important in every book.

I'll say. he has soulfire (which Nicodemus very nicely set up by exposing him to hellfire, which is probably why the guy thinks he has a chance of ending up a saint), he has the Winter mantle, he is a well-trained wizard, he's been exposed to non-negative uses of necromancy.  Harry was not the only potential starborn at the beginning, but he is a major useful piece now.

I do not think that all those powers would have encouraged Harry in his course to Chichen Itza if the reds were a useful or necessery part of the current structure. They all wanted the red court gone every one including Uriel.

You give the Reds far more importance here than I do.

Because I think the gates have to be broken to get the bulk of the outsiders here and that means defeating the bulk of winter. Nemesis influences players either by direct infection or by manipulation and playing on their nature but at the end they need to do something big to get through. Something apocalyptic that takes three books.

I genuinely do not think we are going to get one overall apocalyptic thread, rather than three separate events, in the BAT.

Not enough. If everyone is equally beaten down that will stop for a while or become meaningless.

You've said that before, and I still disagree.  How beaten down do you think people would need to be to stop?  In the absence of the events of Changes, for example, do you have difficulty believing in the last surviving White Council wizard and the last surviving Red Court vampire being more interested in killing each other than in stopping to take a breath and figure out what else is going on?

The big powers will still be untouched however and the bulk of winters troops as well.

Which big powers?  Do you think that Cowl and allies have been doing things offstage to weaken entities like Ferrovax?

They lost. And I am not so sure they even tried that hard. I think you take Duke Ortegas words far too seriously.

I take them seriously because he backs them with his actions.  He puts his own life on the line in an attempt to stop the war.

And also they did exactly what the outsiders wanted from them by waging war with the white council and continuously escalating it.

This feels like there's circular logic in here somewhere.  Why do you think that "waging war and continually escalating it" rather than "waging war and losing as much as they win" is what the Outsiders want here?  The latter is a much better fit with what actually happens prior to Changes.

Doubtless big on Uriels agenda but was that enough to get the whole coalition there?

I would argue yes, because, as I argued in the post I linked you to a bit ago, I think that Harry is nearly unique in the DV, as part of a joint plan involving Uriel, Mab and Odin (and after SG I am willing to put Hades in their camp also) that has been running since well before he was born, with the objective of giving him access to pretty much every supernatural power source in the DV, in order to back up his near-unique ability against Outsiders.  The Red Court are at best a bunch of enemy foot soldiers; Harry is the Manhattan Project.  He's clearly much more important to their plans, and the end of GS is such a perfect manipulation to put him where he will serve Uriel and Mab's interests both, I do not believe that is an accident.

Is it known for certain that the process that created Bob was not in any ways similar to the process that created Bonnie? Natural impregnation and in vitro fertilization both produce babies.They are both spirits of intellect and the Archive seems to be the transferable fusion of a spirit of intellect mantle onto a mortal host with a certain genetic similarity to its first host.

The difference is that we have it in so many words that Bob was specifically built not just as a spirit of intellect but as an attempt at duplicating the Archive.  Which leads me to believe that the chances of Bonnie being more like the Archive in the relevant ways (whatever they are) than Bob are low.

Bonnie also meets that criteria.

How is Bonnie like the Archive ?  It is specified that Kemmler made Bob specifically as an attempt to duplicate the Archive, at the end of SmF iirc.

But if you weaken everyone you achieve nothing, their relative strengts stay the same. To create real chaos you need to strengthen a somewhat weaker aggressive party and weaken the powers that are so someone sees a chance and goes for it.

OK, I was unclear there.  I reckon Cowl is all about weakening everyone else in order to make life easier for the Outsiders. 

The rest of what you are saying, I say both yes and no to. In that I think the method Cowl is using to get everyone beaten down includes sometimes throwing balances off (as between the White Council's hammering in DB and the Red Court's in PG)  but mostly dragging people into wars that benefit neither side (as in GP, and as attempted in WN).

Not compared to the white council but the real target has always been Winter.

I don't agree with you there.  Winter being the ones who are up front guarding the Outer Gates at the moment makes them a necessary target, but far from the only important one.

To disengage for what? They went completely crazy at the end of changes.

I don't agree with you there either.  Harry finds the notion that evil is chaotic and crazy and self-destructive very comforting, and he projects it all over the place, which leaves him a big blindspot to evil that is actually organised and out-thinking him but passes itself off as chaotic etc. (Like the Joker almost all the way through  Dark Knight.)

The Red Court isn't crazy, by all the evidence up to and including Changes.  It is deeply divided over whether war with the White Council in the current timeframe is a good idea.  Harry is looking at the outcomes of a shifting political balance between those in the Red Court who think that outside sorcerous aid can make the war winnable to them at this point (Arianna) and those who see that they can't win the war at this point (Ortega in DM, the Red King in Changes), and thinks he's seeing one commander who is loopy.  The Red King rather neatly plays Harry to get rid of Arianna.

He probably tried to encourage the Fomor to take a more active role as well.

I strongly suspect the death of the Red Court will turn out very much a net loss for the defense of reality.  I like the notion (not originally mine) that Chichen Itza is such a nexus of power because, like Demonreach, there is something really scary buried under there, and I would not be at all surprised if reconstituting the Red Court from the survivors (the ones in the Erlking's basement, and, if I am right, Ortega) is a vital part of the final battle.

So why did Odin and Uriel join Mab?

I've analysed that at some length, and I think my argument still stands; it's in the reference collection at http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,40670.0.html

If Harry does any more self-examining, he'll turn into Hamlet.

If you think that's off-putting, you're talking to the wrong person.  Me, I just get frustrated that all that reflection is so slow to turn into actual serious change of approach.