2 questions, here...

The Venatori know of the Oblivion War, by and large.

Q.1 -- Who else knows?  The OW relies heavily on keeping it secret; indeed the OW itself is about reducing the number of people who know certain secrets -- and writings recording those secrets -- to zero.

So... who (else, besides the Venatori) knows of the OW?



Q.2 -- Who knows of the Archive's role in the Oblivion War???

Damned few, I think... 

I don't think there's any real sign the Venatori themselves know of the Archive's role in it.  Many of them "know of the Archive," of course:  as "a signatory of the Accords" and as "a repository for human knowledge," the Archive is (to the Supernatural community at large) something of a "public figure" (albeit a reclusive or low-profile one; unlike, say, the White Court or the erzatz Reds, who keep/kept up an intentional image as dangerous and active).

But the Archive's role in the Oblivion War?

I think that knowledge is as rare (amongst those who know of the OW at all) as knowledge of the OW itself is, among supernaturals-in-general...  Possibly so rare as to be unknown, within the Dresdenverse; or only known to individuals like Vaderrung, or Mab, or Anduriel.

As has already been pointed out:  the Archive's obvious purpose is to collect and preserve knowledge / information; the Oblivion War's purpose is to eradicate it.  So the Archive has a "cover story" that's reasonably solid... indeed, I might wonder if some Venatori (ignorant of the Archive's genuine role) might conclude the Archive's known "collect/preserve" function is actually a huge threat to the Oblivion War!      

Thoughts?  Insights?  Facts I have overlooked?

So, the Fomor seem to have a feudal-ish power structure (partly with a "Celtic" twist, i.e. "Cantrev Lords").   Many of the Old-World beings do the "Feudal" thing!

They have a "King Corb" we haven't(?) yet seen on-screen.  Above a "King" there is also an "Empress".

And the "Last Titan" is a "she" -- and she's coming with an army.

Is it too much of a reach to suggest these pieces fall nicely into place?

Is it too paranoid to say... Maybe too nicely?

I think most of us have read the Journal microfiction by now.

If not, do so, it's good!  And it casts a HUGE new alternate perspective about past things (Morgan POV, written just before the beginning of Turn Coat), but not at all spoiler-y, because "past."  Admittedly, evocative of future revelations... but not spoiler-y, just evocative.

Anyhow...

In that piece, Morgan writes that he's worried Harry may be a "Destroyer," but we don't have much/any detail of what THAT is...

Some have speculated that it's a sort of the darkside outcome of a Starborn, a "Sith" to the "Jedi" of a Starborn.

But I'm thinking more-mythical... I think maybe Harry is ALREADY a Destroyer.  Just not powerful enough, yet.  He's operating on a heroic scale, and needs a few more novels' power-up to hit the superheroic, the mythic scale.

Everyone who knows Harry talks about his propensity to  F**K  S**T Up.

Butters calls him a "human wrecking ball."  Marcone talks about how much more Harry makes him pay for his insurance.  Thomas mentions the "patented Dresden anarchygasm."  Murphy began observing he caused fires, and later noticed all manner of destruction in Harry's wake.

I assert that Harry *IS* a Destroyer.

The thing is -- MOST of the F'ing up happens to the Bad Guys, and generally when Harry's done F'ing S**T Up... the state of things are better.

But, of course, there's inevitably some collateral damage.  Often quite a lot of it!  Enough general mayhem that maybe Donald Morgan and other rigid-minded sorts see mostly the risks, and don't find the rewards reliable enough to be worth it; so Harry the Destroyer looks like a bad option to them.


But that whole "F**K S**T Up to Make Things Better" schtick?

That is pretty much Shiva-the-Destroyer territory.  Say it with me kids:  Shiva the Destroyer.

And then there's this WOJ -- https://wordof.jim-butcher.com/index.php/word-of-jim-woj-compilation/woj-on-future-df-works/

... more Hindu stuff.  Hindu Mythos is full and rich and confusing ...

Harry as a Shiva-esque Destroyer?  Oh, yeah...

Don't recall which book the Ramp's first showed up to a vamp/wiz fight with Outsiders, but I recall it being a nasty surprise to the White Council.  Harry said with some dismay that Outsider-summoning needed mortal magic (so the Ramps had mortal magicians as allies)... IIRC, it contributed to his "There must be a Black Council" analysis (figuring the BC as having made the Ramps into catspaws).

Meanwhile, over on the "can mortals be nemfected, or carriers, or not" theorycrafting & WAG threads, I've been using the term "Nemvector," as a generalization of carrier and/or nemfected:  the point is they are a 'fection vector.

But of course... every mortal spellcaster is a potential "Nemvector" in the sense of being able to be a new Patient Zero:  do a Summons, get Outsider-y influence and something that IS susceptible gets Nemfected.

For example, it's a whole new way Elaine could have Nemfected Aurora -- she could have been a non-Nemfected non-Carrier, and have no Athame-type artifact... and yet, Summon the Nemfection directly from Outside!

Given how subtle and tricksy Nemfection seems to be, I might further WAG that even SUMMONING a Nemfection might be very VERY hard to detect.
 

Have Side Jobs or Brief Cases made it onto Audible (by Marsters, or anyone else)?

Or even have any individual shorts been recorded, if not entire collections?


_{Edit:  welp, I'll take that to be a "nope."}  :-(

 

Elsethread, @Yuillegan quoted a WOJ:

"I know that a lot of the folks that are generally perceived as bad guys aren’t necessarily, there are several who are currently perceived as good guys who aren’t necessarily, and we’ll continue to have those fall out over the next several books"
2011 Boston Signing

So who are the "bad guys" who "aren't necessarily?"

I think we've seen the groundwork for a redemption-arc for Marcone.  He's long been protective of children, his "criminal empire" has -- overall -- reduced violence and collateral damage, his entire being is defined in large part as remorse for an early mistake, and (most telling from the Doylist POV) he took a huge personal risk in the Raith Deeps to rescue people "because you're the only one who can..." which is pretty much Harry Dresden's own motivation -- nobody else could/would, so Harry had to step up.  Like Marcone did.

Mab, of course, is busy being Cold As Ice so she can save the whole world... no matter the personal cost to her.  A thousand years without contacting her sister, ordering that her own daughter be killed.  Mab's already a goodguy... in her own veins-of-icewater way.

All of the Demonreach prisoners are "bad guys" by definition, but the "British" one seems likely to get more screen-time and to turn into some version of a "Good (_{or at least not utterly bad}) Guy."  I mean, what's the Warden of a prison for, if not to sometimes bend the rules...?

Nicodemus Archleone may have an arc like Marcone's coming.  Sacrificing his own daughter clearly hit him very deeply, and it may be working "below the surface" in a similar (but slower) manner to Harry's rage when he learned about his daughter.  Nic with a Sword trying to redeem Tessa could be a scene worth reading.  Nic with a Sword trying to save Anduriel's next host would be pretty amusing, too.

Kumori's "we can end death" ideal is clearly some version of wanting to do the right thing, and could slip to lighter and lighter shades of gray (the same way I fear Eb may have slipped to darker shades); her criticism against the WC seems mostly to be that they are corrupt and not actually being very whitehat, which... kind of puts her into a white hat herself.  Even Cowl's efforts seem to include doing good (such as trying to Darkhallow in order to prevent "those maniacs" from doing it); we don't know a lot about his other motivations.

Others?

===

And who are the "good guys" who "aren't necessarily?"

To begin with, I note that LOTS of Harry's allies through the years have paid a pretty heavy price.  Maybe one/some of the Alphas comes to the conclusion that Harry is more of a problem than a solution (as just one example).

I'm worried about Molly.  She watched as cute Karrin jerked his heart around, as ultra-hot Susan jerked his heart around, as lovely ex Elaine jerked his heart around; and then learned Harry got Susan pregnant (remember the last time her guy got another girl pregnant?  yeah, I remember that too).  She warned Harry about the personal cost to her, if he involved her in his suicide; and sure enough, the Rag Lady strayed to the borders of sanity... where F'ing Lea found her and began training her.  Then Harry pulled her out to Demonreach and the Winterlady mantle fell on her... so then Mab began training her.  Molly seems happy, now... Well, happy-ish, mostly.  Which honestly is pretty damned disturbing, given what she's been through in the past few years... mostly, courtesy of Mr. Dresden.

And speaking of Elaine... I like her, but I think she's teetering if not fully on the bad side.  Specifically, I think she's a Nemesis agent, the vector from Justin (Outsider-summoner) to Aurora.  She retains at least some free will -- mortals are such a problem that way! -- so she left Harry that clue to free himself in SK.  But she's being a sleeper agent, working for the Paranet and relatively trusted by the other good guys.

I expect that at least one Senior Council member who seems like a goodguy is not.  Everyone suspects Cristos, so I'm betting he's just trivially "bad:"  a bit power-grubbing, marginal morals and worse ethics, but not into the really Evil^TM stuff; at most, unwittingly a puppet of the BC.  Langtry just looks like a garden-variety Jerk, trying mostly to "do the right thing" within the context of being a stick-up-the-ass sorta guy (which could actually be a nice bit of Doylist cover for being a dyed-in-the-wool villain); my biggest objection to him being Black Council is that if the Merlin were BC... they'd have already won.  I mean seriously, Peabody & the Merlin between them would have made the WC a tangled mess of pure ineffectuality.  Maybe Injun Joe saw (during the Ramp war) how bad the White Council's don't-get-involved has been (lots of mesoamerican misery from that, raising specters from his own tribe's death), and the Black Council wins him over with the "we will finally begin Doing Something" line; I like IJ, I'd hate for him to be a bad guy; but I can see the story-arc of despair...  I don't have enough of a "read" on Martha Liberty, but my gut says she's clear.  Rashid is almost certainly a Good Guy, but maybe in a similarly cold-blooded "make any sacrifice needed" way as Mab is.  Eb is kinda on the fence, for me:  he's far, far too used to making compromises, accepting bad here in return for good there, "necessary evils," and all the rest; lots of whitehat's have slipped grayer and grayer trying to Do The Right Thing At Any Cost, and ended up wearing hats so dark-gray as to be indistinguishable from blackhats.

My money is on Ancient Mai, for one reason:  the stone guard dogs are hers.  How could they possibly have missed the ubiquitous mind-control black magic that Peabody was using on all the Council, all the Wardens?  They couldn't have missed it, unless they were made to miss it.  She was VERY badly shaken when Harry showed up with Mouse.  She vouched for Mouse's testimony to the Council, which seems not-BC... except that she wasn't the only wizard there who could vouch, so trying to discredit a genuine Foo Dog would render her a suspect, too.  Hypothetically, one could posit that Peabody had some special "guard dogs won't detect this" magic, but there's been no real hint of that (rather, we see the dogs tend to be a bit hairtrigger, alerting on lots of non-problems).  The black-hat fits Mai better than anyone else.

And -- as I opened the SC can of worms by saying -- it's "at least one" not "at most one," so my strong suspicion about Mai shouldn't be taken as clearing other suspects!

Other thoughts?
 

This is Vittorio's line, near the end of Chap.38 of White Night.

It suddenly struck me:  "At last" ??!? 

I mean, the only thing that had just happened was that Madrigal the Schmuck had contracted a severe case of Dead.  Why is THAT the signal to launch Ghoulmageddon?

It seemed like Harry & Carlos were genuinely a surprise, that Vittorio (and Madrigal) weren't expecting them.  So the Ghoulmageddon plan was aimed at the Wraith Deeps already (even a badass like Coul needs a place to stage his uberghouls, time to gather them... the logistics don't end just because you're an archmage).  The aim, evidently, was to decapitate the entire White Court -- Raith, Malvora, and Skavis -- in one blow (presumably placing King Vittorio on the throne, but who (besides Cowl) really knows, at this point?).

The thing is, Vittorio could (I'd say should!) have performed the beheading as soon as everyone was there:  by waiting, he lets various plots and plans advance, possibly causing one or more of the targets to flee the event being held in their honor, and blunting the strike.

Even after Team Dresden arrived, there was this interval while the Schmuck sent for weapons.  Everyone was lounging around looking forward to the show; guards were, if not lowered, at least a defcon step less primed:  everyone WANTED the show, and DIDN'T want it disrupted.  So they had all pulled their horns in, to not give offense, not Start Something that might interfere with the spectacle to come...  THEN, if ever, Vittorio could have gotten a surprise-attack launched while everyone was waiting for the Party To Start.

But Vito waited until Madrigal died; then he broke cover and went all Igor/ArnaudAmalric on them.

Why then?

I'm not clear else what was going on that night, but I'm pretty sure something else happened that I didn't notice...

Anyone?

Bueller?