If you violate the first law, even in self defense, you still have the taint.  This is evidenced by the kid in SF who could see the taint of HWWB on Harry.

That mark on Harry was a scar from contact with the Walker while it was pursuing him, not the later action of killing Justin in combat. Though given the flashback in GS, the Walker seemed to want to set him on a path to go after Justin, so it's a fine distinction.

Yeah, Hannah Asher had reason for her initial killing, being raped for heaven sake, but she didn't surrender to the Wardens at that time. If she had a good advocate she might have survived under the Doom.  ...  So it is understandable that Hannah ran from the Wardens, but at the same time was she ever able to check her slide into warlockhood?  It isn't totally clear whether or not at the time of Changes when her friends died when their vamp halves died that she wasn't already a warlock.

She was a warlock for killing the Wardens who tried to arrest her, at least. But there seems to be variation in how high-functioning warlocks can be. The paradigm is that rationalizing that it's right to do an act of dark magic warps the caster so they're more likely to do the same thing again, right? So someone like Hannah (or Harry himself) who kills in self-defense is changed by that experience, but I think it's specific to responding to future threats with wrath, rather than a general temptation to burn everybody for shits 'n giggles. Harry even recognizes that tendency in himself - among other mentions, one of the significant realizations in Ghost Story is that he's tended to embrace anger when threatened as an alternative to fear, and he can't really do that when he's watching his friends in physical danger but can't intervene himself. He just doesn't connect those temper issues to his initial experience with killing Justin, but I think that's where they originated.

It's a qualitatively different personality change from someone who kills for personal gain, or in anger that's not connected to a direct threat to their own safety (e.g. the young Korean warlock Langtry used as an example). The option of leniency in self defense cases probably exists because there's more of a chance of rehabilitation for those who have become wrathful when genuinely threatened than there is for those who have changed to believe in using their magic to initiate aggression. I don't think it was an accident that Ebenezar kept Harry largely isolated to a safe environment on his farm (aside from the one encounter with teenage bullies in town, where Harry remembers just staring them down because he knew they weren't a real threat - in hindsight, I suspect Eb was treating that as a test).

There's probably some kind of a trade-off, whereby there's more humans, but our spread has also driven many animal species to extinction, so the net amount of life hasn't changed as much as you'd think just from our numbers.

2.  There was an attack on Arctis Tor, and when Harry saw the damage he commented that he couldn't have done that much damage even with Hellfire.  Well a Dragon using hellfire probably could.

Harry had a mere shadow of a Fallen in his head, and some of the Denarians were stronger in their own right than he was as of PG. I would not conclude that the magnitude of damage there could only be attributed to inhumanly powerful hosts - Namshiel probably could have done it alone, or in combination with Tessa and / or Rosanna.

A Bigfoot took up a Coin, and Goodman Grey was offered a Coin so we can assume he could take it up.  Coins aren't limited to mortals.

They're still a great deal closer to mortal-kind than they are to Dragons. I can't really see any of the Fallen risking bonding to something that might realistically be more powerful than they themselves are, and possibly getting stuck as the junior partner.

I'd buy Dragons being susceptible to N-fection more plausibly than them being suitable for coins, but I'm not yet convinced Ferrovax was targeted with either. It seems a little unsurprising for them to have played the same trick on him that they got Lea with, at this point, and the coin theory would just be upscaling the same surprise that the Genoskwa was already used for. I kind of think Jim will have something more out of left field for Mr. Ferro's next appearance.

^ Maybe they just need a little https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0ry4qBSX2U

I think the key mentioned in that WOJ (a recent one not in the index, Im looking) even if there is an eventual death, there was never a specific Choice made to "Kill".  He didnt Kill them, he freed them from a magical parasitic force that was trying to consume their Souls;  after that Nature took its course (and it's Due), but Id argue that isnt on him.

That's why I don't really find the "effects matter more than intentions" WOJ sensible. The explanation of warlock soul tainting is that to cast nasty spells, you have to convince yourself it's right, and causing the warping of ethical standards. How can that be sensibly applied to unanticipated collateral damage?

But in terms of the elimination of the Red Court and the subsequent deaths of most of the Fellowship half-turned losing their protection against aging, no, I don't believe Harry could have acquired any warlock taint from that. Why? Because he didn't cast the spell - the Reds' sorcerers did that themselves; he and Susan just hijacked its targeting by giving it her blood instead. It didn't take any act of magic (the Red King tried to send one of his warriors to sacrifice Maggie, and Susan would have stabbed herself but for losing control of her hands during the transformation) at that point.

Now, that's not to say it didn't have fairly hideous moral repercussions anyway - but it didn't inherently change the specific dimension of how Harry interacts with magic in an addictively mind-altering way.

Damn. I could have sworn there was something more recent -- either a public appearance or an AMA -- where he said someone tried going after her to get to him, and one of the events he mentions in Blood Rites was him getting revenge.

I'm pretty sure I recall something like that from one of the AMA's, including that he tried to stay away from Maggie Sr. so his enemies wouldn't learn she mattered to him up until her powers manifested.

Edit: Oh, yes. That stuck in my memory because it was part of the same answer as something ... uhh ... just a teensy bit important.

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/3lye65/i_am_jim_butcher_author_of_the_dresden_files_and/cvadt1h/

He didn't hit it after Archangel. He hit it a solid year or more after Archangel, and his stated immediate reason was that Ortega was coming to kill Harry. It's right there, still on the page.
Everyone else's motives aren't really germane.

As I recall it, Death Masks fell in the autumn of the same year as Summer Knight. Four or five months is easier to reconcile with taking a while to figure out who to hit back against.

If it was really in response to Simon, I think it would've happened a lot sooner. Instead it happens literally the week after Ortega tries to kill Harry. I kiiiiiiinda doubt that was a coincidence.

Of course that was his real primary motivation, but the point was Archangel was still a good enough excuse for him to act against Casaverde, as far as any accountability to the rest of the of the Senior Council is concerned. He could spin it that it took a while to ascertain Archangel was Ortega's op, and by the point he was sure who to retaliate against, the duel was already on the table so he wanted to see if Harry would take care of the problem for him, but Oretga's cheating forced Eb to revert to Plan A.

We don't know what the other hits were, but of the ones we have, none seem to have been ordered by the White Council.

I think we've got pretty good basis for linking New Madrid to retaliation for the attack on his wife. The others he told Harry about  were Krakatoa and the Tunguska Event. For reasons I've elaborated elsewhere I suspect Tunguska was about wiping out a concentration of high-value BCV targets who were trying to ride out the Stokerlypse somewhere remote - if I'm right about that, the Council would have been happy to see that happen, but we have no real idea whether it was ordered or at his own initiative.

Krakatoa is an odder one. There were geological warnings signs quite a ways ahead, so that target can't have been someone mobile who could just leave via the NN. It has to have been some sort of fixed stronghold that needed to be got rid of, but whose it might have been is a puzzle.