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The Dresden Files => DF Spoilers => Topic started by: wardenferry419 on November 29, 2017, 10:17:51 AM
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We have seen alot of baddies; but who is the worst of the worst.
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Lara Raith, because as proven by Thomas, she has the capacity to choose something else.
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I think the special attention she gave to Madeline in TC was particularly disturbing.
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I picked Shaggy and Kemmler. Shaggy delights way too much in suffering for suffering's sake. And Kemmler, you know, started World War I. I also credit him for World War II in part, because it really set the stage for a sequel.
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What is 'evil'? How are you defining it? The most destructive to the universe as we know it is the Outsider force, obviously. If we're just going on sheer destructive capabilities, then this is the obvious answer. If you mean something else, then maybe there is another answer.
Also, I think there is a case to be made that Dresden is a dangerous and unstable figure in this universe. So far, he's been a sledgehammer on puppet strings for most of the series. I think that the council is not wrong to fear him and The Merlin may not have been too wrong to want him dead at certain points. It's Dresden's POV series, so we're meant to be most sympathetic towards him and his side of things, but we can also start to see patterns and that other people may not be wrong about him.
Depending on how much Butcher makes of this 'starborn' thingie, Dresden may be the biggest danger to the universe save the outsiders themselves (or itself, depending on if it is a single being).
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The outsiders most obviously because they aim the end of all reality. That means in this list those who help them. Cowl, Maeve,....
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What is 'evil'? How are you defining it? The most destructive to the universe as we know it is the Outsider force, obviously. If we're just going on sheer destructive capabilities, then this is the obvious answer. If you mean something else, then maybe there is another answer.
Also, I think there is a case to be made that Dresden is a dangerous and unstable figure in this universe. So far, he's been a sledgehammer on puppet strings for most of the series. I think that the council is not wrong to fear him and The Merlin may not have been too wrong to want him dead at certain points. It's Dresden's POV series, so we're meant to be most sympathetic towards him and his side of things, but we can also start to see patterns and that other people may not be wrong about him.
Depending on how much Butcher makes of this 'starborn' thingie, Dresden may be the biggest danger to the universe save the outsiders themselves (or itself, depending on if it is a single being).
dangerous and destructive doesn't equate to 'evil'
I think that I would define 'evil' as someone or something that puts his own desires above anyones or everyones best interests.
to put that tag on Nic, I think I'd have to know his final motivation and goals. If he thinks that his is the only way to save the universe from the Outsiders... then I don't know if I would call him 'evil', maybe misguided and ruthless, but I don't know...
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Nicodemus was designed to be the evil counterpart of Michael who is he palladin of the story. Nicodemus is evil by design. He is as evil as Michael is good.
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I think that I would define 'evil' as someone or something that puts his own desires above anyones or everyones best interests.
Like, you know, being willing to let the world burn to save his daughter? (We have WoJ that Harry absolutely meant that at the time.)
Maybe it's a product of growing up in an environment with a very real threat of violence from ideological fanatics, but when I read that sequence, my sympathies were absolutely with the world. It constantly bemuses me how many readers sympathise with Harry in that scene even when he is clearly saying "I consider you personally and all your loved ones acceptable collateral damage so long as I get what I care about" to everyone else in the world. The people I have heard that from before have not been ones I could consider good or sympathetic.
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That is because protecting those near to you, especially your children, appeals to human nature far more than protecting all those nameless people we have too many of anyway.
Jim plays with our emotions which are driven by our instincts which are shaped by evolution. We maybe do not agree with someone who is prepared to let the world burn for their child, especially if we are going to burn, but a lot of us understand it.
Especially if we had a baby and went a little crazy because of it.
Also some of us probably tend to identify with the narrator while reading.
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What is 'evil'? How are you defining it? The most destructive to the universe as we know it is the Outsider force, obviously. If we're just going on sheer destructive capabilities, then this is the obvious answer. If you mean something else, then maybe there is another answer.
Also, I think there is a case to be made that Dresden is a dangerous and unstable figure in this universe. So far, he's been a sledgehammer on puppet strings for most of the series. I think that the council is not wrong to fear him and The Merlin may not have been too wrong to want him dead at certain points. It's Dresden's POV series, so we're meant to be most sympathetic towards him and his side of things, but we can also start to see patterns and that other people may not be wrong about him.
Depending on how much Butcher makes of this 'starborn' thingie, Dresden may be the biggest danger to the universe save the outsiders themselves (or itself, depending on if it is a single being).
I define "evil" within the Dresdenverse as being someone who has a complete and gleeful disregard or hatred of human lives.
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I define "evil" within the Dresdenverse as being someone who has a complete and gleeful disregard or hatred of human lives.
All human lives, or just some? If it’s just some, then I’m reminded of things like drone bombing areas in the middle east where innocent men, women and children are blown to bits on a regular basis, the fire bombing Dresden (the city) and so on. Warfare is full of purposeful civilian deaths. Are those things evil? Does glee have to be involved? Is disregard and dehumanising not enough?
And, only humans? What if someone had disregard for dogs and just went around killing them as much as possible? How about someone who make fearie skin sofas to sit on while drinking champagne from the tiny skulls? Are they evil? How about a person who enjoys killing animals at a slaughterhouse, or do we become utilitarian here because it’s approved?
Not trying to be difficult here, but the term “evil” gets used a lot and I never really know what it means to the person who used it as it’s not describing objective reality, but rather a perspective and everyone has a different perspective (even the same person has different perspectives from moment to moment depending on any number of variables).
To answer the question based on this definition, though, I’m not sure we can give a real assessment. The book is first person and limited to only what Dresden thinks others are thinking. If I were to guess which Dresden thinks is the worst, then I’d say the genoskwa or whatever it was called based on his reactions to and feelings about it.
Objectively, I still think the outsiders are the obvious choice for the most potential to be harmful with Dresden a possible second (depending on this “starborn” thingie).
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Jim Butcher. I think maybe he is behind it all!
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Jim Butcher. I think maybe he is behind it all!
Ah ha! :)
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Like, you know, being willing to let the world burn to save his daughter? (We have WoJ that Harry absolutely meant that at the time.)
Maybe it's a product of growing up in an environment with a very real threat of violence from ideological fanatics, but when I read that sequence, my sympathies were absolutely with the world. It constantly bemuses me how many readers sympathise with Harry in that scene even when he is clearly saying "I consider you personally and all your loved ones acceptable collateral damage so long as I get what I care about" to everyone else in the world. The people I have heard that from before have not been ones I could consider good or sympathetic.
:j I said, essentially, the same thing in a different thread a few weeks ago. While a dramatic thing to say, someone who would do something like that is the opposite of what civilisations need.
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Personally, I like the Granny Weatherwax definition of evil - treating other people as things. All the rest of evil flows from that.
Nicodemus is probably the worst of the appeared-on-page human characters. Shagnasty is more sadistic than indifferent, but he has less of a choice about it than a free-willed human.
Kemmler was probably just as bad as Nicodemus back in his day, too. Possibly even worse, but the brief glimpse in Fistful of Warlocks isn't enough to be sure.
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All human lives, or just some? If it’s just some, then I’m reminded of things like drone bombing areas in the middle east where innocent men, women and children are blown to bits on a regular basis, the fire bombing Dresden (the city) and so on. Warfare is full of purposeful civilian deaths. Are those things evil? Does glee have to be involved? Is disregard and dehumanising not enough?
And, only humans? What if someone had disregard for dogs and just went around killing them as much as possible? How about someone who make fearie skin sofas to sit on while drinking champagne from the tiny skulls? Are they evil? How about a person who enjoys killing animals at a slaughterhouse, or do we become utilitarian here because it’s approved?
Not trying to be difficult here, but the term “evil” gets used a lot and I never really know what it means to the person who used it as it’s not describing objective reality, but rather a perspective and everyone has a different perspective (even the same person has different perspectives from moment to moment depending on any number of variables).
To answer the question based on this definition, though, I’m not sure we can give a real assessment. The book is first person and limited to only what Dresden thinks others are thinking. If I were to guess which Dresden thinks is the worst, then I’d say the genoskwa or whatever it was called based on his reactions to and feelings about it.
Objectively, I still think the outsiders are the obvious choice for the most potential to be harmful with Dresden a possible second (depending on this “starborn” thingie).
If how I define evil is uncertain to you; then tell how you define the word evil, please.
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:j I said, essentially, the same thing in a different thread a few weeks ago. While a dramatic thing to say, someone who would do something like that is the opposite of what civilisations need.
I am not bothered by someone who would do whatever they deem necessary for family. No idea, belief, or thought has that value as far as I am concern, But my family over the rest of humanity is a non-decision.
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Morgan.
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I am not bothered by someone who would do whatever they deem necessary for family. No idea, belief, or thought has that value as far as I am concern, But my family over the rest of humanity is a non-decision.
Do you see how as a member of the rest of humanity I might find that less than entirely positive ?
If I went to the lengths of collateral damage to other people Harry has to protect his family, the least my family would do in reaction is disown me, because causing collateral damage to other people is evil.
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Do you see how as a member of the rest of humanity I might find that less than entirely positive ?
If I went to the lengths of collateral damage to other people Harry has to protect his family, the least my family would do in reaction is disown me, because causing collateral damage to other people is evil.
While I understand the logic of your post and I fully expect my family not to accept the extreme measures I would go for their safety. I would probably still go forward with my actions. Fortunately, I don't have wizard powers or find myself in such a difficult position. ;)
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While I understand the logic of your post and I fully expect my family not to accept the extreme measures I would go for their safety. I would probably still go forward with my actions. Fortunately, I don't have wizard powers or find myself in such a difficult position. ;)
Trolly problems.
https://youtu.be/-N_RZJUAQY4
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I am not as illogical as a 2 year old. Maybe as illogical as a teenager, that could be possible.
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While I understand the logic of your post and I fully expect my family not to accept the extreme measures I would go for their safety. I would probably still go forward with my actions. Fortunately, I don't have wizard powers or find myself in such a difficult position. ;)
(https://desperateandunrehearsed.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/hat-tip.gif)
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Nicodemus.
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I am not as illogical as a 2 year old. Maybe as illogical as a teenager, that could be possible.
You could see this as rebellion against artificial moral dilemma’s in the first place. The trolly problems are interesting because they test human moral instincts. Humans have them because they are a herd animal or at least they originally lived in small groups that needed to cooperate.
But that instinct does not always provide the same answer as logic would, just look at the different forms of this dilemma and examine your own feelings, and your actions are not only motivated by your moral instincts but also by the need to protect those closest to you more than those you do not know. If there is a good friend on one track and three unknown persons on the other...
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Humans have them because they are a herd animal or at least they originally lived in small groups that needed to cooperate.
I keep typing, and deleting because I cannot answer without going into touchy topic stuff... Very frustrating sometimes lol
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Yes, let's get back to comparing evil fictional characters and forego examining the evil in ourselves. Much more civil and safe.
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How about Malvora and Skavis (both entire Houses)? Delighting and feeding on despair and terror is pretty messed up, especially when there are other options—Madrigal changes his tastes, though it's considered really odd to do so.
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I am thinking Shagnasty was so evil that it nearly drove Harry mad seeing it's true nature.
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:j I said, essentially, the same thing in a different thread a few weeks ago. While a dramatic thing to say, someone who would do something like that is the opposite of what civilisations need.
Of course, there was a whole book about convincing Harry that maybe he was out of line there. Like, WAY out of line.
And I think he learned from it and became a better person.
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Of course, there was a whole book about convincing Harry that maybe he was out of line there. Like, WAY out of line.
And I think he learned from it and became a better person.
I'm still waiting to see evidence for that. Nice solid evidence, like him being put in a similar sort of situation and actually handling it differently and better even if it's not the most emotionally satisfying thing for him in the moment.
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With stubborn people, it is always baby steps. And, Harry is as stubborn as they get. I understand stubborn, being one myself, and changes are never readily accepted.
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How about Malvora and Skavis (both entire Houses)? Delighting and feeding on despair and terror is pretty messed up, especially when there are other options—Madrigal changes his tastes, though it's considered really odd to do so.
the problem with these beings is they are bound to demons that feed on these emotions... I don't know... I'd say they are almost comparable to a great white shark. The shark will eat you, not because it's evil, because it's the creatures nature.
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If how I define evil is uncertain to you; then tell how you define the word evil, please.
Thanks and sure.
It is a term that is generally meant to refer to some behaviour considered to be anti-social to the person describing it, but also carries some sort of morality judgment. But, what that is differs from person to person and doesn't even exist outside a person's head. Sort of like beauty; both are just concepts that require a perceiver and subjective discernment. Further, though, "evil" tends to be tied with a belief structure whereas "beauty" doesn't.
Sorry, that was a long answer and maybe not very satisfying, but it's an easy term for people to toss around, but it doesn't hold much meaning in itself.
Anyway, I stick with my answers:
Outsiders are objectively the most destructive.
Genoskwa (or whatever) is the character I think Dresden reacted to the most.
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the problem with these beings is they are bound to demons that feed on these emotions... I don't know... I'd say they are almost comparable to a great white shark. The shark will eat you, not because it's evil, because it's the creatures nature.
Not really. As he says, the White Court is perfectly able to pick and choose what emotions they feed off of- Madrigal, for example, is a member of House Raith that decided to feed on terror because he gets off on it. And Thomas proves that they can... 'diet'? if they so choose.
They aren't really much different from Humans, psychologically speaking (which makes sense, because they were human until they hit mid teen-early adult years).
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Besides if you take free will into account what is then the status of those beings that personify evil? Whose nature is evil? Evil with a capital E does not have free will anymore, it is still evil.
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Not really. As he says, the White Court is perfectly able to pick and choose what emotions they feed off of- Madrigal, for example, is a member of House Raith that decided to feed on terror because he gets off on it. And Thomas proves that they can... 'diet'? if they so choose.
They aren't really much different from Humans, psychologically speaking (which makes sense, because they were human until they hit mid teen-early adult years).
that's up for debate... Thomas did not choose how he ate. He didn't choose to kill his first victim when his demon took over. Raith's daughter didn't have control when her demon was driving her to feed on Harry.. How, and why the families feeding habits changed is up for debate. You will notice that in the different families they all feed the same way. It's not like any of Raith's children feed on fear, they all feed on lust, just as in the other families they all feed on a specific emotion. That's evidence the demon specifically has a feeding preference, and not the mortal person.
Thomas's "diet" is like a constant never ending drug addiction. So the "evil" they do is still evil but they are being pushed every moment towards it. Free will is technically there but not much. They do have to feed no matter what though, or they go insane. So they cannot stop eating entirely, they will do it to some extent.
Evil? yes. More evil than different people in the Dresdenverse who do evil, and have more free will? I don't think so.
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Thanks and sure.
It is a term that is generally meant to refer to some behaviour considered to be anti-social to the person describing it, but also carries some sort of morality judgment. But, what that is differs from person to person and doesn't even exist outside a person's head. Sort of like beauty; both are just concepts that require a perceiver and subjective discernment. Further, though, "evil" tends to be tied with a belief structure whereas "beauty" doesn't.
Sorry, that was a long answer and maybe not very satisfying, but it's an easy term for people to toss around, but it doesn't hold much meaning in itself.
Anyway, I stick with my answers:
Outsiders are objectively the most destructive.
Genoskwa (or whatever) is the character I think Dresden reacted to the most.
It seems that you believe "evil" to be a subjective idea that varies from person to person based on perspective. And, while I believe that has elements of being true; I don't believe it to be the whole truth. I feel that "evil" has some objective qualities that are widely accepted as elements of "evil." I would say that it requires a cognitive being that understands these widely-held acts of good (like forgiveness) and evil (like murder); who then chooses for personal reasons to perform acts of the latter over the former could be defined as evil. I can, also, believe that the repetition, frequency, and scale that these universally accepted evil acts occur is indicative of that person's depth of evil. I can, also, believe that the positive or negative intentions of performing the acts are a factor as to whether the person is good or evil. Finally, the last indicator of whether a person is considered good or evil involves the historical and contemporary context of that person's actions, basically, the winners write history.
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I think it is impossible to come to a consensus on the most evil because everyone's feelings on what 'evil' is is different. For me, one should consider themselves evil. Most people we think of as evil see themselves as good or justified. Nicodemus thinks he is saving the world or making it a better place. Beings like Dracul are just looking out for themselves, which they see as the right thing to do. The Outsiders even are destroying reality because they think it is the right thing to do.
Shagnasty is the one, I think, that actually takes pleasure from the suffering of others, from acts that it knows are evil.
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Yes, everyone's opinions of evil are different; but there are some recurring points of commonality.
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Beings like Dracul are just looking out for themselves, which they see as the right thing to do.
Are you coming from WoJ on that I have missed, or am I forgetting some text about Drakul's motivation ?
To my mind evil is about selfishness - about putting what you care about and want ahead of what other people care about and want in destructively competitive ways. Whether what you care about and want is "me" or "things I enjoy" or "the handful of people most closely related to me" is immaterial.
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Yes, everyone's opinions of evil are different; but there are some recurring points of commonality.
I'd say that the most evil is someone who inflicts pain, and suffering purely for the enjoyment of watching someone else suffer, and has the free will to not do those things. So Shagnasty is probably the most evil that I can think of in the story (beside Outsiders who appear to have no free will in they are 100% pure evil, and cannot be altered). Free will is the snag for me. Can it resist those impulses or is he like a rabid animal that is out of control?
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I'd say that the most evil is someone who inflicts pain, and suffering purely for the enjoyment of watching someone else suffer, and has the free will to not do those things. So Shagnasty is probably the most evil that I can think of in the story (beside Outsiders who appear to have no free will in they are 100% pure evil, and cannot be altered). Free will is the snag for me. Can it resist those impulses or is he like a rabid animal that is out of control?
But what if the outsiders ended up 'evil' from their own growth when free will was available? The fallen for instance, are immutable, but they at some point choose to flip the switch that made them what they are.
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Are you coming from WoJ on that I have missed, or am I forgetting some text about Drakul's motivation ?
To my mind evil is about selfishness - about putting what you care about and want ahead of what other people care about and want in destructively competitive ways. Whether what you care about and want is "me" or "things I enjoy" or "the handful of people most closely related to me" is immaterial.
That is usually true but in fiction there is something called evil that is beyond selfishness. It is the idea of absolute evil, personified evil. Of evil for evils sake. Maybe it is even self sacrificing like serving some evil god or it is just a property like an evil weapon.
In my mind evil is a rather vague label we give to harmfull things that have some guiding personality behind it but which are beyond reasoning with, not because they can not reason but no reasoning will help. With that label we place them outside the group as beings to be feared and to be destroyed if possible. Something like that. I do not think we need a more precise definition because that won’t cover the practical use of the word.
In that sense an evil deed is a deed that can give you that label.
That is also why in the eyes of the knights of the cross the denarian hosts, including Nicodemus, are not truly evil. They are victims of the truly evil Fallen. Michael tried to reason with Nicodemus to bring him back to the fold but he did not try to reason with Anduriel who directed his actions. To call someone evil is to give him up. Mark that free will has no meaning in this context at all but intelligence does.
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That is usually true but in fiction there is something called evil that is beyond selfishness. It is the idea of absolute evil, personified evil. Of evil for evils sake. Maybe it is even self sacrificing like serving some evil god or it is just a property like an evil weapon.
I don't find that particularly appealing in fiction, though it can be a useful tool for some kinds of RPGs, just because of the general lack of realism and because it can be pernicious in leading people to think that way in real life. I have known a handful of people in RL who set out to be evil for evil's sake, and I could have done without them.
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Jim has said very little about Drakul in the DU, so it really isn't possible to say whether he is evil or not. I was going with the more classical version of him.
IIRC, it has been revealed that our existence is painful or somehow damaging to the Outsiders, so they are doing what they consider the right thing to do.
To me, evil does not need to gain sustenance or protection from its victims. It does not need to defend or support itself or another. It is not controlled or compelled into these acts. It causes pain for pure enjoyment. So, for me, the only one that fits this list is Shagnasty.
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I'd say that the most evil is someone who inflicts pain, and suffering purely for the enjoyment of watching someone else suffer, and has the free will to not do those things. So Shagnasty is probably the most evil that I can think of in the story (beside Outsiders who appear to have no free will in they are 100% pure evil, and cannot be altered). Free will is the snag for me. Can it resist those impulses or is he like a rabid animal that is out of control?
I'm not really sure where the skinwalkers fall on the free will question. They disobeyed the beings they were supposed to be messengers for in choosing to stay on earth, but after that they seem to have pretty much lost the capacity for being anything but sadistic monsters. There haven't been any examples like in the White Court where Thomas chooses to fight his nature and Lara actively embraces evil because it's expedient and 'who has the time for being good?'. And it seems like Goodman Grey has to take active measures ('paying the Rent') to retain control of his actions rather than be swamped by his father's nature.
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I don't find that particularly appealing in fiction, though it can be a useful tool for some kinds of RPGs, just because of the general lack of realism and because it can be pernicious in leading people to think that way in real life. I have known a handful of people in RL who set out to be evil for evil's sake, and I could have done without them.
To cause evil upon others without a selfish motive is a form of self destructive insanity, you gain nothing but enemies so it is either compulsive or stupid. But usually there is some other motive though that does not have to be rational.
But the dresdenverse is fiction based on myth and absolute evil is a religious invention now used in myth. It started with Zoroastrian dualism and went on via Judaism and Gnosticism into Cristianity. Some myth is full of it so I do think it exists in some form in the dresdenverse. I do not think it plays an important role i the story though. Black and white do exist but Harry lives in a world of greys.
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All adult mortals live in the grey. It is a balancing act between doing what you want to do, what you need to do, and what you should be doing.
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All adult mortals live in the grey. It is a balancing act between doing what you want to do, what you need to do, and what you should be doing.
It is from Shiro's letter in death masks:
Your path is often a dark one. You do not always have the luxury that we do as Knights of the Cross. We struggle against powers of darkness. We live in black and white, while you must face a world of greys. It is never easy to know the path in such a place. Trust your heart. You are a decent man. God lives in such hearts.
Substitute evil for black and good for white and you have it. Absolute good and evil do exist in the dresdenverse but mostly we live in a world of greys.
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Agreed.
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Agreed.
And absolute evil is not selfish. It does not need to be tempted into evil by wealth, sex or power over others. It puts considerable energy in being evil.
It is really madness if you think about it but some people need that madness to explain the evil in the world and other people want to personify concepts into gods.
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Good thing that the Dresdenverse does have active gods and devils running around. Someone to pass the blame on for the rampant evil that exists. Unfortunately, in our world, we have to chalk it up to people being A$$holes. Way less fun.
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Good thing that the Dresdenverse does have active gods and devils running around. Someone to pass the blame on for the rampant evil that exists. Unfortunately, in our world, we have to chalk it up to people being A$$holes. Way less fun.
Oh you can not explain all evil that way. It is called the problem of evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
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I skimmed it. Not saying humanity covers all evil. But, they hold the majority.
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I skimmed it. Not saying humanity covers all evil. But, they hold the majority.
I don't know about the majority but feeling guilty about it all sure.
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Jim Butcher... Tortures another for the purpose of punishing those who love the person being tortured.
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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.
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Oh you can not explain all evil that way. It is called the problem of evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
In the Dresdenverse you absolutely can, as the Angels have shown. It's about Choice. If you could do no wrong, if you could not say "no" to good, then you are not a free being, you're a robot, a slave. The only way for you to have free will is to be able to say "no" to good. It is freedom vs peace. Within the Dresdenverse the Angels job is to ensure freedom to choose from those who would deny that Choice. In a place where freedom exists, evil will happen.
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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.
MSTR is omnipotent, omniscient but not omnibenevolent of course. Cats are not.
Jim's handling of free will is however much influenced by those who try to explain evil with free will.
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In the Dresdenverse you absolutely can, as the Angels have shown. It's about Choice. If you could do no wrong, if you could not say "no" to good, then you are not a free being, you're a robot, a slave. The only way for you to have free will is to be able to say "no" to good. It is freedom vs peace. Within the Dresdenverse the Angels job is to ensure freedom to choose from those who would deny that Choice. In a place where freedom exists, evil will happen.
You can explain some evil with free will of course but can you explain all evil with free will? If you can imagine a better world with the same amound of free will then answer is clearly no.
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MSTR is omnipotent, omniscient but not omnibenevolent of course. Cats are not.
Jim's handling of free will is however much influenced by those who try to explain evil with free will.
Flip it to the other side of the coin. In the Dresdenverse TWG is simply another deity created from some ritual or worship, and is not omnipotent... Then evil and good do not exist but are instead falsely created beliefs, fantasies.... Simple human constructs. Therefor no action done is actually evil, it simply is. Evil, and good would be simple illusions of human creation much like superstition.
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Flip it to the other side of the coin. In the Dresdenverse TWG is simply another deity created from some ritual or worship, and is not omnipotent... Then evil and good do not exist but are instead falsely created beliefs, fantasies.... Simple human constructs. Therefor no action done is actually evil, it simply is. Evil, and good would be simple illusions of human creation much like superstition.
Dostoyevski?
There are several faults in this logic. First whether something is a human or a godly creation you can always say that it simply is. Illusionary or real doesn't matter, just call reality an illusion as well. You can render everything unimportant that way even eternal torture or bliss in hell or heaven. It just is, it has no meaning. God made it, so what? God just is.
Or do good and evil just have meaning because god commanded it so and would they lose meaning with the power of that god? Then good and evil have no meaning at all.
Or the other way round you don't need an almighty god to think some things are important. People did that for millenia with not almighty gods or none. 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.
Furthermore everything that is just superstition is real in the dresdenverse. Human stories are real in some way. So good and evil are also true because they are human stories. This is a story driven universe.
Good and Evil have meaning if they tell us how people can live together.
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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.
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I am thinking that Shagnasty might be the winner of the poll.
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Based on what we know, I have to vote Kemmler. The question, after all, is not 'the worst Harry has knowingly met', that would probably be a tossup between Shagnasty and Nicodemus, but 'in the Dresdenverse'. Of the entities we know about, that looks like a clean win for Kemmler. He was so bad that Bob recognized it as evil. JB himself has said that Shagnasty is just 'cheap muscle' for the real big boys.
Kemmler apparently was the single most important cause of the Great War. The level of suffering, early death, agony, destruction, etc. that this implies is almost incomprehensible. Even today, the world, Western Civilization, and the nation-states involved have not entirely recovered in some ways, we're still picking up the pieces a century later.
It rather looks, over the arc of the books, as if a lot of the problems Harry and Thomas are trying to cope with now have at least some roots in Kemmler, too.
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I am thinking Shagnasty was so evil that it nearly drove Harry mad seeing it's true nature.
It's not clear how much of that was how evil Shagnasty was, and how much had to do with Shagnasty's alien nature, though.
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Like, you know, being willing to let the world burn to save his daughter? (We have WoJ that Harry absolutely meant that at the time.)
Maybe it's a product of growing up in an environment with a very real threat of violence from ideological fanatics, but when I read that sequence, my sympathies were absolutely with the world. It constantly bemuses me how many readers sympathise with Harry in that scene even when he is clearly saying "I consider you personally and all your loved ones acceptable collateral damage so long as I get what I care about" to everyone else in the world. The people I have heard that from before have not been ones I could consider good or sympathetic.
The thing is that most parents, in Harry's place, would do that. It doesn't make it right, but it does make it quite normal.
Uriel rebuked Harry for it, but the rebuke was as much about the generalized indifference as the priorities. As he pointed out, it's a lot easier to say 'let the world burn', than to say, 'let Molly burn'. The generalization hides the nature of the choice.
But note that while Harry recognizes this, it doesn't mean he still wouldn't prioritize Maggie. She's his child.
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I agree.
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Okay, I chose Peabody.
While he didn't directly do much in the way of busting heads or anything, we really don't know the extent of his influence.
Also, all the others seem to be to be pretty much straight up out for themselves, or at least Ends-justify-the-means types.
Peabody lied and betrayed the people he worked for and who trusted him. To me that is the greatest evil.
You can pretty much plan on how to handle the others, but a traitor .... that's not something you can easily foresee or plan for.
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Okay, I chose Peabody.
While he didn't directly do much in the way of busting heads or anything, we really don't know the extent of his influence.
Also, all the others seem to be to be pretty much straight up out for themselves, or at least Ends-justify-the-means types.
Peabody lied and betrayed the people he worked for and who trusted him. To me that is the greatest evil.
You can pretty much plan on how to handle the others, but a traitor .... that's not something you can easily foresee or plan for.
Ohhh, Well reasoned there.
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Dostoyevski?
There are several faults in this logic. First whether something is a human or a godly creation you can always say that it simply is. Illusionary or real doesn't matter, just call reality an illusion as well. You can render everything unimportant that way even eternal torture or bliss in hell or heaven. It just is, it has no meaning. God made it, so what? God just is.
Or do good and evil just have meaning because god commanded it so and would they lose meaning with the power of that god? Then good and evil have no meaning at all.
I’m not sure I see the fault here. Yes, our surquedry tends to have us only consider a biological point of view, but, if we try to step outside ourselves, we may see there is perhaps no point of view. There is what is. It’s our sensory input and perception of passage of time that allows our nervous system to process and affect behaviours. We’re just a cool nervous system interacting with sensory input in linear time on a large mass orbiting other large masses. The amount of reality we perceive and assign meaning to is very limited and narrow. So, things almost certainly just are and we add meaning because that’s what we do. I’m fun at parties, though. ;)
Also, I wrote genoskwa but meant skinwalker guy in my previous post. What was its fancy name? Nagloshi? I hated that shagwhatevs nickname, so I could never remember what it was called.
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I’m not sure I see the fault here. Yes, our surquedry tends to have us only consider a biological point of view, but, if we try to step outside ourselves, we may see there is perhaps no point of view. There is what is. It’s our sensory input and perception of passage of time that allows our nervous system to process and affect behaviours. We’re just a cool nervous system interacting with sensory input in linear time on a large mass orbiting other large masses. The amount of reality we perceive and assign meaning to is very limited and narrow. So, things almost certainly just are and we add meaning because that’s what we do. I’m fun at parties, though. ;)
Also, I wrote genoskwa but meant skinwalker guy in my previous post. What was its fancy name? Nagloshi? I hated that shagwhatevs nickname, so I could never remember what it was called.
The fault in the reasoning was that an all powerful got gives that meaning, sets an absolute standard for good and evil (add here the meaning of life if you want). That we need that all powerful god for that reason and that for that reason the white god must be all powerful.
And yes at the end language and all the words in it were evolved with us. We gave the meaning to words and we change those meanings. We make the stories. Mostly because those meanings are useful for us in this reality.
If you go for something like good has only meaning because god is almighty you will run into problems.
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Good and evil are man-made constructs; but, they are necessary constructs. Giving objects and ideas meaning gives life meaning. Our experiences, those events that happen to us or that we cause to happen, define who we are as a person. We categorize these experience as a part of understanding. If one interaction feels positive and/or gives pleasure to our selves and others; it is labeled right and good. If another interaction feels negative and/or gives pain to ourselves and others; it is labeled wrong or evil. Very few experiences are entirely one side or the other and very experiences are not linked to other experiences; so, our categorizing of experiences is constantly in flux and continously developing.
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If you go for something like good has only meaning because god is almighty you will run into problems.
Aha, I thought your god talk was strange but just an example. The whole talk, I was wondering why you have this fiction as the centre of the argument, but didn't realise you only used this context. :D Yes, using a construction like a 'god' as the basis of an argument is a fundamental failure of logic.
Good and evil are man-made constructs; but, they are necessary constructs. Giving objects and ideas meaning gives life meaning. Our experiences, those events that happen to us or that we cause to happen, define who we are as a person. We categorize these experience as a part of understanding. If one interaction feels positive and/or gives pleasure to our selves and others; it is labeled right and good. If another interaction feels negative and/or gives pain to ourselves and others; it is labeled wrong or evil. Very few experiences are entirely one side or the other and very experiences are not linked to other experiences; so, our categorizing of experiences is constantly in flux and continously developing.
Yes, all living things need to interpret stimuli in order to fulfill biological imperative of survival, eating, reproducing. We also have the ability to try to step outside our own experience as an imaginary exercise and see that these things are not universal True, but just our experience filtered through our biology and our socialisation and so not take them too seriously.
One really interesting thing with general AI coming soon™ is that we will be able to view how a non-biological intelligence views existence. They very well may lack our foundations of a bias toward eating, reproducing and not dying. They certainly won't be subject to chemical reactions in biological matter. They (I keep saying they, but it might be a singular mind, too) may be completely alien to us and so fundamentally shift our way of thinking about ourselves. It may be like an alien ship landing in our front yard. Too bad I will only see the beginnings of it given I'm closing in on 50.
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Peabody lied and betrayed the people he worked for and who trusted him. To me that is the greatest evil.
You mean, he totally violated their trust that he would behave sensibly in accordance with their best interests, like Harry starting the war at the end of GP ?
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Harry never violated the Council's trust. That would imply he had it in the first place.
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Yeah, ever since Harry's first trial, the WC has expected Harry to be a problem.
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Harry never violated the Council's trust. That would imply he had it in the first place.
I took them lifting the Doom as indicating that he had obtained some degree of trust, at least to the extent that he counted as an official representative.
I do wonder whether the war would have started had Harry been lured into it before the Doom was lifted, or if the Council would have got away with saying "nope, he's not really one of us" the way they tried to in SK.
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They would have a stronger case if he was still under the Doom. As Molly's sponsor; I would say he is still under it. Even though Molly is now less than human.
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They would have a stronger case if he was still under the Doom. As Molly's sponsor; I would say he is still under it. Even though Molly is now less than human.
According to the council Molly is not human anymore so she can break any law she wants and the council won't even care.
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You mean, he totally violated their trust that he would behave sensibly in accordance with their best interests, like Harry starting the war at the end of GP ?
Since we don't know Peabody's motivations, we really can't answer that. But looking in from the outside it would appear as though it was a violation of their trust on a LONG term basis.
Harry was trying to save a life. The Red court didn't HAVE to go to war over it. They could just as easily have given Susan to Harry, totally expecting her to turn eventually. Harry didn't break the Council's trust. He was actually fulfilling one of it's tenants, and protecting humanity.
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The WC is less concerned about saving humanity as they are about power management of its members. And Accords-related activities are very letter of the law and no intent.
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The WC is less concerned about saving humanity as they are about power management of its members. And Accords-related activities are very letter of the law and no intent.
Yeah, that's kinda what happens when you let the fricking faeries write the goddamn rulebook.
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I took them lifting the Doom as indicating that he had obtained some degree of trust, at least to the extent that he counted as an official representative.
I do wonder whether the war would have started had Harry been lured into it before the Doom was lifted, or if the Council would have got away with saying "nope, he's not really one of us" the way they tried to in SK.
Two ways to look at this.
#1. The Red Court had been gearing for war for a very long time, it is implied they wanted it to happen.
#2. If they were honest about not going to war if Harry was handed over, just how important is Harry in the grand scheme of things? Apparently very important.
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Two ways to look at this.
#1. The Red Court had been gearing for war for a very long time, it is implied they wanted it to happen.
#2. If they were honest about not going to war if Harry was handed over, just how important is Harry in the grand scheme of things? Apparently very important.
#2 oh yes, nobody wants to kill Harry so far(well, none of the top people) they just want to possess him like a big ole' weapon. Which Mab has successfully done i'd add.
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#2 oh yes, nobody wants to kill Harry so far(well, none of the top people) they just want to possess him like a big ole' weapon. Which Mab has successfully done i'd add.
I think there are those who do want him dead. The problem for them is because there are so many big players working behind the scenes that to kill him they must do so in an indirect way, and it's proving difficult. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Harry's butt has been saved a lot from those behind the scenes. For example little Chicago not blowing his head off.
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This reminds me of the thread about why the WC fears Harry. By their perspective, Harry is one of the baddest MFers walking.
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Two ways to look at this.
#1. The Red Court had been gearing for war for a very long time, it is implied they wanted it to happen.
#2. If they were honest about not going to war if Harry was handed over, just how important is Harry in the grand scheme of things? Apparently very important.
They were not honest but they were playng power games. If you can make them forget Archangel and hand over one of your own for vampirization you basically own them. After that you just keep demanding things until the white council either breaks and start a war in a weaker position or becomes your property.
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I took them lifting the Doom as indicating that he had obtained some degree of trust, at least to the extent that he counted as an official representative.
I do wonder whether the war would have started had Harry been lured into it before the Doom was lifted, or if the Council would have got away with saying "nope, he's not really one of us" the way they tried to in SK.
They probably wouldn't have tried it if Harry was likely to be repudiated, because he would be repudiated and they'd have to go through the whole charade again. They LaFortier/Langtry faction tried to repudiate him, in Summer Knight, for that matter.
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Yeah, that's kinda what happens when you let the fricking faeries write the goddamn rulebook.
What 'let'? I don't know that Mab was offering any other options.
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Appeasement is never a solution; it is only a delay.
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Appeasement is never a solution; it is only a delay.
Viewing it as "appeasement" is most of the problem.
The Red Court and the White Council have maintained a stable peace for four or five centuries. That's evidence enough that they can continue to do so.
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It is not a stable peace if one side is plotting the best time to attack the other side. Humans are vamp food; noone who is hungry likes it when their food gets the ability to fight back.
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It is not a stable peace if one side is plotting the best time to attack the other side.
It is if they have the slightest bit of sense about their assessment of the other side.
On one side, we have the Red Court knowing about the White Council for four or five hundred years, and taking all that time building up their forces to a point where even the most hardline of them think starting a war is a reasonable exercise.
On the other, we have Luccio in Changes noting that the Council has twice the combat strength it did before the disaster in DB. Which took them about five years.
The Council can stay ahead of any rational Red Court threat indefinitely with a much lower growth rate than they demonstrate themselves capable of. Therefore, stable.
Humans are vamp food; noone who is hungry likes it when their food gets the ability to fight back.
The most important datapoint we have here is Harry's conversation with Butters at the start of Dead Beat, which establishes that disappearances among humans in the DV are exactly the same as in reality. Harry thinks that is supernatural predation because he is not in a position to make the comparison, but the DV is shown to have crime, and abusive families, and generally the same reasons real people disappear. The message that conveys is that supernatural predation kills negligible numbers of people. All supernatural predation, of which the Red Court are a subset.
Which doesn't mean they are friendly kittens. But it does mean that for the White Council to spend time and enemy spent hunting them, compared to addressing much much bigger problems (the failure mode of not catching powerful warlocks early and firmly, for example, being on record as organising a world war), is gross negligence.
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Maybe I over-simplify things; but, I believe the best way to end a war is to kill the enemy. It ain't nice but it would seem to be effective. Peace is not two guys sitting in a room, sharpening knifes and cleaning guns. And that is about where the RCV amd WC stood with each other.
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Honestly, we don't know where the WC was in War prep. We know they weren't prepared nearly enough. It could have been a Rampire thing entirely.
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Maybe I over-simplify things; but, I believe the best way to end a war is to kill the enemy. It ain't nice but it would seem to be effective.
Growing up next to a conflict that that sort of attitude had been prolonging for centuries has made me extremely unsympathetic to that as a position, and to fiction which presents it as an acceptable solution.
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Growing up next to a conflict that that sort of attitude had been prolonging for centuries has made me extremely unsympathetic to that as a position, and to fiction which presents it as an acceptable solution.
Which is not unreasonable when talking about human conflict. But this is the Red Court. They literally can only exist, thrive, and propogate through murder and slavery.
That is why they need to be wiped out- the very nature of their existence is at war with Human kind.
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Appeasement is never a solution; it is only a delay.
To be fair, it's more complicated than that. You can find instances in history where appeasement worked, when the appeased power had limited or tangential aims, and wasn't just looking for an excuse or planning to go all out anyway.
But no, there was no 'off' option on the Red War.
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Viewing it as "appeasement" is most of the problem.
The Red Court and the White Council have maintained a stable peace for four or five centuries. That's evidence enough that they can continue to do so.
Yes, they could do so, if both parties desired it. But the Red Court intended war no matter what, they were simply looking for a way to pretend to be the aggrieved party. Under those conditions, there was no peace option. There was a 'delay hostilities' option, and if the Council was using that time to prepare, it might even be a defensible option. But there's no evidence that the Peabody-influenced Senior Council would have even realized the difference.
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Honestly, we don't know where the WC was in War prep. We know they weren't prepared nearly enough. It could have been a Rampire thing entirely.
We have a pretty good idea that they weren't preparing at all. The whole thing appears to have caught most of the Senior Council by surprise, probably they didn't even realize the problem had been brewing up. It's the old 'the water gets gradually warmer' thing, the frog doesn't realizes it's in trouble until it's too late to get out.
Even without Peabody, the Council leadership had gotten complacent, used to the status quo. Add in Peabody's (if he was the only one) manipulations and you have a White Council caught totally off-guard, completely absorbed in its own business and internal power struggles.
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Regardless how weak the council really was it was looking weak and it was acting weak and that attracts vultures. The red court was expanding and states can only expand by looking for victims, that is how states expanded in the past and supernatural states are old school.
That behaviour between states had become somewhat less prevalent lately because war has become more and more expensive in all respects and bigger states don’t let smaller states get away with it but it still happens if states can get away with it. It used to be quite normal. And the supernatural world is old style.
If the red court did not fight the white council in the past it simply meant the circumstances were different. They probably did not meet each other that often or the red court had other things to do. Their social structure was certainly one that was more geared for war than the council’s
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Growing up next to a conflict that that sort of attitude had been prolonging for centuries has made me extremely unsympathetic to that as a position, and to fiction which presents it as an acceptable solution.
You have my sympathies for your experiences; but, I tend to be a less-than-subtle and often expeditious in my thinking.
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Which is not unreasonable when talking about human conflict. But this is the Red Court. They literally can only exist, thrive, and propogate through murder and slavery.
The numbers I quote above seem to me to indicate that murder is not actually a thing they do as a general policy. Nor am I entirely convinced that slavery rather than symbiosis is impossible for them; Ortega at least clearly thinks in terms of sustainability for his food supply.
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Yes, they could do so, if both parties desired it. But the Red Court intended war no matter what, they were simply looking for a way to pretend to be the aggrieved party. Under those conditions, there was no peace option.
I do not believe they intended war no matter what, because they have waited centuries for the right option*. It's not about pretending to be the aggrieved party, it's about actually being the aggrieved party under the letter of Mab's Accords, because as we see repeatedly, not respecting those gets you killed. That they manipulated Harry into breaking that law does not matter; we also see over and over that with Faerie the letter of the law matters and the spirit is immaterial.
There was a 'delay hostilities' option, and if the Council was using that time to prepare, it might even be a defensible option.
Looking at their relative capacities to increase their strength, the White Council pre-DB would need to carry out minimal recruiting to remain ahead in this arms race.
But there's no evidence that the Peabody-influenced Senior Council would have even realized the difference.
I beg leave to doubt that also.
If Harry had not burned Bianca's place, but had told Eb that the Red Court were trying to manipulate a casus belli, how do you think Eb would have reacted ?
*Either that or they had actually been willing to live peacefully and something changed relatively recently. In which case it is the something that changed that is the problem, not the existence of the Red Court, and Ortega was a prime ally to have thrown away. (Or, as I believe, will be a prime ally when it becomes clear that recreating the Red Court is an essential part of preserving reality and he comes out of hiding.)
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Regardless how weak the council really was it was looking weak and it was acting weak and that attracts vultures.
Changes demonstrates how "weak" the Council actually was, when it came to choosing to go on the offensive. In that situation the Red Court lasts a matter of days.
They have the strength to match a position of confidence. Refraining from genocide in the interest of a peaceful solution and restoring what had previously been established as centuries of co-existence is not looking weak, it is demonstrating that they are law-abiding members of the supernatural community.
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The numbers I quote above seem to me to indicate that murder is not actually a thing they do as a general policy. Nor am I entirely convinced that slavery rather than symbiosis is impossible for them; Ortega at least clearly thinks in terms of sustainability for his food supply.
1) That logic is asinine.
The conceit of Urban Fantasy series is that they occur in the real world, so of course the statistics are the same- The story runs on the assumption that it happens in our world and we just don't know it (the Masquerade), so assuming that the number are negligible because the figures are the same doesn't work- eg, Tilly mentioned in Changes that the Red Court attacks described by Susan sound like the Mexican Cartels, because in the DF, the Red Court runs the Cartels. Saying that the statistics being the same proves the a non-factor is akin to saying that because WW1 happened IRL, the story is wrong and Kemmler wasn't really behind it in the DF.
2) A Symbiotic relationship would imply mutual benefits. There is no mutual benefits with the Red Court. The areas they controlled had people trained to act as walking juice boxes from a young age via indoctrination and drug addiction.
3) It is literally impossible for the Red Court to reproduce via anything other than murder. It's a fact of their Biology. Why is it that you seem to place a higher right-to-life to the Red Court then to their Victims? Because as said, there not being victims is physically impossible due to their reproductive cycle.
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I do not believe they intended war no matter what, because they have waited centuries for the right option*.
No.
Two major things had already happened to upset the old balance of power before the story even opens. One was the rising influence of Nemesis, the other the technological revolution. In recent decades, it's become possible to travel, communicate, and otherwise operate around the world in a way that the Wizards have great difficulty coping with. This made the White Council vulnerable, but the Senior Council and the rest of the older Wizards were not fully aware of how much that changed everything.
The old balance of power was already gone by the time the story opens. That's why, or part of why, the Red Court was willing to take on the Council at all. They had not waited centuries for the right moment, they waited at most a few years, 20 tops. Harry was a handy pretext, but absent him something else would have worked.
(Also, it's possible that Harry looked like a good choice because of Margaret. We don't have enough data to say anything on that, but it's not improbable.)
It's not about pretending to be the aggrieved party, it's about actually being the aggrieved party under the letter of Mab's Accords, because as we see repeatedly, not respecting those gets you killed.
Nope.
It might eventually get you killed, but not fast enough to save the Council in the mean time. And as for being the aggrieved party, all they have to do is set up some situation where a Council member faces an intolerable choice, it's not that hard to do. Harry was just convenient.
If Harry had not burned Bianca's place, but had told Eb that the Red Court were trying to manipulate a casus belli, how do you think Eb would have reacted ?
How does that save Susan?
*Either that or they had actually been willing to live peacefully and something changed relatively recently. In which case it is the something that changed that is the problem, not the existence of the Red Court, and Ortega was a prime ally to have thrown away.
Nemesis and the technological revolution was what had changed (at least, there might be other factors too, I wouldn't be surprised if Kemmler's activities played some role). The old days were over.
(Or, as I believe, will be a prime ally when it becomes clear that recreating the Red Court is an essential part of preserving reality and he comes out of hiding.)
Ortega had already set things up in such a way (or been manipulated to set things up in such a way, the difference is moot) that there was no way to achieve such an alliance. It wasn't one of the options available.
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Changes demonstrates how "weak" the Council actually was, when it came to choosing to go on the offensive. In that situation the Red Court lasts a matter of days.
After the Council came within a hair's breadth of being wiped out several times. By then, the tide of the war had already begun to turn.
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Changes demonstrates how "weak" the Council actually was, when it came to choosing to go on the offensive. In that situation the Red Court lasts a matter of days.
The Council was not the main force that attacked in Chicen Itza so that did not tell anything about the strength of the white council. It is also clear from the book that nobody, except probably Odin, Mab and Uriel, anticipated this ending. Hidden strength does not prevent a war, it was not taken into consideration by the red court when deciding about the war.
The red court was quite confident and arrogant. They really thought they had enough strength to stop enything the white council could bring against them in Chichen Itza otherwise they would have brought their warlock and outsider allies but this was a private party.
They have the strength to match a position of confidence.
It is clear from the books that they don’t have the strength and that the white council depends on the support of Winter that is not really dependable or predictable.
Refraining from genocide in the interest of a peaceful solution and restoring what had previously been established as centuries of co-existence is not looking weak, it is demonstrating that they are law-abiding members of the supernatural community.
Except that this motivation is nowhere mentioned in the text. The only reason the white council want peace that is shown in the text is the cost of war for them which is very rational but does nothing to discourage the red court if they are not feeling the same.
And we are talking about the red courts motivation and how the white council appeared to be. I think the white council is part of the structure against the outsiders and is as such protected by the elders if the situation really gets critical but few know about that and it was certainly not in the red courts mind when deciding about war.
Because who was technical the agressor according to the accords if of tactical importance but it was always the red court who really decided about war or peace. It was always the red court who started the attacks. It was their perception of the situation that decided about war and peace. Not even the real strength of the council but the perceived strength. For preventing war it is better to look strong and be weak than vice versa.and the white council looked weak and acted weak before the war started and then the red court took a big part of their strength out immediately in archangel.
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Back to the topic of most evil character, it seems Shagnasty is leading with Kemmler and Nicodemus rounding out the top 3. Is there anybody not on the poll that deserves a dishonorable mention?
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The conceit of Urban Fantasy series is that they occur in the real world, so of course the statistics are the same- The story runs on the assumption that it happens in our world and we just don't know it (the Masquerade), so assuming that the number are negligible because the figures are the same doesn't work- eg, Tilly mentioned in Changes that the Red Court attacks described by Susan sound like the Mexican Cartels, because in the DF, the Red Court runs the Cartels. Saying that the statistics being the same proves the a non-factor is akin to saying that because WW1 happened IRL, the story is wrong and Kemmler wasn't really behind it in the DF.
I disagree entirely. If the DV didn't have the same things that cause real world disappearances, or had less of them, I would be willing to consider this interpretation, but the evidence is that it does.
2) A Symbiotic relationship would imply mutual benefits. There is no mutual benefits with the Red Court. The areas they controlled had people trained to act as walking juice boxes from a young age via indoctrination and drug addiction.
And you don't see the possibility of, say, being taken care of in exchange for a blood donation a month, as better than, for example, living in the middle of something like the civil war in the Congo?
3) It is literally impossible for the Red Court to reproduce via anything other than murder. It's a fact of their Biology. Why is it that you seem to place a higher right-to-life to the Red Court then to their Victims?
I don't. I do, however, for the reasons I have listed, believe their reproduction is slow and costs very few lives compared to many other concerns in the DV, and therefor I assign those other concerns higher priority.
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Two major things had already happened to upset the old balance of power before the story even opens. One was the rising influence of Nemesis, the other the technological revolution.
Assuming for a moment that Nemesis is some sort of behind-everything boogeyman rather than a Fae-specific infection (which I do not actually believe, because there is no need for it, it does not explain anything not already solidly explained), it's still a specific individual disrupting influence. So that's an argument for attacking Nemesis, not for attacking the Red Court. If anything, it's an argument for allying with the Red Court against Nemesis; they are visibly not benefiting from its actions either.
In recent decades, it's become possible to travel, communicate, and otherwise operate around the world in a way that the Wizards have great difficulty coping with.
The ability of wizards to mess with technology does go a fair ways to counter that, and Harry has been able to contain that to some extent when he has tried, so I have a reasonable amount of faith that more skilled and experienced wizards would be able to do better.
This made the White Council vulnerable, but the Senior Council and the rest of the older Wizards were not fully aware of how much that changed everything.
You buy into Harry's prejudices on this front, then ?
They had not waited centuries for the right moment, they waited at most a few years, 20 tops. Harry was a handy pretext, but absent him something else would have worked.
We see what happens when the Red Court trespass on Winter in DB (they must have, to attack the Council in the Ways, because the Council only ave access to Ways in Winter); they get a through hammering in PG as a direct result of Faerie actions.
We also see what happens in Changes when they make a false peace offer; they get exterminated.
We see, in SG, Mab acting to punish Nicodemus for his violation of truce with the Archive in SmF.
The evidence does not come down in favour of Accords violations being trivial things to get away with. Therfore the Red Court absolutely need that casus belli.
And as for being the aggrieved party, all they have to do is set up some situation where a Council member faces an intolerable choice, it's not that hard to do. Harry was just convenient.
I'm inclined to think any loyal member of the White Council would be expected to have sacrificed one life to prevent a war. It very much seems to me that that is what Bianca expects; she does not read as suicidal.
How does that save Susan?
It doesn't. Why is Susan's life worth more than the tens of thousands the war has taken, and why should anyone other than Harry find his choice there acceptable?
Ortega had already set things up in such a way (or been manipulated to set things up in such a way, the difference is moot) that there was no way to achieve such an alliance. It wasn't one of the options available.
Believing that requires disregarding Susan's take on Ortega's motivations at the start of DM, yes ?
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After the Council came within a hair's breadth of being wiped out several times.
How, several times ?
I can see that they are doing less well between DB and PG. (Which is not something that can be attributed to the Red Court; principal deciding factor there is summoned Outsiders, and we know only humans can summon Outsiders.) That looks like one window to me.
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Assuming for a moment that Nemesis is some sort of behind-everything boogeyman rather than a Fae-specific infection
Point of fact N's forces have been seen in the workings of all 3 main Vamp Courts. Peabody and Cowl(whom are certainly in the mix) have little to do with the Fae themselves. Also, we Have Thorned Namshiel and all that business too so... not so much fae centric.
And then there is GK, and his list of things gone wonky(which he'd know what N's capable of) and his insistence on gazing upon Harry directly when he arrives to check him for Nfection... it was the whole point of his visit to the what's up dock in fact.
*note to self, GK's eye let's him look at someone's arc of fate(changed by changing the alloy of Harry himself when standing upon the island) same mechanism that finds Nemesis. NOT coincidence.
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The Council was not the main force that attacked in Chicen Itza so that did not tell anything about the strength of the white council.
Sure they were. The Grey Council are visibly wizards. Harry is a White Council member. To anyone who doesn't have the inside information we do from Harry's viewpoint, that's clearly a White Council operation.
It is also clear from the book that nobody, except probably Odin, Mab and Uriel, anticipated this ending.
Seems clear to me Arthur Langtry knows it's coming.
Hidden strength does not prevent a war, it was not taken into consideration by the red court when deciding about the war.
I'd argue that an accurate assessment of the Council's strength is why the Red Court have not been at war for them for centuries, and waited until they could put the Council legally in the wrong to do so.
They really thought they had enough strength to stop enything the white council could bring against them in Chichen Itza otherwise they would have brought their warlock and outsider allies but this was a private party.
Their supposed allies hanging them out to dry is pretty visible there, yes.
the white council depends on the support of Winter that is not really dependable or predictable.
My previous post should show why I do not agree with that take on things.
Except that this motivation is nowhere mentioned in the text.
It's there if you can see through Haryr's prejudices.
And we are talking about the red courts motivation and how the white council appeared to be. I think the white council is part of the structure against the outsiders and is as such protected by the elders if the situation really gets critical but few know about that and it was certainly not in the red courts mind when deciding about war.
The Accords, sfaict, protects all its signatories, Council or Red Court. Hence, for example, Marcone being keen to sign up. I can totally buy tha structure having an anti-Outsider purpose.
Because who was technical the agressor according to the accords if of tactical importance but it was always the red court who really decided about war or peace. It was always the red court who started the attacks.
Since when does the person who starts the attacks make the decision about war or peace ? It's the choice of how to respond that determines whether that is a war.
It was their perception of the situation that decided about war and peace. Not even the real strength of the council but the perceived strength. For preventing war it is better to look strong and be weak than vice versa.and the white council looked weak and acted weak before the war started
Disagreed entirely. The Red Court is deeply divided. There would not have been a peace offer after Archangel if the Reds thought the Council was a pushover, and Ortega would not have been working so hard to stop the war in DM if he thought the war was winnable.
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Point of fact N's forces have been seen in the workings of all 3 main Vamp Courts.
I am not recalling any evidence establishing this. Harry leaps to this conclusion at the end of CD, but the only thing Nemesis explains before CD that has not already been explained perfectly well is Aurora.
Peabody and Cowl(whom are certainly in the mix) have little to do with the Fae themselves.
Well, there is that athame. Other than that we have nothing to connect them to Nemesis.
Also, we Have Thorned Namshiel and all that business too so... not so much fae centric.
What do we have about namshiel, exactly ? Mab slapping Harry down when he mentioned it is not really conclusive of anything.
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I am not recalling any evidence establishing this.
N has appeared or messed with every court, Reds in the beginning, likely inspiring the later division in the Reds in CH, Cowl trying to control the 'election' in WN of Wamps,(Outsiders, OUTSIDERS EVERYWHERE!), Mavra seems to be the most cuddly, buddy, buddy N ally ever... Harry leaps to this conclusion at the end of CD, but the only thing Nemesis explains before CD that has not already been explained perfectly well is Aurora.
I've not seen any explanations or anything that explains anything to satisfaction.
Well, there is that athame. Other than that we have nothing to connect them to Nemesis.
Other than intentionally passing along an Nfected knife to Lea? For Cowl that would seem to be enough. Course you gotta start connecting other dot's then direct Nemesis reference(cause it's always so easy), Outsider connections, Peabody's 'the End is Nigh' command is pretty telling when your lookin at what N's trying to do of course.
What do we have about namshiel, exactly ? Mab slapping Harry down when he mentioned it is not really conclusive of anything.
Nico doing it too means nothing certainly? It's later disappearance...
You can always choose to see things a certain way, but i'd like to see what evidence there is N is a fae only thing(especially when it's been described as a human affliction too, and been given mention by GK in things not fae relative)
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Sure they were. The Grey Council are visibly wizards. Harry is a White Council member. To anyone who doesn't have the inside information we do from Harry's viewpoint, that's clearly a White Council operation.
Odin, Mab, Lea, The knights of the cross, an archangel, ....
And arguably Harry was there for Winter and not for the white council. His extra power surely came from there.
Seems clear to me Arthur Langtry knows it's coming.
He is as clueless as ever, I do not think he is in the grey council. He was preparing the counterattack when everything was already finished.
I'd argue that an accurate assessment of the Council's strength is why the Red Court have not been at war for them for centuries, and waited until they could put the Council legally in the wrong to do so.
The red court had simply other priorities first.
Their supposed allies hanging them out to dry is pretty visible there, yes.
Their Fomor allies coordinating their attack with the red court is clearly visible. Their warlock allies were simply not invited in what clearly was a huge party for vampires. Especially because they were all more concerned with their internal struggle for dominance than their white council enemies which shows how seriously they took the danger. Not.
My previous post should show why I do not agree with that take on things.
Without Winter Chichen Itza was not even possible.
It's there if you can see through Haryr's prejudices.
Not even in a loose remark or observation, nowhere. Not from anyone in the white council. They have a clear idea about who is human and who is not.
For them the single killing of a human with magic is a greater crime than the killing of a complete vampire court.
The Accords, sfaict, protects all its signatories, Council or Red Court. Hence, for example, Marcone being keen to sign up. I can totally buy tha structure having an anti-Outsider purpose.
They offer very little protection. They offer structure if the parties want to use it.
Since when does the person who starts the attacks make the decision about war or peace ? It's the choice of how to respond that determines whether that is a war.
To attack is to start the hostilities, that is really starting the war. Not defending yourself just makes it a very short war after which the war atrocities can begin. Nobody is expecting the council not to defend themselves anyway because being captured means being turned so choosing to attack means choosing war and not negotiations.
Disagreed entirely. The Red Court is deeply divided.
Sure and we see in Changes that the war was merely a tool in their internal conflicts. Just like roman generals attacked barbarians to increase their personal power in the roman empire. It shows how seriously they took the white council, not very.
If they really thought the white council a serious enemy they would be more united. The red king had the power to enforce that but for internal political reasons he chose not to.
There would not have been a peace offer after Archangel if the Reds thought the Council was a pushover, and Ortega would not have been working so hard to stop the war in DM if he thought the war was winnable.
That was just to see how far they could push the white council and to keep the pretense of being the aggrieved party under the accords. trusting Ortega's words is foolish.Besides the offers were designed to be rejected.
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Archangel was not a proportional response to Harry's attack on Bianca. It was an escalation. They went straight for Simon Petrovich, a Senior Council member. It was a major political assassination.
They had no real interest in peace. Ortega wanted to delay the conflict so that they could increase their numbers now that they had a better idea of what the White Council can do.
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For a proportional attack you go for someone with a similar position. Then you can make peace with the other family without one family paying too much weregeld to the other.
Read the Icelandic saga's, in particular Njal's saga, to get an idea. But for that both parties must believe the other party can continue the feud and both parties must agree the cost for that is just too high even with all the emotions pushing them to revenge.
The alternative is killing them all or cowering them. Looking only at the proportionality of the attack cowering into submission was a possibility but that never ends well either.
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N has appeared or messed with every court, Reds in the beginning, likely inspiring the later division in the Reds in CH,
What evidence do we have for Nemesis affecting the Reds?
Cowl trying to control the 'election' in WN of Wamps,(Outsiders, OUTSIDERS EVERYWHERE!),
Lots of Outsiders, and Cowl. No Nemesis.
Mavra seems to be the most cuddly, buddy, buddy N ally ever... I've not seen any explanations or anything that explains anything to satisfaction.
What needs explanation that has not already been covered?
Harry likes big simple one-size-fits-all conspiracy theories. The Black Council serves as one for him in PG, and he applies it to a pile of things where there are as many as five plausible different causes. Nemesis is the same as of CD, and I find it equally plausible, that is, not at all.
Other than intentionally passing along an Nfected knife to Lea? For Cowl that would seem to be enough.
And that fits also with Nemesis being a very limited, faerie-specific infection that is a tool of Cowl and his allies, rather than the global contagion Harry likes to think it is.
Outsider connections, Peabody's 'the End is Nigh' command is pretty telling when your lookin at what N's trying to do of course.
The assumption that it is trying to do anything rather than one more weapon in the game seems unfounded to me
Nico doing it too means nothing certainly? It's later disappearance...
Namshiel's disappearance is perfectly well explained by it being cut down and any of a number of people there stealing the coin for their own reasons.
You can always choose to see things a certain way, but i'd like to see what evidence there is N is a fae only thing(especially when it's been described as a human affliction too,
Described by whom, exactly, and what are they supposed to know.
We don't need Nemesis to explain factional differences within the Red Court. We have the plausible explanation of outside sorcerors, whom we know they work with, manipulating them, and we have Cowl and Mavra as plausible candidates.
We don't need Nemesis to explain the White Court's differences, we see Cowl manipulating them. We don't need Nemesis to explain Victor Sells, we have the evidence that that was a known Red Court spell he was using pointed out in Changes, And we have the Red Court researcher in "Love Hurts" as a plausible alternate explanation for where the hexenwulf belts in FM come from.
Nemesis being behind all this stuff is unnescessary.
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Odin, Mab, Lea, The knights of the cross, an archangel, ....
Mab is lending her approval to the Council's legitimate counterstrike against an Accords violator. The Knights move in mysterious ways, and Uriel's involvement is by no means visible, nor are there witnesses around to proclaim Odin's involvement to the world.
Even if nobody except Eb on the Grey Council is White Council, to the rest of the world it is a White Council attack.
And arguably Harry was there for Winter and not for the white council. His extra power surely came from there.
Which proves his allegiance as much as the tengu showing up proves Eb's. Getting power from other sources by being clever is what wizards do. Doesn't make them not Council members.
He is as clueless as ever, I do not think he is in the grey council.
Assertion is not argument. Do you have any logical reason for discounting the notion that Harry taking him as clueless is 75% Harry being prejudiced and 25% Langtry being skilled enough a politician to give a misleading impression when it serves his purposes? Or for discounting his surety at the beginning of Changes?
Their Fomor allies coordinating their attack with the red court is clearly visible.
For values of "ally" who do nothing to help. The Fomor taking advantage of the chaos when the Reds go down does not look like an alliance to me. if anything, it looks like them planning on the Reds going down.
Their warlock allies were simply not invited in what clearly was a huge party for vampires.
"simply" and "clearly" read as assumptions to me. Their warlock "allies" are intentionally abandoning them to my mind.
Especially because they were all more concerned with their internal struggle for dominance than their white council enemies which shows how seriously they took the danger.
I have not, that I recall, argued that the Red Court were not complete idiots to underestimate the Council.
Without Winter Chichen Itza was not even possible.
Which requires casually ignoring that the second youngest of the Senior Council, all by himself, can pull satellites from the sky and trigger massive volcanoes. The Senior Council's ability to nuke Chichen Itza from orbit at any time seems pretty well established to me.
Not even in a loose remark or observation, nowhere. Not from anyone in the white council. They have a clear idea about who is human and who is not.
For them the single killing of a human with magic is a greater crime than the killing of a complete vampire court.
After four hundred years of peaceful co-existence, and willingness to abide by two separate attempts to end the war peacefully and legally?
They offer very little protection. They offer structure if the parties want to use it.
I believe we have WoJ that Mab did not give people a choice about signing on to the Accords.
Sure and we see in Changes that the war was merely a tool in their internal conflicts. Just like roman generals attacked barbarians to increase their personal power in the roman empire.
Half the red Court seem to be persuaded the war can be won, by and with the aid of their warlock "allies". The other half, rightly realise not. Harry in changes thinking they have an insane leadership is oversimplifying what is clearly a power struggle.
That was just to see how far they could push the white council and to keep the pretense of being the aggrieved party under the accords.
Why do you keep calling it a pretence?
trusting Ortega's words is foolish.Besides the offers were designed to be rejected.
The Council was quite ready to accept the one in SK. And I am trusting Susan's assessment of Ortega in DM at least as much as Ortega himself.
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Archangel was not a proportional response to Harry's attack on Bianca. It was an escalation. They went straight for Simon Petrovich, a Senior Council member. It was a major political assassination.
You don't think that's a reasonable wergild for a member of the red Court aristocracy who had just been promoted ?
Ortega wanted to delay the conflict so that they could increase their numbers now that they had a better idea of what the White Council can do.
Which would, by my argument above, take them another couple of centuries at least.
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What evidence do we have for Nemesis affecting the Reds?
Bianca actually. Everything about her. Pretty sure Uppity Red Nobles seeking to ascend and intercourt Sorcerous activities were specifically on multiple lists.
Lots of Outsiders, and Cowl. No Nemesis.
There by ignoring all connections between Outsiders, Walkers and Nemesis. That Nemesis's presence in CD was manifested by a Walker and a bunch of minor outsiders trying to break open the Max security Prison.
and actually, if you look at how the Fae pay lip service to the Balance/rent by not violating Hope, Love or Faith, I can directly connect here what you call N to something not directly Nemesis itself. Hope is balance with Fear, Fae service is Duty,(which I can totally find a complex paper someone else wrote on why Duty is a warriors form of Hope, but I lack the ability to sufficiently explain to my own satisfaction) Faith is keeping their word and Love is respecting Homestead laws(which love is the primary force of empowerment in a familial nature) So, Maeve breaking her bond to mab had more to do with Fearbringers power than another's... meaning Harry's 'sapper' theory is also skewed from the truth...
What needs explanation that has not already been covered?
What's been satisfactorily explained?
If anything were we wouldn't have a debate on the boards about it... so pretty much anything needing discussed
Harry likes big simple one-size-fits-all conspiracy theories. The Black Council serves as one for him in PG, and he applies it to a pile of things where there are as many as five plausible different causes. Nemesis is the same as of CD, and I find it equally plausible, that is, not at all.
But your insisting the opposite it feels like, that anything not Nemesis is not related to Nemesis..
that fits also with Nemesis being a very limited, faerie-specific infection that is a tool of Cowl and his allies, rather than the global contagion Harry likes to think it is.
Nemesis infects Fairie specifically and easily because that's where they got their power, that's why Mab has an aspect of Judgement. From the Literal Greek Goddess Nemesis, and the Scales, those are HER scales. they fed her to the stone table and split the power and the image so that their would be no mirror not already balanced inside reality. So she'd have no foothold. Anything that disturbs the alloy of fairie has Nemesis in it's cracks even if Nemesis didn't do it herself.
The assumption that it is trying to do anything rather than one more weapon in the game seems unfounded to me
It's actually a quote from something else iirc. Mayhaps the Yeats second coming,which is ALL about the coming apocalypse and is specifically mentioned by Murphy whenever things are getting wonky, also quoted by Maeve about being the 'falcon'. Nemesis is the destabilizing factor and then he quotes something that's been reference all over regarding that same destabilization...
Namshiel's disappearance is perfectly well explained by it being cut down and any of a number of people there stealing the coin for their own reasons.
Leaving out the Arctis Tor events... very selective reasoning on that.
Described by whom, exactly, and what are they supposed to know.
Multiple places, of course if we take everything said as wrong, then we have no idea what going on and neither you a leg to stand on as I can point this out too for literally everything, as everything is from Harry's perspective. So saying multiple sources are inherently lying or wrong becomes and endless cycle.
We don't need Nemesis to explain factional differences within the Red Court. We have the plausible explanation of outside sorcerors, whom we know they work with, manipulating them, and we have Cowl and Mavra as plausible candidates.
We don't need Nemesis to explain the White Court's differences, we see Cowl manipulating them. We don't need Nemesis to explain Victor Sells, we have the evidence that that was a known Red Court spell he was using pointed out in Changes, And we have the Red Court researcher in "Love Hurts" as a plausible alternate explanation for where the hexenwulf belts in FM come from.
Quite frankly as Mr. GK is the resident(as in resident of fricken reality) expert on said things I wouldn't see why we should simply dismiss him either. We have Odins comment about Harry not yet seeing who the real players are too, but that won't count I suppose... and just so I feel like i'm not the only one getting holes poked into them, for what purpose did the Red court thereby empower the Shadowman to do what he did in SF? Seems you like to have all your ducks in a row, what you got there? Cause fyi, it's also surmised Raith and his books of Magic were involved, what with the Name of Shadowmans old company having the word Silver in it and Lust being the most effective spellframe... funny that, a Red used spell is best used with Whites Lust power...
Nemesis being behind all this stuff is unnescessary.
Nemesis having Nothing to do with it all seems unlikely.
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Mab is lending her approval to the Council's legitimate counterstrike against an Accords violator. The Knights move in mysterious ways, and Uriel's involvement is by no means visible, nor are there witnesses around to proclaim Odin's involvement to the world.
Even if nobody except Eb on the Grey Council is White Council, to the rest of the world it is a White Council attack.
Switching between real and perceived strength. The perceived strength of the council certainly grew after Chichen Itza but the real strength did not and now they are at war with the Fomor.
And the red courts actions and aims were not based on the white councils perceived strength after they were destroyed but on how strong the white council seemed to be around Summer Knight and that was weak.
Which proves his allegiance as much as the tengu showing up proves Eb's. Getting power from other sources by being clever is what wizards do. Doesn't make them not Council members.
In this case it did not prove the white councils strength, it proved that other powers wanted the red court gone.
Assertion is not argument. Do you have any logical reason for discounting the notion that Harry taking him as clueless is 75% Harry being prejudiced and 25% Langtry being skilled enough a politician to give a misleading impression when it serves his purposes? Or for discounting his surety at the beginning of Changes?
I assert things when they seem overly obvious to me.
The merlin is not shown to be as peceptive as say the gatekeeper.
For values of "ally" who do nothing to help. The Fomor taking advantage of the chaos when the Reds go down does not look like an alliance to me.
They are now at war with the white council and that started exactly at the same moment the big red court attack was supposed to happen. That is coordinated and that would have helped the red court enormously if it was still there to profit from it. They did not back out when they heard about the downfal of the red court because by then it was probably too late.
if anything, it looks like them planning on the Reds going down.
Attacking the white council exactly at the moment of the great red court attack is a strange way of achieving that. Doing nothing would have been better.
"simply" and "clearly" read as assumptions to me. Their warlock "allies" are intentionally abandoning them to my mind.
That is not taking into consideration the nature of that party. Big sacrifices on high altars are feasts were everyone eats. You don't invite food to these parties as guests unless you want to eat them. This was a private vampire thing
I have not, that I recall, argued that the Red Court were not complete idiots to underestimate the Council.
Which requires casually ignoring that the second youngest of the Senior Council, all by himself, can pull satellites from the sky and trigger massive volcanoes. The Senior Council's ability to nuke Chichen Itza from orbit at any time seems pretty well established to me.
I don't see evidence for that.
After four hundred years of peaceful co-existence, and willingness to abide by two separate attempts to end the war peacefully and legally?
There is no reason to believe the red council was peaceful all that time, there is more in the world than the white council to fight with. They expanded from their original base in central america to a far bigger empire just before their fall. That does not happen without war.
I believe we have WoJ that Mab did not give people a choice about signing on to the Accords.
Sure but Mab is not there to protect puppies. The accords leave a lot of room for war and killing. They are not there to protect the weak but to give tools to end endless cycles of pointless violence. But both parties need to agree to stop the war.
Half the red Court seem to be persuaded the war can be won, by and with the aid of their warlock "allies". The other half, rightly realise not. Harry in changes thinking they have an insane leadership is oversimplifying what is clearly a power struggle.
There is a lot of power struggle in the lower ranks but the red king and his inner circle seemed in control. It is normal in some dictatorship to encourage conflicts between your underlings to keep them better in control and distract their attention from the king.
Why do you keep calling it a pretence?
The Council was quite ready to accept the one in SK. And I am trusting Susan's assessment of Ortega in DM at least as much as Ortega himself.
And I am trusting Shiro and Thomas who both know better.
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You don't think that's a reasonable wergild for a member of the red Court aristocracy who had just been promoted ?
She was not one of the original Maya and she was not on the top level of the pyramid by far. Killing a comparable member of the council would be something like an experienced warden or something, Morgan would be pushing it. A senior council member with a strong squad of combat mages is overkill.
Senior council must be comparable with inner circle if there is even a pretence of the red court and the white council of equal strength. If Bianca was equal to a senior council member that would mean the red court was far stronger than the white council.
That could have been the message as well. One of our minor nobility is equal to your top people. You are nothing. Surrender to our terms.
Bianca was minor nobility nothing more. The red court had loads of them.
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I really don't think there is common ground or mutual disagreement to be reached on this topic.
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Actually, I think that the only "evil" character is Kemmler. He's hurting people for entirely selfish reasons from what we've learned.
The other characters have either a higher goal in mind or are insane. This doesn't make their action less bad, but it doesn't mean, that they are evil. They have a goal and are simply unscrupulous. "The end justifies the means" I can't call that evil. I may give it various names, but I can't call it evil.
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Actually, I think that the only "evil" character is Kemmler. He's hurting people for entirely selfish reasons from what we've learned.
The other characters have either a higher goal in mind or are insane. This doesn't make their action less bad, but it doesn't mean, that they are evil. They have a goal and are simply unscrupulous. "The end justifies the means" I can't call that evil. I may give it various names, but I can't call it evil.
How do we know he wasn't one or the other? He was very steeped in Dark Magic corruption at the least, which is insanity inducing. Mayhaps how he appeared in the recent short story is indicative he was once more of a man then Monster?
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Like Harry, Kemmler was a man that made choices. Unlike Harry, Kemmler let his good intentions slip away.
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How do we know he wasn't one or the other? He was very steeped in Dark Magic corruption at the least, which is insanity inducing. Mayhaps how he appeared in the recent short story is indicative he was once more of a man then Monster?
Like Harry, Kemmler was a man that made choices. Unlike Harry, Kemmler let his good intentions slip away.
Well, my starting and ending point is the current information.
Nicodemus obviously believes that he's doing the right thing and is trying to build up power to save the world in the end. And he's somehow trying to battle Outsiders.
Ariana was conned by the Red King and is acting because of injured pride and out of revenge.
Mab is only doing her duty to protect the world from Outsiders.
The Red King is simply tending to his "herd". For him it's basically growing his food source and keeping his power / growing it.
Lord Raith is fairly similar to the Red King in this aspect.Alicia Nelson
Lara Raith dtto, only being sexier because female and a lot more seductive :)
Cowl is quite possibly working with Outsiders. Either got conned or believes to use the power of Outsiders to fight outsiders.
Corpsetaker wants power and is insane. It may be the conclusion of her jumping bodies and her psyche breaking part by part as she encounters various minds [ Luccio is also sometimes dreaming memories of Alicia Nelson ]
Maeve has mommy issues and is driven insane by the crazy libido she can't satisfy. Nemfection didn't help with that. Again, not evil, just a bit insane and a bit mind-controlled. I'm guessing it's similar to Aurora's problem
Mavra is simply one of the surviving Black Court members. As a vampire, she feeds on humans. It's her nature. We don't hate piranhas for killing people and animals because they want to feed. Although I most certainly wouldn't want them in an aquarium at home. Or my bathtub for that matter.
Polonius Lartessa is a bratty nasty girl who didn't manage to grow up in almost 2 millenia. But in the long-term she's probably working with Nicodemus.
Peabody is/was just a power-hungry small-minded thug.
Marcone is simply a businessman who decided, that controlling the mob is the best way to limit the bad things that happen. As was noted in the books, by someone, I think it was Nicodemus, he'd be a good king. Not a kind king, but a good one.
Shagnasty is a Navaho variant of a fallen angel. Kinda pitiful.
Evil Bob is created from twisted parts of Bob. And Bob kinda has a problem distinguishing between good and evil. So I expect "Evil" Bob to have the same issue.
Dracul... well... as someone who kinda read about Vlad II and Vlad III, they have been attributed many nasty things, but what they did was to protect their land from extremely hostile invaders. Again, not evil. Just doing what is necessary.
So there from me :)
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Bianca actually. Everything about her. Pretty sure Uppity Red Nobles seeking to ascend and intercourt Sorcerous activities were specifically on multiple lists.
How is that not adequately explained by a) her wanting revenge on Harry and b) Mavra manipulating her, including specifically teaching her how to use dark magic?
There by ignoring all connections between Outsiders, Walkers and Nemesis. That Nemesis's presence in CD was manifested by a Walker and a bunch of minor outsiders trying to break open the Max security Prison.
I'm not ignoring that; I am not claiming that Nemesis is not a tool of the Outsiders and used by them.
I am saying that suddenly blaming Nemesis for most of everything that has gone wrong in the whole series is not supported.
and actually, if you look at how the Fae pay lip service to the Balance/rent by not violating Hope, Love or Faith, I can directly connect here what you call N to something not directly Nemesis itself. Hope is balance with Fear, Fae service is Duty,(which I can totally find a complex paper someone else wrote on why Duty is a warriors form of Hope, but I lack the ability to sufficiently explain to my own satisfaction) Faith is keeping their word and Love is respecting Homestead laws(which love is the primary force of empowerment in a familial nature)
I'm not familiar with what you are referring to here; if this a bit of speculation/analysis from the past couple of years I may well have missed it.
What's been satisfactorily explained?
Every major plot point prior to CD has a solid plausible explanation in the text except for Aurora going loopy.
Many of them have multiple solid plausible explanations in the text.
But your insisting the opposite it feels like, that anything not Nemesis is not related to Nemesis..
I am not saying that.
I am saying anything not Nemesis is not proven to be related to Nemesis. There is a big difference.
Nemesis infects Fairie specifically and easily because that's where they got their power, that's why Mab has an aspect of Judgement. From the Literal Greek Goddess Nemesis, and the Scales, those are HER scales. they fed her to the stone table and split the power and the image so that their would be no mirror not already balanced inside reality. So she'd have no foothold.
Again, where is this coming from? It makes sense, but I am not recalling textev for it unless I have missed a lot in a recent short story.
Mayhaps the Yeats second coming,which is ALL about the coming apocalypse and is specifically mentioned by Murphy whenever things are getting wonky, also quoted by Maeve about being the 'falcon'. Nemesis is the destabilizing factor and then he quotes something that's been reference all over regarding that same destabilization...
Yep, because that poem is one of the most frequently quoted in any end of the world novel anywhere; George RR Martin uses it a lot in The Armageddon rag for example.
Leaving out the Arctis Tor events... very selective reasoning on that.
We have no evidence linking Namshiel to Nemesis at Arctis Tor.
Here is a plausible alternative explanation:
Arctis Tor is normally guarded by tons of trolls and goblins. Harry and Thomas can't plausibly break through that big a force by themselves.
Mab can't ask Harry to break in and rescue Molly directly without using up a favour, which she doesn't want to do.
Mab can't just order the trolls away because that will be suspicious as heck.
Therefore, Mab hires a Denarian to attack the trolls and goblins and open the way for Harry. (we have a WoJ that Mab would sacrifice her entire court in an instant if there was gain to be had).
Namshiel, or possibly Nicodemus, was there working for Mab. This is why Mab owed Nicodemus a favour in SG.
Note also; Harry's first conversation with Mab in SmF involves her hiding something from his mind (the blasting wand), and distracting him from noticing with a brutal headache. When he mentions Namshiel at the end of SmF, she slaps him down again, and he never mentions Namshiel again. Not even when hanging out with Denarians.
Does this make sense to you?
Multiple places, of course if we take everything said as wrong, then we have no idea what going on and neither you a leg to stand on as I can point this out too for literally everything, as everything is from Harry's perspective. So saying multiple sources are inherently lying or wrong becomes and endless cycle.
Not at all, because saying "everyone could be wrong" is not saying we haven't a leg to stand on. We can assess who might be wrong or lying based on what we know about them. Fallen lie all the time. Faerie tell the literal truth in a misleading way. Michael Carpenter's value of being a good man includes respect for the truth, but he has also said if anything good happens and he does not know where it comes from he credits the White God, which means that if he got a random gift from Odin and did what he said he does he would be wrong about its origin.
Quite frankly as Mr. GK is the resident(as in resident of fricken reality) expert on said things I wouldn't see why we should simply dismiss him either.
I am not dismissing him. I would point out the inherent difficulties of confirming any evidence about Nemesis when part of your working model is "never mention it to anyone", though.
We have Odins comment about Harry not yet seeing who the real players are too, but that won't count I suppose...
Oh, I entirely count that. It's part of why I believe the real players are still to come, and Nemesis is as much of a red herring for One-Explanation-For-Everything as the "Black Council" was.
and just so I feel like i'm not the only one getting holes poked into them, for what purpose did the Red court thereby empower the Shadowman to do what he did in SF? Seems you like to have all your ducks in a row, what you got there?
I see several purposes there, depending on how well informed the enemies are. Challenge Harry; challenge Marcone; expose Harry to an option that nearly turns him to the dark side (just outside the Sells' house, before he hears the mysterious female voice, he is very near using the drug against the wardens); set Harry up to be executed; set Harry up to have the Doom lifted so that he'll be harder for the Council to disavow come GP and subsequent books when he is being set up as cause of the war.
Cause fyi, it's also surmised Raith and his books of Magic were involved, what with the Name of Shadowmans old company having the word Silver in it and Lust being the most effective spellframe... funny that, a Red used spell is best used with Whites Lust power..
Funny that people regard that connection as significant when Odin tells Harry directly in Changes that the spell the Reds were using at CI was the one the Shadowman tested out; I take the direct evidence over the similarity there. Particularly as we know from "love Hurts" that the Reds are specifically doing research into understanding the White Lust power.
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How is that not adequately explained by a) her wanting revenge on Harry and b) Mavra manipulating her, including specifically teaching her how to use dark magic?
because after she died someone who's quite similar suddenly becomes the same uppity Red Noble Lady? Also because i'm guestimating in MM Susan will instead be that Ramp seeking ascension... Meaning someway that was always going to play out/part of an influencial plan.
I'm not ignoring that; I am not claiming that Nemesis is not a tool of the Outsiders and used by them.
I am saying that suddenly blaming Nemesis for most of everything that has gone wrong in the whole series is not supported.
I quite agree, she's not always the one at play, but she's the one all the strings connect back too. It's her role to break reality just as much as it is Mab's to preserve it, THAT is a balance not found in the two queens imo. Neither want's to end reality, Mab wants it for herself(ergo she stops outsiders) and Titania want's to balance that directly. but neither want it gone(same could unfortunately be said of the Mothers, meaning they don't collect the balance on the next level up.
I'm not familiar with what you are referring to here; if this a bit of speculation/analysis from the past couple of years I may well have missed it.
Yes... unfortunately I don't have a collective body of work. I'm not the kind of person who could organize that alone.(like Arnold/Terminator, i'm a firm believer there are no 'self made men')
Every major plot point prior to CD has a solid plausible explanation in the text except for Aurora going loopy.
Many of them have multiple solid plausible explanations in the text.
Well hot damn, you got a list? Cause it would be damn useful lol. Actually though, I can point out a whole host of other things not directly shown related to theories(which have way too much adding up to be nothing), I actually did a 'conclusion' for the purpose/plots behind each of the books. FM, for instance, was about breaking the curse to free Fearbringer from it's current Host/prison. GP tried to remake a spirit of terror directly in Kravos, ect. ect. The goal as far as N and the walkers go, is to find purchase inside reality, find identity, so they can then judge and destroy it in so much as their version is are Hell on earth scenario. This isn't the only Outsiders with beef, that's just theirs. On a different but related tier the Lord of Slowest Terror/Hunter of Shadows aka Chronos wants true Oblivion. for everything to return to it's original oneness, to collect all the 'shadows'. Aka those made by those who stand inside the light, insiders defining outsiders through penumbra effect. WE cast the shadows that give the outsiders definition, without us they have none. and that's the Original Darkness's goal, to be one again(see the Chronos similarity in the desire?)
I am not saying that.
I am saying anything not Nemesis is not proven to be related to Nemesis. There is a big difference.
Perhaps... which I am trying to find here.
Again, where is this coming from? It makes sense, but I am not recalling textev for it unless I have missed a lot in a recent short story.
LOL, no. But imo a lot of people have missed things already in the books out now. Idk if you remember me as Wizard Nelson or Sibelis, but this is why I always liked you. Upon hearing a new and different theory instead of reflexively saying i'm wrong you ask me if I have sources you don't lol. If perchance you'd ever like to talk about my theory, which is grand and unifying as any other I've read here, i'd love for a chance to talk with someone who might actually understand it.
Yep, because that poem is one of the most frequently quoted in any end of the world novel anywhere; George RR Martin uses it a lot in The Armageddon rag for example.
When they do they usually have specific purposes in mind behind it, in the DF it's Nemesis. I'd have to track down(or just use that excellent reference section while I can, duh) the precise scenes but everytime Murphy has mentioned it it's been directly related to a 'wonky' book where Nemesis is the likeliest puppeteer. Course... in some ways i'm applying Nemesis as simply a destabilizing force, or should I say THE destabilizing force.(which the fomor court of water is precisely the Norse end state of the Fire and Ice balance btw, just part of the process of Force Majore Decay) I'd have to go about explaining every aspect its been used in, where, and why though. Maeve apparently being Nfected and her directly quoting it is a prime example though.
We have no evidence linking Namshiel to Nemesis at Arctis Tor.
Lol, I don't disagree with that really, I was just pointing it out as something not taken into account.
Here is a plausible alternative explanation:
Arctis Tor is normally guarded by tons of trolls and goblins. Harry and Thomas can't plausibly break through that big a force by themselves.
Mab can't ask Harry to break in and rescue Molly directly without using up a favour, which she doesn't want to do.
Mab can't just order the trolls away because that will be suspicious as heck.
Therefore, Mab hires a Denarian to attack the trolls and goblins and open the way for Harry. (we have a WoJ that Mab would sacrifice her entire court in an instant if there was gain to be had).
Namshiel, or possibly Nicodemus, was there working for Mab. This is why Mab owed Nicodemus a favour in SG.
Note also; Harry's first conversation with Mab in SmF involves her hiding something from his mind (the blasting wand), and distracting him from noticing with a brutal headache. When he mentions Namshiel at the end of SmF, she slaps him down again, and he never mentions Namshiel again. Not even when hanging out with Denarians.
Does this make sense to you?
Yes, but I will now use it as my own evidence lol. Mab has shown the winter court to time and again be interested in Nfected sources. If she hid the coin's where about's in his mind then she took it is the likelist answer, giving rise to a very good reasoning behind Namshiel being the culprit or otherwise compromised. Recently(griff iirc) someone had a theory it's because his subconscious took control of his empty hand after the soulfire to secure the coin for Mab. It had a glove always, and was shown moving without his intention to snatch a coin at another point(need to make sur the wasn't HIS coin too, cause that would set a precedent on targeting him spc) I find it likely when she took his Rod she made another deal with his subconscious mind coin, she does so when she attacks him again when he brings it up perhaps..
Not at all, because saying "everyone could be wrong" is not saying we haven't a leg to stand on. We can assess who might be wrong or lying based on what we know about them. Fallen lie all the time. Faerie tell the literal truth in a misleading way. Michael Carpenter's value of being a good man includes respect for the truth, but he has also said if anything good happens and he does not know where it comes from he credits the White God, which means that if he got a random gift from Odin and did what he said he does he would be wrong about its origin.
I have a feeling no matter who said it you'd lawyer up a perspective against their authenticity though lol.
I am not dismissing him. I would point out the inherent difficulties of confirming any evidence about Nemesis when part of your working model is "never mention it to anyone", though.
Except for someone whose job it is to do so, would probably have his methods of doing so, case in point meeting Harry face to face when he challenged the council to be sure he didn't see anything in him.
Oh, I entirely count that. It's part of why I believe the real players are still to come, and Nemesis is as much of a red herring for One-Explanation-For-Everything as the "Black Council" was.
I agree, and disagree of course lol. I think I know why Nemesis is the main threat and though it will not always be so by that name, the actual effect it works through will always be an inherent problem in reality. Jim's world is steeped in it's mechanics. I try to see them properly, though holes exist where only clue's are given.
I see several purposes there, depending on how well informed the enemies are. Challenge Harry; challenge Marcone; expose Harry to an option that nearly turns him to the dark side (just outside the Sells' house, before he hears the mysterious female voice, he is very near using the drug against the wardens); set Harry up to be executed; set Harry up to have the Doom lifted so that he'll be harder for the Council to disavow come GP and subsequent books when he is being set up as cause of the war.
Ah... not bad, but I think it was mostly to get the 3 eye drug out there to start effecting mortal belief and weaken the veil more. As Storm Front is literally the storm front of events leading up to the storm in Dead Beat. It's reference to the stirring up of the ghosts and dark magic, the beginning of trying to pierce the veil as Mort mentions in both GP and DB iirc.
Funny you mention the scene outside of Sells house though, i'm fairly sure that's the first time Nemesis made it's presence known in the books. I have this rather simply put theory that N get's purchase whenever magic is used to violate freewill, which most all the Fae infected were either directly or indirectly around strong active sources of mortal magic or wizards themselves. In this case the reaction from N saved Harry because it was his free will being violated by the aura of dark magic. I have no real proof of this, it just aligns well with my theorem.
Funny that people regard that connection as significant when Odin tells Harry directly in Changes that the spell the Reds were using at CI was the one the Shadowman tested out; I take the direct evidence over the similarity there. Particularly as we know from "love Hurts" that the Reds are specifically doing research into understanding the White Lust power.
that's right, they are doing current research, Shadowman's dusty books told him his info I believe, so his sources are better informed. Why can't the whites be doing work into how the Reds spells work? Raith again, is actually very interested in magic apparently.
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Switching between real and perceived strength. The perceived strength of the council certainly grew after Chichen Itza but the real strength did not and now they are at war with the Fomor.
We have Luccio's word early in Changes that the Council's real strength then is twice what it was before the attack in DB. With that being her area of expertise and her having no motivation to lie there, I am inclined to believe her.
And the red courts actions and aims were not based on the white councils perceived strength after they were destroyed but on how strong the white council seemed to be around Summer Knight and that was weak.
At that point they were willing to make a peace offer in exchange for Harry.
We see in Changes what happens to anyone who makes a formal peace offer under the Accords and does not deliver.
Therefore, either they seriously meant the peace offer, or they would have betrayed it and all been dead in a few days.
In this case it did not prove the white councils strength, it proved that other powers wanted the red court gone.
You are ignoring WoJ, and I believe also Eb explicitly saying in the text, that a wizard's strength is measured by the allies they bring.
The White Council bringing a ton of different powers to the battle with them isn't "We are weak, we need help". It's "look how strong we are because we made alliances and brought all these people to the table."
They are now at war with the white council and that started exactly at the same moment the big red court attack was supposed to happen. That is coordinated and that would have helped the red court enormously if it was still there to profit from it. They did not back out when they heard about the downfall of the red court because by then it was probably too late.
You don't think the chaos caused by the loss of the Red Court is beneficial to anyone seeking to take advantage of it?
Attacking the white council exactly at the moment of the great red court attack is a strange way of achieving that. Doing nothing would have been better.
Which part of "let's you two guys fight to the death, whoever survives will be weaker and then I can jump in and finish them off, and that gets rid of two major rivals rather than one" is striking you as poor strategy here?
That is not taking into consideration the nature of that party. Big sacrifices on high altars are feasts were everyone eats. You don't invite food to these parties as guests unless you want to eat them. This was a private vampire thing
Requiring the Red Court to be morons with no ability to put strategic good sense, like actually putting all the defences they can call on around as major a strike as they are planning at CI, ahead of satisfying their bloodlust again doesn't parse with them having spent centuries not starting a war.
There is no reason to believe the red council was peaceful all that time, there is more in the world than the white council to fight with.
There is reason to believe they were not rampantly violating the Accords because they still exist. And we are certain they were not bad neighbours to the White Council because Eb says in PG that the Council have not been at war like this in a thousand years.
They expanded from their original base in central america to a far bigger empire just before their fall. That does not happen without war.
You have some evidence for this being just before their fall rather than a slow process occupying all the centuries since first contact ?
Sure but Mab is not there to protect puppies.
She is there to protect signatories.
The accords leave a lot of room for war and killing. They are not there to protect the weak but to give tools to end endless cycles of pointless violence. But both parties need to agree to stop the war.
Note that Nicodemus' offence in SmF is specifically called out as attacking the Archive without cause or warning. That is evidence for the Accords regulating when and how signatories may go to war. Note also that Marcone sees the Accords as regulating who is likely to attack him, and in "Even Hand", he is entirely sure, having just killed a fairly senior Fomorian, that as a signatory he can unilaterally pay wergild and that legally resolves the matter; the Fomor's agreement is not required.
And I am trusting Shiro and Thomas who both know better.
Thomas, who is part of a conspiracy that Martin admits on the page, in Changes, was there to assassinate Ortega and keep the war going because otherwise it would have stopped?
We know what Thomas is doing there, and why. We know what he wants from Harry. Why there is any reason at all to trust what he says with that motive established, I do not know.
Shiro, on the other hand, is part of an organisation who explicitly choose to put faith ahead of evidence, as we see in their insistence on continually providing opportunities for Denarian hosts to repent.
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We have Luccio's word early in Changes that the Council's real strength then is twice what it was before the attack in DB. With that being her area of expertise and her having no motivation to lie there, I am inclined to believe her.
Numbers, not strength. Wizards get strength when they get older so an old wizard is not easily replaced by a few younger ones.
At that point they were willing to make a peace offer in exchange for Harry.
And what would that have meant in practice? It means the red court can keep demanding things. The Gatekeeper was quite clear about that. The white council had been hit unproportionally heavyly by Archangel.
We see in Changes what happens to anyone who makes a formal peace offer under the Accords and does not deliver.
That is your interpretation. I see what happens if you work too closely with outsiders to change the status quo. The elders take action. Odin and Uriel have no direct interest enforcing Mab's accords anyway.
Therefore, either they seriously meant the peace offer, or they would have betrayed it and all been dead in a few days.
I don't think so. They would simply add more demands until the council had to refuse.
You are ignoring WoJ, and I believe also Eb explicitly saying in the text, that a wizard's strength is measured by the allies they bring.
The red court has allies to and you dismiss them all the time. The Fomor and the warlocks with outsiders. It is about allies you can reliably count on. The Tengu are, Winter is not.
The White Council bringing a ton of different powers to the battle with them isn't "We are weak, we need help". It's "look how strong we are because we made alliances and brought all these people to the table."
You don't think the chaos caused by the loss of the Red Court is beneficial to anyone seeking to take advantage of it?
The attack was too well coordinated, they did not even wait to see how it would end. That is most likely because the attack was agreed with the red court before. They attacked the white council, the victor of Chichen Itza.
If they were just profiting from the chaos they would have acted later both because they wouldn't be that sure about when and who to attack and because it would be safer to attack the loser. They would be all over latin america to profit from the fall of the red court and not fighting a winner. Unless they of course thought the red court, their allies, had a safe plan for winning the war end they would loose the opportunity to profit from the white councils defeat if they did not join.
Which part of "let's you two guys fight to the death, whoever survives will be weaker and then I can jump in and finish them off, and that gets rid of two major rivals rather than one" is striking you as poor strategy here?
They jumped too soon for that. They jumped the red courts enemies, those who won the war.
Requiring the Red Court to be morons with no ability to put strategic good sense, like actually putting all the defences they can call on around as major a strike as they are planning at CI, ahead of satisfying their bloodlust again doesn't parse with them having spent centuries not starting a war.
It makes good political sense, for internal politics that is. Besides this is a magical world based on ancient traditions and believes. Some things have to be done a certain way. It is their nature.
What are sacrificial parties for? You sacrifice, eat the meat and bond with each other.
And of course they did not think they needed more. The red king lied about being crazy but not about his arrogance. That is quite a common feature in this world.
There is reason to believe they were not rampantly violating the Accords because they still exist. And we are certain they were not bad neighbours to the White Council because Eb says in PG that the Council have not been at war like this in a thousand years.
Smaller scale but effective enough because they expanded. The accords are not there to prevent war, they just regulate it. There is more than enough room for violence within the accords.
And sure the scale is unique because the council was stronger than expected and the apocalypse is coming, everything will be on a bigger scale.
You have some evidence for this being just before their fall rather than a slow process occupying all the centuries since first contact ?
Probably a slow process but that changes nothing. Expansion in an occupied world is not possible without violence.
She is there to protect signatories.
She is not there to protect anyone except reality in general. She protects her accords but see what happened in white night for example. The aggrieved party must take action otherwise there is no case and Mab offers only a framework for resolving conflicts.
It is the duty of the aggrieved party to take action, otherwise no case at all. If you have no family you have no protection. This is all old school, Mab is from the dark ages, to look for something that is even better than the UN is anachronistic.
If you kill the whole red court there is no one to take action, that works even if the red court had not broken the accords.
It is much like Njal's saga. A very informative book about a norse feud in the tenth century.
Note that Nicodemus' offence in SmF is specifically called out as attacking the Archive without cause or warning. That is evidence for the Accords regulating when and how signatories may go to war. Note also that Marcone sees the Accords as regulating who is likely to attack him, and in "Even Hand", he is entirely sure, having just killed a fairly senior Fomorian, that as a signatory he can unilaterally pay wergild and that legally resolves the matter; the Fomor's agreement is not required.
He did not expect them to refuse the weregeld. It is never said he could or could not. But it has been historically always an option so unless it is clearly stated it can not be refused I must conclude it can be refused.
And in summer knight the red court did not ask for a weregeld for Bianca, it would probably have been paid by the white council, it asked for Harry, for blood.
Besides the weregeld for simon and his crew would be much higher than that for Bianca.
Weregeld is an option. A duel is also a possibility. Declaring war works as well. And until the reds completely went bonkers and attacked fairy the fairy courts did not take action until much later.
Three days? That would never have happened.
Thomas, who is part of a conspiracy that Martin admits on the page, in Changes, was there to assassinate Ortega and keep the war going because otherwise it would have stopped?
Who also knows the red court and their nature better than we do. Actually ask the merlin in Changes, he would have told us the shark's nature would not change. That was after Peabodies influence was stopped of course.
We know what Thomas is doing there, and why. We know what he wants from Harry. Why there is any reason at all to trust what he says with that motive established, I do not know.
Shiro, on the other hand, is part of an organisation who explicitly choose to put faith ahead of evidence, as we see in their insistence on continually providing opportunities for Denarian hosts to repent.
That does not mean he is stupid. He had a lot of experience.
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because after she died someone who's quite similar suddenly becomes the same uppity Red Noble Lady?
Arianna Ortega was around a lot longer than Bianca, she turned her husband back in the conquistador days and he turned Bianca some time later. I see no reason to think Arianna is suddenly having a change in character to step up to replace Bianca, rather than Harry having got to a point of dealing with someone senior who was like that all along.
(My personal favourite notion for what's up with Bianca is that the Red Court deliberately picked their least stable lower-level type and rushed her promotion, before sending her to Chicago and again once she was there. In order a) that she will sooner or later get into the fights they want got into with Harry, and b) that the higher a rank she is in, the bigger a bite they can legitimately take out of the Council as wergild when she dies.)
Also because i'm guestimating in MM Susan will instead be that Ramp seeking ascension.
That would be pleasingly nasty, but I am pretty sure JB is not as nasty a person as I am. If he was, Mirror Mirror would introduce Harry to a version of himself who'd done everything better, made different choices and engaged in different moral growth, saving thousands of lives, and Harry would forever after have to live with the knowledge of what a screw-up he was by comparison.
I quite agree, she's not always the one at play, but she's the one all the strings connect back too. It's her role to break reality just as much as it is Mab's to preserve it, THAT is a balance not found in the two queens imo.
I remain entirely unconvinced Nemesis is a personification with any wants of its own, beyond "corrode Faerie constraints so that the Faerie in question can make choices that suit their own wants but are outside the bounds of their nature". (Maeve being a cruel type wants to get rid of competition, Aurora being an idealist wanting to end the conflict between Summer and Winter forever, Cat Sith being a proud ancient who would like nothing more than to decorate with the innards of the disrespectful wizard.)
Neither want's to end reality, Mab wants it for herself(ergo she stops outsiders) and Titania want's to balance that directly. but neither want it gone(same could unfortunately be said of the Mothers, meaning they don't collect the balance on the next level up.
CD does seem to me to lock down that the Courts are meant to work together towards an overall goal despite the opposition between them along the way, which was pleasing confirmation of what I have been arguing... since DB was when I came on the forums, but I have believed it since reading SK.
Yes... unfortunately I don't have a collective body of work. I'm not the kind of person who could organize that alone.(like Arnold/Terminator, i'm a firm believer there are no 'self made men')
Ah go on, write it up nicely, then we can ask to have it put in the Reference Collection.
Well hot damn, you got a list? Cause it would be damn useful lol.
I've done that a few times, though I fear most of them are long over the event horizon of post deletion (and I do wish I had asked to have my Harry Dresden: the Case Against thread put in the reference collection); give me a nice long afternoon with nothing else on my plate and I may do it again.
FM, for instance, was about breaking the curse to free Fearbringer from it's current Host/prison. GP tried to remake a spirit of terror directly in Kravos, ect. ect.
This and what you were saying earlier sounds like your master plan is taking Faith/Hope/Love and their opposites as defining polarities in the shape of the DV, yes ?
I am inclined against, because that would make Christianity more defining in the DV than I think Jim intends to; the text so far feels like he is making really remarkable efforts to leave it open either way whether the Christian moral perspective and cosmology is more fundamental to the DV than any other (and I can sympathise with that at a meta-level, on not wanting to annoy either Christian or non-Christian readers.) The Valkyries and the einherjar and the portrayal of Odin are entirely compatible with their cosmology and morality being as fundamental if not more so.
The goal as far as N and the walkers go, is to find purchase inside reality, find identity, so they can then judge and destroy it in so much as their version is are Hell on earth scenario. This isn't the only Outsiders with beef, that's just theirs. On a different but related tier the Lord of Slowest Terror/Hunter of Shadows aka Chronos wants true Oblivion. for everything to return to it's original oneness, to collect all the 'shadows'. Aka those made by those who stand inside the light, insiders defining outsiders through penumbra effect. WE cast the shadows that give the outsiders definition, without us they have none. and that's the Original Darkness's goal, to be one again(see the Chronos similarity in the desire?)
OK, that's an interesting take on it.
I don't find that particularly compelling because we already have other dualities that serve that purpose, though. Heaven and Hell, for one, Faerie and Fomor for another, Aesir and Jotun, and the existence of the Greek gods implies Titans.
I don't think the Old Ones of the Outsiders are going to turn out to be Titans or Jotun any more than they are Fallen. Nicodemus and his like putting so much effort into corrupting souls means that at some level they have to see souls as worth obtaining. Pretty much the only absolutely solid fact we have about the reality outside the Gates is that mordite is (a sort of) regular matter out there, and mordite is equally lethal to ordinary organic life as to soulless evil monsters like the Red Court.
To loop back to the actual thread title for the moment, there are evils that are playing on the other side of the chessboard trying to win things over from good, and there are other perpendicular struggles going on across the same chessboard between different forces, some of which occasionally make alliances with the more good/evil forces. (Think of a game of Hope Verney four-player chess, or, if you want to move beyond dualities, to Orwell chess.) And over and beyond that, we have entities that want to burn down the entire chessboard and dance in the ashes. I don't believe that when Bob in GP refers to the Old Ones being driven beyond the Outer Gates he's referring to some sort of event in the mythical past of humanity, because any large amount of mordite being around on Earth is incompatible with humanity (and we know the DV had an evolutionary-scale history rather than a young-Earth (or young-Yggdrasil) creation because of everyone's favourite tyrannosaurus); I believe he is talking about the Big Bang, and that the Outsiders are not our shadows, but the predecessors of anything resembling rational ordered reality.
But imo a lot of people have missed things already in the books out now.
I'm the last person who needs to be assured of that, sometimes it seems I spend half my posts pointing such things out....
Idk if you remember me as Wizard Nelson
I remember the former, and coolness, I'd not connected the usernames.
or Sibelis, but this is why I always liked you. Upon hearing a new and different theory instead of reflexively saying i'm wrong you ask me if I have sources you don't lol.
Oh, there are loads of things I didn't figure out on my own that seemed obvious once other people pointed them out (like for example the location of the Stone Table in SK and Harry's meeting with Malcolm in DB both echoing Demonreach) so I do try to be open to people figuring out stuff I have missed.
If perchance you'd ever like to talk about my theory, which is grand and unifying as any other I've read here, i'd love for a chance to talk with someone who might actually understand it.
I'd certainly like to; please do start a thread.
When they do they usually have specific purposes in mind behind it, in the DF it's Nemesis. I'd have to track down(or just use that excellent reference section while I can, duh) the precise scenes but everytime Murphy has mentioned it it's been directly related to a 'wonky' book where Nemesis is the likeliest puppeteer.
That seems to me barely one step up from saying that every time anyone claims things are getting bad, it must be Nemesis. One of the things that was set up about Harry very early on is that he is familiar with genre fantasy and SF, that poem is enough of a go-to quote that I am not at all sold on it correlating with Nemesis.
Course... in some ways i'm applying Nemesis as simply a destabilizing force, or should I say THE destabilizing force.(which the fomor court of water is precisely the Norse end state of the Fire and Ice balance btw, just part of the process of Force Majore Decay)
That's the scale of syncretism I think Jim is largely aiming to avoid, btw; I see nothing to see he'd wish to offend contemporary believers in the Norse deities either. The Fomor are Celtic and he has put them in opposition to a version of Faerie that are more in a post-Celtic tradition than anything else; DV Odin is quite distinct from Faerie, and I suspect the Jotun to be equally distinct from the Fomor as and when we do see them. (Which isn't to say they might not find goals in common. Just like Mab and Odin do, or like that centaur in SK, who given the established reality of Classical mythos in the DV, now reads to me as a Classical expatriate living in Summer.)
Yes, but I will now use it as my own evidence lol. Mab has shown the winter court to time and again be interested in Nfected sources.
How many times? The athame and Maeve, and indeed, given post-CD knowledge that Summer and Winter are working together, Aurora. And it's not as if she went seeking out the athame.
If she hid the coin's where about's in his mind then she took it is the likelist answer,
I think so too.
giving rise to a very good reasoning behind Namshiel being the culprit or otherwise compromised.
Not giving anything to distinguish that from Namshiel being her agent she wants to protect and conceal, IMO.
I'm not seeing Mab's reasoning for hiding suspicion of Namshiel from Harry if Namshiel is an enemy, considering how much she uses him against her enemies;and if Namshiel is an enemy, that also leaves the favour Mab owes Andruiel in SG as an unexplained loose end. So without definitive evidence either way, I incline for the explanation that ties up more circumstantial evidence.
Recently(griff iirc) someone had a theory it's because his subconscious took control of his empty hand after the soulfire to secure the coin for Mab. It had a glove always, and was shown moving without his intention to snatch a coin at another point(need to make sur the wasn't HIS coin too, cause that would set a precedent on targeting him spc)
That's kind of neat; I still think that was resurgent Lash, though, and I remain to be convinced Bonnie is not Lash.
I find it likely when she took his Rod she made another deal with his subconscious mind coin, she does so when she attacks him again when he brings it up perhaps..
Works for me.
I have a feeling no matter who said it you'd lawyer up a perspective against their authenticity though lol.
Pfft. When new text smashes one of my favourite theories to splinters I abandon it without looking back. (Well, except for still being sad that Morgan and Simon Pietrovich were not a couple.)
Jim's world is steeped in it's mechanics. I try to see them properly, though holes exist where only clue's are given.
Yes, but the thing that is absolutely key to my methodology, that I seem to have the hardest time persuading other people of, is that the holes are as significant as the clues. The patterns in what people don't say, don't think, don't know, are as important as what they do.
Look at the first two-thirds or so of SK, where Elaine leads Harry around by the nose (until he gets to the Mothers' cabin) in order to get him to steal the Unravelling. Look at SmF where we can see Harry's mind shying away from thinking about his blasting rod, sometimes accompanied by headaches, in places where he would otherwise think of it, even though he has no idea himself that that is going on.
Ah... not bad, but I think it was mostly to get the 3 eye drug out there to start effecting mortal belief and weaken the veil more. As Storm Front is literally the storm front of events leading up to the storm in Dead Beat. It's reference to the stirring up of the ghosts and dark magic, the beginning of trying to pierce the veil as Mort mentions in both GP and DB iirc.
That could be it, I suppose. I had not thought of that and I like it.
Tell me, do you reckon the Unseelie Incursion of 1994 when wherever-it-was disappeared for a few hours tied in here? I suspect that is set-up for all of Chicago falling into the NN during the BAT or the immediate lead-up.
Funny you mention the scene outside of Sells house though, i'm fairly sure that's the first time Nemesis made it's presence known in the books.
It works for me without needing Nemesis at all, because so very many of the influences on Harry's life are trying to encourage him to give in to accepting dark power for his own selfish ends rather than reasonably doing good. SF has the moment outside the Sells house, FM has him nearly being corrupted by the hexenwulf belt, and in GP he gives in when he burns down Bianca's party and again when he kills Bianca. This pattern's been there since Justin.
I have this rather simply put theory that N get's purchase whenever magic is used to violate freewill, which most all the Fae infected were either directly or indirectly around strong active sources of mortal magic or wizards themselves.
That feels almost the opposite of how I read it, that it is causing evil by providing free will that should not be there.
In this case the reaction from N saved Harry because it was his free will being violated by the aura of dark magic. I have no real proof of this, it just aligns well with my theorem.
Fair enough. I tend to read that voice as the first example we have of the insight Maggie gave Harry, which Lea does a Dumbo's feather job on him with in BR (note that the other time he figures something out that is specifically referred to as insight, it is working out Lea must have bargained with his mother, in SK).
Why can't the whites be doing work into how the Reds spells work? Raith again, is actually very interested in magic apparently.
No reason why they can't. I think this again is slightly more moving parts than my notion here though.
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This discussion feels like it's reaching an impasse, so I am going to trim bits that feel deadlocked.
Numbers, not strength.
Have you an exact quote to hand? I am pretty sure she says combat strength.
And what would that have meant in practice? It means the red court can keep demanding things.
No it wouldn't. They get the peace treaty, status quo re-established, they no longer have the right to demand anything. Harry parsing this as being about not giving in to bullies is a self-serving rationale for not accepting the political necessity of give and take to maintain peace and save lives.
They would simply add more demands until the council had to refuse.
When?
The Council say "yes, we got your peace offer, we accept the terms." The Reds change the terms. They are now outside the protection of the Accords. They get exterminated in a few days.
The thing that seems worth keeping front and centre here is that Mab is an entity, from a mythical tradition, where no amount of murder or slaughter can be anywhere near so big a crime as breaking your word.
The red court has allies to and you dismiss them all the time.
Yes I do. For two reasons.
One, that the Red Court are a martial organisation. We know they can't summon Outsiders, because only humans can. We know they are lousy at magic generally, because Arianna, one of their oldest and strongest, is about as capable and flexible in her magical duel as a two-bit hobby sorcerer like Kravos. Nobody has ever said the Red Court's strength is assessed by their ability to bring in allies. Eb and WoJ say the White Coucnil's is. Because, I would say, fighting smart rather than just hard is what makes wizards wizards.
And secondly, because the Red Court's allies do not actually help them. They set up Bianca, dragging the Reds into a war they cannot win. They summon Outsiders to supposedly help the Reds fight the White Council at the end of DB (and possibly also lie to them about imminent post-Darkhallow help being on its way) which leads directly to the Red Court getting near-obliterated by Summer in PG. And when the Reds are on the ropes in Changes, their supposed allies pursue their own interests elsewhere and leave the Red Court to die.
It is about allies you can reliably count on. The Tengu are, Winter is not.
If you are willing to disregard all the evidence I have pointed out as to how Mab is absolutely reliable as an enforcer of the Accords, yes.
The attack was too well coordinated, they did not even wait to see how it would end. That is most likely because the attack was agreed with the red court before. They attacked the white council, the victor of Chichen Itza.
You think everybody who would like to see the White Council taken down has to be a deliberate ally of the Red Court? That feels to me like imposing a very dubious duality on a complex supernatural setting with multiple power groups each with their own agenda.
If they were just profiting from the chaos they would have acted later both because they wouldn't be that sure about when and who to attack and because it would be safer to attack the loser.
You have some reason for thinking the Fomor have no decent intelligence capacities, here ?
They would be all over latin america to profit from the fall of the red court and not fighting a winner. Unless they of course thought the red court, their allies, had a safe plan for winning the war end they would loose the opportunity to profit from the white councils defeat if they did not join.
So you are disregarding the post-Changes evidence that expanding into the space made by the fall of the Red Court is exactly what the Fomor are doing ?
Besides this is a magical world based on ancient traditions and believes. Some things have to be done a certain way. It is their nature.
If you want to apply that to the Red Court's "sacrifice party" (despite that it is actually about working a major piece of ritual magic to win a war and all the sacrifices we see are to that end) why are you reluctant to apply it to the Accords as we see them enforced?
Probably a slow process but that changes nothing. Expansion in an occupied world is not possible without violence.
You are for some reason discarding the possibility of conversions, here? Offering people the chance to become a vampire and live forever? Despite that we are told at the end of Changes that when the Red Court was annihilated, that took out people all through governments and other power structures around their part of the world?
She is not there to protect anyone except reality in general. She protects her accords but see what happened in white night for example. The aggrieved party must take action otherwise there is no case and Mab offers only a framework for resolving conflicts.
They are for protecting signatories. I don't know why you keep moving away from me making this point.
The Whites hunting the low-power magicians in WN is not an Accords violation, because the low-power magicians are not affiliated with the White Council. Harry stepping in to protect them is something he does of his own volition, not because the Council ordered him to.
Likewise, Susan or any of the other victims in GP are not Accords violations. Because regular humans are not protected under the Accords. mab does not have to lift a finger in their defence.
If you kill the whole red court there is no one to take action, that works even if the red court had not broken the accords.
I do not believe this in the slightest. Exterminate the Reds without cause, and you're as much at fault as Nicodemus is for attacking Ivy without cause.
It is much like Njal's saga. A very informative book about a norse feud in the tenth century.
And faerie are not Norse. We see the Norse mythos in the DV as a separate thing. Odin, in his Kringle guise, has to some extent signed up to play by Faerie rules.
Besides the weregeld for simon and his crew would be much higher than that for Bianca.
Bianca is promoted to a Margravine; one step below a Duke, two below the Red King. Give that the red Court definitely has barons and knights, and that set of titles implies the existence of earls and counts and so on, she is nearer the top than the bottom of their ladder. The White Council has the Merlin, the Senior Council, and everyone else. Someone in the middle rank is the appropriate exchange.
Who also knows the red court and their nature better than we do. Actually ask the merlin in Changes, he would have told us the shark's nature would not change.
Yep. The non-suicidal nature which led them to sign the Accords and spent centuries abiding by them and not getting into wars they can't win. The nature that could have been restored by Harry refusing to be baited into starting a war, reporting to Eb, having Eb draw together the Grey Council and like-minded souls like Luccio earlier, sit down and negotiate with Ortega, and get rid of the Red Court's so-called "allies" in order to restore the status quo that's been shown to work for centuries, and save at least the forty thousand lives the nerve-gas bomb killed in the Congo at the end of DB. (Like preventing 9/11 ten times over.)
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What would Bianca's equal in the WC be? Luccio or Morgan?
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What would Bianca's equal in the WC be? Luccio or Morgan?
It is about comparable position and Harry would do I suppose but Simon and ritinue were overkill, that strike was meant to seriously harm the white councils combat strength not just to get equal befor negotiating.
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This discussion feels like it's reaching an impasse, so I am going to trim bits that feel deadlocked.
Have you an exact quote to hand? I am pretty sure she says combat strength.
We know the average age of thee wardens went down and we know Ramirez was speculating about lowering recruiting standards even more. I remember the quote but I forgot the book so I can not easily find it.
No it wouldn't. They get the peace treaty, status quo re-established, they no longer have the right to demand anything. Harry parsing this as being about not giving in to bullies is a self-serving rationale for not accepting the political necessity of give and take to maintain peace and save lives.
When?
The Council say "yes, we got your peace offer, we accept the terms." The Reds change the terms. They are now outside the protection of the Accords. They get exterminated in a few days.
Really? That is too far removed from the reality in the dresdenverse. Nobody would expect that. If that were the case there would be no war in the supernatural world at all.
The thing that seems worth keeping front and centre here is that Mab is an entity, from a mythical tradition, where no amount of murder or slaughter can be anywhere near so big a crime as breaking your word.
She is not breaking her word. It is just that the accord do not enforce that much. Mab does not want to be dragged down in policing all conflicts in the supernatural world.
Yes I do. For two reasons.
One, that the Red Court are a martial organisation. We know they can't summon Outsiders, because only humans can. We know they are lousy at magic generally, because Arianna, one of their oldest and strongest, is about as capable and flexible in her magical duel as a two-bit hobby sorcerer like Kravos. Nobody has ever said the Red Court's strength is assessed by their ability to bring in allies. Eb and WoJ say the White Coucnil's is. Because, I would say, fighting smart rather than just hard is what makes wizards wizards.
And secondly, because the Red Court's allies do not actually help them. They set up Bianca, dragging the Reds into a war they cannot win. They summon Outsiders to supposedly help the Reds fight the White Council at the end of DB (and possibly also lie to them about imminent post-Darkhallow help being on its way) which leads directly to the Red Court getting near-obliterated by Summer in PG. And when the Reds are on the ropes in Changes, their supposed allies pursue their own interests elsewhere and leave the Red Court to die.
The red court did think it had enough strength assembled at Chichen Itza to beat off any assault. The probably wanted Harry to try because it would fail. There is no reason to think Cowl did not try for the darkhallow.
With their allies they nearly defeated the white council, I would not discard them.
If you are willing to disregard all the evidence I have pointed out as to how Mab is absolutely reliable as an enforcer of the Accords, yes.
Because nobody in the books takes your position, not even something that looks like it and I do not think Mab would bind herself to police the supernatural world to that extend. She does not even police Winter to that extend.
The accords are much less than you seem to think.
You think everybody who would like to see the White Council taken down has to be a deliberate ally of the Red Court? That feels to me like imposing a very dubious duality on a complex supernatural setting with multiple power groups each with their own agenda.
The Fomor has been helping the red court before and are a known foe of the fairy courts. Their agendas were compatible. The coordination of their last attack suggests they just went in even more.
You have some reason for thinking the Fomor have no decent intelligence capacities, here ?
Would they not retink their strategy of attacking the white council after the complete destruction of the red court by the white council? But if they already had attacked it would be too late.
Mark that there had been no declaration of war, just a surprise attack apparently without provocation. It seems to be OK under the accords. We have to see how the peace nogotiations will end.
So you are disregarding the post-Changes evidence that expanding into the space made by the fall of the Red Court is exactly what the Fomor are doing ?
That was after the fact. Of course they try to grab whatever they can get but they have also chosen their enemies.
If you want to apply that to the Red Court's "sacrifice party" (despite that it is actually about working a major piece of ritual magic to win a war and all the sacrifices we see are to that end) why are you reluctant to apply it to the Accords as we see them enforced?
Because the way you seem to think the accords work is not how they seem to work and is also not what I expect from a set of rules based on weregeld, duelling and such things. Not from old style beings. This is not how things used to work and the supernatural world usually is more than several centuries behind in many respects.
Just go a millenium back in mentality and then you get a better idea about how the Sidhe and oother supernaturals work. They are not that modern.
You are for some reason discarding the possibility of conversions, here? Offering people the chance to become a vampire and live forever? Despite that we are told at the end of Changes that when the Red Court was annihilated, that took out people all through governments and other power structures around their part of the world?
That would work if they were expanding in a purely mortal world but that does not work with other supernatural groups.
They are for protecting signatories. I don't know why you keep moving away from me making this point.
Because nothing in the settings supports that. Mark that when Marcone was abducted Gard needed Harry to call upon the accords. If Harry had not taken action nothing would have happened.
The Whites hunting the low-power magicians in WN is not an Accords violation, because the low-power magicians are not affiliated with the White Council. Harry stepping in to protect them is something he does of his own volition, not because the Council ordered him to.
Likewise, Susan or any of the other victims in GP are not Accords violations. Because regular humans are not protected under the Accords. mab does not have to lift a finger in their defence.
I do not believe this in the slightest. Exterminate the Reds without cause, and you're as much at fault as Nicodemus is for attacking Ivy without cause.
But if there was nobody to call upon the accords or demand retribution nothing would happen. Ask Gard.
And faerie are not Norse. We see the Norse mythos in the DV as a separate thing. Odin, in his Kringle guise, has to some extent signed up to play by Faerie rules.
This was the culture and law in much of europe with slight variations. The irish would not have acted much different. Njal is even a celtic name, it is a norse version of Neil.
Bianca is promoted to a Margravine; one step below a Duke, two below the Red King. Give that the red Court definitely has barons and knights, and that set of titles implies the existence of earls and counts and so on, she is nearer the top than the bottom of their ladder. The White Council has the Merlin, the Senior Council, and everyone else. Someone in the middle rank is the appropriate exchange.
Formal ranks are not everything and the white council is very conscious about social position. It is about a comparable place in the other group and Simon + ritinue is way above Bianca.
Yep. The non-suicidal nature which led them to sign the Accords and spent centuries abiding by them and not getting into wars they can't win. The nature that could have been restored by Harry refusing to be baited into starting a war, reporting to Eb, having Eb draw together the Grey Council and like-minded souls like Luccio earlier, sit down and negotiate with Ortega, and get rid of the Red Court's so-called "allies" in order to restore the status quo that's been shown to work for centuries, and save at least the forty thousand lives the nerve-gas bomb killed in the Congo at the end of DB. (Like preventing 9/11 ten times over.)
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Also the Fomor are betraying everything far too easy for Mab to be the violent and extremely effective defender of the accords members. It is in their nature to betray and Lea expected betrayal in some sort in the short story but they are aware how things work and few supernaturals will knowingly follow their nature blindly if it leads to immediate dead.
It does not.
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Formor are a strange group. They have strong holds on various US and European cities. Their main actions have been enslavement and betrayal. They have received a smackdown from Marcone, Murphy, and Molly. Several different supernatural groups are directly opposed to them. I don't think Harry has had a direct, in person dealing with them. Their long term goal seems to be revenge. They are like supernatural sea cockroaches.
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Also, they're apparently weak enough to be kept down by the Red Court despite being strong enough to fight literally every Accord Member at once.
Somehow.
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Yeah, that is another point of weirdness.
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I'm guessing, that the reasoning will be 300 - a small power can stop a large power passing through a bottleneck, but once the large power comes through, because the guard dogs are gone, it's a nuisance.
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Yeah, that is another point of weirdness.
To which the answer is they were not kept down by the red court in particular. They were invited by the red court to join tha war during changes as allies of the red court.
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And, the fomor secretly encouraged the RCV downfall.
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Arianna Ortega was around a lot longer than Bianca, she turned her husband back in the conquistador days and he turned Bianca some time later. I see no reason to think Arianna is suddenly having a change in character to step up to replace Bianca, rather than Harry having got to a point of dealing with someone senior who was like that all along.
(My personal favourite notion for what's up with Bianca is that the Red Court deliberately picked their least stable lower-level type and rushed her promotion, before sending her to Chicago and again once she was there. In order a) that she will sooner or later get into the fights they want got into with Harry, and b) that the higher a rank she is in, the bigger a bite they can legitimately take out of the Council as wergild when she dies.)
That depends, do you consider Ramps true immortals incapable of farther change or are they still technically 'mortal' to you? Because of they can't change, then a change that goes from lower level to higher looks a lot more suspect
That would be pleasingly nasty, but I am pretty sure JB is not as nasty a person as I am. If he was, Mirror Mirror would introduce Harry to a version of himself who'd done everything better, made different choices and engaged in different moral growth, saving thousands of lives, and Harry would forever after have to live with the knowledge of what a screw-up he was by comparison.
LMAO dude... think about MM from MM Harry's perspective, yes he is that vindictive! It's just not the Harry we've been following that will have that, though if MM Harry is actually original timeline Harry then... Pleasingly Nasty indeed lol.
I remain entirely unconvinced Nemesis is a personification with any wants of its own, beyond "corrode Faerie constraints so that the Faerie in question can make choices that suit their own wants but are outside the bounds of their nature". (Maeve being a cruel type wants to get rid of competition, Aurora being an idealist wanting to end the conflict between Summer and Winter forever, Cat Sith being a proud ancient who would like nothing more than to decorate with the innards of the disrespectful wizard.)
Being that Nemesis specifically made deals with all but Cat Sith, i'd like to point out a correlation here to Nemesis as a entity. (especially as you mentioned before N basically giving free will where none should be) Morgana Le Fay, the original source in the books of the Atheme and first known Nfection vector, was in lore known as a Sea Sprite. In what i'd consider germaine connections to the mythos as given by Mab to Disney, we have Ursula the sea Hag(sister to Trident or whatever, Poseidon) known for collecting Souls and making bad deals, for having usurped the throne from her brother too.
Now we can connect all this in verse to 1) the Fomor, and the connection that the overthrowing of kingdoms was of Atlantis itself. Possibly making her the 'Merlins Sister' archetype. (which might be more germaine for the source of Merlin then we think besides Atlantis. little known Dresden fact, he likes horses, creatures from the sea gods, clue for his heritage?) 2) IF she has souls or takes souls in deals, then she has Soul to spare to give to Fairie creatures whom are supposed to have none. Which would directly account for the newly proportional freedoms. She's giving them bits of soul/choice thereby altering their alloy. 3)this implies a tiered Nemesis whose in levels just as the fae courts are, Morgana being the 'Lady or Queen' to Nemesis propers 'Mother" status.(which might be less accurate as Mavra and others are part of it too I think, though Mavra might in truth be the original Morgana le Fay) Tier's could go Lachesis, the missing Fate between the two Nemesis, the 'ruler' and Morgana the Lady to come. This of course would start to have to do with the hidden meanings behind the labeling of the court's 6 queens. Those who were directly related to the Norse version of the fates and also being a metaphor for the fact their time has already gone for instance.
So personification is a thing for N, also... she's totally been trying to create than N universe mask too. My bottomline guide for a mirror is someone whose a bit crazy, a young woman, capable of great degrees of magic and who, like Lachesis the Chooser of Fate uses it to control and decide the fate of others
1)this why they tried to corrupt the Archive 2) what Titania and Mab would appear to be together, Kali. the destroyer and crazy magic lady. 3) it's why since her birth Mouse guards Maggie.(well, since her upheaval anyway, before it was there for Harry) 4) could be why Faith is going to come back as Femme Fatal
5) also part of what Molly would have been like without the events of PG saving her.
CD does seem to me to lock down that the Courts are meant to work together towards an overall goal despite the opposition between them along the way, which was pleasing confirmation of what I have been arguing... since DB was when I came on the forums, but I have believed it since reading SK.
Ah go on, write it up nicely, then we can ask to have it put in the Reference Collection.
THAT'S the part I can't do lol. Organization.
I've done that a few times, though I fear most of them are long over the event horizon of post deletion (and I do wish I had asked to have my Harry Dresden: the Case Against thread put in the reference collection); give me a nice long afternoon with nothing else on my plate and I may do it again.
This and what you were saying earlier sounds like your master plan is taking Faith/Hope/Love and their opposites as defining polarities in the shape of the DV, yes ?
I am inclined against, because that would make Christianity more defining in the DV than I think Jim intends to; the text so far feels like he is making really remarkable efforts to leave it open either way whether the Christian moral perspective and cosmology is more fundamental to the DV than any other (and I can sympathise with that at a meta-level, on not wanting to annoy either Christian or non-Christian readers.) The Valkyries and the einherjar and the portrayal of Odin are entirely compatible with their cosmology and morality being as fundamental if not more so.
Those 3 primary powers actually originate In Buddhism and Taoism. Everyone gets that wrong because they know the Christian perspectives better themselves, ergo that's what they see come out. Those Nails are actually preChrist imo. They are the Fateful Nails of Nortia, the Etruscan Name for the Greek Nemesis. They are the weapons of the first 3 horsemen, the last death uses the other three. Under this, the current 'horsemen' are the 3 KotC and Uriel, death, who literally utilizes the other three to insure the order of the current decider of the order of fate TWG and his pro freedom. So Christianity is big in it right now for a reason... but it's not as big as you think.(most tend to get insulted when I imply these things that they know as Christian might not be exclusively so in a fictional work)
OK, that's an interesting take on it.
I don't find that particularly compelling because we already have other dualities that serve that purpose, though. Heaven and Hell, for one, Faerie and Fomor for another, Aesir and Jotun, and the existence of the Greek gods implies Titans.
This is were you might benefit from knowing a little Taoism. You know the yin-yang symbol, you probably don't know using the I Ching and Bagua symbol those two poles are farther broken down by them and 'alloyed' over everything in existence? been combining that with the Maori(iirc) mythos about the dividing darkness that seeks to become one again(much as I ad libbed before). Technically. MS an MW are the original division from Wuji, no poles, no definition, one form, one energy into yin and yang, which is broken down on so many different levels until it forms the 8 manifestations down into the 5 elements... which ARE actually the same metaphorical/metaphysical ones used in the Pentagram Harry wears. it even has the circle and star to represent the creation and destruction cycles between the 5.
I don't think the Old Ones of the Outsiders are going to turn out to be Titans or Jotun any more than they are Fallen.
Not anymore no. Nicodemus and his like putting so much effort into corrupting souls means that at some level they have to see souls as worth obtaining. Pretty much the only absolutely solid fact we have about the reality outside the Gates is that mordite is (a sort of) regular matter out there, and mordite is equally lethal to ordinary organic life as to soulless evil monsters like the Red Court.
To loop back to the actual thread title for the moment, there are evils that are playing on the other side of the chessboard trying to win things over from good, and there are other perpendicular struggles going on across the same chessboard between different forces, some of which occasionally make alliances with the more good/evil forces. (Think of a game of Hope Verney four-player chess, or, if you want to move beyond dualities, to Orwell chess.) And over and beyond that, we have entities that want to burn down the entire chessboard and dance in the ashes. I don't believe that when Bob in GP refers to the Old Ones being driven beyond the Outer Gates he's referring to some sort of event in the mythical past of humanity,
Consider they weren't considered Outsiders then for a reason. I need to get back to this later cause whew, a lot to type up and respond to because any large amount of mordite being around on Earth is incompatible with humanity (and we know the DV had an evolutionary-scale history rather than a young-Earth (or young-Yggdrasil) creation because of everyone's favourite tyrannosaurus); I believe he is talking about the Big Bang, and that the Outsiders are not our shadows, but the predecessors of anything resembling rational ordered reality.
I'm the last person who needs to be assured of that, sometimes it seems I spend half my posts pointing such things out....
I remember the former, and coolness, I'd not connected the usernames.
Oh, there are loads of things I didn't figure out on my own that seemed obvious once other people pointed them out (like for example the location of the Stone Table in SK and Harry's meeting with Malcolm in DB both echoing Demonreach) so I do try to be open to people figuring out stuff I have missed.
I'd certainly like to; please do start a thread.
That seems to me barely one step up from saying that every time anyone claims things are getting bad, it must be Nemesis. One of the things that was set up about Harry very early on is that he is familiar with genre fantasy and SF, that poem is enough of a go-to quote that I am not at all sold on it correlating with Nemesis.
That's the scale of syncretism I think Jim is largely aiming to avoid, btw; I see nothing to see he'd wish to offend contemporary believers in the Norse deities either. The Fomor are Celtic and he has put them in opposition to a version of Faerie that are more in a post-Celtic tradition than anything else; DV Odin is quite distinct from Faerie, and I suspect the Jotun to be equally distinct from the Fomor as and when we do see them. (Which isn't to say they might not find goals in common. Just like Mab and Odin do, or like that centaur in SK, who given the established reality of Classical mythos in the DV, now reads to me as a Classical expatriate living in Summer.)
How many times? The athame and Maeve, and indeed, given post-CD knowledge that Summer and Winter are working together, Aurora. And it's not as if she went seeking out the athame.
I think so too.
Not giving anything to distinguish that from Namshiel being her agent she wants to protect and conceal, IMO.
I'm not seeing Mab's reasoning for hiding suspicion of Namshiel from Harry if Namshiel is an enemy, considering how much she uses him against her enemies;and if Namshiel is an enemy, that also leaves the favour Mab owes Andruiel in SG as an unexplained loose end. So without definitive evidence either way, I incline for the explanation that ties up more circumstantial evidence.
That's kind of neat; I still think that was resurgent Lash, though, and I remain to be convinced Bonnie is not Lash.
Works for me.
Pfft. When new text smashes one of my favourite theories to splinters I abandon it without looking back. (Well, except for still being sad that Morgan and Simon Pietrovich were not a couple.)
Yes, but the thing that is absolutely key to my methodology, that I seem to have the hardest time persuading other people of, is that the holes are as significant as the clues. The patterns in what people don't say, don't think, don't know, are as important as what they do.
Look at the first two-thirds or so of SK, where Elaine leads Harry around by the nose (until he gets to the Mothers' cabin) in order to get him to steal the Unravelling. Look at SmF where we can see Harry's mind shying away from thinking about his blasting rod, sometimes accompanied by headaches, in places where he would otherwise think of it, even though he has no idea himself that that is going on.
That could be it, I suppose. I had not thought of that and I like it.
Tell me, do you reckon the Unseelie Incursion of 1994 when wherever-it-was disappeared for a few hours tied in here? I suspect that is set-up for all of Chicago falling into the NN during the BAT or the immediate lead-up.
It works for me without needing Nemesis at all, because so very many of the influences on Harry's life are trying to encourage him to give in to accepting dark power for his own selfish ends rather than reasonably doing good. SF has the moment outside the Sells house, FM has him nearly being corrupted by the hexenwulf belt, and in GP he gives in when he burns down Bianca's party and again when he kills Bianca. This pattern's been there since Justin.
That feels almost the opposite of how I read it, that it is causing evil by providing free will that should not be there.
Fair enough. I tend to read that voice as the first example we have of the insight Maggie gave Harry, which Lea does a Dumbo's feather job on him with in BR (note that the other time he figures something out that is specifically referred to as insight, it is working out Lea must have bargained with his mother, in SK).
No reason why they can't. I think this again is slightly more moving parts than my notion here though.
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So I don't run out of space...
I don't believe that when Bob in GP refers to the Old Ones being driven beyond the Outer Gates he's referring to some sort of event in the mythical past of humanity
Not sure how to explain this one. Depends on how Narrow your Outsiders are... One part of it that's coming into play for the 'used to exist here'. Fearbringer is described as 'deeper' than Mab for a reasoning. Outsiders that we're having trouble with are by and large the spirits of Gods(which might be oxymoronic, as Gods seem to be spiritual first anyway) who died but who don't want to go away. The ones who are part of reality, as the seasons or remember by human history seem to be more inside than out. But there are those killed intentionally whose masks and power were fed into the stone table that have not faded because they are not forgotten by humanity, but who have only a consciousness, no power of their own, and the memetics of them are tied up into the courts as well. The Walkers and Nemesis are on this tier of outsider.
Consider outsiders coming inside under new forms and finding true purpose. Look at Mab's throne room in CD, it's a giants castle. She is the heir to the ice giants. the beings themselves may have retreated beyond reality, but it's because someone else had gathered up the identity and power for herself(which matches the edda's i'm told and the ice queen basically stomping Laffey's nutz for power). Satan I think did this, and the current outsiders have outsider via lovecraftian appearance because that's the current belief for 'outside' in the human mind. Previously Hell was outside reality, and certainly Jotunheim was considered beyond the realms in Nordic myth.
because any large amount of mordite being around on Earth is incompatible with humanity (and we know the DV had an evolutionary-scale history rather than a young-Earth (or young-Yggdrasil) creation because of everyone's favourite tyrannosaurus); I believe he is talking about the Big Bang, and that the Outsiders are not our shadows, but the predecessors of anything resembling rational ordered reality.
Some are, but what's NOT part of reality tends to be more complex and simpler than that perhaps. Specifically we have a woj the Eldest(including Lea) are actually a parts of the human psyche. The Shadow is a very large part connected to the subconscious which I think Nemesis represents perfectly. It's why MM Harry is Harry's Id, you could say Mab is actually Titania's Id, both brought in reality so that shadow doesn't exist/can't be occupied. MW too. and she's a prime suspect for being Outsider relatable. The balance is intentional. Also my point about the Balance between TWC's ideals and Lucifers' in the DF, they are intentionally opposite.
I'm the last person who needs to be assured of that, sometimes it seems I spend half my posts pointing such things out....
Me too lol. If we have the same data, will we come to the same conclusions lol?
I remember the former, and coolness, I'd not connected the usernames.
Oh, there are loads of things I didn't figure out on my own that seemed obvious once other people pointed them out (like for example the location of the Stone Table in SK and Harry's meeting with Malcolm in DB both echoing Demonreach) so I do try to be open to people figuring out stuff I have missed.
Oh yea, me too. Here's one since you brought it up, When Harry goes to the cottage and travels to the Outer Gates, they actually stand on the opening of the Lighthouse/DR to get there. Firmly planting the idea the sleepers are projecting themselves through dreaming to the outer gates to try and get back in. and with your example and the translation of Sidhe as people of the mounds it's possible all three are firmly tied together. Though how that translates is debatable, I've not had any epiphany to align it proper.
I'd certainly like to; please do start a thread.
That seems to me barely one step up from saying that every time anyone claims things are getting bad, it must be Nemesis. One of the things that was set up about Harry very early on is that he is familiar with genre fantasy and SF, that poem is enough of a go-to quote that I am not at all sold on it correlating with Nemesis.
It describes the inversion of time and the way the gyre will wobble do to natural decay.
That's the scale of syncretism I think Jim is largely aiming to avoid, btw; I see nothing to see he'd wish to offend contemporary believers in the Norse deities either. The Fomor are Celtic and he has put them in opposition to a version of Faerie that are more in a post-Celtic tradition than anything else; DV Odin is quite distinct from Faerie, and I suspect the Jotun to be equally distinct from the Fomor as and when we do see them. (Which isn't to say they might not find goals in common. Just like Mab and Odin do, or like that centaur in SK, who given the established reality of Classical mythos in the DV, now reads to me as a Classical expatriate living in Summer.)
Not sure what to say to that, think you have it a bit different than I do here. Jotun are not Fomor, Jotun are what became winter imo. consider if the last apocalypse simply set up the next one for this, and we're mushing the two together.
How many times? The athame and Maeve, and indeed, given post-CD knowledge that Summer and Winter are working together, Aurora. And it's not as if she went seeking out the athame.
I count Molly to, but that's just me lol. She was Nfected from breaking the laws and the fetch ate the Nfection. Notice after he eats her Scarecrow says he's served the queen of air and darkness since before human history? He is referring to the original. He's fearbringer using the minds eye as the mirror/beacon to find it's way in. That was the goal of the fetches, to fetch and eat her Nfection. which MW I think was allowed to release because... Mab had violated rules containing the Knight whose job killing Nfectee's is. One could say as the Falcon it's the Ladies job to find them.
I think so too.
Not giving anything to distinguish that from Namshiel being her agent she wants to protect and conceal, IMO.
I'm not seeing Mab's reasoning for hiding suspicion of Namshiel from Harry if Namshiel is an enemy, considering how much she uses him against her enemies;and if Namshiel is an enemy, that also leaves the favour Mab owes Andruiel in SG as an unexplained loose end. So without definitive evidence either way, I incline for the explanation that ties up more circumstantial evidence.
You lost me here.
That's kind of neat; I still think that was resurgent Lash, though, and I remain to be convinced Bonnie is not Lash.
Works for me.
Pfft. When new text smashes one of my favourite theories to splinters I abandon it without looking back. (Well, except for still being sad that Morgan and Simon Pietrovich were not a couple.)
No Comment, no comment...
Yes, but the thing that is absolutely key to my methodology, that I seem to have the hardest time persuading other people of, is that the holes are as significant as the clues. The patterns in what people don't say, don't think, don't know, are as important as what they do.
Look at the first two-thirds or so of SK, where Elaine leads Harry around by the nose (until he gets to the Mothers' cabin) in order to get him to steal the Unravelling. Look at SmF where we can see Harry's mind shying away from thinking about his blasting rod, sometimes accompanied by headaches, in places where he would otherwise think of it, even though he has no idea himself that that is going on.
My thing is information dumps on magical reasonings that actually describe something not mentioned. Like beacons in PG and wizards magic being able to summon Outsiders by being crazy enough in woj being why Warlocks are suspect. they create the mirror of their consciousness/beacon inside themselves through their own insanity, and it makes them more and more prone into being that thing as they use the magic. it's a slow possession/replacement.
That could be it, I suppose. I had not thought of that and I like it.
Tell me, do you reckon the Unseelie Incursion of 1994 when wherever-it-was disappeared for a few hours tied in here? I suspect that is set-up for all of Chicago falling into the NN during the BAT or the immediate lead-up.
I think it's going to be a clue for PT actually, I think Mab is going to close a circle around Chicago for the talks, effectively making it part of the NN and under her power directly.
It works for me without needing Nemesis at all, because so very many of the influences on Harry's life are trying to encourage him to give in to accepting dark power for his own selfish ends rather than reasonably doing good. SF has the moment outside the Sells house, FM has him nearly being corrupted by the hexenwulf belt, and in GP he gives in when he burns down Bianca's party and again when he kills Bianca. This pattern's been there since Justin.
Ah, in FM I finger the loups aura for making Harry almost give up on the way out of the Precinct, and the 'old' fireman as uriel providing a balance. The loup, being both mortal and spirit simultaneously gave his aura a human effect with a demigod oomph, it effected Harry directly.
That feels almost the opposite of how I read it, that it is causing evil by providing free will that should not be there.
See my Ursula comment.
Fair enough. I tend to read that voice as the first example we have of the insight Maggie gave Harry, which Lea does a Dumbo's feather job on him with in BR (note that the other time he figures something out that is specifically referred to as insight, it is working out Lea must have bargained with his mother, in SK).
No reason why they can't. I think this again is slightly more moving parts than my notion here though.
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Jonas, I am going to save this and read it later. Too much info for my poor brain to handle. Is that okay?
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And, the fomor secretly encouraged the RCV downfall.
I think I'd sum up my argument there as, secretly from the Red Court maybe, but secret from the readers not even slightly.
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That depends, do you consider Ramps true immortals incapable of farther change or are they still technically 'mortal' to you? Because of they can't change, then a change that goes from lower level to higher looks a lot more suspect
Maybe I am not clear here, then. I do not think there is a change going from Bianca to Arianna, because I think Arianna has been like that characterwise all along, it's just that Harry does not know anything about her until a few years after Bianca dies.
LMAO dude... think about MM from MM Harry's perspective, yes he is that vindictive!
Nah, our Harry has screwed up quite spectacularly enough not to be an annoyingly too-good example to anyone.
Being that Nemesis specifically made deals with all but Cat Sith,
Remind me where that is stated ?
Morgana Le Fay, the original source in the books of the Atheme and first known Nfection vector, was in lore known as a Sea Sprite.
Which lore are you quoting there? I've seen her done as everything from human to half-devil, and most later stories conflate Morgana with Morgause.
In what i'd consider germaine connections to the mythos as given by Mab to Disney, we have Ursula the sea Hag(sister to Trident or whatever, Poseidon) known for collecting Souls and making bad deals, for having usurped the throne from her brother too.
That feels a bit of a stretch to me.
This of course would start to have to do with the hidden meanings behind the labeling of the court's 6 queens. Those who were directly related to the Norse version of the fates and also being a metaphor for the fact their time has already gone for instance.
Gosh. That's quite a set of notions and I think I need to digest them for a bit before I can say anything meaningful to them.
Those 3 primary powers actually originate In Buddhism and Taoism. Everyone gets that wrong because they know the Christian perspectives better themselves, ergo that's what they see come out.
It would certainly be interesting to see more from those cosmologies on-screen in the DV.
Those Nails are actually preChrist imo. They are the Fateful Nails of Nortia, the Etruscan Name for the Greek Nemesis. They are the weapons of the first 3 horsemen, the last death uses the other three.
Cool. And that would fit in with my ongoing expectation that the fourth nail of he cross is due to show up eventually. (Mutter grumble Triclavian Heresy mutter; nobody as Catholic as Michael should be sold on there only being three nails.)
So Christianity is big in it right now for a reason... but it's not as big as you think.(most tend to get insulted when I imply these things that they know as Christian might not be exclusively so in a fictional work)
I am an ex-Catholic agnostic raised in Ireland, so it's pretty much impossible to offend me from that direction.
This is a lot to chew on; thank you.
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Outsiders that we're having trouble with are by and large the spirits of Gods(which might be oxymoronic, as Gods seem to be spiritual first anyway) who died but who don't want to go away. The ones who are part of reality, as the seasons or remember by human history seem to be more inside than out. But there are those killed intentionally whose masks and power were fed into the stone table that have not faded because they are not forgotten by humanity, but who have only a consciousness, no power of their own, and the memetics of them are tied up into the courts as well. The Walkers and Nemesis are on this tier of outsider.
That take on them is definitely qualitatively different; I am not immediately finding it appealing because it binds them more to mortal reality than feels right to me, but this needs further thought.
Satan I think did this, and the current outsiders have outsider via lovecraftian appearance because that's the current belief for 'outside' in the human mind. Previously Hell was outside reality, and certainly Jotunheim was considered beyond the realms in Nordic myth.
Same reaction applies here. I think Outsiders are fundamentally more alien than that, and thinking of such anthropocentric concepts as fear or despair as defining their purpose and nature rather than merely being tools they use feels wrong; mind you, I am still less than entirely happy with how emotionally human Jim has had Faerie turn out to be, it feels both jarring with earlier books and to lessen their impact, to me. The DV is more impressive if it is bigger and more complex than anything human nature can be the measure of.
Specifically we have a woj the Eldest(including Lea) are actually a parts of the human psyche.
I would love to be pointed at that.
Me too lol. If we have the same data, will we come to the same conclusions lol?
Some day Jim will set down a final word on the whole setting, and at that point there will be no conclusions left to draw.
Not sure what to say to that, think you have it a bit different than I do here. Jotun are not Fomor, Jotun are what became winter imo.
I do believe Gard mentions at some point that some Jotun have joined the Fomor.
I count Molly to, but that's just me lol. She was Nfected from breaking the laws and the fetch ate the Nfection. Notice after he eats her Scarecrow says he's served the queen of air and darkness since before human history? He is referring to the original. He's fearbringer using the minds eye as the mirror/beacon to find it's way in.
I read him as Outsider-infected and in the process of attacking Mab there, with Molly as an incidental bonus.
That was the goal of the fetches, to fetch and eat her Nfection. which MW I think was allowed to release because... Mab had violated rules containing the Knight whose job killing Nfectee's is.
That makes Winter sound a lot more internally conflicted than I have considered. I think Mab contains Slade with the intent of putting pressure on Harry to take up the job.
You lost me here.
If Namshiel is working for Mab, it explains why Mab would hide thinking about it from Harry, and it could explain the favour Mab owes Anduriel, which gets called in at the start of SG.
If Namshiel is an enemy, neither of these seem to be the case to me.
Therefore I find the former notion more appealingly Occamian.
I think it's going to be a clue for PT actually, I think Mab is going to close a circle around Chicago for the talks, effectively making it part of the NN and under her power directly.
That would certainly be neat.
Ah, in FM I finger the loups aura for making Harry almost give up on the way out of the Precinct, and the 'old' fireman as uriel providing a balance.
That does not ring true to me because sfaict Uriel only gets to act like that to counter the Fallen.
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That does not ring true to me because sfaict Uriel only gets to act like that to counter the Fallen.
He gets to act to counter violations of free will technically, from Angelic sources. I'd point out though, Michael with the Sword has at least three times been considered 'on duty' vs things not the Fallen. At least once vs Blamps pre series, a Dragon, and vs the Outsiders offscreen in PG. Consider how thing balance each other, does 30 coins to 3 swords seem right? Or does 3 walkers to three KotC?(technically 4, but i'd have to go about convincing you of two or three other things to prove that lol) The Denarians are the inverse balance to the KotC just as much as the Fairie courts. With Nemesis standing on the sidelines waiting for an imbalance for one and the walkers for the other. It's ALL about trying to keep the balance inside of reality to keep it from reality vs unreality.
Since fear becomes Rage I consider the Loup the prison created for Fearbringer's spiritual attachment. So he was directly countering what I consider a known foe.
get to the rest soon.
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That take on them is definitely qualitatively different; I am not immediately finding it appealing because it binds them more to mortal reality than feels right to me, but this needs further thought.
Ah, that's why I have different tiers to them, like the Lovecraftian version too(especially when you start in on the extended lore)
Same reaction applies here. I think Outsiders are fundamentally more alien than that, and thinking of such anthropocentric concepts as fear or despair as defining their purpose and nature rather than merely being tools they use feels wrong;
Mmm, I think that's the whole point of DR and seeing different mindsets/visages of reality. DR made some of those things part of reality, such as fear or death(a negative thing if ever there was one) without giving the patron spirit of those things a way to act through more then Influence(which by and large makes all those things in the well part of what we are considering 'Nemesis' as a dark and possessive force) More perhaps these are just the aspects that aren't alien to them. Those few things in reality we still remember of nameless Gods of many horrid aspects waiting to find more room inside reality. mind you, I am still less than entirely happy with how emotionally human Jim has had Faerie turn out to be, it feels both jarring with earlier books and to lessen their impact, to me. The DV is more impressive if it is bigger and more complex than anything human nature can be the measure of.
I don't think that changing from the beginning of the series to now is a coincidence, but can you detail more of what you mean> your expectations?
I would love to be pointed at that.
If I find it... However, I wonder I can't convince you in a round about way. Lea is a Muse, specifically, like the greek muses, of which the 9 were said to represent aspects of the human psyche(i'd wonder how many Eldest mantles Faerie has., Mmm). This is directly germain when you consider, the Library of Alexandria was specifically known for housing the larges collection on the 9 muses, and OG Merlin is direclt referenced for being the one to save what could be from said Library. I find this... NOT a coincidence you know lol?
Some day Jim will set down a final word on the whole setting, and at that point there will be no conclusions left to draw.
That's what i'm worried about though, even if he completes the series a lot of stuff just might not come up directly that he's still layered into the story never the less.
I do believe Gard mentions at some point that some Jotun have joined the Fomor.
That's probable. I think they made reference to something of that, them being defeated gods.
I read him as Outsider-infected and in the process of attacking Mab there, with Molly as an incidental bonus.
Na, I see the change when Harry is approaching the tower, the door slamming shut that had been opened, to mean SC was at that time overtaken. Which iirc is exactly after molly screamed/was fed upon. The timeline works with the theory.
That makes Winter sound a lot more internally conflicted than I have considered. I think Mab contains Slade with the intent of putting pressure on Harry to take up the job.
Harry didn't even know he was alive for years though. It's less about internal conflict then the mothers doing what's needed to maintain the balance, even if tha's not always a good thing overall. Like with the unmaking it was necessary. Going back to what you said about Faerie emotions... Titania used logic to overcome desire to kill Dresden and Mab used 'romantic' notions to choose who killed Maeve... I think they're not holding together as well as they used to anymore. they're blending in traits.
If Namshiel is working for Mab, it explains why Mab would hide thinking about it from Harry, and it could explain the favour Mab owes Anduriel, which gets called in at the start of SG.
If Namshiel is an enemy, neither of these seem to be the case to me.
Therefore I find the former notion more appealingly Occamian.
I don't agree. Lol, I of course have no idea were you got those idea's to say your wrong. But I can't see the edge on your razor there.
That would certainly be neat.
That does not ring true to me because sfaict Uriel only gets to act like that to counter the Fallen.
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Assuming for a moment that Nemesis is some sort of behind-everything boogeyman rather than a Fae-specific infection (which I do not actually believe, because there is no need for it, it does not explain anything not already solidly explained), it's still a specific individual disrupting influence. So that's an argument for attacking Nemesis, not for attacking the Red Court. If anything, it's an argument for allying with the Red Court against Nemesis; they are visibly not benefiting from its actions either.
Yeah, but that was not an option. What would make sense in a grand, abstract big-view analysis doesn't matter, what mattered was the perceived situation at the time. Harry had no idea Nemesis existed as of Grave Peril, so he couldn't be expected to take it into account in his decisions. Nor would doing so have saved Susan.
Whether and how much the Council as a whole knows about Nemesis is a very, very good question.
The ability of wizards to mess with technology does go a fair ways to counter that, and Harry has been able to contain that to some extent when he has tried, so I have a reasonable amount of faith that more skilled and experienced wizards would be able to do better.
No, messing with technology is the problem. If they could do it selectively, if they only messed up technology when they wanted to, yeah, it would be all good and the balance of power would be retained. But they cannot do that.
In 1850, crossing the Atlantic was a huge big deal by conventional means. Either the RC or the WCouncil could use the Nevernever, but neither had any particular advantage there, or if one side did, it was probably the Council.
In 1950, crossing the Atlantic is no big deal...for the Red Court. A Red can just buy a ticket on a trans-Atlantic flight and be there in less than a day, without dealing with any of the 'overhead' of using the Nevernever. A Wizard can buy that ticket too...but it's not safe. At all.
In 1870, sending a fast message meant a telegraph message. Either the Council or the Court can do that equally well, since the Wizard doesn't have to interact with the tech. In 1970, sending a fast message means using the phone. The Court can do that as easily as you or me, but it's a huge headache for the Council. (We've seen that in-text, Harry mentions that the Council uses telephones like everyone else, but with a lot more service calls.)
Land-lines are bad enough, but by 2000 it's moving to wireless communication depending on microelectronics, which is way worse for the Council. In fact, it's totally impractical for the Council, but Ortega or the Red King can use an iPhone as well as anybody else.
Cars are problematic for Wizards. Computers are impractical, except via hired staff. It all adds up to an ever-greater vulnerability on the Council's part, one they were sort of aware of before the war, but not taking nearly seriously enough.
Which is proven by the events of Summer Knight. A key point of that whole business is that the Council is getting their collective asses handed to them by the Red Court, and their chances of fighting back depend very heavily on getting Mab to let them use the Ways of Winter to counteract the Court's transport and communications advantages. If Harry had failed in that, it probably would have meant the Court won the war.
Now, granted, Mab balances her scales. She knew they were twisting the Accords, and sooner or later she'd probably have handed the Red King his ass in some obscure, twisted revenge. But that wouldn't have done the White Council, or the human race, any good. The Council would still be wiped out and the Court (and other nasties too) still have been free to indulge themselves for a while.
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This made the White Council vulnerable, but the Senior Council and the rest of the older Wizards were not fully aware of how much that changed everything.
You buy into Harry's prejudices on this front, then ?
No, I observe the events of Grave Peril and Summer Knight, among other things, to observe that Harry's opinion on this subject is valid. I don't agree with Harry's attitude about the elders on the Council across the board, but he's right that they were dangerously complacent and out of touch.
It may not have been entirely their fault, Peabody was in play, and I wouldn't be surprised if others were at work as well. But the result is much the same.
We see what happens when the Red Court trespass on Winter in DB (they must have, to attack the Council in the Ways, because the Council only ave access to Ways in Winter); they get a through hammering in PG as a direct result of Faerie actions.
Yeah, but they were already winning even without crossing into Winter. That turned out to be an unforced error, granted.
We also see what happens in Changes when they make a false peace offer; they get exterminated.
Yes, by then the tide of war had turned. Even without Harry's turning the Court's trap against them, the odds of a Council victory were good by the time of Changes. But to get to that point they had had to survive several near-death experiences, and they achieved it as much by luck as good management.
We see, in SG, Mab acting to punish Nicodemus for his violation of truce with the Archive in SmF.
Which would have helped Ivy exactly how, if Harry and Co. had not been in time to save her?
The evidence does not come down in favour of Accords violations being trivial things to get away with. Therfore the Red Court absolutely need that casus belli.
Oh, no doubt! That's why they went to the trouble in the first place!
But at the same time, it's simply not that hard to create situations where the pretext will be made available. Harry was a handy way, for various reasons, but by no means the only way.
How does that save Susan?
It doesn't. Why is Susan's life worth more than the tens of thousands the war has taken, and why should anyone other than Harry find his choice there acceptable?
Because the huge majority of human beings, including most Wizards, would do the same thing in the same situation (at least in essence, the details might vary). Harry's reaction was the normal human reaction. You always bet on people prioritizing their own loved ones over strangers. Exceptions exist, but they're just that.
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Since when does the person who starts the attacks make the decision about war or peace ? It's the choice of how to respond that determines whether that is a war.
Since forever. Once the attack is made, the war has begun. The Red Court attacked the White Council via pretext, the arrangement of the pretext was in itself an attack on the Council. The Council could either defend themselves, or not, but war they had. Failure to respond might have caused the Court to delay things a very little while, until they could rig another pretext, but that's all.
In the meantime, the entire supernatural world would have seen a single clear lesson in the failure to respond: The Council feared the Court. So the number of allies for the Reds would have multiplied.
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Same reaction applies here. I think Outsiders are fundamentally more alien than that, and thinking of such anthropocentric concepts as fear or despair as defining their purpose and nature rather than merely being tools they use feels wrong; mind you, I am still less than entirely happy with how emotionally human Jim has had Faerie turn out to be, it feels both jarring with earlier books and to lessen their impact, to me. The DV is more impressive if it is bigger and more complex than anything human nature can be the measure of.
I rememder you even denied the fairy had any emotions at all even after I quoted Lea in changes who explicitly stated it was Shame what drove her to Mab for help.
Simple emotions like fear and hunger have to be very old in evolution because they are the logical drivers for any action. The Sidhe are all human based, they have to comply to human story telling in some way and magic is connected to emotions. It stands to reason the they are highly emotional creatures. They even have extra emotions we don’t feel that much like a sense of balance.
The outsiders must have some sort of motivation to act as they do, they act like they are directed and plan things and we can communicate with them.
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Like, you know, being willing to let the world burn to save his daughter? (We have WoJ that Harry absolutely meant that at the time.)
Maybe it's a product of growing up in an environment with a very real threat of violence from ideological fanatics, but when I read that sequence, my sympathies were absolutely with the world. It constantly bemuses me how many readers sympathise with Harry in that scene even when he is clearly saying "I consider you personally and all your loved ones acceptable collateral damage so long as I get what I care about" to everyone else in the world. The people I have heard that from before have not been ones I could consider good or sympathetic.
Harry's "Let the world burn" attitude is, in fact, considered as "evil" by the standards of the dresdenverse. Uriel made that clear in GS, and Harry is still suffering the consequences of that particular bad karma even now.
Evil though it may be, but it is still deserving of sympathies. The greatest difference between Harry's kind of "let the world burn" and Nicodemous's "sacrifices to save the world" is explain in book 10. When Harry burns the world, he burns himself along with it, marshmellow notwithstanding. when Nicodemous did it, he look from afar and enjoys the benefits of those sacrifices.
Again, it does not make Harry's attitude "good". It is still "evil", but sympathy is still deserve.
If we compare things to "threat of violence from ideological fanatics" you mentioned: Harry is that guy who got brainwashed or blackmailed or whatever and carry the suicide bomb and die for his beliefs, wrong though it may be, While Nicodemous is the freaking mastermind.
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Harry's "Let the world burn" attitude is, in fact, considered as "evil" by the standards of the dresdenverse. Uriel made that clear in GS, and Harry is still suffering the consequences of that particular bad karma even now.
Evil though it may be, but it is still deserving of sympathies. The greatest difference between Harry's kind of "let the world burn" and Nicodemous's "sacrifices to save the world" is explain in book 10. When Harry burns the world, he burns himself along with it, marshmellow notwithstanding. when Nicodemous did it, he look from afar and enjoys the benefits of those sacrifices.
Again, it does not make Harry's attitude "good". It is still "evil", but sympathy is still deserve.
If we compare things to "threat of violence from ideological fanatics" you mentioned: Harry is that guy who got brainwashed or blackmailed or whatever and carry the suicide bomb and die for his beliefs, wrong though it may be, While Nicodemous is the freaking mastermind.
Anduriel Actually. Nicodemus is just his victim. That is why Michael still tried to save him.
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Anduriel Actually. Nicodemus is just his victim. That is why Michael still tried to save him.
I have to borrow Harry's words for this from book 5. Nicodemous is no victim, he is a freaking collaborator.
In this enterprise of evil the fallen conducted, saying that Nick has a 50% share may not be accurate, but it won't be too much of an exaggeration either.
Michael himself does not deny the fact that the likes of Nicodemous and Cassius are collaborators. He is just duty bound to saved them regardless.
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I have to borrow Harry's words for this from book 5. Nicodemous is no victim, he is a freaking collaborator.
In this enterprise of evil the fallen conducted, saying that Nick has a 50% share may not be accurate, but it won't be too much of an exaggeration either.
Michael himself does not deny the fact that the likes of Nicodemous and Cassius are collaborators. He is just duty bound to saved them regardless.
I don’t know. From what we have learned from Lasciels interaction with Harry and Hannah Nicodemus view of the world is probably greatly distorted and I don’t think someone can have a denarian coin whispering in his head for 2000 years and still be in charge.
That equal partnership thing is probably fake. He may think he is in charge but he surely is not.
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I give it 60/40 ratio of Anduriel/Nico making decisions.
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I don’t know. From what we have learned from Lasciels interaction with Harry and Hannah Nicodemus view of the world is probably greatly distorted and I don’t think someone can have a denarian coin whispering in his head for 2000 years and still be in charge.
That equal partnership thing is probably fake. He may think he is in charge but he surely is not.
Hannah is just stupid, but as EB said, "Stupid" is always more dangerous than a true black hearted villain.
Most of the dinarians are just you said, victims. Nicodemous however is not one of them, and Nicodemous is not stupid either. He is exactly that black hearted evil mastermind, who's only gets uppity on occasion.
Just like you, I doubt Nicodemous is in charge in his partnership with Anduriel, even though he thinks he is, but he is a major shareholder without a doubt.
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Hannah is just stupid, but as EB said, "Stupid" is always more dangerous than a true black hearted villain.
Most of the dinarians are just you said, victims. Nicodemous however is not one of them, and Nicodemous is not stupid either. He is exactly that black hearted evil mastermind, who's only gets uppity on occasion.
Just like you, I doubt Nicodemous is in charge in his partnership with Anduriel, even though he thinks he is, but he is a major shareholder without a doubt.
That depends... If Adolf Hitler obtained a Coin to escape the Allies, and Russians at the end of WW2, would you say the evil he did afterwards was because of the Coin? I'm not saying Nicodemus was always evil, perhaps he wasn't. On the other hand when he obtained a Coin, he may have been a monster already. On the other other hand it would make sense if the ultimate goal will be for Harry to save a once decent man who had been utterly corrupted by such a Coin.
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A thought related to Nico, is he the only person to be a host to Anduriel? We have seen coins with different hosts. And that some coins don't get circulated as often as others. But, I think that Nico is the original host to Anduriel.
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A thought related to Nico, is he the only person to be a host to Anduriel? We have seen coins with different hosts. And that some coins don't get circulated as often as others. But, I think that Nico is the original host to Anduriel.
It is safe to say that Nick is the only host for Anduriel. The coin itself only exist after Judas betrayed Christ which is about 2000 years ago, and Nick is about that age, so the timing match.
I don't think Nick is redeemable. Especially after SG, Nick already reserved a ticket on the southbound train.
Two millennia the guy rampage across the globe. Two millennia of encounters with Knights of the Cross. Countless chances of redemption must had been offered to Nick for all those years, just like the chance Michael offered him in SG. There is an instance of doubt in Nick's expression, so saying that he does not know the score is not believable. If Nick is redeemable, he would have been redeemed already.
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It is safe to say that Nick is the only host for Anduriel. The coin itself only exist after Judas betrayed Christ which is about 2000 years ago, and Nick is about that age, so the timing match.
I don't think Nick is redeemable. Especially after SG, Nick already reserved a ticket on the southbound train.
Two millennia the guy rampage across the globe. Two millennia of encounters with Knights of the Cross. Countless chances of redemption must had been offered to Nick for all those years, just like the chance Michael offered him in SG. There is an instance of doubt in Nick's expression, so saying that he does not know the score is not believable. If Nick is redeemable, he would have been redeemed already.
You are right of course but with that attitude you are never going to wield that sword :)
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It is safe to say that Nick is the only host for Anduriel. The coin itself only exist after Judas betrayed Christ which is about 2000 years ago, and Nick is about that age, so the timing match.
I don't think Nick is redeemable. Especially after SG, Nick already reserved a ticket on the southbound train.
Two millennia the guy rampage across the globe. Two millennia of encounters with Knights of the Cross. Countless chances of redemption must had been offered to Nick for all those years, just like the chance Michael offered him in SG. There is an instance of doubt in Nick's expression, so saying that he does not know the score is not believable. If Nick is redeemable, he would have been redeemed already.
Unless Anduriel violated Nicodemus's free will.... I don't think that's the case because of Uriel trying to save Nicodemus, but who knows.
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Unless Anduriel violated Nicodemus's free will.... I don't think that's the case because of Uriel trying to save Nicodemus, but who knows.
Probably Anduriel did not technically violate Nicodemus free will.
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You are right of course but with that attitude you are never going to wield that sword :)
I am fairly certain that sword might burn me; I am kinda naughty! ;D
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You are right of course but with that attitude you are never going to wield that sword :)
I know that. Harry knows that, Murphy too. Why do you think Harry flat out reject becoming a knight? And why Murphy fail to be a knight so spectacularly?
When Harry sees someone like Nick, he thinks about payback. When Michael sees one, he thinks about helping the guy. In my opinion, neither approach is better than the other, each has it's own merit and demerit.
Even TWG knows this, otherwise the almighty won't be employing a sneaky archangel like Uriel.
If I am an omniscient god, and I can see all possible future, but due to free will, I cannot force one possibility into reality, I won't be sending a KoTC to face a Denarian if there is 0 chance of that particular Denarian from repenting. Michael is sent in SG. For me, It meant that there is a chance, no matter how small, that Nick may choose to repent in SG. As the book shown, Nick did waver for a moment.
However, SG did show us something. Michael did say to Nick that this is perhaps his last chance for redemption. I am afraid the next time Nick show up, Heaven might not send a KoTC to handle him. An agent, most probably Harry, will be facing him and should Nick fail there'll be no more mercy for him. Heaven is merciful, but as we saw in book 12, when "Judgement Almighty" comes calling, Heaven is equally ruthless and absolutely thorough.
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However, SG did show us something. Michael did say to Nick that this is perhaps his last chance for redemption. I am afraid the next time Nick show up, Heaven might not send a KoTC to handle him. An agent, most probably Harry, will be facing him and should Nick fail there'll be no more mercy for him. Heaven is merciful, but as we saw in book 12, when "Judgement Almighty" comes calling, Heaven is equally ruthless and absolutely thorough.
I like your thinking:
TWG does not give the right of judgement to Knights. But He can send others in their stead, which is the judgement in and of itself.
Though in that case, Harry's been sent to foil Nic several times already... what would make a new time different?
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Infanticide, maybe?
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I like your thinking:
TWG does not give the right of judgement to Knights. But He can send others in their stead, which is the judgement in and of itself.
Though in that case, Harry's been sent to foil Nic several times already... what would make a new time different?
Actually, Harry tends to bump into Nick and the Denarians by sheer misfortune.
In book 5, Harry got involved because Cassius try to used him to find the shroud, obviously Heaven did not send Harry to deal with the Denarians at the time. He got involved because the Denarians themselves involved him.
Almost the same in book 10. Harry is involved because Harry is the only wizard who is predictable enough to call upon Ivy for arbitration. He is involved because Nick and co scheme for Harry to get involved.
In book 15, Harry is send by Mab, not by TWG. In all 3 cases, Heaven send the KoTC to handle the Denarians , and Harry just cooperated with the KoTC due to mutual interest.
Compare the above with how the KoTC is involved in book 12. They are asked to help, not due to an official mission from god, well, at least not directly, but because Harry which is the sword's custodian at the time requested for aid. A free will human ask Heaven for aid, and Heaven answered. Just like Mab use the free will of the winter knight to do things she herself cannot do, Heaven most likely could act beyond the normal bounds when a qualified mortal ask for it properly.
Not only Harry is a free willed mortal, he is the custodian as well. Harry qualifies. Harry deploy Fid via Murphy and Ammoracchius via Susan, and he ask Sanya to assist as well. As a result, "Judgement Almighty" comes down upon the red court.
I suspect Nick is about to get the same treatment soon enough. It does tells you something. if a knight leads the team, , it is a mission of Mercy. If the custodian calls the shot, it is a mission of extermination.
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Personally, I've always liked the idea that Nicodemus was the one who sold the Potter's Field to the Temple. For the uninitiated, Judas was guilty over the Crucifixion. In Matthew's account—and Matthew's account only—Judas then hangs himself. It doesn't say where. His death is mentioned in other gospels, but they're all different; one has him crushed by a chariot, and one has him disemboweled, for instance. There's a fourth that's in the Gospel of Judas, but it's considered non-canonical.
There are two conflicting accounts of what Judas did before he died. One (Matthew) says he threw the 30 pieces of silver onto the floor of the Temple, and the clergy didn't want to keep the money for themselves (they specifically called it "blood money"), so they used it to purchase Potter's Field to be a burial site for the poor. Matthew goes on to say he hanged himself, but that's all.
Anyway, we know he hanged himself, because Nicodemus has his bolero necktie. Acts says he was disemboweled, in the Potter's Field, which he actually purchased himself with the money, as an act of repentance.
Personally, in the Dresden Files, I think that both are true, but not completely; I think that Judas bought Potter's Field, then hanged himself there. Nicodemus was the person who had previously owned it, or a representative of a banking institution (one of those usurers Jesus was so uncharacteristically angry at) who handled the transaction. He got the Coins, accepted Anduriel, then spent some time walking around depositing the rest.
All of this is to say that, in my current headcanon, I'm not sure that Nicodemus was "evil" to begin with. I think he was offered power, and he took it. With the options available to him, as time passed, he started to look ahead—decades, centuries in advance. Then he started laying plans. In addition to his own personal devil on his shoulder, Nick started making questionable choices, and kept doing so, until he became the man he is today.
'Course, it's just as likely that he's the Biblical Nicodemus himself, who's mentioned a few times as another apostolic figure. There's a Gospel of Nicodemus, but it's apocryphal. No idea how any of this translates to the Dresden Files, but I figured I'd throw this out there.
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I'd note the Gospel of Nicodemus is what names the lance of Longinus/ the warrior Longinus himself. quite a coincidence since nick specifically wanted the knife from Hades vault.... perhaps he knows precisely it's worth having seen it first hand vs old translated texts sent down through the centuries...
*I lend no small amount of credence to an offhand Woj if Judas had a good reason he knew he had to betray Christ because he asked him to and how that would be a good bit of story telling... Nic seems to think he has the right end of the stick, perhaps long ago he had a good intention to start?
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I'd note the Gospel of Nicodemus is what names the lance of Longinus/ the warrior Longinus himself. quite a coincidence since nick specifically wanted the knife from Hades vault.... perhaps he knows precisely it's worth having seen it first hand vs old translated texts sent down through the centuries...
Yeah, I've noted that connection previously. Longinus's name doesn't show up anywhere else; the Gospel of John simply states "One of the soldiers..."
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Yeah, I've noted that connection previously. Longinus's name doesn't show up anywhere else; the Gospel of John simply states "One of the soldiers..."
Nowhere in the bible; Christian martyrology (both east and west) does refer to him.
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Nowhere in the bible; Christian martyrology (both east and west) does refer to him.
It's in the Gospel of Nicodemus also known as the Acts of Pilate. Nicodemus is mentioned in the Gospel of John as an associate of Jesus.
There are many books, letters ect that were left out of the Bible for one reason or another. That doesn't mean they do not exist.
"Christian legend has it that Longinus was a blind Roman centurion who thrust the spear into Christ’s side at the crucifixion. Some of Jesus’s blood fell upon his eyes and he was healed. Upon this miracle Longinus believed in Jesus"... He was venerated as a Saint in the Catholic Church.