Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 38

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Harry deflects the bullets with his shield bracelet, until Bianca's gunmen start either experiencing malfunctions due to their proximity to magic, or just running out of bullets. One vampire is killed by a ricochet. The gunmen, having realized that their weapons are useless, very understandably flee. 

Harry tells Bianca that she can walk away now, and no one has to get hurt. Bianca points out that Kyle and Kelly already have, although she isn't terribly upset about it. Mostly she's taking the opportunity to tell Harry that Kelly's madness was a result of not making the transition to a full vampire well, to imply that this could also happen to Susan. Harry is too tired and annoyed for mind games to have much impact at this point, tells her it's her last chance to back off. She asks what happens if she says no, and he throws fire at her head. She puts up a shield of her own, which absorbs and scatters the energy. (Based, presumably, on principles of chaos and water magic, as Ramirez's shields are). This is a genuinely alarming thing for her to be able to do - Harry knew she had some magic, but figured it would be limited to things like veils and glamours. This is Wizard level stuff, which Bianca claims to have learned from Mavra. Then she says she wants to put one more piece on the board, and claps her hands for one of her vampires to open the door.  

In walks Don Paulo Ortega. His appearance here is described as reminding Harry of native South Americans, which is a bit odd given that per Changes he's supposed to have been a conquistador. The conquistadors were engaged in plenty of human trafficking, to be clear, but they didn't take a lot of people to Spain from the Americas. According to the Dresden Files fanwiki, although I have not been able to verify this, Ortega is supposed to have gone to Mexico with Cortes's expedition. I considered the possibility that Paulo was conceived by an earlier conquistador and a local and then taken or sent back to Spain before going with Cortes, but the timing doesn't work out at all. This seems to leave the possibility that Harry just straight up misread Ortega's ethnicity, which I find plausible as far as Harry's ability to assess these things, but unlikely inasmuch as this is supposed to be our introduction to the idea that there is a lot of Red Court stuff happening in Central and South America. The other option, I suppose, is that Lea's information was inaccurate - she can't lie, and she has vast knowledge, but she's not physically incapable of being mistaken. Anyway, Ortega is here as a witness to Harry's violations of the Accords, which he enumerates: starting fights in her home, murdering her sworn bondsman, inflicting damage on her property and reputation, and pursuing a grievance with her directly rather than going through channels. Upon reflection, yeah, if Harry and Thomas had stopped to think for like, two seconds, they would probably have realized that while kidnapping Susan wasn't a violation of the accords, kidnapping Justine probably was (it's at least implied in later books that mortals can be entitled to protection under the accords without being bound by its strictures, and in any case Justine didn't actually initiate hostilities - she was just standing there when the fighting broke out) and they might have been able to get them both back if they'd approached the politics right. To be clear I don't think this would have worked - neither of them has support from the signatory factions to which they belong, for one thing - but it would have been worth exploring. Ortega also refers to Bianca as a "Baroness" here, when Kyle and Kelly said in Chapter 8 that this entire shindig was about celebrating her elevation to Margravine. I don't know if "Baroness" was her previous title, and the promotion just hasn't kicked in yet, or if this is another Paula/Rachel issue. I'm sort of hoping for the latter, actually, as Baroness is a more reasonable title that does not carry the same awkward gender baggage (a Baroness can hold the title in her own right), although we lose the implication of Chicago as a border province and gain the new difficulty that Baron is typically the lowest available rank of nobility, and wouldn't necessarily be expected to be able to grant lands or titles to others, or turn them into vampires. 

Harry says that Bianca has broken the spirit of the law, if not its letter, and Ortega reminds him that "between our peoples" the law has no spirit. I'd love to know between which signatories the spirit of the law is taken into account. Ortega also says that Harry's violations could mean war between the Red Court and the White Council. I...could wish we were ever given a real sense of what this means. Members of the Red Court and the White Council seem to be reasonably free to harass each other in public in peacetime, based on what we see earlier in this book. (If they're not, Bianca unambiguously initiated hostilities). Neither party seems to hold substantial contiguous territory that the other could seize by force. They don't seem to attack each other's homes or strongholds before the war, so maybe that's the difference? The idea is that the Red Court can now do that, and thereby force some kind of concessions from the White Council in order to get them to stop? I guess it doesn't make less sense than most warfare after the industrial revolution. Harry is duly impressed by how bad this could get, and Bianca explains that she would be willing to not go to war, to forgive Harry his transgressions against her up to this point, and let him leave with his magical gear and Justine, but she keeps Susan. Harry can stay with Bianca as well, if he wants, in order to remain close to Susan, provided he's willing to be turned into a vampire. This feels like another potentially interesting canon divergence fanfic, but I have way too many fics to write right now. She says her focus on keeping Susan is because Harry took someone very dear to her, so she wants to do the same to him, although I'm not sure how to square that with her apparent willingness to turn Harry as well and have them both stay on. Harry refuses, saying that he loves Susan, and starts drawing power to attack Bianca. 

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Bianca throws shadows at him, and he bounces them into another vampire. He sets some more of her cronies on fire, almost gets spit on by one hanging from the ceiling, kills it, but he's outnumbered and rapidly losing strength. Then something clicks, and instead of drawing power out of the earth, he starts putting it in. Specifically, he feeds it to the ghosts of the many, many people who died in this house. Much like his "die briefly to make a ghost" trick from two chapters ago, this probably would not have worked if the bad guys hadn't set the conditions up the way they did. Ghosts from what looks like about the past 100 years rise from the floor, shaking the house, and start just absolutely destroying the vampire. Several of them make bodies for themselves out of whatever's lying around, including one who uses the spent bullets from Bianca's gunmen, which I note here mostly because I don't think we ever see ghosts do this again after this scene. Bianca tries to flee and take Susan with her, and the ghosts set her on fire. She tries to just kill Susan, less satisfying than turning her, I'm sure, but better than letting Harry get away with this, and Paula's ghost interposes herself, taking the blow in Susan's place. Harry uses the last dribble of his magic to launch her into the air and then slam her through the floor into the burning basement. 

Susan and Justine work together to help him get out of the building, since it's fairly on fire at this point and he's not really in any condition to walk. They take a moment to turn around and watch as the house collapses into the ground. Harry tells Susan he loves her again, and then loses consciousness. 

Next post is gonna be Likes and Reservations for the first half of Wheel of Time Season 3. Post after that will either be Chapter 39 (Last chapter! I'm like 90% sure!) or the Likes and Reservations for the second half of S4, depending on how quickly I get my shit together. Plan on the former, but don't expect the Grave Peril wrap up post until after S3 is out. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!

Wheel of Time TV Series Likes and Reservations Season 2

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Yeah, we're like, 24 hours or something from Season 3 coming out, but better the last minute than never, right? I rewatched episodes 5-8 for this, and it does feel worthwhile to get my thoughts, concerns, and predictions committed to paper, so to speak, before the new season is released. For this one, we're also adding a short "I sure did notice" section, for things that I genuinely don't know what to make of but I did, y'know, notice. I wrote these down as they occurred to me, so they're not going to be in chronological order. Spoiler warning for the first two seasons of the show and possibly all of the books although mostly the first three.

Stuff I Liked

•  The parallels between Moiraine and Lanfear. There's this thing in the books, with most of the female Forsaken, where one woman on the side of the Light chooses them as a personal antagonist, based on some actual or imagined similarity between the two of them. Nynaeve chooses Moghedien in the middle of her "Oh, but I'm such a coward!" arc. Egwene chooses Mesaana, and actually makes a direct comparison between them. Cadusane chooses Semirhage on the basis of her rigidity, and her inability to cope with indignity And Moiraine, of course, chooses Lanfear, for her obsessiveness, her ruthlessness. The show actually emphasizes this connection more than the books, both by directing some of Lanfear's jealousy at Moiraine, and by having Moiraine talk about Lanfear's cruelty like, five minutes after she killed a horse she probably didn't need to kill and threatened a stablemaster she absolutely didn't need to threaten. Both of them clearly think they're primarily fighting each other for the state of Rand's soul, and act as though everyone else, including Rand, the Dark One, and the Creator, is just kinda also here.
  
• Barthanes. So I guess he is a darkfriend in this version too, but he's still just Small. He's probably the least sympathetic non-Forsaken darkfriend who's motivation we've been told so far, but wanting to restore the family's good name (presumably after the clusterfuck that was Laman Damodred) is an understandable, human thing to want, and he's so earnest about it. I also like how the first thing he reaches for in a difficult spot is manipulation, playing on emotional connection, because Moiraine does the same thing when Siuan corners her at the Waygate. She doesn't actually try to explain herself, doesn't give Siuan any new information, any reason to trust her, just "I've been more honest with you than anyone" and "If you ever loved me" as though that's what matters in this situation. This lets us know that Moiraine's (mis)handling of the situation is based in genuine panic and distress. When she has the wherewithal to be the kind of person she wants to be, she doesn't do this. She uses reason, explains herself, show's at least something of an understanding of where other people are coming from. But when she's tired, or frightened, or doesn't know what to do, she acts like a fucking Damodred. 
• The way Aviendha pronounces Perrin's last name. This is a really small thing, but when he introduces himself as Perrin Aybara, she laughs, and when she says his name she puts an audible space between the prefix and the rest of it - ay Bara. It's pretty firmly established in the books, and lightly hinted at (so far) in the show, that the Aiel have retained more of the Old Tongue than most wetlanders. Which means she likely recognizes the matronymic prefix. This 6'2" (or 6'5", depending on which webpage you're looking at) dude with a full beard just introduced himself as Perrin, daughter of Bara. 

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  I really like this version of Dain. For one thing, I like that we meet him before Geofram's death. Butmore generally like, he so...chill? Like, he notices Perrin being even mildly cagey about who he is and what he's doing here and proceeds to just, not ask for his name? Like, that's his notion of being polite in this situation. Perrin is being kinda weird, and Dain just keeps being nice, welcoming, and relaxed, until Perrin actually frees Aviendha. But even after that, when they reconnect in Falme, he doesn't blink before working together with Perrin, even though the last time they saw each other they were fighting. And I suspect part of that is Perrin's decision to spare him (without which, obviously, he wouldn't have made it to Falme), but I think he's also basically just that kind of guy. He's... secure. Untraumatized. Which I guess is usually described as "innocent", but innocence caries a connotation of fragility that I don't think is appropriate here. This isn't someone who's never had anything bad happen to or around him and is gonna shatter when it does, but he is someone who has been able to handle most of the hard or painful things life has handed him, and whose sense of self-worth and self-efficacy hasn't been meaningfully threatened by the things he couldn't. And I'm gonna be really interested to see what it takes to push him into the state of despair and alcoholism in which he spends most of the books. I also like that when he and his guys fought Aviendha and Perrin, he uses the same tactics that Lan describes to Rand in The Shadow Rising, although I do wonder whether that means we're not gonna get the interaction between Aviendha and Ruarc that immediately follows that moment in the books. Also I like that he uses an axe. Sets him up properly as an antagonist for Perrin.
  
• All the adult women being adult women at each other. It was really Moiraine's interactions with Anvere in the second half of this season that made this stand out to me, but it's been a thing throughout the entire show. I don't really know how to describe this one, except that the women in this show - and in case it somehow escaped your notice, there are a lot of women in this show - look, act, sound, and, crucially, interact with each other, like the women I grew up around, and not like most of the ones I see on television. 
• There's a similar thing with the dynamic between Lanfear and Ishamael that I find equally difficult to adequately describe. I don't want to say 'They remind me of my parents.' because my parents aren't, y'know, literal Boogeymen who serve a world destroying force of evil, but like, they do. The way they talk to each other, the way they touch each other. My parents don't do the thing where the male half of a couple speaks English less, and the other home language more, than the female half, but I have certainly met plenty of couples like that. Lanfear and Ishamael aren't even technically in a relationship, but they, I dunno, like with the thing above, they act more like an actual couple who like each other and enjoy each other's company than most television couples. 
• I did not think we were going to hear Stepin's name again, even after Nynaeve quoted him during her Accepted test. Longtime readers, and really anyone who's spoken to me in the past three and a half years, know that I'm maybe have some emotions about Stepin. So naturally I was totally normal and okay (literally screaming) when Lan said "Did you think I forgot what you did to Kerene and Stepin?" because yeah, actually, it kinda seemed like the show itself and everyone in it forgot about Stepin, and I am so, so pleased to be proven wrong. In particular, also, I appreciate the explicit assertion that Logain also killed Stepin, even though in a strictly mechanical sense, Stepin stabbed himself in the stomach a month after Logain was gentled. This may also help clear up for show onlies who have not had it explained by their book reading friends that Stepin's death was a result of the broken bond, not just a reaction to normal grief. I think this may also be an effort on the part of the writers to claim the mind control exception for the way Stepin's suicide was portrayed, which is too little, far too late for anyone who was watching the show as it aired, but may be of some use to those binge watching the first two seasons. 

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  Mat and Rand's reunion. There very much still is toxic masculinity in this setting, but there's not a lot of misogyny or homophobia to go with it. Men aren't necessarily allowed to seek comfort, express the full range of human emotions, or value their own safety and well-being, but they are allowed to like, touch each other, be affectionate, say they love each other. Also, y'know, Mat has to make fun of Rand's hair, but still. Also, if the books are anything to go by, they're gonna be spending a lot more time apart than together going forward, and I think this really helps cement how important they are to one another, and how much they trust each other, which is gonna be important for making sense of their dynamic when they try to cooperate while hundreds of miles apart and unable to communicate directly. 
• Renna. Okay so in the middle books we start getting perspectives from the Seanchan. For the most part, this doesn't do a lot to make the Empire as a whole more likeable - these characters aren't here to explain themselves, they're here to do a job, and that job is conquer the Westlands for the glory of the Empress, may she live forever, not to engage in apologia about it. They are, however, fully human people with a decent depth of internality, and most of them are really goddamn competent as well. This one is a commander who's very good at tactics and cares about his men (getting his ass handed to him by the protagonists because they have resources he couldn't possibly have anticipated). That one is basically just a fighter pilot, joking with her buddies about retiring and buying an inn, which none of them will ever do because who could give up flying. That other one, well, she's trying to cope with a dark secret about her government and still do her job, and honestly she'd have been much happier in a world where there are no damane and she took up like, falconry instead. Were it not for the fact that they lose, and often die in the process, they'd be plausible protagonists in their own movies, y'know? Anyway, book!Renna is not one of those. She's a pure antagonist, presented only through Egwene's perspective, and while she's clearly good at her job and was a reasonable person to whom to assign Egwene (more on that in a moment), her job is, y'know, psychologically breaking enslaved women so they can be used as living weapons. Show!Renna is not quite like that. She's impulsive, she's unprofessional, and I would be genuinely surprised if she's handled the training of a damane before, much less a recalcitrant former marath'damane. I don't know how she talked her way into this assignment, but I don't get the impression that she's really qualified. She doesn't know how to handle the weaves, for one thing. During the strength test, she says "I don't need anything from you for this", indicating that as is the case in the books, the sul'dam effectively channel through their damane, but when they're defending the tower top, Egwene is able to effectively refuse her, indicating that Renna cannot perform the weave for a fairly simple fireball, and must rely on Egwene to do it for her. Some sul'dam do, per the books, cut body parts off of disobedient damane, but it's kinda looked at askance, not so much for the cruelty, as for being an indication that you couldn't manage her by less brutal means. Part of this is that damane are not viewed as slaves, but as animals, and you get about the same range of norms and attitudes about the use of pain in training that you do about, say, dogs in real life. It becomes clear pretty quickly that Renna thought she would be able to handle Egwene, and has no idea what to do when the job turns out to be more difficult than she expected, and that something, likely her career and professional reputation, are riding on a success that it's becoming increasingly clear she can't achieve. She's an evil horse girl, basically. She just had to take on the most difficult, untameable animal available, because she was sure that she, and maybe only she, could do it. Unfortunately (for her) she was wrong and also she's awful, but the basic shape of the trope is there. 

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  Lan helping Rand get ready to see Siuan. Listen, I have a thing for men helping each other get dressed, okay? And it gives me emotions when Lan acts parental towards the boys. Also Lan's response to Rand going for his sword when he tries to take it stands in clear contrast to the "Put that down" from the previous season, giving us, I think, an indication from a reliable source that Rand has substantially grown and matured in the ??? months since season 1, episode 6. 
• The early and explicit acknowledgement that Lews Therin, Lanfear, and Ishamael were all friends. The pattern likes to do things pretty close to the same way every time. Not exactly the same, but it will put people together, repeat stories, that kind of thing. It also doesn't have great... aim, which is why you get things like false dragons, Caar al'Thorin al'Toren getting his hand cut off, and a bunch of people with Arthurian names showing up around the Dragon rather than around Hawkwing. So Lewd Therin's notion of putting Ishamael and Lanfear into stasis so they can't be reborn with him, and won't just play out the same story in their next life, is a pretty solid one. But the pattern is going to want, maybe need, the Dragon to have similar relationship dynamics, even if they don't play out the same way. Only it doesn't have the actual Ishamael and Lanfear to work with, so it has to make do, and that's kinda how we end up with like, Egwene, who shares some of Lanfear's essential qualities (ambition, reactivity when slighted, facility with the world of dreams), but doesn't share others (vengefulness and obsessiveness), and would take really extraordinary circumstances to follow the same path, and Mat and Perrin, who have most of Ishamael's essential traits between them, but divided so neither of them could ever actually be him (notably, Perrin doesn't remember his past lives at all, and Mat doesn't have much potential as an academic). I like that it's put a lot more up front here, rather than being the kind of thing you only catch on a 6th or 7th read. 
• Moghedien! Softly, softly, from the shadows... Sorry I don't have any actual thoughts here, except that she's appropriately unsettling and I'm eager to see more. 
  

Stuff I Have Reservations About

• Dropping Ingtar's darkfriend reveal. I know they literally just didn't have time, but he still dies, and this left him in a really weird spot. At the present writing, I think I'd be okay with it if the show just wanted to pretend that happened, or better yet cover it in a flashback, but I'm a little concerned that they're just gonna drop it and that will end up feeling sorta incoherent. 
• The Three Oaths all having originated in Hawkwing's time. This was kinda gestured at in season 1, and apparently I didn't talk about it then, but this is a little weird. In the books, the second Oath dates to the founding of the White Tower, the first to the Trolloc Wars (likely in response to Tetsuan's promising to send aid she had no intention of providing), and we don't know when the third Oath was introduced, or whether all its many caveats were part of the original version, but World Of indicates that it was in place by the end of the Trolloc Wars. Having all three instead be the result of Hawkwing's siege on Tar Valon gives the Aes Sedai less agency, and Hawkwing more importance, than I'm entirely comfortable with. It also has very different implications for how that siege, and by extension the last years of Hawkwing's life, went, and I don't know if the show is really prepared to deal with that. It's sort of important that neither having an Evil Advisor (probably Ishamael) not a desire to avenge his wife and children (who...may have been assassinated by the Tower?) made Hawkwing any better at war than he already was, which was very good, but not good enough to breach the shining walls. If the much stronger Tower of a thousand years ago, led by Deane Aryman, couldn't withstand like, just some guy (some guy with essentially Yes in all fields related to conventional warfare, but some guy nonetheless), they have absolutely no hope for the Last Battle. None. Of course, what we know about this, we have from Egwene in S1E2, who doesn't necessarily have the facts straight, and Liandrin in S2E5, who could lying or have herself been lied too, but if so that introduces the separate issue of this is history, Hawkwing shouldn't matter enough to be worth being coy and mysterious about. 
• It's a really small thing, but Elayne being the one to successfully channel first when she and Egwene were restrained by the Seanchan just kinda bugs me. Channeling without using your hands, especially a weave you've already been taught to do with your hands, is very hard. It made some sense in S1E5 that Egwene could do it, since she hadn't been taught any weaves any particular way and Valda just told her it was possible, but Elayne's education, such as it has been, was more conventional. I would have been fine with this if we'd ever seen Egwene do her little no-hands fireball in front of Elayne, since they're both very fast at learning new weaves, but so far as I can recall, we haven't. 

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  This is actually an even smaller thing, but astralagus and elderberry are for helping you not get the flu when you're stressed and not getting enough sleep. They're not "calming" herbs. Most of the herbalism in the show, where it referenced real plants, has been pretty accurate, so this surprised me. 
• Liandrin's backstory. This one bothered me so much I ended up writing fanfiction to try and make it make sense, but that required a lot of really specific circumstances, and synthesizing two things from the show I wasn't wild about with some propaganda from the books. Child marriage isn't what you might call a thing in Wheel of Time, domestic violence is pretty rare, and child abuse actually approaches unheard of. The only way I could make this work is to say that Liandrin, who swore to the shadow absurdly young in the books (like 12), was from one of the "darkfriend villages" the Whitecloaks occasionally talk about, because no one on the side of the Light would do that, and the show hasn't provided anything like that much context. Even then, in the books, at least one of the Forsaken considers child abuse to be over the line. There is like, one culture in the between the Aryth Ocean and the Spine of the World that engages in socially sanctioned sexual abuse of teenage boys, but even then, not prepubescent children and not girls. I can kind of get my head around wanting Liandrin to have a more sympathetic motivation, but the show is going to have to either deal with having changed the setting such that Liandrin's having been "beaten, starved, given to a man before [she] bled" is meaningfully a thing that can happen, or establish in no uncertain terms that this was a horrific, vanishingly rare thing that would be unthinkable even to most of the worst people in the setting - in no uncertain terms because the audience all live in a world where this kind of thing isn't unthinkable - and so far I haven't seen a move to do either one. 
• And speaking of the unthinkable, why does anyone in this setting know or use the word "slave"? For my show-onlies, if I have any, I need you to understand that at one point a character who's pretty well centered in the mainstream of Westlands culture encounters the word "da'covale" for the first time, mentally translates it, and almost throws up. I get that this is probably difficult to get across on screen, and that making the characters talk around the idea of slavery would take up more of the show's already very limited time, but literally just having them know the word represents a meaningful change to the setting and I don't have a lot of trust that this will either be explored or contained. 
• Mat being a Hero of the Horn. Obligatory reminder that this is not the "things I think are bad" section. And this one almost doesn't even go here. Mat isn't just a Hero of the Horn. "Since the day of her birth has the Dark One marked Blaes as his own, but not of this mind is she - no Darkfriend Blaes of Matuchin!" Compare "Mat was born mine." I love this. I love how it reinforces that souls aren't gendered in this setting, and is reinforced by Mat's having been visibly female in a past life as seen in the drug trip scene. It also should absolutely put to bed any concerns about Mat turning to the Shadow. Heroes of the Horn don't serve the Shadow. They can't. And Blaes, specifically, won't. But given how many other small-but-loadbearing aspects of the setting seem to be getting ignored for the sake of drama or expediency, I'm more than a little worried that this won't actually put those concerns to bed and it's gonna keep being a Thing.  

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  Where and how did Lan, Alanna, Maksim, and Ihvon intercept the Amyrlin en route to Tar Valon? They were traveling south from Arafel, presumably on the Shol Arbela road. Siuan was traveling north, from Caemlyn, presumably on the unnamed road that runs up through Braem Wood, since for some reason she was traveling by carriage and not by boat.  I guess it's possible that their considerably smaller, and therefore faster, party actually went around Tar Valon to meet her on the road, but it's bugging me. 
• Lan and Moiraine's reunion on the beach. I gotta stress that this scene gave me Emotions, but I don't actually feel like anything was resolved, and it didn't escape my notice that Moiraine never actually apologized. We still don't know what she was referring to with "you failed me", and while obviously she can't have been lying with all that about thinking Lan's better than she is, it doesn't actually do anything to address the fact that she massively betrayed what the relationship between an Aes Sedai and her Warder is and means. I guess if Lan's willing to tolerate that, I should too, but I'm worried the show is just gonna proceed like everything's fixed now, when it very much is not. 
• Perrin actually killing Bornhald. This is one of those ones that I'm sure felt simpler than doing what happened in the books, but it was pretty significant to this plot thread in the books that Perrin didn't kill Geofram. He killed some other Whitecloaks, but not Dain's actual father. He also wasn't, y'know, hiding in the dark and afraid for his life. I don't know how the hell we can resolve this one, unless maybe we're gonna do it where Dain is also a Wolfbrother, because there's not gonna be any getting him to understand in this version of events. 
• What was Barthanes doing? His instructions were to kill Moiraine (technically, to remove her from the board), and if Anvere suspected anything, to "deal with" her as well. But as best I can tell, he made no actual attempt to do anything about Moiraine, and skipped straight to trying to kill Anvere? Like, am I forgetting something here, or does this not actually make any sense?
• Tower Law regarding the Dragon Reborn. It's acknowledged in this scene, and elsewhere, that as far as the Tower knew the Dragon was as likely to be a woman as a man. If the Dragon were born a woman, would they still have done all that with shielding her and having her channel only when and what they decided? Or do these laws only apply if the Dragon reborn is a man?

Stuff I Feel Better About

• Most darkfriends having reasons. In the books, there are a few darkfriends who turned to the Shadow for understandable, if not always sympathetic reasons. Most, however, are never given a chance to explain themselves, and many of those who do are basically like 'Yes, I did it to get ahead. We're all playing the same game here, and it's not my fault if you're worse at it because you have irrational hangups about siding with the ultimate evil." The best we can confidently say for most darkfriends is that they almost certainly weren't expecting the Dragon to be reborn or the last battle to come within their lifetimes. In which context it's just, y'know, a social club, a networking opportunity, something to do on the weekends, only with the occasional murder. In the show, so far, every darkfriend who has any opportunity to explain themselves has had a comprehensible, human reason for their decision. Even Suroth, based on her reaction to Ishamael saying "And I know why you swore your oaths" has more going on than a desire to climb the hierarchy of Seanchan faster than her own abilities would otherwise permit. 

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   The Whitecloaks. Their opposition to the Seanchan, and to slavery, does a lot to complicate their unambiguous assholery of the first season. So does Dain. And Bornhald's efforts to rally the people of Falme against the Seanchan gives us at least the beginning of an idea of why anybody puts up with them. They're still antagonists. They're meant to be antagonists. And I have serious questions about taking a cavalry charge into a city like that. (I have matching questions about the Seanchan letting them do it). But they've been complicated and humanized enough to make Galad joining them, and Dain's long, complicated arc, feel like things that could happen and make sense. 
• Logain being in Cairhien. This one isn't like, resolved for me. We know Moiraine arranged to have him moved, which is a hell of a lot better than nothing, but I'd still like to know how the thing was accomplished, given that as I understand it she wasn't supposed to have contact with other Aes Sedai. But I feel a lot better with an incomplete explanation than with none at all. 
• Aging up the Aes Sedai. I still have more questions than answers, and most of the concerns I expressed previously still stand, but we do now know how Siuan and Moiraine came to hear the prophecy, and what their position was at that time. Now, Siuan not having herself been deputized into a fate-of-the-world level quest as an Accepted is gonna make me look a lot closer at her choices concerning The Girls, but I think it's quite manageable.
  

Stuff I Feel Worse About

• What was actually going on with Moiraine, and with Lan's bond. Technically we get an answer on the former and can make a guess about the latter, but "Tying off weaves is a lost technique so Moiraine was shielded and didn't even know it, but Lan figured it out and was able to direct Rand on how to remove the shield" is kinda unsatisfactory and too clever by half besides. Like, I get that Rand very notably broke out of a tied of shield made with saidar one time in the books and this has given a lot of people the impression that any sufficiently determined person can break out of a shield if they just apply themselves, so if Moiraine had any way of knowing she was shielded she would have been able to fix it on her own, but Rand a) had days or weeks with literally nothing else to do, b) had direct assistance from a male Aes Sedai from the Age of Legends in figuring it out, and c) was considerably stronger than any of the women who shielded him. Moiraine, who is strong in the Power for a modern Aes Sedai but not on a level with, for example, Egwene or Elayne, not being able to break a shield she can't directly perceive or touch, which was put in place by one of the Forsaken, would not reflect a lack of personal grit and determination on her part. Letting us think she's stilled between seasons was a reasonable application of suspense, but making both the characters and the audience wait this long for something that wasn't even that much of a mystery is just annoying, and making tied off weaves a fancy Forsaken thing may cause problems down the road. And the status of the bond is never actually explicated. We can kind of figure that in Season 1 Episode 8, she didn't actually mask Lan's bond, she released it, so that he wouldn't have to go through what Stepin did when Kerene died. This would have been reasonable, since Moiraine had every reason to expect she was gonna die at the Eye. The Light knows they spent enough time in Season 1 establishing what was at stake for Lan if she did. But it never actually says, and even Moiraine's nonpology doesn't include any mention of having released the bond to protect him, much less whether she did it before being shielded (understandable, and not totally outside of Aes Sedai tradition) or after (weird, unhelpful, kinda petty, raises questions about how releasing the bond actually works). 

• 

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  This is the world's tiniest nitpick, but when Mat is gambling with the random Cairhienen guys right before Rand finds him, it sure sounds like one of them said 'Oh God', which the closed captioning seems to support. Once again, what does anyone in this setting think a god is, please? Actually, I changed my mind, this isn't small, and I'm moving it to Stuff I Feel Worse About, because Ihvon having some concept of gods is potentially explicable by his being a Warder and having had the opportunity to read Very Old Books at the Tower or talk to people who have done so. Why does this random Foregater not only also know the word 'god' but invoke it like it means something to him? Like, this is probably just carelessness on someone's part, but this is not a setting that will do well with careless handling on details like this. As with the child marriage thing, audiences are going to expect things to work basically how they do in the real world except where otherwise specified, and in this case, how things work in the real world includes the existence of multiple distinct religions, religious conflicts, and a lot of people who believe in gods. Those things, in turn, have impacts on a lot of other things in the world in which we live, and Wheel of Time very clearly does not experience those impacts. Which is fine if there are no gods and basically only one religion, but becomes nearly incoherent as soon as people start casually saying "Oh, God". They could fix this, honestly, by having someone say "god" in a context where it's clear they mean the same force or entity referred to in the books as the Creator, but they would have to actually do that.
  
• The handling of black characters whose names are not Nynaeve al'Meara. Remember how I said I was holding out hope for a black Aes Sedai besides Siuan who gets a name and doesn't die? Guess the monkey's paw curled on that one, huh? Yeah I do not think what happened with Ryma was cool. If she was freed by end of season, I was prepared to be okay about it, but she wasn't and I'm not. Obligatory reminder that I am not especially qualified to talk about issues of race, but come on. I don't think you have to be especially qualified to have issues with the third named black Aes Sedai in the series (and one who's considerably darker skinned than Siuan), being fucking enslaved. That feels like kind of a no brainer, actually. Don't fucking do that. We see very little more of Elyas in the second half of Season 2. He's fine, I don't have any problems there. Our other newly introduced black characters are the der'suldam (I know she has a name), and Turok. So that's two more villains, and Turok doesn't even have a chance to show the audience how good he is with a sword, which was, to be clear, in the books, very nearly the only thing he was good at. Also Uno pretty well establishes that Heroes of the Horn appear as they most recently did in life, but Hawkwing is apparently white in this version? I know it takes a little attention and extrapolation to notice that he was probably black in the books, but this was an easy way to regain some ground and they just absolutely did not take it. 
• What the hell is the hurry about getting the Horn back? On the one hand, for book readers, this is sort of answered. Ingtar knows that the Last Battle hasn't happened yet, the Dark One wasn't defeated, because he's a darkfriend. Unfortunately, since they didn't take the time to let him explain that he's a darkfriend, he just instead inexplicably knows that it's not over.
• The Seanchan. Renna's thing about the Empress uniting everyone under the Light did not help at all here. None of the Seanchan have been meaningfully humanized, and we've actually seen more of them individually being shitty and capricious than we had at this point in the story in the books. The show is gonna have a hard time making time later to establish that the Seanchan are like, basically just human people, so unless they're planning to just not do Mat and Tuon, we might be in some trouble here.
  

No New Information

• Aes Sedai classism and the possibility of Novices being expelled. We learn essentially nothing new about White Tower policy regarding admissions or rules for Novices. 
•  Min's Aunts. We have gotten no further Min backstory. I dunno what the hell they could do to fix that, but they haven't done it yet, if anything can be done. 
• How to circles work in the show? We do see another circle, and it doesn't look like anything went wrong with it, but that doesn't really give us much to go on. 

 I Sure Did Notice

• "Our master's needs will change with time, you know. And all marath'damane will be leashed." is in imabic pentameter. Suroth is using iambic pentameter here. Idek, but it stood out to me. 
• Same scene, Liandrin's lowkey sul'dam cosplay, with the blue cloak over the red outfit, and the triple braid. She might claim to think that what they do is an abomination, but she's trying to make herself look or feel more like one of them. 
• Verin's conversation with Sheriam. She opens by mentioning Seraille Bagand, who was Mistress of Novices under like three different Amyrlins, despite the position usually being filled by the incoming Amyrlin with a sister from her own Ajah, and eventually became the Amyrlin Seat herself. And then she ends the conversation with an apparent non-sequitor about Tetsuan, the first Amylin raised from the Red Ajah, and the first Amyrlin to be legally deposed by the hall. If you're willing to read way, way too much into it, this feels like Verin is hinting to Sheriam that she has reason to expect the sitting Amyrlin to be deposed (like Tetsuan), and that if Sheriam positions herself right, she could be the next Amyrlin, like Seraille. 

Anyway, that's what I got. Looking forward to Season 3, and sincerely hoping that in two weeks, when the first four episodes are out, I'll have a more timely report for you. Expect at least one Dresden Files post between now and then. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 37

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Harry is angrier than he expects to be at Kyle's attack, which he attributes to the influence of eating Kravos. In a fit contrariness so quintessentially Harry that it's honestly reassuring, rather than immediately reducing Kyle to a greasy spot on the floor, a fate he has uneqivocally earned several times over, Harry gives Kyle the chance to walk away. Kyle declines, validly reasoning that this is probably a bluff on Harry's part, although he says something about "no more illusions" and I'm not actually sure what he's talking about. So far as I can recall, Harry hasn't even used regular deception in dealing with the vampires this book, much less illusions. Kelly rushes Harry, but he throws her into the far wall with a blast of wind. Kyle goes for Harry's throat, but Susan steps in and throws him into the wall... with her bare hands. Maddened by pain and injury, they start attacking each other. I'm almost sure this is supposed to be symbolism, but I'm not quite sure of what. I do, however, quite like that Harry was the one to throw Kelly into the wall while Susan got Kyle - it's a small thing, but Kelly has consistently been the more active problem for Harry, and it's good to see that Named Minor Antagonist Barbie and Ken here weren't positioned to avoid Harry Hitting a Girl or Susan doing anything that might strike a misogynistic reader as emasculating. That kind of thing is very easy to fall into by accident, which gives the impression it was deliberately avoided here. Harry uses one of Kravos's spells to set them on fire, including an incantation he presumably got from Kravos's memories. "Satharak na-kadum" yields no search results not related to the Dresden Files, so I've got nothing on the meaning, but there's a Satharak Industries in Tamil Nadu, India, so the language here is maybe meant to be Tamil? Classical Tamil, as the name implies, stands alongside Classical Greek, Latin, and Hebrew among the, y'know, classical languages, making it an appropriate and respectable choice for a spellcasting language, but one of the things we're gonna be keeping an eye on, largely starting with the next book when the world of wizards, specifically, starts opening up to the reader, is what languages are used this way, and by whom, and the grossest human magic user we've met so far using Tamil while Harry uses Latin does not look like a great start. Although Victor Sells seems to have used a quasi-Latin very similar to Harry's, so there's that. 

As Kyle and Kelly burn to death, their screams sound like tearing sheet metal, but also like terrified children. I have to figure at least some of that is Harry's own guilt about the human kids who (might have) died when he let loose at Bianca's party. They take their time about dying, too, especially compared to my recollection of other times Harry kills Red Court vampires with fire. Maybe Kravos's notion of a fire spell is meant to cause more suffering, maybe it just doesn't get as hot. You can't do anything with magic that you don't believe in, even when you're borrowing someone else's power, but it's understandable that Harry would want any Reds here, and maybe these two in particular, to hurt before they died. I don't think he would have done it like that if he'd been making a more considered choice. He doesn't feel great about it, but tries to remind himself that they're vampires, monsters. Susan, meanwhile, has to take a second to remind herself that she isn't a vampire, after using her new superstrength like that. 

They proceed through the basement, through a room with a drain in the floor, which holds the corpses of some of the human kids from the party, and some of the missing homeless people we were told about back in Chapter 12. Harry extends his magical senses to confirm that they're all beyond saving. They show no lividity, indicating that they were exanguinated - and that Harry examines them rather more thoroughly than is described, since none of them are naked as far as we're told, and you have to check the skin for that. Either he looked under someone's clothes, or a body was left facedown and he lifted it or turned it over to check the face. A hose off to one side drips water, indicating that it was used to clean up after the vampires fed. I like how this detail underscores the vampires' evil and their own fundamental inhumanity at the same time. There's something almost industrial about this approach to eating - it lacks the sexy predator intimacy fiction so often ascribed to being fed upon by a vampire. It's tidy, sort of, it's efficient. It shows how little regard the vampires have for their human prey. But it's also not how people eat. This is how you feed wild carnivores in captivity. It situates the vampires as not just inhuman but subhuman, and simultaneously establishes that they see actual humans as something even less than that. Harry announces that he'll stop them, that he can't just stay out of it after what he's seen. 

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Justine tries to argue with him, but he dismisses her when his wizard senses pick something up across the room. His shield bracelet, his blasting rod, and Bob the skull are all on a shelf tucked into an alcove, with his staff wedged into a corner, where Bianca stashed them after being warned by Bob that if she or her people messed with them, they might explode. I don't know by what exact mechanism Bob determines whether someone is his new owner when he's out of Harry's immediate physical control, but she doesn't seem to have gotten him out of the backpack, so he must have acted pretty fast there. Bob observes that Harry looks grim, despite wearing boxers with yellow duckies on them, and that his aura looks like Kravos's, although Harry doesn't let him finish that part. Harry puts on the bracelet and grabs the rest of his gear, handing Bob to Justine. Since Bob is Bob and Justine is naked except for Susan's cloak, he starts making comments, but banter time is cut abruptly short when they realize Susan has disappeared. 

Justine says the vampires are here, that they just can't see them. Bob says "What's this 'we' stuff, kimosabe'" and scans for veils. Now, to be clear, this is the kind of thing people did absolutely just like, say, in the year 2000. Period typical racism or whatever. But could we not. Could we just...could we not? Like if I wanted to be really, really generous I could make the case that the magic skull with no grasp of good and evil and a limited grasp of the difference between fiction and reality probably doesn't really know what racism is and would struggle to understand why he shouldn't do it, much less extend that understanding to adjusting his tendency to communicate in pop culture references. But that's the kind of thing a book has to actually do, and ideally interrogate, not just leave as a possible interpretation, in order to get credit for it. Anyway, Bob doesn't see any veils, and didn't see Susan leave or anyone come in to take her. Harry starts talking it through, and rapidly realizes that it doesn't actually make sense for them to have snuck in, taken Susan, and not, for example, murdered him or also taken Justine, especially now that Susan has superstrength and can make herself rather difficult to drag off, should she be so inclined. Justine volunteers that Bianca could have mind controlled Susan into leaving under her own power, as this is how she got her into the laundry room. This suggests that Bianca has at least some ability to use magic, which is not an encouraging proposition. For the moment, there's nothing for it but to keep walking. 

They reach the stairs, with open doors at the top leading outside. There might as well be a glowing neon sign at the top of those stairs reading TRAP, but Harry's newly restored strength won't last forever, and waiting until dawn will just move the fight inside, so he leaves Bob with Justine, telling him to help her if he can, and starts climbing. At the top, Bianca waits for him, with Susan kneeling at her side, a dozen vampires in their true forms arrayed behind her, and about half as many mildly enthralled men with machine guns in front. Harry laughs, and says she must think he's very dangerous, to do all this just for him. She confirms that she does, and tells the gunmen to open fire. 

So this didn't come together quite as fast as I'd hoped, but at least it wasn't an entire month this time. I'm still getting back up to speed after being sick, and honestly I've been a little distracted trying to get the latest chapter of my fanfic up before Season 3 of Wheel of Time is released on the 13th. The next post here will probably be me finally doing my second Likes and Reservations post for Season 2, so you may not get another Dresden post until after the ides of March, but we'll see. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 36

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It's not clear whether Kravos comes for Harry immediately, or if at the start his nightmares are his own, but whichever the case, it doesn't take long for the sorcerer to show up. He starts taunting Harry from the shadows, talking about how he watched the vampires take him, how he wishes he'd taped it so he could show Harry. Harry talks back, and Kravos hits him, hard, tell him jokes won't save him now. Harry, naturally, continues talking back, accusing him of cliches. This gets Kravos to come out of the mist and slam him into the ground. He's sitting on Harry's chest, which makes him at minimum the third thing to do that this book. Symbolism. He looks basically like he did in life - thin face, graying hair, awful beard, broad shoulders, ritual symbols all over his chest. Which I think speaks to a level of self-awareness of Jim Butcher's part that he doesn't always get credit for. Aside from the symbols being in blood, rather than tattoos, I have met like, twelve of this guy, and been inappropriately hit on by at least four of him. This is a very specific subtype of That Asshole in Your Local Pagan Community. Like every incarnation of this shithead I've met, he takes himself extremely seriously, and the more Dresden makes it clear that he doesn't take Kravos seriously, the more agitated he becomes. Eventually Harry makes a remark about how perhaps the Ken doll he used to bind Kravos worked so well because it was anatomically correct, and Kravos loses it, starts choking Harry to death. I know this is a life or death situation, but one would still prefer that we hadn't gone with what is, essentially, an anti-intersex joke here. To be clear, I am not of that school of thought which believes that jokes about small hands, small penises, short stature, and the like are only hurtful to those whose own beliefs prejudice them against such traits, and therefore fair game. Were Harry Dresden a real person, I might be inclined to grant him some leeway for his having just personally gone through a horrific trauma that he has been conditioned by the society in which he lives to regard as deeply emasculating, However, Harry is a fictional character, and Jim Butcher had both time to think and the emotional wherewithal to make better choices. 

Harry does die here, although there are some marked differences between this death and the one in Changes. There is, explicitly, no light, train-associated or otherwise, and no "kindly, beckoning voice". There's nothing, in fact, except a sensation like being pressed into, and through, plastic wrap. Then he feels a thudding on his chest, and the plastic wrap pulls away as his heart starts back up. Susan did CPR, just like they planned, and it worked. Crucially, because Harry is a wizard and died suddenly and violently at a time when the veil between worlds is turbulent, his brief death created a ghost. Ghost Harry observes that they look like hell, and offers regular Harry - well, Dream Harry, a hand up. I feel like there's some lesson to be had in "I offered myself a hand up, so I took it," but I don't think Harry gets it until maybe Death Masks. Ghost Harry is a little stronger than regular Harry, and between the two of them they're able to restrain Kravos. 

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Harry extends his dream-self's hands into claws, his face into a muzzle. The book doesn't say so explicitly,
but I am nearly certain these features are borrowed from the wolf form he took when he used the wolf belt in Fool Moon. Thus armed, he physically eviscerates Kravos and starts to eat him. In case we missed the metaphor, it says explicitly that Harry "wolfed into his vitals". He consumes his stolen magic, and then Kravos's own power as well. He eats his heart. This is how we close out the Little Red Riding Hood allusion from Chapter 26. In the discussion of that chapter, I mentioned that modern revisionist retellings sometimes include Red Riding Hood claiming her own wildness and engaging with the wolf on her own terms. That's what Harry's doing here. He is violently, physically reclaiming his power after being violated by Kravos in Chapter 17 and by Bianca in Chapter 33. He's embracing his capacity for violence and destruction. He's literally partly transformed into a wolf. This does not entirely bode well for Our Hero's psychological health, but it sure is good writing. I mean damn. 

When it's done, and the last bits of dream blood and dream viscera have faded from the scene, Ghost Harry puts his hand on regular Harry's shoulder and tells him it's over, he got Kravos. He also reassures him that ghost Kravos wasn't a real person, and that even on the scale of ghosts he was a "bad egg", that he doesn't have anything to regret. Harry says that's easy for Ghost Harry to say, since he doesn't have to live with himself. Ghost Harry is, in fact, already fading out, the unfinished business that brought him into existence completed. 

Harry wakes up, almost painfully full of energy after taking back much of his own magic and all of Kravos's. He assures Susan that she did her part of the plan exactly right. She's naturally a little concerned that he's suddenly able to move under his own power, and he explains that the extra magic is a kind of high - he still feels pain, but it's not important. He tells Susan to get some clothes on Justine so they can get out of there, but Susan says she won't come out from behind the washing machine. So Harry uses a gust of magical wind to physically get her out, and Susan puts her cloak on her. I don't think this is a Tam Lin reference, but we got one earlier so naturally I'm on alert for anyone putting their cloak on anyone else. Then Harry just blows out the locked door of the laundry room. And destroys a couple lightbulbs in the next room. He tells Susan and Justine to get behind him, not so he can stand between them and the forces of darkness but to keep them out of his line of fire. It accomplishes both, though, because as soon has he steps through the door, Kyle and Kelly Hamilton grab him, and announce their intent to find out what a wizard's blood tastes like. 

I am so sorry this took so long. I got Covid, which I haven't had before, and found the experience thoroughly unpleasant. One of my in-laws has never been all that diligent about precautions, and infected someone I live with, after which there's only so much one can do. Assuming I don't get any more potentially deadly diseases, my commitment to trying to go faster between here and the end of this book stands. You might reasonably expect another post within the next week. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 35

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Susan finds the dried blood on Harry's arm, tastes it. She's quite...enthusiastic about it, but Harry pulls away, backs up, and throws the bloodstained towel at her, which she begins to lick, trying to get the blood she needs out of the fabric. I gotta note here that most of the blood on that towel is in the form of bloody vomit, the result of Harry's mushroom poisoning, so what she's licking off that towel is just, dazzlingly gross, and I'm not surprised that it doesn't provide the nourishment she's after. Honestly I'm a little surprised it doesn't make her sick, but I guess it's not that much blood, and even a half-turned vampire probably has more physical resilience than a human. 

Harry asks Justine, who has gone back to hiding behind the washing machine, what they should do, and she says there's nothing to do - Susan will kill them, and once she does, she'll be gone, wholly replaced by her vampiric nature, and come into her full power as a vampire of the Red Court. She confirms that right now, the real Susan is still there, but even if Harry is able to get through to her, her bloodlust will continue to grow until she loses control and eats someone. She suggests that they could kill Susan now, while she's new and weak, before the hunger makes her desperate, but Harry isn't gonna do that, and Justine has an emotion about his refusal that Harry can't readily classify as "warm" or "heated". We'll come back to this in a minute, but I think it's interesting how this scene displays Harry not being a leader. In this particular tough spot, the first thing it occurs to him to do, after the trick with the towel, is ask a relative stranger what they should do. I don't mean that derogatorily, to be clear. Different people have different skill sets, and crisis leadership isn't among Harry's, especially at this stage. When he's had time to come up with a plan, he can direct its execution just fine, and his planning gets faster as time goes on. But so very often, texts treat leadership as an aspect of competence that must naturally occur at the intersection of "man" and "protagonist", and I quite like that Dresden Files doesn't do this. Harry's thinking as fast as he can here, but he's not taking charge. This willingness to express uncertainty, to defer to someone else's even slightly greater understanding of a situation, also helps set up, for the next book, the contrast between Harry and the rest of the White Council. Heck, arguably it helps set up his getting his mother's knowledge of the Ways from Lea in...oh, in Changes, at the opposite end of the war arc. In some ways then, this is supposed to reassure us that with the Winter Mantle and everything, Harry is going to be okay, he's not going to lose himself, because we already saw him hold onto these essential positive qualities of collaboration and humility in the face of several substantial increases in personal power that might reasonably have eroded them. Also, I would love to know if this "You're not a full vampire until the first lethal feeding" thing also applies to the Black Court. It doesn't necessarily matter, but this seems like it may be part of why these three very different types of creature are all classified as "vampires", despite differing in their diets, physical nature, abilities, and means of reproduction.

Susan, getting tired of the towel, makes eye contact with Harry and tries to mesmerize him. He's able to pull away pretty easily, since she's not a full vampire and he is a full Wizard with years of deliberate practice building up his will, but it gives him an idea. Susan soul gazed him, shortly before the start of the series, and memories of a soul gaze can't be removed, since the soul gaze is technically a manifestation of the Sight. Lea could have obscured those memories, but she can't have taken them away. He plucks a hair from Susan's head, wraps it around his right hand (power hand) and spits on his fingers, then takes hold of her left hand (receiving hand). The left and right correspondences are not actually explicated here, but this is a pretty standard aspect of 20th century magical theory (it may be older than that - the claims theosophy, Thelema, and Wicca made to ancient origins have obscured the readily accessible record on such points; let me know in the comments if you want me to get in there and figure out where and when this one actually originated). The touch, the sympathetic physical materials, allow him to amplify the natural bond between them, the one created by their regular human intimacy with each other, making it a channel for his magic. He calls up his own memories of his time with Susan, and tries to press them into her mind, but Lea apparently anticipated his trying something like this, and her spell actually forms a barrier, thin and flexible, but becoming rigid when strained, preventing the memories from getting through. Susan leans in and starts licking Harry's neck. Then she bites him - not that hard, but Harry is nonetheless acutely aware that she is a half-turned vampire and she's biting him, and probably would be even if her saliva weren't making his skin go numb. She's figured out that the blood she wants is inside Harry. So Harry starts talking, about how he can't lose her, he needs her, she could give herself amantin poisoning if she feeds upon him... and then he says "I love you." and the spell breaks through. There's a little bit here about how some words have a power that has nothing to do with magic, but of course we know from Fool Moon that "There's more magic in a baby's first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up", and this likely works on the same principle. With the barrier broken, Susan's own memories are pulled back out of Lea into her, and she is herself again, give or take the vampire thing. 

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She's still pretty much about to bite him, and starts talking about how much she want it (implicitly, his
blood), how he's weak and sick and she could take it, he couldn't stop her. Harry just...agrees, in some cases reflecting her words back ("You couldn't stop me. You're weak, sick." "I couldn't stop you."). I... don't know if he would actually have just let her eat him, here. Honestly I don't think he knows either. But here again, he doesn't seem to feel any need to assert himself. She asks him to "Say it again" and after a second of confusion her tells her, again, that he loves her. The words seem to hit her like a physical blow, and he says it again, and when she looks into his eyes, her eyes are hers. "Dark, rich, warm brown, bloodshot, filled with tears." That's a good sequence of descriptors right there, starting with the strictly physical, moving though the symbolic, "rich" and "warm brown" (in this context clearly meant to suggest emotions of warmth as well as physical color), to the situational. The words and phases mostly get longer as the sentence progresses. This is something writers are taught not to do, because the transition from longer words, phrases, or sentences to shorter increases tension, impact, while moving from shorter to longer does the opposite, and kind of verbal-emotional righty tighty lefty loosey. However, within this moment, that loosening is earned and effective - the relative untidiness of "filled with tears" compared to "dark" reminds us that we are, in fact, in a mess, but that same looseness creates a sense of open endedness, even of possibility. He fills her in on the events she missed, including his best guess that no one is coming for them in any kind of useful timeframe. She says "We've got to get you out of here." and this, to me, is part of the payoff for "What do we do?" and "I couldn't stop you." It's a direct echo of Harry saying the same thing to her at the party, after Lea took her memories, and it helps underscore that their relationship is healthy, balanced, good for Harry, probably good for both of them. "We've got to get you out of here" is something heroes say to damsels in distress, and I just, I love that they can trade those roles back and forth as the situation calls for. 

Unfortunately, getting Harry out of here is complicated by the fact that he used up the last of his reserves on the spell to restore her memory. He's not sure he can walk, much less break down a door and fight his way out through a building full of vampires. Susan asks if it would help if he slept, but of course, as he says, if he did that, Kravos would immediately enter is dreams and start fulfilling those threats about making his last moments a nightmare that lasts for years. But, as Harry apparently told Molly off-screen sometime between the end of Proven Guilty and the end of Cold Days, if you have one problem, you have a problem, if you have two problems, you might have options. In this case, he's got about four problems. He asks if Susan can keep control for a couple of hours, while he sleeps. Susan reminds him that he just said Kravos would kill him, and Harry says he's counting on it.

We're very close to the end of this book. I'm going to try to write a little faster so we don't all forget what's going on between these last few chapters. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 34

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Harry, struggling to wake up after his ordeal, thinks about his father. This, if I remember rightly, is our first real information about him. He was a stage magician, good, according to Harry (who was like six at the time of his father's death and not necessarily objective), but too charitable to ever be very financially successful, although it is worth noting here that in the late 1970s, people employed full time in "amusement and recreation industries" made, on average, in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year, about the same as teachers, a bit more than hotel workers and a bit less than auto mechanics. In today's money, that's about $48,388.50 (although differences in cost of living make accurate comparison difficult), enough to live on in the less expensive parts of Missouri, but hardly in line with conventional notions of "making it big". Harry spent his earliest years sleeping in the back of his father's station wagon, which is interesting inasmuch as it means that even during his very earliest years, when he still felt safe and okay and had a living parent, he didn't have a home in the conventional sense. I'd be genuinely interested to know if that station wagon had any kind of threshold worth talking about. Also of interest here, Harry started having nightmares shortly before his father died. Harry isn't particularly sensitive, magically speaking, and he doesn't have any innate capacity for prescience beyond the limited amount that all wizards seem to possess, although I believe it's implied throughout the series that children are broadly more sensitive than adults. We know Malcolm's death wasn't natural, but don't have any of the particulars, so we're left with four possibilities that I can think of. 1. Little Harry was just more sensitive than grownup Harry is. 2. Someone or something was actively trying to warn him, but the message didn't get through very clearly. 3. Whatever got Malcolm has some specific tendency to cause nightmares in people near its victims when it's like, approaching. 4. Whatever got Malcolm was just so fundamentally big or spooky that it caused a serious disturbance in the force. 

Harry wakes up dizzy, nauseated, wracked by abdominal cramps, and in considerable emotional distress. It takes him a minute to get his eyes open, but when he manages it he sees that he's in a small, horrible smelling laundry room, naked and crusted in his own vomit. Justine is also there, looking disheveled and unsettling, and as soon as she notices Harry noticing her, she starts making some fairly unkind accusations about what he's thinking - and scratches his face about it. Harry asks what the vampires did to her, which, I think, says something about him. He's injured, he's poisoned, he just went through an immensely harrowing experience, this young woman he doesn't know well, and with whom he's had what I would charitably describe as mixed experiences up to this point is accusing him of ableism and misogyny and physically assaulting him, and his first response is "Oh no, what happened to you?". (Obviously, in the broader sense, Harry is not like, wholly innocent of either, but he wasn't doing them here). She shows him the vampire bites on her wrists and thigh, and explains that while she was fed upon, that's not the reason she's unstable. This is her baseline, some kind of poorly defined hormonal condition that prevents her from having the emotional control other people do. Medication didn't help, but Thomas feeding on her emotions does, which is part of why she's with him. We'll come back to this when we get to White Night, and probably again when we get to Battle Ground, but I always found Justine's assertion, in White Night, that her stability at that time was due to medication suspicious because she'd made it so clear in this book that meds don't work for her. On a first read I sorta figured were meant to attribute it to the (not insubstantial) advances in psychopharmacy between 2000 and 2007, but at the time of this writing it seems far more likely than otherwise that her newfound emotional control was in fact because it wasn't her, it was He Who Walks Beside, and I am vindicated. 

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Harry tries to force open the locked door, collapses, vomits again, and loses consciousness for a while. He wakes up with Justine trying to wipe his face with a dirty towel, and asks how long they've been there. Justine says the vampires had him for about two hours, and that it's been around another ten hours since then. He says they need to get out of there, and she says they can't, that this is the larder. Harry tries to explain that he's been poisoned, and needs to go to a hospital soon if he's going to survive, and Justine just kind of...shuts off. Dissociates. Almost immediately, the ghost of Paula, who is referred to in this chapter as Rachel, materializes. She isn't strong enough to speak so that Harry can hear her, but they manage to establish enough communication for her to explain that Bianca's fixation on her death is keeping her here, that she's tired, that she doesn't blame Harry for her death, although Harry apologizes anyway, for his role in it. (As an aside, she indicates "Bianca" with a "bottle-shaped curving gesture". Just, y'know, in case we didn't get that there was a gay thing happening between Paula and Bianca). She looks past him at something that scares her, or more likely that she wants Harry to know should scare him, and vanishes. It's Kravos, now wearing Justine's body, which is interesting, as far as how his ability to possess people works. She wasn't asleep, just kind of absent, which implies that sleeping people are similarly absent from their brains or their bodies or whatever Kravos needs access to. That tracks with what we already know, but it's an interesting way to confirm it. Harry challenges Kravos to try to possess him instead, to come in for a battle in the center of the mind. Kravos, who, while not nearly as smart as he thinks he is and inclined to really catastrophic overcomplication, was not actually born yesterday, refuses. He also tells Harry that several of the Red Court became ill after feeding on his blood. This implies that Reds have the necessary internal anatomy to die of amantin poisoning, which would be mildly intriguing on its own, but also it's Kravos's impression that Bianca was hoping would die as food for her children. He doesn't quote Bianca directly here, he's not trying to be helpful, but that Bianca may have meant for Harry to die earlier in the evening, and that she certainly left him in a room with half-turned Susan, knowing that Susan would try to feed on Harry and that this could very possibly kill both of them, seems to me to reinforce that starting a war with the White Council was a stretch goal at best, and more likely a legitimate accident. If she needed Harry or Susan alive for her plans to come to fruition, and knew this, she would not have left them together. 

Harry insults Kravos's intelligence, provoking him into pinning Harry against the door. He doesn't really do anything, although it's clear that he could, just makes some threats about making Harry's last moments a nightmare that seems to last years, and then leaves Justine's body. She kinda collapses into Harry, who isn't currently in any condition to be collapsed into, and they both end up on the floor, with Harry stroking her hair and trying to comfort her while she cries. She eventually relaxes, and Harry starts trying to make a plan, but he hears something in the laundry pile and of course he has to go investigate, although Justine tells him not to, that he won't like what he finds. She's right, of course - it's Susan, half turned and thirsty for blood. 

The post is a lot shorter than the chapter on this one, because a lot of this chapter is buildup, atmosphere, and emotionality, and there's not a lot for me to say about that other than that it's there and it works. It's sad and spooky and suspenseful - I feel for Harry and Justine, and I'm appropriately concerned about Susan's situation at the end. Also, these posts are considerably easier to write when I'm not directing most of my mental energy to other nonfiction writing. I'm not prepared to commit to a schedule or anything just yet, but the trend it gonna be in favor of More Posts. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!