Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 1

Photo by Luban Tvaroh on Unsplash

Harry meets Billy at Lake Meadow Park to investigate a rain of toads. It's very hot, and Harry's not in a great mood even before one of said toads lands directly on his head. Harry tells Billy to collect some of them, because he needs to check if they're real - if they're not, it's probably just a fairy playing a prank, but if they are, that means reality itself is somehow out of whack, which could be very serious indeed. This handily serves to remind us that fairies are a thing in this setting, which is important since they haven't been mentioned since Harry summoned Toot Toot in the middle of Storm Front, and they're gonna be kind of a big deal this book. Billy has questions about the 'The toads might not be real' thing, but Harry shuts him down hard, saying that he hasn't slept or eaten a hot meal any time recently and he's not in the mood to teach. There's also an old lady with a shopping cart, but we'll get to that in a minute. 

Billy invites Harry to come play Arcanos with him and the other Alphas. Based on his description, I'm guessing this is along the same basic lines as Pathfinder, but as far as I can tell, Arcanos itself is not a real game. He describes how they're working against a Council of some kind in the current campaign, and how there's spells and demons and dragons, which Harry almost reasonably says sounds too much like work. Billy doesn't seem terribly surprised, and uses this as an entry point to express that he's concerned about how much time Harry's spending lurking in the basement, even allowing as it's valid to be stressed about the vampire war and the white council coming to town. Harry denies knowledge of either the war or the Council, and I can't figure out if we're still doing the "The White Council has a whole thing about secrecy" thing or if Harry's just cranky and doesn't think Billy, specifically, whom he perceives as basically a regular civilian, werewolfism notwithstanding,  should know about it. Harry also insists he's gone out and socialized plenty of times, like when he went to a football game with the Alphas. Unfortunately that was six months ago, so this kinda undercuts his argument. Billy lays out, over the course of some back and forth, that Harry doesn't answer the phone or the door anymore, isn't at his office, and apparently hasn't shaved, showered, gotten a haircut, or done laundry in longer than is generally considered socially acceptable. Come to think of it, how does Harry do laundry? Billy says "gone out to do laundry", and if we take that as accurate, he's not handwashing clothes in his sink or using a copper boiler on his hearth and then line drying them in the back yard, which would have been my first thought, but I don't think he can go to a laundromat without risking messing up the machines - even if the washers and dryers, which have relatively few electronic parts, would cooperate, there are other things in there that he'd probably break, and he tends to try to avoid that kind of thing. 

Billy also swung by Harry's office, and informs him that he's a week out from getting evicted if he doesn't pay the rent on it, and that he took the (admittedly fairly extreme) liberty of scheduling Harry a 3pm appointment that day with one Ms. Sommerset. Harry's a normal amount of upset that Billy like, went through his mail, checked his answering machine, and returned phone calls on his behalf, and insists that he's fine, that the last thing he needs is to worry about other people getting hurt for associating with him, and that he doesn't need help. 

Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash

So the old lady with the shopping cart. As they're having this back and forth, and dropping a few other pieces of information, like that the Reds - wait, they keep calling them the "reds", and most of the conflict between them and the White Council is repeatedly described as a "cold war", we should revisit that - are moving more "muscle" into town, we're periodically reminded of this old lady with a shopping cart who's the only other person at the park just now. It's worth reviewing the passage yourself to see how it's interspersed, but we're updated on this old lady and her cart three times before someone tries to kill Harry. A pair of black-clad humans in the bed of a pickup truck open fire on him with what are described as  automatics "in the mini-Uzi tradition", which is a really excellent way to give the reader a good idea of what they should be picturing and what the threat level is without locking yourself into a set of technical specifications which will distract and irritate the gun nerds if you accidentally violate them. Harry gets his shield up, and deflects all the bullets, although it stresses his bracelet, and he's concerned that something might ricochet and hit a bystander. After a few seconds, his attackers have to reload, and he takes the opportunity to use his force ring (we get a reminder of how it works) to strike back at them, although he does it at an angle, because catching them full on could kill them, which would violate the first Law of Magic (of which we are also reminded). One of the gunmen is disarmed and thrown from the truck, the other isn't, but loses the sunglasses and ski mask that are hiding his face, revealing him to be in his mid-teens at the oldest. He takes the magical assault remarkably in stride (indicating that either he's fought wizards before or he's high, although neither possibility is raised explicitly), finishes reloading, and starts shooting at Harry again. At which point, of course, the old lady with the shopping cart reveals herself to be no such thing and produces a sawed off shotgun. With her on one side and the gunman on the other, Harry's shield bracelet can't protect him from both, and he figures he's pretty much dead, and likely Billy along with him, indicating, I note here, that he remembered Billy was there but apparently completely forgot that he has powers of his own. Billy did not forget that he has powers - he strips out of his sweatpants and t-shirt, shifts, and bites the shotgun lady's hand, causing her to drop the gun. Unfortunately, she's a ghoul, so she promptly sprouts claws and teeth of her own, and slashes Billy's face. He backs off a little and circles, timing it so her back is to Harry at the same time the gunman runs empty again. Harry seizes the moment, picks up the shotgun, and tells Billy to move, which prompts the ghoul to turn around, allowing Harry to fire the shotgun into her stomach. Not a fatal injury for a ghoul, but enough to get her to flee to the pickup truck, from whence all of their attackers flee. 

Billy observes that he didn't see the claws coming, which is a sharp and deliberate contrast to Harry's "I don't need help, I won't tell you what's going on" routine. Billy is used to working with a group, and not used to putting up any kind of front. The first thing he did, actually, after this fight (well, and after putting his clothes back on), was ask what the shotgun lady was, and the second thing was to do this error analysis, out loud, without making any kind of big deal about it. What went wrong in this fight? He didn't see the claws coming. This is a reminder to everyone he's working with, even though in this case that's just Harry, to be mindful of the claws the next time they fight a ghoul, and not to assume everything they're fighting that looks human is. It also indicates that this was not a problem of judgement, timing, coordination, or anything else that might need further work or discussion between now and the next patrol. Notably, there's no "I should have seen that", "I'm so stupid", anything like that. Billy doesn't see any shame, or anything to apologize for, in being caught off-guard by an unfamiliar threat, he's just noting it out loud for his own and other's future reference. The Alphas probably make such observations to each other all the time, it's part of what makes them an effective team and Billy and effective leader, and it stands out next to Harry's refusal to even acknowledge that he needs friends. 

Photo by Richie Bettencourt on Unsplash

Harry also tells Billy that the ghoul was probably from the LaChaise clan, which I am never, ever going to spell correctly without looking it up. They work for the Red Court, and Harry has caused them some unspecified headaches in the past. I'd have to check, but I don't think any prior conflict with ghouls is in the short stories, so these headaches may remain a proper noodle incident, if not a terribly mysterious one. And that Billy can let the toads go, because the one Harry was just kind of holding during that entire fight pooped in his hand. Poor toad. That means something is seriously Up in the magical world, a conclusion which is graphically reinforced as they get back in the car, and the light rain of toads becomes an absolute (if highly localized) toad storm, accompanied by a nauseating disruption in the normal flow of magic. 

So there we are, Summer Knight is underway. The other post I'm working on is still in progress, and I haven't spontaneously summoned up the energy to talk about Wheel of Time in the last *checks notes* four days. I still can't usefully commit to any kind of posting schedule, but expect to see something from me within a week, unless something else Happens. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Grave Peril Retrospective

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

Easy things first, it's notable that unlike the first two books, Grave Peril doesn't contain any spectacularly
bad sentences, and does contain a couple of markedly good ones. We're probably going to talk a little bit more about prose and sentence structure as we move forward with this series, if only because as Jim Butcher becomes more consistent in his storytelling techniques, we're eventually going to run out of things to say about the way he does worldbuilding, foreshadowing, and character arcs that isn't "Oh, look, there it is again." 

I must issue a small correction here: when we talked about Chapter 27 of Storm Front, I said I didn't think we saw the montage ending format again, but it does make an appearance here as well. For that matter, I just looked at my post for the last chapter of Fool Moon, and apparently it happened there too, so either this is an early series thing that gets dropped at some point, or it's a consistent thing that I just utterly failed to retain. 

The plot here genuinely doesn't make sense. Let's ignore the wine at Bianca's party having vampire venom in it, assume that was just recreational and that Harry's notions of her not expecting him to come, or poisoning all the wine on extremely short notice were the result of his deeply impaired judgement. Let's assume that she had both the ability and opportunity to mind control Susan into getting a copy made of Harry's invitation. (This is not to say that Susan might not have done it without being mind controlled, but there's no way Bianca could reasonably have planned for that). She still couldn't reasonably have counted on Harry coming to the party, or on his bringing a plus one, especially with the Nightmare putting Murphy out of commission. She couldn't reasonably have planned on his not just claiming protection for Susan. More to the point, she couldn't reasonably have planned on Lea bringing her the sword, unless Lea was entirely in on this from the very beginning, which seems pretty unlikely given her behavior in this book and what she and Mab express about her priorities in later books. Without Amoracchius, she has no real leverage over Harry. Ortega was plainly aiming to start a war (although, why?), but Bianca's plan had like, at least three potential outcomes where Harry was concerned, only one of which involved the war. He could as easily have been killed, either at the party or by Susan in the laundry room, and might have agreed to become a vampire and stay with her and Susan, and it's not at all clear what outcome she was aiming at. If this were Nicodemus, I would assume that all outcomes were considered acceptable wins here, but Bianca doesn't strike me as that type.

I still don't feel like I understand the use of imagery associated with addiction narratives here. It's all over the place but it doesn't really go anywhere. No one in this book really goes through an addiction arc. No one in this series really goes through an addiction arc. Rachel was addicted to vampire venom, but that doesn't seem to affect her choices, or her role in the story, now that she's a ghost. Stallings is apparently addicted to nicotine, but I'm not sure that's ever even mentioned again, and it's certainly not handled by the story as an addiction thing. Justine's situation with Thomas actually isn't presented as an addiction. And while this could have been setting Harry up for long term issues around vampire venom, it mostly doesn't. Lydia might be a drug addict, and someone explicitly suggests as much, but the only time we know of her actually using drugs on purpose, it was to stay awake so she couldn't be possessed by the Nightmare. Come to think of it, after the Three Eye in the first book, addiction is mostly not an issue for anyone in this series, unless I'm forgetting something. Nick Christian is an alcoholic, and the Red King is a blood slave, but they're in one book each and I have difficulty with this notion of someone being addicted to something they literally and straightforwardly need to live. (I am familiar with the concept of food addiction. Not here to challenge how anyone understands their own lived experience, but the Red King is not a real person, has no lived experience, and does not display the behaviors typically associated with food addiction). I guess Mort is an alcoholic in this one, but that doesn't really go anywhere either. On that note, sort of.

List of things we're keeping an eye on, as of the end of Fool Moon:

• The series' difficult relationship with the law and law enforcement. 
• Susceptibility of those who serve the law to psychic trauma and manipulation. 
• Harry has a major vulnerability to things that make stuff hurt less, because he is always in serious physical and emotional discomfort. What is this doing thematically?
• The parallel development of the text's attitude towards women and Harry's attitude towards women. 
• The inadequacy of systems compared to individual judgement and action. 
• Sometimes ingredients for different potions are weirdly similar. Why?
• They "have nots" of the magical community are largely of lower socioeconomic status. Why? It makes sense that powerful magic users can make money if they want, but shouldn't there be minor practitioners who come from money? Where are they?

Additions to this list, accumulated throughout Grave Peril:

• What languages are used for spellcasting, and by whom. 
• Harry's relationship to violence, sexuality, and power, and how that's informed by the sexual trauma he experienced in the late chapters of Grave Peril. 
• Influences from Young Wizards, Wheel of Time, and Valdemar. 
• Is Harry going to give his life (in the sense of either "devote" or "sacrifice") to God?

Malone and Murphy both get got here. Nightmare Kravos possesses Lydia, but the ones he inflicts serious, lasting psychic harm on are the cops. So this throughline is definitely still being built upon, even if we don't yet have any indication what it's about, except that it's interacting with both the series more general difficulty with law enforcement and the inadequacy of systems. Lydia was left lying about loose when they took down Kravos. Kravos was put in regular prison and was able to orchestrate the whole Nightmare thing, because they weren't equipped to deal with him. The cops keep Harry out of the loop about Kravos's suicide because it's police business, where if they'd told him, if Murphy had told him, I think there's about a 70% chance Harry could have basically solved the plot and spent the rest of the book resting off that first concussion rather than accumulating four more. Murphy having been awake for two days was, y'know, probably a factor here, both in her not telling him about Kravos and her being in a position for him to get into her head like that. So just the sheer physical exhaustion often imposed on law enforcement is probably an ongoing factor here, although the former may also be a certain amount of turnabout as fair play, especially given that both Harry and Jim Butcher forgot that Harry didn't actually keep anything secret from Murphy in Fool Moon. We also see some complication to the inadequacy of systems things here, in the form of the Church's supernatural witness protection program. Lydia is the first character thus wrapped up (the Sellses having gone into regular witness protection), and as far as we know, everyone who ends up there is safe and looked after. Harry's vulnerability to things that make him hurt less is definitely on display here, with the vampire venom.

On the misogyny score, this book actually...does pretty well, especially compared to its predecessors? It's got a lot of women in it, which is always a good start. You can still be very misogynistic while having a lot of female characters, obviously, but it's much easier to make clear that a woman displaying a trait that could reasonably be understood as a misogynistic stereotype does not reflect the text's or author's view on women as a group when she's contrasted against lots of other women who don't display that trait. Charity, Lea, Mavra, and Justine are all introduced here, Lydia is load-bearing if not especially well handled, and Sonia, although she doesn't get a lot of depth or screen time, at least gets to be likeable and competent. The only substantial on-page misogyny here, at least that I can find in my notes, is towards Lydia, although that's... significant. Like Harry is really weird about this girl. In Chapters 4 and 15 both, he thinks her willingness to engage in survival sex is suspicious, possibly indicative of involvement with the Nightmare, rather than just, y'know, she's a young woman with few resources at her disposal other than her looks and other people's willingness to take advantage. To say nothing of the assumption that her being victimized by the Nightmare indicates some kind of cooperation with it. That's...not a good look. She's also pretty low on agency here, but that's where the Lots of Women helps. Charity also gets something of the damsel in distress treatment here, but she's instrumental in her own rescue from the Nightmare at the cemetery. Murphy is taken off the board pretty early in the book, but it's honestly hard not to see that as a compliment - if she'd been able to participate, the plot would have been solved too fast, so Butcher had to get her out of the way. We've already talked extensively about how good Susan is in this book, and how Butcher goes out of his way at several points to avoid falling into easy sexist tropes or conventional gender dynamics between her and Harry. Paula is arguably kind of fridged here, I mean, she very much did die to motivate her romantic partner, that was a pretty significant thing that happened. However like, she was fridged for the villain's motivation, she's a woman fridged for another woman's motivation, and she exercises agency and is in fact instrumental in the defeat of the very villain she died to motivate. So while I won't say that this deserves a pass or anything, it's still fridging, it is at least an unusual and somewhat subverted instance thereof. Certain amount of Bury Your Gays, though. Relatedly, Bianca's motives are not at all feminized - wanting revenge about a dead girlfriend is generally something that happens to male characters - although Mavra's are. Speaking of which, the uh, the exorsexism. On the offchance that you're not up on your queer oppression vocabulary, that's hate towards or discrimination against nonbinary, intersex, or altersex people, typically reflecting the belief that it is unnatural, immoral, or impossible for someone to be anything other than entirely and obviously male or entirely and obviously female. Mavra's being referred to as "it" might be a simple piece of species-appropriate dehumanizaton for someone who is both very evil and like, markedly dead, but her physical androgyny, especially as it stands in contrast to her very feminized desire to avenge her murdered children and grandchildren, makes this feel a lot more like the violent degendering of a woman with an ambiguous presentation, and that would be uncool even if it weren't explicitly validated in Harry's perspective, and combined with the repeated assertions that Mavra isn't a lady, isn't a woman, et cetera. They're just this side of harassing her out of a public restroom, honestly. And then we have that crack about the ken doll being anatomically correct, which I think we already talked about as much as we needed to in the chapter in which it occurred, but I'm noting here for posterity.

One of the awkward things about vampires is that you have to talk about their literary sources as much as their mythological sources if you want to be at all thorough, and the literary sources are all over the damn place. To the best of my knowledge, none of the vampire types in The Dresden Files are an exact match for any previous literary or mythological vampire or type of vampire, but nearly all their traits have some precedent. We're going to focus on the Red Court here, and get into the Black and White courts in Blood Rites when we actually learn more than the most cursory details about them. Before we proceed, I should note that we are going to be talking about a lot of creatures whose names either have no standard spelling in the Latin alphabet, have no standard spelling at all, or have multiple similar names across the languages of different peoples. I have generally defaulted to the spelling that appears in the title of any given creature or entity's wikipedia page, from whence you should be able to find at least some of the other names or spellings.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

If the narcotic venom has any direct mythological or folkloric antecedents, they are outside of both readily available vampire lore and my own (by no means comprehensive!) knowledge of mythology and folklore. This concept, as applied to vampires, seems to first appear in Carmilla (which I unfortunately have not yet read), and likely bears a relationship to both the incubus and to sleep paralysis demons like the alp and the mare, both of which are blood drinkers, given the transition from pleasure to suffocation that Laura experiences when Carmilla feeds upon her. Given the nature of the central relationship in Carmilla, I probably should have read it at some point while working on Grave Peril, but I didn't know about the lesbian vampire situation until I started writing this post. Being fed upon as an ecstatic, potentially addictive experience, was sufficiently thought of by 1991 to be codified in the first edition of Vampire the Masquerade, from whence it was transmitted to the urban fantasy of the era, even if Vampire's own literary precedents were not among any given author's influences. I don't know if Jim Butcher has read vampire, but I know he played Changeling, so I'd be very surprised if he hadn't. Storm Front itself is the earliest text with which I am personally familiar that specifically makes the source of ecstasy in being fed upon a venom. The only mythological association I can find between anything resembling vampires and bats or batlike creatures is the Piuchén, a blood drinking snake or lizard with bird or bat wings from Mapuche mythology, which may be able to shapeshift, into the form of humans, plants, or other animals, and in some versions has a mixed form with animal features. Many mythological vampires or other blood drinkers have some ability to shapeshift, but their inhuman form is not a bat or something batlike. In the 1870 novel (strictly speaking a series of short stories) Vikram and the Vampire by Sir Richard Burton, the "vampire" in question, a baital (aka a vetala and like, 6 other similar names because local variation in pronunciation plus Englishmen trying to spell foreign words) is described in the preface as "a huge Bat, Vampire, or Evil Spirit which inhabited and animated dead bodies", although the only batlike quality it appears to display in the text is hanging upside down by its toes (I haven't read this one in its entirety either, just skimmed it). Aside from being associated with dead bodies and often malevolant, the vetala as it appears in mythology does not seem to have any particularly vampiric qualities. Vampires, as such, turning into bats, as such, appears to originate with Dracula, and was certainly codified by it, and the association of vampires with bats appears to have come about sometimes between the 1500s and the 1800s, when white people became aware of blood drinking bats (first referred to as "vampire bats" in 1810) in the Americas. The bat form the Red Court vampires take is, however, seems to draw heavily from Camazotz, a Mayan bat spirit that spreads disease, and which probably serves the lords of the underworld. In the Popol Vuh, they're a type of thing, rather than a thing, and give the Hero Twins some trouble, but the Popol Vuh was strictly oral tradition for most of its existence, and our oldest written records of it are from the early 18th century and were created by Dominican (in the sense of being part of the Domincan Order, not of being from the Dominican Republic) priest Francisco Ximenez, giving us something of a Snorri Sturlson problem, although that's honestly a much less severe problem than we might have had under the circumstances. Per my partner, who actually has some background in this area, Ximenez is generally considered reliable. The flesh masks may reference the Caribbean soucouyant (also known as an asema, or simply a hag), who removes her skin before coming to drink your blood and is believed to be a syncreticization of french vampire folklore, the Yoruba Aje, and the Caribbean creatures (properly a category of creatures) called jumbees.

In mythology, most vampires are revanants - they were killed by a vampire, or were fed upon by a vampire and later died, or they met some other precondition for vampirism that caused them to become one after their death, although those upon whom a soucouyant feeds excessively may become one themselves without dying first. The half-turned junior vampires of the Red Court seem to be playing with both the psychic connection sometimes established between a vampire and its prey (I have not been able to confirm that this predates Carmilla), which is part of the "get fed upon by a vampire, die, rise as a vampire" deal, and with the dhampir, the child (traditionally the son) of a vampire and a human. In Albanian folklore, dhampir are mostly human, but can practice sorcery and see invisible vampires, may be unusually courageous, and traditionally kill their vampire parent (almost invariably their father). They eat regular food without issue, but may be able to extend their lives by drinking human blood. In I think mostly the 15 and 1600s, people claiming to be dhampir were sometimes hired to fight vampires other than their own parents, in order to rid a village of a vampire who was causing a plague or crop failure. In literature, the dhampir seems to have been popularized by Blade. 

While they do not have all the classic vampire weaknesses (notably they are unbothered by garlic and, as far as I know, by hawthorn), most the the Reds' vulnerabilities (sunlight, holy symbols and holy water) are associated with folkloric vampires, with two notable exceptions: their inability to enter homes without an invitation, and their ability to be incapacitated by opening the blood reservoir in their bellies. Whether the "can't enter without an invitation" thing is even in Dracula is sort of a matter of interpretation, and certainly it does not seem to have applied to vampires before this point, although it certainly applied to the fae and a few similar things. Notably, the Red Court vampires of Dresden Files are to some extent creatures of the Nevernever, and separated from the fae more by taxonomy than origin. If the blood reservoirs have any literary source, I have not been able to discover it - they do not appear in Vampire: The Masquerade or Vampire: The Requiem (the source material for the former in particular consisting largely of comics I haven't read) - and do not appear in most contemporary urban fantasy. Instead, this seems to draw from the kappa, creatures of japanese folklore who occasionally drink blood (although for the most part they would rather have a cucumber) and who can be weakened by tricking them into spilling the reservoir of water on their heads (conventionally by bowing deeply, prompting them to do the same), and the Capelobo, a blood and brain eating therianthrope from Brazilian mythology, which might resemble a dog, tapir, or anteater, and which according to at least one source can only be defeated by shooting it in the navel. In this case this seems to be the matter of getting such a precise shot on a dangerous creature with a great deal of obscuring hair, but this is the only vampiric creature I'm aware of for which "get it in the stomach" is a conventional means of defeat. 

Vampires living in societies with complex hierarchies and archaic titles seems to be a 20th century convention. Certainly it existed before 1991, but I cannot readily say from whence it came, although the aristocratic contexts of Dracula and Carmilla must have played a role in its development. Before embarking on this post, I had thought their extensive presence in Central and South America was codified by Vampire: The Masquerade, but if it was, it was not by any of the first three editions of the core rulebook (all other having been published after Grave Peril). So like, why South America? First of all, there's the vampire bats. All three of the world's extant blood drinking bat species live in South or Central America, so it's sort of reasonable to put vampire vampires there as well. Second, much of that area is a hot mess, politically and economically speaking, and if you're not familiar with how it got that way, "it's because of the vampires" probably seems like a reasonable, even antiracist proposition. The short answer is that this part of the world has repeatedly found itself on the expendable/exploitable end of US policies on everything from communism to paper manufacturing. The shorter version is that if you just blame Henry Kissinger, personally, for all of it, you'll be missing some nuance but close enough for government work, although Harry Anslinger probably deserves a dishonorable mention here as well. In a way, this plays with the Southern Gothic tradition, using supernatural creatures (not exclusively vampires) to talk about the various acts of colonialism, slavery, environmental exploitation, racism, and manoralism committed by white people in the Americas, and like, that's pretty accurate here. It is also worth noting that much of the US's fuckery with its southern neighbors was a lot harder to know about when Grave Peril was being written than it is today, as the documents surrounding US involvement with Operation Condor were not declassified until 1999, and there wasn't google yet. (The history of fuckery is long here, I don't know when other things might have been declassified, or how widely known they were prior to officially becoming knowable).Third, there are the persistent rumors, which I have largely encountered through talking to other humans in physical space, and which I have been utterly unable to source, that Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, or both, were vampires. Frankly this strikes me as at least as plausible as any other claim that a real historical person was a vampire. There may be a relationship between this and the pishtaco, a boogeyman who appears as a white man or mestizo and steals people's fat. He originates in what Wikipedia insists are rumors of conquistadors killing indigenous people to use their fat for medicines or to lubricate their guns. Personally I think they did do that. Like, it sounds reasonable. Fucking conquistadors. Anyway. Notably a pishtaco might be warded off by showing him a clove of garlic that has been pierced with a needle. 

Anyway. Like I said we're gonna talk more about the other Vampire courts when we get to Blood Rites, but the other thing Grave Peril really introduces are ghosts, and there's enough here to be worth talking about without getting into stuff from later books. 

Photo by Šimom Caban on Unsplash

If the spirits of the dead hanging out in the world of the living, or influencing our world from some kind of other side, is not a true cultural universal, it's pretty damn close. Of course, ghosts in the Dresden Files, while they seem to have some kind of consciousness, are not the real spirits of the people they resemble, but impressions left behind on the environment. This idea originates with the 19th century notion of place memory, which is what it sounds like, the idea that sounds, events, or emotions could be stored in the places they happened and later retrieved by individuals with the right gifts or skills. Early members of the Society for Psychical Research - an organization which still exists, and which has been involved (more properly, members of which have been involved) with both the perpetuation and the debunking of numerous fraudulent psychic phenomena - considered place memory a possible explanation for hauntings. The idea of "ectoplasm" also dates to this period, and originates in roughly the same community. Originally it was conceived of as a gauzy material draped over mediums by the spirits with which they communicated. I note with interest that this would bear some visual similarity to a caul, the membrane that a very few (roughly 1 in 18,000) babies are born with, which has been associated with supernatural abilities in some parts of Europe since at least the early modern period, and in Romania indicates that the child will become a strigoi (a type of vampire) when it dies. It seems to have been noted spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle who described it as a viscous, gelatinous substance, as is the case in Dresden Files. I cannot find a literary or folkloric origin for ghosts only being able to interact with things related to their death or the trauma that caused them to exist, but it follows quite naturally from the fact that ghosts in folklore and legend generally only do interact with people or things within some specified area of interest. In urban fantasy, which tends to want Rules, this pretty naturally translates into the idea that they only can interact with those things.

Okay, I think that's everything. I'm working on the post for Wheel of Time season 3, but it might be a while. Hopefully not a "don't put it up until like a week before the next season" while, but a while. There's uh, a lot to unpack about the final episode. We'll get started on Summer Knight sometime in the soonish, and I've got a couple of other posts in the works. I also had an Idea about this series, but I'll let you know more about that when it's past the "Could I actually do this?" stage. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 39

Photo by Jill Sauve on Unsplash

This chapter is a kind of montage epilogue tying up the loose ends from this book and setting some of the
major threads for the next one. 

The burn unit at the hospital is full, presumably due to Harry setting Bianca's party on fire. This is basically good news since it means a lot of the human attendees survived, but they stuck Harry in the maternity ward, with Charity, and she's recovered enough to be mean to him the entire time they're in there together, which he mostly weathers with the equanimity of someone who probably has a decent morphine drip. The baby pulled through and is getting stronger, which Harry suspects is due to Kravos having eaten some of his essence and Harry getting it back when he killed and ate Kravos, and Michael thinks is due to God simply declaring that morning to be a day of good things. It strikes me as likely that there is at least some truth to both positions. They're naming the baby after Harry, which is incredibly sweet even if it does also mean the poor kid is gonna be stuck with the name Harry Carpenter. It's no wonder they end up calling him Hank. Forthill and Michael take turns keeping an eye on Harry until he's released from the hospital, to keep him safe from vampire attacks, and when Harry tells Michael that he's worried about the repercussions of using destructive magic, Michael suggests, albeit in somewhat oblique language, that in this case Harry was the mechanism of the universe's retribution, and is therefor unlikely to be its subject. 

Harry, in a wheelchair, and Murphy, newly awakened from Harry's sleep spell, go to Kravos's funeral. They're the only ones who do, since absolutely nobody liked him. Murphy feels bad that she wasn't able to fight back against Kravos, she feels vulnerable and helpless, which is setting up her PTSD and personality changes in the next book, as well as her much greater willingness to trust and depend upon Harry between here and Cold Days. They have a little bit of a Moment in which they squeeze each other's hands. On the way out of the cemetery, Murphy sees Harry's headstone, and he assures her that he hasn't died doing the right thing. Yet. This is a good moment, but it's a bit odd that Kravos was buried in what we were told earlier in this book is a pretty expensive and exclusive cemetery. If we're ever told who went to the trouble of arranging it, I don't remember. 

Lydia, whose real name was apparently Barbara, goes into some kind of supernatural witness protection arranged by the church, but sends Harry a note apologizing and thanking him for his help. Thomas also sends Harry a thank you note, attached to Justine wearing nothing but a ribbon, clearly intended to be a gift to Harry. I'm sure that within the White Court this would be a perfectly reasonable gesture of appreciation and friendship, but I'm not sure it's consistent with Thomas's later characterization that he'd be sufficiently out of touch with human social norms to think this made sense for a human wizard. In any case, Harry sends Justine back, although he keeps the card (if I remember correctly, it's indicated in a later book that he also kept the ribbon, which gives me Questions about what Justine went home in). The ick factor of being given a whole other human being as a gift doesn't come up in the text, but Justine's emotional instability does, although Harry is careful to emphasize that it's not really her fault. He doesn't see needing a supernaturally attractive sex vampire to maintain your emotional equilibrium as fundamentally different from needing to take a mood stabilizer, and both are valid. 

Photo by Peter Hansen on Unsplash

Susan called every day when Harry was in the hospital, but she's essentially dropped off the face of the earth since he got out. She moved out of her apartment and he can't get ahold of her at work. Eventually he uses magic to track her down while she's sunbathing at the beach, enjoying one of the last warm days of autumn. (This and the implied chronological distance to Harry's birthday later in this chapter suggests that it is not the tail end of October and the sunset times in Chapter 23 really don't make any sense). She tells him that the sunlight helps with the vampire impulses, but she has to lock herself in at night. Thomas and Justine gave her the basic rundown on her condition, another thing I would honestly have loved to read about. Harry says he'll find a cure, and then proposes, although he feels bad about the engagement ring being small. Susan kisses him, giving him a small dose of venom in the process (driving home how much she's changed, how much they both change, as Harry realizes he'd been craving it), and then says no. She tells him that she couldn't control herself, that the hungers are too intertwined. This is remarkably similar to the difficulty Thomas describes having with Justine in Turn Coat, which makes me wonder a little whether she would have come to the same conclusions if they hadn't been the ones to read her in on the half-vampire situation. And oh, the gender of it all. Taken in summary, Susan's arc follows this very tidy, stereotypical damsel in distress to badass action girl to fridged woman trajectory, but in the early books, where she's actually around, that really isn't who she is or what her relationship to Harry is, and I kind of wonder whether, if Jim Butcher had been a slightly more mature writer when he started the series, or taken the second and third books a little slower, we wouldn't have gotten something completely different for her, maybe something where she stays and remains both Harry's girlfriend and increasingly one of his allies against the forces of darkness, where she and Thomas have a lot to talk about, maybe get close before Harry and Thomas do, where maybe Murphy pulls away from Harry as a result of the traumatic events of this book rather than getting closer and becomes a recurring antagonist, or maybe she gets basically the same role she has in the books as written because Harry can, actually, have more than one important woman in his life at a time (we get there eventually in any case, but it takes a while because unresolved authorial sexism). That's probably a completely different series in some important ways, as changes like this usually have something of a domino effect. She leaves, telling Harry not to look for her, and that she'll call him 

Harry has nightmares now, about what Bianca and her vampires did to him. He basically stops leaving the house as he starts working on a cure or treatment for Susan. The juxtaposition of these things really reinforces what I said in Chapter 33 about Harry's efforts to fix Susan being about wanting to undo what happened to him. He's focusing on the theoretically achievable goal of reversing what Bianca did to Susan because it's theoretically achievable, whereas he can't just, make himself not have been sexually and physically assaulted. Bob tells him that the war is officially underway, and Paris and Berlin are in chaos, although it's not really clear what that means in practical terms. The White Council is coming to Chicago for a meeting about it, during which Harry will be called to account for his role in the outbreak of hostilities - this is, in fact, how Summer Knight starts, and it's good efficiency to just tell us that here, rather than having to either fill the reader in by narration or do a whole scene to give Harry the news at the beginning of Summer Knight. Murphy and Michael either know or guess that Harry's having a bad time, and come by with a care package, including the things he needs to help heat his apartment through the winter. And a razor, which Harry describes in narration as "pointed", giving us an idea that he's not taking care of himself very well. But they ask how he's doing and he invites them in - Harry reflects that friends make it easier. 

The minor practitioners of Chicago, and presumably everywhere else, have stopped going outside at night. Harry stops ordering pizza after someone delivers a bomb instead. Susan does not, in fact, call, but sent a card on Harry's birthday, which only said "I love you". 

So that's it for Grave Peril. Depending on how fast I work, the next post will either be the wrap up for this book, in which we discuss mythology, misogyny, and my ever-growing list of things to keep an eye on, or the Likes and Reservations post for Season 3 of Wheel of Time. I don't think I'm doing a midseason post for this one, we'll take the whole thing on balance when it's done. In either case, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 38

Photo by Vitaliy Shevchenko on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Tom Frances Palattao on Unsplash

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

Photo by Daniel Bonilla on Unsplash

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. 

• 

  Photo by Roman Skrypnyk on Unsplash

  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. 

• 

  Photo by Jonathan Greenaway on Unsplash

  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. 

• 

  Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

  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. 

• 

  Photo by Dieter K on Unsplash

  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.  

• 

  Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash

  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. 

• 

  Photo by Rajiv Bajaj on Unsplash

   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). 

• 

  Photo by Dyu - Ha on Unsplash

  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!