The Dresden Files / Tropes A to M

The books of The Dresden Files have many, many tropes. These are tropes A through M. You can find tropes N through Z here.

Please make sure spoilers are properly tagged. The series has a lot of them, so try not to ruin everyone else's fun.

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A

• A Death in the Limelight: Morgan gains a lot of narrative focus and Character Development in Turn Coat leading up to their death, as does Susan in Changes, Maeve in Cold Days, and Deidre in Skin Game.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade:
  • The Swords of the Cross are able to go through just about anything. Amoracchius, for example, can go clean through a steel fire door and kill the man on the other side without any real effort on Michael's part. The RPG says they can take advantage of any Weaksauce Weakness the target may have so long as they're "on the clock."
    • As of the end of Skin Game, Fidellachius has become a lightsaber because, as the Sword of Faith, Butters' faith in good versus evil is based on Star Wars as he takes up the sword and becomes a (Jedi) Knight, quoting Yoda in the process.
  • Swords wielded by the Wardens are enchanted on several levels, including, apparently, being able to cut through anything. On at least one occasion, one cuts through a whole tree with little effort. In the RPG book, this is represented as an option to make it hit for Weapon:6 damage. For comparison's sake, the swords are normally Weapon:3, and Weapon:4 damage and above is usually reserved for powerful spells and/or battlefield explosives.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Lord Raith is at the top end of this scale. He (eventually) kills his sons, and he rapes his daughters into servitude using his powers as an incubus. When his eldest daughter discovers that his powers no longer work it goes... poorly for Lord Raith.
  • Justin DuMorne also counted, being Harry and Elaine's adoptive father. Harry mentions that his training to create a magical shield started with baseballs being thrown at him. Later on Justin attempted to mentally enslave both Elaine and Harry, only succeeding with the former before the latter ran away. In response, he summoned a freaking Outsider to hunt Harry down and kill him. Then, after Harry returned to try and rescue Elaine after getting rid of the Outsider, Harry was forced to kill Justin in self-defense after Justin had decided Harry had outlived his usefulness.
  • In the short story "The Warrior", there's a young girl who was being beaten by her father. A comment Harry makes, after making a Diving Save when she is in the way of an oncoming car, alerts her mother to that fact. The girl is used as an example in the ending's You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech on how seemingly minor actions can have a major impact, as by making Courtney's mother aware of the abuse, Dresden "shattered a generational cycle of abuse more than three hundred years old".
• Action Girl: At Dragon*Con 2010, Jim was on a panel about gender roles. The only reason he could figure out why he was up there was because, "I write women who kick ass." At this point, the only recurring female characters who aren't Action Girls all live in the Carpenter household and are somewhere between the ages of eight and eighteen. And given their lineage, it's better to say they haven't become Action Girls yet.
• Adaptation Distillation:
  • The comic books. As Jim Butcher himself points out, The Dresden Files has the heart and soul of a comic book anyway.
  • The roleplaying game is both incredibly faithful to the books, condensing the Dresdenverse into a very elegant and functional game, and flexible enough to handle anything you might want to do with the game. An example is how a couple of people in one playtest group wanted to play as a ghost and a ghoul. They managed to figure out how to do so after about 10 min of planning for each. Additionally, one of the other playtester groups succeeded in making a character who was essentially an animated sentient whip.
• After-Action Patch-Up: Frequently, because Harry needs patching up a lot. Michael's wife, Charity, is a frequent medic — but she doesn't like Harry much, so while Harry muses that they make disinfectants that numb and don't cause pain these days, Charity still uses iodine.
• Age-Down Romance: After the nearly 300-year-old Captain Luccio has her body swapped with a 25-year-old's, she briefly dates Harry, who is in his thirties. Discussed when she complains that the swap has left her dealing with hormones that she hasn't experienced in centuries.
• Ain't No Rule: Harry lives in a world where The Masquerade is preserved by tradition rather than law. It's a minor annoyance to the White Council that they don't actually have the authority to stop him from advertising as a Wizard in the phone book.
• Alien Blood: Black for Red Court vampires, a paler shade of red (almost pink) than usual for the White Court, watery brown for ghouls, green for Fomor, red but with a mucus-like consistency for Fomor servitors, all over the map for the really exotic beasties. Lampshaded in Summer Knight, when one fey warrior's sword is said to look like he'd "cut the throat of a baby rainbow" when there's so many different colors of blood on it. In fact, in the later books, hosts who are "in the know" concerning the supernatural will ask prospective guests to prick their fingers and "bleed for me," showing whether they are actually human or not.
• All-Accessible Magic: In addition to the innate magic of wizards, which is only accessible to the rare few born with the power, magic can also be done using complicated ritual circles. This is achievable basically by any person who knows the ritual, wizard or not, and can perform the right ritual and obtain the magical result. Harry likens it to a cosmic vending machine: put in an order, and magic effects are expended. The main difference between a wizard and a muggle is that, aside from overall more power, a wizard can develop a sense of where magical power is and how it's moving. Casting a spell without this sense is like a blind man building a house; very difficult, but possible. In Dead Beat, Butters is able to create a simple protective circle by following Harry's instructions, although he has to be told that it worked. As of Skin Game, he's used practical knowhow from Bob to become a kind of proxy-wizard, creating magical devices by ritual means.
• All Beer Is Ale: Although the series takes place in 21st century America - where most commercially available beer is lager - Harry actually prefers a craft ale brewed by the owner of MacAnally's.
• All Crimes Are Equal: The White Council claims stewardship of all human practitioners of magic, even those that are completely ignorant of the exact nature of magic, their abilities, the Council, or even the Council's Laws of Magic. And as far as the Council is concerned, this trope is in full effect.
  • Most magic isn't inherently good or evil, but it can affect the user in certain ways, and most magic used to directly produce a negative effect on one's fellow humans is considered Black Magic, even if the intent was entirely the opposite. Black Magic has a corrupting effect that can easily make one drunk on power in short order. The White Council has established its laws to quantify and forbid anything that would be counted as black magic, and does everything in its power to stymie potential warlocks. By the time the Council gets to them, most Warlocks don't have much of a reasonable hope for rehabilitation. While even their own wizards sometimes toe the line and abuse loopholes, anybody apprehended after outright breaking the Laws will have a brief trial followed by a summary execution.
  • The White Council has a grand total of seven laws: Thou Shall Not Kill (no magic to kill your fellow humans, weapons are fine, though that doesn't mean "no consequences"); Thou Shalt Not Transform Others (because in a nonhuman body, the mind would slowly change, effectively killing the victim given enough time); Thou Shalt Not Invade the Mind of Another (looking through the mind of another without an invitation to do so is a light form of Mind Rape); Thou Shalt Not Enthrall Another (mind control, and full-on Mind Rape); Thou Shalt Not Reach Beyond the Borders of Life (no necromancy of humans, though its benevolent cousin is "ectomancy", and that one's okay); Thou Shalt Not Swim Against the Currents of Time (no Time Travel and places heavy restrictions on divination, doing either can result in a Temporal Paradox, and is incredibly dangerous to the user and the fabric of reality); and finally Thou Shalt Not Open the Outer Gates (no looking for knowledge from the Outside, no talking to the Outsiders. Period.).
• The Alleged Car: Harry's car, the Blue Beetle is, not to put too fine a point on it, junk. It suffers much of its damage over the course of the series, but his mechanic is good enough that he can keep the thing running about 7 days out of 10. By Changes it has been destroyed beyond repair.
• Allergic to Love: Completely literal in the case of White Court vampires (at least for those feeding on lust), who receive painful, blistering burns from attempted feeding with anyone whose last sexual intercourse was with someone they truly loved and who truly loved them - even if that person was the White Court vampire in question. The effect even extends to gifts made for that person by their loved one, wedding rings, etc.
  • The micro-fiction "Job Placement" has some interesting implications for this. Irwin, a scion of the Forest People, ^note basically, he's half-Bigfoot and Connie, a White Court Vampire, have been in a relationship for several years (the short story ends with them getting engaged) and have sex both frequently and with great enthusiasm without any issues of the kind that Justine and Thomas suffer (it probably helps that Irwin's capable of feeding Connie's Hunger all by himself with no ill effects). Connie has wondered about the implications of this; Irwin thinks it's because neither of them are completely human. So whether the trope may only apply to those fully human, or because Connie was in complete ignorance about her magical nature until after she and Irwin became a solid couple without hurting him (i.e. Your Mind Makes It Real) is an interesting question.
• All Myths Are True: Yep, all of them. Particular emphasis tends to be given to the Western mythologies and beliefs (Abrahamic, Celtic, Greco-Roman, Norse, Slavic, West African, Native American, et cetera), which makes sense since the series takes place in the US, but passing references are made to Eastern mythologies and beliefs as well, such as the Jade Court of Vampires (based on Eastern vampire mythology), Harry getting into an argument with a naga in one of the side comics, and the Temple Dogs being inspired by both Shenism and Tibetan Mythology. Jim Butcher has stated in interviews that he makes it a point never to ask "Does this fit into my world," only "How does this fit into my world?"
  • Case in point: while the Roman Catholic Church and the forces of the Abrahamic God are a major plot element in some books, Donar Vadderung becomes a fairly important secondary character later in the series. He's the head of a PMC company that doesn't discriminate who it hires out to, though Donar himself is broadly on the same side as the Church. He's also Odin. And Santa Claus.
  • Though it's implied that at least some myths may get changed over time, such as the idea of the Valkyries being Odin's daughters. And the story of Hades abducting Persephone is actually just a cover-up.
• All Women Hate Each Other: Discussed. Harry narrates in one book that women have a complex series of criteria and mental calculations they go through when they meet one another to decide whether to take an instant dislike.
  "Men have a similar system, but it's binary: 'Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?"
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • The White Council's opinion on any vampire, although the White Court are at least capable of acting civilized and not sucking the life force from anyone they meet. However, that ultimately does not make them any less monstrous.
  • Any warlock, since Black Magic poisons your soul.
  • The Fallen, and demons in general.
  • Ghouls may not be cackling villains, but all ghouls so far are shown to be ruthless mercenaries who have no problems with killing anyone, including children. Plus the fact that they eat meat, and lots of it, and human meat works more than well.
  • Ethniu the Last Titan, the Big Bad of Peace Talks and Battle Ground, certainly qualifies, as her Evil Plan is to ultimately turn the entire world into a realm of death and destruction For the Evulz.
  • In fact, plenty of the creatures of the Nevernever must be inherently evil, seeing as they are at least partially shaped by humans' beliefs.
• Altar Diplomacy: Mab betroths Harry to Lara Raith, to everyone's surprise, at the end of Battle Ground to try and preserve the Unseelie Accords.
• Ambiguously Human: The Forest People, Svartalves, and Dogmen have increasingly become this as the books go on. On the one hand, they're all clearly not human in the most obvious sense, with the Forest People being a race of Bigfoot, the Svartalves are basically the Dark Elves/Dwarves of Norse Mythology (though they look more like The Greys than anything else), and the Dogmen all look like Wolfmen. However, they're also all shown to have aspects that were previously thought to be only available to mortals, such as having free will, being able to host one of the Fallen (with the Genoskwa in Skin Game taking up the Coin of Ursiel), and being able to Soulgaze a mortal wizard. It's possible that they're a Human Subspecies gifted with supernatural talent millennia back... but nothing's made explicit one way or the other.
• Amphibian Assault: In the first book, Dresden fights a humanoid toad demon that looks like a large man in a trench coat.
• Anchored Ship: Harry/Murphy. The anchor looked to be being pulled up right at the end of Changes, but subsequent events again put the end destination in question. Cold Days rattles the anchor chain like crazy. In Skin Game, it finally, legitimately moves forward, and is 100% official by Peace Talks...which sadly only lasts until Murphy's death in Battle Ground.
• Angelic Transformation: The angels of the Dresden Files universe are revealed to be capable of transubstantiation in Skin Game, when Archangel Uriel temporarily transfers his Grace to Michael Carpenter. Doing so renders the angel, for all intents and purposes, a mortal, while giving the mortal some of the angelic powers. The biggest downside, though, is that if the mortal ever willingly abuses those powers for evil (as mortals are prone to), the angel automatically Falls.
• Angels, Devils and Squid: There is God and His angels. There's also Satan and his Fallen Angels. Both of these are separate and distinct from demons, which is a catch-all term for typically malevolent supernatural creatures that aren't neatly aligned with one specific supernatural entity. Though the Old Ones, and their foot soldiers, the Outsiders are the weirdest, there are also sidhe, wyldfae, pagan gods, demigods, vampire lords, dragons, and others hanging around the place, to the point where it reaches Fantasy Kitchen Sink levels.
• Anti-Magic: Water "grounds out" magical energy, and running water is even more effective. While not an outright barrier, it makes magic lose its energy and effectiveness much more quickly than normal, and more energy needs to be pushed into the spell to make it work.
• Anyone Can Die: Carmichael, Morgan, Susan, and even Harry himself.
  • Even immortals can die (as evidenced by Maeve and Lily), albeit only under special circumstances.
  • Battle Ground adds Hendricks, Wild Bill, Yoshimo, and, most shockingly, Murphy.
• Arc Number:
  • Three. There are three prominent Vampire Courts (Red, White, and Black), three types of fae (Winter, Summer, and Wyld), three Sidhe Queens for each Court, thirty (three times ten) pieces of silver containing Fallen Angels, and three Swords of the Cross created by the three nails that pierced Christ at the Crucifixion.
  • Five. The Denarians, for whatever reason, only show up in series entries that are multiples of five - Death Masks (the fifth), Small Favor (the tenth), and Skin Game (the fifteenth).
  • Seven. There are seven members of the Senior Council and Seven Laws of Magic. Harry was also Driven to Suicide by one of the Fallen lying to him with seven words, and Uriel serves as a Hope Bringer to Harry by giving him seven words of utter truth after he comes Back from the Dead.
• The Archmage:
  • The Senior Council and particularly the Merlin are this for the White Council.
  • The Archive, a little girl who knows absolutely everything that has been ever written down. She's been shown as powerful enough to hold off fallen angels, literally with one hand, using only the latent magic present in her 12 year-old body.
  • Another candidate for the title is Cowl, a villain explicitly stated to be Senior Council-class in terms of power.
  • Heinrich Kemmler, a (now mercifully deceased) Evil Sorcerer referred to as a "black magic messiah" who took the whole White Council (as in the Merlin, the Senior Council, the Wardens, Simon Petrovich's brute squad and every non-evil magic user with any combat capabilities) to take down.
  • For a non-human candidate, we have the Eldest Gruff. He is a 5 foot tall anthro-billy goat. But he is the top assassin for the Summer Court, wears three purple shawls he took from the dead Senior Council members he beat, and killed the the host of a Fallen Angel with so little effort it was described to be like swatting away a pesky fly. And Titania, Queen of the Summer Court, sent him to kill Harry.
  • And even amongst the Fae kind, the six Queens are in general far stronger than any of their courts. Special mention, however, must go to Mother Winter, the eldest of the Winter Court. She possesses powers of ultimate destruction, including the Unraveling. The Unraveling is capable of breaking most every curse or magical spell, including turning a vampire back into a human being. Presumably Mother Summer is equal to her in terms of power as well.
  • There's also the original Merlin, back when he was still around. The magic he used to set up the prison on Demonreach was so advanced that Bob uses the analogy of an internal combustion engine compared to Harry's wooden axles.
  • Harry himself is a candidate, as he's often described as the strongest wizard of his generation. He doesn't have the control, finesse or experience yet, though. A wizard of the White Council isn't considered a mature practitioner until they've been on the Council for a century and Harry (as of Skin Game) is only in his mid-forties. By comparison, Senior Councillors have three or four centuries of experience and accumulated ability. Harry admits that in a couple hundred years, it's very possible he could become the second-or-third-most powerful wizard in the world, and that's not even considering his various other sources of power he gains over the series. By Skin Game he feels reasonably certain he could take on Mab if they're on Demonreach. That's a lot of power.
• The Armies of Heaven: The existence of the Heavenly Host has been foreshadowed by Queen Mab, but they are yet to make a canon appearance. Archangel Michael (who also has yet to be introduced) is said to be their Frontline General. Archangel Uriel, who has been introduced, is their spec-ops guy.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Generally averted; while Kevlar vests are usually not sufficient against most supernatural threats, everyone who knows what they are up against makes sure to include mail, possibly supplemented with plate, to deflect claws or blades. Charity makes Michael's full plate armor (reinforced with kevlar), and she gave Murphy a double-thickness bulletproof vest with titanium chainmail fitting inbetween layers for Christmas. Come Ghost Story, most characters are in possession of similar kevlar/titanium hybrid armors, all made by Charity.
  Michael: My faith protects me. My Kevlar helps.
  • Dresden's coat is enchanted to be nearly impenetrable and as resistant as chainmail or kevlar to being stabbed, cut, or shot, and several times it's been the only thing stopping him from being killed instantly. Occasionally, though, he points out that it's not great against heavy, blunt blows like clubs or fists.
• Army of Lawyers: It is mentioned many times that Marcone has one to protect him from any kind of legal charges.
• The Artifact: The series title itself. Back when the series was about a wizard-cum-private detective-cum-police consultant, it made sense to have a series title that evoked the idea of working cases and keeping files. Now that it's grown well past that premise and regularly features our hero going to war with vampires, battling demons and fallen angels, watching his friends become holy warriors and Fey princesses, becoming a warrior of the Fey himself and stealing ancient artifacts from gods, the title might make someone who picks up one of the later books without reading the earlier ones think "Files? Just what sort of files is he keeping, anyway?"
  • Although many fans believe that the books are supposed to be journals written by older Harry Dresden, after the fact, in the same way that many wizards before him recorded their experiences.
• Artistic License – Animal Care: One random gag has Dresden mention that he doesn't have a gas mask, which is why he doesn't give Mouse onion rings. As any animal owner can tell you, giving a canine onion rings is a very bad idea period. Possibly justified since this is a Foo Dog, not a regular canine.
• Artistic License – Geography: The Chicago of the early books is not quite the Chicago of reality. Butcher cleans up his geographical act by the later books, though.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Michael loves these, being in a position to innocently pull off these Captain Obvious quips.
  "Demon," breathed Rudolph. "Jesus, can you believe this shit?"
  "Jesus did believe in demons," Michael said, his voice quiet.
• As Long as There Is Evil: Inverted; even if a Sword of the Cross is utterly shattered, anyone who holds to the virtues of love, faith, or hope can reforge them through force of will. Possibly into an even stronger form, as Butters proves in Skin Game.
• Asshole Victim: There's several examples throughout the series, most obviously ghouls since they're Always Chaotic Evil cannibalistic monsters who devour humans and often serve as Dumb Muscle for villainous organizations like the Vampire Courts. However, probably the single most despicable villain in the whole series is Justin DuMorne, Harry and Elaine's Evil Mentor and abusive foster parent. Not only was he a horrible caretaker for both Harry and Elaine - to put it into perspective, while Harry uses playful snowball fights to teach Molly how to develop her shield, DuMorne threw baseballs at Harry - but he Mind Raped Elaine into becoming his thrall and later sicced He Who Walks Behind on Harry when he ran away from home. Suffice to say, pretty much the only downside to Harry having killed his mentor in self-defense is that he performed it with magic, tainting his soul with Black Magic and permanently placing himself on the White Council's bad list.
• Asteroids Monster: Several critters in the series have this ability.
  • Certain trolls shed lots of little trolls when they are wounded.
  • The Denarian Tessa while in mantis form also bleeds countless tiny bugs which recombine into her primary body as a sort of T-1000-esque regeneration.
  • The guardian centipede in Lea's garden on the other side of the Nevernever from Harry's apartment splits into two separate bugs when Harry slices it in half, prompting Lea to complain that now she has two gaping maws to feed.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Battle Ground sees Chicago besieged by multiple Jotun, towering giants from Norse mythology.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Harry considers earth magic to be this. He doesn't use it very often, since it takes a lot more preparation and effort than other types of magic he's used to and he rarely has time for it in a fight. But considering the main earth magic spell that he's been seen using involves redirecting gravity to vastly increase its effects on a smaller area, it always has spectacular results.
  • Morgan has a Ground Pound move that is quick on the draw, but weak.
  • In the hands of an expert like Ebenezer McCoy, however, the impractical part completely disappears. As Harry found out, it's nearly impossible to defeat someone who can use literally their entire surroundings against you without breaking a sweat.

B

• Back-Alley Doctor: Coroner Waldo Butters plays this role for Harry, especially when the hospital is not a safe option (for Harry or for other patients - the ICU doesn't play well with Harry's Walking Techbane tendencies). He is not happy about it, and frequently complains.
• Badass and Child Duo: Ivy and her paid mercenary/bodyguard/surly father figure, Jared "the Hellhound" Kincaid. An interesting example in that in terms of pure power and magical skill, she's more powerful than him. However she's still a kid, is Skilled, but Naive and is a constant target so he does do a lot of protecting.
• Badass Boast: Although not as awesome for the wizards and humans, Toot Toot makes a boast that sounds quite badass for fairies in Small Favor:
  "I have a guard?", I asked. Toot threw out his chest. "Of course! Who do you think keeps the Dread Beast Mister (Harry's cat) from killing the brownies when they come to clean up your apartment? We do! Who lays low the mice and rats and ugly big spiders who might crawl into your bed and nibble on your toes? We do! Fear not, Za-Lord! Neither the foulest of rats nor the cleverest of insects shall disturb your home while we draw breath!"
• Badass Bookworm: Butters has become an example in Skin Game.
• Badass Family: The Carpenters. There's the father, mother, eldest sister and now, as of Ghost Story, her younger brother. With plenty of other siblings to come.
• Badass Longcoat: Justified, since it's a highly-covering enchanted protective coat. It's good enough to stop bullets, can help redirect blunt-force attacks (for the most part), and looks stylish in most public settings.
• Badass Normal: Karrin Murphy, Charity Carpenter, John Marcone, and Hendricks are all recurring examples. Rawlins, Carmichael, Daniel Carpenter, Anna Valmont and Detective Bradley also have their moments.
  • Also, humanity as a whole. Though individual humans are pathetically weak compared to the powerful supernatural beings in the world, nobody wants to risk getting humanity as a whole involved in anything. Why? Humans outnumber the supernatural nations and races by a whole lot, have very powerful weapons, and are ruthlessly creative in using them. Battle Ground gives us a good taste of this, as a large number of normal humans join the effort to destroy the Fomor. Sure, they take devastating losses and are clearly outmatched against the more overtly supernatural foes (most obviously Ethniu), but they also manage to wreak enough havoc against the Fomor and their forces that they still can't be written off. King Corb notes that he loses nearly a fifth of his legion to them - to put it in perspective, there are a little over a thousand humans involved, taking on literal thousands of Fomor. And these are just completely ordinary men and women, most of whom have never been in a fight in their lives.
  • Heck, humanity was this even pre-series as well. Once humans found out how to fight the Black Court vampires, they were hunted down to near-extinction.
• Badass Santa:
  • Shows up in Cold Days as a good friend of the Erlking, who participates in the Wild Hunt with him. It's also briefly shown that he's an alternate persona of Odin.
  • Although we haven't seen him do anything, there is a second Santa, Klaus the Toymaker. He uses children's toys as his focii. Word of Jim says the old Belgian wizard was sent to help the Allied Forces during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II because the Nazis had a warlock summoning demons to help them. Klaus destroyed a band of "SS-summoned demons with a windup wooden duck".
• Bad Powers, Bad People:
  • The White Council believes that using any magic that breaks any of the Laws of Magic (Killing humans with magic, transforming others, Mind Control, Necromancy, Time Travel and Summoning (or even seeking knowledge about) Eldritch Abominations) is addictive. So anyone who does any of that, even if for a good reason, is likely to do it again, more frivolously, or to do another one of them, and must therefore be executed. Only another wizard putting his own life up as surety against repeated Lawbreaking can see a stay of execution.
  • In Fool Moon, the Hexenwulfen belts have the potential to addict and corrupt anyone who dons them. Even Harry.
• Bad Powers, Good People:
  • Thanks to Lasciel, Harry Dresden had access to Hellfire, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. He continues to use it to do what he can to help other people. Though it's pointed out that it's affecting his subconscious - this motives don't change, but he gets more extreme and angrier. However, once Lasciel was no longer a factor, Harry lost this ability and was given the angelic equivalent, Soulfire, instead.
  • Then there's Thomas Raith, life-sucking White Court prettyboy ... who, instead of draining his victims dead, 'sips' from the customers at a hair salon and fights on the side of the good guys. While Thomas Raith is still allied with Harry Dresden, his torment at the hands of a skinwalker makes him forsake the Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire status.
  • The necromancer Kumori believes that she is this, but comes off more as a Well-Intentioned Extremist. Nevertheless, she did use necromancy to save a life; the guy was in total agony until the paramedics had him stabilised, but if he made a full recovery it might be considered worth it.
  • It's an ongoing question whether a person who uses Black Magic is redeemable. The fact that the White Council has a means for probational rehabilitation at all implies that it is, but we haven't seen it so far. Everyone who actually broke the laws of magic except in self-defense has slipped back into Black Magic regularly. Harry is more and more coming to suspect that this trope is totally averted for the Dresdenverse.
  • As Jim Butcher has pointed out, since a wizard's magic is fueled by their emotions a wizard can only cast a spell that they completely believe they should be able to cast. Which means that warlocks, on some level, fully believe in the rightness of their violations of the Laws. From the Council's perspective, there are very few legitimate cases for the use of such magic, extreme self-defense being one. Also, violations of the Laws weaken the borders of reality keeping the Outside out, so the considerations are practical as well as moral.
• Bat People: Vampires of the Red Court, beneath the human disguises they wear, resembles hairless, anthropomorphic bat-things with long, wormlike tongues and thin membranes strung between their arms and torsos.
• Battle Couple:
  • Will and Georgia Borden in wolf-form. Especially apparent in "Something Borrowed".
  • Their teammate Andi with Kirby and Marcy.
  • Harry and Susan in Changes. Especially notable in that they're rescuing their daughter. Mama Bear and Papa Wolf in all their glory. Honestly, the Red Court never stood a chance. However, it's worth noting that they only partially fit this trope, seeing as Harry makes it explicitly clear they are done because Susan never told him about Maggie.
  • After becoming official in Skin Game, Harry and Murph naturally become one as well in Peace Talks and Battle Ground.
• Bears Are Bad News:
  • The first Denarian ever seen in the series is, appropriately, a giant demonic bear...with six limbs, horns, and four eyes.
  • One of the forms the Skinwalker in Turn Coat takes is a combination of a bear, a cougar, and some sort of lizard.
  • Listens-To-Winds. Minibus-sized war bear. Pure awesome.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Zig-Zagged; most of the good characters are very attractive, but then so are most of the high-powered supernaturals. It works out to something like ugly = bad; beautiful = good; really, really, amazingly beautiful = RUN AWAY.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • Small Favor reveals that most of the ancient Oracles at Delphi were actually previous hosts of the Archive, using their vast knowledge to reason what the most likely future to happen was.
  • According to the Paranet Papers Manco Cápac wasn't just a powerful wizard that went against the White Council's directives about not "meddling with mortal affairs." He just went and founded the Inca Empire in Cusco around the 12-13th century and rule it for forty years by proclaiming himself the son of the sun god Inti and the moon goddess Mama Quilla.
  • In Cold Days Harry names Gilles de Rais, Andrei Chikatilo, Fritz Harmann, and John Haigh as past Winter Knights. For the laymen, those are all historical serial killers, and three of them preyed on children.
  • invoked According to Word of God, Horatio Nelson was one of the previous Summer Knights, as was The Duke of Wellington one of the previous Winter Knights.
  • Peace Talks reveals that Beowulf is one of the names of Vadderung, who fought one of the Forest People named Grendel.
• Being Good Sucks: For doing the right thing, your friends will suffer and die, your allies will suffer and die, your family will suffer and die, and you will suffer and die.
  • Fairly early on in the series, one of Harry's enemies gives him a grave as a warning/ironic present. The headstone reads "Here lies Harry Dresden. He died doing the right thing." He eventually does, but it turns out he's Only Mostly Dead.
  • Let's put it this way: Harry would really enjoy being able to store beams of sunlight for later use, seeing as how delightfully effective those are at fighting vampires. Except he can't no matter how hard he tries, because you need to be happy to do this.
  • Subverted by Michael Carpenter. Even though bad things happen to him as a result of his work, he manages to stay upbeat and has a life that makes him truly happy. This is true of pretty much all the Knights of the Cross.
• Beneath the Mask:
  • If a wizard looks anyone in the eye, something happens called a "Soulgaze". Each person sees the other for who he or she really is, with no chance of deceit. That being said, it doesn't show a person who they are completely and isn't a lie detector, as Harry has been completely surprised multiple times by people he's soulgazed (such as Ebenezar).
  • Wizards can use an ability known as the "Third Eye" or "Wizard's Sight", which shows them the truth about whatever they look at with it. Anything about the item, object, person or whatever it is will be made visible to the wizard, also with no chance of deceit. For example, Harry catches a glimpse of Murphy in Grave Peril with his sight, and she appears as an angelic figure in dirty white robes. The drawback to this ability is you always remember anything you see with it with perfect clarity; Harry once was rendered almost catatonic by seeing a skinwalker with his Sight, and wizards have been known to go insane from using it too frequently. As the series has gone on, Harry has become much more careful and reluctant about using his Sight.
• Beware the Mind Reader: Wizards consider it against the law to read minds and mind control, or invading minds as they put it. Transmitting one's thoughts is allowed, though, and as more flaws are revealed in the White Council's doctrines concerning mind magic, as of Turn Coat the Council has started to allow its members to engage in sanctioned mental duels between each other so that they will be stronger against a potential psychic invader.
• Bewitched Amphibians: Harry sometimes jokes about this, but the Laws of Magic specifically prohibit transforming other humans. Shapeshifting your own body is perfectly fine.
• Beyond the Impossible: Demonreach's magical complexity baffles even Bob. That's right: the guy whose literal job is to know everything doesn't have a clue how this is even possible.
• Big Bad: At least one super-nasty per book, though some (like Nicodemus Archleone and Ethniu) star as the main antagonist multiple times. Most of the events of the series so far have been orchestrated by what Harry calls the "Black Council," with the Outsiders as the Greater-Scope Villains behind them through Nemesis (a.k.a. "He Who Walks Beside") as they attempt to destroy Creation itself.
  • Storm Front: The amateur warlock Victor Sells, a.k.a. "The Shadowman".
  • Fool Moon: FBI Agent Phillip Denton and his hexenwulfen.
  • Grave Peril: A Big Bad Duumvirate between the ghost of Leonid Kravos and Bianca St. Claire of the Red Court, with the former personally antagonizing Harry as "The Nightmare". Harry's fairy godmother, the Leanansidhe, is a secondary threat as she tries to turn him into her hound.
  • Summer Knight: Summer Lady Aurora of the Sidhe orchestrates the murder of the Summer Knight in order to tip the balance of power between the Faerie Courts in Winter's favor, hoping to end their neverending conflict. Winter Knight Lloyd Slate is The Dragon.
  • Death Masks: The Denarian Nicodemus Archleone tries to steal the Shroud of Turin in order to cause a plague, with his daughter Deirdre as The Dragon. Meanwhile, Duke Paolo Ortega of the Red Court challenges Harry to a duel.
  • Blood Rites: Lord Raith of the White Court is behind the murders, and targets Harry in order to end the curse placed on him by Harry's mother. Mavra of the Black Court is a secondary threat also trying to kill Harry.
  • Dead Beat: A Big Bad Ensemble between the Kemmlerites Cowl, Grevane, and the Corpsetaker, fighting to gain the power of the Darkhallow. Cowl is the most dangerous of all three and the Final Boss.
  • Proven Guilty: The Scarecrow, Eldest Fetch, though he's just The Heavy for an unknown mastermind (implied to be either Mab or Maeve) who put the novel's events into motion in order to aid the White Council. The Post-Climax Confrontation has Harry trying to prevent Molly from being executed by the Merlin and the White Council.
  • White Night: A Big Bad Duumvirate with Vittorio Malvora as The Heavy for Cowl, the two scheming to overthrow the Raiths in order to bring the White Court into the war against the White Council. Both are revealed to be members of the Black Council.
  • Small Favor: Nicodemus Archleone forms a Big Bad Duumvirate with his wife Tessa, kidnapping Marcone and intending to turn the Archive into a Denarian. Queen Titania is a Greater-Scope Villain, as she sends the Billy Goats Gruff to kill Harry before he can carry out Mab's dirty work.
  • Turn Coat: A Big Bad Duumvirate between "Shagnasty" the Skinwalker and The Mole on the White Council (Wizard Samuel Peabody), the former being brought into Chicago by the Black Council to preserve the secret identity of the latter.
  • Changes: A Big Bad Ensemble between Kukulcan the Red King and his daughter Duchess Ariana Ortega, though the latter is the initial instigator of the novel's events by kidnapping Maggie in a (failed) gambit to overthrow her father.
  • Ghost Story: "The Grey Ghost" (the shade of the Corpsetaker), who is trying to come Back from the Dead after Harry executed her in Dead Beat and forms an alliance with the Fomor to accelerate the process.
  • Cold Days: Winter Lady Maeve intends to release the monstrous prisoners of Demonreach, and is a willing agent of Nemesis (which is revealed to be the Greater-Scope Villain for the whole series).
  • Skin Game: Nicodemus Archleone forces Harry to help him pull a heist on Hades' vault. Mab forces Harry to comply, as a gambit for revenge by her and Marcone against the Denarian for the events of Small Favor.
  • Peace Talks and Battle Ground: Ethniu the Last Titan with King Corb of the Fomor and the servitor "Listen" as Co-Dragons. Since they were originally one novel, Peace Talks primarily features Lara Wraith forcing Harry to help her break out Thomas, with a Nemesis-possessed Justine being the Greater-Scope Villain between the events of both novels.
• Big Brother Instinct: Harry and Thomas are both prime examples. Also, Harry to every young girl he comes across in the series - Kim, Molly, Lydia, Faith....
  • An example: In the short story "It's My Birthday, Too", a Black Court vampire is seconds away from tearing out Harry's throat. Thomas slams into it, stabs a wooden chair leg clean through it's chest, and, when the thing tries to pull it out, Thomas rips its arm off. Harry repays him later - the one that beat Thomas up gets burned to a crisp.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Harry and company frequently arrive at exactly the right moment, often with only seconds to spare, to save the day and rescue everybody. Well, almost everybody...
  • Because of the Knights of the Cross's Contrived Coincidence Super Power, they often arrive exactly when they are needed. Harry even counts on this in both Dead Beat and Proven Guilty.
• Bigger on the Inside:
  • The living area, or sanctum, for Bob inside his skull. Harry visits it during Ghost Story and finds it to be a pimped-out mansion on the level of James Bond, decked out with home theater, every videogame system known to man, and other comforts. Harry initally questions why Bob would ever want to leave. Bob replies, "A gold cage is still a cage, Harry."
  • In the same book, Harry says almost the exact trope name in reference to Molly Carpenter's mental "command center": on the outside it looks like the Carpenter kids' treehouse, but on the inside it looks like the bridge of the USS Enterprise. The really, really cheesy version from TOS.
• Big Good: The Merlin of the White Council is supposed to be this and in many ways is, but often hampered by internal politics or prejudices. Ebenezer McCoy of the Grey Council looks like he is shaping up to be this. God Himself (primarily acting through the Archangel Uriel), Odin, Rashid the Gatekeeper, and Queen Mab can all be counted as additional Big Goods to. Notably, Battle Ground implies that Harry himself will be growing into proper Big Good territory now as he starts his own new supernatural nation after getting exiled from the White Council.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • See that picture on the main page? The characters on Harry's staff are Japanese; specifically, the are the katakana for "matorikkusu", which is how the Japanese would write "matrix", but as you would see in a mirror.
  • Translating some of Harry's evocations from pseudo-Latin occasionally provides a few laughs, as when he calls up "stunt double" illusions using the Latin equivalent of "Lights! Camera! Action!".
    "Flickum bicus!"
  • From Cold Days, the spell to summon an iceberg for a boat to crash into: "Rexus Mundus!" (King of the World!)
  • Many of the Fae names are Gaelic in origin. Leanansidhe means "beloved fairy", which she herself may regard as an appropriate appellation if no one else does. Cat Sith just means "fairy cat", and it certainly predates Star Wars, though whether it can be said to be strictly a name is debatable.
  • The Swords of the Cross are Fidelacchius, Esperacchius, and Amoracchius, obviously derived from Latin fidem, spero, amor ...or in English, Faith, Hope, and Love.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: In the short story "Aftermath", the "turtlenecks" (Humanoid Abominations used as Mooks by the Fomor) utilize sonar to navigate in the dark.
  • Kincaid determines the exact landmine a room is booby-trapped with by smelling the chemical composition of the explosives, and can see infrared. Human, right....
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The series as a whole is founded in this territory. While the Knights of the Cross are all firmly The Paragon and way in the "white" side of the morality spectrum, other characters... aren't. Harry Dresden himself, the series' main hero, is definitely a far more morally ambiguous character, and a lot of his friends and allies (like Karrin Murphy, Thomas Raith, Susan Rodriguez, and Molly Carpenter) have to resort to morally dubious if not downright abhorent or illegal acts in order to do the right thing. Still, while some of their enemies are less "directly" evil than others (like the Gentleman Johnny Marcone or Lara Raith, both of whom are masters at making it so that they're always the Lesser of Two Evils while still being major threats and sources of evil on their own), many of their other foes are evil on a literally inhuman level (like the Outsiders, Always Chaotic Evil Eldritch Abominations who are Omnicidal Maniacs to a metaphorical "man").
• Black-and-White Morality:
  • While Harry often views himself as somebody on the edge, and he frequently teams up with Marcone, the series is very firm on the concept of right and wrong, good and evil, etc. There are lines Harry refuses to cross, no matter what. Until Changes. In Ghost Story, Harry realizes how badly he messed up by making that fatal compromise - but it is also not entirely Harry's fault he chose as he did.
  • Near the end of Death Masks it's stated explicitly that this is the way the Knights Of The Cross view the world.
  • Black and white morality is built into the universe for some beings. The Laws of Magic are part of the world so when one is broken evil is strengthened. Some monsters like Fallen Angels are explicitly stated to be evil in both an ethical and metaphysical sense. However, it doesn't apply to all creatures. Winter Fae are evil by human standards, but not objective universal standards. They are embodiments of the harsh nature of Winter and operate according to Blue-and-Orange Morality. Other times, a situation may be so complex that there is no "black and white" choice even for one of the Knights of the Cross.
• Black Magic: Killing someone using magic, mind reading, necromancy, mind-reading using Mind Control and summoning an Outsider are the main forms we have seen. Forced Transformation and Time Travel are likewise forbidden. It's addictive, and the use of such magic incurs a death penalty if you get caught. Word of God states that every time a Muggle is killed with magic, indirectly or otherwise (as in throwing someone off a building using a magic gust of wind), it breaks the first law and makes the forces of darkness even stronger. If the RPG is correct (and it has enough Word of God on its side to say it is), even seeking information about anything beyond the Outer Gates is a no-no. Exceptions probably exist for the Merlin and the Gatekeeper, and definitely exist for the Blackstaff (that is his purpose). The Blackstaff that acts as his mark of office absorbs the corrupting effects of his Lawbreaking so he does not become addicted.
  • Following the events of Turn Coat, the strictures against mind-magic are slightly relaxed, in that Council wizards are granted permission to use these magics for the sole purpose of mental self-defense training.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • When Harry looks into a person's eyes for the first time they both see each other's inner nature. This is such a turbulent experience that for every day of his life, Harry has to avoid looking into the eyes of any person he talks to. He focuses on the nose instead. Similarly, The Sight, which functions on the same principle as a soul gaze. It lets him see the true nature of anything he looks at, and the memory never fades. Ever. This can be very bad considering how nasty a lot of stuff out there is. Looking at a skinwalker left Harry a gibbering wreck for about an hour afterwards. It is mentioned that wizards who spend too much time looking at things with their Sight often go insane.
    • Wizards in general have this issue by virtue of being Walking Techbanes in an increasingly advanced modern world, and it only gets worse the more powerful the practitioner in question is. Harry can't have a TV, a cell phone, or a hot water heater, and can't even get a CAT scan without setting the machine on fire just by walking near it.
  • The Archive knows everything that has ever been written or committed to paper (yes, this means porn and even Purple Prose), and the Archive itself itself is passed down from mother to daughter along with the personal memories of each previous Archive. This means that, in addition to knowledge and power, one woman gains all the trauma, heartbreak and memories from countless previous lives.
  • The Mantles of the Sidhe Queens. On the one hand, the Mantles make each queen effectively a Physical Goddess with Elemental Powers beyond that of even the most powerful wizards, and also grants them command over The Fair Folk of their respective Court. However, the Mantles sap their host of the majority of their free will since they cannot "act against their inherent nature" as one of the Sidhe, they Cannot Tell a Lie, and they have their minds slowly warped into becoming a glorified Legacy Character embodying the aspects of their Court. The Summer and Winter Ladies easily have it the worst, as not only do they have their own lust enhanced to near-comical levels, but they Can't Have Sex, Ever just to add insult to injury. Suffice to say, they're ultimately pretty sucky gigs with only a few overall benefits.
• Blow You Away: Harry can manipulate air and wind with his Ventas Servitas spell. This sees more play in the early books, as Harry upgrades to pure force blasts (Forzare) later on.
• Blown Across the Room:
  • Harry's Forzare goes beyond this. In Dead Beat one unfortunate ghoul gets thrown out a room through a piece of plywood and lands on the other side of the street. In Fool Moon he sends a werewolf through three buildings with a shot from his Blasting Rod.
  • Harry also wears rings on his right hand which store up kinetic energy gradually and can release it in an instant, allowing similar effects. At first Harry only had one but he later upgrades to a triple-banded ring on each finger of his hand. He can unleash as many as he needs to at one time.
    • Then, once he loses the triple-banded rings, by Skin Game, his new staff built on Demonreach has the same spell as each ring worked into the butt of it 77 times. He only gets one shot, but it's a doozy. When he uses it on Hannah Ascher-Lasciel during the duel in Hades' Vault, Harry describes the spell as hitting Ascher with the force equivalent to that of a garbage truck.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Fae, who simply do not view the world the same way humanity does. Lea, for example, honestly does not understand why Harry would object to being "protected" by being turned into a faerie dog.
• Bluff the Eavesdropper:
  • Cold Days; Harry knows Lara has placed bugs in Thomas' apartment. So when he calls up a contact, he speaks with a representative of the contact, warns them the line is bugged, and uses big words like "operative." Harry knows this will get her attention and send her to keep track of whomever Harry has contacted. The bluff comes when Harry reveals he wants Lara to try and track Odin as he will spot them and this will tell him how the White Court does its surveillance now. This information is payment to him for agreeing to meet Harry at all. Harry then blows out every electronic device in Thomas' apartment, which really should have been a tip-off, but was awesome nonetheless.
  • invoked Exaggerated and mildly deconstructed in Skin Game with the possibility that Anduriel is listening and watching at any time. Harry has to do a book-long, solo version of this, which strains his interactions with his friends since he isn't telling them anything.
• Book Ends: The first and last appearances of the Big Bad in Welcome to the Jungle both take the form of her shadow in profile.
  • The war against the Red Court begins with Susan being transformed halfway into a Red vampire. It ends just moments after she takes the final step into becoming a full vampire.
• Boom Stick: Harry's blasting rod is basically a stick he uses to burn everything in sight.
  • While he doesn't actually use the phrase "boomstick" (because at that point he doesn't have it), in Cold Days Harry begins a speech by quoting Ash: "Listen up, you primitive screwheads!"
• Boring, but Practical: Despite being incredibly boring, Martin is an incredible fighter and gun master. He is boring for a reason, and uses his unobtrusiveness to his advantage, easily blending into crowds and being able to take on other appearances.
  • Dresden likes this trope, preferring simple but overpowered spells like fireballs and wind. He also likes using his gun.
• Brain with a Manual Control: When Harry enters the mind of his apprentice Molly to defend her from a psychic attack, he finds out that she represents her mental defenses as the bridge of the USS Enterprise, with all the posts manned by representations of herself. The various crewmembers represent different parts of her mind, especially id, ego and superego, except for a few in Red Shirts who are only there to get killed by Explosive Instrumentation.
• Brass Balls: "You can say what you like about Gentleman Johnny Marcone, but he has a set of brass balls that drag the ground when he walks."
• Break the Badass:
  • Tessa shooting Michael. The Denarians torturing Ivy. The Denarians killing Shiro. The Denarians like this trope - it makes them stronger.
  • The Naagloshi is also fueled by this trope. It gains power by killing wizards (and a bit from one-trick-ponies like the Alphas). However, it gets crowning mention for what it did to Thomas.
  • In Turn Coat, Harry breaks down when Madeline Raith turns him in to the White Council for shielding Morgan, to the point where it crosses into a Heroic BSoD. Murphy snaps him out of it by point out that (a), he's a badass, man up, and (b) bureaucracies take time to get things done; he has time, man up. Also segues into an awesome scene where Murphy takes Harry to task for his inaccurate self image of an unpredictable lone ranger.
    • Even more so in Changes when he breaks his back. He gets better, but he was so morose that he ended up committing assisted suicide. To further clarify, the aforementioned decision to commit assisted suicide was not directly caused by his feelings about his broken back. Rather, it was an attempt at dealing with the consequences of what he was forced to do after. Dresden's enemies had kidnapped his daughter, who they planned to ritually sacrifice, and with his back broken Dresden had no way of stopping it from happening. To save his child and himself, he makes a Deal with the Devil with Queen Mab to heal his injuries and give him power, at the price of his service to her once his task is complete. However, fearing that Mab would turn him into a monster once he was in her service, he calls up an assassin he knows and hires the guy to kill him as soon as his daughter is safe. Of course, it later turns out that Harry was psychically manipulated into taking this course of action...
  • One in particular would be seeing Stan killed so casually in his flashback in Ghost Story. In a moment that's both heartbreaking and badass, Harry snaps out of it and blows up the assailant, He Who Walks Behind, the foremost warrior of the almost-completely-immune-to-magic Outsiders.
• Breather Episode: Skin Game is noticeably lighter than the previous few books. Harry engages in heist story antics, reconciles with his friends, meets a god he actually likes, the bad guy's plan is thoroughly spoiled, and Harry gets a delightfully WAFF filled reunion with his daughter. It's still a dark book by most standards, but by Dresden Files standards it's pretty laid back.
• Brick Joke:
  • Harry asks for some Listerine after Morgan gives him CPR in Storm Front, and again after Lara kisses him to recharge his emotions and magic in White Night.
  • In Grave Peril, Lea wants to turn Harry into one of her hounds in order to protect him. She gets her chance in Changes, when the group needs to get to Chichen Itza from the Ways quickly.
  • One that comes up 6 and then 13 books later. In Storm Front, Harry mentions that Santa Claus is a faerie, and he would have to have a lot of stones to trap a Faery as strong as him. Come Dead Beat, he has the balls to trap the Erlking, who we learn in Cold Days is the Summer King and co-king of the Wild-Hunt along with the Winter King, Santa Claus.
  • In Battle Ground, Harry weaponizes his conjuritis to drop an anvil on a Black Court vampire... just like he'd previously threatened to do way back in Blood Rites.
• Brown Note: Harry does not respond well to some of the stuff he sees with his Sight. He just about broke his brain at least twice looking at very powerful, incredibly nasty things, and you never ever forget what you see...
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer:
  • Butters. The best pathologist in the city... but he loves polka music more than is healthy and wears bunny slippers.
  • Bob the Skull is an extremely powerful spirit of intellect that has worked for wizards for centuries and has such a wide span of magical knowledge that the White Council considers him a serious threat and they'd be seriously pissed if they knew Harry has him. And he really likes porn and trashy airport romance novels.
    • A Justified Trope in this case: Bob is a form of "pure" intellect, having a personality at all is a result of the emotional projection, assumptions, and inherent biases and assumptions of his current patron. Harry, a child of the '80s with a sometimes unhealthy obsession with pop culture, thinks that someone who does nothing but memorize every bit of obscure trivia in existence should be an endearingly-eccentric nerd, and the largest information network he's heard of is the internet (which is for porn). Bob's former master was a social darwinist necromancer steeped in the lore of the superiority of ancient wizard knowledge and obsessed with ancient dark magics: the personality Bob exhibits under his ownership is much more ice-cold axe murderer than carefree porn hound.
  • From the point of view of the muggles, Harry himself. The cops at Special Investigations put up with his proclamations that he's a wizard because he gets results^note since he really is a wizard.
    • Also, the Wardens recruit him despite his severe authority issues (especially regarding the White Council) and history of dark magic because he's one of the only really powerful wizards left and is famous for rebelling against the Council, so if someone so anti-council is on their side, they must be doing the right thing.
    • We also get to see Harry's bunny-ears from Murphy's perspective. Harry is a guy who walks into a scene with an outfit that looks like it belongs on the set of El Dorado, asks a few questions that make absolutely no sense, occasionally does something strange like take a strand of hair from a brush, vanishes for two days and somehow makes an envelope with the exact information necessary to crack the case wide open and an invoice for twenty billable hours appear on her desk next Monday morning.
• Burn Scars, Burning Powers: Harry prefers fire magic and gains a handful of specific fire abilities over the course of the series (Hellfire and Soulfire), but he also burns one hand so badly at one point he cannot even use it.
• Butterfly of Doom: When referring in a Reddit Q&A to the "alterna-Harry" who'll be seen in the upcoming ''Mirror Mirror", Butcher only said: "Mirror universe Harry is different by one choice. One. And everything else just follows after that."
• Buy Them Off: Weregilds, which are literally blood money; a payment in compensation for deaths throughout the supernatural community. Usually given to either the family or a Mook's superior. i.e. in Skin Game a wereguild is offered to John Marcone due to one of his valued staff members being killed in the course of the robbery, with the implication it will be at least partially passed on to the dead man's family. This used to be Truth in Television (which follows with the theme that the supernatural world runs on the oldest laws like Sacred Hospitality). In dark ages Ireland, for example, the Brehon laws literally spelled out a system like this, so that a family would not suffer from the loss of a vital worker; the amount changed depending on the dead person's skills and their importance to the family income.

C

• Canis Latinicus: Lots of it, Harry uses it for all his spells. Elaine uses Dog-Babylonian and Egyptian. Morgan uses Ancient Greek. As of Changes, Molly seems to prefer Japanese. The explanation given in Fool Moon is that they provide a wizard's mind with "an extra layer of protection against the magical energies coursing through it". The protection is thinner if you use words you are too familiar with, as the words will be close enough to your thoughts that the two are near impossible to separate. Thus, wizards use words that are either made up or from languages they do not really understand.
  • Possibly significant in Harry's case, since Latin is the language the White Council uses in writing, as well as in speech during meetings. By using Latin—even dog Latin—for his spells, Harry has inadvertently made sure that it would be dangerous for him to learn Latin fluently, rendering communication between the White Council and himself a permanent problem. It's implied that Justin DuMorne manipulated Harry towards this choice on purpose, for this exact reason (much like Abusive Parents or spouses tend to isolate their victims so they can't get help from the authorities).
• Cannot Cross Running Water: Rivers aren't much of a problem if you have a boat, but running water of any sort dissipates magic, to the point that Nicodemus is able to completely disable Harry by chaining him up under a waterspout.
  • Casting across/into water is also more difficult which becomes a plot point in quite a few books.
• Cannot Spit It Out: If Harry could just fit his mouth around "I can't tell you, it's a 'Wizard Thing'", 99% of the angst with Murphy could be dispelled. This actually becomes less of a problem in the books after Summer Knight, when Harry finally spills the magic beans to Murphy about the supernatural world.
  • Seeing as Summer Knight is only the fourth book in the series, many fans regard this as Early-Installment Weirdness. It's also Character Development, given that Harry's early tendency to give out information on a strictly need-to-know basis got several people killed due to his difficulty judging who, exactly, needed to know.
    • However, it does come back in Peace Talks, where his close-mouthed nature regarding the White Court and his duties as Winter Knight leads to increased suspicion towards him amongst the other Wardens, at a time when he can least afford it, but his secrecy isn't entirely his choice.
• Can't Have Sex, Ever:
  • Thomas, with Justine only. If he tries, his Allergic to Love nature gives him horrible burns. Justine figures out a method. It involves her sleeping with another woman to remove the protection before sleeping with Thomas. Thomas seems okay with it, and even Uriel seems to approve.
  • Harry and Susan, because pleasure and strong emotion make her lose control and might lead to biting him and turning into a full vampire. Eventually, Harry solves the problem by tying her up. They both have a wonderful time.
  • Molly gets a strong triple-dose of this. First, as Harry's apprentice, Harry won't let her even "self-explore" because the random emotions might trigger her yet-uncontrollable magic. Later, as the Ragged Lady, she's homeless and emotionally unstable and keeping everyone at arm's length to avoid endangering them. After becoming the Winter Lady Molly learns the hard way that the mantle of the Ladies represents Maidenhood and will not allow itself to be despoiled. Poor Carlos.
• Cartoon Bomb: In Ghost Story, the army of ghosts uses some of these, along with the 'pineapple' grenades, when Harry leads them to reenact the storming of Normandy Beach.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • A Wizard's Death Curse, which uses up the life in their body for one last devastatingly powerful final spell.
    • Harry nearly kills himself this way without even meaning to in Grave Peril, expending so much energy to burn down Bianca's party that he keels over. Michael has to perform chest compressions to revive him.
  • Soul Fire, which burns the soul itself — and no soul means no life. Nice thing about the soul, though: It's a renewable resource.
  • Using magic in ghost form (which uses up memories).
• Casting a Shadow: Mavra, a matriarch of the Black Court of Vampires (aka "blampires"), seems to have this as one of her powers, with a brief scene in Grave Peril being described as her "dragging the shadows on the walls to around her fists". Harry suggests it's not a normal vampire power, and that she could be a wizard as well. Which is terrifying.
• Casual High Drop: Gard charges straight off a thirty-foot ledge in her berserk eagerness to attack the grendelkin in the short story "Heorot", landing unharmed with an axe.
• Central Theme:
  • invoked According to Word of God, the primary theme of all the novels and short stories is power. What You Are in the Dark and Comes Great Responsibility are pretty obvious undercurrents, as using power to either lord over others, for one's own selfish gain, or to protect the innocent & better the world around them is a constant struggle facing numerous characters along with the ugly and hazy line separating these three extremes.
  • Another major recurring theme is family ties, by blood or otherwise. Harry suffers from severe abandonment and commitment issues due to his abusive foster parent Justin DuMorne, and slowly assembles a group of True Companions over the course of the novels while learning to trust more in the aid of his friends than try to stupidly put all possible responsibility on his own shoulders. Furthermore, virtually every family in this series (except for the Carpenters... for the most part) is some variety of immensely screwed-up and exploration is frequently given to how their dysfunctional dynamics affect the world around them and color their views of the world.
• Cerebus Callback:
  • Harry's snarky remarks in the earlier novels about how human stupidity and Selective Obliviousness are all that's needed to preserve The Masquerade come across as laughably naive as not only does The Masquerade grow increasingly thin as the series goes on (what with the Wild Hunt and Kemmlerites both making a mess of Chicago in Dead Beat, the extinction of the entire Red Court of Vampires in Changes, the rise of the Fomor in Ghost Story, and the entire Battle of Chicago in Battle Ground), but Battle Ground reveals that the US federal government secretly has a ruthlessly competent Creature-Hunter Organization called the "Special Collections Division" under the Library of Congress' purview, and they're tasked with both researching the supernatural and upholding The Masquerade.
  • In Death Masks, when Harry asks the Archive ("Ivy") why she would need an adult bodyguard like Kincaid, her response is to give him an irritated look and note "My feet can't reach the pedals" (as in, the brake and gas pedals for a car). This is Played for Laughs at the time as Harry just not thinking everything through while showing Ivy is actually a Little Miss Snarker... but the phrase gets reused many years later in a far more heartbreaking context in the microfiction "Goodbye", wherein Ivy is outraged at learning Kincaid has accepted Harry's request for a Mercy Kill. As Kincaid goes to do the deed (and enough Character Development has passed over the books to make it clear that Kincaid has actually been serving as Ivy's Parental Substitute), Ivy coldly informs Kincaid that "My feet can reach the pedals, now" and fires him, showing that she no longer needs him and she will never forgive him for killing one of her Only Friends.
• Cerebus Retcon:
  • From Changes. "If that was the price I had to pay to make my daughter safe, so be it. If I was haunted by my choices for the rest of my life because Maggie needed me to make hard choices, so be it." This passage is from when he was deciding to kill Lloyd Slate and become the Winter Knight. Applied to what happened later, when he killed Susan, there is a whole new dimension of haunting regret.
  • Another one occurs in Grave Peril, when Harry is waiting for Susan to bail him out of jail and sees Michael and Charity talking he finds himself wondering why all his relationships don't work and jokingly puts it down to all the "ghosts, demons and Human Sacrifice." Cue Changes...
  • In the short story "Something Borrowed", Kirby was supposed to be Billy's best man at his wedding, but got really hurt in a fight the night before (no thanks to the jello shots)... Flash forward to Turn Coat...
  • When Molly began her apprenticeship with Harry, he stressed that she should avoid sexual relationships while training due to the possible effect it'd have with her powers. Come "Cold Case", despite being out of her apprenticeship, Molly Can't Have Sex, Ever thanks to the Winter Lady's Mantle's need to protect her maidenhood and, by extension, its power. Should she try and be intimate with someone, the Mantle will cause them severe injury.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The ratio of utter hilarity & awesomeness & heartwarming-ness to horrendously depressing & terrifying-ness has increased at an exponential rate with first Grave Peril, then Dead Beat, and finally Changes (which more or less seems to have set the tone for the remainder of the series going forward), becoming increasingly stacked in favor of the latter. It's starting to get to the point where, before reading a new book, one might ask "Is it worth the sheer craziness and awesomeness just to have my heart ripped out and stomped on yet again?"^note The answer, of course, is yes.
• The Chains of Commanding: In the short story "Bombshells", Molly remarks how difficult is to be the one being asked what to do by everybody else.
  Molly: [narrating] Why do people keep asking me that? Is this what all wizard types go through? I'd probably asked Harry that question a hundred times, but I never realized how hard it was to hear it coming toward you. But Harry always knew what to do next. All I could do was improvise desperately and hope for the best.
  • Amusingly, the above also doubles as Dramatic Irony. Readers know that "improvising desperately and hoping for the best" is pretty much Harry's whole M.O., especially at the beginning, but it makes sense for Molly — his torch-carrying apprentice — to not realize this.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • invoked Harry has two: "Hell's bells!" and "Stars and stones!" (also seen used by Elaine) Thomas has "Empty night" (also used by Lara and presumably the other Raiths). Word of God has said that those three phrases will also be the titles of the Big Apocalyptic Trilogy that ends the series, as in Butcher's own words, "There's a reason those are curses."
  • The catchphrase of Harry's musclebound-barbarian PC in the Alphas' role-playing adventures is "Enough talk!"
  • There's also "Damn, I'm good", which Harry uses often enough that it's rubbed off on Molly too.
• Character Development:
  • Y'know that J. R. R. Tolkien quote about wizards? Harry's always had the "quick to anger" thing pretty much covered, but over time he is getting better at the "subtle."
    • He's also getting much more magically powerful. The first two books had him struggling to use magic after a few powerful bursts, and Fool Moon has a point where he's worried he may have burnt out his magical batteries permanently. Since Grave Peril, he's been throwing around more and more major mojo without showing any signs of weakening, to the point that the only thing that stops him from using magic is lack of consciousness or severe pain.
    • Not just his raw power is increasing, either: his control has steadily improved throughout the series. His blasts of fuego is getting progressively more concentrated — from flamethrower-spew to telephone-pole width to wrist-size to thumb-size — and he's broadening his repertoire as well, tackling veils and illusions that he thought he'd never be any good at, early on. Plus, he went from avoiding the Nevernever like the plague to using little-known Ways to hop from continent to continent.
  • And moreover, Harry's willingness to trust his own allies, and to keep them informed of what's going on, advances enormously over the course of the pre-Changes novels.
  • Ghost Story takes place six months after the end of Changes, during which Harry was out of contact with most of his friends and allies. The changes are somewhat startling. Molly has grown up, Murphy has wised-up, Butters has toughened-up...the list goes on.
  • Billy/Will and Charity both start out a bit flat, but become full three-dimensional characters by their second and later appearances.
• Character Focus: Harry is unquestionably the protagonist of the whole saga (it's named after him, after all), but several of the series' entries also put a heavy focus on certain characters (predominantly Harry's closest friends and family members) to the point where their narrative is arguably more important than Harry's for that specific book. Generally speaking, both Karrin Murphy and "Gentleman" Johnny Marcone have the closest claims to being the actual deuteragonists of the whole series. Probably the closest entries to flat-out averting this trope in the franchise are Storm Front, Fool Moon, and Battle Ground (the former two can be chalked up to Early-Installment Weirdness, and the latter is due to the — quite frankly — ridiculous amount of characters all fighting for proverbial screentime).
  • Pretty much any book with the Denarians as the Big Bad (i.e., Death Masks, Small Favor, and Skin Game) will have Michael Carpenter take a major role in the narrative. And appropriately enough, Michael is also the Supporting Protagonist of his introductory novel, Grave Peril.
  • On a similar note to the above, Thomas Raith gains a lot of prominence in the White Court-focused novels Blood Rites and White Night, though surprisingly little direct focus is given to him in both Turn Coat and Peace Talks.
  • And for the more "individual"/"one-off" examples:
    • Susan Rodriguez returns in first Death Masks (having taken a noticeable level in badass) and then Changes (which serves as her swan song as she works together with Harry to rescue their daughter Maggie from the Red Court).
    • Elaine Mallory's surprise return in Summer Knight is one of the novel's B-plots (along with her becoming one of the Big Bad's collaborateurs), and White Night has her learning how to recover from her trauma and trying to work together with Harry against the White Court.
    • Charity Carpenter, of all characters, goes through a dramatic Defrosting Ice Queen process with Harry during Proven Guilty, and also has her Dark and Troubled Past revealed to Harry.
    • Morgan is the secondary protagonist of Turn Coat, with him getting a remarkable amount of depth as a result prior to his Heroic Sacrifice in the novel's denounement.
    • Poor Molly Carpenter's Sanity Slippage is at the forefront of the plot of Ghost Story.
    • Finally, Waldo Butters takes some remarkable levels in badassery during first Dead Beat and then Skin Game as he grows in both confidence and heroism.
  • Perhaps the most notable example of this trope in action is in Peace Talks, where both Lara Raith and Ebenezar McCoy are two of the book's primary characters, to the level where there's barely any scene not featuring either of them in the entire novel.
• Characterization Marches On: In the first few books, Lea is easily angered when Harry manages to legitimately weasel out of her traps. Later on, she's more likely to praise him for these moments. Though to be fair, the tricks he plays on Lea in the first book she appears in are arguably the nastiest he ever pulls on her (not that she doesn't deserve it). He pours a dust that contains cold iron down her breasts, (which will painfully burn any member of the Fae) throws aluminum nails at her while letting her believe they're iron, then swallows the Destroying Angel (a poisonous toadstool) so that she can either keep him and net herself a dead and thereby worthless prize or let him go and get the antidote so that she might catch him another time.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • In any book where Harry brews a potion or two for a specific use early in the story, they turn out to be vitally important at the climax — which, needless to say, is not the purpose for which they were originally made. And there are a whole lot more.
  • One that doesn't get fired for seven books pops up in Proven Guilty. Specifically, Fix's comment that "She's lying" when talking about Maeve.
  • Everything that happened during Bianca's party in Grave Peril.
    • At least one still hasn't been fired.
  • Mab's insane rage lasting from Small Favor to Changes.
  • Something that manages to be a Chekhov's Gun by virtue of not being there: during Small Favor Harry gets Mind Raped into forgetting every aspect of fire magic he's ever learned, but he (and, correspondingly, we) don't find this out until half the book has gone by and he realizes he hasn't even thought about fire the entire time.
  • The Beckitts' backstory.
  • Harry and Susan's little slips in control during Death Masks.
  • During Changes the heroes assign themselves characters from The Fellowship of the Ring and assign the role of Gandalf to Lea, much to Harry's frustration. As it turns out, she absolutely fits the role of the member playing a long game against enemies that the rest of the party don't know about but who are the ones actually responsible for the entire conflict.
  • Let's just say Butcher is seriously good at using these.
• Chekhov's Party: The third book features a ball being thrown for the paranormal community by the local Red Court nobility, as part of a trap for Dresden. Aside from setting up the book's climax, which triggers a War Arc that continues until the twelfth book, numerous other plot threads are planted which are still paying off years later.
• Chekhov's Skill: Numerous examples, with easily the most prominent being Harry's "Parkour!" in Skin Game.
• Chemical Messiah: The drug Third-Eye featured in the first book has a vaguely New Age style following. Notably, it also does seem to give vanilla mortals some genuine degree of magical Sight (which, as noted above, has been known to drive even fully trained wizards, who know what to expect, insane from using it), but with no explanation or context for what they see and no way to turn the Sight off until it wears off.
• Children Are Innocent: Ivy being a tragic exception. Harry and, to a lesser extent, Kincaid treat her as such though (which she seems to appreciate).
• Christianity is Catholic: Although other denominations are mentioned (Shiro is a Baptist), Catholicism is featured the most out of the Christian faiths.
• Christmas Episode: The short story "Christmas Eve" is set on the Christmas after Peace Talks. It follows Harry on Christmas Eve late into the night as he builds a bike for his daughter Maggie at the Carpenter House and receives visits from three supernatural allies bearing him gifts for the season.
• Chronically Crashed Car: Harry calls in his mechanic to fix the Blue Beetle's damage and breakdowns time after time. Most of the body isn't even blue anymore. It finally gets destroyed for good in Changes.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: We are looking at you, Harry.
  • Michael too, although for him it's a welcomed calling rather than a "Dammit, why me?" obligation.
  • Sanya actually seems to enjoy his Chronic Hero Syndrome. Then again he is The Atoner.
• Church Militant:
  • Michael Carpenter kicks ass for the Lord, but in a very positive, idealistic, open-minded and non-Knight Templar fashion, and is heavily hinted to be carrying the real Excalibur. The other Knights of the Cross are just as ass-kicking, but subvert the "Church" part: one, a non-native English speaker, accidentally converted to Baptism when he was at an Elvis Presley concert and completely misunderstood the phrase "meet the King," and the other claims to be an agnostic despite receiving his holy sword direct from the hand of an archangel. He argues that the "angels" and "demons" could be Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, or he could just be hallucinating the entire thing.
    • Not to mention that in Skin Game, when one sword finds a new wielder in Waldo Butters, he has just one question: " A Jewish Knight of the Cross?"
    • As of Ghost Story, Amoracchius has been confirmed to indeed be Excalibur. The two other swords, Esperacchius and Fidelacchius, are Durendal and Kusanagi respectively.
  • Father Forthill is revealed in the short story "The Warrior" to be connected the Ordo Malleus (the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church, who have been reformed as a secretive order of Catholic priests, monks, and other officials who are "in the know" regarding the supernatural and help combat its dangers). Additionally, the villain of this short story was a Knight Templar who was tired of having the swords waiting for wielders in the hands of a wizard.
  • Any of the Latin American churches affiliated with the Fellowship of Saint Giles' operations against the Red Court of Vampires are probably this trope too.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: One of the main principles of magic is that you have to believe in what you are doing or it will not work. For example, in Proven Guilty, Harry sets up a defensive spell network using blue Play-Doh, telling Murphy that blue will work best. When she asks him if that is how the rules of magic works, he tells her that it is irrelevant because he associates blue with safety in his own mind so it works best for him. This is also the basis for the Oblivion War; it is fought by a small cadre of agents whose mission is to erase all knowledge and memory of the worst of the old demons. Any knowledge of them is enough to bring them back to the world in some measure.
• Classical Movie Vampire: The Black Court Vampires (or, to quote Harry, blampires). In fact, Stoker's book was written and published on the orders of the White Court and White Council in order to teach muggles how to fight the Black Court.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Harry's reaction to hearing that He Who Walks Behind might be coming back into the mortal realm in Blood Rites is to give one of these:
  Harry: Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells.
• The Collector of the Strange:
  • Harry Dresden has a collection of vampire fangs (not the hinged plastic kind), parts of rhino horns, depleted uranium dust, spell/potion ingredients, and a lion scrotum. It was a gift. Stop looking at me like that.
  • Mort Lindquist collects ghosts at his residence. Both warrior-type ghosts that act as his home-security force within the Spirit World, and insane murderer shades whom he keeps out of trouble while sheltering them from both the sun's rays and posthumous predators.
• Cold-Blooded Torture:
  • Lloyd Slate, the Winter Knight. Mab basically tortured him from the end of book four to the middle of book twelve. To put that in perspective... these books take place about a year apart. Each.
    • And given how time works in the Nevernever, this could have conceivably gone on for centuries.
• Combat Pragmatist: Harry will do whatever he can or needs to do to win, using whatever he can get his hands on (as long as it does not violate his personal ethics or the laws of magic). He is not the only one, as Kincaid mentions that his preferred method of destroying a Black Court scourge is to just bomb the entire building, and he mentions that if he ever needs to go after a wizard like Harry he will simply pick him off with a rifle at kilometer range. Even the faeries sometimes decide to abandon their traditional style in favor of pragmatism, as one Gruff hit-squad comes with sub-machine guns and tries to just shoot Harry.
  Molly: I had this teacher who kept telling me that if I was ever in a fair fight, somebody had made a mistake.
  • Harry at one point notes that one of the best tactics for dealing with magic-slinging enemies is to take the first opportunity you get to just slug them in the face.
• Complete Immortality: Certain entities such as gods and the Faerie Queens are absolutely unkillable under normal conditions. Even if their bodies are reduced to their constituent atoms, they will eventually recover completely. However, there are certain places and times where this does not apply such as on Halloween night (where every living thing on Earth is mortal until the first bird song of the next morning), and they can be killed just like anyone else... Provided, of course, that you can get past the defenses of a Physical God.
• Complexity Addiction: If your plan is not insanely complicated the White Court vamps will not respect you for it. Needless to say, they do not respect Harry very much.
• Confusion Fu: Harry often defeats opponents with hundreds, sometimes thousands of years of experience on him, buttloads more magical talent and skill, and vastly superior physical abilities often by doing things that are the exact opposite of sensible. With a bit of every Gambit trope ever thrown in. Yes, even Unwitting Pawn. On Harry.
  • He has been pulling this off since his first ever fight. His opponent, a terrifying Eldritch Abomination, introduces itself and says Harry is going to die. Harry responds by quoting Pee-Wee Herman. The creature could only respond with a Big "WHAT?!" shortly followed by a baffled Stunned Silence, giving Harry the opportunity to bolt.
• Convection, Schmonvection:
  • Played straight in the first book, where Harry threw up his shield to block a burst of fire just fine. Granted, this can also be ignored since he drops low to avoid the worst of it as well.
  • Disturbingly averted in Blood Rites. Harry blocks napalm with his shield and burns his hand to a crisp nonetheless — his shield could block the physical elements of the napalm, but the heat was still able to make it through. His next shield bracelet is made to cover for this, among other things.
• Cool Big Sis:
  • Molly. Even as an adult, she lovingly calls her siblings the Jawas. She is fiercely protective of them.
  • Subverted by Lara. While protective, she isn't the type to shower her siblings with kindness and hugs, unless it is part of some plot.
• Cool Car:
  • Thoroughly averted with the Blue Beetle. Not only is it fundamentally just not that cool of a car (it's a Volkswagon Beetle, after all), but Harry's status as both a Walking Techbane and Cosmic Plaything result in it being constantly mangled and given various absurd fixes to keep it working (such as virtually every door on it being a different color). Special mention should be given below for Harry's description of the car's "redesigned" interior in the first chapter of Blood Rites. Apparently, it'd gotten like that after a warlock had called some mold demons out of the car's decay, and the demons had made bodies out of the organic matter in the car to try and kill Harry with.
    Harry's Narration: I looked around at the Beetle’s interior. It wasn't Volkswagen standard any more. The seat covers were gone. So was the padding underneath. So was the interior carpet, and big chunks of the dashboard that had been made out of wood. There was a little vinyl left, and some of the plastic, and anything made out of metal, but everything else had been stripped completely away.
    I’d done some makeshift repairs with several one by sixes, some hangar wire, some cheap padding from the camping section at Wal-Mart, and a lot of duct tape. It gave the car a real post-modern look: by which I meant that it looked like something from after a major nuclear exchange, a la "Road Warrior."
  • Thomas' Hummer, on the other hand, is so cool Harry refuses to admit it aloud.
  • Lara's Rolls Royce Wraith (the pun is probably intentional in-universe, definitely intentional on Butcher's part): Harry rides in it while wounded, and knows he's going to be okay because the car is way too cool for him to die in.
  • It is yet to be seen whether the Munstermobile as Harry dubs the car given to him by Mab in Cold Days will be this, or go the route of the Blue Beetle.
• Cool Sword: The swords wielded by the Knights of the Cross, each imbued with Holy might and one of the nails of the Crucifixion. They're named Amoracchius, Fidelacchius, and Esperacchius. Or, if you wanna go by their more famous names, Excalibur, Kusanagi, and Durendal.
  • Among others; apparently most of the big name magic swords of history were one of the three.
  • When Waldo Butters acquires Fidelacchius, it transforms from a shikomizue (cane sword-style katana) to a lightsaber.
  • And while they're mostly infamous for being used to execute young Warlocks, the enchanted swords used by the Wardens are also pretty damn cool themselves.
• Cool Versus Awesome: Quoth Jim Butcher himself: "Wizards are cool." And the fans have noticed that so are zombies, werewolves, vampires (be they Dracula, Anne Rice, or Mayincatec types), The Fair Folk, fallen angels, Eldritch Abominations, and evil wizards. And when that first wizard does insanely awesome stuff like riding a zombie Tyrannosaurus into battle, well...
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: Cold Days reveals that reality itself is under a constant siege from the forces of terrifying Eldritch Abominations hailing from somewhere literally outside of our universe, and the current defenders of the universe are The Fair Folk. Suddenly, the stakes are raised to levels so high and vast that it's not even funny.
• Cosmopolitan Council: The Senior Council of the White Council of Wizards currently consists of a white British man, a Native American man (whose tribe of origin is never specified) and who is also practicing an unspecified Native American tribal religion, a Chinese woman, an African-American woman, a white "redneck" American man, a Greek man of Mediterranean descent, and a Middle Eastern man who is also a practicing Muslim. Two of their former members included both a white French man and a Russian man of unknown ethnicity. Justified since they're an intentionally diverse group of elderly wizards from all around the world who have been selected in part to give the whole Senior Council a more comprehensive understanding of how to solve whatever magical problem they're currently facing.
• Could Say It, But...: Harry and Murphy both invoke this trope at times, since officially they're each often barred from involving the other.
• Counterspell: This is one of the defensive tricks a practitioner can do.
  • In Death Masks, when one of the Knights of the Blackened Denarius casts a spell conjuring up a bunch of snakes to attack his love interest, Harry Dresden performs a quick counterspell to get rid of them.
  • In one of the short stories, a Grendelkin displays and boasts of his knowledge of countering magic, making it so Harry's hardest hits just flow off it like water.
  • In Turn Coat, Listens-to-Wind does a Rain Dance as a counterspell—this time, instead of negating the blasts coming at him, he just causes them to miss their marks.
  • The swords of the Wardens of the White Council are also noted as being able to cut through and undo any enchantment. We see it in action a couple times, once negating one of Harry's defensive shields, and another time destroying some magical armor.
  • The RPG goes into a little more detail on how it's done—first, the mage has to do a Lore check to assess the strength of the spell he wants to counter, then he casts the counterspell equal to that amount of power. It's noted this usually takes too long to do as a defensive move, but it can be houseruled in as one.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • The covers of most of the books depict Harry with a fedora-like hat. Not only is such a hat never mentioned in the books, but one short story ("Heorot") has Harry mention at one point that he needs to get a hat, and in Changes he comments that he hates headgear.
  • Harry is a little over six and a half feet tall, and his staff is six feet long. The covers show his staff as being as tall as he is.
  • The covers frequently show Harry with rather long hair. At several points, he explicitly mentions this not to be true most of the time: his signature cut is short on the sides and back and slightly longer up top, the fourth book or so describes him as having let himself go and not shaving or cutting his hair to where it is longish and looks terrible on him , and in Cold Days he hasn't had a haircut in nearly a year and his hair is hanging past his chin (he is living in the Nevernever and he's afraid that someone might get a hold of one of his hairs if he was to get a haircut), which is a far cry from hair brushing past his shoulders in many of the covers.
• Cowboy Cop: Ortega accuses Harry of meting out "cowboy justice" to the Red Court in Grave Peril.
• Crapsack World: invoked The Dresden Files is basically what would happen if the archetypical Crapsack World of a Film Noir (with dirty cops and politicians both taking bribes from The Mafia to look the other way while mysterious conspiracies bring about seemingly endless suffering For the Evulz) was combined with the archetypical Crapsack World of countless different real-world mythologies (where the human race is but insects before ridiculously petty and cruel supernatural entities, with their sorcery and might being used to toy with humanity in the same way that little sociopaths like to pull the legs off of spiders). The later books, most prominently from Ghost Story onwards, even start to directly work in Cosmic Horror Story elements. To paraphrase Harry himself, this is a world where humanity is nowhere near the top of the food chain.
• Crazy-Prepared: Harry. Half of the reason he survives through most of the series is because he either prepared for just such an eventuality or he knows who to call or where to go to get what he needs. The rest, he makes up as he goes.
• Creepy Souvenir / Battle Trophy: Downplayed, but as the war with the Red Court really gets into gear, both Harry and Ramirez start collecting vampire teeth.
• Crime of Self-Defense: The White Council believes that all killing using magic is bad, even in self defense. They're not exactly wrong.
  • Note that this rule applies only to killing humans with magic. Harry and other wizards kill all sorts of non-human things with magic, and the White Council usually approves. In fact this seems to be part of why the White Council exists. Note that apparently this is truly not Black Magic, since it doesn't cause that addictive death spiral.
• Crossover Cosmology: Big G God exists in the Dresdenverse and is fairly active, and so are all the demons and angels that come with Him. However, the Fae are real and there are various demons, loa, and other supposedly mythological spirits and creatures around that Dresden can call up. The Norse gods even run a magical security firm.
  "...there are beings who aren't the Almighty who have power way beyond anything running around on the planet...Old Greek and Roman and Norse deities. Lots and lots of Amerind divinities, and African tribal beings. A few Australian aboriginal gods; others in Polynesia, Southeast Asia. About a zillion Hindu gods. But they've all been dormant for centuries."^note Some of them aren't quite as dormant as all that; Odin takes an active part in several stories under one or another of his guises, and in Skin Game Hades turns out to have been fully aware of everything that's been happening.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Specific examples aside, this is a running theme of the series, as a noir story in something of a Crapsack World, there isn't really a single Sorting Algorithm of Power so much as every power bringing with it a cost and a weakness. Most novels start with Harry not yet knowing the weak point, putting on the receiving end of the curb-stomp, and end with him finding it and applying the appropriate lever, putting him on the giving end. There is very little middle ground in magical combat.
  • invoked The scene in the first book that pits both Harry and Marcone against a traitorous gangster. Not. Even. A. Page.
  • Harry vs. a Xenomorph Expy in the dark during Proven Guilty. No-Holds-Barred Beatdown with a side of Unstoppable Rage.
  • In Small Favor, the fallen angel Magog tries to take on Eldest Brother Gruff. Magog gets annihilated in a single shot, without Eldest Brother Gruff even really trying. Dresden likens it to Gruff swatting him like "an uppity pixie."
  • Michael in Small Favor vs. several hundred hobs (evil Winter fae), some of which are armoured and some the size of mountain gorillas. Michael barely breaks a sweat. Of course, wielding freaking Excalibur helps.
  • In Turn Coat, the Skinwalker utterly thrashes Harry, Luccio, Lara and her sisters, and a half dozen human gunmen.
    • That same being had earlier reduced Harry to near-gibbering uselessness just after Seeing it.
  • In Cold Days, Harry, now the Winter Knight, fights Fix, the Summer Knight. Fix has about ten more years of experience with the job, and has been preparing to fight the Winter Knight nearly that entire time. Furthermore, Fix is at full strength, and has his magic armour and sword, while Harry is running on fumes and has been stripped naked. But Harry has a few things going for him that Fix can't counter. First, Harry is still one of the world's most powerful Wizards. Second, Harry has enough willpower to ignore the combat sense the Winter Knight Mantle bestows him, which Fix would know how to counter. Third, the fight takes place on Demonreach, which grants Harry total knowledge of everything on it. Fourth, Fix may have more experience as a Fae Knight, but Harry has been fighting nearly longer than Fix was alive. Fifth, Harry knows actual martials arts. Sixth, Harry is a Combat Pragmatist who is willing to use the Kryptonite Factor of the fae. Some conjured mist robs Fix of his sight, leaving Harry unhindered. Harry takes Fix down so easily he feels almost ashamed, saying he feels like he's beating up a blind man.
• Curse: Several varieties, most prominently featuring a wizard's death curse.
• Cute Monster Girl: Most of the female inhuman monsters Harry encounters are extraordinarily beautiful but equally scary, and many of them have, literally, wanted to eat him. It's mentioned and subsequently lampshaded in Skin Game that this is why he and Binder are instinctively leery about Ascher's advances. Ascher was Lasciel's new host at the time, making their caution completely justified.
• Cuteness Proximity: Ivy, the all-knowing Archive in Death Masks, is all business when introducing herself and her purpose for visiting Harry... but goes to full 7-year-old little girl mode when Mister enters the room. Or, in Small Favor, goes to full 12-year-old little girl mode when she sees otters. Otters!

D

• Damager, Healer, Tank: Healers are hard to come by in the Dresden universe. However in the later books it becomes clear Dresden has practiced playing tank for his allies. He will throwing up a defensive shield to block incoming attacks while allies will utilize his protection to focus on offense. Unlike most Tanks he is a very capable damage dealer on his own right. It's just that he often has allies who are squishy and incapable of using magic to defend themselves as he can, thus as the one most capable of providing defense he naturally takes up the role of tank.
  • Earlier on when Harry remakes his shield bracelet, after the first one's inability to protect against heat nearly killed Harry, he explicitly says his new bracelet was designed to be more energy intensive but able to block anything. By contrast the magical defenses of wizards close to his level that we have seen were effective and presumably more energy efficient but not quite as certain to defend against anything thrown at it. Thus it makes sense to have the one with the most comprehensive defensive magics, who has experience protecting vulnerable allies, to be the one to be allocated the role of tank for his warden squad. Someone on the team has to do it, and Harry is the one best suited to the role.
  • Dresden explicitly calls this out during the Skin Game novel. When going up against another foe he points out the other foe had always focused on winning through raw firepower and thus had never learned the importance of also worrying about defense. This made his foe unable to compete with a wizard like him who knew how to keep up a good defense as well as toss fireballs.
• Dashed Plot Line: While the plot of each book takes place in under two weeks, there's usually a gap of several months between each book. Ghost Story plays with this- while from Harry's perspective it starts within a few minutes of the end of Changes, for everyone else it has been six months. Peace Talks and Battle Ground is the first time the plot of one book directly follows another.
• Dating What Daddy Hates:
  • Wizard Margaret, mother of Harry, dated Lord Raith for several years much to Ebenezer McCoy's fury.
  • It is implied a White Court succubus' father would never approve of her love Irwin Pounder, a half-human half-Forest-People, as they must leave town and live in Irwin's father's domain for protection.
  • Played with in regards to Inari, daughter of Lord Raith. He wants her to feed on Bobby, who is infatuated with her, to turn her into a full succubus. However, she and Bobby truly love each other and feeding on him first will destroy the fledgling demon inside of her, which is far from her father's plots. So he unknowingly is encouraging her daughter to date the one person he doesn't want her to be with.
  • Both inverted and played straight with Molly. Lasciel suggests that Michael's respect for Harry and Charity's dislike of him both contributed to her crush on him.
• De-aged in Death: In Ghost Story, the first spirit Dresden encounters is Ron Carmichael, who died about a decade before during the events of Fool Moon. Dresden doesn't even recognize him until he uses his catchphrase, because his spirit self is about twenty years younger, 40 pounds lighter, and lacking the receding hairline and poor hygiene of his living self. It's implied this is pretty standard and most spirits have a degree of control over how their appearance manifests.
• Decadent Court: The White Court of Vampires, complete with institutional Complexity Addiction. Both the Faerie Courts could also count for this.
• Death by Childbirth: Harry's mother, although it is later revealed that this was the result of an entropy curse.
• Death of the Old Gods: Most of the old gods have effectively gone into hibernation over the last few centuries. The Lord Almighty (as Harry calls the Abrahamic God) is still very active in modern times, and not all the Old Gods are completely out of the game.
  • Changes reveals some of the Old Gods, specifically Mayincatec ones, to have actually been very powerful, very old vampires of the Red Court, called the Lords of Outer Night. However, from the same books there is indication that the gods really did exist, and the Red Court leadership just stole their names and perpetuated a God Guise.
  • Cold Days reveals even more. Some entities can hold different mantles or masks as times changes. Odin may not be worshipped much anymore, but he still gains much power from his role as Santa. And a whole lot of "dark" gods/entities are imprisoned underneath Demonreach.
  • There are a whole bunch of ancient deities so dangerous to the world that an Ancient Tradition of Venatori has been struggling for centuries to erase every trace of their presence, thus preventing mortals from believing in them and allowing them to exist. This invoked example is appropriately known as the "Oblivion War".
• Death Glare: Mouse pulls a big one on a bully at a beer contest in the short story "Heorot". After spending the first part of the story playing up the Big Friendly Dog act, he suddenly stops and stares. He doesn't growl, bark, or show teeth, he simply stares. Mouse is good at things like this—he just makes people suddenly aware that 200 lbs. of dog are paying them very close and not-at-all friendly attention.
  • Agent Tilly is said to have an effective one.
  • Harry may have one himself - as the books are told first-person, he might not realize it. Cowl is mentioned to have 'swayed' a tiny bit when Harry glared at him. Of course, it might have just been the wind.
  • Charity, as a mother of a large family, is quite skilled at this. She's passed this skill on to Molly.
• Debt Detester: The fairies, although it's not so much that they dislike being in debt as that if they make bargains they're compelled to keep them, so they have to be very careful about any deals they make. That said, fairies are very, very good at playing the Literal Genie act, so anyone entering a bargain with them usually gets the short end of the stick.
  • Harry mentions early in the series that having a faerie in your debt can be as bad as being in the faerie's debt. In Small Favor, having a favor owed to him by the Summer Court becomes so problematic for him that he uses up that favor by ordering one of the Summer Court's top goons to give him a doughnut.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Subtly deconstructed in a tragic fashion. Malcolm Dresden, Harry's father, was a well-meaning but ultimately unsuccessful man who did his best, but ultimately did little to influence Harry's development. His mother, Margaret La Fey, is a highly morally ambiguous character who involved herself in a lot of shady goings-on, which ultimately got her killed. His adoptive father, Justin DuMorne, was a clearly Evil Mentor who abused Harry and put him through Training from Hell... but Harry would not be nearly as strong as he is without Justin's tutelage.
• Deceptively Cute Critter: Dresden's dog Mouse (a scion of a Foo dog, with human-level intelligence and supernaturally-empowered strength) frequently employs the Big Friendly Dog trope to make strangers more comfortable around him or to trick enemies who aren't aware of what he is into underestimating him.
• Deconstructed Trope:
  • The series gradually deconstructs the Indy Ploy methods so much favored by Harry and other heroes flying by the seat of their pants. Harry's "throw plans together within a second's notice" and "survive now and deal later" mindset screw him over multiple times in the long run, such as when he goes to Bianca's party in the third book and starts the Wizard-Vampire War, or in Changes when he wiped out the entire Red Court of Vampires, winning the war — and opening up a massive power vacuum that is throwing the world into such chaos that even the mortals are beginning to take notice.
  • invoked The series also subtly deconstructs the Ho Yay trope - it's all fine and funny if two guys are suspiciously close while insisting they are not gay. But when there are two guys who are suspiciously close and one of them is an incubus who can enslave people to their will through sex and the other is a close friend of yours...it's caused Harry no end of trouble placating worried allies that he is not mind-controlled.
  • House Raith of the White Court is a pretty hideous deconstruction of Free-Love Future. The Raiths are trying to create this type of society through societal brainwashing (they control the erotica industry), but they're only doing this because their Kryptonite Factor is True Love and they want to create a world of constant meaningless sex and vice indulgence where no one can ever form meaningful relationships with each other and thus pose a potential threat to them again. Additionally, the Raiths (and White Court as a whole) regard "consent" as a silly little delusion and they're fully intent on pushing pretty regressive and sex-negative attitudes in order to better control the "feeding habits" of their foodstock (read: humans). Basically, the Raiths want less a utopia of Eternal Sexual Freedom and more one of the Daemon worlds of Slaanesh.
  • Guilt-Free Extermination War is deconstructed in first Ghost Story and again in Skin Game. Yes, the Red Court of Vampires was made up of Always Chaotic Evil Asshole Victims who were a proven threat to the world at large... but they also were a Load-Bearing Boss with geopolitical power on par with the Soviet Union in Real Life, to the point that them being completely wiped off the face of the Earth by Harry has caused a massive Evil Power Vacuum. Relatedly, Skin Game shows that Harry's attack also killed lots of the innocent members of the Fellowship of Saint Giles, resulting in one of their former members seeking out Harry for revenge.
• Decoy Damsel: In the short story "Backup", Harry runs into this. Unfortunately, the person who knows she is a Decoy Damsel (Thomas) cannot tell him she's playing him, for a variety of reasons. This leads to Thomas having to frantically run around behind the scenes making everything work out, including letting Harry throw him into a wall.
  • Gets a Call-Back in Cold Days, where Harry tells a companion he still has no idea what the hell happened on that case.
• Defective Detective: Harry has numerous neuroses.
• Defector from Decadence: Literally Thomas. Thomas disagrees with the White Court's views of humanity, and struggles with his own identity as a vampire. Until the Naagloshi tortures him, bringing his demon back to power in his mind and making him start feeding again, thus averting this trope.
• Defusing The Tykebomb: In an interesting variation, Harry managed to defuse himself when he was sixteen, killing his Evil Mentor in the process. Ebenezar, however, is equally important - even though he came in afterward, he's the one who made it stick.
  • In Small Favor Luccio, on behalf of the Senior Council, warns Harry not to become too closely involved with the Archive lest she become unstable due to her emotional ties. At the same time, she doesn't want to wake Ivy without Harry present for fear of what Ivy might do without someone she trusts to comfort her. Luccio is not blind to the hypocrisy.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • One of the main issues concerning dealing with The Fair Folk is that even on top of their Blue-and-Orange Morality, most of them seem to have their perspective of humanity forever trapped in that of the Middle Ages, resulting in them seeing things like Altar Diplomacy or arranging a Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb situation as perfectly viable policies, whereas nowadays ideas like that are understandably viewed with either outright abhorrence or utter disdain.
  • Noted in Turn Coat. At one point, Ebenezer McCoy talks to Harry of his old teacher and the old journals that his mentor had made. Here, Ebenezer fondly calls the wizard his "master," and Harry visibly winces at that turn of phrase. Ebenezer then notes there was a time when "master" didn't have as narrow of a meaning as it does now with its implicit connections to slavery, racism, and classism, and it used to encompass more benevolent definitions like that of "teacher" or "mentor."
• Delighting in Riddles: All the wizards, including Harry, really love being cryptic and mysterious. The Fair Folk are literally forced to speak like this, as giving straight answers is inherently against their very nature.
• Depraved Bisexual: The Raiths, as most will sleep with either gender. At one point, Lara flirts with both Harry and Luccio in the same scene. Notably averted with the White King himself, which is part of the reason Thomas' father did not turn him into a slave like his sisters.
  • The bias against male homosexuality as Lord Raith's personal preference is significant, since the Raiths control the pornography industry. In-universe, his influence is the reason why modern mainstream society believes two drunken girls kissing is "hot", while two men doing the same isn't.
• Destructive Saviour: Harry's tendency to destroy a lot of buildings has become a Running Gag. Frequently lampshaded. In Side Jobs, the forward to one story describes its early planning as finding a nice mall in the Chicago area for Dresden to destroy.
  • Lampshaded in what is probably the best opening line for any book ever:
    Harry: The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
• Deus Exit Machina: Harry is in the top 10% of wizards on Earth, the greatest of his generation, and guaranteed to be the strongest on the planet, in terms of raw power, once he gets a few more decades under his belt. As a result, side stories and sometimes even the main plot will need to occasionally bench Harry so that vanilla humans, other supernatural beings, and even other wizards with less raw power than him can have the spotlight without the audience wondering why Dresden can't simply throw a fireball at the problem and be done with it. For example, In "Day One" new Knight of the Cross Butters calls Harry for help. While Harry does offer information, he reluctantly refuses to come himself. Dresden tells Butters that his new job means that he is supposed to be the one who people are counting on to help them, so he needs to learn to do these things on his own and can't count Harry to bail him out every time things get a little hairy.
• Didn't See That Coming: Often.
  • Just about any strategy of Harry's relies on him knowing something that the Big Bad doesn't, or him doing something the Big Bad couldn't have expected.
  Wile E. Coyote. Suuuuuper genius.
  • In general, Harry has a lot of street smarts and fights really dirty. Regularly averting the Squishy Wizard trope, Harry is physically fit, somewhat trained in martial arts, has years of brawling experience, and almost invariably packs a gun. On one occasion some wannabe Practioners tried to challenge Harry to a magical duel, so he pulled out his revolver.
  • How Harry killed Aurora, the Summer Lady deserves special mention. Nobody ever thinks of the Little Folk, allowing Harry to smuggle them and some box cutters into the most pitched battle he could find. Just when he seemed spent... he opened the equivalent of a bag of poisonous bees in her face.
  • Harry, the famed wizard detective, hired a muggle detective. He subcontracted.
  • Despite the number of times that Harry gets thrown into situations that he knows less about than he should, he continues to wisecrack his way through. Very occasionally, the baddies bring something so far out of left field that even Harry is rendered speechless. Demeter, Lara Raith, and Nicodemus all had their moments.
  • Kringle, aka Santa Claus, has another name. Odin. Boy did he love dropping that bombshell on Harry.
  • The Big Bad's plan in Cold Days is brilliant, comes out of left field, and is the only fitting successor to the plan from Summer Knight we've seen so far.
  • Harry performed this on himself with a supernatural hitman and a memory wipe.
  • In Harry's duel with He Who Walks Behind, the latter corners Harry at a gas station. Guess what happens. Guess.
  • In the climactic duel in White Night, a Big Bad is taken by surprise when the ground he's running on suddenly turns into frictionless dust.
  • Now that Harry is buddies with the Genius Loci of Demonreach, he gets to regularly pull these off on the island when he's fighting people only running on mortal senses. Even immortal sense aren't as good as intellectus.
  • Skin Game reveals the 'parasite' Mab was talking about is a spirit of intellect born from Lash's Heroic Sacrifice, meaning Harry has been pregnant since the end of White Night. Yes, you read that right.
• Did Not Die That Way: Harry's mom died giving birth to him, and it's later revealed that this happened due to a curse laid by one of her enemies. Also it's implied at one point that his father's death wasn't entirely natural either.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Harry lives for this.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Michael Carpenter has a history of this. He is known to have rescued his wife-to-be by slaying a dragon. (See Our Dragons Are Different.) Holy swords are particularly good at that sort of thing.
  • Harry himself has taken out more than a few supernatural nasties that were well above his weight class, including, but not limited to the Summer Lady, the Red King, He Who Walks Behind, and He Who Walks Before.
  • In Cold Days, Murphy joined the list of humans who have killed godlike entities when she shot Maeve.
• Dirty Business: Many characters are forced to do particularly nasty things to prevent the apocalypse.
• Discard and Draw: Harry lost the Hellfire and immense knowledge he gained from Lasciel's shadow in White Night, then picked up Soulfire from Uriel in the very next book, Small Favor, and forged a mystical link with a sentient island in the book after that (Turn Coat).
  • It's implied that this kind of bargaining your way into external sources of power isn't unusual for wizards, and is one of the reasons the senior wizards are uncomfortable with Harry's relatively high 'base power level' even though it doesn't really present a direct challenge to them. The Blackstaff, the previous keepers of Demonreach, and the council's bargain with the Fae for exclusive use of the ways all indicate that this kind of ability shuffle is one of the main tools in the wizardly box.
• Disciplines of Magic: Some types of magic that have been described are evocation, a.k.a close combat magic, illusions, and thaumaturgy.
• Dispel Magic: Skilled users of water or earth magic can ground out offensive magic (as opposed to just ignoring it, like some of the more powerful Fae and most Outsiders can do). Notable users include River Shoulders, the Genoskwa and Listens-to-Wind.
• Distracted by the Sexy: This is a trait of the entire Svartalf race. Put to use in Bombshells by Molly, Andi and Justine. And Thomas.
  • invoked Harry himself often falls prey to this as well. Any new male character is often described in a sentence, maybe two or three if they're important characters. Almost every female character Harry meets is described in such detail that it fills over half a page, often with Harry missing important details because of this. It's obvious enough that characters in-universe have commented on it. Word of God has explained that this is partly a nod to classic noir detective works, which gave women similarly disproportionate levels of attention, and partly because Harry is really sexually repressed.
• Damsel in Distress: The subject of what practically amounts to a Running Gag, with Harry inevitably helping her (even when it is unwise) because he has a chivalrous streak he cannot seem to override. He even puts himself back under the Doom of Damocles again to save a girl.
• Divided We Fall: The main threat facing the White Council.
• Diving Save:
  • Subverted by Harry Dresden of when he saves Michael Carpenter's newest son from a Artifact of Doom, a Denarian's coin - by grabbing the coin instead of the kid. Guilt ensues.
  • Dresden pulls a young girl out of the way of an incoming car in the short story "The Warrior" (and inadvertently alerts her mother to the fact that her father is beating her). Although she's an irrelevant tangent to the overall story and Dresden thinks nothing more of it, she's used as an example in the ending's You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech on how seemingly minor actions can have a major impact, as by saving Courtney, he "shattered a generational cycle of abuse more than three hundred years old".
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Black Magic is frequently and explicitly compared In-Universe to a severe drug addiction; It's incredibly hard to get rid of, there's always a danger of someone falling off the wagon and being consumed by their addiction after they first get a taste, just the merest "sample" of it almost irrevocably tarnishes how virtually anyone else (particularly authority figures) see you, and letting it consume inevitably results in your demise along with you ruining the lives of everyone around you.
  • The eternal rivalry between the Summer and Winter Courts of the Faeries bears more than a passing resemblance to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union respectively. Both sides are pretty much equal in strength, one side (the Winter Court/Soviet Union) is generally characterized as being stoic and ruthless while hailing from a frozen-over wasteland along with being typically seen as the "evil" side in their conflict (when they actually aren't completely evil), and the other side (the Summer Court/United States) is generally characterized as being emotional and empathetic while hailing from a far more temperate and warmer landscape along with being typically seen as the "good" side in their conflict (though, again, they're not all that good). To make the parallels even clearer, it's repeatedly made obvious that a full scale conflict between them would, in the best scenario, largely wipe both sides out and send the world back into the Stone Age, but if it looks like one side's showing weakness ...well, the other side just has to exploit it even if it's a ridiculously self-destructive move. That's what archenemies do, right? The later books make this even more apparent, with The Reveal that the Winter Court's primary job is to Hold the Line against the Outsiders being a loose parallel to how the Soviet Union was one of the most significant factors in ensuring the fall of Nazi Germany.
  • In Grave Peril, Harry is captured by the Red Court and, while he doesn't go into detail about what they do to him, Bianca's straddling him and shifting from beautiful, seductive woman to terrifying, monstrous vampire, the way the Red Court finds feeding to be a key turn on, in a dark variant of Erotic Eating, and his statement "They did things to me," subtly plays up the gang rape angle. And, when he appears a few months later in Summer Knight, while he's grim, anti-social and short-tempered partly because he's spent his time trying to cure Susan and failing, it's not unreasonable to suggest that at least part of it is his reaction to what they did to him.
  • A lampshaded, in-universe example occurs in Ghost Story. Ghost!Harry, being incorporeal, tries to possess Molly's body and channel magic through it. She fights this initially, trying to push him out, but relaxes after he tells her his identity and lets him go inside her. She notes how suggestive it was later.
• Dogs Love Being Praised: Zoo Day, one of the short stories opens with Mouse narrating:
  "My name is Mouse, and I'm a good dog. I know because everyone tells me so."
• Dominant Species Genes:
  • Vampires of the White Court breed with mortal humans, their children appear to be fully human until sometime in their early twenties, but if they fall in love before then they remain human.
  • Changelings are the progeny of humans and fairies. They make a choice between becoming fully human or fully fairy, and can make that choice at any time.
  • Goodman Grey is the son of a naagloshii and a mortal, as far as anyone can tell he is a skinwalker, but that might be the shapeshifting.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Murphy, in particular, is violently allergic to perceived pity or sympathy.
• Doom Magnet: Harry. He cannot even get a day off without mayhem.
  • Played with in earlier books. Harry points out to Thomas (and, by extension, the reader) that we only see his life a couple days out of the year. Sure, he may battle dark wizards or demons for a few days here and there, but for the most part, his life is fairly quiet. Of course, things change...
• Double-Meaning Title: Jim Butcher seems to have a lot of fun making these up. In fact all of the titles of the full length novels have multiple meanings. The rule is that each title is two words with the same number of letters, except for Changes, that have some sort of double meaning or pun.
  • Storm Front refers to Victor Sells was using thunderstorms to fuel the curse and the incident was the beginning of the metaphorical storm that has been Dresden's life since then. The original title was going to be Semiautomagic, which is about people being murdered with the curse.
  • Fool Moon is an obvious pun on "full moon", referencing the various werewolves (and a single wolfwere) in the book. "Moon" can also be a verb, meaning "to sentimentalize or remember nostalgically". Harry has a habit of purposely not telling people dangerous information "to protect them" (which has originally worked in the past), but now causes people he cares about to make foolish decisions and got a lot of good people killed.
  • Grave Peril refers to both the chaos arising with Chicago's ghosts, and the extreme danger Harry and his allies are in.
  • Summer Knight is about the murder of a Summer Knight, and the climax takes place on Midsummer Night.
  • Death Masks could refer to the Shroud of Turin, which is what sets off the entire story and is believed by some to be the burial shroud imprinted with the face of Jesus Christ. It could also reference how various characters are masking their intentions on either killing someone (Ortega, Martin, Nicodemus) or accepting their death(s) (Shiro).
  • Blood Rites is centered around killing rituals powered by Human Sacrifice. It's also a pun on "blood rights", the privileges that arise from kinship. Family relations and major revelations involving both family heritage and legacy are all central to this story; Harry learns he still has living blood relatives, Murphy struggles with both her mother and baby sister, Arturo Genosa has some pretty tangled relationships involving both his crew and ex-wives, and all of the members of House Raith (Thomas, Lara, Inari and Lord Raith chief among them) are showcased as being immensely screwed up and dysfunctional. This story also sees Harry eventually acknowledging an attraction to Murphy, setting them up for further Ship Tease down the road. And, of course, it's a novel centered around Harry's struggles against two different kinds of vampires.
  • Dead Beat may refer to either the city that he operates in and protects (a.k.a. his "beat") is being infested with undead monsters, or the drum beat required to control necromantic constructs.
    • It also alludes to both the Trauma Conga Line Harry goes through over the novel's course (as in, Harry is dead tired by the novel's end since he's gotten so beaten up), and how the novel's Final Battle has Harry awesomely beating the crap out of his enemies in large part thanks to the (un)dead construct of Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex.
    • Finally, it serves as a subtle reference to Harry struggling to relate to and live with his half-brother Thomas, who is now sharing Harry's apartment and is a "deadbeat" since he can't hold down a job or provide any rent.
  • Proven Guilty comes from the widely-held legal phrase "Innocent until proven guilty", referring to the trials for black magic that bookend the story. It also alludes to various characters coming to terms with the guilt of hiding secrets over the novel's course — Molly's black magic, Charity forsaking her magic, Harry's guilt at killing both Cassius and the Corpsetaker along with picking up Lasciel's coin.
    • This is also the first novel where Harry is able to get enough (admitedly circumstantial) evidence to determine the existence of the Black Council, and he is able to prove to both himself and Ebenezar that the Black Council is guilty for the novel's events.
  • White Night refers to the climax of the book happening at night at a gathering of the White Court of Vampires. It's also a pun on "White Knight", a business term where a company (in this case House Raith of the White Court) acquires an outside investor (Harry) to stop an attempted hostile takeover (Houses Skavis and Malvora).
    • Additionally, a "White Night festival" is a summertime art exhibition that showcases a city's best works and generally gives an overview of its culture. This entire book is essentially a "white night festival" for the White Court through providing a deep dive into the Court's internal politics and culture.
    • Finally, Harry spends most of the novel acting as a "white knight," someone who jumps in and protects others without being asked to do so. Colloquially, a "white knight" does this to protect women, which highlights Harry's chauvinism and its changing nature; he affirms the chauvinism by trying to take hits for the women in this story, but starts deconstructing it by more properly acknowledging the competence of women like Murphy, Elaine, Justine, Lara, and Lash.
  • Small Favor. Mab calls on Harry to fulfill one of the favors he still owes her. Mab also takes away Harry's memories of fire magic as a favor to keep him safe from Summer's hunters. At the climax, Harry trades his Summer-given silver oak leaf to Eldest Gruff for a small favor: a donut. Also, Harry rescues a small child (the Archive) and learns that he has her favor as well.
    • The "Za-Lord's Guard" are also more formally fleshed out in this book, and the immense help that the Little Folk provide Harry in this book shows how much favor he now has among this physically smaller race of fae.
    • The title being "small favor" can also be seen as an allusion to the Judeo-Christian idiom "God grants us small favors", which is very befitting of the Contrived Coincidence powers of the Knights of the Cross.
  • Turn Coat. The White Council believes that Morgan has turned traitor and gone rogue, only to discover that Peabody is a member of the Black Council. At the end, Ebenezar reveals that he's forming "the Grey Council", a group that doesn't necessarily follow the White Council's leadership, making Harry and the rest of the Grey Council "turncoats" by definition.
  • Changes, easily the biggest Wham Episode in the whole series. Harry destroys the Red Court of Vampires, changing the political landscape of the entire world. Harry himself changes as he learns that he is a father and accepts the mantle of the Winter Knight. And then he dies (for a while). Furthermore, as a consequence of Harry’s actions, his allies all undergo extreme personal changes, with the most notable examples including Molly, Murphy, Thomas, Mouse, Martin, Mister, and of course Susan.
  • Ghost Story is about Harry's experiences as he wanders Chicago as a ghost (or a bodiless spirit anyway). It also refers to how ghosts are echoes of who they were in life, living as a pale shadow of their previous lives. This novel also reveals that ghosts are empowered by the memories of their initial lives on Earth, meaning that each ghost is effectively a collection of stories regarding the original human.
    • Finally, there's a lengthy scene where Harry tells the Leansidhe the story of his confrontation with He-Who-Walks-Behind (and also tells the readers several other memories from his life, such as his time with Justin DuMorne), making it a literal "ghost story".
  • Cold Days refers to Harry's first mission as the Winter Knight and also to the revelation of the true struggle underpinning the books' Myth Arc — the fight against Nemesis and the Outsiders. Additionally, Harry's new job, his immediate responsibilities, and the incredibly complicated and chaotic reasons behind his return have forced a degree of emotional distance (or "coldness") into his relationships with his friends and allies.
  • Skin Game refers to Harry's "game" with Nicodemus while working with him and the fact that Goodman Gray is his inside man the whole time and is also a play on the phrase "skin in the game," referring to committing oneself, in this case to family and fatherhood. It's also definitely not a coincidence that one of the most prominent characters playing "the game" in this novel is Goodman Grey, who is revealed at the end of the story to be a scion of a naagloshi, making him half-skinwalker.
    • "Skin" is also functionally synonymous with "flesh" in some circles — as in "flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone," or children. Fatherhood is central to this novel's plot and to the "game" everyone is playing against each other, as Nicodemus turns his daughter into a pawn while Harry finally accepts his role as a parent and Michael tries desperately to keep his own children out of play after he's brought back in for One Last Job as a Knight of the Cross. Furthermore, Harry's previously semi-parental relationship with Molly as her teacher during her apprenticeship is finally dissolved during their talk at the end of the novel.
  • Peace Talks alludes to the major peace negotiations going on in Chicago over the novel's course along with Harry's struggles to tastefully manage his personal life without pissing off some very powerful people. It also serves as a Call-Back to how Lara Raith privately threatened Harry that she "loves peace" and she would "kill [wizards] with peace" following the Final Battle of White Night, alluding to how Lara has a noticeable Character Focus in this book.
  • Battle Ground alludes to both the offensive earth magic Ebenezar McCoy uses against both the Jotuns and Ethniu, and how the vast majority of the novel is one Big Badass Battle Sequence involving virtually all of the series' main characters as they struggle to defend Chicago from the Fomor's onslaught.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Nearly every book and a couple of the short stories give Harry some reason that he can't use his most powerful assets for a chunk of the book. A lot of the short stories are, well, short because he doesn't have that handicap and can roast the monster with relative ease once he finds it.
  • In Fool Moon, Harry burns himself out on magic midway through the book, and is then vastly limited in what he can do.
  • In Grave Peril, the Nightmare eats a chunk of his magic, leaving him similarly crippled.
  • In Dead Beat, his injuries from Blood Rites have given him a psychological block against using fire magic, meaning he's much, much less effective against the zombie hordes menacing him than he should be.
  • In Small Favor, he's stripped of his memories of fire magic in combat, again robbing him of his strongest combat ability in a book where he's getting into fights constantly.
  • In Ghost Story, being dead means that Harry can't do anything but watch his friends fight creatures that he could have wiped the floor with in life.
  • In "A Restoration of Faith," he explains to Faith that while he normally could deal with the troll by blasting it with magic, casting spells all day to find her has left him too drained.
  • In "It's My Birthday, Too," the story opens with Harry and Molly returning from a fight with a slime golem. Harry leaves his spell-armored duster, his staff, and blasting rod at home to clean off later before heading back out to meet Thomas. This ensures that he's a lot less ready to deal with the vampires who attack later.
• Dramatic Drop: In the sixth book, Murphy meets Harry's mentor, Ebenezar. She is not impressed, and demands brusquely she be the driver since he doesn't have a license in Chicago. Harry tells Ebenezar he better just let her do so, calling the older man 'sir'. Cue Murphy dropping her armload in pure, unfiltered shock at hearing Harry Dresden address someone with authority with respect. She talks to Ebenezar afterwards as if he's on the same level as the Pope.
• The Dreaded:
  • We know Harry Dresden is a Sad Clown. Everyone else, like the Faerie Queens, Fallen Angels, and White Council? Not so much. They know him as a possibly-not-so-former warlock who shows a glaring disrespect for Faerie Queens, Fallen Angels, the highest nobility of the vampire courts, and even his seniors on the White Council and gets away with it, continually gaining more power in the process. As far as they're concerned, he is the guy that killed the Summer Lady, fought off Outsiders, and stopped the Darkhallow with a zombie Tyrannosaurus, succeeding Morgan as the "Most Infamous Warden on the White Council". This reputation is enough to give a half-dozen Wardens pause when they are told to arrest him. It has reached its peak by Changes, when a Red Court vampire assassin, the most badass of the vampire badass, one of the most feared vampire assassins in the world sees Harry... and screams in terror and runs the other way.
    • There are hints throughout the series that Harry has some sort of special destiny. This includes the possibility that his magic is some of the only mortal magic that can affect Outsiders. Supposedly some on the Senior Council and many powerful beings of the Nevernever know about this and fear/hate him for it.
    • Summed up neatly by Molly in Ghost Story:
      Molly: You never knew what you did for this town, Harry. You never knew how many things just didn't come here because they were afraid.
      Harry: Afraid of what?
      Molly: Of you, Harry.
  • And naturally, anyone that manages to seriously rattle Harry also deserves a spot here by default. Most notably, Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness and leader of the Unseelie Court of Sidhe, so absolutely terrifies Harry that when he meets back up with her in Small Favor after not having seen her for roughly two or so books, he's too busy quavering in fear to snark at her.
• Driven to Suicide: In White Night and Ghost Story, although in the suicides were the result of mental manipulation in both cases: by White Court vampires in the former case and by a Denarian in the latter.
  • In White Night, one of the characters that Harry is trying to save is driven to suicide by one of the local White Court vampires that feeds off despair. It's implied that if the Denarians ever get their hands on Esperacchius (the Sword of Hope), they would try to drive someone to suicide in the hope that they would use the Sword as a way out, as that would be the ultimate expression of despair, which would destroy the power in the sword, and render it useless.
  • In Ghost Story the flashback reveals Harry himself is the one who hired Kincaid to kill him, in order to escape from being the Winter Knight. However, Uriel immediately draws attention to the mysterious shadow that spoke seven words to Harry, and purposefully pushed him to suicide. While Harry did try to kill himself, he was manipulated into it, so it's a bit of a grey area.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: Using Black Magic almost inevitably leads to the temptation to use it again, ultimately leading to this trope. There are examples of characters who have been able to withstand that temptation, Harry among them, but the only person actually immune to it is Ebenezar McCoy in his capacity as the Blackstaff.
  • The last one has its downsides. Those black veins that appeared on his arm did so for a reason.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Harry has managed to defeat multiple black wizards, demons, and vampires, played a pivotal role in the war between the White Council and the Red Court, saved Chicago from a horde of necromancers, prevented a death plague from taking out most of the United States and saved the entire world from the faerie Courts being thrown out of whack, just for starters. Unfortunately, the only kind of respect he gets from most members of the White Council is the sort of respect with which one might approach an unexploded land mine.
  • Most members of the Senior Council act this way because he's a Cowboy Cop. When we see the younger generation like Carlos Ramirez, they're far more likely to respect him as the series goes on.
• Dumb Muscle: Harry's enemies sometimes accuse him of being this, due to the fact that he a) has a whole lot of power (magically speaking), but isn't so good at fine control, and b) he usually doesn't let that stop him from bringing on the mayhem.
  • Also the kind of character that Harry plays when roleplaying with the Alphas. His preferred character? An extremely dumb barbarian.
  • Harry seems to have this impression of Hendricks, given how large and quiet Marcone's bodyguard is. Amusingly, this is actually a subversion, as "Even Hand" reveals that Hendricks is actually well-read and erudite when he's alone with Marcone, and is even working on his thesis.
• Dying Alone: In Dead Beat, Cassius uses his death curse to tell Harry, "Die alone." Later his father tells him that death is by its nature something you do alone, but that does not mean there cannot be people with you when it happens, or people to meet you after it does, and the curse could mean nothing. In Turn Coat Morgan dies, and Harry reassures Luccio that he was with him when he did. In Changes Harry dies alone.

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness: Some. In the first book, Harry looks at a house with his Sight and Sees it on fire, indicating there is a possibility it will be burned down soon. Much later in the series, it's revealed that wizards gain a measure of precognition called "the Sight" at a certain age, but this is long before Harry's Sight develops.
  • The first three books, not to mention the first graphic novel and early short stories, focus quite heavily on Harry as a sort of P.I. with magic. Much like Philip Marlowe, but with a wizard's staff, he tends to start most stories in his office, and nearly all the stories revolve around him helping the police solve a strange case. While this never really goes away, starting in Book 4, the Faerie Courts, White Council, Vampire Courts and Fallen Angels enemies tend to dominate the stories, with Harry's taking jobs consulting with the police or taking clients put on the back burner, and his office becomes less and less a focal point of the series. In fact, his relationship with the police is eventually whittled down to his close friendship with Murphy, and to a much smaller degree, Rawlins. Hearing someone describe this series as being about a "Wizard Private Eye" means they obviously didn't read very far into it.
  • On a meta level, Harry doesn't actually get into a proper fight or cast a spell in combat until more than half way through Storm Front, and his Shout-Out quotient is pretty minimal aside from one teasing conversation with Murphy.
  • Female wizards are referred to as "witches" in the first book and "wizardesses" in the second; by the fourth, "wizard" has become a gender-neutral term, and "witch" is used only as a generic insult for female magic-users of any species.
  • Harry always makes potions in the first two books, with a lot of detail in how they're made. Later books almost totally ignore potion-making. Possibly justified by potions being mostly a kind of pre-prepared spell, and Harry's power levels have increased enough that he can usually just do what he needs on the fly instead of spending a lot of time and effort setting it up in advance.
    • Supported by several mentions of him teaching Molly to make potions. Since Molly mostly counts as Weak, but Skilled she'd probably benefit from potions more than Harry.
  • In the first two books, Harry is very anti-science, mockingly referring to it as "the largest religion of the twentieth century" and deriding it for covering up the truth of the world. From the third book onward, science - especially physics - becomes very important, with repeated reference to magic being another form of energy that wizards can redirect, and that magic and other supernatural forces must still pay at least nominal respect to the laws of nature (i.e., a wizard can conjure fire and throw it at people, sure, but if they do so too far underground, then the fire will consume all of the available oxygen and the caster will suffocate to death). Additionally, the "covering up the truth" part gets Hand Waved as people's natural tendency to ignore things that don't fit into their worldview, and Harry's frequent references to formulae and equations suggest that the laws of physics are entirely correct, they're just missing the bits for magic. Really, the series goes from saying "Science Is Wrong" to "Science is Mostly Right, Just Missing a Few Key Details."
  • Bob mentions that he's not on good terms with the Winter Court for unspecified reasons and is highly nervous when Harry has to carry him through Faerie in Grave Peril. This isn't brought up again until Cold Days where it turns out to be for a very good reason, but even in Changes Lea still just hides Bob in a garden in Faerie for safekeeping.
  • Early in the series, Harry refers to Bob as the magical equivalent of a computer database, and gives the impression that Bob is nothing out of the ordinary for a wizard to possess. He doesn't even mind that Bob talks in front of Susan in the first book. Later on, Bob is shown to be very unusual, and perhaps even unique, and Harry takes care to make sure that people don't find out about him.
  • Up until Death Masks, whenever the Red Court comes up, a big deal is made of the fact that they have a narcotic venom that Harry has to avoid whenever he encounters them, to the point that he makes a potion specifically to counter it in Death Masks. It's not brought up once in Changes.
  • The narrative style of the first couple books is different than later on. It's much more conversational, like Harry is writing the books to or for someone. While he still had the occasional aside to the reader in later books, it becomes a more standard first person narration, like the reader is privy to Harry's thoughts.
  • Throughout the first several books, it's frequently mentioned that Humans Are Special in that they're the only species to be truly mortal and have free will, and that wizards can only perform a Soulgaze with another mortal (i.e., Harry was able to soulgaze Rasmussen - the vessel of the Fallen Angel Ursiel in Death Masks - but not Ursiel itself). However, later supernatural species such as the Forest People, Svartalves, and Dogmen appear, and they're all shown to be mortal individuals with their own souls. Additionally, Battle Ground has Harry being able to Soulgaze both a freaking kraken and Ethniu herself (though granted, the latter is probably a special case due to her being a Titan and all).
• Ectoplasm: Creatures that are purely magical in nature take form in the physical world through ectoplasm. Their bodies revert back to the goo when they are killed, as there is no spirit in the body anymore to hold it together.
• Edible Ammunition: If you agree that every random thing that the Entropy Curse used from its environment to kill its victim may get called its "ammo", then yes, chalk up one unlucky vampire dying from cold turkey.]
• Elaborate Underground Base: The White Council headquarters is far underground beneath Edinburgh, and if the Ostentationary is not elaborate, nothing is.
• Eldritch Abomination: Outsiders, nightmarish "things" that do not so much as exist as parasitize reality with their mere presence and can only be turned back by the most powerful of wizards... working together. Additionally, they're called "Outsiders" because they're from "Outside". And not just "Outside" as in "extraterrestrial," but "Outside" as in "from outside our reality."
  • Turn Coat features a naagloshi, a.k.a. a Skinwalker. They're basically semi-divine shapeshifting Native American Fallen Angels whose true forms can drive a wizard to the brink of insanity through the merest glimpse with the Sight.
  • Demonreach is an exceptionally powerful Genius Loci located on an unnervingly creepy and uncharted island in the middle of Lake Michigan. Notably, it's not just one already, but it's also a massive prison for these things - enough that according to Vadderung, if it's inmates "the Sleepers" ever escaped, it would be "the end" (there are several Skinwalkers in there already, and they are considered "minimum security"; one of the most horrible beings Harry has ever gone up against is considered "meh, nothing to worry about that much" by Demonreach).
  • The shoggoth from "War Cry" makes most of the other Outsiders we've seen elsewhere (even the mistfiend from Turn Coat) all look like small potatoes, with it being best described as looking like a sea of flesh laden with screaming fang-laden maws that is constantly shifting between low and high tide.
• Eldritch Location:
  • For starters, the Nevernever, which is described as having a surface area roughly equivalent to Jupiter^note this works out to the surface area of 121.9 Earths flattened out. The closest part is Faerie, which is a huge place inhabited by monsters and fey creatures. Further on are also dozens of locations that doesn't appear to exist outside of mythology, including at least one underworld. Even further out is the homes of demons, many of which never even notice the physical world.
  • Then there's what can be called the "other side" (read: the afterlife), divided between God and Satan and their respective forces. The thing is, this is where souls go, and nobody really knows what happens to the soul after the moment of death, so there's no solid information on heaven, hell, or wherever souls go. There's some evidence to suggest that souls can visit the physical world for short times, though the door has to be opened up first.
  • Demonreach is an island in the middle of Lake Michigan covered dotted with the ruins of American settlers and one intact cottage and an air of doom hanging around it. In addition to having a Genius Loci that can manifest into a large spirit, it has a major leyline of dark magical energy running through it. Although it was previously settled by people, the inhabitants went mad and either evacuated or died out, a fate shared by most people who visit the island, and no records of the island has survived: most maps just show empty water where it sits, and the island has a way of discouraging visitors and observation. The key to all of this, is that it's a prison made by Merlin using time travel and levels of magical theory that Harry didn't even know exists, to create interlocking levels of magic that most top-tier wizards wouldn't understand. The prison houses numerous Eldritch Abominations and dark deities, and their body heat is the source of the dark leyline. Demonreach itself is incredibly powerful, very antisocial, and focused only on its sole purpose of attending its prison; and very loosely "good", inasmuch as a creature of its nature and incredibly narrow focus can be.
  • The Outer Gates, though long understood to be a metaphor, (and if the spoiler wasn't enough of a giveaway) a real place. They're a set of incredibly huge gates set at the very edge of the Nevernever, and on the other side lies the Outside, a place which isn't part of our universe, Nevernever and all. What the Outside is like isn't known, though it's the source of Outsiders, Walkers, and Mordite, things that are antithetical to nearly everything on "this side." Winter Sidhe have gone through to the near Outside and fought outsiders, and have been doing so for millennia.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Harry is aware of this trope, as well as how horrible his Latin is. So when Proven Guilty comes around and he has to make an eloquent defense of Molly Carpenter to keep her from being executed for black magic, he manipulates the situation so that he can present his defense in English.
• Emissary from the Divine: The Fairy Courts (Winter and Summer) use emissaries. The Winter/Summer Knight position acts as the court's emissary in mortal affairs. The Knights of the Cross act like God's emissaries.
• Emotion Eater:
  • The White Court vampires draw their sustenance from lust (House Raith), fear (House Malvora) and despair (House Skavis). In Proven Guilty, there are phobophages — creatures from the Winter Court of Faerie that feed on fear and they are perfectly willing to beat some humans to a pulp, kill them or drive them permanently insane to create the fear they need in others.
  • Skinwalkers are said to be able to draw power from people's fear so potently that even so much as talking about them can strengthen them. Subsequently, the Navajo tribespeople who know of them tend to not discuss them with outsiders, meaning that those who encounter them will probably not recognize them, which also leads to fear of them.
• Empty Fridge, Empty Life: Played straight in the first books, where Harry's fridge is filled with beer, coke, and little else. Decreases after the fairies start to fill his fridge with all kinds of food. Rarely what he needs, but the fridge is full nevertheless.
  • In White Night Thomas's fridge contains nothing but beer and microwaveable meals.
• Endless Winter: Whenever Mab stays on the material plane for too long, winter just seems to drag on forever.
• Enemy Within: Subverted, so far. Harry does have an inner subconscious persona, but up to this point he's been harmless, or at worst annoying. Harry thinks his inner self pronounces words like "issues" funny and lampshaded this in his first appearance.
  Harry: Wait, I've seen this before. I'm good Harry and you're bad Harry, and you only come out at night.
• Et Tu, Brute?: In Turn Coat, Morgan survives just fine being on the run for his life after being framed for murder. But let him learn the one person he cares for most thought the worst of him...
  "Ana," he said, almost choking on the words. "You. . . you think that I. . . How could you think that I would. . . .?"
  He turned his face away. It couldn't have been a tear. Not from Morgan. He wouldn't shed tears if he had to execute his own mother.
  But for a fraction of a second, something shone on one of his cheeks.
  • Though the person he perceives betrayed him gently points out Brainwashed and Crazy is a very real danger in this universe, and so the mistrust is not entirely unwarranted.
  • This is one of the worst ways you can hurt Harry. It's happened to him twice in his life, with Justin and Elaine before the series starts and Ebenezar in Blood Rites. Possibly the only way to hurt him more is to manipulate him into doing this to his friends.
• Even Evil Has Standards: More than a few villainous characters have worked with Harry for this reason.
  • Thomas Raith's motivation for helping Harry out. He lied. It is actually because Harry is his half-brother, through their mother.
  • "Gentleman" Johnny Marcone is perhaps the best example of this. He is an unrepentant criminal and vice lord, yet he refuses to tolerate anything or anyone that exploits or harms children. This comes from when he was younger. The son of his boss tried to kill him but missed Marcone and shot an innocent child instead, leaving her in a life-long coma.
    • Indeed, in Even Hand, it was shown that he personally executes anyone who dares to deal drugs to kids or pimp out children in his city.
  • Mab and Bob, both of whom are highly amoral, are disgusted with Heinrich Kemmler, who single-handedly engineered World War I just to get a supply of bodies to work with.
  • In Small Favor, Nicodemus describes the Red Court of vampires with genuine disgust.
    • in Skin Game we see he is actually quite upset after killing his daughter; mind you, that should upset anyone, but for a monster like him, it might be surprising how affected by that act he is.
• Even the Dog Is Ashamed: Mouse's remarkable degree of common sense leads to a few instances of this, especially in Turn Coat.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Thomas Raith, who apparently inspires sexual feelings in... well, everybody.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Inverted. If you are a prominent character, you can forget about getting any. Examples include Harry and Susan (she doesn't feel like losing control after being turned into a vampire), Murphy, Thomas after nearly killing Justine, Raith Sr. due to a curse, Butters averted in Cold Days, he's with Andi the werewolf now, and surprisingly enough Ramirez.
  • Played straight with, of all people, Michael and Charity. There's a reason they have so many kids^note because they're strictly-observant Catholics, which forbids the use of any form of contraception, and they've even Squicked their kids a little from the frequency and volume of their lovemaking, especially when Michael is about to go out on a mission. Justified by both of them knowing that despite a certain degree of heavenly protection, sooner or later Michael won't come back and they want every minute to count.
  • Harry plays this straight in the rare cases when he actually has a girlfriend.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Defied with The Archive. Everybody did just call her "the Archive," until she met Harry. Now she is "Ivy."
• Evil-Detecting Dog:
  • Mouse. He's also a Good-Detecting Dog: The Senior Council of wizards considers Harry reckless, dangerous, and possibly evil because of his past. The council's resident expert on magic dogs is dumbfounded in Turn Coat when she realizes Mouse chose Harry as a companion - from her reaction, it's implied this means he must be a stellar guy.
  • Mister has occasionally demonstrated talent as an Evil-Detecting Cat, hissing at the door when Shadowman's demon comes knocking and prudently keeping his distance from Harry's place when vampires are lurking nearby.
• Evil Feels Good: Black Magic can only be done by a person who truly believes it is the right thing to do. One must wholly believe it is the right course to take. Because of this, it helps corrupt people as they feel totally in the right for their actions, and thus feel good about it.
• Evil Overlord List: Lampshaded Harry suspects Nicodemus of having read it, though having guards without tongues seems to imply he didn't read all of it. And accuses Evil Bob of not having read it when he stops to gloat in Ghost Story.
• Evil Plan: A case could start out as somebody hiring Harry to look into why their sock got lost in the wash, and by the end of the book it'd still turn out to be connected to one of these.
• Evil Sorcerer: Given that it is a supernatural detective story there are a lot of them. Victor Sells, Leonid Kravos, Corpsetaker, Cowl, and Justin DuMorne just to hit the high points.
• Evil Weapon:
  • Morgana's Athame is said to be on par with Amoracchius in terms of strength. It has been used in many dark rituals and sacrifices over the centuries.
  • The Blackstaff wielded by a member of the White Council is aware enough to know when it is being used for death and destruction. It seems to take pleasure when the user does do great things with it. That said, it also spares the user the corrupting backlash from using magic to kill by consuming the corruption from within the person.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Ferrovax the dragon to Michael, a holy knight and dragon-slayer: "I thought you'd be taller."
• External Retcon:
  • The White Court of vampires convinced Bram Stoker to write Dracula in order to expose the weaknesses of the Black Court of vampires, one of several factions of vampires that each conform to different vampire mythologies. This resulted in the near destruction of the Black Court, as almost all of humanity learned their weaknesses.
  • According to Word of God, H. P. Lovecraft wrote his books to spread knowledge of Outsiders. Furthermore, Abdul Alhazred the "Mad Arab" was killed by the Gatekeeper and the Necronomicon was a book of rituals that got distributed by the White Council after his death to lessen its power (each ritual can only give so much power at once and when too many people try to draw on a ritual's power source, it is rendered so weak as to be harmless).
• Extradimensional Shortcut: The Nevernever can be used this way by those who know the proper Ways to take. That said, if one takes the wrong path it can take hours, if not years, longer to reach one's destination.
• Extra-Strength Masquerade: Harry quotes statistics on missing persons to point out that, if a dozen people got eaten by trolls or vampires in a good-sized city over the course of a year, no one would really figure out that there was a supernatural menace as long as the bodies did not turn up. In addition, anything magical by mortals is a Walking Techbane, which among other things makes cameras of all kinds almost completely useless as evidence of something magical. No matter how many zombies, ogres, vampires, werewolves, other faerie tale creatures and dinosaurs run around Chicago, somehow the general public remains convinced that anything apparently supernatural is actually the result of a hoax, hysteria, or hallucination brought on by moldy bread.
  • Everyone knows there is no such thing as magic, so witnesses are never believed. Most just convince themselves they imagined it because the alternative means that the world doesn't work the way they think it does, challenging their entire concept of reality.
  • It probably doesn't help that, as first shown in Dog Men and later confirmed in BattleGround, there's a secret branch of the US Government that's aware of the supernatural and is also trying to keep up the Masquerade.
  • However, as of Ghost Story and beyond, even the extra strength might not be enough. The Fomor are active enough that even the Muggles are starting to notice things. By the end of Battle Ground after the Battle of Chicago, it's mentioned that while The Masquerade still exists outside of Chicago itself, within the city it's now basically gone and Marcone even notes that as soon as the sun sets, the surviving citizens will most certainly take their vengeance out on any supernatural entity that dares cross their path.
• Extremely Short Time Span: Most novels take place over a few days at most. Battle Ground in particular stands out, with 90% of the book taking place from dusk to dawn of a single night. Specifically, the night of the summer solstice, meaning it's less than eight hours.

F

• The Fair Folk:
  • Harry has a faerie godmother, only she is the Leanan Sidhe and there is nothing nice about it. Think "vampire fae who grants poets and artists inspiration in exchange for a vastly shortened lifespan." Also, for a while there she was trying to "protect" Harry from being hurt or killed in the real world by attempting to trap him in the Land of Faerie and turn him into a dog. Permanently.
  • Harry also had two Queens of the Land of Faerie furious with him at one point: Titania, one of the Queens of Summer, because he killed her daughter, Aurora, in Summer Knight, and Mab, one of the Queens of Winter, because Harry managed to rain destruction on her capital, Arctis Tor, in Proven Guilty...and used Summer fire to do it.
  • On the other hand, Toot-Toot the fairy and his pixie buddies are quite fond of Harry, to the point of putting together the "Za Lord's Guard". As a result of Summer Knight, he also has a faerie housekeeping service he can never mention (except to the reader) or they will leave forever.
  • Then there's Mab. Harry's new boss. Hoo boy there.
• Fairy Devilmother: The Leanansidhe only wants the best for Dresden... in her own, very special way, which most reasonable humans would consider dangerously insane at best... and Lawful Evil, at worst.
• Fairy Godmother: The Leanansidhe is literally Harry's godmother, and a very powerful Faerie. It's not as much fun as Cinderella made it look. Though funnily enough, she does take a lot of pleasure out of gussying him up for a meeting with royalty in Changes.
• Fairy Companion: Toot-toot and "the Za-Lord's Guard".
• Faking the Dead: Several important characters.
• Fan Disservice: The scene in Turn Coat where Lara Raith feeds on (read: consumes emotions and soul by having sex with) her cousin Madeline — and Lara, who has been severely injured in battle, is a charred, ravenous, vengeful living corpse. Also appears to eat her cousin's entrails, based on how she stuck her hand in Madeline's viscera while said cousin is turned on by this. The Raiths are screwed up, and it's all but stated that even without viewing it with the Sight Harry can only see Lara Raith as a terrifying burned corpse from now on.
  • When Harry becomes the Winter Knight the deal is sealed via carnal relations with Mab. And it is not sexy. At all.
• Fantastic Catholicism: While Catholicism at large is mostly untouched, Father Forthill seems to be the retainer and clerical contact for the Knights of the Cross, particularly for Michael, who is the Chicago local.
  • The Shroud of Turin plays an important role in Death Masks, where Harry is hired to recover it after it was stolen. Harry errs on the side of the theory of it being a fabricated artifact, but still recognizes that a fake artifact with the better part of a millennium of faith and reverence on it would still make it very powerful due to the amount of faith placed on it. The actual shroud appears in Skin Game, and is held the vault of the Greek god Hades.
• Fantastic Noir: The series as a whole, even despite its increasingly action-focused and arcane sequels, is ultimately a mystery story, focused around Harry unravelling a major mystery/conspiracy both in each novel and series-wide while dealing with the supernatural.
• Fantastic Nuke:
  • The Darkhallow ritual, the most potent necromantic spell to date, which sucks the area dry of all living and undead energy for many miles around the caster. Although it should be noted that this is only a side effect of the spell, the purpose of which is actually to make the caster a god
  • The Bloodline Curse that Changes revolves around might count. Take a member of a bloodline, the younger the better, and perform a powerful ritual to kill every living relative they're descended from. In theory, this would only kill a handful of people, but when Harry shoves the most recently changed vampire of the Red Court in place of the intended victim, it annihilates an entire subspecies of vampire in one shot.
  • Another, smaller, example is the Death Curse, which is the ultimate Taking You with Me attack, in which a Wizard uses all their magic and all the energy keeping them going in one go. The effects can vary based on power and, more importantly, based on intent - it can either be immediate and destructive, like turning a city block to glass (and probably more, in the case of the Senior Council), or, perhaps, more long term, like Harry's mother's, which crippled Lord Raith by preventing him from feeding.
  • Later on the series another becomes known: the island of Demonreach, a magical prison containing a truly incredible amount of nasties. The magical equivalent of body heat that these prisoners give off is so powerful that it's created its own ley line, and in order to prevent them from ever getting free, the prison has a failsafe in case of a breakout. Said failsafe (a magical explosion set to explode on Halloween, when most of the prisoners would be rendered mortal) would reduce the majority of the middle of North America to a crater, and is still stated as being a method to only slow down the few survivors.
  • Ethniu the Last Titan, the Big Bad of Peace Talks and Battle Ground, is armed with the Eye of Balor, an artificial eye of great mystical power. How strong, you ask? As a show of force, Ethniu casts a hex from it which fries everything electrical in the Chicago area, and that's it on a low power setting; according to Dresden, legends say when it's used at full power, it can destroy armies and devastate cities.
  • Inverted in how involving vanilla mortals into a supernatural conflict is likened to using nukes; in part because humans have regular old nukes, in fact (the other reasons are, in order, that the sheer force of numbers means that whoever gets the humans on their side basically wins, and pretty much the entirety of human folklore consists of a long how-to guide on dealing with the supernatural).
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: invoked Though a strictly Fantasy Kitchen Sink, as no elements of science fiction have appeared in this series. Furthermore, almost all mythologies and religions showcased have a Western focus^note primarily Classical Mythology, Celtic Mythology, Norse Mythology, and the three Abrahamic religions (with the notable exception of the various Native American belief systems, which have gained an increasingly prominent role in the series over time), as Jim Butcher has freely admitted that he doesn't want to write about religions/belief systems that he has little familiarity with (i.e., Hinduism) so as to not run into any Unfortunate Implications.
• Fantasy Metals: Titanic Bronze plays a large part in Battle Ground. It's so powerful even the gods can't replicate it - it takes a Titan to work with it. It gets merged with the wearer's skin and places them above such pedestrian things as the laws of physics so long as the wearer's will remains strong.
• Fascinating Eyebrow: Harry is a fan of the inquisitive eyebrow arch, and his narration in Death Masks describes it as Spock-like.
• Faux Yay: Thomas's cover in the mortal world is a man who runs a beauty salon with a French accent and is so camp he could be sold at Cabela's. His apartment is covered with gay memorabilia from bright colors to musical posters. His main bedroom has a huge fluffy bed. The other holds his weapons and explosives. People aren't allowed to look in that one. And to top it all off, Harry is registered at his apartment as Thomas' gay lover. Murphy and the cops just loved this.
  Harry: I was going to kill Thomas.
• Fearless Fool: Dresden comes off as this to some people, but in reality his more reckless actions tend to be motivated by Honor Before Reason instead; he's secretly (and reasonably) crapping his pants the whole time.
• Feigning Intelligence: Used by Thomas to survive in his really messed-up family. While he plays Obfuscating Stupidity to the hilt for most of his relatives so they won't see him as a legitimate threat, his sister Lara saw through that. So he feigns intelligence only for her, making cryptic statements and hinting he has complex plans in motion, which holds her off while she tries to figure out what he's doing. Harry notes it's a good scheme, if there's enough paranoia. And in the White Court, paranoia comes "bottled, on tap and in hot and cold running neuroses."
  • Though its more like feigning scheming, as when push comes to shove, Thomas can run intellectual circles around a lot of people including Lara, but like his brother, he has standards and prefers the direct approach.
• Femme Fatale: Too many to list. Once again — subject of a lot of lampshade hanging.
• Fertile Feet: The more powerful Summer fae like Eldest Brother Gruff or the Summer Lady can do this.
• Fiction 500: The White Court in general, and Lara Raith in particular.
• Fiction as Cover-Up: Inverted by the White Court, which arranged for the publication of Dracula in order to expose the rival Black Court's secrets and vulnerabilities.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions: Two examples.
  • The Unseelie Accords govern relations between different supernatural "nations," though they're not particularly concerned with atrocities, focusing more on Sacred Hospitality and formal redressing of grievances. Even the nastiest types tend to stick to the Accords (or to the letter of them) because 1) gaining a reputation as an oathbreaker pretty quickly drives away anybody who might be willing to work with you and 2) breaking the Accords risks pissing off Mab.
  • The Seven Laws of Magic lay out certain forms of magic that wizards are never allowed to use, on pain of death. The harshness of the sentence is justified by the fact that using dark magic tends to warp your mind, leading to ever-greater atrocities if left unchecked.
• Fights Like a Normal: The Knights of the Cross. Michael seems like "only" a Badass Normal with a Holy Sword, but being on a literal Mission from God also means he's surrounded by Contrived Coincidences. Though of course his greatest weapon is also being The Heart.
• Figure It Out Yourself: Harry's understanding of how magic works in his world is incomplete. This is because he really wasn't taught or trusted by the most knowledgeable. Those who do know refrain from telling him because they believe it is important that he figure things out on his own. As noted below in an interview with Jim Butcher himself:
  Does Harry have an incorrect understanding of the Dark Hollow and other parts of the world?
  Butcher: Oh god yes. I won't say Harry is clueless, but his understanding of lots of things including the way that magic works is incomplete in many ways. If only because he hasn't been trusted by a lot of the wizarding community by a lot of the people who could have taught him better. And a lot of the people who do know better aren't correcting him because they think it's important to learn these things on your own.
  • In one book, Warden Luccio mentions that Wizards eventually develop The Sight, a form of precognition surrounding locations, events and people that are important to the Wizard. However, young wizards are not told about it, since it leads them to see prophecy and foreshadowing in everything
• Final Solution: The war between the White Council wizards and the Red Court vampires ends with Harry using a Depopulation Bomb that had just been primed by the Red Court to kill them all.
• Fingore:
  • One way Mab shows to Harry that she really has control of him, and then she freezes the wound just for spite.
  • Deirdre of the Knights of the Blackened Denarius also likes to employ this trope in torture.
  • When the naagloshii attacks the Raith compound, it is dragging one of Lara's sisters by the arm, and casually nips off a few fingers and swallows them while talking with her.
• Fire Purifies: The reason that fire magic is so prevalent in magical combat. Not only do you get the mundane effects of searing heat and flame but the fire also consumes and disperses magical energy, wrecking most enchantments and hindering magical creatures.
• First-Person Smartass: Harry Dresden, primarily, though Thomas Raith exemplifies this trope in the novella Backup.
• First-Name Basis: To quote Ramirez in Dead Beat, "Everyone else who lets me ride on their dinosaur calls me Carlos."
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Played for Laughs with Sanya (see Church Militant example above). Sanya has a pretty sophisticated and logical personal philosophy on all the supernatural stuff. He lives in a world with ridiculously powerful beings who are not actually worshipped or called gods, and it is possible for mere mortals to gain near-godlike power. So why assume that one particular powerful entity really is a god, or God? And his mission, as he points out, is worthwhile whether he was given his task by a real angel or not, because either way he is still helping the helpless.
• Fluffy the Terrible: In Skin Game, Harry jokingly calls the Demonreach Alfred. It rather likes it.
  Harry: "You know the name Alfred is a joke, right?"
  It stared at me, a wind that didn't exist hampered its cloak.
  "Alright, I guess you need a first name too. Alfred Demonreach it is."
  • To a lesser extent, Harry's dog also qualifies. He's a giant brute of a dog with powerful magical abilities... named Mouse.
  • This helps him connect with Hades, yes that Hades, who notes that he named his giant brute of a dog with powerful magical abilities... Spot.
• Flowery Elizabethan English: The Sidhe and other immortals have a tendency to talk this way.
  • Amusingly, Harry has to correct the Nightmare's improper use in Grave Peril. This actually turns out to be Foreshadowing; the Nightmare is actually the ghost of Leonid Kravos pretending to be the ghost of the demon he summoned prior to his death, and so is intentionally trying to sound old-fashioned so as to invoke the idea of being a timeless monster from the spirit realm. His incorrect grammer later allows Harry to Spot the Thread and figure out his real identity.
• Follow the Chaos: In Cold Days, Murphy immediately realizes Harry has come back to life and quickly locates him just from hearing about some of the shenanigans he inevitably causes within a few hours of his arrival.
• Forbidden Chekhov's Gun: As per Word of Jim, Harry Dresden will eventually break all Seven Laws of magic. As of Battle Ground, he has only explicitly broken two - The First Law of Magic, Thou Shalt Not Kill With Magic (Harry has killed Justin Du Morne prior to the series' start, several innocent partygoers during his Freak Out at Bianca's masquerade ball in Grave Peril, and several Fomor servitors (most of which who were human before being twisted into "something else" by the Fomor) during the Battle of Chicago in Battle Ground), and the Fifth Law of Magic, Thou Shalt Not Swim Against The Borders Of Life (in Dead Beat, Harry raises Sue the Tyrannosaur with Butters' aid as a zombie to use against the Kemmlerites in the novel's Final Battle).
• Foreshadowing: Tons of it, all throughout the series. One-off commentary by a character in one book becomes a whole lot more meaningful when re-read a second time, with knowledge of how the plotlines develop. There is a lot of material that gets subtly foreshadowed, particularly in Grave Peril and Proven Guilty. The latter, for example, has a moment where Harry and Ebenezar discuss the traitor within the White Council, and Harry comments that no one has shown up with mysterious sums in their bank accounts. Morgan's frame-up in Turn Coat involves exactly this. Murphy and Harry's discussion about their relationship foreshadows both Harry's daughter in Changes and Murphy's taking up of Dresden's mantle as the protector of Chicago in "Aftermath".
  • In Death Masks, when Harry tracks Marcone to Persephone's bedside, he assumes the comatose girl must be Marcone's own child. He tries to keep up his hatred for the gang boss because of his many crimes, but a part of Harry can't help but think he might have become every bit as unscrupulously-ruthless himself, if he'd had a daughter who was helpless and needed him to fight for her. Several books later, Changes comes along...
  • When Lea is bargaining with Michael over Amoracchius, she mentions that human children were particularly... useful... to the sidhe, and specifically mentions his "eldest daughter," foreshadowing her relationship with said "eldest daughter" in Cold Days.
  • Another, less memorable bit in Dead Beat, When Harry's Father tells him "There's so much still ahead of you. Pain, joy, love, death, heartache, terrible waters, despair, hope." Sorta makes you think about Harry's death and the fact the story still goes on, along with the intervention of the Fomor, an aquatic adversary of The Fair Folk.
  • Even all the way back in Storm Front, Harry himself foreshadows the Red Court's mass sacrificial rite in Changes when he describes what would be necessary to power the multiple heart-ripper spell.
  • The first volume of the RPG, in discussing famous locations and how their doorways to the Nevernever might be set up, mentions the Pyramids of Giza being "worse than Chichen Itza." This is the location where the final battle of Changes takes place, which was released after the RPG was published, and it indeed involves a route that takes a detour through the Pyramids. This bit is even blacked out in the book, with a side note by Harry not to reveal it.
  • In Turn Coat, Binder states the best way to assault Harry's apartment would be to set fire to it and Harry agrees. Guess what happens in Changes?
  • A minor example from Ghost Story. Harry sees Murphy sparring with a resurrected Viking warrior, after following Butters into The Brighter Future Society, built on the ruins of his former home. Afterwards, the Viking warrior asks Butters when he will step into the ring for a sparring match. Butters replies with "Five minutes after I get a functional lightsaber." During the events of Skin Game, the Sword of Faith is broken and then reformed by Butters into exactly that.
  • In Blood Rites, the monk who's hired Harry to find the stolen Foo puppies looks into the box they're in and asks if this was all of them, clearly expecting there to be more. Turns out, of course, the puppy soon to be named Mouse got out of the box and hid in Harry's car. In the short story "Zoo Day," it is revealed two more puppies were also removed before Harry arrived.
• Forever War: Between Faerie and the Outsiders. Winter bears most of the brunt of the war itself, but is supported by Summer and other groups. Notably, Faerie is stated to only be the most recent defenders of the Outer Gates.
• Formally-Named Pet: Harry Dresden's cat is named simply Mister.
• Franken-vehicle: Harry Dresden's Volkswagen Beetle, complete with a cute nickname: The Blue Beetle. It used to be all blue, but due to monster attacks, he's had to use scavenged pieces of bodywork in other colors.
• Free-Love Future: Viciously deconstructed and Played for Horror by House Raith of the White Court. Through the porn industry, they're trying to manipulate modern Western society into encouraging promiscuity and the eschewing of monogamy in society. However, what makes this bad is that the Raiths see "consent" as a funny little delusion that only "morons" like Thomas and Connie Barrowill care about, and are trying to stigmatize meaningful romance so as to lessen the prevalance of their Kryptonite Factor (True Love). Appropriately enough for a faction of Succubi and Incubi, they're remarkably sex-negative when you get down to it, as seen in how Lord Raith fetishized female homosexuality while stigmatizing male homosexuality at the same time due to his own personal tastes. In short, the Raiths are only encouraging promiscuity and "love without boundaries" so as to both eradicate love itself and further spread their powerbase.
• Fridge Logic: invoked Harry suffers an in-universe example in Turn Coat, when Rashid points out that from an outside point of view, it's easy to think Harry is part of the Black Council.
• Friendly Enemy:
  • Harry and Lasciel's Shadow/"Lash", in the end.
  • Harry and Marcone. They are civil and have some mutual respect, and Marcone extends great courtesies to Harry when it suits him. The RPG Rulebook has fun with this. Nearly every time Marcone is mentioned, there is a sidenote by Harry that has him disparaging Marcone for being criminal scum, then admitting Marcone has good qualities like a Morality Pet and a tendency to help Harry himself, then cursing Marcone for almost making Harry like him.
  • Harry and Lara, who always seem to end up working together and mutually hate and fear/respect each other.
• A Friend in Need: Poor Murph. She got demoted for helping rescue a teenage girl from monsters, then fired for saving the world.
• Friend on the Force: Lieutenant Karrin Murphy.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampires: Subverted; although some vampires like to portray themselves this way, especially to human groupies to be used as food sources, most of them are really nasty monsters. Thomas may be an exception to this subversion, but then again he is half human (like all White Court vampires) as well as Harry's half brother.
• From Bad to Worse: Nearly every single book starts off with bad circumstances getting worse and then escalating.
  • The series of battles between the White Council and the Red Court in Dead Beat. The Red Court began by capturing several Wardens that had to be rescued or killed to prevent their knowledge and powers from being turned against the White Council. The Wardens rescue them, but the Council gets pursued to Sicily where the Red Court launches a trap that keeps the Nevernever closed for an entire day, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Wardens and other wizards. When they finally managed to open the portal to the Nevernever, the Red Court followed them, summoning demons and Outsiders to help them. Then the Council withdrew to a hospital in the Congo in order to treat their wounded... which the Red Court knew all about so it had human guerillas launch a massive nerve gas attack that killed every single one of the hundreds of wounded and thousands of innocent bystanders in a radius of several blocks.
  • The "Day Off" short story plays this one for hilarity. Harry's day just keeps getting worse and worse, albeit in non-fatal and embarrassing ways.
  • In Changes, the obstacles to rescuing Maggie keep piling up, culminating in Harry having to kill the woman he loves to save their daughter.
• Full-Contact Magic: While largely averted for magic, Squishy Wizard, Harry is not.
• Full-Frontal Assault:
  • Harry has an unfortunate habit of getting into hostile situations where he is naked or close to it. It's happened in Storm Front, Grave Peril and Cold Days so far.
  • A lot of supernatural creatures will also charge into a fight naked, though most of them aren't, let's say, noticeably so, except for the Grendelkin, who is described as male and terrifyingly so, with comparisons made to fire extinguishers.
• Full-Name Basis:
  • Very serious business for a wizard, since knowing the True Name of a magical creature allows you to summon or exercise influence over them. This works just as well for humans, but it is a limited-time threat since human self-image changes over time and learning a humans True Name will only remain their True Name for a few months. In Grave Peril, a dragon in human form displays its power by sending Harry reeling, even though it only uses his first and last name (leaving out the two middle names). In White Night, Harry is trying to make telepathic contact with Elaine, and he uses her full name along with his own in a desperate attempt to reach her.
  • Harry very nearly gets himself casually obliterated by the Archangel Uriel, near the end of Ghost Story, merely by casually referring to him as "Uri". As it turns out, an angel's name is tantamount to the angel itself, and forgetting the -el part of his name is close to blasphemy. For clarification, Uriel means "Light of God". Given that his stated role in the universe is to bring truth and balance when the forces of Evil try to cheat, it is a big deal for him.
    • In particular, the -el part of his name is the Hebrew suffix meaning 'of God', explaining the blasphemy a bit more clearly. Specifically, 'light of God' minus 'of God' equals 'Light'... and the last Angel with a comparable name which lacks the suffix was an infamous one indeed (Lucifer).
    • He had no problem with a nickname though. "Well, aren't you Mr Sunshine." Mostly because, angelogically speaking, Uriel is in charge of the Sun.
• Functional Magic: While it generally runs on life energy and (by proxy) emotions, a lot of rules govern it, and not just the White Council's laws against using it to kill, either. For example, any faerie can be forced to comply with a promise if they say it three times, a symbol of faith can be used to consistently ward off or hurt certain creatures, anything with iron will hurt or ward off faeries, a loup-garou werewolf can only be killed with something made from inherited silver, et cetera. One reason that Bob is such a valuable resource to Harry is that Bob has an encyclopedic knowledge of the current state of the rules.
  • In "Backup", Thomas describes magic as a skill that almost anyone can learn to use to some extent, provided they take the time to practice. On the other hand, he readily admits that there's a huge difference between what he can do and what Harry can do (comparing a six-month correspondence course with Ph.Ds from three different Ivy League schools). In Backup, Thomas' first tracking spell is easily foiled, and it takes Bob's coaching to get one that works properly. Thomas states that that would never have happened to Harry in the first place.
• Funny Background Event: In the short story "Aftermath," Murphy helps a woman who's being abused by her landlord, and she gives Murphy a tip which leads them to Marcone. When Murphy and Billy confront Marcone, Murphy reveals that she figured out the woman from before was one of Marcone's gangsters undercover. While Marcone carries on unperturbed, his bodyguard Hendricks gives Gard a sidelong look, Gard rolls her eyes and gives Hendricks a twenty. Hendricks looks rather pleased with himself, and Marcone gives no sign of knowing what went on literally behind his back.
• Fun with Acronyms: This is discussed whenever St. Mark's Acedemy for the Gifted and Talented is brought up. Someone, usually Harry, will note that the acronym for this reads S.M.A.G.T. Had these people been named the school St. Mark's Acedemy for the Resourceful and Talented, then it would read S.M.A.R.T..
• Futureshadowing: For the readers, "Christmas Eve" is this, since it's set after Peace Talks but was released before Peace Talks was published, especially with Molly's gift of medical and funeral bills paid by her due to whatever happened in Peace Talks which killed thousands of people and injured tens of thousands more.

G

• Gas Station of Doom: The flashback where a teenage Harry encounters an Outsider at a random gas station (and blows them both to smithereens).
• Gate Guardian: The Gatekeeper, a wizard in charge of overseeing the Outer Gates which are under constant assault from Eldritch Abominations.
• Gender Is No Object: For a group of people characterized as notoriously behind the times, and for which the ruling group has been alive since—in some cases—women could be considered property, the White Council is very egalitarian as far as the sexes go. Two of the High Council members are women, there are women wizards casually mentioned throughout, and the leader of the Wardens—the most badass of combat wizards—is a woman, even after she loses a good chunk of her magical power. Justified because magical power is mentioned as being primarily matrilineal (meaning that it is more likely to be passed down by the mother than the father).
• Genre Blindness:
  • Several villains seem absolutely determined to underestimate Harry, regardless of the foes he has faced and prevailed against, and the fact that other, more savvy bad guys keep trying to recruit him.
  • invoked Harry himself is not immune to this; Harry is the only one who has figured out the source of Nicodemus's Nigh-Invulnerability is also his Achilles' Heel, but he does not appear to have told anyone this. Word of God is a part of him wants it for himself, and doesn't want to let the secret out so no one can use it against him.
• Genre Savvy: Most anyone mortal has seen the movies and heard the stories necessary to recognize a trope when they see one.
  • Murphy once referred to hunting Black Court vamps as "living the cliche." Harry also described killing Black Court vamps as "doing the Buffy thing." Thomas also shows up for a vampire-duel in a Buffy shirt. See the Our Vampires Are Different note on the next page.
• Genre Shift: First starting with Grave Peril before being permanently cemented in Dead Beat, the series has grown to feature not only honest-to-God aspects of the Cosmic Horror Story genre, but has also taken on more elements seen in High Fantasy with its increasingly epic scale and world-ending stakes.
• Genre Throwback: The Male Gaze-y descriptions of female characters (most of whom are Femme Fatales of some shade or another), popularity of revolvers as the firearm of choice, heavy focus on organized crime (with the associated crime bosses and hired goons that you'd expect), taking place in a Wretched Hive, and Harry's Private Eye Monologue (among other aspects of the series) all harken back to the pulpy detective noir novels of the 1930s and 1940s. The effect is aided in how wizards are all Walking Techbanes who can't use virtually any technology created after World War II without setting it on the fritz, further adding to the series' subtly retro aesthetic and themes. Admittedly, it's worth noting that most of these traits are more predominant in the earlier novels than in the later entries as the series grows its own identity, but even by Battle Ground the majority of these elements are still here moreso than not.
• Geometric Magic: Along with Clap Your Hands If You Believe, geometric symbols drive most magic and its efficiency. As an example, a pentagram is a powerful symbol of magic since it represents the four classical elements (fire, water, air/wind, and earth) bound by the might of human will.
• Gigantic Adults, Tiny Babies: Puppy-age Mouse was small enough to fit in Harry's coat pocket. Two years later, he can barely fit into Harry's car.
• Gilded Cage: The inside of Bob's skull (or at least how Dresden perceives it) is a luxurious mansion that can contain anything Bob wants. However, since he needs permission to leave it, he hates it.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: It is implied that the whole reason why this trope even exists is because of Lord Raith's personal tastes. House Raith controls the pornography industry, and by extension has their thumb in cultural perceptions of sex and attraction. Because Lord Raith isn't into male-on-male (to the point of murdering his own sons rather than dominating them through sex like he does his daughters), only female-on-female is considered "hot" by the mainstream male audience.
• Giving Them the Strip: Happens a lot, e.g. when the loup-garou eats one of Harry's cowboy boots.
• Glamour: The Fae are described as using glamour as casually as humans breathe.
• Glass Cannon: Harry himself describes all wizards as this. They can dish out a whole lot of power-if they're prepared. If not, they're as rendable as the rest of the squishy mortals.
• God Guise: The Lords of Outer Night, the heads of the Red Court who posed as the Mayan pantheon - the Red King is implied to have done a stint at Kukulcan. Played with in that there's a point where the Lords of Outer Night show fear in the face of a divine assault, and Harry wonders if they just picked up the mask when the actual deities got out of town and they're afraid they're being called on the carpet.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: The Faerie Queens of Summer (Titania) and Winter (Mab). They are not so much evil as ruthlessly amoral and self-interested.
  • The theory since Proven Guilty is that, for some unknown reason, Mab has completely lost it, even by Faerie standards.
  • As of Cold Days it is not Mab who has lost it, but Maeve, under the influence of Nemesis. Mab's actions were a result of her fury at Maeve being corrupted.
• God's Hands Are Tied: invoked According to Word of God, at some point in time long before the start of the series, the Creator/White God (the Top God of the Dresdenverse and who is generally agreed to be the Abrahamic God) ordered all of the various "lesser" gods (i.e., those of Classical Mythology, Celtic Mythology, Norse Mythology, and countless other belief systems) to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence after having helped guide and direct humanity into creating civilization, as it was now humanity's time to make their own way in the world through the use of free will. Those few gods who would still want to stick around and interfere in the affairs of mortals would have to be subject to mortal limitations (namely, mortality). As such, almost all actions both of a divine and demonic nature in the Dresdenverse is through indirect means, with only two gods being outright known to still be somewhat active in the modern day (Odin and Anansi, the latter of whom is currently stuck in Arctis Tor).
  • invoked Jim Butcher has has gone into further detail out-of-universe, such as the below comparison in regards to the "power levels" between an Angel of the Lord and Queen Mab of the Winter Court of Sidhe:
    Jim Butcher: Angels are, in this instance, kind of like a super powerful AI. Within the world of the computer, it's not a force that can be effectively resisted. It runs the place.
    But that same AI can only do what it's been told to do—and Mab is a user with mid-level admin access. She can't command or delete those A.I.s, but she knows why they were made, how they work—and how to get around them if necessary.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The entire point of the clandestine Oblivion War. Less than two hundred people in the entire world (of which Thomas, Lara, and Bob are three) know of the... past... existence of unfathomably powerful demons/gods/entities that preyed on mankind. They require mortals to know of their existence to have a connection to the mortal world. So, in the past, certain people went to rather extreme lengths to remove all knowledge of their existence and make them into unthings. The war continues to this day, with agents of Oblivion taking any measures necessary for this secret knowledge to stay secret, as opposed to others who want to bring these things back (either for power or just For the Evulz).
  • However, deific-level entities do not actually vanish, or necessarily get weaker die from lack of belief. Many godlike entities are active in multiple aspects and dimensions of reality, and they can go "dormant", or become seemingly inactive in human affairs for a long time. This can (but does not necessarily) result from lack of belief, or even lack of knowledge. Belief or knowledge's main purpose is to give them a foothold in the mortal world where they can physically interactwith mortals.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: In Turn Coat, Harry barely manages to avoid this after looking upon the skinwalker with his wizardly Sight. When he Sees it, he blacks out, only to awaken some time later as a gibbering, incoherent mess, and in physical pain. He recites prime numbers to prevent himself from remembering it for a time. It takes locking himself in a room and assaulting his mind with the image over and over again to get his mind straight (he also gets a Psychic Nosebleed). Even then, he'll never forget what he saw.
• Good-Guy Bar: McAnally's Pub. It is accorded neutral ground under the Unseelie Accords, giving Harry and friends a safe place to eat, drink and recuperate.
• Good Is Not Dumb: As the series goes on, both Harry and numerous other "good" characters (i.e., Murphy, Michael, and Butters) showcase that being clever is a vital weapon to have in your arsenal when taking on the forces of evil.
• Good Is Not Nice:
  • Harry has not only fought and killed in the protection of the innocent, but tortured, manipulated and executed for the greater good. As he pointed out to Molly when she continued to disobey his instructions, he is not some fictional character who can always avoid tough decisions.
  "I am not Yoda."
  • Also shown in Death Masks, where Harry and the Knights of the Cross are confronted by a willing collaborator of the Denarians who surrenders and sarcastically promises to repent, all the while taunting them smugly because the Knights are bound to not judge or punish, but only to fight the evil possessing the Denarians. Once the Knights leave, Harry takes a baseball bat to the man's kneecaps.
    Harry: People like you always mistake compassion for weakness. Michael and Sanya aren't weak. Fortunately for you, they are good men. Unfortunately for you, I'm not.
  • The White Council of Wizards as a whole is judgemental, hypocritical, isolationist and violent. However, even Harry eventually agrees that their bloody actions are exactly what is needed to protect humanity from supernatural threats, and perhaps even from wizardkind themselves. Their tendency to execute without a second glance is not because they enjoy the blood, but because there is no other option.
  • The only archangel who's been a recurring character so far is Uriel, who is described as, essentially, Heaven's spymaster. He may be Good, but Ghost Story in particular shows that he's at least as tricky and fond of Exact Words as any of the fae.
• Good Is Not Soft: The Knights of the Cross will try to persuade the Denarian-possessed to turn away from evil, but won't shy from taking heads if refused.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Harry notes at one point that a fist to the face is incredibly effective against foes who know they're facing a wizard. They generally expect him to stand back and do nothing but sling spells, thus a punch in the nose is one of the last things they were defending against.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Harry has taken a whole lot of abuse over the years. Small Favor has a partial list, but he has acquired even more since then. Including one of those "badass" eye scars, thanks to the skinwalker in Turn Coat.
• Good Shepherd: Father Forthill.
• Goth: Molly.
  • Perky Goth, specifically. She has the piercings, heavy makeup, and artfully tattered clothing, but she is also quite cheerful most of the time. Not to mention the technicolor hair.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The Order of the Blackened Denarius consists of thirty Fallen, each bound to one of the Thirty Pieces of Silver paid to Judas Iscariot. The Knights of the Cross have, over the centuries, collected several of these coins and locked them away (as they have no way of destroying them), but cannot finally defeat the Denarians until they get them all. This was a major plot point in Small Favor.
  • By the time of Small Favor, the Knights held thirteen; they had gained eleven more by the end of the battle of Shedd Aquarium, leaving six still free. The eleven were stolen back by Thorned Namshiel during the battle of Demonreach, but Dresden recovered one of the six in the same battle, leaving the Church with fourteen.
  • During the events of Skin Game, it's revealed that at least some of the fourteen have been recovered by Nicodemus, including Lasciel, who tells Dresden that the Church's precautions are useless because forces like the Fallen cannot be contained by mere mortals. By book's end, two of the coins (Ursiel and Lasciel) are being held in Hades' Vault.
• Gratuitous Latin: The White Council is a group of wizards from widely varying cultures. Also, wizards live a long time, so a signficant fraction of them are centuries old. They use Latin as a lingua franca for their meetings. Harry's grasp of Latin is ... less than stellar, so his mentor Ebenezar McCoy usually translates for him. The examples we see of Harry's attempts to speak it on his own are comprehensible enough to get the gist of what he's trying to say, but him sound in similar way to speak of monkey-man. Amusingly, in White Night we find that the White Court uses a different ancient language for their meetings, and since Harry has Translator Microbes working for him at the time, he gets to hear that one of his opponents has exactly the same problem with the language his elders prefer.
• Gratuitous Russian: Sanya, a black Russian Knight of the Cross, often quips simple phrases like "Da" ("Yes") and "Bozhe moy" ("Oh my God") in otherwise English dialogue. He often uses them in situations where speaking English all the way (and he is a fluent speaker) is most appropriate. On occasion, his Russian will be mentioned in narration rather than dialogue, obscuring what exactly has been said.
• Greater Need Than Mine: In Small Favor, during the rescue at the book's climax, Gentleman Johnnie Marcone insists that the first person to be evacuated be the Archive, a wounded and unconscious twelve-year-old girl. Harry Dresden remarks that it's stuff like this that makes it hard for him to file Marcone under "scumbag, criminal" and hate him.
• Greater-Scope Villain: At first when Harry starts connecting the dots between his cases, he thinks a Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy of evil wizards might be behind it all; he dubs them the “Black Council” in Proven Guilty. The true nature of the threat is not revealed until the mid point of Cold Days. It’s the Outsiders, an infinite army of chaos constantly laying siege to the Outer Gates of reality. They want in, and some are smart enough to find ways around the Gates. The Black Council is either in league with them, or simply pawns, it’s too early to tell. Every major case Harry had is tied back to them — either one of them finding a juicy target to possess or drive mad, or someone trying to harness their power. Many major parts of Harry's world — the White Council, the Gatekeeper, Demonreach, the entire realm of Faerie — were designed to fight them in one way or another, and Harry never had a clue.
• Groin Attack: Harry receives one in "The Warrior."
• Guardian Entity: Harry has a literal Fairy Godmother. How protective she is of him is...debatable, at best.
• Guilt Complex: Harry suffers from this in spades. Harry often stretches things very far in order to blame himself for things.
• Gut Punch: The ending of Changes is this for the series.

H

• Hand Blast: Harry pulls this when deprived of his staff and blasting rod.
• Hanging Judge: The Merlin, according to Harry.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Various supernatural species get their strength, agility and stamina for free, which pisses Harry off because he has to exercise to achieve a fraction of their result.
  • Averted in vanilla mortals and wizards. Harry's training brings him from being relatively weak and easily exhausted to peak physical conditions, only being beaten out by mortals who are more dedicated to training, like Murphy. Similarly, we see his (and Molly's) magical skills progress dramatically from the beginning to the ends of the books, explicitly mentioning the advanced training they are performing.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Harry grapples with this a lot. He always does what he thinks is right, but it gets harder and harder to ignore that when Harry gets involved, people die; often by the truckload. As the series goes on, Harry has to make more and more compromises to get what he needs. In Battle Ground, he mentions that no one he's ever soulgazed seemed to walk away with a good opinion of him.
• He's a Friend: Harry to Mouse.
• Heal It with Water: Water is associated with entropy, cleansing, and Anti-Magic in the setting. Best exemplified by The Archmage Joseph Listens-To-Wind, who uses water magic both in his peerless Healing spells and to Dispel hostile magic.
• Healing Factor: Explained in detail by Butters. Wizard DNA is different from that of normal humans, in that wizards do not heal until their bodies are fixed — they heal at the normal rate, but they heal until every trace of the wound is gone and the injured body part is back to normal. As in, no scar tissue, no fractures in bones, nothing. This perfect healing (or close enough to make no difference) also slows down the normal cellular deterioration that causes aging, giving wizards a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades.
  • Certain supernatural creatures have more enhanced versions. The RPG rulebook puts it at three levels, the highest of which allows a creature to heal from something that would normally take months or years within minutes.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: Healing magic seems to be nonexistent, at least for humans (Listens-To-Winds does have some capability in this matter, but he's a Senior Council Member and regularly goes back to medical school). Magic can be used to staunch a wound or keep someone alert, but not in any more direct fashion. Very powerful beings like the Faerie Queens can do more, including fixing a broken spine and bringing Harry back from the brink of death, with the help of a powerful Genius Loci. According to the RPG, Summer Magic can be used to heal people (at least, better than most people) as the magic grants some kind of instinctive knowledge of physiology. Miss Gard's Runic Magic and certain forms of Necromancy can also stave off death.
  • A Justified Trope in that the reason healing is so hard is that the body is really complicated and if you try to fix someone without knowing exactly what you are doing, you'll probably kill him or at least make him even worse.
• Hearing Voices: A rare neutral example. Harry can, under specific circumstances, converse with his own subconscious. Subverted in that Subconscious Harry really is part of Harry, but there is no explanation given as to why he appears to Conscious Harry (ironically enough, he can only speak to Conscious Harry when he's unconscious).
• Held Gaze: There's even has a name for this - the Soulgaze, where two people catch a glimpse of each other's souls because they share a gaze. One of them has to be a wizard to trigger it, though.
  "For me, meeting someone's eyes is always risky. Every human being knows what I'm talking about. Try it. Walk up to someone, without speaking and look them in the eyes. There's a a certain amount of leeway for second, or two, or three. And then there's a distinct sensation of contact, of intimacy. That's when regular folks cough and look away. Wizards, though, get the full ride of a soulgaze." Harry Dresden, White Night.
• Hereditary Curse:
  • Harry has to break one in Ghoul Goblin that originated from a Jerkass soldier trying to take a supernatural being's table in a cafe.
  • Harley Mc Finn suffers from one that causes him to turn into a loup garou every full moon. Supposedly the curse guarantees that the bloodline will never die out, although this part appears to have been broken by the end of Fool Moon.
• Hermetic Magic: Most magic in the series is either this or Summon Magic. Both may be powered by Life Energy, but especially this.
• Hero of Another Story:
  • Harry's allies the Knights of the Cross - Micahel Carpenter, Shiro Yoshimo, and Sanya Ivanovich - a trio of paladins battling a cabal of fallen angels, with each armed with a sword containing a nail from the Crucifixion. They've been having their own adventures offscreen since long before Storm Front. In the course of the series, Michael is badly wounded and forced into retirement, and Shiro is killed making a Heroic Sacrifice. Karrin Murphy uses Shiro's sword Fidelacchius for a while, and Waldo Butters eventually becomes Shiro's permanent replacement as of Skin Game.
  • Carlos Ramirez, commander of the West Coast Wardens, Harry's closest friend on the White Council who isn't Ebenzar McCoy, and somone who's mentioned as getting into almost as much trouble as Harry does.
  • Karrin Murphy and the rest of SI. After the first few books, Harry even mentions that SI has gotten good enough at handling minor supernatural threats that they don't need to call him in as much.
  • Warden Morgan. Come on, we get to hear the stories about how he nuked a shapeshifting demi-god of pure evil and cut his way through the entire Red Court, fully intent on dueling a entity that has Odin matched for metaphysical muscle.
  • Susan Rodriguez and the other members of the Fellowship of Saint Giles are one of the only allies the White Council has against the Red Court, and she casually mentions in Changes how she and Martin have gone on various daring acts of espionage during the Wizard-Vampire War.
  • Billy/Will Borden and the other Alphas, a gang of college kids-tuned-werewolf vigilantes. In the short story "Aftermath," Murphy absentmindedly notes that by some amazing coincidence, all mortal crime within several blocks of the University of Chicago dropped by 40% after the Alphas started.
  • Thomas Raith, secret member of the Venatori and participant in the Oblivion War.
  • Waldo Butters, pseudo-"Batman" and new Knight of the Cross.
  • Elaine Mallory, Harry's First Love and one of the founding members of the Paranet, starts up a similar "wizard for hire" business in Los Angeles as Harry did in Chicago after the events of Summer Knight.
  • Molly Carpenter's Coming of Age story is going on throughout most of the series' background following Proven Guilty, and as she takes on more responsibilities, her adventures get even stranger and more dangerous.
  • "Gentleman" Johnny Marcone, mortal representative on the Unseelie Accords as of White Night, financial power behind the defense of Chicago against supernatural threats as of Ghost Story, and rogue Denarian as of Battle Ground.
• Heroic Fatigue: Harry goes through this all the time. Often he will forget to eat or sleep when he is on a case and the world needs saving from supernatural doom. By the time he manages to solve everything he is usually so strung out that he often ends up just blacking out from exhaustion.
• Heroic Resolve: This is SOP with Harry Dresden. He's quite possibly the Trope Codifier (him or Spiderman, who he references every now and then, saying "I follow the Tao of Peter Parker").
  • Immediately before the aforementioned Fae war, Harry explained to the Gatekeeper (the most enigmatic of the Senior Councilors) that the job wasn't finished, so he (Harry) was going to go into the fight. This after he very nearly died multiple times trying to unravel the mystery of the week that led to his actions which caused said war.
  • After that incident, Harry has dueled and killed a Red Court Noble, who was only marginally below a living demi-god. Shortly afterward he kills said Red Court Noble's father, who, by the way, is the ''freaking Red King himself. All after his home was burned, his office detonated, his car crushed, and all the while his daughter was in Red Court hands.
  • Even being dead doesn't stop Harry from riding to his friends' rescue.
• Heroism Won't Pay the Bills: Harry genuinely loves helping people with their back to the wall with no where to go. Problem is people with their back to wall with no where to go aren't usually flushed with cash, and his morals won't let him take shady jobs or work with people with like Marcone so he typically finds himself struggling just trying to pay his rent and keep his car running much less get in the black for most the series. As Dresden himself wrly notes, he made more money dealing with demonic monkeys and flaming poop then did the time he worked for a faerie queen and literally saved the world.
• He Who Fights Monsters: A major concern of Harry's. So far he's been able to resist, but it comes up more and more frequently as the series goes on.
• Hidden Depths: Just about everyone has them, including Harry himself. Many of both his friends and enemies are surprised to discover that he's quite smarter than he looks.
• Historical In-Joke: The frequent term for the Abrahamic God being simply "the White God" is a reference to how the native Scandinavians actually referred to the Christian God being spread by missionaries by that name.
• Hollywood Silencer: Averted. Shots from guns with silencers are described being "maybe as loud as someone slamming an unabridged dictionary down on a table" rather than the "splitting the air with thunder" noise that guns without silencers make.
• Holy Ground: The church of Saint Mary of the Angels is holy ground, meaning that it is mostly impervious to all dark magic and anti-human supernatural forces.
• Holy Hand Grenade: One of Harry's weapons against vampires is a water balloon filled with holy water.
• Holy Is Not Safe: The Soulfire ability Harry receives from Uriel is ostensibly holy, and also powered by his own soul. Uriel also risks corruption when he lends his Grace to Michael, putting a considerable responsibility on Michael not to abuse said Grace.
• Homoerotic Subtext: Lampshaded in Blood Rites, with Harry noting that he personally feels really uncomfortable when Thomas lays the whammy on his sister Lara.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Harry will tell the reader repeatedly that he is not a good and decent man, but any time the opportunity occurs to do the right thing at great personal cost, Harry Dresden steps up without a second thought. Receives a rather cruel Lampshade Hanging in Grave Peril, when an enemy of Dresden's mockingly gives him a tombstone inscribed with the epitaph "He died doing the right thing". She then promptly gives him the choice to either walk away safely, or risk a tenuous peace and the lives of himself and others. Harry sees the trap, and goes in anyway.
  • When a bunch of super powerful warlocks are about to use the population of Chicago to turn themselves into a new God of Death, the Wardens assigned to deal with them stop slaughtering their way through the army of zombies to protect trick-or-treating schoolchildren.
• Honorary Uncle: Harry to the Carpenter clan.
• Hope Spot: Seems to happen at least once per book.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Molly Carpenter is a Perky Goth version of this. When she first becomes important to the story, she's dropped out of school, gotten a bunch of tattoos and piercings, started hanging around with the wrong crowd, and dresses like, in the protagonist's own words, "Frankenhooker."
• Hot for Teacher: Molly for Harry. Also Morgan towards Luccio. Both times unrequited.
• Hot Witch: Molly. There's also Charity (formerly), Elaine Mallory, Anastasia Luccio, Andi, Georgia, Marcy and most female fae.
• How About a Smile?: At one point Harry is forced to seek help from John Marcone. Naturally, Marcone decides to have a little fun with Harry.
  Marcone: Say "please".
  Harry: Please...
  Marcone: Say "pretty please".
  Harry: Pretty please...
  Marcone: Say "pretty please with a cherry on top".
  Harry: Fuck you. *hangs up*
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Harry is 6'9'' tall, while Murphy is five foot even. Also Kincaid and Ivy, although in their case it's because Ivy is still a growing teenager.
• Humans Are Special: Harry thinks so considering how he puts it in Cold Days:
  Harry: Mortals had the short end of the stick on almost any supernatural confrontation. Even most wizards, with their access to terrific forces, had to approach conflicts carefully—relatively few of us had the talents that lent themselves to brawling. But mortals had everyone else beat on exactly one thing: the freedom to choose. Free will. It had taken me a while to begin to understand it, but it had eventually sunk into my thick skull. I couldn't arm wrestle an ogre, even with the mantle. I couldn't have won a magical duel with Mab or Titania— probably not even against Maeve or Lily. I couldn't outrun one of the Sidhe. But I could defy absolutely anyone.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Nevernever, or at least the parts closest to the mortal world, are fraught with faeries, demons and other dangerous creatures. The parts further away from the mortal world are worse.
  • The Nevernever ultimately terminates at the Outer Gate, where Winter Fae are constantly battling things from outside reality trying get in.

I

• I Call It "Vera": Downplayed, but Murphy's P90 is named "George."
• I Can't Believe I'm Saying This:
  • The Gatekeeper in Summer Knight can't believe he's saying "What the Council doesn't know won't hurt it".
  • In Turn Coat, it provides one of the funniest lines in the entire book. When he walks home and finds his dog stopping a Mexican Standoff between his apprentice and two guests.
    Dresden: I can't believe I'm about to say this. So think real careful about where this is coming from: Have you people ever considered talking when you've got a problem?
• If I Had a Nickel...: From Bombshells:
  Molly: Take my hand and close your eyes. Trust me.
  Andi: If I had a nickel for every time a bad evening started with a line like that.
• I Gave My Word:
  • Promises are binding in the supernatural world; a wizard who swears by their power and breaks the promise loses some of their talent, while denizens of Faerie don't seem to be able to break their word willingly at all. A bearer of one of the Swords of the Cross who breaks a promise runs the risk of unmaking the Sword completely. The only supernatural beings who routinely break their word without consequence are the Denarians who are still humans helped by fallen Angels, and even for them breaking promises runs the risk retaliation. However, many entities will stick to the letter of the promise given, not the spirit, such as when the Red King in Changes uses the fact that he never even spoke to Harry, instead communicating through a translator, and thus never actually gave Harry his word at all.
  • Likewise, in Skin Game, Mab tells Nicodemus that Harry will help him break into Hades' vault and steal the Holy Grail. Minutes later, she blatantly tells Harry she expects him to betray Nicodemus the second he takes the Grail, and she'll be disappointed if he doesn't.
  • Also, in Cold Days, we find out, if a mortal who has become a Faerie Knight tries to break the Law of the appropriate Court, the result is the Mantle immediately disappearing, taking all of its power and enhancements with it. This is particularly problematic for Harry, because the Mantle is responsible for fixing his broken back.
  • Down Town reveals that Marcone takes any promise he makes seriously. When a warlock starts attacking people who had purchased protection from his organization, he personally helps Dresden take the responsible party down, on the grounds that since he was being paid to protect people, so he was obliged to provide it to them.
• I Hate You, Vampire Dad:
  • White Court Vampires are born, not "made" like the other Courts, and become vampires if they feed on someone before truly falling in love. Raith manipulates his children to make sure they turn, then he ensures his daughters' loyalties through disturbing means and kills his sons before they can become threats. This is a large part of the reason behind Thomas' Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • The Order of Saint Giles is largely made up of half-vampires dedicated to fighting their Red Court "parents."
• I Have No Idea What I'm Doing: Harry directly says this during Turn Coat and Cold Days. Interestingly enough, it's used for a specific purpose - to convince two people that he's the good guy, because if he were the bad guy they know he couldn't come up with a plan this complex and smooth. The second is a massive Oh, Crap! for the other person.
• I Know Your True Name: True names (i.e. a person's name pronounced exactly the way they do so themselves) grant a wizard, or other supernatural being, power over the one named, to the point that demons will consider a portion of a person's name from their own lips to be worthy payment for a service. Some dragons are apparently so powerful they only need part of the name, and Harry wonders what he could do with the full one. However, it is pointed out that humans are far more mutable than supernatural beings, so a human's True Name can change over time. Wizards, being human, are also subject to their True Names changing, but because they are long-lived, it takes a significantly longer amount of time to do so. Angels know any mortal's True Name by virtue of intellectus, allowing them to non-violently stop a mortal from interfering if they cause trouble in the angel's purview. Although their importance is repeatedly discussed, True Names are used for summoning a few times and not much else.
• An Ice Person:
  • Mab, Queen of the Winter Court of Faerie and Lord of Air and Darkness, is very definitely An Ice Person but very definitely not A Nice Person.
  • And of course her daughter Maeve, the Winter Lady. And her replacement, Molly Carpebter.
  • Harry's been one ever since he became Winter Knight.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The first 11 books had formulaic titles: two words, the same number of letters in each, with some kind of pun or double meaning in the title. Summer Knight, for example, is set around the summer solstice, and it is about investigating the murder of a man who held the office of Knight of the Summer Court of Faerie. Blood Rites is about family ties, with a B-plot about vampire-hunting. The 12th book breaks this pattern with a one-word title: Changes. With books 13 and 14, he returns to the older pattern with Ghost Story and Cold Days.
  Bob: William picked up on your casefile naming pattern, boss. Should we tell him about how it's your insurance against head injuries?
  • Ghost Story was actually suppose to break the pattern, just like Changes, but Butcher's publisher wouldn't let him call it Dead.
  • The pattern evidently will be broken again in the apocalyptic three-book series finale, as one of the final trilogy will be titled Stars And Stones. The other announced titles, Hell's Bells and Empty Night, do conform to the system, at least as far as word- and letter-count.
  • It carried over to a few of the later short stories, but their titles avert it more often than not.
  • The first two original comics (Welcome to the Jungle and Ghoul Goblin) break the rule, but the following comics (War Cry, Down Town, Wild Card, and Dog Men) have followed it since.
• Ignored Confession: In Proven Guilty, Molly confesses her love to Harry. He openly tells her that he's not going to take it seriously, for two reasons: One, because she's a rebellious teenager and her attraction to him is partly fueled by that; and two, because he's just saved her from a highly traumatic experience and her perception of him is being colored by that. Years on, Molly admits this was the right thing for him to do, although she is angry that he refused to acknowledge her feelings even after they became more genuine.
• Ignore the Fanservice: Practically a running gag, though he does have to exercise some forced methods of control. One time Harry winds up dumping ice water on his crotch. The next time he dumps the water on the temptress.
  • Molly is really bad about this, though. In White Night, when Harry and Murphy talk about Murphy's sexual escapades with Kincaid in Hawaii, Molly, who is reading a book, drops the book on her face in surprise, then tries to act uninterested.
  Harry: It would have been a lot more convincing if she wasn't reading the book upside-down.
  • In White Night Carlos resorts to a soulgaze with Lara Raith to give himself an indelible impression of what she really is, so that he'll never be tempted by her. She considers him wise for doing so.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: Played straight and averted. As the series leans into Fantasy Kitchen Sink, there are many different kinds of immortal beings who get it many different ways.
  • The Fae play this trope straight.
  • Vampires of the White Court play it mostly straight in that they aren't truly immortal, but have a drastically slowed aging that makes them stay young and beautiful for centuries.
  • Red Court vampires look like they get this, but they use a disguise to cover their transformation into a more bestial, inhuman form.
  • Black Court vampires stop aging upon turning, but all (except Drakul look like decaying corpses for eternity.
  • Wizards have greatly extended life spans, but this doesn't kick in until middle age, around age fifty.
• Immortality Inducer: The Denarians are immortal due to the presence of the Fallen contained in the silver denarius coin each one carries. Furthermore, Nicodemus is given extra protection by the fact that he wears the noose Judas Iscariot supposedly used to commit suicide around his neck, which allows him to regenerate damage that would drop even other Denarians who are protected by their respective Fallen.
• Imposed Handicap Training: After gaining the Winter Mantle, Harry wears a weighted vest weighing several hundred pounds during his daily jogs just to make them worthwhile.
• Incapable of Disobeying: The Sidhe possess no free will of their own and act in accordance with the various rules and laws of their kind. Understanding these rules and laws is a necessity when dealing with them, especially since the Fae are, as a rule, absolute masters of Loophole Abuse. For example, they are incapable of lying, but are masters at the use of tactics like Exact Words and You Didn't Ask. In Cold Days, a Fae compromised by a major villain is revealed due to this, when Dresden realizes she actively lied to him, which she should never have been able to do normally.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • The book refers to children of such relationships as Scions, and they are unsurprisingly pretty common throughout the series.
  • Margaret, mother of Thomas, and Lord Raith have a wizard-vampire relationship.
  • Justine and Thomas have human-vampire relationship.
  • Depending on the exact minute differences, Harry and human!Susan could be considered this as he will live for centuries and she is lucky to get past ninety years.
  • All changelings come from a fae being with a mortal. Maeve and Sarissa are two such changelings.
  • One of the Forest People, named Strength of a River in His Shoulders, has a relationship with a woman named Carol Pounder. They produced a child named Irwin.
  • In the short story "Bigfoot on Campus" Irwin then went on to fall in love with a white court vampire who cannot bespell him and her feeding from him is non-fatal.
  • Kincaid is half human, half demon, although no further information about his parents is given.
  • In Skin Game reveals Harry's relationship with the shadow of the Fallen Lasciel, Lash, is counted as such. Her final act of sacrifice is an act of true love and love is a powerful force of creation. This results in part of Lash melding with Harry and making a spirit of intellect, which lives for several years inside Harry until it is ready to be born.
  • Goodman Grey is the son of a Nagloshii and a human.
• In the Back: Harry has absolutely no compunctions about taking opportunities as they are given. He does, however, have a conscience.
• Inhumanable Alien Rights: The Unseelie Accords are an interesting version of this. The Accords are signed by several major supernatural powers from the Winter and Summer Fae, Vampires Courts, to the White Council and other gods. In it, it describes the rights and obligations one group has to another, from the right to take vengeance or payment for damages done against one party from another if the action was unlawful to how one could request arbitration from a neutral third party. Low-level magical practitioners are on the edge of protection and only if a Warden or Senior Member of the White Council sticks one's neck out would they get some protection. Normal humans excluding Marcone who signs up in White Night actually don't have any say in them, and thus the Accords cannot be used to claim damages done. That said, this allows for loopholes to be exploited by this, such as not worrying about fighting in neutral territory.
• Inhumanly Beautiful Race: The White Court of Vampires, and the fae. The Red Court of Vampires look like the beautiful people in their flesh masks, but they are really not.
• Inspector Javert: Morgan. He harasses Harry at every turn, accuses him of black magic and cavorting with demons and vampires (which, to be fair to Morgan, Harry does do with Lash and Thomas), and eagerly looks for an excuse to execute him, but this is all because he legitimately believes that Harry is a threat to others. Their relationship mellows (slightly) over the books, and comes to a head in Turn Coat.
• Internal Affairs: Thanks to her constant adventures with Harry, combined with a grudge-holding former member of Special Investigations, Murphy seems to be under investigation by IA for nearly half the series. By the end of Changes, they seem to have won.
• Internal Deconstruction: Especially apparent post-Changes.
  • Harry Dresden's Hot-Blooded nature and proclivity for the Indy Ploy is savagely deconstructed as the series goes on, with it being shown that his "spur of the moment" ideas might work and be effective at the time (or even be the only possibility he has open to him), but they can have horrible consequences down the road since he didn't properly plan ahead and account for all the variables. Just a few examples include him deciding to risk his life for his girlfriend Susan in Grave Peril (sparking an incredibly bloody war that lasts for at least an In-Universe decade), him helping Lara Raith depose her father in Blood Rites (meaning that the White Court of Vampires now has a dangerously intelligent and ruthless Chessmaster in charge), and wiping out the entire Red Court of Vampires in Changes causes a hideously massive Evil Power Vacuum in the supernatural world (to the point where even the series' Extra-Strength Masquerade is starting to fall through). Understandably, this all helps incite Character Development for Harry as he learns to act more carefully and rationally, using more Xanatos Speed Chess instead of being a Leeroy Jenkins.
  • Relatedly, Harry is quite the Destructive Saviour, to the point where there's a series-wide Running Gag of Harry burning down a building practically once a book. However, in Changes, this widespread history of property damage that follows in his wake results in the FBI suspecting Dresden for a terrorist bombing. It even bleeds back over into the supernatural side of things, with Harry having to fight the assumption by both his enemies and allies that he's just a Dumb Muscle Person of Mass Destruction for constantly knocking down buildings as he learns to become more of a Genius Bruiser who can get shit done without causing massive property damage.
  • Harry's It's All My Fault tendencies have been pretty reliably shown to be a tragic but not exactly noteworthy element of his personality and natural part of his Chronic Hero Syndrome. However, Ghost Story deconstructs this being overlooked and taken in stride by showing how Harry was Driven to Suicide when a Fallen Angel whispered the right seven words in his ear to perfectly prey on his massive Guilt Complex. In Skin Game, Michael Carpenter literally calls Harry a "pigheaded, arrogant idiot" for unnecessarily heaping such guilt onto himself and calls him to stop holding himself up to such impossibly high standards.
  • Harry's utter disregard for the White Council leads him to a total Idiot Ball moment in Peace Talks. When the Wardens confront him outside of Lara's house and discover that he's had sex recently, instead of swearing on his magic that he wasn't with Lara, he repeatedly refuses to give anything resembling a clear answer. This is a significant factor in his expulsion the following book.
• Invisible to Adults: The short story "Day One" reveals the existence of monsters informally called "Creeps" who can possess children, to cause them to be bullies and torment other children, for the purpose of children learning to fight them. But memories of these creatures fade as one grows older and into adulthood. Harry walked by a group of school children who were all infected and didn't notice at all.
• I Should Write a Book About This: As implied in the opening and closing of Storm Front and confirmed by the author, the books are Harry Dresden looking back at his adventures and writing about them.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Which is why Harry gives Ivy and Lash their names.
• It's All My Fault: Harry often blames himself when things go badly for him or his friends, even when he couldn't have made things any better. Deconstructed in Ghost Story (and retroactively Changes) when it turns out that a Fallen Angel had exploited this particular trait to drive Harry to suicide. Michael finally calls Harry out on this arrogant presumption that everything is his fault in Skin Game.
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Harry cites this word for word when he admits that he may have kinda thrown himself out of a moving car. He had a plan. Sort of.
  • Harry generally does something to this effect at least once a book. Sometimes it is a good idea, to be fair.

J-L

• James Bondage: Harry gets tied up a lot. The times he weasels out of it on his own and the times he needs to be rescued are split about 50/50.
• Jealous Romantic Witness: Invoked as punishment by Mab, Queen of the Winter Fairy, at the end of Battle Ground. When she declares her intention to seal the alliance with the vampiric White Court via a dynastic marriage between her Knight (Harry Dresden) and the vampire queen Lara Raith, the Winter Lady Molly (who is also in love with Harry) interjects on his behalf, pointing out that he needs time to grieve after his latest loss. Mab agrees to postpone the wedding by a year, but in an act of spite, tasks Molly with personally publicizing Harry and Lara's relationship and upcoming wedding during said year.
• Jesus Taboo: Averted. The series doesn't just make generic platitudes about God and faith, it demonstrates that the tenets and artifacts of Christianity have real power and meaning. In particular, the Swords of the Cross derive their power from the nails of the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin exists and has power and as of Skin Game the other relics of the Crucifixion are back in play in the world. Also, Michael Carpenter is not shy about holding Jesus up as his example and inspiration.
• Join or Die: Nicodemus gives Harry an offer: take up one of the 30 silver coins and join the Order of the Blackened Denarius, or have his throat slit after breakfast. Nicodemus believes very strongly in pragmatic villainy.
• Kill the Lights: Justified with hobs, faeries that hate light and can generate a sort off magic smokescreen that blocks it.
• Killed Off for Real: Several characters, notably Shiro, Morgan, Susan, Lily, Maeve, and Murphy.
• Kiss of the Vampire: The Red Court vampires have a powerful narcotic in their saliva that addicts their victims to being bitten. They also spit into beverages to poison and thrall people that way. Well. They did, anyhow.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Michael is a literal embodiment of the title and elso exemplifies its meaning, as Harry himself says that he is the closest anybody will ever get to meeting an Honest-To-God angel. Well, most people. Harry has hung out a few times with the archangel Uriel.
  • And Michael is armed with a magic sword to boot, Amoracchius. The sword's other name? Excalibur. Yes, that Excalibur.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Harry and Murphy.
• Knight of Cerebus: While the series is never quite what anyone would call light-hearted, The Denarians manage to play this role - the books they appear in are usually Darker and Edgier compared to the other entries. They take a break as this when Changes comes around (and places the Red Court back into this role.) but it's back with Skin Game.
• Knight Templar Big Brother: Do not mess with Thomas Raith's siblings, or he will do whatever it takes to destroy you. Especially his younger siblings Inari and Harry. Harry, though younger, reciprocates the sentiment.
• Knight Templar Parent: Ebenezar McCoy. And when you're dealing with a man who can pull a satellite out of orbit to eradicate you and your entire stronghold, then it would probably be better to not try to kill Harry.
  • Changes sees Harry himself become one, in his drive to protect his daughter. And if you have an unfettered version of Harry Dresden... well, say goodbye to your species.
• Lampshade Hanging: Enough for a whole store of various lighting fixtures and accessories.
• Latin Is Magic: Harry uses bastardized Latin to cast spells. He's fairly unique in this, as wizards tend to use languages that they're not well-versed in to cast spells in order to more easily dissociate themselves from the literal meaning of the words, and most wizards are very well-versed in Latin due to using it as a common language. Harry may have been deliberately put at a disadvantage here by Justin DuMorne's teaching him to use Latin as the basis for his invocations, making it actually dangerous for Harry to become too fluent in the language that wizards usually communicate in, and thus isolating him from seeking help.
• The Laws of Magic: The title character uses and names the Law of Contagion and Similarity, as a basic crime-solving technique. He also mentions and frequently uses the Law of Names, as well as the Law of Words of Power (mentioning in passing that you could technically use English words, but there isn't a sense of buffer between the self and spells, so it causes pain to the user). There are numerous other ones that aren't explicitly named, but invoked. He used the Law of Infinite Data to send Ivy a message, the Law of Pragmatism (numerous times, seeing that he used necromancy to raise a giant dino because it worked), and others.
  • Dimensional travel assumes the Law of Infinite Universes, and there is a wizard with the task of guarding certain dimensions.
• Layman's Terms: Lampshaded in Summer Knight, when Harry stops to give a massive plant monster a cool name, simply because such a thing needs a cool name.
  Harry: It's a chlorofiend.
  Murphy: A what?
  Harry: Plant monster.
  Murphy: Oh.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Every now and then, Harry says things which are clearly directed at the audience. Probably the most egregious example is in Fool Moon when he jumps out of a moving car and the text reads, without any spoken dialogue, "Don't look at me that way." The RPG refers to the books as his case files, and he quite rightly expect that someone other then himself will be reading those case files in the future.
  • In White Night, while helping Murphy come up with something to put in her report, Harry advises her to throw in a dog, as people always love them. Mouse promptly agrees.
  • During Small Favor, there's a scene where Harry and Thomas are looking for an address, and find it on a street marked with a "Dead End" sign. Harry takes a moment to mutter out loud about the Foreshadowing.
  • In Skin Game, the huge twist of Goodman Grey being The Mole for Harry all around is just as much of a surprise for Nicodemus as it is for the readers, as it's not until literally the chapter following Nicodemus' betrayal of Harry and Michael that Harry gives a flashback showing him talking things over with Kringle and deciding to hire Grey.
• Lesser of Two Evils: A running theme throughout the series is Harry having to deal with these.
  • From the point of view of the police, Marcone embodies the trope: he's a ruthless crime lord, but better than anyone else who might try to take over the role.
• Lie to the Beholder: At one point, Harry uses a spell to make Thomas look like him as a decoy to help him hide from the Fae.
• Lighthouse Point: There's an abandoned lighthouse on Demonreach.
• Literary Work of Magic: Dracula was commissioned by the competing White Court of Vampires for the explicit purpose of teaching humans how to kill Black Court vampires. Because of this, the few surviving Black Court vampires are exceptionally clever and dangerous. Additionally, the White Council of Wizards frequently publishes the nastier sorts of ritual so that the entity fueling them gets a crash-course in supply and demand (picture a vending machine being beaten to death with a sack of quarters). This almost backfires in the novella "Backup" when a different sort of baddy nearly tricks them into doing it with her little book — one filled with the names of ancient, terrible, forgotten beings.
• Little Miss Badass: Ivy takes this to levels unequaled by pretty much anyone else, ever. For one thing, she can control Mordite, a literal piece of antilife, with needle-threading precision.
• Living Shadow: Nicodemus has one of these that can strangle people and fly. The shadow is not even his Denarian form. To quote Jim:
  "No, he just has his shadow do things for him. You go relying on an alternate form to get things done, that still puts you in personal danger and Nicodemus is more practical than that. He'd rather stand over here and let something else kill and get the work done. Unless it's something cool like a Knight of the Cross, in that case he's still got something to prove."
• Loners Are Freaks: Harry spends the first few books as a "loner", but less so in the later books when he builds up a decent group of True Companions. It is worst between Grave Peril and Summer Knight, when he is trying desperately to figure out how to cure a loved one of vampirism.
• Long-Running Book Series
• Loophole Abuse: Lots of it, especially in Harry's dealings with the fae and his brushes with the Seven Laws of Magic
  • At the climax of Dead Beat, Harry must use necromancy to get close to an evil wizard. When Lawful Stupid Warden Morgan calls the result an "abomination," Harry points out that the Laws prohibit raising dead humans, and says nothing about Tyrannosaurs.
  • Towards the end of Small Favor he calls in a favor he's owed by the Summer Court to get out of a fight with the third Gruff, who is noted to have personally bested three ruling member of the White Council. He does this by using his favor to ask for a donut. The Eldest Gruff is well aware of the intent of the wish, but goes along with it, under the excuse that finding a donut exactly like what Harry has requested could take "a very long time," because he doesn't especially want to kill Harry either.
  • It's also worth pointing out that loophole abuse is a major part of what makes Harry so effective as a hero, due in large part to the fact that most supernatural creatures are required on some level to keep their promises or risk dire consequences. Most intelligent creatures of the Nevernever are masters of loophole abuse themselves, but they rarely expect humans to be as good at thinking outside the box as Harry is.
    • As a matter of fact it's explicitly stated in-universe regarding the Unseelie Accords that there's no such thing as "the spirit of the law," the letter is all there is. Loophole abuse (and counter-loophole-abuse loophole abuse) is a necessary survival skill in the Dresdenverse.
• Love Potion: Played perfectly straight. It is described as not so much mind control or love-inducing, but rather it lowers someone's inhibitions. Bob refers to it as super-tequila.
• Love Redeems: A common theme of relationships in the series. It was Malcolm Dresden's love for Margaret LeFay that saved her soul from damnation. Charity Carpenter considers falling in love with Michael to be the turning point of her life. Thomas's love for Justine is what holds him back from totally succumbing to his Hunger demon. It was Susan's love for her daughter that led to her sacrifice and the destruction of the Red Court. And it seems to be Harry's love for his family and friends that's pulled him back into the world after taking on the mantle of the Winter Knight.

M

• MacGuffin: Appears a bit throughout the story, but most notably The Word of Kemmler. Harry even lampshades this in one scene by comparing his situation to two similar stories involving MacGuffins.
• MacGuffin Super-Person: The Archive is a repository of all written works from all of human history. Because knowledge is very literally power in the Dresdenverse, she's a terrifyingly powerful wizard when called upon. While most wizards see her only as the Archive, Harry calls her 'Ivy'. Names have power in the Dresdenverse, so calling her that actually makes her more human and less scary-supercharged-twelve-year-old.
• Made of Explodium: Most of Chicago goes up ten points in flamability level whenever Harry is around. One particular instance is when he tries to ground out a magical charge he built up, and Murphy's car randomly explodes. It is later revealed that Harry screwed up the timer on a bomb somebody planted on Murphy's car.
• Made of Iron: Harry. Listing the injuries he receives in any one book would probably make doctors pale (and, indeed, a few of them did make doctors pale), and listing every injury he receives over the course of the series would result in a Wall of Text so large it would deserve it's own folder. He avoids long-term effects by having a minor Healing Factor, but by the time of the climax he's usually two steps away from blacking out and keeps going through sheer willpower. ^note Jim Butcher has stated in interviews that he made up Dungeons & Dragons character sheets for each of his main characters. When a random roll gave Harry a Constitution of 18, he thought to himself, "This guy's going to get beaten up a lot."
• A Magic Contract Comes with a Kiss: With Mab, it's a bit more than just a kiss.
  • Maeve tried to ruin Billy and Georgia's wedding by having a friend take Georgia's place. During the Race Against the Clock Harry tries to figure out when it would be to late to stop it. At the vows? No, it's the kiss that seals the deal.
  • Molly did this to Ramirez when they made a deal in Cold Case.
• Magic Harms Technology: Active magic destroys all post-WWII technology. Butters speculates that wizards project a sort of entropy field that in the current era manifests as glitches in electronics. Previously this field was responsible for legends of witches curdling milk or giving people warts.
• Magic Knight: The Wardens, The Knights of the Cross and The Summer and Winter Knight.
• Magic Potion: Harry occasionally brews potions for various uses, usually when his regular magic isn't enough; this happens more and more rarely as the series progresses. Making a potion involves eight ingredients; a base and something to stand in for each of the five senses, mind and spirit. He then casts a spell which makes the mixture into an active potion. Magic in the setting tends to work because the person using it believes it will, and this extends to potion-making — there's no "true" recipe for any one potion, and the process instead tends to rely on exploiting what the brewer expects to work. This mostly works by using things associated with the potion's effects; other things can be substituted, but they affect the result based on their connotations and associations.
• Magic Wand: Molly is shown to prefer wands, and as of Changes is shown to regularly carry at least two.
  • Harry uses his staff to make it easier for him to control evocation magic. His blasting rod, though, is specialized as a Boom Stick.
  • Molly's wands and Harry's staff and rod are both foci, and depending on preference other wizards might use, say, a soup ladle or a pair of earrings. None of them are strictly necessary; fitting with the general Clap Your Hands If You Believe nature of magic, they're just tools to make it easier. For example, Harry casting a fire spell without his blasting rod is like trying to carve a butter sculpture with your bare hands; possible, but difficult.
  • Elaine prefers jewelry as her magical foci, and describes Harry's chosen foci as phallic.
• Magical Accessory: Several. Notably Harry has a Shield Bracelet.
• Magical Native American: Listens to Wind a.k.a. Injun Joe, although he is also a normal wizard. He seems to be the only one with a familiar, though. The RPG suggests that this is because the White Council frowns on keeping familiars, but Listens To Winds hails from a tradition older than the White Council's influence in North America.
• Magical Sensory Effect: Magic, especially powerful Ritual Magic, usually causes a glow from stray energy escaping the spell. Skilled spellcasters can suppress this with concentration; spells like veils are naturally covert.
• Magical Society: The White Council.
• Magical Underpinnings of Reality: The Fae courts control global climate change.
• Magnetic Hero: Harry draws people into his orbit and transforms them without even realizing it.
• Magnetism Manipulation: Earth magic includes magnetism in its purview. While Harry's go-to elemental magics are fire and wind, he sometimes carries a Sword Cane bearing carved runes that allow him to throw guns and such around.
• Male Gaze:
  • Harry pays a lot of attention to the bodily attributes of almost every woman he sees, and when he's the narrator pretty much constantly comments on their looks and bodies, especially their breasts.
  • Even when Murphy is the viewpoint character, mention is made of a female werewolf having 'curves that drew the eye'.
• Mana: Those capable of conjuring Soulfire do so at the expense of their own soul, which is fortunately a renewable resource if it isn't exhausted completely.
• The Man Behind the Man: No Dresden book is complete without one or two. Or more. We do not always find out about them until later.
  • Lara Raith eventually comes to rule the entire White Court in this way, after learning her father is unable to feed thanks to Margaret Dresden's curse on him, and then proceeds to literally Mind Rape him into her slave.
  • Cold Days reveals that the Outsiders have been using a mind virus to influence pretty much every event up to that point. Damn.
• Masquerade: Though most of the supernatural creatures do not really bother to hide themselves, the public refuses to believe they exist. Harry himself pays very little attention to the Masquerade, he is in the Yellow Pages under "Wizards". The vampires, demons, and the other supernatural creatures usually try to sweep their tracks, because if normals find out that they exist the general response for all of them will be Kill It with Fire and they will be totally outnumbered. In Dog Men, the US Government is shown to also trying to enforce this. Dresden Files Accelerated says that the Unseelie Accord, signed in 1994, was done partially for this trope, however: as a defense mechanism against the Internet. The Accords' considerable amount of concern of involvement by the Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress post-Battle of Chicago also points to wanting to avoid overt government intervention.
  Crane: You wouldn't dare reveal yourself to the world.
  Dresden: Go read the yellow pages in your room. I'm in there. Under "Wizards."
• Masquerade Paradox: The Dresden Files is a mixture of Case 1, 2, 4, and 5. The various reasons stated in-universe are:
  • Dresden claims that people tend to violently freak out when exposed to magic and go all Burn the Witch!. Yet, whenever we see him explaining magic and the supernatural to people, and providing evidence to support his claims, they tend to accept it (see Waldo Butters & Murphy).
  • Dresden have mentioned that muggles are so dangerous because they can keep throwing bodies at a problem until it goes away. However, every time a scene appears where ordinary muggles go up against a serious super, the ordinary muggles are laughably crushed. Powerful Necromancers, Vampires, and Faeries effectively control entire governments, and would have brought down all of human civilization if not for their more altruistic counterparts.
  • Recent developments in modern technology, and knowledge of magical weaknesses have helped humans better deal with some of the lower supernatural threats like vampires, werewolves, or low skilled magic users. The various Badass Normals are pretty good evidence for this. However, the more powerful or godlike supernatural threats would require small armies, going nuclear, or just beyond humanity's ability to deal with. Super's own ability to cause technology to malfunction or kill in mass have been used by wizards & whatnot to crush effective armies armed with modern military weapons. For example, a particularly powerful Necromancer was able to effectively start World War I all on his own, resulting in the deaths of millions. Also, magic and monsters have apparently been around for thousands of years, long before the advent of any of these weapons. What stopped a supernatural takeover is as-of-yet unknown.
  • Weirdness Censor. Muggles apparently have a capacity for self-delusion so powerful that it beggar's the question of how Muggles were able to survive, much less develop modern science and technology. Bizarre events like hundreds of exploding chests, entire continents devolving into chaos, city-wide blackouts, and constant explosions and fires, are summarily dismissed are explained away as college pranks, gang wars, and terrorists. It is also applied inconsistently, as members of the Chicago Police Department as well as other Muggles, have accepted magic and monsters when presented with evidence and a good argument. However, in Dog Men it seems that the part of the US Government that's aware of the supernatural is also keeping the Masquerade up, which probably helps enforcing Weirdness Censor.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: Harry is actually part of two different chains. The first is Merlin > Over a thousand years worth of Masters and Apprentices > Ebenezar's master > Ebenezar > Harry > Molly. The second is Simon Pietrovich > Justin DuMorne > Harry > Molly.
• Master of One Magic: Some people have some magical ability, but not enough to be considered a wizard. Some of those people focus on using one spell really, really hard.
  • Billy and his werewolf gang only know a spell to transform into a wolf and back. It does have a secondary application as a healing spell though; Billy describes it as being similar to transforming into human form.
  • Mort is an Ectomancer, who specializes in magic to do with ghosts and spirits. He's even better at it than most wizards.
  • At one point in Ghost Story, Harry's friends have to fight a Kinetomancer, who specializes in force magic applied to physical movement. Meaning he's incredibly fast and strong.
  • Binder's only real trick is summoning magical Mooks.
• Master of Your Domain: Lash teaches Harry quite a few tricks.
• Master Swordsman: Shiro of the Knights of the Cross is said to be an artist with his blade. The RPG codifies this, giving him a Weapons skill of 6, with stunts to boost it further in certain situations (for reference, skills top out at 4 or 5 for most non-wizard, non-"Plot Device level" characters), and outright says if you try to take him on one-on-one, you are going to lose. Even Nicodemus, who hates Shiro, grudgingly respects Shiro's abilities. Nicodemus himself is also pretty good due to having more than 2000 years to practice.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • Harry's ability to Listen (i.e., tune out extraneous sounds and focus on what he needs to hear) may be part of the wizarding package, or may be just a learned skill Harry can do - he's not sure which.
  • In Death Masks Michael, wearing heavy armor and unconscious, and Harry are in a river when crime lord Marcone tosses Harry a line and pulls both of them to safety. The line turned out to be the Shroud of Turin, burial cloth of Christ. A 2000 year old piece of cloth gaining the tension strength to withstand two heavy men being pulled with it out of rushing water and never tearing. Yeah. Just a coincidence and good craftsmanship. Skin Game confirms that the one used on that river rescue is actually a fake, with the real one being inside Hades' vault. However, Harry explained that faith in that fake might have give it some real powers
• May–December Romance: Kinda-sorta Harry and Luccio—though she's in the body of a 20-year-old coed by the time their relationship starts, she's actually a 200+ year old wizard who grew up in Italy in the early 1800s. Falls into this category because Harry will live just as long as her.
• Mayfly–December Romance: The complications of this kind of relationship are brought up by Murphy in Proven Guilty when she and Harry talk about their relationship. Murphy notes that she does not have Harry's long lifespan, and he will still be relatively young when she is dying of old age.
• Mayincatec: The cover for Changes.
• Meaningful Background Event:
  • In White Night, when Harry and Elaine are heading for Thomas' boat at the marina, there's mention of a boat with a particularly bad engine belching smoke. It gets passed off. The boat in question is carrying Madrigal Raith, a White Court vampire with a grudge against Thomas and Harry, and his ghoul hit squad. The boat then attacks Thomas' ship a chapter later.
  • In Turn Coat several characters are described as having ink on their fingers and the clerk is often described in the background insistently and obsessively collecting people's signatures for menial things. This seemed insignificant until the end when the clerk was found out to be a traitor and the ink contained alchemical substances used for psychological attacks.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Harry's father was a stage magician and Harry himself is named after Harry Houdini, Harry Blackstone, Sr. and David Copperfield.
    • The RPG states the Dresden gets his last name from the Dresden Carpet Bombings fitting him as Person of Mass Destruction.
  • Nicodemus Archleone.
  Harry: Seriously? Archleone? As in "seeking whom he may devour"? Could you get any more obvious?
  • Michael Carpenter. Michael, as in the archangel, and Carpenter, as in Jesus' day job, and Michael is an actual carpenter to boot.
  • Thomas' sister Inari. Inari was the god of, among other things, foxes/kitsune in Japan. Given the folklore surrounding kitsune, it was kind of obvious who Inari was before it was said outright.
  • From "Dead Beat", a necromancer goes by the name of Grevane, which is an anagram of "engrave", usually associated with tombstones.
  • In "Small Favor" Uriel disguises himself as a janitor named Jake when Harry is in the chapel questioning God. In the Bible, Jacob wrestled an angel and got some cool perks out of it. Harry gets encouragement and knowledge of soulfire.
  • Dr. Fabio from "I Was a Teenage Bigfoot", a former Venator who was siphoning Irwin's essence with dark magic... to regrow his hair.
  • The Wardens of the White Council have an apt name. After all, there was originally just one Warden, and he oversaw the prison underneath Demonreach.
  • Ms. Demeter Helen Beckitt, the manager of Marcone's fitness club in White Night. You might think it's just a hint to the customers that there are other services to get, vaguely related to a Greek fertility goddess, but wouldn't be "Aphrodite" more apt and standard then? Well, think who might be Persephone... At the end of the book, it's revealed that Helens daughter is still alive, but lying in a coma.
• Meaningful Rename: While he didn't actually change his name, after Billy the Werewolf shows his leadership dealing with injured members of his group, Harry thereafter refers to him as Will.
• Meat Puppet: A definite possibility for those bearing mantles of power. When he becomes the Winter Knight, Harry fears that the mantle of Winter Knight will erode his personality, sanity and self-control, and take over his mind. Some people say it's inevitable, some say it isn't. There's no definite answer. Some might consider an Archangel's word 'Mab can't change who you are' to be pretty definite. Then again, right before that he called Mab's statements to the contrary 'lies' even though Mab cannot and did not lie...
• Mega Neko: Harry's cat, Mister. He is huge. Seriously. Easily thirty pounds and described by Harry as potentially part bobcat. In the comics, he says he feeds Mister sheep.
  Harry : I like dogs, they give Mister something to snack on.
• Merlin and Nimue: Not the Merlin, the official leader of the White Council, but Harry himself. He has a younger apprentice of the opposite sex who he is training in magic and has a strong personal connection with; Harry was friends with her father for years before ever taking her as an apprentice. Harry is also guarding the Sword in the Stone (or rather, he was until Changes, and is again as of Skin Game) and looking, when he can be bothered, for a suitable user for it.
• Mind Control: Molly Carpenter, who has developed a very bad habit of entering people's minds without their permission. Her intent is always good, but the results are not. She has driven her ex-boyfriend into permanent insanity by trying to frighten him away from drug use. She also invaded the mind of Captain Luccio — and got caught by Morgan. If Morgan had turned them in when he got caught, or had told Luccio what Molly had done, both Molly and Harry would have been beheaded automatically. By Dresdenverse rules, invading another's mind and compelling someone to do something (or not do something) against his/her will not only breaks two of the Laws of Magic and can cause permanent psychological damage to both the victim and the perpetrator, but is highly addictive Black Magic. Though we can't be sure, Molly claims she didn't actually "touch" anything, she just looked around to see if there had already been tampering - and there had been.
• Mind Rape: A favorite tactic of vampires of all stripes and a decent number of sorcerers. Murphy states that her ordeal with Kravos was practically this. Even in the following book she is having trouble sleeping because she gets night terrors; the only way she can get some decent sleep is through a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills.
• Mirror Reveal: Happens to Thomas Raith in "Back Up". Whilst on the trail of a dangerous Stygian Sorceress, she casts an illusion upon him that causes him to resemble an evil looking older man (in the hopes of tricking his brother Harry into mistaking him for the villain and killing him). Thomas doesn't realise until he sees his reflection in the mirror, which allows her to escape.
• Missing Mom:
  • Harry never knew his mother thanks to Death by Childbirth. Or rather, death by being hit with a powerful entropy curse that killed her through Death by Childbirth.
  • Ivy. In Death Masks, she claims that her mother went into a coma when the Archive passed to her, but Luccio reveals in Small Favor that her mother got the Archive as a pregnant teenager after her grandmother died in a freak car accident. Angry at what happened and hating that the unborn Ivy would get to live a normal life instead of her, she killed herself, and thanks to the Archive containing all the memories of all the previous Archives, Ivy knows this.
• Mission Control: Butters acts as this and a Voice with an Internet Connection for Molly, Andi and Justine in Bombshells.
• Mistaken for Gay: In the later books, Harry and Thomas both mislead with this, though for different reasons. It does not help that Murphy and SI wil not let go of the joke.
  • "NBA-sized gay burglar who works with a dog."
• Modernized God: Odin has a day job as CEO of a security firm, where his power is greatly reduced so he can avoid the All-Powerful Bystander effect and remain active in mortal affairs. He also holds the "mantles" of the Winter Court Fae Kringle and Santa Claus, roles which he fills part-time. As he says, a life as long as his is full of strange twists and turns.
• Modesty Towel
  • In Storm Front, Harry's fresh from the shower and wrapped in a towel when Susan Rodriguez arrives for their date that he'd forgotten about. A toad demon also shows up and Harry is forced to go on a Full-Frontal Assault and he ends up losing the towel in the struggle. This is made more complicated when he realizes Susan accidentally drank a Love Potion and he is now stuck naked with an amorous woman in a Geometric Magic.
  • Harry gets into trouble because of someone else's Modesty Towel in Proven Guilty. He's letting Molly, his friend's 17-year-old daughter, get cleaned up in his hotel room while waiting for her mother, Charity, to pick her up. Molly steps out of the bathroom, wearing a skimpy towel just as Charity arrives and assumes she's Sex Dressed. She decks Harry in the jaw, orders Molly to put her clothes on, and storms out.
• The Mole: Numerous over the course of the series, but Wizard Peabody is the best example.
• Monster of the Week: Almost every villain appearing in one of the short stories as opposed to the main books. Includes a Hecatean hag, the spawn of Grendel, a Crazy Survivalist priest, a group of ringwraith and Slytherin house rejects, supernatural fleas, and a maenad.
• Monster Progenitor: The Red King to the Red Court Vampires.
• Monster Protection Racket: Subverted. Johnny Marcone does run one, but the monsters are very much real and not in his employ, Marcone has both the firepower and know-how to actually do something about the monsters, and most of the people who are forking over cash are doing so willingly and appreciate having Marcone standing by to intervene, should they need it. The other option, Special Investigations, is an understaffed, underfunded and largely ignored part of Chicago PD, and they appreciate Marcone's boys giving back to the community.
• Monumental Damage: If it's a major landmark or tourist attraction in Chicago, chances are good that Harry will mix it up with a baddie there sooner or later, probably with lots of collateral property damage.
• Mood Whiplash: Harry likes to tell jokes to lighten tense scenes. In Death Masks Harry was being tortured and refused to take a bribe to end the pain with, "Sorry, I follow the Tao of Peter Parker." He then followed up by saying the nonplussed villain "must be a DC comics fan." However, it is not always intentional, and it often takes Harry himself by surprise. There is a scene in Storm Front when Harry goes to ask Bianca, a beautiful vampire, about the death of one of her girls. The second he says what he is there for she lunges for him, shifting partially into her real form, assuming he is there to kill her. After he drives her back and explains himself, she changes back, and Harry leaves as she is having a snack. All he can now see is the monster who wants to be beautiful.
• Mook Horror Show: Implied a few times, particularly when an undisguised Red Court vampire (read: a human-sized bat monster who is one of his court's professional assassins) sees Harry, screams, and then runs away.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: At the furthest extreme of the Hero end we have Michael Carpenter, the Fist of God, who only fights monsters, has a grand total of one recorded instance of swearing in the series proper (which was in a side story), and is all around about as wholesome as a person can be. Slightly away from the good extreme would be the majority of the series other heroes e.g. Harry Dresden, who is a generally upstanding guy with a massive case of Chronic Hero Syndrome, but isn't above a bit of ruthless pragmatism if it's necessary, is prone to Honor Before Reason and Leeroy Jenkins in the earlier books, and has a disturbing tendency to get Drunk with Power. More towards the middle of the scale is the White Council of Wizards, which is made up of plenty of Knight Templar Jerkasses, but its ruthless methods have oftentimes been shown to be a cruel necessity in the grand scheme of things. The main representative of dark grey is John Marcone, who is a ruthless crime boss, but ends up joining forces with Dresden more often than opposing him and will not tolerate any violence against children. And when it comes to his usual criminal activities, he believes, as characters of his type often do, that crime's going to exist no matter what, and it's better that it be controlled by someone like him than descend into "every-gang-for-itself" warfare. As for the monsters of the setting, we have any one the supernatural villains, e.g. the Skinwalker, a terrifying and sadistic monster where the briefest glimpse Harry grabs of its true form with his Sight is enough to send him into a Heroic BSoD. To top it all off, we even have Blue-and-Orange Morality in the form of The Fair Folk, whose Winter Court guards the universe against the nightmarish Outsiders, who don't enter reality so much as parasitize it, and whose Summer Court protects the universe from the Winter Court. On top of all that, we later find that Winter has the ability to be coldly logical and stay its hand when it's best to in the long term, while Summer is more prone to going off half-cocked as part of them being designed to keep Winter in check (and when a faerie as powerful as the leaders of the Courts does that, we can potentially be talking about something like another Ice Age or the Black Death happening).
• Mr. Exposition: Bob on anything magical. Waldo Butters on anything medical, up to and including trying to give scientific explanations for some of the weird stuff that happens to and around Wizards... and succeeding. The RPG has Exposition and Knowledge Dumping, a Trapping (sub-skill) of Scholarship; on a successful roll, the Game Master can "borrow" the Player Character to use as a mouthpiece to Info Dump about the relevant subject. This effectively cuts out the middleman effect witnessed in most RPG knowledge skill checks (Player 1 rolls, GM relates info, Player 1 says "I tell everyone else".)
• Mister Seahorse: Harry finds out he's been pregnant since the end of White Night, much to his surprise.
• Muggles: Those in the know sometimes call them "Straights." Harry seems to apply the term specifically to those who have no knowledge of the supernatural at all (i.e. Murphy and Butters, both exposed to the supernatural, would not be called "Straights", but Murphy's superiors outside SI would.)
  • He also likes to call them "vanilla mortals," and in the RPG wonders if this means that he's "chocolate."
• Muggles Do It Better:
  • Recent developments in modern technology, pure numbers, and magical weaknesses have helped humans better deal with some of the lower supernatural threats like vampires, werewolves, or low skilled magic users. The various Badass Normals are pretty good evidence for this. However, the more powerful or godlike supernatural threats would require small armies, going nuclear, or just beyond humanity's ability to deal with. A wizard's own ability to cause technology to malfunction or kill en masse have been used by wizards to defeat much larger groups of men armed with modern military weapons.
  • It's mentioned a ways into the series that Special Investigations have become so good at dealing with low-level bugaboos on their own that Harry's income has begun to suffer. SI simply doesn't need to call in the wizard as much as they used to.
    • Harry has to go without so many modern conveniences (electric lights, water heater, cellphones, the internet, refrigerator...) that even he, the biggest magic geek on the planet, starts to wonder if magic really is worth it.
  • This is definitively proven in Battle Ground, where even if they're barely trained, properly led and equipped militias managed to hold out against the forces of the Fomor, though they do still suffer considerable casualties in the process. And near the end of the same novel, the National Guard's attack helicopters manage to obliterate the remainder of the Fomor's forces in Chicago.
• Multiple Reference Pun: Most of the titles.
• Mummy:
  • Although Harry himself hasn't met one as of Skin Game, another character's flashback in Ghoul Goblin shows that animated mummies guard isolated Egyptian tombs in the Dresdenverse.
  • His friends and associates like to joke about it — usually when Harry's all bandaged up. In Turn Coat, Vince Graver sees Harry and asks whether Harry cursed everyone who dug up his tomb, or just the English speaking guys. In Skin Game, Murphy sees a patched up Harry and says Harry's worries about becoming a monster are justified — specifically, he's turning into a mummy.
• Mundane Solution:
  • Harry frequently runs into foes who are resistant to his magic. One confrontation with a spell-proof ogre is resolved when Murphy cripples the ogre with a chainsaw and Harry drenches the ogre in gasoline and ignites it. Harry is also one of the few White Council wizards willing to use firearms and frequently uses his staff or blasting rod as a cudgel. ^note As the staff is designed to manipulate forces, Harry states in Fool Moon that it can be used as a lever in situations where ordinary wood would splinter and break, such as bending the metal bars in a jail.
  • This was established as a key part of Harry's character as early as the second book, Fool Moon, when he'd run himself out of magic thanks to imprudent use of magical amphetamines, and still had a rather pissed-off lycanthrope alpha male to deal with... so he pulled a .38 revolver and shot the guy in the knee. It didn't really work all that well, seeing as lycanthropes have a Healing Factor to rival Wolverine's, but it sure wiped the smug grin off the son of a bitch's face for a while.
  • Speaking of Harry, special mention should go to how he handles a cult of practitioners who keep harassing him in the short story Day Off. Their leader, as an attempt to challenge him to a magical duel, warns Harry to defend himself. Harry doesn't even bother with magic; he just scares them off by pointing his gun at them instead.
    Harry: "I'm a-fixin' to defend myself!"
  • A major lesson that Harry often reiterates (especially to his apprentice, Molly) is that knowledge and basic common sense are a lot more important than magic. For instance, on one occasion when Molly suggests using a tracking spell, Harry points out that a simple phone call would work just as well.
  • In Turn Coat, Morgan talks about how he once had to take on a skinwalker, an incredibly powerful demigod horror with a hefty resistance to magic. He knew he'd get pounded in a straight fight (not everyone can be Injun Joe, after all), so instead he lured it into following him to the middle of nowhere in Nevada. Specifically, a nuclear testing ground. He stepped into a portal to the Nevernever just as the bomb went off. Morgan 1, Eldritch Abomination From the Dawn of Time 0.
  • In fact, mundane weaponry is the accepted way for wizards to kill if it ever must come to that, as killing humans with magic carries not just the obvious moral and legal ramifications but also corrupts the soul. The Council's enforcers carry big ol' swords for this reason.
    • Kincaid pointed out in Blood Rites that a sniper at a distance can kill a wizard without worrying about his death curse; he wouldn't know he was under attack until he was already dead. Kincaid demonstrates this with Harry, at Harry's request, at the end of Changes. Of course, we don't find out about this until the end of Ghost Story.
  • Likewise, all the magic of the Summer Lady isn't enough to stop a swarm of dewdrop fairies armed with cheap hardware-store boxcutters.
  • The most efficient way to handle Black Court vampires? A paintball gun that fires projectiles filled with holy water.
  • In Skin Game, Harry circumvents Marcone's high-grade anti-magic security not by casting a flashy spell, but setting off roman candles as a distraction.
• Murder Makes You Crazy: The reason for the First Law of Magic. Magic is an expression of will given form, so using it to kill someone is particularly warping. Plus, magic is consistently referred to as the power of life, or coming from life, meaning you're warping the power of life to cause death.
• My Car Hates Me: The Blue Beetle is prone to giving out at very inconvenient times. However, this is partially due to the law of averages, since it dies the rest of the time, too, and partially justified by the fact that since magic is fueled by emotion, the more distress Harry is in, the more likely he is to make the car short out.
• My Greatest Second Chance
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Council meetings are conducted in Latin, which Harry learned via correspondence course. It can get ugly if Ebenezar (or Lash) isn't there to translate.
• Myth Arc: The Black Council is suspected by Harry to be directly or indirectly responsible for just about everything bad that has happened to him since the events of the first book. However, as we find out in Cold Days, it turns out to be Nemesis.

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Continued here.