Ok, caught up.
I liked that. Changes is going to look like a bar-room brawl in comparison to what's coming. We might be going straight into The Unmasqued World territory, which would be nuts for the series.
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."My personal urban fantasy setting has several factions within The Masquerade actively planning and preparing for an The Unmasqued World situation because they view it as inevitable as well and imminent. Most world governments already had top secret departments who were part Welcomed to the Masquerade and part Men In Black since World War 2 - and I'm partially surprised that there isn't anything of the like in Dresden. You had the FBI bunch in Fool Moon, but otherwise there's no indication that there are any muggles beyond like Marcone that are dealing with or interacting with The Masquerade in any significant way. I think I would have had a US Men In Black org of some kind in the Dresdenverse if I had been the one to create it, but there you go.
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."
x3
Because I think it's fundamentally based on a very dumb assumption: It's based on the idea that 'well, the modern world doesn't have gods running around performing miracles, so clearly we have to write an explanation for why this is not the case,' which ignores the fact that the planet is in fact full of Actual Billions of people who take their faith very seriously. They may see it as a separate thing from the everyday world of physics and causality that we take for granted, but they believe nonetheless, sincerely, that these figures hear their prayers and care about them, that their sincere acts of devotion are not falling on deaf, helpless ears because the gods made an arbitrary pact to just let the mortals sort it out.
Why should the Deva, known almost above all else for their love of all the mobile and immobile beings they created, be forced by the fading of foreign gods to just disappear from the world? And in the case of the world of the Dresden Files, why does the White God get a pass to create agents of his will just because the ultimate goal is human self-determinism?
It just strikes me as a very atheistic way to write gods, and I don't care for it.
Edited by math792d on Jul 15th 2020 at 7:01:32 AM
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.Just finished and caught up.
I suppose if you really went out of your way, you could keep a masquerade (not like it hasn't been done in plenty of other media, Doctor Who has how many alien invasions by now?), but it is kinda getting out of hand at this point. And we were getting hit over the head really heavy with 'Billions of mortals? Yeah, even supernatural forces don't want to deal with that.' And it does seem the sort of thing you might want to do toward the end of a series (rather than in the middle of a work), which... he's supposedly building toward at this point, yes?
Anyway. I'm wanting to get inside Ebenezar's head once he cools off. Like, dude, you almost freaking killed Harry. Whatever else happens/happened, I'm pretty sure you love the guy like nothing else. You going to just leave it all like that when Harry's still in hot water with the Council and seems bent on putting himself into mortal danger yet again? You still think he's out of his mind and/or dangerous? Whatcha gonna do? And now you know the truth about Thomas. What. You. Gonna. Do. Blackstaff.
Edited by PointMaid on Jul 15th 2020 at 12:49:14 PM
x5 I´m not sure if i remember this right, but i think there was a WoJ that the tape from Fool Moon was disapeared by a Men in Black like organisation.
Regarding the Masquerade i think Urban Fantasy authors have basicly 3 options: 1) The Magic Comes Back and history is only identical to our world until the specific timepoint when it came back 2) The Masquerade or 3) Answer some theological questions philosophers have tried answering for centuries. I´m ok with all 3 of these
Ebenezar said one thing that realy stuck with me "They´re trying to isolate you! That´s what abusers do!" and it kind of changed how i thought of him in this book. Originally i was annoyed with him because he isn´t listening to Harry and just trying to make Harry do what HE thinks is best. I´m still not ok with they way Eb handles things, but i can see his intentions. He sees all the deals and arrangements Harry has made and how it pushes him away from humanity in general and the White Council (right now the only organisation willing to protect Harry), but he doesn´t know what leads to these deals. He thinks Harry is being manipulated into burning all of his bridges and to be fair Harry is doing exactly that. I can´t really blame him for not listening to Harry, if someone i cared about showed these signs everything they said to justify it would be tainted by my thoughts that their abuser might be trying to isolate them. I can even understand his anger. His grandson is apparently knowingly walking towards his doom and he can´t just take him and lock him up at his farm, but everything else he tries gets ignored by said grandson. I think Eb is in the same emotional state Harry was in in Camp Kaboom or maybe even during Changes
Edited by Samaldin on Jul 15th 2020 at 4:43:06 PM
If it's what I'm thinking of, then I think I've already heard about it.
If it's the part where Mab gets punched through several walls, then that's tentatively good news for me, and it does sound cool. What scares me about Mab though is that she's always got a plan, you just won't know what it is until the story is over. So anything could be a ploy or feed into some greater gambit.
I won't comment much more. I don't want to bother people.
Edited by GNinja on Jul 15th 2020 at 6:35:30 PM
Kaze ni Nare!@math792d:
Most Urban Fantasy that have gods roaming around are making use of Crossover Cosmology, which necessitates that the gods can't be as powerful or important as their followers believe them to be, because they're sharing space on the cosmic hierarchy with a bunch of other gods.
x3 Personally I'm not buying that she's Nimue. She's way, way too young for that if she was also at Hastings.
x2 Yeah, but it's funny how every time the Crossover Cosmology happens it inevitably dicks over non-Western forms of worship the hardest because there's usually some kind of dickery going on with the Abrahamic religions (and, let's be real, 90% of the time it's just Christianity in spite of the name). And I think writers, if they insist on using these gods, could perfectly explain it away as a layer of 'mythic reality.'
But a lot of writers are far too obsessed with the idea of arranging things and making them make sense when, inherently, real-world religions don't make a lot of sense. They're sprawling, internally contradicting, complex things slowly pieced together across hundreds of years. Play with that.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.If they're made in the West.
I could mangas manga that think every religion works like Bhuddism all day, if you want.
People gravitate towards what's more familiar, most of the time.
Personally, I'd rather just borrow some concepts and make up my own religions, personally.
If I were to make a work where real life gods came up, then they were gonna be works set in those mythologies, as it makes things significantly easier.
Urban Fantasy (from the U.S. anyway) usually draws its gods from either Christianity or ancient religions that have gone all-but extinct. They tend to stay clear of large-but-still-a-minority-in-America religions for fear of controversy.
Why couldn't she be at Hastings as Mab?
Also, it may be an unpopular opinion but I feel every author has the right to make his world's cosmology as he sees fit be it God Is Good, God Is Evil, Devil, but No God, Kitchen Sink Fantasy, and more.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 15th 2020 at 7:17:44 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Welp, finished Peace Talks. tldr spoiler-free review: I liked the character work for the most part, but I'm not thrilled with where the plot is going.
First and foremost, adding a new antagonist out of nowhere that introduces themselves by literally punching Mab through a wall reeks of Sequel Escalation and I'm not a fan. The Fomor were already plenty threatening as-is, and adding a literal god to their ranks honestly makes them less interesting because it turns it from a complex political situation (having to get the various signatories to the Accords working together against a common foe while still guarding against the possibility of treachery from them) to a fairly straightforward boss fight (have to stop the Last Titan before she destroys Chicago).
And, uh... that's basically it, in terms of plot things. The rest of the book is mostly about developing the relationship between Harry and Lara, and between Harry and McCoy, with Thomas's situation acting as the catalyst for both. I feel like they've pushed Lara and Harry closer to being "wary allies" than "sometimes frenimies" and I'm not really sure how I feel about it. Before there was enough distance between them that they could never really be certain they were reading each other correctly, but in Peace Talks I feel like they dropped enough barriers that that's no longer true. It's difficult to imagine them going back to trying to kill each other after this, short of some short-sightedness or misunderstanding that would feel forced.
Harry and McCoy was the highlight of the book. We finally get to see McCoy as a person, rather than a distant but powerful mentor/protector. Their duel on the dock was great, with Harry "winning" by pressing his advantages (forcing a physical fight where McCoy's superiority is less overwhelming, using his unique talents like being steady on ice to even the odds even further) — and, of course, having anticipated the situation and prepared a plan to undermine the whole thing from the start. Going to be interesting to see how McCoy acts once he's cooled down.
Other random thoughts: not a huge fan of the "starborn" nonsense, because being the Chosen One with special plot-mandated powers is boring. Didn't super appreciate them bringing back The Caper formatting from Skin Game, even if it was only briefly. I didn't mind the events themselves so much as the very movie-ish "cut back to them explaining each step of the plan as it goes down" way it was written. It doesn't really work in a novel. I don't really get the Butters hate, though I agree "Butters is now in an OT3 with two hot chicks" felt rather gratuitous without adding much to anything. Most of the other subplots in the book — Harry and Maggie, Harry and Karrin, Harry and the White Council in general, Harry and Ramirez specifically — feel like either straightforward maintenance of the status quo, or else backsliding to how they were previously. Either way there's not much forward development from any of it, which was disappointing. The only one I really felt good about was Harry and Mab, where Mab actually shows a degree of trust in Harry, which was nice.
Overall, I felt like they're pushing too hard, too fast. We just settled into what seemed to be the new status quo as of the end of Skin Game. Harry was in reasonably good standing with all his allies and not in immediate peril from his enemies. He had a new, secure place to stay, and was living together with Maggie. And then they blew it all up immediately in the next book, which makes the fight to get to that point (which was itself four books long, from Changes to Skin Game) feel meaningless. Maybe they'll settle some of this in Battle Ground, but if they do that, then it undercuts the supposedly earth-shattering nature of the Last Titan entering the fray. I feel like there should have been a book or three of Harry, now that he's finally got his feet under him for the first time in forever, going on the offensive against the Fomor by building up his personal power and solidifying his relationships with his allies, and then the Last Titan shows up (with suitable hinting beforehand that the Fomor were holding something major in reserve) to make it a proper fight. Instead it feels like a Yank the Dog's Chain.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Just read a theory online, that Thomas Hunger is going to be killed by Butters. Fidelacchius is now unable to hurt mortals, but can hurt monsters. Normally i would say a White Court vampire is to closely interwined with their Hunger, but Thomas has always been antagonistic towards it and with his extraordinary situation right now, i think it could work