I don't see it as being very ham-fisted. Harry is technically a warlock, and he has quite a few detractors and outright enemies among the Council who, as we often point out, don't have the benefit of his first-person perspective and only see a reckless and dangerous wizard who's been getting more and more notorious through time and consorting with some very dangerous factions. And Harry also spends the past several books unwittingly alienating almost all his allies in the Council one way or another, and gets put against the wall (as part of a deliberate conspiracy against him no less) at a point where he can't defend himself and his allies are unable or unwilling to defend him, or else dead. It's not the direction I most would've liked to see the story go in, but it's also a natural consequence of the events of the books since Changes. Harry keeps making enemies and the chickens come home to roost eventually.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.This is the part that I find ham-fisted.
Really though, the biggest problem is that Harry's political enemies on the White Council have effectively zero characterization. Most of the wizards we see actually like Harry, even if they're not always happy with him. The Merlin hates him, though, and apparently has nothing better to do than to take every available opportunity to screw Harry over, even though he knows it's likely to piss off other Senior Council members like Ebeneezer and Listens-to-Wind, especially because he can only get anti-Harry stuff done by ramming stuff through when they're not available.
Which is fine, making the Merlin have a personal grudge against Harry could lead to interesting things... if the story ever actually involved him. But it doesn't. We've seen the Merlin maybe four times in 17 books. So his unceasing hatred of Harry seems less like a natural consequence of Harry's actions and more like a plot device to keep the Council from being a consistent ally, which is unsatisfying.
Edited by NativeJovian on Oct 17th 2020 at 1:03:04 PM
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.The books themselves point out that the White Council doesn't seem to put that much effort into seeking out potential wizards and bringing them into the fold before they do something stupid and become warlocks that have gone too far down the path to bring back. Makes you wonder how they even manage to recruit at all if it isn't dumb luck and just checking out the kids of known wizards...
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."I think their outlook is that, since killing people or enslaving their minds or suchlike is obviously immoral, budding young wizards shouldn't need to know there are Laws against that sort of thing; the fact that it's wrong should be enough to keep them from doing it. So if they break one of the Laws, it just proves they were a bad seed.
Edited by RavenWilder on Oct 18th 2020 at 9:42:58 AM
But the Jedi Mind Trick is in Star Wars for goodness’ sakes, and there’s piles of media about telepaths, so it’s not obvious that reading or nudging another person’s mind would be crossing a very major line. And turning people into animals and back is also a pretty common image associated with magic. And time travel is also everywhere in media and something everyone daydreams about a bit.
So it isn’t surprising that a kid who found themselves with magic powers might try any of those.
Edited by Galadriel on Oct 18th 2020 at 1:11:02 PM
Molly and Harry's cases being good examples — the former did something fucked up with good intentions because nobody ever told her it was wrong and she had no way of knowing, and the latter was fighting for his life.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.This is definitely true, and it's one of the things that a Council-aligned Harry would presumably be fighting to fix. I think the idea is that in the past, there were just so many fewer people on the planet that it was easier for wizards to keep up. The human population absolutely exploded in the 20th century (from about 1.5 billion in 1900 to about 6 billion in 2000), and since the White Council leans heavily on seniority and considers anyone below the age of about 50 to be a young upstart, their leadership is largely unwilling or unable to adapt to the new circumstances.
Which is exactly why Harry as a modern wizard working to reform the White Council from the inside would be so interesting. Oh well.
Edited by NativeJovian on Oct 18th 2020 at 3:01:04 PM
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Rather than In-Universe objections, I really agree with the feeling that the story would be more interesting if Harry was allowed to continue his development from always-misunderstood-loner to active player in the power games of the various organizations.
There were a few, very small good signs in that direction (his conversation with Michael in the end, for example), but I guess we'll see...
As far as time travel and animal transformations go, the impression I get is that's super advanced magic. A novice wizard who hasn't learned the consequences of this sort of thing is presumably too unskilled to actually pull it off.
To add something to what Native Jovian's been pointing out, I also think part of it is kind of against the spirit of the series?
Like, if there's an overarching theme to The Dresden Files (whether or not it's intentional, artistic works always reflect something,) it's the question of 'what do you do with power?'
And so far, it's been doing a good job of showing Harry trying to reconcile the fact that he's a person of great personal power and how he's been using (and misusing) that power in order to make his mark on the world. How the quest for power, even with good intentions, has taken him down a road where he has to be more and more careful with how he exercises it.
However, any time Harry comes close to wielding any kind of institutional power, translating that great personal power and the way he's transformed the world into some kind of political victory for the things he obviously believes in, the narrative turns around and takes any attempts at Harry building political power away from him. In Peace Talks and Battle Ground, he's lost his position in the Council, he's lost the support of the Grey Council because of Ebenezer, or at least has presumably done so. While he does the cool thing with the banner during the battle in Chicago, there's no mention of that elevating his station in the Winter Court any, or which political consequences it will have there. The defenders who survive just go their merry way again. The Paranet seemed like it was going to be something like this, Harry investing some resources to make long-term change possible, but even that has become kind of secondary, and it seems to have grown far beyond Harry's influence.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.I mean, I got a very definitive feeling from the end that now that he has the castle as his base and is no longer part of the Council, he's planning to band together the Paranet, BFS and others into a coalition that can actually defend the little guys and face all the fuckery that's coming. Probably the reason, narratively speaking, for his sacking.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.![]()
Yeah, I 100% agree. What I'm hoping to see as of the end of Battle Ground is Harry effectively builds a Brighter Future Society 2.0 and leverages his friendly-outsider personal relationship with so many of the major power blocs (the White Council, the Winter Court, the White Court, the Knights of the Sword, the Paranet, the Archive, etc) into a effective institution (as Math phrased it) for maintaining the balance of power and making things better for everyone, including vanilla mortal humans. I still think that plotline would have worked better if Harry had spent a book or two trying his damnedest to be an Internal Reformist within the White Council and been politically outmaneuvered by the Merlin and his allies (with some exploration for why the Merlin hates him so much in the process), and then gone "fine, the White Council won't do the job I think needs doing? I'll Start My Own!", but there were some hints toward the end of Battle Ground that can be read as Harry heading in that direction. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait for the next book to see how Butcher follows through on all of it. Hopefully it'll be a shorter wait than between Skin Game and Peace Talks...
Edited by NativeJovian on Oct 18th 2020 at 4:31:36 AM
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.I do think that it's important that, while Harry's name is mud with the White Council, his status with basically every other (non evil) faction has never been higher. I'm expecting a big moment where the council fails spectacularly, Team Dresden has to mop up, and the big lesson is, look how much better we all do when we work together.
Honestly, the only factions I would really call out-and-out evil in Dresden Files are the Denarians and possibly the Outsiders. We haven't seen much in the way of motive for the Outsiders so it's hard to talk about them in moral terms, but we know that they seek to invade a realm where they fundamentally should not exist, and that their mere existence corrupts others into madness and betrayal, so they seem pretty firmly in the realm of "bad guys". The Denarians, however, as consistently sadistic and cruel, concerned only with self-centered goals, and refuse to acknowledge any authority other than their own whims — even self-imposed rules like Sacred Hospitality that would be in their rational self-interest to follow, just so the rest of the supernatural world doesn't hate the shit out of them. They're definitely evil.
The Faerie courts are more Blue-and-Orange Morality than anything else. It's important to remember that fae creatures fundamentally do not have free will. They are defined by their innate natures and unable to act against them. That Winter is predatory and merciless is less a moral failing on their part and more a law of physics. They cannot be anything else. In addition, though Summer's compassion is generally friendlier than Winter's harshness, that doesn't make them "good". Recall how Titania nearly murdered Harry for his part in the death of the Summer Lady, despite recognizing it as both utterly necessary and the morally correct thing to do. Her nature as a protector doesn't allow her to do anything else.
That mostly leaves the vampire courts. That's a tricky question, because as far as we know, vampires literally cannot survive except by preying on humans. Even someone like Thomas, who's a member of the least-harmful of the three main courts and actively wants to deny his vampiric side in order to live without harming humans, struggles hugely (and with varying degrees of success) to do so. Red Court vampires have a raging thirst for blood that not even iron will and literal magic seals can always contain. Black Court we haven't seen much of (though we may get more insight to the process after what happened in Battle Grounds), but are probably similar to Reds. Ultimately, I'm hesitant to call vampires evil when there doesn't seem to be a viable way for them to not hunt humans.
Of course — and this goes for everybody, not just vampires — the fact that they aren't necessarily evil doesn't mean that they aren't harmful and shouldn't be opposed. Just as I'm not going to call it evil for a predator to hunt prey, I'm not going to call it evil for the prey to fight back and kill the hunters, either.
As for Marcone, he's a criminal and does all the murdering and drug-dealing and general exploitation that that entails, so yeah, it's pretty safe to say he's evil. That said, the narrative is largely willing to give him a pass, because even if he's evil, he's definitely a Noble Demon. He protects innocents (especially children) as much as he's able, and he keeps his word when he gives it, which puts him above groups like the Denarians and Outsiders. The story also presents him as a Necessary Evil, suggesting that if not for him then someone worse would be running the Chicago underworld (while dismissing the idea that replacing one man in control of the entire city with multiple rival factions might be preferable to the average citizen — much less the idea that it may actually be possible to, you know, permanently reduce the amount of crime and the power of criminals). YMMV on that one.
Edited by NativeJovian on Oct 18th 2020 at 8:43:54 AM
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.That’s a very intriguing post, and far more nuanced on the concept of morality than my thought processes were. I was just using “evil” as shorthand for “dangerous: will kill humans for fun and/or profit and/or food without hesitation or regret”, since those are actions that - if done by humans - we would consider to be evil. The question of whether a group like the Fae, without real free will, can be described in moral terms is an interesting one to consider.
As far as Marcone goes he is now a Denarian, which makes him evil in my book.
Edited by Galadriel on Oct 18th 2020 at 9:56:08 AM
Yeah, probably should have been more specific. By the 'evil'ones, I meant Denarians, Black Council, Kemmlerites, Marcone, Outsiders, anyone who's goals involve a lot of intentional sentient suffering.
I just think it's interesting that a lot of the more 'neutral' groups (Forest People, White God, Vaderrung, the Wildfae, etc.) seem to all think Harry is pretty neat, and how much they like him seems to be proportional to how much the White Council hates him.
Oh, I forgot about the Kemmlerites. Some of them are still kicking around somewhere, aren't they? The idea of necromancy not just being magic related to death but an entirely different thing, created by death the way that magic is created by life, was a super interesting concept. And that one lady who used it to save some rando's life just because it was a nice thing to do... that was neat. Pity they dropped that plot thread entirely.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.I think there's a WOJ that Kumori and Cowl will show up in Mirror Mirror. On the topic of Marcone's evilness, I'm not the only one who feels that the story completely glosses over the inherent immorality of being a crime boss in favor of gushing over how cool and competent he is at every turn, right? The closest we get to see him actually being a criminal bastard is the opening of Even Hand, and even that's contrived so that the thugs he's executing just so happen to be peddling drugs to children. It feels like Butcher likes Marcone so much that in the very worst of cases he's the lesser evil, and mostly it feels like Dresden's animosity towards him is completely unearned as far as in-story actions go (mind you, I fully agree with Dresden's stance, it's just not well supported in the text). If the whole Denarian Marcone thing doesn't end with him jumping off the deep end, but instead controlling Namshiel in a Nicodemus-like agreement without letting go of his morality, I honestly won't be surprised.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

I don't really view the White Council as good or bad on the whole. It's simply a power bloc like any other, this one of wizards instead of vampires or fairies or fallen angels or whatever else. The thing that's frustrating about it is the fact that Harry should be able to rely on them as allies as a member, but can't because Jim Butcher decided that Harry can't have nice things. It worked in the beginning when he was a suspected warlock, but they got past all that and he not only cleared his name, but became the de facto field leader of their policing force. Which is great! Now instead of being a low-ranking outsider, he's in a position to become a player in White Council politics, with all of the opportunities and obligations that that implies, which is ripe with story opportunities.
But then nah, some very ham-fisted things happen and Harry's on the outs again, so the Council is indifferent to him at best and actively hostile at worst. Because "other wizards are mean and don't like Harry" is apparently more interesting.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.