sholio | Oh ... oh, eep

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books:dresden files

Oh ... oh, eep

Yes, Dresden Files again. :D

I'm reading the end of "Small Favor" and I just hit what looks for all the world like a patch of fairly obvious foreshadowing for next April's book.

This is pure speculation on my part. I don't have any spoilers along these lines. But, well ... see what you think.

Harry's talking to Mab at the end of the book, after she's been messing with him "for his own good".

"Not having it could have gotten me killed, too," I said. "And then you'd have wasted all that time you've put in trying to recruit me to be the next Winter Knight."

"Nonsense," Mab said. "If you died, I would simply recruit your brother. He would be well motivated to seek revenge upon your killers."

AAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Because ... what else has Mab done, but just stated her contingency plan in the event of exactly what happens at the end of Changes?

Oh dear.

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...that could be AWESOME!

(...not that I have a thing for grief-driven vengeance quests or nothin' *koff*)

I love a grief-driven vengeance quest as much as the next fangirl (which is to say, a lot *g*) ... but working with Faerie messes up your head! It messes it up badly! Harry's already commented that Lily and Fix don't seem to be the same people that they were before getting involved with Summer. At least Thomas going vampire!darkside is a known hazard, but Thomas having the Winter Queen messing with his head is all kinds of bad.

... also, this is making me think very disconcertingly of the story of Thomas Rhymer.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems, especially since this is what Mab specifically said she'd do under those circumstances ...

EEK.

Oh, wow, that's... wow, very forshadowy and totally something Mab would do!

I know, isn't it? *shivers* I totally think it's foreshadowing. (Damn, Butcher, you're good!)

Oooohhhhhhhh. :O

I KNOWWWW. (You remember what you said about having Butcher-induced attacks of writing angst! I think I just suffered one. *g*)

*grins*

I love foreshadowing almost as much as pie.

ME TOO! There is nothing so delightful as going back and catching early references and knowing that things were all planned out ahead of time. (And being able to guess plot developments is a delight! Although this series is really good at throwing off my expectations.)

.........Oh, crap.

NICE CATCH.

(Hmm, wikipedia has some interesting spoilers for the new book. Not sure how they would fit into this theory-- still possible though.)

Oh, for the love of ... sorry about all the delete-and-reposts. I'm trying to use spoiler span text and LJ keeps stripping it out. WTF, LJ? So, without being specific *g*, I actually think the Wikipedia spoilers make this possibility more likely, if anything.

This is definitely the right time to be re-reading the series, with all the stuff that happened in Changes and so many plot threads coming to fruition right now. This series is so huge, though, and he's seeded so much stuff into it ... the last couple of books have been boggling my mind. I forgot how many balls he's keeping in the air at this point.

Haha, no worries. The funny thing is that the spoiler span text was working just fine in my email notifications!

There is a little bit more than what you mentioned on wiki-- I won't say what else though. And yes, I agree it does make it more plausible-- although I'm not sure how it would fit into the plot as portrayed in the summary, unless Thomas-as-Winter-Knight is more of a sub-plot. Or maybe it's just that Mab is *trying* to get Thomas, but he, like Harry, is resistant to the idea (even with the desire for vengeance).

Butcher-- I just have NO IDEA how he does it all. He must have had this all plotted out *ages* ago, with, like, giant post-it note timelines. It really does almost make me despair. I don't think I could ever manage to juggle that many balls at one time.

Here via a friend.

Question: Could a vampire be the winter knight? Or would Mab change the aspect of him to make him more fitting for her purposes?

(...no, i'm not a desperate thomas/justine shipper. nope, not at all...)

Harry actually brings that up a couple of paragraphs later in the above-quoted scene; he asks her, "Isn't the Winter Knight supposed to be a mortal?" And Mab's answer is, "He's in love; that's mortal enough for me." She then goes on to point out to Harry that if she wanted to tempt Thomas, all she'd have to do is offer him the ability to touch Justine.

So, yes, she not only can, but she said she can. :D

*joins you in the Thomas/Justine shipper corner*

Exceptionally good point. Winter Knight would actually be an interesting position for Thomas, to be honest. A new range of potential stories.

It actually opens up whole new realms of possibility, although it also opens up whole new realms of BAD, since the Faerie Queens are sort of notorious for messing up people quite badly. It worries me a lot, because Harry's commented in various books on the way that dealing closely with Faerie tends to change people, usually not for the better. On the one hand, it would be kind of awesome if Thomas gets to be with Justine without having to find some way of being devamped, but on the other hand, I'm very worried by the possibility that he wouldn't really be Thomas any more. (On the third hand, he does seem to have the family stubbornness in his corner ...)

Yes, but Thomas is used to dealing with very different aspects of his character. And, besides, he's still finding his footing since the skinwalker. So maybe the influence of the faerie courts wouldn't affect him quite so totally.

(And Lily and Fix are also changing/changed because they are maturing in a highly political world. Harry himself has changed a lot since book one. I don't know if his early self would ever trust the Harry from Changes).

And, finally, Thomas as Winter Knight would give Harry a way to be involved in the faerie storylines without himself being compromised by the position. And would trade one form of distrust (vamp-nature) for another.

(Finally the second: I did like the implication from Mab that Thomas still loves Justine. His affection for her wasn't nearly as obvious in Changes than it had been before, from what I recall.)

Good points, all. Actually, if any of the main good guys could withstand being the Winter Knight without being irrevocably changed/ruined by it, Thomas is probably the guy, since he already teeters on the brink of being a remorseless killing machine anyway. Harry would run the risk of being emotionally destroyed by serving as Mab's hitman; Thomas could probably handle it.

And, yeah ... as weirded out as Harry was by the changes in Lily and Fix, at least half the problem was that they now had loyalties other than helping Harry out. And Harry's been doing the same thing to his friends -- hiding things, not telling anyone the whole truth. By Small Favor, he's doing it a lot -- he doesn't even trust the people he's closest to with information like the Denarian hidden in his head. So he's hardly got a leg to stand on when it comes to people keeping things from him. *g* (You know, there are some books where that kind of thing would drive me crazy because I get the impression that the author is not aware of it. But in Dresden Files, especially when we get the side stories from other characters' points of view, I do get the impression that Harry is supposed to be a mildly unreliable narrator. It's not that he's lying to us, just that he doesn't always know the whole picture, or he lets his emotions and biases get in the way. It's pretty neat, because it feels like Butcher is doing it on purpose rather than just using his narrator as a transparent window for relating events.)

I did like the implication from Mab that Thomas still loves Justine. His affection for her wasn't nearly as obvious in Changes than it had been before, from what I recall.

Well, these quotes are pre-Changes (and pre-Turn Coat, for that matter, while Thomas is still working at the hair salon and trying not to eat people).

But as deeply in love with her as he obviously is, I can't see it changing drastically in such a short time. I don't think we got a Thomas and Justine scene in Changes, did we? There just wasn't time to deal with Thomas very much at all. So until proven otherwise, I'm going to drift along in my happy little bubble and assume that the love is still there, even if they've grown more distant from each other given current events. *g*

Well, these quotes are pre-Changes (and pre-Turn Coat, for that matter, while Thomas is still working at the hair salon and trying not to eat people).

Alas. I was just hoping I'd somehow forgotten that conversation from Changes. Oh well.

No, I don't think we did. I do know that Justine features in at least one of the recent short stories. I didn't have time to read it. I just flipped through and saw her name mentioned a few times. Maybe that'll shed some light?

And, I agree, surely that degree of true love doesn't just go away. She still loves him in Turn Coat, even after he more or less ignores her in the end scenes.

Yeah, I was delighted to discover that Justine is in the Marcone story in the anthology whose name I forget that's out right now (which I'm planning on picking up next time I get to B&N :D).

I don't think that Thomas/Justine is a thing of the past at all ... just like I don't think his fraternal affection for Harry is gone, either. I think he's really, really messed up and, with the demon bound to his soul, his current style of messed-upedness takes the form of just not fighting the demon anymore. But deep down, I do think Thomas is as good-hearted and stubborn as Harry; after all, he's fought the demon more successfully, and clung to more of his basic decency and ability to love, than anyone else in the White Court we've ever seen.

He's in a dark place, but I'm clinging to the hope that he'll come through it and still be ... well, Thomas.

That is my hope as well. Over the past two books, the moments that tore me up the most were Thomas and Harry's talk at the end of Turn Coat and Harry's decision to become the Knight in Changes because both of those moments represented a major shift in character and the end of something.

Maybe Harry's death will force Thomas to re-evaluate his current priorities? (Or, and I hope this is not the case, lead him to embrace his demon more)?

Yeah, the end of Turn Coat was really hard to take, all the more so because the first time around I was hoping for a daring last-minute rescue and emotional reunion, and that's ... not what we got. At all.

I think I'm less wibbly about it after Changes because it's fairly obvious in Changes that he's still going to be there when Harry needs him. He's still got his sarcastic sense of humor and the brothers still have their bantery rapport, even if there is more distance between them than there used to be. So Thomas is still Thomas at heart; he's just Thomas in a very, very bad mental place.

I expect that Harry's death is going to hit him very hard. I was originally hoping it would lead to a tidal shift in his loyalties, away from the White Court; now, having read the above, I'm suspicious that the shift might be from White Court to Faerie Court, which wouldn't get him back to anything like where he was, but would at least give him a whole new set of badness to deal with (and maybe an opportunity to be with Justine, as well).

I just have a suspicion that this series is not done taking the characters down yet. I'm holding out a lot of hope that they will come back up ... but I think it might get even worse before it gets better.

I don't think we can go too much further down. This is the middle point, isn't it?

It might be neat sometime to map Harry's adventures to a descent or similar tale sometime. I mean, with his death he is now going into the underworld. But, eventually he'll have to come out. It will be interesting if this was done more in the spirit of, say, Inanna, rather than yet another savior story (ala harry potter and every other fantasy series out there in which the hero must die (literally or figuratively) in order to win). (And there is a possible parallel with the Inanna myth in that she fully undressed before she enters the underworld and Harry loses everything (some by force, some by choice) before he dies).

I hope we don't go too much farther down, but yeah, I think it's the midpoint, which means there's a lot of potential down still to go. Things could keep getting steadily worse until the finale ... but I don't know how much darkness I can take. (I'm crossing my fingers and holding out hope that next book will fix a lot of what's broken right now. I hope.)

That's really interesting to view it in terms of a sort of mythic journey through the underworld. There's a nice epic feeling to Dresden Files without most of the moral black-and-whiteness that's driven me away from fantasy as a genre. Usually it's pretty good about avoiding the easy answers and the genre-cliche solutions, so I'm pretty optimistic as to what he'll do with this.

True on being able to go darker, but the reason I hope this can be mapped to a descent tale is that, often, the revival is not the ending. Gilgamesh gains nothing tangible and returns to his city. Inanna must choose others to take her place in the underworld. Orpheus tries and fails to descend again and is eventually torn apart by maenads. etc.

After Harry goes into the underworld, he has to come out and continue on in the story. The descent is not the final climax. I think that period of coming out could be a very gradual lightening of the story. Maybe. *crosses fingers and hopes*

(All that said, it could take more than one book for that turn to occur).

Oh. OH.

That... yeah. Wow.

Is it totally wrong of me to be going yes please?

I think I'm caught somewhere between OMG WANT! and OH NO, BAD! ... because Harry's mentioned several times that working for Faerie screws with people in a major way -- messes up their loyalties, their morality and so forth. And I don't want Thomas to get his head screwed with EVEN MORE! Of course, Thomas is already about as messed up as he can get ... and somewhere on the next page, Mab tells Harry that she'd be able to give him Justine back (his ability to touch Justine, I mean), so ... there is that, too! I DON'T KNOW!

... I just want April to be here.

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Oh ... oh, eep

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