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100 Things #5
100 Things: 100 favorite scenes from anything (books, movies, TV, fanfic, etc)
Scene #5: "Families stay, Harry" from Dresden Filesbook 11 book 10 actually *facepalm*
Aaah, Dresden Files. I know so many people who've tried to read the series and quit in the first couple of books, usually complaining that they're poorly written and cliche and sexist. And ... it's not like it isn't true! But I have to struggle with my obsessed-fan tendency to wail, "But ... but it gets so much better later on! Give it a chance!"
I know these books aren't going to be for everyone. But they really do get better later on, not just in terms of picking up richness and layers and depth as a series, but also giving depth and agency to a lot of the characters who didn't have all that much to begin with, particularly the female characters. One of the things that makes me love the series is the way that a lot of its characters start out as little more than interesting/amusing ideas or one-note cliches and slowly turn into full-fledged, living, breathing people when you aren't looking. I love to be surprised in that particular way.
And one of the stellar examples of that is what happens to Charity in the course of the series.
Charity is introduced as a gigantic cliche, and a fairly sexist cliche at that. She is Michael's nagging wife. Her main role in the first few books is to take care of Michael's large brood of children and harangue Harry for making her husband stay out late.
But then Book 8 (Proven Guilty) happens.
In which you find out that Charity is, in essence, a reformed bad guy.
All of the traits that add up to make Charity a dutiful-wife cliche -- that she's a stay-at-home mom, a devoted wife, a devout Christian -- are things that she chose for herself. Charity essentially looked at herself as a miserable, screwed-up, teetering-on-the-verge-of-total-darkside teenager and remade herself into this other person, this sort of idealized 1950s-style homemaker that she wanted to be. None of this was a mantle that was placed on her. She chose family, she chose faith, and draws strength from both. Her apparently intractable dislike of Harry isn't a termagant wife's unreflective dislike of her husband's ne'er-do-well best friend; it's that Harry reminds her so much of herself, how she used to be.
Not only that, but she is fully capable of slipping back into her former persona if she has to. Charity can fight, it's just that she doesn't want to, because she's afraid of what she'll become if she does. She has agency, and depth, and the ability to soul-search enough to understand what it is that she really doesn't like about Harry and start moving past that and learning to accept his closeness with her husband and daughter, and even find her way to a friendship of sorts with him. (Not to mention the ability to pick up a freaking big battleaxe and start mowing down bad guys if she has to.)
I knew that I wanted to start out with a Charity scene -- it might not be the only scene from Dresden Files that I use, because there are SO MANY good ones, but for me, Charity's transformation from two-dimensional homemaker into multi-dimensional reformed quasi-bad-guy was one of the biggest pleasant surprises in the later books. The first Charity scene that came to mind is Charity hugging Harry at the end of book 8, because that was so completely unexpected and so very sweet in an understated kind of way. But then I gravitated towards the end of book 11, instead, when Michael is on death's door and Harry (blaming himself, and feeling like a fifth wheel in the presence of Michael's grieving and worried family) is about to slink out of the hospital waiting room and Charity tells him not to go, because "Families stay, Harry. He would stay for you."
Harry is so alone, so incredibly isolated, at the start of the books. Possibly the thing I adore most about the series is the way that he accumulates this ever-widening circle of friends and family as the series goes along, that he goes from being a snarky loner to being at the center of a web of people who love him. And I love that the first person in the Carpenter family to openly acknowledge his de facto adoption into that family is Charity, the person who, in the beginning, resisted most strongly his presence there.
Scene #5: "Families stay, Harry" from Dresden Files
Aaah, Dresden Files. I know so many people who've tried to read the series and quit in the first couple of books, usually complaining that they're poorly written and cliche and sexist. And ... it's not like it isn't true! But I have to struggle with my obsessed-fan tendency to wail, "But ... but it gets so much better later on! Give it a chance!"
I know these books aren't going to be for everyone. But they really do get better later on, not just in terms of picking up richness and layers and depth as a series, but also giving depth and agency to a lot of the characters who didn't have all that much to begin with, particularly the female characters. One of the things that makes me love the series is the way that a lot of its characters start out as little more than interesting/amusing ideas or one-note cliches and slowly turn into full-fledged, living, breathing people when you aren't looking. I love to be surprised in that particular way.
And one of the stellar examples of that is what happens to Charity in the course of the series.
Charity is introduced as a gigantic cliche, and a fairly sexist cliche at that. She is Michael's nagging wife. Her main role in the first few books is to take care of Michael's large brood of children and harangue Harry for making her husband stay out late.
But then Book 8 (Proven Guilty) happens.
In which you find out that Charity is, in essence, a reformed bad guy.
All of the traits that add up to make Charity a dutiful-wife cliche -- that she's a stay-at-home mom, a devoted wife, a devout Christian -- are things that she chose for herself. Charity essentially looked at herself as a miserable, screwed-up, teetering-on-the-verge-of-total-darkside teenager and remade herself into this other person, this sort of idealized 1950s-style homemaker that she wanted to be. None of this was a mantle that was placed on her. She chose family, she chose faith, and draws strength from both. Her apparently intractable dislike of Harry isn't a termagant wife's unreflective dislike of her husband's ne'er-do-well best friend; it's that Harry reminds her so much of herself, how she used to be.
Not only that, but she is fully capable of slipping back into her former persona if she has to. Charity can fight, it's just that she doesn't want to, because she's afraid of what she'll become if she does. She has agency, and depth, and the ability to soul-search enough to understand what it is that she really doesn't like about Harry and start moving past that and learning to accept his closeness with her husband and daughter, and even find her way to a friendship of sorts with him. (Not to mention the ability to pick up a freaking big battleaxe and start mowing down bad guys if she has to.)
I knew that I wanted to start out with a Charity scene -- it might not be the only scene from Dresden Files that I use, because there are SO MANY good ones, but for me, Charity's transformation from two-dimensional homemaker into multi-dimensional reformed quasi-bad-guy was one of the biggest pleasant surprises in the later books. The first Charity scene that came to mind is Charity hugging Harry at the end of book 8, because that was so completely unexpected and so very sweet in an understated kind of way. But then I gravitated towards the end of book 11, instead, when Michael is on death's door and Harry (blaming himself, and feeling like a fifth wheel in the presence of Michael's grieving and worried family) is about to slink out of the hospital waiting room and Charity tells him not to go, because "Families stay, Harry. He would stay for you."
Harry is so alone, so incredibly isolated, at the start of the books. Possibly the thing I adore most about the series is the way that he accumulates this ever-widening circle of friends and family as the series goes along, that he goes from being a snarky loner to being at the center of a web of people who love him. And I love that the first person in the Carpenter family to openly acknowledge his de facto adoption into that family is Charity, the person who, in the beginning, resisted most strongly his presence there.
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Yes, exactly! The books definitely are not perfect, I can't even recommend them to people without throwing in a few caveats (about the early books in particular), but when Butcher is on, he's so on.
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Especially once it became clear he wasn't ever going to get involved with Murphy, who was the most awesome woman ever and whose attachment to him would have resulted in my getting to read even more of her being awesome.I'll believe you that it gets better on the sexism front, but it was the in-character sexism that got to me more than the meta-level sexism, and eight books convinced me that wasn't going to change. *sadface*
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This is very true. :D And there were contributing factors, too: I'm not really a fan of first-person urban fantasy to begin with, so it very much needs to have a narrator I can identify with/enjoy if I'm going to pretend to be him for hours. Otherwise it's an exercise in "but WHY, I would NEVER DO THAT, are you stupid, no, I'm stupid because what am I reading?" (This is why I had to give up on Twilight at chapter two -- I had negative degrees of overlap with Bella, and it was just painful to read "me" being the kind of teenager I never was and, in fact, actively avoided because of the way they treated me!)
Also, I am very very very shallow and when the Dresden books suddenly became an inch taller for no reason I became extremely reluctant to buy them. Might have continued reading via library, but that was pretty much it for my forking over actual money; and by then I'd hit the "I am never going to identify" wall pretty firmly.