Just finished reading it.
God how much I hate that garbage.
Most of my issues with it were already mentioned above, so just a short summary:
1) dumb plot
2) totally underwhelming peace talks
3) formor were at least to my knowledge never truly introduced. So I don’t really give a damn about any of them and the titan reveal did nothing for me.
And now to the two points that really bother me:
4) how in the hell is Harry being the winter knight no major talking point, especially with the white council???
He can just be the primordial killer of the winter court and the white council still sees him as a warden? His grandfather goes beserk because of the influence the white court has on him, but Mab owning him is fine?
5) last but not least the incomplete story. You can bitch, moan and complain about George rr Martin as you like, but at least he delivers a 2000 page story. Yeah it takes forever, but you are left satisfied and want more. After peace talks i just want either my money back or the whole damn story.

 

hey this is random, but where is the quote in your sig from? i tried google and couldnt find anything

 

Mine and @Rahkesh Asmodaeus favourite story. A Second Chance at Life, by Miranda Flairgold, considered the greatest Harry Potter fanfic of all time.

 

If Mab is supposed to have a personal connection to Merlin and/or King Arthur, I'm guessing that she's Morgan Le Fay. There are others who could fit the bill, especially if she had been long-lived and came from an earlier time period, but I'm guessing it's her because IIRC Mab and Titania were flesh-and-blood sisters before they turned, which would make Titania Morgause. Then again, Skin Game indicated that there was a connection between the Queens and triple goddesses like Hecate, and Butcher has overwritten his own canon before (like how Winter and Summer were supposed to be evenly matched, but then it turns out that Winter is far stronger but is just busy with another fight), so who knows?

I'm a little puzzled over how Bonea keeps getting skipped over. Her presence was the driving plot (or at least a moderately important plotline) of two books, but she's just been ignored for the last two books. Maybe there's something in the side stories, but the literal brainchild of Harry and Lash being reduced to a cameo character kind of rubs me the wrong way.

Speaking of the side stories, I have to echo others about how the way they are being integrated into the core plot. There should only be two kinds of side stories that get published in non-core works: Ones that have absolutely no intersection with the main plots (the story about Harry's odd day, where he has to deal with wannabe punk sorcerers among other things, or the Cubs Curse story, are good examples), and ones that expand on things that happen in the main story but don't need to be referenced by the books (Aftermath). Things that are in the side stories should not be part of the main plot--that just reeks of consumerism to me, rather than little nods to those who have read the side stories. Especially when anthologies like Side Jobs don't come out for years after the original short stories were published and then referenced in the core books.

 

Uh, this is the first book in which Bonea is a thing separate from Harry's head.

 

Yeah but it feels longer with the wait....

 

Huh. Maybe I'm confusing it with how he set up her existence in Ghost Story and then just glossed over it in Cold Days.

 

I am up to Small Favor in my reread.

One thing that strikes me, is further training, communication and knowledge in the white council.

It seems once you are done with your apprenticeship, all further development is pretty much on your own. In fact it’s said more than once that older wizards deliberately don’t tell younger ones to much, as it is better to learn themselves.

This causes one small issue and one large.

Small is, this seems to stunt development, especially when it’s a war like we had for 10 books. Now we can assume that over all this is a good tactic, perhaps everyone is unique enough that telling people to much is a issue. But surely Harry, Carlos and others would be better off with some deeper training over time.

The bigger issue is, let’s take Carlos. He was an apprentice, got his full membership, and we can assume from that point on. Everything is personal development with maybe some training in fighting when he became a Warden.

Harry has Bob, that is such an unbelievable advantage, his equivalent power level or knowledges should be decades further advanced than Carlos.

It’s like someone with the internet and someone with out. If Harry has a question he can ask Bob, if Carlos does he has to do hours or days of research, and then maybe not get the right answer.

Hell Harry should have knowledge that wizards a century old don’t. His knowledge of magical theory and how it works, should be right up there with anyone, his practical work maybe not. But Bob has worked with fully trained wizards for 600 years. There is not much he should practically not know. And why would Harry not ask this general stuff.

 

This is something I've thought about -- how what was essentially a plot device in early books (Bob as someone to explain magic to Harry so that it's not all in his internal monologue) slowly morphed into something like a superpower, or at least an extreme resource.

The way I try to justify it to myself is that it's part of the reason why other wizards have to go to Edinburgh (to consult other wizards or a library or whatever other resources they have there) while Harry is seen there less than any other member than the Gatekeeper, and thus why they're more integrated into the actual White Council socially and politically than Harry. It would also explain why everyone has better Latin than him -- he's the only one with no reason or opportunity to practice it.

 

I agree, he'll need some independence before the end of the series*, but I was mainly commenting on the timing of it. If he loses his two main supports (White Council and Winter Court) at the same time as he gains new enemies in the Accorded nations, that's basically saying to the whole universe "Open season on Dresden has started! Please take your turn." And so he'd need something really heavy to counter it, and I'm not sure simply adding another big bad to the list of big bad he has no business beating but did anyway would be enough. Hence my comment on him becoming independent signatory.

Something I hadn't thought of yesterday, but does someone more knowledgeable than me has an idea about the athame and placard he took at the end? I mean, I remember they were the weapons on the same shelf as the Grail in Skin Game, but what mythological objects could they be?

*As an aside, I'm not convinced at all this independence will come during Mab's lifetime. It could simply be that during the BAT, his Winter Knight obligations disappear by virtue of the Winter Court being obliterated. But it's far from now so really all bets are off.

 

Aren’t all the objects Dresden grabbed from the crusifiction?

The knife is the head of the spear that stabbed Jesus to see if he was dead. The placard is the one saying “king of the Jews” hung on the cross.

 

The 4 items in Skin Game were the Grail, the Shroud of Turin (which Jesus was wrapped in after his death), the Lance of Longinus (which stabbed Jesus), and the placard that was above his head on the Cross (reading "Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews" or something similar).

 

That's exactly it, translated anyway. In Latin "Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaerom", the inscription is also supposed to be repeated in Koine Greek and Hebrew, but artistic depictions you see tend to just use the initials I.N.R.I.

Of the four items, it's the one that doesn't really have any kind of mythology associated with it aside from just being a sign that hung there being a sign. Although some various occult types have come up with various 'backronyms' for "INRI" that's not really attributing much meaning to the wood itself.

So it's hard to say what Jims going to do with it.

 

My guess would be that it'll end up being effectively a magical battery that he uses to supercharge a spell or ritual.

 

The Lance of Longinus is mythologically connected to the Spear of Lugh in some media, also known as the son of the Titan Ethniu. He is the one who kills his grandfather Balor, whose eye is apparently being used to empower Ethniu in the book.

So there's that.

 

I'd never come across that connection before, but it makes sense as far as Christianity absorbing local mythologies goes. However, I'm not sure it would fit with Butcher's approach to Christianity in the books where it seems to be that everything is literally true. It would be a bit of a stretch to say that the Spear of Lugh made its way to Jerusalem in order to stab the Son of God, I would have thought.

 

'Everything being literally true' is still open to interpretation. Mythologies don't have singular, codified versions, since they were told for hundreds or thousands of years by a living people and therefore changed multiple times and sometimes directly contradicted themselves. Take Greek mythology for example. According to one myth, Pandora was the first woman. But she was created at the direction of Zeus, which would place her creation long after female Titans and Primordials. Additionally, another Greek myth has human beings formerly being four armed, four legged, two headed genderless beings who were split in half by Zeus out of fear of their power. And that's just one of the contradictions, not even touching stories that have gotten revisions over the centuries.

Which version of which myth that Butcher will use isn't always consistent. Sometimes he goes with an older version of a myth, sometimes a newer revision. Then sometimes he'll invent his own mythology to make things work. This Ethniu Titaness business is a good example. While the term 'god' has a loose enough definition that it can be applied to almost any mythology, Titans are very specifically Greeco-Roman and Ethniu, a member of the Irish mythology, would never be considered as such.

 

Small Mister-centric short comic on Jims site, talks place just before Peace Talks. Illustrated by the artist that did the illustrations for the christmas short.

 

Given its original purpose of naming Jesus (in three languages, even), I suppose it's possible that Dresden will be able to use it to acquire and/or speak Ethniu's true Name to help seal her away. That would be an interesting magical artifact - something that can get you the Name of virtually anything out there.

 

I've been...increasingly dissatisfied with certain things in the Dresden books for a while, and had kind of given up on them as dead - there was a point in 2018 where I started seriously putting effort into writing a Dresden Fanfic for the first time, after doing a most-of-the-series reread because I was commuting a lot at the time and had the audiobooks in my google play library and remembered there was so much cool stuff in these and I hadn't written any fiction in forever, and after actually writing multiple chapters and spending weeks plotting out what would happen, I realized there wasn't much point since the fanfic community for it only really exists in any real numbers here and it was obviously completely dead here, and it didn't look like there was much chance of this book ever actually coming out. Then we got actual release dates for Peace Talks, at which point I was suddenly really hyped to give it a chance, even knowing that there was 0 chance the things I hated most wouldn't just get worse, but I hoped against hope that having years to actually get his shit together might have meant something.

For some reason, I remembered that release date as being in September and only realized it was actually out when I saw the relevant thread on here, earlier today. Having read it, well, I don't really care if more books come out. Whether or not it's dead for everyone else, this was kinda the final nail in the coffin as far as I'm concerned. It's dead to me.