nope I'm on the move already to my new job in a different state.... Bwahahha AND AWESOME NARF! Did you get a chance to go to his panels?

 

That reminds me. We know that Butcher is aware of My Little Denarians (tweet). In Skin Game, we find the following in Maggie's room:

Maybe it's just a coincidental reference, but I like to imagine that Jim did that as a wink in the direction of weird crossover fanfic, or that fic in particular.

 

Or he's just aware of the fact that kids are into MLP.

 

Hmph. Spoilsport.

 

Guys! I think I figured this one out.

Maybe it's not the soul that the Denarians are after; maybe it's the SOLE.
Bigfoots have plenty of sole! :awesome

(...I'll leave forever now.)
(Or until I have something relevant to say.)

 

You made me laugh, Sloth. Thanks. xD

 

Isn't there a fanfic on here started by a DLP member by that name? Holy shitballs if he referenced that in that tweet.

 

Maybe someone here can clear something up for me. I seem to recall in the previous book that Harry thought some nasty things about the Knight mantle. In response the mantle stopped working for like 2 seconds and Harry's legs stopped working because of his broken back. In Skin Games Harry wears those thorn bracelets that cut off his connection to his magic and the mantle, but he's still able to walk. Was the mantle's power still working for him despite being cut off? Or is his back healed and he no longer needs to be Winter Knight to walk?

Anyway, I thought it was a good book. It's the first book since Changes that I actually had fun reading. With the exception of Murph breaking the Sword and Butters spying on Harry I don't have any complaints. When she broke the Sword I texted my friend a meanly worded message calling Murphy all kinds of terrible names.

Christianity being the big religion in town doesn't bother me. If the belief of 2 billion people can give the vanilla Shroud of Turin some magical power I can imagine the actual one being a supernatural WMD as well as any other artifact connected to Jesus.

I was hoping that Nick checked out in this book, but he lives to fight another day. I get this feeling that he's going to try to get Maggie a coin someday and try to claim her as his new daughter just to get back at Dresden.

Can't wait for the next book. I really need to reread the series though. There are so many names and terms that I've forgotten about >_>

 

Pretty sure it's been established by consensus here (maybe in the Little Chicago story thread) that the reason his legs didn't work previously is that he went back on his deal with Winter. Having his back fixed was separate from his deal to become the Winter Knight and the powers that go with it, as I read the agreement in Changes.

 

So I just finished this, and I figured I'd go ahead and throw my hat into the ring as well.

I'm not upset that Butters became a Knight. But I am upset with how it happened.

If just pissing in the Fallen's cereal and looking death in the eye without flinching was enough to qualify, Harry would have been a Knight about eight fucking books ago. It takes more than simply telling evil to go fuck itself in a spectacular fashion to make the cut. One would imagine that sort of shit happens all the fucking time in a world filled with monsters that actively hunt people.

This book was about a lot of things, but faith was definitely a recurring theme for everyone involved. Harry got to sit down and have his faith in himself beaten back into him. Michael came out of retirement to preach about faith to Nick's cult. Harry and Michael both talked about it to Nick, and it's clearly implied in the narrative that if he was ever to have turned away from his path, he would have done so now, which means his failure to choose something different has truly condemned him. Murphy talked about faith to Harry and Butters, Harry talked about it with himself. Murphy having faith in Harry arguably saved both of their lives. Even the puppet masters got in on the act, with there being some subtle byplay of faith won and lost between Harry, Mab, Molly, and Marcone.

Hell, Jim even dragged us into it, using the classic heist flashback. We had to have faith that Harry had some kind of fucking plan for all of this, and lo and behold he did.

Butters was part of this too. Butters was pissed with Harry. And I don't blame him. From his perspective, he has a lot to be pissed about. I don't blame him for being stand-offish. I don't even blame him for being an asshole.

But here's the thing. Butters had a choice to make as well. We even heard it ourselves. Harry woke up, and Butters and Murphy were arguing. Butters didn't trust Harry after everything that had happened. Murphy argued that Harry knew what he was doing, and that he needed his friend's trust now more than ever.

So here, Butters has a choice to make. He has a bug on Harry that nobody else knows about. He even has a good reason to keep using that bug. He also now has reason not to. Butters can choose to have faith in his friends, have faith in Harry, and believe that they know what they're doing. Or he can choose to embrace his paranoia, not trust Harry or Murphy on the grounds that Harry hasn't been trustworthy for a long time and that Murphy isn't objective enough to be able to see it for herself, and keep using the bug on the assumption that Harry has been compromised by the Denarian Knights.

Butters made his choice. He chose to not have faith in his friends, and in doing so, one of the swords was broken and all three of them nearly died.

That was stupid, irresponsible, and a terrible thing. But even that, I'm okay with. People aren't perfect. Sometimes they fuck up. Butters is used to not having anyone around to help solve problems, so even though he is motivated by a lack of faith, I can still understand why he did it.

It's the sign of bad characters and bad writers when people only ever get positive character development.

So here's the kicker. When Butters walked out that door with Harry's duster, knowing he was going to die and knowing that the best he could possibly hope to do would be to buy, at most, twenty seconds of time, that was an incredibly brave thing to do. When he willingly vaulted over the fence off Carpenter property, tackled Tessa, and rode her to the ground, knowing full fucking well that he just opened himself up to being attacked by things far worse than bullets, that was even more outstandingly brave.

But at no point during this entire exchange does Butters show either overwhelming faith or the qualities that are typically associated with a Knight of the Cross.

I will repeat myself again because it bares repeating. If just pissing in the Fallen's cereal and looking death in the eye without flinching was enough to qualify, Harry would have been a Knight about eight fucking books ago. It takes more than simply telling evil to go fuck itself in a spectacular fashion to make the cut.

I'm fine with Butters being Knight of the Cross material. I'd agree that he is, in his own way, much like Sanya is, in his own way. I happen to think that Molly, Thomas, Elaine, Fix, and even the perpetually I'm not worthy Harry are all Knight material, and each only need the appropriate pushes in the right direction to reach that point. Whether they will ever receive those pushes is a matter left solely to speculation, but I feel the potential is there, and I'm fine with that. I'm even fine with Butters fucking things up, because people make mistakes, and sometimes we make bad calls and bad choices.

What I'm not fine with is that Butters fixed the Sword of Faith by touching it and then immediately became a Knight of the Cross, when he did nothing to warrant or justify that happening. The Powers That Be can't work miracles through a void and get away with it. If they could, Uriel could have gotten away with smiting the living fuck out of Nick just because three mortals with free will who were present would have really, really wanted that to happen.

If everything in the entire book had been kept the same, but that final scene with Butters had involved him showing a display of pure faith, even indirectly (like, for instance, choosing to sacrifice himself because he had faith Harry would be able to save everyone else with the time he could buy), I would have had absolutely no beef with anything that happened.

But he didn't. Everything Butters did is justified and understandable from his point of view, it's all solid character development for him, and absolutely none of it would have fixed the sword or greenlit him as a Knight of the Cross. And that irritates the living hell out of me.


But enough bitching. There were far more highlights in this book than downsides. I'd put this in the top three Dresden Files books so far.

Pros:

• Murphy was a fucking boss
• MURPHY was a FUCKING BOSS
• Marcone decided to go full-Monty villain, obvious long-awaited conflict is incoming
• Mab stayed in character instead of taking the easy and simple route, which I always enjoy and consider a thumb in the eye of the fucking fairy apologists that keep writing shit fanfiction and crying about how all the Sidhe need is a hug
• Nicodemus tweaked an archangels nose
• Nicodemus immediately regretted pissing off an archangel that severely
• Epic fucking revenge gambit, I mean holy shit calm down son, goddamn
• One of the swords was broken
• Michael riding one last time
• Us getting to witness Nick's one chance at redemption
• Nick rejecting his one true chance at redemption
• THE FIST OF GOD BEATING THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF NICODEMUS
• Somebody finally wrote Hades correctly as being the straight man to his entire extended, crazy family
• The backwards tie-in that some powers that be vicariously misuse their powers or ignore their duties (Maeve, the other Greek gods, ect) while the ones that don't get shit done (Hades, presumably Odin, arguably Mab)
• Artificer Butters
• Nicodemus getting fucking told by Harry
• Literally everything about the heist
• Goodman Grey
• The continued noire tradition of new women who are sexually attractive by traditional standards and interested in the protagonist being terrible fucking news
• Harry getting to fight someone with Lasciel's coin
• Harry getting to remind Lasciel that every vessel she'll probably get shoved into moving forward will be a downgrade from him
• A belated admission that Murphy confiscating the swords from Harry was illegitimate as fuck
• Molly's interaction with Harry
• Molly's obvious ignorance of the danger she's actually in, and the evidence that Mab has been keeping her separated from Harry to facilitate this
• Solid evidence that Molly is losing her humanity
• Appropriately placed moral lessons
• Uriel working within the boundaries he's provided to completely fuck over Nick
• Uriel being derpy and innocent without his Grace
• The cockblock dream, in it's entirety
• Michael assuming that Harry and Molly are making condom balloon animals and being okay with it
• Binder getting actual character development
• Anna returning and getting actual character development
• Harry telling the Formor to go blow an entire line of dicks on his tab
• Harry actually pulling one over on the bad guys. Full on improvised panic-mode is fine, but sometimes the bad guys need to lose because the hero fucking outplayed them
• Parkour

Cons:

• The sword that was broken was fixed in the same book it was broken in
• Nicodemus felt a little too downsized by the end of this: if he actually gave a shit what other supernatural powers thought of him, and if them thinking bad things about him could set him back in any way, he wouldn't have casually broken the Accords to begin with
• The implication that some of the powers that be would have trusted Nicodemus on his word before this
• Butters became a Knight and fixed a broken Sword of the Cross without any plausible justification or act for doing so
• Harry foresaw Nicodemus having a plant with a coin but didn't catch on that Lasciel was right in front of him even when he had a fucking dream about it and there was a friendly woman who appeared that tried to get close to him and was unnaturally skilled with fire (I called that shit out of sheer paranoia when they were getting dressed in the same room)
• The absence of Thomas
• Some of the jokes were a little forced

Putting aside the disturbing Murphy hate some of you fucks seem to have for literally no reason you can actually justify, if she didn't have the qualities of a Knight of the Cross, it wouldn't have lit up for her. It's as simple as that. It lit up for her during Changes because she had the qualities of a Knight, and it lit up for her again in Skin Games because she still had those qualities.

I'm also glad the sword broke, because I sincerely feel that a sword breaking is a decisive victory for the bad guys. The bad guys need a decisive victory every once in awhile, or else the whole thing comes across as bullshit. I'm also honestly fine with anyone being the one to do so, excepting Harry and Michael, because Harry should know better than to try that shit by now, and Michael is simply too good of a man for him to ever allow it to happen while he's holding one.

What pisses me off is that the sword got put back together again in the same book it was broken. At least give it a fucking book or two to sit and ferment, goddamn. Giving the bad guys a win and then immediately yelling take-backsies really cheapens the whole deal.

Except that she screamed about how she wasn't going to stand by and let Nick fuck up something she had been working on for fifteen centuries. That could be Deirdre she was talking about. Or it could have been something else. Don't make an assumption about what someone's angle in this was. If Tessa really cared so fucking much about her daughter, she wouldn't have been standing there at the end with Nick. She's told him to fuck off and run independent from him and his plans for far lesser reasons than what she had in this book, and yet there she fucking was, standing right beside him at the end.

Why? If she's really so fucking maternal, and you should remember what she turns into before you try and argue she is, then why throw her dice in with Nick once her daughter is dead? For revenge? Against the people who didn't kill her daughter? Don't kid yourself, she'd need a better reason than that.

Tessa had her own angle in this, and it's probably going to play into a future book. I mean, you were literally fucking told that SOMEONE has compromised the Catholic Church, which, conveniently enough, has a lifespan that approximately fits in with Tessa's fifteen centuries, and yet your first thought is "nah, it's her daughter she's worried about." Couldn't possibly have anything to do with her own personal project getting made as a side effect of the Tartarus job.

The Catholic Church's World of Darkness-tier secret society devoted to fighting monsters and keeping ridiculously dangerous evil artifacts secure didn't suddenly decide to start giving the bad guys blowjobs on their own.

Butcher flat-out told us she was in Ghost Stories, which means she can't have died during White Knight, and nobody with cosmic knowledge of the event confirmed that Lash is dead. Normal mere mortals speculated it. Fucking remember what we already know before running in circles and shitting yourselves. Unless you've got a quote from Jim saying he retcon'd that, Lash is still alive. We just haven't seen her, and some of you need to remember what I tried to tell you all ages ago, which is that the idea that Lasciel was the Parasite was purely an assumption we made.

I don't know if you noticed or not, but the Forest People are dangerous enough that one of them could probably have put MacFinn in a headlock on one of his bad nights. Hell, that may even be why he was trying to build himself a preserve in the area he was buying. This wasn't a normal person that was given demonic superpowers. This was a being that could have taken on most of Chicago GTA/Saints Row style in a broad-daylight massacre on the streets and still come out on top that was given demonic superpowers. By the description we were given, his Ursiel form was literally bigger than most dinosaurs.

I don't think Grey is the shapeshifting guru, but you're really underselling what he was fighting.

Except there's two kinds of Naagloshii. There's the kind that Shagnasty is, where, if I'm allowed to butcher Native American lore for the sake of brevity, is basically a kind of fallen angel. And then there's the kind of Naagloshii where it's a normal human practicing powerful shapeshifting magic and The Witching Way, which they can only learn by being taught how to do it by an evil spirit of some sort. The second sort are called skinwalkers because they need to wear the skin of the animal or person they want to turn into.

Seeing how Grey wasn't a walking leyline, and how he needed something from the bodies of the people he wanted to shapeshift into, it seems more likely Grey is the second kind. Which would, for all intents and purposes, make him the literal opposite of Listens To Wind.

I'll lay you odds that it may have been Shagnasty who taught him The Witching Way, though. Him, or one of the Naagloshii that are in the Well.

Unless the sword was lit up, there was nobody in Nick's crew who could have told you it was there. And I don't particularly recall being told that the rocket launcher was always fake.

 

Butcher Q&A at signing:

Iron and the Winter Knight Mantle

Q: What would happen if Harry wore an iron earring?

A: If Harry wore an iron earring?

Q: Like, every day.

A: It would do horrible things to the Mantle around him and put him in terrible pain. So, there you go.

Q: But in several books he's been, like, pierced with iron and the mantle just goes away but doesn't actually … he's in terrible pain because he's already been beaten up, but it's never really been stated that it's at all related to the mantle. Would that be, like, the long-term exposure to... would his back go back to being normal?

A: Well, you know, someone asked the same question or something very similar to it a couple of nights ago, and they pointed out that at one point when Harry crossed Mab and Mab took the mantle away from him, when he broke Winter Law, that his back collapsed too. But his back didn't collapse when he got pierced by iron. And I looked at him and said, “You're right! That sounds like an inconsistency! Like maybe someone is lying or does not understand the exact situation of things or something like that! Huh!” And then I said what I'm going to say to you, “Next question!”

 

Apparently wizards age normally till they're about 50 and then it slow down like crazy. I really don't like that. Maybe I just don't want Dresden to get old and shit so soon. 0.o Dunno.

 

CBF to read the entire thread. Book good. Butters bullshit, ruined it from being great. Murphy wasn't bad, her falling when she broke the sword was good... insta fixing it and turning it into a lightsaber weilded by Batman!Butters... jesus I don't even.

 

Eh, I'm gonna buck the trend and say that the Lightsaber!Fidellachius is kinda cool. I like the concept and the sword being broken and reforged is definitely a thing I really like. The shattering of the sword was really, really powerful, and its evolution/restoration/whatever was a great thematic climax for the book.

I also, by and large, liked Butters in the book. He was unquestionably being stupid for most of it, but it's the sympathetic and understandable kind of stupid and there were clear reasons for his actions. It's annoying for him to constantly doubt and question Dresden, but I'm able to divorce myself enough from the characters to understand the why of it all, so it doesn't inspire nearly the same kind of rage it seems to in most people.

Now, maybe I'm just crazy or something, but isn't that exactly what happened? Butters threw on Dresden's coat and went out to try and sell his life for more time for Dresden to fix things.

It's possible I'm forgetting something or just interpreted it differently, but I was always under the impression that Butters had known he was going to fail and die, and that he trusted Dresden to use that time to work a miracle.

 

Butters thought Harry was down for the count. He mentioned it in his pep talk to himself.

 

It was the ultimate act of selflessness. He knew that by going out there he was consigning himself to death.

Also, the act of faith doesn't necessarily apply to just one moment either. According to Uriel, Butters was a latent Knight of the Sword since dead beat at least.

I think Butters was the weakest part of the book as well, I'm just reasoning out Jim Butchers reasoning. He clearly has a path he's going down with this, the execution was just weak.

 

I see what you mean, but I kind of think that the consequences of his actions are that he has to live with what he did.

Think about it- he caused the Sword of Faith to be destroyed, nearly got his two friends killed and just about fucked up some majorly important plans all because he didn't trust his friends.

And to be fair, there was some pretty compelling evidence that Harry might of gone bad. He had become the Winter Knight, and was working with Nicodemus. And Harry's spent the past 10 years or so telling everyone just how much bad news faeries are. I mean, he fucking arranged his own assassination to get out of being the Winter Knight. If that doesn't send a message, I don't know what does.

Regardless, Butters knows how badly he fucked up, and if it were me that shit would eat at me harder than anything else anyone could of done to me. In fact, the fact that he got away with everything completely probably makes it worse.

At least that's my interpretation of events, as it does seem like a pretty major inconsistency otherwise.