That's just it; for her, there are no other people. Mab isn't a person, Mab is a sociopathic ice fairy.

Personally, I despise her as a character. I think her tendency to dictate the course of events and intrude on plots usurps Dresden's agency as a protagonist, and would be glad to watch her eat several servings of humble pie. If a human being did a tenth of what Mab does, sure, according to conventional morality they would be considered evil. But evil in the Dresden-verse requires choice, and Mab is acting according to her nature, making her no more evil than a hurricane.

 

You're pretending that morality only applies to humans in a world where it obviously doesn't. Fallen Angels exist. Gods can do their jobs and be decent people or sneak up on random innocents and literally rape them just for shits and giggles. YHWH is real, definitively. Uriel and Nicodemus literally just confirmed in Skin Games that it's possible for Uriel to Fall if he chooses to act in a way inappropriate to his station.

Stop trying to apply relativistic morality to a universe that has holy swords and evil magic.

The Mothers, the Ladies, and the Knights all have choice. They can choose how they act and react. Their emotions are their own. The crux of the your argument hinges on the idea that the Queens are somehow inherently different from literally every other spirit, divine being, or mantled entity we've seen. There is zero evidence to support this.

Not making a choice about how to act is still making a choice. If Mab allows the mask she wears to dictate her actions and run roughshod over everyone, that's still on her. What's more, even if you were correct and she had no choice whatsoever in the matter, she can still show whatever emotions she likes.

She's never shown remorse or regret for any of the monstrous or cruel things she's done. Ever.

On every level, you have no argument to make. There isn't enough grey in the Dresden universe to hide Mab in, because lines of Good and Evil are drawn in the sand. You can't pretend she has no choice, because literally everyone else does to SOME degree or another. And even if she had no choice, she could still show remorse for her actions, which she does not.

 

Yes we do. In Cold Days Harry comes up with the hypothesis that the various Queens of Faerie are more or less constrained in how they're able to provide information. He even provides examples; when he outright asked Lily and Maeve in Proven Guilty whether they through Mab had gone cuckoo, they were visibly uncomfortable but capable of giving a straight answer. Mab and Titania probably could at great effort. The Mothers might be completely incapable.

That's the running theory at any rate and I'm inclined to believe it given how much experience Harry has dealing with the Fae and the Queens in particular.

Harry and Molly are mortal, for the most part. They still have free will, though there is some doubt about how far along the path to Sidhedom Molly is as of the end of Skin Game. Maeve, for possibly the entire length of time we've known her in the books, has been infected with Nemesis, which explicitly gave her the ability to act outside her nature.

On the other hand, you do have a point about choice within restrictions. Perhaps it's better to say that Harry and Molly have free will, the ability to act contrary to their natures, while Mab and the rest of the Sidhe do not.

Can you blame a Red Court Vampire for eating people when it's necessary for it to live? It can feed lightly, only taking from willing donors and spreading the feeding over multiple people so that no one becomes addicted. That doesn't change the fact that it still requires blood to live. Some things are simply immutable without Outside interference. This is true in regards to the Fae; the only one we've ever seen tell an outright lie is Maeve, because it's simply impossible for non-infected Fae to lie.

The same holds true for holding to the essential nature of the Fae. Mab cannot up and decide to spend the day only doing nice things. It's not just that she doesn't have the choice to do so, it just wouldn't occur to her to do so in the first place.

I've already gone over this above. Also, it's not free will if it's restricted.

The Knights are always mortal because they act as the Queens' tool in doing things they otherwise would not be able to. Mab can't directly harm someone that is unaffiliated with the Faerie Courts. Her Knight can. That's the reason for the existence of the Knights.

There's a difference between duties and nature. Mab is the Guardian of the Outer Gates and the Monarch of the Winter Sidhe. That does not mean she is rigidly bound into being those things by anything other than circumstance. Mab could opt to remove all of her soldiers from the Gates and use them to utterly destroy Summer, if she was willing to forfeit reality. That's a quote from Mother Summer.

Also, the mantles change their bearers to better fit the positions they hold. When Harry saw Lily again during Cold Days, he almost mistook her for Aurora because the mantle had been changing her over time. It holds with the meta theme that truly immortal beings aren't tied to a single body. They're an idea that jumps from host to host, sometimes more powerful, other times less, but always the same. Immortals do not change.

Maybe one of those is true, maybe none of them. Whether Mab was evil before she became Sidhe is a moot point however, because upon becoming Sidhe she changed at such a level that you can draw a definite line between her mortal self and her Sidhe self.

Again, Mab runs by a different system of morality. Word of Jim has it that she simply does not understand Harry at a fundamental level because he acts in a way that is completely alien to her. We understand him because we're human and we understand his motivations. Mab doesn't because she is not. If we replaced the word Faerie with Alien we wouldn't be too far off the mark.

As a separate example to illustrate this, consider the Leanansidhe. She thought the best way to protect her godson from all the nasty things that try to hurt him would be to turn him into one of her hounds. She spent several books trying to do just that as well, because when a Faerie thinks something there is no room for doubt in their mind (it's the reason non-mortal practitioners are able to use technology, as per Word of Jim.).

Check out the TV Tropes page for Blue and Orange Morality, because that's exactly what we're talking about here.

Do you feel remorse for breathing? Because that's what you're implying here. Mab does not feel remorse because she does not view the acts we find to be evil to be anything other than serving her many and varied goals. She's coldly logical, utterly pragmatic and completely willing to sacrifice every single man, woman, child, Faerie, and other being she can get her hands on if it would serve her goals. And she wouldn't lose any sleep over it because she is not human.

Faeries value family just as much as anything else, apparently. It's one of the things they've got in common with humanity. Remember as well that when Mab found out about Maeve she was so angry she spent years speaking through a proxy because otherwise she'd kill anything she spoke to. Titania only restrained herself from murdering Harry during Cold Days because Eldest Gruff had been coaching her through her grief.

Nicodemus is mortal, human and possibly deluded by millennia of having a Fallen whispering in his ear into thinking he's the good guy. Of course he's going to have more empathetic traits than Mab, especially when we see it first hand.

---------- Post automerged at 09:54 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:35 AM ----------

I'll just cover all this post at once.

Mab understands empathy and human emotion in the same way a man blind from birth understands colours. Precisely the same way.

What you're doing is calling the blind man stupid for being unable to paint.

 

That doesn't mean one shouldn't try. Don't even get me started on Nicodemus, Raine, I love that guy.

I'm still hoping he's got some not entirely evil motives going for him, as unlikely as it is.

Aaand I wasn't seriously asking for fapping material, just fics with characters/pairings I can stomach.

Now... Torturing someone, hell, killing someone, is evil. The act itself, that is. It doesn't always make the person doing it evil, though.

Mab had to deal with Slate somehow and she made the decision to treat him in such a way that would make any other potential traitors, hundreds of years from now, hesitate.

 

Even though tortue is ethically/morally wrong, Slate did violate the accords and almost through off the balance of nature itself.

Mab has a purpose. Titania has a purpose. Mab is just more calculating and rarely let's emotion get the in the way of her decision.

Mab has a purpose, and the way her mantle is programmed, she'll do anything that's necessary to maintain that order. In Mab's eyes, the ends justify the means.

 

I wouldn't say the ends justifying the means is something Mab even considers or cares about. She does what she does. Human measures of morality cannot typically be applied. The exception, I would say, is when she is tailoring her actions to elicit a certain response from, or as a response to, mortal actions and behaviours.

 

Hell fucking yes I can. You didn't have to eat someone to turn in the first place. Choosing to become a cannibal to scratch that itch is your call, and yours alone. Michael said as much IN THIS BOOK. He literally told Harry not to feel bad about wiping out the Red Court, because literally every Red Court Vampire deserved it for what they did to become a Red Court vampire. You want me to go dig up the quote?

What is with all this monster apologism? It's not like we weren't given someone fighting their monstrous nature and finding creative solutions to the problem in stark contrast to everyone else from the very beginning or anything.

What the fuck is Thomas, chopped liver?

I bet next you're going to tell me that the White Court vampires aren't all, by definition, bad people for 'surviving.'

Spoiler alert: they pretty much are. There's this whole fucking message throughout the entire series about how people who have no choice about having a monstrous nature can still choose how to express that in ways that aren't destructive, re: Thomas becoming a hairdresser, Susan becoming a vampire freedom fighter, and Harry not giving in to Lasciel, that you seem to have completely missed.

So let me be perfectly clear here, since you're starting to spread this sideways into other shit.

Some people with a monstrous nature cannot help or change that. What they can help and change is HOW THEY EXPRESS IT. "Just surviving" most fucking definitely makes you evil if your definition of "just surviving" involves killing people, raping people, torturing people, eating people, or doing any combination of the above.

You're already walking a thin line trying to justify Mab as not having a choice when the Knights, Ladies, Mothers, and even Titania have all been shown to be able to choose how they act within the context of their natures.

Don't try dragging other stripes of monsters into this as examples. Thomas alone refutes everything you could possibly try and argue to defend it. The Red Court ate people. They did not feel sorry about it. The 'decent' Red Court vampires had a name; they were the Fellowship of St. Giles. The 'decent' White Court vampires presumably all committed suicide soon after they turned. The very nature of the Court naturally selected out the decent, honest, and mentally stable people. Thomas is the exception, because he cared enough to try to find a creative solution. The rest of his relatives did not, and that is what damns them. The argument you're using to try and justify it is just a rehashed version of what Ortega said to convince Harry to sign up for his team.

No, we don't. Literally every other Fairie Queen has shown the ability to be autonomous within the boundaries of the role their mask has them play.

Mother Summer, Mother Winter, Titania, the Summer Lady, and the Winter Lady have all displayed the ability to make their own choices and exert free will in interpreting how their role is to be played.

Why would Mab be different? She has a role to play, as the Queen of Air and Darkness. Nothing can be done about that. But within the boundaries of that role, she can choose her own behaviors. She can choose not to be unnecessarily cruel. She can choose to be more helpful than her station demands. She can choose to run her operations in ways that avoid screwing over people who don't deserve it. She can't control the hand she's been dealt, but it's entirely up to her how to play what cards she has.

She chooses to let her inner-Winter do the talking for her.

That's still a choice. And given the circumstances, that choice is evil.

Mother Winter has behaved more altruistically than Mab has.

Think about that. For just a fucking minute, think about that. Mother Winter has behaved more altruistically than Mab. The living incarnation of Destruction and The End of All Things has been a nicer person all around than Mab has been.

When Mab was injured, she was so fucking pissed off she couldn't talk normally without killing everyone around her.

When Harry accidentally injured Mother Winter by trying to call her up and ask for her advice, she not only let it slide, which is amazing all by itself for one of the Sidhe, she used it as a teachable moment to show Harry, within the boundaries of her role as a Destroyer, something that it's possible no one else could have.

There's no contest between two. Mother Winter clearly shows that she's in control, not the station she wears. Vadderung is the same way. He wears his hats; he doesn't let his hats wear him.

You can't say the same for Mab.

Your argument is basically that the Queens are restricted in what they can say and do, which I agree with, and that those restrictions become harsher the higher up the chain you go. I also agree with that.

Where it all falls apart is when we get to the Mothers, and realize that both of them have shown, by example, more elbow room in choosing their actions than Mab ever has.

The only conclusion you can draw, assuming that the Queens are restricted and he gets harsher the higher you go (which I completely agree with) is that Mab DOES have the ability to be less of a monster in how she operates. She merely chooses not to be.

That makes her evil.

The only way you have an argument isn't in saying the Queens are different, because we've seen that Titania isn't. No, you have to try and state that Mab, specifically, is separate and apart from EVERY OTHER Queen in Fairie, and indeed every other person who has a Mantle that we've seen, in how her Mantle works.

And seeing how that's an extraordinary claim, it would need to have some extraordinary evidence to back it up.

You don't really have any.

Not according to Uriel. Freewill McChoiceypants is the definitive arbiter on the subject, and he disagrees strenuously with you. Life isn't equal. Everyone experiences pressures that others don't. Your life isn't one choice, it's a constant stream of choices that have all lead you up to this current moment in time. If the deck comes out as being stacked against you, that's still on you. It's fair ball. Not kind ball, no. But it's fair ball.

Harry said it wasn't fair to demand he choose between enslavement to Mab or watching his daughter die. But it was. All of the choices he had made over the course of years lead up to that moment. Yes, the deck came out stacked way the hell against him, but that was as much his fault as it was anyone else's. It was a fair choice. Not a kind choice, but a fair choice.

You don't get to say that it's not fine when Harry does it, but it is fine when Mab does. Mab was no different from Harry, once. She admitted it herself. It was her choices that lead her to where she is now. That's on her, in it's entirety. It's not unfair. It's the most fair thing there is.

Uriel says you're wrong. Your argument ends there. Feel free to take up an extra-canon stance that has you disagreeing with Jim or how he chooses to run his world, but that's got nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

And since we're talking about things Uriel said, let's not forget something else that's important. Uriel told Harry that as long as you do what you do out of love, you'll never get so lost that you can't find your way back out of the darkness you wander into.

Mab doesn't do what she she does out of love. I'm willing to bet a bridge against your brewery that's going to become relevant at some point.

Uriel would disagree. He'd tell you that Mab's actions before she became Sidhe were what lead her to becoming Sidhe in the first place. Therefore, even if everything she did afterwards was not part of her own will, she's still responsible for creating the monster that she became.

Just like how you can draw a clear line between the Molly of now and the Molly of before, even though she's clearly lost a significant portion of her soul already?

I appreciate the irony involved in the fact that I am, at least superficially to a casual observer, arguing for a harder definition of good and evil than you are, and yet you're the one insisting on clear-cut lines in the sand to support your argument.

You keep skipping over the fact that Mother Winter, Mother Summer, the Summer Lady, the Winter Lady, Titania, and both of the Knights have all shown the ability to choose how they behave within the boundaries of the role they have to play, and yet Mab is still somehow special or somehow apart from that, at least according to you.

No they aren't. Thomas isn't mortal, and Mab didn't give half a damn about recruiting him if it was necessary.

No, she doesn't. Everyone in the Dresden universe runs on the same set of rules. If they didn't, then Fallen Angels wouldn't be Fallen, and the Greek gods couldn't run off and fuck horses and peasants while Hades and Minerva are back home doing all the paperwork.

Not being able to understand Harry's motives isn't the same has Mab being divorced from the rules of how the universe works. Nicodemus isn't able to understand that Michael isn't tempted by immeasurable wealth because he's already richer than anyone else could ever be because he has a large family that loves him. That doesn't excuse Nicodemus of anything. It just shows how far he's fallen.

Arguing that Mab not understanding Harry's motivations means she isn't evil is like trying to argue that, because Michael cannot understand how Nicodemus could ever possibly sacrifice his own daughter just to get an object that he really wants, then he obviously isn't truly good.

Evil being confused by the motivations of good people doesn't excuse evil, any more than good people being confused by the motivations of evil people doesn't cheapen good.

Stop that shit. It's a bad argument that requires circular logic to work, and it doesn't survive contact with being taken out of the context of evil upon good.

And stop fucking quoting TvTropes, that shit is meant for Lovecraftian abominations and things that aren't even remotely human, like the Buggers in Ender's Game, and how they didn't realize that dissecting the first humans they saw was morally unacceptable, because they couldn't conceive of a society where everyone was a Queen.


Also, I'm going to do you a favor skip over all of your arguments about whether or not I should feel remorseful for breathing, because they're fucking stupid and you should feel bad for actually making them. I don't kill people when I breathe, and I don't have other options to sustain myself besides breathing that wouldn't kill people when I did it.

That's a completely nonsensical, ridiculous, and absurd comparison, and it's about the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from a Tumblr feminist or maybe someone that was very drunk and had just been punched in the head.

I'm going to give you a pass because I'm going to assume it was late as fuck wherever you were, and you weren't thinking straight. You're welcome.

Then take a leaf out of Vlad's book. Strip him naked, plant a giant wooden pole outside your front door, grease the pole, and impale him on it. It's slow, because you actually die of dehydration, which takes several days, it's excruciatingly painful because your own body weight works the pole through you until it comes out around your neck, and it sends a message.

Even if we choose to ignore the fact that all Fairies are instinctually aware of how wrong violating Fairy Law is, and thus, would not need to have a message sent to them about it, she went about it all wrong if sending a message was the point of the exercise.

Torturing someone for ten years in your private garden isn't about sending a message. The best you could say about it is that she did it to get leverage on Harry in the long term. The worst you could say is that she did it just because she felt like it. Either way, it's not justifiable.

Oh, and just so we're perfectly clear? Even if she'd done what I recommended, that would still be evil.

She could have just snapped his neck and been done with it. She chose to make it long, slow, hideous, and cruel. Her method and manner shows it wasn't about sending a message. She wanted him to hurt because he had betrayed her. It's as simple as that.


I honestly can't believe I'm having this discussion with some of you. Uriel is floating around all glowy and shit saying how EVERYONE is defined by the choices that they've made, and yet some of you are actually arguing that Mab torturing people for years and deliberately harming people just because she can get away with it is fine, because muh circumstances. Uriel even had this big talk with Harry about how your circumstances are still the sum of the choices you have made, and thus your own responsibility as much as anyone else's, and yet you're still saying this.

And you honestly expect me to believe you aren't masturbating furiously while you're arguing? You'd better hope you are, for your own sakes. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt assuming that you've been hypnotized by a make-believe ass that nobody's actually seen. The alternative is far more disturbing.

 

Okay, this is honestly getting completely fucking ridiculous.

Raine, you're being a condescending, insulting prick. Step back, take a deep breath, and calm the fuck down, because pretty much all of the hostility over the last couple pages has come directly from you. Chill the fuck out.

Moving on from there, this whole argument is entirely pointless, masturbatory, and completely unresolveable.

Mab is a twisted, sadistic, vile creature who is the envy of everything that goes bump in the night. She is an utterly inhuman monster all but completely void of anything that could even vaguely be called decency. And she is that way because that is the fundamental nature of her existence. Her very nature is literally to be the epitome of inhuman monsters, and she is physically incapable of acting outside of that nature, in much the same way that she is physically incapable of lying.

Whether or not that's "evil" comes entirely down to if "evil" is defined as a physical action or as a metaphysical choice, and that varies wildly depending on your own subjective interpretation of "evil". No one is ever going to agree with everyone else on it. This debate is literally accomplishing nothing but serving as a font to spew vitriol all over the internet.

Shut the fuck up about it.

 

Thank you, Agayek. I think we've exhausted this discussion. Everybody has put forth whatever "evidence" they've got and it has devolved into childish bullshit that does not belong on DLP.

Shall we discuss something else instead?

 

Sure why not. I'll start off by raising a question I've been contemplating for a while now:

What do people think Molly's cellphone is supposed to mean?

Personally, I'm torn between "It was an off-hand gesture signifying how far Molly's slipped" and "It was a typically-Fae'd plea for help", and I really can't make up my mind on which.

 

Did the phone actually ring? Or did she just pick it up? Cause it could totally be her asking for help because she's isn't actually allowed to do it.

 

Not to derail or anything but I just finished the book (finally) and while I enjoyed it, it didn't have that holy shit factor that the other books left me with. Changes had the most of those moments with Harry finding out he has the daugher in the first page, him wiping out the Red Court, and him dying. Cold Days had Molly becoming the Winter Lady after two big deaths. Ghost Story had Harry revealing he arranged for his own death, and then waking up with Mab at Demonreach after being prepared to die. Pretty much all of the books had moments like that, but to me, Skin Game didn't really have one and was pretty unimportant in terms of the larger plot.

The moment of the sword breaking was that moment for me but it was nullified when it came back with no consequences to it shattering the first place. Even when it happened and the good guys retained the shards, I obviously expected it to come back at some point but I expected there to be real consequences to everyone when it happened. This has probably never happened before in human history (or Nicodemus wouldn't have cared so much to destroy it and cared A LOT more to gather the pieces) and less than a day later someone picks it up and bam, no worries it can multipurpose as a lightsaber.

And, yeah, I echo people's feelings about Butters. I mean I feel like after seeing everything Harry has done for everyone around him and humanity in general first hand , you might give the guy the benefit of the doubt that there may be a reason to why he's trapped himself on the island. And Butters knows Harry really well by this point, he doesn't just have an academic knowledge of his actions - he knows how selfless Harry is at every single point in his life. He only has an academic knowledge of the power of the mantle of Winter Knight, however. If he saw the decline of Lloyd Slate, and intimately understood the power of the mantle (like he intimately knows Harry) then maybe I could understand him thinking Harry has fallen to darkness, but he only has an academic understanding of the mantle, given that I think a decent person should never have mistrusted Harry to the extent that he did. And I'm surprised that Harry's mantle didn't try to let him die to Binder's goons after he found the bug under his bandages. I think at that moment there should have been some conflict between the two (Winter and Harry) as the mantle seems to react poorly to betrayal.

Going back to what I was talking about before regarding the lack of big significant events in this book, here are the big ones (plot-wise) in this book in my opinion: Butters becoming a Knight, and the "birth" of Harry's shadow-baby thing. Maybe put the injury of Murphy in that but I really doubt that she's going to stay sidelined for longer than a book or two. Thats pretty much it to me which seems pretty anti-climactic. I really thing Nicodemus should have killed someone close to Harry, specifically Michael, Murphy or Butters. It just made hims seem really incompetent that Harry bested him in such a complete manner when he has been in the game for millenia.

I think Butcher cares too much about the opinion of fans. You can see it in his unwillingness to kill main characters, his over the top fanservice with pop culture references (I still have nightmares about the whole LOTR thing in Changes) and the whole lightsaber thing, the Star Trek thing for Molly and probably a lot more that I'm forgetting.

Overall though I still enjoyed it, it's not like I will ever stop reading the books, but still felt the need to comment.

 

I don't think it rang, no. She did pull it out and start talking into it, but that doesn't prove a whole lot either way.

 

It's still not a bad thought, Agayek. Kudos. About fan service in the books.

I don't mind so much as long as it's done with a bit of sublety. The Star Trek thing in Ghost Story, I thought was awesome... But the scene in Changes when they were in a hurry and they began to talk about Lord of the Rings. That was pretty over the top.

Cold Days really was where he shit the bed, though. They references were about as subtle as a cockslap to the face... I feel that overall, Cold Days felt unpolished and rushed. There was a lot of word repetition, swearing for no reason (which hasn't been done before or after) and just a lot of awkward scenes.

In that sense, I feel that Skin Game was a big step up. It was smaller in scale and while there were annoying moments, it felt closer to some of the smaller scale books before, like Proven Guilty.

 

Having gone back and thought about it, I'm starting to wonder if one of the reasons Nicodemus made a point of destroying all records of conflicts involving the Denarians and Knights of the Cross is because the swords take any opportunity given to them to repair themselves.

There are only three swords. The circumstances in which they can be broken are incredibly mundane and should, you would think, happen all the time. So why are all three still in service? It's well within Nick's abilities to engineer one to be broken. It's not really that hard.

We even know for a fact that the blades aren't the originals. That's not the 'original' Excalibur. That nail was used in the original at some point, but at some point, it was taken out and put into another sword. Jim told us that. But why would that be necessary? Probably because Excalibur broke.

If controlling information is half the victory, maybe part of Nick's game plan was to fool the Knights and their allies into thinking the swords are irreplaceable and irreparable.

Beyond the void of information that Nicodemus helped engineer, there's nothing to say the swords aren't as equally persistent in finding a way as the coins are.

It actually makes perfect sense if you view it that way. If I was Nicodemus, it sure as hell sounds like a con I would run. Tricking the enemy into walking on eggshells can only play to your advantage in the long run.

 

Not impossible, I guess. I still think it's more likely they can only be repaired or changed very very rarely. Perhaps in correlation with the faith itself changing. Or at the very least the faith the sword represents. Sanya is an agnostic, after all. Butters is Jewish, but I doubt he's religious.

 

Good point, Raine.

Harry confront Michael about the lack of info in... Small Favor? Michael can't definitely argue that no one has ever refused a coin after touching it, because he honestly doesn't know. He also says there's evidence of the blades being reworked over the course of history, but is mum on the details.

There is always a balance; if the Coins can come back into the game, makes perfect sense that the Swords can, too.

I find it unlikely there's ever been a lightsaber before, though.

Nic is pretty much a walking example of "He who controls the past..."

 

I thought this since practically the first time we saw the swords. Dresden nearly broke one in a graveyard in one of the first few books if I am recalling correctly. I always found it odd how easily they were broken and yet they were still all perfectly fine after millennia.

Did I misread? Everyone is talking about a lightsaber but I was under the impression that it in that moment the strong was particularly powerful (and it was glowing). So one could say it was a lightsaber, as a kind of talking point.