Not necessarily. I mean, Harry could run pretty damn fast before taking the job, but with the Winter Knight mantle he doesn't tire or care about injuries he sustains while doing so. I wouldn't put it past him to be able to sprint like an Olympian and keep it up right now, simply because his body isn't telling him to stop being stupid, you're going to pull every muscle.

 

Maybe. Butters theories, or how he's given them, have kind of annoyed me. Maybe that's why I'm contradicting them.

 

Well at least you recognize your bias.

I'm with Aekiel on this one for now, but I still think there's a lot of information we don't yet know.

 

Harry Dresden can't run like an olympian (prior to winter mantle) because his muscles are literally incapable of that kind of exertion. Adrenaline only does so much.

 

Yeah, you have to tire or snap at some point.OR you never go too fast in the first place. I really, really hope that this is fucking Butters talking out of his considerable ass, trying to make things fit into the naturalistic narrative he wants to be true.

That said, if I have to defend this horrible position: Harry has perfect healing. That would go a ways to masking any crippling that the Mantle caused.

On the other hand: Harry seems to heal like a regular vanilla mortal speedwise so he should really have noticed something if he ever pushed into "supernatural" territory.

 

I wouldn't call Butters' world-view "naturalistic"... a naturalistic world-view can take into account magic. Since, y'know, magic is real.

 

Yeah, Butter's POV is just dumb. You can't do the physical feats Harry has done with just adrenaline. Top athletes competing in the Olympics almost certainly have that advantage of adrenaline as well, since those competitions are so psychologically HUGE to them, so an ordinary person like Harry (even in good shape from his boxing) wouldn't be able to keep up.

 

If the Mantle is stopping him from feeling pain, why would you think it wouldn't stop him from feeling exhaustion? That's merely a different kind of pain. If he's fit and used to running, and he is, why would he ever feel exhausted so long as the Mantle is still juicing him up?

Besides, I'm pretty sure "exhaustion" was right up there with "Jesus pissing Christ I've been shot, stabbed, thrown through a wall, and I think my leg is broken" on the things he was feeling when he got stabbed with iron, i.e. he didn't have the Mantle's power greasing the gears.

So why would him being able to run for days and not feel tired prove anything in particular?

 

Harry is a long distance runner, works out fairly frequently, is incredibly tall and has a mantle that lets him ignore his own limits/pain. I'm not saying there's no magical reinforcement going on, but I am saying that the human body is capable of a lot of extreme shit all by itself.

Remember the time Harry blocked out pain so completely that his wounded leg actually had to give out before he noticed anything was wrong? This happening after several rounds of combat and a torture session with Quintus Cassius. That's what Harry's body is running on 24/7 now. He got punched into a wall by the freaking Genoskwa and it only started hurting after it stuck an iron nail in him.

Harry's physical abilities are so far beyond regular humans that I would put him on par with the best our species has to offer, if only because he's able to to keep going until he literally drops dead of exhaustion.

 

Lets not forget the fact that he gets the shit beaten out of him at least once per year, as per Jim's cruelty.

He's used to a lot. But I also think we simply do not know enough to make blanket statements like everyone is trying to.

Jim has explicitly stated that we don't know everything, so any theories that we come up with here will be based on incomplete knowledge.

 

The human body still has limits.

 

In that direction. We've (probably) all seen pictures of athletes collapsing from heat and/or exhaustion, not to mention marathon runners who shit themselves and keep running. Even assuming Harry's equal to or greater than the best of humanity, muscle and nerve damage (even if indirect) should lead to poorer performance that he would notice at one point or another; a crashed car can't feel pain but it sure doesn't handle as well.

Butters' opinion fits Mab to a point. My thought is that the analgesia is a persistent state, which the Winter Mantle physically augments when on official business or to protect the Knight, based on the unknown rules or 'thoughts' it has (e.g. Harry revved up the mantle by thinking about defending territory rather than helping Butters). This way Mab is more likely to have the upper hand in her schemes, so long as she can switch off the mantle.

EDIT: Fun thought. Lea 'lulled the predator spirit to sleep' in Susan and Martin in "Changes"… Maybe high winter has experience w/ something similar?

 

Of course they do. Here's something to consider.

Where's the Wolf?

I'm serious. Where is the Wolf? You can't swing a dead bard without hitting a legend about a wolf god, wolf spirit, god who takes the form of a wolf, or some other incarnation of a supernatural predator that happens to take the form of a wolf. And then, of course, there's The Big Bad Wolf, antagonist of the most well known and infamous fairy tales of them all.

Across thousands of myths and dozens of pantheons and mythic tales, the Wolf is a near-omnipresent constant. The oldest wolf. The greatest wolf. The first, the greatest, the alpha, the most terrible, devourer of gods, predator of all other monsters. The father wolf.

By Dresden universe standards, not only should the Wolf exist, but the Wolf should be powerful. All these legends and myths about it, in pantheon after pantheon. The Wolf is in all the old stories. It makes an appearance in Arthurian legend. You can't go three feet in the Eddas without hearing about Fenrir, the monstrous supernatural wolf that haunted the stories of Norse mythology. Fenrir, the Father of Wolves, the Eldest Wolf, prophesied to be the one to slay Odin Allfather at the dawn of Ragnarok.

Unquestionably powerful. God slayer. Monster eater. Eldest Hunter. Destroyer of mortal and immortal alike. As obviously as it must exist, so too would it obviously be associated with the Winter Court. The Wolf of Winter. The Big Bad Wolf. The one that haunts the sinister path. A supremely dangerous being, neither god nor monster nor spirit, but a terror and fear of gnashing teeth and silent steps, of steaming breath and stalking eyes in the dark made, manifest by eight thousand years of whispered stories and grand epics. The fear of being hunted. The fear of being ambushed. The fear of being eaten alive.

An old fear, the oldest fear, given the breath of life by knowledge and belief, shaped by legend, empowered by song and story, and reimagined as a fairy tale in the modern age, a hundred terrible monsters and wicked demons folded together into a singular antagonist in a parable to tell to young children to warn them of the dangers of rapists and murderers. To teach them caution and fear of a thinking thing older than them that will hunt them for wicked purpose from the shadows.

Where is Fenrir? Where is the Big Bad Wolf? Where is the Doom of Odin, Eldest Wolf? Where is the Father Wolf, God Eater? Where is the Stalker of the Sinister Path, the Fear in the Dark? Where is the Wolf?

I think I know where the Wolf is.

And I think you do, too.

It's right where Mab would want it to be. On a leash, whose lead she holds. A lead made of the only thing that could contain it. For in the Eddas, Fenrir said he could not be held by any band of iron or clasp of steel, and thus he does not fear them, nor will he hesitate to allow foolish mortals and gods to attempt to bind him with such, as he relishes snapping such bonds and devouring those arrogant enough to believe they could contain him. "But if it is made of art and trickery, then even if it does look thin [and tenuous], it will not be going on my leg."

This tells us something important. This tells us something extremely important. Fenrir is not bound or contained by main force. He is held captive by trickery and magic. And it tells us something even more important, too. The Eddas spoils at least part of the apocalypse trilogy.

Because in the Eddas, Odin Allfather dies in Ragnarok, a fate all other gods share in. It is The Twilight of the Gods, after all. And it is the Eldest Wolf, Fenrir, who takes his life.

So yes, Saevanus, I think the Winter Court does have some experience in the field of 'lulling predator spirits to sleep.'

I suspect they have quite a bit of it, actually.

But do you see the greatest part of it? Do you see where this truly becomes twisted and wicked?

Harry spent over a decade of his life fleeing and avoiding his Fairy Godmother, casting his defiance in the face of Fairy Law, to escape being turned into a Fairy Hound.

And then Mab inherited his debt. And she used it to make him her Knight.

It is irony. It is balance. There is synergy to it. It is horrifically manipulative, and monstrously clever. And it serves their needs, and theirs alone, in stacking how the dice will fall.

It is, in other words, exactly the sort of thing the Sidhe would do.

Fucking fairies.

 

...pretty sure book 2 covered this one.

(All jokes aside, you make a very thought provoking point)

 

I'm pretty sure you'll find a few of them at Demonreach

 

MacFinn wasn't really a wolf, though. He had a Greater Demon sealed inside of him that forced him to take the form of giant monster with some wolf-like features during nights of the full moon.

None of them were really wolves. That's the ironic part. The Alphas are a bunch of kids who have a knack for Water Magic and not really much else, and the Hexenwulfen are using cursed belts that have demons sealed inside of them.

The only actual wolf we saw in the whole mess was Tera West. She was a wolf that could take human form, which makes her a being from Native American legend, which frequently references the idea that some animals can take the form of humans and walk amongst us. Listens to Wind indirectly confirmed that for us by telling Dresden later in the series that "Tera West sends her regards."

We saw demonic power, black magic, an ancient curse, and an animal from Native American myth, but nowhere in Fool Moon did we ever actually see anything I would consider as potentially being 'the Wolf.'

[EDIT]

Also, having re-read what I said, I realized I don't think I ever actually spelled out what I was talking about.

I think the Wolf, Fenrir, Eldest Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf, is the Winter Knight. I don't know if he was sacrificed on the stone table to create the Mantle, or if he was bound into it like he was bound by the gods in the Eddas, but I think he is the Mantle, somehow and in some way. Those instincts, the "blood starved wolf in winter" that Harry spoke of, are his instincts. When he looks at Murphy, or Molly, or any woman in particular? What goes through his mind, that's the Big Bad Wolf talking.

I think the Winter Knight is the Wolf. And I think that the Winter Knight is going to kill Odin Allfather at start of the Apocalypse Trilogy.

 

Holy shit, that makes total sense, to me, inside the dresdenverse.

 

Raine redeems himself by predicting Butcher.






And now back to the shitposting ;P

 

Mother Winter would also be a pretty decent candidate. If you can recall what she said in Cold Days about life being far too easy for mortals these days.

 

As I said above, fascinating theory. One question along the same lines, what's your take on the Summer Knight then? The two are intrinsically linked, so what is the opposite of the big bad wolf?