But surely, they would at least notice that the Winter Lady entered their home? Especially since the Carpenters threshold is as good as a threshold can be, alongside divine protection and all that.

 

The thing is that people in Arthur/Merlins time spoke a very different language that has only passing resemblance to today's British.

So either the inmate has the ability interact with the world outside Demonreach, which is unlikely since he explicitly states that the function of the prison is absolute stasis, or he has to be from a more recent timeframe.

And the only semi-immortal being that we know of that fits that description would be Kemmler.

 

Because its explicitly mentioned in Changes? As in the endgame of Arianna's plan was rising to LoON? If someone can rise to it it's transferable which means [speculation]it wouldn't necessarily disappear with their deaths.[/speculation]

 

Even they are transferable, I doubt the Mantles are even recognizable anymore because they must have taken one hell of a beating with that Blood Curse.

Every single Red Court vampire that believed in the powers of the LoON is dead. Every single human that they kept as cattle, every half-vampire, double-agent, and worshipper is probably either free of their reign of terror and no longer worshipping them or being sacrificed to them, or is getting murderized in the resulting power vacuum.

Don't get me wrong. If the Eebs do become the new Lords (which was foreshadowed in that conversation in Changes) the mantles have probably had a massive downgrade, from the next best things to real gods to just fuck-off powerful.

 

Then there shouldn't be a problem providing a citation for the idea that Marcone has different rules and expectations imposed on him because he's a singular signatory and not a group then, should there?

That's not a "Dresden Trope." That's a convention of noire fiction in general. And I'm happy that it was in Skin Game, because if anything, there isn't enough noire in the more recent books. Butcher kind of lost his way in that regard, and moved away from writing supernatural detective stories in favor of Iron Druid-style fantasy kitchen sink shenanigans.

That's still too generous. In an entire series, I'd hesitate to give you permission to do it once. For it to even happen once, there better be a goddamn good reason for it.

As a fan of western comics, the dead need to stay dead. If they'd just left Superman dead when he died the first time, WE WOULDN'T HAVE ANY OF THESE FUCKING PROBLEMS.

 

Coming back from the dead trope started well before Superman.

 

Some guy named Jesus might have kicked it off, but there's reason the trope is called 'Comic Book Death.' Superman kind of codified it.

Once death itself is not so much something to be feared as just another obstacle, it loses its impact, and importance, and your heroes become much less compelling.

As to the Eebs... I'm up in the air on whether the 'mantles' of the Red nobles can really be transferred, or even count as 'mantles' in the first place.

On the one hand, Vadderung put the Red King on par with himself, and the kind of power they exercised seemed to parallel him too.

But on the other, the vampires are not Sidhe, and at no time does anyone talk about them 'trading' or 'stealing' power - or mantles, or masks - in the way that the Sidhe do. Vampires are functionally immortal, but there is no indication or talk in the books of them re-forming from the mantle of 'King' or 'Noble'.

If they were strictly empowered by faith, I'd bow to the idea, but I thought their power was more to do with being really freaking old, and older powers are stronger as a rule in the Dresdenverse. (Could be wrong, haven't read Changes in a while, but don't recall.)

 

I may have missed this mention but is anyone else a little saddened by the lack of Thomas in this story?

 

Don't know about that. There's always been a component of the Hero Cycle that was about the journey to and return from the Underworld that was a symbolic conquering of death.

Hercules did it, as did Odysseus and Aeneas. Jesus certainly made it more literal than the rest, but the trope hardly started with Superman.

But I suppose this is off topic.

Yes.

 

Doesn't Vadderung say/heavily imply that he swaps between the Kringle and Odin mantles depending on the situation he's in?

 

He heavily implies it. However it's a two-edged sword for him as it also allows other's control over him depending on the aspect they have allegiance from, ala Mab's ability to call forth Kringle but not Odin.

 

IN the faerie courts, only the queens become the next mother, and the ladies the next queens. Arianna claimed one of the LOON would beome the king, while she becomes a lord.
How many RCV are held captive by the goblins? If it is two, did they get all the lordships, or will the next vampires they make will become the LOON? I wonder if to make a king, they first need the lords.

 

The Red King came first; all other vampires (possibly excluding the Eebs) are descended from him. So no, I think it's the other way around. The King came first and then raised his best to become the Lords of the Outer Night, placing them above the rest of the court so that they would be next in line to inherit his power, should he die.

 

Do we know if they are actually mantles and not just titles like the Merlin and Senior Council are?

 

More or less my question.

 

Yes, it did. But Superman was the one that popularized it.

Yes, that is a component of the Heroic Cycle. The problem is that, traditionally, that particular story element went "hero dies or somehow passes beyond the boundaries of death, hero has an adventure or quest or trial of terrible danger and great importance, hero triumphs against all odds and either earns his passage back to life or takes it by might and trickery, hero returns from death, sometimes with something to show for it, sometimes not, but always with the triumph that they have managed to do what few, if any, others have ever managed. Death itself has been conquered."

This is often the second to last or nearly second to last stop on the hero's Heroic Cycle before they Meet Their Destiny, but sometimes it can occur much earlier in the story, particularly if coming back from death is the driving impetus of the plot.

Nobody has a problem with that.

The problem comes when you shave 99% of that off, and it ends up looking like "hero dies, hero comes back to life at a thematically opportune moment, fuck the police."

NO. THE POLICE EXIST FOR A REASON, AND THAT IS TO MAKE DEATH IMPORTANT. DO NOT FUCK THE POLICE.

Superman's death did something, and it didn't kill Superman. What the death and return of Superman killed was death. Never before this had such a high profile comic character been killed and then arbitrarily brought back. That had never happened before. It set a precedent that all of comic book-dom has yet to be able to break, which is that death is cheap and that you can bring back whoever the fuck you want, whenever the fuck you want, with no consequences.

The list of people who died and were brought back to life in comic books before this was basically zero. Several characters had indeed died on rare and scant occasion, but they were never brought back from death. Death was treated as the end. But no more. Since this happened, Marvel and DC characters alone have died and come back to life over a hundred times total and counting, often with the same character dying and coming back multiple times.

Killing Superman didn't kill Superman. It killed death. Bringing Superman back to life was the single worst thing Marvel and DC comics have ever collectively done, ever. It is not an exaggeration to say that it completely ruined EVERYTHING.

I can give you the numbers if you don't believe me. The sales of Action Comics dropped out of they sky because of this, and they have never recovered to the levels they were before this. NEVER. They fucked themselves in the ass permanently doing this. Over a full decade of comics has not washed away the taint of this happening.

Any time DC or Marvel goes for ages without people dying, they get called pussies for not killing anyone off. Anytime somebody tries to make a serious storyline about somebody dying and the consequences of their death, nobody cares because everyone knows and assumes that they'll just be back to life in the next run of comics.

Even if they actually make a concerted effort to kill someone off and keep them dead, it would never work, because no one will believe them, and the drawback to hiring fans of comics to write your comics is that some comic artists will always protest killing off somebody, because it's always somebodies favorite hero. They will fight to get that person back in. It's happened before, we saw it when Captain America died during the Civil War. That was supposed to be permanent. Rogers dead, gone forever, bam. No takebacks. If you want another Captain America, it's going to be someone who isn't Rogers. But fans complained, and more importantly, the artists complained and protested, so he got brought back.

If the fans don't ruin it, the executives will, and if you somehow get the executives to greenlight it, the fucking artists will fight it and ruin it.

Before this, almost nobody died. Almost nobody died. But it did happen, on rarefied occasion, and when it did, all deaths were final. In that environment, one was almost completely certain that someone like Batman or Green Lantern or Magneto would not die. But it was still possible that they would, and in the event of that happening, they would be dead.

That particular environment made for more compelling stories being told, if only because the suspension of disbelief was preserved. It's superheroes, so you have almost infinite free license to do whatever the fuck you want, but as long as certain boundaries are respected, such as, for instance, death, or applying sufficient reasoning for breaking the laws of physics and reality (he's an alien, that's her superpower, he's an extradimensional wizard, ect), suspension of disbelief remains intact.

This? This broke death. And just like that, a significant portion of willing suspension of disbelief was dead. Gone. Poof. Just like that.

Arrows, like words, once loosed, cannot be taken back. This is something they can't take back. They really want to, but they can't. There's literally nothing they can do.

Nothing they can do would fix this. Nothing they can do would fix this. Nothing they can do would fix this.

The only way to reverse this is time. Comics will just have to try and ride out the backlash of this, and bank on a new generation of comic book readers being willing to accept and read sagas where their favorite characters are actually risking their lives and the lives of the people close to them to do what they think is right.

It's been over a decade, and it still hasn't fixed itself. And if the situation keeps feeding on it's own mistakes and repeating them, it may never fix itself, as new generations of comic fans are repeatedly soured to the idea of legitimate death happening to western comic book characters.

 

Two tiny notes, Raine, though I'm not sure if they are truly significant or affect your argument:

Superman died in 1992, so it's been over two full decades.

And prior to that, Jean Grey had died 4 times, starting in 1976. She has gone on to die a total of between 9 and 14 times, depending on how you count it.

 

Fair enough on the Jean Grey point. I know that DC had never brought anyone back to life prior to this. I'm not as versed in older X-Men continuity. I'll have to check and see if Jean was merely Phoenix stuff, or if she was legitimately brought back to life for no reason.

Also, I'll repeat the desire for a source on the idea that the Lords of Outer Night are a mantle. They're the elite of the Red Court, and much more powerful than the rest of their kind, but I don't ever remember anything saying or suggesting that they would have had Mantles, or that "Lord of Outer Night" was a mantle in and of itself.

We never saw any evidence that it was anything more than a title, to my knowledge.

 

Eh, To be fair, all the prisoners that were trying to communicate with Dresden were speaking in English, and it's probably safe to say some have them have been stuck in the island for a couple of hundred years. I'm really not sure how that works.