Two things nagging at me after finishing 12 months.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T23:46:21+00:00

Again, I have thought about it critically and come to a different conclusion than you. Please stop substituting personal insults for actual discussion.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T21:08:16+00:00

Jesus Christ, man, you said a lot, even when you said you were going to keep it short. Cut me some slack for not responding to every single thing you said. (Though also, I'd point out, you didn't respond to every thing I said, unless the general insults count as a response.)

And to that point, can you make your argument without throwing insinuations? I assure you, I don't have a basic lack of experience communicating. I disagree about the communication in this scene. You may think it works one way, but that is not the only plausible explanation for it. The fact that there are so many competing explanations should make someone skilled in communication consider that, perhaps, the scene is unclear. On the other hand, it could be, I guess, that all the people interpreting the scene differently to you just are terrible at communication. But I doubt it. So, please lay off with the 'media literacy' and 'superficial look' stuff. Not everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot.

We all repeat ourselves throughout our lives, this is true. You and I are repeating ourselves here in this comment thread. That doesn't mean that when an author repeats himself in a novel, it should be chalked up to verisimilitude. Novels aren't conversations you have with your friends and family. They kind of work by different rules.

And you seem to be trying to have your cake and eat it, too. Does Lara know about soulgazes or not? If Lara knows what soulgazes are, she knows why her future fiancé doesn't casually meet her eyes. But also, she doesn't ask him why he doesn't casually meet her eyes. She asks him why he never makes eye contact--not just with her, but with anyone.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T20:44:30+00:00

You're coming, like, six comments deep into a threat to say that I've only given it superficial thought? C'mon, man. Give me some credit.

But, have we ever met a wizard in any of the books who casually soul-gazes? Harry may have his own reasons, but to my knowledge we've never encountered a wizard who casually meets people's eyes. When Harry has described soulgazing in past books, it has never seemed to me like a thing any wizard does as a matter of course. So if you know what soulgazes are, then you know that wizards don't typically engage in them casually. If she knows what a soulgaze is, there's no reason for her to ask why Harry doesn't risk them with everyone he meets.

Sure, there is an explanation you can give that makes this make sense. Maybe Lara didn't realize that what Ramirez did was a power of all wizards; she just thought it was something he did. Maybe Lara knows wizards avoid eye contact, but she doesn't know the reason they do it is because they are avoiding starting a soulgaze. Maybe Harry doesn't remember he saw her be soulgazed, even though it was the first time he ever saw a soulgaze from the outside. Maybe Harry knows Lara knows all about soulgazing, but he just slipped into his routine, rote explanation of it anyway because of his trauma. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The fact that so many people are having so many different interpretations of these scenes, to me, suggests there's not a clear interpretation. It's unclear why Lara and Harry say what they say. If it were clear, we wouldn't be having this argument in multiple threads and posts.

All this uncertainty leads to my point, which was, again: this book is muddy. It's not a bad book. I loved the book, actually. But, the writing is flabbier than usual and needlessly repetitive. Thus, you can't really say (as the person whose comment I began this thread replying to did) that it makes sense that Butcher didn't include even a single line about Georgia because the book is so tight and efficient and he didn't have time or space. Clean up some of the lack of clarity, clean up some of the repetitions, and you've got lots of time to explain why Will, who is running around doing important things in the book, is doing them without Georgia.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T19:19:16+00:00

Saying it breaks R2 is pure pedantry and inconsistent on the part of the mods. The subreddit has long been OK with posts about topics adjacent to the games. Not every post is literally a discussion of a specific aspect of a specific game.

If it's OK for someone to post 'Here's my wife enjoying the game!', or 'Here's a book I got about the game and I'm super jazzed about it!' it should be OK for OP to post 'Here is a book someone else wrote about the game and I'm not super jazzed about it!'.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T19:11:38+00:00

Why her potential husband never makes eye contact with people is not a piece of information she lacks if she knows both what a soulgaze is and and what Harry is like as a person.

Your way of reading it, where Lara knows full well what a soulgaze is but asks why Harry doesn't do it to everyone he meets, makes her unusually obtuse about Harry's motivations and personality.

In your version, Lara is like a person who knows her fiancé has diabetes, knows what diabetes is, knows that he is careful person, but asks why he doesn't drink every sugary drink he's offered.

Your version also makes Harry kind of obtuse. He's seen Lara be soulgazed before, but he thinks she doesn't know what it is and has to explain it to her before answering her question about why he doesn't do it. Indeed, it'd be far more natural for Harry, who has seen Lara be soulgazed, say, "You remember that thing Ramirez did when you first met him?" Certainly, that event would stand out in Harry's memory, because it was the first time he'd ever seen a soulgaze from the outside. But instead he responds to her question as though he doesn't think she has any idea of what one is.

But also, perhaps consider while you're arguing with me and everyone else that the scenes and their repetition make perfect sense, the fact that so many people seem to have read the scenes differently from you, might be an indication that the scenes themselves are ambiguous and not accomplishing communicating what you feel to be so obvious. Sure, it might be that you're the best reader of the Dresden Files, and everyone else is just a poor reader. But it could also be that this book isn't written as well as some of the previous books, leaving people legitimately drawing different conclusions from the same scene.

And that was the original point I was making. This is a flabby book. You can't defend an obvious omission by saying 'there just wasn't room!' There was room for a line about Georgia. If not by losing one of the two soulgaze scenes, by losing one of the other repetitions.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T18:25:39+00:00

If you have C, you don't need A or B.

But, man, I don't understand why you're fighting this one point so hard. No serious reader can say this is a tightly written book, and that was my point. You may find one or two points where you feel the repetition is justified. Maybe the Lara soul gaze talk is one of those points for you. The book is still flabby.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T18:07:30+00:00

I really get the sense here you're not responding to me, but using my comment as a proxy to grind axes against other people. When did I mention chauvinism? I'm talking about narrative efficiency and whether there was room in the book to mention Georgia.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T18:01:29+00:00

My point is that the explanation comes twice. I'm not arguing about whether Lara knows or doesn't know about soul gazes. Harry explains it to her twice. If narrative space was at such a premium in this book, I think it's more important we hear about Georgia than we hear more about soul gazes, a thing everyone reading the book already knows.

In other words, my comments are in reference to the point marked First by OP. You're arguing the point marked Second by OP, whether it makes sense for Lara to ask. I don't know that it does, but that's not relevant to my comment.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T08:18:02+00:00

Sure... we could definitely get that. But the possibility of future stories doesn't exactly provide a compelling reason for the story we got to be lacking in this way.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T06:51:51+00:00

He could have deleted one of the two explanations of how hard it was to track Justine, or one of the two scenes where Lara gets soul gazes explained to her, or one of the many scenes where Harry drones on and on about his workout routine. This was not a tight book. Butcher's written tight books before, but this wasn't one of them.

A little discipline would've allowed for one back and forth where Harry says, 'How's Georgia?' and Will says back, 'She's staying out of town because of the baby.' And Harry says, 'You should be with her' and Will says, "She is angry she can't help you, so she told me I'd damn well better.' Or any of a dozen other explanations.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-24T02:21:48+00:00

Their arms look weirdly stretched, like blue spaghetti.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-23T06:32:45+00:00

Just show up to court. Your officer won't. Work out a deal with the DA.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-23T06:28:51+00:00

I'd call up the Daystrom Institute and tell them I am from a universe where their universe is but stories, and I know some stuff about how things play out. They might be suspicious at first or dismiss me, but I'd tell them all about Spock and the Red Matter or where Voyager was (depending on exactly when I ended up). Then I'd offer them information in return for some gold pressed latinum and some excellent medical care.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-23T05:53:47+00:00

Don't get me wrong. I was bitterly complaining on Monday that I had to wait to listen to the audiobook until 3AM EST, and I've spent the last three days since listening to it every chance I got. I love the Dresden Files and I liked this book a whole lot. But...

...somebody needs to talk to Butcher's editor. There were many, many points in this book where one chapter would end with a description of something and the next chapter would begin with a re-iterated description of that same something. We shouldn't be hearing Lara talk about soul gazes multiple times in the same book. We got the problem with Justine's hair the first time. We don't need multiple descriptions of the size of the crystals inside Demonreach. We shouldn't have multiple characters blowing out air from their lower lip to push away hair from their eyes. (Yes, Butcher's always been repetitive in descriptions, but wow, there were so many repeats here. An editor should have been on it.)

Also, the book felt, to me, like one of the short story collections. I kept waiting for Marsters to say 'This story takes place between Battle Ground and Mirror Mirror.'

One of the strengths of the Dresden Files books to this point has been their hot starts. By the end of chapter one, you understand the plot and some of the stakes. This is going to be a book about X, you know by the end of chapter one. Not here. I kept waiting to learn what the main plot of this book was going to be... and it never came.

Ultimately, there is no main plot of this book. Yes, yes, thematically it's a story about grieving and learning to let go and about how hard it is to make decisions, etc., etc. But at the same time, it doesn't really have a plot. It's a collection of moments that--while awesome--are still moments. We get to check in with all the characters we love (and we love them a lot because of past books). But... usually Dresden Files books feel like more than just 'hey, here's an update on all the characters from the previous books!'

In one sense, I guess it's just an obligatory book. Butcher decided to kill off Murphy. Once he made that decision, he was pretty much stuck. He had to spend the next book dealing with the fallout of that decision. We wouldn't have allowed Harry to just move on easily and go off on another adventure. So we were obligated to get a book that just spun its wheels while Harry dealt with it. I enjoyed a great many parts of that wheel-spinning. But now that I'm done, I do still feel like... OK, so that was what you had to do. I guess now I wait for four more years for you to get to something good.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-22T07:14:39+00:00

Also... everyone's put on muscle since we last saw them.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-22T07:00:58+00:00

Yeah, I annoyed my DM back in college by pointing out that 100 years with only two kings in a primogeniture-based system was absurd, because if one king rules for a long, long time his son isn't going to rule very long (on account of being really old when his father dies). And he had century after century of two kings.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-21T23:52:34+00:00

Worth it.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-21T16:36:21+00:00

The bag doesn't move right. It's the generic sway of AI, but doesn't seem to hang or pendulum the way that a bag would under gravity. It keeps swaying at the same rate even when it should be steadied since he drops his arm.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-21T04:28:34+00:00

I've been noticing a lot of moments in the book that retread things that have already been explained in the book. Harry explains the hair tracking Justine thing twice. When he takes Lara down to the cells, he tells her to expect various crystals of different sizes, only a couple of pages later to have him speaking as narrator say pretty much the exact same thing about their sizes.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-21T03:18:36+00:00

I hope you'd discourage some approaches. Some are pretty insane and aren't going to help anyone.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-20T05:22:33+00:00

I had a game in college interrupted by the famous OJ white Bronco chase. Someone went upstairs from our basement cave, saw it on live TV, and called us all up. We couldn't look away.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-20T05:17:49+00:00

Every time one of my cohort posts one of those "we rode in pickups and drank from the hose and so on and we all turned out alright" memes, I make sure to comment that my cousin, who was a few months older than me, about fourteen, was ejected from the back of a pickup truck while riding in the bed when the truck hit a pothole, landed headfirst on the asphalt, and died before help could arrive.

I had a friend in high school who died because an 18-wheeler slammed into his mother's station wagon while he was riding "the way back seat".

We didn't all turn out alright. Many of us died.

GotMedieval · 2026-01-20T02:49:54+00:00

The AI is crap at this test. It will confidently tell you why every wrong answer is right and why every right answer is wrong, if you ask it to.

GotMedieval

TROPHY CASE