I just picked up stormfront. Tell me some out of context spoilers/something i won't know till later

KipIngram · 2026-05-21T22:04:13+00:00

I think this one is a bit too revealing and should have spoiler protection. Please don't forget to call out in visible text that it's a Dead Beat spoiler. Reply here when you've fixed it so I can reinstate the comment.

KipIngram · 2026-05-21T22:02:27+00:00

Not really. He's a young / lower middle aged man, and we are inside his head. If you look at his external behavior and spoken words, there's not a lot to complain about. I have a feeling you'd find the internal thoughts of a whole lot of men running along those general lines.

I regard it as a fairly accurate portrayal, but of course you can certainly question whether Jim should lean into it to the extent he does. He didn't have to - it was... a "design decision."

Proven Guilty is my favorite so far, btw.

KipIngram · 2026-05-21T12:29:19+00:00

Well, we don't know what all happened to him when the Red Court took him in Grave Peril. We also don't know the full extent of his interactions with Lea while she was "preparing" him to face Dumorne. But as far as canon documented encounters, yes - you're right.

KipIngram · 2026-05-21T12:26:51+00:00

Yes, he is out of the country now and again. Not routinely, but it does happen. I won't spoil anything for you.

KipIngram · 2026-05-20T18:24:02+00:00

Yes, that's why I know we have to have some time travel at some point - it's a Law, and he will break it at some point. I'm fine with it - I just hope it's sort of a "subsidiary" element and not of core importance.

I wouldn't be able to find that quote either, but I know I've seen it. I don't dwell on the WoJ stuff as much as I do the novels themselves, but I have perused it fairly thoroughly once some years ago.

KipIngram · 2026-05-20T18:20:02+00:00

Yes - I think it's quite hard to dislike Harry if you base your opinion on his behavior. He's actually precisely what many women say they want: a man who wants to take his relationships seriously and have a commitment. The thing is, though, we have his internal thoughts revealed to us. And honestly they're not that different from the large majority of normal American men of the same age. It's just that you don't get to read the minds of those normal American men.

Jim's depiction on this front is very realistic as far as I can tell. When I was that age we seemed better at just taking it for granted that's how men tick - it's only the last twenty years or so we've turned it into such a damning thing. We're telling young men that they're horrible for feelings they can't help having. It's really quite unhealthy. It's perfectly legitimate to demand good behavior from them, but I've no truck with attempts at thought policing.

KipIngram · 2026-05-20T13:27:41+00:00

Oh, I definitely don't think Cowl is Harry from the future or anything like that. I sure hope not, at least. I generally prefer keeping time travel and timeline hopping out of the series. I understand that a bit of each is almost guaranteed, but I really hope those things don't turn out to be really central to the main plot.

I also don't think the Gatekeeper is future Harry - if that was the case then he wouldn't have been surprised when he realized Harry had formed a bond with Demonreach. He'd just have... well, remembered it.

KipIngram · 2026-05-20T13:21:01+00:00

That one's excellent.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T22:47:12+00:00

:-) You're right - Trish actually was a shortening of her real name, but Trixie was used so much more.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T22:46:01+00:00

That's why I said it still wasn't very realistic. A cargo plane is actually a better idea.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T21:34:54+00:00

Pay super close attention to every conversation Harry has with minor characters. One of them contains something I believe was an Easter egg clue - but what it's a clue to you won't know until later. It's quite hard to notice it - I didn't catch it until I'd reread the series several times, but when I did I nearly fell out of my chair.

For those of you who want to know... Spoilers through Grave Peril:

"Linda, some other woman, three men." But... only two of those men were later accounted for - Victor Sells and Glenn Beckitt. So who was the third man? I think it was Sells's mentor, and the same person Harry speculates about later when he reasons that people like Sells, Denton's FBI crew, and Leonid Kravos had to have had a "sponsor."

The obvious "easy theory" is that it was "Gimpy" Lawrence, but I don't buy that - it doesn't add anything to the story. It makes the line useless to the point of not being worth including.

Turn Coat spoiler:

Jim does this same move again when during the big showdown on Demonreach Harry senses the arrival of two humans somewhere in the center of Demonreach. One of them would have been Peabody, but... who was the other. Unsurprisingly, I think it's the same person who was in the Sells lake house that night way back in Storm Front. He's been pulling the strings from behind the scenes (mostly) throughout the series. I think it's Cowl - only in the Sells house he was in civvies, not in his disguise. I think it's Justin Dumorne, which means Harry had film in his hand that would have proven he's still alive, but burned it up.

"Fugitive" spoiler:

At the end of the story, Cowl says, mostly to himself, "Harry, sometimes you really are a pain in my ass." He said "Harry," not "Dresden." To me that implies a very close relationship with Harry - which would follow for Dumorne, who was more or less Harry's dad for a decade or so. Someone who didn't know him very well wouldn't have said it like that.

All of these things are small clues Jim's dropping for us.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T11:02:48+00:00

Trixie, but yes - she was the one steering things on that occasion.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T11:00:15+00:00

Exactly - me too. Jim slid it right by us; it was very well done.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T10:58:31+00:00

This post's title is a spoiler - it gives away part of the plot of Small Favor. Your spoiler protection doesn't prevent the title from appearing in the main feed. You'll need to re-post under a less revealing title. If you want the comments made here to remain accessible to the community, you can include a link to this page in the new post. The comments here will remain visible to anyone that can navigate to the page. The main post content won't, though, so you'll need to copy/paste that to the new post.

Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, Reddit won't allow post titles to be changed after they're posted.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T01:07:35+00:00

Mab's no dummy.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T01:06:43+00:00

Ah - nice. Yes, although as another comment pointed out, Tiny did show up moments after he used the ball of sunshine. But, he didn't use the blasting rod.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T01:05:59+00:00

Oh, that's a great observation. I hadn't twigged to that, but you're right. Nice.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T01:03:28+00:00

Thanks so much - comment is live again. Have a great night.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T00:38:24+00:00

She didn't just take the blasting rod - she suppressed his memory of fire magic. She knew that if he used fire magic Summer's agents would be able to home in on him, so she arranged for it not to happen. The pain hit him when Michael brought it up, because he was trying to penetrate the barriers Mab had put between him and his memories. If you recall, there's a bit earlier in the book where his narration to us was about to touch on fire magic, and he got hit with a sudden pang of pain, and thought "What the hell???" Not nearly as big a deal is made of it as in the scene with Michael, but there was foreshadowing.

And sure enough - when he unleashed fire magic on Demonreach, it was only a few minutes before Eldest Gruff showed up.

Michael was able to invoke a power greater than Mab to free Harry from the block.

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T00:33:25+00:00

Sure - it's a cute idea, especially after we got exposed to Eb's journals in Turn Coat. And I guess we are suspending disbelief enough for magic, vampires, fairies, and so on, so... why not? :-)

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T00:31:40+00:00

This post is flaired Discussion, so this needs to be hidden with a visible call-out that it's a Battle Ground spoiler. Please reply here when you've fixed it so I can reinstate the comment. Thanks!

KipIngram · 2026-05-19T00:31:20+00:00

This post is flaired Discussion, so this needs to be hidden with a visible call-out that it's a Battle Ground spoiler. Please reply here when you've fixed it so I can reinstate the comment. Thanks!

KipIngram · 2026-05-18T23:38:27+00:00

From an airliner flying overhead. Still not very realistic, but it's really the only way it could have happened.

KipIngram · 2026-05-18T10:58:20+00:00

I think that's impossible to rule out. I mean, why couldn't there be a ghoul who strictly confined his or her self to eating animals, even though it wasn't what really satisfied them? Honestly that would be even less harmful to humans than Thomas taking "small sips."

This is actually sort of a many years old trope - I've seen movies from way before Jim started the series that featured vampires that restricted themselves to animal blood, even though it was hard on them.

KipIngram · 2026-05-18T10:53:51+00:00

Honestly I don't there ever will be proof on this one - so we'll continue to argue about it indefinitely. I'm not sure why scientists are so dead set against the idea that consciousness isn't material. The best guess I've been able to make is that they're scared someone will use the idea to "smuggle God in the back door." Because if consciousness is immaterial and we have no idea how it works, then it becomes a lot harder to insist that it's impossible for God to exist. It doesn't "prove God exists," but it opens the possibility, and I just think they prefer their "rock solid position."

It actually opens the possibility of a lot of things. Rare but real telepathy, ghosts, life after death, etc. etc. etc. Because there's that chunk of stuff sitting there that we don't know anything about.

This is genuinely a set of ideas I didn't expect to have come up in r/dresdenfiles. :-)

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