Ghost Story
I finished Ghost Story today! It took me what - about five months? - to bull my way through Changes and I did Ghost Story in less than five hours this morning.
It is kind of strange to be here without any more Dresden Files books at the top of my To-Read pile, I have to say.
I think I enjoyed this one more that any of the others. Possibly because I came to it almost completely unspoiled - I don't come to media completely unspoiled very often, as you might have noticed, but every so often (usually when I'm on a two-week trip when a new book comes out) I arrange it as a sort of a luxury. I am divided on how it changes the experience - I know a study recently came out that claimed that stories are more fun if you're spoiled. I suspect it has to do with how one is spoiled, and how much one would have enjoyed the story regardless - Changes wasn't really a book I would've like either way, but I think Ghost Story is now going to be the book I recommend as a starting point for DF. (Well, that or MoC.) And coming to it unspoiled was fun.
I think all I really knew was that Murphy took a few more levels in badassery and, I think it was![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jadelennox, told me that it really didn't mess up the fanfic at all.
Which was true! Man, this book was a fic writer's dream: it filled in a bunch of backstory, gave us awesome looks at minor characters, played with some world mechanics, threw up some more plot hooks, but resolved absolutely none of the long-standing mysteries and left things in pretty much the same state they were after the previous book. None of the stories I was working on are jossed! Actually some of them are more plausible now. Which is always the mark of a good installment of a serial. :P
I think the main thing, though, was that I actually liked Harry in this book. I liked him in a lot of the early books - he already had issues out the wazoo, but he was likeable anyway. I liked him on-and-off even through parts of Turncoat. I didn't much like him at any point in Changes, and I think part of the reason I bulled through the last couple of chapters is that I knew he got shot at the end. :P Butcher seems to like to take Harry through these cycles of being rage-ful and unsympathetic, and then pull him back - the first time it was fallen angels messing with his head, and it's interesting that this one seems to imply the same kind of crap was going on with him in Changes, dammit every time I decide I don't trust Butcher any more he pulls something where the narrative disagrees with the same things I hated.
Also: every so often I will come across people saying that Dresden Files lacks "strong female characters" and I just sort of go "bwuh?" Dresden Files lacks well-written female characters and has some pretty nasty misogyny written into its fabric, but strong? I mean, in Ghost Story Chicago falls into a supernatural war zone, and the city basically seems to have ended up divided between Molly, Lea, Murphy, and Lara, and a bunch of mostly-female minor practitioners through the Paranet, and the Alphas which gave the appearance of being mostly female despite the mysterious disappearance of Georgia, providing backup. And Mab and the Corpse-taker seething underground and pulling strings. With Marcone and Forthill and Butters keeping the home-fires burning and providing nursing, sandwiches, and emotional support.
I mean, it is in no way a feminist or even female-friendly text, but my god, that book, it was all women making things happen and the men just sort of bumbling around them trying to keep them from going critical. It was kind of awesome.
In other news: every bit as gay as I could have asked for! If I go onto the post-Ghost Story kinkmeme and it isn't stuffed full of Bob/Butters and Bob/Harry, there is no justice in the world. Or Bob/Butters/Harry, since it's now canon that in Dresden-files verse, threesomes solve everything. :P (I hope there is some good meaty Thomas/Justine/Mara that actually treats it as an evolving poly relationship, too.) And somehow it managed to be all about Marcone's fixation on Harry despite his being, apparently, several thousand miles away. :P I am suspecting that fandom and/or Butcher is going to latch on to where exactly Marcone was... (I am suspecting the answer is 'up to his kneecaps in trouble related to Harry's business').
I still need to figure out which of Harry's friends would play the keyboards, though. Harry is obviously guitar, Butters is on drums, one of the Carpenters is on harmonica, but I can't make up my mind about keyboards. And does anybody know of anybody who does polka/blues fusion music? It seems like it must exist but I haven't found any except this one Swedish group that doesn't quite work.
OMG I just realized - Mr. Sunshine. Harry you've got to learn to stop freaking naming creatures of unimaginable power!
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Other thing I did: I fixed my computer cord! With my soldering iron! All by myself! Well, except those two wires that I can't figure out what they're for, but the battery's charging, so there. :P
It is kind of strange to be here without any more Dresden Files books at the top of my To-Read pile, I have to say.
I think I enjoyed this one more that any of the others. Possibly because I came to it almost completely unspoiled - I don't come to media completely unspoiled very often, as you might have noticed, but every so often (usually when I'm on a two-week trip when a new book comes out) I arrange it as a sort of a luxury. I am divided on how it changes the experience - I know a study recently came out that claimed that stories are more fun if you're spoiled. I suspect it has to do with how one is spoiled, and how much one would have enjoyed the story regardless - Changes wasn't really a book I would've like either way, but I think Ghost Story is now going to be the book I recommend as a starting point for DF. (Well, that or MoC.) And coming to it unspoiled was fun.
I think all I really knew was that Murphy took a few more levels in badassery and, I think it was
jadelennox, told me that it really didn't mess up the fanfic at all.Which was true! Man, this book was a fic writer's dream: it filled in a bunch of backstory, gave us awesome looks at minor characters, played with some world mechanics, threw up some more plot hooks, but resolved absolutely none of the long-standing mysteries and left things in pretty much the same state they were after the previous book. None of the stories I was working on are jossed! Actually some of them are more plausible now. Which is always the mark of a good installment of a serial. :P
I think the main thing, though, was that I actually liked Harry in this book. I liked him in a lot of the early books - he already had issues out the wazoo, but he was likeable anyway. I liked him on-and-off even through parts of Turncoat. I didn't much like him at any point in Changes, and I think part of the reason I bulled through the last couple of chapters is that I knew he got shot at the end. :P Butcher seems to like to take Harry through these cycles of being rage-ful and unsympathetic, and then pull him back - the first time it was fallen angels messing with his head, and it's interesting that this one seems to imply the same kind of crap was going on with him in Changes, dammit every time I decide I don't trust Butcher any more he pulls something where the narrative disagrees with the same things I hated.
Also: every so often I will come across people saying that Dresden Files lacks "strong female characters" and I just sort of go "bwuh?" Dresden Files lacks well-written female characters and has some pretty nasty misogyny written into its fabric, but strong? I mean, in Ghost Story Chicago falls into a supernatural war zone, and the city basically seems to have ended up divided between Molly, Lea, Murphy, and Lara, and a bunch of mostly-female minor practitioners through the Paranet, and the Alphas which gave the appearance of being mostly female despite the mysterious disappearance of Georgia, providing backup. And Mab and the Corpse-taker seething underground and pulling strings. With Marcone and Forthill and Butters keeping the home-fires burning and providing nursing, sandwiches, and emotional support.
I mean, it is in no way a feminist or even female-friendly text, but my god, that book, it was all women making things happen and the men just sort of bumbling around them trying to keep them from going critical. It was kind of awesome.
In other news: every bit as gay as I could have asked for! If I go onto the post-Ghost Story kinkmeme and it isn't stuffed full of Bob/Butters and Bob/Harry, there is no justice in the world. Or Bob/Butters/Harry, since it's now canon that in Dresden-files verse, threesomes solve everything. :P (I hope there is some good meaty Thomas/Justine/Mara that actually treats it as an evolving poly relationship, too.) And somehow it managed to be all about Marcone's fixation on Harry despite his being, apparently, several thousand miles away. :P I am suspecting that fandom and/or Butcher is going to latch on to where exactly Marcone was... (I am suspecting the answer is 'up to his kneecaps in trouble related to Harry's business').
I still need to figure out which of Harry's friends would play the keyboards, though. Harry is obviously guitar, Butters is on drums, one of the Carpenters is on harmonica, but I can't make up my mind about keyboards. And does anybody know of anybody who does polka/blues fusion music? It seems like it must exist but I haven't found any except this one Swedish group that doesn't quite work.
OMG I just realized - Mr. Sunshine. Harry you've got to learn to stop freaking naming creatures of unimaginable power!
***
Other thing I did: I fixed my computer cord! With my soldering iron! All by myself! Well, except those two wires that I can't figure out what they're for, but the battery's charging, so there. :P
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Hmmm, I actually gave up when I heard about Changes...maybe I will make myself read it so I can read Ghost Story now.
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With threesomes. /possibly still bitterTBH if you're reasonably spoiled for Changes and don't find it tempting I might just skip right to Ghost Story. It still has some infuriating bits but it was overall a much more pleasant reading experience than anything since, oh, Dead Beat, and there is a fair amount of Harry actually starting to realize why he's been so infuriating ever since Dead Beat and how that is hurting the people he cares about, Harry realizing he was wrong about things I didn't even think Butcher had realized were wrong (although there's still a ways to go, ngl.) Oh, and lots and lots of Butters and Bob, which makes anything better really. Including Dead Beat, come to think of it.
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on a side note, i'm annoyed that the kink-meme is overrun by Harry/Marcone prompts... and yeah, i've done what i can to rectify that, but there's just so darned many of them... and i don't have quite that much energy. more Carlos, dammit! more Morgan, for that matter. XD (and i've supplied prompts for both and fills for Carlos)
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(I can be flexible on the blues but it has to be specifically polka-y + something jazzlike. Because polka never dies.)
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My current stories-I-want-to-work-on have no Marcone at all! And yet.
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I would never call him jazz fusion, though. Newgrass, maybe; made of solid awesome, definitely.
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Heh. I just finished Ghost Story and I was kind of amazed by the whole Nothing Happens aspect of it. I'd reread Changes right before starting Ghost Story and to go from All The Plot to Ghost Story was a bit weird. ;) Ghost Story seems to be all about characterization, but it's 400 pages of no plot, just It's A Wonderful Life plus action scenes: Harry has an epiphany, other characters experience Growth (well, they experienced growth between the time Harry got shot and Harry comes back, so it's off screen), and Harry then wakes up and we're back where we were at the end of Changes, except with +1 characterization. Butcher could have done this as a short story, so, honestly, I think if I were reccing this series, Ghost Story is one I'd recommend *skipping* as mostly a waste of time and sum it up with "Harry realizes he screwed up. There's Shenanigans to make him be a ghost and a lot of exposition about how he's not really a ghost or maybe he is and no one has any clue, basically. Murphy and Molly don't get along, Maggie's a new baby Carpenter, and we get more backstory about Harry's messed up childhood. Plus an archangel is involved and no on gets his wings. Onward to Harry's adventures as the Winter Knight!" But that's just me. ;)
(Dresden Files fandom amazes me. When I first read the books, what I really wanted was Harry/Thomas fic and was very confused about Harry/Bob until I found out that in the tv show, Bob is not book!Bob. And now that there's a ton more fic in the fandom, the most prominent pairing is Harry/Marcone! And while I like Harry/Marcone fic, I think this is more proof that when I consume media, I am reading/watching a completely different source than everyone else. ;) )
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Though I did fill 4/5 of a line w/ Carlos/Harry for kink_bingo this year. (The 5th square was Morgan.)
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On the other hand, it's a particular sort of plot, a kind that a lot of people aren't really going to be grabbed by, and the earlier books have some pretty rough writing and characterization. So if I think it's more likely they'd fall in love with the world and the characters, screw this 'plot' thing (which, admit it, describes a lot of fic writers!) I would probably start 'em with Ghost Story.
I wouldn't say Ghost Story has no plot, though! "Harry is sent back to Earth as a spirit to solve the mystery of his death" (which is a venerable and respected plot, really) "and quickly finds himself in the middle of a fight to save Chicago, and Chicago's ghostly population, from a mysterious robed sorcerer." It's paced very differently from the plots of the other books, though. I found with most of the others, I found find it very slow going in the beginning, until I got about 2/3 of the way through and then everything started happening at once and I couldn't put it down. Ghost Story was a lot more evenly paced, and there were fewer buildings on fire, but I was much more interested in what happens next, right from the beginning.
(Besides, what's wrong with It's a Wonderful Life? Other than a need for urban fantasy elements, of course, but I fixed that for you already :P Although now I'm imagining George Bailey with the ability to light shit on fire with his mind. That would've improved the movie even more than vampires did.)
RE the fandom: Don't underestimate the founder effect! I think a lot of people currently in the fandom got there by way of
bondgaze is there from book 1 and it takes a while to get to Thomas - hardcore slash-goggly people will have imprinted on the Harry/John in the first two books before Thomas even shows up.)I have shipped bookverse Harry/Bob since the beginning, but I have now gotten a bit tangled up in the fact that post-GS, Harry's image of human!Bob is going to be that he looks like a young rebel version of Butters, and haven't quite figured out where to go with that yet. (Also does that mean that if he goes back to Harry, he'll look like young!Harry in a leather jacket? Hmmm.)
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...also I must learn more about this 'Accordion wrestling' concept.
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I liked Dresden with women--I'm getting really tired of Dresden never catching a break, and to me, without Mister and the basement, Dresden just isn't Dresden. So I suspect part of it is that the story is heading in a direction I'm completely uninterested in going. That happened at the end of Battlestar Galactica, and it's happened in other tv, movie, and book series where I have no interest in following the narrative past a certain point.
I hate to give up on Dresden--but I have.
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Ha, yes, I should know than to just shove that out, because my Problems with It's a Wonderful Life are myriad, but it's not like it's Supernatural...
okay. So, it's a wonderful life. The entire point of the thing is "everyone else's life sucks without The Hero being there". No one else can do anything good in their life. Not even with all of their other friends being there, not even in a world where it's not like they're mourning a missing hole for a friend who isn't there, because he was never there in the first place. No one else can do anything. The only reason people have any kind of happiness is because of The Hero. They can't do anything for themselves, and the Hero needs to exist for other people to achieve anything; they can't do it 1) alone, or 2) with-other-people-but-without-Hero. And it's telling the Hero that their existence is what makes life worthful for other people, so *guilt guilt guilt*, you cannot choose to do something else with your life. There are no other people. His brother's life wouldn't have been saved by someone else. The woman he marries would never have married anyone else. Other people he was a positive factor for wouldn't have be saved by other people. Nope, it's the Hero who does it, who's the only one who *can*, or people die. (I will admit that the whole dead sibling thing was one of the things that hit me over the head first of all, because dead siblings are a poke-button issue. If you're going to shove dead siblings at me, it better not be "they died because *you* selfishly were never born").
So it's all of my problems with the Chosen Hero Epic (the hero must be a certain specific person, who is Worthy, and everyone else is just not good enough, and born that way and will stay that way, they cannot change or rise to the occassion), but with an even bigger twist: the Hero *has* to save you from yourself and the inertic suckiness of your life. You need the Hero and if the Hero for some reason fails, you cannot rise and fix your own life.
And then we get the It's A Wonderful Life stuff in other canons. Take Highlander. Tessa would have a life without love. Kronos has magical timing, but even igorning that, okay, I could give them Methos, since they seem to be pushing that's canon that Methos really hasn't changed himself that much, even though Methos's entire shtick is Methos hacking himself and making himself change, for ex the Byron flashbacks. Richie's life sucks. Joe's life sucks. Fitz's life sucks and then he died. Duncan has to be the savior that he's sick and tired of being, that he's run himself ragged trying to do, because without Duncan there, no one will ever smile again and roses will never bloom.
I can take an element of "you yourself are a shiny special snowflake and this specific thing only you could have ever done", but IAWL makes it seem like *one person* not being born is the difference between sucks-but-fundamentally-okay and dystopia.
Someone just needs to write a couple of really good epic-length Harry/Thomas stories to prime the pump! Hint hint.
See, I'd say someone should write that (and they should!), but I think there are books that are epic Harry/Thomas slash. ;) By the time Harry is admitting he's Thomas's boyfriend and getting flirty, I'd forgotten about Marcone. ;)
(Also, if I write any epic, it may be The Laisa Thing, which is pushing hard to be nanowrimo and also to be Laisa/Delia. I have my hands full with *minor* canon characters wanting epics. ;) )
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Though don't count out fiction's ability to reset things! Mister will never die. And I'll take bets we'll have Harry living in a tiny apartment in Chicago (maybe even PI'ing again) by book-after-next. After all, the Summer Knights apparently did that sort of thing. Thought of course some of the changes in Magical Chicago itself aren't turning back.
But I do think any series that goes on too long needs a sea change like that, or it gets boring and jaded; I've stuck with too many series past that point. Any change to something basic in a series is going to lose the people who were there for that, inevitably.
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A few years back I would have agreed with you on all of this, but then I was forced out of a Buffy fic-reading marathon to watch it with family, and I was like, this movie is depressing and terrible and George Bailey is possibly the only person in the world whose life, and the lives of those around him, would be incontrovertibly improved if he was killed by a vampire and replaced with a conscienceless demon.
But in the course of writing that fic I had to actually watch the movie again and pay attention to it, especially the Gothic elements in it, and I realized that no, the problem is with the interpretation that everybody gives it, that if you actually watch the thing, it's dark and creepy and depressing all the way through, and you can read it as the filmmakers trying to subvert that happy message and it kind of kills me that it's become a heartwarming Christmas classic, that George was going to kill himself because he believed all that crap about being the Chosen One and that was why his life was miserable, and if he'd look away enough to realize that there are other people out there who are the heroes of their own stories, he could maybe let himself be happy. But, y'know, he never does, so he's just going to keep on being miserable and probably successfully kill himself before Zuzu's out of school.
...but the fact that vampire!AU is mostly my headcanon for it now may be making my memories of it a bit rosier than they were. (Also possibly my still-residual anger at a friend of mine who killed himself with similar excuses around that time, ngl.)
Although I've been catching up on Ghost Story reaction posts, and I'm seeing a lot of people describe it as grimdark and more depressing than the other books, and I'm like "were you reading the same story?" Because in the Ghost Story I read, everybody had already been living in a grimdark world, but they'd been leaning on Harry and letting him be the hero, and with him gone they all stepped up and fucking became their own heroes, and a lot of the character development Harry got is him going, "Um, actually, you guys are doing at least as well as I would've, possibly better, and all the shit you're in is because I was making stupid mistakes because I couldn't get over myself, stop beating yourselves up for not being me." It was happy and cheerful and fluffy and all about all sorts of different people being awesome and Harry letting himself see that!
So really it was kind of It's A Wonderful Life, except Harry actually started to learn something and gets to go off and have adventures and let everybody grow. Unlike George's reset.
Anyway.
LAISA/DELIA EPIC OMG YES.
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So how are you treating the angel element? He wants to commit suicide because he thinks they'll be happier, and then he depresses himself more by deciding that no, they won't, and so he has to force himself to keep going? And the rowsing angel gets his wings ending?
LAISA/DELIA EPIC OMG YES.
So, Delia Koudelka is the first person, ignore *woman*, the first person, hands down, in her family to go to uni (excepting her father at district military academy which seems to be rather different than uni), and she's 24 and she's getting her Goddamn Masters Degree. But everyone just wants to talk to her about Marriage and Dresses and stuff, and, sure, she can talk that talk and walk that walk, because she knows that beneath the veneer, there are serious games going on, there are power brokers and information streams and it's all connected and working towards multiple things at once. And she gets into these events because she's 1) female, 2) attractive, 3) well-connected, and 4) female and attractive and well-connected. So she knows how to get in, she knows how to move around, and after seven or so years of this, she knows the first questions she gets asked when she's introduced. It's always about her father. Everyone always assumes that everything she does is as an extention of her father, who is himself an extension of Aral Vorkosigan. She knows her lines.
Laisa asks her what she's studying and Laisa is the first person, ever, at one of these events to want to talk about her thesis more than about *men*.
It's a seduction by Bechdel pass, I think.
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Laisa/Delia: Still sounds awesome, OMG. Really exploring how the Koudelka sisters live, yes! Are you keeping Duv/Delia in it, or going AU?
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And then it got plot and wanted to be more serious, and now it's decided it wants to be a lesbian AU. So now I'm wondering if I need to find Gregor a convenient woman, or it's just irrelevant. Or maybe I can mash this up with a Someone Notices You Can Still Have UR Children After You're Dead And Also Legitimacy Laws Only Require Marriage And Not Acknowledgement and so the heir probablem is *which one* of Dorca or Xav's posthumous children/grandchildren (assuming Xav's son was married).
Or...
And now I'm just thinking out loud...
One of the real problems that needs to be dealt with when dealing with sociopolitical, to say nothing of military, Barrayar is the power of the Vor, where they have it, where they don't, where they're holding on by their teeth. I read through Shards/Barrayar and paid attention to who's Vor and who isn't, and so we come to Memory and Illyan's collapse, roughly a year after Aral Vorkosigan got a medical discharge from politics and was replaced by a prole. Proles hold the highest civilian power now behind the Emperor (prime minister is higher authority than chief of impsec, apparently), so any friction that existed between in Shards/Barrayar still exists and now it's been around long enough that people can have their entire careers and never be commanded by someone with a Vor in their name.
And yet the political system is *exactly the same*. And yet the justice system is *exactly the same*. Counts still have the right of life and death over the people in their districts. Yes, they can get up and move... the ones who *can* get up and move. But that assumes there's a real choice between here and over there, that there are significant differences, it ain't meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Something has got to give.
(But this might be like all the times I contemplate Aral's first wife and get pissed off. Which happens more frequently than it might seem, considering her complete erasure in canon... oh, here I go again...)
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You're right, of course, about changes revitalizing a series. And I know that my roommate will buy the next Dresden, and I might even start reading it again. In a lot of ways, though, my free-time reading is intended to relax me after work or on my way to work, so something that is the "same but different" (as my librarian roommate's patrons used to say) is more relaxing for me.
It does make me feel sometimes as if I'm letting my critical brain rot, though, reading relaxing fiction and switching off that for non-fiction in the science, crime, and biography ends...
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It's a seduction by Bechdel pass, I think.
Holy shit. Want.
I just got smacked in the face yesterday, again, with how badly movies erase and isolate female characters, and how little most people care about that. My vast and terrible hunger for Bechdel-passing fic has reawakened. (Not that it was ever really gone.)
I'm kind of torn about which is the more attractive image: Delia/Laisa with no men involved at all, or Delia/Laisa in the context of canon relationships + polyamory. I would read the hell out of either. (I have believed for years that Delia-Laisa is going to be one of the most significant and powerful relationships in Barrayaran history, right up there with Cordelia-Alys. I can't believe it didn't occur to me to slash them. Thanks!)