melannen | 100 days of enemy recs: 32. Dresden Files

Dresden Files! For which I have to do Dresden/Marcone, even though canon gives us many (many many many) other intriguing possibilities.

Harry Dresden and John Marcone are one of those interestingly unbalanced foeyay pairs - Harry think John is an irredeemably evil, untrustworthy criminal scumbag. John thinks Harry is a generally competent and reliable colleague with whom he shares a lot of goals and values and with whom he would enjoy working more closely someday, should the occasion arise. Harry has no idea what to do with this because, forget all the rest, nobody has ever treated him like he was competent, reliable, and pleasant to work with before in his life.

(Harry is also the world's least reliable narrator, about everything but his own feelings most of all, which always makes shipping extremely entertaining, at least until you hit the point in canon where you go... oh. oh no. the author thought that bit of Harry's POV was actually accurate???)

Have some all-time favorites of mine.

Enemy Mine (145371 words) by gremble
Chapters: 16/16
Fandom: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harry Dresden/Johnny Marcone

Sometimes a date isn't just a date.

Mafia traditions (4136 words) by forestgreen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harry Dresden/Johnny Marcone

Sometimes a date *is* just a date, but then it ends up on the front page of the paper and none of your friends and relations will *believe* you when you try to tell them it was just a date!

Black Magic Woman (5114 words) by binz, beachkid, shiplizard
Fandom: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher, Dresden Files - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harry Dresden/John Marcone
Additional Tags: Kinkmeme, Drag Queen, Pre-Relationship, Community: dresden_kink, Drag

Sometimes it's actually a work meeting, but your associate insists on meeting at a drag club just to be obnoxious, and then the starring act turns out to be the last person you ever expected to see in drag.

Sympathetic Magic (11860 words) by Nemo_the_Everbeing
Fandom: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harry Dresden/John Marcone
Additional Tags: Snark, The Apocalypse Made Them Do It, Magic

Sometimes it's not a date at all, but the options were "sex ritual" or "human sacrifice" so you decided to pick the first one and just pretend really hard.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dresden canon really does all apart when you reach the point where you can no longer ignore the fact that Butcher thinks Harry is awesome and a reliable narrator and a feminist ally and whatever. Different people reach that moment in different books, but eventually it becomes overwhelmingly clear that we're all reading very, very much against the text. Which would be fine--canon is full of that--but then we have Peter Grant and Nightingale, and suddenly there's this other place that's not hitting us over the head with the author's explicit nastiness, and it's so much more joyful.

(Although if Kobna Holdbrook Smith narrated Jim Butcher, maybe I'd go back to Dresden.)

Yeah. And it's made even more frustrating that he clearly does play with Harry's unreliability deliberately - there's the thing with Lash and the fire to lamplight it even if you discount everything else as wishful thinking, but surely at least *some* of the stuff where it is slowly revealed that the Marcone situation isn't entirely black and white was deliberate. Which makes it all the more disappointing when you realize how limited the author's awareness of it is.

Like, some of it was clearly never going to be made explicit due to genre constraints - the part where an urban fantasy protagonist is constantly facing rape and never, ever admits that's what's going on or deals with it in any way is practically a required trope, and the fact that we expected better from a male protag than a female one says as much about the audience, really. And we were never going to get the part where he takes a long look at how he looks at men and realizes he's not as straight as he thinks he is, not in a series marketed like that one. And there's only so much any tradpub author is going to be allowed to move his character arcs in a long-running series.

I think it's relevant that the fandom got really big right around the point there was all this buzz about a big new mid-series installment that changes everything! Nothing will be the same! Maybe he really will move his character arcs and transcend genre expectations! And then we discover that the author's idea of huge series-defining changes is basically manpain, and also more manpain, and that's it, and that's really when a lot of people left.

But honestly it's a problem I see in a lot of long-running single-creator series where the characters' personal growth arcs outstrip the author's - they start out well behind and everybody cheers them on together, but then they catch up to the author, and the author thinks they're done. And then we're stuck with either the equivalent of a bunch of anime filler episodes while we wait for the author to get a little bit ahead again, or things go entirely off the rails.

(I notice this more as I get older and start out a little bit farther along my own character growth arc. Presumably by the time I am an 80-year-old fandom granny I will either have given up on canon entirely, or outgrown the need to give a damn.)

tho - we're on book 17 and the series was designed as about 20 casebooks then the big trilogy at the end, so, we're kinda almost done. and i legit figure he'll be all the way done post-trilogy except for short stories.

personally - i was not a huge fan of either Peace Talks or Battle Ground - b/c both were kind of a lot of plot-dump w/ v little happening until the battle thing. and i think the series shift a little bit off the main path post-Changes... b/c they don't really feel like 'cases' anymore.

i'm not a Harry/Marcone person - but i do think Harry isn't quite as straight as he believes himself to be, even if the Harry/Karen contingent waves the straight flag super hard for him.

also - some of the secondary characters get done kinda dirty and left out of the stories where they would be serious assets and very useful. (looking at Ramirez here, among others)

I actually stopped with Ghost Stories, partly because I was mad about Molly, but partly because that's when I realized I just didn't like the way he was doing Big Plot. Or how he was handling having a large cast with big stories - it makes sense to leave out half the cast on a fast-moving case file, not so much when you're planning out the final showdown (Tbf I generally dislike it when long-running series switch over to Big Plot but when they do it by burning everything down and powering up mc at everyone else's expense I like it even less)

Agrees on the bi thing - it was always most obvious with the Knights of the Cross, tbh (there's a reason both Marcone shippers and Murphy shippers wanted their fave to get a sword! I feel like that's Harry's real orientation.)

i marked a couple big-ish spoilers for anyone who might wanna skip those parts...

and if you wanna know about stuff in books post-Ghost Story, lemme know

i... didn't like Ghost Story much at all. it was a 'filler' story that felt a lot like a bunch of exposition for shit that would be needed later. spoiler: Peace Talks was p much the same thing leading into Battle Ground. Cold Days is better than GS, but is still 'plot set up' stuff. Skin Game is more like a typical case book, making it far more enjoyable.

there was a Q&A w/ Jim somewhere about Changes and he said the 3 options for Harry to 'power up' before the battle were: Winter Knight, take up Lash's coin, or call up the Dark Hallow. but - none of these is really necessary if a couple things change - 1) if Harry doesn't break his back (which i'm p sure only happens to force Harry's hand), he doesn't need some big power to 'fix' him; and 2) if he CALLS HIS GODDAMNED FRIENDS. they will help him! he has his mother's magic Ways map thing - he could haul off to pick up all his friends and cart 'em back to wherever he needs them to go p fast and boom - lots of back-up. since 'fight through the vampire army' was what he needed the power for. and if Susan's gonna die anyway, then it's actually a more interesting story for Harry to be regular!Harry and get to Ortega and be like 'well, shit.... how the hell am i gonna win this?' and then Susan goes 'chomp' and no more baddies.

b/c supposedly Harry is like stupid-wicked-hella magic powerful compared to alllllllll the other wizards. but since he's so frequently out-classed or still a clumsy teenager type wizard (when compared to like Morgan and McCoy), it doesn't LOOK that way. if he's that strong, why does he burn out so hard and why is he not able to knock over like a skinwalker? how the fuck is he gonna win against Outsiders if he can't smack around the heaviest Earth-based hitters? or even the medium ones? Battle Ground spoiler: a freaking Titan shows up to smack everyone around and sort of changes the scale again

sword spoiler: neither of the 'faves' gets one... one of the faves gets something else entirely

The bit where three different women declare their feelings for him and I realized, "oh no, the author really does think women are into this?"

The previous time it happened she turned out to be possessed as part of an evil plot! It's like he almost had some self-awareness about it.

100 days of enemy recs: 32. Dresden Files

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