100 days of enemy recs: 32. Dresden Files

[melannen]

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.

Comments

[melannen]

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.)

[highlander_ii]

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