Yeah, Lea's pretty damn powerful. She ripped through several Lords of the Outer Night pretenders in Changes without much effort.

 

As another point of order, I'm pretty sure that the only way to actually kill a Faerie is to do so in the Nevernever or an in-between place like Chicago-over-Chicago. Killing a Faerie in the normal world just leaves you with a bunch of ectoplasm while sending the actual Faerie back to the Nevernever.

 

I'm not convinced that's true. It's certainly possible, but if the Fae behaved the same as demons and other similar creatures of the Nevernever, dealing with them would be much less dangerous and whatnot than it is portrayed as.

For example, we know taking matter from the nevernever and closing a circle around it causes it to revert to ectoplasm, but no one in the series seems to think drawing a circle around Mab or Lea or whatever would do much good.

Then there's also the whole "they can't come [into the mortal world] unless they're called" (ala Binder's friends in TC and the Toad Demon from SF), which doesn't seem to be true of Faeries, seeing as Lea seems to be able to come and go as she pleases.

It's definitely possible that you are correct, and we won't know until we see a Fae die in the mortal realm, but I think Faeries operate on a different set of rules.

 

Harry repeatedly traps Toot within a circle. The first time (onscreen) that this happens, Toot references the fact this has happened before. Several times.

 

Did a quick canon-check, and it's a bit confusing; the Fetches in Proven Guilty dissolve into ectoplasm, but being shapeshifters muddies the issue.

The Gruffs in Small Favor, on the other hand, are a bit of an odder case; they leave behind corpses, but Harry's conversation with Tiny makes it sound like they may not actually be dead, just wounded (and even then only on account of Harry using cold iron against them).

 

Don't forget, Harry trapped the Erlking in a circle (though if memory serves, it was one he had quite a bit of time and thought put into) and likely could've kept him there long enough had he not been bopped on the head.

 

Kinda my point. Toot doesn't get obliterated into ectoplasm like Binder's goons do. He's just stuck inside it. If the Fae followed the "normal" (as best I can tell) pattern of beings from the Nevernever, Mab, Lea and Toot would just dissolve if someone were to draw a circle around them. Since that doesn't happen, it's probably safe to say the Fae follow different rules.

It's hard to say, because it almost seems as if the rules change on a case-by-case basis, but as best I can tell, the Fae are, for lack of a better term, "more real" than the other beasties. Which means if you kill one, it's dead, regardless of where.

 

The earlier topic of discussion reminds me of Wizards vs. Muggles, except now it's wizards vs. Fae. :awesome

On an unrelated note, though, it goes to show you how beastly the Archive is. The RPG puts the Archive's power on the same level as faerie queens, which would seem to mean that Ivy could pretty much take on the White Council all by her lonesome.

I hope we get to see what she can do when she isn't energy restricted, some day.

 

I mean, in regards to magic, what exactly does the Archive not know?

Heck yeah she's a beast.

 

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody writes about it, the Archive doesn't know about it.

 

I think we can safely assume that almost everything about magic has been written down at some point. See: Kemmler. If nothing else, she knows how to perform the Darkhallow.

 

All the Fae are part mortal so they leave physical remains behind when they die. The youngest gruffs in Small Favor were killed in the Carpenters' back garden and it is specifically mentioned that because they didn't dissolved into ectoplasm then they must be Faeries.

 

If its ever been recorded in any fashion whatsoever she knows it so I'd suspect damn near everything.

 

Just think of all the LiveJournal and MySpace entries she has soaking up precious space up there, not to mention the other social media muck :fire

 

Just think of all the CIA files she knows about.

 

Oh god, the poor thing...

4chan.

 

Pfft, myspace?


Hmm, that's what you think of?


Ivy knows what you write in the search box of your porn site of choice.

You sick bastards.

 

Look at the problems historians face - all they know is what is written, and 'history is written by the victors' is a cliche for a reason. The only way she'd ever have first-hand information about something is if the person in question kept a diary, and even then, the human memory is incredibly fallible. Add in that universal literacy is a very new phenomenon and you get a very patchwork view of history.

As for magic, sure, the contemporary western view of magic involves tomes and whatnot. What about the many cultures out there that spread their secrets through word-of-mouth only? You think Injun Joe has ever put pen to paper to spill all the secrets of his dead tribe? And how many other pre-literate societies have been wiped out throughout history, and how many of them would have had potent magical secrets of their own? And sure, the Archive knows everything that's written down, but for every even remotely factual text you've got Lizardmen Jews Built The Pyramids Part 2: Comes With Free Tinfoil Hat. How do you tell what's true and what's not?

What about pictograms? Can she understand cuneiform and heiroglyphs? Does carving a story into the side of a monument count as writing it? If so, how would she know which of the dozens of languages and thousands of dialects a particular chunk of writing is written in? What if it incorporates idioms from a culture that's been dead for twelve thousand years, and is incomprehensible without understanding them?

Surely there's a line between cave paintings and cuneiform where artistic depictions trying to depict actual events and ideas became an actual abstract alphabet. At which point does it 'count' as writing for the purposes of the Archive's powers?

What about context? If someone hand-writes a manuscript for a fictional first-person book from the perspective of the man on the infamous Grassy Knoll, can she differentiate it from a confession the actual man on the Grassy Knoll wrote? Could she tell you who killed JFK, or could she just shrug and say maybe one of the thousands of accounts she's got swimming around in her head is factual instead of fictional?

What about ciphers? If someone invents their own language for keeping notes in, can she understand it? What if it was mentally encrypted beforehand? What if it used a one-time pad? Would Ivy be able to guess which of the millions of one-time pads that built up in her little database during WW2 was actually used? What if they used a random story in the newspaper as a one-time pad?

Surely you bright sparks can come up with hundreds of similar scenarios where the Archive's powers are constrained. Stop talking her up as the biggest power the world has ever known. She's a glorified time capsule in the form of a cute little girl that likes kitties. The job comes with a few perks, magically speaking, but it doesn't come with phenomenal cosmic powers - just a bunch of tips on refining what potential the Archive's current body might have.

 

The archive is meant to be a repository of knowledge, so I'd like to think she had some way of knowing what was truth and what was fiction. And, I think the intent so as to be a repository would mean that any form of stored data (carvings, pictograms, internet, written word) would be stored.