1. DLP Flash Christmas Competition + Writing Marathon 2024!

    Competition topic: Magical New Year!

    Marathon goal? Crank out words!

    Check the marathon thread or competition thread for details.

    Dismiss Notice
  2. Hi there, Guest

    Only registered users can really experience what DLP has to offer. Many forums are only accessible if you have an account. Why don't you register?
    Dismiss Notice
  3. Introducing for your Perusing Pleasure

    New Thread Thursday
    +
    Shit Post Sunday

    READ ME
    Dismiss Notice

Word of God Thread.

Discussion in 'Fanfic Discussion' started by Ryuugi Shi, Mar 28, 2010.

  1. Ryuugi Shi

    Ryuugi Shi Hierarch

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 2007
    Messages:
    1,889
    Location:
    Glorious Bellerophan
    It's not that he was distant, it's how it developed--namely, entirely off-screen. He got wrecked in TC and we had that ending seem of a hollow, distant Thomas. Then, next book, he and Harry meet up and are fine; he falls right back into the group, no problem. Then, in GS, we see him at the end and he's a wreck, but seems entirely himself and most of his problems were then boinked away. He's completely himself in CD and then he's just...gone.

    The skinwalker ruined Thomas in a way that hit hard at the end of a book and then went away, as did Thomas for the most part.

    Also, he forgot that he could just have his men blow up or burn down the Carpenter house right off the bat and win completely, going instead against his usual MO by wanting the good guys to feeeeel his pain! before they died.

    Nick was all over the place in that book and that's probably my biggest problem with Butters, though I was annoyed by him somewhat throughout the book. What should have been a badass ascension of the character, the capstone to his development, instead feels trite and forced because he only did anything because Nick threw that fight. It was a mark against Nicodemus, rather then an achievement for Butters, especially because the latter didn't seem deserved.

    Also, the walking meme and pop-culture reference thing is getting kind of old. Still not as badd as when everyone stopped for five minutes to debate on which Lord of the Rings character they were, though, while was okay for the first two or three lines and just nose-dived from there. A lightsaber though? And a super Sword of the Cross that no one else has never been able to wield that drove Nick away from a guy who'd never even handled a sword and had no training?

    Eeeeeeeh.
     
    Last edited: May 21, 2016
  2. Jon

    Jon The Demon Mayor Admin DLP Supporter

    Joined:
    Jun 5, 2006
    Messages:
    8,014
    Location:
    Australia
    I just can't get over how Butters, Murphy and Co. took all of Harry's stuff as well as Bob. :\
     
  3. Zeelthor

    Zeelthor Scissor Me Timbers

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2008
    Messages:
    3,521
    Gender:
    Male
    To be fair, he may not have wanted to kill Maggie. The ultimate revenge would be to take her, raise her as his own, and then turn that on Dresden.
     
  4. Ryuugi Shi

    Ryuugi Shi Hierarch

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 2007
    Messages:
    1,889
    Location:
    Glorious Bellerophan
    I'm fine with it, too a point. Frankly, when Harry first bit it, it made perfect sense; you can't just leave that stuff lying around, after all. Both Bob and the Swords are hugely powerful and, with the Fomor crawling out of the woodwork and kidnapping countless people, it makes complete sense. When Harry came back as a ghost and then vanished, even more so. I'm even fine with the stuff in Cold Days because, let's be honest, Harry was acting pretty erratically. He starts things off by breaking into Butter's house and beating up his girlfriend, doesn't explain anything, gets in deeper and deeper, etc. Plus, he was Mab's bitch. In the end, his friends still went to great lengths to protect him.

    Having said that, it did start to grate a bit in SG, just because I thought Butters was really reckless in their use. Like, holy shit, what did he expect to happen?

    You know what else it would have been? Needlessly convoluted. Nick was always dangerous because he wasn't dumb and because he would just kill you. Elaborate death traps and pointless plots of revenge weren't really what he went for and that was why he was a threat.

    Besides, if he did want to do that, he had a coin on hand--his daughters. He could have happily murdered everyone, flipped it to her, and walked away laughing.
     
  5. Agayek

    Agayek Dimensional Trunk DLP Supporter

    Joined:
    Mar 20, 2009
    Messages:
    4,548
    To be fair, Nic wasn't exactly thinking straight at the time. He'd just had a knife shoved into one of his few weakpoints, something that seemingly hadn't happened in centuries at least, and then twisted pretty viciously. The more methodical and practical approach probably didn't even occur to him until after the fact.
     
  6. Zeelthor

    Zeelthor Scissor Me Timbers

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2008
    Messages:
    3,521
    Gender:
    Male
    Maybe not... But it's the same kind of plot armour that I feel Murphy carried around for just a little too long, which was also why I was cheering on Nicodemus when he fought her. I may be a bad person. ^^
     
  7. Ryuugi Shi

    Ryuugi Shi Hierarch

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 2007
    Messages:
    1,889
    Location:
    Glorious Bellerophan
    This always feel flat to me for a number of reasons. The first, of course, is that the Gate of Blood didn't seem to actually require him to give up anything; all you have to do is have someone die, their spirit pops out, and they pull the lever...and Nick has an army of fanatics. But okay, whatever, he says some stuff about the Enemy and protecting her and etc., in which case...what's with the apparent breakdown? I mean, it'd be a hard as hell thing to do, but if he could bring himself to actually do it because he thought it was necessary, some jabs and words from some punk wizard probably shouldn't have been what made him snap.

    To say nothing of the absurd amount of plot armor involved. That was the worst part of SG to me; how the Denarians got nerfed and forgot their powers randomly, along with giving up victory. For example, we've seen that the Denarians don't give a damn about darkness with Lash, but Ursiel is halted by it? We've seen the amount of healing they can offer, but he's blinded? We've seen Lash teach Harry complex skills like completely casting aside pain and rearranging the bones in his hands in moments, but Lasciel forgot how to teach Ascher magic and turned her into a rage monster for no reason? On and on, it just seemed bizarre to me.

    The worst one, however, is actually a fairly subtle one--when Nick has Harry captured and held hostage to keep Michael from interfering with the Deirdre scene. He has the good guys seemingly dead to rights, Ursiel's host is in a perfect position to just straight up murder Harry if Michael tries to stop him, and so he's left free to go through with things. Then, he lets Harry go.

    And okay, but why, though? He needed Harry for the ice gate, which was done. He supposedly needed him for the portal, but that was a cover, because he had Ascher. So, Nicodemus had absolutely no reason to keep Harry alive and had no intention of keeping him alive, so...why not just kill him right there? Bam, done, Denarians win. Instead, though, he lets him go into the vault where he can find and steal the stuff Nick is after and then trick Nick easily. What?

    Frankly, SG introduced a lot of Denarian hosts that would have been way more dangerous if the Denarians hadn't left their brains and powers at home for certain part of the book

    And on top of all that? Nick isn't alone in his head. He had Anduriel in there the entire time, presumably ready to say 'Or we could just kill them.'

    The good guys won in that book entirely because the plot said so and that was the problem with SG.

    On a side note, more than Butters, I'm getting tired of super Marcone. I liked Marcone when he was calm, collected, smart, and all that, but also clearly in over his head, like he was in SF and FM. Starting with Death Masks, though, he's basically Batman, tricking everyone because he's a super smart mortal or whatever, even though everyone who fights Marcone can trivially crush him, but just chooses not to for reasons.
     
  8. Shinysavage

    Shinysavage Madman With A Box ~ Prestige ~

    Joined:
    Nov 16, 2009
    Messages:
    2,059
    Location:
    UK
    High Score:
    2,296
    Hadn't Lasciel only been hosted by Ascher for a few days at that stage? It's been a while since I read it, so I may well be wrong, but even it wasn't that short a span of time, it wasn't the 3-5 years Harry had Lash in his head, as far as I'm aware.
     
  9. Agayek

    Agayek Dimensional Trunk DLP Supporter

    Joined:
    Mar 20, 2009
    Messages:
    4,548
    I largely agree with the rest of what you said, aside from a few quibbles here and there, but this is... Really, the only way I can respond to that is "What the shit?"

    Have you never lost family? Rational thought tends to go flying right out of the window, especially if people start being malicious about it. Nic's not a robot, and one of the main points of that whole sequence (and arguably a large portion of the book) was that as much of a monster as he is, he still loved his family, in his own way. It's both ridiculous and a woeful misunderstanding of human nature to suggest he can simply shrug that off like it's nothing.
     
  10. Ryuugi Shi

    Ryuugi Shi Hierarch

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 2007
    Messages:
    1,889
    Location:
    Glorious Bellerophan
    I love my family, absolutely. However:

    1) Whatever his feelings or his reasons or his logic, Nick went through with killing his own daughter. As in, it was planned and prepared and mediated long enough before hand that Tessa was acting to stop it and Dierdre was already emotionally prepared. This wasn't exactly something that he was unprepared for.

    2) Added to that, I'm not a two thousand year old mass murderer with a demon in his head. Nicodemus has a perspective that's unique, to say the least, even before getting into the fact that he actually knows how death works, the nature of souls, and so on. He's met and seen countless people die, killing many of them himself, and he's gotten through it with the devil on his shoulder.

    3) He lives in a world of magic and, worst case scenario, shouldn't be completely without options here. I mean, her soul is right there, in a place he can access again, at least in theory. He's less been torn from her forever and more locked her in a box.

    Given all of that and the extreme premeditation involved, his reaction just didn't strike true for me. Anger? Sure. Hate? Sure. But Nicodemus threw out everything he'd stuck to in the entire series, along with his chances at victory, for something he'd known about and prepared for for months, did himself, and which is quite possibly not a permanent issue for him.

    TL;DR: What's normal for a human, reaction-wise, may not be normal for a two hundred year old wizard (as we've seen) and probably isn't normal for a two thousand year old host of a Fallen Angel.

    (But then, maybe this is just the fact that the whole father-daughter thing in the books fell flat for me, Maggie-wise.)

    1) No, they took her in after Changes.

    2) Doesn't really matter; again, the stuff Lash gave Harry, she did in a matter of minutes. Harry spent most of his time with her ignoring or locking her up; a few days of active cooperation would vastly outweigh that. And, again, she had a lot longer.
     
  11. Aekiel

    Aekiel Angle of Mispeling ~ Prestige ~ DLP Supporter

    Joined:
    Mar 16, 2006
    Messages:
    1,511
    Location:
    One of the Shires
    High Score:
    9,373
    Ryuugi Shi - I think you're making a mistake in assuming Nicodemus and Anduriel were on exactly the same page there. While Anduriel works with his host, it's mostly to take advantage of his free will. Read over the part where Michael tries to convince Nic to give up his Coin; it's obvious in that moment that Anduriel has convinced him that this is the absolute right thing to do, that he is indeed going to be seen as a saint once all is said and done. Then all of this happens and he has a moment of doubt.

    Nicodemus has worked with Anduriel for two millennia; he trusts the Fallen implicitly. So when it came time to kill Deirdre he was very likely assured by Anduriel that it was necessary, that it was for the greater good. Only problem there is that Nicodemus is human. He can rationalise and justify the deaths of millions of people, but he was closer to his daughter than any other human on the planet. You can rationalise a lot, but that's the kind of thing that hits you in the gut.
     
  12. Ryuugi Shi

    Ryuugi Shi Hierarch

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 2007
    Messages:
    1,889
    Location:
    Glorious Bellerophan
    This...is a bizarre interpretation of Nick and Anduriel's relationship, at least by my reading, and I don't really think it's supported by much of anything. Nick's never really struck me as a puppet being constantly played or someone who's been lied to and deluded, just as, you know, a monster. A very smart and logical and competent monster. I also don't think he's working towards anything most people would consider a 'greater good', nor does he really care.

    Nick and Anduriel have always been portrayed as partners and that's always been why they're dangerous; trying to reduce it to the Fallen mouthpiece does them both a disservice. Sure, if Nick did die, Anduriel would probably move on to another host pretty easily, but they're very much written as being together. Plus:

    So, I mean, I guess you could believe all that, I just don't think it's supported by, you know...reality.
     
  13. Ryuugi Shi

    Ryuugi Shi Hierarch

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 2007
    Messages:
    1,889
    Location:
    Glorious Bellerophan
    It's been two fucking years since I updated this thread. It's also been that long since I had a reason to; I've practically forgot about this series a dozen times between the last book and this one. But might as well compile the good stuff:

    Part of the above:

    Regarding healing magic and Molly eventually doing it:

    So some cool stuff all around.
     
  14. Celestin

    Celestin Dimensional Trunk

    Joined:
    Aug 21, 2008
    Messages:
    4,695
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Poland
    The 18th book's title is Body Slam. It's the one with the wrestler gods.

    With all little informations he gives about future books, someone should ask JB if he decided how many DF books there will be before the BAT.
     
  15. Zeelthor

    Zeelthor Scissor Me Timbers

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2008
    Messages:
    3,521
    Gender:
    Male
    I think he said that initially 20 books, but now it's like 22 or 23.
     
  16. Rehio

    Rehio Bad Dragon ~ Prestige ~ DLP Supporter

    Joined:
    Jan 1, 2007
    Messages:
    366
    Location:
    New Mexico
    High Score:
    2588
    At this point I'd appreciate any book.

    The number's been changing enough that I think people just want a current plan, especially since he's been kinda "away" for a while.
     
  17. Zeelthor

    Zeelthor Scissor Me Timbers

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2008
    Messages:
    3,521
    Gender:
    Male
    Yeah. Apparently the move, building a house, and that taking longer than planned, sorta got his writing groove out of wack or something. But yeah, any book is good. I've listened to the Brief Cases short stories and that's something, I guess.
     
  18. Innomine

    Innomine Alchemist ~ Prestige ~ DLP Supporter

    Joined:
    Nov 27, 2007
    Messages:
    2,278
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    New Zealand
    High Score:
    4,500
    I just remember his "I don't have writers block, I have a mortgage" comment from back in the days when he was putting out two a year.

    But yeah, I'm expecting it to be out in the next year or so. It'll be quite interesting to see how his downtime has influenced his writing - from the accounts I've heard, he's gone through a rather challenging time.
     
  19. 9th Doctor

    9th Doctor Groundskeeper

    Joined:
    Nov 25, 2013
    Messages:
    360
    Recent interview

    Not sure if the url worked properly, noticed at about 2:45-3 minutes in that he’s going to have Peace Talks finished before he gets married. I’ve heard that’s September/October time, so at least we’re closer? At work so I can’t cover much else from this.
     
  20. ILikeLurking

    ILikeLurking Second Year

    Joined:
    Aug 1, 2011
    Messages:
    50
    Huh. So Marcone served under Hendricks in the Corps. Interesting detail. I wonder if Marcone knew at the time the direction his life was going to be headed, and if so, how much Hendricks could see as his superior officer. And what it was like for them after the change in dynamic.
     
Loading...