Recorded Neutral Territory - A Dresden Files Podcast

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:00)
Okay, let me make sure I understand. The Greek is first, then the Norse pantheon, and then we've got the fey and the she. So, I have only one question for you, Brian. When are we getting the book where Harry has to defend Mab against Kratos?

Baloreilly (00:19)
It's got to be coming soon, right? I mean, she's next on the hit list.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:31)
Welcome one, welcome all. Welcome to Recorded Neutral Territory, a Dresden Files chapter by chapter reread podcast. Most episodes we talk about a particular set of chapters within a book and then we have a topic episode is going to be very different because we are all topic discussion this episode. We are assessing Stormfront. We're talking about it as a whole and how it fits into the larger Dresden Files universe.

But before we get there, let me introduce myself. I am Adam Ruzzo, and with me, as always, is an editor for the arcane, it's Brian O'Reilly. Welcome, Brian.

Baloreilly (01:06)
Rodriguez, this is the best slop you've ever written. The pigs of our audience are gonna eat it up from a trough like the greedy hogs they are. You should write a book, call it Semi-Automagic.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:19)
Perfect title, no notes. let's start by going through the different major plot beats in Stormfront and talking about two different things. One, do these events have repercussions through the later books? And if so, which ones are the biggest? And next, which sections are really good, really enjoyable and really well in the context of the entire book and the entire book series? So.

gonna organize this by day. Thursday, Harry is introduced to us in his office. We then meet Murphy, we then meet Monica, he then talks to Marcon as well, he meets Susan and we meet Mac, he goes to the lake house and we meet Toot and we meet Morgan and then finally we meet Bob when he's making potions at the end of Thursday night. That is a lot of new characters to introduce, Brian. Which of these do you think is done the best?

Baloreilly (02:14)
So the first chapter, Jim has to do a lot of introductions because he has to introduce us to Harry. And he does it in a way that is absolutely masterful. To write a series that sells millions of copies, you gotta nail some things in the first book, and you probably gotta nail the first chapter. And man, does he.

Butcher is efficient in the sense that he not only introduces us to Harry, he mentions Murphy, we meet Monica, he tells us about the murder, but he also contextualizes Harry's place as the wizard PI in the phone book in a wider world has maybe started to believe in magic again, but is generally distrustful of the mystical and of things that they can't tangibly know.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:04)
Yeah,

it immediately sets him up as an underdog in a number of different ways. The mailman doesn't believe him when he says that he's a wizard. know, he's our protagonist, we want to like him, but he seems kind of like a sad sack. Like, it also sets up the context that he's the only wizard advertising in the phone book. So not only is he

not believed by the general people, but he's like the only one that also sets him up as an underdog. And you're right, the first chapter sets all of that up in a way that's enjoyable and immediately sets some mystery where it's like, he's working with the police on a murder. Here's the case. We're familiar with these tropes from hundreds of other procedurals and detective stories and things like that. It eases us into the universe.

of the Dresden files with the magic and all these other weird things going on because it gives us something grounded and familiar to start with. A police crime scene. We know how this plays out, except their heart exploded. So we gotta figure that out.

Baloreilly (04:08)
Right, mean, Jim delays magic until the end of Thursday when Harry calls up Toot-Toot. there's magic present at the crime scene. We know that was done magically. But he does a great job of keeping us with a weird character in a familiar archetype. And he nails that crime scene too.

The introduction and banter with Murphy leading up to the horror element that he introduces there is beautifully done. Jim idolizes Robert B. Parker. He said that openly, this is up there with anything you can find in Spencer as a walk through a crime scene. And then he compounds that by immediately bringing in Marcon. And Marcon wasn't even, according to Jim, because I was pouring through words of Jim in preparation for this podcast last night, Marcon.

wasn't even supposed to be as big of a character as he was. This introduction is just so good at making him a major threat, a dangerous person, that Jim had to write a bigger into the story.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:15)
it's almost one of those things where you don't know just how important an NPC is going to be in your D &D campaign until your characters start reacting to said NPC. And it's the same way, you don't know quite how good a character is going to be until you start reacting to your own character. Like I believe Butters was also canonically supposed to be like a throwaway character, but Jim and the audience liked him so much that he kept coming back and then eventually became a Knight of the Cross.

yeah, I think all of those introductions that you talked about, meeting Harry for the first time, meeting Murphy, going through a crime scene, and then meeting Marcon, those plot beats in the first two or three chapters, you have to nail those to get the reader hooked on this idea of a wizard PI, and they do it. They really do, right off the bat.

Baloreilly (06:02)
Right, and not only is the scene with Marcon...

so good at establishing Marcon's character. But all of these scenes are so good at slowly developing who Harry is. We learn that he's observant. We learn that he has deep principles. We learn that he's obstreperous and stubborn, but at this point, he's not too hard to fluster. He gets a little green when he sees some bodies that are really torn up. The other masterful introduction on Thursday, I think, is Morgan.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (06:36)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (06:36)
Susan and Toot-toot perfectly adequately done, well written, but the Morgan chapter, the Morgan section is awesome. First, the opening line, just like with Marcon's Eyes the Green of Well-Worn Dollar Bills, you know, the man with the naked sword, is beautifully evocative, but...

Beyond that, Harry's interactions with Morgan show Morgan to a certain extent getting the better of him when he sends him flying. The Saint.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:06)
It makes him the underdog yet

again, even with his own people.

Baloreilly (07:10)
And it's the same thing that he does with Marcon where Marcon gets the better of him. It sets these guys up as not just antagonists or deuterantagonists, but as forces to be reckoned with because they get the better of our protagonist immediately.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:24)
Yeah, so that is Thursday. We then move on to Friday where he interviews Bianca, he interviews Linda, he interviews the pizza-spress kid. This is beginning to sound like a to-do list, by the way. On Friday, I'm gonna interview Bianca, and then I'm gonna get concussed, yep, and then I'm gonna research deadly magics that are forbidden. Yep, okay, that's my Friday. So, the Bianca scene, obviously, huge repercussion for the rest of the series.

Baloreilly (07:42)
Ha ha ha.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:52)
arguably, probably not even arguably, almost certainly, if that scene doesn't happen, Bianca doesn't try to start the war with the Red Court by getting Harry to throw the first punch. Maybe she finds some other way of doing it, but it's explicitly stated later that Bianca, after that meeting, blames Harry for Paula's death.

I don't think we ever actually talked about this, Brian. Do you think that was Harry's fault?

Baloreilly (08:19)
No, I don't.

I think that that's Bianca projecting, pretty obviously. She can't come to terms with the monster that she is. That's why she hates Harry so viscerally after that interaction. Bianca can't control herself anymore. The monster inside of her has let off the leash and kills someone who she's fond of. And Harry literally unmasks her, makes her

show that true monstrous form in front an antagonistic guest. Harry's real sin there is showing Bianca what she is. The same way in Skin Game, that's how he gets to Nicodemus.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (09:05)
Yeah, and so I asked that question because it occurred to me recently. Imagine you're Bianca. We estimated that she's probably like 100 years old or so, and she's probably interacted with plenty of wizards before. Those wizards probably were all well-versed in the Red Court and what Red Court vampires have to deal with on a regular basis. Those wizards should know.

not to antagonize a Red Court vampire the way that she perceives Harry did by walking in and saying, Jennifer Stanton's name as if he's flaunting it in her face, right? So from her perspective, a wizard should know better to borrow from Treebeard. I think that might be one of the ways that she justifies blaming Dresden is he should have known, therefore he did that on purpose.

Baloreilly (09:59)
Right, I think a lot of the interactions between the supernatural community, the rules of hospitality, for example, are about restraining the use of power. And for characters that are monsters, it's about restraining their monstrousness. So the fact that Harry doesn't help her do that is the deepest possible insult anyone could actually give. He...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:24)
Right, and she probably doesn't give

him the credit of being young and foolish.

Baloreilly (10:29)
Well, and part of what makes this scene so great is that we get the impression that Bianca is among Red Court vampires, fairly young. So she's still clinging to the vestiges of her humanity. You the way she says, would only let gentlemen interact with my girls. Bianca has this idea that she's not going to be a monster. She's going to be in some ways good. Yes, I'm the biggest madam in Chicago, but I'm a lady about And stripping that away removes

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:51)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (10:58)
the thing that tethers her to being human. It's why she probably feels free to become more of a vampire as the next couple books go on behind the scenes. But the other amazing thing about this scene is Jim has this whole outline written, you know, the day after he turns in The way that Bianca's personal animus towards Harry

masks the larger conspiracy involving the Red Court successfully to the reader for several books is really great. If we're gonna talk about the standout things in Stormfront, it's that the characters that are introduced in the first two days, Thursday and Friday,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (11:29)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (11:42)
Harry, Murphy, Marcon, Morgan, and Bianca, the people who are introduced, the supernatural figures that are introduced, are all brought in in a way that belies their actual complexity, but which doesn't detract from Jim's ability to craft it in later. I think this is part of why the introductions to Susan and Bob and Mac aren't as compelling, because there is no sort of masking going on there. They are exactly who they seem to be.

immediately and Jim's just introducing us.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (12:17)
he's leaving room to develop them later, rather than already necessarily having a plan for exactly what they mean to the story and what is going to happen with them. moving on to Saturday, he reports to Murphy on how you might do a thaumatological murder. He sleeps on his concussion for like 10 hours. He forgets about his date with Susan. He fights the Toad Demon.

He then has to go and view the second crime scene, loses his hair to Gimpy, and then confronts Marcon, and he still finds time to blow up his relationship with Murphy. So that's a busy day.

Baloreilly (12:49)
Seriously, the craziest thing about the first three days of Stormfront from a serious perspective is that Harry gets 20 hours of sleep. On Thursday night, he sleeps for about 10 hours from like 5 to 3 p.m. And here he sleeps from like 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Now, given that he's sleeping off concussion, perhaps he should go to bed for even longer.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:09)
So let's talk about a couple of these things. I brought this up earlier. I wanna get your opinion on this. Assume for the moment the date with Susan is not ruined by a concussion, memory loss, and then a toe demon attack. If he goes on the date with Susan and it goes as,

they might have both expected it to go with no surprises, do they still end up together several months Does he get the second date?

Baloreilly (13:35)
I

liked this question because this reminds me of the movie Speed, know, relationships formed under stressful circumstances, never last. Clearly, part of what seeing a Toad Demon does for Susan is it confirms to her that Harry's not a kook. He's actually a wizard and he actually is doing magic in front of her and he is the real deal. And simultaneously for Harry.

This is the scene where we really get to see who Susan is. She's the girl who, when the Toad Demon breaks into your house, runs downstairs to get your gun so she can shoot it. Susan is a badass in the same scene. She charms the cops into saying, no, everything's okay. That's ridiculous. She's like such a force in this scene in a way we don't get from her introduction.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:27)
Yeah, absolutely. So next we have that fight with the Toad Demon. Where would you put this on the scale across all the books in terms of best, worst fight scenes?

Baloreilly (14:39)
So ranking this against just fight scenes in books, I'd say it's like a B+. It's little bit better than I'd expect. But for a Dresden Files fight scene, it's actually pretty low on the totem pole. Harry, there's some fun back and forth and stuff, but Jim is clearly covering for some of his, don't wanna say inability, but some of his...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:53)
Mm-hmm.

in experience.

Baloreilly (15:04)
Yeah, at setting this up with just some comedy, just going for some straight visual gags in the fight.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:10)
Yeah, just straight up goofy,

absurdist humor of like, ⁓ he's naked and the suds are getting in his eyes so he can't concentrate and oops, Susan has now drunk a lust potion. Thanks, Bob.

So yeah, think you're leaning on that a little bit harder than might otherwise. And we certainly don't see quite as much of that goofy slapstick in the future fight scenes because I think he gets more confident as a writer. We still get some great lines here, but we don't see a lot of the same referential stuff that we see in the future. But like, the lines that stand out that I can remember is things

says to the shadow man, when the shadow man's, how did you do that? I went to school. And I'm like, of all the quote, like one liners that your hero could give, that one is so nerdy. So I kind of love that one. And then was the other one, please deposit a quarter to continue your call or something when he, those are, he's trying to fit those in. And I think the go to school one works for me, but I don't think the quarter one does. I kind of feel like that one just falls flat.

Baloreilly (15:50)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

You know, I will say one really positive thing about this fight scene, which I don't think was necessarily intentional, is that Harry's so kind of bad at it that it does give him a lot of room to grow.

Jim could have written this in a way that I think is a little bit smoother and kept that note in there. He could have made it very obvious that Harry's inexperienced at this and made the fight scene run a little smoother, but he does a good job getting that across at least. So it's not a bad fight scene by any stretch of the imagination. It accomplishes the goals fine. It's, right, and that's how I describe it exactly.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (16:50)
Yep, perfectly serviceable, for sure. But there's just

so many other great ones that come up in the series that it's hard to rank this very high, but it's only because of how much better they get later.

Baloreilly (17:02)
Yeah, I mean, think even the last scene in the book, which of course we're going to talk about, is very similar in terms of the one-lineriness and some of the inexperience vibes, but Jim even then is a little bit more confident to not go for the straight comedy.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (17:17)
Yeah.

So the last thing that happens on Saturday night before we really start talking about Sunday morning is he confronts Marcon at the Varsity. And of the different scenes in this book, this is one of my favorites because he finally gets to cut loose and you can finally reveal the power fantasy that you've wanted to see since the beginning of this book. Like he's a wizard. I want to see him do cool wizard stuff. And he blasts his way through the doors with his

Duster billowing behind him and you just see this great visual of the hero coming in to confront the villain thing. And then of course the actual confrontation is also kind of interesting because of course Marcon doesn't react quite the way one might expect. He doesn't at least reveal at all that he's intimidated in any way. And then Gimpy winds up trying to shoot his way out and dies and that surprises...

our hero and he feels sad and responsible for this. He didn't expect it to go this way. of course he should have. That's how gangsters work. If you betray them, they will kill you. This isn't just, oh, we'll give you a slap on the wrist this time, you old scamp. No, that's not how the mob works. So he should have theoretically thought of that, but the fact that our hero feels that guilt and confusion and revulsion when he sees Gimpy's dead eyes.

later in that scene when he has to go try to search for his hair, that makes the scene just so much more than just the hero comes to confront the villain.

Baloreilly (18:49)
I feel like that scene is great when you first read it. And it's awesome to look at from a meta perspective. It falls a little bit flatter when you're just going through it for the second time or maybe the third time or something because it's not quite as good at emphasizing that power fantasy as some other books are. But the first time you read it, it's absolutely gripping. This guy's been bumbling through this investigation and he finally just does the thing.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (19:10)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Baloreilly (19:19)
that he can do. The gunslinger kicks in the door to the saloon, weapons drawn, and just goes, all right, I might be dumb, but I'm faster than any It definitely has that vibe. Of course, Harry does this better in later books. He's better at giving the lay down the law speech. But on a deeper level,

It's great that Dresden knows what he wants to He wants to employ the psychological shock effect to get everyone going his way, but he miscalculates what's going to happen because of it. This is a theme not just in this book, but in Full Moon and in Grave Peril with the vampire tuxedo where Harry's going for these psychological gestures and not actually reading how they're gonna be received properly.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (20:04)
Yeah.

Baloreilly (20:12)
all the way to we can take to cold days when he gets in the fight with the red cap kind of by accident. But there's also plenty of moments as Harry grows in the series where he gets better and better at employing this in order to get his way. It's a cool development to track and we're gonna track it as we go through the books.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (20:18)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

So moving on to Sunday, he walks through the rain, he sleeps in a crime scene, he realizes that both cases are the same case, that's an important bit. He interviews Monica to get some more information, saves Murphy from a giant scorpion, delays Morgan at Max, and then races to the Shadow Man's stronghold against time, against the storm, and then defeats his own inner demons before defeating the Shadow Man and talking to Morgan and giving us the final epilogue of the book. So of all these here, I think

think my favorite has to be the scene where he defeats his inner demons, where he's standing outside Victor Cells place and contemplating just taking all the power that's gathering there and burning it to the ground. And we know what that looks like because he does that in Grave Peril just a few books later when he does Pyro Fuego, Pyro Fuego, and just absolutely goes nuts with his fire.

and doesn't care. He could have done that here. I have full confidence that he doesn't need any help with, you know, power level to make that happen, but he has to struggle with himself and he's saved by, we think, probably Leah and his mother's amulet bringing him back to himself. And I feel like that scene has grown on me. I don't think I necessarily really cared much for that scene in the past, but revisiting it now, really thinking about it, I think that's my favorite of these scenes that take place on Sunday.

Baloreilly (21:57)
when you kept mentioning this scene as we were lining up how we were going to do these chapters and what we were going to talk about, it didn't really dawn on me how important it was to me that it was here in my first read. But I think as I sort of remember the experience of reading Stormfront for the first time, this is a really important thing to give the reader. Because in books like Lord of the Rings,

You don't really get this. the movie does a better job of showing Aragorn's doubts about himself than the book does. And in books like, Game of Thrones on the other end, people don't really think this way. How do I use my power responsibly? It's a little bit more Machiavellian. Harry struggling here, like Luke Skywalker, am I going to fall to the dark side? Yeah, it's an element of fantasy that

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (22:48)
Exactly.

Baloreilly (22:53)
I really do love because it feels so human. How many times in our lives do we take the easy way out to try to make things a little bit easier on ourselves? And, how much do we let that change us? It's an important question for an author to ask a reader if you're going to make a series about the use of power.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:16)
And

what's more, I think this scene is the closest that he ever gets to giving in to the darkness within him. Obviously in changes, he gives in to the power temptation, but that is for a more noble goal. He's trying to save his daughter. Here, he's literally hating Victor Shadow Man so much that he wants to murder him with magic.

He's on the edge of doing that. And I don't think he ever gets that close to doing that ever again with that kind of hatred built into his magic. And so he defeats his inner demons here and it gives him the confidence and the strength to do it again and again in the future in an easier way.

Baloreilly (24:03)
And I'm actually going to say that we do get to see him come closer to falling because we see him fall one time in the flashbacks with the ghouls in White Knight. And think about how that alters Harry as a character. Before that happens, Harry doesn't like ghouls, but he handles them the same way he handles, white-court vampires or whatever. After that, Harry has this...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:14)
That's true, yes.

Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (24:31)
urge to smash them every time he sees them.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:35)
Yeah, it blinds him in It really

affects his ability to think properly.

Baloreilly (24:40)
So imagine if he did that to a sorcerer, to a human user of magic who is not in the council. That would have made him such a different character, I think. It would have made him justify that use of magic to himself in a way that would have colored how he views humanity. So this scene is extremely important and the more I think about it, the more I agree with you. It's probably the most important scene in the book.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:05)
And of course, it speaks to the themes of the book as well, pretty directly there. So then the very end of the book, of course, proving Morgan wrong and getting the doom lifted is one of the biggest ramifications moving forward because that allows Harry to work without this shadow hanging over him, this doom, as it were.

So that's kind of all the main plot beats here. Brian, anything else you wanted to mention here before we move on?

Baloreilly (25:31)
I think that basically covers everything.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:33)
Okay, let's move forward to crazy theory corner. Brian's gonna bring us a crazy theory, and I don't mean that pejoratively, I just mean it's a theory that doesn't have a ton of supported evidence, we're just, pure speculation more or less. Talk to me about this one, talking about the Starborn Cycle.

Baloreilly (25:50)
Right, so I wanted to bring this theory up because in this book we get a lot of Dresden talking about ⁓ science as a religion and the place of magic in the mind of the public. we think that Dresden is not so much critiquing ⁓ the way that modern people learn, he's critiquing our loss of mystery, our loss of belief in things we cannot see as sort of short-sighted.

led us to ask, why did that actually happen in the Dresden universe? In actual school, we learn during the Enlightenment there was the Scientific Revolution and people began to think about the material world as an explainable series of phenomena. in the Dresden files, that's not what the material world is. The material world contains supernatural creatures.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (26:44)
you had the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and you had people testing reality in the same way that they did in our world, they would have found vampires, they would have found demons, they would have found wizards and magic, but they didn't. Why is that?

Baloreilly (27:02)
So I think to answer this question, we have to sort of think about...

the star-born cycles as a continuous replacement of who is defending Earth against the outsiders. So let's take the first star-born cycle that we sort of have any knowledge of, in my opinion, which is the Zero A.D. star-born cycle. And I say that we have knowledge of this, of course, because it surrounds the sort of birth of Christianity as a religion, but this is during the Apogee of the Roman Empire.

And presumably, this is when the Greco-Roman gods are extremely powerful, the beliefs of millions of people are supporting their strength, and they're probably defending the outer gates. So why don't they just keep doing that? Well, the next star-born cycle is 666 years later. And the Roman Empire, the former Roman Empire...

has been Christian for over 300 years.

So there's no longer that power source for these gods. This is probably one of the first times in history, if these cycles are perpetual, that Earth has been running out of pagan pantheons that can man the walls of the gates. And in a Eurocentric series, it's natural that the last one left standing at this point is the Norse pantheon. Wotan is already a god, who's spoken of in dramatic and angry

Anglo-Saxon tales, and of course the Vikings are about to come pouring out of Scandinavia and conquer huge portions of the world. So this is where the Norse gods sort of take the lead. They're probably defending the outer gates here. Merlin, who's presumably around in like 400 AD, you know, definitely, but is probably, per the series, around for all of this, for the first thousand years of, the Common Era.

is probably helping orchestrate this transfer of power.

the next star-born cycle is 1334. one thing that we can be pretty certain of, because Mab and Titania last spoke after the Battle of Hastings, is that the fairy courts are established maybe that year, 1066. that happens...

It's probably because this represents, ultimately, the defeat of paganism in the Western world. After William the Conqueror and the Normans and the French take over England, there's absolutely no chance that that Anglo-Norse order is going to continue to flourish. And at that point, honestly, the Norse paganism is nearly dead as it is. It's just got no hope of coming back.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:54)
It's fully being

absorbed into Christianity at that point.

Baloreilly (29:58)
Right, so what do you have to do? Well, in order to get the power to defend the gates, you need to be able to draw not from an organized religion that's sort of state-sponsored and the overarching part of everyday life, but from the underground rituals that people still do as The fact that people in Ireland are still putting out milk and honey for the Fae.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (30:25)
for

Santa Claus.

Baloreilly (30:27)
because these stories have already been synchronized into Christianity. There's a theory that the Celtic god Brigid became the Saint Brigid of Irish Christianity as these stories turned from stories about gods and goddesses into stories about powerful beings and heroes and saints.

That transference of power in Celtic mythology from gods to the she, to fairies, allows the courts to form as a repository for the leftovers of these pagan forces. And that's probably why this star-born cycle and the one before it are really, really scary. ⁓

because the earth is running out of a support structure to man the walls, because there's a dwindling number of people who institutionally support the people manning it. Magic has to go underground because belief in these individuals and these beings has to go underground, and that's why they sort of all collectively decide to use folklore rather than institutions to keep

level of power necessary to man the laws of reality.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (31:48)
yeah, that's interesting. And it brings up the question of where does the cycle go from here? Now, one of the things that Stormfront kind of mentions in that intro is that people are beginning to quote unquote, wake up to the existence of magic again after

and having been underground for a long time, as you mentioned. Is there a reason for that beyond the fact that there's just a ton of people and it's harder to hide now? Is the magic, if there is any magic that is like quelling people's belief in it and making people more skeptical, is that breaking down, if that's what's going on? my own personal theory, is there's some kind of...

very subtle magic making everyone in the normal human population more skeptical of the supernatural. And the few people that are strong enough willpower wise to break through like Butters, like Susan, can find the supernatural world, but everybody else is suppressed by that thing. And that's a better explanation to me than humanity's too stupid to figure it out, which is like the Harry Potter solution, right? The Dursleys.

they would never be able to figure out that magic really exists because of how dumb they are. So I like this version, But yeah, that is a really cool idea. Any final elements? Where do you think it's going from here?

Baloreilly (33:10)
show.

I really want to thank you for bringing up the fact that I think that it's important to note that the court and the sort of people surrounding it, like Odin, agreed in a way to go underground here. And I think part of why they agreed is because of the strength of the influence of the white god and the way that that resulted in, inquisitions and mortals trying to drive the supernatural out during those centuries. So they

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:39)
Right, which would be

essentially a threat that would destroy humanity even if they didn't know it, right? The Inquisition and the witch hunts that are trying to destroy supernatural magic in general and people's belief in it would have weakened the fey, the she, and weakened the outer gates. So it needs to go away so that those things stop happening so that

It can continue as mythology and folklore, and it can continue to give the power of belief, but only from children's stories, more or less.

Baloreilly (34:18)
Right, and I think that

Part of the reason why humans are beginning to wake up to the paranormal again is because that grip of the institutional churches of the world is to a certain extent loosening. People are reconciling religion to modernity in the 20th century, and out of that reconciliation comes a reevaluation of old knowledge of mystical beliefs that is part of the reason why the 60s were the time of hippies and new ages.

⁓ in our timeline, but is also a reason in the Dresden Files why there's a bit of an opening for a new force to perhaps comprehend and defend against the outside.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:07)
Yeah, so we're gonna definitely learn more about that by the time we get to the big Apocalyptic trilogy at the end. But let's move on to talking about themes from this book. We did a lot of that in episode 10 where we talked about chapter 24, the one where he confronts his inner demons. And one of the big ones we talked about then is that Victor Sells is clearly a dark mirror of our protagonist. Both are touched by dark magic. Both are very attracted to power. Both are very smart.

and both plan far ahead. But what is different about these two characters? I think the main difference and part of the theme of the book is what is magic for? What is it supposed to be used for? Harry believes and reiterates in that chapter that magic is a force for life, it's a force for good, it should be used to help people, not to hurt people. And Victor...

at least at the very beginning, specifically seeks greater wealth to show off for his in-laws, a very selfish motivation, where he starts with magic. Whereas Harry's beginning with magic is to protect himself and to try to protect Elaine, and then later he gets why magic exists and his whole philosophy that he gets from Ebenezer when he's being quote unquote rehabilitated there.

So I think those are some of the biggest themes about this. Victor sells as a mirror of Harry. We saw quite a bit of that in chapter 24.

Baloreilly (36:35)
And I think we can make some assumptions about Victor's cells from some of his actions. We know that Monica comes from family that has a history of abuse. Presumably, Victor is also perpetuating a cycle of abuse. And that means that both Harry and Victor have been traumatized, presumably as children.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Baloreilly (36:56)
but they're reacting to slightly different traumas in very different ways. Victor is perpetuating the things that happened to him. Harry had tragedies of a different kind happen to him. He was deprived of family. It's not that his family was bad to him, he was deprived of them. Justin was obviously abusive, but Harry takes these tragedies as a mission. Never again.

Victor takes these tragedies as the way you live your life. This is what the world is. desire to make things better makes him different. And I think one of the most important, symbols of this is that his mother, at this point in the series, leaves one thing to him.

a symbol of how his power, magic, should be used. That's something that even if Victor had more time with his family, he never got.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:58)
Right, that's exactly right. The other two differences that I could find that are really called out by the book to some degree is that Victor is mostly self-taught. We've speculated a bunch that he had some help, maybe from a demon that may or may not have been working for Nemesis. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But he's mostly self-taught, out of books more or less. Whereas Harry had formal education first by Justin and then by Ebenezer.

and Ebenezer obviously being the wise teacher, giving him his ideology and things like that, Victor doesn't have that. He didn't get any messages of restraint or any messages about how magic should be used. And so that is another important distinction between them. Again, we talked about it earlier, I went to school. That's how know how to do this stuff. And so Harry's use of magic is not only more sophisticated, but...

the purpose of it is grounded more because of that formal

Baloreilly (38:57)
I think Jim is actually speaking to what he might see as one of the proper functions of education, which is not just to teach people how to do things.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (39:08)
Hmm

Baloreilly (39:09)
but to teach people why to do things, the purpose of things, the reasons for things. Part of the reason why I've never gotten on the train that Ebenezer is actually in some way a bad guy is that he instilled in Harry these whys and not just hows. And that's different. Victor doesn't get that just from reading the books that teach him magic. They don't tell you in sufficient detail the whys, they just tell you the hows.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (39:38)
Exactly,

that is a very good point. Victor also doesn't withhold information from the people around him. At least we don't see that. We know that Harry does. Harry very specifically withholds information to protect Murphy, and that blows up his relationship with Murphy. Whereas Victor, the only real thing that we have about what he does with information is he imposes it.

on someone else. Monica explains how Victor forced her to drink the Three Eye so that she could see what he sees. So he's not hiding this information and keeping it from others. He's trying to spread it by spreading Three Eye to the streets. He sees it not only as a money-making scheme, but presumably he also thinks other people should see what I see, since he was so excited that he could share that with Monica.

So that brings us to another very important theme, agency versus safety. And this is certainly one that Harry has to take a couple of books to really learn, but in this one, he definitely seems to make some mistakes with regards to not telling Murphy enough information. And then she of course finds out about it and it blows up their relationship for a while. And that is also kind of mirrored. And we talked about this in one of the early episodes.

Monica makes decisions for Harry by withholding information. She is not allowing him to walk into this with all the tools he might need to safely navigate it. If he had died here, there would be a lot of justification in saying that her withholding information got him killed in the same way that maybe Harry withholding information from Murphy got Linda killed.

Baloreilly (41:29)
I think that Jim has a really great grasp of what makes people seem good to others. And it's not something that he has to work very hard to put in the series. It's something that just comes through And what he's doing here is he's telling us, good people debate. Should I tell you this and let you make decisions that you might not be ready for? Or should I try to keep you out of it?

Whereas people like Victor just impose upon you the information they want you to have so you will behave in the way that they desire. who are bad treat information as a propaganda tool, a way to get you to do what they People who are good treat information as a double-edged something that...

can be a tool that someone can use to carve their own path through life, and can be a way that they hurt themselves. They're careful with it, even if they make bad decisions. Victor is not careful with it. He's using it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:39)
Yeah, it's definitely not careful with it. Because the White Council has reasons for keeping certain types of magic from younger wizards and for laws that say don't mess with time and don't do all this other stuff. Because when inexperienced people mess with stuff they're not ready for, it results in bad outcomes.

And the important distinction that Harry learns is it's not a simple morality of, you always need to share information. No, that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is give other people the choice to learn that information and give them as much information as they need to make that choice wisely. And if they choose

Incorrectly, it's not necessarily your fault to withhold that information from them.

Baloreilly (43:28)
Yeah, I mean, Jim is making a value judgment about something he thinks is a character flaw of Harry's early on. Jim thinks that even though sometimes if you know about things that are dangerous, you'll make bad choices, it is always better for people to make informed choices than for people to be kept in the dark. That doesn't mean that the desire to keep people in the dark comes from a bad place.

He's very careful to suggest that you can have good intentions and they can result in suboptimal outcomes, but he lets us know through the story that he believes humans knowing the things that are important and affect their lives helps them more than it harms them, even if it does harm them sometimes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (44:21)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that comes to the end of what we were able to gleam as far as the major themes of this book. There are plenty of other themes that weave throughout the Dresden Files that we didn't necessarily see here, but we do expect to see them coming up in the future. Themes like authority versus free will, morality versus legalism, power having limits, kinds of things. So we'll certainly cover those things when we get to those, but I think we've probably covered everything that's going on here in Stormfront. If you disagree...

feel free to drop us an email, mac at rnt.fm, let us know what you think and if we hear somebody that comes up with a great insight that we didn't talk about, we'll be happy to feature it on the show. So let's move on. Speaking of that, exactly, we have some questions from our listeners that we asked for last time and we have some here. So let's start with this. Bro Bocci asks, who groomed Victor Sells?

Baloreilly (45:01)
And some of our other listeners already came up with some insights, yeah, that we have to talk about.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:18)
Now we did talk about this a couple of times on the show, but for the record, Brian, what is your best guess? We kind of speculated on a couple of different options.

Baloreilly (45:26)
So I don't want to just give you the answer, I want to explain why. So I think there's a couple good options here. Yeah, there you go. So I think there's a couple good options here. ⁓ One that I want to just throw out there and kind of dismiss is the Red Court could have taught him they have sorcerers, you Mavra is teaching Bianca sorcery in a couple books.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:32)
you're going to give me the agency to learn my own answer.

They're the ones that wind

up with that heart explodey spell later on changes.

Baloreilly (45:51)
Right,

so it could totally be them. I don't think it is because I think that they wouldn't be willing to give Victor the level of agency he has. So he would be, under a heavier thumb from the Red Court if they were the one teaching him magic. Also, they're generally not very good at Another possibility is Cowell, and that's a popular theory, that Cowell is actually teaching Victor cells this stuff.

I don't think that's the case in this book. There's two reasons. One, Cowell is a really good wizard. Victor would have seen a shield before if Cowell was teaching him. Two, I think there's a much stronger case that Cowell hands out the hexenwolf in the next book because they are physical artifacts that presumably a wizard had to make. In this book, all Cells gets is information.

He starts getting it from books, later he talks to things, not people, things that he's calling up in the attic. It seems to me like this is coming from first some books that were probably planted by outsider-aligned forces to sow some discord, just like the ritual in backup.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (47:06)
I think that's also entirely possible that he did find some old books. Maybe he was cleaning something out. Maybe they just happened to stumble upon them. And then when he started using them to call things up, the things he was calling up had some ties to Nemesis or the outsiders. And they saw this, ooh, here's an opportunity. We've got a nascent wizard that the White Council doesn't know about. Let's start shaping him the way that we want.

Baloreilly (47:34)
And the reason why we don't think it was just demons causing havoc, and we do think that there was some alignment to Nemesis or the Black Council, was because of course this spell does make its way into the hands of the Red Court through presumably that channel. So there's got to be some connection to the overarching big bads of the series here. And I think it's most likely that the same way that Cat Sith is a piloted drone of Nemesis towards the end of Cold Days,

and Maeve is signed on with Nemesis in cold days, Victor calls up something that's on team outside and which exploits this opportunity for the greater forces. And part of the reason why I believe this is because no huge Nemesis-aligned powers show up to intervene. So I think he's a small part of their plans aligned with ⁓ one of their sort of lesser vassals.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:11)
Mm-hmm.

I think that is also my general take on it. I don't think he who walks beside is the one who is piloting the thing that is talking to Victor. I think you're right. I think it's a lesser vassal. Seeing this as an opportunity to mess with the White Council and test them and see what's going on and maybe get some chaos happening around this important demon-reach place in Chicago. So the next question we had was from striking.

who asks, who was so interested in Harry behind the scenes of this book? Toot says, we're watching you, Harry Dresden. And someone told Bianca that Harry was a quote unquote, gentleman. So who was that, Brian? What do you think?

Baloreilly (49:14)
Well, I think there's a couple possibilities. ⁓ I think one key force in this book who is almost entirely unseen is the Lananchi. We think that she is the hand that moves Dresden to the Pentacle at the end of the book. We know that she's on speaking terms at the Red Court. She appears as a honored guest of the court in grave peril, even though they're actually trying to screw her over. She's at least theoretically on good terms with them.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:23)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (49:43)
And we know of course that she is a major player in Faerie, so that's why the little folk might be keeping tabs on him. It could also be just the word on the street. Harry's first case isn't Stormfront. Canonically, it's at least a restoration of faith when he meets Murphy, and it's probable that he's met many people, like Kim Delaney, who he apparently already knows, in earlier time periods where he's helping people out.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:49)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (50:12)
and that that is just, you know, generally creating a buzz about the person who seems to be the only white council level talent in Chicagoland.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (50:21)
Yeah, but also the only one who advertises in the phone book. I feel like that is kind of something that's not forgotten, but not really brought up quite enough is there's really no other wizard that says, hello public. Yes, I am a wizard.

I have to imagine when this guy put his thing up in the yellow pages, somebody from the supernatural community said, hey, you seen this? Did you guys hear? This wizard in Chicago? Yeah.

He's advertising in the yellow pages. Can you believe it? Like that would be interesting water cooler discussion. That could spread like wildfire throughout the supernatural community, not just the wizards, but just like imagine the vampires going, huh, a publicly practicing wizard. What's A publicly practicing vampire? You know, that is clearly something that could have resulted in.

rumors and talk about Harry Dresden going through the little folk, especially because they love gossip, but also through the red court.

Baloreilly (51:23)
Yeah, that's a really great point. it's sort of like, the Neil deGrasse Tyson effect. Is Neil deGrasse Tyson the best astrophysicist in the world? I don't know, but probably not. But he's the one who gives the good interviews and is willing to spend the time being public facing.

Harry is probably the most public-facing member of the White Council, even though he hasn't had a lot of time to develop that reputation. Like you said, he literally advertises.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (51:50)
Yeah.

Okay, so next question is one I came up with. What are some things that we see in Stormfront and basically never see again or rarely see them again? The first one that came up was the tying vampire's power to the Never Never. That kind of disappears think Jim rethought how he expected the vampire courts to work and decided that They use the Never Never, but they're not.

from there the way it is kind of suggested in this book. Other things, Harry using wind magic to pull items to himself or propel items through the air, including himself, like the cannonball spell that he uses at the end. He uses that weird, almost like will-based banishment with the Toad Demon in that fight where he says, out, out, I banish thee, or some weird sounding thing that wasn't quite a spell. And then also,

Baloreilly (52:26)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:42)
Brian, we almost never see anybody tapping into elemental power like storms to supercharge a spell again. And I think we speculated a little bit why this might be.

Baloreilly (52:50)
Yeah, so a lot of this is of course because there are facets of the narrative that Jim decided he didn't think were worth reusing or were too awkward to reuse on a doilus level. But from a Watsonian level, all of these things are stuff that, Harry probably realizes pretty quickly. That's not a great idea. Literally throwing yourself at the bad guy, you know, physically, maybe just hit him with a kinetic force spell. That's probably a lot safer.

We know from the book that drawing power from storms is incredibly dangerous. Victor is nuts for doing it and you know Harry gets-

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:26)
Yeah, even Morgan

didn't figure it out right away. Like he probably had the same thing. Like he didn't even think of it as a possibility because it's too crazy to try. And I think we speculated the only reason Victor got away with it is because he was given some expert level counsel in the form of the nemesis agent that we were talking about earlier, guiding him through that. Something which if he had gotten by trial and error,

The error part of that would just make him explode if he got it wrong the first time. So that is why we're guessing elemental power like storms is just not used because the amount of experience needed to get to that level will probably kill you before you get to master it.

Baloreilly (54:10)
I will say though.

It's a really great sign that Harry's not just a very powerful wizard, you a heavyweight on the scene, but that he's a very creative prodigy. In the sense that he's able to do a storm spell in this book, he pulls one off to, blow up the Toad Demon in their first encounter, drawing power from the lightning there. And he really does seem one of his natural talents as far as evocation goes, is modifying spells on the fly. It's probably less dangerous for him

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:39)
Hmm

Baloreilly (54:41)
to try to do this than almost anybody because he's really good at that specifically.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:46)
Somebody should tell

him that's actually what a sorcerer does in D &D, not a wizard. Wizards don't modify their spells. Anyway, my other thought is from a Doyleist perspective, he doesn't do the like, summon his staff to him with wind, even though that's like a super cool Jedi power, like pulling your weapon to you. We don't really see that very much in the future. And I think from a Doyleist perspective, it would make...

Baloreilly (54:49)
Ha!

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:12)
It would make solving problems a little too easy for Harry.

Like imagine the fight in the Field Museum in Deadbeat where Harry, instead of being unable to get a weapon, is just able to summon a candlestick or something to him on air currents. It solves a little bit too many problems, narratively speaking, and so if you give him that power, it makes it much harder to come up with

complicated situations that Harry has to come up with a clever solution to get out of. If you give somebody a power that's too universal and flexible, then you have to ask, why don't they use that power in all these upcoming scenes? He also decides to give Harry a drawback that's not really obvious in this book, that is obvious in later books, where he talks about how he has a lot of juice, but his finesse, his control is much worse.

than other wizards. It's just not his strong suit. Of course, we see that he gets more control and finesse with age and experience, but in order for that to be true, he can't be very carefully lifting up his staff and pulling it to him with small currents of wind. That's a very finesse-like use of power. So that has to go away in order for that other story of him growing in power and control to come to fruition in later books.

Baloreilly (56:30)
it also makes it pretty easy for him to just, you know, somebody he's fighting has a gun, they fall. ⁓ summon gun.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:37)
yeah,

So the next question, ⁓ KNNN asks, per Stormfront, up to 13 wizards can combine their powers. Per Word of Jim, 13 members of the Grey Council were at Chichen Itza.

Coincidence?

Baloreilly (56:51)
Yeah, I don't think it the reason why I'm so convinced of that is it opens the door to the idea that there are more badass members of the Grey Council that weren't there because the optimal number for laying down magical justice is 13. So that makes a lot of sense to me.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:10)
Or maybe the ones

that could teleport using the Odin spell had to be part of a ritual that would teleport the 13 of them and you couldn't have more than that or something. That's the way I could see it work.

Baloreilly (57:19)
Exactly.

Right, that's perfect. That's actually a better idea. Yeah. And that ⁓ actually explains to me why, because it really seems odd if Ebenezer is such a heavyweight that he's only got 12 close friends. So it makes a lot more sense if it's limited magically, not just because Ebenezer is not diplomatic enough.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:42)
Right.

Okay, so moving on, has this more focused reading changed any of your opinions about Stormfront?

Baloreilly (57:51)
It definitely made me find the book.

to be more well executed than I originally thought because I got a greater appreciation for all of the goals that Jim had as an author. You can really see him trying to do a lot and he does it in a very tight book. That really made me think as an overall just novel, Stormfront's better than I thought. I moved it up in my mental rankings in the series after reading it more closely.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:21)
Now the

problem will be, if every book does that, then it winds up back near the bottom again, but we'll see as we go through. But I kind of agree with you. Specifically, I never appreciated chapter 24, the one we've been talking about where he has to confront his inner demons and decide whether he's gonna burn down the lake house or not before he goes in there to confront Victor. I never really appreciated that one as much, but as I was reading it more closely, more specifically and intentionally,

Baloreilly (58:34)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:48)
I started to realize that that's where it really explores the themes of the book. And that was a more interesting chapter as a result. The other one that I kind of realized in real time while we were talking about it in that episode is when Susan is revealed to be more of a badass than you'd expect. I didn't really put that together until this reread where I was like, this is where the secret agent Susan that we meet in changes.

comes from, death masks too.

Baloreilly (59:19)
Yeah, I completely agree. I think he does a great job laying the groundwork for that, and it really hit me when we were analyzing that Toad Demon fight. Man, she keeps her cool in a way that when I was reading it the first couple times, I didn't really notice because I was focused on the action.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (59:34)
Right, All right, what's the last couple of questions here? How does this book proceed if Somebody comes up to post-Battlegrounds Harry and says, hey, here's a problem. This lady, Monica, she wants your attention, she needs your help, and then also, ⁓ whoever Murphy's replacement is over at the thing says, yeah, can we get your help on this weird heart-explody spell?

What does post-Battleground Harry do when confronted with this if he's never seen Stormfront before?

Baloreilly (1:00:04)
Yeah, I mean, we're going to ask this question for, I think, every book.

And this is one of the ones where it's the silliest. What does he do? Monica walks in and he goes, okay, you know, listen, go through his hairbrush or his clothes or something, you know, get me a sample. I'll solve that in two seconds. He goes to the crime scene and goes, huh, somebody blew up at his heart with thaumaturgy. You know, I'm not sure exactly how it's done, but I wonder if this has something to do with the drug kingpin in the area, John Marcon. He follows the correct path of the investigation. He finds Victor in 48 hours.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:34)
Because he doesn't

say, a woman did it. He's past that.

Baloreilly (1:00:36)
Exactly. And,

right, he just immediately realizes, ⁓ this guy's a drug lord, and I mean, Adam, how do you think the fight against Victor goes for the winner night?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:50)
⁓ man, the winter night has so much fun messing with Victor and just like completely shutting down all of his magic without even breaking a sweat. I kind of want to see that like alternate timeline. Somebody write that fanfic. That sounds like it'd be really funny.

the other thing I think is when Monica comes in and talks to him, he just accepts that she's right. ⁓ hey, sounds like a warlock. ⁓ Let me just call up Ramirez and let him know that that seems like a.

Baloreilly (1:01:15)
That's right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:17)
That seems like a no brainer there for that version of Harry who has the connections and the respect and the ability to think about these things. We talked about how Victor is like above Harry's capabilities a little bit in this book. He's never done this before or something. Victor would be so far below the winter nights. Like, do I really have to take care? Isn't there somebody else that can do this kind of a situation? Anyway.

Baloreilly (1:01:45)
If you remember the short story, Day Off, when the kids show up and Harry pulls out the gun, you know, I'm a fixin' to defend myself. Victor is like one notch up there, you know, it's a two second confrontation. The last question we have is from ⁓ Dendritid Dysfunctions, love the username. ⁓ They ask, how did a kid on probation with the White Council go from living in the Ozarks with Ed to setting up his own PI firm

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:48)
Yes!

Exactly.

Baloreilly (1:02:15)
in Chicago. So I think there's a pretty clear answer to this, Adam. How about you?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:02:20)
So that's a very interesting question. At some point, Harry had to ask himself, you know, what am I gonna do when I leave this farm in the Ozarks? So at some point, I think he must have read detective stories, police procedurals, and decided, private investigator, I,

can help people. I'm good at finding things. Like he probably obviously determined that Thaumaturgy was one of his strengths when he was working with Ebenezer. And he's like, yeah, I'm good at finding things. I could be a private investigator. I just need a little bit more training. And he eventually finds Ragged Angel's investigations and gets his,

apprenticeship there in order to become a PI. So I think that's, he probably gets it from books, from stories. I think that's where he gets the idea of becoming a private investigator.

Baloreilly (1:03:09)
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that, this is actually an easy sell for Ebenezer when he tells him, I want to go to Chicago and I want to become a Private Eye. Why? Well, it's not like Harry can, you know, join the army or something like that, you know.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:23)
Yeah, that's what kids do these

days.

Baloreilly (1:03:25)
Right, so Ebenezer doesn't want him to enter some highly regimented corporate structure that's going to detract from his ability to learn to use magic better. It's good for him to kind of do a be-your-own-boss thing. ⁓ Harry does want to do good, and he can probably sell Ebenezer that maybe he sees Ragged Angel, they look for missing kids, that's their whole thing. Easy to sell among that. And moreover, he's got to go out into the world

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Baloreilly (1:03:54)
and learn about people. I think Ebenezer knows that. Ebenezer's a hermit, but Ebenezer understands people and politics he's gone through the stuff that he knows Harry needs to go through. So yeah, you wanna head to the big city, be your own boss and try to do some good? and it's gonna involve a lot of thaumaturgy? Sounds great. ⁓

Obviously, is a very idealistic choice by Harry, and it creates a lot of cynicism in him, certainly. But I don't even think Ebenezer would be worried about that, because Ebenezer wants Harry to get over his naivete, because Harry is a starborn, and Ebenezer knows that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:04:34)
Yeah,

he needs him to grow in confidence and part of that means independence. The other thing that occurred to me is we know he kind of wants to punish himself, right? He feels responsible for Elaine's death

and that's one of the reasons he doesn't use his magic to become wealthy. He's kind of punishing himself by living in a Spartan lifestyle, and that really doesn't change. Imagine a different version of Harry that maybe didn't have that trauma that said, you know, I could be the best illusionist ever, because I could use real magic and pretend that it was tricks.

I could follow in my father's footsteps and get really good, but just a little bit, just everyone's to know, just a little bit of magic to hide what's really going on. That's a different version of Harry that decided to follow in what his father did and make a ton of money by being the next big thing, the big act in Vegas or whatever. But he didn't do that choice. He chose the one that was harder, the road less traveled.

Baloreilly (1:05:34)
Right, and what do probably most Jung wizards do? Well, they probably leave their master and then they go work with somebody, some other wizard who's doing something interesting on the council who's gonna house them. Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:05:46)
or gets a new specialization, right? Go

learn with Listens to Wind about shape changing kind of amongst older wizards seems like a common thing that would happen within the formal training.

Baloreilly (1:06:00)
And why doesn't Harry do that? Because he's under the doom and they all think he's a ticking time bomb.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:05)
Yeah, nobody's

gonna take him except Ebenezer.

Baloreilly (1:06:08)
So because that option is foreclosed to him, I think it sort of forces him to go into the mortal world. And among the paths he could take in the mortal world if he wants to ⁓ focus on trying to do good, but not give up his independence to an organization, this is kind of the only way forward.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:25)
All right, that is it for our questions this week, but we've got something even more exciting, statistics.

That's right, we've been tracking a lot of information about the spells that Harry uses, the gadgets that he uses in this book.

And I want to chart those over time, so when we get to the end of Full Moon, we'll look at this again, and when we get to the end of Grave Peril, we'll look at this, and eventually we'll put him in a nice graph as we go through. You know, seven years from now, when we catch up with the rest of the series, we'll have a really cool graph of showing all this stuff. But for now, let's talk about the spells he does use, and what implications that can have. Now, does a smattering of spells that are like one time. He only uses Thaumaturgy one time, and it's a tracking spell.

And he does do that about once or twice per book in the future. Sometimes it's a little bit more, sometimes it's a little less, but I think he usually does it at least once. Listening is something he also commonly uses in the future. He uses it once here. He uses a counterspell, Stregolum Finatus, to banish the shadow man. We never see that specifically named spell again. I can't remember if I've ever seen him do a counterspell.

in the future. I feel like he definitely has and it's just not coming to mind right now.

Baloreilly (1:07:40)
Yeah, I mean, he tries to send away cowls messenger form in White Night, I think. ⁓

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:07:46)
Yeah, he sends something

back that way. I can't remember what it was. It was a fireball or something, but you're right. It might have been like a counter spell to close the gate.

Baloreilly (1:07:53)
Yeah, and maybe he's building on this to do that, but clearly this is sort of a level one version of that counter spell. In addition, we see him use the Sight. He uses that Pulitus Cleaning spell against the scorpions. He uses Toots, true name. He's gonna do that a lot in the future. And he does that weird banishment spell against the Toad Demon. That's a really bizarre one. Do we think that's just like kind of a mistake?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:00)
Yeah.

I think it's just one of those things that Jim decides later he wants demon banishment to be a more physical thing. He kind of does mention it here, but later on, you damage a demon's body or anything that comes from the Never Never that needs to use ectoplasm to create a body in the physical world, you need to damage the body enough that the ectoplasm breaks apart and the demon or whatever it is has to go back to where it came from.

And that is a more narratively interesting thing than Harry just going, how about a little harder? And then the demon just blinking out of existence. Like if that's the case, why doesn't he deal with anything from the never never that way? It's much more fun if he has to fight it.

Baloreilly (1:09:02)
Right, and then we see him do that ⁓ light calling spell in the basement during the Toad Demon fight. Does he actually say Lumos or do we just write that? No.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:10)
No, don't think so, but he does call

light, I just put Lois in there, but he doesn't use the word. ⁓ There's quite a lot in this book actually of ⁓ wordless magic use, and I think Jim's idea of wordless magic damaging the mind of an unprepared wizard isn't something he's come up with yet. or maybe he is using words, but it's not written down on the page, right? I believe,

that we hear him say fuego one time, but there are two or three other instances where he definitely uses what clearly seems to be some kind of a fireball, and he doesn't say anything as far as the narrative is concerned. Doesn't tell us he says anything. It just says, fired, you know, a thing at the stereo across the way in Victor's place. Or he shoots a fire at the jukebox, but he never says the word fuego. So I'm assuming we're still, Jim's finding his feet on where he wants that to be, and that'll kind of go away.

The next thing is that he uses potions twice, obviously. Once for the less potion and once for the escape potion. He uses Hexus twice. Once in the Varsity to mess with the lights and give his big entrance some oomph. And then again to mess up Monica's Taser. Fire, of course, is used four times. Three of them are directly stated be Fuego or a clearly the Fuego spell. Then he uses dispense spells about four times. Circles are used to trap or protect...

⁓ Shield Bracelet is used twice, once in the Varsity, once in the Elevator, and a non-Shield Bracelet spell is used once to block Victor's fire spells. But by far, above and beyond the most common spell, Brian, is what?

Baloreilly (1:10:50)
Wind. Dresden's an Aromancer. He is Avatar.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:53)
Yeah.

Yes, he's the

Baloreilly (1:10:56)
So in this book, Howe uses vento servitas three times to pull the staff to him, to call wind below the elevator, to blow the doors off the varsity. He uses venniche, I come at you, we think twice, once to jump to the platform with cells, and then again to throw himself at cells, though he doesn't say it. He uses ventas fulmino.

which we're calling an air spell. Lightning seems to be kind of an air fire blend, very appropriate for Harry. And Vento Reflitium, which is a windshield spell. That one...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:32)
Yeah, to like

reflect the Toad Demon's acid back at him. ⁓ So that is the long and short of Harry's spells. He does have some gadgets as well. So let's check out those. first gadget that is used the least by Harry is his 38 Chief Special, which they mentioned several times, but Harry never actually uses. Susan uses it against the Toad Demon. It's fairly ineffective at that time. I wonder if Harry had had his like

big magnum like 357 or the the or whatever he has later. Does that hurt the Toad Demon do you think compared to the 38?

Baloreilly (1:12:09)
If he's got the one that Murphy gives him, the .500, yes it does. That thing takes out bears, yeah, I think it could handle the Toad Demon.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:12:14)
yeah.

Okay, so anyway, he doesn't use the Chief's special. It's mentioned, but he doesn't use it. He does use his pentacle one time as like a turn undead against Bianca. He uses his ring, but it's not as a force ring. He uses it as a hexes in the varsity to just blow out the lights as he comes in. So maybe that's like a prototype.

of like just storing generic magic in the ring. And then later when we see him with his force rings, that's the new and improved version of the ring.

Baloreilly (1:12:49)
Right, Harry actually doesn't use a force spell ever until the next book, and I think that's the first book he has a force ring, so he probably grows the force production out of the magic production from the hexes ring.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:13:02)
Yeah, that seems likely. ⁓ One more thing that he uses only one time is the pocket full of sunshine, and we get a reason why he never gets that. It's a depressing reason why we never see this one again, Brian.

Baloreilly (1:13:11)
Poor.

Yeah, you can only catch a pocketful of sunshine if you're happy, and Harry is never again happy enough to do it. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:13:20)
genuinely happy, yeah.

then he uses his shield bracelet twice before it completely melts basically in the elevator. He uses his blasting rod twice on the varsity doors in the varsity jukebox. He never gets to fire his blasting rod at any actual enemies in this book. He uses his staff as a versatile tool that it is five times.

One, to try to hold the demon at bay. He seems to be channeling through his staff to do that. He uses light on his staff in the basement, as we mentioned. He uses his staff when he does the counterspell versus the shadow man. It's pretty clearly described as using the staff as a focus for each of these. He also does it when he's redirecting lightning with the demon and when he's blowing doors off the varsity.

Those are all of the times he uses his various gadgets. And as I mentioned with the spells, we're gonna keep track of these as we go through as well. And then we're gonna come up with some really nice graphs to show how he changes in the types of things that he uses. do you think about those spells and gadgets? Did anything in there surprise you?

Baloreilly (1:14:20)
Yeah, there's one thing that really surprises me because of course I'm reading ahead as we're continuing the podcast. I don't think this is the only book where Harry doesn't use his gun. As far as I can tell, he doesn't use his gun in this book or Full Moon or Grave Peril. So the image of Harry as the wizard with the gun...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:14:38)
Huh.

Baloreilly (1:14:43)
really, I guess, only starts to take shape in summer night when he really starts, I think he actually fires maybe the chlorophynd in that book. ⁓ But found that to be so interesting because it's such a big part of his character that he...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:14:53)
Yeah.

You're right, like I think of him

as the personification of that meme with the wizard that says, may be out of spells, but I'm not out of shells. So, yeah, it's surprising to realize that it's not just this book.

Baloreilly (1:15:05)
Hahaha!

Yeah, anything that surprised you?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:15:13)
I guess all the air spells for sure. And the fact that thaumaturgy is actually used so little in a book where it's all about trying to find things, he just can't get a particular link that he needs to find the right person that he needs. Just as we were talking about before, you're right. he had been a more experienced, he would have told Monica, hey, yeah, just get me his hairbrush and I'll get him for you. Like that's what we'd expect a more experienced Harry to say because he literally says that.

Baloreilly (1:15:15)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:15:42)
to other people in the future when they need to find something. they do that when they're trying to find Molly and proven guilty, and so why isn't he doing it here? I don't know.

Baloreilly (1:15:51)
Yeah, definitely some combination of inexperience and Jim not actually knowing all the tools in the toolbox yet. So that brings us to a great segment about the best lines in Stormfront. So I think we each picked about three. What are your favorites?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:16:08)
Mm-hmm. So

I think one of my favorites is when Harry blasts the doors off the varsity and it's kind of cheapened by him first saying, little pig, little pig, let me in. But the line he says right after that is, there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about, John. And the echo of that where just the visual of him

flying up over the banister and landing right in front of Victor while he's in the middle of his spell and he's so astonished this guy's not supposed to be here and he just casually says, hey, there's been meaning, something I'm meaning to talk to you about, Vic. Like that one always struck out to me as being very cool.

Baloreilly (1:16:53)
Yeah, it's a great entrance line and the fact that it gets a callback really, I think, helps it go over the top there. ⁓ Speaking about Marcon, I've already said it, but...

His Eyes Were the Green of Well-Worn Dollar Bills is one of my favorite descriptions of maybe any character in any piece of fiction, you know, right up there with like real true classic works of literature, not just because it's so evocative, but because it epitomizes so many things about Marcon.

perfectly visible metaphor.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:17:28)
He

also describes Marcon as having a tiger's soul, which I thought was very evocative and cool. The next one that I had on my list is actually also Marcon, where Marcon says, they say you're the real thing, Mr. Dresden, a real magus. And Dresden responds with, they also say I'm nutty as a fruitcake. And Marcon says, I choose which they I listen to very.

Carefully, which is such a badass line because Harry is trying to unnerve him Harry is trying to get him to underestimate him He gets a lot out of that in the series and instead Marcon's like no no no I see you pretending to be a fruitcake and an idiot I know who I should be listening to I realized that you are actually a true mages So I thought that was the just such a badass line when I was rereading it

this time. I don't know that I've really come across it before and thought about it that much.

Baloreilly (1:18:25)
Yeah, I mean that whole scene characterizes Marcon so incredibly well. Obviously, the book end line of the book, my name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk, is iconic for fans of the series, and it is one of my favorites. It's just really fucking cool.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:18:46)
It really is like, yeah, try me bro. Try me bro. Come on, try me. To the reader, yeah. That's a good point. That's true. It definitely does break the fourth wall a little bit there because we get the impression of course later, but it's not really set up in this book that these are the memoirs of Harry Dresden. That is the only real illusion to that in this book where he's talking directly to the reader.

Baloreilly (1:18:50)
Mm-hmm. To the reader. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:19:14)
a lot of first person narratives are told as if they are happening right now with the reader experience them as the first person narrator is. But that is the only hint that in this book that I could remember that these are memoirs being written down and read after the fact by us, which reminded me a little bit of like the Red Book of Westmarch in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Like these are stories that were written down

Baloreilly (1:19:38)
Mm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:19:43)
by Bilbo and later by Frodo and translated into our English, our modern English, because it's to be a mythological history of England that is the closest illusion that I can think of to that kind of a thing.

Baloreilly (1:19:57)
Yeah, I mean, Harry breaks the fourth wall to a certain degree in later books where he says, you know, things like, and nobody can prove that I didn't or whatever. But this is the only time I can recall him challenging readers in that way. It's very effective at telling you're a part of this world. This is the true story of the world you live in. It's got some good secret history vibes. I like that a lot.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:05)
right.

what's your next one?

Baloreilly (1:20:24)
There's a few to choose from here that we both really liked, I'm gonna take the plunge on the... man with the naked sword in his hands, appeared out of the darkness without a warning rustle of sound or whiff of magic to announce his presence.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:27)
Yeah.

So it's such a perfect line to introduce that. that's the smash cut that we were talking about in episode three or four there, where Butcher does that quite expertly throughout the series, taking an otherwise calm scene and suddenly introducing ⁓ some kind of immediate and sudden danger or complication.

Baloreilly (1:21:06)
I think I said this when we discussed it in the episode, but the line it immediately makes me think of, and this is maybe the highest praise I can give, is the opening line of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. It's got that same use of the definite article to tell you these are the parties to the conflict. The gunslinger has the...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:21:23)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

The gunslinger, not just a gunslinger,

the gunslinger.

Baloreilly (1:21:35)
having the concept of the weapon at the ready. I mean, listen, if I'm comparing you to like the most epic work of American fiction completed in the 20th century, that's pretty high praise.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:21:50)
Yeah,

so the next one, and I put this on the list maybe just so could do Toot's voice, but I really like this one where he's meeting with Toot and Harry finally realizes, fairies like pizza, I asked. ⁓ Harry, Toot said breathlessly. Haven't you ever had pizza before? Of course I have, I said. Toot looked wounded. And you didn't share? I love it when Toot doesn't understand things.

I think my favorite line in, where Harry tells him this is an enemy of my enemy ⁓ situation toot, and toot says, a double enemy! And it gets me every time! I love it.

Baloreilly (1:22:29)
Hahahaha!

Yeah,

I think a lot of Jim's best jokes are this kind of comedy of manners wordplay. Toot is definitely a special character for them. But even stuff like, you know, Sanya talking about you depth that this like the incongruity of the statement. Yeah, it just it's always very funny.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:22:52)
Hahaha!

Yes.

Yes. All right. And we've got the final one which may be my absolute favorite.

I the keys and walked up out of the light and shelter of Machinales and into the storm, my bridges burning behind Chills, even now, chills.

Baloreilly (1:23:16)
It's a good line. It's a really good line.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:23:18)
All right, so we've gotta pick, let's say two of these that we're gonna move on to like best lines in the series nominees. What two would you pick?

Baloreilly (1:23:29)
in the bracket. And I'm also going to venture if we each get two choices, then his eyes are the green of well-worn dollar bills.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:23:44)
I think we probably need to come down to three per book or we're gonna have way too many in the bracket later when we get up there and I'm really Okay, let's say we each get one and then we'll we'll each pick one together. So you're gonna pick well-worn dollar bills I'm gonna pick I Walked out my bridge is burning behind me and then we can both pick conjure it by your own risk I think that's that's gotta be it. So

Baloreilly (1:23:50)
Hahahaha!

has to be in there. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:24:12)
I'm gonna go ahead and mark these and then we will out in the future the official answer to what is the best line in the whole series. But we're starting here. Those are officially the three best lines in this book according to Objective Reality.

Baloreilly (1:24:25)
And guys, I don't wanna

hear the building was on fire and it wasn't my fault. Okay, it's good, but we can do better.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:24:33)
It's good. It is. Okay. So there is one statistic, Brian, that I forgot to bring up that we are gonna track. In addition to what spells Harry uses, what gadgets Harry uses, we are going to track Toot's height in inches. Because he goes from six inches in this book to like three feet in the later books. And that's a pretty huge difference. And I just want to see the rate at which that changes.

Baloreilly (1:24:48)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah, absolutely, that's a good one to track. Something we should also mention in this book, we have three nights, actually gets 24 hours of sleep. He's not that sleep deprived compared to later books. So Stormfront, Harry basically is operating on mostly full-ish rest, ⁓ which is probably why he's able to do all of the magic he does on Sunday. And that's something that he's not always gonna get.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:25:27)
We do have a segment that we haven't done yet, but for these, we like to call this segment, why don't you just call it a plant monster? And that is because Harry constantly comes up with cool ass names for the various things he runs into. And unfortunately, he doesn't have that many in this one. We don't get a chlorophynd in this one. What we do get, at the best of ones that I could find, he calls the guard outside Bianca's place Fido.

calls the Toad Demon a Toad Demon. That's kind of boring. He calls Victor Shadow Man. That's kind of cool. And then he calls the mobster Gimpy. Out of those, what's the best name in this book?

Baloreilly (1:26:07)
Listen, Shadow Man, the best thing I can say about it is he pulls it off. That could be way too melodramatic. It doesn't feel that way. But I think the best one is honestly Fido. It's the only one that is sort of unnecessary and non-obvious. So I like it for that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:26:22)
Hmm. Okay,

we'll throw it in there. I don't think it's got a chance against chlorophynd in the future, but let's go with that. So yeah, as you mentioned, we're checking with Harry's ⁓ status in the series at the end of this book, specifically on four major axes. Physically, where's Harry? Mentally, where's Harry? Magically and interpersonally.

So starting off with physically, you mentioned, yeah, he actually gets a decent amount of sleep in this, but he also has a pretty traumatic head injury. He gets bruised and beaten up a little bit. And he also has quite a lot of physical exertion from fighting and even some periods where he goes a long time without rest, even though he does get eventually enough rest. So overall, he doesn't have that bad of a weekend in terms of his physical output. And he's also, he's in okay shape.

Baloreilly (1:27:13)
Yeah, he's a young guy, seems to be reasonably athletic, probably did some manual labor on the farm that got him in pretty good shape. Dresden is big and wiry, and he's not strong for his size, but he's so big that he is strong. So Dresden is a physical force in this book, but he's not somebody who could beat up a trained fighter.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:27:34)
No, and we do learn later, I can't remember which book it is, he starts mentioning that he's taken up jogging as exercise and stress relief, et cetera, but also so that when he gets into these situations, he can either chase or get away from things. And so we don't see that version of Harry yet

All

right, so mentally though, I think it's important to recognize that he levels up his self-confidence by the end of this book. I think having the doom officially lifted and having the White Council, like you mentioned last episode saying, okay, well, they admitted, hey, you went above and beyond the call of duty and having someone else, someone who previously had basically voted to execute him instead saying,

Good job, buddy. That, I think, helped him deal with his own crisis of conscience. Yeah, his own security and self-image.

Baloreilly (1:28:25)
Insecurity. Yeah.

Yeah, more than I think he's willing to admit. Also, Adam, he makes some mistakes in this investigation. The obvious one in the beginning, this must have been done by a woman. Do you think he learns from any of them?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:28:42)
Yeah, that's an interesting question. think he definitely, obviously we get him, you know, six, eight, 10 months later in full moon. I don't remember the exact timeline, Harry is a little bit better at investigating probably just, it's a gradient, right? There's not a lot of obvious points where, okay, now this is what makes him a much better investigator. I think he just slowly gets better over time.

Baloreilly (1:29:06)
for sure. I want to note that I think in full moon he actually makes some

pretty similar mistakes. So I don't really think that he learns a great deal from investigation in Stormfront, but we do see him in the future, when he's got to track somebody down asking for hair. He might review his own notes at some point and recognize, man, there was ways I could have done this better.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:29:29)
Yeah,

that makes sense. So then, course, magically, we talked a little bit earlier about the fact that he's using a lot of air spells in this, but that he's probably working himself towards replacing a lot of the things he does with air in this book with force later. And we can speculate more about that on the Full Moon episodes, about why that is. Now, interpersonally, this is where we get some interesting questions.

How is Harry doing interpersonally? We're gonna talk about his specific relationships in a minute, but how is he doing with people in general in this book? Does he have a lot of friends, a little friends? Is he doing better or worse than he was recently?

Baloreilly (1:30:09)
Man, he is...

So awkward in this book and really not great at viewing things from other people's perspectives. He kind of ruins his relationship with Murphy. He doesn't take any steps to create a better relationship with Morgan. Harry kind of misses the boat at becoming friends with people in this story.

And the only reason things work out with Susan is kind of in spite of him. So, know, the one thing I'll say in his favor is he handles his interaction with Marcon decently. Marcon still has respect for him in the next book, wants to hire him, so he doesn't screw that up, ⁓ though it doesn't exactly solve any problems for him.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:30:51)
Okay, so let's talk about his relationships in general, because this is another thing that we're going to track as we go through the series, and we'll build some cool graphs with this too, because his relationships with various characters change over time. And what we've done is we've built a seven point scale this is all by the way based on how these people view Harry. So one is somebody who hates Harry to the point of

actively working to want to kill him, right? This is your Biancas and your Victors. Then you've got two that might see Dresden as an enemy, but they're not really gonna go out of their way to kill him unless it's necessary for their plans. Three, that's an antagonist. They see Dresden as an obstacle that they can maybe get around. They maybe don't need to go to a lot of trouble to kill him.

Four is someone who's mostly neutral on Dresden, doesn't really like him, doesn't really hate him, maybe could be where frenemies live. And then five is somebody who sees Dresden as an ally. And then six is somebody who is not only an ally of Dresden, but is so strongly in favor of Dresden that they're willing to sacrifice or risk something significant for Harry.

and Seven is somebody who is such a strong ally that they're literally gonna follow him into hell. So that's like Murphy in skin game or Murphy in battleground are perfect examples of a Seven on this scale. And of course, One being Bianca or Victor on this scale. So let's talk through the relationships of some major characters from this book or minor characters that we see later in other books, starting with...

The highest one, I think we gave Susan a six in this one, Brian. Why do you think that is? That would be somebody willing to offer significant aid to Harry.

Baloreilly (1:32:38)
Yeah, I think Susan stands out. She's so obviously invested in Harry very quickly that she's willing to, cover for him with the cops and she, is willing to try to fight a demon with him. She doesn't, seem to hold any ill will towards him for the whole love potion and combining potions thing. Susan thinks this is a crazy thrill ride that she's lucky to get to go on.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:33:06)
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely how she treats it. Then we've got five, again, remember, five, six, and seven allies, one, two, and three enemies with the lower number being more antagonistic. We put Murphy and Mack at five, being allies, small allies to Dresden. And I think that seems right here. I was entirely expecting to put Mack into the neutral camp for several books, but Mack...

lets him borrow his car. That is not a thing a neutral character does. And he doesn't even think about it. He's like, I need to borrow your car, Mac. And Mac just throws him the keys immediately. That is not a neutral character. That is someone who has Harry's back, at least to some small degree.

Baloreilly (1:33:50)
Yeah, and the reason why we're so impressed by that is of course that Harry knocks out Morgan in front of Mac and then Mac aids in a Betzen. So Mac is not just doing him a favor, he's doing him a favor that, I mean we seem to think that, you know, given later stuff in the series, this isn't as big of a risk as it would be for some other people, that's why Mac's not a six, but he's doing him a favor that could cost him in some sense. And honestly, that might play

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:34:00)
Yes.

Baloreilly (1:34:20)
him kind of above Murphy, who by the end of the book isn't sure if Dresden's some guy she works with or Marcon's newest hitman.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:34:30)
Right.

Now, I also struggled on where to Bob in this because I have to be honest, we got to the point where Harry's trapped in the summoning circle down in the basement with Susan and he asks Bob to throw him the sports bottle with the escape potion. I'd forgotten that Bob basically says, you gotta give me something first. And that's not.

the Bob that I was thinking I was remembering from my more recent read through So I was thinking that I might have to put Bob down to a four, but I think you convinced me he's more like a five.

Baloreilly (1:35:07)
Yeah, I think Bob is just kind of a dick. And it's not that Bob is not an ally of Dresden, it's just that Bob is a pretty selfish spirit who doesn't really...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:35:16)
Yeah, he saw an opportunity

for leverage and he's gonna take it regardless of whether he likes you or not.

Baloreilly (1:35:21)
Exactly. I think the next people to talk about are our fours, and honestly, I think that both of these people, and honestly, you could talk me into Murphy and Bob too. You could call these four and a halves. But we have Carmichael and Toot down as neutral because they do work with Harry, but they don't really seem to be particularly invested in his well-being.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:35:42)
Yeah, and that certainly changes over time, especially with Toot Toot, who becomes a staunch ally later on, but right now, he's just, this guy can get us pizza sometime, that's cool, we're willing to trade information for that.

Baloreilly (1:35:54)
Right.

That takes us to our threes, people who view Dresden as something of an obstacle. Dresden kind of makes Marcon into a three. Marcon wants to be friends, but Dresden makes himself a problem for Marcon. I kind of think that Marcon's almost a three and a half here. He kind of goes out of his way not to seek a conflict with Harry, but Dresden definitely puts Marcon on notice that he's gonna be something of a thorn in his side. And the other one is of course Morgan,

who by the end of the book doesn't think that Harry is like a Dark Lord right now, but certainly hasn't reconciled with him.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:36:32)
Right, you

might be able to argue that at the beginning of this book, Morgan would be more clearly classified as a two, as a direct enemy that sees Dresden as a bad guy, quote unquote. But by the end of the book, he still is worried that he still thinks Dresden is going to maybe turn to the dark side, but doesn't think that Dresden already has turned to the dark side.

Baloreilly (1:36:38)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right. And that brings us to the two ones we mentioned already, Bianca and Victor. Victor tries to kill Harry in this book, and Bianca has sworn vengeance against him, and within a couple years we'll be pulling out all the stops to turn him into a body under a mound of dirt in Graceland.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:37:09)
That's

right. Now the next one is where we would be ranking the book within the series. And what we're going to do is at the end of each book, we will rate the next book in the context of the previous ones that we've done. So we're going to do Stormfront right now. We're going to rank that number one, because it's the only one we have. Then when we get to Full Moon, we're going to decide, is Full Moon to go rank higher than Stormfront?

or lower than Stormfront. We also want to ask you guys where you would rank those two books. And then we get to Grave Peril, where does that fit in this ranking? And so over time, we're going to build up the opinion of the pod, the objective, pure, clear best ranking of the series as far as Brian and I are concerned. And we'll build another one up using polls to see what the community thinks, our particular listenership anyway. right now, that's not very impressive because everybody's going to put a number one because we don't have anything else to compare it to yet.

Baloreilly (1:38:00)
What we're gonna do instead is rank Stormfront according to degree of difficulty. So another thing we'd like to do, especially for these early books, is rank them in a way that stands out against the other books in this series to show what their strengths are. So I think that the first book in a fantasy series is really

really hard to do well. There's so much you have to introduce. And when I was going over all 17 of the major books in the series, I honestly thought Stormfront was probably the second hardest to write.

number one is Peace Talks. Because Jim originally planned that as one book and had to split it into two, you know, it's like splitting the Hobbit film duology into the trilogy. Just really, really hard to do that right. And I think that's why Peace Talks is not quite as good as some of the books around it in the series. But I put Stormfront right behind it and right in front of Ghost Story for kind of the same reason. Jim has to introduce fundamentally new and different protagonists. Ghost Harry is very

different from regular Harry. In this book he introduces regular Harry, in Ghost Story he has to introduce Harry who can't interact with the physical world. My next two would be cold days because he has to reintroduce Harry as the winter knight, and then five I would put turncoat because I think it's kind of the most complicated and nuanced plot in the series and that just took a lot of effort to get right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:39:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

now I will agree that starting a new series, especially a fantasy series, even if it's an urban fantasy series, is a very difficult lift. I have my own predilection against stories that I'm not familiar with the world, right? Now, don't get me wrong. I've read Lord of the Rings, I've read the Mistborn trilogy, I've read Alex Varys and the Scholomance and...

on and on. I've read all these books, but when I first start to read a fantasy series, I always have this part of my brain that's just like, this isn't familiar. I don't get it. I don't know what the heck is this new proper noun I'm not familiar with. I had the biggest problem with Dune, but you get the idea. Like that's my own personal hangup, right? But Stormfront, that wasn't really a problem for me.

Baloreilly (1:40:22)
Hm hm hm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:40:30)
in part because it's urban fantasy, right? It takes place in the modern world. I don't have to learn what the heck this Rivendell place is. It doesn't take place there. It takes place in Chicago. And you go to a bar, the varsity. I know what that is. So it was much easier.

to get into as far as a fantasy series is concerned. So while I agree with you, starting a fantasy series is very difficult, I would personally put Stormfront a little bit lower just because the kind of fantasy made it much easier to onboard people.

Baloreilly (1:41:01)
Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable opinion. I honestly think that part of why I rank Stormfront so highly is because Jim goes, in my opinion, above and beyond in his world building for a book one. You know, a lot of the stuff that he puts in there about Morgan and the White Council, you could have delayed that. This could just be a murder mystery. But Jim, has all the ambition in the world in this book and tries to do everything, and I think he succeeds.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:41:16)
Okay.

I

think the fact that he puts that in makes it more compelling. It hints at a wider world that you want to know more about. So it's not just, that was an interesting story. I'm glad I read it and put it down. It's, I want to figure out what else is going on with this white council and the vampires and why does he not want to go to the never never? Like all those little hints that he drops in this book are the kind of things that get you wanting to learn more in a mystery story.

Baloreilly (1:41:34)
Mm-hmm.

Right, our next ranking is the book's title in the series. Now, obviously for the same reason, Stormfront is number one right now, but Adam, I've got a question for you. Stormfront had three different titles, two working titles, before we settled on the final one, Stormfront. So out of the three, what's your favorite? Storm...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:42:15)
Well, the only one I

knew before this was Semi-Automagic. And I did like that name. It's a very cool name. When I first heard somebody say that, I'm like, why didn't he keep that one? But I can see why he didn't. It is a really cool pun, but it doesn't command respect the way that the gravitas of Stormfront, I don't know, it feels more goofy and less serious, and maybe that's not what they were gonna go for.

Baloreilly (1:42:43)
So let's just get your final ranking then out of Stormfront, Semiautomagic, and the short-lived working title Abra Kadabra.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:42:52)
Hi, Adam in the editing room here. Just wanted to point out that we learned after this recording the correct third name was Abra-Cadabra, as in a cadaver being a dead body. That pun makes a lot more sense than just Abra-Cadabra. So take that with a grain of salt here for the rest of this discussion. We should have been discussing the potential third title, Abra-Cadabra.

Baloreilly (1:43:17)
What's your one, two, three?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:43:19)
I think Stormfront, Semi-Automagic, and Abracadabra, as far as the title itself, if you think about the title a little critically, the title can be read in a couple different ways. Obviously, it's a direct reference to Victor using the storms that roll through Chicago to power his spells. But it can also be read as this is the beginning

of a series of storm fronts moving through Chicago, represented by each of the other books that comes through. Or it could be read as Harry is a storm front moving through the magical community, causing havoc and chaos and changing things as storms are wont to do. So I think the fact that you can read it in those three major ways make it really a great title that fits the book really well.

Baloreilly (1:44:10)
I think if you made me rank them, my personal favorite is semi-automagic because I love the versatility of that pun. Obviously semi-automatic, you you're trying to do a modern PI who uses it, right? But I also love the idea that it's also that the magic itself,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:44:24)
But he didn't use his gun, and he has a revolver! It doesn't fit!

Baloreilly (1:44:36)
is semi-auto in the sense of this is describing a sort of different take on magic than a lot of books. Harry is not just reading spells out of books. He's coming up with things on the fly. He's improvising. It's a little bit more rugged than the magic you'll see in other stories. ⁓ I will say though, the one thing I do agree with you on is that Stormfront as a title,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:44:54)
OK. Yeah.

Baloreilly (1:45:06)
setting up that two words equal amount of letters pattern is really really good and served the series very very well.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:45:15)
And it's so

effective when changes comes out and it's one word and everything changes, including the title.

Okay, so yeah, we'll be coming back to this in the future and ranking the title of the books, including, in addition to the content. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the show itself. If you've listened this far, then you probably are fans of the show. I just wanted to give some small news, some small updates. We've been slowly evolving our episode formatting and our preparations.

and this is the first time we've done our assessment episode, so I hope we did a good job with this one, but I feel like we've kind of nailed the flow of putting together the chapter by chapter episodes. If you have any feedback, we'd love to have that. Send us an email, mac at rnt.fm, or send us a comment on any of the news posts about the show. But I did want to point out some new things that will be changing somewhat soon. We have commissioned some artwork to replace the currently...

placeholder artwork that is AI generated that was just put together as an idea, as a concept. And I don't have a huge budget for this show and most of it's gone into the tools that we've been using on a month to month basis, but I finally got some extra cash set aside for this, so we've commissioned some artwork. are low on the priority list for this artist because we are paying a slightly lower rate, so we will hopefully have that by the end of the summer and we can sort of backfill all the episodes from there.

So that's sort of the update on that. I know some people are very uncomfortable with AI art and I understand exactly why and it's not something I would choose to do normally. And this was always the plan, was to commission actual artwork for the logo of the show. And just to reiterate, the current one that you may be seeing right now here in the year 2025 is Placeholder.

Baloreilly (1:47:03)
Yeah, we also want to just say that this podcast is something that Adam and I are obviously very passionate about as, huge fans of the series. And we hope we're demonstrating that we're knowledgeable fans of the series who are good at analyzing these books. But I think we also both envision it as a show that's trying to embrace the fan community. And that's why we ask questions and try to solicit your guys' theories and questions and

information

because we want that to influence the show and

we ⁓ want the Dresden Files fan community to feel like is ⁓ a part of that community,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:47:44)
The only thing I've asked of you guys is if you enjoy the show and you know other people who like the Dresden Files, let them know that it exists. would help us more than pretty much anything else.

Baloreilly (1:47:53)
So thanks for subjecting yourself to the dry technical sort of future discussion portion, the meta discussion portion of the pod, but we're gonna end with next week's question for Bob, which will be about the first couple chapters of Full Moon. And that question is, why doesn't Kim Delaney tell Harry the truth? And what would happen if she did?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:47:58)
Yeah.

Yeah, that is a fun thing to speculate about, and we'll talk about that next time.