[30Days]: The Dresden Files
renay has asked me to talk about books, and since I sent her some of this particular series (ACCIDENTALLY COVERED IN CHOCOLATE, that will never stop being funny) and she hasn't had time for them yet, today I am going to talk about: The Dresden Files.
I do love this series and I enjoy these books very much, but let me get out there first that I am definitely not the kind of reader who lets books I like get a free pass. I actually enjoy critiquing books I like. Sunshine, aka my favorite book of all time? SOOO not a perfect book; and one of my favorite things about it is being able to discuss its flaws with other people, discussing how it works with them and around them. So! If you also like the Dresden Files but you don't want to see them discussed from all angles (strengths AND weaknesses), uhhhhhh this is so officially your warning. If you're curious about the Dresden Files and you'd like to see my take on where they succeed and where they fail, hey: this is your invitation!
Note: There should be no major spoilers in this part. If I end up wanting to write about something that's a spoiler, I will mark it!
The Dresden Files
This series revolves around Harry Dresden, a professional wizared-for-hire in Chicago. The books start out following Harry as he solves cases, wrestles baddies, tangles with the law, and does the right thing; later books begin to pick up an over-arcing plotline, mysterious stuff in the works and in the background that are driving the series to a pretty climactic battle-for-the-world-type conclusion. It is a little bit funny because there's this huge good-vs-evil battle going on, and yet Harry still has to pay his bills because saving Chicago doesn't net him any serious income; it's an irony that's played pretty well.
Harry's a wizard; magic's real, but most people are ignorant of its existence and its danger, and Harry has positioned himself to help protect people from all the evils of his magical world. He starts off as a private-investigator-type, consulting for the polics department and solving cases on his own, but like I said, a bigger plot begins to appear in the later books.
It's a supernatural series, and one of the strongest things about it (in my opinion!) is the way Jim Butcher weaves in all kinds of supernatural standards, myths, stereotypes, and tropes, in a way that's both new and works in the world he has built. For example, there are vampires, but there are three vampire Courts, and each one represents its own kind of vampire trope (traditional "Bram Stoker" vamps, incubi/succubi, superpowered meat sacks, etc) - and the Courts sometimes collaborate and sometimes fight, and sometimes ally with wizards and sometimes with each other and sometimes they backstab, and the way Butcher represents all of the traditional "expected" vampire mythology but turns it into his own is quite clever in my opinion. Likewise, when we meet werewolves, they come in a variety of flavors, each type obeying its own magical rules. Butcher also draws heavily on the world of Faerie - the Summer and Winter Courts play very heavy roles in the ongoing conflicts and in Harry's life - as well as some interesting artifacts of Christianity and faith as magic.
There are a lot of kinds of magic and power, wizardry being only one - and two of the arguably 'strongest' characters in the series (Karrin Murphy and Gentleman Johnny Marcone) are 'normal' humans, a cop and a mobster respectively. It's interesting the way it all weaves together; Butcher has his own set of rules which keep everything relatively balanced. There aren't any Mary Sues or stuperpowers here: the powers have their price, characters have their weaknesses, and even Harry - the series' POV and obvious badass - can't overpower everybody by blunt force, although that doesn't always stop him from trying.
You read the first book, and you go, "That was pretty good. Not amazing or anything, but good. I could have written it." And then you read the second, and the third, and by the fourth you are going, "I wish I had written this, because it is awesome." By the fifth or sixth you realize that you're going through them in a day, staying up until bleak hours of the night, because they've caught you.
Cast and Characters
Harry himself is a (usually) likeable character, which is good since the books are all told from his POV. He's delightfully cynical, snarky, and sarcastic, but seriously has a huge woobie heart of gold underneath it all -- he lives to "do the right thing", a philosophy that makes him both likeable and annoying, because it can make him kind of dumb. As the books go on, however, he gets both smarter and more clever, and can actually get fairly ambiguous in his good/evil divide even while striving to do "the right thing", an inner conflict I found/find pretty fascinating. He's a wizard; he's a nerd who likes roleplaying board games and makes awful quips in the face of danger, his jokes are terrible and he lives like the world's worst bachelor. He's a rogue. There is admittedly something about him that is downright sexy. He's terribly complex and also simple.
The supporting cast is one of the other great things about this series: Dresden's friends and companions are fully-drawn, living-breathing characters, with their own stories and motivations and agency and powers. The characters (and their relationships/interactions with Harry) are really well done, barring a few cases that feel meh at times.
I actually wanted to discuss some of the characters here, but uh I am afraid of spoiling! I'm just going to say: Murphy, Thomas, Michael, Kincaid (oh Kincaid)... what an awesome cast. Yes. That is all.
The Dresden Files From a Lady's Perspective
The one thing about the Dresden Files is that they're told from the POV of a white(, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied) dude! There are a lot of books told by white dudes, about white dudes. So let's talk about this for a moment.
POC: The supporting cast does carry a fair representation of minorities (Susan Rodriguez, Ramirez, Kincaid (? although he may not count, being [spoiler]...?), Martha Liberty, Ancient Mao, Listens-To-Wind, and more) but they are supporting cast rather than main standby characters. Many of them are shown to be powerful, and there's a decent amount of not-white-people philosophy showing up in magic/wizards (Elaine, for example), so it's representation but not ground-breaking in any way. A pass but not a gold star?
Queermosexuals: Sadly, none I can think of, and in a scene where Harry pretends to be Thomas' boyfriend to gain access to his place I am pretty sure it's (sadly) played with the same "Oh, but I'm not gay, but I have to pretend to be gay" homophobic humor most sitcoms and movies use. :( Poor form, Butcher, sorry. (Although as I am mentally shipping Harry/Thomas the scene pleases me on other levels, because of [spoiler].) If there are any representatives of the GBLTQ community here, they're not obvious ones, because I'm not remembering them. Maybe we'll get something fabulous in the later books.
Ladies: This is where is gets interesting; the series both strongly passes and strongly fails in this light. I'm going to take this apart a bit.
It's difficult to apply the Bechdel Test (two lady characters, who talk to each other, about something other than a dude) to this series, because it's in Harry's POV. We see female characters talking to each other and often it's about or involving Harry, because he's there. And it's implied that female characters might talk with each other (about non-guy things!) off-screen, but we don't see it, because we're in Harry's head. So that's pretty much an automatic fail for the books because of the way they are structured. Some readers will call this a fail and some will not. I leave it up to the individual.
There's also the case of Harry's chivalry/misogyny/deal with women: Harry has a thing when it comes to women, and women in danger; he likes to "save them" and "protect them." Ugh, say all the woman wizards, right? Also, pretty much every female character in the books is described as attractive at some point: Harry spends a lot of time dwelling on the sexy, smokin' hot ladies he works with all the time. I can go either way on this one; on one hand it's tough to put up with, as a lady reading a book about a guy - it's irritating (and demeaning!) to have characters reduced to their curves. On the other hand, it's often used as a storytelling device (the Fae are described as dangerously, otherworldly beautiful, so this kind of "Harry's boner woke up" can often be a subtle warning sign), or it's made obvious by the way it appears in the story that this is part of Harry's worldview, and not necessarily that of the author.
I will also point out as a counterexample that Harry takes great pains to mention how amazingly sexy Thomas looks every time Thomas walks into a scene (man I ship them). And that his protective instincts extend to friends of both genders - I am thinking of Billy and the Alphas, specifically - so. These aren't excuses; it makes it no less annoying to read when directed at the women, since ladies have to put up with this kind of shit from all kinds of books written by a dude. I just point it out that a lot of it is just Harry.
This is the kind of thing I'd definitely be interested in discussing with people who have read the books: do you give Butcher a pass or a fail?
The thing is that even with this, these books can drip with female character agency! For example: Karrin Murphy is quickly becoming one of my favorite woman characters of all time. Harry starts out wanting to protect her, but Karrin basically runs him over time and time again with her agency and by maybe the third? fourth? book, Harry is confiding in her, taking her advice, following her direction, trusting her judgment and not just respecting her own personal choices but really not even commenting on them, as if this is totally normal and the way it works (which it is, or should be) -- it isn't even "EVEN THOUGH she's a woman" in later books, it's like "oh she is amazing and by the way female". Murphy is awesome, and the Harry-Murphy relationship (no matter what you see in it (I can also ship them okay)) is really well-done. It's a huge strong point against the other iffy bits.
It's a huge strong point for the series, alone, period: read it for Harry-Murphy (or Harry/Murphy) because gosh, do I love what they do together. It's a perfect example of trust, trust both earned and given like trust has to be. They embody every last bit of it. And I love it. it's so significant, the way Harry trusts Murphy - a human in a world of superpowers! - so much more than anyone, and Murphy trusts Harry - the keeper of these mysterious things she doesn't understand! - and they have each other's back no matter what. I am wanting to go back and re-read their scenes right now. Fuck.
And the other female characters carry strengths of their own, both magically and personality-wise - Molly, Elaine, Charity; the Faerie Queens are basically the most powerful beings out there - and moreover, they aren't caricatures of female characters. They aren't stereotypes; they may start out that way, but they develop into their own characters with unique motivations and unique choices. (Even Susan, who I feel is the blandest of the female characters (unfortunately...!), demonstrates her agency in a major way later in the series when she [spoiler].)
In The End
This post is too long, and I know I've left out a ton, so feel free to ask stuff in the comments. Overall: I have really enjoyed this series, with its flaws, because the storytelling is engaging, the characters intriguing, and the world-building excellently complex.
AND NOW I POST.
This is part of my 30 Days of Posting meme - feel free to check out the schedule of posting and contribute if there are any spaces! DW || LJ
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