The Dresden Files: musings on TV!Bob and book!canon and names
It's all _medley_'s fault.
Between her meme on the things she personally holds to be canon for The Dresden Files and her incredibly awesome fic The Naming of Ghosts and some third component that I haven't quite figured out yet but is quite probably also her fault, I've been noodling.
It is stressed in the books that names are a Big Deal magically speaking. Mostly that refers to the trope that knowing someone or something's name gives you power over them. But there's something else there too, something that was sort of vaguely referred to a few books back and moreso in White Night (a big fat spoilery thing that Thou Shalt Not Discuss even in the comments here) - the idea that the act of naming someone or something has a power of its own; that in giving someone or something a name you can affect them, change them.
Which brings us to our favorite snarky bad-ass necromancer cuddlemonkey.
We may know some of the story of how he ended up chained to his skull, but we don't know all the details. I believe it had to have been about more than him just breaking the rules. I think it had to have been something really bad, something abominable even, something that did a lot of damage and harm. But if we accept the existence of a soul, than the soul is the Self, and it seems rather silly to believe that death alone imposes some kind of stasis that would keep us from growing and changing (I say "death alone" because speculating on what kind of effect any number of different kinds of afterlife might have is just straying off topic for my purposes here). It is not that big of a leap to presume that the person who committed what might be truly heinous acts is not that same person anymore.
And then there's the name thing. I think it's entirely possible that in the act of giving Hrothbert a new name, Harry changed him. It's not something that would have happened at once, because what someone calls us is not automatically going to count as a true name. But as 'Bob' became his name, I think that in part he became Bob. It's interesting to consider all the kinds of things that could mean.
And here's a really interesting piece of speculation I want to throw out at you: what if the changes eventually became so significant that he is essentially no longer the person who was bound? I mean, the magics that binds him had to be built to bind him, so what if he is no longer the person those magics were built around?
Between her meme on the things she personally holds to be canon for The Dresden Files and her incredibly awesome fic The Naming of Ghosts and some third component that I haven't quite figured out yet but is quite probably also her fault, I've been noodling.
It is stressed in the books that names are a Big Deal magically speaking. Mostly that refers to the trope that knowing someone or something's name gives you power over them. But there's something else there too, something that was sort of vaguely referred to a few books back and moreso in White Night (a big fat spoilery thing that Thou Shalt Not Discuss even in the comments here) - the idea that the act of naming someone or something has a power of its own; that in giving someone or something a name you can affect them, change them.
Which brings us to our favorite snarky bad-ass necromancer cuddlemonkey.
We may know some of the story of how he ended up chained to his skull, but we don't know all the details. I believe it had to have been about more than him just breaking the rules. I think it had to have been something really bad, something abominable even, something that did a lot of damage and harm. But if we accept the existence of a soul, than the soul is the Self, and it seems rather silly to believe that death alone imposes some kind of stasis that would keep us from growing and changing (I say "death alone" because speculating on what kind of effect any number of different kinds of afterlife might have is just straying off topic for my purposes here). It is not that big of a leap to presume that the person who committed what might be truly heinous acts is not that same person anymore.
And then there's the name thing. I think it's entirely possible that in the act of giving Hrothbert a new name, Harry changed him. It's not something that would have happened at once, because what someone calls us is not automatically going to count as a true name. But as 'Bob' became his name, I think that in part he became Bob. It's interesting to consider all the kinds of things that could mean.
And here's a really interesting piece of speculation I want to throw out at you: what if the changes eventually became so significant that he is essentially no longer the person who was bound? I mean, the magics that binds him had to be built to bind him, so what if he is no longer the person those magics were built around?