The Dresden Files/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The Books provide examples of:

  • Adaptation Distillation:
    • The comic book. As Jim Butcher himself points out, Dresden Files has the heart and soul of a comic book anyway.
    • The roleplaying game is both incredibly faithful to the books, condensing the Dresdenverse into a very elegant and functional game, and flexible enough to handle anything you might want to do with the game. An example is how a couple of people in one playtest group wanted to play as a ghost and a ghoul. They managed to figure out how to do so after about 10 min of planning for each.
    • One of the other playtester groups succeeded in making a character who was essentially an animated sentient whip.
  • Awesome Ego: Ramirez. The Tabletop Game says as much.
  • Complete Monster : Has its own page.
  • Crazy Awesome: In Ghost Story, Harry was able to manifest his disembodied spirit into the real world and punch a mook, specifically because he was insane, which is the very definition of this trope. Recall that only insane ghostly spirits can manifest physically, because it's incredibly dangerous. Oh, and the way he comes to realize he's crazy enough to do this? He remembers all the other crazy stuff he's done in previous books. And much of that crazy stuff was awesome.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: Heck, just look at the page. But particular mention should go to the Dinosaur Incident. (Yes, it deserves the caps.)
    • While this might not count as a true crowning moment, I'd say that at the very least, Harry qualifies for father of year. Let's look at the facts. From the moment he finds out that he has an eight year-old daughter that he never knew even existed, he is prepared to go to the wall and do whatever it takes to make sure that she's safe. This is a girl that he never even knew existed, much less met. When you compare that to how many fathers have lived with their children for their several years and couldn't give two shits about them, this becomes extremely awesome.

Harry: "If the world burns, so be it. Me and the kid will roast some marshmallows."

Lash: "I... she doesn't deserve you."

    • From Dead Beat:

"You're the one they arrested in the nursery a few years back," he said. "You broke in during a blackout. They found you in the middle of a wrecked room with all those babies."
I took a deep breath. "Yeah."
Lamar was silent for a second. Then he said, "You know that the year before, the SIDS rate there was the highest in the nation? They averaged one case every ten days. No one could explain it."
"I didn't know that," I said.
"Since they arrested you there, they haven't lost one," he said. He turned back to me. "You did something."

      • For clarification, when you realize that Harry has been suffering from Being Good Sucks this whole series, and keeps at it anyway, having someone notice that he made a positive difference and help him because of that is huge.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Ride of the Valkyries. Also tells you something about Gard's sense of humor considering what the short story "Heorot" reveals about her true nature.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Lara Raith is pretty much the embodiment of this, as are all the other Raiths, and both Fairy Courts, and Bianca and many of the Red Court vampires (before seeing their true form at least). Harry even mentions the benefits of having no hot water as taking cold showers constantly is a good defense against the supernatural charms of the dangerous female beings he meets constantly.
  • Fan Disservice: The scene in Turn Coat where Lara Raith feeds on (read: consumes emotions and soul by having sex with) her cousin Madeline -- and Lara, who has been severely injured in battle, is a charred, ravenous, vengeful living corpse. Also appears to eat her cousin's internal organs, based on how she stuck her hand in Madeline's viscera while said cousin is turned on by this. The Raiths are screwed up.
  • Foe Yay: Harry and Marcone seem to have a little of this going at times.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: The short story "Day Off", found in the anthology Blood Lite, features the characters of Kirby and Andi, the fact that they are going steady, and the fact that Harry is in a relationship with Warden Captain Luccio. In the book Turn Coat, Kirby dies and Harry and Luccio are told that their relationship was psychically arranged by the same Council traitor who killed LaFortier and Morgan. Consider the difference in tone between the two stories and you have got Mood Whiplash as well.
  • Growing the Beard: The first two books are okay, but the series really hits its stride at Grave Peril. It improves even more during and after Dead Beat.
    • Butcher really hit his stride when he had Harry punch a werewolf through a goddamn wall. After that the series figured out its pattern of stringing together incredibly awesome scenes with interesting mysteries and witty dialogue.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: From "Changes". "If that was the price I had to pay to make my daughter safe, so be it. If I was haunted by my choices for the rest of my life because Maggie needed me to make hard choices, so be it." This passage is from when he was deciding to kill Lloyd Slate and become the Winter Knight. Applied to what happened later, when he killed Susan, there is a whole new dimension of haunting regret.
    • Another one occurs in Grave Peril, when Harry is waiting for Susan to bail him out of jail and sees Michael and Charity talkling he finds himself wondering why alll his relationships don't work and jokingly puts it down to all the "ghosts, demons and Human Sacrifice." cue Changes...
    • In the short story "Something Borrowed", Kirby was supposed to be Billy's best man at his wedding, but got really hurt in a fight the night before (no thanks to the jello shots)... Flash forward to Turn Coat...
  • Ho Yay: Harry and Thomas. Even though they're half-brothers. Half-BroYay!. Hell's bells, the Ho Yay actually becomes a plot point at times.
  • Les Yay: All of the female members of the Raith clan are bisexual, but the few male members are all straight. An example of Fan Service or Author Appeal anyone?
    • Actually, this makes sense in context. The White Court, and House Raith in particular, have a very large hand in shaping the Pornography industry in America, with the intent of twisting the human psyche towards empty lust rather than genuine love (which is poisonous to the White Court). When you consider that the heterosexual porn industry glamorizes bisexual women but avoids showing bi/gay male sex... basically, it means that the White King's personal fetish for bisexual women was (and is still) getting transmitted into our culture through white-court-controlled porn memes. As for the female members of House Raith, all of them had been shaped (read: raped/dominated/traumatized) by the White King, so it follows that they'd fall in line with his sexual appetites. Now that the White King is only a figurehead, it remains to be seen if Lara will continue in the same vein, or try different approaches.
    • Don't forget Lara more or less outright says that Luccio was bisexual in her previous body....
    • Well the whole thing about male Raiths not being bisexual might not be true. In Blood Rites Lord Raith, as an offhand comment, said that he thought/hoped that Thomas was 'feeding' on Harry considering how much he was spending time with/helping him... and he wasn't necessarily disturbed about it when he said it.
      • There isn't a "whole thing" about male Raiths not being bisexual. Thomas just says that his dad doesn't swing that way is all. And it's not like we've got a lot of data to extrapolate from.
        • Also, Thomas never says he's not bi, just that his father isn't. He's clearly much more interested in women, but considering Lara and several others actually assume he and Harry are an item, it's entirely possible he's had male lovers before that made this assumption much easier to leap to.
    • Subverted in Ghost Story, where a female White Court vampire tries to blackmail Murphy into letting her feed on her. Murphy's counteroffer is to slam her face through a table and put a gun to her head, and making it clear that if anyone finds out about the Swords that she'll kill the vampire personally.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Quite a few of these are kicking around, to Harry's dismay. Fortunately, some are his friends. Harry himself is TRYING for it at times. He's still at Guile Hero/Manipulative Bastard though
    • Marcone is constantly getting people that hate him to do what he wants, even when they are perfectly aware that, lesser or no, he is evil.
    • Martin, in Changes.
      • Lara Raith.
    • Collin Murphy scams Uriel Wow.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome: An unfortunate result of the books being told from Harry's POV is that we miss some of the crazier fights in the background, like the battle between the Wardens and the Red Court across half of Europe in Dead Beat or Morgan and Michael and half of Summer trouncing the Red Court in Proven Guilty.
    • Add to the list Molly, Thomas and Mouse fighting the Ick in Changes while Harry lies broken on the other side of a house.
    • The Oblivion War, as specified in Backup. Jim Butcher even said that by Harry's very nature, he'd be an immense liability if he even knew about the war.
    • Small Favor had what was likely an awesome parkour chase as a gaggle of faerie elves chased Thomas-disguised-as-Harry across the Chicago rooftops. We missed it mostly because Harry was with Michael as he went Fist of God on a few hundred hobs in the subway.
    • Between Changes and Ghost Story, Murphy killed two warlocks who were at Council-tier strength. Considering Murphy is a human with no magic to her, that is really impressive, but we sadly don't get to see it.
    • Of course, considering how much awesome is crammed in the series already, adding more might result in brains melting.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Lasciel's shadow can make illusions so perfect that Harry can not tell the difference. She completely makes up a person to interact with him, and he is so taken in that other people start thinking he has gone nuts because he is talking to empty air. Then she demonstrates that if she wanted, she could use this to kill him at any time. Yeeeesh.
  • Squick:
  • Too Cool to Live: Shiro
  • The Woobie: Both Harry and Thomas. The universe clearly hates their family.
    • Molly as well, and how, as of Ghost Story.

The TV series provides examples of:

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