Quantus noted the other day that I hadn't actually put this all in one readily findable place, so I thought it might be worth doing so.
CORE HYPOTHESIS
Premises:
There's a storm coming. Odin mentions this to Harry at the end of CD. At least some Great Powers have access to foresight and/or intellectus. They can plausibly have known this for some time.
The Great Powers work together. Sources; WoJ on Uriel and Odin being in very different divisions pointed at the same general end, Bob in GS telling Harry Mab is working with Uriel. At least those three, and possibly others we've not met yet or not seen enough to know about, are in a loose alliance
The Great Powers have to act indirectly. Sources; WoJ and text on it being minimally possible for Great Powers to act directly on Earth without endangering reality, iirc Mother Winter in CD is an example and Ferro in GP makes sense retrospectively as another. (This appears to have held up for approximately 2000 years and may have something to do with the WG - cf. the bassanid in "Last Call", Harry in PG talking about old gods existing out in the NN.)
Human free will is Significant: According to WoJ and to Uriel. Also, it is correlated with ability to summon Outsiders.
Given these premises, the central notion is:
Starborn are a Manhattan Project carried out by the alliance of Uriel, Mab and Odin (and possibly others), hence referred to as Team UMO. The object of the exercise is to concentrate in a free-willed human, preferably one of good moral character, as much as possible of the different kinds of power available in the DV, to have a champion/weapon/Swiss Army chainsaw/supernatural equivalent of Programming in Perl available come the BAT.
Harry is one of several potential candidates (WoJ confirms this) of whom Elaine may be another.
Elements of the plan in more detail:
The original idea comes from Mab via Lea:
- Motive: Winter is, in this age of the Earth at least, the guardian of reality against the Outsiders (CD)
- Means: The folkloric Leanansidhe's thing was providing inspiration to mortals, and we have a WoJ saying this innovation was how DV Lea got to be so high up in the Winter hierarchy.
- Opportunity: Maggie leFay, powerful wizard, on the outs with the Council over what appear according to Luccio in SmF to be serious political differences, willing, according to Eb in BR to break the Laws; a strong female wizard is a good candidate for parent to a strong wizard given that magic is mostly inherited in the female line (Harry in PG) and Maggie's demonstrably an easier sell than many on her own judgement of the right thing to do being something she will put ahead of Council policy (just like Harry).
- Complementary argument; We know the Council go all Fahrenheit 451 on information about how to break the laws (cf, Kemmler's writings, Bob, chapter 3 of DB). Therefore, information about Outsider-related magic is difficult and dangerous to find. Yet Maggie (starborn child) and both her known associates, Justin (summoning HWWBh) and Lord Raith (summoning HWWBh, protection against magic which Harry identifies as feeling Outsidery) all visibly have it to some degree. It seems most Occamian that it came to them from the same source and was shared among them, which would be a necessary element of them managing the breeding of starborn.
Mab always intended to get her hooks into Harry
- Lea was often hanging around when Harry was a child. (WoJ)
- Lea's deal with Maggie requires her to protect Harry (siren noise and grumpy neighbour in SK, primrose garden and alliance at the end of Changes) but not to inform Harry that she is required to protect him. (It's news to him in SK that she's even trying.)
- Logical deduction from these two facts: Lea expects Harry to get into some form of trouble and turn to her for help, and intends to make a bargain that will give Faerie a hold on him. (Why was it Lea that Harry turned to for assistance against Justin, out of all the possible supernatural entities to deal with ? We don't know, but her having in some way planted the relevant information where he could get it is what makes sense to me; I'm not seeing Justin as very likely to teach his apprentices "Twenty Entities You Could Call On To Defeat Me In Battle")
- The way we have seen for a Faerie Court to most invest their power in a human is through Knighthood.
- Therefore, the plausible long-term goal of all Winter manipulation of Harry is to put him in a situation where he will take up the offer of Knighthood. (cf. offers in SK and DB; Winter keeping their Knight on ice despite major handicap of so doing in PG; actual knighthood in Changes)
- Odin's direct role in this, in Changes; giving Harry the information he needs to make it absolutely clear he needs to look to a major power source beyond what he has available in order to have a chance against the gathered Red Court.
- Uriel's direct role in this, in Changes; showing Harry Maggie, giving his motivation the final push to call on Mab and accept the Knighthood.
- Odin's indirect role, in Changes; as a member of the Grey Council, capable of influencing them by what information he provided with them (or presumably just making suggestions; I doubt any of them fail to take the All-father seriously).
- Uriel's indirect role in Changes; powering up the Swords is a Heaven thing.
POTENTIAL ADDITiONAL ELEMENTS
(Note: I think any of these might be the case. I'm not proposing all of them as a unified theory, so if some of them are contradictory to others, that's utterly beside the point.)
Evil
- We see several attempts by villains (Nicodemus in DM, Kumori in DB) to subvert Harry to their particular dark side
- Therefore whatever Harry is being built towards, the character he is along the way has potential utility to evil as well as good.
Heaven
- If the "Swiss army chainsaw" theory is true, Uriel always intended for Harry to have soulfire.
- Therefore (speculative) it may be the case that Nicodemus was in some way serving Heaven's ends by exposing Harry to a coin, thus enabling Harry to fight off (?) Lash and thereby enabling Uriel to give Harry soulfire. Either unwittingly, or having deniably figured out a way to help Uriel that Uriel does not have to take responsibility for. (Like Captain Jack in GS; and that might be an explanation for why Nicodemus thinks he could come out of all this a saint.)
- Michael regularly gets missions from On High (we see this on stage in PG)
- Michael met Harry and insisted on a soulgaze when they were both investigating the same missing child (WoJ)
- Therefore it is possible that Michael meeting Harry, and exposing Harry to both his moral influence as a good person and awareness of the Swords, is on Heaven's orders.
The All-Father
- It seems tolerably obvious that anyone in Harry's line of work in DV Chicago will have to be aware of Marcone and will likely cross paths with Marcone sooner or later.
- We don't, IIRC, know when Marcone first became aware of the supernatural world. It is possible (and appealing to me on plot-aesthetic grounds) that his soulgaze with Harry was it.
- Of all the jobbing sorcerers Marcone could have hired, Gard being the one he ends up with suggests the All-Father had an eye on what was going on there.
- Likewise the All-Father being willing to sponsor Marcone as a freeholding lord (WN).
- Gard acquires Harry's professional respect as a sorcerer (the wards of hers that he has to overcome in DM) his personal respect as a warrior and sometime ally (DB, "Heorot") and ultimately serves as the conduit for him to turn to when he contemplates the necessity of looking to the All-Father for help (Changes)
- Given the All-Father's foresight, some or all of this was planned in advance.
- Harry eating in Odin's halls gives, in the original Norse mythos, Odin a claim on him. Whenever Harry does eventually end up dying for good and facing judgement, whatever he expects, he'll end up in Valhalla being kept handy until Ragnarok.
- Speculative notion; whatever it was that happened about a thousand years ago when Mab last saw Titania is tied into events surrounding the battle of Hastings. That happened just after the Saxon King Harold had defeated the last great Viking invasion of England at Stamford Bridge, and then marched south to be defeated by the Normans under William the Conqueror. The Normans (Latin Nortmannii, same root as Northmen/Norsemen) were just Vikings who happened to have lived in northern France for the past century and a half. Chances of the All-Father not having a hand in there seem low to me.
- Speculative notion 2: Merlin's apprenticeship to the All-Father (cf. Eb in TC) has some connection with the building of Demonreach (CD), likely in acquiring the knowledge of how to do it.
- Speculative notion 3; given Odin's level of foresight, both those prior sets of events are plausibly prep for the coming storm.
Dead Beat
- Incidental observation that feels like it fits in with this model somehow; one thing DB accomplished was to show Harry that necromancy is not inherently evil (Kumori saving the life of random gangster dude) and then give him experience of using it himself in a not inherently evil manner (Sue). One more blade to the Swiss Army chainsaw as needed.
I have a feeling there's one more related point I am forgetting, but I will come back and add it if it comes back to mind.