In “The Law” Harry mentions how he only has funds to run the Castle for 18 months… that must be his Skin Game loot.  At some point Harry’s constant money problems are just ridiculous.  Can our Author not just addess that?

I'm pretty sure the Author has no wish to do so.

Money is power.  If Harry has access to lots of cash on a regular basis, his life gets easier, his options more extensive, it gets harder to wrap him in plot difficulties.

Remember back in Turn Coat:  Harry was hiding Morgan from the Council and almost everyone else, but he had only a handful of places he could use.  Luckily for him, most of the people hunting him were used to having lots of resources and didn't fully grasp how limited Harry's options were.

Binder did get it, and he actually said at one point "Money never gets it."  Binder is working class background and he understood exactly why Harry was doing things they way he did them.

I concur with this theory..  It fits with my theory that Justine had been infested from the beginning.  Lord Raith knows full well who the half brother of Thomas is, he may even know what Harry is, so Justine infected thrown together with Thomas as a way to control him.  Also knowing that Thomas and Harry will get together at some point so eventually a way to get at Harry.  And as we saw at the end of Battleground it almost worked.

My only problem with that idea is that it has a lot of moving parts that have to play out just right.  Sort of like the theory that Martin wanted Harry and Susan to get together in Death Masks.

Yeah, LR, Lara, Nicodemus, Marcone, Mab, Martin, etc. are all chessmasters, but there are still limits to how far ahead they can calculate and how many moving parts they can juggle.  If Justine has been nemfected all along, that would mean lots of opportunities for someone to detect it.  Suppose a rival WV offs Thomas and claims Justine?  Suppose some circumstance forced her to handle a Sword?  If Harry is her target in LR's plot, suppose he happens to be with Rashid at some point when she's near him?

That's a lot of variables that he just can't control.

THAT! Would end it for me right then and there!

Not for me, not in itself.  That is, as long as alter-Murphy and alter-vampire-Susan are appropriately different from our universe's verisions of them.  Different live experiences would cause them to be different people.  Obviously in the case of vampire-Susan, but alter-Karrin would not reasonably be our universe's Karrin, either.

Or in other words Langtry is for throwing the baby out with the bath water, which isn't really the best solution.  However since he doesn't have enough resources to deal with either the bath water, baby, or the tub at the moment, he is okay with sacrificing the baby.

To be honest, we don't really know how 'ok' Arthur is with that choice.  We see that he's prepared to make that choice, but we don't know what's going on in his head as he does it.  Maybe he's coldly calculating the best interests of the largest number of people, like an idealized Vulcan.  Or maybe, in the privacy of his quarters in Edinburgh, we knocks back a big shot of whisky to help him sleep after ordering the death of some pleading 13 year old warlock.  We just don't know, and Arthur isn't going to show public weakness if it does get to him.

My only problem with your theory is why the Council allowed young Harry to live?  Half of the Senior Council never bought that Harry had killed Justin in self defense, thus he broke a Law of Magic.  They all knew who's son he was and suspected that Harry might turn out like her.. Yet, they proclaimed him at 16, a full wizard because he was able to face off with and kill Justin a full wizard and retired Warden. After they did that since Harry was under age the Council handed him over to Eb under the Doom.. Yeah, Eb is Blackstaff, had orders to watch Harry closely and kill him if any signs of warlockness appeared, but if the Council really felt, 'never again,' why let Harry live at all?

That's a good question.  But then again, it's an equally good question whether my hypothesis is true or not, considering that whether or not the Council was more 'relaxed' before Kemmler, they visibly were chop-happy by the 1990s and after.

We don't fully know the answer to how Harry survived.

To be fair, they almost did kill him.  He came very close, several times, and it was partly the fact that Ebenezar is a high-ranking Council member himself, and a few of the other high-rankers were at least prepared to listen, that saved him.  Harry being a starborn may have been part of the equation, too.  The Council clearly knows more about starborns than Harry has been told, some Councillors may have considered his starborn status to make him valuable enough to take a risk with.

But we just don't have enough information to say for sure.   

We've all observed that the White Council is freaked out because Harry is accumulating power and connections at a tremendous rate, and starting to remind them of Kemmler.  But it occurs to me to wonder, purely speculatively (it has to be speculative since we have little data), if there are more parallels than we know.

Bob informed Harry and us that Kemmler was one of the causes of World War I (I'm sure he was not the sole cause, there were a lot of quite mundane reasons why a big European war was likely in the early 20C, but we know from Bob that Kemmler played a big role building that up ver the previous century, too).  Bob told us that Kemmler had connections with the major vampire courts, the nastier Fae, and so on.

It occurs to me that no matter how brilliant and naturally magically strong Kemmler was, building up all that would take a long time.  Kemmler might have been a major innovator in necromancy, but I'm sure he didn't come up with his knowledge overnight.

Why did it get so far?  Why was in only in freaking 1961 that the Council finally punched Kemmler's ticket, after all that?  World War I ran from 1914 to 1918/19 (depending on when you count it ending) and its aftereffects went on for decades.  Necromancy is a straight Law violation in itself.

What I'm getting at here is to ask, given the Council's chop-happy approach to the Laws, how is it that Kemmler wasn't neutralized fairly early, while it would still have been relatively easy?

My speculation is that the Council wasn't always as chop-happy as Harry has known them.  Any human organization, over generations, goes through phases and changes, things get stricter or easier, attitudes get softer or harder.  Wizard lifespans would make the Council slower to change, but it's over 2000 years old, so it's certain to have gone through such phases.

My speculation is that in the late 1700s/early 1800s, maybe all the way up to the turn of the 20C, the Council was a lot more easy-going.  I'm sure they still executed warlocks and enforced the Laws, but they might well have been more willing to see grey areas or grant second chances, too.  I wonder if it was in a 'more relaxed' phase.

Which might have enabled an up and coming young warlock to grow into Kemmler himself.  There might have been doubts about his intentions.  Maybe he hid the bad well, or maybe his first indulgences in necromancy were technically legal, like Harry and Sue.  Maybe he even did some good stuff, so the Council wasn't sure about him, and they erred on the side of mercy.

And the result was World War I (and as a side-effect of that, the USSR, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, etc.  All that stuff flowed from World War I one way or another.) and a near-miss elevation of Kemmler to Mab-level power in a darkhallow.

OK, the Council finally caught up with Kemmler and put him down in 1961.  Harry killed Justin sometime around 1988-1992.  (If Harry is born in the early 70s, that makes him 16 around then.)

If my speculation is right, post-Kemmler the Council is probably traumatized and maybe guilt-stricken over the scale of the deaths and suffering and horror Kemmler caused, and determined 'never again'.

If we count in everyone that the USSR either starved intentionally in the 1930s or mass-murdered in the gulags, and everyone the Nazis murdered, plus the deaths of soldiers and civilians in the World Wars, plus the maimed, the blinded, the mentally broken, then Kemmler's direct and indirect butcher's bill is in the hundreds of millions.

Then on top of that, Kemmler is narrowlly stopped from becoming a small-g god in a Darkhallow.

So it would be completely understandable if the post-1961 Council took the attitude that public safety now takes absolute precedence over justice or mercy, with no meaningful gray areas.  So the post-1961 Council is chop-happy, they no longer err on the side of letting the innocent slide, they're more concerned with making sure no more mega-warlocks get past them.

(If I'm right, eventually that phase too would pass and things would relax somewhat again, but given Wizard lifetimes that might take a century or more.)

This theory might explain Maggie Sr. too.  Apparently Margaret had been a thorn in the Council's side for a very long time, but she still lived.  But if my theory is right, after Kemmler went down the Council was no longer prepared to tolerate such thorns, and the orders went out to the Wardens to hunt her down and kill her.  Lord Raith beat them to it, but we have it straight from Ebenezar that the Wardens were hunting her, not just watching.

It might be that the late 50s/early 60s war with Kemmler caused the Council to say, "Enough of this crap!" and start cracking down hard on warlocks and proto-warlocks and anyone who looks like they might become a warlock.

 

We are all capable of making wrong choices, that's what free will is all about, nothing automatic about it. Even saints are capable of screwing up once in a while. However which is a mere mistake and which is a clear deliberate choice?  In other words emotion of the moment type mistake verses that of a calculated cold blooded monster?  When Harry wanted to kill Rudolph, he had just witnessed him killing with a gun his beloved friend and lover, Murphy.  The pain and rage he felt in that moment doesn't make Harry a monster or a protomonster, it makes Harry very human. 

All humans are part monster.  Rage is one of the things that can release that monster from its cage.  That's one of the reasons the Council is so hard-ass about the First Law.

Harry was in the grip of rage that had overridden his conscience and his rational mind.  He was, or was close to being, an animal in that moment.  A beast.  An angry predator. He wasn't seeing Rudolph as he was, he wasn't seeing anything as it really was.  If he had given in to it, it would have been a first step down a dangerous road.

What is more consider how much control over the Winter Mantle Harry really does have verses if he didn't.  In Cold Days it was all Harry could do to keep from raping any female that moved or not fly into a rage at any slight because of the influence of the Mantle.  He has learned to keep the Mantle under control with all that exercise and whatever mental discipline's he has developed for himself. The fact that Harry has worked so hard to keep the inclinations of the Mantle under control proves he isn't a monster or a protomonster.  If Harry had really cut loose at the moment of Murphy's death, being a strong trained magical talent turbocharged with the Mantle of Winter, even two Holy Knights with Holy Swords would have had difficulty stopping him,

On the contrary, it would have made it easier for the Knights.  If Harry had really given in entirely to the monster, then the Knights would have been free to act against him without holding back.

Remember what happened when Harry tried to strike aside Fidelacchius.  As he himself tells it, it was something like 'pain beyond pain'.  His Mantle instantlyu collapsed, his power fled, he was just Harry Dresden, ordinary human being.  If he had tried to use his own personal magic in that moment against Butters, I'm pretty sure Fidelacchius would have taken that away, too.

Even after the Mantle returned and eased the pain of his other wounds and began to heal them, the burn from Fidelachius kept hurting, it was a reminder of what had almost happened.

Sanya would have to have used his AK-47 [sorry can't spell the Russian version] on him, and I doubt short of a head shot, that would have stopped him.

In that state, the Swords would be useful against Harry, and they would absolutely stop him.  So would a point blank headshot from a rifle, for that matter.  Even as Winter Knight, Harry is still mortal.

  No, Butters and Sanya were able to talk sense into Harry, calm him down, because Harry's human will prevailed, not the mantle of Winter.

Butters and Sanya were able to reach Harry after Fidelacchius erased the Mantle and left Harry just Harry again, and after the pain of touching it shocked him out of his 'clarity', as he was thinking of it.  He wasn't even listening to them before that.

Before that, Harry was so lost in his rage that he thought the Knights were behaving wrongly by interfering, he was in that precise mental state the White Council worries about with the First Law:  he was ready to kill and thought it was right. He might very well have used magic to kill Rudolph in that moment.

Remember Harry's mental state a moment later after Fidelacchius freed him from the Mantle.  He was horrified, he suddenly perceived that Rudolph was himself horrified and guilt-stricken, that he had been fighting his friends, the best men he knows.  That he had been ready to become a murderer himself, for what was fundamentally a selfish reason (it's not as if murdering Rudolph would restore Karrin, after all).

Sanya and Butters weren't saving Rudolph, they were saving Harry.  If they hadn't been there, there's a good chance that Harry would have broken the First Law, straight up, in that moment...and then it wouldn't just be expulsion from the Council he was dealing with.