I absolutely love this.
Justin does train Harry in exactly the style Lea seems to prefer when training molly.
 If Lea decided that  Malcolm staying alive would keep Harry from learning magic effectively, he fits all the criteria she would look for.
All it takes is overbroad wording on how Lea should protect harry from ANY threats from Maggie Sr

I still think that magic ability would have to be interwoven with our core body systems/central nervous system. Dresden first did magic in grade school but i say since before his birth it was already inside him
specificlly it would be forming in the first trimester of the pregnancy like almost all of that stuff does.

this magic forming in a fetus should be by far the most susceptible to outside influence during this time.

Just like the first 2 months or so is when all the craziest and worst birth defects form on humans and the risk to the fetus from drugs is the highest.

     also Charity had just been rescued from death by a knight in shining armor along with some love at first sight stuff.  Its easily possible they got the order of things wrong, got pregnant the first night, then spent a week in a magic lair cleaning up the mess left behind by a dead dragon and cultists.

    Susan early pregnancy would have been running around south America with supernaturals spying on supernaturals.

       Ive just looked into the bare basics on how genetics work for skin and hair color because of interesting things on how my daughter and nephew turned out and learned that how we understand genetics is so oversimplified as to be functionally incorrect.
     It is all way more complex than simple dominant and recessive stuff for most traits is my understanding

          Magic would be an order of magnitude more complex than hair color i would think.
small examples would be the weird traits that wizards have (healing, mage sight, more random powers) would likely be hard-coded somewhere in all that junk DNA that we don't know what it does yet. i would think this would all take a rather large chunk of DNA for all the different things.
              maybe everyone has that stuff but the right genetic match  makes it all become dominant to various degrees.
could be exceptionally powerful magic during first trimester cause birth defects that have a small chance at triggering this dna, remember the level of mages is in single digits per country
or arn't all humans really females at first  anyway and males are made by the Y chromosome modifying bits as we develop,
and all the weird stuff about Maternal DNA lines, maybe that dudes female line ancestor from thousands of years ago had power and the dna has silently been passed along.
I'm sorry if parts of this are wrong.
 I'm not an expert

i want to point out that injuries almost never leave iron inside of someone.  I was an emt/firefighter for a number of years and you just don't see things like that much. knives/etc usually don't stay in.

 like for 100 trauma calls or vehicle collisions you might get 1 where theres something sticking out.
and that seems to just turn off his mantle so if the mantle wasn't the only thing keeping him conscious he can quickly remove the knife/ect .
99 times out of 100 this magical toughness would be a godsend while once it will be a liability
i don't see the iron thing as much of a disadvantage
bullets are lead and i want to say are usually jacketed with non iron softer metals(copper/brass) so as not to mess up a guns rifling.
when he remakes his duster and isn't fighting naked it will become almost a non issue

the mental effects seem to be a super adrenaline rush which is the exact set of responses evolution has made so people are more likely to survive violent encounters.
If he were to become a lawyer or polititian it would be a liability but dresden is basicly a warrior and these effects already seem to have caused him to survive a few times  when he wouldn't have.

he could have told Harry that taking Molly to Chichen Itza was a really bad idea.

    Was it a bad idea to someone with foresight?
            Didn't that lead to a chain of events which Molly went from a relative weakling to a major power and who knows where she will end up?
She was going to keep jumping into every fight and  Dresden didn't train her well enough for that. Now she can survive them and her dieing wont turn Dresden to the dark side of the force. 

It could be that Odin lost a good deal of power to move to the mortal realm.  He probably couldn't take on the LOONs directly anymore, they'd gang up on him and kill him.  But he could show up and fight their minions.

but he doesn't seem to have lost any of his knowledge and hes the one who taught OG merlin the demon reach creation level magic wasn't he?
And he seems to have retained the king of the gods level information network through his raven things and other spies
       So he cant stand toe to toe against them but he could cheat so bad in fights he would make Dresden's tricks seem like a 2 year old. I would guess that he might not be that far from  harry's demonreach inteliectus but everywhere when you combine all that and extra mantles and the senior council level powerups he probably has stashed away after doing his thing with  freedom to act for a long time.

Now to the main thing. Ive wanted to mention this for a while now.
If you think it through being the winter knight is great for Dresden.
Everyone gets way to hung up on Mab being unlikeable and ignores the big picture.

Think back through every single thing Mab has had Dresden do and they're all things he would have wanted to do anyway but couldn't have pulled it off on his own.
           Lets see Mab ordered him to stop a Faye war she couldn't stop on her own that would have at least sent civilization back to the stone age.   um yeah how dare she.
           Some very convoluted plot which resulted in molly not being executed and a major blow against the  red vampires. once again how dare she.
          She gives him the magic muscle and even coordinates allies for him to completely destroy the red court and save himself, blackstalf,maggie, maybe the Wraiths.
         Orders him to help in a plot that ultimately stopped marcone or the archive from becoming a denarian.
gets him to stop the outsiders from destroying the universe, and gets rid of 2 n-fected high positions and the summer lady whos too stupid to be a leader during the Apocalypse.
        gets him to stop the denarians from getting a massive power up and gets him the massive power up and a few mill in diamonds.
         has the leanshe kill thousands of things that try to come through the never never to kill him, Also has her watch over him very closely since he was born. Has the leanshe protect then hand over all of the knowledge of the ways from Maggie SR.
( the leanshe is COMPLETELY loyal remember.   Her actions are supported by Mab.

Mab seems to be preparing to lead earth through apocalyptic level dangers and Dresden is becoming her main problem solver.

Why wouldn't Odin push harry towards that?


Harry always rushes at things with no thoughts to the danger.
        The winter court has always been watching and insuring its possible for him to win his various fights.

Also in case you missed it Mab seemed to want or at least be fine with a romantic relationship between Dresden and her daughter whom she was grooming for power.with Molly as the backup so no shes not going to kill dresden for something minor.

 She has a crazy amount invested in him by now.
 It seems from my point of view that Mab has been viciously protective of Dresden even too the point of ignoring all her duties and risking all out war with summer to keep Dresden's body alive.
which means keeping Dresden alive was more important to her than losing 6 -9 of time when she has a LOT on her plate.

Yes she acts very mean to him. That is necessity to shape him into someone who will be able to survive what she knows is coming.

Yes but what I'm saying is that the genetic component IS that your more prone to your body making bad copies for these things, no mater what your genetic component is it takes a full lifetime of your cells constantly replicating and doing it worse each time for you to get these. i believe the ends of the DNA chains actually start to get lost after a long life.


Genetic disorders that you seem to be talking about are things like heart valves formed incorrectly. if it brakes something critical you die, if it breaks other stuff you have whatever problems from that.  thats not a replication error, thats a blueprint error.
 The environmental factors lead to things being tougher on the cells and they may start to have runaway broken replication sooner(cancer).
wizards would only have to be super careful about things that could kill a person rather quickly like poisonings, radiation etc on the environmental side,

like for smoking the epithelial cells in the lungs that get damaged by the smoke get replaced by a different type that is more prone to cancer, alvioli grows back thicker and not very good at its job. but even with smoking only half of smokers die from smoking and it takes a LONG time in most cases.


Also i wouldn't worry too much about Alzheimer's and dementia for plot reasons
There are literally dozens of other mental disorders that are also barely understood and don't seem to be age related any any way.
and since we know this stuff only helps for so long, anyone senior council age would start to become susceptible to all this stuff again.

 To be clear im just theorizing with all this

I think all we can really take away from that is that Vadderung is an oddball.  What it does not say, or even really hint one way or the other, is whether he was able to stay relevant with his full Immortal Power intact or whether he had to give it (or something else) up.

hmm that reminds me of the Odin from Norse mythology, 
The guy who would disappear for long periods of time as he walked alongside humanity in is quests for wisdom.

             some of you guys must know this better than me but Odin didn't really rely on any typical godlike powers, the  mythologies we still know about him mostly focus on Odin learning all kinds of knowledge in crazy ways, it seems perfectly in line with that for Odin to give up the god side of his powers to focus on gaining more knowledge/wisdom/magic, whatever, and the series has portrayed him as knowing just about everything.


the point im trying to make is that all that knowledge was his main focus and he most likely is now in a mortal (but still wizard level) body, but he can wield his low amount of power with his godlike cunning and knowledge base so hes only kinda mortal.
 Remember bob explaining the insanely complex magic behind demon reach.

the oddball stuff is true because the rest of the old gods would never consider trading in for a mortal body