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Messages - Zaphodess

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1
DF Spoilers / Re: White Court, Venatori and Kemmler
« on: August 24, 2017, 05:15:16 PM »
Quote from: Shecky on August 24, 2017, 03:08:03 PM
Gentle reminder: what happens on these forums is intended to be friendly discussion, so let's keep it that way.

You're right, sorry.

Jonas, I apologise if I've hurt your feelings. It wasn't my intention and I never intended to get sarcastic. Please let me rephrase my personal, subjective opinion on this statement of yours:
Quote
Stoker changed that not by publicizing their secret weakness's, but by causing belief about them to create said weakness's.
It is my opinion that for this to be true, too many factors other than belief have to be cut out of the equation. Their relevance isn't reflected in your theory. Physics, the power of the opposition, other beliefs maybe ... The most important one imo is that belief doesn't just happen, it has to have a strong basis to grow from, and it probably doesn't do diddly if it is just one guy believing something, no matter how strongly he does so. The reason I called your theory an over-simplification is this: I think it would just be way too easy to finish a strong enemy if I just made people believe they had certain weaknesses if those weaknesses were not really there. That'd be dangerous misinformation, not a weapon to be shaped. In my interpretation, the logical consequence of your proposed theory is that something very akin to wishful thinking could be effective. Imo, the power of faith is not that easy to be tapped into because true faith just isn't that easy and it might not be able to account for everything.

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DF Spoilers / Re: Small Favor: Why Mab got involved in the first place
« on: August 24, 2017, 03:10:10 PM »
Quote from: Quantus on August 24, 2017, 12:09:15 PM
You said Maeve was behind the attack at the train station (ie the Hobbs, no?)  But then right after that you say that Mab sent the Hobbs in response to the attack at the train station.  So I am very confused.  It made it clear that they were /winter/ creatures, not specifically Mab's as opposed to Maeve or anyone else that can leverage Winter creatures, theoretically up to and including whomever was giving orders to those Winter Spiders in TC.
Ok, I guess I didn't phrase that one very well. I thought that maybe Maeve had planned something on the train station or at the place Ivy intended to stay. An abduction or something like that. Mab sending the Hobbs could have been a last-ditch attempt to thwart her daughter's scheme.

The reason I think this might be the case is that the Hobbs attack was awfully gauche for Mab's standards. It smacks of desperation and not much time to plan.

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DF Spoilers / Re: White Court, Venatori and Kemmler
« on: August 24, 2017, 02:43:40 PM »
Quote from: jonas on August 24, 2017, 02:22:21 PM
I already said that in the little bit you quoted, then pointed out why that's significant and why your early assertation that Stoker had informants or researched himself was off track... you can't say it one way before and claim you meant something else now... that's not what you were referring to earlier  It's not linearly connected to the idea Stoker researched or 'had informants' vs what I already pointed out, Lara did it. Who is also a venator who knows all about how the oblivion war works. It's not a big leap when Mab had Disney make fairy land to cement the Sidhe back in that someone else can do the same. Someone else who knows the value of mortal information.
Look, I don't wanna go into one of those discussions about a stupid point where people dissect each other's posts sentence per sentence for ages. They usually aren't very interesting for anybody else. I wrote informants because Stoker had been provided the information. It is commonly known that those "informants" were the WC, especially Lara. I wasn't trying to argue anything else, I just used a word that I thought would be understood in the meaning that's commonly accepted afaik. Maybe that wasn't the best choice of words, so sue me.

btw: English is not my first language, so I am simply going to claim some leniency for stupid foreigners here.  ;)

4
DF Spoilers / Re: Faith's importance spoilers
« on: August 24, 2017, 11:26:43 AM »
Quote from: wardenferry419 on August 23, 2017, 11:02:19 PM
Just speculating, but by DB, I put Kumori as a warden-level person between the age of 30 to 100 and I put Cowl as a SC-level person well over the age of 100.  How this applies to Faith, I am uncertain.
That's what I thought too for a long time and I suppose it's also Harry's conclusion. But it's not necessarily true. Kumori could be a lot younger than we think. The only serious bit of magic we know she performed was the resurrection of that gangster. And we don't know how demanding or complicated that actually was. I suppose that assumption about Kumori's age and competence stemmed from Cowl's generally snobbish attitude, we don't think he'd bother with someone who isn't able to lift heavy weight yet. The thing is though that someone already established might not be as malleable as a real apprentice. And they could think about how it is not right that they're not being treated as an equal or even harbor ambitions to replace the boss.

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DF Spoilers / Re: White Court, Venatori and Kemmler
« on: August 24, 2017, 11:04:46 AM »
Quote from: jonas on August 23, 2017, 06:15:36 PM
Stoker had informants or he himself? proof of that? cause it seems like you just pulled that one out of the air there, he was informed by lara. Whom we know is part of the oblivion war and understands both identity and how mortal belief effects it.
Raisins and Quantus have already provided the quotes, so yep, Stoker had informants. Lara Raith. We don't know exactly how she got the information, but it's not very hard to figure out imo. She probably collected it from various sources. And maybe Stoker himself was encouraged to figure some things out. How they put it all together isn't that important though, imo. The thing is that it was information about weaknesses of the Black Court that was already true. You were arguing that the publication of those weaknesses somehow was a catalyst for the methods to become effective because people believed in them. I only pointed out that this was an over-simplification of the way how belief works in the DV in my very humble opinion. People don't start believing in things because they read about them in a novel. Ok, some do, but that's not the normal case. I'm sure that very few readers of the Dresden Files rely on crying out "Forzare" at their opponents when they end up in a fight.  ;)

Now, I don't argue that it isn't possible for some of those methods to be more effective if people really believed in them. Especially the faith magic. Simply because people would have more faith or stronger faith if they started to believe that it can help them against monsters. That makes the attack stronger, not the vulnerability to it of the monster. But would a belief in the effectiveness of garlic against BCV increase the effect? I don't think so. For some odd reason, BCV can be killed by throwing garlic at them. Maybe garlic is a substance that is especially life-affirming, so much so that the Necro-magic that holds together a BCV implodes upon contact. Why doesn't the same thing happen if you throw an apple at the creature if someone truly believed that it should be more effective because they don't like garlic and apples are more life-affirming? Because it doesn't work and the idiot gets killed relying on a substance that just doesn't have the same effect and his reasoning was faulty because it wasn't the vitamins or the taste but one of the oils that can be found in garlic has a very specific reaction to the BCV magic aura. Theoretically, some nuts that grow in Indonesia would work as well, but nobody has figured it out yet because it's still a mystery why it is garlic of all things out there that can kill the BC.

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DF Spoilers / Re: Small Favor: Why Mab got involved in the first place
« on: August 24, 2017, 10:24:06 AM »
Quote from: Quantus on August 23, 2017, 03:06:23 PM
So you theory at this point is that MAB gave Summer a heads up that she was going to recruit Harry, in order for Harry to feel pressured enough to accept the Job.  How and Why would she do so before anyone else had made any moves to do anything?  What is her motivation to kick the ant-hill in the first place?  I thought you were initially suggesting that it was Maeve?
Ahem, nope. That's not what I said. I said she was the least likely of a number of possible candidates. I am exploring possibilities here, not proposing one single WAG. ;)
Quote from: Quantus on August 23, 2017, 03:06:23 PM
Not true.  SmF stated that they were able to track his Fire Magic (specifically the Fire) becuase he'd melded it with Lily's Fire Spell in PG during that whole Wellspring attack thing.  It was why Mad took away his Rod and memory of Fire Magic.  His status as Emmisary had nothing to do with their ability to track him, only their ability and/or motivation to actually go after him.  That still doesnt the fact that the first event in this whole escapaede was Titania's.  Your original theory had that reversed.
Again, not what I wrote. I was talking about attacking, not their ability to track him.

Quote from: Quantus on August 23, 2017, 03:06:23 PM
She never admits it, or even anything Id call an implied admission; though Harry does jump to the that conclusion and asked her why she did it. 
Regardless, you JUST said you thought Maeve was actually behind the Hobs.  Which is it, and Why?
No, I didn't say I thought it was Maeve behind the Hobbs, I said it was Mab. Am I that bad at expressing myself?  I was extra careful to use names instead of pronouns ...

Mab never admits to the Hobbs attack, but she didn't deny it either and she answered Harry's question why she did it. It's also made clear in the text that the Hobbs were Mab's creatures. As her reasoning makes sense imo, I have no doubt about it that Mab was indeed behind it.

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DF Spoilers / Re: Bob's Personality, and Justin
« on: August 24, 2017, 10:10:42 AM »
Quote from: Quantus on August 23, 2017, 02:53:08 PM
This is still possible.  The Mission was nominally to Hunt the Summer Knight, but he did so by allying with the Summer Lady, and in at least one instance deliberately failed his task given by the Winter Lady (in not recovering usable Blood from Elaine).
Faerie bargains and law are all about the letter of the law. He did attack Elaine brought back some blood, he just wasn't really successful. Of course that was intentional, but technically, he had followed his orders.

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DF Spoilers / Re: Bob's Personality, and Justin
« on: August 23, 2017, 02:50:47 PM »
Quote from: Quantus on August 23, 2017, 01:28:17 PM
Im not implying that a Knight is restricted in the same way as a Sidhe (as being physically incapable), but per Harry's whole "Screw Winter Law" episode they DO face consequences of such defiance.  He doesnt need a Nemfection to become Willing any more than Maeve did, but he may well have needed a Nemfection to avoid the Fallout of open defiance against Winter.
Yep, Harry lost what he has bargained for. We don't know what Lloyd Slate has bargained for, it might have been something stupid and he realized that he had been screwed.

Or, he didn't actually break Winter Law. The scheme was based on hurting Summer, which the Winter Knight is allowed to do. It's kind of his purpose. Technically, Winter would have become much more powerful if the Summer Knight's power were added to its pool.

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DF Spoilers / Re: Small Favor: Why Mab got involved in the first place
« on: August 23, 2017, 02:40:28 PM »
Quote from: Quantus on August 23, 2017, 01:54:01 PM
So if Im following you, you're no longer saying that Mab hired Harry to flush out Maeve's plan, but rather that Maeve Lied to Summer to sick them on Harry's trail, long before Mab got involved?  That seems like the sort of thing Mab should have noticed, when it became apparent that Summer was targeting him for no apparent reason but coincidentally only hours before she herself decided to hire him.

Im not giving up on it yet, but this seems to be unraveling a bit. 
I was starting from the bad guys problem: The goal was to get the Archive, not (just) Marcone. The chosen method was to make it an Accords matter. Harry was the most likely to get the Archive as mediator. Problem was: Harry wouldn't have done anything if it was just Marcone on the line.  They needed to motivate Harry to become involved.

Mab would have been motivated to become involved if

a) Maeve was involved (nothing good could come from it)
b) Thorned Namshiel was involved
c) it was somehow clearly a Nemesis-driven plot
d) she cared enough about her Accords to protect the new guy
e) she had an interest in Marcone because of Vadderung in one way or another
f) she had an interest in Marcone himself - maybe a bargain with him
...

b) is unlikely imo, because she had no idea who abducted Marcone. d) isn't strong enough in that instance, cause the Accords don't protect you from conflict, they just set down the rules for how it's got to be played. If Marcone can't protect himself or make sure he has allies - his problem. e) and or f) are quite possible, but we don't have enough facts to prove it. My WAG tried to address the possibility of a) because it is also an instance of c) as Maeve was Nemfected and her mother knew it, tried to persuade her to let herself be cured, Maeve didn't seem to like the idea... I thought it was logical that Mab wouldn't let her run around completely free, unsupervised and not under observation during that time.

Mab didn't know the details of what the Enemy really wanted to achieve. So she was likely to call in a favor from Harry in order to get some more information. But: Harry had the right to refuse if he didn't like it, and he could be expected to refuse to save Marcone. Getting Summer involved achieved that he was motivated to accept the offer. This would have served Mab's interests as well as the Enemy group (including Maeve if she was on board). So it's a coin toss as to who managed to do it in what manner. But I think Mab is the least likely, she can't tell a direct lie and she'd probably have preferred another way to motivate Harry. Summer trying to kill him did not improve the chances of him being successful.

Technically, Summer shouldn't have been able to attack Harry before he was officially Winter's Emissary. He had the right to refuse, so not even Mab's intention to recruit him as such was good enough. But I think the Queens can make mistakes if they truly believe something. The initial attacks might have been possible if Titania believed him to be the Emissary already (a lie fed by Maeve to one of Titania's spies maybe or something Nic orchestrated). Titania either had very bad information or very good information (knowing and reacting to a great danger to reality) or the initial attacks wouldn't have been possible.

Quote from: Quantus on August 23, 2017, 01:54:01 PM
So if Im following you, now you are suggesting that Mab was responsible for the attack at the train station rather than Maeve?
That's actually a fact iirc. She admitted to it in the hospital chapel.

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DF Spoilers / Re: Bob's Personality, and Justin
« on: August 23, 2017, 01:22:01 PM »
Quote from: Quantus on August 23, 2017, 11:47:55 AM
New Question:  Would Slade have needed to be Nemfected to Betray the Winter Court and/or the Natural Order to the Summer Lady as he did?  Harry is bound by Winter Law, but it seems to me it's not as forcefully as a queen/lady.
I don't think so, the Knight still has Free Will and can betray his Queen and Court. Aurora seems to have promised him the power of the Summer Knight in addition to that of the Winter Knight. He didn't need to be Nemfected, he was willing.

Fix was bound by a geas in Proven Guilty, so the Queens can restrict their Knights' Free Will to a degree. But I think they have to actively do something specific, meaning they have to think about it in the first place.

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DF Spoilers / Re: Small Favor: Why Mab got involved in the first place
« on: August 23, 2017, 01:12:16 PM »
Quote from: Quantus on August 22, 2017, 08:18:17 PM
Only catch I see off-hand is the timeline of Harry's hiring:  The Gruff's already began attacking Harry as the Winter Emissary /Before/ Marcone was Taken in the first place, and long before Mab would have chosen an emissary for that reason.   
That's actually been the reason I started considering Maeve, cause she could lie about Harry being Winter's Emissary and she might also have been able to disregard bargains and Fae restrictions.

Another possible angle: We might be making assumptions about Summer's motives. Sure, Titania wanted Harry dead because he killed her daughter. What if it wasn't her only motive? She could have had information about Nicodemus' plans that Mab didn't have. Mab was ready to kill Ivy rather than let the Archive fall into the hands of the Denarians (and indirectly to Nemesis). Titania might have been ready to let Marcone rot and kill Harry in order to prevent that as well. Revenge was just the cherry on top. Fighting a move by Nemesis might be enough to let a Faerie Queen get around the restriction about killing mortals.

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DF Spoilers / Re: White Court, Venatori and Kemmler
« on: August 23, 2017, 11:01:28 AM »
Quote from: jonas on August 23, 2017, 10:42:39 AM
Define your problem better than blunt opinion that I might smite it down with the bluntness it rode ye in on :) or do you think people just randomly day dream about taking control of their lives, about being safe from monsters in the dark or that there's a 'cure all' to anything or do they actually hope and believe them? an idea's a powerful thing, the stokerocalpse was caused by a book, and it ended by and large through the same mob methodology used in said book. why? Because after being introduced to the idea they choose to believe it was possible. By and large otherwise it coulda happened the same way waaay before any book on how to. Still had Clerics, still had fire... Nothing changed but the belief in the possibilities ;)
fyi, the storks hide with fear, not with faith.
Of course the book gave people power and hope. Knowledge is power. And of course people believed in the methods described. They worked. You were arguing that the methods only worked because people believed in them, that they became effective via blind belief. That's not very logical imho. Someone had to try them for the first time and that person can't have been too confident about their chances of survival at the time. They were facing a Black Court Vampire. The first guy to try anything from Stoker's repertoire was probably very surprised they made it.

Stoker himself or his informants had to collect the information before they put them together in a book of mass-destruction. If your reversal of cause and effect would have worked, they could have just made up the weaknesses of the Black Court. If that method worked, you could kill anything that way.

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DF Spoilers / Re: White Court, Venatori and Kemmler
« on: August 23, 2017, 10:34:38 AM »
I just had a thought about Mavra in Dead Beat. What if she is a Venator too? The reason Lara is is that she wants to get rid of competition. Gods don't seem to have much use for Vampires ... they feed on and destroy too many sources of potential power. Reason enough that no new ones arise.

Quote from: jonas on August 23, 2017, 10:21:14 AM
Stoker changed that not by publicizing their secret weakness's, but by causing belief about them to create said weakness's.
Sorry to be so blunt about it, but it seems to me that's a bit too simple. Belief is more than wishful thinking. Something in the universe has to back it up. Otherwise all those storks with their heads in the sand wouldn't lose out on the evolutionary lottery so badly.

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DF Spoilers / Re: White Court, Venatori and Kemmler
« on: August 23, 2017, 08:19:40 AM »
Quote from: Con on August 23, 2017, 03:37:15 AM
So we know the White Court are the primary caretakers of the Venatores ...

Huge assumption there in your first sentence. Given that the Archive plays a major role in the Oblivion war according to WoJ, I'd rather assume she is masterminding the Venatori.

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DF Books / Re: Brief Cases to be released Summer 2018!
« on: August 23, 2017, 08:08:20 AM »
I don't particularly care which publishing house does the book, as long as it gets published. Or does it make a difference?

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