That seems quite clear and Vadderung should know.

Yeah, putting two statements next to each other and leaving the listener to assume a possibly misleading degree of connection is not a confirmation.

That depends, do you consider Ramps true immortals incapable of farther change or are they still technically 'mortal' to you? Because of they can't change, then a change that goes from lower level to higher looks a lot more suspect

Maybe I am not clear here, then.  I do not think there is a change going from Bianca to Arianna, because I think Arianna has been like that characterwise all along, it's just that Harry does not know anything about her until a few years after Bianca dies.

LMAO dude... think about MM from MM Harry's perspective, yes he is that vindictive!

Nah, our Harry has screwed up quite spectacularly enough not to be an annoyingly too-good example to anyone.

Being that Nemesis specifically made deals with all but Cat Sith,

Remind me where that is stated ?

Morgana Le Fay, the original source in the books of the Atheme and first known Nfection vector, was in lore known as a Sea Sprite.

Which lore are you quoting there? I've seen her done as everything from human to half-devil, and most later stories conflate Morgana with Morgause.

In what i'd consider germaine connections to the mythos as given by Mab to Disney, we have Ursula the sea Hag(sister to Trident or whatever, Poseidon) known for collecting Souls and making bad deals, for having usurped the throne from her brother too.

That feels a bit of a stretch to me.

This of course would start to have to do with the hidden meanings behind the labeling of the court's 6 queens. Those who were directly related to the Norse version of the fates and also being a metaphor for the fact their time has already gone for instance.

Gosh. That's quite a set of notions and I think I need to digest them for a bit before I can say anything meaningful to them.

Those 3 primary powers actually originate In Buddhism and Taoism. Everyone gets that wrong because they know the Christian perspectives better themselves, ergo that's what they see come out.

It would certainly be interesting to see more from those cosmologies on-screen in the DV.

Those Nails are actually preChrist imo. They are the Fateful Nails of Nortia, the Etruscan Name for the Greek Nemesis. They are the weapons of the first 3 horsemen, the last death uses the other three.

Cool.  And that would fit in with my ongoing expectation that the fourth nail of he cross is due to show up eventually.  (Mutter grumble Triclavian Heresy mutter; nobody as Catholic as Michael should be sold on there only being three nails.)

So Christianity is big in it right now for a reason... but it's not as big as you think.(most tend to get insulted when I imply these things that they know as Christian might not be exclusively so in a fictional work)

I am an ex-Catholic agnostic raised in Ireland, so it's pretty much impossible to offend me from that direction.

This is a lot to chew on; thank you.

The red court as pretenders is Harry's wishfull thinking. Odin was quite clear about it. They used to be gods and were worshiped by a whole nation just like him.

We know from various sources (Harry in PG, the bassanid in "last Call") that the old gods mostly left Earth and the bassanid at least believes TWG had something to do with it.

Nothing prevents the original mayan gods being kicked out whenever that happened (which I think was most likely around the time of Christ, am I remembering the bassanid referring to about two thousand years correctly?) and the Red Court who replaced them having centuries to be worshipped as gods before the various relevant Mesoamerican cultures collapsed.

We know it wasn't OG Merlin because Jim said so.

OK, I'd not seen that one. 

Granted that is a logical leap in reasoning there, but not an unfounded one since we have an Nfected meave seeking to break open the well. It's safe to assume they have allies or otherwise contained individuals in there for those reasons.

Or they just want to release evil stuff to cause chaos and act under cover of that chaos. No formal alliance necessary.

The connection between DR and Outsiders is most outright stated by DR himself, when he names them Old Gods with capitalization in the book(unless i'm wildly misremembering something I thought before when I read it) vs Harry's proclamation in DB of the same manor towards the Outsiders as Old Gods and their servants.

I think you are misremembering here.

IIRC, Old Gods is used in several places to refer to the polytheistic deities who are mostly in the NN and not affecting Earth any more, as by Harry in PG.  The gods of the Outsiders are the Old Ones.

because after she died someone who's quite similar suddenly becomes the same uppity Red Noble Lady?

Arianna Ortega was around a lot longer than Bianca, she turned her husband back in the conquistador days and he turned Bianca some time later.  I see no reason to think Arianna is suddenly having a change in character to step up to replace Bianca, rather than Harry having got to a point of dealing with someone senior who was like that all along.

(My personal favourite notion for what's up with Bianca is that the Red Court deliberately picked their least stable lower-level type and rushed her promotion, before sending her to Chicago and again once she was there.  In order a) that she will sooner or later get into the fights they want got into with Harry, and b) that the higher a rank she is in, the bigger a bite they can legitimately take out of the Council as wergild when she dies.)

Also because i'm guestimating in MM Susan will instead be that Ramp seeking ascension.

That would be pleasingly nasty, but I am pretty sure JB is not as nasty a person as I am.  If he was, Mirror Mirror would introduce Harry to a version of himself who'd done everything better, made different choices and engaged in different moral growth, saving thousands of lives, and Harry would forever after have to live with the knowledge of what a screw-up he was by comparison.

I quite agree, she's not always the one at play, but she's the one all the strings connect back too. It's her role to break reality just as much as it is Mab's to preserve it, THAT is a balance not found in the two queens imo.

I remain entirely unconvinced Nemesis is a personification with any wants of its own, beyond "corrode Faerie constraints so that the Faerie in question can make choices that suit their own wants but are outside the bounds of their nature". (Maeve being a cruel type wants to get rid of competition, Aurora being an idealist wanting to end the conflict between Summer and Winter forever, Cat Sith being a proud ancient who would like nothing more than to decorate with the innards of the disrespectful wizard.)

Neither want's to end reality, Mab wants it for herself(ergo she stops outsiders) and Titania want's to balance that directly. but neither want it gone(same could unfortunately be said of the Mothers, meaning they don't collect the balance on the next level up.

CD does seem to me to lock down that the Courts are meant to work together towards an overall goal despite the opposition between them along the way, which was pleasing confirmation of what I have been arguing... since DB was when I came on the forums, but I have believed it since reading SK.

Yes... unfortunately I don't have a collective body of work. I'm not the kind of person who could organize that alone.(like Arnold/Terminator, i'm a firm believer there are no 'self made men')

Ah go on, write it up nicely, then we can ask to have it put in the Reference Collection.

Well hot damn, you got a list? Cause it would be damn useful lol.

I've done that a few times, though I fear most of them are long over the event horizon of post deletion (and I do wish I had asked to have my Harry Dresden: the Case Against thread put in the reference collection);  give me a nice long afternoon with nothing else on my plate and I may do it again.

  FM, for instance, was about breaking the curse to free Fearbringer from it's current Host/prison. GP tried to remake a spirit of terror directly in Kravos, ect. ect.

This and what you were saying earlier sounds like your master plan is  taking Faith/Hope/Love and their opposites as defining polarities in the shape of the DV, yes ?

I am inclined against, because that would make Christianity more defining in the DV than I think Jim intends to; the text so far feels like he is making really remarkable efforts to leave it open either way whether the Christian moral perspective and cosmology is more fundamental to the DV than any other (and I can sympathise with that at a meta-level, on not wanting to annoy either Christian or non-Christian readers.)  The Valkyries and the einherjar and the portrayal of Odin are entirely compatible with their cosmology and morality being as fundamental if not more so.

The goal as far as N and the walkers go, is to find purchase inside reality, find identity, so they can then judge and destroy it in so much as their version is are Hell on earth scenario. This isn't the only Outsiders with beef, that's just theirs. On a different but related tier the Lord of Slowest Terror/Hunter of Shadows aka Chronos wants true Oblivion. for everything to return to it's original oneness, to collect all the 'shadows'. Aka those made by those who stand inside the light, insiders defining outsiders through penumbra effect. WE cast the shadows that give the outsiders definition, without us they have none. and that's the Original Darkness's goal, to be one again(see the Chronos similarity in the desire?)

OK, that's an interesting take on it.

I don't find that particularly compelling because we already have other dualities that serve that purpose, though.  Heaven and Hell, for one, Faerie and Fomor for another, Aesir and Jotun, and the existence of the Greek gods implies Titans.

I don't think the Old Ones of the Outsiders are going to turn out to be Titans or Jotun any more than they are Fallen.  Nicodemus and his like putting so much effort into corrupting souls means that at some level they have to see souls as worth obtaining.  Pretty much the only absolutely solid fact we have about the reality outside the Gates is that mordite is (a sort of) regular matter out there, and mordite is equally lethal to ordinary organic life as to soulless evil monsters like the Red Court.

To loop back to the actual thread title for the moment, there are evils that are playing on the other side of the chessboard trying to win things over from good, and there are other perpendicular struggles going on across the same chessboard between different forces, some of which occasionally make alliances with the more good/evil forces.  (Think of a game of Hope Verney four-player chess, or, if you want to move beyond dualities, to Orwell chess.)  And over and beyond that, we have entities that want to burn down the entire chessboard and dance in the ashes.  I don't believe that when Bob in GP refers to the Old Ones being driven beyond the Outer Gates he's referring to some sort of event in the mythical past of humanity, because any large amount of mordite being around on Earth is incompatible with humanity (and we know the DV had an evolutionary-scale history rather than a young-Earth (or young-Yggdrasil) creation because of everyone's favourite tyrannosaurus); I believe he is talking about the Big Bang, and that the Outsiders are not our shadows, but the predecessors of anything resembling rational ordered reality.

But imo a lot of people have missed things already in the books out now.

I'm the last person who needs to be assured of that, sometimes it seems I spend half my posts pointing such things out....

Idk if you remember me as Wizard Nelson

I remember the former, and coolness, I'd not connected the usernames.

or Sibelis, but this is why I always liked you. Upon hearing a new and different theory instead of reflexively saying i'm wrong you ask me if I have sources you don't lol.

Oh, there are loads of things I didn't figure out on my own that seemed obvious once other people pointed them out (like for example the location of the Stone Table in SK and Harry's meeting with Malcolm in DB both echoing Demonreach) so I do try to be open to people figuring out stuff I have missed.

If perchance you'd ever like to talk about my theory, which is grand and unifying as any other I've read here, i'd love for a chance to talk with someone who might actually understand it.

I'd certainly like to; please do start a thread.

When they do they usually have specific purposes in mind behind it, in the DF it's Nemesis. I'd have to track down(or just use that excellent reference section while I can, duh) the precise scenes but everytime Murphy has mentioned it it's been directly related to a 'wonky' book where Nemesis is the likeliest puppeteer.

That seems to me barely one step up from saying that every time anyone claims things are getting bad, it must be Nemesis.  One of the things that was set up about Harry very early on is that he is familiar with genre fantasy and SF, that poem is enough of a go-to quote that I am not at all sold on it correlating with Nemesis.

Course... in some ways i'm applying Nemesis as simply a destabilizing force, or should I say THE destabilizing force.(which the fomor court of water is precisely the Norse end state of the Fire and Ice balance btw, just part of the process of Force Majore Decay)

That's the scale of syncretism I think Jim is largely aiming to avoid, btw; I see nothing to see he'd wish to offend contemporary believers in the Norse deities either.  The Fomor are Celtic and he has put them in opposition to a version of Faerie that are more in a post-Celtic tradition than anything else; DV Odin is quite distinct from Faerie, and I suspect the Jotun to be equally distinct from the Fomor as and when we do see them. (Which isn't to say they might not find goals in common.  Just like Mab and Odin do, or like that centaur in SK, who given the established reality of Classical mythos in the DV, now reads to me as a Classical expatriate living in Summer.)

Yes, but I will now use it as my own evidence lol. Mab has shown the winter court to time and again be interested in Nfected sources.

How many times?  The athame and Maeve, and indeed, given post-CD knowledge that Summer and Winter are working together, Aurora.  And it's not as if she went seeking out the athame.

If she hid the coin's where about's in his mind then she took it is the likelist answer,

I think so too.

giving rise to a very good reasoning behind Namshiel being the culprit or otherwise compromised.

Not giving anything to distinguish that from Namshiel being her agent she wants to protect and conceal, IMO.

I'm not seeing Mab's reasoning for hiding suspicion of Namshiel from Harry if Namshiel is an enemy, considering how much she uses him against her enemies;and if Namshiel is an enemy, that also leaves the favour Mab owes Andruiel in SG as an unexplained loose end.  So without definitive evidence either way, I incline for the explanation that ties up more circumstantial evidence.

Recently(griff iirc) someone had a theory it's because his subconscious took control of his empty hand after the soulfire to secure the coin for Mab. It had a glove always, and was shown moving without his intention to snatch a coin at another point(need to make sur the wasn't HIS coin too, cause that would set a precedent on targeting him spc)

That's kind of neat; I still think that was resurgent Lash, though, and I remain to be convinced Bonnie is not Lash.

I find it likely when she took his Rod she made another deal with his subconscious mind coin, she does so when she attacks him again when he brings it up perhaps..

Works for me.

I have a feeling no matter who said it you'd lawyer up a perspective against their authenticity though lol.

Pfft.  When new text smashes one of my favourite theories to splinters I abandon it without looking back.  (Well, except for still being sad that Morgan and Simon Pietrovich were not a couple.)

Jim's world is steeped in it's mechanics. I try to see them properly, though holes exist where only clue's are given.

Yes, but the thing that is absolutely key to my methodology, that I seem to have the hardest time persuading other people of, is that the holes are as significant as the clues.  The patterns in what people don't say, don't think, don't know, are as important as what they do.

Look at the first two-thirds or so of SK, where Elaine leads Harry around by the nose (until he gets to the Mothers' cabin) in order to get him to steal the Unravelling.  Look at SmF where we can see Harry's mind shying away from thinking about his blasting rod, sometimes accompanied by headaches, in places where he would otherwise think of it, even though he has no idea himself that that is going on.

Ah... not bad, but I think it was mostly to get the 3 eye drug out there to start effecting mortal belief and weaken the veil more. As Storm Front is literally the storm front of events leading up to the storm in Dead Beat. It's reference to the stirring up of the ghosts and dark magic, the beginning of trying to pierce the veil as Mort mentions in both GP and DB iirc.

That could be it, I suppose.  I had not thought of that and I like it.

Tell me, do you reckon the Unseelie Incursion of 1994 when wherever-it-was disappeared for a few hours tied in here?  I suspect that is set-up for all of Chicago falling into the NN during the BAT or the immediate lead-up.

Funny you mention the scene outside of Sells house though, i'm fairly sure that's the first time Nemesis made it's presence known in the books.

It works for me without needing Nemesis at all, because so very many of the influences on Harry's life are trying to encourage him to give in to accepting dark power for his own selfish ends rather than reasonably doing good.  SF has the moment outside the Sells house, FM has him nearly being corrupted by the hexenwulf belt, and in GP he gives in when he burns down Bianca's party and again when he kills Bianca.  This pattern's been there since Justin.

I have this rather simply put theory that N get's purchase whenever magic is used to violate freewill, which most all the Fae infected were either directly or indirectly around strong active sources of mortal magic or wizards themselves.

That feels almost the opposite of how I read it, that it is causing evil by providing free will that should not be there.

In this case the reaction from N saved Harry because it was his free will being violated by the aura of dark magic. I have no real proof of this, it just aligns well with my theorem.

Fair enough.  I tend to read that voice as the first example we have of the insight Maggie gave Harry, which Lea does a Dumbo's feather job on him with in BR (note that the other time he figures something out that is specifically referred to as insight, it is working out Lea must have bargained with his mother, in SK).

Why can't the whites be doing work into how the Reds spells work? Raith again, is actually very interested in magic apparently.

No reason why they can't.  I think this again is slightly more moving parts than my notion here though.

=
Nemesis used to be a Greek Goddess. Now she's not, now she's what GK watches for at the gates.

I don't believe we have had it confirmed that the infiltrator Nemesis was literally the Greek goddess Nemesis, rather than another entity taking up that name (like the Lords of Outer Night pretending to be the Mayan gods).

Lucifer in particular here, because in SmF his power is described as the anti version of what TWC promotes, the idea of freedom.

I am now trying to remember which theology it is where Lucifer's revolt is prompted by being absolutely horrified that the WG would be so evil as to enable humans to make choices that would deny them Heaven.

Besides, TWG is all judgey.  Lucifer loves and rewards everyone, no matter how bad.  The bit in the Gospels about loving your enemies comes to mind.

Moral of that rant is the division between 'outsider' and insider isn't so clear, and indeed Shaggy and co all have the same vein of negative attributions as Outsiders and even Blamps, who exist inside but are apparently effected heavily by Necromancy and the power of NOT.

There's a connection between necromancy and Outsiders, beyond that free-willed humans interested in causing havoc mess about with them both and the White Council think both are a bad idea?

We got the very British sounding guy everyone is willing to accept as Nefected but conceivably an actual mortal... but totally leave behind the signifigence of him saying he needs to be in their and why that is.

Since when has everyone been willing to accept that guy as Nemfected?  Last I heard, the prevailing wisdom was that he was the original Merlin and in there voluntarily.

Bianca actually. Everything about her. Pretty sure Uppity Red Nobles seeking to ascend and intercourt Sorcerous activities were specifically on multiple lists.

How is that not adequately explained by a) her wanting revenge on Harry and b) Mavra manipulating her, including specifically teaching her how to use dark magic?

There by ignoring all connections between Outsiders, Walkers and Nemesis. That Nemesis's presence in CD was manifested by a Walker and a bunch of minor outsiders trying to break open the Max security Prison.

I'm not ignoring that; I am not claiming that Nemesis is not a tool of the Outsiders and used by them.

I am saying that suddenly blaming Nemesis for most of everything that has gone wrong in the whole series is not supported.

and actually, if you look at how the Fae pay lip service to the Balance/rent by not violating Hope, Love or Faith, I can directly connect here what you call N to something not directly Nemesis itself.  Hope is balance with Fear, Fae service is Duty,(which I can totally find a complex paper someone else wrote on why Duty is a warriors form of Hope, but I lack the ability to sufficiently explain to my own satisfaction) Faith is keeping their word and Love is respecting Homestead laws(which love is the primary force of empowerment in a familial nature)

I'm not familiar with what you are referring to here; if this a bit of speculation/analysis from the past couple of years I may well have missed it.

What's been satisfactorily explained?

Every major plot point prior to CD has a solid plausible explanation in the text except for Aurora going loopy.

Many of them have multiple solid plausible explanations in the text.

But your insisting the opposite it feels like, that anything not Nemesis is not related to Nemesis..

I am not saying that.

I am saying anything not Nemesis is not proven to be related to Nemesis.  There is a big difference.

Nemesis infects Fairie specifically and easily because that's where they got their power, that's why Mab has an aspect of Judgement. From the Literal Greek Goddess Nemesis, and the Scales, those are HER scales. they fed her to the stone table and split the power and the image so that their would be no mirror not already balanced inside reality. So she'd have no foothold.

Again, where is this coming from?  It makes sense, but I am not recalling textev for it unless I have missed a lot in a recent short story.

Mayhaps the Yeats second coming,which is ALL about the coming apocalypse and is specifically mentioned by Murphy whenever things are getting wonky, also quoted by Maeve about being the 'falcon'. Nemesis is the destabilizing factor and then he quotes something that's been reference all over regarding that same destabilization...

Yep, because that poem is one of the most frequently quoted in any end of the world novel anywhere; George RR Martin uses it a lot in The Armageddon rag for example.

Leaving out the Arctis Tor events... very selective reasoning on that.

We have no evidence linking Namshiel to Nemesis at Arctis Tor.

Here is a plausible alternative explanation: 

Arctis Tor is normally guarded by tons of trolls and goblins.  Harry and Thomas can't plausibly break through that big a force by themselves.

Mab can't ask Harry to break in and rescue Molly directly without using up a favour, which she doesn't want to do.

Mab can't just order the trolls away because that will be suspicious as heck.

Therefore, Mab hires a Denarian to attack the trolls and goblins and open the way for Harry. (we have a WoJ that Mab would sacrifice her entire court in an instant if there was gain to be had).

Namshiel, or possibly Nicodemus, was there working for Mab.  This is why Mab owed Nicodemus a favour in SG.

Note also; Harry's first conversation with Mab in SmF involves her hiding something from his mind (the blasting wand), and distracting him from noticing with a brutal headache.  When he mentions Namshiel at the end of SmF, she slaps him down again, and he never mentions Namshiel again.   Not even when hanging out with Denarians.

Does this make sense to you?

Multiple places, of course if we take everything said as wrong, then we have no idea what going on and neither you a leg to stand on as I can point this out too for literally everything, as everything is from Harry's perspective. So saying multiple sources are inherently lying or wrong becomes and endless cycle.

Not at all, because saying "everyone could be wrong" is not saying we haven't a leg to stand on.  We can assess who might be wrong or lying based on what we know about them.  Fallen lie all the time.  Faerie tell the literal truth in a misleading way.  Michael Carpenter's value of being a good man includes respect for the truth, but he has also said if anything good happens and he does not know where it comes from he credits the White God, which means that if he got a random gift from Odin and did what he said he does he would be wrong about its origin.

Quite frankly as Mr. GK is the resident(as in resident of fricken reality) expert on said things I wouldn't see why we should simply dismiss him either.

I am not dismissing him.  I would point out the inherent difficulties of confirming any evidence about Nemesis when part of your working model is "never mention it to anyone", though.

We have Odins comment about Harry not yet seeing who the real players are too, but that won't count I suppose...

Oh, I entirely count that.  It's part of why I believe the real players are still to come, and Nemesis is as much of a red herring for One-Explanation-For-Everything as the "Black Council" was.

and just so I feel like i'm not the only one getting holes poked into them, for what purpose did the Red court thereby empower the Shadowman to do what he did in SF? Seems you like to have all your ducks in a row, what you got there?

I see several purposes there, depending on how well informed the enemies are.  Challenge Harry; challenge Marcone; expose Harry to an option that nearly turns him to the dark side (just outside the Sells' house, before he hears the mysterious female voice, he is very near using the drug against the wardens); set Harry up to be executed; set Harry up to have the Doom lifted so that he'll be harder for the Council to disavow come GP and subsequent books when he is being set up as cause of the war.

Cause fyi, it's also surmised Raith and his books of Magic were involved, what with the Name of Shadowmans old company having the word Silver in it and Lust being the most effective spellframe... funny that, a Red used spell is best used with Whites Lust power..

Funny that people regard that connection as significant when Odin tells Harry directly in Changes that the spell the Reds were using at CI was the one the Shadowman tested out; I take the direct evidence over the similarity there.  Particularly as we know from "love Hurts" that the Reds are specifically doing research into understanding the White Lust power.