I have lurked among you for years, reading the theories, laughing at the silly ones, 'mmmMMMmmm....'-ing at the possible ones, never really finishing reading any of the PhD theses posted by a Duck, and throwing my hands up in frustration at any post attempting to explain what happened in Proven Guilty. Now that the forums are fading from this world, I must speak.
Truth 1
Simon is NOT Cowl! There is NO evidence - yes, I've heard all the arguments, and all of it is grasping at straws. Maybe Cowl is someone we know, maybe Cowl is Cowl, but he is not not NOT Simon, and those of you who cling to this outrageous belief will feel quite silly indeed when Cowl's identity is revealed (in, like, fifty years).
Truth B
Molly and Harry? "Oh but she's not a child now so why won't Harry bang her?" Okay, okay, listen to me: Molly is still a little girl. Small children never grow up - aren't any of you guys and gals here parents? The little ones stay little forever, if you were a parent/guardian/close adult relative type of person to them when they were little. Harry was an uncle-type to Molly for long enough that when he looks at her he sees the child. And he'll always see the child - at least for like the next hundred years, by which time Charity will have been dead for long enough that he won't have to worry about her coming back and haunting him.
Next Truth
Karen Murphy will never be "irrelevant" due to her being a vanilla mortal. That's what makes her relevant, you sillies! She's a normal person against whom we can measure the relative strength of the monsters. She helps us calibrate. Harry the Super Saiyan goes toe-to-toe with MegaMonster - well, okay, that can be cool, but without someone like Karen we don't have a scale that tells us "Stars and stones, those dudes' power levels are OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!!11!!1" Obviously she can't go hand-to-hand with a lot of the things Harry spends his time hobnobbing with these days, but she can show us the power in being smart, perceptive, and practical - she did manage to survive an encounter with Puck, after all. And she can be - and has been - powerful and useful off the field. She's a vanilla mortal, yeah, but so is the Baron of Chicago. They're both intelligent, practical leaders, and this alone makes them very powerful. But most of all, Karen keeps both Harry and the readers grounded. Everyone else in Harry's orbit is a faerie or a wizard or a scion or a vampire or a god or being of pure intellect or a construct or bla de bla bla bla de bla...... even Butters is no longer vanilla-flavored. We'll see how much more grounded Harry's become in the time since Skin Game, and I'm sure he has, but no vanilla character introduced now could compete with the character investment given to Karen. Heck! I'm pretty darn sure there's a WoJ saying just what I've said here. Read it long ago, in a different life, so I have no idea where it was.
Please turn to the light and recognize that I speak Truth. I cannot, morally, let this forum cease without turning as many as I can to the light.