(spoilers) Black Council

[Landing]

Your right neuro that there is no black council, it is just a bunch of independent groups and players that Harry is lumping all together. But what you are really missing and what wont be reviled in the books until the end is that there is a SUPER black council that is secretly manipulating these secret groups and players. levels with in levels, games with in games. 

and there may be a SUPER SUPER black council that is manipulating that SUPER black Council that is manipulating the secret groups and players which are manipulating everything that is going on in the Dresdenverse   

[Gman]

Put it this way; if around the world on the same day, the IRA, ETA, some terrorist group in Indonesia, and some Mafiosi in Vegas all shoot different people with the same specific make of gun, does that mean they are all part of the same massive conspiracy ?

Actually, many different terrorist groups do work together and help each other out against the greater enemy. For example, Libya used to help train the IRA or Saddam Hussein used to help train Al Quida. They can stab each other in the back when it suites them too. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were allies and worked together. There is no way, if their side won they wouldn't fight each other eventually.

[Sh33p]

Speak for yourself; I think it would be awesome.

Bear in mind, on a meta-story scale, we are talking about a hypothesis that the hero of an ongoing mystery plot proposed a third of the way into the story as a whole, and has not had disprovved by halfway through the story as a whole.  It does not at all seem to me that this hypothesis turning out to be flat wrong is incompatible with how mystery plots work.

Alright, let's put it this way.

You, yes YOU!, neurovore-with-a-lower-case-n-and-no-defined-gender, are now Jim Butcher. That Jim Butcher.

Your mission, whether you choose to accept it or not, is to write a twenty-three year long wild goose chase without pissing off your entire fanbase. Your own kid reads it and likes it. Your wife steps in from time to time as a sounding board for ideas and occasional? beta reader. You're on a first name basis with several other big fans, publishers, etc etc. You have a few million people squabbling about like rabid weasels waiting for your next book.

How do you write the wild goose chase without having one or more of that whole group brutally violate you with a cattleprod for it?

Good luck.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

You, yes YOU!, neurovore-with-a-lower-case-n-and-no-defined-gender, are now Jim Butcher. That Jim Butcher.

No, I'm not.  But I'll bear your reaction in mind when I do publish a multi-volume series, if that ever comes to pass.

How do you write the wild goose chase without having one or more of that whole group brutally violate you with a cattleprod for it?

Same way every mystery writer since the beginning of time has put misleading things, errors by the detetctive, and yes, wild goose chases into the middle of their stories; by making it entertaining, and by having a really clever resolution.

I will note, also, that your claim of a twenty-three year long wild goose chase is hyperbolic to some extent.  We are talking a theory Harry comes up with at the very end of book 8 that could be disproved as early as book 13; less than a quarter of the series as a whole is not that long for Harry to have the wrong idea about something major.

[Sh33p]

Same way every mystery writer since the beginning of time has put misleading things, errors by the detetctive, and yes, wild goose chases into the middle of their stories; by making it entertaining, and by having a really clever resolution.

NOT AN ANSWER, neuro. Give me a specific way to do it. C'mon. Be brilliant. Pretend you're Jim. If you think it'll be so awesome, show us how. Not in vagueries, but with specifics.

I will note, also, that your claim of a twenty-three year long wild goose chase is hyperbolic to some extent.  We are talking a theory Harry comes up with at the very end of book 8 that could be disproved as early as book 13; less than a quarter of the series as a whole is not that long for Harry to have the wrong idea about something major.

Not hyperbolic at all, actually. By his own account, Jim has had all of this planned out almost from the moment Dresden popped into his head as more than a side character. If Jim planned to do an anticlimactic frackjob, then according to his own words, he started sewing the seeds from book one onward.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

NOT AN ANSWER, neuro. Give me a specific way to do it. C'mon. Be brilliant. Pretend you're Jim. If you think it'll be so awesome, show us how. Not in vagueries, but with specifics.

So now I have to spoiler my own Hyper-Ambitious Awesome Series Plot for you ? I think not.

Not hyperbolic at all, actually. By his own account, Jim has had all of this planned out almost from the moment Dresden popped into his head as more than a side character. If Jim planned to do an anticlimactic frackjob, then according to his own words, he started sewing the seeds from book one onward.

Thing is, I am kind of hanging on the notion that "there is no Black Council" has to translate to "anticlimactic frackjob".

Harry thinking he has tracked the "Black Council", coming in all metaphorical guns blazing, and making everything much worse thereby ?  That would be sodding awesome.  (Also thematically in keeping with the ending of GP...)

[Sh33p]

So now I have to spoiler my own Hyper-Ambitious Awesome Series Plot for you ? I think not.

Not your series. This one. Dresden Files. You keep saying it's going to be awesome if/when an author basically knifes his entire audience in the brainstem with a big fat troll face and a LOL j/k, so put your money where your mouth is. How would you do it if you had to write a twenty-three year goose chase that couldn't be revealed in full until near the very end of it?

Thing is, I am kind of hanging on the notion that "there is no Black Council" has to translate to "anticlimactic frackjob".

Harry thinking he has tracked the "Black Council", coming in all metaphorical guns blazing, and making everything much worse thereby ?  That would be sodding awesome.  (Also thematically in keeping with the ending of GP...)

The Harry is wrong and everything's about to go worse for it plot can only be done so many times before it starts getting into Idiot Ball territory. Jim's done a commendable job avoiding that so far, but only by making Harry's enemies more competent than he is -- which isn't easy considering that Harry is, if nothing else, pretty damned competent in his own right. At a minimum, one villain would have to be in the perfect time and place to set up the idea and make sure it takes root -- not just in Harry's mind, but in the minds of at least two Wardens and multiple members of the Senior Council.

Which would basically be about the same as having a Black Council in the first place, considering the infrastructure and skill you'd need to pull all that off.

Nevermind that whole Peabody thing.

If it's all just a delusion on Harry's part, then it seems like a serious failure on the author's part considering how many people would have spent twenty-three years invested in the belief that X is Y without sufficient proof otherwise. You might be able to justify it after the fact...but only if you let the cat out of the bag with enough books left over and enough good will among your fanbase to keep them from throwing your series out a window.

[Scop]

clouds... bunnies... conspiricies... all the same thing...

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Not your series. This one. Dresden Files. You keep saying it's going to be awesome if/when an author basically knifes his entire audience in the brainstem with a big fat troll face and a LOL j/k,

No, I'm not.  You keep characterising the potential reveal of the Black Council not existing as being that sort of a thing, and I am rejecting that.

so put your money where your mouth is. How would you do it if you had to write a twenty-three year goose chase that couldn't be revealed in full until near the very end of it?

"can't be revealed in full" ? No reason for the "Black Council" not to be revealed as a blatantly wrong hypothesis in the very next book. (Most easily by Harry learning that half of what he thinks is "the Black Council"'s work is one faction's and the other half another's, and they are not in cahoots in the slightest.)  And the rest of the plot to go on being totally awesome without that element being part of it.

The Harry is wrong and everything's about to go worse for it plot can only be done so many times before it starts getting into Idiot Ball territory. Jim's done a commendable job avoiding that so far, but only by making Harry's enemies more competent than he is -- which isn't easy considering that Harry is, if nothing else, pretty damned competent in his own right.

Competent, with massive blindspots.  Distract him with Family in Danger or a woman in danger, it will work nine times out of eight.

At a minimum, one villain would have to be in the perfect time and place to set up the idea and make sure it takes root -- not just in Harry's mind, but in the minds of at least two Wardens and multiple members of the Senior Council.

Gosh. Imagine, it would take a villain who had a senior White Council position, had been working away at it for years, influencing people's minds subtly, and in all that time had never been noticed.  What do you reckon the odds of that ever happening in the DV are ?

If it's all just a delusion on Harry's part, then it seems like a serious failure on the author's part considering how many people would have spent twenty-three years invested in the belief that X is Y without sufficient proof otherwise.

It is a mystery series.  Mysteries come with false trails.

I would wager that if we cut off the first half of every single DF book by wordcount, and looked at what Harry believes is going on at that point, in every single one we will find that he is making major mistakes and misinterpretations compared to what we know by the end of the book.  I do not see "there is no Black Council" as being any bigger a misdirect on the series scale than "Shiela" is on the scale of the book she is in, and I've not seen anyone complaining about that. 

I am not understanding why you seem to find the notion upsetting, and I am not at all seeing why you are assuming that many of Jim's fans would agree with you; my experience is that people who do not like complex clues and misdirections don't in general get into mystery series in the first place.

[Phariah]

No, I'm not.  But I'll bear your reaction in mind when I do publish a multi-volume series, if that ever comes to pass.

Same way every mystery writer since the beginning of time has put misleading things, errors by the detetctive, and yes, wild goose chases into the middle of their stories; by making it entertaining, and by having a really clever resolution.

I will note, also, that your claim of a twenty-three year long wild goose chase is hyperbolic to some extent.  We are talking a theory Harry comes up with at the very end of book 8 that could be disproved as early as book 13; less than a quarter of the series as a whole is not that long for Harry to have the wrong idea about something major.

actually it was book 3 or 4 don't have the direct quote atm have to look it up. he talks about someone teaching Sells and Kravos and giving out wolf belt to the FBI. he says the someone is behind it all. and it still cannot be disproved that there is a Black Council.

[sandman1313]

do they exist: yes

who r they: the only ones who i can guess at r cowl, langtry, and and thorned namshiel.

what is their goal: once again only a guess but i would say that it is bringing the outsiders to this plain of existence

this is all just guesses here but we know that a group exists that calls them self the circle and the the work with the outsiders
and i further believe that they will end up being the big black hats harry will have to face in the end

[ClintACK]

Simple questions:

1 Does it exist?

I doubt they call themselves "Black Council" -- and many of them probably don't know each other -- but, yes.  Yes, all of the odd schemes do trace back to a group of individuals with an ultimate agenda.

1 A If so, what is it's ultimate agenda? Distributing hexenwulfen belts, exploding heart curses, and the other chaotic muck we've seen makes for great novels, but what is the ultimate point?

The Old Ones (a really powerful bunch of Outsiders) want to rule our world again -- whatever that means.

1 B Who is involved?

• He Who Walks Behind is behind a bunch of this.
• Cowl, clearly, and all his lackeys (Kumari, Vitto Malvora, Madrigal and Madeline Raith, etc...)
• Peabody, at a minimum.  Possibly also Christos.  Probably at least one more relatively surprising Wizard.  (Cowl might be one of these...)
• Mavra.
• Lord Raith.
• Thorned Namshiel.
• At least one Faerie Queen.  (Titania?)
• Ferrovax.
• Justin DuMorne, before his death.
• Likely plenty of individuals we've never seen -- and many who have died along the way.  Kemmler (Bob?!)?  Drakul?  Ariana, or the Red King?
  

1 C When did this body form?

I'm not sure it ever officially has.  The Old Ones have probably been trying to return ever since they left (or were kicked out?) -- so in the distant, prehistoric, past.

Different current members of the conspiracy have likely been recruited at different times...

[ebliss1]

I would wager that if we cut off the first half of every single DF book by wordcount, and looked at what Harry believes is going on at that point, in every single one we will find that he is making major mistakes and misinterpretations compared to what we know by the end of the book.  I do not see "there is no Black Council" as being any bigger a misdirect on the series scale than "Shiela" is on the scale of the book she is in, and I've not seen anyone complaining about that. 

I am not understanding why you seem to find the notion upsetting, and I am not at all seeing why you are assuming that many of Jim's fans would agree with you; my experience is that people who do not like complex clues and misdirections don't in general get into mystery series in the first place.

There is a VERY large difference between having a dramatic reversal or reveal in the middle of a book and having an entire series or at least a substantial part of it being a misdirection. You can look at something like "The Sixth Sense" that has a big mystery reveal and suddenly everything falls into place, or you can have something like that season of "Dallas" where Victoria Principal wakes up from having dreamed the entire season that pisses off the fanbase to no end. The first one is fine since you were telling a story, and then revealed that your interpretation of it was from a flawed perspective since you did not have all the information, but could have figured it out with the clues provided - but all happened in 2 hours. The second does not work since you have a fanbase that has invested a substantial amount of time into a series only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them with a reveal that could not have been figured out from the available material and invalidated everything that they had been shown to that point.

IF (capitalized for a reason) Jim is going to spend as much time as he has sending Harry after the Black Council, (and making us read about it and speculate and discuss it etc) only to later reveal that there is not and never was a Black Council, it had better be pretty damn cool what actually was happening. If not, it will royally piss off his readers. If he does something so incredibly lame as to pass it off as a bunch of random things happeing that just  HAPPEN to intersect with Harry's little corner of the world in a constantly escalating magical way by coincidence, it will have been a complete waste of our time and Jim's.

Will I admit that there is the possibility that there is no Black Council? Sure. Anything is possible. BUT, the presence of one makes a hell of a lot more sense than any other theory that I have read in the various threads here or anything I could think up. Does it have to be a bunch of dudes wearing black, twirling their mustaches and saying "Excellent" a la Montgomery Burns all the time? No. All I'm saying is that it had better not be something that will piss off everyone, like Harry actually dying in the fire at Victor Sells' house in Storm Front because Morgan beheaded him instead of cutting the handcuff he was dangling from and everything that followed was just Harry's suddenly oxygen-starved brain not accepting reality and his life-as-he-imagined-it-would-proceed flashing in front of his eyes before all brain function stopped.

[Der Sturmbrecher]

Mr. Butcher has maintained an excellent level of plotwork so far. If the Black Council doesn't exist, I think finding out what was really happening would make up for any disappointment.

Potential out of series spoilers Look at the Potter books: after Half Blood Prince, I'm sure many people wanted Snape to get what was coming to him. He did, but then you realize "Oh, he wasn't the git we thought he was. Well actually he was, but he was a good guy." I personally was hoping for Snape to become the real villain, moreso than Voldemort, but I was happy with how it turned out.

For future reference, what works outside of Butcher should be marked as spoilers here?

[Piotr1600]

Bad guys? Sure
A certain... parallel interest between differently-goaled opposing forces? Oh absolutely!

A "Black Council" analog of an evil version of the Knights of the Round Table? Still gotta go with Neuro on this. So, no.
Why? Two reasons:
One: Incongruent group goals
Look at bad-guy goals - there's the key to my mind of seeing that while the bad guys might well cooperate short term, they are incapable of long term, tightly focused cooperation because their small-group goals are very different.

Cowl / Kumori
Nico / Tessa (and there appears to be some divergent goals even there.)
Mavra
Red Court (IMO, aka "patsies who thought they were players")
Skinwalker (we have sort of WOJ that something big considers the skinwalker 'cheap muscle' IIRC)
Kemmler (my personal favorite 'red herring')

None of those have long term convergent goals.



Two: Too much *disorganization* in the OpFor.
The whole skinwalker/Madeline skedaddle was kind of a cluster for the bad guys.
Not to mention getting Peabody killed.
And then you have things like Cowl going from "Recruit Harry" to "Kill Harry", and Nico going from "Kill Harry" to "Recruit Harry", (and now probably back to "Kill")


The putative "BC" as we're shown in the books - if it existed - would only be plausible (to me, obviously!) if it were super-tightly cellular, and the cooperation and information exchange was only at the very top of each cell's leadership. And for the lack of cooperation/info sharing to indicate that the cell leader *didn't* have all that good of control inside the cell... At least as I see it.

As a convenient label for the bad guys, and a means to keep in mind that they may well be cooperating at some level, sometimes, "Black Council" is a good name.
As an accurate description indicating formal organization, deep cooperation, information sharing and common long term goals across some fairly disparate groups... IMO - Not so much.