Awesome / Changes

• "Fuck subtle." Which becomes even more awesome as it's part of a The Lord of the Rings reference!
• Early on, Harry comes across a group of Red Court vampires in his office building—after delivering the above line, he incinerates one, and rounds the corner to face the other. The vampire takes one look at Harry, Screams Like a Little Girl and runs for its life.
  • Made more awesome in hindsight: The vampire that screamed and ran was apparently Esteban, one of the Red Court's most efficient and effective assassins.
• Butters' Properly Paranoid bulletproof vest.
• Not so much a traditional Crowning Moment so much as an event so huge in-universe that it can't really be considered anything else - the complete and utter destruction of the Red Court by Harry at the end of Changes.
  • Sure, the fact that he managed it was awesome, but the circumstances were less Moment of Awesome than another trope...
  • It still becomes a double CMOA as Harry turned their own magical WMD against them to annihilate them. Delicious Laser-Guided Karma at its finest.
• The final battle counts for Murphy! With the assistance of an Archangel, she killed a Physical God with one hit— after cutting her way through a crowd of vampires and elite half-vamps to get to him! Preceded by the angelic warrior giving one hell of a Badass Boast & Pre-Mortem One-Liner combination worthy of its stature at the Red Court through Murphy.
  False gods! Pretenders! Usurpers of truth! Destroyers of faith, of families, of lives, of children! For your crimes against the Mayans, against the peoples of the world, now will you answer! Your time has come! Face judgment Almighty!
  • Fidelacchius bleached her clothes and Bob was circling around her head to protect her from the Lords of the Outer Night's psychic assault. So she looked like was an avenging archangel in holy white, with a glowing golden halo, laying waste with frigging Kusanagi, The Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven. You know, exactly like she looks whenever Harry looks at her with the Sight?
  • Even better when you read back and notice the foreshadowing: When Harry arrives to find his crew waiting to go, she's playing chess with someone. What move is she noted as making when Harry walks into the room? Moving a Knight into a horde of enemy pieces.
    And she raised Fidelacchius, let out a scream that had startled a great many large men working out at her dojo, and plunged into the warriors of the Red Court like a swimmer breasting a wave.
    Sanya blinked.
    Holy crap, I hadn't meant she should do that.
  • It’s also a combat CMOA for Good Bob. After being a snarky assistant forced act within his limitations, only having a small glimpse via Evil Bob, Demonic Possession or lip service from Luccio that he’s almost on par with the Archive, we finally see him cut loose and continuously shield Murphy from everything 5 Physical Gods could throw at her. Beware the Silly Ones indeed.
• Mouse confronting the Leanansidhe, and calling her a bitch (though would that even be an insult from a dog point of view?), then threatening to literally bite her ass off.
  • "How did he ever win you?" "He didn't. I won him."
  Lea: "You are far from the centres of your power here, demon."
  Mouse: "I live with a wizard. I cheat." Cue Intimidation Demonstration via Shockwave Stomp.
  • He effortlessly takes command of Harry and co, despite the fact that they have been transformed into Lea's hounds and thus she should be the one in control. Mouse is the true alpha.
  • It should also be remembered that, according to Jim, he draws his power from the threshold of the home he guards. Not only is he thousands of miles from Harry's apartment, that threshold has presumably been greatly weakened by the FBI storming in. He's still dangerous enough to make Lea back off.
• Harry's duel with Arianna, culminating when he beats her using a combo of his own raw powers and the fact that Arianna has never been forced to fight with just magic (resulting in her trying the same trick twice, giving Harry the chance to nail her). After Harry overpowers her, Arianna just stares up and dumbly refers to him as cattle. Harry responds first by saying "Moo" then by saying "No one messes with my little girl" before blowing Arianna's head off, reducing it to pieces. Arianna is older than written language.
• The final confrontation is a hundred and more pages of "Holy shit!" moments piled on top of one another. Harry gravity-pounding a Red Court horde. Harry calling out the Red King. Harry killing Arianna with a combination of Winter Knight freeze-power and forzare. Murphy and Sanya becoming Back-to-Back Badasses, with Harry, Mouse, Molly, and Thomas on support. Lea summoning the Big Damn Grey Council, which includes fucking Odin himself, who then summons an army of kenku. Ebenezar proving again why he's the Blackstaff by killing two hundred men with a gesture of the Blackstaff itself. Murphy cutting through a Lord of the Outer Night like he's not even there. Susan holding off the entire remaining Lords of Outer Night and the Red King with the Sword of Love, aka Excalibur. Martin's insane Xanatos Speed Chess to take out the Red Court at any cost. Everything. No exceptions.
  • What especially stands out is Harry grabbing the Red King's sword arm mid thrust, impaling, than setting his eyes on fire, before freezing his right forearm and breaking it off. DAMN
  • Nicely foreshadowed, too, by the fact that Harry'd come very close to putting out the White King's eyes in Blood Rites, and had set a murdering ghoul rapist's nerves and body fat ablaze in White Knight. Essentially, the Red King suffered everything Harry's dished out to his most-loathed previous enemies, but worse.
  • Harry's gravity spell can barely crack the pillars of the Red King's palace. Ebenezar? Bulldozes them casually.
• Harry pulls some insane new tricks in this one. Notable examples: Freezing a would-be hitman's gun. Tapping into an earth ley-line to crush hundreds of mooks against the floor with gravity. Using tiny fireballs to "bomb" cars as a distraction. Tripping up an onrushing monster by chucking another monster under its feet, so it slips on the resulting puddle of trampled guts. Draining the heat from a target and using that heat to power a fireball, then shattering the vamp-sicle. Lots and lots of White Magic-laced silver fire. Borrowing Luccio's tactics and slicing a monster in half with a magical laser cutter. Intentionally causing a cave-in over both him and his opponent, then opening a dimensional portal directly above himself.
  • And then there's Molly and her "One Woman Rave," complete with Thomas break-dancing while decapitating bad guys with a sword and shooting them with a machine gun.
• A couple of vampires have thrown a Molotov cocktail at Harry's apartment building, and the whole place is burning down. Harry, with a broken leg managed to haul his elderly landlady out of bed to safety, but the upstairs neighbors are also old and unable to make it out on their own. Harry tries to rescue them, but can't due to a badly-timed explosion knocking him off the ladder. The old lady yells "Oh God in Heaven, help us!"... and he does. Best-timed entrance ever, Sanya.
  • This scene even contains something of an awesome moment for Mrs. Spunkelcrief (the aforementioned landlady). When Harry's taken out of action, she pulls the ladder upright and tries to climb it herself, and is only stopped when her bad leg collapses under her. It doesn't sound like much, but consider that she's probably in her mid-seventies, with a bum hip, and has trouble walking even with the aid of a cane under the best of circumstances. One gets the feeling that Mrs. S may have been a bit of a Determinator in her youth.
  • The woman also sleeps with a pistol and considers an army of ghouls pounding on her door as not worth waking up for. Although you don't live under the same roof as Harry Dresden for ten years without learning to sleep through a little thing like that.
• Odin showing Harry why it's a bad idea to fuck with physical gods.
  • Odin unhesitatingly giving Harry exactly what he asked for, with no price tag attached, proving that some supernatural entities are neither evil nor dicks.
    • Not so surprising if you consider the code of honour of the ancient Norse. Courage even in the face of certain defeat is a defining characteristic for Harry, and one Odin certainly appreciates. One thinks he would love to have Harry in his band of warriors when the time to fight and lose to the Ice Giants has come. To Odin, Harry is definitely one of the good guys, so why not help him as much as he can?
    • And also not that surprising once it's revealed that Odin is also Santa Claus. Of all the various supernatural entities in the Dresden 'verse he's obviously the most likely to give Harry a gift, free from any hidden consequences.
  • Vadderung is rather insistent that Harry have some coffee and a doughnut. Since he likely realizes that Harry is on a suicide mission, Father Odin does the modern equivalent of having Harry drink Odin's Mead, giving our hero one more way back from death, as an Einherjar. Its also a practical one, to ensure that Harry doesn't get bogged down with hunger.
  • Ebenezar speculates that pretty much the entire book was a Batman Gambit by Odin. Given what we've seen of the guy, it's not hard to believe.
• They blew up a pyramid.
• "Moo."
• Martin gets one which was, appropriately, almost impossible to notice. In fact, no-one would ever have known he was anything but The Mole if Harry's soulgaze hadn't revealed his Thanatos Gambit to wipe out the entire Red Court while he lay dying.
• Harry managing to impress the Erlking again, this time through some Politeness Judo. When he and Susan, escaping some Red Court vampires, drop in on his domain, he semi-sarcastically calls them his "guests," which Harry uses to claim Sacred Hospitality.
  • The best part is that the rest of the goblins present are angry at what they think is a misuse of the rules of hospitality, but the Erlking thinks it’s clever, equating Harry to a wily fox.
  • Something of a Chekhov's Gun also, as his previous encounter with Lea at his apartment established that letting one's guests win a semantic argument for courtesy's sake is a very old fae tradition. Naturally the Erlking was obliged to be gracious about it, once he had acknowledged Harry's status as a guest.
  • Erlking gets his own CMOA as a Rules Lawyer by reminding his guests that its been years since he had guests, so according to Fae tradition he could keep them entertained in his home, possibly forever, a la Gilded Cage. Harry and the vampires have no way around that and are forced to just beg to be allowed to leave in time for their responsibilities. You don't rule for millenia without being smart and Erlking proved it.
• When Harry meets with Mab to accept the Winter Mantle, she gloats that he has no other options...but he interrupts her by listing his options, from least evil to most evil, all the way from accepting her offer, summoning back Lasciel's coin back to him to command the power of a Fallen Angel and ending with activating the Darkhallow, consuming the raw lifeforce of the entire city and becoming a necromantic god. Even Mab had to admit Harry has a lot of options.
  • Which he would actually do if it meant saving Maggie.
  • And not-so-subtly threatens to destroy Mab in the process if it came to that, which takes a pretty large set in itself. And if he takes up the other options, he absolutely can.
    • And an even more awesome moment for Mab herself: As the Fridge page points out, she knows perfectly well that neither of the other options would actually work, but she still lets Harry believe he has the upper hand, because it suits her purposes.
• Leanansidhe kept a relatively low profile, but besides summoning the Grey Council she:
  1. infiltrates Red King's posse of Lords of Outer Night (using a very high level veil)
  2. takes on seven Lords of Outer Night at the same time, killing two with the first blow In the Back, and has massive fun doing it too (as usual)
  3. "aggressively negotiates" with Odin for a direct portal to Chicago for Harry and Maggie, since "she is given to understand the little ones are quite fragile." Take a minute to let that sink in. She "aggressively negotiated" with freakin' Odin!
  • And she finally gets to turn Harry into a dog, which she's wanted to do for years.
  • Not to mention the reveal that all these years, she's been defending Harry's apartment from the Nevernever side with a flower garden so lethal, it's surrounded by mounds of bones from enemies who've tried to sneak-attack him. And Harry never even suspected it.
  • Another one for Lea. What are the four most dangerous words in the whole English language, which also double as Pre-Asskicking One-Liner for Mab?
    Lea: My queen, to what degree am I permitted to act?
    Mab: You may indulge yourself.
  • This also shows how much Mab trusts Lea, considering that in previous books, Lea had been 'infected' by Nemesis.
• Villainous example for the Red King and The Lords of Outer Night. Especially when they show the power to paralyze an enemy with sheer force of will. Granted, they were defeated, but those guys still were the epitome of Rank Scales with Asskicking.
• One that might cross into Heartwarming territory is when Harry needs to escape the FBI building under siege, so he opens a Way into the Nevernever...and finds out it connects to the hall of the Erlking, Lord of Goblins and the Wild Hunt. The FBI are some of the best manhunters in Law Enforcement and always take the lead when there’s a child kidnapping, and the Erlking's domain agrees by connecting to them through the Nevernever. Badass.
• A subtle one at the end. Susan has just become a Red Court Vampire after killing Martin, and Harry kills her to wipe out the Red Court. There is no indication that Vampire!Susan tried to struggle or fight him off - instead, she allowed Harry to do it, fully knowing what it meant, all because it would put an end to the ones that turned her, kidnapped her daughter and have outright been some of the biggest monsters to ever exist. Mama Bear combined with Heroic Willpower to provide the Heroic Sacrifice that changes everything.
• Mac uses multiple full sentences to give Harry genuine heartfelt advice. Like Lea, he makes it extra powerful. This gets Harry out of his funk caused by learning about Maggie's existence and ready to eviscerate vampires. You don't need to fight-side-by-side to be True Companions.
  • And the last part? Just wait...

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