‘Dresden Files’ Karrin Murphy NEEDED Harry Dresden!

SPOILER WARNING for The Dresden Files. In this episode I’m exploring Murphy’s character journey a bit, particularly as it relates to how much of an impact Harry had on it. Not just as eventual romantic partners, but how her character changed when they weren’t each other’s ride or die. Please SUBSCRIBE: https://youtube.com/@belatedbingeJoin Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/BelatedBingeSocials:IG: https://www.instagram.com/belatedbingeTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@belatedbingeFree FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1bZFKLYbkM28Hg8v/Shoutout to these channels for their awesome work that led to some of the visual elements of these videos as well as all the fan artists who’s work is so inspiring and being used with only fair use intentions:Priscilla Spencerhttps://youtube.com/@priscellieHarry Dresdenhttps://youtube.com/@harrydresden3405

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Does Karen Murphy need to be with Harry Dresden?
The answer might surprise you. The Belated Binge podcast Hi and
welcome to Belated Binge. I'm Zach, former radio host and
lifelong sports fan discovering the magic of urban fantasy.
Today we're talking Dresden Files, so spoiler warning for

(00:21):
everything through Battleground and the discussion for the day.
The flavor, if you will, is why Karen Murphy needed to be with
Harry Dresden and not just as a romantic partner.
While that was a compelling partof the storyline, it's far more

(00:44):
than that in reflecting on her journey, which I had the idea
for before I found out that I was going to be reflecting on
her whole story. At least assuming she doesn't
come back later as a Valkyrie, which I don't know if I think
that should happen or not. It could without going down a

(01:07):
complete rabbit hole, which I'm prone to do.
I love the idea of seeing Murph again at the end of this series,
perhaps. Like at the very end, maybe.
But if she does come back at some point then I think it also
cheapens the stakes. Harry is already regularly

(01:27):
punching above his weight class at literal all times, and even
when he died he didn't actually die.
So if we start bringing back other characters too, then how
do we continue to even care or worry about anyone in the series

(01:49):
when anything is happening that should have us tense or stressed
or scared or thinking, Oh no, no, don't take away Michael, but
Nope, he's OK. No, don't take away Murph, but
Nope, she's back. Now you kind of get what I'm
saying. I don't know.
That's not the point of today's chat.

(02:09):
Real quick, before we do get into today's discussion though,
can we just take a moment to sayfuck you, Rudolph?
OK, now that we got that out of the way, why is Harry Dresden
the mini me or the Jerry Maguirefor Karen Murphy?
Why does he complete her? It starts at the very beginning,

(02:36):
I think to figure out this, the answer to this just high stakes
question, we have to go back to kind of how we met Murph.
And that's not to say in the short story where they met when
she was a beat cop with the troll under the bridge.
Not that far back. I mean, at the beginning of the

(02:58):
Stormfront, right? She starts off as a no nonsense
female cop who wears her hair shorter than she likes and is
consumed by breaking the glass ceiling of the boys club in the
police force. She doesn't seem to trust well
about anyone, especially Harry Dresden.

(03:23):
She is always suspecting that he's lying or that he's guilty.
She tries to arrest him multipletimes, including a tiny bit of
police brutality in Stormfront. She thinks he's guilty, puts a
warrant out for him, blames him for the scorpion attacking her,
claims that he set her up, handcuffs herself to him while

(03:44):
he's trying to save her in full moon.
She physically assaults and arrests him because she thinks
that he's the one that is behindall of the werewolf activity
that is happening and the deathsthat go with it.
In Grave Peril, she gets pissed off and hangs up the phone on

(04:05):
him when he's trying to warn herthat he wasn't the one who
called her earlier, directly leading to her being attacked by
the demon impersonator and Tada.That's the first three books in
a nutshell. In the whole time that all of
this is going down, Harry seems to consider her a friend.

(04:28):
But it absolutely does not feel like that is particularly
mutual. Sure, there are micro moments
within it where she will do somekind of gesture that suggests
that this, you know, this this act that she has is actually
just that an act, this police facade, I guess, for lack of a
better way to put it, because she does, you know, take care of

(04:50):
him when he's got a concussion and Stormfront, she does, you
know, hold his hand and reassurehim that she's there.
But then she immediately followsit up, like I said, by putting a
warrant out for him and thinkingthat he's guilty when he doesn't
tell her every single thing thathe well should might not even be
the right word, correct? Like he's holding back

(05:13):
information from her, but not ina malicious way.
He's doing it because he thinks he's protecting her from the
consequences of knowing said information, but she goes all
the way to the extreme of thinking that it's all malicious
intent and it's all making him abad guy.

(05:35):
I guess. Until summer night, when Harry
finally confides more of the truth about the supernatural
world inside of a Walmart, of all places.
That moment, that conversation, that's when her character turns
around. And while she's still a badass

(05:56):
cop, she becomes a friend, an ally in the true sense of the
words, right? And she trusts Harry and others
in their circle, kind of from that point on.
And that's obviously where the will they won't they type of

(06:16):
romantic arc kind of begins, right?
And we get a lot along that pathway, if you will.
We get the really stupid Kincaidstuff as one excuse for the
won't they. And it never makes any sense to
me at all, actually. Let's stick with that for a

(06:39):
minute. This is all not going to line up
perfectly chronologically, but Idon't think it has to for the
point to actually make sense. So ultimately, throughout the
will they won't they narrative, Murph gives Harry two general
reasons why she doesn't think that they would work together

(07:00):
romantically. The first is that she doesn't
want anything serious. If he would be willing to just
bang it out with her, she'd be DTF, like we said back in the
day. But because Harry can't do
casual, it wouldn't work. And this makes some sense for
someone who's been married before and is married to her
work. It comes off as a little bit of

(07:23):
a cop out. See what I did there?
Cop out. Yeah.
Yeah, you're in the right place.But it's logical, right?
But the second reason that she gives him kind of completely
contradicts the first, as she also says that she wants to be

(07:43):
with someone that she can grow old with.
She is a vanilla mortal, Harry is not.
She was going to live maybe 80 ish years or so if the job
didn't take her out first. Harry would live for 203 hundred
years. Apparently because of that they

(08:04):
wouldn't be compatible with eachother.
Now let's assess this Kincaid situation for a second.
Casual check. But he's not even fully human.
He was already centuries old when she met him.
And so while I wouldn't like it kind of either way, if you just

(08:28):
said they did it once after the Mavra thing happened, fine, I
guess if you absolutely have to use it as a way to get Murph out
of the way. And deadbeat, I would have liked
it better if she just met a random person rather than
Kincaid in particular. But the idea that not only did

(08:52):
they somehow strike up this fling, they kept up with each
other and kept seeing each otheroff and on later, That's the
thing that bugs me way more. Given everything that she's told
Harry, it doesn't make sense to me.

(09:15):
Again, I would, I would have been totally fine with it if she
just got a boyfriend that was anaccountant or something.
And that would have been way more plausible and felt more in
line with her character because again, to this in this series,
aside from Harry himself, if we pretend Kincaid didn't happen,

(09:37):
she's been at least up until thepoint in which she met Kincaid,
she was always like leery of anything in the supernatural.
She likes things she can control.
She likes keeping things, you know, in compartmentalized in a
way that you know, she can rationalize it and she can solve
the problem in front of her. And that is the exact opposite

(10:00):
thing that you get when you shack up with an inhuman
assassin. I don't know.
Anyways, romantic storylines aside, because that's not what
this podcast or this YouTube channel is really about.
Despite the fact that some of mybest content has to do with
romantic ships in books between fictional characters, and that's

(10:24):
never going to make sense to me.But again, outside of the
romantic part, Murph became Dresden's Ride or die.
She was Leddy to his Dom, Mia tohis Brian O'Connor.

(10:45):
How many Fast and Furious references can I put into this
before you get what I'm saying? And it's actually a bit
ridiculous how she was leveling up right alongside him in her
own way. Not that she shouldn't also grow
as a character, but just like, these are magical monsters of

(11:07):
the highest magnitude. And Harry is barely escaping
with his life while becoming apparently one of the most
sheerly powerful Wizards on the planet.
And she's really good at martialarts and shooting.
It's sort of like how powerful is the magic if this normal

(11:31):
human can continue to go toe to toe.
Sometimes I think that Butcher needed to write her out of a
story just because he can't keepputting her in these scenes and
letting her survive so that we can still believe that there's
stakes in all of this. I, like I mentioned earlier,
stakes, and it's kind of wild tome the arc that Murph ends up

(11:59):
having in that way. And it's starting to sound like
I'm being critical of the writing, but that's not the
intent at all. It's more a reflection of Murph
as a character that she is particularly unique to be able
to hang as long as she did. And quite frankly, the way that
Harry was barely making it out with his life in so many of

(12:20):
those situations, he was gettingout because of her.
She was the one saving his ass. It's sort of like the Walmart
scene was something that she needed to not only trust Harry
because he finally told her everything that he was up
against and what he'd been trying to protect her from, as I
mentioned earlier. And it also marked her coming to

(12:43):
grips with the mental attack that she went through in Grave
Peril. It's like having these two
things happen at that time is exactly what she needed to
realize that she couldn't actually go up against this
stuff, that she couldn't handle it.

(13:04):
And it was almost like having that realization is exactly what
allowed her to go up against this stuff and allowed her to be
able to handle it. Like a healthy amount of fear
and self-awareness were the secrets to unlocking her ability
to level up in her own way and face it and ultimately become
the most bad ass vanilla mortal on the planet in her five foot

(13:27):
package. And of course it was because of
Harry too. He was her link, that innate
ability in herself, the link to the person she needed to be to
be her best self. And we know that because we saw
that growth. And then when we saw what

(13:49):
happened, when changes happened and we see the fallout in the
short story aftermath, how it broke her.
She's still a bad ass, but she'snot herself.
And then as we see more in GhostStory, without her badge and
without Harry, she reverts back to a more combative personality,

(14:12):
mistrusting everyone including her friends.
More narrow minded, more harsh in her.
Just like XS and OS mentality. Good, evil, kill the evil thing.
And it was like she was devolving in Aftermath.
She was broken, but she was there for her people and ghost

(14:36):
story. She was broken and she was
isolated, not trusting her people, not confiding in her
people. It's like what I imagined she
would have become if she and Harry had never had that Walmart
chat. And then the moment that Harry's
back in her life, she comes backto being the character that we

(14:58):
love. Of course, there's a bit of an
adjustment that she has to make to accept that he's really back,
but it doesn't take much before they pick up right where they
left off. And obviously the romantic part
finally starts to fall into place kind of along the way,
which I'm completely certain Butcher did just so that he
could take her away from Harry because he takes everything away

(15:24):
from Harry. But that's another topic for
another day. Keeping our sights on Murphy and
wrapping this thing up. It's like Harry was some missing
puzzle piece in her life, and without him, she loses a big
part of herself. And I'll end this by saying

(15:45):
again, FU Rudolph. In fact, leave that as a comment
if you are watching this on YouTube or Spotify and go ahead
and like the video. Subscribe for more Dresden and
urban fantasy content. If you're listening on a podcast
player, please leave a five starreview.
I would greatly appreciate that.And remember, life is short

(16:09):
drive that trusty Blue Beetle, curl up in your basement
apartment with a good book and fuego the whole damn building.
If anyone has a problem with it,just make sure that Bob makes it
out and the fartouts are able tokeep enough power.
Going to catch the next episode of Belated Binge.