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the dresden files - Does the existence of the Archive make the Oblivion War unwinnable? [Mild Spoilers]



In the Dresden Files, there's an effort known as the Oblivion War, to sever the connection that old gods and their ilk have to the mortal world. The way to do this is to remove these gods from mortal memory, because the mortals are their conduit into the physical world. (This makes it an incredibly hard war to document.) One of the common tasks of the Venatori, humanity's champions in the Oblivion War, is to destroy ritual books so that no budding sorcerer can call upon that particular deity.


Fortunately, spirits' memories don't serve as conduits like mortals do - fortunate, because they all would live forever without outside interference, and mutually prevent each others' disappearance. This means that the Archive, the repository of all mortal knowledge ever written down, doesn't directly block their objective, because the Archive isn't a mortal.


But Archive's mortal host can! What if the host, in a moment of mortal danger, decided to access all of the memories of all of the routes to power ever written down? Does a mortal suddenly know the lost knowledge that the Venatori have destroyed? Does that reopen the conduits for those beings?



Answer



The Archive was created specifically to lead the Oblivion war. Ivy is the one giving Lara and an unknown number of other agents their orders.


Jim Butcher actually addressed this specifically on his forum.


This is a direct quote from Jim Butcher:



I'm pretty sure this will never make it into the actual Dresden Files since Harry has no idea the Oblivion War is happening, along with everyone else. So I'll share it here. :)


The Archive was constructed /for/ the Oblivion War. Specifically.



Yes, the Archive (and Ivy, the two aren't really divisible) know about these forgotten beings. The Archive is in essence the keeper of the dead, where they are concerned. Once the archive believes one of them has been consigned to oblivion, she holds on to the memory of that being briefly, for another thousand years or so, watching for any mention of that being in print in an effort to make sure that she is the /last/ person alive who remembers whichever hideous entity has been consigned.


And once the safety period has elapsed, and the Archive is confident that no one else remembers, she deletes the memory from the Archive. Bad guy, /gone/.


She also tries to keep track of the enemy players in the Oblivion War via watching for communications and so on. When she finds a trace of them, somewhere, she lets a cell of operatives (like Lara and Thomas) know what's up, through a blind drop, and sends them off to handle the problem.


The Oblivion War is a huge, /slow/ thing. Stuff happens every few decades, at most. That's why the Archive was created--to be an immortal awareness, something that could track and intelligently direct responses to the enemy in a war happening on an almost geological scale. All that other stuff she says the Archive is for? Smoke and mirrors. :)1



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