I feel like it’s really unfair the way most readers buy into the narrative’s assertion that the White Council are unjustified and paranoid in treating Harry with so much suspicion. In many ways he’s everything they fear he is, and more.

In the first book, he gets himself knee-deep in the black magic going on in Chicago, then ends up researching how to rip out somebody’s heart with magic. His motivations are pure enough, but he’s dancing close to the corrupting influence of black magic in blatant defiance of the Laws because he has no respect for the council and is bound only by his own morality. He doesn’t yet understand that black magic can warp the user in and of itself, but that’s the whole point of the Council’s laws being so absolute, they use fear to keep people from doing things they’re too young to see the folly of.

The second book has him taking up (however breifly) the power of a Hexenwulf belt which, even leaving aside what we later learn about the Nemesis connection, nearly has him breaking the First Law within a minute, and then it takes him weeks (months?) to shake off the bloodlust it leaves him with.

The third book involves him plunging the Council into a war that very nearly gets them wiped out, probably killing several people with magic, surviving only with the help of the White King’s only son and Mab’s best frenemy. Not to mention the fact that the woman he loves (and started the war for) is now halfway to vampirism, and Harry’s had a dangerous level of exposure to Red Court venom.

I could go on and on for every single book (most things being much worse than what I’ve already noted), but my point is that they have more than enough justification to fear Dresden and to consider him a danger. His actions in Changes alone are almost incomprehensible. He openly disregards the Accords in his challenge of Arianna, disrespects the Senior Council (mostly Cristos, but the others to some degree) in front of almost the entire Council and a senior member of the Red Court nobility, subverts the Captain of the Wardens to work against her superiors, *looks the Merlin in the face and threatens him*, then vanishes for a few days while everything goes to hell (surely there must be some among the old guard who suspect Dresden, rather than Arianna, of unleashing whatever sickness incapacitated Edinburugh) only to re-emerge as the Winter Knight, fighting alongside the aforementioned Sidhe lady, White Prince, and pulling together *all three Knights of the Sword*, two of whom he armed himself, and his own personal temple dog. Then he brings in some of the heaviest hitters in the world (at the very least Odin would be recognised by anybody who lived to carry tales away from Chichen Itza), and proceeds to make the Red Court extinct with a single movement. Oh, and the Council couldn’t possibly miss that hundreds of people had the life torn out of them through the use of magic.

If Dresden ever picked up all of the weapons he has at his disposal (Lasciel, Darkhallow, whatever he can get out of Demonreach, and probably other major things I can’t recall right now) then I’m literally not sure anything could stop him.