"Dominance of Fate" Extract Spork
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antishurtugal_rebornEpistler: Some of you may recall that way back in the day Paolini published a “special edition” of Eldest, which came with some extra content. The biggest of these (I forget if there was anything else noteworthy) was an extract from the in-universe history book, The Dominance of Fate, aka Domia Abr Wyrda, which Galby apparently banned for no very good reason. And as it happens you can now read it on paolini.net.
So of course I decided to sit down and spork the shit out of it, because it’s just as bad as I remember. Bear in mind, this thing was written while Paolini was at his least experienced and most pretentious. So it’s probably going to hurt.
Torylltales: And, as has become a big of a habit, I’m sticking my sticky nose into it as well. Anya’s going to join us, because we are a great team.
Anya: Would it be too hubristic to call ourselves the Holy Trinity of Inherisporks? Probably.
Heslant the Monk was a member of the Arcaena, a human religious sect that holds all knowledge as sacred.
E: Shame nobody bothered to establish that in-universe until right at the end when it was completely irrelevant.
TT: “Arcaena”. For all the worldbuilding Paolini supposedly did, I’ve always been frustrated that he failed so completely at building anything at all interesting for the human population. “Arcana” means “secret”, so, a secret society should be “arcana” with an extra letter. Words fail to describe the transcendant brilliance of Paolini’s worldbuilding process.
A: You know what that reminds me of? Stephenie Meyer, with her characters Edward Masen Cullen, Esme Evansen Cullen, etc. Instant Variant, Just Add E!
He took a great risk when he published the history of Alagaësia in the volume Domia Abr Wyrda—Dominance of Fate.
E: What a spectacularly moronic (and meaningless) title.
TT: with yet more evidence that Alagaesian Humans are simply Old English Humans without the Old English culture or religion.
Heslant was executed for this act of defiance. Galbatorix declared the work and its creator blasphemous and ordered all copies destroyed.
E: This still doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Blasphemous against what? The Empire doesn’t have a state religion. Which god, goddess or pantheon did it insult? And why would Galby even care? He’s a Rider so presumably he’s above all that religion nonsense.
A: Maybe he’s trying to imply that Galbatorix was trying to set himself up as a god? If so, that would have been nice to see. It would have meant that the villain actually did something, you know, VILLAINOUS.
TT: Even without the religious implications of “blasphemy”, why would Galby care about a printed book, when only the wealthiest elite could afford to learn to read? When most of your country is illiterate farmers and tradespeasants, monks can publish whatever the hell they want. All you need to do is hire an army of narrators loyal to you, to offer the service of “reading” the books out loud to the common folk. By which I mean telling them any old story that works for you and assuring the illiterate folk that that’s what the book says.
Even if some people do read it and decide for themselves that it paints Galby as a bad guy, what does he think would happen? Is there seriously any force in Alagaesia that can challenge the might of the last adult dragon (at the time) and the last immortal, magic-wielding, superhumanly-overpowered Rider wielding an indestructible sword? That’s the problem with the series – his villains and heroes are so absurdly overpowered that the mood and actions of the common folk are literally worthless.
I mean, let’s say there’s a peasant uprising in Uru’baen because of this book. What are they going to do to the ancient enormous dragon, bleed on it? Throw their little spears at it? Meanwhile, all Galby has to do is say a couple of words and they are all ash. He’s like Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet, but instead of superheroes with absurd strength and energy-throwing powers, it’s just ordinary people rushing at him with aluminium baseball bats.
The point is, this book is absolutely no threat to his power, even if enough people could read it, and even if enough of those people interpret it specifically to paint Galby as the villain, and then enough of those people decide it’s worth the risk to try to depose him.
The book proved even more important than the monk could have predicted; Eragon would eventually find details on the location of the Vault of Souls hidden with its text.
E: Conveniently leaving out the part where he needed to have his hand held the whole way with extra hints from the dead dragons before his three braincells finally kicked into gear.
If you like this scene, be sure to check out the rest of the deleted and deluxe content from the Inheritance Cycle!
E: Oh, I’ll go there too. Trust me.
A: I already sporked one of them. Remember that bizarre Big Lipped Alligator Moment scene with the swashbuckler? Yeah, that’s another one of these.
A Brief History of Alagaësia
(An Excerpt from the Preface of Domia Abr Wyrda by Heslant the Monk)
. . . and I suppose that I should provide a summary of the following content before plunging into its depths, so that the unsuspecting literary enthusiast may decide beforehand whether this is the type of composition he enjoys perusing, lest he find himself suddenly engulfed in the dark and convoluted byways of dwarven politics and only then realize that, no, he would rather read a ballad or a collection of poetry to soothe his stomach after an especially heavy supper in his dining hall.
A: Wow. That’s rich coming from the man who wrote Brisingr.
E: Why yes, I do enjoy being talked down to. Thanks.
TT: Who writes like this? Honestly, who would write a book under the assumption that nobody would want to read it? People generally assume, when they’re writing a book, that the people who read it are doing so because either they want to read it, or they have to (for school or university, for example). Heslant is making enemies of his readers before they’re even read anything.
E: Methinks a certain person is just trying to show off how OMG erudite and intelligent he is, without stopping to consider the implications of what he’s actually saying. You know, again.
A: Were this any other writer, I might think that the dwarven politics thing was a deliberate jab at his own writing. Self-deprecation is always a good look. Unfortunately, Paolini has continually demonstrated that he lacks the self-awareness needed to even attempt such a joke.
Domia Abr Wyrda, is my life’s work: a complete history of the land of Alagaësia, beginning with its earliest myths and legends and proceeding through the intervening millennia to the present.
E: Given how little culture and history Algaelab actually has, it must be a short book.
TT: 
image: a teeny tiny book held open between someone’s thumb and finger.
Herein I detail the origins and cultures of each of the known races, including the dwarves and the elves, whom I sought out in their secret places. It is my hope that this book will serve as a bridge between the past and the future, preserving a true account of events that would otherwise be lost in the confusion following the Riders’ fall and the darkness of Galbatorix’s reign.
E: Because eighty years is enough time for everybody to forget all about the shit their grandparents would have told them growing up. Dude. Galby hasn’t been in power that long, and there’s no indication of a propaganda campaign by him to cover all this up. World War 2 happened about 80 years ago in the real world, and you can still talk to people who were there at the time. And this is a setting with actual immortals in it! Give me a break.
TT: As if the elves would deign to share their history with a random human wandering through the woods with a pack full of scrolls. As if they wouldn’t slaughter him immediately for daring to enter their forest.
A: I’d like to think that Heslant is lying when he says he talked to the elves, and that Galbatorix banned the book as a reasonable measure against fake history.
Before I proceed even with this summary, it seems wise to pause and explain what is meant by alagaësia, and thus define the exact nature of my subject and hopefully avoid unnecessary confusion in later chapters.
E: Why no, this isn’t patronising at all.
TT: Because anybody reading a Complete History of Alagaesia first needs to learn what exactly an Alagaesia is. I’m rather medically-minded lately due to current circumstances, so to me it looks like some kind of disease. I’m sorry sir, you have alagaesia of the liver.
The word itself is one of Elvish extraction that means “fertile land.” The dwarves and Urgals possess their own appellations for this region, of course, but we humans chose to adopt the elves’ title, and with good reason.
E: “Because we don’t have any culture of our own, so we have to adopt everybody else’s”.
TT: What I’m interested in is, what part of “Alagaësia” means “fertile”, and which part means “land”? Is the -ia part the bit that means land? You know, exactly as it does in many English place names, like Romania, Nigeria, Virginia, California, Algeria, India, and so on? Because Paolini is supremely un-creative?
A: “Good reason”? Heslant. Dude. Broski. In your extensive studies, did you happen to notice the GIANT FUCKING DESERT in the middle of this “fertile land”?
The gods
E: What gods?
TT: The dwarvish gods? The urgal gods? The “nomad people” gods? Angvard, the only Broddring human god to have been named in the entire series?
E: Ya got me.
A: You know, considering Heslant’s byname is “the Monk,” you’d think he would reference gods quite a bit. Heck, this book could easily open with an invocation of a god(dess), a la the ancient Greek and Roman epics – Lucretius’s didactic epic, De Rerum Natura, comes to mind. That device would certainly make more sense here than it did in a poem by the militantly atheistic elves.
I really need to do a post just on that poem at some point. Such a blatant case of Paolini throwing in some tropes from ancient writings without any understanding of how and why they’re used.
have blessed our home with vast amounts of arable soil, timber, iron, gold, gems, and all else a prosperous kingdom needs to thrive. As for the physical boundaries of Alagaësia, they are commonly identified as follows: beginning at the shore of the Western Sea and extending east to the far side of both Du Weldenvarden and the Beor Mountains, and spanning the territory between the southernmost point of Surda and the north shore of Vroengard Island.
Little is known of what lies beyond these varied and far-flung locations. During my decades of research, I learned that the Riders had instituted an extensive program of exploration, flying to the farthest reaches of land and water. Some of their discoveries were already familiar to the elves
E: …because the elves are Better Than You. And weren’t most of the riders elves anyway? This maketh no sense.
—who have preserved both maps and lore describing the continent from which they emigrated across the ocean—but the rest was as yet uncharted territory.
E: And apparently due to remain so.
TT: elves in this series are really selfish. Self-elfish. Heh. They have all these discoveries, magic and technology, that would be a huge benefit to other people, but hoard them for themselves, for no other reason than “fuck humans, that’s why”. Didn’t Oromis explain in Brisingr that elves basically have a germ theory of disease? That could save hundreds of people from unnecessary suffering, but no.
E: Because fuck them lame hoomins who aren’t immortal and don’t have magic or pointy ears. Let ’em all die – they’ll breed some new ones in a jiffy. You know, just like rats!
Unfortunately, Galbatorix burned the great libraries in Doru Araeba and Ilirea, although not before pillaging them for his own personal collection. This act must count as one of the most heinous crimes of history; it is impossible to calculate the size of our loss. Overnight Galbatorix consigned almost every piece of writing produced by humans either to the flames or to the impenetrable void of his hoard. He destroyed the only existing copies of innumerable plays, histories, mathematical treatises, ancient spell books, and other unique documents, and we must regard what was contained within their pages as forever beyond recovery. Our race is diminished as a result.
E: Um, why? What the hell for? What on earth motivated him to do this? If we want to look at real history for a moment, historically speaking when regimes have burned books it was because said books were thought to be against either the state or the dominant religion, or in some way offensive to public decency. So you get fundamentalist Christians burning comic books and fantasy novels for “promoting magic” or some such rot, Nazi Germany burning anything they judged to be “too Jewish”, governments censoring stuff like The Anarchist’s Cookbook in case would-be terrorists use it as an instruction manual to carry out an attack, and books like Leaves of Grass and The Scarlet Letter being banned and even destroyed for containing frank depictions of sex.
What exactly was it about all this knowledge that Galby considered such a threat? If he’s so obscenely powerful, how would keeping the population ignorant help? This could have been an intriguing plot point, but as Paolini never bothered to give his villain any genuine development or any particular motivations, it’s just nonsensical.
TT: I completely agree, this is Paolini writing Galby as “evil for the sake of evil”. There is no reason I can think of for Galby to do this. Especially with regard to the “ancient spell books”, as he was consumed with, if nothing else, a search for more power and knowledge of the AL and magic. Destroying spell books would be actively hindering his only known motivator.
I’ve said before, if I were to write this series, Galby would be a champion of humanity and human culture above elves and dwarves, hence his overthrowing the elf-centric Riders and reinstating the ancient human monarchy. He would have destroyed elfish and dwarvish literature, and filled the libraries with human culture and histories. And then encourage all his human subjects to learn to read and to create and participate in arts and discovery/learning.
A: Oh, no, there’s a reason. It’s so that Paolini doesn’t have to flesh out any of these plays, histories, treatises, etc. because they were “lost forever”.
Of the Riders’ collected wisdom, only fragments remain, cryptic references scattered like chaff before the wind throughout dwarf scrolls and the elves’ ancient stores of knowledge. These often impenetrable shards of truth provide, for the most part, nothing but frustration to one who studies them and is unfamiliar with the source manuscripts, but what can be gleaned seems to indicate that while humans may also dwell somewhere outside of Alagaësia—and Urgals as well, for they are hardy creatures—the elves and dwarves exist nowhere else.
E: Because if the uber Sue order of Riders didn’t write it down, no-one could possibly know about it. There are no oral histories among the humans which recount any of this. And apparently, no migrants or visitors from outside Alaglag ever. This is some seriously elitist shit, you guys.
TT: Wasn’t it canon from the start that elves came to Alagaesia from Aman Alalea, across the sea? Is this implying that not a single elf stayed behind in their home country? Or that the Alagaesia elves no longer consider Alalea elves to be the same people?
A: My head hurts. Do your heads hurt? Paolini loves purple prose, but this… this is just agonizing. At least in the Cycle there was typically something going on, even if it was stupid or irrelevant. This is just Paolini wanking to his own vocabulary while he pretends to be good at worldbuilding.
And what, an educated reader might ask, about dragons?
E: What about them? They’re almost as irrelevant as the dwarves.
Despite the romantic fantasies propagated throughout the Empire at regular intervals by individuals bold enough to beard our dark king—a perilous endeavor at best—I do not believe that any skulblaka escaped Galbatorix and the Forsworn. Dragons spoke to each other through their minds, and when Galbatorix began to kill them, every dragon from around the world would have rushed to defeat him and, in doing so, ensured their doom.
TT: “individuals bold enough to beard our dark king” – to beard? I mean, I know what it means in context, but in the queer community a beard, or one who beards, was a person who, knowingly or not, was in a relationship with a gay person, to help them conceal their homosexuality and preserve the illusion of straightness. And now I’m imagining women hired to hang around with Galby to hide the fact that he likes men.
E: I guess that would explain the “concubines”. And apparently Galby, the guy so pathetic he was taken out by some dumbass teenager making him feel bad, was simultaneously badass enough to kill an entire planet’s worth of dragons. Rather than, say, the wild dragons becoming disillusioned by the failure of the Riders to stop one fucking guy and leaving. Sure, that’s plausible.
TT: playing devil’s advocate, in a half-decent writer’s work, it’s entirely possible Heslant is mistaken in his belief, as many monks were in pre-scientific times. Unfortunately, Paolini seems to not be capable of writing characters with sincerely-held beliefs that differ from his own.
E: Which is precisely why all his POV characters talk, think and act the same, and have the exact same attitudes (bratty, arrogant and selfish) regardless of their age, gender, species, nationality and education.
While it is a popular pastime among learned minds to imagine sending expeditions to search for friends and allies in unknown lands, such ventures are currently impracticable and will remain so into the foreseeable future.
A: THEN HOW DID YOU GET TO TALK TO THE ELVES, YOU NINCOMPOOP? I swear, my headcanon about him lying gets more and more probable with each line.
E: Who wants to bet this guy was just writing paid propaganda for the Varden?
Since Galbatorix assumed his station, every kingdom has devoted its resources to war. They cannot spare men and ships for voyages of indeterminate length aimed south, past the daunting Beor Mountains; north, where it grows ever colder, until the ocean and land become entombed underneath a crushing shell of ice that does not melt even in summer; or east and west, across near-endless tracts of salty waves and empty grass-bound plains.
TT: War with whom? The elves have retreated to their forest, the dwarves stay hidden in their mountains. Galby seemed perfectly content to let Surda secede, so who is he devoting the resources of an entire kingdom to fighting?
A: I guess maybe the Urgals? There was that bit in Eragon where he mentioned legions disappearing into the Spine… but then, that seemed more like a one-time thing; there was never any current war or army draft mentioned. Heck, that’s something the movie arguably did better than the book, and we all know what an absolute pile of turds the movie was.
TT: Also, “near-endless tracts of grass-bound plains”? You mean the ones Eragon rode a horse across in like two days?
E: And why do we see zero evidence of any fighting going on before Ergy joins up with the Varden? We spent 80% of Eragon watching the dumbass wander around half the continent, and everything is perfectly quiet and peaceful with the exception of a few urgal attacks which are portrayed as happening very recently. I’m getting a distinct whiff of BS excuse-making.
So. Domia Abr Wyrda begins with an account of the dwarves, who—along with the dragons—are the original inhabitants of Alagaësia. (For the sake of simplicity, dates are given in the dwarf calendar, as it is the only accurate record of years that encompasses all of known history.) Thus nearly eight millennia ago, or 0 A.C. (After Creation), the dwarves believe that their god Helzvog breathed life into the first members of their race.
E: “After Creation”. Real imaginative.
TT: Aside from the likelihood of any people having a single uninterrupted calendar that is never challenged with alternatives or alternate counting methods or language change or political change or splintering or cultural upheavals or famines or disease or portions being lost or forgotten or abandoned or just becoming inaccurate due to transcription errors or maths errors for EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS...
A: I guess he’s trying to imply that the dwarves made their calendar by doing the same adding up dates and ages trick that leads fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religions to believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
Within a generation after 0 A.C., the climate in the plains where the dwarves lived underwent an abrupt change, transforming the plains into what we now know as the Hadarac Desert,
E: Um, why? Is climate change a thing in ancient Arglebarg? Were the dwarves producing record amounts of greenhouse gases? And how on earth did this happen in just one generation? That is insanely fast.
TT: Yeah, that’s cataclysmic, apocalypse level fast. Like the extinction of the dinosaurs fast, and that involved a massive world-changing meteorite slamming into the planet and permanently altering the atmosphere. Ooh, maybe this was the terrible event that destroyed the Grey Folk and forced them to bind magic to their language?
A: Or maybe it’s legendary embellishment of an event that actually took longer… is what I would say if I thought Paolini could work such a thing into his shoddy worldbuilding.
and forcing the dwarves to migrate into the Beor Mountains so as to fend off starvation. Soon afterward, their first king, Korgan, discovered the hollow mountain Farthen Dûr, which has housed Tronjheim, their capital, ever since.
E: Wait, that name seems familiar.
Goddammit, Paolini.
TT: Korgan isn’t even my favourite character, but of COURSE Paolini would crib a name from the Forgotten Realms mythos. It’s surprising he hasn’t taken more.
From then until 5217 A.C., the dwarves occupied themselves with tunneling and mining; waging periodic wars among their clans; building their monumental cities, which are the embodiment of architectural perfection; and amassing an impressive body of mathematics, astronomy, astrology, metallurgy, chemistry, botany, and other branches of natural philosophy of which we in the west are now mostly ignorant. Though the dwarves possessed a rough acquaintance with the workings of magic, it was not until the elves introduced them to the ancient language that they truly began to master it.
E: Because once again the elves are Better Than You.
TT: not to mention another example of Fantasy Races Are Better Than Humans.
During this first age, dragons did little more than eat and breed.
E: But they’re totally an intelligent species with their own culture and everything, you guys.
Seriously though if a species does nothing but mindlessly eat and mate and has no natural predators in the wild, it will lose any advanced intelligence very quickly. A brain powerful enough to sustain conscious thought and such uses up a lot of calories which would be better spent elsewhere.
TT: That explains Trump supporters. *rimshot*
A: Nothing explains Trump supporters.
The Chronicles of Ingothold say that the great fire-worms congregated in the heart of the Hadarac Desert, as the heat was to their liking, but that they also nested in the Spine and the Beor Mountains, where they seemed to have taken a special delight in persecuting the dwarves.
E: Because reasons.
TT: I just want to point out something in Paolini’s favour, for a change: For a culture that prizes mining and metalworks, “Ingothold” is actually a really good place name. I like it. It’s a cliché, but in an interesting way that makes you think for a moment.
No one has unearthed evidence to suggest that the dragons ever developed a culture or language of their own, notwithstanding their manifest intelligence. It is possible that they only acquired these attributes after becoming linked with elves and humans.
E: Wait, never mind – they really were just mindless beasts. Except that they were totally intelligent and stuff. I ask you, what is the point of having sapience if you never use it for anything? Does Paolini not realise that intelligent creatures/people get bored? Which is what then leads to art, science, storytelling, and all the other trappings of culture. This is so stupid.
TT: Having seen the results of Paolini being bored, I wouldn’t guess that art or storytelling could arise from boredom.
E: Hey, I didn’t say it had to be good art or storytelling.
This state of affairs persisted until 5217 A.C., when elves arrived in Alagaësia at the place where Teirm now stands. From whence did the elves come and why? They will only say that their homeland was called Alalëa—a very rare word in the ancient language that has multiple meanings, the most likely in this case being “a melancholy dream of great beauty”—and that they left to escape the consequences some terrible mistake.
E: Because the elves are so important and special that nothing noteworthy happened until they showed up.
TT: Wait, how can the Ancient Language, a True Name Language of Absolute Truth, in which a word for a thing is equal to the thing itself, have words with “multiple meanings”?
A: Well, the Ancient Language canonically didn’t begin life as the magic-guiding True Speech that it is today. It started life as the language of the Grey Folk, who tied it to magic later. Thus, having it function much like a regular language with synonyms and homophones and words that have multiple meanings kind of serves as an indicator of that origin. However, I rather doubt that that was the original intent. Most likely, Paolini came up with the “it used to be just another language” story after the fact.
TT: And again, linguistics point: what portion of “Alalëa” means “melancholy dream”? What part of it means “great beauty”? A skilled conlanger might make “ala-” a word-forming prefix that beautifies the noun, hence Alalëa as “Beatiful [Lëa]” Alagaësia would be “Beautiful [Gaes] Land”, but I don’t give Paolini credit. Besides, Alagaesia means “fertile land”, not beautiful anything. Unless the elves equate fertility with beauty so strongly that they cannot be separated linguistically, in which case ala- could mean both, but then it would still be translated consistently.
A: It could also be that “ala-“ is a prefix used to make place names for very large areas, but I don’t give Paolini credit for that either, because the given translation of “Alalëa” doesn’t contain “land” in any form.
I could give some credit for a language having single words to express ideas that need entire phrases or sentences to say in another, since that is something that happens, but having such a small word express such a specifically complex concept seems… a bit contrived.
Really, it would make the most sense if Heslant was just pulling all of this out of his ass.
Whatever the reason may be, the elves soon committed another mistake when, in 5291 A.C.—having established themselves across Alagaësia—they slew a dragon for sport, thinking them naught but beasts. (Elves still ate meat then.)
A: That parenthetical with the dashes is completely unnecessary. As is the one with the actual parentheses.
E: I wonder if they also mounted its head over the hearth and turned the skin into a big sparkly rug? Also that dragon must have been pretty lame if it managed to get itself killed by primitive elves with no magic to speak of.
TT: I thought he just said that dragons WERE only beasts until after the Rider thing? They did nothing but eat and mate, had no culture to speak of, and gave no outward indications of higher intelligence.
The war that followed was so ferocious, it threatened to drive both races to extinction. The fighting ceased in 5296 A.C. only after a certain elf, Eragön, chanced upon an abandoned dragon egg
E: And now original Eragon’s name suddenly has an umlaut in it because apparently it wasn’t special enough as-is. Unfortunately, Paolini seems unaware that this means it would now be pronounced “EraGOON” – a little fact which will never not be amusing.
A: Another thing that would make more sense if Heslant was just getting shit wrong.
—if indeed it was actually abandoned—
E: …because if it wasn’t that means the kid abducted the thing, but never mind about that…
TT: And what nesting dragon would intentionally abandon a viable egg? Unless he’s implying that maybe Eragoon scared the mother away, or waited in hiding for the mother to leave.
A: I think the attempted implication is that the dragons planned for this ~bonding~ shit all along, which raises the question of why the hell they would want to become the elves’ flying powerups… or whether they made the worst miscalculation in the history of their species.
raised the subsequent hatchling, and then traveled among the dragons and convinced them to end their hostilities.
E: Because it was totally the dragons who started this whole thing and not a bunch of douchebag elves who apparently liked killing inedible wild animals for fun.
Then did the älfakyn and skulblaka join together and form the Dragon Riders, to bind one to another and make certain that the newly formed peace would endure forevermore, which was perhaps the most significant occasion in all of history.
E: And not at all a catastrophically bad idea.
Only two events worth noting occurred during the next three centuries.
E: And yet Galby was being totally unreasonable when he pointed out that under the Riders everything stagnated.
TT: THREE HUNDRED YEARS with nothing at all notable happening. No wars, no in-fights, no famines or diseases or insect plagues or particularly bad storms, or earthquakes, or tidal waves, or new discoveries or philosophies or art fashions, or dance moves, or anything at all of any significance.
Just a reminder, 300 years ago we were just starting the Enlightenment period in Europe. 300 years before that we had the Battle of Agincourt. 300ish years before THAT, Henry the First was crowned King of England.
The point is, a lot can happen in 300 years. Paolini’s sense of time scale is ridiculous.
A: I think the problem is even worse, actually: Paolini just can’t be arsed to think up any history for those three hundred years. After all, none of it pertains to his precious protagonists!
The first was the appearance of Urgals in Alagaësia, who, like the elves, sailed east from across the sea. That they could build vessels capable of traversing such distances, and were able to navigate them accurately, indicates that the Urgals of that era had achieved a level of sophistication far greater than the brutes we encounter in our own age.
E: Because that makes sense and isn’t at all an incredibly smug and condescending thing to say.
Upon disembarking, the Urgals signed treaties with the dwarves and elves, and for two decades, they refrained from provoking their allies.
E: Apparently the big stupid orc ripoffs were still smart enough to understand the concept of signing treaties and were literate as well, but never mind all that.
TT: at least “two decades” is a more normal and believable timescale. Unfortunately surrounded as it is by ridiculously huge leaps of time, it seems really short.
Ultimately, it proved impossible for the Urgals to maintain their oaths, for they are a bellicose race,
E: Remember, children – all members of any given race are pretty much exactly the same.
TT: I’ll have one Noble Savage trope, hold the noble, extra savage.
and they choose their leaders and determine their social order based upon feats of combat. Without battles in which to prove themselves, their young rams, as they are called, had no opportunity to win the status necessary to acquire mates or to supplant their elders.
E: Why not just fight each other?
TT: I don’t see how this is objectively any less silly than the courting rituals of modern Western humans. And in fact makes a lot more sense, survival-wise, than flowers and chocolates and moonlit beach walks.
A: How the fuck does Heslant know this? By his own words, he only talked to the elves and dwarves; he says nothing about seeking out the Urgals. He’s either using what other races said about the Urgals, or doing what I’ve so often accused him of doing: producing all of this direct from his rectum.
These and other pressures drove the Urgals to raid the dwarves and elves and to challenge them in feats of arms. The Riders quickly intervened, razing the Urgals’ villages and banishing their tribes to the fringes of Alagaësia, where they no longer posed a significant threat.
E: Because apparently this was the best solution the all-wise peace loving perfect dragon riders could come up with.
TT: 
(gif: English wigged judge asking “was that a bit harsh?”)
E: Not if they annoyed and/or mildly inconvenienced the favoured characters, which normally warrants a fate worse than death. By Paolini’s usual standards this was pretty merciful.
The Urgals settled throughout the Spine—especially in the north, to which they are partial—and also in the wilder reaches of the Beor Mountains. They still occasionally attacked the dwarves and the elves, but since they proved to be no more of a nuisance than, say, the internal strife among the dwarf clans, the other races tended to ignore them. From then unto the fall of the Riders, the Urgals’ fortunes declined as humans multiplied and expanded their holdings, thereby reducing the Urgals’ remaining territory. With Galbatorix’s ascendancy, however, and the loss of the Riders, Urgals have been freed to return to haunts that they have not occupied for centuries, and even millennia in some instances. Throughout the Empire, they now bedevil many towns that were once safe.
E: So they’re smart enough for ship-building, navigation, literacy and treaties, but they’re also mindless warmongering monsters. Right.
TT: Inconsistent. Also, see earlier for my alternate headcanon about Galby championing humans far more than the elfcentric Riders did.
A: Actually, I’m not as inclined to hit this with the Inconsistency Stick. I think it’s very consistent… if you interpret Heslant as being a massive racist who is blatantly wrong in a lot of his assumptions.
Notice how he said that Urgals were driven by their culture “and other pressures” to raid the elves and dwarves. What “other pressures” is he talking about? I’d guess that somewhere in that time, the Urgals experienced a massive shortage of resources. Perhaps the crops failed en masse, and they began encroaching on the dwarven and elven territories looking for more fertile pastures. And in return, they were slaughtered and driven out of their homes until their only remaining territory was the Spine, a region completely incapable of supporting the kind of large-scale farming necessary for a culture to develop or maintain things like literacy and complex societies. Thus, the Urgals were reduced to scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers, with only oral traditions to recall their former glory.
Tell me a more plausible story, Paolini. One that doesn’t require me to be racist. I’ll wait.
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed by now that, unlike many authors, I do not refer to Urgals as monsters. This was a deliberate attempt on my part to avoid perpetuating certain preconceived notions that do nothing but impede our understanding.
E: And the backpedalling begins! Because our narrator is so very wise and enlightened, you know. That’s why he’s okay with calling them “brutes”, but “monsters” is taking it too far.
Urgals are no more monsters than dwarves or elves. It is merely due to an unfortunate flaw in their culture and temperament that we have not yet joined forces with them. “But,” many people will protest, “they are animals! They hate us, and they love naught but slaughter and bloodshed!” Nonsense. They only hate us insomuch as we, and the dwarves and elves, represent the other to them, a status that centuries of antagonism have reinforced.
E: Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now!
Can we please move on? I’ve had more than enough of listening to this pretentious wankery.
TT: It’s not only highly unprofessional to go on a tangential rant in the middle of your chapter, it’s also worded extremely casually. An historian looking at this might be inclined to view this section on urgals, especially given previous mentions of them, as an anonymous insertion by some scribe or another wanting to make a point. (Yes, it is fact that scribes often inserted their own thoughts into texts as they rewrote them. One famous example is a document by ancient historian Josephus, into which an anonymous Christian scribe inserted references to Jesus completely out of the blue in an inappropriate section).
It is true they have a predilection for battle, but I have also seen their cunningly wrought carvings and the savage beauty of their woven straps, with which they record the crests of their clans. And I once had the opportunity to watch from hiding an Urgal dam caring for her young, and I have yet to encounter a human woman who displayed more solicitude toward her brood than did that bull-necked matron.
E: …nope, still going. Note the use of the word “young” instead of “children”, and the fact that this guy spied on them in secret like he was watching some wild animal or other from the bushes.
TT: “savage beauty”. He may as well just call them noble savages and be done with it.
A: *holding head in hands* Paolini. Stop. You are making yourself look really, really bad.
If we could but temper the Urgals’ warlike habits with more civilized behavior, then we might find that our races have a large measure in common.
E: …and then we have this. Oh, it’s not their fault they’re aggressive and warlike – they just need someone to come along and civilise them out of their savage ways! How has nobody picked up on how incredibly goddamn racist this is?
In case this seems harmless, I’m going to bring up a few uncomfortable facts.
When certain countries were colonised by Westerners, most notably Australia and the US, the colonisers began not only driving the local people out of their homes and finding excuses to kill them, but they also started taking their children. Why? So the kids could be “educated” to act like us. They were made to forget their birth cultures and languages and taught to be ashamed of their heritage. They had to speak English and dress like Western children, and most of them never saw their families again. A good number of them were so traumatised by all this that they fell into addiction or crime, or committed suicide.
This is what happens when someone tries to “civilise” another culture.
And it’s not even that long ago. I have a friend whose mother was one of the Stolen Generation here in Australia, and trust me, the wounds are still deep.
Nor can we just write this off as Heslant being a product of his time, because guess what Ergy does with the urgals at the end of the series? That’s right – he goes and teaches them how to be civilised like the Great White Saviour he is. And the urgals thank him for it.
Uh-huh.
So this is just texbook colonial arrogance and racism. Paolini should be ashamed of himself.
A: He should. The “White Man’s Burden” is rolling off of this in waves.
Oh god, now that intro he wrote for The Jungle Book looks horrible, too.
TT: I tried to play devil’s advocate for the fact that Paolini is writing from the perspective of a character whose views may not be his own, but we have seen abundant evidence that Paolini is basically incapable of sustaining a character with a worldview that does not match his.
E: Yup, like we said before. His characters believe what their author believes, and think the way their author thinks. Paolini doesn’t have enough empathy or insight to do otherwise.
Moreover, I believe that much of the hostility that festers between Urgals and humans is the result of our almost universal revulsion toward their grotesque appearance, a trait that is certainly no fault of their own.
E: …tonight on “The Epistler Bursts a Blood Vessel”…
The second of the two noteworthy events I mentioned was the brief visit to Alagaësia in 5596 A.C. of some twenty human warriors, who sailed up from the south and landed in the vicinity of Surda. They and the dwarves met and exchanged gifts, and then the humans departed soon afterward.
E: Okay, that’s actually kind of interesting and a nice change from the “humans just arrived all at once” cliché you usually get in these things.
A: Plus, it could be used to imply all sorts of interesting stuff happening on the other continents. Think about it: the elves come across first, possibly fleeing some catastrophe, followed by the Urgals, who seem like they may have been doing the same. Humans then appear first as traders, and then later as colonists. Did humans run the other races out of the previous continent? Or did something else run the others out, and only catch up with humans later? There are so many possibilities here, and Paolini explores precisely none of them.
E: That would mean spending too much time on something that isn’t self-insert praise and childish wish fulfillment, and is therefore off the table.
Thereafter, until 7203 A.C., little happened among the dwarves, elves, and dragons, except for the usual succession of kings, queens, poets, playwrights, births, deaths, and other historical minutiae. Though I examine this age in some detail, I must admit that I found it monotonous to research, much less to write about. Happiness, as a philosopher once said, is a boring activity to watch others engage in.
E: Huh, I thought happiness was a warm gun. Have the Beatles misled me?
TT: No, happiness is crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentation of their women.
E: My mistake.
Both the dwarves and the elves consider this era, and even extending back to the creation of the Riders in 5296 A.C., the golden age of their civilizations, when they reached the pinnacle of their knowledge and power.
E: Power = equally as important as knowledge.
A: More important, even, considering how he puts it at the emphatic position at the end of the sentence.
I should point out that the remarkable stability both races achieved was not solely the result of the Riders’ influence—as Eddison tried to prove in his Dialogues—but was also a product of the dwarves’ and elves’ impressive longevity. When each generation lives for a century or more, it takes much longer for a culture to change or to assimilate new information.
E: Why would living a long time make it harder to learn new things?
TT: Now I’m imagining elves and dwarves as boomers, and urgals as millennials. Crotchety old curmudgeons hoarding all the gold and knowledge, shaking their canes at urgals with their strange haircuts and fashion and music.
E: “Git offa mah lawn an’ go git a job, ye useless welfare parasites!”
A: Does this make humans Gen Z, then?
E: If they’re in the habit of running around outside partying like morons during times of deadly plague, then yes.
In 7203 A.C., King Palancar landed near Teirm with a fleet of ships carrying his entire nation. He and his people, the Broddrings, had sailed east and north from some unknown coast, intending to colonize Surda, but just as they were about to reach their destination, an unexpected squall blew them back out to the open sea. When Palancar managed to regain sight of land, he found himself confronted by the inhospitable wall of mountains that is the Spine, which prevents ingress to the main body of Alagaësia. He forged onward, searching for an estuary or pass that would grant the Broddrings entry—along the way establishing a settlement that became the town of Kuasta—and eventually discovered Teirm, though the city was not called such by the elves who then occupied it.
E: What, so the elves originally built that place? I thought they were supposed to be forest dwellers who live in trees.
Unlike the dwarves and elves, we know little of our own history before this point. All I can say with authority is that the Broddrings fled both famine and war in their land of birth, bringing as many landholders and slaves with them as they could.
E: Because again, humans apparently have no oral histories and despite being this advanced had no writing system. Seems legit.
TT: Either their documents were all destroyed and all the storytellers slaughtered (by whom? Elves?), or humans were really just that culturally blank.
I mean seriously, there are Indigenous Australian cultures who have oral histories dating back to the last ice age 21,000 years ago. There are oral traditions that talk of Giant Ground Sloths which went extinct over 10,000 years ago.
Given the fact that the dwarves supposedly have an unbroken chain of historical record going back EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS, surely the humans can have a few thousand years worth of handed down oral traditions.
A: So, less time than there is between us and the giant ground sloths. There really ought to be some historical records.
No one followed them except for a single ship that arrived six years later, bearing a tribe of men with coal-black skin who spread across Surda and formed the basis of the current nomad tribes, as well as the famed artisans of Aroughs, Dauth, and Aberon.
E: Ooooh dear…
TT: Here we go. The Nomad People. Paolini sure does love that Noble Savage trope.
E: The 1920s called – they’d like their literary cultural tropes back.
It has also been whispered that something foul and evil pursued humans to Alagaësia, a dark race that travels in shadows and preys off the flesh of our kind, a fear known only by the name that the elves bestowed upon it: the Ra’zac. This I cannot confirm or deny, but the rumors seem too abundant not to have some basis in fact.
E: Ah yes, the legendary man-eaters so invincible and scary they couldn’t handle one dumbass peasant boy armed with a nutcracker.
A: Or one brooding rogue with a lot of arrows.
When Palancar encountered the elves, they explained to him which land was theirs, which was the dwarves’, and which was the dragons’, and granted him the right to claim that which was unoccupied. They and the Riders also demonstrated their physical and magical prowess.
E: So in other words they threatened the guy. Imagine watching a couple of Riders strutting around throwing magic and breaking stone blocks in half before casually remarking “…so you won’t be causing us any trouble will you?” Anyway, weren’t we told the Riders kept their magic a secret from the rest of the population for no very good reason? If this happened then how did people not already know about it?
TT: “That’s a nice refugee caravan you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”
Intimidated, Palancar dared not argue with them—at least not so long as his docked fleet was at their mercy—and so he agreed to their terms.
E: So it’s confirmed – they threatened him. Because that’s how Paolini’s heroes always deal with potantial problems. Threats, closely followed by violence.
The Broddrings roamed Alagaësia for several years before they discovered Palancar Valley—as it was to be dubbed—and decided to make it the basis of their kingdom. After Palancar vanquished the local Urgals and founded the town that is now Therinsford, his hubris grew so massive, he thought to challenge the elves for the region between the Spine and Du Weldenvarden. It is still baffling why—having witnessed the Riders’ might and main—he believed he could prevail in this matter.
E: Because the Riders were Just That Awesome, lest we forget.
On this subject, I agree with Eddison, who reasons that Palancar was in the early stages of dementia, an assumption that is borne out by his later actions, and those of his family, for madness always runs through the bloodline.
E: This bit always makes me laugh, because Eragon and Roran are heavily implied to be descended from this guy and both of them sink into violent sociopathy right about the age when mental illness usually begins to manifest in a person.
TT: And yet, it is another example of “mentally ill = evil, violent, and/or dangerous”
E: Lest we forget that Paolini knows fuck-all about mental illness he didn’t get out of books and movies made by other people just as ignorant on the subject as he is.
Three times Palancar’s warriors faced the elves, and three times the elves obliterated them. Aware of the Urgals’ fate and having no desire to share in it, the Broddring nobles sent an envoy to the elves, and they signed a treaty without Palancar’s knowledge. Palancar was then banished from his throne. He and his family refused to leave the valley, however, and instead of killing him, the elves constructed the watchtower Edoc’sil—now Ristvak’baen—to ensure that he could cause no further strife.
E: A century or two later, the elves would live to regret not having just killed him as his descendants emerged from obscurity and wrought sickening carnage all over the country.
TT: Eh, there were only a handful of elves involved. No big deal.
E: Except for the “hundreds” who died taking Unicode-Baen, but those were just paid extras.
The elves took pity on the remainder of our ancestors and allowed them to live in Ilirea, which the elves had abandoned during their war with the dragons nearly two thousand years earlier.
E: How goddamn magnanimous of them.
TT: “Here, have this abandoned city that may or may not be attacked by wild dragons at any time. It’s perfect for you!”
Ilirea became the new capital of the Broddring Kingdom, which exists even to this day as the center of Galbatorix’s empire: Urû’baen.
That brief confrontation with Palancar—which cost humans far more than it cost the elves—
E: …because of course it did, because the elves are Better Than You.
A: And rather than vilifying the elves for slaughtering his people, Heslant, a human, continues to verbally suck their hairless genitalia.
E: Now there’s a mental image I didn’t need…
convinced the then leader of the Riders, Anurin, to amend the elves’ magical pact with the dragons to include humans.
E: “Hmm, humans are unpredictable, greedy, violent bastards. I know, let’s give them dragons! That’ll fix things!”
TT: Anurin, like the river Andurin from Lord of the Rings?
A: That’s Anduin. Or it might have come from the sword Anduril.
E: No way! And I note there’s no mention here of the dragons being consulted about any of this, which is par for the course.
Anurin recognized that, as a race, humans are hardier than the elves and that we reproduce faster than the dwarves, making it inevitable that we would soon proliferate across Alagaësia. Before that day arrived, he wanted to weld our species together—using a flux of spells, oaths, and commerce—in order to prevent what he saw as a likely war for domination of the continent.
The controversy incited among the elves by Anurin’s decision was so fierce and acrimonious, it prompted him to take one more momentous step: he and the other Riders seceded from the elf kingdom and established themselves on the island of Vroengard, where they built their great city of Doru Araeba.
E: Can you imagine those guys actually wasting their time with physical labour? I can’t. And how did they manage to ship enough food out there to keep the dragons fed anyway?
TT: Clearly they used magic, of course. Or slaves.
E: I’m gonna say slaves. Controlled by mind-rape of course.
A: Exactly: they used their dragon slaves.
Many reasons existed for doing so, but the primary one was, and here I quote my own translation of Anurin’s account of the affair, “Since the Riders were now responsible for the protection and welfare of three races—although the dwarves yet insist upon guarding themselves—and also for the preservation of their combined knowledge, I believed that it was improper for any one group to control us. We had to be impartial if our authority was to be respected by dragons, elves, and humans alike.” Noble intentions, to be sure, but flawed by a fatal weakness: without some form of oversight, there was no one who could point out the Riders’ own lapses and indulgences.
E: Indeed. And apparently no-one learned anything from this, since when Eragon came along even the elves allowed him to go around doing whatever the hell he wanted, and we all know how that worked out.
TT: This was how many years ago? (According to Inheriwiki, nearly 800 years before the books). But Anurin still writes like a modern-day politician answering an interview for a newspaper. Linguistic evolution is a thing, people! An ancient elf noble from 800 years ago is not going to have the same written voice and register as a human monk 700 years later, let alone a modern-day Montana 24-year-old!
E: Mindeth thee, this be the same Setting in which an “ancient dragon” useth the phrase “most any creature”. Next, our heroes will “fix” themselves a nice plate of Buffalo wings and watch some baseball on the wide-screen TV magic mirror.
A: To be fair, this is Heslant’s own translation of Anurin’s words, so maybe he’s taking some heavy liberties.
For six and a half centuries, we humans built our villages, towns, and cities, ever more complacent within our envelope of safety. We were content to work our fields and shops and trade with the dwarves and elves, never pausing to consider that our greatest threat lay among those who had sworn to protect us.
E: Considering their previous behaviour toward those weaker than themselves, it shouldn’t have been that surprising.
TT: I still have not seen anything worthy of Galby burning it and declaring it blasphemous.
E: Hell, there’s barely been any mention of religion at all.
And so it came to pass
A: *rocking back and forth* Maradonia flashbacks… Maradonia flashbacks…
in the year of 7867 A.C. that a boy, Galbatorix by name, was born in the province of Inzilbêth. He became a Rider and showed great promise, but in his nineteenth year, a band of Urgals killed his dragon. The loss drove Galbatorix mad.
E: But please don’t spare any sympathy for the traumatised nineteen year old kid; he doesn’t deserve it because of reasons.
TT: This whole theme Paolini has about emotional trauma and mental illness being bad and dangerous and morally wrong is incredibly creepy to me. Creepy might not be the right word. Disturbing? Upsetting? Either way it is very much Not Nice.
E: It really bothers me too. It’s victim-blaming of the worst sort. Paolini comes across as the kind of person who would tell someone suffering from clinical depression to “just snap out of it” and “fix your attitude!”
A: I’m just focusing on the fact that Galby’s introduction is a blatant copypasta from Brom’s story in chapter three of Eragon: “And it came to pass at the height of their power that a boy, Galbatorix by name, was born in the province of Inzilbêth.” It’s almost exactly the same!
E: What d’you know, Brom is a plagiarist just like his author.
Denied a second dragon, he slew two Riders and fled into the wilderness, where he remained for seven years. At the end of that time, he encountered Morzan, who became the first of the thirteen Forsworn.
E: Or met someone who finally spared him an ounce of empathy – who knows?
Morzan helped Galbatorix steal another dragon, then they both hid until Galbatorix’s dragon, Shruikan, was grown and Morzan had learned all of his master’s dark secrets of magic.
E: What “dark secrets”? Where did he learn them? What do they do? I thought magic in this setting was morally neutral.
TT: I thought Galby was a teenager still, barely trained and certainly not a “Rider in Full” as Paolini is fond of declaring Eragon every other chapter. What “dark secrets” could he possibly have, except magic-pictures of sexy elf women? Or men, let’s not judge.
E: In Eragon there’s a passing mention of him learning unspecified secrets from a Shade, but Shades just seem to use the same kind of magic as everyone else.
A: There’s also a passing mention from Angela of “unholy” forms of magic, including necromancy, but that’s never brought up again.
Galbatorix and Morzan revealed themselves in the winter of 7896 A.C. By the spring solstice of 7900 A.C., Vrael was dead, Vroengard and Ilirea had been sacked, the elves and the dwarves had been forced to retreat to their ancient places of safety, and the Riders—the pride of the humans, elves, and dragons—the Riders were all but exterminated.
E: And it only took him four years to accomplish this? I’m impressed. Maybe that’s why Ergy had to throw down the Empire in only one year – he had to outdo Galby’s record just so we’re all clear who’s the superior character.
A: Though, if you consider how Galby had to go up against the entire old order, while Eragon just had to go up against one OP’d guy and his unwilling right-hand man, I think Galby still comes out on top.
E: No matter how hard Paolini tries, Galby will always be way cooler than his self-insert.
It is now the year 7982 A.C., and Galbatorix is still king, the dwarves and elves are seen no more outside of their caves and forests, and we have no hope that any mortal man can rival Galbatorix’s power or that he will ever be removed from the throne.
E: Boo freaking hoo. What was so great about the Riders anyway? You still haven’t bothered to establish that.
It is this story, then, that I intend to tell in full over the following pages. It may be conceit to think that I can compress eight millennia into one book . . . and yet I must try. We cannot allow this knowledge to be lost, no matter how grim the times we live in. I know that if we do someday find the means to overthrow Galbatorix, it will only happen by remembering the deeds of our ancestors and by avoiding their mistakes.
E: And we all know how that ended, don’t we? The new ruler proceeded to carry on where Galby left off, the three remaining Riders were allowed to run around doing whatever they pleased with no oversight from anybody, one of them is now set to train even more of the bastards – again with no oversight – and basically all that has changed is that thousands of people are now dead and half the countryside laid to waste. Oh, and the Empire is presumably bankrupt now because Nausea handed out free money to the entire population in a cynical attempt at buying loyalty. Heslant the Mook must be rolling in all five of his graves.
A: …I want to correct that typo, but I think “mook” is a more accurate byname than “monk” for this elf-fellating fuckwad.
E: It wasn’t a typo. 😉
TT: I still don’t get the hate for Galby. His ‘tyranny’ is barely held up by the story and backstory. How did the fall of the riders affect the common folk? They have freedom of trade, freedom of religion and movement, are by and large fairly prosperous, and are mostly safe aside from the urgals (and there are patrols of royal soldiers to help with that). Other than a different face on their coins, what has changed for them? The only party that actually harms the common people’s lives or livelihoods are the Varden and the elves.
E: Indeed. The Riders of old never come across as anything more than a bunch of arrogant, over-powered tyrants who brought their downfall on themselves. Why the hell would anyone be expected to give a damn? Thank goodness Paolini never wrote out this “history” in its entirety – this “extract” was more than insufferable enough.
BONUS: Vintage blurb for Eldest!
Eragon and his dragon, Saphira, have just saved the rebel state from destruction by the mighty forces of King Galbatorix, cruel ruler of the Empire.
E: What “rebel state”? The Varden isn’t a “state”. And the forces that attacked Tronglebongle were under the control of Durza, not Galby.
A: I mean, Durza did work for Galby, but there’s enough textual evidence to convincingly paint him as a rogue agent.
Now Eragon must travel to Ellesmera, land of the elves, for further training in the skills of the Dragon Rider: magic and swordsmanship.
E: …and also how to mindrape those weaker than you into doing your selfish bidding!
Soon he is on the journey of a lifetime, his eyes open to awe-inspring new places and people, his days filled with fresh adventure.
E: I must have missed all that during the 10+ chapters of monotonous travelling through boring landscapes during which nothing fucking happened.
But chaos and betrayal plague him at every turn, and nothing is what it seems.
E: I must have missed that during the 10+ chapters of training montages during which nothing fucking happened.
TT: “awe-inspiring locations” are only as inspiring as you can write them. Saying “it’s an awe-inspiring treehouse city in the forest!” doesn’t make readers go Ooooh, you have to actually describe it in such a way that it inspires awe. And Paolini can only write things as to inspire eww or eh.
E: Like I said in my spork of Eldest, Paolini’s use of description is so bad that a lot of the time it actually makes it harder to visualise what he’s trying to get across. For example the description of the dwarf temple, which was so muddled and overwritten that it went in one ear and out the other.
A: See also, the entirety of what we just sporked. I literally just read it, and all I remember is rolling my eyes and being very angry at a racist bastard.
Before long, Eragon doesn’t know whom he can trust.
E: Just use “who”, you pretentious berk.
TT: There’s maybe one moment in Eldest where betrayal or trust even come close to being themes, right at the very end. Eragon never questions why he should trust Oromis, and nobody really ‘betrays’ him at all. Paolini/Eragon might argue “but Murtagh”, but if it wasn’t willing and in fact was the product of torture and magical slavery, does it really count as a betrayal?
E: Going on the way Eragon reacts, apparently the answer to that is yes and screw you. Argh.
A: The true betrayal here is from the narrator of this blurb, who promises excitement on which he cannot possibly deliver.
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Date: 2020-04-01 12:45 pm (UTC)...And I am also forced to notice that my own half-written lore makes more sense than Paolini's "canonical" one. Good grief, that's embarassing.
Palancar's lore doesn't make any sense.
How many humans traveled across the sea with Palancar? At this point of the story there couldn't be that many humans in Alagaesia, so how the royal fuck did they manage to produce enough men (men able to fight, and so only a small percentage of the population) to form not one but THREE armies to move three times against the Elves? Since I doubt that the Riders were so kind to stop the humans without killing them, I must suppose that each time they needed to recontruct the army with fresh man... three times... all in a few years? This honestly graces my with a logistic problem I have yet to solve.
What possessed Palancar to think that he could win this thing? I don't buy the dementia-thing. I am not a mental health expert but I doubt that dementia alone could push you to these lenght. It doesn't make any sense.
And if even I accept to buy the dementia-explanation, why didn't the uber powerful elves mind-rape him, see that he was not in his right state of mind, and tried to avoid bloodshed? Mind-raping someone because it annoys you is fine but suddenly mind-raping a King who is leading hundreds to death is too much? THIS is where the assholes should have used their mental powers. They could have solved it very quickly and mostly peacefully. Why didn't they? Just admitt you like killing people, you fuckers.
But even before that... what possessed Palancar to think Alagaesia was a safe place? Personally, if I was escaping with my people and arrived into a land with FUCKING ELVES AND THEIR PET DRAGONS THREATENING ME I WOULD LEAVE THAT BLOODY LAND JUST SO QUICKLY.
Why nobody knows anything about humans before Alagaesia? Nobody asked? Fuck, if a new, sentient race, arrived today on earth in peace I would ask them every single thing - from their history to how their toilets are made. How uncurious, self-absorbed, racist and arrogant must to be to not give a crap in the slightest?
The "arrived from the sea" thing is overdone. Elves, humans, Ra'zac/Lethrblaka and Urgals ALL arrived from the sea. Did they live in the same place? Wtf? It doens't make sense. Paolini chose the sea because TOLKIEN chose the sea, and Tolkien Dwarves are - coincidence? I don't think so - also the "original" sentient race of middle-earth (to say it very, very poorly), with humans coming after them, but in Tolkien's lore it makes sense. So not only Paolini copied Tolkien once more, but he was also unable to do it decently.
I didn't catch the name of Anurin's dragon...? Interesting, it's almost as if he/she was nothing more than his overpowered horse... AND NOT EVEN BID'DAUM GETS EXPLICITLY NAMED. And I am supposed to buy that dragons are important? Bah.
...I mean, seriously, Paolini? Are you real?
no subject
Date: 2020-04-02 03:34 am (UTC)Indeed. Not one single named character in this extract is a dragon, and nor are there any mentions of a dragon doing anything significant. Because in Paolini's mind they're accessories, not characters or a people. Whether he realises it or not.
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Date: 2020-04-01 04:45 pm (UTC)Galby a relatively young rider managed to learn "dark magicks" in five years and and with the help of his quirky miniboss squad over through the riders in four years. Killed off a good majority of wild dragons and collected their magical dragon kidney stones. And so Paolini made his nigh unstoppable Evul Emperor--seems to me he just got rid of fat heads that were hoarding knowledge and resources if you ask me. Aside from the Not-Orcs razing the country side due to influence from the shade, Galby didn't seem that evil. Readers are just told how evil and tyrannical he is.
Then we have Eragon who goes from farmboy, to well learned reader, to master swordsman(still think that Brom teaching him wrong and by extension the elves doing it wrong is kinda funny), wearing armor, master orator, to mastering magic, acquiring powers as the plot demands all within a year is some epic quest speed run.
You know what I find the worst thing? He may have changed physically, but Eragon and his shimmering-blue steed remained static. There were hints of good story ideas hidden here and there, only for Paolini to focus on something trivial to get over his writer's block.
I still think rather than getting a brand spanking new rider sword, Eragon should have found Brom's missing rider's sword that fits Eragon's sloppy sword style perfectly, and the swords name--Brisingr. Bam.
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Date: 2020-04-01 05:01 pm (UTC)Next, what would be a bit harder would be which anime series he drew some inspirations for his fight scenes?
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Date: 2020-04-01 07:13 pm (UTC)Compiling an official list might be an interesting project, but also seems like it would quickly turn into an exercise in pure depression.
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Date: 2020-04-02 03:08 am (UTC)Fortunately we don't have to - there's a list here. https://aydee.wordpress.com/2006/12/17/eragon/
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Date: 2020-04-02 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-02 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-02 03:54 am (UTC)Yeah, I really don't believe him on that claim. If he planned this thing out that carefully it wouldn't be 60% plot holes, contradictions and dropped plot threads. To me a good chunk of the series just reads like a string of unconnected scenes and world-building elements thrown in on a whim because he thought it was cool.
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Date: 2020-04-02 03:46 am (UTC)That was one of the most disappointing parts, really. Eragon and Saphira don't change. The narrator and other characters occasionally claim that Eragon has changed (Saphira goes ignored as usual), but it's simply not so. He doesn't grow or mature or have his horizons broadened, or suffer from genuine trauma thanks to all he's been through, he doesn't gain any actual insight into himself or the people he knows. It's as if all the supposedly big amazing events he lives through never happened. Does Paolini seriously think getting superpowers is the same thing as character development? Because newsflash - it isn't.
It's frustrating to me because seeing your characters develop and change is one of the most exciting and rewarding parts of writing a novel or a series of novels. I've had two of them in different stories who went from only particularly caring about their own personal concerns (jobs, relationships, etc) to maturing towards greatness after circumstances change and they have to start fighting for a greater cause and put others before themselves.
Eragon doesn't do this. From beginning to end his goals remain shallow and selfish. He doesn't spare so much as a thought for the lives of the people he's supposedly fighting for, instead behaving as if his imagined status as "the champion of the people" is some sort of personal privilege or trophy to wave around (he flat-out calls himself that despite at no point having been hailed as such by anybody). If it's not about personal power and privileges and getting more of them, he doesn't think or care about it. Some hero.
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Date: 2020-04-01 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-02 03:49 am (UTC)Reminds me of a comedy sketch where religious groups were picketing some movie or other because they deemed it "offensive", so the sketch comedians went and picketed The Benchwarmers and waved signs demanding for it to be banned on the grounds that it was a really bad movie.
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Date: 2020-04-02 01:39 am (UTC)This whole thing looks like he found a lazy shortcut to let him get 30 minutes worth of honest results after putting in 30 hours of effort. Because I have literally generated a more interesting world using random name generators and the ketchup technique of globe mapping.
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Date: 2020-04-02 03:51 am (UTC)