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antishurtugal_rebornI hope this is the chapter where Paolini apologises to his readers for lying about the eldunari in the Vault of Souls. Probably not, though.
Spoiler: the chapter title has absolutely no relation to anything in the chapter.
I would have started this with a note that this chapter is almost entirely filler content, but… that could be said of the entire Muckmaw side-quest. If not the entire first half of the book.
I wanted to eat the fish, Thorn complained as they circled over Gil’ead.
Never mind cleaning, de-scaling, removing the poisonous visig and other organs, or anything else.
[...]do you really want to eat a fish that Durza meddled with?
Thorn huffed. No magic can survive the belly of a dragon.
Maybe you’re right, but better not to test it.
Two points: I thought that any active magic effects stopped once the caster died, which is why magic can’t be used to build any large-scale architecture like bridges, if the magic is the only thing keeping it together.
Second point, why would Durza put all that effort into making Muckmaw (more like Lackjaw, am I right?) so dangerous and deadly, and not make its flesh or mucus or whatever poisonous? Can dragons be poisoned? Paolini would probably say no, but they canonically can get drunk, which means ingested substances can affect their physiology and impair their judgement and higher brain functions. If alcohol can affect them, why not neurotoxins like tetrodotoxin (which is made in pufferfish), verrucotoxin (produced by stonefish) or ciguatera toxin (produced by various reef fish and some marine eels)? Or some entirely new magical toxin made by Durza’s magical gene splicing?
I mean, Muckjaw has so far been described with a mixed bag of anatomical features from across a wide variety of marine vertebrates, and some things that are complete fantasy. Why not add some stonefish spines too?
Despite not wanting Thorn to touch Muckmaw’s corpse, Murtagh decides not to stop the men of the city from eating it, and even says that if they try it and something bad happens, “they have only themselves to blame.”
Wow. Much heroic. Very chivalry.
A few miles out from the city, Murtagh strips naked, washes all of the river mud off himself, and then puts his clothes under some heavy rocks to be washed clean by the river current. Then he stands up and looks toward Gil’ead.
Why was it necessary for Paolini to write that Murtagh is standing naked and looking at the distant city lights?
At least we didn’t get a way-too-long description of Murtagh’s rippling pecs and throbbing --
Well, of course not, Eragon’s not here. Although that’s no guarantee that he isn’t scrying on them. He is a notorious Peeking Tom. Peekagon.
Thorn convinced Murtagh not to go rushing off to wake the captain up in the middle of the night, and then they say their True Names to each other. Or try to. It seems that Murtagh’s True Name has changed, and he can no longer say the old one because that would be a falsehood in the Ancient Language.
The change had to do with Glaedr’s death, and the battle for Gil’ead, and all the lives that had been lost therein. For them, he felt a greater sense of remorse, and for himself, a greater sense of grief and shame. The realization left him diminished and far less certain about his past choices. Even though he and Thorn hadn’t been in control of their own actions at the time—even though they’d been Galbatorix’s oath- bound thralls—Murtagh realized he still felt responsible for what they’d done. At a certain point, the reasons didn’t matter. The deeds remained, and the consequences thereof, and their reality was a pain greater than any wound.
They weren’t responsible in any way, and had zero control over their actions. Galbatorix literally puppetteered Murtagh’s body, for goodness sake. Though that certainly hasn’t stopped the entire world including Eragon from acting as though they were.
He gave voice to his newfound knowledge, and the sound of it was even more stark and discomfiting than before.
Yet as always, Thorn listened and accepted without judgment, and for that, Murtagh was deeply grateful. Then he lay beside Thorn, and they rested close together as the cold of the night pressed in about them.
I like this scene. It’s a brief glimpse of the relationship we keep getting told about, and it’s a nice moment when they’re not insulting or bullying each other.
And then Murtagh and Thorn curl up together and go to sleep.
Instead of getting a nice quick cut to morning, we’re treated to yet more literary humming and hawing. Murtagh wakes up from a nightmare, they talk a bit more, they go back to sleep. The nightmare is a nice bit of characterisation, but it could just as easily have been mentioned in summary.
Murtagh woke the next morning sore and tired. Between aching muscles and nightmares, he had barely slept.
THERE I FIXED IT.
Murtagh goes back to where he left his clothes, shoos off an angry otter, dries his clothes with magic, and puts them back on.
Please remember my comment at the beginning of this chapter regarding filler content. Paolini needs to learn when and what to summarise.
I bet a competent structural editor given free reign could reduce this book to a novelette and not lose any important details.
Second point. Murtagh dries his clothes with magic. Why couldn’t he wash them with magic, too? I guess all the “dark secrets” of magic that Galbatorix taught him never included magical laundry.
Murtagh goes back to his ever-full saddle bags and fetches a dried apple and some jerky. Paolini specifies that it is the last of his jerky, so keep that in the back of your mind in case he gets more out later before buying more.
Murtagh didn’t mind cooking, but he never liked how long it took. He thought of all the meals he’d had growing up, when servants would bring him whatever he wanted, or when he could visit the kitchens and snare a cooked pheasant or aged beef roast and a pitcher of cool milk to wash it down.
I like that this isn’t quite as whiny as Eragon would sound. It’s a nice subtle bit of difference between Eragon Classic and Eragon Red Edition. Murtagon.
On the other hand. Does Paolini know how big a pheasant is? Is he really expecting us to believe the royal kitchen would just overlook an entire roast pheasant going missing? That Galbatorix, as Paolini tries to write him, would have accepted less food than expected on his table? And an ENTIRE pitcher of milk?
I think the main problem for me is that Murtagh’s childhood is so inconsistent. Paolini can’t decide whether Murtagh was a pampered prince, or a nobody urchin who the royal guards didn’t recognise, and who was beaten by the servants for not being recognised by the guards? (See Part 2 Chapter 2: Questions for a Cat)
Anyway, there’s yet more pointless banter and re-hashing old information yet again, and then Thorn tries to bully Murtagh into casting a spell he’s not confident with, to cause an effect he doesn’t understand, in order to heal the symptoms of a virus in an age and society before viruses were even known about, let alone understood.
To his credit, Murtagh protests that casting a spell to cause an unknown and vaguely-defined effect could possibly kill him, but Thorn eventually wins.
And of course when he does try a generic healing spell, without knowing what exactly he was trying to heal, it works perfectly with no unexpected side effects and doesn’t drain all of his magic.
Because unexpected side effects would be interesting, and we can’t be having that.
Thorn and Murtagh have a brief argument about whether bread tastes good or not, because that’s an important moment of character growth for them both that we definitely needed to read and shouldn’t be cut.
In the morning (no, there isn’t a handy time-skip that could easily have covered all of this nothing we’re having to slog through), Murtagh thinks Muckmaw’s head is too heavy to carry back to the city, so he casts a levitation spell.
He grabbed the corners of the cloak and started to pull. After a few steps, he stopped and swore. The head was too big and heavy. If he dragged it all the way back to Gil’ead, he’d be completely exhausted by the time he arrived....
“Reisa,” he murmured.Without a sound, Muckmaw’s head lifted off the ground, so that it hung floating a finger’s breadth above the matted grass. Murtagh waited a moment to see how much effort the spell cost him. It felt equivalent to shouldering an overladen pack: noticeable, but not so much that he couldn’t sustain it for a fair amount of time.
Wait, doesn’t levitation take the same amount of energy as if you’d lifted it manually? Or is that yet another magic mechanic that Paolini forgot about as soon as he wrote it?
Thorn then objects to Murtagh going back to the city alone:
Thorn hissed. I don’t like being left behind. I want to help.
“What would you have me do? There’s no changing this, not unless you want to face every soldier in the city—”
A small tongue of red flame jetted from Thorn’s narrowly opened maw. I would.
Murtagh gave him a hug about the neck. “Be careful. I’ll be as fast as I can. If all goes well, we should be able to slip away without being noticed.”
Good. And then we can fly again and not worry about these people and their prying eyes.
“And then we can fly again.”
The thing that I hate about this is that I don’t hate it. Not even close. Not even a little bit. Not even at all. (Bonus points for you if you can name the source of that quote). This is a good character moment. It’s almost something I’d write between Morzan and Alaion, or Kialandi and Tyrian. It shows their concern for each other, empathy for each others’ concerns, which is rare among Paolini characters, and it’s a genuinely nice moment between the two.
Which is the reason I hate it so much. Paolini has this habit of giving us rare glimpses of a better, possibly even good story hiding amongst the first-draft chaff, but never, ever following through on that potential.
And that just makes the rest of what we get feel a little more insulting.
SECTION BREAK
We cut to… Murtagh jogging toward the city, with the severed head of Muckmaw floating behind. We could have just cut straight to Murtagh arriving at the city, but no. There is no time skipped between the previous section and this section. The section break was entirely pointless.
He reaches the city, turns off the floating spell because he correctly assumes it would be suspicious as fuck, shoos off a stray dog with an Ancient Language command, and then talks to a servant in the worst example of a put-on accent that should immediately make the man suspicious:
“ ’Scuse me, master. Could y’ tell me where I might find th’ barracks of th’ city guard?”
The manservant eyed Murtagh and the cart with undisguised disdain. His hair was pulled into a short ponytail, and his shirt was made of fine bleached linen, and he stood with the poised grace of a dancing instructor. He sniffed. “Up that street, on the right. Although I’ll be much surprised if they’ll speak to the likes of you.”
Murtagh bobbed his head. “Thank’ee, master.”
I feel like this is racist, somehow. Or classist. Some kind of -ist, anyway.
Murtagh takes Muckmaw’s head to the guard barracks, and has a short and tedious back-and-forth with the two guards at the gate who could have been dropped directly out of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
Murtagh convinces the guards to call over their supervisor, Gert, who happens to have thick British sideburns.
Gert was heavy-shouldered, broad-handed, with the sort of determined stride that Murtagh had seen in dozens of veteran weaponmasters. He wore thick, short-cropped sideburns shot through with white, and his brow seemed permanently furrowed with exasperation at the stupidity of his troops.
So, Gibbs.
Gibbs, sorry, Gert, says that the captain might be interested in Murtagh joining their troop:
“But afore I go bothering the cap’n ’bout you, you’ll have to prove yourself to me, Gert.”
Who talks like this? This dialogue is genuinely just not human. This is three goblins in a trenchcoat trying to convince you that they are a man named Gert.
Gert hands him a spear and tests his military skills. Even though Murtagh has never before now been mentioned in canon as holding or training with a spear, he is able to perfectly match Gert’s moves, including sparring with him.
Between this and Roran’s spear scene in Brisingr, I’m beginning to think Paolini has never seen or held a spear, let alone watched any videos of spear fighting. Almost nobody can just pick up a spear and fight competently with it, no matter how much training they have had with a sword. It takes training, and it's distinctly different from sword fighting.
Gert stops the match, says that Murtagh is “Not half bad. Not half good either”, which doesn’t make any sense, and then they swap the spears for wooden swords.
And then we get a fight scene that pales in comparison to the one in Sword and Shadow.
“No head strikes,” warned Gert, raising his waster.
“No head strikes,” Murtagh agreed. Neither of them was wearing a helmet. He spun the sword about in a quick flourish.
Gert gave him no warning. The man attacked with a speed that belied his bulk, beating Murtagh’s waster and stabbing at his liver.
If the stab had landed, Murtagh knew he would have been curled up on the ground, unable to move. But it didn’t land. He parried the stab and took advantage of the resulting opening to poke Gert in the right armpit.
The man fell back a step, his expression surprised. He recovered quickly, but before he could launch a second attack, Murtagh feinted toward Gert’s left hip. Gert moved to block, and Murtagh whipped his waster around—changing directions in midair—and rapped Gert against his upper arm, near the elbow.
A series of cries went up from the onlookers.
Gert grimaced and shook his arm, and Murtagh allowed himself a quick grin. The blow hadn’t looked like much, but he knew it hurt badly.
Then Gert feinted as well and attempted a short slash across Murtagh’s ribs, although it was an obvious attempt to lure Murtagh into a disadvantaged position. The man was skilled, but nowhere near the level Murtagh was accustomed to.
He allowed the slash to fall past without blocking or parrying, and when Gert drew back in an attempt to regain position, he struck the flat of Gert’s waster. Hard. Harder than most men should have been able to hit. The man’s blade flew wide, and Murtagh brought his wooden sword up,
faster than the eye could see, so that the dull edge touched the side of Gert’s neck.
They stood like that, Gert breathing hard, Murtagh’s chest barely moving. Did I dare too much? Yet he also felt a fierce satisfaction at a move well executed, at a duel well fought and won.
Not to toot my own horn, but I think I could write a better duel scene. There’s no sense of urgency or pacing here, Paolini still over-describes everything to the point that it becomes tedious, and still doesn’t have a great sense of scene blocking. It’s just as emotionless and over-described as all his other previous fight scenes.
Murtagh narrowly wins the fight by cheating with his superhuman Rider strength and speed (to be fair, actually using his advantages is entirely in character for the Murtagh I know), and Gert takes him to see the captain.
And that’s the end of the chapter.
To summarise: a whole lot of nothing that should have been either skipped entirely or summarised in a paragraph, and then Murtagh brings the Quest Object back to the Captain to fulfil the fetch quest and initiate the next Quest Objective.
At this rate, I'm half expecting the captain to have a glowing exclamation mark floating above his head.
Next up: Chapter VIII, “Masks”, with Epistler.
And don't forget to check out the Part 2 chapter list, as a reminder of which chapters have been claimed by whom.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-15 06:51 am (UTC)A key part of fooling people into doing what you want: never, ever admit to having been wrong, or to have lied about anything.
"Hi, I'm a Paotagonist so 95% of my dialogue is whining about things."
This exchange was, of course, intended to be cute and amusing.
It isn't, of course.
Wow, way to be a heartless asshole.
"Hi, I'm Paolini and I'm WAY too interested in situations involving naked guys being in the presence of other men way older than them. In this instance, me. And now you're wondering if I was naked when I wrote this. Eeeexcellent."
(I'm only half kidding; remember that interview where he asked someone if he writes in the nude? Because I do).
Um, why? Is it because he's Morontagh now? If that be the case his entire True Name should have changed because he's a completely different person now.
Heehee. Whatever happened to Morontagh being scry-proofed anyway? Did he have a hammer necklace like Eragon did? What?
Uh, what consequences? It's not as if Nausea is trying to have these two idiots brought in on murder charges or something. So far the only "consequences" seem to be Morontagh whining a lot.
And because they hadn't bothered to make themselves invisible or otherwise protected themselves, they got ambushed and killed in their sleep. The end.
Of course, it's also yet another example of the dragon not getting to have any input or even dialogue.
...wait, does this mean he spent the entire night naked??
USE MAGIC DUMBASS. Also, this is even more whining about petty bullshit.
Another Mark of the Paotagonist: being insanely greedy and stuffing down ridiculous amounts of food. Most of it meat, I note.
Maybe because he doesn't think of the above as "pampering" at all but just what he's entitled to because eating lots of food is just a normal part of life? Does he have an eating disorder or something?
Over-description of a character who is not important and more of Paolini arrogantly sneering at traditional nobility. Drop it, Chris. And why isn't this guy paying any attention to the giant rotting fish head?
And more importantly, is the fish head roly-poly?
"If he was tellin' the truth he wouldn't have told us!"
Stop being an insulting ass! I mean come ON. I hate how every Paotagonist describes other people with this nasty holier-than-thou, superior, judgemental tone. It make them come off as such arrogant creeps.
So we had this entire stupid side-quest just to get into the guards... but he gets tested with weapons anyway. This is just so STUPID!
Or a flaming ring.
Ah yes, the chapter with the random masks that have nothing to do with anything. Lucky ole me.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-15 03:13 pm (UTC)When I first read this, I thought the title might mean that Murtagh and Thorn had only pretended to kill Muckmaw and that they were trying to defend using a fake head or something. Unfortunately, nothing of the kind happens.
Filler it may be, but it's still at least relevant to the other books, which can't be said of the Nal Gorgoth quest.
Two points: I thought that any active magic effects stopped once the caster died, which is why magic can’t be used to build any large-scale architecture like bridges, if the magic is the only thing keeping it together.
That's said nowhwere that I can remember, and we also see plants on Vroengard still growing according to magic, even after their caster have died. There's little reason this should be the case, too; as long as the energy doesn't come from the caster, the spell can endure.
Yes, dragons can be poisoned, considering this from Eragon: "Some plants could heal their sicknesses, while others would make them ill." And I would also expect Durza to have made Muckmaw incredibly poisonous to everyone who could conceivably eat him.
and even says that if they try it and something bad happens, “they have only themselves to blame.”
I highly doubt that anyone would try, but this isn't a good look.
I note that when Murtagh looks toward Gil'ead, we get a note that the smoke from the city forms a "diffuse lens of ashen haze" hanging over the buildings, because apparently Alagaësia's got air pollution as a problem now?
Even though he and Thorn hadn’t been in control of their own actions at the time
But there's no indication Thorn wasn't in control when he killed Glaedr, and I honestly like it better if he killed Glaedr to protect himself and Murtagh, instead of being forced to.
I don't hate this paragraph, but it just feels hollow that this is the only thing they're allowed to be broken up over. Sure, Murtagh had the dead soldiers last chapter, but Thorn didn't want him to; I still think that allows for a better emotional connection than with Oromis and Glaedr.
I bet a competent structural editor given free reign could reduce this book to a novelette and not lose any important details.
I do think they'd have to focus on either this plot or the Nal Gorgoth plot, though, as those two don't go together well.
Second point. Murtagh dries his clothes with magic. Why couldn’t he wash them with magic, too? I guess all the “dark secrets” of magic that Galbatorix taught him never included magical laundry.
I suppose coming up with that himself was just too much magical cleverness for a single book.
Paolini specifies that it is the last of his jerky, so keep that in the back of your mind in case he gets more out later before buying more.
That's one error that Paolini won't be making, I see from a quick search.
and then Thorn tries to bully Murtagh into casting a spell he’s not confident with, to cause an effect he doesn’t understand, in order to heal the symptoms of a virus in an age and society before viruses were even known about, let alone understood.
He hardly tries to "bully" him into it, I must say. Thorn only gets him to consider it, he leaves Murtagh the choice, and Murtagh does it because he wants to.
Yeah, lifting Muckmaw's head like this seems a bit too easy.
Oh, that interaction is nice! It's what Paolini probably wanted to have with Eragon and Saphira, but here it does come out.
and then talks to a servant in the worst example of a put-on accent that should immediately make the man suspicious:
Exactly. Why does he think eliding vowels before consonants is a good idea for a natural accent?
and has a short and tedious back-and-forth with the two guards at the gate
One of them does say "blow me sideways". Make of that what you will.
It really doesn't help that these fight scenes are quite unnecessary. Who cares that Murtagh gets in the guard when he could just turn invisible and slip in?
I'll begin with my other chapter soon enough, then!
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 12:54 am (UTC)It's just so heartless and uncaring.
This is almost as bad as Eragon and Brom doing that idiotic "duurr we stoopid peasants durr" act in book one.
Sounds like a mangled version of the real life exclamation "fuck me sideways!" to me.
Who indeed cares. Just because you CAN fight that doesn't mean you should be doing it at every opportunity. Note too that both Morontagh, Eragon and Roran ALWAYS think of everything in terms of fighting and weaponry, even to the point of constantly comparing things to swords and spears. It's really disturbing.
I've already started mine and am aiming to have it posted in a couple of days!
no subject
Date: 2025-09-14 04:55 pm (UTC)or when he could visit the kitchens and snare a cooked pheasant
Pheasants are notably not native to the Americas, so Paolini might have done his research better there!