epistler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
epistler) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
antishurtugal_reborn2025-05-10 08:20 pm
epistler) wrote in antishurtugal_reborn2025-05-10 08:20 pm
Entry tags:
Dragons in Alaglag's Culture
Or rather, the absolute lack of any impact on the culture due to the fact that dragons exist.
Before I get started, a quick note: I just checked Paolini's Twit feed and he has informed a fan that this new self-published book will finally give us the names of all the rest of the "Foresworn" [sic]. Yes, he spelled "his" own made-up word wrong. ("His" is in inverted commas because in reality the word was stolen from someone else's book.)
Anyway, there's a big fat problem with the world-building in the Cycle, in that dragons exist and have existed since the beginning of time, and yet the existence of both Riders and dragon in the country and most notably its history just doesn't fit. There's never the least sense that this place was ruled over by dragon Riders for a thousand years or whatever absurd timescale Paolini went with.
For one thing, nobody except a few elves even seems to remember the Riders/dragons ever existed, including the whole thing about Galby's uprising. There are no stories passed down about them other than the revisionist propaganda Brom recites in book one. Book one also briefly refers to how there's all this history and legends and shit centred around the Riders, but we never find out what any of that actually is. If the Riders and dragons are remembered at all, it seems to be in the form of extremely vague myths rather than any sense of actual history. And no, Galby burning one library and banning that stupid history book doesn't count. Most people can't read, so they'd be passing this stuff down verbally.
And real human history has shown that stories passed down that way can not only last a really long time, but can also be incredibly accurate, often to a jaw-dropping degree. For example there were and are stories passed down among Aboriginal Australian tribes that go back so far they describe prehistoric megafauna that did indeed once exist thousands of years ago. There's also surviving accounts passed down about significant geological events which have been proven to have actually happened.
That's just how us humans roll. Before we could put them down in writing, we used stories to preserve our knowledge of the past (among other things).
Yet in Alaglag this has somehow completely failed to happen, even in really out of the way places like Carp Hat where there is no government presence enforcing some kind of Thought Police state of affairs.
Moving on from this, there are also no traditions, sayings, holidays, songs, art, plays... anything in the culture that reflects that the Riders and dragons were ever a thing. We still preserve cultural practises that are as old as the hills even when we only half understand them. Like Christmas? That used to be Yule, the feast of midwinter. Every year we put up trees and decorate them, light candles, get the kids excited for Santa's arrival - do we even bother to think about why we do these things? Why a pine/fir tree anyway? And who even is this Santa person? Well, all this is happening because we're still following the practises of our pagan ancestors, whether we realise it or not. Same with Halloween.
And so on. If there's somehow no recollection of history, why aren't there traditions like these ones which Alaglag humans still follow because that's just how it's always been done? Like a festival held in honour of what was once the day of the year when children would be presented to the dragon eggs, where every kid in the household gets given some kind of symbolic present and everyone sings a special song?
Setting aside the bizarre fact that the humans at large have no religion, the Riders and dragons should have affected religious practises as well. After all, there's no way some people didn't view them as gods. A couple of passing mentions of this being a thing in book four and Montagh don't cut it.
Note too that there aren't any sayings or superstitions that have anything to do with Riders/dragons. Nor does the architecture reflect the fact that they ever existed, except for the dragon hold in Tronglebongle that, given the frosty relationship between the Riders and the dwarves, really shouldn't be there. (Other than all that wrecked stuff on Rider Island. What, it existed there but literally nowhere else?). There's no dragon roosts or landing places in any of the cities, including Uraboobies. Nor is there any indication that such things used to exist but have since been destroyed for some reason. Given that Galby actively wants to bring the Riders back and had a bunch of them working for him for the better part of a century, there's no reason why he would have done it. Instead you'd expect the people living in those cities to have just repurposed it. For example in Game of Thrones, King's Landing still has a dragon pit even though dragons are supposedly extinct forever.
So in other words, as is so often the case here, it just doesn't fit. There aren't even dragons on the currency. People didn't use shed dragon scales to make jewellery and even armour which would logically still be kicking around. (Where the hell did all those scales even go anyway?). Instead the dragons, like the Riders who enslaved them, seem to have been transplanted into the setting wholesale from somewhere else. They don't even fit into the natural history of Alaglag; there are no animals adapted to be good at avoiding them, or preying on their eggs and hatchlings. Nor is there any indication of how the fuck this rather small country was able to provide enough food for gods know how many dragons who, even when they're just a few months old, eat "several deer" per meal and also breed like rats. It was even one of the reasons why Eragon took the eggs he looted from the Vault Of Deus Ex Machina and left! The more you think about it, the more hopelessly impossible and ridiculous it gets.
Before I get started, a quick note: I just checked Paolini's Twit feed and he has informed a fan that this new self-published book will finally give us the names of all the rest of the "Foresworn" [sic]. Yes, he spelled "his" own made-up word wrong. ("His" is in inverted commas because in reality the word was stolen from someone else's book.)
Anyway, there's a big fat problem with the world-building in the Cycle, in that dragons exist and have existed since the beginning of time, and yet the existence of both Riders and dragon in the country and most notably its history just doesn't fit. There's never the least sense that this place was ruled over by dragon Riders for a thousand years or whatever absurd timescale Paolini went with.
For one thing, nobody except a few elves even seems to remember the Riders/dragons ever existed, including the whole thing about Galby's uprising. There are no stories passed down about them other than the revisionist propaganda Brom recites in book one. Book one also briefly refers to how there's all this history and legends and shit centred around the Riders, but we never find out what any of that actually is. If the Riders and dragons are remembered at all, it seems to be in the form of extremely vague myths rather than any sense of actual history. And no, Galby burning one library and banning that stupid history book doesn't count. Most people can't read, so they'd be passing this stuff down verbally.
And real human history has shown that stories passed down that way can not only last a really long time, but can also be incredibly accurate, often to a jaw-dropping degree. For example there were and are stories passed down among Aboriginal Australian tribes that go back so far they describe prehistoric megafauna that did indeed once exist thousands of years ago. There's also surviving accounts passed down about significant geological events which have been proven to have actually happened.
That's just how us humans roll. Before we could put them down in writing, we used stories to preserve our knowledge of the past (among other things).
Yet in Alaglag this has somehow completely failed to happen, even in really out of the way places like Carp Hat where there is no government presence enforcing some kind of Thought Police state of affairs.
Moving on from this, there are also no traditions, sayings, holidays, songs, art, plays... anything in the culture that reflects that the Riders and dragons were ever a thing. We still preserve cultural practises that are as old as the hills even when we only half understand them. Like Christmas? That used to be Yule, the feast of midwinter. Every year we put up trees and decorate them, light candles, get the kids excited for Santa's arrival - do we even bother to think about why we do these things? Why a pine/fir tree anyway? And who even is this Santa person? Well, all this is happening because we're still following the practises of our pagan ancestors, whether we realise it or not. Same with Halloween.
And so on. If there's somehow no recollection of history, why aren't there traditions like these ones which Alaglag humans still follow because that's just how it's always been done? Like a festival held in honour of what was once the day of the year when children would be presented to the dragon eggs, where every kid in the household gets given some kind of symbolic present and everyone sings a special song?
Setting aside the bizarre fact that the humans at large have no religion, the Riders and dragons should have affected religious practises as well. After all, there's no way some people didn't view them as gods. A couple of passing mentions of this being a thing in book four and Montagh don't cut it.
Note too that there aren't any sayings or superstitions that have anything to do with Riders/dragons. Nor does the architecture reflect the fact that they ever existed, except for the dragon hold in Tronglebongle that, given the frosty relationship between the Riders and the dwarves, really shouldn't be there. (Other than all that wrecked stuff on Rider Island. What, it existed there but literally nowhere else?). There's no dragon roosts or landing places in any of the cities, including Uraboobies. Nor is there any indication that such things used to exist but have since been destroyed for some reason. Given that Galby actively wants to bring the Riders back and had a bunch of them working for him for the better part of a century, there's no reason why he would have done it. Instead you'd expect the people living in those cities to have just repurposed it. For example in Game of Thrones, King's Landing still has a dragon pit even though dragons are supposedly extinct forever.
So in other words, as is so often the case here, it just doesn't fit. There aren't even dragons on the currency. People didn't use shed dragon scales to make jewellery and even armour which would logically still be kicking around. (Where the hell did all those scales even go anyway?). Instead the dragons, like the Riders who enslaved them, seem to have been transplanted into the setting wholesale from somewhere else. They don't even fit into the natural history of Alaglag; there are no animals adapted to be good at avoiding them, or preying on their eggs and hatchlings. Nor is there any indication of how the fuck this rather small country was able to provide enough food for gods know how many dragons who, even when they're just a few months old, eat "several deer" per meal and also breed like rats. It was even one of the reasons why Eragon took the eggs he looted from the Vault Of Deus Ex Machina and left! The more you think about it, the more hopelessly impossible and ridiculous it gets.
no subject
YES. This is one of my biggest gripes with the worldbuilding, second to the fact that nothing really fits together at all. There's no sense of history anywhere, least of all among the humans. No superstition, no history, no stories, no "my grandfather used to say", nothing.
No stories, no family histories, no anecdotes passed down through families, no sculptures or carvings or depictions of Dragons or Riders anywhere.
Galby's war against the old Rider Order happened 100 years ago. People who were alive at that time have children and/or grandchildren who are alive now. Where are the old folks telling their grandchildren "my father used to tell me about watching the dragons over the hills at sunset", or the grandchildren showing off the dragonscale-inlaid silver spoon they inherited from their grandparent, who bought it from a wandering elf ("That was before the War, of course"). Nobody except Brom complains about the Usurper-King, or how "old King Angrenost, now he was a king who knew how to act like a king."
There are no children who play make-believe, re-enacting famous battles between the Dragon Riders and Forsworn, using sticks for swords and blankets for dragon-wings.
Hell, Eragon didn't even know he was named after the very first Rider! That would be like a person named Charlemagne not knowing about, well, Charlemagne
(On an unrelated tangent, why does everyone in fantasy only have unique names? Nobody confuses Tom the Smith with Tom the Tailor or Tom the Baker, because there is only one Tom in the entire world)
The world can have exactly zero dragons in its entire history, and the absence of dragons would not have any effect whatsoever.
no subject
It's not as if they have any impact on the plot either, when all is said and done. Actually, come to that, if there was some sort of official day of choosing (and why wouldn't there have been?), why hasn't Galby kept that going? He's got eggs he wants to hatch, after all. Why wasn't he also having them ferried around the countryside, or better still holding a public annual event when hopefuls can come to the capital and try their luck? It's not as if the Varden could have done much to interfere with him and Shurikan right there.
no subject
The truth, though, is that Paolini didn’t think about the consequences of such a line, and that someone might ask where these people are being disappeared off to. What’s happening to them? And why aren’t the people of the country talking about the disappearances of these people? Why does everyone sympathize with the Varden when they are literal rebels and murderers? I can’t imagine a family would side with the Varden if the Varden took away their kids and they would never see them again.
no subject
Yep, that's very much a problem, and it isn't helped in the least by us not getting to know much of what "the common people" actually know about the dragons (and they should know quite a bit; the last one, outside of Shruikan, died in the memory of most people). Not knowing that, it'd make quite some sense if everyone refuses to talk about the Riders and dragons because of how awful they were... though of course the Forsworn should be well-known in that case. Thinking about it, I don't think many people are actually surprised to see dragons? That'd suggest that they are well-known, but Paolini never bothers to get into it, and that's a real pity!
If he did focus on how much people know of dragons, the loss of the Riders could also be quite a bit more effective than everyone seemingly not noticing... but then, he seems more concerned with the dragons on their own, not in context.
no subject
This just screams Fantasy Easter - painting eggs, maybe even buying chocolate eggs (if chocolate even exists in this world)... Instead of the Easter Bunny there's a friendly dragon involved, helping the kids find the hidden eggs.
no subject
Going on the way he writes them, Paolini doesn't seem to actually like children all that much.
no subject
Then I really hope he's making an exception for his own o_O