What Will Happen In Eragon IV: Afterword

[torylltales]

 

 

We're finally here. The last part of this awful cash-grab book.

The rest of the series can be found here: https://antishurtugal-reborn.dreamwidth.org/tag/wwhie4

 

It’s been a long journey, I started sporking this in 2018 or something [edit: 2017]. Richard Marcus has basically recapped the entire series from Eragon to Eldest, and offered his thoughts on what might happen in the final book, Inheritance.

 

I’d say, overall, he was probably about 50% accurate. That’s my gut feeling, and no, I don’t care to go back through it and work out accurate numbers. Feel free to do that yourself if you want.

 

Some of the things he predicted were more or less inevitable, some were favourite fan-theories widely accepted by the fans at the time, and some of his predictions were perfectly reasonable and logical, but wrong. A few predictions were logical and fan-favourites, but Paolini broke his own worldbuilding and foreshadowing because too many people guessed where he was originally going.

 

Throughout the entire book, the one feature that stood out the most was how long-winded and self-important the author can be, stretching a paragraph or two worth of content into entire chapters.

 

With that said, here’s the final substantive part of the book: the Afterword.

 

Over the course of writing [this book], the hardest task I faced was not becoming wrapped up in the story. […] The world that Christopher Paolini has created with his Inheritance cycle is so compelling that it’s almost impossible not to become caught up in it.

 

I seriously beg to disagree.

 

The second hardest task I faced was separating out what I wanted to happen in the story from what I thought actually would happen. Like all fans of the books, I’ve got my favorite characters and my favorite moments, and would dearly love to see certain things happen.

 

Like that guy on Twitter who kept reply-tweeting Paolini with his terrible fanart of Eragon and Arya with the caption “release the TRUE ending!”

 

I know there are predictions in this book that people will disagree with. I also know there will be questions raised as to why I didn’t talk about such and such or so-and-so. That’s fine. I can live with that.

 

Methinks the man doth protest too much.

 

However, as far as I’m concerned, there is only one person who knows what’s going to happen, and that’s Christopher Paolini.

 

Somehow I feel like Paolini himself wasn’t sure how to end the story, or the trilogy wouldn’t have snowballed into a quadrilogy. ad the ending wouldn’t have been so rushed and (as) plagiarised.

 

I would never presume to say that what I’ve presented here are anything more than educated, well-thought-out guesses.

 

Someone else could easily […] come up with a totally different prediction

 

Someone like Paolini, who threw out all of his foreshadowing and setup to change the ending at the last minute.

 

I wrote this book in the hope that people would have fun reading my predictions

 

I’m sorry to say I haven’t had fun with this at all.

 

Also, I wrote it as a way of encouraging people to delve beneath the surface of the story and come to a deeper appreciation of just what Paolini has accomplished with the creation of the Inheritance Cycle.

 

Paolini’s accomplishment is much like Dr Frankenstein’s: An abomination before both Man and God. An eerie and unnatural glimpse of What Ought Not To Be, which Men Were Not Meant To Wot Of.

 

 

 

Jokes aside, Paolini’s heavily plagiarised and derivative surface-level worldbuilding and skin-deep character development are hardly anything to write a whole book about.

 

Although overanalysing a book can ruin it,

 

In this case, under-analysing it is giving it unearned and undeserved credit.

 

that doesn’t mean that there can’t be some benefits derived from reading between the lines and trying to figure out any deeper meanings that the author has tried to impart to the reader.

 

I agree completely. I can only say I sincerely and earnestly wish more fans would read the series from a critical and analytical perspective instead of filling the gaps with their own imagined story and characters.

 

I like to encourage people to think.

 

Again, that’s fantastic. I wish you would do more of it yourself.

 

So even if you disagree with everything I say or predict in this book, I’ll still consider it a success because you thought about the book and came to your own conclusions.

 

I had a lot of fun writing this book, but I have a feeling the fun is only just beginning, now that you’ve read it and want to have your say.

 

 

Richard Marcus, if you ever do come across this critical deconstruction of your book, I hope you enjoy it. And have learned a lot more about the craft of writing since you wrote this one. It’s about twice the length it should be for the amount of actual content, and most of it is simply rehashing what any fan already knows from the books. The analysis is generally shallow, and there were very few predictions that differed from the popular fan theories already around when you wrote this.

 

I really can’t think of any reason this book should have been written and published. It should have been a series of discussion posts on the eragon subreddit, or something like the old shurtugal.com forums.

 

All the same, you did put the effort in to writing this book, and to your credit I think you put more effort into checking details of the story than Paolini did when writing Inheritance.

 

But still.

 

 

I would ask for my money back, but if I recall correctly, I bought it second hand at a charity shop, and I don’t want to deprive the charity of my dollar.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[epistler]

Wow.
You know how some people have gaydar? Well, I have douchebagdar. I instinctively hated Rolf Harris for no reason I could put my finger on since I was a child, decades before it became public knowledge that the guy was a rapist scumbag. To name just one example. Again and again I've gotten bad vibes about someone who hadn't done anything wrong that I was aware of, who later turned out to have done something very wrong indeed.

Then I saw Sanderson in that video, yukking it up with Paolini, and something in me just screamed "this guy is a huge asshole who thinks he's the cat's particulars."

[torylltales]

I have a feeling Sanderson would be good friends with Shadiversity if they were in the same country and/or tax bracket.

[epistler]

Ugh, same. Complete jerks always attract other complete jerks.