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antishurtugal_reborn2025-05-23 04:52 pm
epistler) wrote in antishurtugal_reborn2025-05-23 04:52 pm
Immortality In The Cycle
I've been thinking about this recently. Why did Paolini insist upon making Eragon immortal? And Riders and dragons generally, for that matter?
I mean okay obviously the answer is because getting to live forever is a pretty common form of cheap wish fulfilment given that nobody wants to die. But other than that... why?
As it turned out in the end, there really wasn't any reason at all for Eragon to be immortal because the entire Cycle is over and done with in about two years (I'm including the year that apparently passes in between the end of the war and Eragon's psycho ass leaving the country). He hasn't even hit twenty by the end, so it's not as if there was some risk of his dying of old age before everything was resolved. In fact it's reduced to a complete afterthought that Eragon's going to live forever. Even his whining about how he "has" to be with Arya because she's immortal too is lip service at best and swiftly forgotten.
Instead, his immortal status has no bearing on the plot and no consequences for him as a character. It's just kind of... there.
Of course, this is ignoring the wider implications of the Riders, dragons and elves all being immortal, and the dragons in particular. There's a reason why your average apex predator is going to be comparatively short-lived and fewer in number than their prey. Unlike, say, a tortoise who only eats plants. If the dragons bred like rats (who are extremely short-lived creatures) and also lived forever, with no mention of becoming infertile at any point, then it makes no sense whatsoever that the country was somehow able to sustain thousands and thousands of them.
Nor does it make any sense that the Riders were immortal and numbered in the thousands with more being added to the ranks every single year, yet didn't end up overpopulating the country in their own right. Even less so that there were so many of the fuckers yet they were somehow taken out by a tiny handful of rebels.
This is why, in most stories, if there are immortals they're likely to be written according to the following rules:
Plot and world-building aside, immortality can be a very interesting subject to explore on a character level. After all, just imagine what it would be like to know you're going to live forever. Or to have already been alive for hundreds of years and there's nothing you can do about it short of suicide. There is after all a reason why immortal characters are so often written as tragic figures. You have to keep watching people age and die around you. All your loved ones will be lost to time sooner or later. And that would be agony to anyone who isn't a completely cold-hearted sociopath (maybe that's why Eragon really doesn't seem to have a problem with it?). I've written a few immortal characters in my time and pretty much all of them ended up becoming very sad people. One succumbed to nihilistic depression and substance abuse because they couldn't cope with the loneliness.
But not once does Eragon stop to think "oh hell, I'm going to outlive Roran and all his descendants, what am I going to do when that happens?" Though to be "fair" that is consistent with his pattern of never thinking about things in the long term and only thinking about his immediate petty concerns like food or Arya not putting out. He does after all have no personal hopes or dreams. Even Murtagh, who at least before he became Morontagh, should have had the sense to know a relationship with Nausea was a bad idea because he's immortal and she's not. But this never comes up either.
Nor do any of the immortal characters in the Cycle change as a result of having lived for hundreds of years. Oromis and Glaedr are supposed to be ridiculously old, but both of them act like petulant children. Supposed ultimate mastermind Galby is still making rookie mistakes after a century on the throne. Of course it tracks with Paolini's usual pattern of his characters not learning and growing from their experiences, but it becomes particularly glaring when some of them still haven't managed it after a thousand years of doing... whatever it is they even do with all that time.
Something else that really doesn't help is that in LoTR, the existence of immortal elves and such was part of giving Middle Earth that feeling of antiquity which was so important to both the plot and setting. Inheritance doesn't have that. There is no feeling of antiquity, no "ancientness", no real sense of history at all, and it feels like the events of the books themselves take place over a couple of long weekends. And no, throwing in stuff about things being "ancient" such as Galby being an "ancient foe" does nothing to fix that. Galby isn't Sauron. He's only been around for a century. There are regular human beings in the real world who have lived longer than that. My great-grandma lived to be over a hundred.
Anyway, that's some thoughts. The TL;DR version would be "the immortality in this thing is worse than pointless".
I mean okay obviously the answer is because getting to live forever is a pretty common form of cheap wish fulfilment given that nobody wants to die. But other than that... why?
As it turned out in the end, there really wasn't any reason at all for Eragon to be immortal because the entire Cycle is over and done with in about two years (I'm including the year that apparently passes in between the end of the war and Eragon's psycho ass leaving the country). He hasn't even hit twenty by the end, so it's not as if there was some risk of his dying of old age before everything was resolved. In fact it's reduced to a complete afterthought that Eragon's going to live forever. Even his whining about how he "has" to be with Arya because she's immortal too is lip service at best and swiftly forgotten.
Instead, his immortal status has no bearing on the plot and no consequences for him as a character. It's just kind of... there.
Of course, this is ignoring the wider implications of the Riders, dragons and elves all being immortal, and the dragons in particular. There's a reason why your average apex predator is going to be comparatively short-lived and fewer in number than their prey. Unlike, say, a tortoise who only eats plants. If the dragons bred like rats (who are extremely short-lived creatures) and also lived forever, with no mention of becoming infertile at any point, then it makes no sense whatsoever that the country was somehow able to sustain thousands and thousands of them.
Nor does it make any sense that the Riders were immortal and numbered in the thousands with more being added to the ranks every single year, yet didn't end up overpopulating the country in their own right. Even less so that there were so many of the fuckers yet they were somehow taken out by a tiny handful of rebels.
This is why, in most stories, if there are immortals they're likely to be written according to the following rules:
- There aren't very many of them. Possibly there's only one or two
- They either cannot have children, or they can but the kids don't inherit their immortality
- They're not functionally invincible as well but have some kind of weakness and can be killed
Plot and world-building aside, immortality can be a very interesting subject to explore on a character level. After all, just imagine what it would be like to know you're going to live forever. Or to have already been alive for hundreds of years and there's nothing you can do about it short of suicide. There is after all a reason why immortal characters are so often written as tragic figures. You have to keep watching people age and die around you. All your loved ones will be lost to time sooner or later. And that would be agony to anyone who isn't a completely cold-hearted sociopath (maybe that's why Eragon really doesn't seem to have a problem with it?). I've written a few immortal characters in my time and pretty much all of them ended up becoming very sad people. One succumbed to nihilistic depression and substance abuse because they couldn't cope with the loneliness.
But not once does Eragon stop to think "oh hell, I'm going to outlive Roran and all his descendants, what am I going to do when that happens?" Though to be "fair" that is consistent with his pattern of never thinking about things in the long term and only thinking about his immediate petty concerns like food or Arya not putting out. He does after all have no personal hopes or dreams. Even Murtagh, who at least before he became Morontagh, should have had the sense to know a relationship with Nausea was a bad idea because he's immortal and she's not. But this never comes up either.
Nor do any of the immortal characters in the Cycle change as a result of having lived for hundreds of years. Oromis and Glaedr are supposed to be ridiculously old, but both of them act like petulant children. Supposed ultimate mastermind Galby is still making rookie mistakes after a century on the throne. Of course it tracks with Paolini's usual pattern of his characters not learning and growing from their experiences, but it becomes particularly glaring when some of them still haven't managed it after a thousand years of doing... whatever it is they even do with all that time.
Something else that really doesn't help is that in LoTR, the existence of immortal elves and such was part of giving Middle Earth that feeling of antiquity which was so important to both the plot and setting. Inheritance doesn't have that. There is no feeling of antiquity, no "ancientness", no real sense of history at all, and it feels like the events of the books themselves take place over a couple of long weekends. And no, throwing in stuff about things being "ancient" such as Galby being an "ancient foe" does nothing to fix that. Galby isn't Sauron. He's only been around for a century. There are regular human beings in the real world who have lived longer than that. My great-grandma lived to be over a hundred.
Anyway, that's some thoughts. The TL;DR version would be "the immortality in this thing is worse than pointless".
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Some thoughts of my own:
My own guess is that it was a combination of "immortality is cool" and "other series I liked (LOTR and the Belgariad) have it, too". After that, I guess he just forgot about it in favour of other stuff?
Yeah, he could certainly have made it more relevant than it was, even within the relatively short timeframe of the series (and I'm happy to see that I seem to have convinced you on the length!). It could be as simple as showing what kind of impact it has on elven society, which would also go a way toward fleshing out their culture. For Eragon... well, not having human Riders become immortal would solve the problem of him (and Murtagh) outliving everyone, and it'd only require relatively few changes to implement.
There's a reason why your average apex predator is going to be comparatively short-lived and fewer in number than their prey. Unlike, say, a tortoise who only eats plants.
Do apex predators actually live shorter than their prey? I haven't heard about that, and looking it up shows me that they tend to have rather long lifespans. Sure, tortoises can be quite long-lived, but they're an outlier, and Greenland sharks also live to hundreds of years and are certainly apex predators, so I'm not wholly convinced.
That list has me thinking of my own project, and I think I have another reason for that list in it: quite a bit of the potential immortals don't actually use it, either because they find mortality is something to aspire to (because that's naturally-occurring), or because of ideological trouble with it. Beyond that, mortality's quite high (since most of them are in animal forms), and since reproduction often requires specialised people, it's easy to get under control if necessary, too. As for tragedy, those who do go for immortality tend to seek each other out to lessen that kind of thing (and for a community), though it's still sad when someone you've known for a long while dies, so it's far from gone.
Back to what you're saying... yeah, the ancientness could be conveyed much better by giving us some concrete history, something like Dras-Leona having been settled four hundred years ago, for example. I find that easy to connect with and imagine, at least.
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My rodent pets have all had significantly shorter lifespans (2-8 years) than my predator pets (14-19 years).
*shrug*
That's my incredibly helpful comment for the day.
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And I shouldn't have expected that from you, either! Still, I really like to fact-check, so I couldn't resist.
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I hadn't thought of it as thankless, but I'm happy to take that role on me, even if it would be!
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So this led me down a fun trail! When I first saw this, I assumed that it was, in fact, an old saying, though I'd never heard it before, so I went to look it up. Wikisource, which is usually quite good to find old turns of phrase in, yielded nothing, and looking up the phrase itself taught me that it appears in Repo! The Genetic Opera, in the song "Thankless Job". I still wanted to be sure, so I searched through Dreamwidth's archives, and found some instances of the phrase, with a large clump around 2008, the year the film came out. I did find one instance from 2006, but as it turns out, the film was adapted from a musical that came out in 2002, so it might well have come from there, or it might be that the person came up with it independently.
In any case, I am quite sure the saying is derived from that film, and that it's not really that old!
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I can't say anything about that, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least; it's not exactly a far-fetched phrase to come up with, after all. And yes, I did find it interesting to look into, too!
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Well, thanks for bothering to look all of this up! It seems I was a bit too stuck with the opposite notion, so this does help me!
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Definitely. The elves are just far too much like really pretentious humans and not much else. In book two we got some crap about them having really complicated politics that are a "game" that has been going on for centuries, but it's never mentioned again. (Leading me to suspect that, as usual, Paolini stole it from somewhere and then lost interest in favour of some new shiny toy). In reality, an entire race of immortals would be very different. For one thing, unless they never, ever go anywhere (unlikely) every elf would probably know just about every other elf. For centuries. How would that impact their relationships?
But no, Paolini just doesn't think about these things.
We don't even find out at what point the two of them will stop ageing - it's stated in book two that Eragon is still going through puberty, or at least implied. Will he stop ageing any further when he hits, say, 25? And if so, why that particular age?
Also, imagine what it would be like being stuck looking like you're barely out of your teens when you're actually five hundred years old. People who didn't know would probably keep treating you like a kid. Forever. It happened to one of my immortal characters; he's basically a grumpy old man trapped looking like he's 19. Mortals who look older than him don't take him seriously a lot of the time.
Mind you, Eragon is never treated like a kid, even though he's 16 and acts like he's 8.
It was actually kind of easy to miss that a year passes between the end of the war and the end of the book given how dreadful the pacing is. I noticed nobody ever celebrates or even mentions a birthday at any point.
And what history we do get is a complete mess. The timeline is all over the place and he just keeps making it WORSE!
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Maybe that would have been the Sithi of Tad Williams? I've heard of them as an inspiration, at least.
And yes, I'd expect such relationships to be much more easy-going; after all, the elves have all the time to join with people they actually like. If there were to be hostility, I'd expect it to be between different cities or different groups in society, not everyone trying to manipulate everyone (and how would that have started, anyway?).
We don't even find out at what point the two of them will stop ageing - it's stated in book two that Eragon is still going through puberty, or at least implied. Will he stop ageing any further when he hits, say, 25? And if so, why that particular age?
That's a very good question! With Oromis, we don't get much about how old he is physically, apart from "neither young nor old", and Galbatorix lost Jarnunvösk when he was around twenty, so he isn't exactly representative, either. The impression I got myself (which isn't exactly based on much) was something like 25 to 30. As for why it's that age... maybe because it's old enough to be quite adult, but not old enough to be "old" in any sense? (shrugs)
For the child characters, it'd almost be worth it to wait until societal attitudes change, I think. They've got all the time to wait that out, at least.
It was actually kind of easy to miss that a year passes between the end of the war and the end of the book given how dreadful the pacing is. I noticed nobody ever celebrates or even mentions a birthday at any point.
Yeah, I mostly pieced it together from the passage of the seasons, which Paolini's better at mentioning, at least.
He really should know when further tinkering will just break previous canon. I just hope he won't do the same with To Sleep...
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That's what Vallon Darkrune (a major fan of Williams) thinks, and she pointed out a LOT of similarities. Except unlike Paoelves, the Sithi aren't invincible ubermenschen and actually have a reason other than selfish cowardice to not want to leave their forest.
Instead they're all stiff and formal for some reason, and don't seem to have any friends.
At least once he gets over the part where it somehow manages to be spring for what feels like an entire year. The seasons seem to have been put on hold until the war ends.
I hope he doesn't write any To Sleep sequels, full stop.
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I got it from MG myself, so I think there's quite some basis to suspect that!
Instead they're all stiff and formal for some reason, and don't seem to have any friends.
Yeah, I'm not seeing the appeal of it, and Paolini only manages to bring out the downsides of this, not any potential upsides. The "be very careful of what you say, lest you offend someone" part also seems a bit like what you could see authoritarian society, so that doesn't help, either.
For the seasons... yeah, he does a very poor job of conveying the passage of time there, and seems to be confused whether a year actually passed or not.
I hope he doesn't write any To Sleep sequels, full stop.
Well, he did write Unity... Yeah, it really isn't a sequel, but it's set after To Sleep and deals with issues from that book, so it did have the potential to mess things up. As for a proper sequel, I don't think I'd mind seeing it if done well (though I think the plot would be too slight for a whole book), but I really don't trust Paolini to do so.
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That's a good point. Being immortal is supposed to be a wish fulfilment power-up but he doesn't make it look like it's any fun at all. I mean if you were functionally invincible as well as ageless you'd think you would at least have a good time with it. Like woo, I can do all this ridiculously unhealthy and dangerous shit with little to no consequences! Let's get drunk and go skydiving!
If these guys are IMMORTAL, you could quite reasonably expect it to be the opposite: like 100 years is an eyeblink to us so why should we give a damn about something that happened last week?
And unless he genuinely has no idea how long your average pregnancy is, he also thinks a human being can be pregnant for a year (possibly longer) with no consequences. And no I'm not counting the "cat lip" - the baby should have straight-up died and probably taken the mother with it.
Well why would you? The guy has squandered every other chance he's had.
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Exactly! And even if they weren't invincible, why not try out all sorts of safer stuff (skydiving's pretty safe, from what I've heard, for example)? I really can't think of any elf doing something like that..
If these guys are IMMORTAL, you could quite reasonably expect it to be the opposite: like 100 years is an eyeblink to us so why should we give a damn about something that happened last week?
Yeah, that too; why would you waste so much of your time on grudges and stuff? You'd think they'd leave it alone after a while...
For the pregnancy, I'm not convinced it was that long in Elain's case (and a cleft palate develops early in the pregnancy, and thus has nothing to do with overlong ones anyway), but in Katrina's... yeah, that's two months past the longest on record. I see that the placenta begins to fail after the ususal term of the pregnancy, so Ismira should most probably have died.
Well why would you? The guy has squandered every other chance he's had.
Yeah, he genuinely has, and it's kind of a pity to see.
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It just makes them sound like such petty jerks.
Wait, what? He fucked it up TWICE? Good lord.