Immortality In The Cycle
May. 23rd, 2025 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
epistler posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
antishurtugal_reborn 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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Date: 2025-05-24 06:36 am (UTC)I'm currently writing about a man who cries when he's upset and hugs his friends when they're in need of comforting and he can still kick your ass with nothing but a toilet lid. But only if it's 100% necessary. Not just because he can.
In a world of Eragons, be a Pedro Pascal.