antishurtugal_reborn | The WormForkSpork: Part One

Well, here we go again. Seven frigging years since Inheritance came out, Paolini finally returned to Alaglag. The fans must have been ecstatic. Apparently this is the first in a series of books of short stories, or “Tales of Arglefart”, so we can eventually expect more volumes. And since this is Paolini we’re talking about, the key word here is “eventually”. Rarely has an author used so much time to produce so little. Or so many words to say so little. The book I dubbed “the WormFork book” is a measly 129 pages long, and almost one hundred percent content free. It doesn’t resolve any major mysteries, it doesn’t tell us anything new about any of the characters with the possible exception of Angela (and in the latter case that’s really not to the good). Whatever else this thing is, it’s most definitely not the Book Five people have been demanding for half a decade and counting.

It’s also the publishing debut of Angela Paolini, something that hasn’t really attracted a lot of attention. As it turns out, Chris did not in fact get the talent in the family... and neither did she, so don't ask me where it went. But we’ll go into more depth about that when we come to it. Suffice to say that’s the one part of the book I’m least looking forward to tackling.

Part one of the book is called The Fork, and the title page has an okay drawing of a fork on it, done by Paolini himself. I do however feel like I should mention that it has three tines. Medieval forks only had two.

I’m just saying it could have been an opportunity to demonstrate some research and realism, but nope. Whatever.

I am not looking forward to the fork.

There’s also a really ugly, garishly coloured map that looks like it was done in crayon by a small child.

For now let’s start at the beginning, well known as a very good place to start, and we do at least start in a familiar place – with Eragon being a whiny asswipe. Truly, it was an excellent tactic for making longtime readers feel at home, sigh…

Chapter one opens with Eragon drinking “blackberry mead” and mentally whining about how he misses Carp Hat before moving on to whining about how the dwarf ambassador guy, Hruthmund, is annoying him by not delivering supplies frequently enough. You’re not giving me free shit at a fast enough rate! How dare you!

How goddamn entitled can you get?

Apparently Ergy’s new digs are called “the Academy”, and having established that he moves on to… complaining even more! He looks at the paperwork all over his desk and bitches about how he’s so busy, baww. Then get some subordinates to help you, you idiot! At the very least, shut the hell up! Christ.

After that Ergy looks out the window and we get some description of the landscape below before Paolini starts trying to show off what a linguistic genius he is yet again as we get an infodump about how the mountain they’re building on has a bunch of different names in different languages, all of them suitably pretentious. Probably the most painful one is the elvish one (of course), which means “hope”. Because, you know, “the Dragon Riders were a hope for all the races of Arglegargle”.

Ah yes, the uber-powerful order of tyrants who wrecked half the country fighting among themselves and were brought back by a murderous sociopath who slaughtered his way through half a dozen cities, burning slums and allowing his underlings to put heads on pikes and torture prisoners along the way. I can definitely see why people would find the likes of him inspiring.

Eragon then goes back to bitching and moaning, and in an historic moment the elves are actually honest to god criticised. He even thinks that he finds them the most frustrating to deal with.

More whining and complaining ensues, and we learn that Ergy’s so stressed out he’s losing weight. Don’t ask me why I should care.

After that comes – oh dear lord – even more complaining. Boohoo he doesn’t want to have to deal with paperwork all day, boohoo he wishes he could fly off and have adventures with Saphira (when at any point did he have “adventures” in the previous books?). He even fantacises about using magic to destroy the mean ole paperwork.

At this point Saphira shows up and tells him he’s done enough and should get some R&R, to which he replies that “there isn’t anyone else who can do it but me”.

Oh yeah, because Eragon is an expert on governing people and administering a settlement.

Or not. I’m not sure if this is blindingly arrogant or just stupid.

What am I saying – it’s both.

Saphira tells him to shut up and then tells him he’s not himself. Oh really? How is endlessly whining and complaining while acting like an entitled buffoon anything at all unusual for him?

In the end she wins the argument and Ergy stomps off. Paolini still has no idea how to make his hero likeable, I see.

Ergs walks through the building, and we get some description of how everything’s super big to make room for dragons and also there are storerooms, etc. He enters a courtyard where a couple of urgals are wrestling, and then sees a couple of elves who get names for no reason before going into a big main hall and then checking out some stores, and complaining even MORE about how he’s overworked. Again, there’s no reason given why he can’t just delegate. Hire some secretaries for gods’ sakes! I’m starting to get the feeling he just flat-out doesn’t respect anyone else enough to entrust them with anything.

Finally he goes into the room where they’re keeping the Eldunari. Yet again Paolini fails to use the plural “Eldunarya” which he once specified in an interview. Is… is he delegating the interviews to someone else? Or is he delegating the writing to someone else and just doing the kiss-ass interviews?

Anyway, we learn that the Eldunarya here are mostly the ones Egy looted from the Vault of Souls, but some of the “mad” ones he got off Galby are here too. The rest are all underground out of harm’s way. We learn that Ergy wanted to keep all all them underground along with the eggs, but the eldunarya said no.

Thanks to the eldunarya and the fancy crystal windows it’s always really colourful in here, and having thought about that Ergy goes to chat with Glaedr. Glaedr asks him what’s up, and on being told that Ergs is stressed out offers up some clichéd platitudes about centering yourself, blah blah. Umaroth joins in the conversation and says he needs some distraction, adding that they have the power to show Ergy stuff that’s happening elsewhere. Ergy says okay, so they start showing him visions, and the chapter ends on this cliffhanger.

We now cut to chapter two, and the POV of some random kid called Essie. Apparently it’s “two days past Maddentide”. I have absolutely no idea what Maddentide is, and Google had nothing for me other than some advertising for designer shoes.

As for our new protag, she’s – what else? – sulking. Apparently she’s had some kind of falling out with a couple of other kids, one of whom she pushed into a trough. This is all going down in Ceunon, ie the city the elves slaughtered in the main series for having the gall to cut down trees, and we get an infodump about how Essie’s family leaves out offerings of milk and bread for “the Svartlings”. Which is another piece of lore dropped in out of nowhere which will not be explained.

Blah blah, descriptions of the fish market, Essie reaches a tavern called (groan) the Fulsome Feast, which has pretty windows made out of crystal (you wot?). Her dad is inside working at the bar, and there’s a guy sitting by the fire who’s obviously a traveller, and who gets a chunk of description – don’t ask me why because Essie “didn’t care” and thinks he’s just another traveller so whatever. Then why did you pay enough attention to him to give us all that description of him, kid?

Our heroine gets some food and sits down to eat it in a sulk. What is this – Temper Tantrums: The Novel?

The traveller guy asks her what’s up, and for absolutely no reason Essie decides to tell this random stranger about how she hates some other kid called Hjordis. Again for no reason, the random guy asks to hear about it chapter and verse. And, like most of Paolini’s protagonists, he talks in the most pretentious and stilted manner possible. Essie thinks that he talks “as if he were sculpting the air with his tongue”.

Ewwww.

After that she suddenly starts acting like a five year old, bouncing her feet around and childishly saying she can’t confide in him unless they’re friends and that if he tells her his name that will make them friends.

Has Paolini ever met a child before?

Anyway, the guy gives his name as “Tornac”, and for no reason Paolini feels the need to tell us how his nails are trimmed.

Seriously. Don’t ask me why the bizarre fingernail fetish carried over from the last book, but apparently it has.

Also, it’s now pretty obvious that this guy is Murtagh.

Don’t ask me why, but Totally Not Murtagh is all too happy to sit there and listen to the kid bitch about how Hjordis is “mean” and encourages other kids to pick on her. And then Paolini compares him to a cat, because clearly that’s the only thing he knows how to compare a character to.

To cut an extremely boring story short, the bully Hjordis manipulated our whiny heroine into pushing a friend of hers into a horse trough. Thankfully the pulse-pounding excitement of all this is interrupted by Essie’s dad, and Not-Murtagh pays him off to keep a table clear because he’s expecting company.

Unfortunately once he’s left Not-Murtagh asks for more detail. Or rather he asks “Was that the full accounting?”, because that’s just how Paolini does dialogue. Essie wails about how now her friends won’t like her any more, even if she apologises, to which Not-Murtagh says “Then maybe they weren’t really your friends”.

Well, that’s definitely something Murtagh would understand given how his own “friend” Eragon treated him.

Finally Essie declares that she’s going to run away from home. Oh, and Murtagh’s “eyebrows climbed toward his hairline”. And that is one truly horrible piece of description.

After some more blah blah in which Not-Murtagh plays around with his fork, he notices the burn scar on Essie’s arm and tells her he should be proud of it “Because a scar means you survived. It means you’re tough and hard to kill. It means you lived. A scar is something to admire”.

Well that’s a rather large change of tune after all the boo-hooing about how terrible scars are in the last four books. (And it will be completely disregarded by the end of the story anyway).

Further blah-blah ensues about how she got the scar (an accident involving boiling water), Essie asks Not-Murtagh about where he’s from, and finally the monotony is broken up by the arrival of a guy with a creepy voice. He also looks ugly and wears ragged clothes, so you know he’s Evil. Essie immediately decides she doesn’t like him, so yep – Evil.

The dude is introduced as Sarros, and he’s brought some obvious goons with him.

Murtagh, the fucking idiot, actually insists that Essie sit in on the conversation. Because that definitely won’t compromise your privacy and potentially put the kid in danger, will it? Couldn’t Paolini have just had her eavesdrop, at the very least?

Sarros tells Murtagh “I’ll not argue, even if you put your foot crosswise”, whatever the hell that means, and then gives him a chunk of rock. Except it has “a deep shine” and smells like sulphur. He explains that he found it in some unspecified place along with a bunch of others which were all burned but with “no sign of flame or smoke”. He then smiles creepily, and we learn that he has teeth filed into points.

Ten bucks says he’s a Shade.

Murtagh pays the guy, and demands more information, but in a plot twist which would be shocking to anyone who’s never watched a movie before the obviously shady Sarros suddenly announces that he and his goons are going to rob him instead. And then – shock of shocks – he takes Essie hostage with a knife at her throat.

Gosh, who would have thought inviting a kid to sit in on a meeting with obvious bad guys would end badly for said kid? Nice work, Morontagh.

This being Paolini, he proceeds to emotionlessly exposit that Essie is, like, scared and whatever. Oh no. I might get hurt. Woe is me.

"I'm like scared and whatever. Where's my fifty bucks?"

Murtagh briefly attempts to negotiate, and then says some magic words. Sarros busts out a random amulet and says neener neener he’s protected against magic, so Murtagh uses “the Word” to render that null and void, which doesn’t work, whereupon Essie’s “Papa” randomly realises what’s going on and rushes in like an idiot, only to be bashed over the head.

Essie, being a Paolini character, reacts to this with more half-hearted description about how totally scared and upset she is. Totally. Believe me!

"Oh no. Woe is me. I'm so upset I just can't even. Where's my fifty bucks?"

God Paolini sucks at writing emotions.

Murtagh is still fiddling with the fork (where’s the unbreakable magic sword, you stupid dickhead?), and this is where it gets really stupid. The more so given that it’s clearly supposed to be “cool” and “badass”.

He casts a spell over the fork, then uses it to disarm Sarros and hold him at, uh, forkpoint, and makes a “cool” quip about how he can still cast spells over other things, “Like this fork, for example”. Sarros shoves Essie away, and she’s, like, totally scared and whatever and crawls away, after which she watches Murtagh – groan – kill some baddies with the fork. Supposedly he looks totally cool and badass while he does this, with “amazing skill”. Then one goon decides to attack Essie for… no reason, and then drops dead because Murtagh threw the fork and impaled him in the back of the head with it.

There is no way in hell any fork would have tines long enough to penetrate that far into the skull. Paolini still needs to stop basing his fight scenes on stupid action movies from the 80s.

Sarros throws some random “glittering crystals” at Murtagh, who uses the Word to divert them into the fireplace where they explode. He then uses Super Strength™ to bodyslam Sarros into the floor before interrogating him. Sarros tells him he’s “moon-addled and nose-blind”.

Nose-blind? Paolini’s just pulling words out of a hat now, isn’t he?

Anyway, so then Sarros starts spewing a bunch of random stuff about “the sleeper” and “the Dreamers”, and then has some sort of fit and dies.

Well that was… random.

Paolini suddenly remembers Essie is supposed to be our POV character, because he throws in some more uninterested exposition about how she’s scared and whatever and how the world is a scarier place than she realised alas and whatever.

Murtagh gets his stuff back and gives Essie’s dad some money to pay for the damages, and then pulls the fork out of the dead guy’s head before making a little speech to Essie about how running away isn’t always an option and sometimes you have to stand and fight and now do you understand that. Obvious moral is obvious.

He then gives the fork to Essie, saying she should use it on Hjordis. Lovely.

Naturally our heroine accepts it and proves to be just as much of a sociopath as all the rest of Paolini’s protagonists because, immediately after multiple violent deaths and having almost died herself, she “adorably” and “hilariously” names the fork Mister Stabby (seriously), then gets all smiley and happy about having a cool new weapon.

Apparently shock isn’t a thing that exists in Arglebarg, even for small children.

Murtagh is asked the old dramatic chestnut “who are you, really?”, and answers that he’s “Just another person looking for answers”, after which he randomly and for no reason uses magic to remove Essie’s scar. Because, you know, scars are cool and badass and whatever but you don’t want to look ugly, do you?

And then Essie starts crying.

Not because she almost died. Not because her dad almost died. Not because she just witnessed multiple violent deaths.

Nope, she cries because now she’s not ugly any more.

Like I said: sociopath.

We then cut to Murtagh’s POV as he leaves. He thinks about how he hasn’t killed people in a while, then gets all prissy and disgusted because there’s some blood on him. Shouldn’t you be used to that sort of thing by now, Murty?

Thorn contacts him mentally, asking if he’s okay, and this is his only contribution to the story, after which Arya’s grass ship randomly shows up. Murtagh watches it flying around for a bit, and then Has Emotions about how maybe he should go back to “old friends”. What old friends? Supposedly Eragon and Nausea “vigorously” defend him but pretty much everyone still hates him anyway, which is why he’s going by the most obvious pseudonym on earth and has apparently used magic to disguise his face.

He then moves on to looking at the random amulet he got from Sarros, and wonders how it protected him from the Name of Names before deciding to go have a chat with the “witch-woman” the guy claimed to have got it from.

And the story ends there.

Well that was a waste of time. And yet again Paolini hints at something interesting before choosing to focus on something completely boring and irrelevant instead. Who cares about some random innkeeper’s daughter who will probably never appear again, and why would Murtagh want to hang out with a random kid anyway? It doesn’t help that Essie is a dull and unlikable character to begin with; literally all she does in the entire story is whine and sulk and then act like a sociopath. Couldn’t we have seen Murtagh investigating the weird burned rocks and having an adventure instead? He’s one of the most powerful guys around and the best we get is a barfight with an uninteresting and extremely clichéd minor villain.

The chapter ends there, and we won’t be seeing Murtagh again or learn anything further about whatever it is he’s investigating. Boo!

The next chapter returns to Doucheagon, reacting to the boring story he just witnessed. He’s inexplicably glad to have seen Murtagh, and thinks about how “He deserves to be happy”. Apparently our supposed hero has conveniently forgotten all about his previous attitude toward the guy. Murtagh gets enslaved by Galby and is forced to serve him? Boo hiss you are teh ebilness!!1 But the moment Galby’s dead it’s all happy happy joy joy smile on your brother best friends 4 eva, etc. The abrupt heel-turn is incredibly jarring, and just makes Ergy look like an asshole who only thinks of you as a friend or even a relative if you’re serving his interests.

He then moves on to thinking about whatever it is Murty is investigating, and then – oh dear lord, apparently the whole thing was about teaching Ergy an Important Moral too, because he thinks about what Murtagh said to Essie, and then reflects how if a kid like that can face her problems so can he because he’s, like, a big important Dragon Rider and stuff. Barf.

Glaedr asks if that helped, and Ergy says yeah thanks and leaves. It’s nighttime outside so we get some description of the stars and a recap about how Arya created the grass ship Murtagh saw before Ergy goes back to Saphira. She tells him “You’re much nicer when you’re not snapping like an angry fox”.

I disagree. Even when he’s not in a temper Eragon is not a nice person. He’s boring, he’s arrogant, he’s entitled, he’s judgemental and smug, he’s needlessly violent and cruel, he’s callous, he’s utterly incurious and dull, he has no empathy, he’s apathetic, he’s an egotist, he’s breathtakingly selfish, megalomaniac, monumentally stupid and intellectually lazy, racist, sexist, a stalker and a creeper, a hypocrite who pretends to revere life while gorging on meat and revelling in the unnecessary slaughter of sentient beings… I can go on.

Moving on, he shows Saphira what he saw earlier and she says it’d be nice if Murtagh and Thorn came and joined them. I disagree with that as well; you just know Ergy would take it as an opportunity to abuse the pair of them in a hundred subtle ways.

Saphira asks if he thinks they have “another enemy hidden in Algalbloom”, and Eragon responds with what amounts to who cares and let’s not think about it before going to sleep “snuggled” against her. Don’t ask me how that’s the slightest bit comfortable, but I see our hero’s track record of being apathetic and incurious remains intact.

The WormForkSpork: Part One - The Whinefest

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