My goal here is to make our cast more heroic with minimal changes to the plot as a whole.
Making Eragon have his entitlement as a flaw to overcome is good and deepens him as a character. I'm going to try and work on ways to make him actually heroic. Eragon is supposed to be a champion for the people, right? Have him stand up for them, even in the face of unpopularity. Eragon seems to really care about his public image and sacrificing that for the sake of his morals makes him heroic. One of our lovely dropped plot threads was the Urgal-human conflict that went nowhere, have something bad happen there. Maybe the Urgal kill someone who is very popular because that person ran away during a battle and they decided that their public shaming wasn't enough. The humans decide they should just genocide the Urgals because those savage monsters will be the death of us all. Eragon comes in to be a negotiator between then, because he still believes that peace is an option.
Keep this up, have him continue to defend the downtrodden and the outliers. Eragon has a position of authority, he should be using it to make people's lives better. Healing the sick and fighting wars is fine and dandy, but we need to either see him making sacrifices or see his actions having a tangible effect on the world around him.
Throwing Roran into the Empire would be an interesting dynamic, but changes a lot of details on the plot so I'm going to try and work from another angle. Making Roran is heroic is very easy, if follow the John Wayne rules of manliness: Men should be tough, fair and courageous— never petty, never looking for a fight, but never backing down from one either. Roran comes close to being heroic by virtue of standing up for his morals and actively going against the Empire to try and save his little town despite being vastly outnumbered, but he's too eager to inflict violence. Make him and Eragon different by having Roran less proactive, but also less likely to try and negotiate once the gauntlet's been laid down.
Murtagh's fine, just leave him the way he was in book 1.
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Making Eragon have his entitlement as a flaw to overcome is good and deepens him as a character. I'm going to try and work on ways to make him actually heroic. Eragon is supposed to be a champion for the people, right? Have him stand up for them, even in the face of unpopularity. Eragon seems to really care about his public image and sacrificing that for the sake of his morals makes him heroic. One of our lovely dropped plot threads was the Urgal-human conflict that went nowhere, have something bad happen there. Maybe the Urgal kill someone who is very popular because that person ran away during a battle and they decided that their public shaming wasn't enough. The humans decide they should just genocide the Urgals because those savage monsters will be the death of us all. Eragon comes in to be a negotiator between then, because he still believes that peace is an option.
Keep this up, have him continue to defend the downtrodden and the outliers. Eragon has a position of authority, he should be using it to make people's lives better. Healing the sick and fighting wars is fine and dandy, but we need to either see him making sacrifices or see his actions having a tangible effect on the world around him.
Throwing Roran into the Empire would be an interesting dynamic, but changes a lot of details on the plot so I'm going to try and work from another angle. Making Roran is heroic is very easy, if follow the John Wayne rules of manliness: Men should be tough, fair and courageous— never petty, never looking for a fight, but never backing down from one either. Roran comes close to being heroic by virtue of standing up for his morals and actively going against the Empire to try and save his little town despite being vastly outnumbered, but he's too eager to inflict violence. Make him and Eragon different by having Roran less proactive, but also less likely to try and negotiate once the gauntlet's been laid down.
Murtagh's fine, just leave him the way he was in book 1.