Where the Heart of Anti-Shurtugal Rises Again.

When I first read the Inheritance Cycle years ago, I thought it was one of the best book series out there. Granted, most of that admiration can be traced back to my relative immaturity at the time, but even looking back on it now there are still moments that stick with me. Eragon and Saphira’s awe at discovering the world is round, the glimpse inside Thorn’s mind we get in Inheritance, some of Oromis’ speeches in Eldest are all scenes that even today influence my worldview and the way I write.

Of course, that just makes the overwhelming suckiness of the Inheritance Cycle an even greater blow. There are hints of a really good book, but they’re buried under mountains of filler, unsympathetic protagonists, antagonists who seem more like heroes than the actual heroes, and more plagiarism than the Roman pantheon. Maybe it could have been a good book series if Paolini was allowed to develop it as he wanted to, rather than rushing it out the door to satisfy his parents’ greed and egotism. Sadly, we’ll likely never know.

The Inheritance Cycle deserved better, and that’s why I’m making this series of posts. My goal is to talk about the changes I’d make to the series, to flesh out some of the more interesting concepts within it, give it a unique identity of its own, and hopefully make it an overall better work of fiction. Before I do that, however, I need to establish a solid basis for further development, the core pillars of this work’s identity. Once I’ve got the themes figured out, it’ll help guide the worldbuilding, the plot, characters, and other aspects; guidance Paolini unfortunately lacked as he wrote the series by the seat of his pants. Ah well, you know what they say about hindsight.

Mental health and trauma
In the Inheritance Cycle, Eragon isn’t really affected by what happens to him beyond a few token expressions of grief. He really should be. In the span of a few days, his home is destroyed, his uncle is killed, and he’s forced to abandon everything he’s ever known for an uncertain future. Things don’t get better for a while – his mentor dies (twice), he’s horrifically scarred, his close friend betrays him, he fucks up his relationship with Arya, and for a while he’s placed under the impression he’s the son of an abusive mass-murderer. And that’s just the stuff I can remember.

Yet somehow, he remains the same person throughout all of this, only becoming more arrogant, OP and unlikable. Combine that with the treatment of Galbatorix, who’s canonically mentally ill and characterized as “insane = violent”, and you can see why I’d want to rework how mental illness is depicted in the series. Eragon is essentially a child soldier; he should be affected by this! Put him through hell, show how he reacts, how he struggles with his trauma, and how he recovers! Give him a happy ending, but make him struggle and bleed for it, and make it clear that he’s never going to be 100% okay with everything that’s happened to him.

Identity and legacy
One of the more interesting questions raised and neglected within the Inheritance Cycle is that of nature vs. nurture – cliche, yes, but if pulled off well it can be rather compelling. Both Eragon and Murtagh struggle to reconcile their parentage with what they want to do in life – how much does the bloody legacy of their father define them? Can they break free from the system of control and authority that’s defined history, or are they doomed to forever walk in the footsteps of others?

Even if Paolini didn’t explore it, Eragon’s ripe soil for a conflict of identity. Is he the son of a farmer, or the son of a monster? Is he loyal to the Riders, or the Varden? Is he the boy from Carvahall or the savior of the world? He’s fifteen, and he’s being told that he needs to become an incredibly powerful magician in order to overthrow the government he’s known all his life – those are some heavy expectations to place on a teenager. I’d want to explore both the mundane change he undergoes as he grows into himself, and some of the more exotic changes he undergoes as a result of magic and his bond with Saphira. Ideally, his departure of Alagaësia at the end of the series should be less political, and more the logical conclusion of his character arc – he’s done letting others dictate who and what he’s supposed to be, and for the first time in a while he’s got the opportunity to figure that out for himself.

Magic as fucking weird
Magic as it currently exists in the IC isn’t super unique – it’s a bunch of separate, stolen concepts jammed together into a messy whole. Is it controlled by language, or intent? What are the limits of magic? How was magic first discovered, how do its scholars innovate and expand the horizons of arcane knowledge? We don’t know, because Paolini never bothered to give magic a concrete identity.

I’d definitely want to play up some of the more surreal (stuff like the living tattoos of the Blood-Oath Ceremony), dangerous aspects of magic, emphasize it as something old and dangerous, maybe even eldritch and unknowable. Magic was super uncontrolled until the Gray Folk tried to restrain it, an act that required such a heavy price that it wiped out their civilization? MAKE THAT SHIT IMPORTANT. Oromis’ description of wild magic, which I re-discovered via the TV Tropes page on Wild Magic, is one of the big inspirations for how I’m writing magic here; barely controlled, possibly even alive and conscious to a certain extent. To be honest, though, the precise mechanics of magic are still something I’m trying to work out, and I’ll definitely try to flesh it out in depth in a future post.

There’s also the fact that all the races in the IC, save for the Ra’zac, are super derivative of Tolkien, and it shows. Elves are smug, superior and irritatingly sexy; dwarves are short bearded dudes who love rock and are ruled by a warrior king; and Urgals are a pastiche of Orks and shitty, offensive “noble savage” stereotypes. Needless to say, as a glutton for weird fantasy I’m really not a fan. I won’t go super in-depth about the changes I’d make in this post for brevity, but suffice to say it’s gonna get weird.

The bond between dragons and their Riders
Paolini had a psychic bond between a human and a non-human at the core of his work, and he barely fucking explored it. More often than not, Saphira is a glorified horse for Eragon to get around on who provides him with magical abilities and backup in his attempts to strongarm people into obeying him. The only time we actually see how Saphira thinks is “Black-Shrike-Thorn-Cave”, which...leaves much to be desired. I want to explore some of the questions raised by their bond – what would it be like to be connected to someone for the rest of your life on a level more intimate than any human connection? What happens when that connection is broken, by outside intervention or by death of one of the connected individuals? Is there personality bleed? Could Eragon become more like a dragon, could Saphira become more like a human?

I’d definitely like to compare and contrast Eragon and Saphira’s bond with some of the other dragon-Rider bonds, including those of Galbatorix and Shruikan and the Forsworn and their dragons (who are still around in this version because the fact we never got a quirky miniboss squad of Riders is a CRIME). Going back to the theme of change as inevitable/necessary, I’d also try to explore the difference between dragon-Rider bonds before and after the fall of the old order; Eragon’s character development is a story for another post, but he definitely wouldn’t just look at the way dragons and Riders used to work together and go “this is Fine and requires no changes”.

And that’s about it for this post. Next post will discuss Eragon, his personality and his character arc. After all, you can’t have a story without a hero, even if that term applies loosely to both canon!Eragon and 2.0!Eragon (for very different reasons).

Feel free to post any questions, thoughts and/or feedback you may have in the comment, and I’ll do my best to respond!

EDIT: After some consideration, the next few posts are actually going to focus on the reworked races of Alagaësia, starting with the dwarves. There's just too many worldbuilding changes for me to talk about Eragon's character arc without explaining a new term every five seconds.

EDIT 2: Made some edits to reflect some of the changes I'm making to themes. Namely, removing change as a theme.