Straw Men and Bandages

[kippurbird]

Chapter Eight: The Price of Power.

Hey, so remember Emo-Chicken? Apparently Paolini does because Nasuada is finally taking off the bandages for those cuts. She hasn't looked at the cuts since they were first bandaged because they were so horrid. Since winning the Trial of the Long Knives, she had refused to look at her wounds; they had appeared

Comments

[dove_cg]

Paolini doesn't seem to understand how marriage works in a semi-feudal period for a person who is of nobility or pseudo-nobility. Her beauty doesn't matter that much, if she's the ruler of a whole country. It's simply a plus. Marriage is to gain assets, strengthen power, and spread influence. He sort of tried to touch on that with the idea of marrying Orrin but the problem is she'd still have to find a PERSONAL method of keeping the reigns in her hands, as you noted.

But, uh, yeah. Did they ever consider, I don't know, putting masks on the Urgals? Make it hard to tell what they are? Even just a lot of armor and some encompassing helms would do the trick. I forget how tall they are and if they have other precise traits but give them enough padding and it might work.

Further more... ugh. Just... everything. I have no more words, really. I agree, Nasuada is a terrible ruler. I would say this not only exemplifies that Paolini is bad at writing characters as people but he's bad at writing women and writing people of another ethnicity, as far as I'm concerned. (I could be wrong, simply thinking of the movie, but aren't Nasuada and her people darker skinned, as well as tribal?) Maybe it's just the generic awfulness shining through though. It's kind of hard to properly categorize the details sometimes.

But yeah, Nasuada has been written consistently as unintentionally fairly stupid up to this point and it's just sad.

[kippurbird]

Exactly. Marriage for love is a recent thing. Before it was for gaining ... vast tracks of land.

Putting masks on the urgals would be undignified. Or something. I'm sure. They also have horns and are taller.

[dove_cg]

*responding super late but oh well* So get helmets that have holes for the horns and they're fine. ;) As for the taller, it depends on how much taller. Giant-sized might be hard to pass off but if they're just in the tall end of a human's range, even if it's strange to see SO many tall warriors at once, it could still work. :P :)