The Inheritance Cycle and Evil

[ghostwyvern]

While I was posting my reply about the chances Eragon has of being made into a movie again by Disney, something occurred to me.

We  know that Paolini began writing his series very young, and although it  was published when he was in his 20s through 30s, I feel that his youth at the time of the original writing shows--and not just in how he pulled so

Comments

[cmdrnemo]

If you look at the way his characters operate in the context of a lot of his writing advice the blinders become pretty obvious. For example at one point Nasuada refuses to acknowledge or plan for a direct personal attack on the Varden by Galbatorix. Or in the bit where the Urgal join forces and there is something pretending to be a murder mystery side plot. The battle at the end of the first book. In all these cases the characters are unable to stray outside of some very strict rules

[ghostwyvern]

To me, it just feels like it's written from a child's mindset. Everything has to be simple and just so. Evil looks a certain way, so you know they're evil even if they don't go out and kick puppies or menace the populace. Good guys have to win, so they can be as stupid as they want and they'll still succeed. Why? Because they're the good guys and the good guys always win! Obviously!

[cmdrnemo]

Forgive me if this sounds a bit harsh. When things go badly wrong, like for example these books, I don't like to stop at "that guy was less... ." Was he less mature than he needed to be? Probably. Does that in any way help the rest of us learn anything? I doubt it. I expect he was restricting himself with unwritten rules. Ideas he felt were so fundamental to the book writing process there was no need to ever mention them.

You are right. These books have the morality of a child's tale for other children. The heroes are the heroes because they are the heroes. The villains the same.

That doesn't mean I can't have fun with it.

[ghostwyvern]

I never said you couldn't, or that Paolini was correct to write it in the way that he did. It's just a bit of speculation on how it ended up in such a messy state in the first place.

Even a children's book ought to have more thought put into it than the Inheritance Cycle did. If someone's evil, they should be shown being evil so that the reader can see why they should be stopped. If someone's good, they shouldn't do anything heinous--morally questionable deeds are one matter, and murdering an unarmed child is quite another.

[snarkbotanya]

That idea actually makes a lot of sense. Paolini hardly ever focuses on the actual plot; most of the story is taken up by pointless exposition and sidequests. It's "I Just Really Wanted to Write This Scene" Disease turned up to eleven, all the time. Whenever he has an idea he thinks is interesting, he plops it into the novel, story be damned, just so he can showcase his own brilliance. The Sue-stuff is easy enough to see, but there are other results as well. Pacing is probably the most obvious one: the story doesn't flow so much as hop from one scene to the next. It might be tricky to see that when it comes to the extended travel scenes, which seem to be dwelling on the in-between, but remember, this is Paolini. He loves excessively purple description of the landscape. The rushing tends to come in places where Paolini's characters are in one place and he really wants to progress the current subplot; e.g. the bit in the chapter I just sporked where Eragon completely glides past anything between the reader-of-law's instructions and the

[ghostwyvern]

Well, maybe so. Or maybe he just wanted it to be a fun adventure and lost sight of what a fun adventure was (hint to Paolini: if you wander off into boring dwarven politics, it's probably not an adventure anymore

[syntinen_laulu]

Why did Paolini not show more of Galbatorix himself being evil, rather than just his henchmen?

Actually I don't think that was in itself the problem. A writer could convey the evilness of the master villain just as effectively, possibly even more so, by leaving him or her completely offstage and just depicting the kind of lieutenants s/he chooses to employ and give power of life and death to: and also maybe by showing how terrified these terrifying monsters are of their Big Boss. (This is of course the technique Tolkien used in LotR, and it works just fine; I don't think anything at all would have been gained by giving Sauron any scenes or dialogue.) The problem is rather that Paolini just never grasped that he needed to show - or even know himself - what was evil about Galby and his rule, any more than people telling or listening to fairy tales feel the need to explain what's so wicked about the Wicked Fairy or Wicked Stepmother; they just are.

[ghostwyvern]

He never needed to show Galbatorix acting directly, if we had seen his henchmen acting on orders to, for instance, kick people out of their homes/farms to give those homes/farms to his loyal officials. Or burning down homes of people who were rumored to have spoken ill about him and his empire. Even if they are acting on their own accord rather than on orders, you'd generally assume that they are acting in line with the wishes of their leader. Then Galbatorix is as evil for not stopping them as if he had given direct orders.

[anonymous]

Except for the part of Galby torturing Nasuada, those magical modifications he put on his troops -the unable to feel pain thing, which could have well been replaced by greater resistance to pain and/or body's resilience to damage and/or fast healing (you get the picture)- up to Murtaugh, the kind of people he had as associates (Durza, etc), I don't see him as an evil overlord or at the very least the typical one who eats babies. Don't blame me if the books are so dense that it's hard to remember things.

At the very least Galby seems to care for the welfare of his people (I don't remember that he taxed to death his kingdom and the forced military part is something to be expected when you lack a professional army and/or mercenaries). He's not black but grey -very dark grey at best-

[ghostwyvern]

One thing he's done that is definitely evil is put people under mind control. But we don't know how many people he has done this to. We also don't know if his soldiers had their inability to feel pain given to them as a mandatory/random thing, or whether they volunteered for it. Durza and the ra'zac are definitely questionable allies; we are given to understand there are no good shades. However, it's also possible Galbatorix may have seen some use in setting Durza against his enemies and letting him burn himself out that way rather than taking his wrath out on random innocent opponents in the empire

[anonymous]

That was I was refering to under the use of magic, the mind control Galby put on others as well as supposedly the oaths or whatever he put on Murtagh. As you say we lack information on some things.

I have to agree on the statement of Galby not being particularly evil by medieval standards, I guess that it happens when you see things from a XXI century perspective and don't bother to think from the perspective of said epoch, when life was a lot worse even for royals.

Same for the Garrow (Carvahall) thing. In a spork someone commented that peasants lived in relatively harsh conditions even in the early XX century and things during the real Middle Ages were even worse. I may chalk that, however, as Alagaesia is not the real world and as happens in so many fantasy settings life may be somewhat better for the lower classes even if they had no running water. Or perhaps just like the use of siege machines as anti-infantry weapons Paolini failed at research.

The not-feeling-pain thing was, by the way, discussed on a spork elsewhere as

[hergrim]

We also don't know if his soldiers had their inability to feel pain given to them as a mandatory/random thing, or whether they volunteered for it.

IIRC, the last of the Laughing Dead in their first battle said that they were volunteers and that the deal was their families would be cared for by Galby.

[eragonsshrink19]

I was re-reading Book 4 out of curiousity (mostly because I've never actually read the whole thing straight through - I just peeked at the ending/the big battle to see what happened), and in the prologue it states that Galbatorix had ruled for 100 YEARS before the start of the first book

[ghostwyvern]

I'll also point out what I said above... Carvahall, at least, seems to be prospering under Galbatorix's rule, taxes or no taxes. Garrow can afford to eat chickens (which were very expensive food until the advent of factory farming only a few decades ago in the real world) instead of their eggs. He has two horses--which are very expensive animals to maintain, rather than using some smaller, easier-to-feed animal or sharing communal draft animals. his house has three bedrooms, which would be unheard of in the actual medieval era, for more reasons than expense of materials. Until the advent of the modern hearth, you needed the home to be small and one-room so everyone would be warm in winter

[ghostwyvern]

Can't edit my post, so just adding this to my comment: I'm agreeing with you, not disputing/arguing anything. Just adding corroborating evidence that he's been in charge 100+ years and everything seems to be going just fine anyway. Even if he's evil (which there's limited evidence for), it doesn't seem to widely affect the populace.