Brisingr Sporking 51 Mind over Metal

[cmdrnemo]

I am not prepared. A demon hunter tells me this with a certain regularity. The Boy Scout in me bristles at the idea. In this instance it is completely true. I am attempting to spork the chapter Mind over Metal in Paolini’s Brisingr. I have never read this book. I have no intention of reading anything outside my self-assigned chapter here. This will

Comments

[cmdrnemo]

Using meteoric iron is fine, as is using a fantasy magic metal, which may or may not come from meteors. But, Brightsteel is a really boring name.

[syntinen_laulu]

Actually all it makes me think of is stainless steel. Admirable easy-care for the go-ahead modern Sue.

[cmdrnemo]

There's exactly two things in this chapter: boring and creepy. Sometimes you get both!

[thegharialguy]

I actually don't mind the creepy rape subtext. It's reinforcing how precious one's mind is, to the extend that even when you willingly allow someone into it, it still feels uncomfortable and wrong. Consider, it it's so rapey when it's consensual, imagine how horrifying it'd be when it's actually rape.

[hergrim]

I think the worst thing is that Paolini took a massive Japanese style smelter that takes weeks to build and prepare for use, then three days to fully run its cycle and which produces two and a half tons of iron/steel for make a sword. Sure, you could probably scale it down, but why bother? When the Japanese wanted to make small quantities of steel they just chopped up scrap iron and melted it down in an ordinary forge to produce just enough steel for the edge of the blade. Which, since Japanese techniques generally revolved around inserting a hard steel core into a jacket of softer steel, is all you really need.

Also, I'm pretty sure Paolini had them start the smelter's fire with oak chips rather than pine charcoal. If he wants to describe the whole process in detail in order to show his work, then he should get these little things right.

[cmdrnemo]

That's what I thought. Turns out the exact type of smelter he choose was a single use industrial design. I can only assume he choose that design because otherwise you wouldn't be able to identify it as a Japanese smelter. The whole thing is just a massive voodoo shark. Every effort to explain what's going on just raises further questions.

[snarkbotanya]

So this is a bit of a strange detail to harp on, but since everything else has been so thoroughly dissected...

Lunch break, bread and cheese.

How the fuck do they have cheese?

Paolini's elves are vegetarians, if not complete vegans, and we've never seen them farming, let alone keeping livestock. The implication seems to be that they forage all their food, which just makes getting cheese even harder, because none of the animals native to their forest are that good for milking. I mean, I'm sure you could milk a deer, hypothetically, but I've never heard of deer-milk cheese.

Hell, come to think of it, how the fuck do they have bread? That tends to require flour, which comes from grinding a crapton of grain, which comes from farms. What, do they grind up acorns or some shit and turn that into bread?

[cmdrnemo]

That is a very good question. What's the worst possible answer? Elf cheese? Call it a meal of elf cheese and dwarf bread. That's about the right combination of creepy and boring to fit the general theme of the chapter.

[snarkbotanya]

What's the worst possible answer? Elf cheese?

Having milk-producing cows means taking the calves and slaughtering them for veal so you can take the milk.

New horrible headcanon: elf children are rare because most babies are quietly disposed of so that their mothers can make cheese from their breast milk.

[vorpal_tongue]

I don't see what's so horrible 'bout that headcannon. Bit o' babe'n'cheese sounds like a nice dinner to me.

[anonymous]

The sword-forging part is just rule of cool and PaoPao wants to show also his research, even if its pointless.

Shit, I thought elves here ad larger ears. Not like those of crappy WoW, but something larger and more animal-like.

[cmdrnemo]

Yeah, everything in this chapter is supposed to be rule of cool. Except it completely fails. There's nothing cool about any of it. He doesn't use the dragon to make things better. She only makes things go slightly faster. Magic is used again, not to make the sword better but to cut steps out of the process. The net result is like making a magic McDonald's Hamburger +1. Instead of, you know, making a good hamburger. It's pointless and weird and not fun.

I like the WoW elf aesthetic. Those eyebrows are glorious. Without the matching ears the faces would just look wrong.

[anonymous]

Especially night elves, who had a quite cool background (as being a feral race (think like D&D wild elves) in being unable to use arcane magic, otherwise they'd become a high elf, and their domains being under an eternal summer night) if you were by the old RPG for D&D 3.5 and the early artwork for Warcraft III where like the Tauren they were quite inspired by the native Americans. It's a pity most of that, along the ideas I had for them, went down the drain in WoW -oh, well, time to recycle them -.

As for the sword, remember also the cool toys that Angela has in the last book in Dras Leona. They appear as fast as they're forgotten, and like that belt that is lost there does not offer much -not to mention I highly doubt the roof of a cathedral could withstand the weight of two dragons-.

(PS: Am I the only one who feels not only Alagaesia elves are highly Mary Sueistic but also quite insufferable?. The smell of napalm over the elven lands in the morning would be really enjoyable).