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Inheritance Cycle

_Ditto_, listen to my completely original story.

Me said:
Once upon a time, there was a young lions that had two older brothers that always bossed him around. The young lion was forced to work as a slave for the two older lions. They laughed at him and called him names. One day, the three lions learned that the famous stripper Kitty Business was coming to town. She was the hottest stripper in all the land. The two older brothers went to go see the stripper, but they left the youngest brother behind. This made the young brother sad.

BUT THEN, the younger brother magically found twenty dollars on his bed, and went to buy a ticket to the strip show. The catch was, the young lion was on house arrest, so if he left his house for more than six hours, the cops would pop him. He had to go see the stripper right away! When he was at the strip show, the stripper instantly fell in love with him. After the show, they talked, and he went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant with her. They had a lovely time. However, he then realized that his six hours were about to run out! So he ran back home, leaving his arm behind at the restaurant. The stripper was heartbroken.

But then she went around, looking for lions who were missing an arm, until she found the young lion. They went out again, and then they married and lived happily ever after.
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Wait, you're saying it's plagiarized from Cinderella? WHAT? But... when did Cinderella have friggin' lions in it? Or strippers? And there was nothing about a fairy godmother, a prince, or a glass slipper in this story!

So clearly, this was a completely original story.
 
Well, no; the point of the comparisons to Star Wars are that it reads like the plot of Star Wars in a medieval fantasy setting. You know, boy lives with his uncle in a world ruled by an evil emperor, he obtains something that leads him to an old mentor who turns out to have belonged to an ancient order of people with magical powers, his uncle is killed by the evil emperor's henchmen who are looking for the thing he obtained, he is trained in the arts of the ancient order, he joins the rebel forces, secondary bad guy is revealed to be his father, et cetera.

Not that I ever believed there was any reason to call it plagiarism. Paolini is not reading through the Star Wars script and rewriting it while cackling manically about his evil plot to make money from George Lucas's work; he's just a sheltered kid having fun writing a book who was subconsciously inspired by some movies he likes and took various fantasy tropes as a kind of a given or at least game for including in his series as well (ancient language, true names, place names with umlauts, tall fair elves, dwarves who are miners, telepathic dragons, and so on). It is right to call him not very original, but a plagiarist? Hardly.
 
I have watched the Star Wars movies, but I don't remember a thing, hardly. I don't think that the books are written the best they could be. Does anyone remember at the end of the first book when Eragon "...thrust [Durza] in the heart."? That sentence was so cheap and almost ruined the whole book for me...almost.

And the movie!! Oh my was I pissed. I couldn't believe that Saphira grew into a large dragon in five seconds and that Arya was awake when they went to the Varden. Can't the damn people understand that they needed to get there quickly because Arya was dying??!!

I am now going to apologize for using multiple words in italics. I just thought the moment called for it.
 
_Ditto_ said:
As far as I can see, there is no mention of outerspace, The Force, light sabers, or aliens anywhere in the entire Inheritance Cycle
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In case you can't be bothered to read the pages Furret kindly linked to:

Plot is not setting. The same story can take place in space, in medieval Europe, or in modern London and it would still be the same story.

For example: Romeo and Juliet. The basic story of two lovers separated by their families can be adapted to literally any setting and still remain the same story. See?
 
Don't care about the books but the kid who played Eragon in the film was cute. :B

I read the first one and went meeeh.
 
Eevee said:
I'm not calling him a plagiarist

just a terrible writer
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Hence why my post was not directed at you; it was just expressing my irritation over how many people seem to honestly believe that Paolini painstakingly looks for medieval fantasy parallels to everything in the Star Wars films and then specifically edits some parts so that he can get away with it.
 
I don't care for it. I've never really enjoyed reading the Inheritance Cycle.
:P But I don't hate it.
 
Paolini might actually make something of himself in years to come, I think, and even if the story does have essentially the same things as Star Wars in it, I still enjoy reading the series, because who knows? Something different may happen.
 
Lorem Ipsum said:
Paolini might actually make something of himself in years to come, I think, and even if the story does have essentially the same things as Star Wars in it, I still enjoy reading the series, because who knows? Something different may happen.
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well obviously that isn't the only thing wrong with it. the writing is incredibly flat and emotionless, as are the characters; everything is over described; the vocabulary used is ridiculous (in Eldest we had quatrains, now we have a soliloquy).

And so on.

edit: if someone can give me a good reason why an arrow augered past Eragon's face rather than flying past it I will shut up. (<midnight> "In aviation, the term augering in refers to the usual result of an unrecoverable spin (flight), in which the airplane hits the ground rotating like an auger.")
 
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opaltiger said:
edit: if someone can give me a good reason why an arrow augered past Eragon's face rather than flying past it I will shut up. (<midnight> "In aviation, the term augering in refers to the usual result of an unrecoverable spin (flight), in which the airplane hits the ground rotating like an auger.")
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It's to prove that Paolini can't write at all. And he should really stop using the thesaurus.

Well, thanks to you guys, I can see that the new book isn't worth reading at all. Now I don't have to waste my time checking to see if Paolini improved at writing or not.

I still can't see why people like this series...
 
I can't see why anyone can manage to read his drivel.

You know, in Eldest, he specified that Eragon saw a flock of geese in a tree.

Think about that for a second.
 
It's easy for many people to ignore the crappy writing style and that it's cliched and derivative as all hell; it's a lot harder to ignore that a flock of geese in a tree makes no sense.

You'd think he'd've realized the issue there.
 
Well, I have yet to read the third one, but when I read the second one, I noticed it was superior to the first one. Still cheesy and/or poor at parts, but hey, I still liked both books

I think that Paolini is getting better, personally. When he is done the Inheritance... Guess it would be a Quartet now, well, I think that he will likely start improving at a far faster rate (he can't really do a complete upheavel of his writing style in the middle of a series of books, as I am pretty sure that would disrupt the flow of it too much. Like if the Pokemon anime was like it currently is one episode, and then the next one it becomes drawn out, darker, Pokemon die, etc. Yeah, in that case, I would want a gradual change so I don't go, "What? Why the hell did they let a Magmortar light Pikachu on fire, beat it up horrendously, and make it barely alive, with what appears to be ten episodes before this arc is finished?")

Also, I don't remember any damn tree geese in Eldest
 
Second one was more boring than the first one and had prose even more purple. :| Yaaay, thesaurus abuse (psst paolini i don't think that word means what you think it means)

What excerpts I've read do show that he has improved a bit, but not significantly. He fairly obviously still has no idea what the hell he's doing, seeing as he apparently decided that retconning Eragon's one moment of self-doubt would be a good idea so he isn't ~tainted~ by being related to Morzan.


Tree geese were sometime around Elfland, I believe. Would have to reread the bricks to find out exactly where but they were there.
 
surskitty said:
Second one was more boring than the first one and had prose even more purple. :| Yaaay, thesaurus abuse (psst paolini i don't think that word means what you think it means)

What excerpts I've read do show that he has improved a bit, but not significantly. He fairly obviously still has no idea what the hell he's doing, seeing as he apparently decided that retconning Eragon's one moment of self-doubt would be a good idea so he isn't ~tainted~ by being related to Morzan.


Tree geese were sometime around Elfland, I believe. Would have to reread the bricks to find out exactly where but they were there.
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I will have to check that part... Tree Geese sound funny :3

Also, yeah, like I said, he will start improving at a far greater pace after he is done with the Inheritance Quartet, as it gives him a chance to overhaul his whole writing style then
 
No, because he's been sheltered from criticism and told that his stuff is good.

I don't get the impression that he realizes that he needs improvement.
 
Considering how freaking sheltered he is? Don't count on it.

Also he's still a pompous ass.
 
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