Filly

hi! i'm filly!

trans-femme moist fur-beast.
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dante
@dante

there's a rumor that Disney+ is working on a tv series of Eragon and it's got me thinking about Eragon again. released in the high era of post-Harry-Potter YA novels, it's basically LOTR fanfiction about what if the entire story was about a cool young wizard who has a dragon. and also he's the most powerful wizard and he falls in love with the hottest elf in the world.

and all of that is honestly fine, whatever, charming YA fare. i loved these books when i was like 12. but the part of them that is infinitely funny to me is the magic system. here's how it works.

magic is about 1:1 to physical strength. so the amount of "magic power" it takes to lift a big rock is the same as it would to lift it physically. so all wizards are jacked in the first two books or so (there are four books total). inherently funny.

THEN eragon learns you can cheat the magic power situation by simply sucking the life force out of shit around you. but that's evil obviously so eragon doesn't want to do that. so he learns you can store magic power in crystals. so for the rest of the books he is constantly decked out in crystal armor which he siphons power from exactly like a magical battery. which is also very funny to me.

THEN!!! after spending like 2 books learning how to make sick fireballs or whatever, eragon meets this old elf guy who is like. you idiot. you fucking dumbass. you don't need to make a fucking fireball to kill a guy. you can just flick a rock at their neck... really fucking fast. Or, even faster than that, you can just snip the brainstem of your target using magic, which uses basically no physical force, and kill like a hundred guys with zero effort.

and then shit just goes wacky mode. the books are suddenly about this magic arms race as battles become about wizards using mental blocks on entire platoons of soldiers, and all the combat is wizards doing mental 4d chess on each other to get through their magic mental blocks, and if a wizard succeeds they just mercilessly slaughter that wizard's entire platoon of guys.

there's also dragons involved in this story but let's be real by the third or fourth book they're perfunctory to the mental magic nuke fights constantly happening. the author of these books, christopher paolini, was sixteen when he wrote the first one. by all accounts he's a decent guy fwiw, i think he does youtube videos on writing stuff now.

anyway: the magic system was so logical and realistically modeled that it completely took over the books. whatever plot was originally planned now had to respect this magic model and it turned from a trilogy to a quadrilogy. and Paolini was a language nerd in the JRR Tolkein way so there's also a conlang involved in all this because of course there is.


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in reply to @dante's post:

wait fuck ive been kicking around a magic system idea that hits that same endpoint of magic nuke fights. i mean i guess any weapon system is bound to power creep to that point naturally anyways, but...

i will give eragon the dues it's earned that it's at least a novel spin on the idea of magic nukes. but the arms race is extremely real. it does not feel like the series was planned out in order to accommodate this magic system lol

it's like method acting, but for writing. you weren't expecting it, but one day [you/the fiction] figures out how to make nukes and everything just goes off the fuckin' rails

when I was young I did read a lot. And my mum put in my arm the hobbit then lord of the ring. I just read them like any other book. Years later in high school, I heard like the 4 top of the class kids talking about how they started reading lotr but it was hard or something. I didn't mention I had read it.

and Paolini was a language nerd in the JRR Tolkein way so there's also a conlang involved in all this because of course there is.

I can remember a decent bit of this book, but I will die knowing that "argetlam" means silver hand in Christopher Paolini's made up language instead of something useful, like my Grandfather's mostly dead language of Munsee.

I thought it was based on the Latin for silver, argentum(though looking at the Irish it also makes sense that it is either the root for it or has a root in common) and a word that sounded like limb. What you said makes way more sense.

yeah, also Tolkien had a character nicknamed Silver Fist (Celebrimbor) and he's accredited in that wikipiedia article because he helped provide thoughts for the etymology of the actual mythological figure. so Paolini being a lotr fanboy would've been aware of that and probably would've wanted to make a character or thing that meant "silver hand" in his own work.

he was sixteen??? from my vague memories that makes so much sense lol

i remember finding the magic system super compelling. i think one of the only moments i remember clearly from these books is where they realize wizards can mass produce most items that are time consuming / complex to make since they usually dont require a lot of physical force to produce. and then they end up pissing off the weavers guild(?) when they flood the market in order to fund their rebellion(?)

yeah I remember the second book sucking because as I recall (spoilers) most of it is Eragon angsting about his injury and being all "how will I fight the final boss with a debilitating injury??" and the answer is "sexy elves do a dance and it breaks the rules of magic to fix your body and not only does it heal you but actually your more muscly and sexier than ever before". I had more fun after that.

God, I specifically still remember a horrific application of the bonkers magic system thats just described in the book, where Eragons like “let me out of prison or Ill demonstrate how little relative energy it takes to heat a single grain of sand white-hot and slowly grind it into your body until it melts through and starts cooking you to death”. Unhinged series. Was worth a CRAZY amount of Accelerated Reader points in 5th grade though

Wow. I read these as a kid, I remember reading the third book and being confused that the story wasn't over, I remember when the fourth book came out... but I do not remember that aspect at all. Like, I remember that magic involved speaking the true name of things, that the main villain had the true name of the true name language so he could cancel spells and oaths, I remember that elves were just so much better than human, so the protagonist had to be upgraded to an elf essentially, and I remember dragons and storing dragon's memory in crystals, but that's about it. Like, I have no memory of the whole magical nuke thing.

this is a pretty good rough/funny summarization but i want to add that paolini did NOT have a conlang of any sort going on, he just borrowed a mix of Old Norse mostly and then sometimes Welsh or Irish or other stuff as he deemed cool or relevant or whatever.

the wiki you linked actually has a part that words what i feel/felt

Some have criticized the Ancient Language, however, maintaining that it consists mostly of Old Norse words replacing English words in a sentence. The Ancient Language is almost translated to fit the semantic meaning of each English word exactly.

meaning, like, not only is (was) it only mostly just straight-up old norse, but as a language it's still functionally Translated From English, English That Was Translated. which is not how a full, operating language should work, but given that Paolini was a teenager/young adult when he started on this and presumably only knew English, it's clear (and understandable) why this happened

but after looking on his site's dictionary and thinking some, i think paolini's ancient language has evolved past where it once had been in just the books — which is where i was basing my original comment from — (especially with the help of fans, it seems, he makes a small shoutout to fans in the netherlands), where it was basically just old norse. it seems like it's really been fleshed out and there are a number of words i cannot immediately find an origin/direct real-world-language for. 👍 good for him and thank you to you for making me fact-check and find out i was wrong and things have changed.

I still remember how there's a big moment where the political faction you're supposed to root for realizes it can cheat the economy by making luxury goods that are just time intensive to make with magic, because they don't rely on physical effort, just time and precision. Lace was specifically what they brought up. So they just went "Hey support the wizard nuke war, buy cheap lace!" It's just like. Infinite money cheat code energy. Inherently funny.

All the coolest stuff in that series definitely came from the magic rules, like the child that the protagonist accidentally cursed because he fucked up the grammar on a good luck charm lmao

I will never forgive Paolini though for making "true names" a very important part of the setting/ending and then refusing to reveal the protag's name (even after the protag learns it himself). Just completely killed the story for me, essentially revealing that he didn't actually have any characteristics other than "protagonist."

!!!!!! Ohhh I was fucking obsessed with Eragon when I was little!! I wore the hell out of my original hardcover and reread it when the second one came out, and again + Eldest when the 3rd came out, and so on (I was admittedly also a HP kid, but the more swords & sorcery-type magic fantasy was always more appealing to me, so I latched onto Eragon). As an artsy kid also BIG into creative writing and RP i thought it was so fucking cool how young he was when Eragon was published lol

I pre-ordered and read Murtagh when it came out last year and am looking at the special hardcover coming out in October with the fancy edge & bonus material :') (i imprinted on Murtagh specifically as a kid he's my fav) These books hold a v special place in my heart alongside Cornelia Funke's Inkworld Trilogy🩵🩵🩵 (& many other Funke books tbqh). Was delighted to find out a few days ago she's writing another book in the Inkworld series i think is coming out in the fall??? 👀👀👀👀

I was also personally wronged by the screen adaptations of BOTH Eragon and Inkheart and to this day I am owed financial compensation for the emotional distress caused by both films lmfao my mom n cousin took me to Eragon when it came out bc they knew I loved it i was SO excited and I walked out of that theater THE most bitterly enraged 13 year-old😂

I am. Terrified of a possible series, but at least with a series there's the opportunity for better pacing lmao I still find some of the movie casting Fun