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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.