#spoilers: eragon

[eldunari-ignasia]

I can’t draw for the moment so instead I’m going to share the highlight of my year which was getting my partner to read Eragon [a new fan]! She’d liveblog her reactions for me and they are my everything:

[next-gazelle]

Murtagh is so upset about being upgraded from secondary antagonist to main character

[magicandmundane]

Murtagh: Yeah, sure, my stupid kid brother is the leader of the Riders. But am I going to acknowledge that? F*ck no. I hate authority, and I am not giving him that ego boost. Now let’s go hunt down this witch and her cult.

Meanwhile, Eragon: *gets nervous when someone says he’s in charge* *literally could not sleep in a bed because Vrael used to sleep there* *turns down positions of authority almost every chance he gets* *is just a goofy little guy who would like to see his big bro every once in a while*

[parkerspancake]

The differences between Eragon&Saphira and Murtagh&Thorn

Saphira: If you hurt yourself, I'm going to kill everyone involved. Eragon: *gets hurt* Saphira: Oh, little one. Come here. *cuddles him for hours* Thorn: If you do that, you're going to hurt yourself. Murtagh: *gets hurt* Thorn: I fucking told you. *grunts disappointed*

[primaphomet]

The Murtagh experience

Original memes below the cut

[a2zillustration]

Why does it always have to be violence

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[bardofthesouth]

Don't know if it'll make sense

But Eragon is a teacher

And Murtagh is a technician

Eragon is always pondering on the *why* of things. How this works, what words did what, and how could he get a better result.

Murtagh is just "alright it's taking a bit more energy outta me than I would've liked, but it's working, so it's fine"

[thankyouretinazer]

thorn really just said “murtagh you need to get laid”

[sparklepirate]

Hey wait shit I just realized something.

So one of the big themes in this book so far is that Murtagh is super super protective over children. It, you know, makes sense that he ruminates on this a lot. He was abused... At every point in his life, but especially as a child. So, while he's extremely hesitant at the idea of having children, he knows that if he were ever to do so, he would give everything in him to be a good father. And in the meantime, he is viciously protective over the children he meets- Essie, saving her from Sarros and making sure she's safe from her father. The street urchins in Gil'ead, beating up their dad for being neglectful towards them (perhaps not the most tactful move, but still). His whole motivation for helping Carabel in the first place was purely to save Silna, because he couldn't stand the idea of a child being scared or hurt, or suffering any of the same horrible experiences that he did.

Which. Um. Made me wonder.

... Does Murtagh know that Eragon made Elva? Like... Like he probably knows she exists, but does he know, like, what her powers do to her, and how she got them, and that it was Eragon's fuck up that made her and made her suffer so much? Because uhhh. He would lose his absolute fucking mind over it if he ever found out. 😬😬😬😬

[eldunari-ignasia]

Thinking about my top three favorite scenes throughout the Inheritance Cycle and I think my choices are a little sappy in the end. All three are moments wherein Eragon and Saphira are just giddy with the joy of being near each other OR scenes in which there's a lot of catharsis. I just like to seeing them outside of the Horrors of War for once.

Putting my picks under the readmore to avoid spoiling scenes for anyone who HASN'T read the books yet. If any Inheritance fans are out there... cmere... I just want to talk.

Brisingr | Reunion Eragon and Saphira's second reunion in Tronjheim never fails to get a reaction out of me. I always know when the chapter is coming up but it always hits just as hard as the first time I read it. The separation isn't as heartbreaking as the one before it [Helgrind] but it still makes me ache- all the giggles that follow when she gets the hiccups really add it to it. One of those scenes that reminds you of how young they both are and how deeply the bond between them goes.

Eragon | Master of the Blade Our protagonist, a farm boy and a dragon, play in a lake [that's it!]. It's another one of those rare "Eragon and Saphira are just having fun" scenes that I can never get enough of. Because of the nature of the narrative, and the nature of narratives in general, the characters don't have a ton of downtime to just enjoy themselves. There are plenty of moments wherein Eragon is happy but not many where he's doing something just for the fun of the activity- it's not a luxury that he is allowed.

Brisingr | Two Lovers Doomed, Inheritance YES, this is literally two chapters and YES, you should have seen it coming. Eragon finally getting to know the truth of his father [Brom] and getting more insight into who Selena was? It was everything to me. The truth is hinted at frequently enough and intrigue about who his parents were and what they were like is set up in book one baby. There are 157,220 words in Eragon, roughly 176,000 in Eldest, and you have to get through 604 PAGES of Brisingr before you get to know the full truth. The catharsis is as real for the reader as it is Eragon himself.

Honorable mentions: 4. Every single dragon POV chapter. 5. Every interaction between Eragon and the villagers of Carvahall in Brisingr [bread making scene <3 Eragon paying Gedric for the saddle leather <33 Gifts of Gold is another favorite chapter of mine]. 6. Every Nasuada scene [no the ones with the horrible worms]. 7. Eragon and Saphira drunk singing.

[bijectiveandinvertible]

I'm reading Murtagh and this part immidiately hit me:

Eragon used magic on his stubble... like without even a thought.

Meanwhile Murtagh actually thinks things through. I'm crying.

[arielta]

I might try to write down all of my thoughts on the MURTAGH book later, but for now I just want to say that one of the things that shocked me the most (in a good way) was the fact that we were SO WRONG about Murtagh being a total nerd in academic settings, like it literally says in the first pages that he haaaates studying and math and history, instead he LOVES DANCING and he even entertains Thorn with some dance moves I...

LET THE BOY DANCE LET HIM DANCE FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE

[lunamond]

Here is Silna thanking Murtagh.

I'm going to be pretty busy next month, so I will only be making quick sketches like this.

If anyone wants to see a specific moment or character from Murtagh or the other books, let me know, I'm open to suggestions. 😊

[saphira-approves]

Okay no I’m not done talking about swords, and their names, because sword names are IMPORTANT okay and they MEAN THINGS—

I rambled in the tags of this post about Eragon and Murtagh naming/renaming their swords to be positive, compared to their fathers’ respective negative sword names, but I want to go further into it.

First is the obvious one, Morzan’s Zar’roc, Misery, and Murtagh’s Ithring, Freedom. I’m almost certain Morzan names his sword as an offensive measure—and I don’t mean offensive as in insulting, I mean it in the combat sense. It’s a curse, almost, upon his enemies: any opponent he faces with this blade will be struck by misery, literally. But one thing we know about Morzan: he’s not particularly wise, and even his best works backfire on him. We see it with Selena, and his confidence that she loves him too much to betray him, so he never warded against her. He named his sword Misery, and Misery is all it brought him: he joined Galbatorix, brought the downfall of the Order, and lost his dragon to nameless madness; he killed Brom’s dragon, making an enemy of the man who once had idolized him and sealing his own demise by Brom’s hand; he threw Misery at his own child and pushed his wife to betray him, which ultimately led to the downfall of everything he had ever worked for. Talk about a curse. He upheld Misery, and Misery came right back to bite him in the ass.

And then Brom took Misery from him, and sequestered it away, and eventually gave it to Eragon without telling him its meaning; and Eragon wielded it without knowing its meaning or history, trying his best to do good with it, and even when he did learn its history and its name he resolved to work to give it a better legacy. After all, a good sword is a good sword. But Murtagh, Morzan’s son and heir, was not done with Misery, bore too painful a scar from Misery to let it go—he took Misery from Eragon and claimed it as his own, claiming his birthright, yes… but taking Misery away from Eragon, in the very same moment that he also protected Eragon from capture and forced servitude, the fate that had befallen Murtagh himself. Complicated as feelings all around may have been, intentional as the act itself may or may not have been, Murtagh here is very much intentionally shouldering that burden. He fully believed that Eragon was another son of Morzan, he could have easily justified rejecting that part of his history and his father’s legacy and offloading it on his younger brother, and yet he didn’t. He took it for himself and declared it his own.

And then he called it Freedom.

After enduring torture and enslavement and a hundred other humiliations, he took Misery in hand and said, no. I do not uphold you. I do not fight for you. I fight for Freedom, for my own and my loved ones’, and for the Freedom of all. He looked at the horror of his past and refused to let it define him. He looked at his father’s mistakes and refused to be bound to them. He took a name of offense, of attack and hostility, and changed it to a name of preservation, of defense, of peace.

And then there’s Eragon, with Brisingr, Fire, and Brom’s mysterious Undbitr, Void-biter. At first glance it may seem that they have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but I would not be here if I wasn’t going to loudly and fervently declare otherwise.

My guess for Brom’s reasoning of naming his sword Undbitr would be somewhere between edgelord teenager antics (look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn’t have wanted a sword name Void Biter at twelve years old) and his admiration for Morzan, who named his sword the simple yet devastatingly clever Misery. Void-biter, bite of death, the bite that would send his opponents to the void. To darkness, to nothingness, to anti-life and anti-hope. A sword lost after his dragon’s death, never seen again, and yet Brom himself succumbs to the bite of his own personal void: he dedicates himself to vengeance, throws everything he has of himself into orchestrating Morzan’s downfall, and the downfall of Galbatorix and the rest of the Forsworn for good measure. It’s implied, from Brom’s own admission of fearing his son would hate him and Oromis’s discussion of his near-suicidal madness after Saphira’s death, that revenge is all Brom lived for until he met Selena—and even after he met her and fell in love with her, I suspect his need for vengeance is what ultimately decided the events leading both to Morzan’s death and Selena’s doomed reunion with Murtagh. Brom may have lost Void-biter, but the void consumed him anyway.

And then there’s Eragon. Yes I’ve said that already but if anything can sum up these books, it’s And then there’s Eragon. The first spell he learns is fire. A dangerous force, certainly, one that can easily break control and wreak untold havoc and destruction, but what force of nature doesn’t fall into that category? He could easily have learned, and thus be represented by, wind or ice or lightning, or even just pain or break. But he didn’t, and he’s not. He wields fire. A force of nature, a destructive weapon… but also the foundation of a home, fire in the hearth; the fuel of invention, to shape metal and glass; and most importantly, a light in the dark, the hope of dawn in the long cold night. Eragon names his sword Brisingr, and it’s not merely a weapon: it is a beacon. His father was consumed by darkness, but Eragon is the one who guided him back to the light, who gave him something to live for after he had defeated his enemy and lost his love; Eragon was the figurehead of the rebellion, the spark that drove a passive resistance into the blaze of true revolution; and now Eragon builds the new hearth of the Dragon Riders, to tend and defend it for future generations.

What a change from misery and the void.

Fire, and freedom. Hope, and peace. Family, and love.

I think Selena would be very proud of her sons.

[phiasoup]

I’ve read the first book of the Eragon recently and really enjoyed it. Sadly I haven’t got the chance to rent the second one from the library but for now I can relax a bit from the Helluva boss/ Hazbin Hotel brain rot and instead spend my time keeping myself from looking up Eragon stuff

[applejuucee]

Managed to go to the Paolini signing for the Murtagh deluxe edition, it was super cool! He implied some things about having another story for Murtagh, and A BOOK WITH HALF AN ARYA POV!!!

Also the most important thing I wanted to share- someone asked a question about why humans reinstated a monarchy after it had done them so much harm. His response was that things like that don't change so quickly, BUT Nasuada and Arya would run into some MAJOR issues as monarchs that would have them reavaluate such positions. I'm thinking paired with this + Murtagh's placement as a free rider + Urgals and Dwarves joining the Rider order, some sort of enlightenment/major structure change within the continent will occur. This could be a few democracies joining an alliance, but I imagine it won't be so easy.

My theory would be that the catalyst is born of necessity against a major enemy - i.e. Azlagur or the like. His awakening (movement of the Spine Mountain Range) would be cataclismic events for humans and urgals, with everyone else following quickly behind. Eragon never returns to "Alagaesia" because it's completely restructured when he needs to come and fight. Probably very wrong, but I think something huge is gonna happen a few books from now.