Bad Book Blog: Week 2
Week 2: Chapters 2 and 3
Welcome back everybody, and I am going to pretend I didn’t hear cricket noises. Well, for everybody who has returned, I thank you, and I say we dive right into chapter three of Eragon, entitled “Palancar Valley.” And yes, it really is more filler.
Ok, that was a lie, because I feel like I should point this out, starting here is where I started to really slam my head against the book, so if you hear a really loud whack, that’s just me giving myself a concussion (which really isn’t all that hard to do, as I’m the only person ever to get a concussion from a sit up).
After Eragon wakes up, he, of course has breakfast. He’s hunting because he’s afraid if he doesn’t get meat his family will starve. Ok, this is one of those times when I’m calling bullshit. From my own research, peasant families in this time setting, usually only ate once a day, because they couldn’t afford more, if they gorged themselves, they’d eventually run out of food and starve to death. It was also rare that they would ever eat meat. Meat was a luxury. And this kid acts like meat is the only kind of food in the world. Some of our first indications that our author, Mr. Paolini, never bothered to research anything when he began writing this shit. I honestly think that everything he wrote was done because it sounded cool. There’s no other explanation for this slap to the face. Ok, somebody please give me the ‘it’s a fantasy excuse,’ because this is my response; if you’re going to set your story in a medieval setting with your protagonist as a peasant farmer, THEN MAKE THE PROTAGONIST PEASANT FARMER.
Moving on, despite the fact that the forest caught on fire and some giant paperweight showed up out of nowhere, Eragon is completely nonchalant about the whole affair. After he decides that nothing else weird, you know like a RANDOM EXPLOSION, happened while he peacefully slumbered, he heads on home, giving us yet another info dump about how scary the Spine is, and why Eragon is cool because he’s awesome enough to survive it. Drink. And no, we don’t actually see any of that, since so far the only thing Eragon has done in this place was hunt for a disabled deer (and yes, I’m still bitter).
And while he’s doing that, I feel like I need to complain again. The characters are still using swords, and I’ve yet to see any use of gun powder… wouldn’t a random explosion be more exciting that a paperweight? How many explosions does a fifteen year old peasant living in a medieval village actually see? Damn it, stop it, I’m thinking again! You can’t think when you want to read this book if you want to stay sane!
Oh, don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything with my rant. He just kept travelling, fell asleep, and then travelled some more (boy, this book really gets to the point quick, doesn’t it?). And then… guh. “Before him lay Palancar Valley, exposed like an unrolled map.” *Whack!* Yes. That is really in the book. And yes, it really is that stupid. First, let me just point out how dumb it sounds description-wise. An unrolled map… is a map. A FLAT surface that, particularly in that time, probably wouldn’t have much in the way of color. So basically, his home looks like a bunch of ink blots. Anybody else think of Indiana Jones right there? Second, our protagonist is a farm boy. A peasant farm boy. When the flippoty-flop would he need to see a map to know what one even looks like? Bullshit!
Sigh. Eragon describes the valley in stupid detail with a lot of stupid sounding names before he finally decides to head on home. And prepare to smack yourself in the head again.
“The village was composed of stout log buildings with low roofs-some thatched, others shingled. Smoke billowed from the chimneys, giving the air a woody smell. The buildings had wide porches where people gathered to talk and conduct business.”
*WHACK WHACK WHACK*
This is NOT a peasant village, and there is a difference between poor and peasant. Real peasants lived in huts, if they were LUCKY those huts had two rooms, and the buildings were held together by crappy wood and plaster. Oh, AND THEY DIDN’T HAVE CHIMNEYS. OR SHINGLED ROOFS. Think about this, they needed to farm in order to feed their families, would they really waste that much time to shingle their house, especially when they spend all of their time out in the field? Does that make sense in any way?
Getting back to the point, Eragon heads over to the butcher, and unlike the Agony Booth recapper, I’m not going to complain, because medieval villages did actually have a butcher. I will say this about the butcher, he hates Eragon, but he’s a prick according to everybody, so it doesn't count. Drink. Well, there’s a useless exchange where the butcher mocks Eragon for his lack of hunting booty (the kid couldn’t even kill a disabled deer, and he’s a master hunter, how?) and demands to be paid in money for his meat, because, you know, peasants have money and all and never used a bartering system. *Whack*
Eragon tries to barter with the paperweight (and yes, I will continue to call the stone/egg a paperweight until it actually does something important, maybe even afterwards). And apparently, a paperweight is worth ten times three crowns, or something. I don’t know, it’s a pretty blue stone, but I can’t imagine a butcher really has any use for it. Unless he really needs something heavy to hold down his invoices.
Finally, Eragon decides to take the meat and sell the paperweight for three crowns, but the butcher changes his mind when he hears Eragon found it in the Spine (out of curiosity, where the bloody hell did you think he was hunting?). And yes, this comes just as suddenly as it sounds. Really. He hears “Spine” and then shouts “Get out!”
Well, because Eragon is a Gary Stu and the butcher’s just a dick, the town black smith who does nothing except be nice to Eragon, so is therefore an important character, shows up. He gives the butcher a murderous glare and pays for Eragon’s meat, enough meat to fill up his entire knapsack. See, he has money, and he can buy all this meat for a kid who isn’t a part of his family, because he’s awesome. That’s a whack-and-drink. We also get to meet Katrina, the butcher’s daughter who happens to be dating Eragon’s cousin. Why is this important? I really don’t know, but we keep hearing about it, so it must be important.
And before I move on, I would just like to bring your attention to this wonderful turn of phrase that has become popular for all the wrong reasons. “The door slammed open.” When Katrina and smithy arrive, this is how they do it, by slamming the door open. Now let me end this by saying how THIS MAKES NO FREAKING SENSE! A door does not slam open, it swings open, it slams shut. Why do people think that a door slams open? It’s moronic! And I have to calm myself again.
Then there’s useless filler where smithy offers Eragon a job as his apprentice in the future, and then Eragon finally heads on home. Eragon lives ten miles outside of town, for some stupid reason, with his uncle Garrow and cousin Roran. Neither character is important in any way, but we still get treated with a bunch of useless crap involving both of them. Oh, and Eragon’s house is shingled with a BRICK chimney, and they own two horses, and they have wooden floors. WOODEN FLOORS. In a farm house. In a peasant village. *Whack whack whack whack!* My head hurts.
Ok, this deserves another rant. When we finally get to meet Uncle Garrow, he’s thin and hungry and “looked like a man who had been partly mummified before it was discovered he was still alive” (ok, it’s a cool description, yet even then it’s still idiotic seeing as how a peasant actually knows what mummification is, unless everybody gets this incredibly complicated and most likely expensive procedure done after death in Alagaësia), yet… he has two horses, a woodstove, quite a bit of farm land, a couple of chickens and a cow. WHY THE BLOODY HELL IS HE STARVING? He has all this crap around him to eat and/or sell to buy food and he’s waiting for a fifteen year old twerp to come back from a completely pointless hunting trip? No, wait, I’ve figured out why Garrow’s starving. Because instead of being around the farm to actually help harvest and do anything useful, Eragon was out chasing after a single, disabled doe. Now it makes sense. Garrow is in such bad shape because of his completely stupid and selfish nephew. Not that he points that out. I think that warrants a drink.
And after a completely pointless argument where Garrow tries to convince us that they really are poor, Eragon pulls out the paperweight. Garrow decides that they’ll try and sell the paperweight to the traders (and I’ll get to why they’re so stupid in a minute) and Eragon can wait yet another day before he does anything helpful for them. I don’t know if I should smack myself with the book, or take a drink, so I’m just going to do both.
The chapter ends with Eragon falling asleep (told you that happens often) and the next picks up with him waking up and giving us an info dump about his mother. Actually, this entire chapter is pretty much an info dump. So let’s see if I can sum this up. Eragon’s mother showed up sixteen years ago, pregnant, and wearing enough money in pearls and fabric to provide for her son for his entire life, and instead takes off the second she names him and asks Garrow and his wife raise him. Without any money. This upsets Eragon for all of five seconds before he goes back to his daily life. He also doesn’t know who his father is, so it’s nice to know that being a bastard child isn’t a big deal in this world. But then again, that would actually give the character depth, so that of course was left out.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s head right into our next rant. Eragon and his family are waiting for traders to arrive because the traders sell stuff the villagers might need for the upcoming year, and they also buy any surplus harvest.
I’ll let you soak that one in.
Can I just point out the basic plot of this book? Apparently Eragon is some sort of chosen hero who’s going to save the world from the king, with the funny name Galbatorix. And yet, I have yet to see him do anything evil… he’s… king, I guess. And yet, he’s actually a hell of a lot more lenient than every other king in our history. In real medieval times, people had to give a good chunk of their harvest to the church and the people in charge. Meaning there was rarely anything left over for them to sell, and if there was, especially when people provided for themselves like this, odds are, they’d keep it SO THEY WOULDN’T STARVE. So yes, this is stupid, because 1.) what the hell does the king do that’s actually so horrible as to have a rebellious force against him, and 2.) why the fuck are these people starving if they have surplus harvests?
And I also want to point out, we’re on page 32 and so far nothing’s happened.
Well, Eragon and Garrow meet with a trader who tells them (surprise surprise) that he can’t sell the paperweight because nobody actually has use for a paperweight. And he doesn’t know what it is. And this is another reason why I like the movie more, there Eragon at least tried to keep the damn thing hidden, here he’s telling just about everybody about it.
And it’s time for another info dump! Which, I believe exists solely to make us think that the king is evil, because he’s giving out false information. That fiend!
Apparently, the traders were late this year (by a couple days, which caused a huge uproar for the characters, despite the fact that there was a giant blizzard that stuck all of them inside for a couple of days, and the traders are moving a huge cargo, pretty much on foot) because Urgals are now apparently working with the Varden, a rebel group that hates the king, because he’s evil and all that, and the king had to send more soldiers to towns to fight them off. See, this makes him evil, because the Urgals are really working for him! Again, I assume, because that’s how it was in the movie, the book kind of sucks in that regard.
Then there’s more filler, and some stupid stuff about people selling their seeds for low prices, when they need the money, instead of doing something smart with their seeds and, you know, planting them, then you really don’t need money, but I’m sick of complaining about the same damn thing. Oh and we get yet another info dump about the Varden, and how they hate the Empire, because it’s evil, and they want to overthrow it. And even in the book, they make a good case of why this is dumb. Seriously, verbatim; “the majority of us have nothing to complain about. Every country has some small group of malcontents who aren’t satisfied with the balance of power.” And that actually makes sense! So far, I have yet to see the king do anything that’s even remotely evil. There is nobody affected in this town, he doesn’t even expect a ration out of their harvests (something that every lord or empire asked for in the real world), really the only bad thing about their situation is that they’re poor. But that’s still not a legit reason, because no matter what government you have, PEOPLE ARE STILL POOR. Things aren’t going to suddenly get better with a regime change. Especially if that regime change follows a war. How was Germany after World War I? How about Italy after World War II? How’s Afghanistan and Iraq dealing with all the crap we’re doing to them?
Sigh. There’s more filler, and then we get our biggest info dump of the chapter, where Brom the storyteller (He’s Obi Wan Kenobi, pretty much, except not as cool, and not nearly as hilarious as Herbert the pedophile’s Obi Wan Kenobi on Family Guy) talks about Galbatorix’ rise to power. And again, let’s see if I can make this quick.
So, the country used to be ruled by the Dragon Riders, who for ridiculous reasons, despite having all this power and whatnot were completely good and everything was dandy and everyone was living in the Garden of Eden, pretty much. Then some kid named Galbatorix was born and eventually was given a dragon (kind of goes against the story later, but whatever, I’ll cover that when we get there). He decided to be cocky and took a random trip with his buddies, when they were attacked by Urgals, his friends were killed and so was his dragon. He goes crazy, demands a new dragon, and instead of saying this physically can’t happen, the head Riders, Elders, refuse to give him one. He gets pissed off, becomes paranoid and with the help of a fellow nutjob, kills an Elder, kills the fellow nutjob, then hides out, because “he was cunning in his madness,” because those two always go hand in hand. *Whack!*
So he’s hiding out, and after a while, the other Riders decide to just forget about him, because they can’t find him… despite the fact that they have dragons, and all that. And I really hope some of the powers that Eragon gets in the movie are directly from the book, because that will make this entire situation all the more hilariously stupid. Anyways, eventually, Galby (And I’m just going to call him that from now on because his name is just too long and annoying to have to constantly see on paper) gets an apprentice in Morzan and he also gets a new dragon (hurrah!). They eventually find twelve more friends, because this group’s power can only ever be used for good *whack*, and Galby’s men become the Thirteen Forsworn. The other Riders were apparently “unprepared”-which in other words means that they could keep the peace as long as there was peace, but when an actual opponent came into the picture, they were pretty damn useless-and get killed off, save but one. Vrael, the sole remaining Rider goes after Galby, gets beaten, runs, gets discovered and then Galby “kicked Vrael in the fork of his legs” and kills him. Yes, Galby beat the last Rider Elder guy by kicking him in the nads. This is our villain, ladies and gentlemen, Galby the Ballcrusher.
After that, Galby becomes king and so ends our info dump. And as Brom and everybody take their leave, Garrow tells Eragon and Roran that if the king found out Brom was talking about it, he’d be dead within a month. Still, completely pointless and pretty damn filler like. We really could have heard all of this when something WAS HAPPENING too. But we don’t. In fact, we’re on page 51 now and still NOTHING HAS HAPPENED EXCEPT THAT THEY TALK ABOUT A FREAKING PAPERWEIGHT!
Damn it, I keep trying to make this thing shorter and cover more, but every freaking page gives me something to complain about! Well, on the plus side, I think I’ve proven that you don’t need fifty pages to get all this crap out of the way. Hell, I managed to cover all of this, and my own personal rants, in ten. Still long, but we’re getting there. Well, next week, something actually happens, so stay tuned for that!