Case 2: Star Wars vs. Eragon

            Due to popular demand (by which I mean a friend asked me to do it), I’m going to do another paper comparing the original Star Wars with Eragon.  Now, this going to be a bit different from the other one because Eragon is almost exactly like A New Hope, so I’m going to do a plot summary of Eragon and make special note of its similarities to and deviances from the plot of A New Hope, then I will do a character-arc comparison based on the entirety of both series.  I will exclude the film version of Eragon because much like the Star Wars Christmas Special it doesn’t actually exist outside of your mind; they’re just painful hallucinations that your mind creates while you go through the gom jabar. 

            As to my qualifications: of course I’m a Star Wars fan.  I’m also an Inheritance Cycle fan (bet you didn’t know Eragon had a series name huh?), which is a bit of a tribulation when one goes on the internet.  It’s something else to do with the popularity effect again: Eragon was made into a move so there was backlash against it, then the movie sucked I mean doesn’t exist so there was further backlash.  As a result the series developed quite a hatedom, which is the opposite of a fandom.   This hatedom developed rabies and became a hate-dumb, a slovenly order of creature just shy of troll.  There’s a magnificent thread on the forums of TV Tropes where a guy bitches on and on about how Eragon is a Mary-Sue because he shouldn’t be able to wield a falchion because he trained with a longsword goddammit, and this other guy keeps trying to tell him that from the information presented in the book, the sword is an English falchion, but the first guy won’t listen and continues his griping, until the second guy provides a link to an image of an English falchion which is essentially just a longsword that’s only sharp on one side, and the thread suddenly ends.  Now, if it had been literally any other character in fiction, no one would care what kind of bloody sword he’d been using.  That’s what we’re dealing with here.

            Mind you, Star Wars has had nearly forty years to develop both an impressive hate-dumb and fan-dumb.  Just say “Expanded Universe” in a room full of fans and watch them come to blows over whether they are canon or an AU or if they suck or if they’re better than the movies and blasphemy, lynch the fucker.  And while the prequel trilogy is universally agreed upon to be inferior to the original series, God help you if you say you enjoyed a minute of it!  Especially so if you are a younger Star Wars fan who saw the prequel series first.  And the old guard, the ones who were lucky enough to see those movies in theaters, who were genuinely shocked that Darth Vader and Luke were actually the twin personalities of criminal mastermind The Joker (that’s a joke, shut up), are rat-bastards about it.  Recently I read a ravenous comment on a picture featuring Leia saving Sleeping Beauty (awesome) that was essentially a two page paper about how new things are awful, wherein the author of the comment attacked the prequel films, the Expanded Universe, Disney, Calvin & Hobbes, George Lucas, and the critically acclaimed 2009 Star Trek, saying that all of those things were abominations pandering to a modern audience instead of pandering to him and his taste and his nostalgia specifically.  It made me sick to my stomach.  Fuck you, guy.  Fuck your very soul.

            I suppose I said all of that to equalize the two series in your mind by making you equally appalled at their collective fans.  If it made you physically ill, I offer you this riddle to take your mind off of things.  As I was heading to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives.  Each of his wives had seven sacks and each of their sacks had seven cats and each of those cats had seven kits and each of those kits had seven mitts.  How many were going to St. Ives?  You mull that over while I get on with the paper (read: watch a YouTube video).

            Anyways: Eragon is the tale of a young farmboy who finds himself a dragon’s egg.  He becomes psychically bonded to it like the legendary order of dragon riders that once protected the land until they were betrayed by a handful of young prodigies and destroyed, establishing a vaguely oppressive Empire.  When the Empire catches wind of this, they send a pair of shadowy badass monster-men to hunt him down and either kill him or take him to the emperor, but he’s not home so they kill his adopted father instead.  This is the first major deviation from Star Wars, but unfortunately while the seeds of major plot shift are planted in this first book they don’t bear fruit until later books, giving the ravenous hate-dumb room to grow.  What I mean is, Eragon’s motivation for much of the series is revenge; even after joining the rebellion, he’s still on the lookout for these nasty beetle-dudes, and whenever he learns a new spell, his first thought is “can’t wait to try it on them”. 

            So he gets himself a wise old mentor named Brom, who is implied to be a retired Dragon Rider (surpirse surprise; he is!); Brom teaches him how to use magic, swordfight, and properly ride his dragon, Saphira.  The two of them go bug-hunting and spend some time in a city where they check records concerning the sale of a certain kind of caustic oil that was used to torture Eragon’s uncle.  I don’t remember this scene from Star Wars.  Also, Eragon meets a delightfully quirky witch named Angela who in the nonexistent movie was changed into a generically creepy if kinda hot lady with no plot relevance.  Anyways, Angela reads Eragon’s fortune and tells him he’s the chosen one!  Except that that’s just hate-dumb propaganda and doesn’t happen; no one ever says that Eragon is special in any way, except for the fact that he’s the only Rider on the good-guy’s side!  Having a Rider is like having an ICBM in this series.  She just tells him that he’ll live a long life and fall in love with royalty, but it won’t work out, which is only a little more reliable than a fortune cookie in Seattle on Election Day.  Her were-cat Solembum (heh, solemn bum) however tells Eragon some cryptic bullshit that won’t pay off for four books, but that’s okay.

            So the gang piles onto the Mystery Dragon and heads to another city where the largest shipment of the oil went and try to find out where the miserable buggy hitmen are hiding, but someone sics the guards on Eragon and they flee into the desert, where they are ambushed by said insectoid assassins, and one of them kills Brom.  Eragon doesn’t even scratch them, and feels pathetic and worthless and angsty, as well he should, because Brom was the best character in the series.  But he teams up with a dashing rogue named Murtaugh who actually does not resemble Han Solo at all; he’s a gloomy bastard.          Anyway, Eragon starts having prophetic visions of a sexy elf-maid in chains and rather than taking a cold shower like a normal person, he tries to find her instead.  Thankfully, it does not turn out to be his sister.  So they track her down to a military base in some other city but Eragon gets captured by a monster called a shade, which is basically what Cartman sees when he encounters a ginger.  They fight it off and rescue the elf, Arya, who is slowly dying from poison and needs to be taken to the Varden, aka the rebels.  Murtaugh doesn’t want to, but the gang kind of forces him to come along, and he kind of has to once they’re in the middle of the desert and being chased by urgals.  Urgals, by the way, are the orcs of this series.  They have horns, and some of them are giant.  Moving on.

            Murtaugh angstily reveals that he is the bastard child of King Galbatorix’ most trusted enforcer, Morzan, the actually long-dead Darth Vader of this series.  Bet you didn’t see that one coming.  Eragon and Saphira are assholes and he bitches them out.  Eventually they reach the hidden rebel base in the ridiculously huge Beor Mountains and find out that the rebels are actually renting space in a dwarven city.  Arya gets her treatment, Eragon meets some asshole magic users, a few friendly dwarves, and the rebel leader and his sexy daughter, who are both black.  I mention this because I find that the best gauge of a fantasy work’s quality is the ability of the author to explain the presence of black people in his medieval European setting, because how many of you have seen a really shitty fantasy movie where there are just black people randomly mixed in with the extras?  Your society isn’t advanced enough to have proper waste disposal and yet they have a fully integrated military?  Don’t call me racist; whenever fantasy authors want to have an Asian guy they make him part of this really complex Asian style culture which is almost always a foreign power somewhat removed from the main action, unless they’re the antagonist (The Seanchan, the Counterweight Continent, others).  But I digress.

            Eragon is asked to bless a baby in the scene that probably led to the misconception that he’s special.  The old woman who asked him calls him “argetlam” a term that is rarely used outside of this sequence where he’s living in the dwarven city, which is actually the dwarven word for Dragon Rider.  He blesses the girl and Saphira marks her with a silver star.  This will have far-reaching consequences, mostly by creating an evil mutant baby named Elva who is the second best character in the series.  A horde of Urgals attacks the dwarven city with a weapon that can destroy a planet except not really.  Eragon kills the shade, Durza, in an awesome scene where Arya and Saphira distract it by exploding a gigantic diamond all over Durza, but Eragon gets a nasty scar for his trouble, much like how Luke is disfigured in his fight with Darth Vader, the shade being the Darth Vader of the first book.  Except, I think that this is handled better in Inheritance.  Please don’t hurt me, just wait a bit and I’ll explain.  Think about that riddle until you forget what I just said.

            I’m gonna cut down on the plot details now though because I mostly did it to get the big issues out of the way; Eragon’s resemblance to A New Hope.  Yes, there is a definite resemblance, a very strong resemblance, but I’ve got to tell you, Christopher Paolini wrote this when he was 15 and his dad published it for him.  Who would’ve known that Knopf, a major publisher, would’ve picked it up and distributed it around the world?  Or that Time Magazine would call him handsome?  Seriously they call everyone who writes a book handsome.  They better not forget to call me handsome when I get published!

            This doesn’t excuse him, but he’s still better than that guy who wrote The Sword of Shyamalan or whatever the fuck it’s called, which is literally just Lord of the Rings with the names changed.  Anyway, he’s a far better writer than I was a fifteen.  Like Susanne Collins, he’s got that description thing down.  Alagaesia is a rich and interesting world, and this becomes more apparent in the sequels.  Which is not to say that Star Wars isn’t, but it’s a completely different medium; movies need a good setting more than books do, and Star Wars is no slouch in that department.  And again, this is not to say that books don’t need a good setting, all fiction needs a good setting, and if you don’t believe me go see one of those minimalist plays where unshaven hipsters in nostalgic t-shirts pretend to be Romeo and Juliet and tell me how immersed in the plot you weren’t.  Now, let’s get on with the head-to-head analysis!  To the hero!

            Eragon and Luke are definitely both “avatar” characters like Shuya in BR.  Luke is definitely less so, because you can’t do it in movies to the same extent as books, because you have actors that look and sound differently from anyone else, but they both definitely have that personality, a sort of blank slate for you to project your insecurities on.  You want them to get revenge and get the girl because that means you get revenge and get the girl; you don’t want to have a sad ending.  And that is why you scour yourself with steel wool when Leia turns out to be your sister I mean Luke’s sister.  The more distinct a character’s personality, the more likely they are to come to a bad end, unless the creator is fucking with you and wants you to be suicidal at the end of the movie when your avatar gets raped and murdered or his live interest is your sister I mean his sister.

            Anyway though, here’s the thing I promised earlier that I made you forget about with that riddle.  When Luke gets his hand cut off, he has it replaced with a mechanical one and other than that, there are no consequences.  He never complains about the lack of feeling or the pain or how much clumsier it must be or how long it took for him to get used to it or oh no I accidentally broke this glass because my new hand is too strong!  He just covers it with a single black glove and gets on with it.  If someone saw Jedi without seeing Empire, they would just assume that Luke took fashion tips from Michael Jackson for most of the movie.  And we know prosthetics in this world suck because Darth Vader is a lumbering mess of a man, so why doesn’t Luke ever say anything about it?!  Even without seeing how spry he was as Anakin or how much of his body is actually mechanical, not even you old guard bastards can look me in the eye and say you didn’t think Vader was a cyborg!

            Eragon’s scar however is cursed, and it completely cripples his ability to do nearly anything of use for most of the second book, Eldest.  He pretty much resigns himself to failure and just hopes that he can maybe train the next Rider after him.  He’s devastated, until the elves heal him with their super-magic that’s somehow still not strong enough to fight the Empire.  Now, the Vader!

            I use this term to refer to the true villain’s main enforcer.  TV Tropes would call this character a Dragon, but we’re already talking about actual dragons so that would be confusing.  Darth Vader is a mechanical monster who can choke you to death with his mind and deflect light with his palm.  He’s got a deep booming voice like the rumblings of the earth (like a dragon!) and he’s clad head to toe in shining black armor that even obscures his face, covering it with a mockery of the human form.  He’s a cyborg samurai-magician, combining the most sinister tropes of every form of genre into one nightmarish being.  No wonder Luke fights him in his mind on Dagobah, no wonder he’s the most feared creature in the galaxy (one hesitates to call him a man), much wonder that some people still have the balls to mock his religion to his face (remember that first dude he strangles in A New Hope?  That’s basically what he did).  And it turns out he loves his son.

            That’s a perfect fucking character right there.  What does Inheritance offer us?  Not much; a ginger kid in Eragon, a traitor with a red dragon from the second book onwards, and Morzan in the backstory.  Morzan is essentially, well, Kinpatsu Sakamochi with magical powers and a touch of Darth Vader’s class.  It doesn’t help that he’s been dead since before the first book, or that there’s a scare that he might be Eragon’s dad (yawn).  Mind you he’s not; Paolini was exploiting our expectations to make the real twist less contrived.  Moving on to the dashing rogue!

            Do I really need to tell you about Han Solo?  He shot first man.  He is the dashing rogue.  They invented that term to describe Han Solo.  He’s a space cowboy and a pirate, making him essentially Malcolm Reynolds’ grand-daddy, or at least his cool uncle with a motorcycle.  Also, he’s basically a smoother version of Toshiro Mifune’s character Kikuchyo from the masterpiece Seven Samurai, one of the main inspirations for not only Star Wars but surprisingly enough the western genre of film.  Yeah, Toshiro Mifune was awesome.  Have you seen Samurai 7 by the way?  It’s a sci-fi anime adaptation of Seven Samurai, basically bringing the whole thing full circle.  Where was I? 

            Ahem.  Murtaugh however is a fairly interesting character in his own right.  He’s an angsty git unlike his Star Wars counterpart, but he has reason to be.  His dad was a physically abusive alcoholic pervert and his mom was daddy’s private assassin.  How abusive was he?  He threw a three-foot long enchanted broadsword at the kid when he was only five; it would’ve killed him if Morzan hadn’t been drunk.  And then he becomes the traitor in Eldest and tells Eragon that they’re (half) siblings.  Asshole right?  Galbatorix, the emperor, learned his dragon’s true name while it was still in its egg, and used their psychic link to learn Murtaugh’s as well.  Having someone’s true name essentially lets you control them, but they’re aware of it the entire time.  If they try to resist they’ll pop a vein and then do it anyway as they bleed out on the inside.  Anyway though, being a magic-knight who rides dragons and wields a red broadsword is pretty chill.  Not quite the same moveset as a Rogue though.

            The mentor!  Obi-Wan doesn’t really have much personality in the original series, he develops that in the prequels (or does he lose it sitting in the desert for 20 years?), oh shit, he said the prequels are better in some minor way, burn the witch—how many are going to St. Ives again?  Obi-Wan doesn’t need much of a personality, he’s smart and compassionate, and a great teacher, and Luke doesn’t need a quirky hipster of a teacher who likes to argue about how the latest holoplay isn’t as good as the original text-packet (did you know there’s no paper in the Star Wars universe?  That’s weird yo). Brom however is awesome.  He and Eragon know each other for much longer than Obi knows Luke and so they (and therefore we the readers) get to know them both better and the result is that Brom is awesome.  He’s a former Rider from a city full of weirdoes who murders the shit out of Morzan for killing Brom’s dragon, the original Saphira (aw), who founded the Rebel Alliance I mean the Varden and stole Saphira II’s egg right out from under Galby’s nose.  He’s got a ring full of stored up magical power (which Eragon wastes in the fourth book like a tool) and a blue sword named Undbitr, which I think is a cool name.  So there.

            The princess!  Leia’s a strong beautiful young woman (whose actress was constantly worrying about her weight; irony? Maybe) who doesn’t need a man in her life, unlike Hollywood’s perception of strong beautiful young women, who simply feel the need to remind everyone that they don’t need a man in their life, but (twist!) actually do.  What?  Anyway, Leia’s basically a female version of Shogo Kawada when you think about it, except that she’s not a little gangster but an upper-class lady.  She knows her way around a blaster, she’s not above seducing the enemy (why the Hell else was she laying like that and acting all coy when Luke showed up?), she’s a skilled politician, and if the EU is to be believed she’s also a good cook.  So, yeah, the perfect woman.  She does begin to show more emotional vulnerability once she acknowledges that she’s in love with Han, and again when Luke reveals that they’re related and flies off on a big red dragon.

            Of course Arya’s a princess, do you think I’m comparing two dissimilar series?  Phaw.  Anyway, she can do just about everything Leia can after she gets out of her angst I mean poison induced coma, including use magic if you recall the end of Jedi when Leia turns out to be the “other”.  That said, Leia is a fiery passionate individual, while Arya is cold, calculating, and something of a loner.  Since they are thankfully not related, she ends up reciprocating Eragon’s feelings but due to their duties must be separated for, it seems like eternity, literally since they’re both immortal.  The shell that she’s put up around herself begins to crack when Eragon starts to delve into her backstory.

            The Emperor!  Palpatine gets extra points for essentially being the emperor.  It seems to me that Star Wars has some of the most iconic villains in genre fiction; Palpatine, Vader, Greivous, Saruman the White.  According to his own actor, “Palpatine is evil, more evil than the devil.  The devil, at least, had a fall.”  Imagine him saying that in his Palpatine voice with his creepy fucking Palpatine face leering at you, and after you’ve finished changing yourself come back here and finish reading you damned sissy.  Of course, we don’t really get to see him be all that badass until the prequel movies, where he’s scooting his geriatric ass around like one of those jumping spiders.  And his Imperial regalia are just a dirty black cloak, I mean come on.  Shaddam Corino has a throne of jade, the Emperors of Melnibone have a throne of living ruby that emits blindingly bright light, the Fire Lord has a throne made of red velvet and carved golden flames surrounded by actual flames, and you have a cape and a Bond-villain chair!  Did you buy it from The Claw after he gave up on getting that Gadget?

            Before talking about King Galbatorix, I’m going to address another complaint of the Inheritance hate-dumb.  One of the biggest ones out there is that we “never see the Empire do anything really evil”, “Galbatorix just got rid of some corrupt power mongers!  Who watches the watchmen?!  I saw that movie today!!”, “The worst thing he did was raise taxes!”  Fuck you.  Fuck your very soul.  That is a thing now; you made it be a thing.  Galbatorix overthrew the previous regime by murdering every last member of it; he successfully committed genocide against the dragons, he drove one of the last surviving dragons insane so it would serve him, he made his imperial regalia out of dragon leather \m/(^_^\m/), he learns his subjects’ true names so they can’t even defect if they want to, he hired a ginger to mind-control an entire race of bloodthirsty warrior-monsters to destroy his enemies and had them practice on his own subjects, he uses the actual souls of murdered dragons as a goddamned power source, he uses the only two members of a species of insect-monster that is described as humanity’s natural predator as his private assassins and of course he knows that they eat his rivals he pays them in slaves!  Oh yeah, he reinstated the slave trade too.  And those taxes?  They’re funding his cold war with the other nations on the continent.  Fuck this guy.  Hmm, I guess I don’t have to say anything else.

            Good night everybody!

Also, you’re the only one heading for St. Ives genius.