Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Religion and Culture in Inheritance Cycle

It has been at least four months since the last time I got on Inheritance Cycle’s case, which is entirely too long. So it’s time to rectify that now. A longstanding complaint of the series is the lack of culture within the world of Alagaësia, specifically among the humans of Carvahall. One of the ways Paolini could have fixed this would have been by adding more religion, which is surprisingly absent for a good portion of the first book, despite the fact that there is no logical reason for religion to not play a larger role in the narrative.

In Brightest Day: Eragon (Again)

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about Eragon’s disability during the events of the second book, Eldest, in the Inheritance Cycle series. Originally, I had been torn between writing about that, or writing about whether or not Eragon is a sociopath or a psychopath. While I do believe that Eragon displays many sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies, at the same time, he was also written to be a hero, and so his character becomes confused due to the fact that Paolini tends to tell one thing and show the opposite. As such, Eragon is left with many conflicting personality quirks that make it hard to understand his character.

For example, Eragon seems to have no trouble killing other human beings, to the extent that he rarely has any kind of emotional response to the people’s he’s killed, but as of Eldest, he becomes a vegetarian, because killing animals for food is wrong.

So while Eragon comes across as a horrible murderer sometimes, other times he can come across as a relatively decent guy. Relatively.

In Brightest Day: Eragon

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the abomination that is this series, so let’s talk about it again. When it comes to Eragon, I sometimes don’t even know where to begin. Christopher Paolini’s books are shit, and Eragon himself is so obviously a self-insertion, that I’m not sure if the author was ever able to separate himself from the character.

Unfortunately, because Eragon is a self-insert for Paolini, his character is given a lot of leeway and is handed rewards for almost no reason except that the author thinks he deserves them. Nowhere is this more apparent than near the end of the second book, Eldest, when Eragon is magically healed from a restricting handicap.

Sexualized Saturdays: Eragon from The Inheritance Cycle

I’ve decided to get this one over and done with early on because, quite frankly, outside fanfiction, I really want nothing more to do with Inheritance Cycle. It will only lead to disappointment. Now, I know some of you may be wondering why we’ve included Eragon on this list, since he’s very obviously in love with Arya and seems like someone who’s more or less heterosexual. Or at least I know many fans will be wondering why, before proceeding to get angry at all the following paragraphs. And I also know many of you haters probably knew exactly where this post was going the moment you read the title, but I should also remind everyone that Sexualized Saturdays is meant to explore people of all sexualities. That includes heterosexuality.

However, regardless of the relationship with Arya, many people came out of these books under the not-entirely-unfounded impression that Eragon represses his homosexuality. And again, this is something I disagree with and support. This all comes back to how to rate a story, and this problem wouldn’t be here if the author could show what he wanted, as opposed to telling and showing the opposite. If we go with how Paolini wanted Eragon to be, he’s straight. If we look at how he presents Eragon in the books, however, his sexuality becomes less clear.

An Inherent Disaster: The Inheritance Trilogy—I mean, Cycle

Yeah, I’ve recently come to conclusion that Inheritance Cycle sucks about as much as the title of this post. So quite a lot.

The last book of the series recently came out this month—and about time too, as we’ve only been waiting three years for the damn thing—and I have been planning to do a review of the series for a while now. So now that it’s out, I might as well get started.

Spoilers and a trigger warning for rape after the jump.