Poll: The Inheritance Cycle (i.e. Eragon)

[Kiefer13]

I read the first two when I was twelve or so and kinda liked them. Went back and tried to read them again a couple of years ago, having read many better books since, and found them pretty terrible. Honestly couldn't force myself to get through them. So yeah, they're pretty terrible if you've something actually good to compare them to.

The film was even worse. Jeremy Irons was literally the only good thing about that movie, and even he couldn't salvage it.

 

[Tiger Sora]

I liked it. It also helped that I barely ever read. My brothers gona get the 4th book when it comes out. And once he's done I'll read it. I'm a Tolkien man myself though.

 

[Hawkmoon269]

It gets alot of flak, because it isnt the most original of novels, and it borrows alot of fantasy elements from the likes of Tolkien, but i really enjoyed it, though more so when i was younger.

It fulfils and important role in the fantasy novel industry; its the kind of book that younger readers will see, buy and then enjoy, before moving onto more complex fantasy stories as they get older. It introduces new readers to the genre, and for that fact alone it deserves some recognition.

 

[Canid117]

Aside from it being a product of borderline plagiarism, it was a decent read.

Someone summed up my opinion for me. Thank you sir. Movie was terrible though.

 

[oden636]

I loved the series. I can see why people complain that its too much like Tolkien and other fantasy worlds but that works for me.
I think the best thing about the book is the way magic works in it. and i Like Roran he is just cool.
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The film needs to be purged from existance

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I like the books, all copies of the movie need to be burned and forgotten. The movie didn't even really follow the books, they changed it so much they can't make the second movie anyway because of what they changed and messed with of the first book's story.

People that cry out plagiarism are just grasping. Truly there are only a select few plot points in all of writing/literature. If you read enough you will know that, you will be able to find similarities in all books to other books. What makes each one different is the wrapping that each same story is covered up with, and The Inheritance books had some awesome wrapping.

It wasn't plagiarism, because that would mean that the books were a word for word copy. Yes the plot was similar to other things, but that isn't plagiarism. If it was then more than 99.9999% of literature is plagiarized.

Now if the magic talked about in the book was called the force, and the main character was named Luke, and he flew an X-Wing and his father turned out to be Darth Vader: That is plagiarism.

Yes, it has some similarities to Star Wars and other stories, but it happens all the time in literature. I would be lying if I said that I had read something that was totally 100% original, as would everybody else.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Aside from it being a product of borderline plagiarism, it was a decent read.

Someone summed up my opinion for me. Thank you sir. Movie was terrible though.

Of course the movie was terrible, it is the perfect example that Hollywood doesn't understand how to turn a book into a movie. Yeah everybody in the movie had the same names as in the book, but that's about all that was the same.

As I said above, they changed it so much that they couldn't even make the second movie if they wanted to. The reason, they killed off the secondary villains the the first movie: In the Book: The Ra'zac killed Brom. In the Movie: Brom killed the Ra'zac. They play a major role in the books after, so ergo, they can't make the second movie.

This just tells me that the people that put it together, didn't actually read the book. They probably read the spark notes and forgot 98% of what they read, then said "let's make a movie...wait, what are we making a movie about again?"

This is the reason why I wouldn't ever let a story of mine get made into a movie unless I had complete control of what got put into it and what got taken out. Of course stuff has to be taken out to get it to movie length, but Hollywood doesn't seem to understand what parts are integral and what is filler.

 

[DrWilhelm]

Badly written, cliche-ridden tripe. The first book is little more than Star Wars filtered through The Lord of the Rings and sprinkled with elements lifted from half a dozen other fantasy greats. The heroes are bland Mary Sues, the setting is uninspiring and the magic system is unimaginative and so poorly designed it's every use seemingly results in either deus ex machina or gaping plot holes. Or both.

Inheritance's only redeeming quality is as a starting point for young readers just getting into fantasy, but then there are better YA books that can serve the same role.

 

[Srs bzns]

Looking past many rip-offs and cliches I really liked it. I've read them through twice and I'm waiting for the fourth. However, more and more, I find the romance scenes with Eragon and Arya just painful to read.

Hahaha they read like pubescent fanfiction. I doubt I could write them better though.

 

[Zeema]

I liked it alot

i can't wait for 4th book

 

[Berethond]

I liked it until I realized how racist it was. The Elves are just automatically better than humans at everything ever? Interesting. (Not.)

I suppose your feelings also go toward LotR as well on this?

Yes, but at least Lord of the Rings wasn't quite so blatant.

 

[AngryNerd]

I read it and like it. It did take a lot from other books, though.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Yes, but at least Lord of the Rings wasn't quite so blatant.

Plus, in LoTR they were actually in decline at the time of the story. Eragon has a tendency to replicate fantasy tropes without understanding why certain things in other better fantasy novels were written the way they were.

 

[bob1052]

I read the first when I was in grade school. Wasn't interesting enough to make me want to get the second.

When i reread it a few years back and I wasn't a little kid anymore I could tell it was almost as painfully poorly written as Twilight.

 

[Jonluw]

I liked it, but I was, like, 14 when the last book came out, I think...
Honestly, I have no idea.

It was an okay read, interesting enough. I wouldn't call it great literature, but I didn't exactly give a fuck about that back then.
The cliches didn't bother me. I hadn't read that many stories, after all. Neither have I now, for that matter, but whatever.

I will probably pick up the last book too. I hate to leave a story unfinished. However, I have no memory of what happened in the last book, exactly, or what the names of all the characters was, so I might have a hard time getting through it.
There's no way I'm re-reading all the other books. I'm way too slow a reader for that. Well, it isn't that my reading speed is bad, but it's rather that I can't concentrate on reading. I sit down, read two sentences, adjust my sitting position, forget where I am, re-read the last sentence and get two sentences further, my ear itches, scratch my ear, forget where I was on the page, re-read the last two sentences, think of something else while staring into the distance, daydreaming, 10 minutes have passed, I've read two pages.

I like how people in this thread are saying it's poorly written and stuff though. No shit guys? It was written by a 15-year old.

 

[TornadoFive]

It's not bad. I've read the current three, and when number 4 comes out, I'll pick it up at some point. Just probably not launch day. They're an OK read, but there's nothing new in them, and it's all been done better by other authors.

 

[1nfinite_Cros5]

At first, I kind of liked it. I thought the writing and dialogue was absolutely laughable, but I held through because it was amusing.

Then the movie ruined them for me.

 

[HooterNanny]

I'm 16, and I still go back to them every now and then, and still love the. Can't wait for the fourth (and hopefully last Paolini! God those cliffhangers with huge gaps in between the books are annoying!).

Honestly, and I might catch some flak for this, the LotR books are fucking aweful. I pick the first one up about once every 6 months and I just can't force myself to get through it. Such a dreary read.

 

[Azahul]

I liked it, admittedly it has the flaws previously mentioned. I like how he did dragons especially, not enough people portray them as intelligent creatures (Tolkien did better though). However I dare anyone to find any sort of media or literature that has added to the fantasy genre with something that can't be argued as a reskin of the fantasy basics, the genre starters don't count.

The way he did dragons was criminal. I'd just finished reading the Dragonriders of Pern series (by Anne McCaffrey), and I couldn't believe it. He'd copied dragons from that almost word for word, excluding the fact that the dragons in Dragonriders were in a Sci-fi setting and had a (kinda) scientific explanation for their abilities that Paolini just called "magic" for his setting. And when I say he copied everything, I mean everything. The telepathic connection to a rider bonded at birth, the death of a rider equaling death for a dragon, but the death of a dragon "merely" reducing the rider to a shell of a man, the dragons changing their riders (although in Dragonriders of Pern this is left rather vague and unspecified, it's even hinted that the belief that Dragonriders are the better men could even be nothing more than folklore).

People that cry out plagiarism are just grasping. Truly there are only a select few plot points in all of writing/literature. If you read enough you will know that, you will be able to find similarities in all books to other books. What makes each one different is the wrapping that each same story is covered up with, and The Inheritance books had some awesome wrapping.

Oh, it's not just the plot (although the plot for the first three books is pretty much exactly the first two and a half Star Wars movies). The magic, for example, is a perfect copy of the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin. The elves were straight from Lord of the Rings (but the had an attitude that made it seem that they thought they were from the Silmarillion, where the LotR elves still had the strength to be a dominant force in the world). The series didn't just copy other stories in the overall plot, even its details are torn straight from other, better books. Legally, it probably isn't plagiarism (or else someone would've sued the man by now). But ripping off other, better authors to make money is as close to being a criminal as you can get, in my mind.

As you might have guessed, not a big fan of the books. To those that say that all literature is copied in some way or another, I laugh in your face. From where I'm sitting, I can see a number of books that I regard as absolutely unique. I can see Anno Dracula, set in the late 1880's in an England ruled by Dracula, where Jack the Ripper has begun stalking vampire prostitutes, and its sequels, and while all of them borrow characters from the public domain (particularly in Victorian literature) the books mesh them together into a setting and plot unlike anything else that I've ever read. I can see half a dozen Terry Pratchett books, which were all rather different from anything I've ever read before (the earlier ones get really weird towards the end...). I can see Kraken by China Mieville, which is both the best and the strangest modern fantasy story I've read in a good long while. The list goes on. Originality is perfectly possible. The Inheritance Cycle is in the exact opposite direction. If it had even been written well, I might have forgiven it, but it isn't and thus I hold it in roughly the same esteem as I do the Twilight series.

 

[Sudenak]

I couldn't even finish Eragon when it first came out. Probably because I read the Hobbit in fourth grade and spent fifth grade through to eighth grade lovingly re-reading the LotR. I also read the Redwall series, and thought Star Wars was pretty lame (with the exception of ANH, but even then I thought it was 'okay').

Really, Eragon's cookie cutter plot and unlikable characters didn't stand a chance. Then the LotR movies came out, with that miserable Eragon movie squeaking by at some point that I care not remember.

Point being: It's awful, there's better fantasy, and I don't get why anyone loves it. Well, I do get it. Everything's gotta have a fan base. Even if it is awful.