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My complaint about Paolini was that he took a reasonably generic plot idea and... wrote it generically. His worldbuilding wasn't original, in any capacity. His characters were boring. His elves wer...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-13T12:00:46Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32867 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T07:47:35Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32867 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
My complaint about Paolini was that he took a reasonably generic plot idea and... wrote it generically. His worldbuilding wasn't original, in any capacity. His characters were boring. His elves were cookie-cutter, if you'll pardon the phrase. It particularly ticked me off because he was writing about "boy finds dragon egg, hatches dragon, raises baby dragon" and it was just. so. generic. I threw the dang thing across the room. The book I had finished prior to _Eragon_ was the gorgeous [_Joust_](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0756401534) by Mercedes Lackey, which is _also_ about "boy finds dragon egg, hatches dragon, raises baby dragon," but with thoughtful worldbuilding and distinct characters and beautiful descriptions and a real sense of time passing and an actual plot and real stakes. There's the old saw that there are only like forty plots in all human literature, and what makes any particular telling good is whether it is original and relatable. Paolini's sin was that his version was neither.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-01-29T22:12:25Z (almost 7 years ago)
Original score: 8