Eragon pt. four
Jan. 17th, 2007 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kippurbirdChapter Awakening
Characters Eragon, baby dragon
Shiny magical objects in Eragon's possession One baby dragon
Summary
Trying this again since LJ ate my first post.
Awakening begins with a description of the baby dragon. While the description is fairly standard there is something anatomically incorrect about the way Paolini describes the dragon's wings. If we keep in mind that a dragon's wing is usually another hand modified for flight. There's the thumb and the hand and it usually looks like this:
However Paolini describes the dragon's wing as such, "... and ribbed with thin fingers of bone that extended from the wing's front edge, forming a line of widely spaced talons." Now, I'm assuming that since he went out of his way to describe the dragon's wing that it's not a normal looking dragon's wing. So, I tried to sketch out what such a wing would look like and came up with this:
The blue lines are the bone and it doesn't really look that feasible of a bone structure. But apparently anatomy isn't for mysterious dragons.
Now that the dragon has hatched, one would assume that it is hungry. After all it has absorbed all the yolk that should have been in the egg (unless, once again, it has teleported into the egg) and it exhorted a lot of energy to get out of that egg. This is how most baby animals react once they are born. They go "Where's the food?" The baby dragon, however, goes about and instead explores the room, curiously. It is only after it bonds itself to Eragon and examines him curiously does he exhibit hunger.
To make a parallel example, look at the dragons from Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern Series. When these dragons hatch, they impress upon a person immediately and then demand food. They don't explore anything or look around curiously until after they've been fed. They also hatch out much larger, now that I think of it, and they grow to be big enough for riding. I don't want to think of the amount of food and energy needed to grow a baby dragon that starts out a foot long into a dragon capable of carrying a full grown human in five months (as Brom says in a later chapter). Pernese dragons aren't capable of carrying a human until they're nearly a Turn old.
I'm not going to comment on the whole bonding sequence except to say that it really didn't seem to have any emotional stirrings for me. It came off as rather bland instead of this wondrous scary thing. I think it's because of the way he mixed his metaphors and couldn't stick to a single image. He also doesn't put in what Eragon is feeling at the time too which would make the scene more potent.
However, he then goes on to show another bit of Eragon logic. Eragon, we have learned, has been raised with stories about the Dragonriders and how they are good, kind and wonderful and the whoopie keenness of everything Good in this world. He has a dragon on his bed. What does he think? "This was a dangerous animal, of that he was sure". Dragons are good kind and hang around people, yet it's a dangerous animal. That doesn't follow.
Continuing in Eragon's brilliant line of reasoning, he decides not to show the cute harmless dragon to his Uncle but instead wait until it is bigger and therefor they would be unable to get rid of it. I'm not sure what size has to do with a person's ability to get rid of something is. You can kill a cow just as easily as you can kill a mouse. It would make more sense to show them the cute innocent little dragon than the potentially dangerous big dragon and ask if you can keep it.
He then decides that he can't keep the baby dragon in the house. He has no idea if this baby dragon can fend for itself from the cold or predators. He doesn't know how often this dragon needs to be fed. He knows nothing about its habits or anything like that. But what does he do? Leave it in the woods in a hut and hope that it doesn't wander off. It would make more sense to keep it in his room where he could check on it frequently and make sure it's okay. He doesn't do this, of course.
Finally Eragon waits for about a month before he decides to go and see if someone knows how to take care of a dragon. He decides to go see Brom. Apparently he's hoping that Brom will have a story entitled "Care and feeding of Dragons" because how else would Brom be of any help?
My final nitpick with this chapter is when the dragon talks to Eragon. We know that the dragon says his name but we don't learn what the voice sounds like. Is it male, female, high pitched, low pitched? Rumbling? There are no descriptors to this voice. One would think that this is an important thing to describe. His dragon has just spoken to him for the very first time and we get nothing about its voice! This is what he should spend his time describing! And if he did it right he wouldn't of had to wonder if the dragon was male or female. Even if the voice was gender neutral he should have said it, to keep up the idea that he doesn't know what gender it is.
Characters Eragon, baby dragon
Shiny magical objects in Eragon's possession One baby dragon
Summary
Trying this again since LJ ate my first post.
Awakening begins with a description of the baby dragon. While the description is fairly standard there is something anatomically incorrect about the way Paolini describes the dragon's wings. If we keep in mind that a dragon's wing is usually another hand modified for flight. There's the thumb and the hand and it usually looks like this:
However Paolini describes the dragon's wing as such, "... and ribbed with thin fingers of bone that extended from the wing's front edge, forming a line of widely spaced talons." Now, I'm assuming that since he went out of his way to describe the dragon's wing that it's not a normal looking dragon's wing. So, I tried to sketch out what such a wing would look like and came up with this:
The blue lines are the bone and it doesn't really look that feasible of a bone structure. But apparently anatomy isn't for mysterious dragons.
Now that the dragon has hatched, one would assume that it is hungry. After all it has absorbed all the yolk that should have been in the egg (unless, once again, it has teleported into the egg) and it exhorted a lot of energy to get out of that egg. This is how most baby animals react once they are born. They go "Where's the food?" The baby dragon, however, goes about and instead explores the room, curiously. It is only after it bonds itself to Eragon and examines him curiously does he exhibit hunger.
To make a parallel example, look at the dragons from Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern Series. When these dragons hatch, they impress upon a person immediately and then demand food. They don't explore anything or look around curiously until after they've been fed. They also hatch out much larger, now that I think of it, and they grow to be big enough for riding. I don't want to think of the amount of food and energy needed to grow a baby dragon that starts out a foot long into a dragon capable of carrying a full grown human in five months (as Brom says in a later chapter). Pernese dragons aren't capable of carrying a human until they're nearly a Turn old.
I'm not going to comment on the whole bonding sequence except to say that it really didn't seem to have any emotional stirrings for me. It came off as rather bland instead of this wondrous scary thing. I think it's because of the way he mixed his metaphors and couldn't stick to a single image. He also doesn't put in what Eragon is feeling at the time too which would make the scene more potent.
However, he then goes on to show another bit of Eragon logic. Eragon, we have learned, has been raised with stories about the Dragonriders and how they are good, kind and wonderful and the whoopie keenness of everything Good in this world. He has a dragon on his bed. What does he think? "This was a dangerous animal, of that he was sure". Dragons are good kind and hang around people, yet it's a dangerous animal. That doesn't follow.
Continuing in Eragon's brilliant line of reasoning, he decides not to show the cute harmless dragon to his Uncle but instead wait until it is bigger and therefor they would be unable to get rid of it. I'm not sure what size has to do with a person's ability to get rid of something is. You can kill a cow just as easily as you can kill a mouse. It would make more sense to show them the cute innocent little dragon than the potentially dangerous big dragon and ask if you can keep it.
He then decides that he can't keep the baby dragon in the house. He has no idea if this baby dragon can fend for itself from the cold or predators. He doesn't know how often this dragon needs to be fed. He knows nothing about its habits or anything like that. But what does he do? Leave it in the woods in a hut and hope that it doesn't wander off. It would make more sense to keep it in his room where he could check on it frequently and make sure it's okay. He doesn't do this, of course.
Finally Eragon waits for about a month before he decides to go and see if someone knows how to take care of a dragon. He decides to go see Brom. Apparently he's hoping that Brom will have a story entitled "Care and feeding of Dragons" because how else would Brom be of any help?
My final nitpick with this chapter is when the dragon talks to Eragon. We know that the dragon says his name but we don't learn what the voice sounds like. Is it male, female, high pitched, low pitched? Rumbling? There are no descriptors to this voice. One would think that this is an important thing to describe. His dragon has just spoken to him for the very first time and we get nothing about its voice! This is what he should spend his time describing! And if he did it right he wouldn't of had to wonder if the dragon was male or female. Even if the voice was gender neutral he should have said it, to keep up the idea that he doesn't know what gender it is.
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