I taste like...

I taste of Death. Doesn't everyone want a taste of death? Well they should. Most people deserve death. Keep away from me unless you think you're better than that. I probably won't like you. What Flavour Are You? *giggles*

And another little meme

Comment and I will give you 3 interests on your list, and 3 icons,for you to explain. Then you must post the answers in your own journal and allow others to comment. (Say boo if you want in on the meme.)


misscam  asked for explanations on:

Green Lantern, the Inheritance Trilogy and Parakeets

Green Lantern is in reference to the comic book character, to be more exact the Kyle Rayner version, as opposed to the Hal Jordan or Guy Gardner. He's one of my favorite comic book characters and I try to collect what I can about him. Even if he is calling himself Ion these days.

The Inheritance Trilogy is pretty simple. I'm doing a analysis of the books and the writer and just the entire culture of the series that's sprung up around it. I find the disparity of the fandom fascinating. You have the Antis and the Pros and they both go at it with a wolverine's intensity.

As for parakeets. I have one. Or technically my mom does, and I really love the little birds. They're just so cute and fun to watch.


And these three icons

This one I came up with under a series of bizzare train of thoughts. I was talking to someone or another about autism and then the idea about how a lot of anti-Semites often say things like, "Not that I have anything against Jews. Some of my best friends are Jewish" came to mind. And there's a sort of Anti-Non autistic feeling with a lot of autistic people, which is sort of similar. They're just sort of tired of being told what to do and how to live their lives and things like that, being treated like a non-person. So, I was playing with those two aspects. As for the gecko. I had just come back from Hawaii and saw lots of geckos and was perceverating on them at the time. And geckos are non autistic and no one ever said that my best friend non autistic buddies had to be human.  Wow, that's a long explanation.



This one was made by Veet. She had a conversation with someone about how being dorky is now cool and they're charismatic. The +5 Charisma bonus is in reference to dungeon and dragons games where certain types of races get certain bonuses. So, it's an incredibly geeky way of saying dorks are cool.



And here we have a reference to the Eragon analysis that I've been doing. At one point I commented on the fact that Eragon seems to be rather obsessed with meat. Somewhere along the line that got turned into a sexual metaphor. In this case, someone commented and said, "Eragon/Meat is my OTP" which certainly demanded an icon.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

So, millenium_king brought up an three way interview with Paolini and two other authors. Curious, I went searching for it, finding it here.

It was fairly banal stuff, Paolini talking about writing and wanting his characters to have depth and such:

Paolini: I know when I'm writing if I happen to get sidetracked into long pastoral descriptions or too many fantastical elements, I find that my interest, even as the writer, diminishes. It doesn't return until somehow I find a way to get back to the characters' inner lives and how they're dealing with the questions of everyday life.


Or where he gets his ideas.

One of the things I love about working on a large story is being able to fill it with interesting little tidbits from the world. For instance, puzzle rings. I came across them last year, and I'm putting them in the book. I gave one to my hero to stymie him. Then I found out that the American Indians used to make bows from the horns of mountain sheep. I have monsters with large horns, so I thought, Maybe some of my characters are making bows from their horns.

Thus proving my previous theory that Paolini put things into the novel because they were "Oh Neat", which is not the way you want to write a novel. Just because you find something interesting or cool, doesn't mean that it'll fit into the novel.

And then there was this gem:

Actually, I think that's one of my biggest complaints with the majority of fantasy I've read, where you do have a hero or sometimes heroine who does not seem to experience the majority of human emotions and runs around hacking monsters and all this stuff. There's no reaction to it. There's no emotion about it.

Which is exactly what Eragon does. He has absolutely no emotional depth and all he does is goes around and kill things. Except for rabbits. The fact that Paolini actually thinks that this is otherwise shows that he doesn't have the experience and knowledge of human behavior to write this accurately. He talks about emotions in the books, but they're never followed through. We're told that he's sad about Murtagh's death, and then we never hear about him again.

A good place to mention Murtagh would have been in his training or after he had been elfified. He could have thought to himself, "if only I had this power when I lost Murtagh, then I could have saved him" or something like that. But instead it feels like we're being told that he has this emotional response because that's the appropirate response for him to have.

It reminds me of my brother, when he was younger. He would sometimes hurt himself, and he'd cry until mom said that it was fine, and then he'd be okay. It's as if he was only crying because he was told that was the appropriate response for getting injured. Another similarity, is the empty gesture. You say something, like, "Oh, we should get together soon," or "do you need any help," when both you and the person you're speaking to knows that you don't really mean, but you're saying it because you're trying to do the right thing and show that you are interested in the other person and what they are doing. This is how Eragon and everyone else's emotional responses comes off as. They're emoting because that's what they're supposed to do, but after that... they stop. Kinda like Data with his emotion chip.

And then there's this insight into the final of book three,

It's interesting that you mention that because I was considering how Book Three is going to wrap up, and I don't want to give away the details, of course, but it involved what you do with the people who once held power. Now they're out of power. What do you do with them? You can't have them sitting around, and yet I can't have a mass murder on my hands because I would hate myself for writing it, and I would hate my characters, and I know my readers would just throw the books in the trash.

Fortunately, I managed to come up with a solution that works within the rules of magic and the laws of my world that I've already established, but for a long while I was feeling very badly because I knew realistically you can't have a threat to the power structure hanging around without it being dealt with one way or another.

So, it sounds like Eragon is going to do the Noble Thing and not kill Galby, thus proving him different that Galby. After all Galby is a mass murderer (which is different from Eragon, who is a Mass Murderer). Personally, I think the best way to end it would be to kill Galby as much as I like him. Because that is how Eragon has dealt with the previous Big Bads and it would be out of character for him to suddenly do the noble thing. Eragon is very much a kill first ask questions later type of person. Except for that one moment in Eragon where he bitches at Murtagh about killing the slaver. He's been shown to revel in learning how to kill and the act of killing itself. To use magic to "fix" Galby, which is what it seems like he's going to do, is a cheap cop-out. He's not being punished for the evil that he's supposedly done and it's safer to get rid of him, least he discovers a way to become a threat again.

This is like the dilemma that Harry Potter faces with Lord Voldemort. He's been forced into a position where the only reasonable and safe thing to do is kill Voldemort. He may not want to do it, because he doesn't want to become a killer, and even if it is the only way to do it, it's still not an easy thing to do. If Harry were to let Voldemort live, to show that he has the moral high ground then everything he has worked for and all the deaths that happened because of Voldemort would become meaningless. People died to take Voldemort down. To let him live would be the complete opposite of what they worked for.

You can't let the greatest threat ever known live, because it means that he wasn't as big as a threat that the reader was told that he was. In away, it would be like if the Nuremburg trials decided that the best punishment would be to just... maybe wipe their minds and let them go. Which is what I have the feeling Paolini might do.