Someone Twitted this at Plagiarini - it's a really nifty little site which lets you select a setting (there are only two right now - Middle Earth and Alaglag), then a book from that setting, then a character from that setting, and the map goes through that character's entire journey through each chapter. Of course, it does a great job of exposing just how superior Tolkien is in that department as well. I had a look at Morontagh, and the titular idiot basically just goes in a circle and then stops going anywhere at all. Apt, considering. 

Not going to try and embed the video because of how that usually causes chaos, but here's a link. The short version is that the Potter series exploded the way it did largely because Warner Brothers invested massive amounts of capital in order to make it happen. They flooded the media they controlled with coverage, and ultimately flooded the market with insane amounts of merch until things reached a tipping point and we ended up where we are now.

While watching this it occurred to me that this is what Paolini is trying to make happen so he can have a huge franchise of his own (as it happens, this very same day I also noticed that in interviews he never talks about the joy of telling stories, but rather sounds like a grifter trying to sell us on a pyramid scheme). The difference is that he doesn't have a Fortune 500 company investing millions in his brand. And as Disney obviously isn't going to be making a TV series or using the merch rights they likely now own to fill the shops with Eragon action figures and plushies and blankets and fuck knows what else, he's resorted to selling his own ridiculous merch (I'm still not over the To Sleep-themed yoga pants and baby onesie) based on what he's legally allowed and using Kickstarter to get his Saphira statues and illustrated special editions. 

I'm getting the feeling this is not ultimately going to work.

The video also closes with this spectacularly relevant quote from Ursula K. LeGuin (I wonder if she knew Paolini plagiarised from her? If so I can only imagine the biting response). 

“Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life- of a sort, for a while.”