20 KiB
[RT] Legacy, an Eragon rational fic. Prologue and Chapter one.
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Author: u/None *
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Score: 22
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Created: 2016-06-18T16:12:34
Post:
Comments:
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+26] (4 hours later)
To put a bit more constructive in our collective constructive criticism, a word about following the stations of the canon: don't. The original Eragon wasn't rational, so I would strongly advise against even paying lip service to its plot. The essence of drama is conflict, and there's no conflict in being handed magical powers on a silver platter. Wherever possible, make things harder for him than they were in canon; don't have the dragon hand herself over to him, put Brom halfway around the world, and so on.
I'd recommend starting with the magic system and going from there. Suppose he's always been fascinated by the Ancient Language. He learned his first word from a peddler (maybe make it "fire" for thematic reasons), and, since he only had the one, spent weeks experimenting with it, squeezing as much out of that one word as he could. Have him do that with every word he gets, and you have an interesting protagonist who doesn't even need to be a dragon rider for the first 30,000 words.
u/Gh0st1y [+8] (12 hours later)
How about a trader of books and instruments comes through the town, for a festival. Eragon, also in town for the festival, meets him, and over a discussion we have Eragon learn about the ancient language (dudes really a front for the varden, and looking to acquire as many books of magic and such - - powerful objects, something to hoard before a war) and he is given a "starter kit" pamphlet/short book of the history of the Empire. The dude scribbles a couple phonetics of the ancient language aside their ancient language character, fire, water, force. He gives him a terse instruction on magic and a mantra/chant for meditations to focus himself. He charges Eragon's festival allowance for the book but the rest is on the house, so to speak, in hopes he works it out and comes to fight for the varden.
Obviously the dudes here to talk to brom (I'm a fan of having brom there from the beginning for a number of reasons) and convey the news that the egg is traveling and that he is their backup, as he is in a permanent location to send the egg to, so they can prepare part of the spell beforehand.
I have more ideas tbh.
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+1] (13 hours later)
I'd be first in line to say your plotline is better thought out than mine. Are you planning a fic yourself, or just spitballing?
u/Gh0st1y [+1] (14 hours later)
Just spitballing, but i love those books and I'm a little baked, so it sorta just flowed out. I might just do it though, not sure. I have other stuff on my plate right now.
u/None [+4] (21 hours later)
put Brom halfway around the world
If you knew you had a son (and you weren't a terrible person), would you be half a world away from him?
u/CouteauBleu [+12] We are the Empire. (an hour later)
Haven't read the chapter yet, but early feedback: I feel that "it's like [franchise], except rational" is kind of an unappealing description for a fanfic, especially on this subreddit where every story is supposed to be rational so you're not really distinguishing yourself much (except by, you know, not making a fanfic of Naruto or HP:MoR).
I would recommend describing the challenges the protagonists face or how scary the villain is, or how the ambient rationality changed the setting, or something other than "everyone is kind of smart". The generic Eragon title doesn't help.
EDIT: Okay, read the prologue. Random thoughts before I read chapter one:
The writing is okay. Not incredible, but kind of good.
The main problem I immediately have is that's it's completely indistinguishable from Eragon's original prologue. I read canon a long long time ago, so I don't remember the details very well, but it's kind of a problem that I have no idea what's the same as canon, and what's different. The setting is basically the same (Shadow hunting Elves with Urgals to steal the egg), the outcome is exactly the same, so the difference in execution feels cosmetic.
If you look at the beginning of "Animorphs: The Reckoning", which is probably the best-written "the same but everyone is rational" fic, the difference with canon is obvious from the second paragraph. In canon, the protagonists immediately trust Elfangor and listen to his story. In the Reckoning, they hesitate to trust a potentially hostile alien, they question its motives, they try to consider their options, etc. The difference in tone is obvious even if you haven't read the original for a long time. Here, as far as I can tell, it's the same except with more bear traps.
EDit: And, read chapter one.
The writing in this chapter is bad. Not horribly bad, but noticeably less fluid and more awkward than in the prologue, especially during the dialogues, which feel super stilted and unnatural. For instance: (please post on aoo too, by the way, copy-pasting from ff.net is a bitch)
"Eragon," his uncle asked panting, "what are you doing here? What happened? We heard an explosion, what is all this burned grass around you? And where the heck have you been until now?!"
This is not a realistic sentence. If I'm the uncle, and I haven't had news of my nephew for hours, and it's way past curfew and FUCK I heard an explosion and OHMYGODS he's here, and there's a strange glowing rock next to him... Well, first off, I'm probably way too excited and anxious to form four complete, coherent sentences in a row, and second, the first question I'm going to ask is "Are you alright?" Worrying about where Eragon has been and what is going on with the burned grass can wait. Jeod's only concern should be Eragon's safety.
Otherwise, there is way, way too much rationality-dropping in this chapter. It feels unnatural, and it lacks subtlety. For instance, Eragon's musing about how he doesn't like to lie about his (absence of) faith feels like the narrator is shaking my shoulder and saying "Look, he's rationality-driven and kinda-socially awkward, LIKE YOU!". I think the reason it feels so jarring is that the rationality is mostly told, not shown, and the only part where Eragon shows agency in his judgement in when considering the pirate thing, which...
Look, pirates are a big deal. Eragon should not think about them nearly so calmly, and Jeod should not be nearly so cool about the whole situation. Like, pirates. Killing your associates, destroying your business. If someone really is hiring them, then it's not a competitor's dick move, it's a terrible crime. Again, pirate activity is a big deal. If pirates target Jeod's business exclusively, people should have noticed, and notified the authorities, which are really really not found of people messing with trade routes. Jeod should be acting super super worried about the fact that someone is trying to take out his business, and ready to kill his associates in the process, which means his life is probably in danger. He should not be acting all business as usual, and he should not let Eragon wander off in the wilderness without protection.
The seriousness of it aside, Eragon solving the pirate puzzle feels kind of flat. First off, because it's not exactly a difficult one (if you're being attacked by pirates, but no one else is being attacked by pirates, it doesn't take a lot of acumen to deduce that the pirates are specifically targeting you); and second, because the solution is laid out at the same time as the problem, which makes it very apparent that it's a problem that was created by you, the author, and resolved by, well, you, in the same breath, which doesn't feel like an accomplishment at all.
Finally, regarding the egg scene... touching an object of an unknown nature less than ten seconds after it appeared in a mysterious flash of light, with no protection, magical skill or any knowledge of the situation strikes me as neither wise nor rational. The story seems to "assume" that both Eragon and Jeod+Brom immediately guess at its plot-relevant nature, instead of wondering what the hell is up with the rock that appeared with a flash of light, then making guesses with the information at hand.
u/None [+5] (4 hours later)
Well, I guess I'll drop it here then, but thank you for the feedback anyway. I never supposed to be making a masterpiece, but in all honesty these many problems were not apparent to be as I was writing. I will comment os some points though, because I feel like they've been misinterpreted (my fault, no doubt)
The generic Eragon title doesn't help.
The title is just Legacy, I put the Eragon here because there was a previous thread in which I requested rational Eragon fics and raised the possibility of writing one, eventually, and got many requests, so it was just to signal to previous commenters.
it's completely indistinguishable from Eragon's original prologue
I understand how this might be unappealing. The concept was to progressively reveal setting differences and different motivations for the same stuff, but I guess it doesn't work.
Look, he's rationality-driven and kinda-socially awkward, LIKE YOU!
Strange that you say that, because I din't mean to make him socially awkward. I guess I failed...
and Jeod should not be nearly so cool about the whole situation.
Jeod knows it's not pirates.
because the solution is laid out at the same time as the problem
I guess in my rush to get to the real plot I wrote bad stuff.
which means his life is probably in danger. He should not be acting all business as usual, and he should not let Eragon wander off in the wilderness without protection.
Only he's not in danger in that way. I was thinking about my background though, and realized it didn't click at all.
touching an object of an unknown nature less than ten seconds after it appeared in a mysterious flash of light, with no protection, magical skill or any knowledge of the situation strikes me as neither wise nor rational
Considering that magic is extremely far from your everyday life in this setting, that Eragon is a teenager and that he supposed he knew what the rock was, can you blame him?
Jeod+Brom immediately guess at its plot-relevant nature
they do because they've seen that same egg already in the past, and are aware of the implications.
I'm not looking for excuses, but I imagine I still have to defend my unfortunate creation. Oh well, c'est la vie.
u/xamueljones [+4] My arch-enemy is entropy (8 hours later)
I guess in my rush to get to the real plot
Just start writing the scenes you like to write. Don't waste your time and energy on the parts you find boring. Very often if you're bored by what you write, so will the readers. If you only write the parts you like, then it's very likely that the entire story can be done purely through such scenes.
I may not be explaining myself clearly enough but to use an example, Brian Pratt decided to write the Morcyth Saga in a way that he would only write the 'fun' parts first and then fill in all of the boring parts later. Once he finished the exciting parts, he looked back and realized that he didn't need to add anything more to the story. It worked well as it was.
Granted that this story is in the swords and sorcery genre so I don't know how well this might translate to other stories, but I will be surprised if this same technique doesn't help to some extent in other genres.
u/t3tsubo [+8] (a day later)
Glad to see you taking feedback well, just to re-iterate the general point that you shouldn't be discouraged! Only way to get better is by writing more and having people tell you what you did well and what you did poorly. Otherwise writing (fanfics especially) is just an exercise in masturbation.
I do hope to one day read a great rational fic in the Eragon universe /magic system.
u/None [+8] (a day later)
Honestly, I really got discouraged. I had no presumptions that my first fanfiction would be magical, but I hoped passable it would have been, at least.
But after taking it down, I'm thinking that maybe the bad reviews discouraged more than they should have, since my project was to learn to write with feedback, anyway.
New idea is to write it from scratch, a little more thoughtfully, and then post it again and see if there's a gem to be found in the guts of the previous concept. Even a modest one.
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (2 days later)
Good thinking :)
And yeah, getting that amount of negative feed back probably hurt a lot. If it helps, I thought the prologue was okay, aside from its lack of originality, it read pretty well and it got its point across (evil creature, brutish minions, trying to capture the payload, everyone is competent and trained and prepared), so it's not like you need to throw everything out and restart.
If you're interested in the advice of someone who has never written anything more than fanfic omakes and, well, amateur literary criticism, here's my two cents: you should probably try to concentrate on your number one quality/message/goal. As other people have already said, you're probably going to need a lot of experience before writing well comes easily to you, but as you pointed out, when trial and error is mostly people telling you your work sucks, accumulating this experience is no fun.
So you should concentrate on what you think is your biggest comparative advantage, be it a message you want to pass, a story you want to tell, something compelling enough to at least make up somewhat for the errors you make initially. Wildbow's early (mostly unpublished) stories were shitty to read because there was no compelling plot, no drive to see what happens next in the story. Early Worm is still badly written (or so I'm told), but the narrative about a bullied girl with no hope of being left alone going out in the streets to save people and escape her shitty life makes up for the work's weaknesses.
I'm not sure how you'd find or even define this compelling core, but it must be something other than "like X, except better". Making a rational fic can be a good premise in itself, but the rationality must be more than a theme or an aura the main character has, it must be something that shines through every character's action. Which is of course super hard because making a character implicitly rational -the way alexanderwales does it, for instance- is way harder than saying "he is very smart", especially if you want to show the rationality in a way that doesn't feel heavy handed or like a re-hash of Methods of Rationality (and by harder, I mean I have no idea how to do it).
u/None [+2] (2 days later)
Thank you. I think I'll try to follow your advice, for however vague it may be. But it really helped with the perspective, at least.
u/chaosmosis [+4] and with strange aeons, even death may die (3 hours later)
Yuck.
Prologue is a blatant rehash, nothing different occurs except the prose choice. Waste of time to read it.
Sending him to live with Angela triggers my Sue alarms.
Rehashing the canon conversation about frogs is anti-creative. You've got a quirky person who can say anything!
Figuring out that something fishy is going on with the shipping so quickly triggers more Sue alarms.
The part immediately following that, describing his reasoning process as he tries to diagnose the cause of the shipping problems, was slightly better. You should make almost all his realizations work like that. Paragraphs, multiple pieces of evidence, justifications, lines of thought abandoned as false or counterproductive, mistakes that get glossed over or ignored entirely. Not one sentence insights by author fiat. The average kid wouldn't know much about the shipping business. You need to establish that he knows about it and is interested in it. somehow, before you do anything with the topic.
You also need to provide motivation for the reader to continue reading, to care about the protagonist and their problems. I was bored the whole time because I already knew the puzzle and its answer from canon, and the analysis given was not interesting or original or insightful.
u/None [+1] (4 hours later)
Thank you for the feedback. I'm putting this unlucky animal down, before it suffers too much.
u/GaBeRockKing [+5] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (4 hours later)
I'm sad you're doing this, but thank you for taking the effort to write it. Hopefully you've learnt as much from writing it as I did from beta-int it.
u/None [+4] (4 hours later)
I guess I knew it wasn't going to be up to the task, but it's been fun to try my hand at writing.
Thank you for all the help, really.
u/chaosmosis [+10] and with strange aeons, even death may die (5 hours later)
Don't hesitate to try again in the future, please. I was harsh. My perspective is that writing improves the fastest if there is clear feedback.
u/None [+3] (5 hours later)
Your harshness was justified, so no ill will by me. I might try to rethink the whole plot and write something again in the future, but if ever, I'm gonna take my time with it.
u/TennisMaster2 [+4] (14 hours later)
Don't take too much time. Once you've given it a solid effort, test to see if you've succeeded or failed. Repeat with progressively longer periods of effort as you notice your failures become less prominent and numerous.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (3 hours later)
Wait, there's a pirate plot in canon?
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (5 hours later)
u/jldew [+3] (a day later)
I don't know if it's just me, but the story seems to have been deleted.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
I deleted it. Comments made me realise that it was bad in many ways. I think I'll rewrite from start and see if the result is better.
u/vallar57 [+1] Unseen University: Faculty of High-Energy Magic (18 hours later)
If you are going to try it again, here is a few things about magic system.
Magic in Eragon is language-based, everything you say in a special language is a spell. I though it was good, until I attended a few liguistics lectures, and learned that natural languages are always, inherently not mono-defined (sorry, don't know proper english terms). Meaning that a huge amount of sentences can and will have two or more meanings, wrecking spell constructs. So you'll have to either bring in a healthy dose of intent-based magic, which will make it possible to outright lie in elvish with some training and quick wits and will ultimately make it possible to replace words with intent, or make elvish an artificial language designed to make commands - a programming language.
u/None [+3] (18 hours later)
Thank you, but I'm a linguist myself. The way my version was gonna unfold, the magic language wouldn't have been so problematic, I think.
u/vallar57 [+3] Unseen University: Faculty of High-Energy Magic (19 hours later)
Excellent!
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (6 days later)
I rememebr ursulla le guin magic system (from which Eragon one derives). In it Dragons who had a padronance of the magic language could lie in it with noe problem.