Inheritance Cycle/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Narration: When they finished, Eragon flopped on his blankets and groaned. He hurt everywhere – Brom had not been gentle with his stick.

  • Alas, Poor Villain: Durza memory dumps onto Eragon in his dying moments and reveals his tragic past that led him to become a Shade in the first place.
  • Angst? What Angst?:
    • Eragon exhibits this in the second book Eldest. It is revealed to him that his father was The Dragon to the Big Bad, and to put it lightly, not a nice person. He gets over this in three paragraphs (although, in fairness, he does revisit it later). He does, however, angst when his uncle dies (for a few chapters, after which he gets over it), when he is told that his father was really his mentor, Brom, and when Murtagh joins the enemy.
    • There's also Arya, in the first book: in spite of having been, by her own admission, beaten, tortured, and very nearly raped for weeks on end, the biggest reaction we get out of her thereafter is a paragraph of her clenching her jaw a bit as she recounts the events... and after that everything's just peachy, although that may be a racial thing for her.
  • Ass Pull: Some people consider several plot elements to be either plucked out of the gluteus maximus or at very least badly foreshadowed. Examples include Eragon's curing at the Blood-Oath Celebration
  • Cliché Storm: One of the book's criticisms is that the plot is similar to that of Star Wars, though it starts to deviate from those films as the books go on.
  • Critical Research Failure: Oromis' explanation of the Ancient Language gets basic points about language wrong: "The suffix o forms the past tense of verbs ending with r and i. Sköliro means shielded, but skölir means shield. What you said was ‘May luck and happiness follow you and may you be a shield from misfortune.’" Unfortunately, "a shield" is a noun, not a verb, so it can't have a past tense. Also, Eragon wasn't using the active past tense, but the passive future imperative ("may you be shielded" is an imperative pertaining to something that is to happen, not something that has happened).
  • Dancing Bear: The first book was sold on the basis of having been written by a 15-year-old.
  • Ending Aversion: Some fans of this series hated how the fourth book ended, due to the fact that it left too much left hanging.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • Murtagh: even some of the anti-Eragon fans like him.
    • The latter part may be because some fans left the series at his Heel Face Turn, since he was the Ensemble Darkhorse and it seemed like an attempt to get more fans behind Eragon.
  • Growing the Beard: Brisingr is considered by some readers to be an improvement over the first two books. Inheritance took the changes further.
  • Internet Backdraft: Fans of the Inheritance trilogy have their hands full defending the object of their fandom from a gigantic number of anti-fans. Anti-fans have to defend their criticism from a gigantic number of fans.
  • Narm: Has one of the largest entries on that trope's page. Highlights include:
    • The very first line of the entire series: "Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world."
    • The description of Eragon post his transformation at the Agaeti Bloedhren as "more beautiful than a man, more rugged than an elf" is somewhat overdone.
    • The High Priest of Helgrind, who has no arms or legs, reminded some readers of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Durza, Galbatorix's dragon in Book I, is described as having pale white skin and red hair. Like a certain fast food mascot.
    • The Film of the Book gives us Galbatorix's infamous line:

Galbatorix: I suffer without my stone. Do not. Prolong. My suffering.

  • [[Moral Event Horizon]]: Galbatorix decapitating Vrael, who was willing to forgive him for what he had done.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Everything about Vroengard. The place is implied to be radioactive. Burrow grubs, those disgusting carnivorous maggots which Galbatorix uses to torture Nasuada, originated there. It's also populated by giant man-eating snails that move as fast as a running human.
    • Vroengard basically is radioactive, seeing as it was annihilated by a Fantastic Nuke (you can replace any mention of 'magic' when the contamination is mentioned with 'radition' very easily). What's worse is that those man-eating snails were on Vroengard before said Fantastic Nuke. They survived the equivalent of a nuclear explosion and the resulting fallout.
  • Unfortunate Implications:
    • The discussion of gods in the series has drawn some, with some readers seeing it as a Take That towards theists and others seeing it from the opposite direction. Word of God says that it is supposed to reflect CP's agnostic position.
    • The elves reject all forms of meat, and discuss their reasons for doing so at great length. From this, some infer that Paolini is trying to argue that "meat is murder."
    • A human woman who is able to take care of herself is an unusual occurrence. All elf women are, like the rest of the elves, ten times as competent as any human, male or female. (Which in itself has some Unfortunate Implications.)
    • What are the two things Nasuada remembers about the (black) wandering tribes? Them talking a lot. And "smoking cardus weed."
  • Villain Decay:
    • Murtagh. When he is first seen in Eldest, he's sympathetic but his actions are well-justified and believable. But by Brisingr, he's decayed into Galbatorix's minion complete with an evil cackle.
    • Good All Along
  • Villain Has a Point: Galbatorix is of course an evil tyrant, but his concerns about how easily those with magic can manipulate and abuse those without it are entirely valid. Even after he is gone, Nasuada struggles with the exact same issue.
  • What an Idiot!: Eragon. "Huh. That perfectly smooth, round rock seems to be squeaking. Do rocks usually do that? Weird. Oh well, it's probably nothing. It's definitely just a regular rock. I'll just leave it on the shelf and go to bed, and not tell anybody."

Assorted character YMMVs

  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Eragon: A hero or sociopath?
  • Base Breaker: Nasuada, following her decision to have Roran whipped for insubordination in Brisingr.
  • Complete Monster: Morzan, Murtagh's horrible father.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Murtagh
  • Fan-Preferred Couple:
    • Nasuada with Murtagh, since she seems to like him.
    • Seeing as Inheritance decides to deal with their relationship directly, don't be surprised if it becomes even more Fan Preferred.
  • Dangerously Genre Savvy: Galbatorix, in Inheritance. He hijacks the magical language itself in the final battle such that only he can use it, effectively depowering nearly every other character. The only reason he lost was that Murtagh was not as loyal as he thought.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Galbatorix. By Inheritance, its clear that his cunning and manipulation go much deeper than anyone would previously have guessed.
  • Real Women Never Wear Dresses:
    • Arya shows disdain for human women, who she considers to be weak and helpless. She briefly wears a dress in Brisingr, and when Eragon comments on it, she says that she never really understood why humans insist on separating their men and women in these ways.
    • Subverted by Nasuada, who is never seen outside of a dress, thinks it's sketchy that Arya wears pants, and finances the war by selling fine lace.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: Sloan.
  • The Woobie:
    • Murtagh. Also an Iron Woobie and Jerkass Woobie.
    • Thorn.
    • Eragon at the end of the series. At around 16, he's facing complete isolation for years, having to explore a vast new continent that is extremely difficult to reach, and establish a new order of dragon riders there virtually by himself. He does not expect to see any of his loved ones alive again (which a certain prediction makes explicit), and has given up all thoughts of romance or pleasurable company. Kind of harsh for a band of grown men, let alone a single teenager.
    • King Orrin - after years of busting a gut for the Varden (in Eragon Orik flat out says: "The Varden couldn't exist without Orrin,"), living in terror that Galbatorix is going to roll over and crush his kingdom and enslave his people, and sheltering the Varden's noncombatants, he is completely supplanted in La Résistance by Nasuada, insulted by Roran and seems destined to spend the post-war period as a "second-fiddle" nation to the Empire. No wonder he takes to the drink.
    • Durza - Carseib never wanted to become a Shade.
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