 I'm willing to bet that a substantial portion of you watching have read The Inheritance Cycle before. It was released from 2001 to 2011 and was one of the most popular books for young people during that time. Every entry made it onto the various bestseller lists when it came out. This was all right in the middle of the Harry Potter craze. Of course if my 2017 trip to Universal Studios is any indication we are still in the middle of the HP craze, but I digress. The kids who loved Harry Potter, or even got into reading because of it, were looking for something that could scratch that same itch. There was a movie made too, but it wasn't very good. I need clips to play while I talk though, so. But before that, a word from this video's sponsor, Campfire. Organizing stories can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. Campfire Pro is a writing software with tons of tools to keep you organized. Its character pages will help you keep track of all your characters with details and backstories. Timelines can help you hammer out all those plot points. You can even track character arcs and use the map view to create all the locations you need. You'll also definitely want to check out the brand new Worldbuilding Pack. It's an expansion to Campfire Pro with even more tools to help build your story's world. Construct new species, magic systems, and develop your cultures with religions, philosophies, and languages with this massive bundle of features. Campfire Pro is a one-time purchase of $49.99 and the Worldbuilding Pack is available for an additional $24.99. Do away with all those Word documents and spreadsheets. Keep everything easily accessible with Campfire Pro. Click the link in the description to learn more. The success of the Inheritance Cycle makes perfect sense when the circumstances around its release are taken into account, even if a lot of people thought that the series wasn't… good. The last few years have seen a small uptick in the conversation around the series, mostly based around fans looking back now that they're older and coming to the conclusion that they don't like it. And as someone who puts my opinions out into the world for some reason, I want to talk about how it's perfectly fine. Not to say there aren't problems, obviously nothing out there is perfect. But Aragon has been called, among other things, boring, stupid, derivative, too long, tedious, and furry bait. Most of these labels are applied unfairly or not viewed through the proper lens. So I guess this is a defense of Aragon from people who dislike it. Spoilers ahead, but you could have guessed that already. Based on both my demographics and those of my audience, it's safe to say that a lot of you fell into the target audience, so you're at least somewhat familiar with the plot. For the rest, the story of the Inheritance cycle takes place in a land called Allagazia. It's a land full of humans, elves, dwarves, urgals, and of course, dragons. Before the series starts, peace was kept in Allagazia by a group called the Dragonriders. The name is a bit misleading. They were actually people who formed a magical bond with dragons and rode them around. A young Dragonrider named Galbatorix betrayed the order and gathered up some allies to destroy the other Dragonriders. When the story starts, the dragons are mostly extinct, he's the king of a huge part of the continent, and he goes around doing, well, various tyrant stuff, but for the most part he just doesn't care about his subjects. Aragon is a young boy living in an isolated rural village with his uncle who finds a strange rock in the forest one day that later hatches to release an infant dragon. Turns out a resistance group had stolen the egg from Galbatorix and it got magically teleported to the spot near Aragon to keep it out of the king's hands. He hides the dragon, who he names Saphira, for a few weeks and searches for information from an old storyteller named Braum. Not long after, some of Galbatorix's servants come by, kill Aragon's uncle, and burn down the farm. Aragon and Saphira live by flying off and hiding in the mountains. With his life in shambles, Aragon runs off to get revenge and Braum comes along, teaching him swordplay and magic and stuff. When you hear the story unfolds, Aragon joins up with the rebels, meets some new companions, has magical sword fights, all kinds of fantasy adventure stuff. I'll be the first to admit that this is basically just the original Star Wars trilogy. Aragon is Luke, Braum is Obi-Wan, the Empire is the Empire, Dragonriders are Jedi, and so on. It doesn't follow all the same themes or plot beats and it's split into four entries rather than three, but it's basically Star Wars. And you know what? I like Star Wars. Most people do. It's a fun, dumb series of popcorn films that touches everyone's inner child. There's nothing wrong with following the same formula, especially when you remember that the author was a teenager when he wrote the first book. He was having fun and writing a story like the kind he enjoyed and putting it into a setting that was basically just a tweaked version of Middle Earth. All that should be kept in mind when reading or discussing it. I'm not going to say something like, cliches aren't bad, it's how you use them because that's a surface level talking point which doesn't say anything. What I will say is that if you're a season fantasy reader, then the lack of originality will probably bother you considerably more than if you're new to the genre, which most kids and teens who liked the series probably were. I can't say that the plot is new or subversive, but I can say that it's fine. Aragon simply follows a traditional hero's journey. After traveling with Braum for a few months, he becomes a competent swordsman and magician. But then Braum, his mentor who used to be a dragonrider, is killed before he and Aragon can exact revenge and Aragon is forced to abandon his quest. He decides to meet up with the rebels, called the Varden, and helps them win a major battle. Then he goes off to meet a new teacher, who also used to be a dragonrider. After a training period, he heads back to the Varden and helps them win a big battle again. But then he discovers that his father was one of the bad guys and goes emo for a bit. Then there are some more struggles and Aragon defeats Galvatorex. So yeah, it's just Star Wars. There are a few small tweaks to the formula though. For starters, Aragon is part of a prophecy that isn't really a prophecy. He gets advice from a werecat telling him information that he later uses to find a meteorite under a talking tree that he uses to make a new unbreakable fire sword. I would explain that, but I don't have the time. More importantly, he's told that when all hope is lost, he needs to speak his name to open the vault of souls. He doesn't know what this means at the time. When he needs to find a way to defeat Galvatorex, he heads off to the old base of the dragonriders and finds the vault. To everyone's shock, there's a treasure trove of unhatched dragon eggs and stones that hold the brains of dead dragons. Again, I'd explain that, but we're on a schedule. The vault had been magically wiped from everyone's memories to prevent it from being destroyed and the dragons had been magically influencing the events of the story to make things go the way they wanted. Saphira's egg appearing to Aragon may have seemed like the mother of all coincidences at first, turns out there was a reaction behind it, so what seemed like typical plot armor had an explanation. Then there's the story of Aragon's cousin, Roren. He starts off as just a minor character, a guy who we're told Aragon is close to and looks exactly like him in the movie. He's barely even in the first book. Later on, though, he winds up saving their entire village from Galvatorex's army, joining up with the Varden and becoming a major reason for their eventual victory. There are other small storylines too, such as Naswada's struggle to gain support for the Varden that all hammer home one point. Aragon does not defeat the Empire alone. He plays a big role in it, as both propaganda and a magic super soldier. However, he's not the one who organizes the rebellion and he's not the one who cleans things up afterwards. Unlike similar stories that often involve the hero defeating the evil king by himself and everything being immediately awesome afterwards, this reiterates that fixing the world is a team effort. And in the end, things don't get fixed immediately. Aragon is forced to leave his home to find a new place where he can rebuild the dragonriders into an organization that'll keep the peace again. It's primarily small things like that, but the storyline is at least a little different than you'd expect it to be. Different doesn't always mean good, sure. It just bothers me a bit when people describe it as completely unoriginal when there are some bits of originality here and there. Now on to some of the other major problems people had, starting with Aragon himself. He's generally not seen as an interesting hero. He's just a bland, chosen one who leaves behind his life, goes through some training to be a badass, and eventually saves the day. To the people who say that, I respond, did we even read the same books? The setup for Aragon's character is standard, sure, but the places Paulini goes with it are much more unique. For starters, Aragon feels like an actual farm boy. He can't read, is uneducated about most of the world, doesn't understand things like magic, becomes an awesome hero through circumstance. He sounds almost like an audience self-insert at first. A lot of things don't go his way, though. He has to give up on his desire for revenge, at least for a while. That's his main motivation for most of the first book before he winds up being forced to realize that his time is better spent elsewhere. He only winds up killing the Razzok in the third book to rescue his cousin's wife. Then look at his relationship with Arya. She's an elf who works with the Varden against Galbathorix and is the one who teleported Saphira's egg to Aragon. Except in the film where she's a human for no reason, seriously, this movie sucks as an adaptation. She's a prisoner for most of the first book and he rescues her because Princess Leia. Once she emerges from that damsel in distress archetype, she shows herself to be a competent and independent character. She fights in battles, teaches Aragon about magic, offers advice, and generally contributes to the story. She's also beautiful, so Aragon, being 16, becomes infatuated with her. In most fantasy adventure type stories, Arya would rebuff his advances at first because she was disinterested and came from a different social class. Then he would break down her walls and she would fall in love with him too and they'd live happily ever after. Well, that doesn't happen here. Arya is annoyed at him constantly making advances after she's made it clear she's uninterested, which makes sense when you remember he seems like a toddler to someone her age. Aragon eventually accepts that she doesn't think of him that way and learns to value her friendship, but never truly gets over the rejection. In the end, they're forced apart because they each have obligations to their communities. If that's wish fulfillment, y'all have some depressing wishes. And personally, I just think Aragon's Dragon Rider powers are cool. He's not just a dude who rides a dragon, he's far stronger and faster than a normal person. He has magic powers which allow him to do almost anything as long as he has the energy to do so, then there's the mind-controlling stuff which is neat too. I don't have much to say about it, the powers are just cool. The one bit about his character that still annoys me years after reading it is his parentage. At the end of the second book, his father is revealed to be one of the Forsaken, the Dragon Riders that betrayed the Order along with Galvatorex. He's upset about this and takes some time to try and come to terms with it before it's revealed that Braum is his real father. Because, you know, having an evil dad makes you evil, or something, and power is carried in bloodline so only a few families are allowed to be important. Has enough time passed for me to talk about the rise of Skywalker spoilers? No? Okay. It was a little more interesting when Aragon thought his dad was the bad guy. Sure, it's another way in which he's just fantasy Luke Skywalker, but at least in this case his dad was dead and wouldn't have a redemption arc. When Braum turned out to be his dad, it felt like the author was giving him a hug and saying, It's okay, bro. You don't have to learn to accept the things you can't change. But then Murtog's whole character arc is about learning to accept that he's not his evil father and becoming a hero in spite of his parentage. Look, it just doesn't match up and that irks me, okay? As for the setting, I could do a whole video just on that and maybe I will one day. Yeah, okay, it's a rip-off of Tolkien. There are some fun changes. Like the mountains so tall they exit the planet's atmosphere, or the dwarven city so big it can hold their whole race, or the bears the size of a house, or the whales that eat dragons, or the elves that cover themselves in blue fur, or the magic system based on the language of an extinct race. Actually, there's a lot of little things here that are cool. Shame they aren't focused on more. The thing to note about all of this is that even if it's not that good, Aragon served to get a lot of people, myself included, into reading fantasy. Even as a kid, I liked the idea of going into a totally new world and getting to follow characters on their adventures there. The problem is that epic fantasy is an intimidating genre to get into. The books are often extremely long, part of a series, and have very steep learning curves. Something like The Wheel of Time would be way too long and for that matter way too dense for most people at that age. Even less famously long stuff like Mistborn would be difficult. The reason I love epic fantasy is that it has a lot going on. There are often tons of different characters to keep track of and a whole new world to learn about. But that's a lot for someone to do without practice and build up. Can you imagine a 10-year-old reading Dune? Probably not. It's too advanced for most of them. That's not even taking into consideration how a lot of adult fantasy has things like violence and sex that kids would be uncomfortable with or not allowed to read. If I read Aragon today, I probably wouldn't be able to get into it. I might see it as competent, but not all that engaging. It would be too long to serve as light reading, but too shallow to be an expansive experience either. It would be too cliched for me to get into. The characters would just be a little too childish for me to connect with. As a younger reader though, it served as a fantastic introduction to the wider world of epic fantasy. And even if you have problems with the series itself, we need to acknowledge this positive effect that it had for me and others. The first real adult epic fantasy I ever read was The Wheel of Time. Well, sort of. I started and stopped it a couple of times before finally finishing. I read the Night Angel trilogy before I finished Wheel of Time. The point is that it's a much denser series with a lot more going on and a steeper learning curve. Had I jumped in without any practice or experience, I would have been completely lost rather than just mostly lost. Aragon gave me a vital stepping stone to the world of long epic fantasy that I love today. The Rangers Apprentice did pretty much the same thing, but I'm too much of a view whore to talk about that here. I'll do it some other time. Thanks for watching. And thanks to my patrons, Appo Savalainen, Brother Santotis, Christopher Hawkins, Christopher Quinten, Joel, Joseph Pendergraft, Tobacco Crow, and all the other names you see here. 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