We’re all with you Epistler, but consider this. We have a board and means to talk of what we will. We have proven our superior grasp of writing and story structure, and defeated the designs Paolini. We need not defeat him again.
…And if nobody gets this reference I will feel sad.
And now for something completely different.
Anyway on an entirely separate note I’ve been thinking about Paolini’s elves and how they are all universally beautiful, sexy, etc, etc, and supposedly stay together as long or as short a time as they might and only have children when they want them. Which sounds, in theory, like the subject of a teenaged version of paradise.
Of course any degree of analysis, or, you know, thought, would reveal this concept to be patently horrifying. Institutions like marriage were created for very good reasons, after all.
For instance: Who is responsible for rearing children that are born?
If relationships exist only so long as someone wants one without getting bored, and people do not have any obligation to maintain those relationships, what of the bond between parent and child? I’m sure all parents have moments where they are really sick of their kids, and the way the elves have set things up it really seems like there is nothing stopping them from just abandoning them.
Now you might argue that the community takes care of them. Problem is, this is a community which, as a whole, does not seem to have any sense of personal responsibility. The basis for the elves society seems to be that pleasure is the ultimate goal of a relationship. When it ceases to give you pleasure it is abandoned. This does not seem to me to be a healthy recipe for raising children.
Or another element: What is their criminal justice system?
No seriously. They clearly have some big taboo about eating meat. So if we assume eating meat is against the law, what measures are in place to punish someone who decides to start chomping venison because he takes pleasure from the taste?
Or what if one persons ex lover gets jealous after another has ditched them and splits their skull open with a broadsword, then kills the person who stole her from him? Elves are extremely violent people, we see this again and again, and they are a warrior culture for whom reckless hedonism seems the end goal.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the elves were obviously Paolini’s concept of a Utopia. But he didn’t actually put any thought into how said utopia would work. Maintain a society takes time, effort, and discipline. It isn’t just about coasting off of the best impulses of society, it is about curbing and punishing their worst.
The law, at its most basic level, exists to avoid blood feuds and limit the violence that results from vigilante justice. Paolini cheated with his Utopia and just said that all those things magically fixed themselves because elves. Except the entire point of a Utopia is to create a fictional society which readers can examine, and decide for themselves whether it is truly the best, and truly attainable.
Frankly the only possible way I can see elvish society actually working was if the elves were actually just a hive mind. That would explain why they all have the same personality, why their society apparently all shares the same values. The moderate differences in individual elves which appear are representations of different aspects of the elf’s personality.