[Suzerain of Sheol]

Donning my purple hat for a second: please keep it civil and avoid personal attacks. Thank you.

On the subject: there's a difference between being inspired by a work or idea, and incorporating it wholesale into your own work with the serial numbers filed off.

And, unfortunately (I suppose), having an original fantasy setting only gets you to 0 on the scale of quality fantasy. It's assumed that a good fantasy book will be innovative and creative in its use of genre conventions. (And, of course, that goes for any genre) There's still the lion's share of the work to be done melding prose, plot, theme, pacing, characterization, dialogue, etc... to actually produce of a competently-written novel that tells a story worth reading.

For my own personal purposes, Eragon (and it's sequels) doesn't do that, from the few pages I've made myself look at. But, I admit to having very high standards, and I've dismissed other successful authors for the same reasons I dismissed Paolini's series. So, my own views on the subject aren't exactly representative.

I do wonder how the translation reads, since from I saw from the English text, the prose was over-written, dense, and seemingly out of control on the author's part -- which is rather typical of a writer of that age.

Also, I'm aware of the status of the movie, I was just relying on it to have some basic understanding of what this story is about -- I can do that, yes? Or is it truly that unfaithful to the book?