Board Thread:Roleplay Ideas/@comment-26065062-20160713125226/@comment-26237442-20160726204544

Avid fantasy readers (lime myself will often notice repeated names, themes or even plot points. This derives from three main things

A) Almost all modern fantasy is dervived from ancient European folklore and almost all names in fantasy have a basis in real life languages (starting a proper language "from scratch" could take thousands of years (or a computer). Fantasy languages are based on real life languages and styles from preceding writers (and yes Tolkien had preceding writers, the character gandalf was inspired by the West Wind.

B) The fantasy author's community is a close one nods and tips of the head are incredibly common.

C) Elves, dwarves and evil empires are genre staples, it's how the author takes these staples that matters. Poalini's world takes traditional fantasy and turns it on his head. The elves of Inheritance may appear similar to Tolkien's elves at first glance but in all honestly there are very few similarities (they have pointy ears, live a long time, have nice horses and have good senses. the similarities stop here (unless you count living in a forest)). If you want to look into Paolini's elves read the actual books. Whilst dwarves are a little less varied in fantasy almost universally being stout, solid, wise builders and engineers, there are differences. Riding giant goats and having a giant ruby sunroof for one thing. People often confuse Tolkien's detailed histories of his nations with an in depth analysis of their cultures, looking at canon sources very little can be understood of dwarven culture beyond a love of music, treasure, mining, architecture, fancy toys and battle. Paolini's "minute detail" shows us dwarven stratification, music, architecture, concepts of beauty, burial rituals, family feuds, forms of government, art, a slightly different form of architecture, magic and even hunting methods (and feasting of course).

Poalini's dragons can be compared with the dragons from Dragon Riders of Pern but are otherwise fairly original (although Katherine Ker's dragons show similar traits) so there isn't much need to talk about that.

But the most atrocious thing here is your ignorance of Urgal-kind!!! here we have one of the best examples of how Paolini challanges the tropes of fantasy, the urgals are not as they appear! Urgals are not souless (rather dull and unimaginitive) hordes like orcs but an advanced culture with stipulated morals, codes of honour, religion, leadership, family based clans (all urgal families have a tapestry to represent their lineage) AND they actually side with the varden when not under the controll of a shade. (and if you want to compare someone with a nazgul use a shade, Ra'Zac and their parents are magically morphed dragon/human hunters on the brink of extinction. Whereas shades are sorcerers who have foolishly summoned spirits powerful enough to take over their body and mind.)

AND

Come to the darkside we have werecats.