#btw im not passing judgement on selenas character

[alagaesia-headcanons]

Sorry I snatched this screenshot from a different post, but this drives me insane and I don’t want to derail that post

*adds this to the list of reasons I would throw hands with chris*

Inheritance is the titular theme of the Inheritance Cycle, yet Paolini seems so incredibly inconsistent about what he wants to say about it. On one hand, the series has so many examples of how circumstances can frequently push children into the roles their parents once had, either willingly or forcefully. A lot of the growth of the characters and themes comes from the idea that such fates aren’t binding and these people can leave behind the roles of their parents by growing beyond them and making something entirely their own or by rejecting the role entirely and carving a new path outright. It’s a theme that means a lot to me and think is very valuable to consider for the truth it carries and the beauty of the idea that our lives are our own to shape.

And then he turns around and says shit like this that undermines all of that.

The idea that Eragon inherited his determination and his “deep seated sense of what’s right and wrong” from Selena makes me so mad. Morals are not inherited. Remember, Selena didn’t raise Eragon at all. She left right after he was born. She had no influence on his upbringing. To declare that she passed on such complex moral characteristics by merit of having conceived and given birth to him is so reductive.

This does a disservice to the people that actually interacted with Eragon as he grew up. If anyone had a formative affect on Eragon’s personality, it would likely be Garrow and Marian first and foremost. And after that, Roran growing up along side him and the rest of the villagers he interacted with frequently. These people around him are the ones who could pass on their knowledge, their experience, and their beliefs.

But far more important than that, enough to make that close to irrelevant, it that this does and incredible disservice to Eragon himself. Despite the influence of the people who were actually around him, it is still up to him to decide how he wants to live and what he considers important. Throughout the series we see as Eragon fights with himself to figure out how to use the power suddenly thrust upon him, for example, when he makes the choice to prioritize his service to the Varden and subsequent training with the elves out of his devotion to the peoples of Alagaesia as a whole over his quest to slay the Ra’zac out of a sense of loyalty to his family. He has to examine himself to understand why that desire to fight for (what he sees as) the greater good of the public is the most important to him and what he is willing to do to achieve that.

We see him struggle when presented with people who have moral systems different than his own, such as Murtagh, who feels no obligation towards a large group or a ideological cause, but has an incredibly loyalty and devotion to the individuals he loves. And Roran, who, in the end, fights for the same cause as Eragon does, but for wildly different reasons based on the wellbeing of a smaller group and the immediate, tangible things they need to be cared for, like housing, food, and safety from military threats.

Eragon’s sense of right or wrong, is not inherited because it’s not innate. I wouldn’t even say it’s deep seated. It changes. It’s something he learned as he grew and then had to personally refine as it wavered and strengthened and shifted in response to the far reaching dilemmas he found himself in. It was a journey Eragon had to personally take when formerly abstract ideas of what is good and what is evil became much more tangible when he became a Dragon Rider with incredibly influence. It’s not a journey anyone did or could have taken for him.

How Paolini managed to write all that and then just say he got his moral compass from his absent mom is beyond me. It’s a condemnation.

This idea degrades a persons autonomy. It declares that even something as deeply personal as morality is subject to an outside force, to someone else, and not something built and shaped by our own actions. This idea binds people to the character of their parents, which seems benign and inoffensive enough when talking about positive characteristics, but it implies vile things about those with bad parents.

Sorry for being a prick and quoting myself, but I touched on something similar to this in another post about Murtagh and said, what does it mean to say, “Oh, you aren’t like your father, so you’re not damned to follow his path; you’re like your mother instead!”

I think the temptation is to attribute good characteristics of children to parents as something those children can then depend upon as something innate that they don’t have to struggle for and something that won’t fail them. It makes things nice and simple. But that’s not true, it never is, and the idea falls apart when considering the possible inheritance of negative traits. Using Murtagh as an example, cherry picking positive traits from Selena that he has in common to negate the idea that he got negative traits from Morzan is still damning him to the exact same idea that he is solely a product of his parents and that his actions don’t truly belong to him. Murtagh literally states that his frustration in being compared to Morzan isn’t because he’s being compared to someone who did horrible things, it’s that he isn’t being regarded as an individual who can make his own choices independent of someone else’s influence. He longs to be seen as his own person, not a continuation of someone else.

Attributing Murtagh’s qualities to Selena, or Eragon’s, or any other character’s qualities to their parent is continuing the exact same problem, no matter how complimentary the comparison may seem at first glance. Morals are not inherited, they are learned through the world and our experiences as we go through it. The books do a great job of showing this in many places which makes me even more angry and sad to see the author himself say things like this. I think it demands a critical eye not just in the way that we view these characters, but how it relates to the way we see real people.

These are just my thoughts for consideration if you want them.

Edit: got the source of the screenshot just bc I wanted it here