u/RatTheBerserker

disclaimer: i first read eragon when i was a young teenager and didnt notice any plot holes at all. and i suppose that most of them only become clear in hindsight. now ive started to reread them, but holy, are there many in the books! to the authors credit, he did plan out a lot of stuff from the beginning, which is, given that he was very young when he started writing stuff, at an age when all I could do, in a nutshell, exist, indescribably impressive

in case that for some reason someone would open this thread without having read all the books: spoiler ahead

>!the death of brom is so fucking stupid. firstly, why on earth would he 1) give away his ring with all his energy he could have healed himself with to convey an arguably pointless message, especially given that apparently scrying zoom exists?? mr paolini probably didnt plan ahead with that ring, but why on earth did he then later decide to make it an energy storage? that makes brom look so stupid, lol. 2)also, what the heck is up with those ancient words he teaches eragon before he dies? as far as i am aware, they never get mentioned again. 3) of course, there are a lot of dragons having their little fbi observation operation running from vroengard all along and they are apparently able to alter spells to the point where an egg gets transported somewhere completly else or the spell that eragon casts on galabtorix does far more than he intented. But, when brom is mortally wounded and eragon is casting the spell to heal him, they couldn't have just... altered the spell a teeny tiny bit to make it heal him completly? doesnt seem very far fetched tbh. doesnt make sense anyway that they revealed themselves so late from a strategic standpoint. 4) speaking of the egg, why on earth would arya bother to transport the egg around the world all the time when apparently you can just... teleport it? Also, given that there are only very few elves and elf children, why on earth would the elves need the egg every second year anyway? they could have just gathered all elves, and elf children in particular, and let them touch it all at once or at least in one year, problem solved. 5) how galabtorix was able to murder the whole order with only a handful of supporters and only a few eldunari under his control when there were so many defending dragons and elves and eldunaris sounds completly bonkers to me, that stuff is very poorly explained. 6) why would a subset of eldunaris just decide to surrender instead of fighting alongside the rest of the order with a lot of experienced riders and dragons, against galbaotrix, and wait for 100 years to wait until galabtorix has enslaved the rest of the eldunaris, who would have been fighting against him before, to wait for 1 single rider without experience who would attack galbatorix, to risk it all and fight all those enslaved dragons they would have been allied with before? what the fuck? there must have been A LOT more defending than attacking eldunaris on vroengard given that galbatorix needed so long to enslave them and he didnt plunder the main storage before? i mean, this has to be the biggest plot hole of all bec this really, really doesnt make any sense at all. cool idea but paolini really fucked this up in my opinion. and i dont even think it would have been very hard to write this in a a way that wouldnt have been as obviously nonsensical as this, even if he only noticed this problem in book 4. 7) not gonna get into oromis and glaedrs death bec honestly they are so unneccessary, in hindsight its completly clear to me that mr paoloni just wanted to get rid of them such that eragon had to be the new teacher and leader lol!<

ive noticed some more plot holes but im too lazy to write them down, im sure im probably not the first one to bring them up anyway

im sorry to be that person, I still love the books and they had such an amazing potential, but im kind of sad that mr paolini didnt try to fix the most obvious plotholes in book 4 :( especially that the whole plot twist in the final book is so nonsensical ruins it for me a little bit. but, at the very least, i didnt notice them when i was younger at my first read through and given that the books are probably thought for young teenagers, the books have therefore certainly completly served their purpose for me. they are undoubtedly magnificently written

edti: some of yall really havent thought this true, have you? especially the bit about the eldunari. there is absolutely no way that by what they did they elevated themselves into a stronger position, and if they did, it is NOT explained. there is no way of explaining how somehow one rider with 150 eldunari is stronger against galbatorix with hundreds and hundreds of them instead of many riders on vroengard with many wild dragons, including that very big one, with hundreds of hundreds of eldunari against galbatorix with other 12 riders with only a handful of eldunaris to help them. the only explanation in the books is that even dragons can wait to strike, but this doesn't explain this at all

https://preview.redd.it/7aj7c0dnqmah1.png?width=958&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b8c9388e7526aa6335e363029f5289a334ae9a2