The L'il Coffee Shop, Holidays and New Year's Edition!!! (Likely) Options

[The Metal Mallet]

Oooo, new coffee shop. I'm digging the festive appearance of it.

This is meant to be a place where you can talk about anything without having to stay on topic. Feel free to ask questions, to talk about the things in your life you like to share with your fellow-members. Or just step inside for a while, have a coffe and a good chat!
You may feel free to post whatever you like as long as it is within the rules of the forum.
But if the conversation degrades to spam, you will be treated as though you are spamming anywhere else on the forum. This is a thread where you can relax and talk about personal things, but it is not to be used as an excuse to make pointless posts.
Please help to keep this alive and well and a place where we can meet and share.
Enjoy your stay here!!!

We had intended the coffee shop to be a nice place where people could talk about their daily activities and such, kinda like the Lurkers Lair on the Official Forums.
It didn't quite turn out that way though, people have been taking advantage of their freedoms in here, there has been a lot of spamming and even some flaming. We will not tolerate that any longer.
So unfortunately we've had to decide to increase the rules for this thread. Of course the normal forum rules still apply, but we'll elaborate here.:
1. No spamming.
We consider double posting and posting posts with only a few words to be spam. If you do that your post will be deleter or moved, do it too often and you might receive a warning for it.
We also consider chit-chat spam. This forum has a special chat channel for chatting, you're welcome to go there, and chat with other members or with the staff as we're always there, doing it in here is not allowed.
The address to that chatroom is:
W4O chat
And for assistence to use a chat like this, I recommend looking over this thread:
http://forums.waiting4oblivion.com/viewtopic.php?t=248
Or contacting one of the Administrators.
2. No discussion of accounts or warnings.
There shall be no more discussion about members, about accounts, about how many warnings you've gotten or anything like that.
3. No trolling.
No posting of random nonsense, no posting of irrelevant things, no posting the same thing over and over just to get it noticed, no swearing or flaming.
4. No religion or politics.
No discussion about religion or politics is to be had in these threads. If you want to discuss religion or politics, please do make another thread, or if another such thread already exists, please post in it.
If you have a question about the rules of the forums, feel free to ask it to either a Global Moderator or an Administrator.
If you're unsure if something is fit to post here, it might be. Again best to ask a Global Moderator or Administrator.
If you're wondering how we think a Lair or the Coffee Shop should look like, what we do allow, then I recommend taking a look at the Lurkers Lair at the Official Forums.

[jack cloudy]

Alright, I went to see Eragon in the cinema today. Since people were arguing about it a while ago, I'll give my opinion on the movie. The movie, not the book.

First of all, let's take a look at the main characters.
Eragon:
Hmm, average farmboy living with his uncle thrown out to save the world. His inexperience and overconfidence at first was decent. (He believed that having trained with his cousin during their spare time made him a master fighter. Till Brom kicked his behind. ) But later on, I was beginning to get irritated with his continuing overconfidence. In fact, he defends his reckless actions passionately, even though he always gets himself or others into danger.

And please, his armour really needed a helmet. The best Varden smiths had worked day and night on making his armour and they couldn't get a helmet done? Oh well, the hero needs to show his face, so that can be forgiven.

Saphira:
Ok, I'll start of by saying that Draco from Dragonheart is a much better dragon visually despite being much older. (Incidentally, Draco is Soulseeker's avatar) That said, a further bad point in my opinion is her super-accelerated growth during her first flight. But, I suppose that by the time Saphira would have reached her massive size through natural growth, Eragon would be an old man.

Personality-wise, Saphira was Eragon's voice of reason, constantly warning him when he was about to do something stupid. Though she didn't have much luck with that unfortunately. I also liked her remarks. She had the best dialogue in the film, though even her's wasn't brilliant.
Brom: ,,She can't breath fire....yet."
Saphira: ,,Luckily for you.” This is just one of the many one-liners. Is it just me or do Dragons always get the best dialogue?

Brom:
Old teacher. That pretty much describes Brom’s role. He teaches Eragon how to fight properly, how to use magic, he makes a saddle so Eragon doesn’t fall from his dragon’s back and blablabla. He also gives Eragon Za’Roc, some supersword which falls under the same category as Excalibur, Durandal, Anduril, Sting (ok, technically a dagger but still treated as a sword), various katanas, Stormbringer and Chrysamere. (Yes, I just have to include my favourite Claymore in the list. Shame on me. )

His personality was a sharp contrast with Eragon’s constant overconfidence. Brom took the matter serious, very serious. He was angry, sad because of the death of his Dragon and so on. He is also quite strict and mysterious. It was a bit of a pity to see him die. I personally preferred Brom over Eragon though not by much. If only Dragons could change riders during their life.

Arya:
Ok, now Arya could be replaced by any other character. Her only role was as a key around which the events unfolded. Throughout the first half of the film, she’s stuck in Durza’s fortress where the Shade gets to play with her. (torture.) It is because of her that Eragon goes to said fortress to save the woman of his dreams. (dreams need to be taken literally here.) This also incidentally allows the army of Urgals (orcs) to follow Eragon to the Varden city which leads to this big old battle at the end. Her last role is to kick the behind of every Urgal in sight during that battle but to say the truth, all characters with a name kicked the behind of every Urgal in sight.
As far as I’m concerned, Arya was just decoration, not a true character even though our farmboy develops a crush on the princess. (Yes, she’s a princess. What did you expect?)

One final note: The scene in which Eragon, Murtagh and Saphira take the poisoned Arya to the Varden eerily resembles the same scene in Lord of the Rings in which Glorfindel/Arwen races to Rivendell with a poisoned Frodo. Creepy.

Murtagh:
Finally, we go back to a good character. Now Murtagh is even more mysterious than Brom. He turns up to save Eragon (trust me, that farmboy needs to be saved all the time.) and saves him again later. Throughout the movie, he maintains a cloak of secrecy and it does seem like he has hidden plans. Murtagh turns out to be the son of a major baddie to which he says: ,,A son does not choose his father.” While he openly claims to stand against everything his father did, I’m a bit reluctant to call him a pure do-gooder myself. If he is, he is the shadowy good type. And I like those types. Much better than the lightheaded farmboy turned into hero.

Durza:
The great evil overlord. Ok, Galbatorix is the head baddie but that guy only got to tell Durza to do the dirty work. Durza is a shade, some sort of supernatural creature with an immense mastery over magic. His smoky teleportation was neat to watch and he came back from the death to haunt Eragon which was pretty cool. He is quite sadistic, taking pleasure in all forms of death. That said, his ending was a bit too abrupt, no matter how cool it might be to see Eragon get launched at the Shade like an arrow from hell. He could have struggled a bit more. Oh well.

Ra’Zac: These two were a pair of assassins sent to kill Eragon. They were only seen in short flashes, with a lot of emphasis put on how scary and unstoppable they were. Because of this, I found the final confrontation with the Ra’Zac halfway through the film extremely disappointing. Within less than a minute, both were death and the only success they got was injuring Saphira’s wing so light that the Dragon wasn’t even bothered by it. (The injury was caused by a tree by the way. That’s what happens when you tell a big Dragon to divebomb into a dense forest. Stupid Eragon, he doesn’t notice the leafy obstructions in his path until it is too late.)

Moving on to the film, I’d say that the plot was average at best, nothing special. The worst plothole has to be the constant meetings. Saphira is a Dragon and described as faster than any horse. (Which in fantasy is usually the fastest non-magical means of transport.) Yet still everyone manages to catch up with her whenever it is convenient. Take Brom for example. After Eragon abandoned him to save Arya, the old man somehow managed to get to Durza’s fort, get inside the fort and jump in front of Eragon just in time to catch a big spear for him. Just how did he get there in time anyway? The whole story falls apart once you take this into consideration.

My final report (is about time because it gets rather long.). Feel free to see it if you like dragons really much or just have to see every fantasy movie there is. Otherwise, stay away and get yourself a LOTR night or something. You won’t really miss anything.