skygiants

The compulsion to re-experience some mediocre epic fantasy of my childhood appears to come on me like some sort of annual plague, which is why I have just read the entirety of The Belgariad.

For those unfamiliar with these seminal works of Incredibly Fantasy-Shaped Fantasy, the plot is roughly as follows: Garion is a Simple Farmboy who is both secret long-lost royalty with a kingdom to inherit and the hero prophesied to defeat the evil god who sleeps in the evil empire! The prophecy also has a lot of other helpful information about what needs to happen when and where in order for the evil empire to be defeated, so Garion's long-suffering immortal sorcerous aunt and grandfather take him on a Grand Tour to chase a MacGuffin while he Comes Of Age and Grows Into His Destiny.

Of course the MacGuffin Chase is really just the opportunity to visit various Fantasy Countries, each of which have a single national characteristic and will helpfully provide the quest with a single representative side character, such as:

The Fantasy Vikings, whose representative side character can turn into a bear, and cannot be discussed without someone bringing up how rowdy they are!

The Fantasy Saxons and Normans, whose representative side characters are respectively Will Scarlett and Lancelot, and cannot be discussed without someone bringing up how stupid they are!

The Fantasy Romans, whose representative side character is Garion's destined fiancee, and cannot be discussed without someone bringing up how much they care about money! This one is a bit different because Garion's destined fiancee has her own characteristics: she is Tiny and Willful! We know this because the adjective 'tiny' is used in almost every sentence describing her and she spends most of her time onscreen throwing temper tantrums, but she and Garion will fall in love anyway because the prophecy says so. This is all very explicit. It's not even that destiny can't be struggled against, it's that nobody really even bothers to try, except Garion for maybe half a second, and then everyone tells him he's going through a sulky teen phase and to knock it off. And he promptly does! No glory in defying your fate in the Belgariad!

Relatedly: the Fantasy Genocide Victims, whose representative character is a sexy slave woman whose Destined Romance after they rescue her is with a religious zealot who spends their first three months of acquaintanceship slut-shaming her for having been a slave! But it's all right, ~*~destiny~*~ wears him down and the Eddingses are sure they'll be very happy together.

There's also a country of highly-exoticized snake people, who don't get a representative character because they're too busy sexily drugging and poisoning each other. And, of course, the Evil Country of the Evil God, which is composed largely of villainous human-sacrificing priests, merchants who are secretly villainous human-sacrificing priests, and extremely stupid and terrified sacrificial victims. (There's a lot of scenes in the beginning of Our Heroes riding into some kingdom and warning them to kick out all the merchants of Evil Nationality because they're secretly plotting something, which, uh, I think is probably not deliberately anti-Semitic, and yet .....)

As it may be evident: these books are very readable and also they are not at all good. I think it would be very difficult for any adaptation to make them good; the orientalism, sexism, and plot determinism are completely baked into the premise. However, I have come up with one simple way to wildly improve them for me, personally. ( Spoilers under the cut )

Anyway. The Belgariad! There's a bit in the beginning of the omnibus version I was rereading in which David Eddings talks proudly about how he was inspired to write it by wanting there to be more realist fantasy and how it broke away from previous patterns, which confused me enormously, because I think of the Belgariad as being, uh, wildly emblematic of its time, for sure, but not really ... a trailblazer .... anyway, if anyone who remembers the 80s and the fantasy scene wants to tell me if there is any grain of truth in this claim, I'd appreciate it!

Soon, probably: The Mallorean, the sequel series, in which they do all the exact same things over again. "Then why are you going to read it?" Because I remember it being slightly better than the Belgariad! "Then why didn't you just read the Mallorean to begin with and skip the Belgariad entirely?" Because I'm a completionist who doesn't make good decisions!