I am writing a novel, and I need to know if this idea is too similar to Dragonriders of Pern or Eragon?
There are two breeds of dragons in Ilerinia, Firebreathers and Iceblowers. The two races typically breed together, and their offspring are either Firebreathers or Iceblowers. However, when the balance between good and evil shift, the dragons are called to fight on the side of good to return balance to the forces if the balance of evil overrides good. When this happens, a hatchling is born with the abilities of both breeds. This special hatchling along with a chosen human (my main character) have the duty of fighting on the side of good.
Another help would be if someone could help me think of a name for this said relationship.
When I started writing this story, what is now a main subplot was my main plot, and since adding this idea, my story has started to take on more the form I want it to. One of my editors says that the idea is too cliche, and my main character being female is just a very obvious way of differing the stories.
My main character is a princess whose life has been at stake since she were born. She is the only ligitimate child of the king and queen, and the king has an illegitimate older son whose mother wants the throne for her own son, so she has been trying to kill my main character since she was born. But she is not my main antagonist. My main antagonist is a king of another nation who is corrupted by evil, who is trying to stop a prophecy involving my main character from coming true. My main character is destined along with her dragon to restore the balance of good and evil, and some other ideas that are still in the works.
Actually, in response to number five, the son does join the evil king and takes a band of followers, a very large band of followers, with him.
- confusilated
Tags: Cliche, Eragon, King Queen, Overrides, Relationship
August 18th, 2009 at 6:17 am
I think Eragon was a rip off of Pern and if he had been older Anne McCaffrey might have thought differently about not sueing him.
August 21st, 2009 at 3:52 am
it could be too close, but if you mix it up, and put some new ideas— not your typical hero, etc, then it could be really good.
August 24th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I don’t know too much about Pern, but that idea of yours(very creative, by the way…) is, I don’t think, too similar to Eragon.
GOOD LUCK ON THE BOOK. GREAT IDEA!!!!!!!!
August 25th, 2009 at 11:51 am
I have read the Dragon Riders of Pern, and this paragraph seems nothing like them. Eragon, ehhh….no, not really similar. a name for ur main character…Anita, Tia, Gwen, Leeah. those are all i can think of. I think the idea of having special dragons with both powers is cool. Nope, i still see no similarities between Eragon, and this story ur writing.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:31 am
I think you have a good idea and I agree with the others. A cool plot twist would be if the mother’s plans kept failing and her son got fed up with her so he joined the evil king.
August 27th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Anything with someone riding a dragon to combat the forces of evil is going to sound like Eragon.
There’s no way around that.
Maybe make it so the dragons aren’t fighting for ideal “good”, but are fighting for something else, like their survival, or a community of humans they co-exist with, something to make the dragons feel like a real race with their own goals, instead of defender of “good”.
You also have to figure out why the dragons need a human to ride on them, otherwise, the story is just an excuse for the image of someone riding a dragon. In Eragon at least, Eragon had magic that the dragon didn’t.
The other cliche, the old “elite who is special because they were born with super powers”. It’s like its not enough that Eragon (Luke Skywalker, etc)was a good, brave person. No, the real reason he’s the last dragonrider (Jedi, etc) is because he had the right parentage. Make your heroes people who choose to fight the good fight, with what they have. Maybe they earn their powers along to way.
August 27th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
The story itself doesn’t sound like the stories of Pern, but your themes are a bit too similar. You sound like you have a really fine imagination, why don’t you try to write something more original, don’t take it personally, but I honestly think dragons have been done to death. Anne McCaffrey’s books are good, but even she was getting boring towards the end of Pern…
August 30th, 2009 at 11:35 am
There are only so many plotlines, and fewer still in a fantasy realm. Don’t worry about if it’s been done before. Write for the enjoyment, write for yourself, and the rest can come later. If you enjoy writing the story, and your mechanics (grammer, spelling, sentence construction, etc) are sound; others will enjoy reading it.
September 1st, 2009 at 1:17 am
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: WORLD LIST
THE ANCIENT WORLD
Old Testament
Homer
Aeschylus (524?—456 B.C.)
Thucydides
Sophocles (495—406 B.C.)
Euripides (480—406 B.C.)
Plato (429—347 B.C.)
Aristotle (384—322 B.C.)
Lucretius (99—55 B.C.)
Cicero (106—43 B.C.)
Virgil (70—19 B.C.)
New Testament
Petronius (died 65 A.D.)
St. Augustine (354—430 A.D.)
THE MIDDLE AGES
Song of Roland
Dante Alighieri (1265—1321)
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313—1375)
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340—1400)
Sir Thomas Malory (1410—1471)
THE RENAISSANCE
Desiderius Erasmus (1466—1536)
Baldesar Castiglione (1478—1529)
Niccolo`Machiavelli (1469—1527)
Francois Rabelais (1494—1553)
Benvenuto Cellini (1500—1571)
Miguel de Montaigne (1533—1592)
Edmund Spenser (1552—1599)
Miguel De Cervantes (1547—1616)
William Shakespeare (1564—1616)
NEOCLASSICISM
John Milton (1608—1674)
Jean-Baptiste Moliere (1622—1673)
Jean Racine (1639—1699)
Alexander Pope (1688—1744)
Francois Voltaire (1694—1778)
ROMANTICISM
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778)
Johann Wolf-gang Von Goethe (1749—1832)
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788—1824)
William Wordsworth (1770—1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834)
Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792—1822)
John Keats (1795—1821)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809—1824)
Robert Browning (1812—1889)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809—1849)
Walt Whitman (1819—1892)
Nathaniel Hawthorn (1804—1864)
Herman Melville (1819—1891)
REALISM AND NATURALISM
Honore De Balzac (1799—1850)
Gustave Flaubert (1821—1880)
Charles Dickens (1812—1870)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821—1881)
Leo Tolstoy (1828—1910)
Anton Chekov (1860—1904)
Henrik Ibsen (1828—1906)
SYMBOLISM AND MODERN SCHOOL
Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867)
Arthur Rimbaud (1854—1891)
Alexander Blok (1880—1921)
William Butler Yeats (1865—1939)
Federico Garcia Lorka (1899—1936)
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875—1926)
John Millington Synge (1871—1909)
T.S. Eliot (1888—1948 Nobel Prize for Literature)
James Joyce (1882—1941)
Andre Gide (1869—1951)
Thomas Mann (1875—1955)
Franz Kafka (1883—1924)
Marcel Proust (1871—1922)
William Faulkner (1885—1930)
Raul Brandao (1867?—1930)
EEP Honors Engiish
Caucer by E.J. Priestley for Honors English EEP Students
Caucer (1340-1400) Cantebury Tales are a series of tales told by Geoffery Caucer (1340-1400). The tales describe the experiences and feelings of twelve pilgrims on their way to Canterbury England and the Shrine of Thomas Beckett who was martyred there in 117
Note: Comparative English language note: Caucer died in the year 140 The English Caucer spoke, wrote and understood was as different as the English written and spoken by Shakespeare as Shakespeare’s English is different to the English, which is spoken and written today.
The Tales:
The Knights
The Miller’s
The Reeve’s
The Wife’s Bath’s
The Friar’s
The Clerk’s
The merchant’s
The Franklin’s
The Pardoner’s
The Shipman’s
The Prioress’s
The Nun’s Priest
The Words necessary to understand Canterbury Tales:
clep(en): name, call
danngerous: aloof, cool
eke: also
fetis: pretty, neat
bent: seize
hight: named, called
ilke: that, same
lever: rather
lewd: ignorant, layman
list: want, (… the which me list …)
ne: a negation (e.g., n’is, n’as, isn’t, wasn’t; n’ill—will not, n’ould, wouldn’t)
sentence: option, meaning
sickerly: certainly
stint: stop
swink: work
trow: guess, think
wend (end): go
whilom: once upon a time
wiste: knew
wood: mad
wot: knows
POST MORDERNISM
Nobel Prize in Literature 2005: Harold Pinter
2004: Elfriede Jelinek
2003: John Maxwell Coetzee
2002: Imre Kertesz
2001: V.S. Naipaul
2000: Gao Xingjian
1999: Gunter Grass
1998: Jose Saramago
1997: Dario Fo
1996: Wislawa Szymorska
1995: Seamus Heaney
1994: Kenzaburo Oe
1993: Toni Morrison
1992: Derek Walcott
1991: Nadine Gordimer
1990: Octavio Paz
1989: Camilo Jose Cela
1988: Naguib Mahfouz
1987: Joseph Brodsky
1986: Wole Soyinka
1985: Claude Simon
1984: Jaroslav Seifert
1983: Sir William Golding
1982: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1981: Elias Canetti
1980: Czelaw Milosz
1982: Odysseus Elytis (pen-name of Odysseus Alepoudhelis)
1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977: Vincente Aleiandre
1976: Saul Bellow
1975: Eugenio Montale
1974: Eyvind Johnson & Harry Martinson (Prize divided equally between the two)
1973: Patrick White
1972: Heinrich Boll
1971: Pablo Neruda
1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1969: Samuel Beckett
1968: Yasunari Kawabata
1967: Miguel Asturias
1966: Shmuel Agnon & Nelly Sachs (Prize divided equally between the two)
1965: Michail Sholokhov
1964: Jean-Paul Sartre
1963: Giorgos Seferis (pen-name of Giorgos Seferiadis)
1962: John Steinbeck
1961: Ivo Andri’c
1960: Saint-John Perse (pen-name of Alexis Leger)
1959: Salvatore Quasimodo
1958: Boris Pasternak
1957: Albert Camus
1956: Juan Jimenez
1955: Halldor Laxness
1954: Ernest Himingway
1953: Sir Winston Churchill
1952: Francois Mauriac
1951: Par Fabian Lagerkvist
1950: Betrand Russell
1949: William Faulkner
1948: Thomas Sterns Eliot
1947: Andre Gide
1946: Hermann Hesse
1945: Gabriela Mistral (pen-name of Lucila Godoy Y Alca-Yaga)
1944: Johannes Jensen
1943–1940: Prize money was allocated to the Main Fund (1/3) and the Special Fund (2/3) of this Prize Section
1939: Frans Sillanpaa
1938: Pearl Buck (pen-name of Pearl Walsh Sydenstricker)
1937: Roger Martin Du Gard
1936: Eugene O’Neill
1935: Prize money was allocated to the Main Fund (1/3) and the Special Fund (2/3) of this Prize Section
1934: Luigi Pirandello
1933: Ivan Alekeyevich Bunin
1932: John Galsworthy
1931: Erik Karlfeldt
1930: Sinclaire Lewis
1929: Thomas Mann
1928: Sigrid Undset
1927: Henri Bergson
1926: Grazia Deledda (pen-name of Grazia Deledda)
1925: George Bernard Shaw
1924: Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (pen-name of Reyment)
1923: William Butler Yeats
1922: Jacinto Benavente
1921: Anatole France (pen-name Jacque Anatole Thibaulk)
1920: Knut Hamsun
1919: Carl Spitteller
1918: Prize money was allocated to the Special Fund Prize Section
1917: Karl Adolph Gjellerup & Henrik Pontoppidan—Prize divided
1916: Carl Gustaf Verner Von Heidenstam
1915:Romain Rolland
1914: Prize money was allocated to the Special Fund Prize Section
1913: Rabindranath Tagore
1912: Gerhart Hauptmann
1911: Count Maurice Polidore Maeterlinck
1910: Paul Heyse
1909: Selma Otillia Lovisa Lagerlof
1908: Rudolf Eucken
1907: Rudyard Kipling
1906: Giosue Carducci
1905: Henrk Sienkiewicz
1904: Jose Y Elzaguirre & Frederic Mistral—Prize divided equally.
1903: Bjorstjerne Martinus Bjornson
1902: Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen
1901: Sully Prudhomme (pen-name of Rene Francois Armand)
Pursue clarity
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