I think, if you don't take the author's advice, you should at least take mine. I have read - and anaylzed - the entire series up to Inheritance. ALSO I have a huge f'ing Gary Stu as a character. (Agent Alec Troven, to be exact. He's the physical embodiment of Chaos for the entire multiverse, can manipulate reality at a whim and is unkillable. You can't really more 'stuy than that)

Now Gary Stus as some have said, aren't bad things, it's all a matter of how they're handled. Mercedes Lackey has a tendency to write Gary and Mary Sues. Anne McCaffery's Lessa and Menolly are definitely in the Sue category, to knock off a few names.

However the problem with Eragon is that he he is a Gary Stu and not a very good one at that. In that his Stu'ness, his lack of empathy for others, his idea that he's the Judge and Jury of everything. We are supposed to accept that his actions are Good and Right. Even when they're heinous. I point to Sloan for a good example of that.

But really you can look at my analysis that I've done (I think it was linked to earlier) for my proofs.

Yup! I was rather surprised at it too.

Hi! Nice to see you again. :D

Okay, first? Martian Manhunter is arguably more powerful than Superman. He has laser eyes, the flight, and he's just as strong, and on top of that he can shapeshift, is psychic, and can turn intangible. Then again, his weakness is far more common. As Batman says in Justice League: First Flight, "I've got a million-dollar rock for the one in Metropolis. All I need for you is a penny for a book of matches."

Secondly, power levels or being the "sole survivor" aren't what make Superman and J'onn Stus or not Stus. It's how believable they are in their setting. Since Martian Manhunter is a less popular character, he is frequently downplayed, and thus is more believable in within the DCU. Usually Superman is as well, however since he's far more popular, he gets more screen-time, which means more time for writers to play around with him, and pull stuff like the Superman Red/Blue, or having him die then come back to life, or the many times he's been compared to Jesus, or how his powers seem to be "Whatever he needs at that moment in time." When Superman is a Stu, it's a result of bad writing, just like any other character, however since there are many writer who have worked with him, there are just as many occasions where he's a well-balanced, interesting character. All it takes is the right writer.

Saying Superman is a huge Stu, without exception, is a little like saying that Sherlock Holmes is always a huge Stu, just because that how some authors writers write him, regardless of how the original author, or other good authors, have written him.

...doesn't make him not a Stu.

The sheer unoriginalness and outright stolen ideas scream "STU! STU!"

The plot is the original trilogy of Star Wars, with some Tolkien ideas thrown straight in (undiluted by time), the dragonrider concept and how it works stolen from Anne McCaffery's Pern series (who actually made a go at trying to sue him for it), with the magic style of Earthsea and none of the sense that Ursula LeGuin gave it. Individual items within the series, be they concept, character idea, or creature, or what else have you, can generally be pinpointed down to exactly creator/original story in a mix going back to the 1940s as far as modern fantasy goes.

Oh. Let's not forget the B5 allusion, or the inclusion of the Doctor in ways that make no sense whatsoever.

The Babylon 5 allusion is one a friend of mine caught: 'Eragon at one point says some idiotic thing about "I stand between the candle and the dark." The standard greeting of a member of the Grey Council of the Minbari (totally the elves) of Babylon 5: "I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey. We stand between the darkness and the light."'

As to Doctor Who, to quote wikipedia: 'Paolini admitted he is a Doctor Who fan, which inspired his reference to the "lonely god" (the epithet given to the Doctor by the Face of Boe in the episode "New Earth"), to "rooms that are bigger on the inside than the outside" (from "Questions Unanswered" in Inheritance), as well as to Raxacoricofallapatorius, the home of the Doctor Who Slitheen ("Blood Price" in Inheritance).'

That? That is utterly bad writing. Not because they're allusions, but because they are not clever. They are unsuited to his story and the whole world he has created. They are in for the sake of the cool factor, regardless of any sense they make in the setting or as things for characters to say or name things as.

There is nothing good about any of this. This isn't 'inspired by' or 'influenced by'. This is 'stolen from'. If people cannot separate the idea and see it as being true to the story it is currently in, and instead only see- immediately, often enough- that it is from some different other series, some other story, some other creator, there is something wrong with the writing. You can't claim it as your own if people cannot see your touch to it, if they still see the poorly scribbled out name of the previous user of the idea somewhere on a tag attached to it.

This is what Stus and their stories do. They are derivative for the sake of being cool without anything making much more than an ill made patchwork of sense.

The Eragon books reek of trying to cram all the cool ideas he came up with or wanted to use into a single set of books, with one cast.

Eragon himself is painfully, shallowly, derivative.

And, no. A book is focused on its cast of characters. Even when they are not the main character, they still have agency and other things to do. They should not be relegated into either being 'good' and thus helping or needing help from the main characters regardless, or 'evil' and thus not helping the main characters or actively working to be annoyances if they are not out-and-out bad guys/

Again, here's the sporking of the series, by one of our own.

You can like Eragon, sure. You're allowed to have a guilty pleasure. It doesn't mean you have to defend it, say it isn't bad, say Eragon isn't much of a Stu though. Doing that is completely, utterly unnecessary because he is a Stu, and a very big one.

He somehow became better than Brom in the course of weeks fighting with sticks. I would like you to somehow become better than an actual sword fighting master in a few weeks, using sticks that aren't even analogous to how one would use a sword at all and claim that makes you actually good. Nowhere did I see him ever do drills, learn footwork, study technique... This is like saying he improves by LARPing for a few weeks against somebody with greater skill. It doesn't work that way.

And then he switched to actual swords. He sparred against his mentor with the actual weapon he would use to kill people like it was no big deal. Sure, Brom shielded the edge with magic, but he was still flailing around a heavy metal bar that 1) he is totally untrained in the use of, sticks discounted, 2) he does not know the weight of, or his own strength. He by all rights could break bones and seriously hurt a person. And his instructor is a so-called swordfighting expert? What kind of teacher would have completely NO knowledge about basic safety, or even that maybe Eragon should learn how to not hurt himself before he pretends his LARPing skills can serve him in an actual fight with dangerous steel weapons, sharp or otherwise?

My family reads buzz-books on principle, and is a fan of fantasy in general. So we all picked up a copy of Eragon and passed it down the line. My father, a blackbelt in aikido and quite proficient with the sword, threw down the book in disgust, absolutely mad that this kid had the gall to think he was good at any kind of martial art, when he'd practiced for only a few weeks, utterly disregarded safety, his mentor acted with total lack of knowledge, and somehow was superhuman enough to become good enough to BEST that skilled mentor with only a few weeks of effort that shouldn't have taught him anything in the first place.

I'm sorry. Eragon is bad. The way he treats learning new skills, the total lack of research, the sheer disregard and disrespect of those who actually had to spend time and effort developing said skills... he's bad. He's a Gary Stu, through and through. He is like the manifestation of all dweeby people flailing around their sticks and LARP swords and wishing that they could be MASTER SWORDSMEN!!!11one! with just a few weeks of 'practice,' and don't need discipline or applied study because they're special and amazing.

(No insult to LARPers. I am one, in fact, but the dweebs have seen... for every person who tries to study footwork and technique and improve, there is a guy who thinks flailing around like Star Wars Kid makes him a combat master)

I am sorry. I have read the books, but I'm so sorry. Eragon is terrible. I can really only see it as maybe somebody's guilty pleasure. It's just so totally entitled, disrespectful, and uninformed. Argh blargh blah.

I really really want to read that part.

You realize that every other Rider had one of those swords? It's only unusual because most of the other Riders died.
I have yet to see evidence of the elves being Sues any more than I can see any other elves being Sues.
And about that last, I distinctly recall asking for 4th book spoilers to not be discussed. Granted, this is minor (and I have to agree with the point you've made, from what little I know of the incident in question), but I would still like to actually read the book and find out for myself.