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January 2009 |
Book Evaluation 1: Alara Unbroken - Friday, June 19, 2009 7:41 PM Alara Unbroken Book Read: Magic the Gathering, Alara Unbroken by Doug Beyer This will help in your understanding in the following context. There are Five Shards of Alara. Alara was a plane split into 5 parts by a planeswalker dragon called Nicol Bolas. Naya is a lush jungle, Jund is a searing world of fire, Grixis is ruled by dark magic and the undead, Esper is full of magic, while Bant is a enlightened world of angels and sigiled knights. Planeswalkers are beings that can teleport from one plane to another. Ajani is a Wild Nactal who later discovers he is a planeswalker, disliked by his tribe because of his unusual white fur. Elspeth is from Bant, and she is a planeswalker who came from a world that was in suffering, where she did not want to return to. Rafiq the Many is also from Bant, and is a very decorated knight. He cannot find his honor in the defence of Bant, and is thrown into confusion. When I compare my life so far with that of Ajani, I feel privileged to be born in a world that accepts me the way I am and accepts my tries at second chances. In Alara Unbroken, Ajani is ostracised out of his tribe of Wild Nactal, but whatever efforts he puts in to fit in are in vain. This book has allowed me to realise that I am like an insect next to the rest of the world. There are so many different cultures and ways of life that I am unfamiliar with. I truly feel that the five Shards of Alara are meant to represent the seven continents in the world, as though there are seven continents, some of them share cultures that are widely the same, and Antarctica does not count. Anyways, there is so much to explore out there that I do not even know exists, exactly like the people in the different shards were like: they did not know of the other shards’ existence. If the main character entered my classroom, he would most likely just look confused, and then planeswalk/ teleport to another world. One of the other main characters, Elspeth, was faced with a hard decision to make when the five shards started coming together and chaos ran rampant in her homeworld: her world was not an ideal place anymore, and she could just planeswalk/teleport to another, better world. Should she or should she stay and defend her world with whatever magic she had? If I were in her shoes, I would choose to stay and defend my world, as my world no doubt has provided much for me, so I must stand and defend it. I would like to link this back to my life by saying that Singapore has been my home all my life, and if it is attacked by others, I would give my life to defend it. I learned from this book that whatever problems you have, be it that you are ostracised by others, or that someone is putting something dear to you in danger, it is always best to face the bull by its horns, like how you should face problems by the ‘p’. There were many problems that arose in the book, and I feel that if the characters did not confront them, the story would not have been the same. Once, someone I knew had something very dear to her destroyed by someone she was sure was one of her friends who came to her house one day. This links back to Ajani’s brother, Jazal, getting killed one night by creatures summoned by someone unknown, and Ajani tries to find him or her to exact his revenge. The culprit that destroyed that object was none other than her brother, and the person who summoned the creatures on Ajani’s brother was his childhood friend, Zaliki. Both culprits committed their deeds out of accident. By the way, Zaliki lived, and my friend’s brother did too, just not as well. If I were one of the characters in the book, this would be my diary entry for two consecutive days: The past two days have been extremely confusing. Zaliki told me she was the one who summoned the creatures into our tribe. She said that she heard voices in her head telling her to ‘preserve the peace’ of our tribe. I don’t know if I should kill her or forgive her this accident. After all, she was not directly the one who killed Jazal, was she? The next day she killed Marisi, the one responsible for Jazal’s death all along stripping me of any chance of avenging my dear brother. What should I do now? I have to move on and forget about all this. I have a feeling that tomorrow will be the day that I will face off with Nicol Bolas and at last end all this… The important places in the story are the borders of all the five shards: Naya, Grixis, Jund, Esper and Bant, and most importantly, the maelstrom. No change would have to made even if the book occurred 200 years ago, as this story took place not in this world, and there is no sign of modern technology in the whole story. Singapore is a humid place that has gone through much industrialisation, and there is definitely no source of mana for magic. Naya is a lush, untainted jungle of a world. Humans and elves alike worship giant behemoths, seeking to uncover their ancient secrets. Bant is an enlightened kingdom of holiness and angels, where political disputes are settled by means of war, each side having to follow laws set by Asha, the late leader of all angels, as in she is dead. In Esper magic rules the shard. Sphinxes watch over all sentient beings of the shard. Etherium is an alloy that is able to enhance the physical ability of a living being, and the sphinxes ensure that every living thing is ‘cleansed’ with an Etherium enhancement. Grixis is a closed coffin without any source of white mana to give life to its denizens. It festered for centuries, and turned into a cesspit of demons and ghouls. The humans that still live there hide away from the demons. They are the key for the demons to make new undead minions. Jund is a primevial, seething cauldron-world of volcanoes and reptilian predators. Humans live in tribes that stick together to survive. Goblins scurry from mountaintop to mountaintop, seeking the ‘honour’ of getting devoured by dragons. If my story took place in a modern time like today where there is modern weaponry available for use. The humans would be the rulers like in the real world, with their sense of teamwork better than ever, using all the guns and ammunition to gun down the self-centered demons. The humans would come together and fight as one single force, destroying any resistance they come across, from dragons to goblins to planeswalkers. I feel that Ajani’s traits can be represented by a shape that has a circular bottom, and a livid and spiky top, like a symbol of fire. Inside the circle I would describe him as a person who is good at bringing out the best in others, and tolerance, patience and love are his virtues. This would be how I write the ending to the book: Ajani pushed a sponge into the bottom of the wooden bucket, soaking up water and cleanser. He had to clean up Jazal’s lair one more time, before he went away. Away from all this. Naya was never fit for him, and he did not know if he would ever come back. ‘Will you ever be back?’ Ignoring her question, he said, ‘I’m appointing you kha. I’ve met with the elders, and they decided this way was the best. Please, do this for me.’ ‘Ajani, I… is that forgivance?’ ‘It’s close. It’s trust..’ ‘Thank you.’ She managed to say before Ajani abruptly stood up and embraced him. Words that were never spoken were expressed through that one embrace. She left the room after, knowing that she might never see him ever again. Ajani scrubbed all night until the floor until it was clean. He carried the bucket outside the lair and dumped the soiled water over the ledge, into the jungle below. I changed this story as I felt that Zaliki should be better off than in the real story. I felt sorry for her when her folly severed her childhood friendship with Ajani, even when she still cared for him. So I decided to change to story’s ending to a more quiet and touching setting, so that they could embrace and make the story more satisfying to the reader, which is me. I feel that the character that is most like me in this story is Rafiq the Many. He has had a best friend, as I have, and has lost him, as I have. At one point of time he wondered if ‘friendship could be severed with a blade’, as he had affected his friend’s spine so that he was paralysed, but it was not in the intention of truly paralysing him. I have gone through similar thoughts as Rafiq. Rafiq has also faced horrible failure, as I have. He tried to heal his friend’s paralysis, but ended up causing his death. That was a blunder only slightly different from the time I forgot to send my friend a copy of something very important in a file check (that he lost), and thus he ended up dead, like Rafiq’s friend, just in a more horrible way. Rafiq is also someone who has achieved many honours, as I have when I got into Hwa Chong. But he also regrets the stress that is brought on to him when he is seen as the most decorated knight in the world and also as a hero. This attributes to the stress that my family puts on me to do well in my results. And similarly, we have both not done very well. Rafiq got his friend killed, while I failed to get an Ipod Touch. I feel that the word that best describes Ajani is ‘lonely’. He has been a loner his whole life, having only two true friends through his childhood, Zaliki who was forsaken by him, and Jazal who was killed. He hunts alone, hoping to redeem himself for the colour of his skin, and his hunted always gets stolen by his tribe-mates that resent him. He treasures everything that his two friends gave him, and holds sentimental value to everything that he owns. It is the sad truth that he was lonely, so lonely that he mourned his brother’s death and his lost of a friend so much that it ignited his planeswalker spark, and a planeswalker spark, however rare to possess, requires a lot of trauma to ignite. Even at the end of the story, Ajani chose not to stay with Zaliki, his last remaining friends, and planeswalks to another world… The two characters that I will compare are Ajani and Nicol Bolas. They are two completely different beings. Ajani is good at strengthening others by bringing out the best in them, while Nicol Bolas destroys others from within them, thus killing them by bringing out the worst in them. Nicol Bolas forges no real bonds with anyone in the galaxy, but Ajani puts his life before those who accept him as who he is, and he has friends, however few, to fall back on. I would change the part of the story where Nicol Bolas was defeated. This part of the story caused some dissatisfaction, as Nicol Bolas died rather trivially. Ajani brought out another Nicol Bolas from within, which was forged by the power from the Maelstrom. Nicol Bolas was a dragon more than ten thousand years old, and he no doubt had survived much more disasters more dangerous than what Ajani defeated him with. This part of the story is no doubt a mistake in the writer’s part, and this is what I would change if I ever have the chance. Rakka Mar: At the impact, a mighty cascade of lightning burst from where she landed, pent-up magic released from her death. Alteration: Rakka watched in sick pleasure at Ajani, who was holding one of Kresh’s humans in his hands. The pain it’s going through right now must be unbearable. He will have no choice but kill the human, Rakka thought. After a while, she decided that it was taking too and she raised an arm and was about to take out the both of them, when she was swept back by a sudden sphere of overwhelming power. It was a strange thing watching her flesh burn. Then she was impaled in the neck. She never got to know what killed her. Radio Advert: Once upon a time, the plane of Alara was shattered into five planes, each distinctly populated with relative mono-magical culture that reflects each of the five colors. Now, the planes are beginning to realign and merge once more. As nefarious forces work to hasten the cataclysmic realignment for their own gain, the populations of once ordered planes struggle to come to terms with a new planar order in which long separated struggles between opposite clash once more; martyrs face executioners, fire and water, earth and air, growth and decay, the innate versus the artificial. Amid this chaos, Ajani, a fierce leonin planeswalker, struggles to bring justice and resolution to his brother's death. Noble warrior Rafiq searches for the source of this evil that has invaded his world. And Sarkhan Vol, planeswalker and dragon hunter, taps into a power so pure and ancient, it threatens to consume him even as he revels in its unadulterated totality. Get your copy today at your favourite book store. The climax of this story is the part where Ajani fought the final battle against Nicol Bolas. It was not just one tremendous struggle, but involved many other struggles as well, like the battle of the humans and the elves going on elsewhere which the author kept switching back to, and the Nactal civil war was also raging on around them. Ajani’s inner struggles were also included in this part of the story. All this combined no doubt aroused the most emotions in me. The problem in the book is that Ajani has no real friends, and in the end the solution presented by the author is simply to just go to another world, one that he finds more suited for himself. I feel that he should just stay on in Naya and become kha, which is the leader of the tribe. He would have to find acceptance then, and he already could have a clean slate by forgiving Zaliki for all that she had done and become friends again. This would solve his problem and made sure that he would have more friends. The author obviously wrote this book for people who play Magic: The Gathering the trading card game and who would like to know more about the multiverse of Magic. But I think that the personal reason for him writing this book is to ensure that the people who play Magic do not end up having an addiction to Magic the Gathering, and rather play the game as a pastime, spending some of their time reading books like these, and then moving on to other books that are not related to Magic. I would save Rakka Mar, the fiery sorceress, from her death by the hand of Ajani much too early in the book. If she survived the kill, she could have come back to hunt Ajani down, making the storyline of the story more complicated, and inevitably more exciting. In my opinion, the author killed Rakka so fast as he wanted to save the trouble of writing so much more about her. The title is good as it can tell the reader what the story is about and it kind of gives off an aura of magnificence to the book. It is appropriate to the content of the story, and I find that it is creative that the word “unbroken” was used instead of just excluding th word completely or using something more common like ‘reformed’. I feel that the ending of the story can be better, in the way that Ajani did not have to leave Naya, or the Elspeth did not have to leave Bant. There was also no mention of Sarkkhan at the end of the story, and there was no mention of him dying. I would choose Ajani as a friend as he truly needs one. He is compassionate, able to defend himself from others, and most importantly, loyal. He could stand up for me whenever I need an argument won, and nobody would be stupid enough to argue with somebody taller than Yao Ming. PS The answer to q48 can answer the last two questions, so I really don’t see the difference in the questions. |