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A review by soartfullydone
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
0.25
For a bad time, read this book—or save some time and read my warning label.
I buddy-read this book with my friend Liz, and honestly, if we hadn’t had each other, I think we both would’ve DNF’d it pretty early. The promise of a brutal military war college with dragons and magic extends only so far as the synopsis and never makes it into the actual narrative. In truth, Fourth Wing is a very silly book that takes itself as seriously as the plague despite it saying absolutely nothing and not even being enjoyable to read.
At a mere two percent into the book, I didn’t believe any of the world-building Yarros was trying to force-feed me through Violet reciting textbooks under her breath. Violet’s country and her dragons/riders have been “at war” with another country and their gryphons/riders for 400 years. What does “at war’ mean? Don’t worry about it. They’ve been “in conflict” for 200 years before that. What does “in conflict” mean, and how does it differ from “at war”? Don’t ask questions. But these two nations have a “trade agreement,” you say? What does that m— [gets blasted with dragon fire]
Since this is a nation at war for 400 years, surely the situation is desperate on the dragons’ end, no? After all, dragons are larger, stronger, and fly at higher altitudes than gryphons, yet despite this, they can’t bring this war to a conclusive end and, to make matters worse, the magical wards protecting the country from external attack are failing. Military enrollment is so poor that Violet’s country must enforce conscription and less dragons are willing to bond with riders, which means they must need all the bodies they can get. So, of course, the solution is to waste their best and brightest cadets at Basgiath War College, where they can die in a hundred silly ways for absolutely no reason and everyone just shrugs about it.
To even qualify for the Riders’ Quadrant, you have to cross a parapet without falling to your death instead of taking a very sensible bridge. If you make it, you then have to survive your fellow first-years because they’re going to kill you to make the dragons have less options to choose from. However, there are a bunch of convoluted rules as to when cadets can kill each other and when they can’t, and this changes arbitrarily, like if a day ends in “y”. Wear your armor even when you sleep—except when you get your own private room because no one should be allowed to pick a lock.
You have to survive sparring with your fellow cadets because after all, dragon riders are going to do a lot of ground fighting. You have to survive climbing a vertical American Ninja Warrior obstacle course because how is a dragon going to find you worthy if you can’t scale a wall that professional athletes have to train months for? You then have to survive Presentation, where a dragon could decide to torch you if it finds your topic of conversation with your fellows is annoying enough as you walk in front of it. Then, you have to survive Threshing, which involves wandering aimlessly around the woods until a dragon picks you or kills you, or another cadet does you in first. Then, you have to survive staying on the back of a dragon because no one’s ever thought of saddles and straps before. Then, you have to survive cadets who didn’t get a dragon because they could decide to kill you while the bond is fresh to convince the dragon to pick them instead. If you dodge that blow, you then have to survive the magic your dragon gives you, which will manifest in unsuspecting ways according to your innermost being, but watch out! You could explode after six months, or you could develop an illegal ability like mind reading, and the one thing this military doesn’t need is an opportunity to obtain real intelligence!
And if, for some reason, you just can’t get a dragon, you get the option to do it all over again! Because why would an effective military redistribute a great resource like you when it could just waste you for another year? But then, what other options are there? Becoming a healer? Being a scribe nerd who just looks at books all day? You’re overqualified for the infantry, and no other branch of the military exists!
That’s right. You can only be a rider, healer, scribe, or infantry in this military. There’s no cavalry, no artillery, no reserves, no heavy armor units, no siege engines, not even bannermen. But it’s okay! Because the gryphon rider side didn’t think of any of that stuff, either. Welcome to the shitshow. Now you know how a war can last 400 silly, silly years.
Did I mention how you have to compete with over a hundred separatist kids to be a dragon rider? Oh yes, there was a little internal war of succession not so long ago. Squashed, of course, and the nation’s king, in his magnanimity, decided to forcibly conscript all of the separatist kids into the Riders’ Quadrant after they all had to watch their parents be executed, even civilian parents. Because that’s what you want to do as a king that just squashed a rebellion: give a bunch of avengers direct access to your nuclear codes because it’s only “likely” they’ll die trying to obtain them, rather than it being a near certainty they will never gain such power in the infantry. Now all of the high command is standing around, looking at each other awkwardly because uh-oh, a whole lot of marked rebellion kids have dragons now, and they’re going to serve with the loyalists soon in live combat. No one could have predicted this!
If all of this sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. Yarros didn’t have to do any of this, but unfortunately, she confuses hijinks for high stakes. To execute something like this well, you can’t just throw every dire-sounding situation at the wall and see what sticks. You can’t have an enrollment problem with your fighting force, and be in a multiple-century war, and waste your best potential cadets over entirely avoidable bullshit. That they’re doing this because the dragons need the weak weeded out doesn’t hold when you also tell me that dragons can see inside of your soul and tell what kind of person you are. You cannot tell me that dragons never make mistakes, are too prideful to admit when they have, that they do what they want regardless and no one can question them while also telling me that humans undermine their decisions and autonomy at every turn without consequence. Either dragons don’t need humans to help them make their decisions, or they do.
Yarros cannot decide if dragons are completely autonomous predators who call the shots or if they are just tools humans use to gain magical abilities, and unfortunately, her “characters” reflect her indecision. Their words say that dragons are in control while all their actions say the complete opposite. How else do you name dragons after the characteristics of human weapons, rather than with terms from the dragons’ own culture? How else do you have three cadets decide they need to “take out” a smaller dragon because it’s “a liability to all dragons” and have none of them pay for their audacity at making that presumption? I’m not talking about the “human justice” they face; I’m talking trial by dragon because how dare you even speculate you can decide which among dragonkind doesn’t deserve to live, you puny fleshbag?
There has to be a logic, even to the absurdity, or you didn’t execute your story well. For instance, I see people compare this book to The Hunger Games, which I guess they missed how deeply political THG is, how controlling the Capital is down to the slightest aspect, how helpless the people are yet how primed for revolution. They just saw “haha death stuff” and called it a day.
So let’s take it a step further and contrast Fourth Wing to Squid Game. In the first episode of Squid Game, the viewer is introduced to the humiliation of qualifying for the competition and the deadly stakes. Immediately, the viewer is questioning why the characters are putting themselves through this. Who is insane enough to willingly compete in a competition to the death, no matter the reward? And then the second episode happens, titled “Hell,” where, by a single vote, the game is called off and the competitors go back to their lives. We see how trapped each of the characters is at home, how miserable they are, and through the intimacy of their pain, we come to understand. When most of them return willingly back to the game, we’re no longer questioning why. We have seen so clearly how desperate each of them are, how pushed to the brink, that it makes complete sense that they feel as if they have a better chance within a death game than they do at the game of life, where everything is rigged against them.
This contrast brings me to Fourth Wing’s main character, Violet Sorrengail, who has been forced to apply for the Riders’ Quadrant by her mother, a celebrated general. Instead of going into the Scribe Quadrant that she’s trained for her whole life, she now has to face the grim probability that she is going to die, especially after living a sedentary lifestyle with a chronic painful illness. In short, her bones are brittle and her joints suck. The reader is repeatedly told that it doesn’t matter if Violet tries to leave or not apply; her mother will just drag her back, and she’ll be viewed as even weaker for it.
Since I was already struggling to accept how this military structure was doing literally anything, this reasoning was hard to swallow. In truth, I never accepted or swallowed anything. But I at least could wait for the Moment: when does it click with Violet—and in turn, the reader—that the Riders’ Quadrant is where she wants to be? When do we see that “Hell” episode? When do we understand Violet’s motivations?
Turns out, never. Violet only decides to remain in the Riders’ Quadrant because she has to, because Yarros has no plot if she doesn’t. Violet’s only motivation is to survive, and she is handed the perfect opportunity to do just that. Dain, her childhood best friend, offers multiple times to smuggle her to the Scribe Quadrant, breaking every rule of the Riders’ Quadrant in the process. He does so with growing urgency and certainty that, by the time her mother figures it all out, it’ll be too late to do anything about it. Fact is, I needed Violet to take Dain up on that offer. I needed to see how futile it truly was to leave the Riders’ Quadrant. I needed Violet to actually choose survival if that was her only motivation and, at failing, to find a new way to survive. I needed us both to make peace with the fact that graduate or die was, in fact, the only way. I needed to see her hell.
Instead, all I see is Violet barely struggle and face little consequence to any of her actions, what few she gets to make. Her motivation quickly changes from survival to needing to impress this guy she likes, who is the equivalent of drying wallpaper. That means being a rider or die trying. Never mind that the “training” their instructors put them through has little and less to do with being an actual dragon rider, but okay. No joke, my military college was more rigorous and succeeded in killing exactly no one. Never mind that the ways Violet survives only apply to these very subjective circumstances at the war college and won’t transfer to live combat. Your opponent won’t be telegraphed to you ahead of time nor will you be able to poison them perfectly. Never mind that Violet thought she could be a dragon rider and also a pacifist who doesn’t murder anyone. Again, why are you here? Honestly, it makes it even funnier that Liam got hurt and died, both times because of her inability to take a life.
I constantly have to read about her having to wrap her joints, but no matter how much punishment her body weathers, no matter the endless cycle of healing it is constantly forced to undergo, she never suffers any repercussions. I don’t care how much strength of will you have; sometimes, your body just won’t do what you want it to, but Yarros decided she would rather power fantasy too close to the sun than write anything of substance regarding Violet’s illness. I mean, Yarros also thinks the best time to weight train is after you’ve pushed your body to its physical limits, when your form will be shit and you’ll be much more likely to hurt yourself. She also thinks that Violet can fall from her dragon more than eleven times in a day and never dislocate anything on the catch. Was I supposed to take her seriously at any point?
Fourth Wing has something of a plot for the first third of the book, and then it devolves into just throwing more threats at Violet’s life, threats that you know won’t amount to anything and that the book doesn’t even take seriously.
Death threats are the only gimmick Yarros has to offer because it sure isn’t the love interests. There are two. Dain, Violet’s childhood best friend, and Xaden, the drying wallpaper rebellion dude. They are the exact same person. It’s just that Dain is Xaden with a beard, and Xaden is Dain but with black hair and tattoos. They both say and do the exact same thing to Violet, except one is always right (Xaden) and one is always wrong (Dain). Xaden is aggressively overprotective and Hot, while Dain is aggressively overprotective and Not. Xaden coddles Violet, which means he believes in her, while Dain coddles Violet, which means he doesn’t. Dain is punished for saying to his superior officer (Xaden) that he wouldn’t break the rules to save Violet (despite that he was prepared to do that very thing early on), while Xaden is praised for also not breaking any rules to save Violet. Dain tells Violet she has a choice about how she uses her power, only for Xaden to yell at him to stop lying to her and coddling her just so he can say an hour later that she DOES have a choice. They both also lie by omission and betray her.
Don’t get it twisted. I’m not team jackshit here. If I had Dain, Xaden, and Violet in front of me and I only had two bullets, it would be a struggle to decide who I’m shooting twice. I do have to slow clap for Dain’s betrayal, though. Though not set up well at all because we can’t define anybody’s powers in this book, it was appropriately cold, and Violet deserved every bit of it. I laughed, actually. It was the only true joy I felt the entire book.
This is because the rest of the time, my eyes glazed over at how bland the attraction was between Xaden and Violet. I’m not shown how Xaden is hot, just told repeatedly, which never works. Their banter reveals little and less about either of them, Xaden most of all. Violet disintegrates into a helpless “pick me” girl in Xaden’s presence, going so far as to beg him to fuck her and love her, on the anniversary of her brother's death, no less. If he won’t, she’ll just convince him, like the wack ass crazy girlfriend she isn’t. It kinda feels like self-harm that I read this book during Women’s History Month, to tell the truth. That Xaden starts to reciprocate her obsessed feelings out of nowhere and for no reason is pretty par for the course. Enemies to lovers? No. That would require something for them to be diametrically opposed about beyond Xaden ordering her to not fall for him.
It occurs to me that I haven’t talked much about dragons in a dragon book, and that’s because there’s little to say. Violet gets not one, but two dragons because Yarros couldn’t decide how to give Violet one ultra-cool power, so she gets two decent ones for convenience's sake. The dragons have no personality and no information to give beyond chuffing and quips. Violet’s biggest dragon, Tairn, is mated to Xaden’s dragon, Gayle Waters-Waters, only to force the human couple to be together. Oh, and so they can read each other’s minds, naturally. The mated dragons situation is somehow not a problem for any other character. Xaden’s dragon makes him the strongest dragon rider of his generation for no reason, and somehow, his shadow magic is tangible despite shadows famously not being so.
You get told that a dragon without their rider is a tragedy; a rider without their dragon is dead, and that's poetic and all, but we need that defined before the last 3-4 chapters of the book. Shame on me for thinking it meant something reasonable. Like if a dragon dies, the rider is likely going to die because it's mid-air and there's no parachutes, or they die in a war zone/behind enemy lines, leaving the rider outnumbered and with no magic. But no, it's because the rider will drop dead for no discernible reason.
Of course, Violet is also destined to become the strongest rider of her generation even beyond Xaden because she has blunt-force lightning magic she can’t control. In fact, her body overheats from her power during sex, and I’m sorry, but that means Xaden’s dick just got boiled like a pus-filled hotdog. The man is dead or a eunuch, and this is why we don’t write SJM sex scenes. It's all jack-hammering missionary, no intimacy. To call the smut in this book good or even spicy is a reach. Maybe if you are similar to a slug touching salt for the first time, you'd mistake it for spicy, but there is so much better out there, I promise you.
But Fourth Wing wouldn’t be a new generation BookTok special if it didn’t provide empty, masturbatory commentary about How Important Books Are, how the knowledge keepers hold the true power in society despite how little weight the sentiment holds for the characters or the major themes of the story. Violet may be trained as a scribe, but she believes all the information she’s read holds the absolute truth. She can’t connect two dots between the various clues she’s given that maybe... history has been altered to suite the one-dimensional propaganda of the state. She offers no contrasting opinion to counter military dogma or the party line. She rejects the Archives, not seeing it as her home anymore because she’s a rider. Real power, it turns out, isn’t books or fairy tales or information. It’s having two badass dragons, lightning and time-stopping powers, and a dick to ride, even if he fucks you so hard your furniture breaks but your hips do not, hell, even if he fucks you over. That’s what matters.
In actuality, real power is revisionist history. This sordid tale is a sad, lonely standalone because there’s no way Violet learned that Xaden had every opportunity to tell her Brennan, her brother, was alive but didn’t, and she didn’t go nuclear on all of them. Everyone’s dead now. What a great book.