Iron Flame (Chapter 3 & Chapter 4)

STATS

Title: Iron Flame

Series: The Empyrean (Book 2)

Author(s): Rebecca Yarros

Genre: Fantasy (Epic)

First Printing: November 2023

Publisher: Red Tower Books

Rating: 1/10

SPOILER WARNING

Heavy spoilers will be provided for the entire story up through the end of the content covered in this part. Mild spoilers for elements later in the story may be provided, but I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers from later in the book will be confined to clearly labelled sections.

THE SENTENCE IS DEATH

Chapters 3 and 4 cover the return of Violet and the rebel children to the Riders Quadrant and the immediate consequences of their decisions in Fourth Wing. Chapters 1 and 2 both made it very clear that they are going to their potential deaths. They must use every ounce of wit and deception at their disposal to avoid this fate. Therefore, in order to lend adequate context to the events of these two chapters, we must first review the list of charges and evidence against Xaden and the rebel children (and, by association, Violet).

Addendums 5.2 & 5.3, Basgiath War College Code of Conduct

In the best interest of preserving peace within Navarre, no more than three cadets carrying rebellion relics may be assigned to any squad of any quadrant.

In addition to last year’s changes, marked ones assembling in groups of three or more will now be considered an act of seditious conspiracy and is hereby a capital offense.

These are quoted directly from the Chapter 7 epigraph of Fourth Wing. They were a deliberate inclusion by Yarros to set up the pre-climax twist of the weapons smuggling. She did not have to include these, let alone invoke Melgren's omniscience as the reason for them. Turning them into a crucial plot element was her own decision.

Xaden assembled a squad of Violet plus eight rebel children before walking into the War Games trap. He personally violated Addendum 5.2 by doing so. Everyone in the squad (except maybe Violet) violated Addendum 5.3 by accepting this assignment and going along on the mission.

For that matter, Ciaran, Eya, and Masen were not part of the original squad. They came to find Xaden and the others at Aretia after the fact. That means that they have separately violated Addendum 5.3. By joining up with Xaden’s group, they further made the group complicit in their violation. For those keeping score, that’s two violations of Addendum 5.3 for Xaden’s group and one violation for Ciaran, Eya, and Masen. (I think Yarros wanted to imply that the departure of this latter group went unnoticed, given that the three of them together should be hidden from Melgren’s near-omniscient gaze, but this is simply not believable. The rider leadership should now be on high alert for any rebel children doing anything irregular at this point, especially since those irregularities could expose co-conspirators of Xaden who were not caught in the trap. The absence of three rebel children for multiple days should be noticed.)

Add an additional Addendum 5.3 violation on top of that for whatever gatherings Dain identified while reading Violet's memories. These were explicitly credited for revealing Xaden’s activities to the rider leadership and for making the climax of Fourth Wing possible.

Case closed. No defense can be made. Xaden and his cohort will now be executed for sedition. Every rebel child will also be executed for Xaden having violated his deal with the rider leadership. Whether or not Violet is executed is up for debate, but she will surely be interrogated to ensure that the rider leadership has all possible information as to what the rebel children were up to.

No antagonist with any amount of credibility will fail to nail the rebel children to the wall for this.

Weapons Smuggling / Treason

The rider leadership knows about the weapon smuggling. That's the only reasonable explanation for how they knew to bait their trap by threatening a Poromish village. Why do this if they don’t have reason to believe that Xaden is at least a Poromish sympathizer? Even if the rider leadership don't have evidence of Xaden and his cohort accessing and stealing from the luminary (a tall order, but let's accept it momentarily for the sake of argument), they clearly know that someone is delivering weapons, and with Melgren's awareness of his blind spot, they could narrow down the suspects very easily.

The case here might be circumstantial. However, we learned in Chapter 2 of Fourth Wing, the Quadrant does not wait for trials before executing. Circumstantial evidence should be enough.

No antagonist with any amount of credibility would pass up this opportunity to mow Xaden and his cohort down.

Insubordination / Mutiny

Xaden and his cohort were given direct orders to retreat from the venin attack on the Poromoish village. It was made clear that intervening would be viewed treason. They violated those orders.

Now, Melgren would know that he couldn't see the events of the trap unfolding. Surely, there were riders and dragons observing the operation at a safe distance. Surely, they would have brought word of both the choice made and the fate of the riders involved back to the rider leadership. After all, someone buried that venin lure. That means that Navarre had people in the area.

No antagonist with any amount of credibility would be dumb enough to just wait and see if Xaden reported as ordered, let alone assume that failure to report meant he died while fighting the venin.

Absent Without Leave

By the time Violet and the rebel children return to the Quadrant in Chapter 3, we are explicitly told that they have been missing for six days. They should be designated as AWOL. Later in this very book, Violet going AWOL for just two days will be used against her by the rider leadership, so six days should be a guaranteed thing. Ciaran, Eya, and Masen are likewise guilty of this offense, though the time that they have been AWOL could be as little at 36 hours (depending on how long they were hanging around in Aretia).

No antagonist with any amount of credibility would overlook this. If nothing else, this should be grounds to detain and interrogate the rebel children.

Which brings us to the fact that the Violet and the rebel children can offer …

No Excuses

This is not a charge in and of itself, but it is why any defense that Violet, Xaden, or the other rebel children might make will ultimately have zero protective value.

Dain can read minds. This was how the climax of Fourth Wing was made possible. It was hammered on as a threat for Chapters 1 and 2 of this very book. Xaden and the others have insisted that Violet can shield her mind against him, and they just need to keep Dain from touching her in the first place, but this does not matter.

Literally all that the rider leadership needs to do, in response to any argument presented in the defense of Violet and the rebel children, is order them to submit to interrogation at the hands of Dain and other riders with Signets that aid in extracting information, whilst they simultaneously order Dain and these other riders to perform the interrogation. Refusal of these orders would, at best, erode the credibility of any defense presented by Violet and the rebel children. After all, why would they refuse if they have nothing to hide? At worst, refusal would itself be grounds to excuse them for their treasonous refusal to cooperate.

Shields will not protect them in such an interrogation. With how the shields have been previously described (and how they will be confirmed to work later in this book), they are not like Occulmency in Harry Potter. It is not an invisible defense that allows false information to be fed to the person reading minds. Instead, shields are like the mental defense techniques in Eragon. Anyone attempting to access a shielded rider’s mind will know that said mind is being shielded. Once Dain or another loyalist rider identifies the shields, the rider leadership simply needs to order Violet and the rebel children to lower said shields. Failure to comply will put Violet and the rebel children in the same boat as refusing to undergo interrogation.

No antagonist with any amount of credibility would ignore this very simple means to blast aside any defense that Violet and the rebel children put forth.

Other Concerns

Violet, Xaden, and Xaden’s cohort have been absent (without leave) for several days. Given that they were supposed to be participating in War Games, their absence would be noticed by the student body, if only because they did not return to the Quadrant after the fact. People would start asking questions.

Surely, a regime so desperate to suppress information and control narratives would not leave this up in the air. Surely, once Xaden and his cohort failed to report as ordered, the rider leadership would expose them as traitors and spin a narrative that would turn every rider in the Quadrant against them. We have been told and shown that many among the student body do not like or trust the rebel children, so it would be all too easy to whip the Quadrant into a frenzy that, at the very least, would ensure that alarms would be raised if they ever reappeared at the Quadrant.

No antagonist with any amount of credibility would miss this chance to reinforce the position against Xaden and his cohort, especially if manipulation of information is one of the things that we are supposed to find threatening about said antagonist.

Why This Matters

This list of charges and the inability to defend against them are not a fan theory. They are not deep-cut observations made by a subject matter expert or a passionate BookTuber critic. They are the information that Yarros herself has chosen to present to the audience in Fourth Wing and the opening chapters of Iron Flame. She established this information and then doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on it to generate stakes and tension.

It is not impossible to write a solution to the quandary that Violet and the rebel children are in. The nigh-insurmountable challenge that Yarros has given herself is to do so without destroying the audience’s ability to take her antagonists - and, by extension, any tension, stakes, or story that leans upon said antagonists - seriously.

When the author gives the antagonists such an overwhelmingly good hand to play, the protagonists cannot beat that hand with anything less than a superb combination of skill, planning, insight, and / or improvisation. We must be dazzled by a solution that proves just how impressive our protagonists are. If the protagonists achieve victory via any other means, it will set a precedent that nothing the antagonists do actually matters. It will cheapen any situation where the protagonists are supposed to be challenged.

What happens in Chapters 3 and 4 may not make the entirety of Iron Flame, but it certainly can break it.

STORY

Violet and the other rebel children return to Basgiath. The riders dismount at the flight field and enter the school as quietly as they can, while the dragons smuggle Andarna back to the hatching grounds for the Dreamless Sleep. Violet and the rebel children enter the Riders Quadrant, being spotted by other riders in the process and mocked for missing, and therefore losing, the War Games. Violet and Xaden go to Liam’s room as steal a packet of letters from under his bed. They are found by Rhiannon, who is relieved to see that Violet is alive despite having been missing for six days. Violet asks Rhiannon to hide Liam’s letters (since the burial customs of Navarre would call for the letters to be burned with his other possessions).

Violet and Xaden talk about trust. Xaden promises full disclosure about any personal information about himself, but Violet is enrages when he refuses to pour out every operational secret about the Aretia rebellion to her. She tells him that they cannot be together unless he gives her full disclosure about the secure operations of the rebellion.

Violet and the rebel children then arrive at the Quadrant graduation ceremony. Colonel Aetos is shocked to see that they are alive. Xaden puts him in his place by spinning a story about how the rebel children were attacked by gryphons and then had to find a healer for Violet, accusing Aetos of incompetence for emptying out the border fort to which their squad had been assigned. He shows the note Colonel Aetos left as evidence of this. General Sorrengail shuts down any effort by Colonel Aetos to establish control by playing a political angle, claiming that if Violet agreed with that version of events, then it would be an attack on her own credibility to challenge the story; she doubles down on Xaden’s accusation of incompetence by acting as though Aetos had emptied out the fort without her knowledge. Just like that, the whole incident is swept under the rub, leaving Colonel Aetos with nothing but impotent rage.

Dain approaches Violet and Xaden as they start to get in formation. Xaden loudly and publicly shames him, making it sound as those Dain sexually assaulted Violet. He then asserts his own authority to force Dain to stand quietly in formation.

REACTION

The rider leadership of Navarre, along with any underlings, agents, or forces associated with them, no longer have any credibility as antagonists.

We now know that Xaden and the other rebel children were not declared traitors during the days that they were gone. The riders Violet and Xaden encounter before the confrontation merely jeer at them for losing War Games, rather than sounding alarms and drawing weapons. Xaden claims that this was to avoid calling attention to the secret of the venin, but given the extensive list of charges, there is no reason that a public declaration of sedition and treason would need to expose anything. Colonel Aetos was not aware that the rebel children had even survived, further indicating that no observers were posted to report on either what Xaden decided or the aftermath of that decision.

During the confrontation, Colonel Aetos does not at any point invoke Addendums 5.2 and 5.3 of the Codex. He does not reveal to all of the witnesses that the children of Tyrrish rebel officers are arming the enemies of Navarre, not even when Xaden reveals the note. This, for the record, is what the note said back in Fourth Wing, as read aloud to Violet by a secondary character.

“This is a test of your command. You have the choice of abandoning the village of our enemy or abandoning command of your wing.”

This was followed by orders to depart for another fort, but these two sentences are enough. Colonel Aetos could have made up any excuse for why the Poromish village might need defending. All that he had to do was follow it up by announcing that the rider leadership knew that Xaden and his people were guilty of treason, and that the leadership offered them one last chance to choose Navarre over the enemy. The note that Xaden so helpfully brought would be plenty of evidence, at least by the standards of the Quadrant.

At a bare minimum, Colonel Aetos could declare that this entire scenario warrants investigation and order that Violet and the rebel children be detained for interrogation. When General Sorrengail shuts him down, Colonel Aetos could reveal that his orders came from Melgren himself. Even if Colonel Aetos had acted alone and hadn’t alerted anyone above General Sorrengail (which is not what was implied previously, but let’s run with it for the sake of argument), that bluff alone would have bought him the leverage to force General Sorrengail to back down, or perhaps even to relieve General Sorrengail of command on the grounds that she is too closely connected to an obvious traitor to make a sound judgment. Melgren would surely back up any such action retroactively.

There are so many ways that Colonel Aetos could have and should have secured victory. Instead, he is swept aside like a dry leaf in a hurricane. The threat Yarros pushed so hard in Chapters 1 and 2 simply expires. And, since Colonel Aetos has been made into the representation of the rider leadership, the entire faction is therefore robbed of any credibility.

PLOT

Setting aside the utter destruction of one of the two antagonist factions of this book, there is not much else to say about the plot of these two chapters. It is functional at a purely conceptual level. “Protagonists win in a no-win scenario” sounds great. It’s the execution that horrific.

CHARACTERS

Violet

As mentioned in the previous part, Violet thinks that sex entitles her to a security clearance. This snippet from her latest unhinged outburst really embodies both her position and the sheer ridiculousness of this conflict.

“Full. Disclosure,” I demand like any rational woman staring down the man who kept her brother’s life a secret from her, let alone an entire war. “I can forgive you for keeping me in the dark before today. You did it to save lives, possibly even mine. But it’s complete and total honesty from now on, or …” Gods, am I going to have to say it?

Am I really about to issue an ultimatum to Xaden-fucking-Riorson?

“Or what?” He leans in, his eyes sharpening.

“Or I’ll get busy unfalling for you,” I spit out.

Violet acknowledges that Xaden did the right thing … but in the end, it’s all about her. She was kept in the dark, and that angers her. And so, even as she admits that he did the right thing, she attempts to emotionally manipulate him into endangering his cause by revealing operational secrets to her.

This is not about you, Violet. This is bigger than you. You have not earned a place at this table just by having sex with Xaden. If anything, given that you begged him for a relationship, you owe him the benefit of the doubt and leeway in this matter. Shut up and earn your place in the rebellion like everyone else.

Also, please note that Violet refers to herself as a “rational woman”, directly contradicting her moment of self-awareness back in Chapter 1. This undoes any potential development on that front. I could somewhat get behind this is being a limitation of being in 1st Person Present POV, except she is not going to be held accountable for or even recognize the contradiction at any point in this book.

A Rational Woman

There is a spark of something positive here. It is something that could have made this romantic subplot conflict workable. It is one of those details that indicates that maybe, just maybe, Yarros could have made Violet sympathetic if this story were set in a realistic setting, rather than a brutal, war-ravaged Epic Fantasy.

Among the things Violet is mad about is that Xaden kept the secret of her brother being alive. While the emotional impact of Brennan’s loss has been little more than a background detail, it does exist on paper. The death of Violet’s father is at least partially attributed to the stress of Brennan’s death, so there is a tangible loss there. This is something that has affected Violet. It is therefore understandable that she would be furious at her romantic partner for knowing the truth and concealing it from her.

It’s possible that Yarros intended for this to be the focus. Later in the book, Imogen is going to call Violet out on how ridiculous she is being. Violet tries to justify her behavior with an analogy about battle axes falling out of wardrobes and not wanting to open the door, with the truth about Brennan being one such battle axe. The reason that this ultimately doesn’t work is that the “violated trust” card was already played back in Fourth Wing, when Violet was mad at Xaden for not spilling all of his secrets mere hours into a relationship that he had tried to avoid. Add on top of that the fact that Violet is demanding full access to absolutely all of Xaden’s secrets while simultaneously acknowledging the high stakes that require him to keep those secrets. This entire scenario would need to be reworked for the personal trust angle to work.

Imagine, if you would, the following alternative scenario for the back portion of Fourth Wing and the opening chapters of Iron Flame.

• Violet and Xaden become an official couple after their first sex scene (which would be moved up to an earlier point in the story, such as the Squad Battle). This would give us multiple chapters of them growing as a couple and getting to know one another.

• During this time spent together, Xaden could learn just how deeply Brennan’s death affected Violet, could understand how the truth would affect her, yet choose to withhold the truth because it would inevitably lead to her discovering the rebellion.

• When Violet finally does learn the truth of the rebellion, her outage at being left in the dark would make a lot more sense. She would begrudgingly admit that Xaden had a point (per the arguments she herself presented in the above excerpt) after she wakes up from her coma. She and he would reach an understanding. Trust had been shaken, but with that damage and its necessity having been acknowledged, they can now rebuild.

• Fourth Wing ends on the Brennan reveal. As Iron Flame opens, and Violet is processing her emotions, it would finally hit her that Xaden withheld such a personal and life-altering secret about her own family from her. This would outright destroy her trust in him.

• The trust conflict that defines the romantic subplot for this book would thereafter focus on Violet’s inability to trust Xaden on personal matters. Violet would not demand that Xaden spill the secrets of the rebellion to her. Instead, she would state that she no longer has any reason to trust that he will give her full disclosure in purely personal matters. She will support the rebellion, and she will even accept that she needs to be kept in the dark, but even if Xaden were to spill the rebellion’s secrets to her, she could not trust him as a romantic partner.

• The romance subplot would then follow Xaden earning Violet’s trust and / or Violet learning to forgive Xaden.

The reason Violet fails as a character time and again is because she is constantly at odds with the reality of her circumstances. Simply accepting the practical necessities of war and framing her mistrust around the emotions of the moment would resolve so much, especially if she and Xaden had actual time for a relationship before being pulled apart.

Xaden

Xaden is an idiot.

Why would he bring the note with the ultimatum from the rider leadership? It is evidence against his cover story.

Why would he denounce Dain in a public manner that implies sexual assault? This is not attacking Dain’s pride. It’s just making a spectacle that invites people to question what really happened.

Dain

I don’t know what I can say about Dain here that wasn’t said in the last book. He is consistent in that he is utterly harmlessly. He has no intent to harm Violet, and even any incidental or unintended threat he might pose lacks any teeth.

This book is going to take the demonization and abuse of Dain even farther than the last. The thing about being in 1st Person POV is that it does not mean that the audience needs literally every thought that floats through the POV’s head. Every thought we are shown is curated for relevance. Yarros found is relevant to show us every vile and hateful thought Violet has towards Dain. It all starts right after Xaden bullies Dain into submission with the public implication of sexual assault. The graduation ceremony continues, and we get this:

“It’s kind of underwhelming,” Ridoc whispers from my other side, earning a glare from Dain as he looks over his shoulder from two rows ahead.

Fuck him.

Dain is literally just doing his job, yet Violet is reviling him for it. I’ll have more to say about this next week, when we cover Chapter 8.

Colonel Aetos

This man holds all the cards and yet still loses. He cannot be taken seriously any longer. Since he is the face of the rider leadership at this point in the story, the entire faction is now too incompetent to take seriously.

General Sorrengail

The retcon-with-obvious-intent-for-redemption of General Sorrengail really kicks off in Chapter 4. This paragraph, in particular, jumped out at me.

My mother locks eyes with me for one heartbeat, a side of her mouth tilting upward in an expression I’m almost scared to call … pride, before she quickly masks it, resuming the professional distance she’s maintained impeccably for the last year. One heartbeat. That’s all it takes for me to know that I’m all right. That’s no anger in her eyes - no fear or shock, either. Just relief.

I went back and reread General Sorrengail’s interactions with Violet in Fourth Wing. It was made excruciatingly clear that she is a cold-hearted bitch who only cares about Violet in terms of how Violet reflects upon her. The closest we are shown to affection is her getting emotional when she brought up Violet’s father - she loved him, but not Violet, no matter how much Violet reflected him. While the “professional distance” was mentioned all the way back in Chapter 1 of that book, the way that both Violet and Mira reacted to and talked about General Sorrengail made it clear that distance was the status quo, with General Sorrengail merely taking advantage of the Quadrant to make things official. When General Sorrengail expressed optimism in Violet’s chances of survival in the Quadrant, it read like she had rationalized her decision and was merely brushing of criticism, not like she was reassuring herself to smother genuine concern for Violet’s well-being.

For Yarros to now tell us that General Sorrengail is a loving mother who would bend every rule to save her daughter is a blatant retcon. It is not enough for Violet to mention in passing that General Sorrengail doesn’t want to see any more of her children die. We needed to have been shown it.

Take the example of Doctor Catherine Halsey from the review of The Fall of Reach. That book managed to make a far more convincing case for Halsey caring about the SPARTAN-IIs, and it did so in the very same scenes where she conscripted six-year-olds into the military and presided over horrific medical experiments upon fourteen-year-olds. Thanks to having multiple scenes from Halsey’s POV, we are shown her emotions. We witness small actions that reflect the presence of some maternal instinct beneath her chill rationality. Halsey may be more monstrous than General Sorrengail by most modern moral metrics, but because we are shown that she does care about her SPARTANs to some degree, she is more believable as a maternal figure than General Sorrengail is.

That’s not to say that redeeming General Sorrengail would be impossible. Yarros could have had a character arc wherein Violet learns to see the humanity in her mother slowly, across the entire book, while General Sorrengail learns to appreciate her daughter in turn. Frontloading change like this is lazy. When coupled with Colonel Aetos being made into a scapegoat (both in- and out of the story), it’s clear that Yarros wrote herself into a corner (or thought that she had) and needed General Sorrengail to be a different person to get out of it.

Nadine

Nadine is named three times in Chapter 4, and she gets two lines.

• She says, “That was hot,” in response to Xaden bullying Dain. (This is the sort of thing that makes Xaden an idiot for publicly shaming Dain. Now people’s attention has been drawn to the fact that the hostility between them over Violet has gotten a lot worse.)

• She asks who the next wingleader will be.

Still nothing for her character-wise. Any other character could have said those lines.

WORLDBUILDING

Death School (Heavy Spoilers)

Violet has an interesting moment of reflection during the graduation. She begins to think about all the people who had died over the past year. Then she begins to reflect on someone one of the Poromish gryphon fliers said before the climax of Fourth Wing.

Maybe this place is exactly what the gryphon flier had called it - a death factory.

This could have led to something interesting for this story. Yarros could have explored this. It could have been a plot point, part of Violet’s character growth, or just something that is fleshed out more as the story progresses.

Except, no. That doesn’t happen. It’s going to be touched upon a bit in Part Two of the book, but even that will be very surface-level. It reads like Yarros only wanted to reassure her readers that she didn’t personally think that the Quadrant’s deadly practices are a good thing.

Dragons

We get the following right at the opening of Chapter 3.

The window of time we have to get Andarna to the Vale without her being spotted is slim, and if we miss it, we’ll put every hatchling in danger.

“I still don’t understand why the Empyrean would ever agree to let dragons bond human riders, knowing they’d have to guard their own young not only against gryphon fliers but the very humans they’re supposed to trust.”

I said I was not going to hammer on recurring issues without new pieces of information, yet Yarros is shining a spotlight on this, so let’s get it out of the way:

How, Ms. Yarros, are the dragon hatchlings in any danger from the humans? You have done nothing but demonstrate that the dragons have the upper hand. You will reinforce, in this very book, that dragons possess the only true agency in this relationship. (More on that in three weeks’ time, when we get in Chapter 13.) The only example you have provided for humans intending harm to dragons is when Jack and his minions tried to harm Andarna at Threshing, but that was due to a combination of a misunderstanding and of values that the dragons have pushed upon humans. They mistook Andarna for a stunted adult and believed that they were obligated to kill her for the good of dragons and riders alike.

Every effort made to imply that humans pose a genuine threat to dragons is hollow, and every attempt to use that to raise the stakes and tension is flaccid.

Military Hierarchy

How, exactly, does the military command structure of Navarre work?

General Sorrengail shames Colonel Aetos for supposed incompetence by publicly berating him for emptying a border fort for War Games. The issue is that Colonel Aetos is General Sorrengail’s aide, and General Sorrengail is specifically in charge of Basgiath War College. How, then, could Colonel Aetos have possibly have had the authority to empty out the border fort, especially without her knowledge?

Yarros put General Sorrengail in charge of the War College specifically. In so doing, she acknowledged a fundamental reality of military logistics: that officers are assigned to specific commands, and they can’t simply go about requisitioning resources from someone else’s command without permission. Colonel Aetos, as someone who is under General Sorrengail’s command, should not have been able to empty out an entire border fort without communication between General Sorrengail and the general in charge of the border forts. At minimum, he would need to have gone around General Sorrengail to General Melgren - but that would imply that he and Melgren had a reason not to trust General Sorrengail, which is something that has not been established.

This problem is not limited to this one incident. At a couple of points in this book, we see professors from the Riders Quadrant get deployed to the front lines to fend off gryphon raids and to assist in covering up the venin and wyvern. One of these incidents, in Chapter 21, sees the bulk of the teaching staff deployed in this way, leaving the cadets with minimal supervision. These are not reassignments of officers from teaching posts to the front lines. Officers in teaching posts are being summoned to the border to put out fires and then sent right back to Basgiath to teach their regularly scheduled classes.

Why would these incidents be the responsibility of the professors, rather than the authority in charge of the border forts? Does Yarros think that professors of military academies have the same leeway to rush around on missions as Indiana Jones has for his private expeditions?

These two issues nagged at me enough that I asked my father, who was assigned to a teaching post at the US Naval Academy for a few years, for his take. His response boiled down to:

• The Superintendent of the Naval Academy (the position to whom General Sorrengail most closely corresponds) has no authority over any naval assets except for designated training craft.

• In a extreme circumstance, like an active military conflict, an officer who was assigned to a teaching post might be reassigned to an active front on account of possessing unique skills, though this is unlikely.

In other words:

• General Sorrengail should have no authority to empty out an active border fort, and thus, Colonel Aetos definitely shouldn’t be able to do it without her knowledge, even if she delegated authority to him and then asked no further questions.

• If one of the professors has a special skill - or, in this case, a special Signet or dragon - that professor might be reassigned in a special circumstance. The emphasis here is on reassigned. That professor would not be rushing back and forth between border crises and Physics class.

My father also pointed out that realistic military organization and operations go out the window in a fantastical story. He’s right. This entire topic should be a nitpick. A fantasy world can operate by vastly different rules than our own. Suspension of disbelief is also an integral part of storytelling. We the audience can certainly critique the effectiveness of a military structure and question how a fictional military is able to remain functional, but at the end of the day, whether or not a fictional military mirrors the real world shouldn’t matter for objective literary quality.

The problem is that we are seeing the return of the realism toggling effect from Fourth Wing.

Yarros is perfectly happy to lean upon military chains of command, permanent reassignments, legalistic deployment of military regulations, and the assignment and promotion of military personnel based upon unique skills whenever doing so serves the needs of her story. She chose to make Basgiath a war college specifically, rather than some military facility that just happens to host officer training; she chose to assign riders as professors, to call out the idea that this is a permanent assignment to a desk job (per Chapter 16 of Fourth Wing), and even to spell out how some of these professors have skills and Signets that uniquely qualify them to these academic assignments. As we will see in Chapter 14 of this book, she is also happy to have the rest of Navarre’s army conform to the standards and practices of a real-world military (so that she can spit on those standards and practices, but still, she’s happy to employ them). Chapter 22 will even include an altercation between Xaden and a far superior officer wherein Xaden will invoke the chain of command to argue that said officer has no authority over him (and said officer will then confirm that this is accurate).

Yarros will choose to ignore any and all of the above whenever they get in the way of whatever scenario or characterization that she wants to push.

The result is the same mess as with, say, Yarros wanting women to be both victims who are disadvantaged against men and empowered Amazons would overpower multiple male opponents with ease. A good story could be told with either option. Doing both at the same time makes it very hard to grasp the actual rules of the world. Yarros has chosen to muddy the waters and make it unclear what tools are or aren’t available for officers to resolve (or in the case of rider leadership, worsen) any given scenario.

NEW SEMESTER

Next time, we’ll pick up the pace a bit, rolling through Chapters 5 through 9. Now that the loose ends from the last book have been shredded, the book can start properly rolling forward with its own narrative. New characters, plot threads, and worldbuilding elements will be brought into play. While I don’t feel that any of these new additions are unworkable, their implementation, even at this early stage, leaves a lot to be desired.

It all continues next Friday. I hope to see you all then. Have a good week.