Iron Flame (Chapter 5 through Chapter 9)
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.
STORY
Violet joins the post-graduation festivities with the rest of her squad. In the midst of drinking and feasting, she reflects upon the loss of Liam in the climax of Fourth Wing and struggles with having to lie to her squad about the venin threat. Once Violet is drunk, she learns about Xaden’s first posting on the border and the arrangement by which they will receive leave so that their dragons can fly to meet one another. It is at this point that we learn that Colonel Aetos has been reassigned by General Sorrengail, taking him away from Basgiath, and are introduced to Vice-Commandant Varrish, who is being brought into the Quadrant to crack down on supposedly weakening standards. Aetos makes an overt threat on Violet’s and Xaden’s lives. Violet and Xaden then say goodbye, with Xaden warning her to be on her guard. After Xaden leaves, Violet returns to her squad, and leaves that Rhiannon, her Token Queer Best Friend, has been made the squad leader.
Violet and the other newly-minted second-year rider cadets attend their first Rider Survival Course (RSC). They learn about the tests they will endure to ready them for both wilderness survival and interrogation. The RSC is leveraged to renew the tension of the death school from the previous book. Violet then goes to the Archives, intended to research a means to activate the wardstone in Aretia. She enlists the help of Jesinia, her Token Disabled (Deaf) Best Friend, to acquire documents for her research.
Conscription Day for the new academic year arrives. Violet and her squad are assigned to man the entry to the Parapet. After watching Violet and the squad abuse and disrespect Dain, we are introduced to some of the new first-years. Particular emphasis is put on Sloane, the younger sister of Liam, and “Aaric Graycastle”, the third son of Navarre’s king. We then cut to the test of courage after the Parapet, where the dragons intimidate the cadets and incinerate deserters. Varrish’s dragon indiscriminately slaughters second- and third-year riders, a transparent attempt to kill Violet in the course of purging the deserters.
The next morning, Violet goes running, a response to the death of the other rebel child who died in the climax of Fourth Wing. She is joined by Imogen and lies about why she is running to Rhiannon. We see the first Battle Brief class of the year, where Colonel Markham, the scribe who teaches the class, acts noticeably less intelligent and more sinister than the previous book. After the class, Rhiannon tells Violet that she thinks the school is up to something sinister, as part of the infirmary in the Healers Quadrant is sectioned off. She then tells Violet that she feels like Violet is avoiding her.
We get the first sparring session of the year. Early in the session, a first-year wanders over the Violet’s squad, asking for Violet. Nadine makes a flippant remark about how she’s Violet. The first-year then snaps Nadine’s neck.
PLOT
Rebellion Plot
The introduction of Vice-Commandant Varrish marks an evolution of the rebellion elements of the story. Specifically, it marks the beginning of Yarros’s effort to imitate The Order of the Phoenix, with Varrish standing in as Dolores Umbridge.
The efforts to kill Violet - first with Varrish’s dragon, now with this first-year - feel hollow. I do think they constitute any improvement over Fourth Wing, as now Violet is facing some actual danger to back up on the statements about how dangerous the death school is supposed to be. However, as mentioned in the last part, the rider leadership lost all credibility as antagonists when they held all the cards and yet still failed to execute Xaden and his cohort. It’s really hard to be afraid of any assassination attempt they attempt to organize.
On that note: the cliffhanger ending to Chapter 9 requires a plot hole. There is no feasible way that this first-year mistook Nadine for Violet. Fourth Wing made it excruciatingly clear that Violet, the “Silver Haired One,” the woman who is far smaller than other people at this school, the one wearing literal plot armor that visibly shimmers when she moves, is not someone who casually blends into the student body. The fact that Violet does not die here and now hinges entirely on the fact that someone wants her dead but didn’t bother to provide the bare minimum of physical description to their assassin.
Romance Subplot
As part of Violet and Xaden discussing their new assignment, we get a rehash of Violet demanding a security clearance from Xaden. There’s no progression here, just doubling down on the previously established issues.
Wardstone Subplot
Violet’s research into the wardstone is a functional way for her to contribute to the larger narrative while being stuck in school and not involved in the weapon smuggling operations. It’s not high-stakes (not yet, at least, but we’ll get to that), but at this sage, it works fine as something that chugs along in the background.
Secret Secrets
These chapters being the character conflict of Violet struggling with lying to her friends and keeping secrets from them. This is fine conceptually. The issue is that the stakes of this plot is rooted in our investment in the characters. Given that Rhiannon is little more than an accessory for Violet and a tool to showcase Yarros’s virtue, and how we have even less to go on for the other members of Violet’s squad (whom I’ve also come to think of as Violet’s accessories), there’s not enough to generate any meaningful stakes. Yarros has not given me reason to care about these people whom Violet supposedly cares about. I therefore do not care when Violet risks losing the trust of those people.
One issue that is rather annoying is the bit with the infirmary. When Rhiannon introduces this element, Violet literally trips up as she goes into a panic about how much Rhiannon knows already. This is how Rhiannon introduces this element.
“I wanted to talk to you before breakfast but didn’t get a chance. I think the school is hiding something from us.”
Not, “Something strange is happening in the infirmary.” Not, “Did you notice anything odd when you went to the infirmary to get the burn ointment after Varrish’s dragon nearly immolated you?” Rhiannon introduces this topic in a very unnatural way, with wording that is optimized to prompt a reaction from Violet. It is very forced.
Death School
The RSC is this' book’s version of the Gauntlet from Fourth Wing, an easily understood manifestation of the deadlier aspepcts of the school. the primary manifestation of the Quadrant’s deadlier aspects for the purposes of this book. While there is a great deal to criticize about the RSC as a worldbuilding concept and how it is used to further other aspects of the plot, I think it is fine in terms of new ideas to bring into the book.
Next Generation
Violet has to deal with complicated emotions regarding the new riders. In particular, she does not want to learn the name of the new cadets, as an effort to harden herself against their potential deaths. This appears to be an extension of her grief at Liam’s death.
This subplot is supported by what came before. It’s just that it’s neglected. It’s going to surface every so often, so that Violet can say something to the effect of, “Oh, no, I wanted to keep my distance from these cadets to protect myself from the pain of losing them,” but these moments are so far between and get so little focus when they do surface that it’s hard to really feel invested in it.
CHARACTERS
Violet
Violet is consistently characterized in these chapters. Most of what I have to say about her character is really more of a reflection of other characters (in particular, Dain and Sloane), and thus will be captured in their respective analyses. With that said, there is one piece of characterization in Chapter 8 that I think is was a good inclusion.
In Fourth Wing, the arrival of the dragons is a moment of awe and terror. Violet has seen dragons before, but in the heat of the moment, with the dragons looming over her, she feels the same fear that all the cadets feel. This was a harrowing moment for her.
In Chapter 8 of Iron Flame, attending the same spectacle after one year in the Quadrant, after encountering multiple dragons up close and riding one of the largest dragons alive, Violet is so unfazed by the dragons that she takes a moment to pick lint off her uniform. It is a significant contrast that strongly demonstrates how much she has grown in terms of her interactions with dragons.
Xaden
I still struggle to analyze Xaden. He is very paint-by-numbers. At this point, our Bad Boy Love Interest is in conflict with the self-insert Mary Sue because he will not offer unconditional surrender to her demands. He is not going to give ground at this point in the story, because it is not yet time for this conflict to end.
Dain
I cannot provide an objective analysis of Dain’s characters in these chapters. I found almost every paragraph that mentioned him or involved him hard to get through. Chapter 8 as a whole was especially challenging. This is for the simple reason that, reading through these chapters, I felt like I was watching domestic abuse in progress and being asked by the abuser to laugh along.
The sheet amount of spite vomited upon Dain is nothing short of cruel. Violet fantasizes about murdering him. Her narrative voice is sprinkled with spiteful remarks and obscenities against him. She and other characters openly abuse and disrespect him, to his face, and then we are expected to smile and laugh along, as if he is receiving some comeuppance. In fact, Yarros makes it very clear that we are supposed to blame him for the deaths of Liam and the other rebel child who died in the climax of Fourth Wing (despite the fact that Dain ultimately had nothing to do with the planning or implementation of the trap and the fact that Xaden is ultimately responsible for both causing the situation in the first place and for dragging the rebel children to the location of the climax).
There are multiple lines I could cite for this, but there’s one interaction really hammers home the issue. This takes place right at the start of the Conscription Day, before would-be cadets begin to cross the Parapet. For context, Dain was promoted to wingleader after Xaden’s graduation. After noticing that Rhiannon (who answers to him directly) has done a sloppy job with delegating responsibilities to her squad, we get this interaction.
Dain frowns at Rhiannon. “Running a tight ship there, squad leader.”
What an ass.
“There are no regulations about four riders on the turret during Parapet,” she counters. “Don’t even get my started this morning, Aetos.” She looks up from her perfectly numbered scroll and raises a finger. “And if you even think about telling me to call you wingleader, I’ll remind you that Riorson did a hell of a job without needing everyone to supplication themselves to him.”
“Because he scared the shit out of everyone,” Nadine mutters. “Well, everyone except Violet.”
I fight my smile and lose as Dain tenses, clearly at a loss for words.
To be clear: I do not choose this as my example because it is one of the worst offenders. It is actually one of the mild examples. I choose it because of the range of abuse displayed: the needlessly vitriol, the naked disrespect, and the fact we are expected to laugh along.
Dain has been on the job for all of five days. We have been given zero reason to believe that he is incompetent in either this book or the last, outside of throwaway lines of Yarros telling us that he is incompetent. In fact, in this entire book, we are shown nothing but him doing exactly the same things that Xaden did - giving the same speeches, reassigning people to accommodate Violet, etc. - yet for some reason, we aren’t supposed to respect him for it. If anything, the only thing he does that makes him unworthy of respect is that he does not exercise his authority to punish a subordinate officer under his command. Yet we are supposed to hate him and think it is a good moment when people mistreat him for doing his job.
This constant abuse, this constant beating down, this demonization, all after Dain was so thoroughly defanged in the last book, is sickening. Yarros’s own hatred towards Dain is palpable. Given how much of her own life in mapped into this story about her self-insert Mary Sue protagonist, it is impossible to ignore that Dain is most likely a strawman for a real person for whom Yarros feels blind, irrational hatred towards.
The Wages of Sin
The cruelty towards Dain might be easier to stomach if he had been written to have actually done something worthy of such scorn. We have not gotten that. Yes, him stealing memories is a violation of trust if done intentionally (and believe me, we will get to that). Yes, Yarros very clearly wants to frame this as analogous to sexual assault. However, she has failed to capture any of the immediate harm or lingering trauma that sexual assault would actually inflict. Violet is reacting this hatefully to the principle of stealing memories. Since no trauma has been inflicted, it really seems like she’s angrier about the theft of information she wanted to conceal than because Dain somehow violated her to execute that theft.
I have a real-life example to demonstrate why this is so flimsy.
A few years ago, my younger brother admitted that he had repeatedly stolen money from me as a teenager. He laughed off his own wrongdoing without so much as an apology or an admission of just how much money he stole, just a casual, “Oh, I’ll pay for dinner tonight, and we’ll call it even.”
Now, theft is wrong. It is indeed capable of harming people’s lives and causing trauma through the financial damages and associated psychological trauma. I’m unlikely to leave my wallet unattended around my brother ever again.
However, the simple fact of the matter is that my brother took so little money that I never noticed the theft. It was allowance money I’d been saving in a drawer, not post-tax income that I needed to survive. Much like Violet with her stolen memories, more damage was done by the reveal of the theft than by the theft itself.
So, if I were to write a book series were I demonized and belittled my brother in the same way that Yarros did with Dain, justifying it within the narrative itself with nothing but the flimsy reasoning that my brother stole money that maybe I could have donated to some orphans, I don’t think it would be the least be unreasonable to say that my self-insert Mary Sue was the real bad guy.
A Guttering Hope
On a first read, I thought that maybe, just maybe, this sickening display was Yarros’s way of starting a character arc. Perhaps Violet would begin the story in this state of irrational hatred, born of her grief rather than the rationality that supposedly justifies her other decisions. Over time, as she healed and interacted with Dain, she would accept that he is ultimately not to blame that Liam’s death (or, at least, is less at fault than people she has already given a pass to). This would eventually lead to her repenting her past treatment of him and respecting him on at least a professional level.
That is not what we get in the chapters to come.
Vice-Commandant Varrish / Draconis Umbridge
There is no subtlety about Varrish being the Dolores Umbridge stand-in. I am actually going to call him Draconis Umbridge for the remainder of this review, both because it’s easier to remember and because I keep typing the wrong number of r’s every time I try to input his actual name.
The epigraph to Chapter 5 made it very clear that Draconis is a brutal interrogator who had to be reassigned after killing three prisoners in consecutive interrogations. We are also told up-front that his role is to “tighten the ship” at the Rider’s Quadrant, not unlike Dolores Umbridge’s role as Hogwarts High Inquisitor. This man is obviously going to be the face of villainy for the rider leadership for this book.
It certainly would be a shame if the rider leadership had previously been robbed of all credibility as antagonists by failing to execute Xaden and the rebel children after having literally everything needed to get the job done.
Draconis’s dragon, Solas, isn’t a functional character. The closest thing Solas has to a trait is that he is missing an eye (which we learn that Tairn tore out). However, due to his connection to Draconis, Solas reinforces that Draonis is a creature of indiscriminate violence who doesn’t mind the collateral damage to achieve his goals.
In short, this character is functional yet derivative, and he is harmed more by the context in which he exists than flaws in his own writing.
Colonel Aetos
As punishment for trying to do his job, General Sorrengail has Colonel Aetos reassigned away from Basgiath. His last scene (though not last contribution) is to introduce Draconis and threaten Violet and Xaden.
“Secrets make for poor leverage. They die with the people who keep them.”
Given that he had the perfectly opportunity to do that in Chapter 4, this just makes him seem even more pathetic.
General Sorrengail
As mentioned back in the analysis of Chapter 2, Chapter 8 hosts a piece of characterization that directly contradicts the idea that General Sorrengail would not be involved in the trap from the climax of Fourth Wing.
[Nadine] glances my way. “You’d have thought your mother would have held off the storm last year, considering you were crossing.”
“Clearly you don’t know my mother.” She wouldn’t call the storm to kill me like a coward but she sure as hell wouldn’t stop it to save me, either.
Are we really supposed to believe that General Sorrengail would force her daughter into the Riders Quadrant out of personal pride, fully accepting of the multiple avenues of death that this would expose Violet to, and wouldn’t even intervene to shift the odds in Violet’s favor, yet she would risk traitors going free when Violet throws in with said traitors of her own volition?
This is line is one of the reasons that I think Yarros has convinced herself that the trap in Fourth Wing was an unforgiveable sin (despite the fact that she ignores Xaden’s role in that mess) It’s clear that, deep down, she knows exactly who this character is. It should have been an easy decision to let General Sorrengail act in-character. Nothing is lost if General Sorrengail organized and executed the trap. If anything, it would enrich the story, as we would not need to deal with the repercussions of Colonel Aetos being so utterly pathetic as an antagonist. Perhaps then, Violet could actually sit down and think through her anger about that event, as she can’t just spite her mother the way that she spites Dain. Instead of following the natural flow of the plot and characterization, Yarros chose to retcon two characters and needlessly complicate the plot, all so that General Sorrengail would not be sullied by something that is nowhere near as vile as she is making it out to be.
Rhiannon
I am happy to announce that Rhiannon now has her own character traits outside of being Violet’s Token Queer Best Friend. Per the above quote with Dain, she is a insubordinate, anti-social, immature harpy who has no business being a military officer.
Ridoc & Sawyer
These are two other members of Violet’s group of accessories. I all due ignore them in the Fourth Wing review, as they are even more irrelevant than Rhiannon. However, I do need to reference them in this review, so I might as well establish way little is known about them now.
Ridoc is the comic relief. While Whedonistic quips are the norm in this book, they serve as Ridoc’s entire personality. He also is one of the Token Queer characters, the only one thus far established who is also male.
Sawyer was introduced in the last book as a cadet who was held back for failing to bond with the dragon during his first attempt at first year. Early in the story, he is the one with the most experience and skill. However, this trait fades throughout the back half of Fourth Wing, with emphasis being put on Liam as the best in class so as to make his death more tragic. As a result, Sawyer is just sort of around at this point.
Nadine
Nadine’s name appears 40 times in this block of five chapters. Her lines are almost all interchangeable comments about wanting new people to have sex with, commenting on Violet’s relationship with Xaden, and whatever else supports the conversation at hand. However, it is her final bit of dialogue that is really telling.
“Popular today, aren’t you?” Nadine whispers with a smile, pivoting playfully towards the first-year. “Hi. I’m Violet Sorrengail.” She points to her purple hair. “See? Like my hair. Do you have a message for -”
Why would Nadine say this?
That’s not rhetorical. I genuinely have no idea. She has zero established character traits to distinguish her from the mob. I therefore am not sold on her engaging with a stranger this way, especially since this particular type of comment is not something we’ve seen before. If anything, this sounds like a line that Ridoc would deliver.
Ultimately, Nadine was a mob character devoid of actual character. Her only trait at the time of her death was introduced purely so that she could be sacrificed as a Red Shirt. She is emblematic of the typical handling of tertiary characters within this book: contributing only to bloat and being sacrificed without a second thought so that Yarros can convince us that danger exists without harming any of the characters she actually cares about.
Colonel Markham
I don’t plan to do exhaustive analyses of the professors of this series. Given that this book is derivative of Order of the Phoenix, they can easily be slotted into the categories of Good Teachers (Violet’s allies) and Bad Teachers (Draconis’s allies). Markham, a Bad Teacher, warrants special mention because he is assassinated.
In the last book, Markham was a kindly and indulgent mentor. Violet spent a lot of time with him when she was living in the Archives with her father. He continued to show goodwill towards her whenever they crossed paths.
In this book, Violet immediately assumes that he is involved in the effort to suppress the truth of the venin. She is correct, of course, but this is her line of logic.
He wrote the fucking textbook on Navarrian history that all riders are taught from.
It seems strange for her to fixate on that, given that we later learn that the books in the Archives have already been changed to reflect to new version of history.
Regardless, as soon as she jumps to this conclusion, Markham becomes shifty. When Violet challenges something he says, he becomes cold; he also fixates on her reactions to information, rather than following standard procedure and letting the first-years contribute to discussion first. He apparently jumps the rails so far that the rider professor in the Battle Brief admonishes him in front of the class.
Much like the redemption of General Sorrengail, this is not earned. Time should have been taken for Violet to gradually learn that Markham could not be trusted. Perhaps she could have gone to him to help her research the wardstone, only to gradaully realize that he was getting suspicious of her and reporting her activities to Draconis.
Jesinia
I am mixed on Jesinia’s characterization. Now that Rhiannon has a character trait, whereas she is still just the Token Disabled (Deaf) Friend, she has less dimension than Rhiannon. This isn’t too surprisingly, given that Rhiannon has appeared in more scenes than her. However, I feel more invested in Jesinia than Rhiannon.
I think the issue here is how Yarros used both characters. One would think that Rhiannon would be the easiest to care about, given how much time she spends with Violet, but Yarros doesn’t give her an actual role in the story (hence her being Violet’s accessory). Jesinia, by contrast, is actually involved in driving the plot, albeit in the purely functional capacity of getting books into Violet’s hands.
I think the takeaway here is that investment in characters leans on both defined traits and relevance to the story. Rhiannon has one (even if it is a negative trait), while Jesinia has the other.
Caroline Ashton
Caroline Ashton raises her hand from her seat in First Wing across the room. A chill races down my spine as I remember how close she’d been to Jack Barlowe - the rider who’d been intent on killing me until I killed him instead.
Caroline was mentioned in passing in the last book, seen in a scene where Jack congratulated her for bonding with a dragon whose rider had been killed.
This introduction implies that she is going to be an antagonist in this book, but … she’s really isn’t. She’s an interchangeable background character. Her only function is to remind us that Jack was an antagonist in the last book, but the only information imparted could have been slotted into a conversation with very little effort.
Also, while this is not relevant to Iron Flame, Caroline Ashton’s name is rather close to that of Carol Olston from Tomo-Chan is a Girl. That’s probably why I kept picturing her as a wavy-haired blonde, despite the fact that she’s one of the few tertiary characters who never receives any physical description.
Sloane
Sloane is Liam’s younger sister. Due to Liam’s death in the climax of Fourth Wing, Violet feels an immediate urge to protect Sloane. However, her effort to provide Sloane last-minute help before crossing the Parapet is met by this.
“Go straight to hell,” she whispers. “And I really mean that. I hope no one commends your soul to Malek. I hope he rejects it. Liam was worth a dozen of your kind, and I hope you spend eternity paying for what you cost me, what you cost all of us.”
This should be a gut punch. Violet offered a hand of friendship to the family of someone she genuinely did care about, and it is being slapped away. Sloane blames Violet for something that, while not Violet’s fault, is something Violet blames herself for.
Instead, Sloane just became my favorite character.
Violet has gotten away too much at this point. Not even the Protagonist-Centered Morality can cover for her abhorrent behavior and overall double standards. The fact that someone whom we are not told to dismiss as a villain is now holding her accountable is therefore a breath of fresh air. Also, on the matter of double standards, Sloane’s attitude towards Violet is almost identical to Violet’s attitude towards Dain. By the standards presented by the book to validate Violet’s morality, Violet deserves the abuse heaped on her by Slaone. If anything, Sloane’s attitude is more justified that Violet’s attitude towards Dain, given that Sloane did not spend the last year being abusive and spiteful towards Violet and that Sloane is not heaping blame onto Violet that she should know belongs to someone else.
Aaric Graycastle / Cam, Son of Tauri
Aaric / Cam (I will use the names interchangeably throughout this review, depending on which name is being used in the text at the time) is the third son of King Tauri of Navarre. He is entering the Quadrant under a false name because his older brother, the king’s second son, had entered the Quadrant and died a few years earlier, thereby making his father unlikely to approve of Aaric joining up. Dain and Violet immediately recognize him because they grew up with him, on account of their parents’ military postings. Their immediate reaction is that the king will kill them all if anything happens to Aaric.
I’m not going to lie - from the way Aaric was introduced, I thought he was going to be another love interest for Violet. A new childhood best friend appears out of the blue and gets half a page of physical description? And he’s also a prince? It seemed very paint-by-numbers. However, Yarros did manage to surprise me. Aaric does not get used in this manner.
As for how he does get used … well … we’ll get to that.
VIRTUE SIGNALS
By the end of this section, all of the disability- and sexuality-based tokenized characters from Fourth Wing will be reestablished. We also get some racial tokenization: a member of the Aretia rebel leadership and a first-year rider in Violet’s squad both have “umber” skin, and one of the professors has “rich mahogany” skin.
As with Fourth Wing, the sexuality-based tokenization is always always brought up in throwaway lines that could easily have been edited in as an afterthought (and can just as easily be edited right back out for certain foreign markets). Violet’s EDS is brought up only when it suits Yarros’s convenience. Jesinia being deaf is something I will have a great deal to say about down the line, as Yarros will go out of her way to virtue signal about the value of sign language.
The racial diversity still makes very little sense and is devoid of rhyme or reason. Yarros will make an attempt to explain it down the line by saying that Navarre took in refugees from all over the Continent before they sealed their borders. However, this doesn’t really work.
The Continent that we are shown doesn’t appear to be very big (we aren’t shown a scale, but given how dragons can cross its entire width in just a few days, and given how they would need to move slow enough for their riders to say mounted, I have trouble believing that it is larger than the continent US). The geographic barriers imposed by the mountains would certainly facilitate some diversity between Navarre and Poromiel. However, Poromiel has almost no barriers within its borders, and the barriers imposed within Navarre appear comparable to those within Europe - come to think of it, because access by sea is open, even the barrier between Navarre and Poromiel isn’t that much of an obstacle. It really does seem like everyone should be in same general racial group, with only relatively small ethnic differences. Maybe I could see this if the provinces of Navarre were extremely isolated from one another, with skin tone revealing a province of origin, but given that Xaden and his cousin are the only “tawny” people among the otherwise pale denizens of Tyrrendor, this is clearly not the case.
All this is the say that this racial diversity feels extremely forced. If I were to be charitable, the racial diversity could be a symptom of the character bloat. Yarros uses one or two physical traits to flag individual mob characters. Of course, in that interpretation, that means Yarros is effectively treating a character’s race as the defining aspect of her that character. If that’s not a virtue signal, it’s something far more unsavory.
WORLDBUILDING
Hedonism
Chapter 5 sets the scene by describing the raucous, indulgent party that the rider cadets have after graduation. There is a great deal of both food and alcohol. During the scene, Violet’s squad muses about how excited they are to get leave on weekends, with their explicit interest being the chance to have sex with people outside of the Quadrant.
While the sexual element of the hedonism still feels tacked on, I do think that this chapter finally manages to do justice to the idea that the Quadrant is hedonistic due to the looming threat of death. It’s a bit of a shame that we didn’t get any of this in the last book (and don’t get any more of it in his book). Much like with the culture of the Tuerasians in The Shadow of the Conqueror, this subtle worldbuilding through eating and drinking reveals a missed opportunity.
Dragons
Mating Bond
Due to their dragons being mated, Violet and Xaden are being granted two days of leave every fortnight, with these leave periods coming on alternating weekends. This allow them - and, more importantly, Tairn and Sgaeyl - to take turns visiting one another to satisfy the needs of dragon mating.
Violet’s reaction to this is puzzling.
Tairn and Sageyl are never apart for more than three days. A week? They’ll be in a near-constant state of pain. It’s unfathomable.
This “near-constant state of pain” was not established in the last book. The three-day limit was established as the amount of time they could stomach being apart, but it was not described as something this intense.
Agency
This is Xaden’s reaction to receive the news that his dragon will be separated from her mate for a week at a time.
“Dragons give their own orders,” Xaden says calmly, pocketing his papers.
The topic of dragon versus rider agency really comes into focus in Chapter 13. I want to hold my thoughts on this topic until then. For now, I’ll just say that Xaden’s delivery of this line makes the stakes uncertain. Can Tairn and Sgaeyl just ignore these orders and visit one another whenever they like? Could they just visit one another without taking Xaden or Violet along? This really isn’t clear.
Bonds
Solas kills a lot of riders during his attempt to “accidentally” incinerate Violet.
So … he’s going to be swarmed by the dragons of those riders, right?
If we had not been shown that dragons bonds deeply with their riders and care about the survival of those riders, I would not have an issue with this. Dragons certainly turn a blind eye to all of the other incidents of death in the school.
However, dragons do care about their riders. They are, at least, possessive of them. As Tairn himself so eloquently puts it when he arrives on the scene to drive Solas off:
“You do not have the right to burn what is mine.”
I might buy that the death of one rider, whose dragon is weaker than Solas, under circumstances where the rider was at fault, would be ignored. That multiple dragons would accept the loss of their riders in an indiscriminate slaughter is not credible.
“Riders Make Their Own Rules”
The Chapter 6 epigraph really sums up the nonsense of Yarros pushing that phrase as a way to say that riders are rebellious.
What no one openly says is that while all four quadrants obey the Code of Conduct, a rider’s first responsibility is to the Codex, which often overrules the regulations other quadrants live by. By definition: the riders make their own rules.
This is not a statement of rebellion. It means that the riders, as an organization, do not answer to the rest of Navarre. They absolutely have rules and operate by those rules.
Also, for those of you who were cracking Codex Astartes jokes when I was talking about this book on the Shadiversity Discord: moments like these really make those jokes stick, don’t they?
Rider Survival Course
The RSC makes a lot of sense for the Quadrant. It trains the riders to handle themselves in the wilderness, to navigate, and to endure both the physical and psychological pressures of interrogation and torture. This is practical knowledge.
With that being said, there are three issues that really stand out to me.
First, the story explains that these skills are for when riders are separated from their dragons. What is the scenario in which riders are expected to be separated from their dragons for a prolonged period in hostile territory without the dragons being dead (which would, as previously established, kill the rider)? The dragon can just go and get the rider back, using their bond to find the rider. Given the immense advantage that dragons have over gryphons (something reinforced in Chapter 4), it seems unlikely that enemy forces can prevent this.
(To be clear, I am not saying that the RSC is useless. I just think that the justification is weak. This would have made a lot more sense if it were just framed as emergency survival training.)
Second, why was this not part of first year training? In the scene that introduces RSC, it is made clear that riders die in this portion of the training (with the implication being that they are executed if they fail their tests). Given that the whole point of culling potential riders through deadly challenges is to avoid humiliating the dragons with weak riders, wouldn’t the dragons want their rider candidates to be screened for survival skills and psychological resilience just as much as balance and combat skills? Plus, given that bonds strengthen over time, a dragon losing a second-year rider should be more traumatic than losing a freshly bonded first-year. Wouldn’t the dragons want to both avoid the risk and minimize the damage of any failed cadet?
Third, the justification for why this was not even mentioned in Fourth Wing is contradictory.
“Don’t know what [RSC] is?” Professor Grady asks with a grin, staring straight at Ridoc. “Good - our tactics work.” He crosses one boot in front of the other. “RSC is kept classified for a reason, so we get your genuine reactions to the situations at hand.”
By mere virtue of telling the second-years that RSC exists, this premise is invalidated. Now they know exactly as much as they’d have know if they were told about RSC in their first year. Grady will proceed to double down on this by explaining the skills covered and how the exercises and tests will be random and unannounced, thereby negating the value of surprising the students that way, too.
It’s pretty clear that Yarros didn’t think of RSC until she was working on Iron Flame, after it was too late to add reference of it to Fourth Wing. Even if that is the case, there were better ways to explain the lack of RSC in the previous book (such as simply saying that, as riders, the odds of them needing RSC were far less than them needing flight skills, so no one bothers to mention it before second year).
Draconic Right of Kings
Thanks to the introduction of Aaric, I must now ask more questions that previously did not need to be asked:
What is the nature and extent of the authority of the King of Navarre?
By what right does he rule?
How does he hold on to his authority?
What are the political implications of a royal heir becoming a dragon rider?
What are the political implications of a royal heir dying in the Quadrant?
The fact that the king would not approve of Aaric joining, coupled with the fact that the death of the second son if treated like personal tragedy rather that politically relevant information, implies that the king’s authority does not flow from the power of dragons - but then how does the king stay in power? Does he just have to trust that the rider leadership will never overthrow him with the help of the dragons? It’s not like we’ve been introduced to any other military force that is strong enough to keep them in check. Would it not strengthen the king’s position to bond with a dragon? Is the king just a royal figurehead whom the rider leadership parade around so that the people don’t realize that they are under the control of a dragon rider junta? If so, shouldn’t any heir who joins the riders need to renounce his claim to the throne?
Actually, how does ANY nobility work in this story? Xaden is the heir to Tyrrendor, but we get confirmation in a few chapters that his father was not a rider. How do these people hold on to power?
We will later get confirmation that magic keyed to bloodlines is a thing in this setting. Maybe there is some sort of Divine Right of Kings in place. The thing is, the reason Divine Right of Kings works is because it gives kings a form of religious authority, which is leveraged to gain military support, which in turn is used to assert the kings’ authority upon the populace and upon other kingdoms. This is further reflected in how feudal nobility worked: the nobility used their positions of privilege and associated free time to train in the arts of war, and they paid for professional militaries to support them, thereby allowing them to use the threat of force to keep the peasants in line. How were any of these people staying in power when any peasant who bonded with a dragon could potentially talk his mount into laying waste to the nobles he didn’t like? Why have the dragon riders not become the noble warrior elite, especially if they are training bloodlines of legacy riders?
To provide an example of fiction that got this right, I am going to reference Pokemon, of all things.
The postgame of Pokemon Sword and Shield featured a bid by the brothers Sordward and Shielbert to establish themselves as the kings of the Galar region. They try Divine Right of Kings by claiming to be heirs of the region’s first kings, only to have their case fall apart when it is revealed that those first kings were actually a pair of Legendary Pokemon. While the chaos they unleash in response is intended to discredit said Legendary Pokemon in the eyes of the people, it ultimately boils down to Pokemon’s default story resolution: teams of Pokemon (full-time warriors trained by elites with the free time and resources to engage in such a pursuit) beating the pulp out of each other. The brothers ultimately relinquish the throne when the player defeats them and captures whichever one of the two Legendary Pokemon is the mascot of that particular game. They have been defeated by superior force. They cannot make use of their divine right and must bend knee to the force that defeated them.
Replace the 10-year-old Pokemon trainer with a team of Dragon-type Pokemon with a single pissed-off 20-something rider with a Signet and a dragon.
How can any noble who is not a rider assert any claim or authority against such overwhelming force? How can a king? At least in Pokemon, we are shown that that law enforcement and various societal elites either have Pokemon partners or employ people who do. There is a balancing force. Navarre doesn’t have that balance.
I want to write this off as a nitpick, but Yarros was the one who brought it into focus. This book hinges on a conspiracy by the rider leadership and the scribes to suppress the truth about the outside world. We are supposed to mistrust the authority figures. How are we supposed to contextualize the story or understand the possible solutions that exist if we don’t understand even the basics of how Navarre functions? Then there’s also the matter of Violet and Dain fearing the consequences if the king learns about Aaric joining up. How are we supposed to contextualize this as a source of stakes and tension?
PROSE
After Solas slaughters multiple riders, we get the following as the riders are forced back into formation.
“Riders do not balk at fire!”
The fuck we don’t. Whoever didn’t balk is dead.
For those who don’t know, “balk” means “hesitate”. The riders who were incinerated by Solas were the ones too slow to dive out of the way. In other words, what Violet just said was the opposite of reality. The riders who did balk are the ones who died.
This really should be a nitpick, except later, Yarros is going to have Violet show intellectual superiority over Draconis Umbridge by correcting him for a minor vocabulary mistake. For Violet to mess up vocabulary this bad is therefore rather funny.
DEATH OF SUBTLETY
Yarros does not have faith in her audience to pick up on anything that is not explicitly stated
This is a problem found throughout this book, but these chapters are where it really starts to wind up. I first noticed this in the break between Chapters 5 and 6. Recall, from above, this line from Colonel Aetos that caps off Chapter 5.
“Secrets make for poor leverage. They die with the people who keep them.”
Then this is the opening to Chapter 6.
The churning in my stomach has nothing to do with the lemonade. I’m pretty sure Colonel Aetos just insinuated he’d kill us.
Did anyone really need their hand held for this?
And this is not the only example. Within the first two pages of Chapter 6, Aetos also threatens to kill Mira, and then we get confirmation from Violet that, yes, he did indeed threaten to kill Mira. There are more examples of this sort of hand-holding throughout the text.
There there are all the times throughout the text where one character says something, then another character has a line just to acknowledge that the first character made a good point. On a first read, I thought this was only done to validate Violet, but while combing through the text for this review, I realized that multiple secondary and tertiary characters are validated in this manner.
Then there is Violet’s unfiltered narration. While I do believe that much of the bile that Violet spews is Yarros expressing her own hatred of her characters, when held up besides the other two points, it seems almost as though Yarros is also trying to remind the audience which characters we are supposed to hate.
It’s hard to say whether Yarros doesn’t think her audience is intelligent enough to pick up on these things on our own or is afraid that we might draw different conclusions from the ones she wants us to draw. Either way, this lack of subtlety undermines nearly every beat and detail that it is meant to support. I can feel Yarros whispering in my ear, “This is what it means!” It breaks immersion.
Unless you are writing for children, please trust you audience to understand what is going on without you holding their hands.
Liberty
Apologies for such a long post. There were far more issues to cover than I had originally anticipated. Hopefully, the next two parts will be more concise.
We’re going to cover Chapters 10 through 12 next time. This is rather short, but there are a lot of issues in these three chapters. What’s more, Chapter 13 is the point where the issue of dragon versus rider agency begins to actively disrupt the story, so I think we need a dedicated part just for that. It’s a lot to get through, but I promise, there’s also a lot that we can learn from it.
See you all next Friday. Have a great week.
