Iron Flame (Chapter 53 to Chapter 56)
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
Nearly the entirely to Chapter 53 is wasted on Violet, Sloane, Cat, and a Red Shirt going on a training mission, accompanied by Cat’s gryphon and Andarna (both of whom are small enough to fit into the caves that the group is searching). This amounts to nothing but vapid bickering, with Violet abruptly making an insane leap of logic about Signets that will drive Chapter 55. The inane madness ends when Solas (Draconis’s dragon) abruptly shows up and tries to kill them. Chapter 54 is then an insane jumble of random action moments, ending when Andarna kills Solas in a climactic showdown that Yarros does not show to the audience.
At the end of Chapter 54, Xaden barges in on Violet receiving medical treatment. After throwing everyone else out, he and Violet spent Chapter 55 arguing about how he kept secret the deal that he made with her mother (something we were apparently supposed to have been thinking about for the past 19 chapters). Violet twists this into her not being able to trust Xaden at all. When he tries to soothe her insecurities and meet her halfway, she reveals the mad conclusion that she jumped to in Chapter 53: that Xaden has two Signets. She demands to know what his second Signet is. Before Xaden can answer her, Brennan arrives. It turns out that, thanks to Violet waiting a week to raise the wards, Aretia is about to be obliterated by an oncoming horde of wyverns.
Chapter 56 is easily double the average chapter length. First, Violet activates the wardstone. She and Xaden then fly to the Cliffs of Dralor, at the edge of the newly warded area, to see if the wyverns are kept out. Yarros wastes two whole pages pretending that her self-insert Mary Sue is intelligent, having Violet riddle out Xaden’s Signet based on rules established just for these chapters. The big reveal is that Xaden is an inntinnsic. This is used to pretend that Violet has a legitimate reason to mistrust Xaden. We then endure multiple pages of buildup to an absurdly large horde of venin and wyverns, only to reveal that they can’t cross the ward. Violet and Xaden return to Aretia, where there is celebration … only for Chapter 56 to end with the reveal that the wards are flawed, as the fliers can still use their magic. It is also at this time that Melgren sends a message to Aretia, requesting a meeting.
WORLDBUILDING
To fully appreciate just how forced and pointless the plot beats in these chapters are, we must first cover the additions to the worldbuilding that were clearly did not exist until Yarros needed them to whip the plot onward.
Signets
Two Signets
“So do you think you’ll get a second signet?” Visia asks, breaking the silence. “Two dragons, two signets, right?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, glancing back at Andarna. I actually figured because she bonded me so young and lost the ability to stop time, the signet of lightning wielding was all that I would be blessed with. But now I wonder… “Will I?”
“Why are you asking me? Signets manifest according to the person wielding.” Her eyes blink gold, her black scales blending in with the darkness.
“Second signets only happen when a dragon bonds a rider in the direct familial line as its previous,” Sloane says, misunderstanding Visia’s question. “But there’s an equal chance of it causing madness.”
First of all - why is Violet having a second Signet being ruled out? No rider has had two dragons before. There is no precedent to draw upon. Why is Yarros asserting this like an absolute and verifiable fact?
Second, notice the wording Sloane uses. It is not, “Second Signets ALWAYS happen,” in this circumstance. It is that that, “Second signets ONLY happen”, and the risk of madness scales off of that. Sure, one could read this as, “People who bond with a dragon who bonded with their relative either get a second Signet or go mad,” but it could also mean a 1% chance of either event. Surely, no “rational woman” from a group obsessed with legalistic arguments (and, hence, precise wording) would hear this and conclude that -
Gravity shifts. That can’t be right. That would mean—
“Violet, are you okay?” Visia asks.
I shake my head but say, “Yes.” How do you explain your heart is sinking past the rock floor of the cave? I take a deep breath, flex and unflex my hand as I grip the brightly glowing conduit. Andarna growls to my right, and I quickly assure her, “I’m fine.” But we both know I’m anything but fine—I’m also equally certain now isn’t the time to let my mind wander down that path.
Oh. That’s right. Silly me.
Oh … and because she is Yarros’s self-insert Mary Sue, she’s right.
Given that she’s right … why did the rider leadership not figure out that Xaden is an inntinnsic? He hasn’t gone mad, so he clearly has a second Signet. Wouldn’t they also logically assume that he is hiding a Signet from them, interrogate him to find out what it is, and assume he is an inntinnsic when he refuses to divulge it?
(Yarros knows this is a plot hole, and she will try to fill it in Chapter 57 by making the rider leadership look even more incompetent than they were already. I will go into that next week.)
Personal Expression
“Signets have to do with who we are at our core and what we need,” I think out loud.
This is a really interesting idea. It is not exactly original, but it is an avenue that opens up so much opportunity for characterization and character development. All it requires is effort by the author …
… so, naturally, Yarros squandered it.
When did Violet figure this out? Is this another irrational conclusion that she jumped to based upon that cryptic utterance from Andarna in that earlier quote? Or did she learn this in her Signet training? If the former, why isn’t this common knowledge among riders, and if the latter, why haven’t the rider leadership been putting this information to good use?
At a bare minimum, why aren’t the rider leadership selected rider candidates via psychological evaluation to screen for the most powerful Signets? The original premise of dragons culling the physically weak has long ago gone out the window, and they need psychologically strong individuals to endure torture. Why not use this same process that Violet applies here to estimate what Signets candidates could provide prior to sending them over the Parapet, or at the latest, prior to Threshing?
For that matter, wouldn’t this be a great way to prevent inntinnsics from forming in the first place? Just identify the likely candidates and discharge them to the infantry.
Inntinnsic Limits
Why does Navarre execute inntinnics on the spot?
The reason presented thus far is that inntinnsics are a security threat. They can rip classified information from the minds of others. Given that Signets that expose information are allowed if they have limits - Dain needs to touch people and only reads memories, Draconis only saw weaknesses, the truth-sayers just real biological tells of stress - the implication was that inntinnsics have no practical limits or countermeasures. The only defense against them is to kill them before they can learn and exploit classified information.
Unfortunately, we now learn that basic shielding techniques will shut an inntinnsic out.
“Less than a minute,” Xaden whispers as Sgaeyl moves toward him—toward us. “That’s how long it took for you to fall out of love with me.”
My gaze flashes to his. “Don’t read my…whatever!”
Tairn stalks toward me, his head low and his teeth bared as he places himself at my back.
“I didn’t.” The saddest smile I’ve ever seen tugs at Xaden’s mouth. “First, because your shields are up, and secondly because I didn’t have to. It’s all over your face.”
Shielding is a basic technique that, at minimum, all riders can learn. (We have no reason to assume that other people can’t learn in, only a lack of examples.) They SHOULD be learning it, anyway, because “mindwork” is the main weapon of the fliers. We will get confirmation in Chapter 59 that an inntinnsic Signet counts as mindwork, so if shielding blocks Xaden, it should also invalidate fliers. Everyone should be learning this.
So if shielding can stop inntinnsics, and if everyone should be learning it anyway, what danger do inntinnsics actually pose? Just make the shielding technique a prerequisite to receiving any sort of security clearance. Inntinnsics could then be safely integrated into the black ops arm of the riders and wielded as a weapon against Navarre’s enemies.
We are not done with this point. It has massive implications for the Plot. I just wanted to take a moment to cover how Yarros has once against demolished her past work before we look at the inadequate reward this destruction has gained.
Wardstone Limitations
As Violet is rushing to activate the wardstone, we get this line.
“And it took reading the entire beginning to know that once a dragon fires a wardstone, their fire can’t be used on any other, and reading the entire end to know they created two wardstones. But it doesn’t say why they never activated this one. It’s dragonfire that triggers the imbedded runes, and they obviously had enough dragons, so why wouldn’t they protect more of Navarre if they could?”
One Per Customer
Why can a dragon only activate one wardstone?
It’s not like it’s a lifeforce thing. Otherwise, the Basgiath wards would have collapsed the instant that any one of the original dragons who activated it died. (If dragons have been rotating in to keep it active, how was the process still a big secret?) We also aren’t going to be shown that the dragons give up a portion of their power to sustain the wardstone. Who or what is arbitrating that a dragon can only fuel one wardstone?
The reason for this, as we will cover in Chapter 64, is that Yarros wants to set up bland Sophie’s Choice in the climax. She wants us to believe a great sacrifice has been made. She is making up rules to shoehorn in said sacrifice.
Why Do I Pay Taxes?
This passage confirms that Aretia, and by extension a large chunk of Tyrrendor, was NEVER inside the wards. It wasn't a case of the ward extensions being reset to punish Tyrrendor after their revolt. This stone was always meant to “protect more of Navarre”.
This blatantly contradicts two elements from the previous book.
First, why is Navarre roughly circular? We were explicitly told that this was because of the protective field of the wards back in Fourth Wing. Tyrrendor is part of that circle … but it is not inside the wards? Shouldn’t Navarre be a circle protected by the wards and an additional blob that is Tyrrendor?
Second, recall that Tyrrendor receives less military resoruces to defend itself than other provinces, being forced to rely on its geography instead. That’s fine against gryphons, but the rider leadership know the venin are out there. Why leave an entire province (one that pays more in terms of military support than any other) vulnerable to invasion by the venin? There is an unguarded path up the Cliffs of Dralor, and we are supposed to think that none of the traps on that path can kill a venin, so even without considering wyverns, it would be very easy for a venin to infiltrate and despoil this entire province.
The Six and the One (Heavy Spoilers)
Yarros has further undermined the twist in Chapters 63 and 64 by shining a spotlight on why it shouldn’t be a twist.
The answer to Violet’s question as to why the wards weren't expanded is that there was only two rainbow dragons alive at the time that Navarre was founded: Andarna (we’ll get to how she’s still alive when we reach that reveal) and the one who activated the Basgiath wardstone.
Here’s the problem: if the rainbow dragon was the final ingredient needed to make the wards work, why were there no historical records of this rainbow dragon? Why are there no records of said rider’s dragon (and there must have been a rider, because the rainbow dragon reveal in Chapter 64 heavily implies that Andarna needed a rider)? Why was the inability to activate a second wardstone (one that protects Navarre’s own territory) due to the absence of another rainbow dragon not widely known? This is a limitation that does more than just leave a portion of Navarre’s territory exposed. It prevents expansion. It prevents the venin from being driven back by creating and activating more wardstones in Poromiel. It’s not like the rainbow dragon contributed in complete secret, given that the journals mention her. Why would her death not be wielded as propaganda to justify Navarre’s isolationism and militarism? After all, losing their only hope of rebuilding or expanding the wards would really help reinforce the cultural idea that they are a lifeboat and can't risk capsizing by taking in refugees.
PLOT
Pacing
We’re going to go through the rest of the issues chronologically, but this is a problem that is pervasive throughout.
The pacing in these chapters is horrific. Scene after scene wastes far too many pages for either no payoff or for a payoff that is immediately negated.
Chapter 53 is almost entirely devoted to meaningless character drama, only for everything to be forgotten once Solas arrives. The only thing it accomplishes is Violet jumping to a wild conclusion about Xaden having two Signets, and that was triggered by a line of dialogue that could have been injected into any other scene.
Chapter 55 drags us through the entire back-and-forth of Xaden and Violet’s fight, only for Violet to negate all progress when she demands to know about his second Signet, and then far too much time is spent on Xaden building up to the answer before they are interrupted anyway.
Multiple pages of pointless drama precede Violet activating the wardstone, which makes the bathos of its uneventful activation infuriating.
Multiple pages are wasted on the buildup to the reveal of Xaden’s Signet, including the two pages where Yarros pretends Violet is intelligent by having her deduce the Signet at a mind-numbing pace.
Multiple pages are spent to build up the venin and wyvern as such an absurd threat that it loses all meaning, only for the wards to work just fine, and then Yarros pulls an UNO reverse card and says that the wards are failing (thereby negating any potential payoff of the wards thwarting the venin).
And these are just the cases on a scene-by-scene basis. In terms of the big picture:
The encounter of Solas is an arbitrary injection that has no greater consequences. It is pointless noise that clearly only exists to trick the audience into thinking something is happening. Yarros including this scene is effectively an admission that her story had ground to a halt and that she needed something to distract the audience from the lack of momentum.
The revival of the Trust conflict is Yarros backpedaling to a conflict that had no real traction in the first place, and the way she tries to drive it forward is even more nonsensical than Violet equating sex with a security clearance (more on that later).
On top of all of this … had Violet activated the wards in Chapter 51, Chapter 56 as a whole would not have happened. I am willing to acknowledge that everything in Chapters 53 through 55 could have still happened, but if the wards were already established, then the flaw in the wards would have been identified before Chapter 53, and the venin might have sensed the wards and never launched the assault we see in Chapter 56.
This is just … so pointless. So exhausting. At least when shounen manga / anime takes dozens of issues / episodes to resolve conflicts, there’s visual storytelling to soften the blow. Here, there is just endless, worthless scribbling.
Solas Attack
I want to like the Solas attack scene. It comes so close to resolving some of the issues that marred Violet’s venin fight back in Chapter 42. It could have fortified the twist in Chapter 59. And, while I do take its inclusion as an admission by Yarros that this story is dead in the water, it is superficially nice to have some excitement in the midst of the meaningless grind.
The problem, like so many other problems in this series, in context.
No Substance
The possibility that Solas might hunt Violet down has never been touched upon. The odds that Solas would just happen to find Violet, rather than anyone else, is such a contrivance of such magnitude that I’m tempted to call it a plot hole (and am only stopped by the technically that the odds of this happening are not zero). Let’s roll with it, though. Let’s, for the sake of argument, accept this as a natural progression of the story.
Oh, no! Solas, a dragon associated with the rider leadership, is poking around Aretia! Surely he is a scout. The Empyrean and the rider leadership must be rallying forces to attack!
Even if this isn’t what’s happening, surely the characters will assume this?
Nope. Yarros doesn’t even bother to gaslight us to dismiss the possibility. Solas is forgotten almost immediately.
Why did Yarros not just use a wyvern here? It would achieve the same result as Solas, only with the added bonus of revealing that the venin are readying to strike, thereby tying things back into the wardstone.
Invalidated Obstacle
Once more, we are put in a situation where Violet’s inability to aim and shoot lighting from her hands should have mattered, but simply … didn’t.
In fairness to Yarros, this isn’t as bad as what happened in Chapter 42. The conflict did not explicitly hinge on Violet’s aim, only for that to be ignored. The electrical arc trick that was set up back in Chapter 50 gets paid off. Violet has to display some actual cleverness when her conduit breaks, forcing her to stab Solas was a shard of the conduit to pull off the arc trick. This is an improvement overall.
Of course, if a scene is garbage after improving, it is still garbage.
Sure, the conflict didn’t hinge on Violet’s aim, but because the electrical arc trick was set up, she already had an alternative tool at the ready, negating any challenge for her. Violet innovating with the conduit is not an adequate substitute. The fact that she was able to stab a dragon with a small piece of metal and then slowly back away while maintaining the electrical arc, all while said dragon is brawling with another dragon, requires incomprehensibly thick plot armor.
In other words, Violet is still being handed a solution that invalidates the obstacles put in place.
Dragon Slayer
“You killed him.” My shoulders dip in relief. “You killed Solas.”
Pride and worry assault me at the same time, but I can’t force my shields up before Tairn’s voice fills my very existence.
“Slayer.”
Let’s ignore the fact that Yarros is trying to recycle the emotional beat from when Violet unlocked her lightning Signet and focus on how pointless this accomplishment is.
At no prior point was it established that dragons slaying other dragons was a big deal. It is therefore utterly pathetic that Yarros tries to give this moment significance retroactively in Chapter 56.
“She’s being questioned by the elders, and her actions were found justifiable,” [Tairn] answers. “But to slay another dragon is a heavy mark upon the soul, even when in defense of yourself or your rider.”
“That’s why you only took [Solas’s] eye instead of killing him.” I stiffen as Xaden approaches, refusing to look his way as he moves into position with Sgaeyl.
“I should have ended him then. I will not hesitate when faced with a similar predicament in the future. She now suffers with a burden that should have been mine.”
Remember how, back in Chapter 19, Tairn grabbed Solas by the throat and threatened to slaughter him just to force Draconis to grovel? Remember how he faced no consequences for that? Slaying another dragon was not such a big deal then.
Remember how … actually, you can’t remember this, as Yarros didn’t write it. At no point did she establish that Tairn deliberately chose to tear out Solas’s eye instead of killing him. All we were told was that Tairn took the eye. If anything, it was implied that Solas lost the eye during a fight with Tairn before he either surrendered or fled. The important takeaway that Yarros wanted us to have was that Tairn is superior to Solas. So how is Violet looking at the information available to her and concluding, “Oh, you chose not to kill Solas at that time due to dragon social mores,” especially given that she was present for the aforementioned throat-grabbing-and-threat incident?
Dragons Are Pathetic Now
Solas is killed by a disabled adolescent and three human cadets using mundane hand weapons and a magical taser.
How, exactly, are dragons a threat to anyone in this setting?
Violet blinds Solas with a throwing knife on her second try. We are told that Cat shoots him twice with arrows, hitting the same mark both times. Andarna kills him despite him being larger, stronger, and more experienced. (If her scorpion tail is the deciding variable, it begs the question of why all dragons don’t grow scorpion tails, since that venom is clearly the best weapon a dragon could have.) If this is the skill level of individuals with little in the way of training or experience for killing dragons, then imagine how easily a small squad of specialists could assassinate dragon after dragon without casualties.
Why haven’t the venin just recruited people to assassinate dragons for them? Even if they couldn’t hunt the dragons to extinction, they could still hamstring the Empyrean and throw the rider leadership into chaos by eliminating important dragons or the dragons of important riders.
Second Draft “Foreshadowing”
In the heat of combat, Sloane manifests her Signet. She can siphon, just like the guy who resurrected Brennan.
This contributes nothing to the fight.
The manifestation itself is basically background noise, a blip of melodrama based on Sloane screaming about how she’s turning into a venin (which is not founded on anything previously established about the world or her character).
It gets heavy-handed setup in the Chapter 53 epigraph that directly tells the audience how it will be used in the climax.
In other words, the manifestation of Sloane’s Signet is Iron Flame’s equivalent to Jack yelling that he has an orange allergy.
Romance Subplot
How is Yarros an established Romance author? How has she successfully built a career? I am asking seriously, because I have no idea how someone could possibly possess a resume as extensive as hers and yet screw up this badly at writing a romance subplot.
I could go line by line through Chapters 55 and 56, dissecting the compounding layers of insanity and the sheer pointlessness of it all. What would you all gain from it, though? It is literally nothing new. In fact, Violet herself tells us that it’s nothing new.
“How are we still having the same fight five months later?” I shake my head.
In a Romance - whether as a plot or subplot - a lot of the drama and investment comes from the conflict between the romantic leads. Happy relationships can be used to satisfying stories, but relationships threatened from without or within provide an easier source of drama. I think it makes sense for Yarros to use Iron Flame to test the bond between Violet and Xaden.
Why, then, can she not think of a way to do this that actually makes sense? Why did she introduce a Jealousy conflict and then immediately toss it aside? Why could she not think of a different conflict to replace the Trust conflict?
The fact that Violet is Yarros’s self-insert Mary Sue makes this worse. You can feel how hard Yarros is grasping at straws to force this conflict - she allows her desperation as the author to bleed into Violet’s narrative voice. It genuinely reads like Violet is searching for excuses to not trust Xaden. That would be fine in a narrative that justified her paranoia or that explored said paranoia as a flaw, but we have not gotten that. We are expected to think that Violet is a “rational woman” for repeatedly going out of her way for excuses to browbeat Xaden.
Thus, when Violet says this:
But how many more blows can that love take? How many more daggers are there in that metaphorical armoire?
My reaction, as jotted down on my first reading, was:
Every blow inflicted on this relationship is your fault.
Refusal To Communicate
Back in Chapter 17, Violet tried to communicate her frustrations to Imogen about how Xaden keeps secrets from her. She chose to relay this with an analogy about having a battleaxe hurtle out of an armoire at her (Xaden kept a secret that hurt her emotionally) and how anyone in that situation would want to make sure no other battleaxes are hidden in said armoire (Violet needs a security clearance to go with the sex). Imogen mocked this analogy.
In Chapter 55, Violet whips out this analogy again. Xaden, seeking to find common ground with her, engages with the analogy, demonstrating how there is indeed a knife hidden in his armoire, but he will never let it hurt her, and she could have easily found said knife herself if she’d looked for it (or, more importantly, asked him about it).
Violet chooses to blast aside this effort to communicate by insisting, repeatedly, that what she said was just an analogy.
This reaction would have made sense in the case of Imogen. Attacking the details of an analogy is a common and frustrating tactic that people use to avoid engaging with the truth behind the analogy. However, that isn’t what Xaden is doing. He is trying to meet Violet on her own terms, and she is rejecting that effort … just like she rejected Dain’s efforts to communicate when she was blaming him for Liam’s death.
Remind me why we are supposed to want this hateful creature to end up in a romantic relationship with anyone?
Xaden Is Right
Xaden kept the secret of being an inntinnsic because it could kill him and because he fears Violet would stop loving him if she knew.
Violet reacts to the reveal with horror, terrified of Xaden's nature as an inntinnsic, and begins to question how their love can endure.
For a crude comparison: imagine if you, as a woman living in a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, asked invasive questions about your boyfriend's sexual tastes, then reacted with revulsion and fear when he admitted to having some sexual attraction towards men (not that he is outright homosexual, just that he finds men somewhat attractive), justifying your sudden loathing on the basis that your boyfriend must be so riddled with sexually transmitted diseases that he would make Nurgle sweat.
Yeah. What a virtuous soul Yarros’s self-insert Mary Sue is.
Not a Betrayal
The reveal that Xaden is an inntinnsic is one of the dumbest, most nonsensical routes Yarros could have taken to force conflict into the Romance subplot, for one very simple reason:
Xaden already has a backdoor into Violet’s mind, courtesy of the mated bond between their dragons. While it’s unclear if this lets him read her mind at will, we do know that he can ‘overhear’ her thoughts and emotions. All of the development in the relationship (outside of Violet’s sexual attraction towards him) happened after this bond was formed.
To illustrate why this is idiotic: imagine if, one day, through circumstances beyond the ability of either of us to control, you and I ended up with full access to each other’s personal information. Bank records, insurance numbers, passwords, emails, phone logs, various government ID numbers, taxes … you and I each gain full access to all of these. You, having a firmer grasp of such matters than me, quickly cut my access to your personal information. You then teach me how to conceal my personal information from you. We both live harmoniously. Then, one day, I find out that you have followed me on Twitter since the day I joined the platform, and I begin screeching about how you have violated my trust.
It could not be more blatant that this was not planned out in advance. If it was, Yarros would have either changed the nature of the mates bond or given Xaden a secret that actually works as a betrayal.
The Inntinnsic … Twist?
As with twists previous and twists to come, Yarros feels compelled to explain the twist of Xaden being an inntinnsic, and that explanation exposes just how barely written the twist is.
An audience should not need to have a twist explained to them in detail for it to make sense. Some notes about how a twist offers new context to past events is fine; a broader explanation of the solution to a mystery (which may include a twist) is fine. If the author needs to pause a story to explain how a twist makes sense, though, then that twist has fundamentally failed.
The reason I am shining a spotlight on this particular problem is just how bad the explanation is in this case. Xaden being an inntinnsic doesn’t shatter the narrative as severely as the other twists in the book. However, reading through the explanation, it is blatant that Yarros thought up the twist on the spot and is trying to gaslight us into thinking it makes sense, rather than doubling back to do the necessary revisions for the twist to be a natural evolution of the story.
Brace yourselves. I’m going to provide Yarros’s explanation in full, cover what it fundamentally fails, and then go through line by line.
The Explanation
Oh gods. There’s only one signet riders are killed for having. Fear churns in my stomach and threatens to bring up what little I’ve had to eat today.
“Yes.” He nods, his gaze boring into mine.
Shit, did he just—
“No.” I shake my head and take a step backward out of his shadows, but he moves as if he takes the step with me.
“Yes. It’s how I knew I could trust you not to tell anyone about the meeting under the tree last year,” he says as I retreat another step. “How I seem to know what my opponent has planned on the mat before their next move. How I know exactly what someone needs to hear in order to get them to do what I need done, and how I knew if someone remotely suspected us while we were at Basgiath.”
I shake my head in denial, wishing I’d stopped pushing like he’d demanded me to.
He crosses the space between us. “It’s why I didn’t kill Dain in the interrogation chamber, why I let him come with us, because the second his shields wavered, I knew he’d had a true epiphany. How would I know that, Violet?”
He’d read Dain’s mind.
Xaden is more dangerous than I ever imagined.
“You’re an inntinnsic,” I whisper. Even the accusation is a death sentence among riders.
Big Picture
Does this explanation lend context to past events?
No. All of the referenced scenes are functional without Xaden being able to read minds. Common sense or previously provided information already would produce the outcomes we got. Even in the cases where the referenced scenes are broken, Xaden being able to read minds does not fix the breaks. This is not so much new context as it is historical revisionism.
Does this explanation resolve a mystery?
No. We were given no reason to question these things (at least, within the narrative itself). Violet has not spent any time dwelling on these things. There were, in simplest terms, no questions that demanded this answer.
Does this explanation cannibalize past scenes that worked fine as-is (or, again, were at least broken in ways that Xaden being an inntinnsic can’t fix) to force a semblance of credibility into an ass-pull?
Yes. Yes it does.
This is fundamentally terrible storytelling. A good twist must flow naturally from events that came before - and the emphasis here is on ‘naturally.’ What we have here is not natural. It is, at best, a conspiracy board threaded together by a madwoman who is desperate to find any sort of pattern to sustain her mad theory.
Cascading Breakdown
All right, let’s go through point by point to demonstrate how the “evidence” of the twist is anything but.
“It’s how I knew I could trust you not to tell anyone about the meeting under the tree last year.”
Of all of the points listed, this is the closest to working, yet it still fails.
There has never been any mystery to why Xaden trusted Violet. If anything, the mystery was on why he didn’t wasn’t on board with revenge killing her when all the other rebel children were. That mystery overrides the mystery of why he trusts her. After all, he has nothing to gain by sparing her, and in fact ended up owing her a favor for her keeping the secret; if he didn’t have an active interest in keeping her alive, then it would have been easier for him to just kill her, regardless of whether he trusted her.
The mystery of why he doesn’t want her dead has been given not one but two explanations (in Fourth Wing, is was that he had already fallen in love with her, and in Iron Flame, we got the deal with General Sorrengail). Either one of those explanations would itself invalidate the trust issue.
Even if neither (1) nor (2) applied, this could easily be handwaved by Xaden being a good judge of character (without any supernatural aid) or just being an edgy Bad Boy Love Interest who doesn’t mind gambling with the lives of his people.
Nothing is added by claiming that him being able to read minds influenced his decisions, as he already had adequate reason to make the decision that he did.
“How I seem to know what my opponent has planned on the mat before their next move. . .
Or … as Yarros has gone out of her way to point out, both through Professor Emetterio’s blunt assessment of skills and how Violet has improved via is training … Xaden is just a very good fighter, either through (non-supernatural) talent or training.
Actually, given that Xaden was able to successfully train both Violet and Cat, his fighting skills can’t be supernatural in origin. Neither one of them has his Signet. If anything, any fighting skills relying upon him an inntinnsic should be pathetically useless if taught to anyone else.
To illustrate what I mean by this: in the Marvel comics, Spider-Man’s fighting prowess originally came from his superpowers, with his Spider-Sense being the most critical in this regard. He would flail his arms and legs in the general direction of his targets, trusting in his Spider-Sense to guide his body so that he would avoid attacks, land blows on-target and without injuring himself, and pull his punches enough to avoid killing mundane humans with his super strength. Then came a story arc where he lost his Spider-Senses - and, as a result, lost any semblance of fighting skill. He had to train in kung fu in order to continue operating as a superhero.
In other words, if Xaden was truly relying on inntinnsic powers to fight, then his actual fighting skills should be weak, or at least, not nearly at a level where he can train others who lack this power.
… How I know exactly what someone needs to hear in order to get them to do what I need done …
When was this demonstrated? Xaden has never been demonstrated to be a persuasive or manipulative person. The closest he’s come to that is people saying that he’s a better leader than Dain. Not only was this applied purely to punch Dain down, but as shown in Chapter 36, Xaden’s persuasiveness amounts to brutish displays of power to cow people into doing what he wants.
… and how I knew if someone remotely suspected us while we were at Basgiath.”
This is both not demonstrated and explained by other factors. Throughout the entirety of Part One of this book, we were not shown a single instance of someone actually coming close to uncovering the truth about the weapons smuggling. The incompetence of Draconis and the rider leadership has already been covered in great detail. At no point did Xaden need to display supernatural awareness and deal with a threat. Yarros went so far to neuter this threat that see eliminated any basis for this statement to work as evidence of an inntinnsic.
“It’s why I didn’t kill Dain in the interrogation chamber, why I let him come with us, because the second his shields wavered, I knew he’d had a true epiphany. How would I know that, Violet?”
This one is particularly stupid as a point of evidence.
Violet stopped Xaden from killing Dain. No further explanation is needed there.
Dain stabbed Draconis, moved to kill Draconis himself, and then did not stop Xaden and Violet from indulging in their psychopathy. He has thrown away his entire future to help Violet. His trustworthiness has been demonstrated.
Dain’s dragon could vouch for him, as Yarros herself reminds us for all the defecting riders.
The Takeaway
There is nothing wrong with coming up with a great twist in the moment. However, that twist must actually be supported by what came before. The author must be prepared to double back and make whatever changes are necessary to ensure a natural flow of events.
Cannibalizing past events like this is a hallmark of lazy writing.
Scale
Yarros has no idea how to scale up threats, and it is destroying the integrity of her story.
The horde of wyvern that throws itself at the freshly activated wards is explicitly “hundreds” strong, with Violet later providing the following summary.
Seventeen dark wielders and a horde that rivals the riot at Aretia against … us. “We’re dead if the wards aren’t up, if I messed up the translation.”
After the wards hold, we get this.
We wait three hours before flying back, long enough to Suri to arrive and tell us of three similar incidents along the cliffs. We weren’t the lucky recipients of a lone horde. It was a coordinated, simultaneous attack.
Because Yarros is so vague, and since there is no given reason why the four different forces would be a drastically different sizes, we can therefore safely assume that there are no fewer than 68 venin and 800 wyvern in existence. (We will later be told that a single attacking wave of the total wyvern forvr had more than 1000 wyverns.). A mere quarter of this force would destroy a city with 200 dragons to protect it.
By making the threat this vast, Yarros is denying herself the means to resolve it. She will have to compensate somehow; given her track record, this will likely come down to flinging out more god-tier Signet powers and warfare-breaking weapons. Otherwise, if the protagonists overpower this force, it will make the entire concept of venin and the wyvern laughable.
(What Yarros ends up doing is overcompensating. As we will cover in Chapter 60, once all of the assets of both sides are laid on the table, Violet and her allies are actually in a better position than they were in Fourth Wing.)
CHARACTER
Violet - The Masking of a Mary Sue
A common attribute associated with the Mary Sue is flawlessness, or at the very least, the absence of any flaws that would serve as an obstacle to her progress through the narrative or that she would be held accountable for. I have highlighted this very quality with regards to Violet throughout this review. We have also gone over how Yarros goes out of her way to set up opportunities for character growth, only to always provide Violet with some sort of out that is clearly meant to keep Violet unstained and project her failures onto others.
One thing I haven’t really touched upon are all the times that the narrative limply plays at telling Violet that she is in the wrong, only to make it clear that we the audience are still meant to take Violet’s side and not take such criticism seriously. I haven’t been covering this because it’s ultimately an extension of the aborted setups problem. For example, when Violet confides in Imogen about her trust issues with Xaden, Imogen directly tells her that Violet is deluding herself if she expects anything different than what Xaden is doing. However, at no point does Violet take this seriously or learn from what Imogen said.
These moments don’t come across as honest attempts to hold a character accountable. At best, it feels like Yarros was aware that she was writing a self-insert Mary Sue and went through the motions of accountability to distract the audience from that problem. At worst, it reads as though Yarros is so convinced that her audience will take Violet’s side in all matters, and thus saw such criticism of her character as something that could be included purely so that she could steamroller over it.
Marvel comics went through this during X-Men’s Krakoan Era (which I hear has finally, mercifully, ended). During this era, the X-Men became … well, bluntly put, the antithesis of everything they once represented, creating an isolationist, segregationist nation for mutants on the island of Krakoa and welcoming such violent figures as Apocalypse into their ranks. In response to fan backlash to this event, at least one writer wrote stories in which the villains (including a literal demon) pointed out these problems. The framing was clear: yes, this criticism exists; no, we will not acknowledge it accept to discredit it.
The reason I am bringing up this insidious behavior is that Yarros does it three times throughout Chapters 55 and 56, each time as part of forcing the plot forward.
During the argument with Xaden about trust, Xaden actually manages to back Violet into a corner. He does his best to address her concerns and soothe her fears. However, once all of her arguments are dismantled and Xaden tries to help her overcome the flaws behind them, Violet pounces, whipping out the reveal of Xaden’s second Signet. The tone of scene instantly flips, with Violet now being the one who has Xaden in a corner.
Yarros acknowledges Violet’s failure to raise the wards for a full week by having a character whom has been previously established to not like Violet be angry about how Violet’s decision nearly got all of Aretia killed. Violet’s only defense is a childish dismissal about how she’s “definitely not winning any points in the trust department,” after which the narrative tries to ignore her failure entirely.
When Violet figures out that Xaden is an inntinnsic, she has a moment of remorse about not stopping her inquiry when Xaden asked her to, but then the focus immediately pivots to all the damage that Xaden has done by keeping secrets from her.
At the end of the day, no matter how much Yarros toys with flaws or growth for Violet, it is only an act. We are meant to see Violet as unstained, perfect, sinless, unstoppable. Accountability and other things that might enhance the narrative at the expense of Violet’s perfection are avoided or trampled at every turn.
Sloane
In Chapter 53, there’s a very cringe moment in which Yarros showcases Violet’s virtue by standing between Sloane and Cat … after Sloane antagonizes Cat and Cat has the audacity to stand up for herself.
“Andarna thinks you’re arrogant, not confident,” I tell her.
“She is,” Sloane agrees.
“Just because your brother didn’t like me doesn’t mean you know me,” Cat whispers at Sloane.
“No.” I turn to face Cat, making her pause in the footsteps I’ve carved in the ridgeline. “You want to pick a fight? You come at me.”
Cat cocks her head to the side and studies me. “Because you feel guilty for her brother’s death.” It’s not an accusation or even a dig. Just the truth.
“Because I promised him I’d take care of her. So, you can aim all that hatred right here.” I tap my gloved hand to my chest.
This is stupid in the moment. However, what is damning for Sloane’s character is that, a little later, with full awareness that Violet will shield her, she continues to nettle Cat.
Does every gryphon have lair in their name?” I ask Cat, hoping the subject change might change the aim of her sharp tongue from Sloane.
“Of course not. Is every rider named Sorrengail?” She folds her arms and bounces back on her heels like she’s trying to stay warm.
“That right there is why I don’t like you.” Sloane crosses into the cave. “You’re—”
[Red Shirt] slips and I lunge forward, catching her hand and tugging her into the cave as snow crumbles where she’d just been standing.
“You all right?” I ask, pulling her farther into the cave and scanning her startled face.
“Of course she is. You never seem to have a problem saving her,” Cat mutters.
“I’m fine.” [Red Shirt] nods, dropping her hood and revealing the dragonfire burn scar down her hairline. “That’s going to make it hard to leave.”
I shoot Cat a withering look, but she’s too busy watching her gryphon, Kira, stretch across the hole in the path, then safely squirm her way in to notice.
“Reason number two.” Sloane holds up two fingers and walks past Cat into the dark cave.
Setting aside how cowardly and petty Sloane’s behavior here is, does anyone else remember how, in Part One, Sloane had to be extorted into accepting the help of others? This here is character assassination. I do not for a second believe that she would hide behind Violet’s skirts while pulling faces at Cat.
PROSE
To cap things off, let’s appreciate a very silly line from the start of Chapter 53 that really shows us that Yarros can't decide if we’re supposed to take this story of war, death, painful revelations, and existential threats at all seriously.
Forty minutes later, the four of us are hiking down a steep, snow-covered ridgeline to a cave only accessible by foot in the sector our group has been assigned to, and Lucky Me is in the lead, which leaves Cat at my back.
LIES AND BROKEN MORALS
Next week, we will be covering Chapters 57 and 58, which details the meeting with Melgren, the immediate fallout of that meeting, and a predictable sexy fight between Violet and Xaden so that their latest fight can be swept under the rug. They ultimately serve to transition the audience from the meandering events in Aretia into the book’s climax, which is set to take place back in Basgiath.
I should have a massive amount to discuss. The hallmarks of Yarros’s writing style - plot advancing through contrivance and nonsense, worldbuilding that continues to eat itself, and characters acting like idiots and/or high school mean girls instead of reflecting their actual age and experience - are all here. Violet and Xaden’s makeup also highlights how psychotic Violet is and how Xaden is better off far away from her. The thing is, all of these things are so pervasive in the story that they have been talked to death. There aren’t new lessons to be learned here, only flaws to be acknowledged.
Rather, what’s worthy of discussion here are four issues that have existed in some degree throughout this entire book but only properly come into focus here.
Yarros lies to the audience.
Melgren’s future sight is inconsistently handled, and then Yarros outright acknowledges that the rebel children damned Navarre without seeming to have realized that she did this.
Yarros finally shines a proper spotlight on the theme of isolationism, only to promptly botch it.
Violet’s story rips off The Hunger Games and the Divergent series as she goes from being a rebel allied with the rebellion to a rebel who rebels against the rebellion because That’s Good.
It’s coming your way on August 9th. I hope to see you all then. Have a good day.
