Onyx Storm (Marketing Materials)
Hello, everyone. I hope you are having a wonderful week.
I’ve been camping out on Rebecca Yarros’s website for what feels like a month now, waiting for her to finally post the back-cover blurb for Onyx Storm. As it turns out, the information has been available since at least June - Yarros shared it as part of that Good Morning America interview that got referenced back in the Iron Flame retrospective. The information has also been on the Barnes & Noble product page for Onyx Storm for an unknown period of time.
Since the information is available, there’s no point in delaying things any further. It’s time to give my initial reactions to the premise of this third installment of The Empyrean. Much like with my reaction to Iron Flame at the end of the Fourth Wing review, this will reflect my perspective as someone who has read the previous books and is considering whether to read more (assuming I hadn’t already pe-ordered it, of course). We will review this premise again at the start of the Onyx Storm review series to give my thoughts after reading the book.
Additionally, I’d like this time to cover a few odds and ends.
First, Yarros posted a trigger warning for Onyx Storm on her website. I’d like to take a few moments to evaluate this warning in the context of her writing style and translate it into practical information, while also acknowledging what her intention may actually be with this warning and why she falls short of said goal.
Second, I previously stated that the reason Yarros delayed publishing Onyx Storm to give herself more breathing room after the insane act of putting out two bloated Epic Fantasy novels and a Romance novel in a 6-month window. I expressed some hope that she would learn a lesson from this experience. As it turns out, I was incorrect, having read too much into her statement about delaying the relase. A little book called Variation indicates that giving herself more time to produce a quality product isn’t high on her list of priorities.
Finally, on October 17th, E! News published an article reporting on something Yarros said at a Q&A panel regarding her hopes of the upcoming TV adaptation of The Empyrean. We’ll take a moment to touch on both the answer being reported upon and my general thoughts about said TV show.
Buckle into your special snowflake dragon saddles, everyone. It’s time to return, however briefly, to the grim darkness of The Empyrean.
SPOILER WARNING
Heavy spoilers for Fourth Wing and Iron Flame will be presented in this post. None of them will be marked. Given that this is prep-work for the review of the third book in a series, I am assuming that anyone who reads past this point is either full caught up on the books (either by reading them or consuming reviews about them) or simply doesn't care if they are spoiled.
PREMISE
The blurb on the Barnes & Noble website (sans marketing fluff) reads thusly.
After nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there’s no more time for lessons. No more time for uncertainty.
Because the battle has truly begin, and with enemies closing in from outside their walls and within their ranks, it’s impossible to know who to trust.
Now Violet must journey beyond the failing Aretian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. The trip will test every bit of her with, luck, and strength, but she will do anything to save what she loves - her dragons, her family, her home, and him.
Even if it means keeping a secret so big, it could destroy everything.
They need an army. They need power. They need magic. And they need the one thing only Violet can find - the truth.
But a storm is coming … and not everyone can survive its wrath.
Barnes & Noble further lists the following as “Related Subjects”. From what I understand, this is effectively an identification of genre and sub-genre.
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Romance
Fantasy Fiction
Paranormal Romance
Epic Fantasy
Fantasy - Women of Lore (I think this one just means that the main character is female)
Fantasy Romance
Reaction / Anticipation
Overall, this premise does not fill me with great confidence. Everything is so vague. Everything is so generic. It reads like Yarros Googled a bunch of back cover blurbs for popular Epic Fantasy and then tried to copy the vibe … and like she did this before she actually wrote the book. It would not shock me if this was actually a book proposal that she wrote for Red Tower to approve of while her contract for this series was being hammered out, with said proposal now being recycled as a premise. That’s probably why Xaden is not named, only referred to by a pronoun. When this was written, Yarros may well have still been undecided as to which love interest Violet would be with at this point in the series.
Now, for the details.
After nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there’s no more time for lessons. No more time for uncertainty.
As ways to start a premise go, this works fine enough. There’s just a thought that nags at me: didn’t we do this in the last book?
Part One of Iron Flame ended with Violet leading a mass defection from Basgiath. They were giving up their lessons, and they weren’t exactly uncertain about it. Yet the first thing Yarros did was to reset things back to a school setting in a new location. Yes, this made an amount of sense within the story, but the reasons why it made sense then should still apply now. Violet is still a second-year cadet with a great deal to learn, and many members of the Red Shirt mob are even less experienced than her. If they weren’t ready to fight a war at the time of the defection (which, judging by the note about Violet having 18 months of education, was maybe three months prior to the start of Onyx Storm), they aren’t going to be ready now.
I would very much like Yarros to leave the school setting behind. She’s not doing anything interesting with the school itself - it’s not an environment filled with wonder and mystery, and it stopped contributing to Violet’s character development after Threshing in Fourth Wing. The time spent on school activities just bogs down the pace and forces the narrative to warp in ways that destroy the characters and world. It’s just that she had the perfect opportunity to leave the school setting already, yet she went out of her way to recreate it in another location. For her to claim that she is suddenly going to shift gears is either a lie to the audience - something that Yarros is well-versed in doing - or the setup for a pivot in the plot that will likely be as nonsensical as Violet’s returning to Basgiath at the start of Iron Flame.
Because the battle has truly begin, and with enemies closing in from outside their walls and within their ranks, it’s impossible to know who to trust.
Again, Yarros has a chance to do this in Iron Flame. She could have made Part One all about Violet trying to acquire allies and figure out who she could trust while sneaking around Basgiath. She instead chose to focus on school activities, pointless conflict in the romance, Bad Teachers being obviously evil, and Violet’s accessories validating her after chapters of her angsting over if they would valdiate her. For her to promise it now reads like a forced attempt to drive up tension.
Also … what enemies within their ranks? If it’s the rider leadership or other citizens of Navarre, why did Yarros establish at the end of Iron Flame that the leadership was reconciling with and trying to reintegrate the Aretia riders? Or does this mean that Yarros is going to engage with the fact that venin can easily form within Navarre and that the entire kingdom is now overrun? I’m not confident in her ability to do this in anyway that doesn’t further damage her story.
Now Violet must journey beyond the failing Aretian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. The trip will test every bit of her wit, luck, and strength, but she will do anything to save what she loves - her dragons, her family, her home, and him.
Even if it means keeping a secret so big, it could destroy everything.
Violet is going beyond the Aretian wards? Why not Basgiath’s wards? Again, what was the point of establishing that everyone was being reintegrated, not to mention the Sophie’s Choice of saving Basgiath instead of Aretia, if the Aretia rebels are going to keep operating out of the place they don't need to be in anymore? It can't be because of civilians. All the civilians in Aretia are only there in the first place because of the riders. They can just go back where they came from. It also can’t be to protect the rest of Tyrrendor, unless Yarros is prepared to explain how Tyrrendor was ever part of Navarre in the first place while not being protected by Basgiath’s wards.
“Unfamiliar lands” … if Onyx Storm is going to make an effort to actually explore and flesh out Poromiel, I’m open to it, but this phrasing implies new places entirely. Is Yarros going to start throwing even more nonsense at us in the form of new locations with their own cultures, motivations, and possibly even magic? She can’t even be bothered to first clean up the mess she’s already made on the Continent? Are we finally going to learn where the ethnic diversity of this story comes from, or is Yarros going to treat every place like it has the diversity of Colorado?
I suspect the “stand with Navarre” bit is going to be used to make more ham-fisted commentary about isolationism. Never mind that isolationist regimes and international relations are not mutually exclusive. Given that Yarros has previously established that Navarre does trade with foreign powers, they must already have some friends abroad, even if Yarros wants to sweep this under the rug. At best, this is going to be setup for another simplistic moral binary to help frame the narrative. That’s not a bad thing, just a missed opportunity for meaningful thematic discussion. More likely, though, we're going to get a repeat of Chapter 21 of Iron Flame.
The bit about wit, luck, and strength … well, plot armor is often contextualized as luck. If Master Chief can get away with it, I don’t see why Violet can't. Good on you, Ms. Yarros. You were honest one time out of three.
The fact that Violet would let everything be destroyed and claim she was doing it because she loves people is perfectly in character for her. Remember how she was prepared to let everyone in Aretia die to show she cared about the feelings of her squad? That said, the phrasing here is also a reminder that Violet should never have joined the rebellion. If she would let the world burn to protect the people whose validation she loves, then she should be an ardent supporter of the isolationism policy, especially since even Melgren, the “villain”, framed the isolationism as a desperate act for the survival of their people with his lifeboat analogy.
The bit about keeping a secret does interest me. Either Yarros is going to pay off Xaden becoming a venin by having Violet trying to keep it a secret while he struggles with the temptation to drain more power, or else some new secret will be the inciting incident. Unfortunately, past precedent does not leave me optimistic about either possiblity being handled well. It may even be that this secret is something very, very dumb and contrived, such as Violet keeping the secret of Andarna being a rainbow dragon despite Andarna having already fulfilled her purpose.
They need an army. They need power. They need magic. And they need the one thing only Violet can find - the truth.
I love how “power” is before “truth”. Actually - I love that it is mentioned at all. Yarros didn’t have to include that to make this paragraph work. Its inclusion hammers in that power, not truth, is what this series enshrines.
Also, the truth about what? The truth about the venin assaulting Navarre has already been revealed. Is Yarros going to project dishonesty onto yet another background character to justify a wild redirection of the plot?
But a storm is coming … and not everyone can survive its wrath.
This is just fluff to close things on a note of high tension.
Part One?
The premise of Iron Flame only described Part One of that book. There is a strong chance that this premise also only describes an early half (or less) of Onyx Storm. Even if Violet is going to different countries to try to recruit people, past precedent shows how quickly that could resolve itself. Yarros build up Tecarus / Techlis as a huge obstacle for all of Part One before having Violet travel to his castle and get the luminary from him in the span of two and a half chapters. I would not be the least be surprised if she collapsed a globe-trotting adventure down to 150 pages or less and then spent the remainder of the book foundering as she searched for a new story.
Genre
Of the seven Related Subjects listed by Barnes & Noble, three identify Onyx Storm as Romance. Yarros’s own website identifies it as a “Fantasy Romance” and a “Romance”.
Can anyone honestly tell that it is a Romance from the premise?
Maybe Barnes & Noble and other bookstores will shelf the physical copies of Onyx Storm exclusively on Romance shelves. If so, fair enough. However, if this is shelved with Fantasy, or if you clicked onto the Barnes & Noble sales pages looking for Epic Fantasy and didn't scroll down to check the other Related Subjects, could you honestly say that you could tell that this was anything but a highly generic Epic Fantasy with, at most, a Romance subplot?
There are two major reasons why this is an issue. The first is honest marketing - in other words, the issue of lying to consumers. The second is a matter of the standards by which we judge the story.
Marketing
Originally, I was going to use this part to detail my take on the Romantasy craze currently being pushed by Fantasy publishing. The marketing for Onyx Storm is very emblematic of the problems that I’ve heard others report upon and that I’ve observed through my own experiences in trying to get traditionally published. However, that discussion ran too long to be worth cramming into this part, and it swerved away from the book we’re here to discuss. I’m going to flesh out those ideas a bit more and share them with you all on January 3rd. For now, I’ll just give the abbreviated version.
Romantasy is supposedly the hot new trend that has redefined the Fantasy genre, with series like The Empyrean leading the charge. However, the way that Onyx Storm is marketed makes me extremely doubtful that this is true. If Romantasy is truly redefining the Fantasy genre, then why is the romance so downplayed? Why does this present itself as the most generic of Epic Fantasy?
What I find particularly strange about it is that Red Tower Books wanted a Romantasy. I can’t find the quote where Yarros says she was approached the write this series, but I was able to recover what she said to Today back in June.
So, I love dragons. I don't know anyone who doesn't — us fantasy girlies, right? I grew up reading a ton of fantasy. I knew my publisher was looking for romantasy in that new-adult line — and I love new adult, I think it's such an unexplored genre. There are not a lot of books that deal with people in that period between adolescence and adulthood. I love that sweet spot. So knowing that I could definitely build it on a romance, I was in love with the forced proximity of the romance being between their dragons and not necessarily (the characters). And everybody loves a morally gray hero, so I definitely had to have that one. And because I majored in history in college, it was really, really fun to explore those themes of who would get to write down our history and what would happen, perhaps, if the history we were educated on is not accurate.
This isn’t an indulgence that Red Tower Books is begrudgingly accommodating to please one of their parent company’s regulars. Even if they didn’t commission Yarros to write this series, the demand was still theirs, and they accepted what she offered to fill said demand. They should have every incentive to tell the whole world that this is a fusion of Romance and Fantasy, not to bury any hint of Romance.
The only way I can make sense of this is that it is dishonest marketing - that Romantasy is not, in fact, defining the Fantasy genre, and the publisher knows this, so they are lying to the core Fantasy audience to trick people into buying it. The way that this series is marketed would make sense if it were solely shelved with Romance titles and if no effort was made in online stores to associate it with Epic Fantasy. As it is, it’s like the publisher is hoping that only the BookTok crowd will know what the series actually is while banking on dissociation from BookTok to trick everyone else.
I would never have bought Fourth Wing if I was not lied to about what it was meant to be. Now that I have engaged with this series, and now that I understand that an active effort is being made to normalize bad Fantasy writing through dishonest marketing, I’m going to call it out. I may not have any excuse to claim I’m being mislead anymore, but that does not justify the continued lying to others.
Romantic Fantasy vs. Epic Fantasy
Regardless of whether The Empyrean is intended as a Romantasy rather than an Epic Fantasy, I will continue to judge it by the same standards as an Epic Fantasy, rather than making allowances for common tropes and flaws of contemporary Romance. I could lay this at the feet of the dishonest marketing - if the publisher tells me that it is an Epic Fantasy, then they have chosen the standard by which it is to be judged - but the simple fact of the matter is that this series isn’t a Romantic Fantasy.
A minimum bar that a story has to clear to be a Romance, rather than just a story that features a Romance subplot is that the romantic relationship drives the narrative. Either this relationship is the entirety of the narrative, or else the relationship needs to be what incites drama and fuels the progression of the narrative. To give just a handful of examples:
Maid in Manhattan could be interpreted as a drama about social mobility and the relationship between blue collar workers and the white collar elites they support. What makes it a Romance is that, from the moment Marissa and Chris have their first encounter (with the mistaken identity snafu that comes with it), the drama is propelled entirely by their relationship. Were it not for Chris’s efforts to see Marissa again and the fact that her feelings for him keep her from shutting him out entirely, this film would have ended without conflict. Marissa would have successfully accomplished her career goals and climbed the social ladder were it not for this romance putting her in a compromising situation.
The trajectory of Caraval is directly influenced by Scarlett’s sexual awakening, her growing attraction towards Julian, and how this leads her to reject the fiancé whom she’d previously dreamed about. Without those first two elements, Scarlett would have, at a bare minimum, reacted very differently when she finally did encounter the fiancé, which would have radically altered the trajectory of the final act of the book.
My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend is entirely focused on Jesse’s relationships with Ethan and Troy, with the third act conflict be the result of needing to choose between them.
The vampire politics, werewolf treaties, and everything else in the Twilight Saga are only an issue because Bella and Edward started dating. If their romance did not happen, James would never have tried to kill Bella, the Quileutes wouldn’t have experienced a massive spike in wolf pack membership due to vampires trespassing on their lands, the Volturi would not have had an excuse to stick their noses in the Cullen family’s business, and all the drama related to Bella and Edward reproducing wouldn’t have even been conceivable. Bella would have wandered on through her life, and the Cullens would have eventually moved out of Forks when their (lack of) ageing threatened their cover identities.
For a case of a story that almost clears this minimum bar yet still falls short, consider Notorious Sorcerer. The sexual relationship between Siyon and Izmirlian is almost relevant to the events of the story. Major events only happen because Siyon is harvesting Izmirlian’s bodily fluids and seeking a method by which to use those fluids to achieve a goal on Izmirlian’s behalf. However, Siyon was paid to do that job. He would have harvested Izmirlian’s fluids regardless. By the rules of the magic system (as inconsistent and flimsy as those were), he did not need to kiss Izmirlian to extract breath, and he could have used blood instead of semen to cut Izmirlian’s ties to the Abyss. The erotica subplot may be intertwined with the events of the narrative, yet it isn’t a primary factor that drives events. (An argument could be made that the romance between the Prelate’s son and a harpy does drive events, but that relationship is a plot device, not a plot.)
The romance in The Empyrean is even less relevant to that narrative than that of Notorious Sorcerer. Every meaningful plot development of both Fourth Wing and Iron Flame happens regardless of Violet and Xaden having sex. Yarros actually went out of her way to negate the Romance as a driving factor. All the moments where Xaden protects or save Violet are a matter of survival for him and his dragon thanks to the mated bond. On top of that, the survival of himself, the rebel children, and his cause hinge on him honoring his deal with General Sorrengail to protect Violet. You could remove their romance from the story entirely, and the only meaningful negative impact it would have is that the audience would not longer have sexual tension to distract from Xaden’s blandness or Violet’s loathsomeness.
On top of this … if I were to acknowledge this series as a Romantasy, I would have to rate the books even lower than I have already. The romance is terrible. Violet is a horrific, abusive creature who cares only about satisfying her own impulses and desires, lashing out at anyone who denies her, including the man she claims to love. To defend this writing by associating it with the Romance genre just puts excessive focus on a weak aspect of the story and degrades the Romance genre by the association. The damaging association to Fantasy is set in stone by the nature of lauding the terrible worldbuilding as something worth celebrating, but at least we should try to salvage the Romance genre. It suffers enough scorn as it is.
Now, I do want to acknowledge that this may sound like a contradiction. I just roasted the publisher for lying about the genre of this series while simultaneously insisting that the series is actually the thing they lied about it being. The key factor here is intent. Red Tower Books wanted a Romantasy. They are banking on this supposed Romantasy trend. Yarros wrote this project or them based upon that demand. However, Yarros failed to actually write a project that met the demand … and Red Tower is bulldozing forward anyway, trying to have things both ways by feeding the BookTok furnace while lying about their intentions to everyone else. When a lie becomes truth by way of failure, that doesn’t make the liar honest. It just makes the liars look incompetent.
Yarros Admitted that The Empyrean is not Romantasy
On November 18th, Yarros did an interview with People to promote her latest contemporary Romance novel, Variations. The article bears the rather dramatic title of:
Rebecca Yarros' New Book Saved Her: 'If I Hadn't Written Variation, I Wouldn't Have Written Onyx Storm' (Exclusive)
In the article, she explains that she wrote Variation to cope with the psychological strain of the popularity that Fourth Wing gave her. This is embodied by the following dramatic quote.
“I've had a year to kind of adjust and grow and write Variation, which I think helped process a lot of those emotions. And I can tell you, if I hadn't written Variation, I would not have written Onyx Storm. If I hadn’t written Variation, I wouldn’t have survived.”
I feel like Yarros is being melodramatic (if not outright lying) to garner attention and sell books. It’s certainly not impossible that she’s telling the truth. Both social media and a surge in popularity can have disastrous consequences for one’s health, and many writers (myself included) write stories as a means of processing difficult emotions. However, after all the lies she told the audience to wring emotion out of us in Iron Flame, I’m not inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.
That’s not the important bit, though. These two quotes are the important ones.
“Really, branching into fantasy was kind of an outlier for me, and my first loves are always a combination of fantasy and romance,” she says. “I couldn't write the fantasy without writing the romance. The romance is really what causes you to focus inward on internal conflict and character struggles. And it makes an even richer fantasy when you go back to it.”
“I get to balance both, so I honestly can't imagine ever giving either genre up,” she says. “They each enrich the other so very much that it would be impossible to let either of them go. Writing contemporary allows me to just let my brain go and really explore internal conflicts. And of course, love, because if it doesn't have love, I'm not interested.”
Yarros is absolutely right about Romantasy being about a Romance that enriches a Fantasy narrative. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been doing that in The Empyrean. The “Romance” of The Empyrean is a subplot that is purely about sex (to the point that her self-insert Mary Sue literally utters the phrase, “I miss sex,” and reflects on how she uses orgasms as a surrogate for meaningful human connection). This is crowbarred into a Fantasy narrative that would progress exactly the same with or without the sexcapades. What’s more, Yarros did this in such a manner that basic attention to the worldbuilding and the plot undermines this subplot. If The Empyrean counted as Romantasy, it would be an example of what happens when you fail to adhere to the platitudes Yarros is spouting. Did her publisher just give her a list of talking points that she’s regurgitating with zero self-awareness?
I find it very interesting how Yarros describes the difference between writing Romantasy and writing contemporary Romance. She’s careful with phrasing so as to avoid anything that might acknowledge that she isn’t writing Romantasy. However, note those sentences in bold.
Yarros establishes that Romance is all about “internal conflict” … and then talks about how she needed to write contemporary Romance to write internal conflict. This implies that she wasn’t doing that in The Empyrean. There should be no matter of degrees that could be explained by the “really” - either she’s writing internal conflict, or she isn’t. Either she wrote a Romance that enriches the Fantasy world, or she wrote a bad Fantasy with a time-wasting subplot.
Yarros insists that contemporary Romance lets her write about love. Assuming that this isn’t a transparent appeal to emotions by a compulsive liar, why couldn’t she write about love while writing The Empyrean? Didn’t she just talk about how she was writing a Romance in a Fantasy setting? How was she writing a Romance without love?
Before reading this article, I believed that Yarros herself at least thought she’d done a good job writing Romantasy. The quality of The Empyrean is so low that she might well have indeed started with the concept of having the Romance drive the narrative, only to lose her way and then fail to provide the necessary edits to course-correct. This contradiction changed my perspective. Yarros is essentially saying that writing Variations is a return from Fantasy to Romance. This means that she either never truly intended to write a Romantasy, merely wanting to indulge in an unhinged power fantasy in an Epic Fantasy setting, or else that she intended to write Romantasy and came to realize that she’d fundamentally failed. Rather than own up to said failure, she blamed the genre for now allowing her to write an effective Romance. Rather than buckle down and course-correct The Empyrean so that it became a Romantasy, she chose to run away and write a new Romance project. She avoiding consequences in favor of making herself feel good and look good.
It sure sounds like something Violet would do, doesn’t it?
Or maybe I’m giving Yarros too much credit. I could be reading too much into the platitudes and contradictions of a bad writer who compulsively lies to her audience. It could very well be that Yarros just wrote a bad book and genuinely has no idea how she’s coming off.
Yarros is free to pick her poison.
A Romance Would be an Improvement
I would be very happy if Yarros stopped trying to write this series as Epic Fantasy and instead made the Romance the core of the story and the driving factor behind the plot.
It’s time to stop the nonsensical plot twists and the expansion of the world in ways that cause it to immediately implode. A slower-paced story that explores Violet and Xaden’s dynamic as Xaden struggles with venin hunger could be incredibly compelling stuff. Give us some genuine emotional substance to go with the sexual tension. Explore why Violet and Xaden have the flaws and hang-ups that they do. Let meaningful decisions driven by their romance take the wheel, rather than arbitrary nonsense.
The only claim that this series has to being Romantasy is that it is written by an established Romance author. Is it really so much to ask that it at least be a good romance, rather than an unhinged power fantasy?
TRIGGER WARNING
Yarros’s website features the following trigger warning for this book.
Onyx Storm is a nonstop-thrilling adventure fantasy set in the brutal and competitive world of a military college for dragon riders, which includes elements regarding war, battle, hand-to-hand combat, perilous situations, blood, intense violence, brutal injuries, death, poisoning, graphic language, and sexual activities that are shown on the page. Readers who may be sensitive to these elements, please take note, and prepare to enter Basgiath War College…
Save for the book title, this trigger warning is word-for-word identical to those from inside Fourth Wing and from Yarros’s product pages for Fourth Wing and Iron Flame. (I will give Yarros a gold star for actually posting the trigger warning for Iron Flame herself, whereas her publisher merely put a link in the e-book … a link that, as of October 30th, still has no content warning associated with it.)
Giving Yarros Some Credit
A part of me wants to ease up and give Yarros some credit. She is explicitly calling this a “trigger warning”, not a content warning. This isn’t a detailed breakdown of what’s in the book. This is telling people, “If you will suffer negative psychological effects from any exposure to this content, do not read this book.” I can somewhat respect the effort.
However … even in this regard, the warning falls short.
All the stuff related to themes and violence is fine, but simply saying “graphic language” does not come close to describing the vomit Yarros sandwiches into her text, and “sexual activities that are shown on the page” is a deceptively sterile way of describing pornography. Not everyone who has issues with graphic language has problems with a couple of F-bombs dropped in narratively relevant moments. Not everyone with sexual trauma is going to mind a single paragraph acknowledging that characters had sex during the scene. Such people might read this warning, think to themselves, “I read A Song of Ice and Fire, and it had all these things. I’ll be fine,” and then get hammered by content far in excess of what they were told to expect. Put another way, this is like warning people that a film might induce photosensitive epileptic seizures with a trigger warning for “bright light.”
Of course, given how the blurb reads like a proposal and how this trigger warning is copy-pasted across all three books, it might well be that Yarros also wrote this as part of a proposal to Red Tower, with the text being recycled rather than tailored to fit each book.
What We Can Expect
Based on past precedent, the following will likely be a far more accurate description of the content of Onyx Storm.
Onyx Storm is a grueling, dull slog of a fantasy set in a wannabee grimdark world featuring an American university where everyone has fire-breathing dogs, which includes angst about war, hollow spectacles, contrived duels, desperate attempts to liven up the pace by pretending peril exists, blood being splattered on the page to try to twist emotions, predictable violence being propped up by the aforementioned spectacles and blood, injuries that only matter when more angst is needed, death being cheapened by the sacrifice of countless redshirts and the resurrection of people Yarros goes out of the way to assure us are dead, poisoning, a foul-mouthed child vomiting on the page, and graphic pornography that is probably from the author’s personal sex diary. Readers who are sensitive to this elements, you have now been properly informed, so the suffering that follows is inflicted upon you with informed consent. Prepare to enter this latest entry in the unhinged ramblings of an entitled, self-serving Khornate.
I’ll come back to this prediction when the Onyx Storm review starts. It will be interesting to see how many of these I got right.
YARROS HAS NOT LEARNED HER LESSON
In the retrospective for Iron Flame, I expressed hope that, with all that extra time Yarros has given herself to write Onyx Storm, she would finally be able to give her bloated Epic Fantasy the editorial attention is required. I also expressed dismay and confusion that, seven months before publication date, she’d only just completed her first draft.
Now I know why the first draft came so late: Yarros hasn’t learned any lessons. She has dialed back her work load, as we will cover below, but evidently, that was incidental rather than intentional. Onyx Storm was delayed so that she could vent her frustrations about social media pressure by writing Variations. In doing so, she squandered the breathing room that might otherwise have enabled her to produce a quality product.
Variations released on November 19th. And, lest you think that maybe this was a short, fun side project: it’s 464 pages (as measured by Barnes & Noble for the paperback copy). For comparisson, Fourth Wing was 528 pages, Iron Flame was 640 pages, and Onyx Storm is slated to be 544 pages. In the Likely Event, the book released between Fourth Wing and Iron Flame that overloaded her and forced her to take more time, was 350 pages.
So … let’s do some math.
There’s no objective measuring stick to directly compare how much time and effort any given book requires. That being said, because of how blatantly obvious it is that Yarros does not put much (if any) effort into redrafting her work, it is reasonable to assume that most of her workload is just pushing out new pages. We can therefore judge her workload based on an estimate of the average number of pages she writes per day.
I don’t have the exact dates when Yarros started and ended each project. The best approximation would be to measure times between publication dates. This gives us a clear timeframe of 14 months between the release of Iron Flame (November 2023) and the scheduled release of Onyx Storm (January 2025).
Variations and Onyx Storm have a total of 1,008 pages.
Time frame is 14 months. Assuming an average of 30 days per month, this is 420 days.
Average Work Load: 2.4 pages per day
Things get trickier for Fourth Wing, In the Likely Event, and Iron Flame. The total window of time we would need to measure runs from Iron Flame’s release date to the release of Yarros’s previous book. However, the book in question, A Little Too Close (published October 2022), is part of the Madigan Mountain series, of which Yarros is only a co-author. I have no idea how much collaborative effort is involved in that series. Therefore, it’s impossible to tell whether this was something that Yarros engaged with full-time or merely a side project she typed up after being handed a story treatment. She was probably working on this at the same time as Fourth Wing.
Without any hard numbers, we will need to calculate work loads for two scenarios: one that assumes Fourth Wing was started after A Little Too Close and another that assumes it started after Yarros’s last standalone back, that being A Reason to Believe (released April 2022). For this second rate, we will add the page count of A Little Too Close (344 pages) to her total work load.
For Scenario 1, we get:
Fourth Wing, In the Likely Event, and Iron Flame have a combined total of 1,518 pages.
Time frame is 11 months. Assuming an average of 30 days per month, this is 330 days.
Average Work Load: 4.6 pages per day
Change from this scenario to the Variations / Onyx Storm work load: reduction of 2.2 pages per day, or a 48% decrease
For Scenario 2, we get:
A Little Too Close, Fourth Wing, In the Likely Event, and Iron Flame have a combined total of 1,862 pages.
Time frame is 19 months. Assuming an average of 30 days per month, this is 570 days.
Average Work Load: 3.3 pages per day
Change from this scenario to the Variations / Onyx Storm work load: decrease of of 0.9 pages per day, or a 27% decrease
Mathematically, Yarros has indeed slashed her workload. This should be a cause for celebration … and yet, it's not nearly enough if the goal is to improve her writing.
There is good reason why Epic Fantasy books are often spaced out by a year or more, without their authors putting anything out in the middle. These are massive projects, and accounting for the complications introduced by worldbuilding takes time.
On top of this, given how shoddy the narratives and worldbuilding of the first two books of The Empyrean have been, given the dire need for editing, revisions, and outright redrafting, merely halving Yarros’s workload simply isn’t enough to have confidence in her writing. She needs to slow way down and give every page adequate attention
Ironically enough, if Yarros had only worked on Onyx Storm in the time since Iron Flame her average work load would be 1.3 pages per day. That's a 72% reduction from Scenario 1; effectively, she would almost quadruple the time at her disposal. That would enough to feel confident in her ability to improve. Even in Scenario 2, that's a 61% reduction - perhaps not enough to feel truly confident, but still a marked improvement.
Doing the math has calmed me down quite a bit and eased the worst of my fears, nevertheless, it is clear that Yarros hasn't really learned her lesson. She is still maintaining an absolutely breakneck pace. That may work for contemporary Romance, but it really doesn’t suit Epic Fantasy.
I do understand why Yarros might have been motivated to do this, even outside of her claim of social media stress and the possibility that she was just running away from her failure. Writers with established audiences need to maintain those established audiences. Yarros couldn’t exactly take a decade or more off from writing contemporary Romance without potentially losing the audience that garnered her success in the first place. However, if this is indeed the situation, the solution would have been to take more than 14 months to write Onyx Storm. Fantasy audiences are used to waiting years between entries in a series. If, say, Yarros wanted to take two or three years to work on Onyx Storm and put out a pair of contemporary Romance novels during that same time frame, she could have held on to her original audience while giving herself more time to properly revise Onyx Storm. If the fandom for The Empyrean is so fickle that it cannot stomach waiting an extra year between books, then the risks of pumping out the book so quickly probably aren’t worth it in the first place.
My hope for Onyx Storm is not dead, yet it has taken a serious blow.
THE AMAZON TV SHOW
For those not already aware, Amazon (by way of Amazon MGM Studios) has acquired the TV rights to The Empyrean. Outlier Society will handle the production of the show, while Moira Walley-Beckett of Breaking Bad was selected as showrunner back in July. Yarros has also chimed in with her thoughts about casting. One of these moments of input was documented by E! News on October 17th.
Category II Virtue Signal
The article by E! News opens with these three paragraphs.
Rebecca Yarros is riding hard for one particular casting choice.
With the author's book Fourth Wing—the first in her Empyrean series—currently being adapted into a television series by Amazon MGM Studios and Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society, Rebecca revealed that while she doesn't have a ton of say into who ends up being cast on the show, she does have one major stipulation.
"They know how staunch I am against whitewashing Xaden," Rebecca told the crowd at a recent Q&A. "And so I think that's the biggest thing."
You may think I am going to critize how Yarros is trying to stretch the definition of the word “tawny” (which is what Xaden's complexion is) to signal her virtuous defense of “people of color” (to use her own terminology for people who aren't white). However, I actually want to call out how Yarros’s negligence reveals her true values. Guess who has “dark” skin (i.e. even farther from “white” than Xaden is) but who was not protected by this stipulation against whitewashing?
Rhiannon.
Huh. Yarros is not okay with the erasure of people who are slightly darker than “white” … but she won’t say a word against washing away truly dark-skinned people? Or is it that Yarros doesn’t care about Rhiannon’s identity as a person of color because Rhiannon already serves Yarros’s purposes as a Token Queer character? But wait … Yarros made no stipulation to protect that, either, did she?
Dearie me, Ms. Yarros. Your true values are showing again.
Mockery aside, this is why virtue signaling in general, and virtue signaling about identity politics in particular, aggravates me so much. These thunderous efforts to seize personal validation are annoying enough on their own. They ruin immersion to glorify the storyteller above the story. When one stops to think about these signals for more than a few seconds, though, the fact that said virtue is a lie becomes pathetically clear.
If authors are going to bludgeon us with their virtue, they should at the very least have the virtue to back up the signals.
Now, I do want to acknowledge that an author having preferences about the race of actors hired to play their characters is not inherently a virtue signal. If anything I write ever gets made into a film, I will certainly have pages of notes regarding the different ethnic and racial groups within my setting, what the closest analogs in our real world would be, and where I’d be willing to accept compromises for the sake of ensuring that casting directors have an adequate pool of talented actors to hire the most qualified individuals possible. My issue here is that Yarros clearly doesn’t care about the integrity of her artistic vision. At best, she only cares that the man of her sexual fantasies doesn’t deviate from said fantasies.
My Thoughts on the Show
I have zero optimism about the books of The Empyrean. I hope they improve, but I have no faith in Yarros to make those improvements.
The Amazon show, though? That is something I’m optimistic about. I won’t go so far as to say it will be this revolutionary show that recreates the hype and fandom of A Game of Thrones (which we all know is what Amazon is hoping for), but I am genuinely optimistic that it will at least be better than the books.
So many of the problems that exist in the books can be saved in the adaptation process. The restructuring of the narrative to fit around the time constraints of TV episodes can reduce bloat. This restructuring can also simplify or cut plot elements, addressing plot holes in the process. The shift in medium could spare us from Violet’s unhinged inner monologue and Yarro’s more questionable bits of prose. Tweaks can be made to properly foreshadow events and to set up twists - Screen Rant pointed this out on October 29th, stating that having access to Iron Flame will allow the screenwriters to set up Jack’s resurrection while writing episodes that take place during Fourth Wing. Worldbuilding can be streamlined in the course of making it easier for TV audiences to follow, thereby removing things that undermine the story.
And that’s before we get to the screenwriters themselves. I’m sure Amazon and Outlier will hire people who are cheap and will bend knee to any and all studio demands, but the fact remains that these screenwriters will be a fresh pair of eyes on the material. There is hope that they can, at the very least, balance out some of the more unhinged moments in the story by either softening or justifying Violet’s conclusions and perspectives in a natural manner, rather than taking for granted that people will agree with Yarros’s takes.
Actors add further potential. A good performance can go a long way to elevate or change a character. The right actress can transform Violet into something other than a nymphomaniacal abuser. The right actor can reframe all of Dain’s actions so that he ceases to be the victim or even become a proper villain worthy of our scorn. Xaden can be reforged into something more than a cardboard cutout, with a nuanced performance helping to set up the various twists that have been heaped upon him. With the right actors providing the voices of the dragons, they might actually become characters.
I also think it’s worth addressing the ESG elephant in the room. One of the reasons Amazon takes massive liberties with The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time is because they have literal diversity quotas regarding the inclusion of and roles for characters who are female and/or non-white. This places constraints on the adaptation process for any story or franchise that does not already satisfy all of those quotas, forcing identity swaps at best and outright breaking elements of the story at worst. They don’t need to do that with The Empyrean. Yarros’s compulsive virtue signaling has produced a narrative that is practically tailor-made to suit ESG checklists. The only changes Amazon will need to make are the ones the genuinely serve the transition from one artistic medium to another or that will correct objective narrative flaws in the writing.
There is plenty of room of things to go wrong with this show. None of the potential improvements I’ve listed are certainties. There is a possibility that nothing will improve, that improvements will be lackluster, or even that things could get worse. There’s also the possibility that the show will never get made, or that if it does, it will never be released. The making of movies and TV shows are massive undertakes with a lot of moving parts, and the whole endeavor could fall apart at any stage of production.
Nevertheless, it’s nice to feel optimism for something related to The Empyrean.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Back in my review of Xenos, I commented how that book was the first one reviewed on this site that I couldn’t really connect with. I was sincere about that. For all of my criticisms of The Empyrean, this is a series I should be able to love. I want this series to be good. I want Onyx Storm to finally be something worth reading and, if we’re lucky, perhaps even redeem its predecessors.
The issue is that Yarros seems determined to proactively demonstrate how little she understands or cares about the genre she’s working in. She’s barreling forward with no apparent interest in improving, prioritizing virtue signals and the most lazy and generic of marketing materials over actually writing and selling a good Fantasy story. It’s to a point where I wonder why she ever agreed to write a five-book Epic Fantasy series by herself. The existence of Madigan Mountain demonstrates that she is happy to collaborate on series with other writers (and it is not the only example). I feel like Yarros’s lack of investment in what she’s working on would be a lot more forgivable if, say, she were partnered with an author or authors already intimately familiar with Epic Fantasy. The many collaboratively written book series of Star Wars Legends are proof that you can have an author with wildly different priorities from the others on the team or a few books that are bad while still having the series as a whole stick the landing. One or two bad Romance-driven stories in the midst of this epic about war and dragons could have worked.
Regardless of what could have been, this is the hand we have been dealt. I now look ahead towards Onyx Storm with less hope than I did before. Maybe Yarros will surprise me and produce something worthwhile. From all the things we’ve covered here, though, I’m just doubtful that will be the case.
