Onyx Storm (Marketing Materials - The ELLE Article)
I do not want to write this post.
For all of the much-deserved criticism that I bombard Rebecca Yarros with, Recent Reads does not exist to disparage her or any other writer. Any criticism of the writers that is folded into a book review is purely a commentary on how they are perceived through their work, to exist separately from the real people behind the keyboard.
I have tried to uphold this ethos in my past criticisms of Yarros. I don't go out of my way to find dirt on her. If she says something revealing while discussing her book or anything derived from the book, that is fair game for criticism, but the woman herself is off-limits. Even my assertion that she is a compulsive liar is limited to how she treats her audience. I’m not saying the real Rebecca Yarros is a woman who lies to and gaslights her husband; I’m saying that anything she says in an interview is suspect, because that interview is intended to be read by her audience, and if she’s willing to gaslight and lie to us in a book, there’s no reason to think she won't do the same while trying to sell her book or basking in the attention it brings her.
Thus, when ELLE.com posted an interview with Yarros on January 15th, 2025, my gut reaction was not to write about it. I did read the article, and I did have multiple things to say, but I told myself that this was one step too far removed from the books to be worth discussing.
Unfortunately … this was very clearly a puff piece to market Onyx Storm. What’s more, Yarros makes statements within the article about her books and the criticism said books have received. This is meant to affect audience perceptions going into Onyx Storm.
In order to market Onyx Storm, Yarros went out of her way to reveal rather telling details about herself and how she perceives the world. Because she chose to do that, I can no longer separate the real person of Rebecca Yarros from either the image of the author or her self-insert Mary Sue going forward. They are all the same person. You all deserve to understand my criticism of Onyx Storm is going to hold nothing back when it comes to calling out Yarros for any abhorrent thing she does or expresses through Violet.
Brace yourselves. The self-insert power fantasy is about to get uglier.
BEFORE WE START
Authors are like Onions
Most of this post is going to be quite critical of Yarros, so I want to come right out the gate and highlight the aspects of the article that succeeds in what articles like these are meant to do - that is to say, the aspects that make Yarros sympathetic and relatable.
If we take Yarros at her word, then she has suffered and continues to suffer from trials and stresses that most of us will never have to deal with.
Her disability (or “chronic illness”, as this article prefers to call it) causes her such immense physical strain that she can barely do the book tours.
She has had to deal with the stresses of having a husband on multiple military deployment (which, while not stated in this article, included a tour where half his face was blown off and he went temporarily blind in one eye). She openly admits that she starting writing as a coping mechanism for that deployment stress.
She also struggles with depression. It’s unclear if this has any relation to the deployment stress.
She suffered from the stress inflicted by overexposure to social media, and she has had to deal with harassment by both fans and opportunists as a result of the fame from Fourth Wing, to the point that she reportedly had to move after people came to her house and scared her children.
If this was all the article talked about, I would have nothing but praise for Yarros. It is admirable to see someone achieve their dreams while bearing the burden of health issues. Depression and military-related stress are difficult crosses to bear. She set a wonderful example in the case of social media by recognizing the dangers and disconnecting before it could break her completely. As for the post-fame harassment, that’s not something that any writer should have to deal with, even if it is a near-unavoidable consequence of great success.
I don’t respect Yarros as a writer. However, that does not in any way detract from what she has endured and how she has pulled through it. If you read the ELLE article for yourself, please keep that in mind. Authors are people, and people are nuanced and layered. We can criticize Yarros for her layers as a writer without writing her off completely.
Conditions and Structure
I wrote this post between January 16th and January 20th, prior to the release of Onyx Storm. Everything you read here, with the exception of the final section (The Storm Surge), was finalized before I read a single word of Onyx Storm.
By the time this post is actually released, I have long since finished reading Onyx Storm, and we will be only two weeks out from the start of the review series. The Storm Surge was written from that perspective to provide a transition into the review.
We will be proceeding through this article from beginning to end, analyzing topics as they come up. I will only quote the most relevant lines, summarizing the rest. Please visit ELLE.com if you want to read the article in full.
Why This Article
The ELLE.com article is not the only fluff piece being used to raise hype of Onyx Storm. For example, Vulture released their own article on January 17th (“The Rise of Rebecca Yarros, Mother of Dragon Smut”). The reason I am specifically highlighting the ELLE.com article is that it is the one that actually affected my opinion of Yarros and of her writing. While I will make reference to the Vulture article, the ELLE.com article is the one that actually affected the Onyx Storm review. Any others just confirmed my previous conclusions.
BEFORE I HIT MY BREAKING POINT
Title and Log Line
Yes, we do need to start here.
Rebecca Yarros’s Fantasy Life
The romantasy sensation spent years toiling in the literary trenches before finding fame. She’s still adjusting to everything that entails.
We haven’t even reached the meat of the article, and already, I have questions.
Yarros published nearly 20 novels prior to writing Fourth Wing. As far as I can tell, most (if not all) of these were traditionally published. She had an established fan base. With how she described Red Tower’s demand for a Romantasy project in past interviews, she didn’t need to fight to get The Empyrean published. Why, then, is this article framing her as a starving artist who just now got a big break?
Paragraphs 1 - 3
The opening paragraphs are typical PR fluff. Time is taken to describe Yarros as “the epitome of a cool millennial mom, her blonde hair tinged with fuchsia streaks”. We are reminded of her recent success with Fourth Wing and the pending adaptations of her various works.
There are two lines in here that are interesting admissions about the publishing industry. In the second paragraph, we get:
… she’s become a success story in an industry where success stories are fewer and farther between.
Then, in the third paragraph, we get:
Seventeen years later, she wrote her first book, a fantasy novel. It landed her an agent, but the project never found a publisher; it “died on submission, which happens more than I think people want to talk about in publishing,” Yarros says.
It sounds to me like the article is trying to pump Yarros up as a rare success while skating off that something is deeply wrong in the publishing industry. Why are success stories so rare these days?
My gut instinct was that this is another point of evidence towards the gatekeepers of Fantasy publishing are strangling the market by working against demand. If a manuscript “dies on submission”, it means that the agent couldn’t sell it to an acquisitions editor. It points towards towards agents requesting manuscripts that are so far from market demand that not even acquisitions editors who share the same biases can get behind said manuscripts.
… however, that’s not a fair conclusion to draw in this case.
“Seventeen years later” refers to a previous line about Yarros reading historical romance at the age of 12, so this book died on submission when she was 29. She is now 43, so this would have been 14 years ago (or around 2011). That’s before a lot of modern trends really kicked off.
Taken by itself, this reference to failure in publishing simply doesn’t reveal anything about the industry. More evidence, whether statistical or anecdotal, would be needed to explore any connections between conditions in publishing 14 years ago versus now versus, say, 28 years ago.
However, this talk of success does beg the question: what, exactly, does success look like, according to this article (or, rather, to Yarros)?
Paragraph 4
She got back behind the keyboard when her husband, who served in the U.S. Army for 22 years, was deployed to Afghanistan. “He’d already been seriously injured once,” she says, “and I needed to process some emotions.” Full Measures, a military romance, was her literary debut, and she entered the uneasy ranks of what the book world calls the “midlist.” “It’s wild. I almost quit,” she says. “When I was writing Fourth Wing, I felt like I hadn’t found my ideal readership. I had the people who loved me, but I wasn’t growing. And in publishing, you’re either growing or you’re declining, right?” Yarros is a fast talker, her words clattering like Jenga blocks, her pace clearing the speed bumps of her emotions. “I remember how often I’ve been told, ‘This is the book that’ll break you out.’ And it wasn’t, and it is devastating for someone who suffers with depression to keep hearing, ‘This is the book,’ when this is not the book.”
So … success is defined by Yarros not feeling insecure?
The Midlist is Already Success
I have never heard of this “midlist” before, but I’ll take it on good faith that this is indeed a thing. This article implies that Yarros believes she did not find “success”, did not leave this midlist, until she put out Fourth Wing.
This means that, while on the midlist, she was:
Enough of a financial success that the publisher pumped out nearly 20 of her books. She made them enough money that they were willing to keep coming back to her rather than discarding her and letting someone else take her place.
Enough of a financial success that she convinced her publisher to sink massive amounts of money into the obvious garbage that is The Empyrean, an investment that was risky not only because of the amount of marketing they have pumped into it but also because of what book length does to profit margins.
Not in such dire financial straits that she needed to give up writing. Writing takes a lot of time and a lot of energy, time and energy that could be put towards more financially beneficial activities. What I’m getting at here is that, regardless of whether Yarros was a stay-at-home mother or working another job, she has clearly been in a financially secure enough position to not need to give up the writing to bring in income by other means. Either she had another income source, or she was making enough money off the books for it to count as a job.
This is success that most writers can only dream of. Yarros acknowledges this in the interview. Much later in the article, the interviewer notes, “Ever since she was 10 years old, scrawling her byline on notebook spines, Yarros has wanted to be an author, and she’s thrilled to have her dream job.” What is she complaining about, then?'
Either this is purely about an insecure person’s self-image, or else Yarros is more interested in the fame and fortune of being a “success” than she is in being a good storyteller.
Look, I get it. I fully appreciate the stress of trying to maintain growth in this industry. Judging by the dates listed for the book that died on submission, I’ve been at this just as long as she has, with far less success. I appreciate the psychological toll that not meeting your goals can take.
However, this article is trying to frame Yarros as a starving artist who never gave up on her dreams. That simply isn’t the case. If anything, it sounds like Yarros writing a stereotypical Mary Sue insecurity arc is based on personal experience. She had success; she just didn’t have as much of it as she wanted. Now she’s exploited her position as someone already inside the industry to piggyback on a trend being pushed by the industry. This means that the added success from The Empyrean was, if not necessarily handed to her, far less earned than it would be for an actual starving artist trying to jump onto the Romantasy trend from the outside.
Contradiction
The Vulture article, released a mere two days after the ELLE.com article, further undermines this idea that the midlist is not success. While Yarros may not be responsible for either article, she still made statements that fed the flames eating away at this false image of a starving artist.
First, in the “Her Start” section, we get confirmation that Yarros had an inside track with her publisher to get The Empyrean published.
But when her publisher, Entangled, decided to start an imprint for new adult fantasy-romance books, she jumped at the chance to try the genre. Yarros told Entertainment Weekly that she submitted five ideas, including the one that became the Empyrean series.
She didn’t even have to have the books ready. She just made some proposals and got her contract. This is not something the publishing industry does for people who aren’t already successful.
Then, in “By The Numbers”, we get this glorious line that acknowledges the same numbers that I mentioned above but ELLE.com neglected.
Yarros has published 23 novels in the past decade, including standalones and her “Empyrean,” “Renegades,” and “Flight & Glory” series.
Discounting The Empyrean and the contemporary Romances put out after Fourth Wing, that’s Vulture acknowledging 18 published books. These are presented here as a resume of success.
Also, in that same section, we get this bit about Yarros’s writing schedule.
She wrote Fourth Wing in about three months, sometimes writing up to 14 hours a day; within eighth months of its publication, she put out the sequel Iron Flame.
This is not the writing schedule of someone who needs to work a day job, especially not one who also have six children. Either Yarros is lying about how many hours she works in her writing sessions, is misrepresenting one or two high-productivity days as her standard productivity, or … she was already a financial success who could commit full-time to pumping out such a project.
Paragraph 5
Paragraph 5 is a combination of meaningless fluff about the Romance genre and the Romantasy sub-genre. Yarros gives her answer for why a woman “in a very happy marriage” needs to read about other people finding emotional and sexual gratification.
“I like romance because I’ve been in love with the same guy since I was 19. That’s it; he’s it. We have six kids. But when I read a romance, I can fall in love over and over and over. It’s the same brain chemicals,” she says. “So even though I’m in a very happy marriage, I can slip into a romance novel and get a boost of those endorphins.”
I don’t think that dissecting that answer would be fair. Yarros is effectively saying, “I get a little extra excitement in my life through escapism.” Since the Fantasy genre is heavily fueled by escapism, it would be a double standard to criticize Yarros for saying that. Maybe Yarros will say something down the line that will cast this into a new light and eliminate the double standard, but for now, I think this is a perfectly reasonable take for her to have.
THE MOMENT I STOPPED SEPARATING ART FROM THE ARTIST (PARAGRAPH 6)
“Romance is this beautiful place where women get to say on the page what we want, what we deserve, what healthy relationships should look like. [It’s about] destigmatizing what a woman feels she’s worth.” For those who get upset about the amount of sex in Fourth Wing, “I always have to laugh. I’m like, ‘Okay, well if you’re more worried about the sex, I understand, but there’s murder. There’s a lot of murder.’ I would hope that people who are 20 to 25, in that ‘new adult’ age range it’s written for, are having more sex than murders.”
Pure Reflection
Remember this charming line from Chapter 10 of Iron Flame?
One touch, and I’ll be back in his arms, accepting whatever he deems as enough of the truth instead of the full access I deserve … no, need.
“I deserve.”
“Romance is this beautiful place where women get to say on the page what we want, what we deserve, what healthy relationships should look like.”
Yarros just openly declared that Romance (or what she passes off as Romance) is where she vomits her true self onto the page.
There’s … no ambiguity now. Violet isn’t just Yarros’s self-insert Mary Sue. She is Yarros.
Violet isn’t a deluded because Yarros didn’t think through the implications of her own worldbuilding. Violet isn’t an abuser because Yarros failed to provide basic context. Yarros truly, unironically, unconditionally believes that this Khornate bitch is “beautiful”, “destigmatizing” figure.
Yarros the Master Debater
“I always have to laugh. I’m like, ‘Okay, well if you’re more worried about the sex, I understand, but there’s murder. There’s a lot of murder.’ I would hope that people who are 20 to 25, in that ‘new adult’ age range it’s written for, are having more sex than murders.”
I am not going to reiterate my whole analysis of sex scenes in literature from the analysis of Chapters 27 & 28 of Iron Flame. You are free to go back and check it. Suffice it to say that this dismissal does not in any way address my point about the difference between sex and physical violence.
What I will do is thank Yarros for providing a direct point of comparison for why her sex scenes, specifically, are such blatant pornography. She makes it so easy to muster an “intelligent response” to her nonsense.
Vibe Versus Substance
Murder in The Empyrean is a vibe. It’s talked about to generate tension, but rarely surfaces. When it does comes up, it is handled is a very disconnected way that robs it of emotion. Yarros did not write these murders in traumatic or even impactful detail. She splashes blood onto Red Shirts or has Violet engage in cool action scenes. We are not meant to feel these murders out of a knee-jerk reaction to violence and death occurring.
The sex scenes, by contrast, are written in fetishistic detail. This is meant to be erotic and arousing. We are meant to feel every moment. The Vulture article confirms this; in the section titled Her Approach to Smut, we get:
Explicit, first-person sex scenes are common in books by Yarros, who says she likes to “draw upon the female gaze and make sure that what we find to be sensual and sexual is represented on the page.”
Comparing murder to sex therefore highlights the different way in which these elements are utilized.
Relevance
Despite the murder being mishandled in terms of having an impact on the audience, it actually does force the plot along.
Violet got to bond with Tairn and Andarna because Jack and his cronies tried to murder Andarna.
The assassination attempt orchestrated by Amber reveals Andarna’s time stop power and kicks off (or pretends to kick off ) new plot threads.
Jack trying to kill Liam causes Violet’s Signet to unlock. (EDIT: At least, that’s how Fourth Wing presents it. More on this when we reach Chapter 16 of the Onyx Storm review.)
The botched assassination in Chapter 10 of Iron Flame is meant to hammer home the idea that the rider leadership wants everyone from the climax of Fourth Wing dead.
The murder of Draconis Umbridge was meant to show Dain’s true allegiance and give Violet some closure after her torture.
As we covered back in the Iron Flame review, Yarros doesn’t bother to make the sex scenes relevant. Most of the time, she doesn’t even impart narrative relevance on the objective fact that sex takes place. She just crowbars in pornography with the flimsiest of excuses.
Comparing murder to sex therefore highlights the narrative irrelevance of the pornography.
Sin versus Fetish
Murder is presented as a bad thing in The Empyrean. That’s the whole reason that Yarros uses it to make the Riders Quadrant seem edgy; it’s why she feels to compelled to make those halfhearted attempts to tell the audience that she’s not personally on board with it. Yarros does not promote murder.
She does, however, spray her masturbatory material in our faces. We are meant to see it as something good (especially in the context of that earlier sentence about being able to reveal her true self). Her argument in the ELLE.com article doubles down on that idea, as it effectively boils down to, “Hey, at least the sex isn’t this thing we all agree is bad. Why aren’t you complaining about the bad thing?” This is then confirmed in the Vulture article, since the way she talks about satisfying the “female gaze” makes it clear that the pornography is meant to be appealing.
Comparing murder to sex therefore provides a great example of how society perceives violence and sex differently and why people would object to sex being foisted upon them while not protesting the violence.
Inability to Muster an Intelligent Response
The way that Yarros tries to “discredit, deflect, then distract” from her pornography with the comment about murder is incredibly revealing.
Before, I thought her inability to write a meaningful interaction between differing ideologies was because she was hellbent on forcing a specific interpretation of her story down our throats. She didn’t want debate or thought; she wanted virtue signaling and compliance. She didn’t dare let her opposition have any good points unless she thought she could bulldoze through that opposition without anyone noticing she hadn’t addressed the opposition.
The fact that she also does this in real life reveals that this is a personal failing. She either refuses to or is incapable of wrapping her head around any ideas that disagree with her own viewpoint. She has to rip a page out of her own gaslighting handbook to swerve away from valid criticism.
The End of Separation
Back in the Fourth Wing retrospective, I stated that we should separate art from the artist even if the art in question is an obvious self-insert power fantasy, but with the caveat that there is a “breaking point where writers actively proclaim their worldview to their audience.” At the time, I just meant it in the sense of recurring ideas across multiple works revealing an author’s true worldview. I never dreamed that Yarros would come right out and say that we should not separate her art from the artist.
Yarros did not have to say this. She did not have to praise a genre for being an outlet for spewing the most toxic impulses inside a writer; she did not have to demonstrate that her inability to deal with conflicting viewpoints in a personal problem rather than a flaw in her writing. Now that she has done both, she has willfully removed the barrier between herself and her work. Even if Violet is not literally doing and acting as Yarros in every situation, Yarros thinks that what Violet thinks and does is “beautiful” and should be celebrated rather than stigmatized, for no other reason than that Violet is a woman. She wants to be praised for sharing such abusive, narcissistic behavior with the world. She wants us to take her seriously when she goes through the motions of writing a clash of ideologies.
If you want the barrier between you and Violet to come down so badly, Ms. Yarros, then that’s exactly what you’ll get.
YARROS’S SOCIAL MEDIA STRUGGLES (PARAGRAPHS 7 - 9)
The next three paragraphs are preceded by a blown-up quote in the article itself, which was pulled from something Yarros says in Paragraph 7.
“Social media is like living in a hall of mirrors, and no one should look at themselves that often.”
This is followed by a brief summary of the immense distress Yarros suffered because of social media pressure in the wake of Fourth Wing becoming a bestseller, along with how disconnecting has helped her to focus more on her writing.
Yarros deserves kudos here. She recognized a source of unnecessary stress in her life and pulled back from it. Yes, this is a problem that technically her fault - she defined “success” on the basis of external validation, and that is exactly what she got - but the fact remains that she has displayed the wisdom to walk away from an unhealthy situation. Far too many of us these days need to take that step but won’t. Yarros set a good example that we should learn from.
WHAT YARROS THINKS SHE’S ACCOMPLISHED
Paragraph 10
The focus swerves to the impact that Yarros being a military wife has had on her writing, leading to this:
“You start looking at, ‘What are we doing and why are we going and why is this happening?’ We’ve buried our friends. One of our friends was recently critically wounded. And it leads you to wonder why we do this to each other.” With her depictions of war in her writing, she wants to “make people ask the same question—not only in Fourth Wing, as we’re sending 20-year-olds across a parapet where death is imminent—but to pull that question out of the book.”
If this is true, Yarros has really dropped the ball. This theme is not explored in either Fourth Wing or Iron Flame in any meaningful way. (EDIT: It’s also not explored in Onxy Storm, unless the answer to the question is, “Because the enemy is unambiguously evil and needs to be destroyed for our own surviva.) It’s just limited to throwaway lines that Yarros can’t engage with because doing so would make the dragons (who aren’t characters and who she refuses to find fault with) look bad.
Then there’s this bit.
Military spouses often come up to talk to her about books like Full Measures. “Some men will talk to me about Fourth Wing, which I love. It cracks me up. I’m like, ‘Yes! We brought the men to romantasy.’”
It’s really easy to bring people into a genre when your book is misleadingly marketed.
Paragraphs 11 through 13
This is where Representation is plugged, and … well, it’s very weird.
In these paragraphs, a big deal is made out of how Yarros not only has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome but also a blood disorder called POTS. The article confirms that Violet has both conditions. Yarros then talks about how horrendously taxing these conditions are. She makes it sound like she can barely endure sitting at panels for book tours.
Yarros simultaneously spews the usual fluff about being seen on the page and how she’s inspiring people through Violet.
People are free to be inspired by this. If a character being superficially labeled as chronically ill is all you need to feel uplifted, that is your right. No one can take that away from you.
However … if Yarros’s condition truly is that bad … then her failure to actually write Violet as having these illnesses is even more blatant.
If Violet truly suffered in the way Yarros describes here, she would not have lived long enough to bond with Tairn. She would have died saving Andarna. She would have died on the Gauntlet. She should have been in a state of near-collapse after climbing the stairs to the Parapet and then fallen off the Parapet itself within the first few steps. Frankly, with how bad Yarros makes her own health situation sound, I don’t think that Violet poisoning her sparring opponents would have meant anything. They could have killed her even while suffering from the various afflictions she imposed upon them. Jack could almost certainly have killed her before she could reach for the oranges.
Now, sure, maybe Violet represents a less severe case of these things … but wouldn’t that be walking back the Representation? Would that not be an admission that someone like Yarros can’t succeed in the story she’s writing? If Yarros is truly committed to showing women like herself on the page, surely she wouldn’t downplay or overlook the realistic toll of her symptoms, especially if she’s not going to hold back on telling us how bad these symptoms are in interviews.
ALL THE REST
Paragraphs 14 through 23 shift focus entirely, discussing Yarros’s plans for vacation time now that Onyx Storm is done as well as her struggle to maintain boundaries with her readers.
Success and Consequence
The short version is Yarros is struggling with her fame. Most of this is not her fault. People are crossing boundaries. However, it’s also very clear that she thought she could get the perks of fame without any of the downsides.
Since Fourth Wing came out, Yarros has been bombarded by adoring fans. Some people apparently figured out her address and “scared” her children, forcing her family to move. She also has to deal with resellers trying to get autographs from her at inconvenient moments. She felt “recognition” when singer Chappell Roan made a statement in August 2024 about setting boundaries with fans.
This is another moment where I want to empathize with Yarros. I am not a social creature, to the point that the isolation that I’m told foreigners feel in Japan has yet to affect me. I would not appreciate people tracking me down or demanding that I autograph books on airplanes.
At the same time, though … what did Yarros think “success” looked like, especially when she defined “success” on the basis of how much validation she got from fans? Did she not expect rabid, fanatical support? If any of this is from people who hate the book, did she not expect vocal criticism to come paired with her success?
Entitlement
Yarros has the sheer audacity to play this card.
“I always feel like it’s women who get the hate piled on them, at least in author world.”
We live in an era where publishing is dominated by women and where even genres that used to be male-dominated are becoming exclusionary to men. The fact that Yarros dares to complain that women get the most hate (while disregarding the fact that most of that hate is probably coming from her readers, who will be predominantly women) is the peak of entitlement.
Oh, right. She’s the origin point of Violet. Where else would Violet get that trait come from?
The Final Paragraph
The article closes with Yarros lying through her teeth about her passion for Fantasy.
And every so often, she gets a reminder of just how far her imagination has taken her. While on tour in New Zealand, she told her publicist, “I just want to see the Shire.” The mental landscape Yarros had conjured and committed to paper had now propelled her all the way around the world, allowing her to stride right into J. R. R. Tolkien’s dreamscape. She and her sister were “taking the most ridiculous pictures in the Hobbit doors and just soaking it up because it’s the Shire. How do you not?” she says. “Again: raised on nerdy books.”
Clark also used Tolkien to elevate himself, but at least he put passion for Fantasy on the page. A Master of Djinn has a beautiful world that mostly holds up. He might not have been ready to write a full novel, yet I have no trouble believing that Clark deeply cares about the genre.
Yarros does not care about Fantasy. She puts no effort into either a world that holds up on its own merits or a story written to fit the world she did throw together. If The Empyrean is the best she can do after a decade to grow as a writer, I shudder to think of what that Fantasy novel that died on submission was like.
The fact that Yarros claims to have been “raised on nerdy books” while showing no care for the genre is another point that makes me think that she loves the idea of being a bestselling author more than she does telling a good story. She wants us to celebrate her for nerd cred that her work gives no hint that she actually possesses. Writing Fantasy is clearly just a means to her personal ends. If her publisher wasn’t hoping on the Romantasy trend, I somehow doubt she’d have written The Empyrean at all.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Rebecca Yarros is a human being with layers and nuance.
By her own admission, at least some of those layers are Violet, or at least, those layers will unconditionally support Violet no matter what wretched thought or deed comes out of Violet. Either way, the stains on Violet’s character fall back onto Yarros.
The Yarros we meet in this article is overflowing with entitlement. She acts like a starving artist despite having more novels traditionally published than most writers every will; she chased fame yet bleats about the consequence of fame, both terms of the stress it causes her and the strain publicity tours inflict upon her physical and mental health. She milks her disability for Representation clout while simultaneously not writing a story that deserves that clout. She openly declares about how wonderful and empowering it is to manifest her worst qualities through a self-insert character.
If Onyx Storm is good, I will not keep that to myself. I intend to praise this book where I can, just as I will criticize everything that doesn’t work.
However, regardless of whether the book is good, I am no longer able to give Yarros the benefit of the doubt. She herself has declared that Violet’s delusions, entitlement, and abusive behavior are either her own delusions, entitlement, and abusive behavior or else something that she wants to celebrate. She has demonstrated behaviors that prove that her handling of conflict and inconvenient information is faithful reflected in her prose.
The separation of art from artist is broken, and it is broken because Yarros went out of her way to break it.
THE STORM SURGE
This last section is being written after I read Onyx Storm. Rather appropriately, we are now just two weeks out from the start of the Onyx Storm review.
We’ll be kicking things off on March 27th with a Prelude, followed by the Prologue on March 28th. Subsequent parts after that will released biweekly. Currently, the series is drafted up through the end of Chapter 28. On this schedule, we won’t finish until we’re into 2026.
I won’t bury the lead: this book is bad. It’s the best book in the series if viewed in isolation, but in context of the series, it is the second-worst. While Yarros doesn’t write a cannibalistically as she has previously, that’s mainly because the cannibalism is focused upon destroying past books rather than this one.
This ELLE.com article may have been intended to make Yarros look good, but reading Onyx Storm after reading this article actually makes both her and the book look worse. There are multiple moments where her praising Romance for “destigmatizing” what a woman “deserves” really does not play out well. This is a book where the artist desperately needed to be separated from her art.
I hope you’ll join me for the exciting journey as we break it all down. I’ll see you all at the end of March. Have a good week, everyone.
