Fourth Wing (Chapter 22 through Chapter 29)
STATS
Title: Fourth Wing
Series: The Empyrean (Book 1)
Author(s): Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: 2023
Publisher: Red Tower Books
Rating: 2/10
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
During sparring practice, Violet laments that she is not yet able to channel magic. She sexually objectifies Xaden as he spars with another rider. She and Xaden then get into an argument about her not wearing her armor while sparring. That night, Violet must endure her first experience of Tairn mating. In an attempt to distance herself from any men, she wanders into Xaden. He helps her to mentally block Tairn out, and also helps her to channel magic. The two of them are overcome by their dragons and make out until Xaden announces that it would be a mistake to keep going. The next day, Violet has another argument with Dain, which ends when he complies with her wishes and validates her.
Months of training pass. Violet spars with Jack. She nearly loses the fight, only to win by shoving a vial of orange extract (Jack is allergic to oranges, as we learned from a throwaway line in the previous chapter) into his face. After this, Xaden reprimands her for not committing to killing Jack, then tells her that he will take over her training. He begins training her himself, starting with a sexually charged sparring bout (wherein she “wins” several knives that he had custom-made for her) and moving on the extra flight training.
The school goes through its annual Squad Battle (a series of games there were mentioned in passing since Chapter 20 and are completely contained to Chapter 25). As part of this battle, Violet's squad needs to demonstrate both strategic awareness and tactical cunning by stealing intel. She helps her squad break into her mother's office to steal a battle map.
Violet deploys with her squad to tour a forward outpost. There she reunites with Mira. She and Rhiannon try to sneak away from the outpost to visit Rhiannon's home village, which is nearby; Mira catches them, but Violet convinces her to go with them. Upon returning, they find that Xaden has arrived at the outpost, forced to fly there because his dragon can't stand being away from Tairn. His presence causes friction with Dain. This is interrupted by a gryphon assault, forcing the squad to flee. Xaden kisses Violet before she retreats.
Chapter 28 has the War Games (an event introduced in Chapter 27). This pits the wings against each other in a military objective. During the War Games, Jack, who is on the wing opposing Violet’s, stabs Liam. The stress of this moment causes Violet's Signet to manifest, and she strikes the stone tower Jack is a lightning bolt that is so powerful that it blows the structure apart. She then uses Andarna's magic to save Liam.
After the War Games, Xaden validates Violet for killing Jack, while Dain accuses him of trying to turn Violet into a cold-blooded killer. Xaden puts him in his place with facts and logic. Later, Xaden visits Violet on her room. He validates her again. The sexual tension between them rises until she kisses him.
PLOT
At this point, the fact that Yarros had no plan after Threshing is blatantly obvious. You can feel her making up and resolving conflicts as she goes along, as if trying to inch her way towards a target word count set by an editor.
Tournament Arc (?)
Both Squad Battle and the War Games get introduced as events that will climactic importance in this story. At least, they are mentioned as if they will take such positions in the story. Then they just arrive and conclude within a single chapter, and the story keeps barreling onward.
These events would have been very easy to establish at the start of the story. We didn't need to know exactly when they were, or even WHAT they were, but establishing that they would be milestones would have helped to set expectations for the plot as a whole. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire hinted about the TriWizard Tournament from early on the book, and as soon as the story moved to Hogwarts, we were clearly told what to expect from it. Yarros could have built towards these beats in the same manner. Instead, reading this part of the story is like being told the First Task was the only one, casually mentioning the Second Task during the Yule Ball, jumping right into Harry arriving at the merpeople village during the Second Task, and then copying the movie's strategy of cutting right from the Second Task to the Third after a minor Pensieve side quest.
I think that having this story be able a full academic year in the Rider's Quadrant was a good idea. There was potential in organizing this plot around school events. The lack of effort put into actually setting this up for the audience reveals that Yarros wasn't really interested in doing that. She just needed generic Fantasy things to happen while she baited the audience with sexual tension.
This is the A and B Plots of Notorious Sorcerer all over again.
Hollow Triumph
Violet's fight with Jack had genuine potential.
Jack has been utterly devalued as an antagonist as this point. He has been humiliated too many times. It's the same problem as Kylo Ren had going into The Rise of Skywalker. After Rey had beaten him twice, we had no reason to believe she wouldn't do so again. The rivalry between Violet and Jack is even more limp than that one, as we are privy to Violet’s internal monologue. Back in Chapter 17, she wrote Jack off after he is bonded to a dragon who is low in the social standing, thinking to herself, “Feral dogs bite harder when they’re cornered.” I’m sure Yarros meant to make Jack sound more intimidating, yet in execution, it only serves to remind us that the bully who has already proven ineffective is even worse off than he was in Violet’s previous encounters with him.
All the same, there was an opportunity here. Violet could have proven herself as a rider by finally winning through martial skill alone, without either of her dragons intervening on her behalf. This could have been a defining moment that got her arc moving again.
Well, we certainly got a defining moment. Violet came prepared to cheat again with poison, and she did so.
Yarros tries to justify the poisoning by having Jack violate orders from the professor (and superior officer) supervising the match, throwing knives and using his Signet. This only highlights the issue that (A) Jack should have then been executed for the attempted murder in front of an officer and (B) Violet should now also be executed for forcing poison down his throat in front of an officer.
(The setup for Jack being allergic to oranges was also incredibly flimsy. Throwaway lines are a valid form of foreshadowing, but upon doubling back to review this setup, what I found was laughably tacked-on. One of Jack’s friends tries to offer him an orange slice in the middle of him casually threatening to kill Violet, and Jack stops threatening Violet for long enough to loudly announce his allergy to everyone. It’s very obvious that Yarros either added this foreshadowing as an afterthought or was wildly grasping at straws for a way to make Violet poisoning Jack seem clever.)
By the time War Games arrived, I just couldn't bring myself to care. Violet didn't earn this victory. Jack did not die dramatically due to some character flaw. Violet just manifested god powers and blew Jack up.
What a waste.
Romance Subplot
This is the C Plot of Notorious Sorcerer all over again - except, in terms of quality, it's worse. Both cases fail to reflect character growth, instead prioritizing the choking of the audience with sexual tension. However, at least Notorious Sorcerer framed the tension around a clear plot objective. Siyon had to work towards the goal of severing Izmirlian from the Mundane. Fourth Wing just has one sexually charged encounter after another with no unifying objective.
This is another moment where I’m willing to shrug and say, “Maybe it works better in the Romance genre.” I do see the wish fulfillment angle. It’s just incredibly hollow in Epic Fantasy.
Dain Goes Unhinged
A subplot that arguably exists is that Dain evolves into an overt antagonist as the chapters progress. No longer does he merely embody the status quo that Violet let behind. Now he is actively challenging every effort Xaden makes to progress her story.
It's fine in concept, but the execution is a mess.
First, what is Dain's motive at this point? Is he the jealous ex? Is he the coddling friend? Does he just not like Xaden? The progression of this arc implies the first, but the way Xaden treats him, coupled with the fact that it's unclear if Dain is even aware of the sexual tension between Xaden and Violet, means that the second and third are perfectly viable. That ambiguity makes it very hard to understand the developments taking place.
Second, Yarros went too far in her efforts to demonize Dain prior to this point. Violet and Xaden have treated him like trash for a while now. It's hard not to reflexively side with him over Violet and Xaden, even if they are in the right, because it feels like the author has a vendetta against this character.
Third, because Violet has whipped Dain into a submissive, validating mess by the start of Chapter 23, I can't take any resistance he puts up seriously. This poor man had been abused to the point that I know he'll fold as soon as Violet shows her teeth.
Classified Information
The matter of information being withheld from the Battle Brief is raised again. This is again established as something Yarros wants to build towards. However, it again fails due to both lack of focus and heavy-handedness. Yarros is leaving us a Post-It to remind us that it is important rather than telling us a story that incorporates it.
CHARACTERS
In these chapters:
Violet continues to be abhorrent. Among other things, she is a hypocrite, as she views Xaden as desirable for forcing his help onto her when she lashed out at Dain for offering a helping hand. She also openly and unrepentantly sexually objectifies Xaden for at least half a page in Chapter 22. Remember, by this book's own standards of karmic morality, that demands death by dragon fire.
Dain is unnecessarily demonized.
Xaden is a Bad Boy Love Interest.
Jack is the Murderous Sociopath Classmate.
Liam is the best friend character this story deserves.
Rhiannon exists only to validate Violet.
Nadine
Nadine is name-dropped a total of 12 times in these chapters.
Once in Chapter 24. Violet observes that only she and Liam have survived from among the cadets transferred to Violet’s squad after Threshing (thereby calling attention to the fact that Yarros is killing off nameless background characters rather than kill her darlings).
10 times in Chapter 25. During the intel-stealing exercise of the Squad Battle, she is intimidated into submission when she objects to taking orders from Imogen. She later has some interchangeable dialogue about how hot it is at the forward outpost that the squad visits.
Once in Chapter 26, when she is mentioned during a role call of which riders from the squad are assigned to what tasks at the outpost.
Again, her only discernable character trait is, “Doesn’t like rebel children.” The fact that she is intimidated so easily makes this trait too weak to care about.
Hands of a Killer
These are the chapters where Yarros puts focus on Violet not wanting to kill anyone, and the moral journey that reflects. Once again: fine in concept, horrible in execution.
First, the only reason Violet has not killed anyone thus far is that Yarros uses Rule of Cool to make her attacks non-lethal. Are we really supposed to believe that Violet never messed up a single dose of poison? That she never considered that potential consequence? Are we really supposed to believe that not one thrown knife hit a vital organ or tore open a major artery (especially when she was attacked in her own room, and had little time or space for proper aim)? If Yarros operated purely in Rule of Cool, this would be fine, but she is the one who wanted to use realism to drive up the stakes. It is therefore very hard to buy that Violet ever believed she'd get this far without killing.
Second, establishing Dain and Xaden as the ends of the moral balance beam that Violet has to cross is ludicrous. Their entire argument in Chapter 29 hinges on the idea that Dain does not understand that soldiers need to kill. Not only should Dain fully understand this, being from a military family and a year ahead of Violet at this school, but we know he is fine with justified violence. In Chapter 23, when he comes crawling to Violet, he is only angry at her for not sharing the memory with him, not because Amber died. On the other side of things, Xaden's validation of Violet killing Jack is so shallow and entry-level that it sounds like something that Violet should have been able to come up with herself while trying to rationalize her actions. (It also involves talk of duty that emphasizes Violet's selfishness.)
ACTION
The fight with Jack is fine in terms of choreography. Violet has trained enough at this point that facing him one-on-one is not an insurmountable task. However, Violet's body armor destroys the tension. Not only does it render her immune to Jack's knife, giving her a massive advantage, but by not demanding that she remove that body armor (which everyone knows about by this point), Jack demonstrates that he is too stupid to pose any threat to her.
The War Games are another matter. They showcase that Yarros did not actually think through how riders would fight on the backs of dragons.
When Jack stabs Liam, he does so by leaping from his dragon's back to Liam's. He stabs Liam from this position, then manages to safely leap to the top of the tower. Since Yarros has demonstrated multiple times that gravity and momentum are things that can knock a bareback rider off a dragon when they are holding on, I have to ask: how does Jack successfully pull this off? Even Spider-Man would have trouble with this maneuver. We know by this point that Jack's Signet is not some sort of Spider-Sense (it's a vibration-inducing power). However, if it IS possible for a mundane human to do this during aerial combat, why do so many people fail to remain seated during routine maneuvers?
This would be frustrating enough as a one-off, but will be relevant in the climax.
WORLDBUILDING
Just when you think Yarros can't blow more holes into her story, she finds another solid surface to punch through.
Saddles
At the start of the War Games, Xaden gifts Violet with a dragon saddle. Tairn agrees to wear it.
If Tairn is willing to wear a saddle, why aren't other dragons? Why aren't ALL dragons?
It can't be because Tairn is the only dragon who values his rider. Amber's dragon mourns for her when she is barbequed. What's more, we already know, via the Chapter 14 epigraph, that there are “hundreds of known cases" of dragons being emotionally traumatized by their riders' deaths. Why would a dragon not want to minimize the risk of death in basic flight maneuvers?
It can't be because of the threat to Tairn's life if Violet dies. The strength of their bond depends on his power level. The most veteran and powerful dragons should all therefore need to preserve their riders at all costs. And if these dragons would need to use saddles, it would be hard to justify withholding saddles from the weaker dragons.
Tairn justifies this saddle by saying, “There is no rule that says a dragon cannot modify their seat to serve their rider.” This means that nothing has been stopping any previous dragons from realizing and seizing the advantages offered by a a saddle.
We're also supposed to buy that Xaden invented this saddle himself, implying that Navarre never developed these previously.
No. Just … no.
The murder school premise of the Riders Quadrant has now been ruined from every possible angle. It hinged upon the concept that dragons would only accept the riders who would not embarrass them by dying, and that the people who emerged from this crucible would then be forged into a cohesive military unit. It has shredded as this story progressed, all because Violet can't make the cut and thus needed loopholes, handicaps, and exceptions to survive. This saddle is the nail in the coffin. Much like her armor, it is obvious technology that the military would be idiotic to not conceive and implement. The only thing that kept its absence from making sense was a vague, “Well, the dragons won't allow it.” That is gone now.
Among other things, this renders the Gauntlet completely pointless. At the very least, there is no longer any point to it being a death trap. It is only relevant for emergency situations when a dragon does not have a saddle or the saddle is damaged to the point of being unusable, so there is little practical benefit to culling cadets with it. Aurelie did not have to die. Violet did not have to cheat.
There's also the matter that neither the Kingdom of Navarre, the riders, nor the Quadrant have been characterized as factions that care about accommodating the disabled. We have been told the exact opposite. In Chapter 6, Violet made it clear that people would flag her as a weak link and kill her if they realized that she needed healing on a regular basis. An accommodation as glaring as a saddle should be a death sentence in this environment.
A Moment for Meta
I have seen at least one reviewer praising this saddle as a necessary handicap to accommodate the physically disabled. I strongly disagree. This saddle is an atrocity on the same level as D&D's Combat Wheelchair.
Both the saddle and the Combat Wheelchair suffer from the same core problem: rather than putting the disabled character on an equal footing with everyone else, it grants additional advantages. No one else gets to have their legs secured to their dragons. Many riders have died because of that. For this to be justified as accommodation for a disability, Violet's saddle should put her on the same footing as everyone else … and the only way for that to happen is if everyone else also had saddles, and hers was merely designed to accommodate her EDS.
Signets
Violet
Violet can blast people with lightning of such intensity that annihilates military fortifications.
There’s nothing for me to criticize here.
I'm being sincere. This is obviously another case of handing the Mary Sue a super special ability to double down on her super specialness, but it doesn't break the lore. It fits comfortable within the established limits of the magic system. (Those limits are admittedly quite lose, but that's a problem with the system as a whole, not this one Signet.)
Mira
Mira can erect wards. What does this mean? Wards haven't been explained, outside of the hazy idea that they are some sort of shield that enclose the kingdom. Is it an energy barrier? Some sort of magical wall that blocks the motion of certain entities or objects? An anti-magic field that doesn’t affect dragons or their riders? We've been hearing about wards failing throughout this book, but does this mean Mira can just fly over to them and rebuild them like she's throwing up boards in a COD: Zombies game?
This doesn't impact the narrative - yet. It's just raising questions that we didn’t previously need to ask.
Time Stop (Part 2)
The War Games in Chapter 28 add lore to Andarna’s time stop power, and it’s … messy.
When Violet invokes Andarna to use the time stop power, Andarna issues the following instruction:
“Focus on everything except you and Tairn!”
On first read, this makes sense. Violet and Tairn need to still be able to move to get to Liam in time. However, upon reflection, it hit me …
Everything? How, exactly, is Violet supposed to focus on everything?
Does that mean the time stop only affects entities within her local area? What about things that are in the area that Violet isn’t aware of? What about things inside or on her and Tairn that she isn’t actively thinking about (like, say, the bacterial ecology that exists in every human being’s gut, or a buckle on Tairn’s saddle that she didn’t get a chance to notice because she wasn’t the one who put it on him)?
Come to think of it, this violates the rules set by the first time stop. Xaden arrived at Violet’s room right when the time stop kicked in. Violet didn’t know he was there until the time stop had activated and she’d changed position. Shouldn’t he have kept moving?
I suppose that this retroactively explains why Violet’s blood kept moving in the first time stop, but this is honestly a far worse position to be in than before. At least the blood thing was a minor detail. This doesn’t make sense in isolation and actively clashes with the previous time stop when in context.
Knives
This one is purely a problem of Yarros wanting things both ways.
Those custom-made knives that Xaden presents to Violet are designed to accommodate her physique and fighting style. In doing so, Yarros acknowledges that knives are not one-size-fits-all and can have different properties. This contradicts every previous instance of knives being interchangeable throwing instruments that all fit into Violet’s sheathes.
Realism demands that these issues be acknowledged and accounted for from the start. Rule of Cool would not acknowledge why Violet needs special knives and just make them generically special.
Doing both reeks of laziness, incompetence, or both.
ALL THE PORN
Yes, it is time. Next week, we will review Chapter 30 through Chapter 32, where the three sex scenes take place.
If you want to read along, but don’t want to read the sex scenes, one is located in Chapter 30, and the other two are located in Chapter 32. I’d provide precise pages, but I don’t have a hard copy of the book, and the page numbers of the Barnes & Noble Nook edition appear to vary between my phone and my iPad.
I am not going to provide a breakdown on the pornography. What I will highlight are some worldbuilding issues that were glaringly obvious even while skim-reading. I will also be touching on how dragons are utilized to push the sexual content of this book.
If you don’t want to be bothered with that sort of thing, fear not. I will be isolating all of the analysis of sexual content to a single section. There will still be a small slice of content that can be analyzed without needing to touch the porn.
If you’d prefer to skip this entirely, you can hop ahead two weeks, where we will pick up with Chapter 33 through Chapter 35. I will include a small recap on the important non-sexual plot beats from Chapter 30 to Chapter 32 prior to the story summary for that part so that you can get caught up.
Thank you all for bearing with me. I hope to see at least some of you next week. Have a good day.
