I finished reading Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros a couple weeks ago, and it was…an experience. Be prepared, this is gonna be a LONG post.
While I was raising my eyebrows at some of the writing decisions while I was reading, it wasn't until I talked about it along the way with my friends in our Discord server and listened to a review about it on YouTube that I truly realized just how BAD it is. Like, basic worldbuilding and story structure that makes absolutely zero sense if you think about it for more than five seconds.
The thing that personally gets me the most is just how unnecessarily LETHAL the "training" for the riders' quadrant is. How does it benefit anyone to lose seventy-one would-be cadets in ONE day to a bridge that's 200 feet above the ground? Even if Basgiath is trying to test cadets' bravery or agility or whatever in order to "weed out the weak" (which they could've already done with preliminary physical tests that the author seemingly just…forgot are a thing in military schools), surely there should be a less deadly and much more effective way of testing for these attributes that wouldn't needlessly waste human life?? Especially when they've been at war for 400 YEARS! What, you mean to tell me that at NO point during this time period, Basgiath was pressed for cadets and decided to restructure how they conducted training to minimize loss of life as much as possible?? You'd think the they'd would want all the manpower it can get; no way there's enough people in Navarre to just toss into the riders' quadrant willy-nilly.
And WHY do they have an obstacle course that can kill cadets?? WHY are the students allowed to kill each other based off of extremely vague ideas of what makes someone a "liability"?? WHY don't the professors seemingly do more to prepare the students to meet the dragons for the first time so they aren't just immediately incinerated for breathing in their direction the wrong way?? WHY does the riders' quadrant seemingly value the lives of their cadets so little if they're at the same time so important for their four century long conflict??
I don't think I'd have as much problem with the Carnage College functioning the way it did IF it was shown in-text that all these regimes and rules were backfiring on Basgiath terribly and have the characters (or at least Violet) question more thoroughly why things are the way they are. Like, maybe it actually isn't a good idea to subject our would-be soldiers to a 200 ft. death drop! Maybe it isn't a good idea to let cadets write up their own rules on who it's okay to murder based on extremely flimsy rules on what does and does not constitute a "liability"! Maybe it isn't a good idea to leave our cadets so clueless on how to act around dragons if we need them to, you know, RIDE DRAGONS for us in our centuries long conflict!
Maybe these could even be more recent changes to the rules due to incompetence from leadership. Or a wedge forms between the humans and the dragons that makes the dragons less friendly towards the riders and more likely to harm them, but because the dragons are the best weapon Navarre has in the war, they put up with their aggressive behavior because they feel they have no other option. Just…something that would help this all make sense!! 😭I think what makes all this oversight particularly egregious is that the author herself is married to a member of the military and has been for 20 YEARS. Did it never occur to her to just…ask her spouse if her portrayal of this war college is accurate?? Did she conduct ANY kind of research beyond the first page of results on Google?? Because that's the vibe I'm getting from how Basgiath is written.
Don't even get me started on some of the lesser issues I had with this book:
*The dialogue was super corny half the time and felt weirdly modern despite the medieval inspired fantasy setting, mainly due to the characters dropping words like "badass" and "fuck" in their conversations.
*The swearing itself felt tacky and immature at times, shoehorned in just to make the characters sound "edgier".
*Jack was cartoonishly evil, and while I get that he's kind of supposed to be a hate sink, it was really hard to ever take him seriously when he was always harping on about "taking out the weakling".
*The side characters Violet was surrounded by were pretty one note; despite being her "friends", it felt like she never really got to know any of them on a deeper level aside from Rhiannon, and even then, it was just the one thing with Rhiannon's sister. Liam was the only one I genuinely felt any connection towards, but then Yarros decided to kill him off towards the end so…so much for him. 😭
*The "romance" between Violet and Xaden is terribly devoid of any real romantic chemistry between them; it's PURELY sexual, and even that's largely based on the other's physical appearance. Hell, Violet doesn't even begin to THINK about getting to know Xaden on a more personal level until he literally tells her to her face, "You actually don't know that much about me," and she realizes, "Oh, shit…I really don't!" And then all the questions she asks are so laughably surface-level that it makes her declaration of love and the subsequent "betrayal" in the final act especially hard to believe in. Girl, all you really knew about this man was how hot he was and that his favorite food was chocolate cake! Where are these feelings even coming from?? Their romance being labeled "enemies-to-lovers" is also inaccurate, too, considering that they're hardly more than moderately distrustful of each other for the entire duration of the book, and even THAT'S undone by Xaden's chapter at the end where it's revealed he was actually in love with Violet the whole time! He was just being broody and closed off because he was afraid of falling in love with her! 😍 God, give me a break. What's the point in even calling them "enemies-to-lovers" then if you won't commit to them actually being enemies?!
I feel like I glossed over a lot of the issues Fourth Wing had while I was in the middle of reading because I had just come out of a Warrior Cats binge read. I'm kinda just used to some of the more objectively questionable writing choices in that series (and believe me, there's a lot of them), so I didn't give Forth Wing too much flack at first because I was just excited to be reading something that wasn't Warriors for a change. But I still can't help feeling like a lot of my time has been wasted on a book with an overall shoe-string plot, which is a shame because the premise itself sounded interesting, and I really wanted to give this book a fair chance despite being notoriously overhyped on Booktok. I guess the one good thing I can take away from this experience is stuff *not* to include in my own writing and how I can spot signs that a book probably isn't going to be that great much earlier so I don't wind up wasting time on it. :/
by -GreyRaven