Recommendation: If you enjoy deliberately derivative, paint-by-numbers, trope heavy YA fantasy romance, go for your life.
Read with: Tequila so you can take a shot every time they blow a window out in a fit of passion. If all goes well, you’ll be too drunk to finish the bloody thing.
In brief: This is trash. This is trash compacted into an overflowing landfill slowly polluting the water table and causing fish kills in the river. It is the trash at the centre of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Bin chickens have evolved to pry lids off rubbish bins in order to get to trash of this quality. So naturally it went gangbusters on the Tikytoky and, equally naturally, I read it.
Let us begin with a new word, “romantasy”, which is the cursed portmanteau of ‘romance’ and ‘fantasy’ that seems to have completely displaced romance-dystopian YA as the trending genre, while stealing most of the plot points. The Fourth Wing is an almost perfect distillation of the form, to the point some are suggesting it was written with the assistance of ChatGPT or a bot trained on the collected works of Sarah J Maas. Yarros gives us a relatable heroine™, a very good looking potential love interest/friend, an EXTREMELY good looking nemesis with a secret noble side™ who also happens to have shadow magic and be ridiculously overpowered, a college or school of some description, a kingdom with some dystopian tendencies that will become apparent to our heroine on her journey of discovery and sassy telepathic dragons as the pièce de résistance.
On the subject of heroines and their love interests, in The Fourth Wing we have Violet “Violence” Sorrengail. She is a twenty year old with a requisite weakness and insecurity that keeps her “relatable” (see, for example, the endearingly clumsy Bella Swan). She is also gorgeous, although she doesn’t know it, and instantly attractive to the unbelievably handsome men around her. She acquires a male bully who targets her because of her gender and perceived weakness but, after a training sequence copy-pasted from Divergent, becomes more physically capable and confident. One of her love interests is very protective and does not want to let her grow so she fucks him off because we do not like controlling men and she is a #rolemodel. Things then get serious with the “end game” love interest, the ludicrous named Xaden Riordan. In keeping with ALL the tropes, he:
- is substantially older;
- may or may not want to murder Violet for the first half of the book because we stan enemies-to-lovers;
- is ridiculously overpowered and has some sort of “shadow magic”;
- has dark hair and a tragic back story;
- wouldn’t know what healthy communication looked like if it bit him on the arse;
- has a penchant for concealing key information “for her own good”;
- finds her sexy when she’s poisoning people just a little bit; and
- crucially, is a FUCKING PSYCHOPATH.
He is drawn to her obvious childhood trauma and unstable sense of self and proceeds to encourage her to also become a fucking psychopath. Highlights of the dialogue at this point include:
”you look all frail and breakable, but you’re really a violent little thing, aren’t you?”
Excuse me while I reach for a bucket. The two of them spend the rest of the novel fucking each other in increasingly improbable positions at a tempo a jackhammer would envy, having zero healthy interactions, engaging in periodic fits of homicidal jealously and possessiveness and egging each other on in an escalating spiral of violence your average counter terrorism agency would find very interesting.
Of course, it turns out the counter terrorism agencies are watching, because The Fourth Wing is dystopian YA-with-dragons, and the governing regime is oppressive, militarised, fascist and concealing information from its citizens in order to cling on to power. Throughout the novel, Violet becomes increasingly aware of the sinister currents swirling around her, the distorted version of history she is being taught and the tenuousness of her position as she becomes a threat to existing power structures. The climax of the novel, naturally enough, is a ham fisted attempt to kill her, her boyfriend and her associates which results in a poorly written action scene.
All of which leads to an overarching observation about romantasy as a genre – there seems to be a marked tendency to conflate a propensity for violence and skill in its application with empowerment and to feature powerful heroines who are basically unrepentant war criminals. The Fourth Wing is not that stark (yet) but lack of restraint and the power to evade accountability for amoral or immoral conduct is commonly portrayed as self-actualisation for our female protagonists. Certainly, that seems to be the aptly-nicknamed Violence’s trajectory. There might sometimes be an attempt at moral justification and or an ends justify the means argument (hence a fascist government to fight against) but the point stands. I am not acquiring pearls to clutch just yet, but this hedonistic bloodbath of a genre is a very long way away from the self-sacrificing “Chosen Ones” I grew up with or Tolkien’s “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness … I love only that which they defend” understanding that war is not glorious but is sometimes necessary.
Finally, a word on the sex scenes, which feature a loss of magical control, a total lack of respect for anyone within a 10km radius and grotesque overuse of the word “inches”. I truly do not understand how anyone with even an ounce of satisfactory sexual experience finds this compelling, although I acknowledge the word ‘satisfactory’ is doing a lot of work here because … men. But seriously, the last time I was this repelled was that execrable scene in Oppenheimer with Florence Pugh looking completely unenthused and poor Cillian Murphy reciting the Bhagavad Gita.
A sequel has recently been published – go read it I guess????
Bookshelves & Bourbon 