Seriously though, the way some people treat liking media as if it has an expiration date is so weird to me. And three years is still so recent in the grand scheme of things anyway, actually!
Normally, Alderode and most Aldish males don't encourage the ladies to learn much of combat at all, which Lemuel and Mikaila are bucking the trend on. However, Alderode is going through a Civil war, right? And in history there comes a time in any civil war where every hand needs to be holding a dagger. Is that his motivation, knowing she might *need* her talent to be deadly, regardless of social norms?
Mm, not really, though he'd agree with you it's a good argument. For the most part, Lemuel is full of hatred for the very bones of his country, and hasn't trusted its norms and ideas since he saw the Etalarche curse in person. He doesn't even trust God anymore; we know he wanted to find the son of a bitch and throw hands.
So his instinct has become to buck those norms and do the forbidden things. That includes raising Mikaila to be exactly the kind of person she has decided she wants to be, even in opposition to the rest of the family's wishes; even Leysa's! Mikaila is his little firefly stubbornly flashing against the darkening of the light.
I love how casual she is, Duane at her age couldn't sit up straight😭Either she got it from her mom ,or Lemuel was that good as a father figure...
Gotta hand this one to Lemuel. She just spent a year at his side, and Lemuel did not coddle her. It did her self-esteem and confidence up a treat. Once you win a few fights and learn how to knock people down, you start to carry yourself a little differently.
It's been fun to see all the assumptions people have made about what Mikaila and her life would be like. Lemuel has thrown a real wrench, I think, in a lot of those.
I have been reading Fourth Wing lately, and I wish I'd been taking notes on this shit from the beginning. It's genuinely an educational experience. I was warned about its quality, but I didn't know it was going to be such a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with average NA fantasy novels. It's like it was perfectly constructed to piss me off and it comes just shy of including one of my trademark Least Favorite Tropes. It's breathtaking.
Go read it if you haven't and I mean that. If you can stomach it anyway.
(there are only minor spoilers in this post because I haven't even finished the book but I had to post about it, that's how incredible it is. this is not a structured or proper review. I'm just yelling into the void here.)
Every new reveal and twist is incredible. The main character is reaching heights of specialness I couldn't have dreamed at the outset, and the specialness and rarity of her abilities and circumstances torments her. She's the typical underdog of a YA fantasy FMC, with all the accompanying trappings, including special hair color and something to prove.
The quality of the writing is deeply juvenile and her narration is no exception. It's gloriously un-self-aware. She provides exposition to the reader that serves no other purpose than to pad out the setting and make it seem fleshed out, but it's hardly interesting stuff because it's not portrayed as interesting, and its relevance is (thus far) questionable. She recites the facts for us like she's reading her grocery list. Multiple times. Narrating the basic facts of the realm and its recent history, you see, is her calming mantra. I guess the author couldn't think of any other way to get the basic info into our heads.
Therein lies a problem: the worldbuilding is a hot mess from the start, and not just in the way it's relayed. Not a single character questions any of the glaringly obvious issues with the, uh, society they live in (using that term generously). Every new chapter gives me more baffling questions and equally baffling answers. I would swear to you the author is merely checking items off of a list titled Elements of Storytelling as if they're ingredients in a recipe, without actually having any understanding of what they are or how and why to use them. Which is a fucking shame because she could have a field day playing with all the hideous implications of the world she's built, and she hasn't even seemed to realize they're there.
The book takes place in a generic fantasy setting and in a society with a near-nonexistent structure, and a baffling structure where it is implied to exist. Everyone talks like it's the 2020s. Genuinely, the characters love talking about consent and boundaries and safety and self-care, which largely falls flat in the face of, well, everything about their circumstances being horrible human rights abuses, on top of being annoying because who authorized these fantasy 20-year-olds to therapyspeak each other constantly.
They use the Gregorian calendar for some reason. The protagonist and her peers attend a fantasy military school in the hopes of becoming dragon riders, and it's the most nonsensical portrayal of a school I've ever seen (military or not), to the point where I question whether the author has ever gone to a school. The students are allowed to kill each other as long as they follow the rules about killing each other, which really should tell you all you need to know.
This is implied to be because it's actually dragons running the society and they love to weed out the weak, but they're very few in number, they're reclusive and only show up for or talk to their riders, and they don't allow humans into their secret dragon councils, so I'm not actually sure how any of that's supposed to work. Anyway, someone at some point mentions a physics test, and another time, a deeply offhand mention of viral infections is made. This sent my soul straight out of my body.
I'm not sure, if I'm being honest, how anyone in this society is meant to live. What average people live like or where their food comes from or what's important to them and what their cultural values are besides Dragons Are Cool and Dragon Riders Are The Most Badass despite the dragons, in my general estimation, sounding like enormous dicks on the whole. I think their entire society is divided into fourths depending on which of four job titles you get from which school quadrant you go to. That is straight up my understanding of how it works.
Sometimes there are border skirmishes. I can't remember where. I don't know who these nations are or why they're fighting, if I'm being honest. I don't know what values or resources they're clashing over. There is some vague mention made of trade agreements with other lands, and passing nods to the idea of border conflicts and things like that. I'm twenty chapters in and couldn't tell you what they are or who they are or where they are or why they're happening.
Even the protagonist's life before her enrollment in fantasy military school is incredibly vague, without a flashback to be found. Her self-concept and insecurities seem to stem from nowhere. I don't know what her people are like and where she gets the ideas she's got, other than from her surviving family, who struggle to be defined in any way other than in relation to her.
The worldbuilding, if you can call it that, is awkwardly shoehorned in from the start. Long before there's any inkling of why it matters. Then eventually I realized it doesn't matter because the author is just checking it off like an item on the list. It's very apparent she didn't think some things through, and by some things, I mean, like, all of the things. The main character and her family and the setting and how they coexist with the dragons and the implications of it all.
I can't wait to dig into the goodsreads reviews after this and give myself psychic damage with the inevitable 5-star ratings. When I found out this massively successful book has 2 sequels already, with another 2 in the works, I just was like...
That's it. Clearly I need to write some schlocky fantasy novel and make huge money. My high standards and perfectionism are holding me back. I could do this too and maybe I even should.
I honestly can't even be mad at Yarros for writing this. Good for her. More women should be writing self indulgent fantasy novels with just enough set dressing to give their super special OCs adventures to go on, even when those adventures make no sense, and smooch dark and mysterious and powerful(ly) hot broody boys.
okay i blew through the last third of this book this evening and oh my god. where do i begin. what the fuck. i mean i already knew that nothing of consequence was going to happen to the mains, no matter how much the manufactured drama escalated, but jeeeeez.
i won't mention the inevitable smut scenes except to say "lol" because wtf was up with those. girl why are you casting chain lightning with your pussy. what.
anyway there was a point at which the mc was pissed at her bf for ~betraying her~ by not telling her everything he could have told her about the state of the kingdom's borders, none of which particularly individually concerned her, and she already knew her mom and the general of the entire military was lying about that stuff, and i was like, figuratively rubbernecking between the two of them trying to figure out why she was upset. everyone here is supposedly 20+ but they all act like such teenagers.
also i liked (not) when we got her bf's POV at the end, and his narration sounds exactly the same as the MC's right down to Occasionally. Emphasizing. Sentences. Like. This. and i hate both of them so much <3
and the actual final ending? wtf. god. it could have been something and meant something but she didn't build up to any of it at all. EVERYTHING IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE AND NOTHING GOES WRONG FOR THE PROTAGONIST (enough for her to like, actually change and grow about it).
I have been reading Fourth Wing lately, and I wish I'd been taking notes on this shit from the beginning. It's genuinely an educational experience. I was warned about its quality, but I didn't know it was going to be such a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with average NA fantasy novels. It's like it was perfectly constructed to piss me off and it comes just shy of including one of my trademark Least Favorite Tropes. It's breathtaking.
Go read it if you haven't and I mean that. If you can stomach it anyway.
(there are only minor spoilers in this post because I haven't even finished the book but I had to post about it, that's how incredible it is. this is not a structured or proper review. I'm just yelling into the void here.)
Every new reveal and twist is incredible. The main character is reaching heights of specialness I couldn't have dreamed at the outset, and the specialness and rarity of her abilities and circumstances torments her. She's the typical underdog of a YA fantasy FMC, with all the accompanying trappings, including special hair color and something to prove.
The quality of the writing is deeply juvenile and her narration is no exception. It's gloriously un-self-aware. She provides exposition to the reader that serves no other purpose than to pad out the setting and make it seem fleshed out, but it's hardly interesting stuff because it's not portrayed as interesting, and its relevance is (thus far) questionable. She recites the facts for us like she's reading her grocery list. Multiple times. Narrating the basic facts of the realm and its recent history, you see, is her calming mantra. I guess the author couldn't think of any other way to get the basic info into our heads.
Therein lies a problem: the worldbuilding is a hot mess from the start, and not just in the way it's relayed. Not a single character questions any of the glaringly obvious issues with the, uh, society they live in (using that term generously). Every new chapter gives me more baffling questions and equally baffling answers. I would swear to you the author is merely checking items off of a list titled Elements of Storytelling as if they're ingredients in a recipe, without actually having any understanding of what they are or how and why to use them. Which is a fucking shame because she could have a field day playing with all the hideous implications of the world she's built, and she hasn't even seemed to realize they're there.
The book takes place in a generic fantasy setting and in a society with a near-nonexistent structure, and a baffling structure where it is implied to exist. Everyone talks like it's the 2020s. Genuinely, the characters love talking about consent and boundaries and safety and self-care, which largely falls flat in the face of, well, everything about their circumstances being horrible human rights abuses, on top of being annoying because who authorized these fantasy 20-year-olds to therapyspeak each other constantly.
They use the Gregorian calendar for some reason. The protagonist and her peers attend a fantasy military school in the hopes of becoming dragon riders, and it's the most nonsensical portrayal of a school I've ever seen (military or not), to the point where I question whether the author has ever gone to a school. The students are allowed to kill each other as long as they follow the rules about killing each other, which really should tell you all you need to know.
This is implied to be because it's actually dragons running the society and they love to weed out the weak, but they're very few in number, they're reclusive and only show up for or talk to their riders, and they don't allow humans into their secret dragon councils, so I'm not actually sure how any of that's supposed to work. Anyway, someone at some point mentions a physics test, and another time, a deeply offhand mention of viral infections is made. This sent my soul straight out of my body.
I'm not sure, if I'm being honest, how anyone in this society is meant to live. What average people live like or where their food comes from or what's important to them and what their cultural values are besides Dragons Are Cool and Dragon Riders Are The Most Badass despite the dragons, in my general estimation, sounding like enormous dicks on the whole. I think their entire society is divided into fourths depending on which of four job titles you get from which school quadrant you go to. That is straight up my understanding of how it works.
Sometimes there are border skirmishes. I can't remember where. I don't know who these nations are or why they're fighting, if I'm being honest. I don't know what values or resources they're clashing over. There is some vague mention made of trade agreements with other lands, and passing nods to the idea of border conflicts and things like that. I'm twenty chapters in and couldn't tell you what they are or who they are or where they are or why they're happening.
Even the protagonist's life before her enrollment in fantasy military school is incredibly vague, without a flashback to be found. Her self-concept and insecurities seem to stem from nowhere. I don't know what her people are like and where she gets the ideas she's got, other than from her surviving family, who struggle to be defined in any way other than in relation to her.
The worldbuilding, if you can call it that, is awkwardly shoehorned in from the start. Long before there's any inkling of why it matters. Then eventually I realized it doesn't matter because the author is just checking it off like an item on the list. It's very apparent she didn't think some things through, and by some things, I mean, like, all of the things. The main character and her family and the setting and how they coexist with the dragons and the implications of it all.
I can't wait to dig into the goodsreads reviews after this and give myself psychic damage with the inevitable 5-star ratings. When I found out this massively successful book has 2 sequels already, with another 2 in the works, I just was like...
That's it. Clearly I need to write some schlocky fantasy novel and make huge money. My high standards and perfectionism are holding me back. I could do this too and maybe I even should.
I honestly can't even be mad at Yarros for writing this. Good for her. More women should be writing self indulgent fantasy novels with just enough set dressing to give their super special OCs adventures to go on, even when those adventures make no sense, and smooch dark and mysterious and powerful(ly) hot broody boys.
How close was Will with Lemuel? Was Lemuel a role model in the same way Duane was, or were they more like friends due to the smaller age gap?
It's a little weird. Will's dad developed a dad-crush on Lemuel pretty quickly after he joined the Lions, so Lemuel is strictly "Father's Friend," in Will's head. This only deepened when Duane died and Lemuel became Mikaila's dad and even more dad-coded.
There's not a huge age gap there, no, but the social chemistry is too weird for Will to think of Lemuel as a friend, and their positions in life too different to think of him as a role model exactly either. Lemuel is intimidating and tricky to figure out. Only Mikaila seems to understand him, and just laughs whenever Will suggests Captain Adelier is kinda bloody scary.
@vampxrebarbie was discussing dredgen bael with me and in the course of rotating him in my brain along with my oc, my brain started spinning dialogues on its own that have me putting reviewing/replaying renegades on my to-do list.
titsay
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2087
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