If you liked the Fourth Wing books keep scrolling. This is my personal opinion and I’m not personally attacking you for liking a thing.
I held this in a LONG time. I don’t like shitting on peoples’ fandoms if they’re not hurting anyone. I have a personal issue with this author because I cannot fucking stand her writing.
Reading the first book was like trying to down cherry cough syrup with the consistency of mucus that tastes like the bitter memory of a cherry that’s been dead and buried for a few months.
I cannot read the second Fourth Wing book. I tried. I’m not even a full chapter in and I just cannot do this. It feels like staring down a long dark hallway with no end. I slogged through the first one and it took me nearly 3 weeks. I’m a fast reader but I could only handle that author in small doses.
The way she describes people drives me to madness. Everyone has one single defining feature that’s usually described in THE most unflattering ways possible. They have no other features. She refers to them by these features per the MC’s POV so I get to hear about someone having a “hawk nose” or “jowls like a wildebeast” repeatedly and it’s literally all I can picture. Meanwhile the more important characters have fully fleshed out descriptions but pretty much all of them are conventionally attractive.
Everyone’s eyes are always “flaring”. Maybe I’m the problem reading this as literal now and then but I imagine them flashing like high beams at night. Or them just bugging their eyes out at people.
The sex scenes. Please god, don’t get me started. I read a lot of smut. This is abysmal. Imagine if the bed breaking honeymoon in Breaking Dawn didn’t fade to black and you got to read an entire room being broken. There are also lightning strikes (her power is lightning!).
The world building makes no sense to me either. Sustaining an active war for hundreds of years just seems impossible. The battle school they funnel kids into tried to ⚰️ them at every turn. It’s a literal survival of the fittest military school. Which makes no fucking sense. Why send your kids into a meat grinder when you could be using the ones ill suited for war for other vital things to keep both the kingdom and the war effort going???
I actually am mad because the plot outside of that does get better and have some interesting points. Unfortunately you have to spend nearly the entire first book getting there. I just cannot stomach her writing style. Maybe I’m being too particular or unfair. I find most of the characters to be insufferable too. The main character has a chronic case of Not Like Other Girls with a side helping of I am very Small and Pale and Special.
Additionally she’s disabled. It’s very heavily implied she has EDS or some other sort of hyper mobility disorder that causes joint instability and we just endlessly see her pushing herself to her breaking point and it’s meant to be seen as this big achievement. As a disabled person I don’t find this to be admirable. She can be disabled just give her magical accessibility devices or a role that doesn’t require her to continually break her body to gain the respect of others idc. Framing is admirable to break your body over and over when you’re disabled is unforgivable to me as someone who was force fed the idea I needed to be “inspirational” and if I wasn’t pushing myself to my breaking point I wasn’t worthy of literally anything.