Dragons Made Me Do It: Season 2, Episode #4: Fourth Wing

Tequila Mockingbird: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about the cultural context and legacy of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but still the only one by us.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I guess I’m glad I read this book, so I can say I’ve read it and never have to think about it again.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and this is sadly not the worst romantasy dreck that I’ve read. You guessed it, guys: it’s Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.

Lleu: Oh, my god. So, Fourth Wing is about Violet Sorrengale, who is the daughter of a general of the Kingdom of Navarre — don’t ask me why it’s named after one of the autonomous communities of Spain, but it is. She is forced by her mother to enter not the military scribes’ part of the War College, but rather the dragonriders’ part of the War College, which is notoriously deadly because everyone wants to murder everyone else, because you want to cull the weak riders, because only the strongest will actually get to bond with dragons.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and also there’s a resource hoarding issue, right? There’s only so many dragons.

Lleu: Yes, also that. There’s only so many dragons. Violet is kind of a pacifist, but in a weird way, which we’ll talk about, and also has a chronic disability that makes it difficult for her to, for example, build muscle and sustain physical activity, but she manages to develop a complicated psychosexual relationship with an upper-year cadet, Xaden — with an X, of course —

Lleu: — who is the son of the executed rebel leader who hates her mother and so by extension hates her. She survives, surprisingly, through all of the challenges to bond with not one, but two dragons. Very special; first time this has ever happened. And, of course, one of her dragons is the biggest and scariest dragon. Also, her big, scary dragon is the bonded mate of Xaden’s dragon, and if one of them dies, the other one will also die, so now Xaden can’t kill her. They do start hooking up, and then (quote-unquote) “fall for” each other — that phrase is used a whole lot for some reason. Then, at the end, the state tries to arrange for Xaden’s death, Violet gets caught up in things, and they narrowly escape with their lives, some of their friends die, and then they find out some…exciting — question mark? — revelations about the politics of the Kingdom of Navarre and its relationship to its neighbors and the world outside.

Tequila Mockingbird: There are many problems with this book, but I think the key problem is that a lot of things that the book treats as if they should be exciting, shocking revelations were so obvious from page 3 that I don't think they hit the way they were intended to, because after you’ve spent the entire book telling me that this system is corrupt and callous and doesn’t care for the lives of its recruits and is constantly manipulating them and lying to them, learning that actually the total war they’ve been in for the past 600 years isn’t representative of the real political situation really doesn’t surprise me very much.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it would have been more shocking if the story had actually fully committed to the gryphon riders being ontologically evil.

Lleu: Yeah. It would would have been one of those things where, like, okay, I’m expecting the twist, and then the twist is, “Oh, there is no twist. You’re just playing it straight.” So it still would have been bad, but it would have been bad in a different and —

Tequila Mockingbird: As soon as you tell me, “Oh, no, the sexy bad boy love interest is a traitor!” Oh, well, but he’s correct, actually.

Tequila Mockingbird: Clearly the narrative is going to inform us that his treason was justified, and we’re gonna have to defect to his side. There’s no other option here, narratively.

Lleu: There’s also some weird vocab around that. The official term for this uprising in one of the provinces is the “Tyrrish Rebellion,” but the Tyrrish characters all call it the “Apostasy,” for some reason.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it seemed like she thought that word meant something different.

Lleu: Yeah. Religion simply does not factor into it at all. Maybe we should start off by talking about the one thing that we both agree the book does well.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes! It seems to me, as someone who does not have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, like pretty solid representation on that aspect. I think Violet’s disability is consistent. It’s narratively meaningful, and so are the accommodations that she manages to either design and implement for herself or that are designed and implemented by those around her, allow her, in the end, to fly around on a dragon and wield lightning magic and be a badass.

Lleu: Yeah. This is the only part of the book that I will say — this is better than Pern disability at any point in the series, except Readis for that one section at the end of Dolphins of Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think it is unrelated that the author also has the same medical condition. I appreciated the ways in which Violet was — I wanted Violet to honestly be more violent, because they kept telling me that she was ten pounds of fury in a five-pound sack, and wanted to express this physical violence and was so deadly, but then they never let her kill anybody. And I think that was honestly my only frustration with this narrative beat.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also did really enjoy the way in which her childhood best friend ends up being really paternalistic and condescending about what she is and isn’t capable of, because I think that felt like a meaningful conversation to have in this romantasy/young adult narrative space.

Lleu: Yeah, absolutely. One of the other things that I did appreciate about the book is, it seems, initially, like it’s gonna be doing a whole love triangle thing, because of course her childhood best friend is also there, and very quickly, she realizes that her childhood friend is not capable of seeing her as an adult who can make her own decisions and do things for herself, and that kills all of the romance for her. They kiss once, and she’s like, “And I felt nothing.” And then one of her friends asks her about it, and she’s like, “Yeah, it was horrible, actually. I never want to do that again.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. On one hand, I agree, and I appreciate that narrative being, again, put in this space. I think I benefited a lot from Tamora Pierce’s Alanna chronicles, which, despite many other flaws, very emphatically lay out, if you are romantically interested in a guy who is only romantically interested in part of you, or you if you are softer, or gentler, or nicer — dump that guy.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think that’s a good lesson to teach teenage girls, and teenagers in general. But I honestly was a little disappointed in how the romance was portrayed, because it sets itself up as if it’s gonna be this very tense, sexy, bad boy enemies to lovers situation, and I don’t think it really commits to that enough. Xaden is ultimately a solidly decent partner? He doesn’t tell her about the treason he’s committing.

Lleu: Yeah — that’s his fatal flaw, is, he’s committing treason and doesn’t tell Violet about this.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also, it’s fair to feel like, “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you about the reason I’m committing against your mother. Maybe that would be a conflict of interest for you that I shouldn’t introduce two months into our romantic relationship.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But also maybe don’t get into a romantic relationship with them — fair. But he’s not enough of an angsty bad boy. For all of the angsty bad boy trappings that he gets.

Lleu: Yeah. I said to you as I was reading it — there’s a reading of Xaden as F’lar if he was sexy.

Lleu: And that is, I think, the problem here, is that Xaden is F’lar if he was sexy. And, to be fair, not nearly as fascist.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, only very lightly fascist. Yeah. I think Xaden does have the same issue as F’lar: the narrative keeps reinforcing that he’s right.

Tequila Mockingbird: Xaden is correct because the narrative will not allow him to be incorrect, in a way that I think makes him a little more boring. But honestly, I don’t want the revelation in the last chapter that he’s actually been in love with her the entire time. That’s so boring!

Tequila Mockingbird: Why can’t he genuinely dislike her and then fall in love with her? At least F’lar genuinely didn’t like Lessa to start with.

Lleu: Yeah. So, I should also say, by way of summary, all of the book except the literal last chapter is narrated by Violet, and then the last chapter switches POVs to Xaden, because Violet is in a coma. And I think that was not a good choice.

Lleu: I think it would have been fine if it had switched back and forth, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: That is also a common thing, but — well, I don’t think Yarros is a skillful enough writer to maintain the suspense, or the lack of reader knowledge in Xaden’s POV, because a lot of the plot is resting on just not knowing what Xaden’s motivations or actions are. I don’t think that’s a particularly good or interesting plot element, but that is what’s holding up a lot of it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so if you’re in Xaden’s head, I don’t think she could maintain that successfully.

Lleu: That’s fair. I also think it would suffer from the fact that I don’t believe she could distinguish two characters’ voices, because every character in this book speaks exactly the same way. They all sound identical.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. You could have done Dane’s point of view, but, counterpoint, I’m not interested in it.

Lleu: Oh, my god, no, absolutely not. That’s like saying, “You could have done Dragonflight from K’net’s point of view.” Yeah, you could have, but why?

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a lot of ways in which this is a bog-standard romantasy novel. It’s not breaking a lot of ground. I think, as we said, it’s got solid disability rep. I think it’s got okay dragons, and it has dragons, and I think what this teaches me is that the children yearn for dragons.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because what else are they finding in this book that makes them so excited about it?

Lleu: Alright, then let’s talk about the dragons and the dragonriders, and maybe about this book’s influences in general.

Tequila Mockingbird: Absolutely. As we said, you can draw a pretty clear line from Pern, which is why we’re talking about it, and also because people on tumblr asked us to.

Lleu: I hope none of you asked us to because you liked Fourth Wing. If so, I’m sorry; I don’t know what else to say.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I don’t think we have anything for you. If they expected us to uncritically enjoy anything, I think they have been listening to the wrong podcast.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do think the dragons are solid. I’m a little bit baffled by why the dragons are committing to this giant political lie? That seems a little weird…

Tequila Mockingbird: …because it doesn’t seem like the dragons would have any motivation to do this.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, but we’re being repeatedly told that all of the magic comes from the dragons, the system of how dragon riders are chosen is instituted by the dragons, you can’t make the dragons do anything, they’re giant and canon will kill you at the slightest provocation.

Lleu: And, crucially, the dragons are the ones maintaining the wards that keep all other magic out of Navarre.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s fair to say that they can’t just drop those wards, or they’ll be overrun with venin, but why not just let gryphon riders into the wards? And it’s possible that the later books will engage meaningfully with that, but as far as I could tell the dragons just don’t like gryphons…?

Lleu: Yeah. I think they have to engage more with it, because the series is called The Empyrean, which we learn is the name of the dragons’ internal government structure.

Lleu: So that suggests that dragons’ internal government structure is going to be important later in the series. Probably.

Tequila Mockingbird: Probably. We can only hope. There’s a very clear Pern influence in how the dragons choose their rider. You make a psychic connection, you share your name, you can then talk in the dragon’s head — but it reverses the age and experience dynamic, in a way that I thought was actually fun. So, these dragons can and do outlive their rider and then choose a new dragonrider, but apparently have sort of a predilection for choosing the descendants of their previous dragonriders, which I think was fun.

Lleu: The one thing that I was a little bit like, “Mm…” about is, the intervention that Pern makes in stories about dragons is McCaffrey looking at stories about dragons and being like, “Okay, but what if dragons were not evil, bloodthirsty monsters.”

Lleu: And this book is like, “Actually, what if dragons were evil bloodthirsty monsters, and they bonded with you psychically anyway?” I feel like that sort of misses the point of dragons in Pern.

Lleu: I agree that the experience differential is an interesting choice. Notwithstanding the fact that Tairn and Violet sound the same — because everyone in this book sounds the same — their dynamic was fun, I will say.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, I liked that. I’m open to a “dragons have very different priorities, and they live a very long time, and to them it’s like, okay, this is a piddly little human; whatever; move on. I have more important things to worry about; we have to protect the kingdom.” But I don’t think it really landed that for me. I agree; it just sort of feels like, and then they murder teenagers for fun.

Lleu: Right — having different priorities is one thing, summarily executing 18-year-olds is another.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And I also don’t entirely understand the logic, from the dragons’ perspective, of murdering candidates who aren’t sufficiently ruthless or cool or badass, because you can just…not choose them.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? They murder Pryor for being indecisive. But when the actual Threshing comes, you could just not bond with him. What’s the harm? You know?

Tequila Mockingbird: Where, from the other riders’ perspective, it’s like, “Oh, if you bond with a dragon, you’ll be a bad dragon rider, and that might risk my life, so I have to eliminate you” — which I think is a little silly, but at least there’s a chain of logic there.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where, from the dragons’ perspective, it’s pure malice. That doesn’t sit well with me.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I do think she does intend to, and moderately succeed at, the thrill of being chosen by a dragon, right? The specialness of the bond, the overwhelming excitement and joy. But I think she does it very uncritically, and it just sort of feels like this is received from Pern — despite maybe passing through some other inspirations. “Wow, you bond with your psychic magical companion animal, and everything’s good and great.” I’m, as the reader, going, like, “Okay, but why?” Because, as you say, they just seem to like to murder people for fun. Why do I want that in my head all the time? And that really doesn’t get engaged with or interrogated at all.

Lleu: — where Ramoth has just murdered several people, and Lessa’s like, “Wow, she just murdered several people, and I would die for her.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think, again, that could be fun to play with, if it felt like you were playing with it on purpose —

Tequila Mockingbird: Which, as you say, leads to my broader frustration with the narrative ambivalence over Violet’s violence or pacifism, because Violet doesn’t kill anybody in this book, and the book makes a big point of how she doesn’t kill anybody, and then finally, at the end of the book, she does kill somebody, only for it to be apparently revealed in later books that she didn’t kill him. And it’s so annoying, because you’ve built this entire world where it’s like, “Yeah, you gotta be ruthless; you gotta just murder everybody.” That’s what this culture values, and Violet doesn’t do that but also doesn’t seem to take any meaningful stand against that, either internally in her narration, or externally in the story’s values?

Lleu: Yeah. This is, for me, the core problem with this book. So, like Valdemar, dragonriders here have been absorbed into state power, and, in this case, they are very specifically a branch of the military. The dragonrider cadets are studying at the War College, alongside military doctors, the Healers; the Scribes, who are military scribes and the state censorship bureau, basically; and the Infantry. These are soldiers, fully. We have gone even past Valdemar being like, “Well, these are direct agents of the state, personal agents of the Queen” — no, no. No more special ops stuff.

Lleu: Yeah. So that’s already a difference, and the problem with that is that, if you are talking about the army, obviously any standing army that has volunteers — which, this seems to be about 75% volunteers, 25% conscripts; we don’t get exact numbers — so, any volunteer standing army is going to be full of bloodthirsty murderers, right? But typically, you want those murderers to be aimed at enemies of the state, and not at their fellow soldiers.

Lleu: But the book is committed to — and we’ll talk more about influences in a bit, but — there’s a Hunger Games element here, right?

Lleu: There’s only so many dragons, and you want to cull the weak riders, both for your own safety and also because it decreases competition for dragons. So it sets up this world where, inside the College, murder is not only allowed but encouraged. There are some circumstances where you’re not allowed to murder people, but, other than that, basically anything goes. So, first of all, that makes very little sense if you want to create a corps of dragonriders who will trust and be able to rely on each other.

Lleu: But also, the problem with that is that, at the same time, the book wants to be a story about military camaraderie. Yarros is the kind of author who describes herself in her bio as an “army brat,” and her husband fought in Afghanistan — she’s not anti-military, I don’t think. This wants to be a story about finding your people and bonding with your squadmates — but also your squadmates want to kill you, so it’s trying to do both of those things, and it never gets past the cognitive dissonance that that gap creates.

Tequila Mockingbird: And from the very beginning of the story, Violet distinguishes herself by being friendly —

Tequila Mockingbird: — right? She gives Rhiannon one of her boots so that they can both make it across the parapet at the very beginning, which also just doesn’t feel realistic. I don’t understand why it’s useful, other than to establish, oh, characters are gonna die all the time; this is a violent, dangerous situation. And Violet is helping people instead of pushing them off the ledge, quite literally. But then it never really paid off for me, because, as you say, there’s this weird narrative ambivalence between whether that’s good or not, where Violet is supposed to be hurting people, and the fact that she’s not is sort of a character flaw, but she’s also very angry, and she wants to hurt people, and, eventually, she kills a lot of venin, but venin are, again, ontologically evil not-quite people. And there are multiple situations where Violet is willing to die to save others’ lives, but not willing to kill, and that, to me, seems weird in the context of the world and the value system of that world that has been otherwise established. Because being willing to die to save someone’s life, knowing that after you are dead, they will die anyway, but not being willing to kill the person who is trying to kill the both of you, to me, has to spring from a committed pacifism, because it’s not objectively the right answer. It’s not gonna save the person you're trying to save.

Lleu: Yeah. As I said when we were chatting about this as we were reading it, I honestly didn’t even register it as marked until, like, halfway through. Eventually, I was like, “Oh, I guess that was thematically important the whole time.” It didn’t read to me as thematically important the whole time, until halfway through the book, when suddenly Violet’s choices are catching up to her, and I’m like, “Oh, I guess we were supposed to be like, ‘Huh, that’s kind of weird’ about the choices that she was making.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And I don’t know that it’s fair to call this an influence, because A Deadly Education was only published three years before Fourth Wing, and, realistically, publishing timelines, probably that means Yarros was already writing it before Deadly Education came out.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I gotta say, it kind of does all of this stuff that Yarros is trying to do, but better.

Lleu: This is Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education, the first in the Scholomance books.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, the Scholomance trilogy. It sets up the deadly school story. It has the shifting alliances and “Can we trust each other, or should we sacrifice each other to try and stay alive?” It has a protagonist who is ambivalent about that, and it commits a lot more effectively, because I think it doesn’t wince back from allowing bad things to happen in a way that feels narratively meaningful, where Fourth Wing felt like it flinched in a lot of places when it was asked to actually really engage with state violence and cruelty and the dignity of choice and a lot of things.

Lleu: — including many of Violet’s friends. But part of this is a worldbuilding issue, too, in that the way mourning works in Navarre is: you don’t. Every morning, they read their names aloud, and then they bury them and burn everything that they owned, and then you’re never supposed to talk about them again. And Violet, by and large, doesn’t. If Violet were like, “Oh, man, I feel really bad about Dylan, who fell off the parapet. I know we’re not supposed to talk about it, but I still think about him and him dying that way,” then I’d be like, “Oh, okay. There’s something here.” But instead, Violet’s just like, “Yup. Then we buried them, and we burn their stuff, and we don’t think about it ever again, except my brother, but that’s different.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think a lot of the genre broadly suffers from the same problem, which is overall an unwillingness to commit to narrative ugliness and narrative pain. And frankly, it’s something McCaffrey struggled with, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s not interested in grief. Because, frankly, grief isn’t fun to read. Ultimately, I think Fourth Wing is trying to be a lighthearted, cool, edgy, fun, sexy fantasy story. It’s not actually interested in sitting and thinking about the military, and treasonous uprisings, and loss, and dictatorship. That’s not what they’re here to do.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think, frankly, a lot of the genre has been shaped by trying, as you pointed out, to be The Hunger Games. But the problem is that Suzanne Collins actually had something to say and said it rather eloquently.

Lleu: And also the core plot element that the romance in The Hunger Games is bad.[1]

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. “We created the Torment Nexus from the beloved novel Don’t Create a Torment Nexus,” right? But also, ultimately, Prim dies, right?

Lleu: Yeah.[2]

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s important. Collins is willing to commit to that, and to make Katniss suffer, because it’s a story about war, and it’s a story about political violence.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you can’t, I think, tell that kind of story if you flinch away from actually giving your protagonist consequences, you know?

Lleu: The one thing I will say, in fairness, is that neither of us have read books two and three, and it’s possible that Liam dying does have consequences. It seems unlikely, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s possible. It also seems like there’s gonna be book four. I don’t think she’s done.

Tequila Mockingbird: But the fact that the one genuine loss that Violet’s experienced — or one of two; she’s also very sad about her father’s death — is her older brother, and then at the end of the book, ta-da! He’s back! Doesn’t really give me a lot of faith that Yarros wants to play hardball.

Lleu: Yeah, which, it occurs to me now, maybe we should have known from the fact that she has his journal. That should have been a clue that he was alive the whole time, because they didn’t burn all of his stuff.

Lleu: Anyway, I don’t think that was probably intentional; I think it was just —

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not like Collins is the only author to have done that. I think K.A. Applegate in the Animorphs books also does a very good job at actually engaging with war —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in a way that is appropriate for young readers but also is very seriously trying to let young readers know that war is not actually cool.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t think Yarros accomplishes that, and I don’t think she’s trying to.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also, frankly, would not be surprised if Violet’s dad is also alive —

Lleu: I think he has to be dead, because I think she was present when they buried him.

Lleu: Well, yeah. Anything is possible. So, since we’re talking about this as if it's a book for young readers, maybe we need to talk now about genre and influences.

Lleu: So both of us were like, “The Hunger Games is here.” This is a Pern crossed with The Hunger Games.

Lleu: I found the book a little bit perplexing, because they do feel like they’re about three to eight years younger than they apparently textually are. Xaden is 23. Violet, I believe, is 18.[3] They definitely all feel like they’re about 15 or 16, to me.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, I think that is a publishing convention. The impression that I get is that it’s a harder sell to write sexually explicit YA at this point.

Tequila Mockingbird: But the problem is when you just kind of age them up on paper so that you can publish it, you end up with these 23-year-olds who are running around acting like 16-year-olds.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it sort of flattens things. I also just think, broadly speaking, I’m a little burned out on a school story if you’re not actually doing it on purpose or for a reason? And it feels like the reason Basgiath exists and is narratively relevant is just that she needs to put all of her characters in a box full of danger and violence.

Tequila Mockingbird: Is there any meaningful distinction between putting them in Basgiath and putting them in, say, a maze where they have to run around, or dropping them onto Earth when it’s been abandoned for generations, but these 100 teenagers are being dropped back on it to see if it’s viable — I don’t know. All of these teen narrative clichés are just about, “Let’s get a bunch of kids in one space that’s dangerous and see what happens.”

Lleu: Yeah. I think this could have been a more interesting book if she’d embraced it being a War College. If they felt like undergrads —

Lleu: — if they had essays to write and were up late, if they could be hanging out in the library at 3 a.m. doing work, I think that could have been more interesting, if it had tapped more into the campus novel, or even, frankly, if it had felt more like a boarding school narrative than it did. The school part is not there.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and I do think some of that has to do with the fact that she needed another editing pass. There’s a lot happening that feels extraneous, and I think you could either have engaged a lot more with the school element and split this into two books, or ruthlessly edited it. Because, as it is, Violet’s just smart, so a lot of it is like, “Oh, Violet already knows everything. Haha, she’s helping her friends with essays,” and it doesn’t actually engage with the education component. But, frankly, I think even though I agree that I would have wanted more of that, it’s already too long.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I would honestly ditch the first quarter of it entirely.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t really think that a lot of that is providing any particular value. Give me a couple of flashback scenes later, so I know that her mom made her enter against her will, and we’re fine.

Lleu: It gets both a lot more interesting and a lot less kind of awkwardly episodic once she actually has a dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And I guess I can see wanting there to be tension of, “Oh, no, will she make it? Will she survive? Will she be able to get a dragon?” But it’s just not interesting.

Lleu: But also — “Oh, no, will she survive?” There’s no actual tension there.

Lleu: She’s the protagonist — she’s the only protagonist. It would be a power move if Violet had died partway through, and the rest of the book had been from Dane’s POV or Xaden’s POV — that would have been more interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s this whole YA, dystopian series, and then, halfway through the last book, they kill the protagonist.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think it was executed super well, but a really bold concept. I don’t think it’s impossible to have real narrative tension in YA. Other people have accomplished it, and this isn’t even technically YA, right? I think it’s romantasy —

Tequila Mockingbird: — on paper, and it’s a very new subgenre, but it does seem to be coalescing pretty firmly around a set of narrative expectations, and I think this book does fulfill them, although, I think, honestly, the world-building here is a little rough for romantasy, because I do think part of romantasy is often a lightly idyllic or utopian, more than dystopian, kind of world-building —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but I don’t know that I want to commit hard to that, because I haven’t read that extensively, but I do think it’s a little less hopeful than romantasy usually is?

Lleu: Interesting. I feel like this conformed with my expectations for what romantasy is. I expected romantasy to be a little bit edgy.

Lleu: Yeah, I don’t know. And I will say, the other one that I read, which is Alastair Reeves’s A Spell for Heartsickness, is definitely idyllic and does also suffer from chickening out at the end. Briar should have died — even if he came back to life, he should have died for a little bit.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I definitely think that that narrative chickening out is not uncommon in romantasy, because part of what I do think about romantasy as having is an aversion to consequences.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s sort of narrative on easy mode, structurally or emotionally, pulling from romance, where, if I’m reading a romance novel and the main character dies, I would be very upset. I would feel, “Hey, this is not the genre contract.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I feel like if I was looking for that, paranormal romance would be where I would go, that edgier thing that you’re discussing. And I don’t think romantasy and paranormal romance are really the same. Paranormal fantasy romance, I don’t know.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s definitely a thing, but I think of it as a very distinct thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: And a thing that is more often contemporary fantasy as opposed to a secondary world fantasy.

Lleu: This is a little bit tangential, but it feels related in my head. One of the things that I found striking in terms of the book’s use of dragons and its relationship to Pern is the relationship between Violet’s and Xaden’s dragons.

Lleu: And I think the thing that really made me go, like, “Huh…” is early after Violet — I was gonna say “Impresses” — bonds with Tairn, she wakes up in the middle of the night and is, like, extremely horny —

Lleu: — and is like, “Oh, my god, I need to go outside where it is cold” — because it’s winter, — “and don’t look too closely at me, person in the room next door; I don’t want to make decisions I will regret in the morning.” And then, outside, she finds Xaden. They have a moment, and they do kiss, and then Xaden’s like, “Nope, you have to leave now. We can’t do this while you’re not in your right mind.”

Lleu: I was like, “Okay, I see where you’re coming from. You want to put consent back into this.” But also, it feels like the point of having dragons who are —

Lleu: — and are having sex, and that that makes you horny, is to enable your protagonists to make bad decisions.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Why is this here? Because, ultimately, the purpose that that scene serves is to tell me that Xaden is a stand-up guy, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s the only purpose that that subplot serves. I mean, I guess maybe mildly titillating — they get a kiss out of it. But it’s there so that I know, as a reader, that Xaden would never abrogate her consent. But I don’t think I needed to know that? I’m not sure that that is a meaningful thing to tell me in this story, because I wasn’t ever really worried about that.

Tequila Mockingbird: As you say, like, why is that here in this story? What purpose is it serving?

Lleu: Yeah. The moment Xaden found Violet eavesdropping on him and the other children of rebels, and was like, “Hm. I’m not gonna kill you now, but you owe me,” I was like, “Okay, so we’re not worried about Xaden anymore, then.”

Lleu: And then the book kept showing me things to make me not be worried about Xaden anymore, and I was like, “But I already wasn’t worried about Xaden, though.”

Lleu: But I think this moment is the one thing that makes me think that maybe Yarros has actually read Pern, specifically.

Lleu: Because otherwise I would characterize this book as somewhere Valdemar and Eragon crossed with The Hunger Games, rather than actually Pern with The Hunger Games.

Tequila Mockingbird: I, at least, do feel like I see Valdemar influence, both in the more explicit state control and structure of the dragonriders —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but also, I don’t know if this is something that’s common in other fantasy literature, but using “grounding” and “centering” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — as, like, key elements of being able to use your magic powers.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which I certainly encountered first in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s entirely possible that it’s showing up in other places. I also do think there is a more direct line, because while Pern is debatably planetary romance, science fiction, etc., I think the type of romantic fantasy that Lackey was writing has a pretty direct line to romantasy.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think it’s fair to call it the same thing, because I think romantasy is a pretty firmly 21st-century publishing category —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but the kind of stuff that it grew from I think is very clearly the stuff that Lackey was doing that’s mildly utopian, strong romance subplot, written by a white lady in America in the ’80s and ’90s fantasy —

Lleu: Even this scene where the dragons are having sex also — as much as it invokes the specter of mating flights in Pern, what it actually is doing is the scenes in Valdemar when Talia is like, “Oh, my god, Rolan’s having sex again. I don’t want to think about this, but here we are.”

Lleu: It much more strongly evokes those scenes and that relationship with your companion creature having sex.

Lleu: Rather than Talia being like, “Well, I’m learning lots of things that I didn’t really want to know.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that actually circles back to the comment that you made when we were reading it: this feels like Pern if the author was sexually attracted to men.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think that, for whatever else about the book, it is successfully horny about it. I believe that Violet is really attracted to Xaden. I believe that Xaden is attractive. While I’m reading, I’m like, “Ooh, this sounds like a fun person to make out with.”

Lleu: Yeah. I have complaints about the execution of the sexuality, but I think the fact that Violet is allowed to just be constantly low-key-to-high-key horny for Xaden is really good.

Tequila Mockingbird: I enjoy her being like, “Ugh, god damn it — he’s being sexy again. I have to worry about fighting people and not dying, and he has his shirt off!” I think that’s a fun narrative kind of beat. I think it’s hit just the right amount, right? It doesn’t go too much, but it’s pretty consistently present.

Tequila Mockingbird: Honestly, I think it cops out a little bit about of the casual promiscuity that we are promised.

Tequila Mockingbird: Much like Pern, we are told that everyone is just hooking up left, right, and center, and we see some side characters doing that. I think it’s fair to say that it’s clear that Violet has had sex before getting into Basgiath, although we never get details.

Tequila Mockingbird: But she manages to not actually hook up with anybody other than Dane — one kiss — and, of course, Xaden. And so it feels like, again, we’re sort of promised this, ooh, sexually liberated whatever, and what we get is heterosexual monogamy.

Lleu: But the thing that really bugged me is — casual sex is not a problem. Promiscuity is not a problem. Violet is horny. Violet is complaining to other people that she’s horny. Multiple people that she knows are like, “If you're interested, we could hook up.” Violet, they’re not trying to get you into a long-term relationship. They’re saying, “We could have casual sex and be friends, and it would be fine.” And Violet’s like, “Oh, no. Not with you, though.” I’m like, okay, sure…but…come on.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and that, to me, felt like the trappings of romance, the genre.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know if I can speak for all romantasy, because I do think that there’s space in romantasy, or at least there was in that kind of earlier romantic fiction era, for more casual relationships, as long as the protagonist does end up with their one true love by the end, right? Like, Talia and Kris hooking up in Arrow’s Flight.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we don’t get that here, and it does feel like maybe that’s the trappings of romance, the genre, where, even though she’s allowed to be offered casual sex, Xaden has to be her one true love, and that’s that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Apparently he has a fiancée that turns up in book three or something, so I’m sure that's gonna be built for all kinds of drama and jealousy subplots.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I will also say, not, again, unlike Pern, we do get queerness on the page. We have Rhiannon, Violet’s first friend in a casual friends-with-benefits situation with Tara, another woman. Is there anything else that’s textual?

Lleu: — and it’s unmarked, which is very perplexing. Hard to imagine what that means in this unhinged setting, but we never find out, which is also sort of the problem.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. In a lot of ways, this felt like Yaros wanted “everyone's having sex and there’s no homophobia,” and we also get casual references to characters of color or sort of intimations of that, but it doesn’t actually feel like it’s engaging with it any more meaningfully than Pern did.

Tequila Mockingbird: And to be fair, Pern was, at times, quite offensive, so I think at least this avoids that.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it avoids it by being kind of milquetoast about it.

Lleu: I would agree. The one non-binary — question mark? — side character who’s in one scene —

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re in two or three scenes, because they end up in the squad for the war games at the end.

Lleu: Okay. That in particular jumped out at me. I was like, what is this doing here? Because we’ve had no engagement whatsoever with gender. Does this mean that there’s a third gender? Does this mean that nonbinary people exist in the whole spectrum of nonbinary experiences that they exist in our present. What does that mean? It raised questions that it did not have any interest in answering.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, and I think I feel, at least, like that does not surprise me, coming from a straight, cis, white female author. Because I think there’s often a very casual world-building “Oh, and there’s no racism or homophobia, and everything is fine in this fantasy world,” and that’s about all the thought that gets put into it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And as I said, it’s, I guess, less offensive, perhaps, but not particularly more interesting or meaningful.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s maybe related to the question of anachronism in this book?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. There were definitely moments where I noticed turns of phrase or something, and I was just like, “Well, that’s a little 21st-century America for this fantasy world, isn’t it? Okay.”

Lleu: Yeah, there’s, you know, there’s a reference to “playground equipment,” and I was like, do they have playgrounds with identifiable playground equipment?

Lleu: Right. That was kind of weird. I think, in general, the anachronistic tone of the dialogue worked. I’m totally fine with that. It was the specific references that imply the existence of “playground equipment” in this fantasy world that made me go, “What is happening here?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and I think also, in general, a lack of real interest in the material conditions of the world —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that is not, I think, surprising from romantasy but is a little disappointing to me as a reader. I have all these moments of stuff like, okay, you’re telling me that wandering around this school is incredibly deadly, and people are dying left, right, and center — who’s cleaning the place? Who’s cooking their food? Are those people also just getting murdered at a whim? Presumably not, or you wouldn’t be able to keep them employed. But…

Lleu: That’s a plot point, is that Violet finds out who they’re going to let challenge her, i.e., potentially murder her, and arranges to have breakfast duty that day so she can poison their food.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m sitting here going like, okay, so there’s five unique, incredibly poisonous things growing in this space that she can easily get access to. Okay. There’s just, like, a lot of little things like that where it feels like Yarros solved a problem that created another problem that she didn’t notice.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think ultimately my verdict would be that this was better than Dragondrums.

Lleu: I put this solidly on par with Dragondrums. It has many of the same flaws to me, namely, just having this bizarre clash between what — what the author wants the school to be and what the author is showing us the school as.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think, for me, I definitely noted flaws, but I also think a lot of my nostalgia for that Mercedes Lackey-style romantic fantasy did carry this for me a little bit.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because a lot of the ways in which it’s sort of lazy, tacky, and predictable are like, “Aw…” I had some nostalgia moments, and that got me through a lot easier than I think it might have.

Lleu: That probably did affect it, because I had not read any Lackey before we did our episode.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think, to me, about at Renegades-level. Suffice to say, we don’t recommend it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Instead of Fourth Wing, I would recommend A Kiss of Crimson Ash, by Anuja Varghese. If you’re looking for a dramatic, violent story about political machinations, the lies of those in power, and falling in love and feeling a little horny about it while you try and fight back and make a better world, then I think A Kiss of Crimson Ash is going to offer that with, frankly, a lot more interesting world-building and also some canon queer romances.

Lleu: If you are interested in fantasy that is at once joyously anachronistic while also taking its high medieval setting extremely seriously, I recommend Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous, which is a book about two journalists who have been reporting on the Grail quest, and what happens when every knight who goes into the chapel comes out with what appears to be the Grail, and they have to navigate the news landscape and also the political landscape in the aftermath of that. It’s really, really good; it’s very funny at times but also takes itself very seriously, and the seriousness pays off.

Tequila Mockingbird: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It! If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast.tumblr.com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes, along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast.neocities.org — N E O cities.

[1] Lleu is of course talking here specifically about the first book; he’s never read the sequels or prequels and cannot speak to their handling of romance.

[2] To be honest, Lleu got Rue and Prim mixed up here. Not relevant to Tequila’s point, though.

[3] Actually 20.