“The Fourth Wing,” he smirked.
An Analysis of the Most Popular Book of 2023
December 2023 Editorial Assistant Book Club: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (April 5, 2023)
“The professional classes have all coalesced into a world of omnivore taste where nothing is great because everything is good.” —Status and Culture by W. David Marx
This quote, which I cannot stop thinking about, is a sharp summary of the state of criticism across the arts. In context this is about the evolution of music criticism, which evolved from 20th century rockism—those who believed that pop was trash consumerism and rock and roll was authentic and artful —to 21st century poptimism, which posits that commercial, seemingly less complex pop music deserves the same critical attention that traditional rock had always received and built gates around. Fast-forward to today and we are in late-stage poptimism—our biggest pop stars like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Lady Gaga are dominant commercially and also critically (including having college courses designed around them). But the optimism around populism has a knock-on effect: the vast majority of criticism in film, music, and books is viewed through the lens of Everything has Merit if People Like it. As the quote says, the result is a feeling that “nothing is great because everything is good.” From Nickelback to fast food chains to reality tv, critics and fans will make the argument that something once considered obviously shallow or unhealthy or exploitative, actually has value because it either entertains or comforts, or brings us together.
With Fourth Wing we are not going to fall into this poptimism trap. What you need to know from the outset is that Fourth Wing is not worthy of criticism. As a work of art it simply doesn’t exceed the bar of quality or originality that is necessary to be considered critically. So, we’re neither going to work hard to find some easy reason as to why the bestselling book published last year (1.5 million+ copies sold) is worth celebrating — e.g., it helps people escape into an easy read, life is so hard—nor are we out to eviscerate this novel as every good critic should when a piece of art comes in a sleek, accomplished technical package but has half-baked ideas. If not criticism, then what? We are going to unpack Fourth Wing, how it is put together as a novel and attempt to unravel why this book got so big.
Frankenstein’s Dragon
Fourth Wing is a Romantasy novel about enemies to lovers Violet and Xaden, who meet in a deadly dragon-riding school/college— she’s a daughter of a commander, he’s a son of the rebellion. The novel’s structure is a Frankenstein of fantasy mega-IP properties, such that you only have to have seen see the movies or television shows of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and The Hunger Games to recognize their clear echoes in Fourth Wing. The milieu is largely reminiscent of Harry Potter because of the elite-schooling element— the book is most like the fourth Harry Potter book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, in which the students have to overcome a series of games, tests, and challenges against wizards for other regions. However, in Fourth Wing they also fight to the death, like in Hunger Games. Game of Thrones comes in when anything regarding the fantasy elements of kingdoms, factions, dragons, or magical bad guys comes into play. If all these examples seem somewhat vague, these comparisons are much clearer to see as you read Fourth Wing; Yarros spends little space establishing a unique world and relies heavily on the reader’s familiarity with these types of popular fictions to fill in the gaps.
On the romance side, Fourth Wing taps into the Reylo trend in fan fiction and romance genre — which is an enemies-to-lovers-esque trope revived by the romance in the newish Star Wars movies between Rey (good girl), played by Daisy Jazz Isobel, and Kaylo Ren (bad boy), played by Adam Driver. The on-screen chemistry between two real actors neatly summarizes why we’re seeing fantasy, a genre closely linked with science fiction, being smashed together with romance in book form. Just like Twilight inspired Fifty Shades of Grey a decade ago, Reylo was a seed that has been blooming in the form of romance and Romantasy novels since 2019.
Yarros’ Frankensteining is not without consequence. Because the Fourth Wing’s influences come from both young adult and very adult literature, the novel has a discordant tone—the characters feel incredibly young at times when the elements of Harry Potter and Hunger Games are at the fore, only for the same characters to then talk and think like they’re in a soft-core pornography film when the romance bit comes into play (late into the book, it’s revealed they’re supposed to be in their early 20s).
Coherence
The word that kept popping in my head to explain the Fourth Wing while reading was “coherence.” Coherence is another term for a logical consistency that plays an important function in all fiction. For example, if an author tells you that there is no cell phone service where the novel is set, you expect that to hold true throughout and to have consequences. This concept is especially vital in fantasy, where the genre’s parameters give writers free reign to make their own set of rules: social, magical, political, and geographical. And Fourth Wing disregards this traditional notion of coherence in fantasy entirely.
The fantasy elements of Fourth Wing are largely assumed to already be understood by the audience and reader because they are so familiar from other books and films. And if they aren’t naturally assumed, then they are introduced as deus ex machina: new fantasy lore appears whenever it is convenient for a plot turn or twist. If someone needs a new magic power—to see the future, to read minds, to stop time—it appears without pretense. Whereas a book like Harry Potter might lay out some parameters, watch the characters struggle for a solution, and then solve a problem in dramatic fashion over a few chapters, Fourth Wing will do all of these things in a few pages for any given plot point. The Big Bad of the novel is introduced in its entirety with only 50 pages to go—everything, from how these evil magical beings look to their magical abilities to their origin story—just in time for when our protagonists need a dramatic showdown. Because Fourth Wing’s prime evil is essentially the same as Game of Thrones’ White Walkers (undead, super powerful, can only be killed by weapons made of a special material, and originate from an old myth that turns out to be true), the difference is palpable in execution. Famously, Game of Thrones constantly foreshadows the White Walkers impending arrival with the phrase “winter is coming.”
Even more puzzling: in addition to mixing YA and adult romance tonality and randomly tacking on new fantasy rules when convenient, Fourth Wing also mixes a traditional fantasy setting—a sort of middle-ages, kings-and-queens milieu—with total modernity. The characters in Fourth Wing have names that a millennial parent might give their kids— Luca, Liam, Aurelie, Dain — and they speak in a vernacular of teenagers that grew up with the internet: they say “slick as shit”; “the fuck you will”’; “I’m not saying you didn’t kick absolute ass by getting here”; “I already knew your parents were tight.”; “you hardly give off snuggly morning-after vibes.” A crossbow is the most advanced non-magic weapon technology in Fourth Wing and they pass down knowledge copying it by hand (no printing presses), but there are mentions of indoor plumbing, taxes and budgets are done in April, dragon riders sometimes wear name tags, and some meetings are convened around conference tables.
One expects yeoman-like sentence construction from a commercial book, cliché, common phrase, repetitiveness, and big, melodramatic descriptors over small, considered choices. Fourth Wing, expectedly, has these, as its characters wink, blush, grit, drip, snap, grin, sigh, mock, and seethe through nearly every piece of dialogue. Eyebrows and heads work overtime on nearly every page to communicate sass, dismay, or lust. A drinking game came to me while reading, to see how many pages in a row a reader could go until they found a page without a cliché or rote phrase.
But the most fascinating part of reading Fourth Wing is that usually highly commercial books balance out workmanlike prose with a felicity for storytelling and a sense of coherence that is very satisfying. The analogy to pop music might be the brevity of a catchy chorus. But from its sentence level to its eschewing of coherence, Fourth Wing is not a novel that rewards close reading but punishes it. Leaving us to ask…
Why is Fourth Wing a Sensation?
It’s not hard to see why Fourth Wing is popular—it is a TikTok video feed of a fantasy book. Each episode is contained, brief, and doesn’t pretend to follow or lead to the next item logically. Fourth Wing ditches complexity, recycling ideas from other fantasy and romance tropes so that an understanding can be reached by the reader with minimal effort. Easy comprehension is taken even further by a pared down sentence structure and choices that don’t require any mental bandwidth to unpack. Descriptions are kept to a minimum unless they are the sexy bits. Action and dialogue are the brick and the mortar, with plot points underlined through dialogue rather than exposition. There is nary a psychological observation in the entire novel. In 500 pages I counted a grand total of four paragraphs that run longer than four sentences (most in the final 20 pages or so).
As the programmer saying goes “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” Fourth Wing’s zero-work style, along with its mixing and matching various familiar elements is precisely why it has massive appeal. This Romantasy is not so much the immersive experience to slip away into — a fantasy — as much as a vehicle for serving readers back comfortable tropes of magical worlds and modern cliches about heterosexual relationships. And although we’ve talked mostly about how Fourth Wing is an odd hodgepodge of fantasy blockbusters, let’s not forget that what many readers are actually here for…
The Sex
My biggest point of curiosity around Fourth Wing was how it would mash up genres, since it is the novel that can credited with taking the fantasy-plus-romance fusion that is Romantasy into the stratosphere. Sex doesn’t happen until about 400 pages into this 500-page book. Before that, the tension is mostly built by the main character Violet looking and thinking lustily about Xaden, the hot, black-haired, brooding guy she’s not supposed to be with. Like many other elements of the book, the hard shifts to the romance genre are often shoehorned in mid-page between the fantasy action stuff, which is about 90% of the book. Although facing near-death constantly, everyone at the dragon academy is remarkably turned-on—Violet, inexplicably, talks about “getting laid” moments before going into a near-death fight.
The sex is a full seven pages long and an actual scene, established and described in a way that most of the other parts of the book aren’t. In comparison to her fleeting attention to consistency, dialogue, and originality, Yarros’ ability to describe action—both the fighting kind and the sex kind—is stronger. Even if there are some groan-worthy metaphors and cliches, it’s not easy to, say, describe a dragon battle and have it be legible for the imagination or deliver a credible sex scene after hundreds of pages of buildup.
Like its name suggests, Romantasy gives readers the permission to engage in two kinds of escapism at once. And just like how the advent of the eBooks allowed Fifty Shades to be read in secret on beaches and subways across the world, wrapping a bodice ripper in a fantasy package (absolutely nothing about Fourth Wing’s marketing or cover would lead you to believe there’s sex in it) has made reading lightly pornographic entertainment easier to engage with for the generations that grew up with Harry Potter, evolved to Hunger Games, and graduated to Game of Thrones. Engaging with the themes and tropes that Fourth Wing feeds the desire for—such as the idea that hot assholes have a heart of gold waiting to be unlocked—is another study for a sociologist to undertake. But as a reader, examining how this novel is put together provides a counterpoint to poptimism: while sometimes pop equates to universality, which was once under appreciated, at other times a piece of art’s broad appeal simply reflects its generality.