 I heard your cries and I decided to answer, so fourth wing, yeah I'm finally doing that. This thing just came out a couple of months ago and it has grown insanely fast. It's probably the fastest growing and most popular fantasy thing to come out in years at this stage. Like it only came out in May, the sequel is coming out in November already and it already has half a million ratings on Goodreads. It has its own subreddit with 11,000 subscribers and it's genuinely shocking for something to grow in popularity that fast. Like normally it takes time and I'm not gonna say that this was like AstroTurfed, like this was corporate marketing trying to look organic or anything, but it wouldn't shock me if that were the case because normally these sorts of things take times. Now this book apparently got popular because a whole bunch of people were talking about it on TikTok and if people are hyping up a book on TikTok that inevitably means that it is shit. Like that just, that means it's bad, full stop, end of story. The first half of fourth wing I just thought it was stupid and bad and cliched. Like it had a couple of good things in there but overall it was just very stupid, very poorly put together and remarkably clumsy, but in the second half that's when I really started to just despise it. The second half is when I just decided I hated everything about this book and that's when I decided okay this isn't just gonna be a brief review, this is gonna have to be something where I go a little deeper. Fourth wing genuinely feels like somebody took Red Queen's refusal to break the mold in any conceivable way, which if you didn't watch my Red Queen video go do that. It took that, it took Lightlark's complete incoherence, throne of glasses, obnoxious verbosity and put all of those in a blender with a dash of the characters only ever thinking about how horny they are. Like you put all those together into this unholy amalgamation and that's what fourth wing is. Now like all popular books on TikTok, again they're all shit, but this fourth wing was judged entirely by how much it panders to its audience. You know like last year a lot of people on there hated Lightlark. They didn't hate Lightlark because it was bad, although it is, they hated it because it didn't give them the exact same enemies to lovers romance that they've read 35 times already. Like fourth wing gives them exactly what they want, when they want it, in the exact way that they want it. That is why it's popular. Also this book is new adults, which means it's exactly the same as young adults but characters say fuck sometimes. That is literally the only difference between young adults and new adults. It follows the adventures of Violet Sorengeil, a 20 year old woman who is drafted into the military of the kingdom of Navara, not the real life kingdom of Navara, a fantasy one in a fantasy world. Now she wants to be a scribe because she is actually disabled, but her mother forces her to become a dragonrider instead. Also her older brother used to be a dragonrider and he died years ago during a rebellion and her sister is currently a dragonrider. And then the entire book is just Violet going to this special dragonrider academy dealing with people at school being mean to her while she is horny. And you might think I'm joking, but no, that is just the entire book. That is all there is. And before I really get into everything I hate about this, I'm going to have to do an entire summary of the plot and then we can deal with all the issues one at a time. So spoilers ahead if that bothers you, but the thing is you could literally read the first chapter of this book and then know everything that happens after that. But still, spoiler warning, part one, the summary. So we start with Violet being conscripted or rather it's a little while after she's been conscripted and she and some others have to climb a big stone parapet up to the barracks where the dragonriders live and train. It's like their first test, I guess. Violet has known this is coming for a while so she's been training hard, but even after six months of intensive training she's still in really horrible shape. She was training to be a scribe for most of her childhood, but she was forced to be a dragonrider. Like her mother is the general, she's actually in charge of this whole academy that trains the dragonriders and her mother is forcing her to become one because ego. Like that's literally it. Just no daughter of mine is going to go being a scribe, which is really not a good way to go through a military academy. You know, you can't be forced to do it, you have to want it. But whatever. Now Violet is upset that everyone calls her weak, even though she is. Like whatever disability she has, I believe it has a real name, but it makes her like really physically small and frail and it also makes it so her joints will stretch and tear really easily. So it's not a super bad disability, all things considered, but it is still a disability. So she just shouldn't be able to be a dragonrider and she knows that but her mom is forcing her to. But in spite of being physically weak and frail, she also scored really high on agility and speed exams apparently. We never see those, but apparently she scored high. Now she climbs up the parapet and while doing so, she instantly makes friends with a girl named Riannan because she notices that Riannan is not wearing the proper types of boots to climb this and so they switch one boot so that Riannan will have some proper grip, which tells me that this school does not supply the students with proper equipment and this first test, which could kill you if you do it wrong, they just sort of throw you on it and they don't actually care about you doing well. Okay, as if to hammer that point home, a lot of people fall off and die while they are climbing up this. And at one point Riannan just tells her, stay away from Zaden Rierson, which is the name of another guy at the academy. Basically, he is a high ranking rider at the academy. He's a couple years ahead of them. He's actually, this is his last year before he graduates and he is the son of the leader of a failed rebellion. Now Violet immediately sees Zaden, like you know, why bother introducing the concept of Zaden before he actually becomes relevant, you know, just, he shows up immediately and they spend an entire page describing how hot he is. Now the two of them really shouldn't get along or at least Violet thinks they shouldn't because her mother, the general, actually killed his dad who was leading the rebellion and during the rebellion his dad killed Violet's older brother. So because of that she just kind of assumes that he hates her and while they're climbing up the parapet, again this takes quite a while for them to go up and a lot of exposition happens while they're doing this, while they're climbing a boy named Jack tries to kill her but Violet stops him by holding a knife to his balls and then he vows revenge on her. When they finally reach the top of the path Violet meets Dane. Dane is someone who was not mentioned before this point but he is apparently her best friend forever and they've known each other since they were little little kids. So after like 30 pages Violet already has eight stereotypical love interests. Now while climbing she hurt her knee so she goes to get it treated and Dane helps her walk over there and she offers to pretend to have sex with him so other people will think he's like a stud. I don't know and she's very obviously super interested in him and she tries to flirt but it just comes across as just very very painful like the book is trying to tell us that she's witty but the wittiest thing she says is leather does it for you to Dane so I mean she doesn't really come across as witty in the slightest and also after this point we learned that 67 people died while climbing the parapet. So 67 before they even reach the school Violet also gets assigned to Zaden's squad which is called the fourth wing you know because the Dragon Riders are split into different groups and they're called wings so there's like the first wing second wing fourth wing etc and I just want to say that it does annoy me when the first book in a series has a number in it other than one you know like this is fourth wing it's the first book but it has fourth in the title you know it's the same reason I refuse to read I am number four they also hear a dramatic speech about how half of the cadets will be dead by the end of the year I really trying not to get into my later problems right now during the summary but oh my god it's hard at moments like that it is so hard so later a violet talks to Dane some more and he says that she got assigned to the fourth wing because Zaden wants to kill her because they're just allowed to kill cadets here you know cadets are just allowed to kill each other and their superior officers are just allowed to kill them for no actual reason and then Zaden comes in and he acts kind of hostile and then violet runs away and then they go to a class which is specifically called battle brief and they return to this a couple of times throughout the book but it's really only important this first time basically battle brief just goes over recent fights in their war and we get exposition about how Navara has dragons and a magic barrier and they've been at war with another country called Peromiel which has griffin riders and they've been at war for a very long time and I guess they're trying to make it seem like it's going poorly but it does not seem like it's going poorly at all later violet shows up in sparring and she witnesses Jack the douchebag from earlier who she held a knife to the balls of and he kills somebody and then violet fights another girl who was also the child of a rebel just like Zaden and her name was Imogen there's actually a lot of kids who were children of rebels that were forced into this school as punishment for their parents actions and they're easy to identify because they all have tattoos on them which identify them as such that becomes maybe not important later because nothing in this book is actually important but it becomes relevant so Imogen tries to kill her but it doesn't succeed because violet actually has some dragon scale armor which she's been wearing this whole time it was a gift from her sister and then she refuses to submit after getting her arm put in a lock and then her arm gets broken and then she gets magically healed and her sister Mira gives her a notebook which was written by their older brother and it's full of advice now violet realizes that she's really bad at sparring so she tries to think of a way to work with it and she finds out that the instructors all set up their sparring matches a week in advance specifically to weed out the weakest people there and violet realizes that if she can find out who she fights in advance then she can actually prepare for it and do better against them so one night she goes outside the school to gather up some poison berries and while she's heading back she sees Zaden and Imogen the girl who broke her arm and a whole bunch of other rebel kids at first she thinks they're up to something nefarious and they would actually be put to death if they were found to be gathering in groups this large but it turns out they're actually just giving each other advice on how to survive and then one of them just randomly says they want to kill violet but Zaden says no she's mine to handle and then when the others leave he catches her and he could kill her but he decides not to as long as she agrees not to tell anyone about the meeting because again it would get them executed and then she agrees and then they leave and it's all good the next morning violet poisons somebody's food and then she goes to class and the professor tells her that she's smarter than her siblings and super nice and just the best thing ever and then the point her poisoning someone's food becomes relevant because then there's the sparring match where she fights a guy named Oren and it turns out she actually poisoned his food nothing deadly but he's sick so he can't fight very well so she wins and then this goes on for a couple more weeks like she finds out who she's gonna fight she poisons them ahead of time and they're weak so she's able to beat them so she wins every single match but one opponent actually goes to the healers before their match is set to begin so she winds up having to fight Zaden and again they mention that he can kill her without consequences even though he is her superior officer but you know that's just a thing that can happen and he basically just fights her and wins very handily like he disarms her of the many daggers she has because she has like 12 on her at any given time he lets her know that she that he knows that she's poisoning people and he tells her to try using deadly strikes against him he's like you know you're not gonna beat me like that try using deadly strikes again they're in training and of course while all this is going on violet just cannot stop thinking about how effortlessly gorgeous Zaden is I really can't emphasize to you how much of this is just violet being horny like so much of the book is just that so later violet goes on an obstacle course and she doesn't make it to the end and she complains to Zaden and he tells her well there's another way to complete the course and then after a while she figures oh I can just climb using my daggers so she like jumps towards a wooden wall and rather than just scrambling up with her bare hands she stabs it with her knives and is able to climb up that way which is technically allowed isn't she just such a genius really she just she's just such a genius who is totally working within her limitations so later they go and meet some of the dragons and a red dragon decides to just kill one of violet squad mates his name is prior and she just the dragon just kills him because that's just a thing that again happens a lot and is very common at this school now some dragons smell her dragon scale armor and they sniff her and they're like she's cool so they don't hurt her and this all happens in October and I know it's happens in October because violet specifically mentions it happens in October October exists in this world so I guess this world just has the exact same orbit as earth now jack and company just attack violet while she's looking at the dragons because again they are just allowed to murder each other that's just a thing that happens she throws a knife at one and apparently she quote knows where to hit because she has weak joints like yeah I don't think it's that impressive to know to just hit in certain spots with a knife it really doesn't matter where you hit that it's always going to hurt so a big black dragon comes along and then chases them all off and that dragon chooses to bond with her his name is tear neonak dragons in this book are all given Scottish Gaelic names which is kind of neat I guess I wish more people spoke Scottish Gaelic then you would know my last name is pronounced Tullis it's not a joke that's how you say it so she climbs on Taren's back and they fly off and later they land and violet is mad at her mom because her mom doesn't seem to care that she almost died and basically throughout this whole process violet bonds two dragons one is Taren the big black one and then there's a much smaller golden one named and Darna who is actually so small she can't carry violet on her back and Taren is also mated to Zaden's dragon whose name is Seagal or something along those lines I guess I shouldn't talk shit about not being able to pronounce Scottish Gaelic names because she's bonded to just such a cool powerful dragon violet gets a mark on her back it just covers most of her back and everyone's like whoa that's so cool and impressive violet and then Dane kisses her and that doesn't lead anywhere but you know Dane kisses her and now she's a target for other people who want to bond with Taren and get his power why would Taren bond with them after they kill his rider who he seems to like a lot I don't know but they seem to think that if they just kill violet then everything will be great they try doing flight training and violet falls off a whole bunch but she doesn't die obviously but she keeps falling off Taren's back while they're trying to fly around which seems like an important skill for a dragon rider now later a bunch of people including Oren the guy she poisoned earlier tried to kill her again because she's just so special and so cool and they like come into her dorm room and try to kill her in the night and then Andarna appears and actually freezes time to save Violet's life which is kind of cool and then Zaden comes and he kills Oren and he kills five others he does it very casually too which I don't know what that says about him but it says something and he helps Violet with her injury and they're both really really horny and it turns out that because Violet is bonded to Andarna she can also stop time and this has to be kept a secret for some reason I have I have no idea why it has to be kept a secret now later Zaden calls out the leader of the attack who is another wing leader named Amber Mavis because there are too many fucking characters in this book and then Taren just executes her on the spot which is apparently allowed but he just he just does that a little while after that we just suddenly learned that squad battles are a thing it's like a competition that each wing goes through and they just they compete that's a thing that happens and the winner this year will go to the front lines to shadow an active wing of dragon riders while they're fighting which doesn't feel like a reward for winning so much as a regular part of training a reward for winning would be like a week off or something but whatever now later Violet is really horny because Taren and Seagal are mating and their emotions are pouring through the bond and Zaden shows her how to shield the bond and then the two of them make out for a bit and then he pushes her away and says we shouldn't do this because reasons Rhiannon also tells Violet that she's the most powerful rider of their generation which I guess makes some sense because she bonds with two dragons which is apparently a thing but also Violet's not that impressive stops sucking her dick Violet spars Jack for a little bit and she kicks him in the balls and then he tries to cheat by using magic and then she hits him with ground up oranges which apparently he's allergic to and then she wins and then we go to chapter 25 and it's already in the middle of the squad battle like Violet already competed and won at this point but we I guess we didn't need to see that like we just need to hear after the fact that the main character is the bestest coolest person of all time the only actual competition we get to see is the last one where they have to find what would be most useful to an enemy if they were to attack the school and Violet and company decide okay what if we just get a map of troop movements and that would probably be the most valuable thing to them so they steal it from her mom's office and while they're there they learn that there's rumblings of another rebellion in Tyrell which is the same place that Zaden came from where there was a rebellion not long ago and after they bring the map to the judges they win and their reward again I feel like we should put quotes around the word reward there is that they get to shadow the wing that has Mira who is Violet's sister and then while they're shadowing them a battle comes and they all have to immediately leave Violet literally has to be dragged off to avoid helping her sister and it ends with them flying away and seeing a whole bunch of griffons close in on the keep and later we hear that the riders all survived and there there was no casualties there were no issues whatsoever later they're flying and yet again Jack attacks Violet he stabs one of her squad mates a guy named Liam and then Violet fights him and finally she activates her magic which she has been unable to do up until this point and she actually kills Jack sending him falling down a chasm to his death turns out she can actually use lightning yeah she can just shoot lightning from her hands and stuff which means this is the second young adult series in a row that I have done where the main character uses lightning and I don't know what to do with this information and just to hammer home how special and cool Violet is a little bit more we learn that she is the first lightning user for a hundred years awesome so she's super sad that she killed someone which like what did you expect dumbass like at this stage she's had several opportunities to leave like her mom would be mad at her but she's had opportunities to leave and go train to be a scribe or something and she hasn't taken any of them because she's like no I I want to be a dragon rider I want to prove to people that I can do this but like what did you expect you were gonna have to kill people at some point dumbass you should have just been a scribe I guess so Zaden comforts her because of that and then they kiss for a bit and then a little while later they just they have sex and it's like pretty graphic so I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail about it but I will say that Violet is so into it she shoots lightning and sets the curtains in the room on fire and then later it turns out she also sets some trees outside on fire too which is just just beautiful they are now approaching the end of the school year it doesn't feel like a year has passed but they're now approaching the end of the school year so Zaden is about to graduate and then they have sex again and then the academy is under attack which is the first actual threat of the story so they all rush out and get prepared to fight back and it turns out okay it's actually just war games it's a drill basically and then they're like okay cool it's a drill so they go fly off and then Violet and Zaden sneak off to try and have sex again and it turns out there actually are griffin riders out there so it's not a drill like griffin riders come and they find Violet and Zaden while they're sneaking off to fuck because all of her problems are self-inflicted now it turns out Zaden along with most of the other kids who are marked as rebels because their parents were built are actually traders and he gives a bunch of information and some weapons to the griffin riders and this is where the book really just loses coherence because the griffin riders say that there are these creatures called veneen that are coming and they are super dangerous and apparently there are legends about them but we haven't heard anything about them up until this point and the veneen are also kept super secret for some reason even though they're going off and attacking entire cities and stuff and anyways they go off to evacuate a town and Violet decides to help them out because oh it's the right thing to do and while they're doing this a weavern shows up and those aren't supposed to be real and then there's just a giant battle that happens Liam dies you know the guy that gets stopped stabbed earlier he survived but now he dies and then Violet takes out a veneen by herself even though earlier we heard that it only takes two of them to destroy an entire city but during the fight Violet gets poisoned and then she falls off of Taren's back while he's flying and then she gets caught by Andarna and then we go to the epilogue which is told from Zaden's POV of course it is Violet survives the poison just affects her memory and makes her lose some of her memories we don't exactly hear which one she loses but she loses some of them I guess and then her brother Brennan comes in because it turns out he's alive and then he says welcome to the rebellion and I guess that exists and that's the end that is where this ends I hate this book so much like I like I said the climax is where things just completely lose coherence because while it was bad up until that point at least it all made sense part blurk there is no conflict so now that you know the book and you know what happens in it let's talk about everything that is wrong with it and the big thing that is wrong with it or at least the thing that is wrong with the actual plot is that there is no conflict like hearing the summary you might think it's about Violet wanting to fight the evil griffin riders but no it's not really about that in fact that's barely even mentioned until near the end it's not about Violet trying to overcome her disability and succeed as a dragon rider either it's also not about her romance with Zaden the two of them just are in love at some point the closest thing there is to a conflict here is all of her fellow students trying to kill her but they don't have any real reason to do that it's just that they're trying to kill her so it's like a weird high school drama with bullies except the bullies are actively trying to murder the protagonist and everyone involved is a fucking adult i want to hammer that home the youngest of these people is 20 years old and the rest of them are much older than that these people should not be acting this way and i wouldn't think too much about this if it was just a regular high school drama because you can have characters that hate the main character for no reason if they're just jerks and they try to make the mc feel bad about themselves but them trying to murder her just for existing in their vicinity is not just stupid and it's not just really dull motivation for a villain but it just makes no sense like navara put the kingdom of navara puts all this effort and time and resources into training them and then just lets them die and on top of that even if we're not talking about all the waste that navara is putting through here by allowing students to just murder each other for no reason would you trust these people after graduation you know if they tried to kill you like if jack killed violet then her friends and her lovers her older sister and everyone they wouldn't trust him afterwards or what if zaden decided to kill violet like let's say he actually was a psycho like she thought at the beginning and then later he graduates and he has to work with mira her older sister like would she want to work with him would they be able to trust each other fuck no they wouldn't be able to like this entire military would be incapable of working together if they just allowed people to murder each other like that and again that's not even really what the story is about because they're never really a threat to violet at all like she's protected by zaden she has the magic dragon scale armor which saves her life more than once and also she has lightning later on so she's like super powerful and no one can stand up against her so there's no actual threat here and violet is way more preoccupied with zaden's than with all the people that are trying to kill her like she barely even thinks about jack and company outside of the scenes where they are actively attempting to murder her like i said this book takes takes place over the course of almost an entire year but it feels like a week passes you know because there's little indication that the characters are changing or that their relationships are growing and changing or even that they get better at anything like they just suck at things or specifically violet sucks at some things and then she's better in a later scene you know there's not any real training here and in the background we have the big war against the griffin riders of peromial now why are they fighting this big war not important i guess so we just we don't need any depth i i guess like we don't need to know why there's a war going on just that there is a war going on but if we don't have any depth to it at all we there's no depth to the villains there's nothing interesting about them then in order to get the audience invested we're left with making the villains be a big threat to them but that doesn't work either because at no point do we see the griffin riders in action you know even at the very end we barely see them do anything and they're partaking in this big battle right alongside violet like a smart rider would show them in battle early on to show them being you know really powerful being strong and so then the audience would wonder how violet could possibly get good enough to stand up to people like that in this world griffins and dragons both channel magic and dragons also have a barrier in place around navara which prevents griffins from using magic when they cross into the country which means that the heroes are more powerful than the villains which is not really great for tension and drama again like they don't feel like this powerful overwhelming or intimidating force in any way when violet's sister comes under attack and she has to run away and she's like no i don't want my sister to die we're supposed to be worried but we know nothing about what the griffins and the riders can actually do you know like if at this point we had understood that they were stronger or they weren't stronger but they could overwhelm dragons with sheer numbers or they had magic which wasn't necessarily stronger but very difficult for them to counter like if we understood any of that then we could genuinely be worried for violet's sister but that's not there and even then the conflict against the griffin riders is thrown out before the climax like i think that peromial is supposed to be the good guys but again we're given like no explanation and no context to understand what's going on it's just at the end that i guess they're the good guys now and violet's brother is in the rebellion so we have no idea why they're fighting they just are and at the end i think it's revealed that the navara government is evil now we've seen little indication of them being evil so far like we've seen that the conscripts are treated awfully but that seems like incompetence more than anything or if you're stupid it seems like really harsh training but really it just seems like incompetence rather than them being evil and then there's just these secret magical creatures that are bad that the heroes have to fight that come in out of nowhere and are i don't know what role they play in this other than that they are bad so there's a rebellion going on but we have no context for it we don't understand why it's happening or what's going on like we don't even have a scene of some nobles sneering at dirty peasants so we're thinking like okay the dirty peasants are revolting or something so all of the quote epic conflict in this fantasy novel just winds up being action figures bashing into each other and the thing is that might be fine for people who just want smut but it takes 370 pages to get to the first sex scene that's the only thing in here i can think of that appeals to any sort of audience but it takes that long to get to it why would they even bother you know why wouldn't they just read something that's shorter and gets to the freaking point and it's also weird for this to be considered a smut book as opposed to just a book with some smut in it because it has all this fantasy stuff but then the fantasy is just there to have lazy life and death quote unquote bullying so if fourth wing was shorter it had no murder and it was set in a regular school it would be exactly the same as it is now up until the climax where the fantasy stuff actually starts to matter so there isn't a real story here at all is what i'm getting at there is a plot like there are events that happen but it's not really about anything that's why i really only started to hate this book in the second half like the first half was bad but the second half is where it dawned on me that nothing here matters at all part q violet is the worst protagonist ever all right before i get into this i do just want to say one thing violet is an actual character she's not a total blank slate she's not likable by any means but she does have a genuine personality like right before this i read red queen and the protagonist of that book or that book series mayor barrow had nothing she was a complete blank slate 100 there was no personality or anything to her violet sorengeil is selfish stupid overly reliant on other people to do anything unable to control her sexual urges and only does anything when someone else tells her to do it and that's bad yeah but nine times out of ten i will take a protagonist i hate over one who actively bores me so i'll say that much violet is better than a lot of terrible young adult protagonists the only time i liked her was when she was poisoning her sparring opponents before their matches you know it's cheating but that sort of ruthlessness is a strong character trait and it made me start to feel like maybe she would have to you know work around her disability or work with it in some way but no she essentially isn't disabled by the end of the book because she just powers through and through the power of her willpower her disability no longer matters by the end of the book like you hear that people in wheelchairs you just don't want to walk badly enough just try a little harder and you'll start running like before except violet is going through all this trouble and she doesn't even really want to be a dragon rider like i said her mom forces her to be one and if this was a story about someone trying to become a rider despite everyone around her telling her she can't do it it might have been good a disabled character having a dream and everyone around them going no you can't do it but then they decide they're going to do it anyways like that that could be really good but it's not that it's about a girl being pushed around and doing what others tell her to do at one point zaden makes violet a saddle so that she can ride on terns back more easily and won't keep falling off but she doesn't want to use it because everyone will know that i need it which number one why don't riders use saddles like i don't know it seems like something that would be useful to them but whatever but also like girl get over yourself you know sometimes you need help you should accept it there are some things you just can't do if you're disabled and this mostly bothers me with regards to all the fighting here you know like if you want to so show somebody that is at a physical disadvantage to other people then they should have to work around it rather than barreling through it like for starters magic exists in this world so if she just focused on honing that then she could blast all her opponents with lightning and then she would be a character who okay she's not great at fighting hand to hand but she's still a valuable part of the team a good example of this sort of thing would be like professor x from the x-men you know he's paraplegic he's in a wheelchair but he's still very useful he's the leader of the x-men and arguably he's more powerful than a lot of the x-men but violet isn't like that at all she doesn't use any magic until very far into the story and the magic system consists of magic existing and nothing else like we don't know any sort of rules or limitations to it so it's not like she finds clever ways around that now failing that if we're not going to have violet be really good at magic to make up for her being bad at hand to hand she could be sneaky and ruthless you know like the poisoning stuff early in the book is a good example but she really only does it for a little while and then forgets about it and then all the rest of her fights and everything she doesn't seem particularly ruthless she just is fighting good now so despite being really small in frail violet is just very good at fighting by the end of the book she uses knives and is very good just due to that and that irked me because in the real world there are martial arts that were entirely created by people who were very small and very weak like judo was created by a guy named jigoro kano and same with people who are disabled they've also done this like there's a russian guy named viktor spiritanov who was a soldier during the first world war and actually lost the use of his left arm during combat and he invented sombo like both of these guys were disabled or weak or however you want to put that but they found ways around that and they invented these styles which rely a lot less on you know physical power and more about using your opponent's body weight and their momentum and everything against them and at the beginning of this book i actually identified with violet quite a bit because i am also a small and weak guy so i think about this sort of thing too but the difference is being disabled or weak doesn't mean that we have to be helpless it does mean we have to work within our limits and violet doesn't actually have limits she just pretends to have them to give you an idea of just how little violet actually has limits and how no one seems to care about them at one point she is sparring against ryan and using a staff and zaden tells violet not to use it because quote it'll be easy to knock out of her hands which is not how that works and she should just stick to daggers now that's the exact opposite of the advice he should be giving her because a staff has a lot of reach and versatility like it's actually great for smaller people and daggers i mean there's nothing wrong with those but if you're slashing at an opponent with something that has that little reach you are at the risk of being grabbed and at no point does she have to like learn to counter that like zaden okay if he if you miss and then he grabs your arms like this here's how you can throw him or here's how you can squirm out of the grapple or something like there's no point in this book where violet has to work within her limits and become a great writer in spite of that she just powers through and then it's just not a problem and even if we set all of that aside she's just a jerk i'll never get over how quickly move on around here how callously death is swept under a rug and trampled on minutes later gods zaden looks good today his brow slightly furrowed as he listens intently to something lamani says then nods hard to believe i had that mouth on mine last night those arms wrapped around me forget second thoughts i just want more oh fuck off oh my god this girl has negative self-awareness like she's literally thinking about how everyone is callously moving on from the deaths of their fellow students and then she's thinking about how hot zaden is and how she wants is if this was a better book i would assume that that was being done as a joke you know it's like being done to show how violet is lacking in self-awareness or how she's a hypocrite or something like good series do this a lot like wheel of time actually has a lot of moments where characters i in their inner thoughts are either being hypocritical or they're projecting their own insecurities onto someone else or they're lacking in self-awareness or you know just stuff like that and it's genuinely funny but in here no that's not the case at all it is just the protagonist being completely right and self-indulgent all the time and i don't really have a good place to put this but violet is just constantly horny from page one to page 498 she is just always horny it is hard to emphasize how often there was a scene that was almost interesting like it was a good character moment or something is actually happening in the story and then it gets interrupted by violet thinking about how she wants zaden to i am not joking in the slightest when i say it is constant like just constant she's not thinking about danger she's not thinking about how she needs to train more or how she doesn't want to disappoint her mother or anything like that she's just thinking about sex and like at that point just stop pretending to be fantasy like this book clearly doesn't want to be fantasy it just wants to be smut so just be smut and no matter what she does no one ever calls violet out for it you know others only hate her because they're jealous of her they never have an actual reason to dislike her even though there are plenty of actual reasons to dislike her and then she tries to maybe have a moment of character development when she feels bad for killing jack but then it goes away after a couple of pages and also it was self-defense so who cares you know like violet is really only in this book to be cool and to be badass while also being kind of a blank slate for readers to project onto and being a token disabled character so the author can point and claim she's being progressive but she fails at all of those simultaneously now if you're actually a person that likes fourth wing if you genuinely like this book let me ask you a question why does zaden love violet besides her being so effortlessly mind-bogglingly hot to him like why why does he love her and counter to that why does violet love zaden there's no real reason she is just the protagonist therefore she is special and important and the bestest boys are gonna be in love with her parts stibidu the other characters aren't even blank slates this book has a pretty big cast and none of them have anything that can be said about them beyond a single sentence maybe two zaden is hot and he fights good and he loves violet he is unfairly punished for his father rebelling and he helps out others who are also being punished but like who is he i really can't say you know he's just a prop for violet to work off of jack is a bully who wants to kill her because he's jealous of her dragon power and is also just a jerk that's it there's nothing else to say violet's mom is a general and a hard-ass who is there to force violet to be a dragonrider that's it mirah is just violet's sister who is also a dragonrider and gives her a little bit of advice throughout the story and then at the end her supposedly dead brother brennan comes back at the end and again it just it it means nothing like we're given no context and we know nothing about this guy he just pops back up at the end the main characters older brother who was thought to be dead popping back up at the end of the book and who also turns out to be working with the rebellion is the exact same thing that happened at the end of the first red queen book as well but and it kind of pains me to say this but it actually made sense in red queen because in that her the main character's brother his name was shade was mentioned a couple of times earlier and he wasn't killed before the story began he was executed partway through the story or so they thought because he had magic powers and so it makes sense that okay he hates the government and he was running away and then he ran into the rebels like that that all makes sense so it all checks out but when brennan shows up at the end of fourth wing we don't have context to understand him being alive or his choice to be a rebel so what does it mean going forward i i genuinely have no idea there's also an evil king who was mentioned a couple of times at the end but we never actually see him and all that matters about him is that he hurts violets friends and do you see what i'm getting at here like literally everyone in the story revolves around violet they have no lives beyond helping or hindering violet they have no personality beyond how they treat violet they have no relationships beyond besides the relationship with violet violet is the linchpin for this entire universe but the book is pretending like she's not she's the center of absolutely everyone's world even though she's not really that good of a dragon rider i guarantee you like i'm predicting the rest of the series right now i guarantee you that through the rest of the series violet will be meeting with leaders of countries and stuff she'll be being rescued by entire armies because she'll be like captured and they'll be like oh no we need to go and help her and they'll like throw away thousands of lives to do so and everyone is going to be talking about how she's amazing and special all the time but at the same time violet is not going to be good at fighting she's not going to be good at coming up with plans and she won't become any sort of leader herself the villains are going to be obsessed with her the entire time maybe one or two will fall in love with her and maybe they'll try to capture her to try and forward their nefarious plans like that in fact they're definitely going to capture her or at least try to capture her to do something evil with her everything bad they do is going to relate to how they mistreat her and her friends like everything bad the villains do is just going to be about violet there's not going to be any real ideological differences but besides doing bad things is bad and violet thinks that doing bad things is bad but the bad guys think that doing bad things is good like i guarantee all of that will happen violet is going to be the most important person ever while also being incompetent unhelpful and unlikable and i know that this section was supposed to be about the other characters and i'm still talking about violet but that's the point here she's so powerfully bad that she ruins the rest of them too like they aren't even blank slates they are just props for her to use part kikibidu the tropes are unearned but they're also all that there is this book can entirely be summed up by simply naming entries on tv tropes ready faux romance school is murder wizarding school handicapped badass wrong side all along that's it that's the entire book there is no twist on any of these there's no subversion there's no surprise and they are not built up to and they are not earned in any way like tropes are not bad okay since literally everything that can be put into a book of some sort would would be a trope yes they need to be earned though like if you want to have a faux romance also known as enemies to lovers then the couple needs to start as enemies so that they can become lovers over time like zayden and violet are clearly trying to be an enemies to lover relevant lovers romance but zayden is not violets enemy at the start she's just paranoid that he hates her and then he does nothing but assist her throughout the whole book and then they're in love they don't have to get over anything they don't have to be tempted by forbidden fruit so there's no point in pretending that they are enemies this book also reveals at the end that the heroes were on the wrong side all along yet that means nothing because the heroes haven't actually fought for navara in any substantial way like they've trained at school that's it like they never went into battle and discovered that they killed someone innocent they never had their ideals challenged and realized that they no longer believed in the cause that they were fighting for they just learned that the other side are the good guys again somehow is not explained well in the slightest like the whole point of the wrong side all along trope is for the heroes to realize that they've done something awful and then they have to work to try and redeem themselves over time but violet and the others have not actually done anything bad so this rings completely hollow the school they go to is very dangerous and people die constantly for no reason the training isn't just harsh it's stupid like it has no safeguards like a single slip and you'll lose a very promising recruit like one of the people who fell off the parapet because they weren't told what sort of boots they needed and they weren't provided with the proper types of boots they could have been the most powerful dragon rider of a generation you don't know that's why you have safeguards in place in training and the fact that they're allowed to murder each other could easily turn any small grudge into an actual fucking blood feud that's stupid use your common sense like if you want to have a bunch of soldiers go through cool badass training you could literally just look at real-world military and special forces training to get an idea of what to work with like if you look at navy seals training or the marine corps martial arts program barely anyone dies in those like it very very rarely happens and barely anyone is even badly injured in the training but those are still very very brutal programs to go through and they produce very very good soldiers officially it's called the leadership room because it tests your fighting skills under incredible pressure unofficially it's called the house of pain and it's designed for one thing to prepare marines for the physical and mental punishment of combat the room is deliberately kept brutally hot over 100 degrees let's go instructors are yelling at you left and right and you have to constantly be pumping weight waiting for your turn to fight the lack of realism here is not the problem it it is a problem but it's not the main problem but it's also incoherent but that's not the main problem either the main problem is just that there's no point to this like it's trying to show off that the school is really dangerous so we can feel that the heroes are in danger but the danger never actually affects them and it also is never used to showcase any sort of flaw in the school's leadership and by extension the leadership of the kingdom like they aren't at this academy for punishment except for the rebel kids who are sent there as punishment which means that violets mom wanted her daughter to suffer the same way the rebels do it i don't know it's unclear like the author just thought it would make people pick it up if she made it sound like the story was dark and dangerous but she never actually made the story or the setting dark and dangerous that is why half of the competition the squad battle in the middle of the book gets skipped over or more than half of it we just skip right to the end like there's no point in putting in effort and having the character struggle because it doesn't actually matter and no one actually cares like that is all fourth wing is at the end of the day it is a thin facade trying to look like something it's not like you go past the exterior and it is completely empty part the themes are just tokenism as we went over earlier violet is disabled but the story is not about her overcoming her disability or working with her disability it's there so that the author can point and say she's a good person for giving quote disabled representation zaden and the other children of the rebels are being punished for their parents actions but violet and everyone else from the start thinks that that's the wrong thing to do like this could have been an entire storyline about how the people of navara are vindictive or paranoid or cruel and violet would agree with their actions but then she would realize oh okay it's wrong and we shouldn't be doing this like maybe the people of navara are so desperate from their war with peromial that they can't risk uprisings and are willing to do literally anything to prevent them including using innocent kids as cannon fodder but no violet just believes it's bad to punish people for the actions of their parents which to be clear it is from the very start so it never becomes a way for her to realize that the government is bad this could have been a reason for her to hate or distrust her leadership like even if she thought it was bad from the beginning but no it's just no thoughts head empty just the rebel kids are being punished and that's bad this could have been an actual commentary about how war can strip entire countries entire societies of their empathy which feels pretty fucking topical right now but there's no actual themes or exploration or anything here it is literally just this thing is happening don't think about it any further at same with zaden and violets romance you know it's supposedly like a forbidden love you know it could easily be a way to show that love can blossom anywhere even amongst people who have been told by society that they should hate each other but no it's not that it's just two hot people fucking how about all these young adults being conscripted and forced to fight for their lives at this academy so that they can be thrown at a bunch of other young adults and who are also fighting for their lives but who happen to be born on the wrong side of an imaginary line that never leads anywhere no one comments on it it's just a thing that happens everyone accepts it and we're not supposed to think about it at all beyond that like war is a very complex topic and this book wants to pretend that it's really easy and really simple to understand how about the bond between dragons and riders it's it's just sort of there you know there's nothing else to say about it people form telepathic connections with non-human entities that have their own psychology their own laws their own culture their own biology like that could be really neat you could do a lot with it but it doesn't affect the riders or their society in any way it's just there because that's what other authors have done before like this book fourth wing is not about anything it is literally just events occurring with very little tying them together part skiddy makey makey makey skiddy makey skiddy makey flop no one involved cared now i know that's a bold claim to make that no one involved in making this book cared but i'm making it no one cared not the author not the editor not the publisher not one of them gave a shit about making this book good and i am confident that none of them cared and just shout out without a single thought because well for starters this thing's about 500 pages and the sequel is coming out only a couple of months after the first book like you cannot write a book that long and polish it get it ready to be put out into the world in that short amount of time you just can't do that but what really made me realize how little they were trying was just one small scene near the halfway mark of the book so i mentioned earlier that at one point violet is sparring with ryan and using staffs and they don't say anything about them they just say they're using staffs it doesn't say what kind doesn't say how long they are you know any description at all would be nice because there's a lot of different types and then a couple of pages later we get our answer it's a bow staff i'm sorry that's not how you spell it that's how it's spelled in the book but it's actually called a bow staff and actually it's not even called a bow staff because the word bow just means staff in japanese so it's literally just one line which shows you how little the author cared and how little effort was put into this book like you could literally just google shit and figure out hey that's not how you're supposed to spell that none of them even tried learning the names of the objects that they were talking about like the real world objects which you again you can just google it and see oh that's what it's called and that's how it's spelled and on top of that if they're calling things bow staffs because i'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be a bow staff they just misspelled it that means japan exists in this world or at least the japanese language exists in this world i guess i actually all of the language and names here are kind of weird but like i said earlier the dragons have scottish gaelic names which is a consistent theme at least but the main characters have a random hodgepodge of names which are usually english sounding ones like violet and jack and liam but then there's also stuff like zaden and orin mixed in there and they also live in a country called navar which is also the name of a region of spain which has a large basque population so it i don't know it just makes the whole world feel incoherent and ill-defined like there's no actual culture or cultures here even lightlark gave most of the characters spanish names you know like that that was more consistent than this it would have been really really simple and easy to give all the places slash characters slash objects names that sounded like they're from the same place like literally just control f and then replace when you have a common theme chosen but they just they couldn't be bothered to do that the calendar is also literally the exact same as ours like they mentioned months like october and may more than once throughout the book which i guess that means this world has the exact same orbit as the earth you know their years are the exact same length they are also tilted like the planet is also tilted so we have seasons and stuff here i guess did they also have an augustus caesar who added the months of august and july to the calendar naming him after himself and his uncle julius i don't know i i guess they do usually in fantasy it's best to just mention seasons to show the passage of time you know spring autumn summer fall unless you're doing something weird with it and if you do want to name months then you should just make up names for months and again unless you're doing something weird with it usually just it's best to make it so that the years are about the same length as a year here on earth so we don't have to think about it that hard and honestly i could go on about this sort of stuff for a while but you get the idea there wasn't a single point in this book where anyone put in any effort they straight up did not care and because of that i'm not reading the sequel like fuck you it's not happening i don't care if it's only coming out in a couple of weeks i don't care if i could get a whole bunch of attention on my channel for reading i'm not fucking doing it okay the audience for books like fourth wing are just actively ruining the fantasy genre at this point and i hate them i actively hate them because the audience who makes things like fourth wing popular are people who just demand pandering constantly at all times they only ever consider reading things where they know every single detail about it before even starting and because of that the authors who are trying to pander to them so that they can actually make a living are just writing tropes and nothing else you know it doesn't matter if zaden has a personality at all just that he is the quote enemy so that he can become a lover to the main character later it doesn't matter if the school being dangerous just makes sense they the audience which demands pandering all the time just wants the heroes to quote be in danger it's also pretending to be a story with serious danger without committing to it so it all just feels really really fake because obviously it is really really fake like even the fifth sorceress as bad as that book is showed bad things happening to the heroes like they had to fight to survive at multiple points and if i'm comparing a book to the fifth sorceress and the fifth sorceress comes across better in any way there is a serious problem the types of audiences who just again constantly demand pandering all the time they've already ruined stuff like star wars they've already ruined the entire young adult genre and i mean sure neither of those are really for me anymore i can accept that but now they're starting to pretend that their stuff is made for adults by just throwing in a couple of graphic sex scenes and some random swear words but leaving everything else exactly the same as it is in every other young adult fantasy series they're turning everything they touch into a single amorphous blob where nothing can be distinguished from anything else like individual genres tropes entire series like none of them are even really separate anymore it's all one big pool of heroin that they are drawing from to get a dopamine hit like it's all completely interchangeable because they're just demanding the exact same shit over and over again to the point where they get mad if they don't get it and that's not what art is supposed to be art is supposed to entertain and offer escapism sure but it's also there to make you think to inspire you to show you another person's perspective like it's not just there to make you zone out for a bit and i mean there's nothing inherently wrong with something that does just make you zone out for a bit the problem is when that's all you consume like you're not broadening your horizons you're actively shrinking them and shit like fourth wing is growing to dominate more and more and more like it's pushing out and making stuff that is made with actual care and it's actually worth reading it's just making it harder to find and as it becomes harder to find it's harder for writers to make a living from and more of them are just going to give up so we're just going to be left with more shit like fourth wing so genuinely fuck book talk fuck everyone who tries to hype up fourth wing and fuck everyone who tries to hype up shit like fourth wing genuinely fuck you you are making the world worse so after that uh yes i will be reading the sequel to lightlark that comes out next month because lightlark is at least entertainingly bad whereas fourth wing is just enraging and uh also i will be getting to everneath sooner or later so thanks for watching goodbye hi everyone you watched to the end you're probably familiar with the patron names that are on screen right now you know you you understand the concept right like these are all the people that send me money once a month over on patreon if you want to get early access to 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