My introduction to Romantasy feels more like dirty fan fiction – I HATE that I love it…
Violet Sorrengail is the daughter of a General and a Dragon Rider. Her sister is a Dragon Rider, her brother was a Dragon Rider. And now she is forced to become one to. Despite her lack of skills and her small and weak frame, Violet is forced to attend Basgiath Academy where she must content with some of the toughest and most ruthless young fighters in her kingdom. It’s fight or die, and Violet must rely on her wit, and the occasional helping hand of Xaden Riorson – son of great rebel leader – to survive.
Sounds interesting right? That’s what I thought to! Harry Potter for adults who grew out of Hogwarts and instead wanted to see what the Golden Trio would have looked like growing up in Kings Landing. J.K Rowling, minus the disgusting transphobia, meets Martins’ A Song of Ice and Fire.
It’s a good idea, and at times writer Rebecca Yarros makes me believe in this exciting and dangerous world. An academy for Dragon Riders filled with sexual deviancy, psychopathic assassination, and DRAGONS! It’s unfortunately a shame that Yarros doesn’t seem to have a clear narrative beyond her concept.
Fourth Wing, first in what will probably be a long series of books, is far from the greatest fantasy novel out there. It lacks any of the narrative consistency of Brandon Sanderson nor the world building of J.R.R. Tolkien. Its romance is, at best, mildly better than what one might expect from a Stephanie Myers book – but that’s it!
It’s not a good fantasy novel for so many reasons – beyond the premise of ‘small helpless girl goes to school for magic, gets powerful, shags enemies to lovers’ it’s got relatively little going for it. Whilst Yarros certainly manages to capture the danger she imposes on training as a Dragon Rider, it’s hardly enough to keep me interested wondering which of the side characters will live and which will die (although I really hope Ridoc makes it to the end of the series, I love that dude).
The entire novel reads like bad fanfiction – it’s full of smut, the twists come with no warning and the big bad barely even makes an appearance let alone a reference until the last hundred pages (no, literally). The fact that Violet manages to survive the first novel is based mostly on little else but luck and falling for the murderous bad-boy.
Still, somehow, I really enjoyed it. I know, it feels like a contradiction to write and yet I could perfectly explain to you why Fourth Wing has managed to garner such a cult following. For the many of us who grew up reading fan fiction either on Wattpad or Fanfiction.net, we grew up on stories like these. Ones that were built entirely around the main characters romance, where every other character and every other decision makes no impact to the plot. Where you could be ten chapters in and have a plot twist not even hinted at and you don’t even question it – because it’s so damn JUICY!
To a many of us, fanfiction is our shitty teen tv show – our 90210, our Vampire Diaries, our Gossip Girl. To put a metaphor for it, it’s like getting the dirties filthiest kebab after a night on the town – logically you know its trash, but you’re so intoxicated you love it. Fourth Wing is the filthy kebab we readers have devoured after gorging on smut-fanfic mimosa’s and 2 for 1 cocktails of three-way loved triangles. It’s not good, it’s by every definition terrible literature. And yet, we enjoy it precisely because it is dirty. It is classless, a 1 out of 5 hygiene rated take-out on the drunk walk home. When we wake up the next day, we’re ashamed to look at it – at ourselves. So ashamed we have to spend the next month cleansing ourselves with some good literature like Samantha Shannon or Joanne Harris.
And yet, we know we’ll be back in that same shop soon enough. We can’t help it. It’s the cherry on top of a filthy fanfiction Sunday – disgusting and delicious all the same.
