Fourth Wing and the YA Vortex
I have to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this post: this is not a review of Fourth Wing. I haven’t read most of the book, nor am I currently feeling well enough to do so. This is more an explanation of why I bounced off it so quickly and viscerally when I tried to read the sample, but in a way it’s not really about Fourth Wing at all; it’s more about a particular trend I’m noticing in the adult fantasy genre that very much doesn’t agree with me.
After I briefly mentioned the book in my Gizmodo round-up, Rebecca Yarros’ dragon novel seems to be taking off in a big way, showing every sign of becoming A Thing in the publishing world. Given the lightning speed that pop culture moves at today, that means we’ll probably have a movie or streaming series adaptation within a year, and an aborted attempt at a cross-media Dragonverse by Christmas 2025. Naturally, I had to get on this bandwagon early, so I downloaded the sample of Fourth Wing (or to give it its full current Amazon title, Fourth Wing: Discover TikTok's newest fantasy romance obsession with this BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick! aka FW:DTTNFROWTBBCR2BCP!) and hopped on board.
It…well, let me walk you through it. The book starts with this:
The following text has been faithfully transcribed from Navarrian into the modern language by Jesinia Neilwart, Curator of the Scribe Quadrant at Basgiath War College. All events are true, and names have been preserved to honor the courage of those fallen. May their souls be commended to Malek.
Does anyone else find this sort of thing annoying, or is it just me? The “this is an actual historical document I have acquired” gimmick was a feature of early novels and genre fiction back when they were considered new and experimental, doing it today just feels pointless. From my own perspective, front-loading the book with world-building fluff and Proper Nouns is also a turn-off.
That’s not actually a big deal though, it just bugged me. Lots of fantasy novels have cringe-ass opening material, it’s no worse than a map with locations called “The Troll Ocean” or whatever.
On to the actual opening chapter, and let’s play a little game. Read the following without looking up anything about the book, and try to guess what age group it’s aimed at:
Conscription Day is always the deadliest. Maybe that’s why the sunrise is especially beautiful this morning—because I know it might be my last.
I tighten the straps of my heavy canvas rucksack and trudge up the wide staircase of the stone fortress I call home. My chest heaves with exertion, my lungs burning by the time I reach the stone corridor leading to General Sorrengail’s office. This is what six months of intense physical training has given me—the ability to barely climb six flights of stairs with a thirty-pound pack.
I’m so screwed.
This is YA, right? It couldn’t be more YA. It screams YA. It could be the Type Specimen for post-Hunger Games, Game Of Thrones-influenced young adult fantasy novels, based purely on these paragraphs alone. “Conscription Day”, the clunky prose (“conscription day is always the deadliest”), the melodramatic narrator, the first-person present tense, it’s all here.
Now read it again, but this time I’ve fixed the one-word alteration I made to the previous sample:
Conscription Day is always the deadliest. Maybe that’s why the sunrise is especially beautiful this morning—because I know it might be my last.
I tighten the straps of my heavy canvas rucksack and trudge up the wide staircase of the stone fortress I call home. My chest heaves with exertion, my lungs burning by the time I reach the stone corridor leading to General Sorrengail’s office. This is what six months of intense physical training has given me—the ability to barely climb six flights of stairs with a thirty-pound pack.
I’m so fucked.
It’s YA, but there’s fuck-words and sex to hastily convert it into an adult fantasy novel. Which doesn’t work, because fuck-words and sex were actually fairly common in young adult literature before conservative Americans codified the modern YA genre as a place where you can describe children being murdered in graphic detail but can’t put in too much cussin’ and ungodly content, so really, this is just YA. I’ve read lots of YA. I know how to recognise it. This is YA.
And that’s what this post is really about, because friends, I have literally lost count of the number of times I’ve cracked open a hyped-up new “adult fantasy” novel only to get my eyeballs blasted with the most YA prose ever published.
Why is that a problem? Let me break it down for you.
First off, a lot of YA is bad, and consequently a lot of YA-masquerading-as-adult fiction is also bad. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to say that, but let’s be honest here. YA publishing strategy ever since the Twilight boom has been to try to cash in on whatever the latest trend is by scooping up a huge glut of material and dumping it all on the market in the hope that something will catch on.
Publishers seem to have eased back on the amount of books they churn out due to diminishing returns in recent years, but this still leads to the same fundamental problem, which is that books that aren’t good enough for publication get fast-tracked out the door solely because they align with the current trend. It’s similar to what happened with early fantasy and SF during the pulp era, and that also resulted in the market being flooded with unreadable garbage. This strategy is never going to result in anything but the average quality level of a genre or demographic going down.
During the height of the Twilight and Hunger Games booms, the majority of the YA market consisted of this dreck. Since writers are heavily influenced by what they read, this led to a new generation of YA authors whose only reference pool is cheap, formulaic trash that was published in order to cynically cash in on a fad. It also led to a new generation of readers who grew up on this stuff and don’t know or care to demand better (again, see pulp-era SFF readers). The result is a feedback loop that causes an inescapable race to the bottom. At some point in the last twenty years the YA market turned into a whirlpool powered by greed, and now it’s grown to such a size that its outer edge is sucking in other markets.
That’s a big picture issue, though. On a more personal level, the real problem is that I, an average Ronan browsing the adult fantasy shelves (assuming these books haven’t been placed in the YA section by booksellers who aren’t fooled by this shit), am looking for adult fantasy. By which I don’t mean grimdark gore-fests about straight white dudes hacking babies and pregnant women apart (hello r/Books, that sentence was just for you), I mean stories with depth and nuance and complex characters. Stories that weren’t written for teenagers. It makes me grumpy and disinclined to purchase books from the same publisher again when that’s what I’m led to expect, but do not receive.
…Okay this is turning into a rant, let’s get back to the book and I’ll provide more evidence for my “this is YA” claim now that I’ve explained what I mean by that and why it’s a bad thing. If you’re not on board with my central thesis, feel free to check out of this post now.
Don’t worry, I’m going to discuss BookTok later. I haven’t forgotten.
So our heroine, Violet, is arriving at Basgiath War College on Conscription Day, the day when all the twenty year olds get drafted into the Navarrian military and join the forever war the country is apparently embroiled in. Violet is being tested to become an elite Dragon Rider even though she hasn’t been groomed for the role since birth like most riders, and also she’s disabled due to some sort of congenital illness. But her mother is the commander and also an asshole, so Violet’s getting tossed into the dragon’s den to, everyone assumes, die instantly.
See her mom is also a Dragon Rider, which is the school club that all the cool jocks belong to, whereas her late dad was a ner…I mean, Scribe, which is the club that all the uncool losers are part of. Violet wants to be a Scribe as well, but her Mom’s not having any of it, especially not since her older sister is the star player (sorry, soldier) on the basketball te—I mean, Dragon Rider squad, and do you see? Do you see why I have a problem with this?
In a novel that’s supposed to be about young people being ruthlessly conscripted into a bloody war, I shouldn’t be able to instantly map all of the characters and plot concepts onto a suburban High School setting. It’s like I’m reading a fantasy AU fanfiction of a different story. You can’t do that shit with All Quiet On The Western Front. Hell, you can’t even do it with your average military fantasy potboiler.
Why is her mom the commander? Why is her older sister, the favoured golden child who we’re explicitly told isn’t supposed to be here, present for this opening scene? I’ll tell you why, it’s because this should be happening in a suburban kitchen in Ohio, and even though the words on the page say “Dragon Rider” and “Conscription Day”, they’re actually talking about college admissions and whether Violet (didn’t even have to change her name for the comparison to work!) should be allowed to turn down the volleyball scholarship and Kai Cappa Mocha sorority membership her rich mom bought for her and go to a community liberal arts college instead. As experienced by you, the assumed reader, who went through something broadly similar in your recent past.
Is this the “New Adult” thing I keep hearing about, that publishers should put out books tailored to the experiences of twenty year olds in order to fill the gap between YA and adult fiction? Because if it is, I’m starting to see why that hasn’t existed before now. By all means write about twenty year olds, but write about them getting addicted to drugs, or dropping out of college, or struggling with bad relationships, or working in shitty jobs, or volunteering in a foreign country, or trying to make it as an artist, or anything except this anodyne shite.
It’s not just the plot setup that immediately shoves the book straight into the YA Valley despite its attempts to pretend otherwise. There’s also the writing. We’ve got:
Environments that are so thinly sketched out, it feels like people and objects are popping out of a featureless void
The protagonist interacting with disembodied body parts (“Worried brown eyes look down at me as strong hands brace my shoulders.”)
Characters robotically expressing every emotion that goes through their head via facial features (“It’s like that fever stole all your coloring along with your strength.” Grief flashes through her eyes and her brows furrow. “I told him not to keep you in that library.”)
Flimsy excuses to describe everyone’s appearance in detail as soon as they step onto the scene
Action used incorrectly in place of dialogue tags (“I grumble”, “I counter”, “Mira seethes”)
Extremely natural expository dialogue (“Just don’t try to channel power without being a bonded rider and red-eyed monsters won’t hide under your bed, waiting to snatch you away on their two-legged dragons to join their dark army.”)
We’re only on page five and the main character already seems insufferable. No, I don’t know why this became such a common feature of YA novels, but for some reason it did
Whatever the fuck this is: “Double standard for the win.”
No really, I didn’t make that last one up. It’s actually in the book. You can write a fantasy story with contemporary slang if you want, but you have to be really good at it, and Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps this ain’t.
Apart from the baffling inclusion of years-out-of-date internet slang, these are all problems that could be alleviated just by reading a decent amount of well-written fiction. But if my theory about the YA Vortex is correct, a lot of genre writers these days aren’t reading well-written fiction, they’re reading other books that also have all of these flaws. And now people will read this book, and the cycle will continue.
And of course the other factor in all of this is BookTok.
See, the problem is that BookTok has bad taste and most of the things they recommend are bad.
…That’s it, that’s the whole argument. I don’t like BookTok. They should Tok better Books, in my opinion.
I could discuss a lot of other topics here, like the way the romance genre has been swallowed by trope-based writing and how that’s affecting adjacent genres, or the whole uwu cinnamon bun thing that I’m already detecting off this despite the ostensibly gritty setting, or the way so many genre writers’ primary literary inspiration these days seems to be the Twitter arguments they get into instead of actual books. If I sat down and read the whole thing, I could probably say something about the Chronic Illness Rep that’s listed among the book’s selling points (literally, a lot of publishers sell novels like they’re cars now).
Like, in a blog post. You could call it a kind of “review” of the book. Hypothetically, if I could bring myself to read the rest of it, I could make a post like that. It would probably be pretty fun to read.
Anyway, see y’all next time!