fantasy – existing ironically

‘Fourth Wing’ Review – The Aesthetics of War

May 17, 2023May 17, 2023 Beatrine Shahzad3 Comments

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is backed by the Tiktok Hype Industrial Complex and I’ve got FOMO.

I am going to make one thing quite clear. This is not an unbiased review. I did not go into this book with an open mind. I typically don’t like this vein of fantasy romance, but normally it’s something I’m willing to push aside until the book begins to speak for itself. I had no such intentions for this book, because I made the terrible mistake of reading the author bio before I read the first word of her novel.

“A second-generation army brat, Rebecca loves military heroes and has been blissfully married to hers for more than twenty years.”

A dark cloud descends over my mind. Lightning strikes in the distance. Thunder rumbles underhead.

I am not going to pretend to understand the current politics of being a military wife. I don’t know where they stand on, like, the current war and sending our #troops overseas to drone strike Yemeni villages or whatever. But my guess is that they really don’t care, because if they did, their association with the military would not a badge of honor trampstamped across the backside of their novel. I cannot pretend to know exactly how Rebecca Yarros feels about the current state of US imperialism, the US industrial complex, or US foreign relations, but I can point to that line in her bio and say it makes me deeply uncomfortable. Because, like, what exactly about “military heroes” do you love so much?

A military hero cannot exist without a military villain. They are on opposite sides of the propaganda machine, one cannot exist without the other, and for every military hero you prop up, there’s another person, or rather sort of person, you kick into the dirt. Did you love the movie ‘American Sniper’, Rebecca Yarros? Is that the kind of military hero you love? Because after it came out, there was a rise in anti-Muslim threats.

Yeah, so basically, military brat writes war novel. But even if the book is more anti-war than a Nixon era hippie protest on the steps of the US capitol, I still don’t think military hero worship is cute, or ever will be. I don’t think supporting the US military is cute, or ever will be. I think we should normalize shaming people who support the military. (Veterans are a different conversation, and one that I am not very interested in having right now.)

So. Is the book anti-war? Well. It’s as much pro war as it’s anti war because it’s a whole lot of nothing.

In Fourth Wing, Violet is conscripted into war college to become a dragon rider. It’s dangerous. A lot of people die doing it. Her mom is a hot shot general who basically killed the parents of a bunch of rebel’s kids who are mandatorily conscripted, so a lot of people at the school want her dead. And at this school, you can just do that. You can just kill people. There are some rules sprinkled in here and there, but we basically see a kid get murked during sparring practice and the murderer just shrugs like “oopsies”.

The entire rules surrounding the school and who’s allowed to kill who when and why so many parents are okay with their kids dying and why the war would be okay with their conscripts dying require a lot of suspension of disbelief. And the logic of who wants to kill Violet when also requires suspension of disbelief. At one point someone remarks that after graduating from War University, people will protect Violet to stay in her mother’s good graces. Why doesn’t that protection extend into the school? Surely, if someone kills her daughter, she’d hate them after graduating. Because Yarros needed the plot, and the plot of this book is, “Violet doesn’t want to die.”

It took me about 60% into the novel before I realized nothing was really happening. This book bamboozles you pretty bad. The first chapter is really long and a ton of it is just blatant over the top exposition. Like, the main character literally recites a textbook to the audience. And then the exposition just keeps going. It doesn’t feel like you’re learning about the world in a natural way to progress the story. It feels like you’re being fed exposition through scenes of Violet lusting over another man and trying not to die. And while “trying not to die” sometimes works as a plot, it just didn’t here.

The focus of this book, besides the endless exposition, was clearly the romance. Xaden. Enemies to lovers. Except not really. Yarros never defines them as ideological enemies, only as circumstantial enemies, which aren’t really enemies. Your mom killed my dad. Okay. Same sort of thing happened in West Side Story, but they were on the same page about it. (JOKE).

Oh, but he wants to kill her. Or rather, she thinks he wants to kill her, but he really doesn’t, and the audience knows that, and he tells her that and she just doesn’t believe it. For the first 30% of the book, they don’t even know each other and he most definitely is not trying to kill her. For the next 70%, they are on the same side. They are instantly horny for each other. I guess it could be fun to read in a trashy when-will-they sort of way, but it does not deliver the enemies to lovers intensity you’d expect. I found it dull.

Oh, not to mention that there’s supposed to be a love triangle in this. It’s not really a love triangle, because Yarros was not interested in making the second love interest a desirable option. He’s the classic childhood best friend, and his name is Dain. He’s a squad leader, so logically, within the narrative, he must have some sort of skill or capacity for usefulness in his day-to-day operations. We see none of it. He’s nice to Violet, but overbearing, and not sexy enough. It seems that he has no desire but to abide by the rules and protect Violet. He’s barely a character. It’s trite.

I have mixed feelings on Violet. On one hand, I am a small girlie described as frail and undervalued because of this. I understand that Violet had a chronic illness, so I’m not gonna pretend to relate on that front or comment on that sort of representation, other than the fact that it was incorporated into the novel in a natural way. I appreciated how, in that sense, she didn’t feel like the typical fantasy heroine. Her flaws were well defined and how she overcame them was realistic enough. She’s easy to project onto. Comma. But.

Xaden’s nickname for Violet is Violence. (I found this 2 be CRINGE!) She has this whole arc about coming into her power or whatever, but a biproduct is that she is very dangerous. She can really hurt people. She’s a weapon. This makes her upset, but Xaden is like don’t be ashamed of being a weapon, be proud to be the weapon. Which like. Nice on paper, in an insular sense of “own your strengths”. Bad when you take a couple of steps away from the paper. Terrible when you remember the author is an army wife.

Interlude: I Discuss the Technicalities.

Prose: This is a voicey fantasy. It’s riddled with modern slang and anachronisms, with the narration resembling that of a contemporary romance rather than a fantasy. I don’t particularly like this! It might be your cup of tea! But it isn’t mine! Mostly because it was common on Wattpad when I was 13 and I don’t like reliving those days. I did my time. I have grazed those fields and am now going on to different pastures.

Editing: There were some weird sentences in here. I have a couple of highlights like “‘You know very well the natural pigment seems to gradually abandon it no matter the length.'” One, that’s not good dialogue. Two, badly constructed sentence. Just say gradates. PLEASE. These sorts of mistakes weren’t super common, but when they were present, they did pull me out of the book.

Pacing: This book gave me a little bit of my old Wattpad buzz, but I’m not sure it was its intrinsic quality as a page turner or if it was because I dared myself to finish it in one day (I didn’t). Either way, I do think it’s bloated. Because this book stakes its central conflict on Violet’s survival, once she ends up in a relatively safe position, it loses momentum. There are clear separate acts in the book, but as one ended, it became increasingly difficult to become invested in the next. If her life will always be in danger, what’s the motivation to keep reading? When will it end? Once I hit the 60% mark, boy howdy, I was ready to throw in the towel. Yes, that’s when the romance ramps up, but too bad the romance is uninspired. Like, relies on 20 questions to be endearing type of uninspired.

Dragons: Personalities but no insights. Their backstories were the stuff of legends, not points of connection. I had no idea what their motivations were. They didn’t feel like characters in their own right, merely support for their riders. Yarros tried to dissuade this idea by showing them to be adversarial or blabber something about how they do what they want by their own rules, but it doesn’t really land. The last series I had to read with magic interlinking sex and also dragons was the Farseer trilogy and I think that it was very brave of Rebecca Yarros to stitch together those ideas, but if she was gonna do that, then she should’ve written a book as good as any in that trilogy.

Vibes: People describe this as fun because there’s sarcasm and banter in it. I wouldn’t call it fun, but if that’s what your idea of fun is, go live your life. I’m not your mom. But if you agree with me, then know that this book is not fun.

Interlude: Fin.

I’m going to do my best to sum up my issues with the war sentiments in this book without spoiling anything or going into too much detail. If you want to go in completely blind, tap out now. If you’d be alright with some mild spoilers, proceed with your own caution.

For 80% of the book, you have no clue why these two nations are at war. There’s a throwaway line about how the enemy isn’t content with their resources and is greedy, but we all know that’s not really a reason wars are fought. Yet, that’s all we get. People are dying left and right, we hear about how taxing this war is, but the only ideology behind it is greed, so it doesn’t really feel real.

When we learn about the rebellion, it’s only about the effects of the rebellion. Because of the rebellion, the marked conscripts are orphaned, they hate Violet, they’re ostracized, etc etc. We don’t really know what the rebellion entailed. We don’t know in what way their parents betrayed the kingdom, or if they agreed with that decision. There are no politics, only the effects of said politics, which is why so much of the book seems hollow.

All of this hollowness culminates in some great reveal about the true reason for the war. Call me stupid, but when the book was done I had to go back and name search the countries to try and piece together why it was such a shocking reveal. We were given so little substantial information, the characters believed in so little to begin with, that it couldn’t have been a subversion. There was nothing to subvert. It turns out those dry textbook clippings were supposed to mean something for the story, but it was really hard to keep my eyes from glazing right over them because I had no reason to care about it because the characters didn’t care about it.

Up until the very end, I’d say the last 10%, I would say that this book was borrowing the aesthetics of war as a vehicle for some story about survival. I already hate that. By the end, when we learn the truth, it’s strange. Yarros is attempting to say nothing without having anything of substance to say. The great wool over the main character’s eyes in this book doesn’t say anything about the morality of war or how propaganda operates. If the book was about morality, the main character would have believed in the morality of a cause worth fighting and dying for (she doesn’t). If the book was about propaganda, we would have seen how the government brainwashed her (they don’t push a narrative, only hide things).

I see people bring up the military-industrial complex when it comes to this book, and I must respectfully disagree. I think that people just like… don’t know what that term means. It’s specific. It refers to the way that the private weapons manufacturers, the government, and the military interact with each other to perpetuate war because it is profitable for all of them. If war, then government get to have weapon and Lockheed Martin get to sell weapon. It’s not about how war is profitable because of its spoils or how people perpetuate war out of greed. The military-industrial complex isn’t about how the oil corporations pushed the US into invading Iraq, it’s about how weapons manufacturers push the US into supporting Israel so that they can get paid for the missiles they supply to them. This isn’t a huge deal, just a distinction that I find important, because I talk about imperialistic themes in media a lot and I like being precise.

In Fourth Wing, weapons are brought up in how they relate to the war, but it has nothing to do with the profitability of manufacturing them. Instead, the reason for the war becomes somewhat of a trolly problem. An us or them sort of thing. It can only exist as a hypothetical, and so still, it says nothing.

One thing the book is weirdly consistent with is the necessity of violence. Violet must become a weapon to survive. Violence against a foreign enemy is required in order to have peace. Either we must fight a warring nation to secure ourselves, we must fight with them to secure the both of us, but either way, we must fight.

This, believe it or not, is actually a form of US military propaganda. (I know you are soooo sick of me by now).

The United States Military justifies its far reach into other countries by parading as the global police force of the world. They believe that safety and security can only be achieved under the threat of violence. They perpetuate war by perpetuating the idea that the world needs violence to be secure.

This is part of the reason I found the “Violence” nickname, and the context surrounding it, to be troublesome. It’s why I found the cavalier nature of the slew of deaths to be worrying. It’s robbing war of context, yet still insisting that it is necessary. Death is necessary, but it isn’t something you should worry about unless it’s coming for you. In that case, it is kill or be killed. This is the nature of things.

Except it isn’t. And the book’s insistence that it is frustrated me. I don’t care if she corrects this in a sequel, it’s bad storytelling. Not only is it careless, it is lazy. If people are dying on page, there should be a good reason, or at least the attempt of a real good reason, other than to create stakes. A character becoming a weapon out of necessity is boring. You may disagree with me. That’s fine. But it’s boring. I am so bored.

So yeah, Fourth Wing. Not it. (I know I talk about a lot of things in this review, but by far, its biggest sin is the terrible exposition. So yeah.)

(I wish this was a silly review poking fun of the fact that you needed magic to use a pen or other weird convoluted aspects of the worldbuilding, but depictions of the military and war in media are much too important for me to disregard. Sorry I’m like this. I’ll find something silly soon.)

For more writing on imperialism and military propaganda in media: see my Black Adam review.

Race Without Racism in Fantasy

January 16, 2023May 17, 2023 Beatrine ShahzadLeave a comment

When I was in college, I took an anthropology class. Its first midterm asked, “Is race real? Is it important?” Maybe it was phrased a little differently, but that was the gist of it. Though I knew the answer, I pulled at my hair at the idea of condensing it onto the four lines provided. Because race is complicated.

Race is not “real”. It’s a social construct. It’s more modern than the average person probably thinks, coming about in the 1500s and subsequently becoming very closely tied to the Atlantic slave trade. It groups people together by phenotypical traits, things that are observable like skin color or facial features. It’s a classification based on others’ perception of you, how others find a place for you in the world, rather than any sort of personal self-identification reflective of cultural upbringing. Race isn’t real but it is important insofar as it allows us to understand racism.

Racism is a system of oppression built on race. It’s a list of stereotypes and beliefs of inferiority based on the way that someone looks. Over time, this definition has expanded somewhat to include more specific ethnic and cultural signifiers, but it was invented around the idea of observable traits. Much of the specifics about racism can become complicated and contradictory and cluttered, but I will not dedicate much time to the nuances. What is important to know is that most people’s understanding of race is not based on any cultural understanding of how people in that race act, it is, rather, an understanding of how an outside force views a group of people.

Asian-American is only a useful phrase insofar as it explains the shared experience and treatment of those who have been grouped together as Asians in America. It’s more of a description of shared oppression than anything else. Any discussion of culture is divided by country, a discussion of ethnic background. There are cultural similarities between China, Japan, Korea, etc, of course, but though they all eat noodles, the dishes themselves are unique to each culture. The languages are different. They practice religion differently.

This is all important because many people in America have been conditioned to think of both cultural and physical otherness through the lens of race first. And race is understood through the symbiotic relationship with racism. So, what happens when you try to yank racism out of the equation but view society through a racial lens?

It gets kind of weird.

I am all for not depicting racism in fantasy when you’re not planning to make any sort of commentary on it. That’s great. But. You still, then have to put thought into how you depict people of color. Your first instinct to that news is “of course I’m careful not to have my BIPOC characters fall into harmful stereotypes”. And to that, I say that you’re still thinking of these characters through a racial lens, in which the way they’re depicted has more to do with others perceive them than how their culture has shaped their identity.

The default fantasy setting is European inspired. The cultural norms that writers don’t think twice about putting into their books are based on European, or modern western, sensibilities. It is not a blank slate. It is defined by a real world culture. And so, when you take a character of color and cram them into the world without any discussion of cultural differences, you’re having them conform to a culture that isn’t theirs. Their only claim to diverse representation is the color of their skin and their physical features. Which, you can argue that in your world, people who look different all have the same cultural background and your world doesn’t abide by the same regional distinctions that inform physical differences that this world does, but you are being lazy. Also, you’re full of shit.

Because there is a real-world counterpart to the idea of a racist-free utopia in which white people and people of color all share the same cultural sensibilities and coexist, and it’s the casual racist’s hope for a post-racial America. The really hardcore racists, the fascists, want to send all the people of color back to their countries or force them from white spaces. But the casual racists, they don’t mind people of color– as long as they act like white people. As long as they share Christian sensibilities and conform to what’s “normal”. Those are the good people of color, and if we ever want to be free of racism, people of color should all strive to be good and stop highlighting differences and shaking the table.

So, I guess this is a plea for authors, especially white authors, to think about how they depict people of color in their books. Think about their ethnic or cultural background. Think of the way that ethnicity operates in your world, the different regions and people who operate it and how they interact. If you want to do the post-racial American utopia because you’re lazy, whatever, but at least acknowledge that’s what you’re doing. Allow room for nuance. Your choice comes with consequences. This is a common critique of contemporary books, white authors writing characters of color without any understanding of how they differ from white people, but it’s still a criticism worth exploring in Fantasy. Because if the author does not take the time to world build every detail, people will fill in the blanks with their understanding of our world, so writers must be conscientious of what doors they’re leaving open.

It is possible to not have racism in your books and still depict characters of color, but it is important to still acknowledge the differences between them. People of color have different cultural backgrounds than white people and that’s fine to depict. In fact, it’s good. Difference should be celebrated and explored. Do not depict to claim ownership of cultural elements, but introduce and acknowledge. In fact, without racism, the cultural interaction could take a very different shape. They could meld and share more than they do now, and that’s an interesting way to world-build. Creating different cultures and reflecting on how they interact and grow together is a better sandbox to play in than a blanket culture that probably is western inspired. It’s just important to consider how they society got there.

I can imagine that there are a few white authors feeling very frustrated right now. A “damned if I do want to include diversity, damned if I don’t” kind of attitude. Which, I gotta say. If being told to think about depicting characters of color further than skin deep makes you feel overwhelmed or upset, then I think you should… rethink your worldview. Rethink how you interact with your marginalized friends. Writers are meant to be curious, and if you don’t think different cultures are worth learning about and depicting, then you’re not very curious, and also probably not a very good writer.

I received an arc of Lightlark by Alex Aster and read it before the average person did. It was marketed as a diverse Hunger Games, which didn’t turn out to be true. Of the main cast of six rulers, only one seemed to be a person of color, a Black man named Azul. After the book was published, I was shocked to learn that, apparently, according to the author, our main character was also supposed to be “Latinx/indigenous”. Which, like, What does that even mean?

The only descriptions of the main character’s physical appearance are green eyes, thick lashes, and skin that is “naturally tan”. Not only could this describe a white person, but these features can be found in West Asia and other regions as well. There is no Latin America in the Lightlark universe. And when she says indigenous, indigenous to where. The regional groups of Lightlark are divided by magical ability rather than skin color. Azul is the ruler of the Skylings, but there are pale Skylings. So, geographical indicators shouldn’t be indicative of physical feature, but indigenous implies that they are. Or rather, the author wants us to impose a modern understanding of race onto her fantasy world, which just does not work.

Lightlark exemplifies the issue of relying on representation that is only skin deep, even in Fantasy. If there was some sort of cultural distinction implying her background, something that resonated to Latinx/indigenous readers, then this confusion could have been avoided. The representation the author claimed would have been obvious to see, and easy to empathize with. This is the difference between thoughtless and thoughtful representation.

Also, there is the issue of fantasy depictions like Robert Jordan’s Aiel in Wheel of Time. They’re desert gingers. Tall, pale skinned, red haired, and home to a cruel and unforgiving desert. The desert had not always been a desert, which explains how gingers got there, but the optics are still weird. The way that the Aiel must veil themselves to protect from the sun, the steps they take to survive in the desert is reminiscent of how many desert-faring real world cultures did so, such as Arabs. This is just how humans survive in the desert, but these practices and beliefs around the desert have been folded into the cultural dress and belief in the real world, belonging to peoples who, for the most part, don’t really much resemble the Aiel. The ethnic groups of the desert are very diverse, but it was clear he was emulating whiteness specifically. The desert has shaped the people who have lived there for generations, shaped their culture. Learning from their practices and depicting their land yet refusing to represent them is strange, and although it is a made up world, it resembles erasure.

I am not going to pretend to offer some sort of catch all solution to this issue. Race is complicated. For example, Black Americans have been forced to adopt a shared culture through a racial lens because their ethnic histories were lost in the slave trade. It isn’t my place to dictate how Black people should be represented, only to encourage authors to consider this history when they depict this racial group.

The point of this article is to bring light to an issue, to challenge how you have been thinking about representation in SFF novels. It’s also worth noting that I’m writing from a western, American perspective. It’s meant to start a discussion, rather than end one. I’m tired of reading Fantasy books in which brown faces are just that- brown faces. Because truly, I believe that if we begin to consider the cultures from which we borrow the features we want to represent, it can only lead to a richer novel. Many authors already grab cultural inspiration from around the globe, but now it’s a matter of depicting and crediting them in a careful and thoughtful way alongside thoughtful characters. And as always, do not tell stories that are not yours to tell.