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‘Fourth Wing’ Review – The Aesthetics of War

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.

‘The Magician’s Daughter’ Review – Warm and Witty

Beatrine ShahzadLeave a comment

Many thanks to NetGalley and Redhood Books for the arc of The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry. Had fun with this one.

The novel follows Biddy, a sixteen-year-old who washed ashore an isolated and secret magical island as a baby and was raised by the mage who inhabits it. Though she loves her home, she’s grown restless with solitude. When she finally gets the chance to visit the real world, it’s under less-than-ideal circumstances. Her guardian is in danger, magic is in a crisis, and through adventure, she is forced to confront the truth of what she’s been told her entire life.

Right now, “cozy fantasy” is beginning to pick up steam. I’d describe it as fantasy that is more comforting than isn’t, sort of domestic and something that’ll leave you warm. The Magician’s Daughter isn’t precisely a cozy fantasy, but it is very comforting. It’s infused with love and whimsy. As the kids say, the vibes are on point. They make the reader feel as if they’re reading a fun middle-grade fantasy, but for adults. Most witty adult fantasies are adventure/quest novels such as Stardust or The Princess Bride, but The Magician’s Daughter is more limited in scope.

The book plays close to its 19th-century United Kingdom setting, commenting on both its mythologies and historical shifts. The reflections on womanhood and sexism were interesting. Having a heroine who isn’t interested in romance was a good angle for this story, one that allows it to delve more deeply into other commentaries. It touches dark elements and isn’t afraid to confront ugliness, but does so with care and in a way that isn’t offputting. The reader feels safe.

The characters are lovely to be around and the world is easy to slip into. If anything, maybe a lot of the characters are a bit too similar and interpersonal conflict is too easily resolved. If their arguments were more abrasive, the storyline would be more interesting, but then a huge chunk of the appeal would be lost. These characters love each other and this is a story that highlights the good rather than explores the bad.

The prose is lovely and sharp without being too much. Biddy’s monologue has a distinctive voice and the rest of her world is infused with personality. The tone is perfect for the story. In fact, the tone sets the foundation from which all other expectations are built. And so, the tone, the character voice, and the descriptions, all layer beautifully and cohesively in a way that compliments rather than clashes. This work is delicate, but Parry succeeds.

The plot isn’t anything special, but it doesn’t need to be. The magic system, worldbuilding, politics, mythology, and characters are the clear story elements that shine. The plot attempts to string the reader along by offering mysteries to be solved and lies to be revealed, but truly the reason to get to the end is that the reader wants to see all of the characters end up okay and out of danger. In that way, I can appreciate its simplicity. The few attempts to subvert or complicate the plot and story didn’t really pay off.

I really like The Magician’s Daughter, almost to an embarrassing degree. I’d forgotten how much I am enchanted by whimsy-adjacent fantasy. But this was a great reintroduction to that genre, the strange combination of a high-stakes fantasy novel with a low-stakes tone and lovable characters. It was a great palette cleanser after reading Assassin’s Quest by Robin Hobb, I can tell you that much. If you enjoy witty fantasy, particularly those set in this setting, I’d recommend The Magician’s Daughter.

‘Black Adam’ Review- Anti-Imperialism, Innit?

Beatrine Shahzad1 Comment

This is gonna be kind of a weird one for me.

Spoilers incoming, so be warned.

The superhero genre is built on the backs of military propaganda for WWII, but as the genre has grown with the times, so has the look of military propaganda. The United States has become a global police force and uses that guise to invade other countries. Namely, it has a very strong presence in the SWANA region and uses that influence to maintain control over their natural resources (oil).

This topic has been very important to me for a very, very long time. It wasn’t until I read Edward Said’s Orientalism that I had the words to describe what I was seeing on the screen and what it was advocating for. There’s a lot that seems harmless but perpetuates a norm that’s anything but.

Black Adam finally tried to break that streak in a way I haven’t seen any mainstream superhero movie try so far. It has SWANA people both on and behind the screen in some capacity (I peeped an Iranian screenwriter) and you can tell that at the very baseline level, they cared. And, as corny as that is, that means a lot to me so I’ve extended a lot of grace to this movie’s rating when I probably otherwise wouldn’t have.

That being said, the anti-imperialist themes of Black Adam are like if you took shrooms and stared into alphabet soup. Every so often, for a blissful second, the letter would come together and spell it out for you so clearly, but at every other moment, it’s just alphabet soup. The movie is alphabet soup. Even the worst alphabet soup out of a can still has a little flavor to it, some fun times, but it’s still just trying to make sense of a mess.

When the characters look straight into the camera and are like “imperialism bad”, they’re right! The reason, though, that the bluntness was needed is because the allegory collapses under its weight. With the number of motivations and groups of people involved, it loses sight of the point.

A huge contributor to the confusion is that the allegories don’t have clear equivalencies. The “Intergang” that occupies Kahndaq, the West Asian city where the film takes place, is described as a militant force, but has no country nor ideology. They take these resources… for what? This is never made clear, which later becomes a problem.

At first, based on a bit of a monologue at the beginning, you think that the Intergang is some sort of stand-in for a western force. They’re called imperialists. But later, you learn that Ishmael, who we thought to be working with the protagonists, actually is the leader of the Intergang. So, this isn’t an imperialist force at all, is it? The leader of this group is descended from the region, and they’re abiding by his personal interests, rather than operating under a larger system that imperializes and conquers other lands for foreign interest.

When Ishmael asks Adrianna, the woman he betrayed, how she could side with foreign invaders for teaming up with the Justice Society, I first thought he was being a hypocrite. He’s the leader of Intergang after all. But then I realized that Intergang is not defined enough to be classified as a true imperialistic force, and I just had to accept that his question is genuine. The Intergang, then, is not an imperialistic force in the narrative, but an allegory for oppressive regimes in West Asia.

Black Adam, then, becomes a movie about a foreign force helping liberate a foreign country from its domestic, oppressive, militant regime. Which, let me remind you, is exactly how imperialism actually operates in Central and West Asia. Western (American/British) interests intervene for their own personal interests, destabilize the region, and an oppressive regime takes control in the subsequent power vacuum or in the midst of instability. Those same American forces then use the oppressive regime as justification to occupy and fight a quasi-war in the country as a “global police force”.

Which, correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the Justice Society describes itself as a “global police force” or a “global peacekeeper”? Adrianna tries to tell them off for not caring before when they were occupied, instead only showing up when Black Adam does as a threat to be neutralized, but I thought this movie was supposed to be against imperialism aka foreign intervention? It gets murky.

The Justice Society, known as the Justice Society of America in the comics, got its American association chopped for this movie. Probably because the optics would be bad if they pointed attention to how the global police force that forcibly inserts itself in foreign entanglements is, indeed, American. They’re bossed around by Amanda Waller, a US operative, so they’re still American. Just toothless all around. I’m still going to shorten their acronym to JSA, though,

I don’t actually have much to say about the JSA. My brain kinda turned off when they were on screen. What can I say, they were charming to watch. The big emotional moments didn’t work for me, because I didn’t see enough of them to care about them as people. But… they were fun to watch, even if their justification for being in the film, framed as heroes, is weak. Every explanation for why it is okay for Black Adam and Adrianna to work with the JSA feels so “this needs to happen in the plot because it has to” that I don’t think there would be much value in trying to make logical sense of it. But it did, certainly, muddy the thematic waters.

At the end of the movie, the JSA and Black Adam dispose of the dictator together. It seems here that the writers realize they have a power vacuum problem. Putting Black Adam on the throne would be just replacing one dictator with another, since he’d rule entirely through brute force and quite literally does not understand modern politics considering he’s like 5000 years old. And so, they end the movie just resolves with “oh Black Adam will just be the protector of Kahndaq”. So, who’s gonna run this city then? The answer can’t just be “the people”. That’s not how it works. It’s a question that the movie doesn’t seem to be very concerned with, but it has to be if it wants its allegory to check out. Otherwise, the loose strand could very well play into pro-Imperialist and Orientalist narratives.

I want to make it very clear that I don’t think that this was the intention of the narrative. The writers wouldn’t call out Imperialism by name, try to write scenes about the people coming together to fight against their oppressors, and give Adrianna back her agency in multiple scenes to reflect how domestic issues should be handled between their people. When the characters get on a soap box, they are right. Imperialism bad. The west doesn’t care. The people should stand against their oppressors. Yada yada. But, the plot and players involved are so convoluted and toothless that the allegory crumbles.

Another thing that Black Adam wants to do is deconstruct the idea of what a hero is. Which, cool. Whatever. That’s never been an idea I’ve been particularly interested in. I’m just not a morally gray girlie, but I see where others find appeal.

The thing about Black Adam is that his personal moral code is supposed to extend to a larger point about what’s acceptable when fighting an oppressive force. Or, at least it thinks it’s challenging that notion.

But here’s the thing, it doesn’t really challenge what it means to be a hero. Within the context of DC superheroes, maybe it does a little. People get sad when Superman and Batman kill people. They don’t see that as very heroic. But that’s because they’ve been established as heroes that don’t kill and their enemies have been established as people they have a modicum of empathy for.

The audience is not uncomfortable with the bloodshed Black Adam spills throughout the film, from the brutal kills from the beginning to the end, because he is killing people they do not care about. In America, the heroic thing is to murder your foreign enemies. And so killing Intergang, some nondescript oppressive, militant, occupying force occupying a West Asian country, is nothing shocking. We’ve been conditioned to accept it as a necessary evil to the point where most don’t blink twice anymore. It’s almost a staple of all action and war movies that take place in this region and the people who do the killing are always framed as the hero.

There’s a false dichotomy in Black Adam. The JSA doesn’t kill people, they believe in due process, so the only way to actually get rid of these oppressive occupiers is to be willing to resort to Dark Violenceâ„¢. Because Black Adam is violent and Killsâ„¢, he cannot be a Heroâ„¢. In reality, that’s the exact justification that America uses to drone strike West Asia and kill a bunch of innocent civilians in the process. And for the most part, historically speaking, that decision has been framed as the morally correct thing to do in the mainstream. A difficult decision, but one for the greater good. Those who make those hard calls are the heroes of the story.

If Black Adam was an American hero and the movie took place in America, I’m sure we’d be having a very different discussion about the place of violence in revolution and fighting your oppressors. But alas, this is a very specifically a SWANA film, and so its context lies in how violence has historically been wielded in that region and for whom it’s acceptable.

If you want to read an interesting essay about oppression, Ursula Le Guin essay titled “A War Without End” is a great one. It’s about the willingness and responsibility of people to fight against their oppression and injustice and the cost associated with it. It doesn’t come down very strong on a final solution, but it explores a lot of questions around oppression that Black Adam tries to simplify. I was reminded of it a couple of times during this film, and if you have me thinking about Le Guin during your movie, you’ve already lost bro. It’s over.

On to normal movie stuff, when the Rock was cast as Black Adam, I asked myself, “Are they really going to send one of the most easily charismatic actors in Hollywood to the emotionless gulag?” The answer is yes.

The Rock was fine. I did not care about his character. For 70% of the film, we think that he’s a kid with a big heart who was willing to die as a martyr. When we learn that isn’t the case, it really doesn’t recontextualize the Rock’s performance. It’s so stilted that it’s near impossible to get a read on the character’s personality.

This movie’s third act also felt an hour long. There were just so many action sequences that felt like they were supposed to signal the end. Honestly, they didn’t feel like a drag or a slog individually, but so many in succession tired me out. The huge third-act fight sequence with the JSA and Black Adam fighting Devil!Ishmael was just a mess. There was so much going on emotionally that I couldn’t bother to care about any of it.

The third act is also where the themes go all wonky. They just want the cool factor of Black Adam fighting alongside the JSA. Which, I get it. But also, at that point, I found most of what was going on the screen to be completely pointless. The movie had already found a good resolution with Black Adam deciding to submerge himself, his self-acceptance arc as believing that he can do right with the power he’s been given even though he isn’t pure of heart is extraneous. Why should I care? It wasn’t something that we saw him grapple with throughout the film. Even without knowing his backstory, it would’ve been possible to outline this insecurity Black Adam has. Instead, he proudly blows stuff up and kills people. The shame around his morality is such a sharp 11th-hour turn that I’m not sure what to do with it.

On a positive note, both in the narrative and in this review, I kind of love the presence Amon, Adrianna’s son, had throughout the film. His character’s presence was strong and meaningful in the narrative, and it was a fun addition. Screw that Black Adam vs Superman crossover bullshit, I wanna see Black Adam’s Amon become besties with Shazam’s Freddie Freeman.

In the end, the movie was a movie. There were characters in it who did things. I am almost beginning at this point to lean into the zaniness of it. No, I did not laugh once, but the humor kept the movie from sinking. You need the camp, besties. It cannot stand on its own. I appreciate the attempts at heart and authenticity, but it needs cleaner writing to pull it off. I know this script was written and had to be rewritten by new screenwriters and I’m sure they had numerous constraints. But man, the final product was a mess.