fourth wing *could* have been good...

you ready kids I usually try to dress a little bit more on theme for these videos but I got this sweater um and I'm not taking it off there's that hello hi what's up nerds welcome back to my channel my name is Maddie if you're new here I hope your day is going well we're gonna be talking about a book this book oh wait no that's not the right one wrong book this book I actually don't have the copy anymore because uh 123 people still have this on hold and it took me 10 weeks to get it from the library so yeah let's talk about four swing by Rebecca yarrows so I read this book over the course of a week ish and up to about the halfway part I was on board I was enjoying myself surprising I know now let me be very clear I don't do rant reviews typically speaking going into them to Dogpile on the book later I too want to enjoy the things that I read and with this particular book I was very intrigued by the people that I saw liking it and the people that were like trashing or being very upset by the fact that this book was not what they were expecting um so I definitely went into it open mind as much as possible but I did have a couple of misconceptions about this book before I ended up getting my hands on it fourth Wing gained traction on Tick Tock and for the most part I had the assumption that one it was y a this cover looks like Yay to me like screams Wyatt this synopsis sounds y a and number two that it was a romance fantasy not a fantasy with a romance I was wrong on both accounts I also want to say I did have another assumption I thought it was called Darkwing for a really long time um and I kept being confused by the fourth Wing thing I I'm still actually a little confused on that um but I kept calling it Darkwing Duck in my head too that was fun let me explain a little bit more about the other assumptions that I had if you were living under a rock let me tell you what this book is about Violet is a scribe it's the only thing she's ever wanted to do her dad was a scribe and he died so now she's got dead daddy issues and she wants to sniff books for a living but just as we meet Violet our main character we also meet her sister a dragon rider and her mother the Dragon Rider and her mother basically says Hey sucks to suck you can't be a scribe you're going to Dragon riding school she's a wee bit concerning for our main character because she has a chronic illness that would make that feat very impossible for her but instead of like explaining why her mother wants her to do this she immediately gets thrown in line to the school her sister tries to give her some like helpful hints like find Dane here's some armor also stay away from that one guy that wants to kill you which already in like the first chapter of the book is like so much happening for a new adult novel but additionally it sets up no motivations for any of the characters other than violet wants to be a scry but really that's only relying on her relation to her dead dad and it's not exactly strong enough for me to realize why she wants that other than she just likes writing books or something because a scribe at least to me doesn't necessarily work in a library a scribe is someone who Chronicles history but that doesn't seem to be the way that this book actually goes but I'm getting off track let's go ahead and refocus here to fix the fact that we are speed running the plot at this point Violet decides in a very obnoxious way that she needs to World building dump and she does it because it's an anxious take of hers which is interesting for like about 0.5 seconds and then becomes incredibly annoying because even though she's describing the world around her because she's got this thing where she likes to just speak facts out loud none of the facts are relevant to the story or the plot at that point and it just completely feels so wildly unnatural no one would do this maybe they would list like facts about animals or something like that but like the way that she describes like the continent in the world it just doesn't make it easy from what I know Euros is not a fantasy writer and I can definitively say that if she would like to continue writing in this genre I would highly recommend building more of your world pre inciting incident but that's just my recommendation I'm just a connoisseur of fantasy recommendations that are set at military academies happen to know quite a few there are so many elements of the world in fourth Wing that just need to be flushed out on a couple of different rewrites and I would actually find this world relatively enjoyable if this book hadn't just been published without really a second thought to how the structure of the world Works which I know is probably what everyone has touched upon in their reviews on this book but it really was very grating even at the jump because we have no explanation of why Violet's been made to do this no explanation of what is actually happening and she's info dumping things that don't have relevance at all to explaining that and it doesn't even really feel like one of those books where you're just kind of thrown in it just feels like there wasn't World building so we're gonna just list off a bunch of [ __ ] about the world that's supposed to help you understand the world but it really just comes off as info dumpy and stupid oh I said I have the couple of misconceptions I did on find out that it was new adult while I waited 10 weeks for this book to come in at the library so I was expecting some spice some heat so to speak I found while I was reading the book that was really interesting is that despite the author being a romance author this to me didn't feel like romanticy this felt like a very strange attempt at trying to combine a why a novel with a smutty romance novel and it doesn't work General I just feel like if this book was just why a it would have been a lot more fun for me um but because Euros didn't pick a lane we've got this kind of amalgamation of strangeness that still reads as I said like a first draft and if we'd Rewritten it a little bit better it would have been good and I'm sure there's a bunch of you in the comments going write your own book blah blah blah I have and I'm working on rewriting it because it helps if you rewrite it it gets better with rewrites just saying the closest I can compare this book is to like if the Hunger Games and acotar went on a date but had no idea what to talk about with each other I can't stop thinking about you despite the fact that you killed my whole family my whole family died right before my very eyes and then I was conscripted into being the government's plaything like tonally these two things do not make sense romance is just forced like as I'll get out so what fourth Wing ends up becoming is this like lukewarm fantasy with an incredibly tepid romance and then a [ __ ] ton of people liked it but as I said but as I said I did enjoy pretty much how what I read about halfway through was gonna probably be like a three star it wasn't blowing my mind as I said the World building was grading it didn't seem like we had a lot of thought process going into it but halfway the book turned South for me I for the most part enjoyed the Hunger Games uh-esque style of writing it didn't really matter at the time that the world wasn't really making a lot of sense because we were in the military academy and it's a fun little dragon story I like fun little dragon stories and then the book lost in its own damn sauce so let's backtrack a little bit here the cadets get have to clamber over this wall thing to get to the academy because as many people have pointed out it's very necessary to kill off as many of your military Elite as possible before they can go fight the war that you're fighting that makes complete sense Miss Violet is hanging out with Rhiannon and her new BFF and then she also hangs out with this guy named Dylan which I thought was a very interesting name to have in a fantasy novel but he dies like a page later so bye-bye Dylan Violet does end up getting attacked on this parapet walk Thing by another guy named Jack he's kind of a [ __ ] that's his whole personality um but she manages to escape because she likes knives where she reunites with her bestie Dame here's the thing this book has been the one that's tested my reading comprehension skills in a while because when I read the first chapter I thought Dane was Mira's friend Violet's older sister and that they had just kind of known him and violet was like kind of aware of who he was but she wasn't really close to him but over the course of just like three chapters I found out oh no no no dane is supposed to be Violet's best friend despite the fact that that doesn't feel like it was set up at all Dane's whole personality is rules and regulations you know the thing that the captain of the Ocean Gate ignored when he took a bunch of people down and assembourine to view the Titanic Jane rightly thinks that Violet should not be training to become a dragon writer learning to become a dragon writer schooling to be a drink the school doesn't make sense considering her illness he thinks that she probably shouldn't attempt this and he also knows that she wanted to be a scribe and despite the fact that 10 seconds ago Violet was also on board with her being a scribe and not a dragon rider she now then gets angry at Dane for having all the audacity to tell her the thing that she wanted to do herself girly he's trying to help you Violet's motivations make no [ __ ] sense throughout the whole book despite that fact she's called the smartest and most clever when she is not shown to be either of those things Violet is a cheater and she's not even smart about how she cheats which is a whole other subject let's go back to my main mundane here name is comically annoying he's judgy and weird and controlling he's so hot that he Violet just finds herself fascinated with him like the allusions to Tamlin in recent are very prevalent uh while reading this book um those characters being from acotar if you haven't read those books um but here's the problem with that comparison Dane is always right he's right to want to get Violet out of the school she's in danger she could die he was right that her assumption that he she wanted to be a scribe was true but she decided to change her mind without us actually seeing that he was also right to think that Zayn was a little fishy let's talk about Zayden now which by the way we've already met him at this point in the book it was in the first chapter where Violet was just told stay away from the guy that wants to kill you because apparently that's just a normal thing in this world people just want to [ __ ] kill each other all the time their conversation their initial conversation the romance initial conversation the meat cute or the meat stupid so to speak um is as awkward as like watching 8th graders at a middle school dance hi how don't kill me okay like I know this book was written for one purpose and one purpose alone and that was to fill the void that everyone is feeling while there isn't more Avatar books out here um but how did you guys get suckered into this I don't understand regardless of the romance fantasy genre or the romance fantasy tropes I do have one Siri scrape with this genre on a whole and it lies with the white women who write this genre does not get you out of being a weirdo now that that's been said let's move on so Zayden does not get any character development for like 80 of the book which is pretty impressive considering the fact that he is the most ineptic character throughout the whole storyline but in my opinion he's almost if not more annoying than Dane is Zayden is just as controlling his Dane hot take he doesn't believe that Violet can do things on her own so he just does them for her off page and then his backstory makes no sense everyone has kind of reiterated the fact that the children of the Rebellion doesn't going to the elite Military Academy to be Dragon writers doesn't make sense so we're not gonna go in depth on it I was told at one point that Euros was coming under Fire for being at one point a part of the Mormon church and albeit I didn't find a much religious iconography in the book it definitely felt like the religious like notes were just dropped in randomly whenever she needed a new God of something like the god of death shows up the God of Rage I don't remember they were not very relevant to the plotline but there is a point at the end of the book where we find out that Zaden is a pseudo Messiah character for these Rebellion kids and that's pretty weird if you ask me but it is not as weird as making yourself insert character Jesus so there's that once again back to the plot line as many have pointed out the politics of this world do not make any sense and the way that Violet describes the conflict they're supposed to be in is pretty interesting in the lack of a better word she says these greedy [ __ ] are never content with the resources they have they always want us to give more until they've learned to be content with our trade agreements we have no chance of ending conscription in Navarre which like the way that that's worded it's really undynamic and almost propaganda-like like War propaganda like the the people that they're fighting aren't satisfied with their trade agreement so we're just going to keep trying to kill them until they are gonna back down and calling them greedy [ __ ] is very generalistic you know this just especially considering the fact that there are children of the Rebellion against her own country like it's interesting to me that she doesn't see any sort of gray between her team and the other team I did spend half of the book a little bit confused about all of that but I was able to just run with it because War school and Dragons oh yeah let's talk about the dragons I was told that I would enjoy the dragons and for the most part I did about a third through the book there's this thing called the threshing where the new Cadets walk by the dragons uh and they get uh basically bonded with the dragons goes as well as you could prajin and character that's ever main character bonds with dragons this is where I started really understanding that this book has not gone through any rethought process because the concept of having two dragons is completely foreign to everyone including the dragons themselves and it's established that the dragons that talk like telepathically to their writers have just given these people no information about how their culture works and that just seems entirely lazy to me and I feel like it's because the author didn't want to think about how or why this is a culturally relevant to both dragons and their Riders and just decided to blow past it but our main character is super special so she gets two dragons tan tan Tarn Tarn is the biggest baddest dragon ever like he's like 500 years old and he's big and large and Darna is a little baby dragon and she can [ __ ] stop time oh yeah so the dragons can give their Riders power and I think they show up as like tattoos they're called relics I was really having a hard time understanding what this was supposed to convey but now she's got powers yay also this is just a random [ __ ] note that I put in the script there's a point where Violet wakes up in the middle of the night and she's wearing a corset and I don't know if that was established that she needs that to sleep but it was very odd and strange that she would be wearing that to sleep because nobody wears corsets to sleep unless there's like some kind of back issue I think you would be wearing a brace not a corset because corsets do not help whatever Sidetrack moving on and so despite the unbelievability of this situation Tarn and violet are bonded now and they are going to go flying and Miss Violet cannot keep her seat she falls off his back like a little [ __ ] lemon off of a cliff so this giant dragon has to catch her ass hundreds of times like I could get on board with her falling off the seat maybe like once or twice and him being really gentle when he had to catch her poor Widow body and his giant [ __ ] claws um but hundreds of times I just can't see it your honor like you're trying to tell me that this person who has an illness that makes her bones incredibly brittle is being captured from a free fall in a giant dragon's claws that are bone material from what I was thinking a dragon would be made out of and being jolted out of the sky and she doesn't come back with like a [ __ ] ton of broken bones every time bear in mind I do not have a much reference for this particular illness I did have a comment on one of my shorts that I made about this book that the Eds rep was good um but I I don't know if this is possible if there are more people with information about this please let me know I am as you can probably tell a little bit uneducated on the concept but it just felt strange to me that this was this was this was a plot Point she can't keep her seat so he has to keep stashing her out of free fall no but on the subject of Violet's illness she has to work around it which I do find to be an interesting part of the book but the fact of the matter is is that she does it in ways that just don't work outside of a controlled training environment like when she has fighting class she just poisons the kids she's gonna go up against and she does it so very blazing raisingly brazenly that Zayden immediately picks up on what she's doing and then like lets her get away with it because pretty girl I guess I don't know and then on top of that like they have this like American Ninja Warrior track setup and she can't reach like she's too she's too widdle she's too short I'm so sorry I don't mean to be like so like down and like babying her but like I really don't like this character um but she's too small so she has to stab her way up the side with her daggers because remember she likes knives um and she she cheats she cheats remember and once again she isn't a great Dragon Rider so Zayden off screen makes her a saddle and then yells at her like she's a child to use it let's be very clear if she wasn't in a training environment and she was going up against a trained warrior in hand-to-hand combat who wants to kill her she would die because she wouldn't be able to poison them and she doesn't know what they're allergic to I don't understand especially the saddle part is where I started getting really annoyed because like we don't even know what it's constructed out of it's just on this giant [ __ ] dragon's body and we don't know how he made it it just plot device can like it just Zayden just fixed it the zaddy happens to be a [ __ ] talented leather Smith I don't know also by the way Tarn is this giant dragon and he knows how to take the saddle off on his own and put it on on his own I don't know if you've seen a dragon recently but they don't seem to have thumbs or the ability to like put on outfits just saying so here's the thing Violet gets bonded with two dragons and then after that she becomes in [ __ ] sufferable she is whiny as [ __ ] despite the fact that she has two [ __ ] dragons and no one can tell her [ __ ] I had to pause multiple times through the book because she's just genuinely so annoying to me on top of that her and Zayden oh excuse me zaddy and violence as the derivative nickname he gave her at the beginning of the book are now in love despite that never being established they've had like three conversations and most of the time she's just like don't kill me please and he's like I'm wasn't planning on it could you calm down this is where the book just started questioning my judgment out of nowhere because apparently they were supposed to like each other but they hadn't had any situation where that actually happens the only difference is now they're bonded and their dragons be [ __ ] that's it that's the Tweet so zayden's like I can't take advantage of you while you're dragonhorn which like oh [ __ ] gay sure gold star man he teaches Violet how to meditate and she's super good at it like she's never been good at anything before in her life and then there's this random part where they go on a field trip to the front lines and then they get attacked because it's the front [ __ ] lines and they have to run away things just [ __ ] happened in these books and I don't understand if there was any real thought process that went into them oh yeah by the way they're fighting a nation of griffins which if you were unaware a griffin is a lion bird hybrid and from what I know of dragons and Griffins a griffin looks like this and a dragon looks like this so I'm a little confused why we're fighting them it's the Griffins are there just like millions of griffins is that the is that why we have to have as many Dragon Riders as possible and if we have to have as many Dragon Riders as possible why do you keep killing your Cadets like Zayden straight up tells Violet with Tarn she could mow down units of griffins in moments like yes she's got the biggest dragon but aren't there dragons in the field already why are we at War like it seems like you guys have the odds stacked in your favor heavily like at like there shouldn't be a war going on if you're just going up against Griffins with dragons like there isn't there is no [ __ ] way so after they run away from the the field trip and go back to the academy there's this very weird scene tonally speaking where Violet is having to like a normal conversation with someone where there's these weird Millennial innuendos because this book has so many of those and then she's told that her sister is not dead and she just breaks out into tears fear tonal shifts of the crass tonally weird 13 year old boy humor is very strangely juxtaposed upon a very stressful emotional ties to a war that is going on this goes from being standard whatever to being a complete [ __ ] nervous wreck and it just makes me more worried about Violet's mental health than anything else after that emotional moment we have to have a dragon battle why because [ __ ] you that's why and that's when Violet kills the dude which in a book where death is used as a punchline more often than not she doesn't take this very well I have been known to not [ __ ] with and I don't kill people main character I tend not to like them in books like these because I just feel like it's lazy writing and really strange and unlike other characters in the book point out like girl you're at a school where they train you to write atomic bombs into battle well you didn't think you'd be killing people so there's this like weird stretch in the book where she pretends to be this like far humble person but she's a bad person let me be very clear she cheats she decides when the rules get applied to her or not she leads her best friend on for literally no reason despite the fact that she knows she doesn't like him romantically like all of these like all of these things are bad traits and you're trying to tell me that she's broken up for having killed someone when she's at a war Academy for learning to ride a dragon huh get get so [ __ ] right now her motivations make no [ __ ] sense we're not even done yet oh by the way she's also got lightning powers now which also mirror perfectly with zaddy's Shadow powers yay and then they bone that's it they Get Saucy and people have said that the sex scene was really descriptive like yeah I guess so it was it's new adult and I think that if you didn't have this sex scene in or the sex scenes that take place at the very end of the book that don't really make sense um the this book would have no ability beating the this is a why a book allegations so they're just included despite the fact that these characters should not have been already physical with each other there should have been a slow burn with these characters and I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more and I'm not really a slow burn type of person but they have no reason to want to [ __ ] each other yet despite the dragon boning situation roofie [ __ ] [ __ ] hell and then they immediately break up right afterwards this is where the book made me irreversibly angry I was still relatively on board this is where I just couldn't handle it anymore zaddy says some [ __ ] boy [ __ ] like don't fall in love with me and violet gets all whiny and annoying and goes you're gonna be with me because I can't do casual sex I don't know why she had that accent but that is exactly what happened so they break up and then they get back together 10 pages later because character development am I right guys and then at the very end of the book that is completely foreshadowed Zayden is actually a bad guy and on top of that Violet's brother is alive I haven't even mentioned her brother yet let's do a segment on my Channel that I have never done before so it's not really a segment um let's fix fourth Wing So fourth Wing has issues as I've already spent the past 40 minutes talking about let me tell you how I would fix fourth Wing number one make Violet's whole personality be about wanting to be a dragon rider from the just establishes an actual motivation wild number two remove Dane's character entirely remove him entirely put that emotional backstory into zayden's backstory Zayden can still be a child of the Rebellion his parents still could have done whatever but they could have had emotional connection that went back to their childhood that would have established a backstory that could have been a little bit more I don't know [ __ ] believable and then Dane wouldn't be around to be annoying so number three introduce the dragon bonds way earlier in the story even maybe saying that could have been the inciting incident it would have been fascinating if Violet had like snuck into the threshing um and then bond with two dragons like we could have just LED with that and you would have had something very interesting sting right out the gate number four have Brennan die in the story if we're going to introduce your characters into war have them have an emotional story that actually happens on page and not off of page because we don't use Brennan oh I'm sorry Brennan is her [ __ ] brother if you don't know um her brother has been dead the whole book uh and when he comes back it is such a [ __ ] like non-issue like I I don't even care that he's back because he's been this weird mythical figure for her giving her like advice through this journal that's called The Book of Brennan which is a weird way to describe a journal and his advice hasn't really been anything interesting so he comes back I have no emotional ties to him if he was actually maybe this kind of older Mentor figure at the school helping her and then he gets called out and then [ __ ] dies on the battlefield that gives her an emotional reality that she she wants to pursue and then once again having Zayden betray her would be so much more effective and then the twist of Brennan being not dead would be interesting wow crazy number five tonal [ __ ] dissonance when someone dies give it gravitas or I will not give a [ __ ] if any of your characters die additionally please stop using Millennial jargon in any of your fantasy novels if you can't do it well don't do it at all that's gonna be it I'm done talking about this uh like subscribe all the good stuff bye put a dragon Emoji or something down below in the comments I want to go do anything other than this goodbye [Music] don't worry [Music]

Channel: a lil bit mads

Views: 18,517

Keywords: books, booktube, booktuber, bookish, book reviewer, bookseller

Id: wSIL7-pNY2M

Length: 29min 11sec (1751 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023