A blog for my reactions reading to the Empyrean series

I've watched enough videos reviewing Fourth Wing that I just had to check it out for myself, so here's this blog for me to essentially live blog my reaction to the book, give thoughts and commentary, and just have fun with a text that I think is pretty fun.

The goal of this blog is to not bash or hate this series. I will be critical with it, but I do believe this series is quite fun and has a lot of good going for it overall. And in all honesty, I need a fun read at this time lol (too much dry academia in my life. i need to give my brain a bit of a break).

I'm also 1000% here for dragons. No other romantasy series has captured my attention quite like this one and I'm pretty sure it's because of the dragons.

So! If you want to stick around and follow this blog, please do! I'm interested in chatting with people about it, their reactions, thoughts, feelings, and theories on where the series is going next.

i need to get back on my lore and worldbuilding deep dives to do this whole topic justice because i am interested in runes and the history behind them, especially since it's a dying/dead language within FW, hardly practiced since Fen's failed rebellion and really being censored since unification if i recall my details about this correctly

i do appreciate the absolutely desperation that clearly went into those runestones that Colonel Mairi made before she was executed. it was a desperate hail mary to keep those kids alive and give them a chance and i liked that it did complicate a few things.

the hazy details on the whole execution thing i think are just part and parcel of this series and its often under baked ideas. it's all about giving the hot shadow boys tattoos. like some of the girls obvi have tattoos but... lbr it's mostly about the boys

and as for the runestones leading to these second signets, that also doesn't really work for me because the relic tattoos are meant to be a physical manifestation between dagon and rider. does that mean all the marked ones have a bond with Codagh? is he just an infinite well of power for these 107-odd kids?

like there's a lot of it that doesn't work for me. i think giving all the marked one riders a second super special power feels like a convenient cop out. Xaden can't just be good at reading people as a means of survival since he's likely been dealing with two-faced people his entire life. no. he has an intinnsic ability that allows him to sense people's intentions.

excellent point! Lilith feels strangely absent in FW despite the fact that she's supposed to be running that college. like that's her job. she's the general in control of what's supposed to be happening at Basgiath.

i also looked up the history of Athebyne again. apparently it's changed hands between Poromiel and Navarre many, many times so it feels stupidly dangerous to send cadets to it. which is why Aetos would want to send them there in the first place, easier to get them killed, and while we know this is the Death College and all, it still feels a bit ridiculous for Lilith to sign off on sending them to Athebyne in general, especially if it's an active war zone. like it just feels too out of touch to send them in that direction.

oh anon you get me so hard. and i want to try and address this in several points because i think a lot of us do enjoy Violet's character! there's something spicy to her but as the series has gone on, she's been made to be too perfect

Violet isn't an underdog any longer i think this part about her is what made her so compelling. she's been shoved into the rider's quadrant with a short notice to train, complete the exam, and be physically fit enough to cross the bridge while it's raining. all the while her mother can make the rain stop at any time but doesn't. it's pretty cold lol. plus she does struggle to do anything within basgiath her first few weeks because physically she can't do things the same way. so she gets crafty. poisons people. uses tools to get through the gauntlet even if it costs her team time. like there's something there!! but any sense of struggle or achievement is kinda undone the further the series goes. especially in Onyx Storm when shit is straight up easy for her now despite her general lack of worldly experience

Violet is a Mary Sue listen.... we're all thinking it lol. two of the most special dragons of all time. a super special rare signet. super special hair. when it gets to this level, it's hard not to make these comments that Violet is just too OP and nothing feels like a challenge. nothing she does feels earned.

Violet and Xaden are boring now guys.... im starting to hate Riorgail lolololol. for real. Xaden has lost a lot of his edge and you bring up a lot of great points!! why the FUCK is Xaden giving up on the Revolution now that he has Violet as his GF? we hear about Violet's feelings on Liam all the time but never get aaannnnyyy insight into how Xaden is feeling beyond his love for Violet, and it's getting really repetitive at this point. i want to see more between him and Bodhi. what happened to the Xaden confronting all the marked ones in secret? what happened to the Xaden standing on the parapet while everyone celebrated the day his father was defeated? like he's lost so much of himself and i think it's because RY is setting up this bullshit ending where Violet and Xaden fuck off to one of the isles to live in peace with their 2.5 kids because it's peaceful or whatever... rather than committing themselves to the hard work it takes to build up society and leave it better than you found it

Violet gets everything she wants this was soooo apparent in Onyx Storm. like the riddles she had to answer to get those books of her dad's was such bullshit and didn't really do anything to show off Violet's smartness. like so she can memorize a history fact. the fact that one of the riddles was about why she broke up with Halden is soooo fucking stupid lol. like it doesn't feel like she's being challenged in any meaningful way or at least not in any way that makes her feel regret for her actions especially in regards to keeping Xaden being a venin secret. she causes a mass mutiny at the end of Iron Flame and get welcomed back with basically open arms. she gets to call herself a Revolutionary while having sacrificed nothing of her comfort or anything of her former life.

believe me. there are so many parts in this series that are just like... damn this bitches are dumb lol

but you bring up a lot of great points as to how to make this battle work that isn't an utter contradiction. like obviously the reason all these marked ones are here is because they are trading materials with the gryphon fliers. they are all in cahoots with what is happening. but that only lends more credence to the paranoia of Navarre that the rebel kids will pick up where their parents left off. it would be much more impactful if it was only say Xaden, Liam, and Bodhi who know of this exchange. keep it quiet. keep it contained and slowly tease out that a few of the older marked ones are obviously involved like Imogen and Garrick (Garrick especially since he's such a one dimensional character at this point despite the fact that he also has a signet that's one of the first six??)

and trading out Bodhi for Liam would DEFINITELY give Bodhi much more stuff to be mad about with Xaden to build up the conflict between them. i think Bodhi is underutilized as Xaden's only living family member left. the fact that we don't know much about their lives before the rebellion is disappointing.

or, if we want to ensure there are 3+ marked ones together, have it be legitimately dangerous. have Xaden be suspicious of being allowed to have that many marked ones with him. have it so Colonel Aetos says it's a test for Xaden as much as it is the Navarre military to see what will be the outcome once marked ones begin graduating from Basgiath. or have it so Xaen actually picks up on it being a trap. to have the oldest of the marked ones grouped together for what might be a dangerous mission.

yeaaahhh the rules around the marked ones has never made any sort of worldbuilding or narrative sense. they were so arbitrary in Fourth Wing and are kinda dropped by the time we get to Iron Flame?

like ensuring they don't group up makes sense in terms of surveillance. to ensure that the children of the traitors we executed don't try to start shit. that there makes the most sense for why these rules exist. but there's no other sign that they are being heavily watched and reported on to keep track of their movements and ensure they aren't congregating.

like i went back to check the set up to the battle of Resson, because how did they get away with so many marked ones at that battle?

at the start of the final squad battle for that year, Colonel Aetos gives the wings their instructions and they are set to fly out to various outposts for 5 days for additional war games. then Xaden brings up this bullshit excuse of making a 'headquarters squad' whatever the fuck that excuse is and pulls Violet from Dain's squad because Dain will never know peace in this. Xaden also pulls Imogen and Liam. so right there. we know this 'headquarters squad' will have 3 marked ones. that should be an automatic no.

but that's not all! because on the way there, there's also Garrick and Bodhi. so like... what the fuck was this? these rules for the marked ones have never been treated as anything other than a minor inconvenience or an arbitrary rule that is immediately broken. they have no weight to them.

And when it comes to Melgren, I really want to know what counts as a battle. Like how is an assassination attempt a battle, Violet? Does he have to actively look for a battle, or is it on all the time? That must be a headache. But again, to reference anime, there's a cool concept from Symphogear of philosphical weaponry, where the Sword Breaker would destroy anything defined as a sword, causing some real issues for Tsubasa who defines herself as her family's sword. Imagine something like Melgren's signet working like that, that a battle must be defined as a battle either by Melgren or the people involved. Like imagine, he can see the outcome of a battle of wits or wills or a battle of the mind. I think it's another case of RY doing things that sounded really cool and not thinking through the consequences and impact on the world.

oh these are some GREAT points and please feel free to nerd out about Anime in my inbox any time. i think it brings up a lot of great comparisons for us to work with when we consider the implications of precogs and other psychic abilities in the world of FW.

i like the example you bring up from BSD and MHA. both of them have constraints for what the characters can see and do with their ability to see the future. and it also doesn't treat the future as fixed, which i fear is being done in FW because we don't KNOW anything about the limits of their abilities

especially for Melgren because we've known of his signet for longer. like when i think of Melgren's signet, i think of it as like he can see the outcome, loss or victory, but it is very murky for how that loss or victory shakes out. so it gives him a sense of where to put troops, whether or not he should call a retreat but also not knowing the cost of those wins and losses. how many riders/soldiers will die. if they are victorious but lose like... 20 riders, is that still considered a true victory?

we need more limitations to the signets!! we also need a better structure that designs signets!!

with how over powered signets can be and giving EVERYONE the wildest signet of all time (despite the fact that wielding the elements like fire and water are supposed to be the most common. we just threw that information out the window), it is difficult to understand what the limitations of these powers are

from Violet all we get is physical exhaustion and a burning pain from when she's learning how to master it in IF, but beyond that signets are still ill defined.

which makes it all the worse when you have riders doing straight up wizard shit. Rhiannon pulling shit out of thin air from another location. Quinn making straight up projections of herself to confuse an enemy. like this is X-men level shit. Dain is a watered down version of Charles Xavier.

and then there's fucking Aaric's signet along with Melgren's because they both have a foresight/precognition problem. we do not know the limits of their signets. would Aaric be haled as some sort of oracle? what happens if he spouts off a future that goes against the wishes of Navarre? would they kill him for that just as they kill inntinsics?

Melgren's only ONLY makes sense if you put severe guardrails around it. if he can see the future outcome of a battle, does that help with directing troops? does he know when it's a lost cause? how far in advance can he see the future? how does this help him become the greatest general this military has ever seen?

i will say i am very curious to see what characters will show up in that book. is it all going to be threshing stories? i mean one of the biggest draws of this world is seeing how dragons and riders sort of choose each other.

if i had my way, i'd like to get perspectives from Lilith Sorrengail, Mira, Tairn's previous rider Naolin to name a few.

i also feel like we're bound to get a Xaden chapter lmao

oh man where do i even start with this lol

first, i do agree the worldbuilding is a bit of a mess. if RY wanted to hammer home the damaging effects of controlling and erasing history, that unfortunately goes hand in hand with oppression along the lines of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, age, and physical capabilities. but Navarre is almost too equitable on that front. there is no severe punishment for questioning the status quo, which you think there would be in a state as control and power obsessed as Navarre but they honestly feel so absent in this story.

there's no real tension when Violet says she's going to be executed as a traitor for the things she does. we know she's going to be fine because Navarre has never really shown its teeth other than keeping immigrants and refugees out of their borders. it almost feels like RY is being a bit too hesitant in showing the really ugly side of militarism and imperial expansionism.

like we hear about how Navarre has destroyed or oppressed forms of culture. Tyrrish runes are one of them, but there are other remarks of how oral history for some stories is also under threat of Navarre's control. but we don't really get anything more of that. we don't see how a culture suffers when it can no longer practice what is customary to it. we don't see the forms of resistance against this oppression. we don't see the ugliness of it. the mistreatment. the bigotry. and not saying RY needs to get too gritty with it, but it does these themes a disservice by not even exploring their ugly sides because it's almost like RY is afraid to make the things Violet does ugly or morally questionable.

and as you said, maybe RY just does want to make something aesthetically appealing and focus more on the dragons, but the battles feel too polished to properly explain the weight of this war and how devastating it is. because it honestly feels like Poromiel doesn't exist anymore with how many times they discuss where the venin are amassing so it's like... are the venin actually a threat? how many Poromish people have died lol

it's so unfortunate that we get so much detail at all times but have so little time to truly sit with it before something new is thrown our way.

like we've seen King Tauri in like what... one scene so far? and Queen Maraya we barely know as well. as the monarchs of the two biggest nations, you think we'd see more of them or at least see more of their impact in the world, but we don't get a lot

especially since Queen Maraya had access to so much information to give Violet. also... why does she trust Violet so much? i feel like a lot more Poromish officials would give Violet a heavy side eye considering who her mother is and Violet has barely done anything to establish trust with them. like yeah we have her somewhat helping out to evacuate people, but because we get stuck in the military college setting, it really hampers our ability to see Violet put in the work to establish diplomatic ties. we don't even get to learn what Queen Maraya saw in Violet, a fucking student who's been flying for barely a year lol.

killing her off so quickly in the series only makes sense if Cat is to be queened by the end of the series with Tecarus maybe dying. and i thought Tecarus would be a lot more duplicitous for how he was built up in Iron Flame, but we've barely had any time with him either.

yeaahhhh i loved reading the Mortal Instruments (only the first three really before it was expanded out to a series of 6 and then a whole ass franchise) because Clary worked well with her best friend Simon and Jace never showed a lot if any jealousy towards him throughout the books

Dain was basically never given a chance. he was always portrayed to be overbearing despite the fact that his concerns are very valid and i think his fear of seeing Violet severely injured/killed was impacting him a lot. and it's not like Violet needs to make choices that appease a man in her life, but she certainly does make a lot of decisions that concern Xaden and Xaden only

I wish this series had a villain that was just straight to the point: no yapping session, no glazing the protags, just straight up murking without batting an eye. Someone who can beat Xaden’s ass without a sweat and call him a pathetic excuse of a rider.

I'm so tired of these bitches winning every fight. Let them lose and let them sit with that loss.

you have no idea how much i need Xaden to lost a fight lol. like EVERYONE says he's the MOST POWERFUL RIDER of all time. and im like yeah.... because he's OP as shit. and it's a larger critique i have about how the Riders can effortlessly beat any opponent they are set up against, including fighting against the people from the Isles despite not knowing one thing about their different fighting styles.

and it's like.. Rebecca looooves giving her antagonists long winded villain speeches that just don't work well with a fight scene. like there are so many opportunities to kill Berwyn because he's just monologing his ass off.

like having characters lose is for character growth. and we don't really get to see Xaden or Violet lose and learn and grow from that. so much of Xaden's development has happened off screen and by OS he's so obsessed with Violet it verges on annoying/boring. like he barely cares about Tyrrendor by that point

I think if RY wanted to make Dain a rules guy, she should have let him rules lawyer it, use loop holes to get what he wants and work on technicalities, or make him more earnest and less overbaring. There are lots of examples of well done beloved rules guys, after all. Or, if he should have been a good but overbaring guy, that should have been more obvious.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more it kind feels like Violet doesn't entirely know Dain that wel at all, just a version of him she wants to see or imagined, and when he didn't live up to that romantic vision of him she had in her head, she turned him into a villain. Doouble this given the implications that Asher might have been influencing the both of them from OS.

saddle anon. love it.

yeah this is all good stuff on how to improve Dain's function within the story because he's villainized worse than the fucking absolute monarchy in this series.

the part about how Dain's concern for Violet could be more self driven by PTSD and showing the damaging effects of The Death School does a much better job at expressing the impacts of this sort of environment rather than killing off characters i barely remember the names of. it would also do a better job at showing Violet how much Dain has changed from childhood to now. which the books barely do.

and Xaden is such an ass sometimes lmao. i wish people recognized this about him. he can come off like a jock. he's huge. he's strong. he's the bestest fighter ever, capable of taking down people who have 10+ years experience and training on him. and Dain, lbr, was raised as a nerd.

and the way Violet and Dain were raised should also come up more often because they are the nepo babies here. their family members are WELL established within the military and they were raised on military grounds. they are the most indoctrinated out of all of them. so if Violet gets the ultimate pass that doesn't have her really critically examine her biases towards Riders, then why does Dain have to be dragged through the mud?

That said, I think it would have been a lot more interesting if Dain and Violet had made the saddle together. You could get a whole plot of strengthening Violet and Dain's friendship, characterising dragons and their bonds better, and even do something like getting accessiblity adaptions made more standard. Like imagine: Dain wants ways to keep Violet safe, so brings it up, Violet doesn't want to because she doesn't want to seem weak and singled out, Dain gets Cath to agree to wear one too because if a great powerful dragon like Tairn will wear one, Cath feels not shame, and Dain can make the perfectly rational arguement that saddles are good actually for carrying supplies in battle, and even an extra layer of armour. They get to be research nerds in the archives designing and looking at maybe historical saddles. We get to see them as friends on a project together, being friends and even having romantic chemistry. And even Liam can get in on it when he joins the squad. More and more powerful dragons and competent riders using them without shame normalising the practice. Imagine making your dragon a saddle slowly becoming an accepted way of bonding with your new dragon.

honestly Dain is such wasted potential as a symbol of what Violet was against Xaden's symbolic presence in her life as what she could be.

and yes! even having Dain make the saddle for her would be more fitting to who Dain and Violet are at this point in the story than Xaden, when it's mostly clear he's doing it for romantic reasons as they are portrayed in the book.

and the way you have it sketched out here is much more fitting to who Rebecca was trying to write Dain as in OS but it feels a little too late at this point. like we barely get to see how Dain and Violet are childhood best friends in FW before Violet rebukes Dain and Dain betrays her. like imagine how much weightier that conversations would be if they hung out more in FW. plus having Dain make the saddle would remove the convenience of Dain being unable to communicate to Tairn except through Cath

i have larger issues of why only Violet gets to have a saddle plus the dragon scale armour (she's not beating the Mary Sue allegations any time soon lolololol). there being a precedence of saddles from hundreds of years ago is vastly more interesting than just Xaden coming up in FW being like 'here's a saddle.' we don't even get to SEE him make it.