"Conquer the Skies and Abyss"

Like, compare this to the Hunger Games. Both are tools used to punish certain individuals but also produce "winners" to use as idols for the general populace to make them think that they can also be "winners" and volunteer more easily, giving them a false sense of autonomy while unknowingly being nothing more than a cog in the giant meat grinding machine that is their fascistic country. The careers are the volunteers while the lower districts (11, 12, 13) are people like the Marked Ones and, to an extent, Violet. Nothing about the Games is glamorized in the books. It's all just bread and circuses.

Aside from the glory of wielding magic and having a twenty-five-foot flying atom bomb around to intimidate your enemies, there's not much used to distract the cadets from the surrounding carnage (none that we see at least). Post Threshing, there should be no reason any of these bitches should be dropping like flies. What reason is there to kill off second- and third-years after the book made it abundantly clear to emphasize that their dragons are severely affected by their deaths to the point where they can no longer be of service; we see it in Claidh and even Tairn to some extent)?? We don't get any explanation for this whatsoever. You could use Violet's excuse of it "sharpening" them for the frontlines but like??? There's no propaganda to support this claim in-universe; what she says only applies to first-years transitioning into their second-year phase. How does watching your classmates get tortured to death sharpen you as a person?

The book is, from what I've gathered, intended to be critique of the US military/government. The senseless slaughter is meant to parallel the senseless deaths of actual soldiers sent out to war. I remember somewhere Yarros mentioned how her experiences in living with her husband who suffers from ptsd had her questioning why soldiers are sent to hurt each other in such ways. She also says in one interview, “I always like to write about war from a perspective that makes you question why it’s happening, and how it affects the people serving in it." Personally? I think she succeeded in making us question why all of this bullshit is happening but I don't think she really delves deeper into the why. She lampshades the Parapet in Iron Flame with the flier's Harvest but goes no further than this. As one book reviewer on YT put it, it feels like she's just trading one evil military for a less evil one.

Granted, she does mention how the thesis of this series as a whole is "Would you give up your shield to be your neighbor's sword?" and that "[the riders] have to understand that the way they’ve been taught is not the only way. And something is wrong with asking those kids to cross that Parapet, something is wrong with making them die on the Gauntlet, and something is wrong with how they’ve been trained" but Onyx Storm doesn't do much to combat the rampant ableism in Navarrian society. These issues can't just be solved with a quick fix and change of leader. The dragons need to be humbled, the gryphons need to get buffed to be on a level with them, or it's all going to fall apart.

My second biggest gripe is the Navarrian government as villains. They're evil but comically so. There's no weight to their evil actions and I don't think Yarros is ever going to humanize them. There's was a special kind of horror the Burning of Aretia had that lingered in the first book because that's a whole ass city. Those were innocent people who were killed by their government, children who died in agony because their parents didn't like the way their king was ruling. That felt real. There was weight to that. Now, they're just casually negotiating with the Revolution all because some evil wizards happen to be the bigger threat. The Navarrian government can be hand waved away as just some venin infiltrating their ranks and destroying it from the inside.

Yarros hints in an interview that the Scribes and Markham are in cahoots with the venin. Colonel Aetos is definitely one in disguise. Fucking Panchek was a spy for Berwyn. And you know what? They're all comically one note villains. There's no depth to their villainy so far. They have nothing interesting going for them. There's no flavor to how they display their vileness. I feel like Varrish in those torture scenes had more flare than all of them combined and that's not saying much. I don't think Yarros is trying to give either of these men any hidden depths. If Melgren happens to be the only competent non-venin bitch in this military by the end of the series, I'm going to bust out laughing.