The way I learned how to type is sort of embarrassing. In fourth grade, my parents gave me my first computer, probably hoping that I would pick up some useful skills and maybe begin coding. Unfortunately for them, around this time I was also becoming extremely obsessed with the children's book series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which follows a teenage demigod from New York City as he adventures through the mythical world. It was all I could think and talk about, consuming every part of my life. I remember going to my first bible study at church and having some sort of existential crisis because I was struggling to separate reality from all the Greek mythology I was reading on the side.
When I finally exhausted all the books published in the series, I didn't know what to do. I daydreamed about being Percy Jackson's long-lost sister and prayed to God that I would suddenly gain the power to control the waves of the oceans. Then, it struck me—what if I wrote my own Percy Jackson book? What a revolutionary idea! From then on, I became deeply attached to my computer, my little fingers learning where the keys were located as I rapidly punched out tens of thousands of words about myself in the Percy Jackson universe.
In this fairytale world, I was awesome. My eyes were green and I was a super-demigod, a concept I created which meant that I had special powers from all the Olympic gods (the standard demigod only had powers from their singular godly parent). I slayed monsters with swords and rarely got injured. Also, the boy I had a crush on at school was a demigod too, and he liked me in this story!
By the time I reached fifth grade and was all grown up, I'd learned that what I had been doing had a name. Self-insert fanfiction was a concept exhausted by internet users and fan clubs that had come and gone long before me. There was even a character archetype to describe the (super) demigod version of myself: a Mary Sue. Unrealistically talented, flawless, and virtuosic, Mary Sues have been plaguing fandoms for decades, with the term itself originating from a 1973 Star Trek fanfiction. She or he is usually the result of a very young person's self-insert fantasy, much like the 40,000-word behemoth I had written as a 9-year-old. Despite how embarrassing this part of my life was, I like to talk about it because I think it's funny. Also, by writing something really, really awful, I ended up learning a little bit about what sets bad stories apart from the good. Originality is important, and by falling victim to the Mary Sue trap, my story, as unique as it was to me, had joined the vanilla lineage of all the other wish-fulfillment narratives that had come before.
I stopped writing fanfiction after this failed foray into becoming Rick Riordan's ghostwriter, but I remained a pretty avid consumer of fantasy books for young readers. I loved battle scenes and political intrigue, winged women and cursed princes. Some of the book series I read went on for way too long, but my literary standards were low, so it was easy to make me a devout fan.
Many of the books I loved as a tween have gone on to be favorites on BookTok, a notorious subcommunity on TikTok that centers reading. At times, BookTok's been credited with reshaping the publishing industry, reviving print book sales, and bringing in new readers. But despite all the genres that exist out there, BookTok leans heavily on young adult, fantasy, and romance.
The quality of books that go viral on BookTok varies widely, and a lot of it is geared toward younger adults, which is where some of the criticism for the subcommunity comes from. But as I said before, I'm not particularly pretentious when it comes to reading. My threshold for bullshit is pretty high, which makes it easy for me to inhale almost every breezy romance or fantasy novel I come across. That's why, when romance author Rebecca Yarros's fantasy debut, Fourth Wing, went mega-viral on TikTok, I thought I would give it a try. After all, the book had claimed the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best seller list for three months—surely it couldn't be that bad.
At first glance, the premise of the book seems okay. Fourth Wing has the classic fantasy setting of a battle academy, with an underdog protagonist who comes in to master some sort of physical craft. In Yarros's universe, our main character is a 20-year-old named Violet, who, despite an unnamed chronic illness that leaves her prone to injury, is forced to enlist with the most dangerous division at the Basgiath War College—the dragon riders. There is, of course, a love interest, because Fourth Wing is a part of the growing romantasy genre. In Violet's case, she can't keep her eyes off of Xaden Riorson, a powerful, brooding dragon rider who's supposed to be her sworn enemy because her commanding-general mother executed Riorson's rebellion-leader father.
I'm usually a sucker for battle academies, so in theory, Fourth Wing should have been a slam dunk. Sure, Xaden's name was immediately off-putting, but I could overlook that. Unfortunately, my initial trepidation was a good indicator of what would come. Despite its quasi-medieval setting, Fourth Wing's dialogue is jarringly modern, and the world-building is lazy from the get-go. Violet conveniently has a habit of reciting "facts" when she's nervous, which means that you end up learning about the fantasy land of Navarre via these paragraphs of info-dumping dialogue. The narration was on par with what I had written in my elementary school self-insert Percy Jackson fanfiction, clunky and cringeworthy. Yarros seems to love these clipped phrases, like in this scene where Violet sees Xaden for the first time:
Even the diagonal scar that bisects his left eyebrow and marks the top corner of his cheek only makes him hotter. Flaming hot. Scorching hot. Gets-you-into-trouble-and-you-like-it level of hot. Suddenly, I can’t remember exactly why Mira told me not to fuck around outside my year group.
Here's another bit where she looks at him:
My gaze snaps to Xaden, and my chest tightens. So. Freaking. Beautiful. Apparently my body doesn't care that he's as dangerous as they come in the quadrant, because heat rushes through my veins, flushing my skin.
I have more from where this came from, because I couldn't stop hate-reading this book. I needed to know why people loved it so much, and maybe, I reasoned, it would get better. Besides, with the simplicity of its writing, Fourth Wing went down quickly, like mush.
The training it takes to become a dragon rider is often a fatal path, with students constantly killing each other and the dragons mercilessly incinerating those they find weak or annoying. At Basgiath, Violet's life is always in danger, because others see her as the runt of their class. However, despite her physical limits, she rises above the rest with her "kindness" and "cleverness." She even reveals extreme proficiency with knife throwing—something which we have to assume she picked up before the start of the book.
When it comes time for her and her classmates to go into a forest and find the dragon they will "bond" with, Violet miraculously dodges a murder attempt and emerges with not one, but two dragons that have bonded with her, something no rider has done before. Better yet, they're both extremely rare dragons, and one of them is dating Xaden's dragon. At one point, Violet and Xaden's dragons become horny, which, unfortunately, means that our main characters also feel the rabid need to get it on via the telepathic bonds they have with their dragons, as in this section:
He tastes like churam and mint, like everything I’m not supposed to want and yet can’t help needing, and I kiss him back with everything I have, sucking on his lower lip and scraping my teeth over him.
“Violence,” he moans, and the sound of the nickname on his lips makes me ravenous.”
Yeah, his nickname for her is "Violence."
Violet is the spot-on definition of a Mary Sue. Despite a tragic upbringing, she is nearly flawless and almost immediately competent at every task thrown her way. I had gone in expecting to read about cool dragons but came to the conclusion that all of the mystical creatures and world-building were simply pawns in the greater objective—getting Xaden and Violet to fuck and fall in love.
When I finished, I felt baffled. Who was reading Fourth Wing and enjoying it? The answer, it turns out, is most people, if the 4.58-out-of-5 rating on Goodreads, aggregated from over 1.8 million readers, is anything to go by. I've begrudgingly decided that this makes sense. What I've come to realize is that Fourth Wing is the final boss of BookTok. Of course, it's a romance book, brimming with clichés and accompanied by the quintessential sexy bad boy who's actually soft and kind on the inside. But more importantly, it's the sort of toothless, inoffensive boilerplate media that allows the publishing industry to rake in profits with TikTok's assistance. The publishers and the algorithm agree that the consumer shouldn't be challenged by their literary choices. Instead, the books should cater to their specific desires, even if it means they end up substanceless. The quality of the writing or the plot doesn't matter, because readability is prized above all.
And when I say readability, I don’t necessarily mean simple syntax, although that's part of it. At its core, readability isn't bad. It means a book that can go down like bubble tea—sweet and smooth, save for the occasional soft tapioca pearl or jelly cube for texture. For many people new to reading as a hobby—a niche to which parts of BookTok cater to—this sort of fizzy writing supposedly draws them in because it's not mind-bending or controversial. In the case of Fourth Wing, the reader is spoonfed the world-building, no reading comprehension needed. It's even better if the book is based on whatever trope is trending (say, for instance, hockey romances). Character dynamics start fitting into familiar archetypes (grumpy vs. sunshine, enemies to lovers), which comes with the bonus of SEO optimization. This formula of ease and familiarity has worked wonders for the publishing industry. Facing a consumer base with a declining attention span, marketing books along themes rather than actual content has helped bring in sales from readers eager to read variations of the same story over and over again. But at what cost?
In 2015, one of the top young adult releases of the year was Six of Crows, a fantasy novel that follows a teenage heist crew in a mythical city based on Dutch Republic–era Amsterdam. I was 11, and I remember it being the first fantasy book where it took me a while to get my footing in the world, piecing together the mechanics through the bits of unfamiliar terminology thrown my way. When it finally came together in my head, I felt this rush of fulfillment. I loved all the thievery and deception in Six of Crows, and it quickly became my favorite book. Last year, I revisited Six of Crows for the first time since middle school. It felt a little juvenile now—I was now older than the cast of characters, who had always been suspiciously too young for the crimes they were committing—but the magic was still there.
As I flipped through the pages of Fourth Wing, hopping over plot holes and dodging past repetitive language, I found myself repeatedly asking myself if the book had even been edited. Hell, most of the books I had read as a middle schooler were better than this one, which was marketed for adults. I couldn't help worrying about the 11-year-olds pushed in this direction by their phones. Was this the future of reading?
Fourth Wing's sequel, Iron Flame, was released only six months after the first novel. Around the time of its publication, Yarros ran into a bit of controversy when she accidentally revealed at New York Comic Con that she didn't know how to pronounce some of the Scottish Gaelic words she had used in the book. At best, it was an embarrassing incident. At worst, it revealed the kind of ethical corners she and her editors had been willing to cut—a story hastily written with a careless attitude toward cultural background. This sloppy, fast-fashion approach to writing is disappointing, and I'm reluctant to think that it will help develop readers who can engage critically with media in the long run.
I don't mean to trash all romance books here. I even enjoy love stories that make my brain feel smooth. Yet it seems like we've reached a point where checking off a list of tropes has superseded the excitement of the fresh and new. These readability-focused books begin to blur together, each one nearly indistinguishable from the next, and Fourth Wing is the nadir of this trend. I wonder if the industry is doing readers a disservice by assuming that they'll consume anything with descriptions of a hot man.
Anyway, if you're a publisher reading this, I might have a pitch for you. It's a book about a college girl in New York City whose life is suddenly upturned when she realizes that she and some of her friends are the children of the Norse gods. After a near-death experience, she escapes to a special camp for demigods like herself, where she goes on epic quests and fights evil. Don't worry, there's lots of romance, and the potential for five sequels. Please direct any and all offers to my agent.
