penwalla

ch. 33
violet and xylon get dressed and rush to formation. xylon throws his jacket on violet, since she's wearing a dress. again, it is silly to me that violet's "dress uniform" is a sleeveless gown with a thigh high slit. she argued in the last chapter that the slit "allowed for movement" but like...come on. this is a military! everyone should have identical dress uniforms, barring differences for rank/body habitus. or yarros could have just said they had the option of formal non-military dress.
violet finds her squad. everyone is complaining. violet's very obviously wearing xylon's jacket, since it's marked with his rank and is huge on her. everyone roasts her for this.
violet is watching xylon stand up with the other wingleaders being cool and put together, and dramatically wonders which is the real xylon: that guy, or the one who was with her last night? violet, this is the kind of melodramatic nonsense you could have gotten away with early in the book. now you just sound silly.
it turns out there's no attack. this is the final segment of the War Games. lmao. that's actually kinda fun, i like it.
dain's dad reads out the scenario they'll be playing out: the wards are failing, gryphons are attacking everywhere, etc. they'll have to spread out along the border. the exercise will be five days.
guessing now that that'll be a problem later, since so far it's been stated xylon and violet's dragons can't be apart more than 3 days.
violet rushes back to her room to pack and change.
they meet up with all the dragons. liam seems tense--more foreshadowing, i'll bet. rhiannon says they're going to win and she's going to become squad leader. i wonder if this is a sign she's going to die soon. we've only got 15% of the book left--presumably we're approaching some kind of climax, and yarros loves to kill characters off. so far no one important has died, but that may change.
andarna has a harness on that clips to Big T's, in case she can't keep up. xylon took care of that.
speaking of xylon, as dain starts giving orders, he barges in to inform dain he's taking violet, liam, and imogen with him to his headquarters squad. he admits that this is in part because he and violet can't be separated. dian argues back, saying they've never tested it, and xylon's dragon gets mad.
dain is still arguing, accusing xylon of plotting to kill violet by taking her beyond the wards, but violet says that she'll go if xylon wants her to go. dain clocks to their relationship and gets mad.
this is silly. they are in the military and xylon is the officer in command. he and violet don't need to engage in this pagentry, violet doesn't need to dramatically resolve the nonexistent love triangle, xylon can literally just say "im taking these three with me. end of story" and go. if violet privately wants to tell dain later that she trusts xylon, sure, but it's not necessary for them to have this drama in public.
ugh. this wouldn't bother me if the book was better, you know? but it's so clear that yarros has not thought through any element of the worldbuilding. it's so clear that the setting is hackneyed. and also, it's just absurd that we're supposed to believe violet is intelligent and strong and so brave that she'll refuse medical treatment to look cool, but not smart enough to not constantly air out her romantic life in public.
ch. 34
they fly to athebyne, an outpost beyond the wards that protect the nation. we know xylon secretly went there, earlier, because violet coaxed it out of him. violet has said this was a secret mission he was assigned, but xylon was very scanty with details, so i suspect he was up to something.
magic is "wilder" outside the wards, something violet can physically feel. Big T warns her it might impair dragon communication.
they're by a lake in a forest near athebyne, stopping to rest and drink before they arrive. violet is nervous and says they traditionally lose 10% of the graduating class in the final test.
TEN PERCENT? DURING THE FINAL TEST?
this book is so dumb
violet can't stop thinking about sex with xylon. liam tries to warn her off him, which is interesting, but something is clearly up with him. i wonder if xylon is using this mission to enact a coup or something treasonous, and liam is worried violet will get caught up in it.
xylon pulls violet aside for some handholding and a massage. how professional. they start making out as xylon drops some generic bad-boy romantic talk--"you're mine", etc.
and then they're interrupted! by a woman who mocks them and refers to their war college as a "death factory", already making her my favorite character. she is a gryphon flier, accompanied by others. while xylon restrains violet in shadow, the others join them. none of them are drawing their weapons.
oh, so they're all in kahoots. violet doesn't immediately figure this out, because she is stupid and i am now. chapter end.
ch. 35
xylon is arguing with the woman, complaining that she's early and that he doesn't have a full shipment yet. she explains that she is here to warn him they lost an entire village to venin.
violet's mind is racing. by the way, this chapter opened with an excerpt from an "unauthorized biography" explaining the leader of the rebellion was accusing the gov't of a vast unspeakably evil conspiracy.
yarros you can stop flogging that horse now
the woman tells xylon where the horde of venin is, and then they start insulting the sorrengails. violet throws some lightning as a warning, the other riders close in to protect her, xylon tells them to fuck off, etc.
so uh, violet's like "why aren't they laughing at these guys for saying mythical creatures are real?" and she's just. unbelievably stupid.
violet realizes...all the riders except her are rebellion kids. and she realizes that her dragons were in on it. how can she have fallen for a traitor?
deep sigh. like...ok, one, violet caught the rebel kids secretly meeting like 20 chapters ago. two, over the course of the book she has developed a lukewarm awareness of the incredible oppression the rebel kids face at the hands of the gov't, including her own mother. three, she's gotten plenty of clues about the venin thing being more than folklore.
the thing is, violet never does anything to advance the plot. she just reacts to things that are happening. she never investigates or applies herself to any of the mysteries this book poses. the reader can see all the heavy-handed foreshadowing and knows what's coming, so the end result is that violet is always behind us in terms of understanding. it's such a frustrating thing to read about, becaue this is a first person novel, she has all the info we have, and there's no reason that she cannot put the pieces together!
violet is having a breakdown because everyone lied to her. ugghhh.
anyways she and xylon fight as he tries to explain the truth to her. he is way more reasonable than she deserves. the creation myth is real, venins are real, xylon has been helping the gryphon fliers fight them with weapons shipments.
it's like...violet argues that she was trained as a scribe and she knows that her country is right and the gryphon dudes are wrong. but she's been presented with plenty of info that should have made her question that. sure, she didn't, so it's not...ooc that she's still staunchly on the side of her own country. but she's so undercharacterized and so incurious as a character that it just underlines how bad this book is.
wait let me give a counterexample. ok the main character of some desperate glory by emily tesh is a fascist. she was raised by fascists in an isolated environment and has never questioned anything she was taught. even when she begins questioning and breaks the rules, she repeatedly goes back to those beliefs as a bulwark to protect her whenever she's afraid.
in contrast, the setting of fourth wing is so underdeveloped that it can't support the characters. we never get a sense that violet is influenced by propaganda or that she's absorbed toxic teachings from her family or something. yarros gives her individual moments of sympathy for the rebel kids, but never lets her achieve the logical next step of questioning the entire system that allows it. like that just makes violet look shallow and careless and meanwhile the text insists she's so smart and kind and the end result just makes you mad as hell.
ok so the plot twist is that the enemy country they're fighting is plagued by venins, who can't enter violet's country because of the wards, which disable all non-dragon magic. but the leadership all know about the venins, to the point they supply their own people with anti-venin weapons but otherwise conceal their existence from the general population.
violet is so mad that xylon lied to her that i guess all her moral fiber just goes out the window? she refuses to believe dain would take her memory of xylon confessing and use it to do harm, she's telling xylon she doesn't love him while he's pointing out that he had to keep it a secret, because, you know, his dad was executed for knowing about it.
xylon gives violet a knife to kill venin with. she says she believes him but doesn't trust him. then she goes back to being mad at her dragons for lying to her, and then, finally, she decides to use her brain.
she finally works out that hey, maybe this is why her dad's fables weren't in the archives, and hey, isn't it weird that the archives have no original texts older than 400 years, even though the country is more than 600 years old? and hey, her dad literally told her scribes held all the power and it only takes one desperate generation to change history by erasing it?
they arrive at the outpost and it's completely empty. they split up and start searching. then a drift of gryphons is visible, approaching them. there's a letter left to xylon, addressed to him.
xylon is like, violet, has dain touched your face. and she's like, he always touches my face. hahaha i was right about the mindreading!
the whole thing is a trap, and they were all sent here to die!
ch. end.