The Fall of The Empyrean

The Fall of the Empyrean

What Went Wrong After Fourth Wing

Warning: This post will vaguely spoil plot points from Fourth Wing and Onyx Storm.

Beginning with Fourth Wing and continuing into Iron Flame and, most recently, Onyx Storm, the Empyrean series has taken the Internet by storm. I would argue that it cemented the “romantasy” genre into public consciousness, and it has amassed a huge following. Really, Fourth Wing alone found itself treasured by the general public. It was TikTok’s darling, and even as a single book of a promised series it had numerous special editions that were flying off the shelves.

Back when I first read it, I gave Fourth Wing a grand 4.5 star rating. That’s a near perfect score. In my review, I said: 

"This book is perfect for those of us who grew up (or just enjoyed) the 2010s Dystopia craze, as it employs a lot of those elements in the fun and dangerous world of Navarre."

I didn’t read Fourth Wing until right before the release of Iron Flame, so I only had a few agonizing months to wait for my burning questions to get answered. Rebecca Yarros, the author, had successfully created a world that had gripped me and was boiling with potential. What would she bring us next?

Iron Flame released three months later. I gave it 2 stars.

I won’t rehash the whole thing again (you can read my full review here), but that year in my Book Awards, I gave Iron Flame the title of Least Favorite Book of the whole year, and wrote this: 

"The rage I feel when I think about this book is honestly unparalleled. I didn’t need it to be good. I just needed a bit of an effort. But it’s hard to read 600 pages, and Yarros wasted my time."

Clearly, I was very upset about this turn of events. All of the big questions that I left Fourth Wing with got replaced with just one: What happened?

I spent over a year thinking about this series before the latest installment, Onyx Storm, came out. This reprieve in releases gave me an opportunity to come to some conclusions. Yarros had caught lightning in a bottle with her first (in this series) book. Fourth Wing wasn’t the newest thing in new adult literature, it was reductive and nostalgic. It was a house built on the sand, and it crumbled after the first sign of rain. 

Fans of the series will often deflect criticism by saying, “it’s just meant to be fun!” And honestly, they’re not wrong. One of the main things that I loved about Fourth Wing was that it was fun. It reminded me of being a teenager, truly falling in love with reading for the first time. She hit every beat that I expected her to hit, but she took it to its extreme. 

The super special and unique but otherwise very plain and unassuming heroine is obviously going to bond to the biggest, toughest, and scariest dragon. Except guess what? She actually bonds to TWO dragons! A feat that we’ve never seen accomplished before!

The brooding, shadowy (in more ways than one), dark-and-handsome-and-racially-ambiguous love interest is inexplicably obsessed with the main character. But now their lifelines are bonded together, so of course he is! And as a bonus, you can even have a cartoonishly-failing secondary love interest (Is he blond? Probably!) that might as well be Gale from The Hunger Games. As a treat. 

Violet (the main character) is constantly referred to as small and frail, because all the best female main characters are. That’s what makes them so cool when they become inexplicably perfect in all battle scenarios where their size would, realistically, be a problem. Except Violet is actually written intentionally to have a disability. Don't worry: she's still magically perfect skilled at everything when she needs to be.

And just for good measure, let’s also throw in a bunch of various beloved TikTok tropes. A hint of enemies-to-lovers, a dash of a I’d-burn-down-the-world-for-you/morally gray love interest, and voilà: the perfect book.

I mean, I liked it, but it was predictable. It felt like Yarros was looking at the books that her target audience loves, collecting the tropes and plot expectations, and committing even harder. It felt self aware. It was almost ironic. How else could someone write something so unoriginal? Fourth Wing was surely written like that on purpose. Because it was meant to just be fun. Surely.

When a book is so carefully engineered to be the perfect combination of tropes and borrowed plot points from other books, what happens when it’s time to write the sequel? Enter Iron Flame.

Once Fourth Wing stopped existing in a vacuum, it became clear that this wasn’t intentional from Yarros. Fourth Wing wasn’t quirky and self aware, it was just … bad. Because now the promised five book series has to be written and there’s nothing there except a book that is borrowing from everything else in the literary canon. That’s not a foundation for a story, it’s a cash grab. And you can’t build a sequel off a cash grab. Not a good one, anyway.

So, what do we get instead? A 623 page mess. The love interests spend the entire book having the same argument across five different settings, there’s some messy world building about a war that I can barely bring myself to care about, and we committed so hard into the sexy romance plot that we abandoned the political fantasy storytelling. Cheap plot devices get multiple hundred-page justifications. The big plot twist is spoiled by the title of the book and still takes 500 pages for Violet to figure out, but I'll take it because its still the only consistent “plot” that we get other than her fighting with her boyfriend.

It was also just weirdly misogynistic. But hey! So was 2010s Dystopia, so I guess it hit its mark.

The fate of The Empyrean is the result of all the worst aspects of literature right now. We prioritize sexiness and fun tropes over storytelling and insist that sometimes books are just meant to be fun, which apparently means they don’t have to be good. Onyx Storm improved a little, but with the rise of anti-intellectualism that we’re seeing right now, it’s deeply disappointing to see this series continue to be as guarded as it is when it has done nothing to earn that respect. 

We should be holding authors to a higher standard. No author needs to be perfect, but churning out 500+ page books with sloppy planning and even worse editing should not give you one of the biggest series in modern literature. Readers — even those who say they’re just reading for fun — deserve good quality stories. They deserve authors who will care. 

There are still two books left in the Empyrean series, so we’ll have to see where it goes from here. Although, while she still has legions of fans who defend every plot hole and poor writing choice, I’m not holding my breath for any major improvements.

From yours truly,

Kendall