Holiday Bonus: That's Fourth Wing, Baby!

We've got a present for you from our secret feed vault! Rachelle, Kelsey, and Brandy gather over a bottle of wine to discuss Rebecca Yarros' FOURTH WING. If you'd like to get in on these monthly extra episodes, subscribe as a Friend or a Friend-of-a-Friend https://defector.com/products/normalgossip. Subscribe to our newsletter for writing from Rachelle, Se'era, Jae, Alex, and Kelsey, plus blog recommendations and secrets! https://defector.com/normal-gossip-podcast You can support Normal Gossip directly by buying merch https://defectorstore.com/collections/normal-gossip or becoming a Friend or a Friend-of-Friend at supportnormalgossip.com https://defector.com/products/normalgossip. You can also find all kinds of info about us and how to submit gossip on our Komi page:https://normalgossip.komi.io/ Episode transcript here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SkmlY1oqEqQpP8_gY6fDIJlJOv2cDlO1v-pWIRIkERc/edit?usp=sharing. Follow the show on Instagram@normalgossip https://www.instagram.com/normalgossip/, and if you have gossip, email us at [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 26-79-GOSSIP. Normal Gossip is hosted by Rachelle Hampton (@heyydnae https://www.instagram.com/heyydnae/?hl=en) and produced by Se'era Spragley Ricks (@seera_sharae https://www.instagram.com/seera_sharae/?hl=en) and Jae Towle Vieira (@jaetowlevieira https://instagram.com/jaetowlevieira?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==). Alex Sujong Laughlin (@alexlaughs https://www.instagram.com/alexlaughs/) is our Supervising Producer. Justin Ellis is Defector's projects editor. Show art by Tara Jacoby. Normal Gossip is a proud member ofRadiotopia https://www.radiotopia.fm/. Support Radiotopia's fall fundraiser here http://radiotopia.fm/donate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to Normal Gossip. I'm your host, Rachel Hampton, and in each episode of this podcast, we're gonna bring you an anonymous morsel of gossip from the real world. Now technically, you are listening to Rachel of Christmas past because Rachel of Christmas present is probably drinking a hot toddy and watching Die Hard for the fifth time this month. We here at the Normal Gossip team cannot say how much we appreciate y'all and the way that you have stood ten toes down behind all of us this year. So to express our gratitude, we wanted to share this steamy little holiday treat. Every couple of months over on the subscriber feed, I host our boozy book club where I make some

• 0:46Speaker 00

  of my colleagues drink wine and discuss esteemed literature such as Rebecca Yaros's Fourth Wing. We recorded the following episode from a hotel room floor at our annual Defector Retreat in August. It is truly one of my favorite memories from this year. And if you absolutely love this episode, which I have a feeling a lot of you will, consider subscribing at the friend or friend of a friend level. We just released our second boozy book club installment where we discussed Ice Planet Barbarians, which is somehow even hornier than Fourth Wing. I know. If you want to give yourself the gift of joy and smut for as little as $5 a month, go to defector.com/normalgossip to subscribe. Merry Christmas, y'all, and a Happy New Year.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Hello, friends and friends of friends. I am reporting to you live from our company retreat and I am joined on the floor of a hotel room sipping some rosé by none other than Kelsey McKinney and Brandy Jensen. Hello.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Hi, so happy to be here.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Hello, Rachel. Hello, Brandy.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  I'm so excited for today's episode, which I have corralled all of you into because I decided to read the romanticy novel Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros, which is very popular. And I think we all have a lot of thoughts about it.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  I, when you said you had read it, I was like, oh, yes, I devoured that in a day last year, have also read the sequel, remember absolutely nothing about what happened in it. Because to me, it was what I'm looking for in the romanticy experience and what it provided is the feeling of having information sort of caress the outside of my brain.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Without ever settling into any of the creases or burdening me with anything that even remotely approaches knowledge. And it was perfect for that. It's just, you know, a sort of light tickle of the exterior of my cerebellum, maybe other places, I don't know. And then it was gone in the morning. It was a perfect one night stand of a read.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I read the book specifically so that we could have this conversation in which I feel like I've served my country to do so. But as I was reading it, I was becoming like more of an apologist for A Court of Thorns and Roses because I was like, oh, I actually like, I liked reading those books and I felt like the plot was better. But now that you're speaking, I'm like, is it possible that it's just been so long that I forgot what was in those books entirely?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  It is so possible.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  And so I'm like, what a positive experience I had in the past.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  You remember only the cerebellum tickling finger of Sarah J. Maas and not any of the other parts of it? I feel like we should establish both our romanticy and fourth wing bona fides. So I will start off, I, Brandy knows this because she heard me say this in a meeting, but my intro to writing was writing self-insert Twilight fanfiction, which is why I am here. This is why I'm the woman I am today. So romanticy is deep in my bones. But I haven't actually, this is the first one of the recent boom of romanticy novels that I've actually read. Like, I never read A Court of Thorns and Roses. I don't even know what the other ones are that all have the kind of same cover where

• 4:14Speaker 00

  you see these bookshelves on TikTok where all the books kind of look the same. And I'm always like, what is that? I do love Holly Black, who was an old school YA novelist, but this is my first intro into like TikTok romanticy.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  So I am a longtime fantasy lover and then separately from that, a sort of more recent romance reader. And so I got into romanticy as somebody who really enjoys fantasy. And I often find myself in the position of sort of like pushing my glasses up my nose and saying like, I object to an inconsistency I've discovered in the magical system that this world is deploying. I think actually, if you're going to be converting pleasure into the ability to like move objects with your mind, then I don't think that you can

• 5:10Speaker 01

  be able to. Yeah, so I like really, I nerd out on that aspect and it annoys me. But I do, I find romanticy interesting, just from somebody who's interested in trends in the publishing market. I think that, so Rebecca Yarros is a great example. She's somebody who had written like very traditional romance books. She wrote military romance. She's like a military wife. And so she wrote, you know, romances where a woman's husband is like deployed and then comes back. I don't know, I haven't read any of them. I assume that's what military romance is.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  So you're talking about Fourth Wing?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  But then her agent was like, oh, there's a big interest in romanticy. Do you want to like, can you write, can you insert fantasy into like the military romances that you already have been writing? And this is where Fourth Wing comes. It's like a kind of like, she wrote it sort of on spec because the interest for something like that existed before her meeting the need. And I find that dynamic fascinating and like a little unsettling.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  That also makes a lot of sense to me because I feel like the romance aspects of Fourth Wing are much stronger than the fantasy aspects. And particularly the world building and like the way that magic works feels very weak and strange to me. And so it makes sense to me that she like came from writing military romances because at its core, this book is like Kind of a military romance. Uh, my relationship with romanticy is I don't really have one. I read all the like rom coms books, like the Emily Henrys. I read those. My problem is that I don't like fantasy. I don't want to read about a battle. In fact, when I'm reading Fourth Wing, I'm flipping, flip, flip, flip through the battle. That's not my business. Goodbye. Mm hmm. I don't care.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I want, I want a sorcerer. I want a mage.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Give me magic spelled M A G I C K. Please, I want it. I need it. I love it.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  I'm like, tell me who's dead and let me out of here.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  He said, give me the list of dead and dying at the end of the battle. And that's all I need.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't need it.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  I feel like we are kind of dancing around the plot of this novel. So I feel like we should get into.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  So is the novel.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  And you know what? We're gonna get into that.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  But I feel like, I think this discussion will probably flow from us going through the plot of this novel and, you know, pinpointing the moment at which you started flipping and the moment at which you started flipping and the moment at which I was like, I'm gonna start listening to this in the audiobook form because that is how I finished this novel was on 1.2x speed on Spotify.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  I'm gonna admit something embarrassing. I know, shocker. I have not had a bedside lamp for an undisclosed amount of months, long enough that I basically haven't read before bed for a really long time. And I only realized this because I'm hosting a friend and I was like, wow, they deserve to have a light by their bed at night. I don't. But, uh, this finally inspired me to find the perfect bedside lamp. And I had a vision in mind. Wayfair, they had exactly what I need, which is one of those library style lights with like the green lampshade and little pull cord. I have been having this image in my mind of having one and now I have one because of course Wayfair had it.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  For all things hosting, Wayfair delivers high quality, customer trusted products for your home so you can host and celebrate without distress. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  We've been cooking up a fun, special holiday project for y'all over here at Normal Gossip. And usually when work gets crazy, I kind of just try to continue my life like nothing's happening. But recently, thanks to therapy, this time around, I was like, what if I did not try to pour from an empty cup? And that is what growing feels like. If you've been thinking about starting therapy, then I think you should check out today's sponsor, Growth Therapy. Growth Therapy is built for therapy that actually feels like care. You can find therapy based on what matters most to you, like insurance taken, mental health specialties, identity, or night and weekend availability if you're working a lot.

• 9:48Speaker 00

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• 10:15Speaker 03

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• 10:48Speaker 00

  This book starts off with our female main character, whose name is now escaping me.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Uh huh, see, it just tickled right over. It's gone.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Does anyone here remember her name?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Violet.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  You're right.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Violet Serengal?

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Yes. Violet Sorengal.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Sorengal.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Very close. That is one benefit of the audiobook. I learned how to pronounce all these names, which is very helpful, specifically with the female dragon's name, because it's spelled S-G-A-E-Y-L. And I saw that. Saegeal.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Saegeal.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Saegeal. So this is about a society that has been at war with its neighbors for 400 years. And they're now at the point where every child is conscripted into some sort of service. Either you are an archivist, or you are a dragon rider, or you were just in the infantry.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  You're a cannon. You're just cannon fodder.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Basically.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  I think there are also other places you could be, but they're not our business.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So Violet has been trained from birth to be a scribe. And then her mother, who is the general of the army.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Evil.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Evil decides, she's mean mommy for real. She decides at the beginning of the novel, Violet, I know you trained to be reading books, but you're gonna go ride a dragon, even though you have a disease that is very clearly Ayler's Donlos Syndrome, which Rebecca Yarros also has. Self-insert queen, hello, I see you and I respect you.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  I too want a large man named Zaden to love me.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Not Zaden.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Zaden is the name of our male hero.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  I feel like my extreme joint flexibility could come in really handy in certain situations. I'm just saying.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  What's funny is she doesn't even use that.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  No, not at all. Not at all. So Violet enters this military academy where she is literally, her entire thing is she's gonna die. Because you have to be the strongest of the strong to be a dragon rider. And basically, something like 40% of the people who enter the Dragon Rider Academy die.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. This book, I feel, really suffers from a problem, which is the main stake is, is she going to die?

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  And the problem is, there are 600 pages of this book.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  And also two other books.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Also several other books. So you're like, if there are, I don't know, 1,800 pages of material to come after this, she's certainly not gonna fall off this plank she has to walk. Like, there's no way.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  I also, like, this book suffers, again, from this sort of world-building problem that you have, which is, okay, we're supposed to buy that this is a society in which parents willingly just gamble, like, on one out of four children are going to die in this academy. You would think at some point, there might be some kind of popular uprising that says, "Hey, can you stop feeding our children into, like, the meat grinder of this endless war, please and thank you?" Especially since the Dragon Riding Academy takes children of, like, you know, noble birth, they're like, you know, the upper crust of society, and

• 13:59Speaker 01

  they are cut down just as easily. I just do not buy that, uh, rich people in any society are actually willing to sacrifice their own in service to the cause.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  It's also kind of wild, because not only is your, like, potential for death very high, the potential for death is mostly also while you're still in school to become able to ride the dragon. And I'm like, it feels like maybe you could just, like, look at some of these people and say, "Not you, actually. You're gonna go home," instead of being like, "I don't know, why don't you run up this gauntlet and see if we... we'll see if you die."

• 14:35Speaker 01

  It's very wasteful, yes.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of wasted lives.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  So many wasted lives, to the point where I'm like, no wonder your military force is constantly needing, like, replenishment. It's all these kids who could have been doing something else are all dying in the first 24 days of this Dragon Academy. So you get to this academy, you go through your first year, which includes a series of challenges. The first one is you have to run across this, like, really long bridge that has no railings, and people fall off immediately. The second challenge is called "The Gauntlet," and it is apparently, my friend Danielle told me this, um, I haven't fact-checked it, so if it's not true, I'm so sorry, but apparently, in describing the gauntlet, it's quite literally just an American Ninja Warrior's course?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  It is. Uh, also, though, the, like, so the first test, that you have to, like, cross, uh, you know, sort of rickety rope ladder

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  over a endless crevasse to get to school, I feel like that would so be my story. I'd be like, "All right, time to start my adult life." Whee! Whee! Whee! Whee!

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. I also would have fallen off immediately, also because you're holding a huge pack on your bag as you're walking across this parapet or whatever. So is this is the moment, as soon as our hero Violet walks across this parapet, she meets the love of her life, who we don't know is the love of her life, but obviously is Zaden Riorces, who is her born enemy because her mother killed his father?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  I think it's Zaden Riordan.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Because I will say, a lot of the Resistance characters have vaguely Celtic names. They reminded me of the IRA.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  I want to be clear that none of us know what this man's last name is. And Alex just offered to look it up and I said it wasn't important. So don't be mad at us. We don't care.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  And I think you're right. All we need to know is that his name is Zaden and it's spelled X-A-D-E-N, which tells you everything you need to know about him.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  He is XXX-A-D-E-N.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Exactly. And he hates her because her mother has killed his father. Because, I mean, speaking of an uprising, there was an uprising at one point for reasons that I don't think are ever fully explained as to why this section of the country decided to rebel. But the leaders of the rebellion were all killed and then their children were branded by dragons. And then they have to go into the Dragon Academy to either die or become dragon riders to prove their loyalty to the country? So that's how they punish dissent in this country.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  The thing that makes me feel crazy about this book in general is that every time you say something like that, I'm like, but that doesn't make sense with the rest of the book. Like, why would the dragons agree to brand people of the Resistance? All we've seen of dragons in the book is that they just like light people on fire and they die. Like, when did they become able to brand? Do you know?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Well, so having read the sequel, but I've heard the third one is terrible and so I haven't gotten around to it yet. Perhaps one day I'll be desperate enough to actually do it. But so the like, the Dragon Council. Listen, I am never more in my fucking element than when I can say, look, what you have to understand is that the Dragon Council operates as a sovereign entity. It's called, so the title of the series is like The Imperian Chronicles, I think. And the Imperian is the name of the dragon. Counsel. And they do operate sort of in concert, but ultimately independently.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  I can, how does this bore you, Kelsey? I love, I love, I love that you and I are so different and are yet able to love each other.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  I know.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Across this difference.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  That's beautiful. When you're saying those things, it just reminds me of like people, people who watch MSNBC on election night, where what's his face is like, this county, which is controlled by this. And I'm just like, I don't care, man. Like, just tell me what you think is gonna happen.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  But it's dragons.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  I don't care for them.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, the dragons also enter kind of late in this novel. I think it's like maybe, speaking of late, what's actually late in this novel is the fucking.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, they enter late, but they enter sort of resoundingly with the twist that it turns out that you are psychically bonded to the dragon that picks you to ride them. And then those dragons also mate with each other. And so.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of mating.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  You know, like, we couldn't see this coming from across a vast parapet that you have to use to get to your fucking college. Zayden's dragon and Violet's dragons be fucking. And through that psychic bond, it's sort of like, it's like an only one bed convention, but an only one dragon mating.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And they're also the most powerful dragons in the army, to be clear.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think one of the things that I think we need to make clear is that Violet is the definition of, I think, like a Mary Sue character. And that every single one of her flaws just ends up being her strength. In that she has, again, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is like makes your ligaments weird and fucked up, which makes her unable to do most of the things that she should be able to do as a dragon rider. But nevertheless, she overcomes every single time and into becoming her strength because she poisons all of her opponents. She knows how to throw a dagger. She rises to the point that Zayden starts to. Going to her as violence as a nickname, which is the point in this novel where I started crashing out a little bit.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Well, it was very, so I, I like to keep track of in action movies when they cast like a very frail woman as sort of like assassin, you know, it's like the Gal Gadot thing.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Who is problematic for many other reasons. But yeah, so would like one of her, it turns out like she can't fight, but because she's constantly in pain, she's just able to like take a blow in a, in a physical fight. Like, like her opponents can't figure out because she's just so used to being in pain that she's able to turn this to her advantage. Um, and yeah, she was supposed to be a scribe, so she's like smarter than everybody. So she figures out that like book learning can defeat, you know, a, a large muscular opponent, which as, as a book learner, I can tell you in my experience, no, doesn't, doesn't help.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Also, everyone is trying to kill her, but no one succeeds, which I think is really, again, you've raised a very important point of this novel, which I think is the thing that interests me about the difference between romance and romanticy, which is romance, there's a defined narrative arc. It has a happy ending. That's the entire point. With romanticy over a series of five books, it's hard to draw out narrative tension if you know that the person at the beginning of the novel is going to live through everything. It's like, okay, well, how important can any of this be really?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Well, so what she did in this first novel, which is also sort of a classic romance thing, is that she did introduce the possibility of a love triangle, right? There was the, there was the other guy who was her childhood friend.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Dane.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Dane, who's like the son of her mom's closest advisor or something. Um, who she thought, you know, that she had like carried this torch for, for years. Um, and he was incredibly protective in, you know, that classic way of like, oh, it turns out he's just babying her, you know, he's, he wants to be her father and Zaden wants to be her daddy.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Say that. One thing I do really have to hand to her is that Rebecca Yarz clearly just took a list of tropes and then was like, I can put them all in there. Watch me, I will. And I have to hand it to her on that, right? Like, it's like, love triangle, childhood crush, evil man, mating kink, right? Like, it's just like, all of them. And that is fun, in a way.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Enemies to lovers.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Enemies to lovers, family feud.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Mean mommy.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Mean mommy.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Sibling dynamics. Yeah, I think Rebecca can get a mini points from me. I mean, I quite frankly, respect anyone who can write an entire novel, let alone three, because I have many ideas. And yet, I will not write any of the transitory scenes that get you from idea idea. And neither will Rebecca, because as soon as a scene is...

• 23:33Speaker 00

  As soon as a scene is, I got to the point, especially listening to the audiobook, I got to the point where I think maybe a graph before a chapter ended, I was like, next chapter's coming up. I can tell, because she's like, and this is how this action-filled scene ended, and next action-filled scene.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  And I was like, you know what? Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. I don't know, all, no filler.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  We're literally all just gimme to garbage about this book.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it does have, in that sense, it's a very like TikTok-friendly, quick-cut kind of narrative aesthetic.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  It is very, it's ripe for adaptation in a way that as soon as I started reading it, I was like, so who bought the rights to this? And the answer is Amazon.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Can I bring us back to the fucking?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Please. I was just, I was just about to say, the question with the adaptation, though, is like, how dirty are they gonna make it?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  They're gonna get kinky.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  So, Amazon is sexless.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  I want to start with the first scene in which they are, I don't know, kissing, physically intimate at all. And the whole reason that they even get together, her and the forbidden one, is that their dragons are fucking? And it's hard for them to block that out. And I was just like, this? I like, this is crazy. Like, you're, oh, you've become incredibly horny because your dragon is having sex? And you can't figure out how to separate his horny from your horny? Like, okay, great, I'm locked in, sure.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  That was a beautiful device. I do, I was talking to one of our colleagues about this and I was like, I'm not gonna lie, going into this, hearing romanticy and dragons, I was like, well.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  You assumed they fucked the dragons, right?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also assumed that.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  I mean, at the very least, I assumed I would be reading some kind of monstersma. I didn't, I was like, the logistics of a human fucking a dragon sounds very complicated. So I was like, maybe because they're a mate of dragons, we'll get some insight into that. And the answer is no, it's all about the human to human contact, which is kind of disappointing. But we skipped a few scenes.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Oh, please.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  How Violet and Zayden get together throughout this entire, like, trial and tribulations that she goes through. Again, enemies to lovers, very standard fare of Violet is slowly figuring out that this person, who is her lifelong family enemy, is actually a good guy. And actually, maybe her mom is the one who's wrong. And actually, maybe the government is keeping secrets from them. And actually, maybe everything isn't as it seems.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Listen, who among us has not experienced a political awakening because of a hot guy?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Who among us hasn't gone to college and been like, wait?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Been like, wait a minute, the government is lying to me.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  But that hot man never would.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  He's so tall.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  He's so tall and beautiful. Yes, exactly. And then Violet goes through the whole gauntlet process of bonding to a dragon. And Zayden is like, I want to save her from these people who are trying to kill her. And Violet has to go up against three other people because she wants to save a tiny golden dragon, who is a huge liability to the rest of the squad, but is so beautiful and perfect. And who is that an analogy for? Who could it possibly be? And Violet's like, I will defend this tiny golden dragon to my death, which allows her to bond with the larger, more powerful dragon, who's like, I like, I like your spunk kid. He's like, I like your moxie.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idea that in this like relentlessly militaristic society, like actually showing honor and nobility will serve you well.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Right. It's incredibly funny that like the whole book, she keeps making the same, well, she's constantly making the same points over and over again. But one of the points she's making over and over again is that like honor is irrelevant here, right? Like you can do whatever you want at any time. The only thing that matters is the quote unquote codex, which is like a book of rules, but the book of rules seems to only be you can't kill each other when they're sleeping. That's it. That's the only rule that matters. All the other ones are irrelevant. You can just stab people while you're wrestling. That's fine. And then the dragons are like, no, we value honor. That's what we care about.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this does feel like a good lesson in how sort of inculcating young people into a violent ideology works, right? Is that you pit them against each other, you tell them that there is such a thing as rules of engagement, and then outside of that, anything is allowable. And then you also get them to think that concepts like honor and courage and nobility like entail in what they're doing. And meanwhile, you're sending them out to slaughter innocents.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Yes, and that's beautiful.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, the tensions between what morals the leaders of this military society are actually valuing is very not clear. Because on one level, they're like, you can kill anyone you want during training, but the moment that you're out of training, that's your best friend. And it's like, I was trying to murder him two days ago, and you want me to protect him now?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Well, but this is where the background of being somebody who writes, being somebody who writes military romance, where it's like, oh, what you have to understand is that even when the system goes wrong, there are good people who are caught up in the system who want to make it right.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  One good apple.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Like Violet, the best apple. So the dragon that Violet ends up pairing with, well, actually, she pairs with two, which has never happened in the history of dragons ever.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  First time threesome.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really like, man, no threesome, threesome forbidden for no reason.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  And then she bonds with these two dragons. One of them is mated to Zayden's dragon, which means maid dragons cannot be apart from each other for longer than four or five days. So that means that Zayden and Violet, for the rest of their careers, are gonna be next to each other. And so this means Zayden is like, we can't fuck. It would be a mistake. And Violet is like, are you sure? Are you sure about that?

• 29:36Speaker 02

  As soon as that plot point came up that was like bonded dragons can't be apart for more than four or five days. I was like, is this a Christian book?

• 29:47Speaker 02

  I was like, wait a second. Is this a Christian book? And then you know what happened? I went to the acknowledgements and the first line is like, I want to thank our heavenly father. And I was like, I fuck called it. Absolutely called it.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  So much romance and so much romanticy is inherently Christian, oftentimes specifically Mormon.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  But I saw all of that before I got to like the big sex scene. So I was like, wait, our heavenly father, we're thanking for this? For this?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  We're thanking for this because it's like, it's spicy, but it's spice in service to like eternal pairing. Right? Like this is, it always cashes out as this kind of like faded, we will be together forever. Right? And often there's like this device that comes in that assuages like a lot of our anxieties about contemporary dating. Right? So our like, our, our dragons are mated and therefore we are somehow also meant to be together. In Court of Thorn and Roses, it's, you know, we are, we're, we're mates. There's something about being like a fey as opposed to being a human man that says like, no, once I have like locked into you, that's it.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  I know you don't have to have any anxiety about me ghosting you or like not returning your texts or being ambivalent. Like it is, there's no sense of like ambiguity about these relationships. They are overwhelming. You feel like there's no sense resisting because this is fate intervening in your life and you are going to be together forever. So if you do have, you know, some premarital sex that can

• 31:26Speaker 02

  As a treat?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Probably be, you could probably like, you know, be swept up under the fact that you, you know, the two of you have been like overwhelmed by some sort of higher power, right?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  I think what I'm saying is like, you've got to hand it to her a little bit where I'm like, if this is propaganda for Christianity, like I tip my hat to that babe, like incredible work.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  I also have the moment of being like, is this Mormon? And I don't think Rebecca Yarros is specifically Mormon, though it is giving shades of Twilight. I think the thing that made it feel very similar to Twilight is the way that the female man character is the one who's really propelling this relationship of being like, the man is the one who's like, no, we must be logical and we must not fuck and it wouldn't make any sense. And I don't want to hurt you. And then she's like, well, actually, as a woman who has agency, as a woman who has power over her body, as a woman who's in control of her emotions, I'm the one who's saying, I want this and I know you want me. So fuck that. And it's like, all right, yeah, sure. What I, why not?

• 32:32Speaker 01

  But then, but then it always turns out that he's resisting because he is worried about being so overcome by emotion, right?

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  It's not that he's resisting because he's ambivalent in any way. It's that he knows that he like loves you so much.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Oh, wait.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  That were he to just get like one little sniff, it would be over for him.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  I'm just realizing that that's actually the fantasy part of this.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  This is the fantasy part of this book. The fantasy is not the dragons. The fantasy is that you will have a man who is like

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Who needs you.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  so enamored of you that he realizes it will lead him to ruination if he got even slightly close.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  To be fucking clear, textually, it will lead him to death.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And yet unto death.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:30Speaker 03

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• 34:09Speaker 00

  One of the things we haven't mentioned yet is that, once you're attached to a dragon, you can channel their power, which means that they all have these different signet powers. And Zayden's is obviously controlling shadows because he's Zayden. And then Violet's is controlling lightning, which no one has done for 100 years. And it's like, well, yeah, fucking course. But how this comes up is that there are moments where they're fucking, where she literally blows out windows because of her lightning power. Or people are like, there was a weird storm like two miles away from here in a forest. And it's like, oh, that was me coming five times.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yes. And yet, that lightning is brought down by vaginal penetration. That lightning is brought down by a dick in a pussy. Can you come five times? Which is, again, like the Mormon sort of underlay of all of these books is that the height of depravity that they can imagine is a dick in a pussy, right? That is as depraved, as disgusting as it gets. And I read so many of these, and I'm just like, I'm begging you, like, have somebody lick an armpit, like, something.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  This one thing.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  But please, can I just get like a foot in a mouth? Can I get something?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Can I get him?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Let's see that these people are like some other form of perverse other than like the least perverse thing that you can be a pervert about, which is dick in a vagina.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  He gives her oral sex.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  He looks so pussy.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  What other perversion?

• 35:49Speaker 00

  What are you talking about?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  I want them to fuck the dragons.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Same.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, I find it funny that this warring society that has no indoor plumbing, seemingly, like the logistics of where we are in history are not explained at all. Because they're in a castle, no one talks about where the toilet is at, or whether or not they're doing chamber pots.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  They don't have electricity.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, they do have, but they have mage lights. But they also have some kind of like anti-fertility drug. And I'm like, all right, y'all have gone to the point of birth control. Do you have vibrators? What's going on here? Is there a vibrating crystal? What's going on here?

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  I don't need to be in the mic.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Do it.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  At one point, somebody says, for the win. And that, I wanted to just like tear the book in half. Because like, that is an internet phrase.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  For the win?

• 36:42Speaker 00

  No, that was, that was, that was, that was your queen Alex.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Thank you, Alex.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Who had to chime in at that point, but that was a moment where I texted my friend and I was just like, why is this feudal society that's been at war for 400 years using the phrase for the win? And she was like, that's fourth wing, baby.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  And I said, you're so right. It is fourth wing.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Really hard for me to move on from that. Because I did not catch this.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  So to me, because you know, to me, I'm scanning a lot. Because this is so prevalent in romanticy is that they will like pepper it with these like very contemporary idioms in a way that like I have just learned to gloss over at this point, right? The like, the, the big one that I, the one that I do notice is you'll get like a paragraph of text about, you know, the like physical properties of a man. And then you'll get he, period, was, period, so, period, hot, period. And it's like, they're typing it out like it's a Tumblr post. Like they're doing the sort of like, you know, grammatical emphasis thing. And I'm like, I just, oh, okay. Well, good luck with your cauldron that you're going to next.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  I want to go back to the kinks for just one second. So all of these books are very clear about why they're introducing things, right? Like, nothing is introduced that is not immediately clear what it will become. It's all very transparent, which you know what? Fine. I understand this. But then they introduce the fact that her dragon is wearing a saddle. And I was like, this must be a kink. I was like, it must be coming. But no, that was the one time I thought we were going to get a little bit of something.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  No, that's just because her joints are bad. And so she needs to be lashed to her dragon. Listen, we've still got, this is a five book series, so it could become a cake at some point. This, the saddle could be the Chekhov's gun of fourth wing sex scenes.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  To be clear, I won't be reading the next four books. So I'm going to need someone to tell me whether or not there's a saddle sex scene.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  I feel like this is a good place to, to do a meta-commentary of, um, what was, let's do some roses and thorns.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Because I feel like we maybe shouldn't spoil the actual end of this book. Cause there's a really, one thing I always respect about romance that is multiple books is that the cliffhanger every single time really gets you where I'm like, you know what? If I was really invested in this plotline, I would immediately buy this book. It worked with me with the Ferrante novels.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  Which is a completely.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Maybe the first time in history that somebody has brought up Fourth Wing and the Neapolitan Quartet.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  If you think about it, though, in a way, the Neapolitan novels are also a romance issue.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  And they are.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  About having a best friend.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Well, it's about historical romance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But so, we're not gonna spoil the end, because there's some major character death, which I appreciate in a romance novel.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  I do like that they're willing to kill people.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  I do, too. And they start from the beginning, literally from the moment they're running across the parapet, someone dies immediately. And I was like, you know what? Hell, yeah, Rebecca. Let me know people will die in this novel. I appreciate that.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Wait, that does remind me that the novel has a content warning at the front of it.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Does it?

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Did your copies have this?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  I do not remember.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  I don't remember.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  My copy of Fourth Wing had like a block of text before the dedication that was like, FYI, people are going to die and fuck, but longer. And I was like, wow, I really could have seen that one coming, but thank you? Question mark?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Once again, you know, were I like a 12-year-old reader, I'd be like, thank you. I am definitely gonna check this book out at the library.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  It really reminds me of the conventions of fanfiction. Like, that reminds me of what you put at the top of like an AO3 fanfiction story, where it's major character death, or like the really fucked up one, which is Dead Dove Do Not Eat, which is, you just don't.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Do not enter that door.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  I am making a face right now, which our listeners can't see.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Well, I can't tell you exactly what it refers to. I know it references a specific fanfiction, but if you see Dead Dove Do Not Eat on a fanfiction, there's something extremely fucked up in it. Like, not even in the way of like, oh, you know, like, non-consensual sex. That is something people will tag, or like rape, etc. Dead Dove Do Not Eat usually means something that you will never forget.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  That's not your business.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  That's not, unless you want to make it your business.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  And then it will be your business forever.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Now you have to think about this. And because of the way my brain works, I'm not a fanfiction reader, but I am going to specifically search out.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  I'm hoping that I will, that we will continue to drink rosé for long enough that that phrase will be wiped from my brain and I can save myself.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  No, somebody is gonna listen to this and just go to the dead dove, do not eat tag on AO3 and suffer a lot.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  And the person is going to be me.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  I will not be held liable for anything that happens after this episode. I'm telling you, it literally says dead dove, do not eat. I don't know what else to tell you.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Sorry, you were talking about how we're not gonna ruin the ending.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yes, okay, and I was also saying we should do roses and thorns of this entire experience. Kelsey, I want you to go first because you texted me when you started reading this, which is, I started reading the first page and I wanna shoot myself.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also texted Brandy that because I was like.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Exact text as well.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  I was like, you two are complicit in my death, potentially, and you should know. Um, okay, my rose is that I do think the first big sex scene was pretty good. I was like, okay, all right, sure, like, good sex scene, I'll hand it to you, I like it. My thorn is, um, everything else. In that I think that like, there were so many parts of this book that I really wanted to like and just couldn't because I kept getting like yanked out of it by the narration. And like, that's maybe a me problem, genuinely, but the book is in first person and the thing that is repeated the most is her being like, I feel scared, I feel like I can't do it.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  And I'm like, I don't know that that's really how people think. And so that is my thorn, I think.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Um, my, I, I, am I to understand that roses are what I like and thorns are what I didn't like?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  My rose is that I read it in a day and I read so much romanticy that I will just, I'll get 40 or 50 or 60 or sometimes 80% of the way through and be like, nope, I've reached, like, I can't finish this, I don't, it's too bad, I'm going to feel bad about myself if I continue to read one more page about this. And so it was like engaging enough that I read it in a day and again, I got that, you know, brain tickling sensation. That I enjoy so much. So that was my rose. My thorn is, yeah, I guess most

• 43:39Speaker 01

  most of the rest of it. I

• 43:43Speaker 02

  To be clear, I will be recommending this book to people. Like even though I'm like, it's garbage. I didn't like it. I don't think it's successful at the things I wanted it to do. I'm also like, if you want to read a book in the, in a day on the beach.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Listen, I will, so there, there, I would recommend it as a reading experience. I would not recommend it as a book. And these are

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Fuck.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, same. These are potentially two different categories for me.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Um, I do think that mine follows up on that, which is that my rose is that this is the first time I've understood the appeal of audiobooks.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, you have to speak on this because the audiobook, the narrator does dragon voice, right?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  I want to confess that I also listened to part of the audiobook because I had to drive here to Ocean City, which is like a three hour drive. And so I was like, well, I have a hundred pages left of this book. I'll simply put it on. And so I also experienced audiobooks for one of the first times.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Did you experience dragon voice?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Oh, did I?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Experience this and I feel like I'm missing out.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Voice acting.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Literally voice acting. I mean, I will say it to the point of, um, the quality of the prose. I was finding it hard as I was reading it to honestly not start zoning out in the middle of a sentence. Because I was like, I know where this is going. But when you're, when it's being read to you at 1.2x speed and you're playing a little phone game at the same time.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Optimal reading experience.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Again, that's a reading experience versus a book.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  But also the audiobook was like, I really respect people who can do that because the narrator is going from being like, and then he like plunged his hard member into me. And then the next thing is you hear the dragon being like, control yourself.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  What's also funny about the dragon voice, like I thought this voice actor was honestly quite good.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Same.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  But the thing that's the funniest about it is she didn't do voices for any of the characters.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  It was only the dragons.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  No, exactly. So you had no idea who was really talking to each other.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  And so it was a dragon?

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  You knew a dragon was talking.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  And you knew when a dragon was talking, but specifically only one of the dragons, specifically Taren.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Don't ask me.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Who is Violet's dragon, who is like the biggest, baddest dragon of them all, but he has this, like you, as soon as he started speaking, I was like, oh.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  That's Taren.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  That's him. That's him. So that's my rose, which is that I finally understood the appeal of audiobooks, which I'm like, oh, it's nice to be able to read a book while doing other things.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  She's doing air quotes for read a book.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Not that audiobooks aren't reading a book, but sometimes like I've listened to In Cold Blood on audiobook and that was not something where I was like, I'm playing a phone game. I maybe wash a dish, but I was like, I kind of need to pay attention to what's happening here.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  I do feel like we've really missed a trick, just technologically, that we couldn't record Truman Capote reading In Cold Blood.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Randy, that would have been incredible.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Right, come on.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Because the narrator of that audiobook is kind of trying to do like a Truman Capote-esque thing. Not like full, full send, but very much like trying to be, and that, it kind of like a Mid-Atlantic accent in a way where I'm like, you know what, all right, sure, whatever.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  An audiobook that I have listened to before, Always at the Beach, is Cole Kidman read The Waves, the Virginia Woolf book, and she does this like old English accent the whole time, and I was just like, that's beautiful to me. Congratulations, ma'am.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  I love that they put in a little effort.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. I love it too. So yeah, audiobooks, A+. That's my rose. My thorn is that this was the first book where I think I actively was like, I can't read this.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  I need this to be read to me at a faster pace than my brain can actually go.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Okay, see, I'm, I am, uh.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  You're built different.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  I'm so happy for the two of you that like the floor of your shame is so much higher than the floor of my shame.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  I want to be clear, I think I was really, really in trouble when I started this book because the book I read before this was John Steinbeck's East of Eden. And I read it for the first time and I was like saluting American literature. Like I was like, wow, we used to be a country, like this book rules. And then I came straight into fourth wing.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  I was in a graduate program for English literature.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  No, I know, I know. I'm saying, I think the, the direct juxtaposition of the two did not do fourth wing any favors.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Also, to be clear, I read fanfiction. I think what I'm not used to is like, fanfiction is straight to the plot. There's no filler, there's no world building because you're already in a world that you understand. And so I think the combination of, I think we all agree, not great world building with like the actual parts that I wanted to get to, I'm like, I, you're going to explain things to me and I'm going to be like, that doesn't make sense. And I, that's going to wash over me because none of that actually matters. But I will read some terrible things, Brandy. Don't, don't get it twisted. Control yourself.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Uh, this was beautiful. This was beautiful, friends.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  We drank a whole bottle of wine. We did. We respect, we let people enjoy things. If you liked the book, good for you. We also liked it in our own special and beautiful and evil ways.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  And we will be recommending it.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Do not yell at me for my opinion of fourth wing.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Honestly, please yell at me for my opinion now for, come at me. I've read trash that none of you people can even begin to understand. This is nothing, I love, I am a connoisseur of trash.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  All right. You can, you can send me emails, but I won't read them because I'm too busy reading about Minotaur Malcay.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  And the way that you know that we all read garbage is that we knew what she was talking about.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  I didn't need any explanation. Kelsey, Brandy, thank you so much for joining me. This was so fun. I love you.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Thank you for having us.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Thank you, Alex.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Thank you, Alex.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  For the win.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for listening to Normal Gossip. If you have a gossip story to share with us, that email is [email protected], or you can leave us a voicemail at 2679 Gossip. If you love this podcast and want to support us, become a friend or a friend of a friend at supportnormalgossip.com. You can follow the show on Instagram and TikTok at @normalgossip. Normal Gossip is hosted by me, Rachel Hampton. Our lead producer is Ciara Spragley-Ricks. Our subscriber episodes are produced by J. Tol Viera. The co-creators and dowager queens of Normal Gossip are Alex SuJong Laughlin and Kelsey McKinney. Defector's project editor

• 51:10Speaker 00

  is Justin Ellis. Jasper Wang and Sean Coon are Defector's business guys. Alex SuJong Loughlin is Defector's supervising producer. Tom Lay is our editor in chief. Thanks to the rest of the Defector staff. Defector Media is a collectively owned, subscriber-based media company, and Normal Gossip is a proud member of Radiotopia. Please remember, you did not hear this from me.