Onyx Storm (Spotlight on Romance)
Hello, all. Welcome to the Spotlight analysis on the Romance in Onyx Storm.
This analysis was originally prepared as part of the analysis of Chapters 48 & 49, and has been split off in the interest of trying to shorten the lengths of my individual posts. I encourage you to go back and check out at least that post, as this analysis is rooted in the events of those chapters.
If you’re all caught up (or don’t particularly care about being caught up), let’s discuss how there’s nothing to Violet and Xaden's relationship but sex.
STATS
Title: Onyx Storm
Series: The Empyrean (Book 3)
Author(s): Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: January 2025
Publisher: Red Tower Books
Rating: 1.5 / 10
SPOILER WARNING
Heavy spoilers will be provided for the entirety of The Empyrean up through the end of Chapter 49 of Onyx Storm. Mild spoilers for elements later in Onyx Storm may be provided, but I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers from later in Onyx Storm will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
DISCLAIMER
The problem we are about to discuss exists independently of the pornography issue. It would exist regardless of whether any sexual activities were presented in the page, Violet and Xaden ever had sex, or even if the mere idea of sex was ever raised in the story.
I’m going to steal an argument made by Bobsheaux in his review of The Swan Princess (the 1994 film), regarding a much-memed scene where Odette asks Prince Derek why he wants to marry her.
Odette: Wait.
Prince Derek: What? You're all I ever wanted. You're beautiful.
Odette: Thank you. But what else?
Prince Derek: What else?
Odette: Is beauty all that matters to you?
…
Prince Derek: I ... What else is there?
At this point, Bobsheaux joked that the film was really more about lust than love. Taking him at his word (since I’ve never seen the film myself), I would say that at this stage in the film, Derek and Odette’s relationship has the same foundation as Violet and Xaden's does three books in. Both are just about sex.
The reason I will continue to say the relationship is about sex throughout this analysis, rather than something more general like lust or physical attraction, is that Yarros herself chose to make sex the focus, rather than just attraction.
I laying all of this out up-front because, as a problem that exists separately from the pornography, I do not want it to he overshadowed by the pornography. Even if you disagree with my on the pornography issue, I hope you will approach this spotlight with an open mind. Yarros could have fixed this problem without removing the pornography. She chose not to.
FOUNDATION
Outside of the sex, why are Violet and Xaden together?
Let’s really think about this. What interests do they share? What values? Do their personalities compliment each other? What does each of them actually like about the other?
Why Does Xaden Love Violet?
Thanks to Chapter 39 of Fourth Wing being in Xaden’s POV, we have a very direct statement of what he cares about outside of the sex.
She can’t die, and not just because there’s a chance I won’t survive. She can’t die because I know I can’t live without her even if I do. Somewhere between the shock of our attraction at the top of that turret to realizing she risked her own life by giving up a boot for someone else on the parapet that first day to her throwing those daggers at myhead under the oak tree, I wavered. I should have realized the danger of getting too close the first time I put her on her back and showed her how easily she could kill me on the mat—a vulnerability I’ve allowed no one else—but I brushed it off as an undeniable attraction to a uniquely beautiful woman. When I watched her conquer the Gauntlet, then defend Andarna at Threshing, I stumbled, stunned by both her cunning and her sense of honor. When I burst into her room and found Oren’s treacherous handat her throat, the rage that made it so easy to kill all six of them without batting an eye should have told me I was headed for a cliff. And when she smiled at me after mastering her shield in mere minutes, her face lighting up as the snow fell around us, I fucking fell.
In other words, buried amount constant repetition about attraction, we have two qualities:
Cunning
Honor
We can also add “brilliance” to the list, since he lays it on thick to validate Violet’s intellgience before the chapter ends.
Unfortunately, none of this testimony is worth anything.
First, there is the issue of the power fantasy rearing its head. This praise he has for Violet doesn’t feel like a natural extension of his character. Yarros is having him think these things in this way because she wants her self-insert Mary Sue to be praised for these things. If this is romantic chemistry, then every character who ever validated Violet is also romantically involved with her.
Second, none of the examples Xaden gives for these things actually work, to the point that the ones for cunning and honor directly contradict each other.
The Gauntlet was not cunning. Violet cheated in a ludicrous way that only worked because the plot warps around her and that amounts to her stabbing her dragon in the leg. What’s more, Violet’s perversion of the Codex is not honorable, not when every other cadet is expected to die by the rules she warps.
Even if we wanted to argue that rescuing Andarna was honorable, Xaden’s interference was dishonorable. He doesn’t really care about honor if he’s this willing to undermined what Violet was trying to do. Her decision to openly face three-on-one odds in an open field with nothing but daggers, trusting in literal plot armor to protect her, is also not cunning.
Xaden praises Violet for brilliance for knowing architectural trivia and jumping to conclusions that just happen to be correct.
Third … by this point, all three of these have been disproven at least once.
We’ve covered many examples of Violet’s stupidity throughout the reviews of all three books, but her insistence on trying to stay on Tairn’s back without magic, forcing Xaden to make the saddle so Tairn wouldn't have to keep catching her, should have told him that Violet is neither cunning nor brilliant.
Violet premeditated and threatened to execute the murder of two children to cover up the fallout of her unprompted poisoning of the Triumvirate on Hedotis. Given that defending a child (so to speak) was how she proved herself honorable, Xaden should no longer see her in that light.
Outside of things clearly written to validate Violet, nearly all the things Xaden praises about Violet are sexual, to the point that I can’t actually recall him praising anything else about her.
So … Xaden’s got nothing.
That’s okay, though. Violet is our main POV. She is the self-insert Mary Sue around whom this universe warps. Xaden can be an object who exists purely to emotionally and physically gratify her without this breaking the Romance. What matters is that she has a foundation to be attracted to him.
What’s that foundation?
…
Yeah, this is where things really go to shit.
Why Does Violet Love Xaden?
Violet’s attraction to Xaden started with sex and progressed to superficial things. He gives her gifts. He validates her. He exercises his power and influence to achieve her goals.
This last is the closest Xaden and Violet come to shared values, namely in Violet’s appreciation of the fact that Xaden welcomes in the Poromish refugees. Unfortunately, this isn’t why she is attracted to him. Per the rules of the moral binary enforced by demonization of characters, Violet appreciates anyone who serves her interests and hates anyone who doesn’t. Remember, in Iron Flame she was rejecting the possibility of a relationship with Xaden because he kept secrets from her, despite her accepting that he kept those secrets to help the rebels (and, thus, the Poromish people). Violet values her personal sense of security far more than either Xaden or any morality they might share.
At the end of the day, Xaden is not a person to Violet. He is an object who grants her wishes. He has POWER. He is easily molded to her will. He gratifies her sexual appetites.
I suspect that Yarros registers this deficiency on some level. In the epigraphs of Chapters 45 and 46, she Tells the audience why Violet loves Xaden and tries to lean into the idea that these two are planning the future (more on that shortly). Unfortunately, she botches both so horrendously that she makes the situation far worse.
Let’s start with Chapter 45 first.
I think I started falling for you that night in the tree when I watched you with the marked ones, but I began tumbling the day you gave me Tairn’s saddle. You’ll give some self-serving excuse, but the truth is you’re kinder than you want people to know. Maybe kinder than you know.
— Recovered Correspondence of Cadet Violet Sorrengail to His Grace, Lieutenant Xaden Riorson, Sixteenth Duke of Tyrrendor
Oh … oh shit.
Let’s ignore the bit about Xaden helping the rebel children. Much like with care for the Poromish refugees, Violet’s behavior in Iron Flame makes it clear that she doesn’t care about his kindness so much that he happened to do what she would have done in his situation. Let’s instead focus on the saddle point.
Remember all the times where Violet reviled Dain for merely offering her help but got weak-kneed over Xaden actively forcing help onto her? Remember, in particular, her tantrum in Chapter 18 of Fourth Wing? Is Yarros honestly saying that, if Dain had ignored Violet’s objections and forced a saddle upon her, she would have turned away from Xaden and chosen Dain instead?
Of course not. In fact, she has openly acknowledged the double standard in interviews and tried to laugh it off because … Xaden is hot.
And, since I glanced at the comments sections of those TikTok interviews: no, the difference between the Dain and Xaden is not that Dain holds Violet back while Xaden helps her grow. That logic died when Dain stepped aside and let Violet prove her strength by facing Threshing on her own, whereas Xaden meddled. Yarros then executed the double-tap when Dain came to Violet in Chapter 18 to ask her how to help her grow and was screamed at.
At the absolute best, this is another example of Violet loving Xaden because he gives her gifts. At worst, Yarros has just reversed Violet’s character arc by telling the audience that she wants to be with a man whose “kindness” drives him to liberate her from the consequences of her actions - in other words, she’s telling us Violet should get together with Dain, despite Dain being inviable as a love interest for two books by this point.
Now, on to Chapter 46.
When this is over, we should take as much leave as they’ll give us and spend it all in Aretia. We can figure out what life is supposed to look like without the daily threat of death. You can govern the province you love during the day, then slide into bed with me at night. Or I can always join you in the Assembly chamber. You do some of your best work on that throne.
— Recovered Correspondence of Cadet Violet Sorrengail to His Grace, Lieutenant Xaden Riorson, Sixteenth Duke of Tyrrendor
This brings us back to the issue of Violet and Xaden discussing marriage. These two have barely spent any time together as a stable couple, and most of the focus in that relationship had been on sex. Even this discussion of the future loops right back around to sex, with the ending referring to the sex scene from Chapter 48 of Iron Flame. Yarros is trying to milk emotion she hasn’t earned, and even then, she can’t keep herself from steering right back to the only actual substance this relationship has.
Soft Moments
There is a reason why I haven’t mentioned any of the moments in this book where I praised the Romance, such as the moment of tenderness on the shores of Deverelli or Xaden getting Violet a gift.
While these moments could absolutely work if there was a relationship for them to build off of, they don’t work nearly as well in isolation. They are not enough to set the idea that two characters are a loving couple who are attracted to each other for reasons beyond sex. These same moments could be applied to siblings, friends, or parents. Is Violet in a romantic relationship with Rhiannon because she gave Rhiannon a boot at their first meeting? Is she in one with Mira because she and Mira have shared heart-to-heart chats filled with unspoken emotion? Is she is one with Dain because flexed his authority as wingleader to move Sloane to her squad?
Then there’s the issue of how few and far between these moments are. They are so few that they are roughly equal to the pornographic scenes, and then the amount of addition time focused on sex buries them entirely.
Bottom line, while these moments would indeed show how close Violet and Xaden are and how much they care for each other if attached to a functional romance, they are nothing but a superficial play for our emotions in the current story.
Benefits
In the Prologue of this book, Yarros set us up for a meaningful Romance subplot about Violet struggling to save the man she loves … only to immediately swing the focus to sex, because that’s what Violet truly cares about. We’ll get into the narrative impact on this in a second. For now, let’s look at just the implications for the relationship.
The fact that Violet and Xaden can’t have sex gets more focus than Xaden being a venin does. It is what Violet cares about most. This was evident the moment Yarros made the lack of sex between them the focus and motivation for the venin cure subplot, but it became particularly clear when she made Xaden a professor. After all, why should Xaden being a professor honestly matter if Violet is already committed to curing the venin condition? What did it actually change about their situation? The rider leadership can’t stop them from speaking through the mated bond (more on that in a moment), so the only thing this interferes with is sex. If Violet truly prioritized curing Xaden over sex, she would shrug this off and focus on the task at hand. The fact Yarros stooped to this at all says more about her priorities than anything else, but the fact she steered Violet down this same path still damages the romance she’s toying with.
Plus … well, not to put too fine a point on it, Violet is so desperately, all-consumingly devoted to getting laid that it’s honestly off-putting.
Chapter 48 is really a microcosm of this problem. The following are a few examples from Violet’s narration that show how hyper-fixated on sex. As you read these, bear in mind that this is a fictional narrative, where the thoughts put onto the page are curated for relevance. Not everything needs to be concluded. Just like with Violet’s spite towards Dain, it was important to Yarros that we see Violet in this light.
One second he’s standing in the hallway, and the next, his hands are in my hair and his mouth is on mine.
Gods, yes. His lips are cold, but his tongue is deliciously warm as it strokes into my mouth. The kiss wakes up every nerve ending in my body and reminds me just how long it’s been since Deverelli. Between traveling, our close confines with other riders, and his fear of losing control, it’s been too many weeks since I’ve felt his skin against mine.
One kiss from him is all it takes for power to hum along my skin, for need to override any and all thoughts besides closer and more. It’s always closer and more when it comes to him.
…
He nods. “I’m not ignoring my fate. I know there will come a point in time where I’ll become more it than me.” He swallows. “But as dangerous as hope is, you’re right—I have to fight for this. I think I’m stable for now, and I know it’s only day seventy—”
“What is this magical number you have?” Gods help me if we’re looking at triple digits.
He tucks my hair behind my ears. “Seventy-six. It’s twice Barlowe’s longest stretch without draining after his first significant channeling—the cliff incident. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but I figure that making it seventy-six days will indicate that I can stall the progression.”
I blink. “Three days?” My hopes don’t just rise; they soar.
“I told myself I’d wait until day seventy-six to show up at your door, but Sgaeyl changed course once I realized if I could keep control beyond the wards…” He leans in, hovering inches above my mouth.
“Then you can keep control with me?” I shamelessly finish the sentence the way I want it to end.
…
“Not distracted. Obsessed. You look…” His eyes darken as he studies my curves like he’s never seen them. “Maybe we should wait until day seventy-six.” He retreats and reaches for the door handle.
Absolutely not.
“Open that door, and I’ll pin the edge of your pants to the wood and leave you therefor the next three days.” I glance meaningfully at my daggers on the dresser. “Wecan curl up in our bed and just sleep if that’s what you want, but please stop runningfrom me.”
There were more examples than this, but I wouldn't be able to give adequate context without showing some of the graphic bits of their foreplay.
The long and short of this is that Violet is driven by the need for sex. She doesn’t want Xaden to loosen up because she cares about him and wants him to be happy. We saw what that looks like on Deverelli, and it was a blip. No, Violet wants Xaden to relax and just have sex with her because she wants it. Even her claim that she’d been fine with him just sleeping in the same bed feels like she’s just trying to get him to give a little ground and move closer to her goal.
The entire book has been like this. Violet expresses all this frustration over Xaden not opening up to her and not being there for her sexually, but outside of the lip service paid to curing Xaden and that blip of tenderness, she doesn't really care about what he’s going through. Her entire focus has been on getting him back to a point where he’ll have sex with her again.
I can't help but flash back to a line from Chapter 3 of Iron Flame.
Ignoring the explosive chemistry between us is hard enough without him reminding me what we feel like together. Physically, our relationship—or whatever we are—is perfect. Better than perfect. It’s hot as hell and more than addictive.
Violet says this in contrast to the emotional dysfunctionality that she herself insists exists (while refusing to admit that she is the problem). By her own admission, sex is what pulled their relationship forward. It’s what she demanded in Chapter 27 of the same book as an ultimatum where the implied alternative was that Xaden would lose our on any future with her.
Bringing things back to the original point: I am not saying that it is unrealistic for human being to have their thoughts. That fact that Violet has these thoughts does not inherently say anything about her character. My issue is that Yarros priorities these thoughts and makes them Violet’s primary motivation. She chose to make sex the crux of this entire relationshp.
The Bond
At multiple points during the rainbow dragon hunt, Violet and Xaden bemoaned the loss of their telepathic communication with the mated bond. This is something Violet misses alongside the sex.
I see both a literal and a metaphorical reading for the bond, but both boil down to the unfortunate implication that Violet and Xaden can’t maintain their relationship without help.
If literal, Yarros is implying that Violet’s and Xaden’s relationship is dependent upon this telepathic communication, as if they are incapable of maintaining healthy communication without it.
If metaphorical, Yarros is implying that some mystical X factor is needed for the relationship to work, as if Violet and Xaden can’t work towards a happy relationship without some infatuation to drive things.
The Future
A couple of times now, I’ve covered the baffling effort to imply that Violet and Xaden are already planning for the future and discussing commitments. It is as nonsensical now as it was back on Deverelli. The one thing I’ll add here is the impact the hyper-fixation on sex has on these moments.
If Yarros had taken the time to forge a meaningful, emotional connection between Violet and Xaden, the hurry for them to decide on marriage after just a couple months would make more sense. It might feel rushed, but with the right relationship built to support it, this would actually enhance the story. It would come across like Xaden and Violet have been swept up in an overwhelming whirlwind of romance.
Yarros chose instead to make the relationship about sex. That simply doesn’t yield the same payoff. At best, the rush to get married feels like an obligation, like a shotgun wedding - though at least a shotgun wedding has a baby to help the couple grow closer through a shared responsibility. This just makes me wonder if Violet will file for divorce if Xaden’s encroaching venin tendencies kill his sex drive.
NOW IT MATTERS
Ironically enough, the fact that Xaden and Violet are together purely for sex wasn’t a narrative problem prior to Onyx Storm. Don’t get me wrong, their relationship has always been shallow, geared towards wish fulfillment for Yarros’s self-insert Mary Sue rather than having any meaningful depth, but this was still functional within the Romance subplots that Yarros chose to work with. She had the luxury of time to build towards something more meaningful.
Fourth Wing
The Romance subplot within the first book was an extension of Violet’s character arc. From the beginning of the novel through the end of Chapter 16, Violet grew away from Dain as she came to realize that she actually wanted to be a dragon rider rather than returning to the scribes. From Chapters 17 onward, she found herself drawn towards the man who embodied all the danger and allure of the life she’d chosen. It would certainly have been nice to see a foundation laid for something more emotional, but pure wish fulfillment work fine to execute this goal.
Iron Flame
The Romance subplot within the second book veers from a Trust conflict, to a Jealousy conflict, and then right back to the Trust conflict. Emphasis is put on the threats to Violet’s wish fulfillment. Yarros fails at writing both conflicts, but the concept was at least there.
While it would, again, would have been preferable to get actual romantic chemistry and an emotional foundation at this point, this still wasn’t strictly necessary. The focus of the conflict was not on the relationship itself but the threats to that relationship, and enough other things were going on to distract from the question of whether the relationship was really worth preserving.
Onyx Storm
The relationship between Violet and Xaden is no longer under threat by this point. They are secure in their feelings for each other and agree that they both want to be together. Now is the time to actually explore what these two meant to each other and show why the two are together outside of wish fulfillment.
And … Yarros chooses to put the focus on sex.
Okay, that’s unfortunate, but she did have an out. The original Romance subplot conflict that she set up in the Prologue could have done the same heavy lifting as the conflicts in Iron Flame. If Violet were wholly invested in curing Xaden, investing all of her agency into pursuing a cure and acting beyond what was demanded by the hunt for rainbow dragons to help him, that would have served as a distraction. We could have been put in a position where we’d be too invested in Violet accomplishing her goal to properly question whether she’s actually fighting to protect a meaningful relationshp.
Instead, Yarros chose to remove Violet’s agency from the issue and simply tag this objective onto the rainbow dragon hunt. She then made sex the focus … and still didn’t give Violet agency to resolve the problem.
For the Romance to work under these conditions, Yarros would have needed to use every available opportunity within the meandering plot to explore the emotional side of Violet and Xaden’s relationship. She could have sold us on the idea that Violet is emotionally invested in Xaden and thus is content without the sex for the time being. She could have explored Xaden’s psychological struggles as a venin (rather than just having him brood) and had Violet try to comfort him. This entire subplot could and should have been an extended version of that tender blip of Deverelli.
Except … no. Yarros doesn’t explore this. The closest she comes is making Xaden a professor, giving him and Violet and obstacle to overcome, and that loops right back to sex and wish fulfillment.
Yarros looked at the options available to her for this Romance subplot and chose the worst option. In this so-called Romantasy, written by an established Romance author, we get no romance, just delayed sexual gratification. This was Yarros’s moment to make this couple shine, and she squandered it. She made one of the supposed selling points of this book into an afterthought behind the power fantasy and the pornography.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON ROMANCE IN ONXY STORM
I keep emphasizing Yarros’s background as a Romance author because, at this point, I have absolutely no idea how she even made it to the midlist of Romance writers. How is she this bad at writing a romance with a convincing, emotional foundation?
Even if we pardon Xaden as existing purely for wish fulfillment, a person can write a wish fulfillment romance that still has believable emotion and attraction that goes beyond sex. This is standard fare for Hallmark movies, particularly the Christmas ones. If Yarros can’t even get this right, how did she ever convicne her publisher to retain her services for this long, let alone to gamble on the bloated monstrosity that is The Empyrean?
After reading Onyx Storm, I suddenly find myself looking at this quote from the November 2024 interview with People in a new light.
“Really, branching into fantasy was kind of an outlier for me, and my first loves are always a combination of fantasy and romance,” she says. “I couldn't write the fantasy without writing the romance. The romance is really what causes you to focus inward on internal conflict and character struggles. And it makes an even richer fantasy when you go back to it.”
“I get to balance both, so I honestly can't imagine ever giving either genre up,” she says. “They each enrich the other so very much that it would be impossible to let either of them go. Writing contemporary allows me to just let my brain go and really explore internal conflicts. And of course, love, because if it doesn't have love, I'm not interested.”
Back when I first analyzed this, I concluded that Yarros was admitting to not actually writing a Romantasy, since she was acting like a Fantasy Romance did not contain the basic ingredients needed for Romance. Now, I wonder if this was actually an excuse. I wonder if, on some level, Yarros knows how badly she’s failed here and is trying to shift the blame for her failure onto the genre of Fantasy. It wouldn’t be the first time she projected or tried to avoid looking bad, after all.
Ms. Yarros, if this is indeed the case, then I must inform you that blaming the genre does not work. It would not have been hard to deliver a Romance in this Epic Fantasy you constructed. The building blocks were there. You set things up and gave yourself plenty of pages to explore them. You decision to instead write pornography with a poorly delivered framing device is no one’s fault but yours.