The Empyrean Interlude - On the Matter of Bonus Chapters
Hello, all. Thank you for joining me for this spur-of-the-moment post.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that I Google Rebecca Yarros’s name every couple of weeks. I’m hoping for some form of news on Book 4 (a title, at the very least, so I don’t have to keep calling it “Book 4” in my reviews). I don’t read most of the articles outright, as their headlines make it clear that they are publicity fluff, intended to keep Yarros relevant until she finally puts Book 4 out.
This morning, though, I found an article from E! News, dated July 30th of this year, that bore the following title:
Fourth Wing Author Rebecca Yarros Reveals Bonus Chapter Excerpt
This intrigued me enough to open the article … and …
It was publicity fluff to keep Yarros relevant until Book 4 came out.
Specifically, this article is a breakdown of an Instagram post made by Yarros on July 28th. The article featured the following photograph (which I have extracted from the E! article, rather than the original post) and caption (which I copy-pasted from the Instagram post).
Instagram/Rebecca Yarros (courtesy of E! News)
Sometimes switching up the office view for a couple of weeks makes you want to dip a toe back in Empyrean and start writing a little bonus scene.
You know…just for funsies. 😉
Most of the E! New article is just telling their audience everything I just told you. If that were all there were to this article, I would not be writing this post. However, the analysis provided after this summary is of particular interest.
One possibility touched upon by this article is that the scene in question is tied to the finale of Onyx Storm. I personally do agree with this assessment. My review series of Onyx Storm won’t reach the climax of the book until December - we’ll actually be rattling through the entire climax in three consecutive days, from December 19th through December 21st. However, while this information is relatively fresh, I want to take a moment to discuss it.
The issue ties back into the opening line of the E! New article. Whether intentionally or not, the author of the article calls out the manner in which Yarros exploits her audience to avoid doing the hard work of writing a coherent narrative.
Rebecca Yarros is encouraging readers’ theories to take flight.
I know this seems like a harmless line, so please, bear with me.
STRUCTURE
This post will consist of three parts. The first will serve as something of a spoiler-free preview for a critical issue we’ll cover in December (namely, on December 20th, when we discuss the book’s singular Xaden POV chapter). The second will be a discussion will dive deeper into this issue by touching on heavy spoilers from the climax and exploring just how problematic this issue is if myself and the author of the article are correct. We’ll then do a conclusion and wrap things up for the night.
THEORY BAIT
The Bonus Content
First, let’s go into the text that is shown on Yarros’s computer screen. Rather than re-type it, I am going to use the transcription provided by E! News.
“I’m with you to the end, Brother. But someone has to say it,” Garrick’s face tightens. “This plan risks everything our parents worked for,” he warns, already reaching for his flight jacket. “Everything they died for.”
“They died for us, for a world where we have the knowledge to make our own choices.” The shadows at my feet sharpen as I sheathe the second sword across my back. “Violet’s my choice. I’m more than willing to die for her.”
“Let’s go hunt some wyvern.”
Now, as pointed out in the article, there is no telling when this bonus content could take place. Having it tie into the climax of Onyx Storm makes sense (for reasons we’ll get into when discussing the heavy spoilers), but it could easily occur at any point in the previous two books. It could even take place before Fourth Wing, seeing as how Garrick was already part of Xaden’s smuggling operation by the time that book began.
In and of itself, this screenshot is too ambiguous to be worthy of analysis. It is utterly devoid of context. We the audience must make up context and tell ourselves stories to give it any substance.
… which is exactly the problem we are here to discuss.
Yarros Gives Up
The finale of Onyx Storm starts as the strongest ending of any book in the series thus far. While it is ultimately just enough thunderous final battle, Yarros starts it off with extremely strong personal stakes for Violet. For the first time since Liam’s death in the climax of Fourth Wing, I felt genuine emotional investment in Violet’s struggle, even while I was fully aware that Yarros would not kill Violet or any of Violet’s allies.
This conflict resolves itself by the end of Chapter 59.
The climax does not resolve until Chapter 65.
I’ll wait until December to analyze the nonsensical lengths Yarros goes to in order to pad her finale with filler. For now, I just want to touch on a non-spoiler explanation of the gaping problems with Chapters 65 and 66, which wrap up the climax and then serve as the epilogue.
You may recall that, in the climax of Iron Flame, Yaros has Xaden and the Sage Berwyn dueling on the ground by some ravine. We have no explanation of how they got there, when the earlier setup was that Xaden was going to fight Berwyn in the air. We have no explanation as to why they would do this, given that fighting in the air was really the ideal scenario for both Xaden and Berwyn. The reason this happened as that Yarros needed Xaden on the ground so that he could drain magic from the earth and become a venin. Whether it made sense was secondary to forcing her desired ending with zero effort.
Chapters 65 and 66 of Onyx Storm individually pull this same stunt, only so much worse.
Chapter 65, which is the Xaden POV chapter, has Xaden in a location without any clear explanation for how he got there, and it features him reaction to two twists that both come out of nowhere and that we did not get to see. One of those twists doubles as a mystery box, as Yarros chooses to play a variation of the pronoun game by referring to a character Xaden knows by a common noun rather than just using the character’s name.
Chapter 66, which is Violet’s last chapter, where she wakes up with amnesia to discover a new narrative status quo.
A core idea of my analysis of the finale of Onyx Storm is that Yarros gave up on writing the ending. She had a new status quo she wanted to establish. Rather than earn it through cause and effect, she left gaping holes in her narrative and told us that the new status quo was simply the way things are.
The only setup she did for any of this was to go back and bolt the foreshadowing for the second Krovlan uprising (which we covered this past Friday) onto the story. This was so sloppily done that it clearly was not part of her original narrative. It is only spared from being aftshadowing because of the level of effort required to graft it onto the story and the level of significance it is given within the narrative.
Instead of setting things up, Yarros relies on mystery boxes. She relies on shock value. She relies on the audience crafting their own theories, to tell her story for her as we struggle to rationalize the utter insanity she has vomited onto the page. Even the foreshadowing for the second Krovlan uprising seems to only exist to encourage theory crafting.
This is the pinnacle of lazy writing, if not outright entitled writing.
The Empress Has No Clothes
E! News claims that Yarros’s decision to share bonus content is “encouraging readers’ theories to take flight”.
I would exchange the word “encouraging” for “begging”.
Something you may have noticed already from the cycle of power fantasy in Onyx Storm, as well as something we will cover more as Yarros pulls filler into the back third of this book, is that Yarros is running out of ideas. She does not have a story to tell, and even if she did, she does not know how she is going to tell it. She recycles the same threats, rehashes the same conflicts, and escalates tension with the same tired tricks.
Yarros cannot tell a good Fantasy story … so she relies on her audience to tell themselves a better story than she ever good. She forces mysteries into existence by leaving gaping holes in her story and by slinging mystery boxes at us. She forces us to use our brains to make sense of the madness so that she won’t have to use hers.
This is a tactic that Arch recently got into while criticizing the worldbuilding in Trench Crusade. His argument boiled down to the idea that grimdark settings lean heavily into evocative imagery, encouraging the audience to invent their own lore. This is all well and good when a setting or story has enough meat to survive on its own. When it is the entire game plan, though, it’s simply lazy, and the holes quickly show.
Yarros is already past that threshold. I suspect she shared this in order to spark the audience interest and keep those theory engines chugging. After all, it has been seven months since Onyx Storm released, and judging by her comment about dipping toes, she hasn’t even started Book 4 yet. She is resorting to cheap tricks to keep us invested in a story she has no idea how to continue.
And the alternative is, unfortunately, even worse.
SHORTCUTS AND HACK WRITING (HEAVY SPOILERS)
Before I get into this next part, I must reiterate that no one has any idea where this bonus content plugs into the timeline. I believe it plugs into the climax of Onyx Storm, as it could be an attempt to plug one of the many holes left by Yarros giving up on writing her story. At least a few rabid fans agree with me, judging by responses quoted in the E! News article. Still, there is every chance that it refers to some wholly unrelated events at another point in the series timeline.
With that out of the way …
In Chapter 65, we learn that Xaden’s “brother” has now also become a venin. (Also, Panchek is a venin now - a twist which is as devoid of emotion of my delivery of that information). In Chapter 66, we further learn that Xaden went rogue after the final battle and that Garrick is also listed as missing.
Given the close bond between Garrick and Xaden, Yarros clearly wants us to think that Garrick is the new venin. She is going out of her way to tell us this, despite Garrick already being the obvious answer. I’d go so far as to say that, if it’s not Garrick, Yarros is lying to us by going to all the effort that she does. The fact she withholds the name of the “brother” despite Xaden clearly knowing who he is also represents a deceptive choice that is not justified within the narrative.
This bonus content makes things worse. It is very hard to believe that Yarros did not know what she was doing when she had Garrick call Xaden, “Brother,” in this excerpt. She is pushing us harder and harder towards that one theory.
Which leads us to why this bonus content may be something so much worse than theory bait.
If this excerpt does indeed plug into the finale of Onyx Storm, then it is most likely a scene that either explains how Xaden got to the place where he was in Chapter 65 or explains what happened between Chapters 65 and 66. In either case, Yarros is relying of bonus content to fill in holes in her work, holes that only exist because she gave up on writing a coherent ending. She chose to put out an incomplete and inadequate product and then treats fixing the damage as something she does for “funsies”.
Why are we giving Audra Winters grief over her planned 2nd edition of The Age of Scorpius while allowing Yarros to get away with this?
WE SHOULD NOT NEED BONUS CONTENT
Much like expanded universe material, bonus content is something that should be a reward for fans who are deeply invested in the source material. It should not be a crutch that allows the author to hide behind the theory-crafting of others. It certainly shouldn’t be used to patch holes that only exists in the first place due to the neglect of the author.
I think that having a scene where Yarros explores the dynamic between Xaden and Garrick is not a bad thing. It would be nice to get that scene in the actual novels, given how weak the character work is now, but if the scene is not strictly necessary to the book and would throw off the pacing, bonus content is a good way to share it with the world. (It could also be done in a later book in the form of a flashback.) The issue here is how Yarros is using the content to hide from her failures.
Bonus content should be a reward for the audience, not an injection to help us ignore the phantom pain from the stump where good writing is supposed to be attached.
EXTRAS
Now that this article has gotten me thinking, I am strongly considering doubling back to analysis some of Yarros’s other bonus content for The Empyrean. As of the time of writing this, it appears that Fourth Wing had no fewer than three bonus chapters (or, at least, bonus content for three different chapters). These wouldn’t be full reviews on the standard Friday slots. Rather, I am thinking of sprinkling them in as short reviews on Tuesdays when I don’t have anything going on with Tales of the Five Worlds.
Speaking of which, Chapter 8 of “The Unbottled Idol” releases on Tuesday. We are now halfway through the investigation.
Now that Mohsen and Kowsari have acquired the ifrit binding ring, it seems like it’s only a matter of time until the ifrit explains why Amāstrī assassinated Shapiev. When the ring fails to work, though, Kowsari calls upon Mohsen to help her solve this new mystery.
Whatever you’re here for, thanks for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe to the newsletter if you’d like weekly updates with the latest posts and to share this post with others if you liked what you saw. Enjoy what’s left of your Sunday, everyone. I hope to see you all again soon.