Fourth Wing

“Dragons don’t bond with fragile women. They incinerate them.”

Violet’s concern here establishes both her frailty and the stakes of the world. She is just as likely to die from a dragon as she is from the challenges of becoming a rider, heightening the book’s tension from the onset. This statement also does much to establish how Violet initially views herself; by describing herself as fragile, she others herself, clearly separating herself from her family and the other rider candidates and doubting her own ability to use her strengths to survive.

“There’s a reason strength is revered among riders. A squad, a section, a wing is only as effective as its weakest link, and if that link breaks, it puts everyone in danger.”

As Violet breaks down the command structure of the Rider Quadrant, she also outlines the justification behind the violence at work within military culture. She implements the idiom of the weakest link after already having described herself as breakable. This creates the automatic assumption that she embodies that undesirable weakness, identifying her as a newfound target for her peers. The irony here is that Violet only thinks of strength in terms of the physical, not the mental or emotional; this ties into the complex ideas of using Psychological Strength as a Survival Trait.