The Rise of Rebecca Yarros, Mother of Dragon Smut

Her Military Background

Yarros grew up an Army brat bouncing from place to place until her parents (both lieutenant colonels) retired and settled down in Colorado, where she still lives. While studying history at the University of Colorado, she met and married an Army private named Jason, with whom she now shares six children. He was seriously wounded in 2003 but went on to deploy four more times during his 22 years of service. Yarros began writing novels to pass the time while he was away on his third deployment, and she eventually built a reputation for romances that often draw on her experience as a military spouse and don’t shy away from character deaths. (“Rebecca is a ruthless psychopathic killer posing as a romance novelist,” one reader joked on Reddit.) “We’ve buried our friends,” she recently told NPR. “I’m very personally affected by the actions that happen in war, and I think I like to examine it because I would like everyone to question it.”

Her Start

The first book Yarros ever wrote was an urban fantasy, but publishers weren’t interested. Instead, she made her debut with 2014’s Full Measures, a love story about a woman dealing with her father’s death in combat. It launched her first series, the five-book “Flight & Glory” saga, and Yarros began releasing about two contemporary romance books a year. But when her publisher, Entangled, decided to start an imprint for new adult fantasy-romance books, she jumped at the chance to try the genre. Yarros told Entertainment Weekly that she submitted five ideas, including the one that became the Empyrean series. But she still writes contemporary romance: Her most recent, Variation — which follows a ballerina and a Coast Guard rescue swimmer — dropped in November. And she has another, about a soldier and a congressional aide, being developed as a Netflix movie.

Her Definitive Book

Fourth Wing introduces a high-fantasy world of magic, violence, secrets, and sex and a plot that had BookTok experiencing emotional whiplash. It follows Violet Sorrengail, who’s forced to train to become an elite dragon rider at the ruthlessly competitive Basgiath War College, which prepares students to fight in an ongoing (and increasingly deadly) war. Violet may not get along with fellow student Xaden Riorson right away, but she does immediately think he is “flaming hot. Scorching hot. Gets-you-into-trouble-and-you-like-it level of hot.” Conveniently, their dragons are mates so they have no choice but to be part of each other’s lives at this school where students often die before graduation — and sometimes start questioning what they’re being taught. Yarros, a Swiftie, said she wrote a lot of Fourth Wing while listening to Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” because she thinks the song has “underlying political themes” that align with the world of her book.

Both Fourth Wing and its sequel Iron Flame are preceded by a note that says the contents have been “faithfully transcribed” from the fantasy language Navarrian into “modern language.” Yarros explained on the Professional Book Nerds podcast that she wanted her writing to be as accessible as possible. “My goal is to bring non-fantasy readers into fantasy,” she said. “So we made the vernacular more modern and more approachable.”

Her Approach to Smut

Explicit, first-person sex scenes are common in books by Yarros, who says she likes to “draw upon the female gaze and make sure that what we find to be sensual and sexual is represented on the page.” Gayle King suggested that married people should read Variation together. “It’s so sensual and so steamy without being vulgar. And I marvel that you were able to do that,” she said on CBS Mornings. “I’m thinking you and your husband are having very good sex, if I may say.” In the “Empyrean” series, Yarros’s spicy scenes mix in magic: When Violet has sex with Xaden for the first time, her orgasms trigger her lightning powers to start a storm and a fire.

By the Numbers

Yarros has published 23 novels in the past decade, including standalones and her “Empyrean,” “Renegades,” and “Flight & Glory” series.

Fourth Wing sold more than 2 million copies in its first six months. It has so far spent 70+ weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, with 15 of those weeks in the top spot.

She wrote Fourth Wing in about three months, sometimes writing up to 14 hours a day; within eighth months of its publication, she put out the sequel Iron Flame.

More than 200 Barnes & Noble stores held midnight-release parties for the sequel, Iron Flame, which sold out on Amazon in 12 hours.

In 2024, the two most-read books on Goodreads were Fourth Wing (about 1.1 million readers) and Iron Flame (about 977k readers).

Before TikTok eliminated its hashtag-view stats, #FourthWing, #Rebecca-Yarros, and related terms racked up more than 1 billion views on the app.

Her Chronic Illness

Yarros and several of her children have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects connective tissue and is associated with symptoms including chronic fatigue and pain. Fourth Wing’s heroine also has EDS; sometimes she’s too weak to stay on her dragon. “I wanted to tell a story about a girl who should not succeed, and who should not be able to endure an overly brutal environment,” Yarros told the New York Times. In an interview with The Bookseller, she said that creating a main character who shares her condition helped her set new personal limitations on writing time, signings, and travel. In late 2023, Yarros shared plans to slow her pace down in order to prioritize her health.

Her Fourth Wingers

According to Yarros, you’ll find a “group of phenomenal, supportive, hilarious women” in Flygirls, her Facebook group for fans, which advertises itself as a “place for fun, friends, giveaways, Rebecca’s books, and of course … book boyfriends!” But a subsection of her fandom is also dedicated specifically to the “Empyrean” series: The fan-run website Empyrean Riders— which functions as a hub for theories, plot breakdowns, and news about Yarros’s romantasy books — logs 4.2 million annual page views, according to its 2024 media kit. On Reddit, r/fourthwing is currently hosting “theory bingo,” where people can lock in their “wildest, most speculative” predictions about Onyx Storm. Fan art is also popular. Book covers in the series so far don’t feature any people, leaving character appearances mostly up to readers’ imaginations (or manifestations, when it comes to the forthcoming show). There isn’t a clear consensus on a dream casting yet — fans seem to prefer the likes of Taylor Zakhar Perez and Matthew Daddario just as much as a bunch of AI-generated options on TikTok.

Many readers have praised Violet for offering meaningful disability representation and showcasing strength beyond physical ability (“I felt seen for the very first time ever in a fantasy novel when reading FW/IF,” says one). And her love interest has no shortage of stans, either (though perhaps for more openly thirsty reasons). “us when xaden riorson,” declares the caption of a TikTok in which two people cover their mouths, fan themselves, pull at their collars, and slide down a wall or off a bed. Some particularly enthusiastic readers call him “Xaddy” — and yes, there’s fanmade merch to prove it.

Her Controversies

In the summer of 2023, TikTok user @ceartguleabhar pointed out various spelling and grammar errors with many of the Scottish Gaelic words in Fourth Wing, like Basgiath. A larger discourse around Yarros’s use of the language took off that October after she mispronounced several character names at New York Comic Con. “fourth wing isnt even inspired by scotland or its folklore so why is there gaelic in it??? bc shes relying on a minority language to add depth to her story,” @ceartguleabhar captioned a two-minute critique of the author’s remarks. “at least pronounce the words right if u insist on writing a book using a language you cannot speak lol.” Yarros later told Variety that the inclusion of Gaelic was meant to be a “love letter” to her mom’s Scottish ancestry. “You know when you read a word and it sounds different in your head? That’s what happened to me,” she said. “I remedied it by finding a Gaelic tutor. And I’m sorry.”

The author also faced backlash over her perceived stance on Gaza in light of the fact that translation rights were sold for the publication of a Hebrew version of Fourth Wing in Israel. On October 15, 2023, she posted a lengthy Instagram statement noting that she finds claims that she “support[s] genocide” to be “not only false, but personally insulting,” given that her grandfather survived a Nazi concentration camp. The statement initially did not mention Palestine by name, but an edited version noted that she was “horrified by the despicable attack on Israel” and also “terrified for the children and Palestinian innocents of Gaza,” which she characterized as a human-rights stance rather than a “both sides stance.” Yarros also said she believes that refusing a translation would be a form of book banning, which she is against. (She has stated that Fourth Wing is largely about “weaponizing ignorance” and the consequences of banning books and revising history.) Ultimately, she argued that her “white, privileged voice” should not be centered in this discussion and encouraged people to boost other voices and donate money.

In 2019, Yarros made headlines for writing a scathing open letter to the Army that outlined 10 grievances — including that the war in Afghanistan had stretched on for too long — to explain why her family was rejecting a re-enlistment bonus offered to her husband. “Every single time you deploy him, you spin the chamber and play Russian Roulette, and quite frankly, his life is worth more than $105K. I’m done gambling,” Yarros, who signed the since-deleted post as “The War-Weary, Salted Spouse,” wrote. Not everyone was as supportive as the comments section of her blog. “That was the first time I got canceled on the internet, super fun,” she deadpanned to NPR at last year’s National Book Festival.