Fourth Wing adaptation makes key hire as BookTok favourite heads to TV

If you don’t yet know about Fourth Wing, you soon will.

The fantasy book is huge on BookTok (TikTok’s obsessive book community), which delivered it a number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list as well as on Amazon. More importantly, it had all the girlies fawning over sexy dragon riders. It’s a thing, trust us.

It was no surprise then that Amazon’s studio business along with actor Michael B. Jordan’s production company Outlier Society picked up the rights to Rebecca Yarros’ books. There are two tomes released so far in what has been called the Empyrean series but five are planned.

The books have been compared to Harry Potter and Twilight in terms of its popularity. The first book in the series sold two million copies in its first six months.

The series has been in development since last year but now Moira Walley-Beckett has been tapped as showrunner/head writer.

Canadian Walley-Beckett is best known for creating Anne with an E, the well-received 2017 series adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. She also worked on four seasons of Breaking Bad, where she won three Emmys for writing and producing, and created Flesh and Bone, a miniseries set in the high-stakes world of a ballet company.

Walley-Beckett’s experience with Anne with an E likely played a role in securing her the gig on Fourth Wing, which is also a coming-of-age story centered on a young woman.

The Empyrean books are set in a fantasy world where there is magic and dragons, and people are split into four quadrants: riders, healers, scribes and infantry. The protagonist is a character named Violet Sorrengail, a 20-year-old who has always seen herself as a bookish sort, someone who was going to pursue a life as a scribe.

Her mother, a fierce general, had other ideas and forced Violet into an elite college to train as a rider – a dragon rider, that is. The courses are brutal and physically demanding, and the only choice is between graduation or death.

One of her classmates is Xaden Riorson, the son of a man who was executed years earlier for leading a rebellion, and the person who dished out the punishment was Violet’s mother.

So, Violet and Xaden start off as enemies but soon discover their desires for each other.

The Fourth Wing books are as notable for their complex fantasy world-building as they are for their charged romance between Violet and Xaden. The books’ sex scenes have led it to being dubbed “romantasy”, a term which has over 475 million views on TikTok.

The combination of the fantasy elements (who doesn’t love dragons?) and the saucy hijinks is a huge part of why Fourth Wing has become such a big hit on BookTok. Yarros has previously called “the most reader-centred space I have ever been in my life, which is amazing, but also terrifying”.

BookTok has driven many female-focused titles to big sales, including A Court of Thorns and Rose by Sarah J. Maas, Someone Else’s Shoes by Jojo Moyes, The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Big Swiss by Jen Beagin and Gallant by V.E. Schwab.

Another BookTok favourite, Red, White & Royal Blue, a frothy LGBTQI romance about the son of the US president and a British prince, was adapted into a streaming movie starring Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez.

Fourth Wing was released in May 2023 with the sequel, Iron Flame, following soon after in October. The third book, Onyx Storm, is due for release in January.