The Iron Squad Fantasy Draft!!

Your favorite literary chaos agents Abby and Ronnie are back with a FUN twist on their usual deep dives - it's IRON SQUAD FANTASY DRAFT time! We're taking a break from our usual theory-heavy episodes to play a game where we draft members of the Iron Squad for different categories. Some of it's serious, some of it's silly, all of it's fin.

The concept is simple: for each category, we each get to pick one Iron Squad member, but we can't pick the same person. Our draft pool includes Dain, Rhi, Ridoc, Aaric, Sawyer, Maren, and Cat (sorry Violet, you're excluded from this one!).

First up: Who's the most powerful member of the Iron Squad? Abby makes the shocking choice of Cat over the obvious Aaric, bringing receipts about Cat's emotion manipulation powers being way more terrifying than we've given credit.Meanwhile, Ronnie defends Aaric's precog abilities and reminds us that we've barely scratched the surface of what Molvic (Aaric's blue dragon) can do.

Things get juicy when we debate who's most likely to betray Violet. Ronnie picks Ridoc (but only because he'd think it was for Violet's own good), while Abby makes a compelling case for Maren, whose parents were killed in a trap meant for Violet. We also tackle the most unlikely couple in the Iron Squad (Rhi and Ridoc give major sibling vibes) and whose signet would be the ABSOLUTE WORST to accidentally wield during sex (freezing your partner mid-moment? No thank you, Ridoc!).

The laughs start coming when we pick whose signet would be the BEST to accidentally wield during sex (Cat, obviously - emotion manipulation has its perks!), who will play the biggest role in upcoming books, and who our personal favorites are. Poor Sawyer barely gets any picks throughout our draft, confirming Rebecca's admission that she hasn't given him enough attention!

In our wildest Precog Corner yet, Abby dives into the fascinating mythology behind our Iron Squad members' names. Did you know that Aetos means "eagle" in Greek and refers to Zeus's childhood companion who was later the object of Hera’s jealousy? The parallels to Dain, Violet, and Xaden are too eerie to be a coincidence.

Ronnie counters with a theory about the cure for Venin that might just change everything: What if there IS no cure because channeling from the source is simply a choice that Venin have to stop making? What if the entire series is actually a massive allegory for addiction? The implications are chilling!

We wrap up with our current reads - Abby's loving "This Is How You Lose the Time War" (a tight, dense novella about two beings on opposite sides of a time war falling in love through letters), while Ronnie's rereading A Court of Thorns and Roses and discovering all the hidden gems she missed the first time around.

Spoilers for the ENTIRE Empyrean Series (Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, and Onyx Storm)

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