Explain your love for a controversial character.
okay, at first I was going to do Severus Snape, and then Edmund Pevensie, but both of those got redemption and like 50% of the fan base adores them. So I’m going to do an even more controversial character: Peter Hayes.
I can’t deny it. In the first book, we all hated his shitty ass. First of all he was irritating. Like that boy did not say a single sentence without “Stiff” in it, and it wasn’t even a productive or funny sentence. We hated him with every fibre of our being. He was worse than Jeanine Matthews, because we’ve all dealt with bullies and people who just want to put us down, and Peter was the embodiment of all of that. Tris was Divergent, she was strong and she was brave and she stood in front of a target and allowed her instructor to throw knives at her to help someone else - someone she was competing with. None of us can relate to that, but we can all relate to Peter. He represented everything we had in common with Tris Prior, and we hated him.
In the second book, he got slightly better. He saved Tris’ life, and we even got an insight into Peter’s world: the world where everybody’s choices were totalled up, and they had to be even. He couldn’t live in a world where Tris had saved his life and he hadn’t saved hers - it just wasn’t equal. Lots of people felt pity for him at this point, because it’s a crappy way to view life. Some people just felt even more disgust. I felt intrigued. Nobody looks at life that way without some sort of psychological damage. That was the moment Peter interested me. And (let’s all be real) it was the moment we started finding his one-liners funny.
In the third book, we all loved him as much as we had hated him at the beginning. His redemption was heartbreaking. He was no longer content with being the person that he was, and he couldn’t get away from it. I would have found it better if he was denied the serum. Seeing Peter coming to terms with his problems would have been really interesting. But anyway, we all loved Peter at that moment.
So, why do I like Peter? Well, firstly, I’m all for the characters that we hate that redeem themselves right at the end. They’re really intriguing; and Peter is one of the most intriguing of the lot. So say what you like about his actions, Peter Hayes was funny, he was ambitious, and he was (possibly) Divergent, and I know I should be Team Tris, but I adore both of them and - though it’s weird - for very similar reasons, despite them being so different.
