Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy
okay, I will be honest: I didn’t totally hate these books. they are vaguely fun dystopian ya novels with a lady protagonist. it is hard to completely hate a book like that. (especially since in my teenage years I had a massive boner for dystopian literature.) but there was enough to hate that it warrants a hateview to deter those who are not fans of good ideas that are totally warped into impenetrable bullshit that makes little sense.
really, there are at least two dystopias that can be clearly defined in these books. two. if you actually read veronica roth’s commentary in some of the extra bits she had released, it reveals that there really wasn’t much of a fucking plan going into this twisted mess. so, you get all these good ideas that just don’t mesh together into any sort of a cohesive whole. you have one dystopia in the first and second books where people are forced into small communities based out of certain desirable characteristics with a giant underclass of people who can’t cut it. and that would be a great dystopia by itself if it was better executed!
and then you have this really messy dystopia based off of genetics in the last book. and when I hit it, it was like, where did this bullshit come from. there are so many new characters. who are these people. why are you throwing all of this at me now. in the last book. this is a whole new world of young adult dystopia fuckery. what happened to your world building. it is atrocious. (seriously, seriously atrocious world building through the entire series. christ it is horrible.)
when you FINALLY know what the whole divergent thing means, it actually works out to be a sort of nice twist. but it comes so fucking late in the series it doesn’t feel worthwhile in the slightest. and it is about the only thing that keeps the second dystopia going.
and oh god. the characterization. I couldn’t figure out how tris, our heroine, identified herself at any given moment, and in a series of books where identity is a theme it can get a little annoying. she is sixteen, which, whatever, I can understand flitting through different labels. but we don’t get to see half of that thought process as different labels come into the picture. and she can shrug off labels so fucking easily.
tris is a perfect little super powered pixie of a character who makes about two mistakes in the entire series. it’s her near complete lack of weaknesses along with how easily she brushes off major life crushing events that bothers me. like, katniss in the hunger games is super talented, but she actually seems to have a significant emotional response to what is going on around her, rather than being ‘oh hey this happened holy fuck whatever I am just going to keep shooting this gun at people and deal with this emotionally devastating event in two sentences cool’.
tris is just a paragon of perfection and a super duper special snowflake that everyone loves. this is not a compelling character trait to carry through three fucking books of story.
now, if the series was about tris’s brother caleb (preferably gender swapped because I like lady YA protags), I probably would have eaten it up. caleb is a genuinely interesting character with genuine growth and change. but nope, he is just a supporting character through the entire thing.
if you want to read a series where good ideas go to die, divergent is your game.