I would love to hear/read your thoughts on Divergent because I read it last month (really excited to get into it because I had heard good things) and was immediately disappointed. And frustrated.
Okay, my thing with Divergent basically is probably not going to be coherent (and also got really long...) but it’s like this:
There is a whole mess of books that have come out recently since the popularity of The Hunger Games that all capitalize on this Horrible Dystopia World craze going on in fiction in general and YA in particular.
And I have problems with basically all of them but my most common complaint is that none of these Horrible Dystopia Future Worlds seem to be in any way related to actual, realistic Horrible Futures that could ever develop out of actual human nature and flaws and the world as it exists now?
Like, The Hunger Games’ world building is pretty vague but at least you can see basically how things came to be and it seems to be in line with actual human flaws that have resulted in Bad Things in the past: there were horrible wars, in the chaos and fear of the aftermath a greedy dictatorship rose up and oppressed the masses, then there was a revolution and its failure lead to even worse oppression. I have problems with THG’s Panem but at least, at its base, the dystopia world has a grounding in how actual humans behave in times of panic and fear and how oppressive power imbalances arise.
In comparison, the world of Divergent falls into the problem that a lot of recent dystopia stories have, in that it’s more interested in the aesthetic, surface appeal of a gritty shitsack world where everyone wears leather and is a metaphor for the endurance of the human spirit or whatever than it is in actually building a world I can believe in and be invested in because it feels like something that could happen.
To be more concise, Divergent is basically “All My Problems With the Hogwarts Sorting System: The Book” and I don’t understand how a world like that would ever develop naturally out of the world as it is now and people as they exist.
Like, to continue with Hogwarts, in Harry Potter everyone is supposedly either brave, loyal, clever, OR ambitious at age eleven and is sorted as such, which is obviously ludicrous because everyone has shades of all of those things in them and also none of those traits are mutually exclusive. This is annoying in Harry Potter and REALLY annoying once you start trying to sort characters OUTSIDE of Harry Potter because you realize immediately that the system makes no sense at all, something the book tries to address in Dumbledore’s “I think we sort too early” line to Snape and also in the fact that you have multiple characters who could go either way with two houses (Harry as Slytherin!Gryffindor, Neville as Hufflepuff!Gryffindor, Hermione as Ravenclaw!Gryffindor, etc.) but in Divergent you have basically the same problems and none of the explanations, and also instead of a boarding school that you eventually graduate from it’s the entire world.
In the world of Divergent, you are either selfless, peaceful, honest, brave, or intelligent. Obviously, you run into the same problems here as you do with Hogwarts Houses because none of these traits are mutually exclusive, but in Divergent you don’t even get the minor HP hand-waving of “It’s all about your choice” and “Really most people could go in any group” because the whole basis of Tris’s power and uniqueness as the main character and hero in the story is that her being “divergent” AKA belonging in multiple groups makes her unique.
WHICH IS NOT HOW PEOPLE WORK!!!
Like, the implication here is that because being brave, intelligent, AND selfless is what makes Tris “divergent” and special, most other people must fit neatly into one group.
Which, again, is simply not how people are.
On that basis, everyone in the damn world should be divergent!
So, for me, the whole story falls apart on the fact it’s basic premise has nothing to do with actual human beings and is also frankly really insulting.
But then on top of that the factions themselves could have been interesting but are basically completely superficial and boring representations of each virtue, anyway.
Like, really? Selflessness means wearing gray and being passive and never looking at yourself in the mirror? Bravery is jumping out of a train every day to get to school and knowing how to throw knives? REALLY?
And it takes place in Chicago, which would be an enormous plus for me except that it’s BAD and therefore is BRINGING MY CITY DOWN, -2000 points for you, Divergent.
And also in the first chapter it’s got a “describing my main character’s appearance by having her look in a mirror” scene which is like an automatic book-closer for me. Just, personally. Ugh.
A friend of mine went to school with the girl who wrote it and told me about it before it really had a fandom and I checked it out and pretty much ignored it at the time because of all of the above and would probably still be ignoring it except that now, for some reason, it has a fandom and a movie being made. :(
