The Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth
I only wrote one story this year, but I think it's “solid.” I enjoyed writing it and the recipient liked it. For me, a Yuletide “win” is crafting a gift for an audience of one.
The fic I wrote: the most beautiful great city, Divergent, for
scribble_myname
I got really lucky with my yuletide assignment this year, in that my recipient wanted “world building” and really liked canon-based fic. This fits right into where my current interests are at, and I was looking forward to playing in a new world (and yes, with Four because Four is all kinds of awesome).
Since I didn't want to give my recipient Jossed fic (it's like giving a sweater a size off... potentially usable, but it doesn't fit right), I waited until the third book came out so I could read it and give something that fit the entire trilogy.
I can't decide if that was a good decision or not.
In Which we discuss writer responsibility, the creation of worlds and Allegiant in general
Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions. Your mileage may vary.
When Tris died in Allegiant, I chortled. I was literally gleeful because I could not believe that Veronica Roth actually killed her heroine. As I continued and we saw Four's reaction and her cold, dead body, I gave Roth kudos for the chutzpah required to kill the first person narrator in a teen romance, and leave her dead. I knew that a lot of her fans had to be ticked off something fierce, and I couldn't help but laugh.
On reflection, this probably isn't the best reaction for a reader to have.
I've been thinking on it for a while, trying to figure out why I had such a reaction, and why on reflection, I think Allegiant wasn't a good conclusion for the series. Roth ignored the cardinal rule of writing: know your audience.
Divergent is marketed as young adult/teen (female) dystopic world. It's a niche genre, but the nearest “relatives” of the book I can think of are The Hunger Games and Twilight. It builds on a lot of previously done tropes and plays right into the sweet spot of where daydreamers want to be. It struck that something that speaks to the reader's id – something that the reader wants and may be a guilty pleasure, but oh my god it's enjoyable. It's a current hot genre because it speaks to the desire for the hero's journey with a modern, cynical spin and a touch of romance.
I picked up the book after going through my HG obsession last year, since it's always on the “if you like the Hunger Games, Try THIS” lists I see. It's easy to see why, since it fits right into the dystopic world genre. The thing I think appeals to people's id about dystopic world teen genre is that there is a fulfillment of the desire that things will get better. The main characters may suffer like ohhhhh, but in the end, they'll manage some form of success.
It was interesting that Roth didn't use the standard love triangle cliché – Four never had a rival, and there was never any choice that Tris had to make. Maybe Al was interested, but it's clear that Al is never going to be one of the cool kids (he's weeping in his bunk the first time I remember him as an individual). Al was never going to rival Four, so he was never going to be a viable option for Tris. Instead of a triangle, we had a straight-forward romance, which was novel in the current market.
Two other things that stood out for me was a dystopic portrayal of a specific US city (some of the images of Chicago are haunting), and the Faction system. The Faction system automatically engages the reader because people think on which Faction they would choose – much like the House system in Harry Potter. I can't decide if I'm Candor or Erudite... I'm probably a Candor-born Erudite.
Anyway, a writer has a contract with their audience. The writer promises the reader something in return for the reader's attention. In the case of fiction, the writer is generally promising to entertain the reader. Then we get into genre issues, and the writer has certain responsibilities to the reader.
If I'm reading a whodunnit it, I know that at the end, I will be told who did it. If I'm reading a Harlequin, I know there will be romance and a happy ending with a handsome partner. If I'm reading something from the science fiction section, I sure as heck want the science fiction to have some explanation that I can buy into. If I'm watching a Disney animated film (totally its own genre!), I get the happily ever after.
If I'm reading a teen novel, I'm expecting my hero to go on some kind of hero's quest, survive and learn from it. If I'm reading a novel aimed at teen females, I'm also expecting some romance with resolution of some type.
When you look at writers who have alienated their readers by “betraying” them (hello, Laurell K. Hamilton... whatever happened to the sex-free Anita Blake who was a tough girl doing supernatural police procedurals?), you find that the alienation often comes from defying the tropes. In Twilight, I don't think there was ever any question that Bella was going to choose Jacob over Edward. If Bella had, it would have violated the reader's trust.
Killing a first-person narrator who the audience uses as an avatar can definitely be seen as a violation of reader's trust.
Of course, killing Tris wasn't the only hole I found in the book.
It's clear at the epilogue that the character who Roth was most interested in was Four. This is fine, since the teen-girls are going to be most interested in him, too. Four is my favorite character. However, my interest in him came at the cost of any empathy I had for the rest of the cast. Four's development and complexity compromised my compassion for Tris. Roth's focus on him actually reminds me of Anne Rice and her obsession with Lestat. I bet she never, ever thought of killing Four.
Killing Four might have worked better from a genre standpoint. I've read books where major supporting characters are killed, but I can't recall having a first person narrator die successfully in teen fiction (okay, there's Christopher Pike's Remember Me and Alive Sebold's The Lovely Bones, but those are about life after death, and of course Lurlene McDaniel made a whole career of killing her main characters, but again, that was a specific genre where the reader was forewarned that the heroine would likely die).
I thought something strange was going on when I saw Free Four being offered as an e-book telling Four's side of the story of the knife-throwing scene. It sounded very fanfic to me, but I thought it was a new push to include “expanded” material and keep the story relevant between books. Then there's another Four story, and another, and I started to wonder if the author had any distance between herself and her fantasy man.
Finally, Roth made the mistake of declaring that she has to split the narrative between Four and Tris in order to tell the whole story. This gave me some really, really bad flashbacks to reading Winds of Change, which is the first book I can remember reading that used a split narrative, alternating chapters between the ultimate “romance” of the series. Considering this book is where Mercedes Lackey started to lose me, it's not a good reflection. I vaguely recall seeing it done with other stories, but I cannot remember anyone pulling it off (within the teen fiction genre – some literary efforts manage, but literature is a distinct genre written for entirely different purposes than mass market popular fiction).
The big problem with Allegiant using this style is that there's no narrative difference in his voice and the one Roth uses for Tris. The language is exactly the same, and you can't tell who is speaking without looking at the header of each chapter. The character voices are not distinct, and thus both come across as interchangeable. I also didn't see enough limited POV/unreliable narrator to believe they were two separate individuals with distinct points of view. Switching narration style in the last book of the series comes across as poor planning because it interrupted the flow of the series. Four/Tobias is also, in my humble opinion, built up with the mystique of an outsider narrator. Getting into his thoughts make him lose a bit of the romanticism.
My problems with the trilogy started in Insurgent when the world failed to build on what existed, but instead tried to expand. I would have liked more detail on how the Faction system functioned before it was destroyed. I think I would have cared more if the pacing had been better – honestly, the Divergent series has enough plot for six books and would have benefited from a slower pace. Build up the world before it's destroyed. Make us care about the status quo, or let us see the inherent flaws in the system.
The technology mesh was a huge issue for me personally, and it kept highlighting little logic fails that kept me poking holes in the universe. The technology that was available in Divergent didn't make sense – broadcasting, monitoring stations, complicated simulation and serums, but no real individual communication system or individualized computer access? No cellphones/radios, etc? How does this work? The smear campaign for the Abnegation conducted via printed press release? What kind of exchange system is in place for currency/service? The class size is way too small, because Dauntless would have had less than 200 people if you do the math... etc., etc. I thought Roth might be able to reconcile this further in the series, but it was never addressed. All these little issues contributed to my problems with buying into the world.
Do I think people need to genre-push? Definitely, that's how we get new genres.
Do I think Roth succeeded? Nope.
Roth failed because her world building wasn't strong enough to make the jump into pulling off the surprise twist of killing a first person narrator. By the third book I was having a lot of logic fails with the series. Most of it was on the depth of the world building – in order to sculpt a believable world, an author has to have answers on how things work, even if it's not included in the series. This is “iceberg” stuff – ninety percent may be below the surface, but it's there and supports the ten percent the reader sees.
Killing Tris didn't engage me on the right emotional level because I didn't care about her. My amusement is also an unwelcome sign that the book wasn't done correctly for the intended audience (female teenagers primarily). The fact that I laughed at Tris' death showed there was an emotional disconnect between me and the character and I wasn't invested in her.
I am not in the targeted demographic of the book. Killing Tris was a literary choice which I can appreciate as an adult with some perspective. It was not a teen fiction choice, and I think that will come back and haunt Roth. I have serious doubts if some of her fans will ever forgive her, and I think she will find it harder to launch another successful series.
Was I betrayed? Nope. I was amused. I think if I was fifteen years younger, I would be frothing with righteous rage and demanding fix-it fic, and leading the cavalry of “Allegiant Does Not Exist” fighters (I still believe there are only three Star Wars movies, by the way, and some of them were made before I was born!).
I don't think I will be buying her books again. If she comes up with something I want to read, I'll probably sign it out from the library. I don't want to make that much investment in a writer who I don't trust to do things right.
World building is an art. The reason I loved Divergent is that it presented some interesting twists on tropes (Sorting Personality, a Choosing Ceremony, Factions of Society being aligned in clearly delineated groups). The first book managed to pull off an interesting world with a cohesive plot and ended on a killer cliff hanger.
This is where it fell apart.
It's clear (from reading some of her journal entries) that Roth didn't know where things were going. As such, there's places where her world-building doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If a writer is creating a trilogy, they have to know their world well enough to be able to tell the entire story. There should be foreshadowing in the series for it to feel cohesive. I'm still of the Chekov's gun school of writing – details selected should feel like an ultimate part of the narrative as a whole. She made many references to “patch works” and blanket statements that denied complexity. In Allegiant, I never bought into the GD vs GP thing because there was no foreshadowing, and the attitudes didn't ring true for me. The “outside world” was very flat, and I couldn't believe the ways Tris and Four were immediately slotted into it.
My main question after reading the trilogy is what in blazes was her editor doing.
Writers like to make artistic choices. It's the editor's job to reel them back in when they start producing something which is unmarketable. A really good editor is worth his or her weight in gold. It's not just about spelling and grammar – a good editor provides perspective and keeps the writer from failing to tell a satisfying story.
I wonder if some Hollywood exec read the published book and that's the loud screaming you hear from the distance. I also wonder if Hollywood is already planning on an ending rewrite, since I don't see how they could produce Movie 3 with that ending.
The timing of the book couldn't be worse from a commercial perspective. In killing Tris and denying a “happily romantic after” to her main couple, Roth has alienated a portion of her fanbase. I'm wagering some of her truest fans are really angry, and they're going to help give the film bad press. If it's an awesome movie, the fanbase may be expanded enough so this doesn't do a ton of damage. If the movie is mediocre, it's going to hurt the bottom line quite badly, since repeat sales are one of the reasons teen-oriented films do well.
If a writer wants to be artistic, then he or she sacrifices some ability to publish. If a writer signs a book contract, they sign an agreement that they are going to be producing something that people want to read. Killing a lead character because Roth felt it was time for her to die is a really questionable choice.
Roth's editor should have been saying, “That's a great idea. Explain how it works to me.”
And I think that's my issue. Roth doesn't explain how things work. In short, I didn't buy it. When you lose the ability to suspend belief, you've lost the power of the story.
The fic I wrote: the most beautiful great city, Divergent, for
scribble_mynameI got really lucky with my yuletide assignment this year, in that my recipient wanted “world building” and really liked canon-based fic. This fits right into where my current interests are at, and I was looking forward to playing in a new world (and yes, with Four because Four is all kinds of awesome).
Since I didn't want to give my recipient Jossed fic (it's like giving a sweater a size off... potentially usable, but it doesn't fit right), I waited until the third book came out so I could read it and give something that fit the entire trilogy.
I can't decide if that was a good decision or not.
In Which we discuss writer responsibility, the creation of worlds and Allegiant in general
Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions. Your mileage may vary.
When Tris died in Allegiant, I chortled. I was literally gleeful because I could not believe that Veronica Roth actually killed her heroine. As I continued and we saw Four's reaction and her cold, dead body, I gave Roth kudos for the chutzpah required to kill the first person narrator in a teen romance, and leave her dead. I knew that a lot of her fans had to be ticked off something fierce, and I couldn't help but laugh.
On reflection, this probably isn't the best reaction for a reader to have.
I've been thinking on it for a while, trying to figure out why I had such a reaction, and why on reflection, I think Allegiant wasn't a good conclusion for the series. Roth ignored the cardinal rule of writing: know your audience.
Divergent is marketed as young adult/teen (female) dystopic world. It's a niche genre, but the nearest “relatives” of the book I can think of are The Hunger Games and Twilight. It builds on a lot of previously done tropes and plays right into the sweet spot of where daydreamers want to be. It struck that something that speaks to the reader's id – something that the reader wants and may be a guilty pleasure, but oh my god it's enjoyable. It's a current hot genre because it speaks to the desire for the hero's journey with a modern, cynical spin and a touch of romance.
I picked up the book after going through my HG obsession last year, since it's always on the “if you like the Hunger Games, Try THIS” lists I see. It's easy to see why, since it fits right into the dystopic world genre. The thing I think appeals to people's id about dystopic world teen genre is that there is a fulfillment of the desire that things will get better. The main characters may suffer like ohhhhh, but in the end, they'll manage some form of success.
It was interesting that Roth didn't use the standard love triangle cliché – Four never had a rival, and there was never any choice that Tris had to make. Maybe Al was interested, but it's clear that Al is never going to be one of the cool kids (he's weeping in his bunk the first time I remember him as an individual). Al was never going to rival Four, so he was never going to be a viable option for Tris. Instead of a triangle, we had a straight-forward romance, which was novel in the current market.
Two other things that stood out for me was a dystopic portrayal of a specific US city (some of the images of Chicago are haunting), and the Faction system. The Faction system automatically engages the reader because people think on which Faction they would choose – much like the House system in Harry Potter. I can't decide if I'm Candor or Erudite... I'm probably a Candor-born Erudite.
Anyway, a writer has a contract with their audience. The writer promises the reader something in return for the reader's attention. In the case of fiction, the writer is generally promising to entertain the reader. Then we get into genre issues, and the writer has certain responsibilities to the reader.
If I'm reading a whodunnit it, I know that at the end, I will be told who did it. If I'm reading a Harlequin, I know there will be romance and a happy ending with a handsome partner. If I'm reading something from the science fiction section, I sure as heck want the science fiction to have some explanation that I can buy into. If I'm watching a Disney animated film (totally its own genre!), I get the happily ever after.
If I'm reading a teen novel, I'm expecting my hero to go on some kind of hero's quest, survive and learn from it. If I'm reading a novel aimed at teen females, I'm also expecting some romance with resolution of some type.
When you look at writers who have alienated their readers by “betraying” them (hello, Laurell K. Hamilton... whatever happened to the sex-free Anita Blake who was a tough girl doing supernatural police procedurals?), you find that the alienation often comes from defying the tropes. In Twilight, I don't think there was ever any question that Bella was going to choose Jacob over Edward. If Bella had, it would have violated the reader's trust.
Killing a first-person narrator who the audience uses as an avatar can definitely be seen as a violation of reader's trust.
Of course, killing Tris wasn't the only hole I found in the book.
It's clear at the epilogue that the character who Roth was most interested in was Four. This is fine, since the teen-girls are going to be most interested in him, too. Four is my favorite character. However, my interest in him came at the cost of any empathy I had for the rest of the cast. Four's development and complexity compromised my compassion for Tris. Roth's focus on him actually reminds me of Anne Rice and her obsession with Lestat. I bet she never, ever thought of killing Four.
Killing Four might have worked better from a genre standpoint. I've read books where major supporting characters are killed, but I can't recall having a first person narrator die successfully in teen fiction (okay, there's Christopher Pike's Remember Me and Alive Sebold's The Lovely Bones, but those are about life after death, and of course Lurlene McDaniel made a whole career of killing her main characters, but again, that was a specific genre where the reader was forewarned that the heroine would likely die).
I thought something strange was going on when I saw Free Four being offered as an e-book telling Four's side of the story of the knife-throwing scene. It sounded very fanfic to me, but I thought it was a new push to include “expanded” material and keep the story relevant between books. Then there's another Four story, and another, and I started to wonder if the author had any distance between herself and her fantasy man.
Finally, Roth made the mistake of declaring that she has to split the narrative between Four and Tris in order to tell the whole story. This gave me some really, really bad flashbacks to reading Winds of Change, which is the first book I can remember reading that used a split narrative, alternating chapters between the ultimate “romance” of the series. Considering this book is where Mercedes Lackey started to lose me, it's not a good reflection. I vaguely recall seeing it done with other stories, but I cannot remember anyone pulling it off (within the teen fiction genre – some literary efforts manage, but literature is a distinct genre written for entirely different purposes than mass market popular fiction).
The big problem with Allegiant using this style is that there's no narrative difference in his voice and the one Roth uses for Tris. The language is exactly the same, and you can't tell who is speaking without looking at the header of each chapter. The character voices are not distinct, and thus both come across as interchangeable. I also didn't see enough limited POV/unreliable narrator to believe they were two separate individuals with distinct points of view. Switching narration style in the last book of the series comes across as poor planning because it interrupted the flow of the series. Four/Tobias is also, in my humble opinion, built up with the mystique of an outsider narrator. Getting into his thoughts make him lose a bit of the romanticism.
My problems with the trilogy started in Insurgent when the world failed to build on what existed, but instead tried to expand. I would have liked more detail on how the Faction system functioned before it was destroyed. I think I would have cared more if the pacing had been better – honestly, the Divergent series has enough plot for six books and would have benefited from a slower pace. Build up the world before it's destroyed. Make us care about the status quo, or let us see the inherent flaws in the system.
The technology mesh was a huge issue for me personally, and it kept highlighting little logic fails that kept me poking holes in the universe. The technology that was available in Divergent didn't make sense – broadcasting, monitoring stations, complicated simulation and serums, but no real individual communication system or individualized computer access? No cellphones/radios, etc? How does this work? The smear campaign for the Abnegation conducted via printed press release? What kind of exchange system is in place for currency/service? The class size is way too small, because Dauntless would have had less than 200 people if you do the math... etc., etc. I thought Roth might be able to reconcile this further in the series, but it was never addressed. All these little issues contributed to my problems with buying into the world.
Do I think people need to genre-push? Definitely, that's how we get new genres.
Do I think Roth succeeded? Nope.
Roth failed because her world building wasn't strong enough to make the jump into pulling off the surprise twist of killing a first person narrator. By the third book I was having a lot of logic fails with the series. Most of it was on the depth of the world building – in order to sculpt a believable world, an author has to have answers on how things work, even if it's not included in the series. This is “iceberg” stuff – ninety percent may be below the surface, but it's there and supports the ten percent the reader sees.
Killing Tris didn't engage me on the right emotional level because I didn't care about her. My amusement is also an unwelcome sign that the book wasn't done correctly for the intended audience (female teenagers primarily). The fact that I laughed at Tris' death showed there was an emotional disconnect between me and the character and I wasn't invested in her.
I am not in the targeted demographic of the book. Killing Tris was a literary choice which I can appreciate as an adult with some perspective. It was not a teen fiction choice, and I think that will come back and haunt Roth. I have serious doubts if some of her fans will ever forgive her, and I think she will find it harder to launch another successful series.
Was I betrayed? Nope. I was amused. I think if I was fifteen years younger, I would be frothing with righteous rage and demanding fix-it fic, and leading the cavalry of “Allegiant Does Not Exist” fighters (I still believe there are only three Star Wars movies, by the way, and some of them were made before I was born!).
I don't think I will be buying her books again. If she comes up with something I want to read, I'll probably sign it out from the library. I don't want to make that much investment in a writer who I don't trust to do things right.
World building is an art. The reason I loved Divergent is that it presented some interesting twists on tropes (Sorting Personality, a Choosing Ceremony, Factions of Society being aligned in clearly delineated groups). The first book managed to pull off an interesting world with a cohesive plot and ended on a killer cliff hanger.
This is where it fell apart.
It's clear (from reading some of her journal entries) that Roth didn't know where things were going. As such, there's places where her world-building doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If a writer is creating a trilogy, they have to know their world well enough to be able to tell the entire story. There should be foreshadowing in the series for it to feel cohesive. I'm still of the Chekov's gun school of writing – details selected should feel like an ultimate part of the narrative as a whole. She made many references to “patch works” and blanket statements that denied complexity. In Allegiant, I never bought into the GD vs GP thing because there was no foreshadowing, and the attitudes didn't ring true for me. The “outside world” was very flat, and I couldn't believe the ways Tris and Four were immediately slotted into it.
My main question after reading the trilogy is what in blazes was her editor doing.
Writers like to make artistic choices. It's the editor's job to reel them back in when they start producing something which is unmarketable. A really good editor is worth his or her weight in gold. It's not just about spelling and grammar – a good editor provides perspective and keeps the writer from failing to tell a satisfying story.
I wonder if some Hollywood exec read the published book and that's the loud screaming you hear from the distance. I also wonder if Hollywood is already planning on an ending rewrite, since I don't see how they could produce Movie 3 with that ending.
The timing of the book couldn't be worse from a commercial perspective. In killing Tris and denying a “happily romantic after” to her main couple, Roth has alienated a portion of her fanbase. I'm wagering some of her truest fans are really angry, and they're going to help give the film bad press. If it's an awesome movie, the fanbase may be expanded enough so this doesn't do a ton of damage. If the movie is mediocre, it's going to hurt the bottom line quite badly, since repeat sales are one of the reasons teen-oriented films do well.
If a writer wants to be artistic, then he or she sacrifices some ability to publish. If a writer signs a book contract, they sign an agreement that they are going to be producing something that people want to read. Killing a lead character because Roth felt it was time for her to die is a really questionable choice.
Roth's editor should have been saying, “That's a great idea. Explain how it works to me.”
And I think that's my issue. Roth doesn't explain how things work. In short, I didn't buy it. When you lose the ability to suspend belief, you've lost the power of the story.