3 things I would change about Divergent

In our effort to figure out how to tell good stories, Kate and I spend a fair amount of time pulling apart popular stories to see what makes them tick.  It's kind of how serial killers do with animals, but less likely to get us arrested.  We do this a lot to Harry Potter, but in the interest of fairness, I thought I should post some thoughts on another book that's gotten a lot of attention lately: Divergent.

Divergent has some major problems, but I think they can all be fixed by changing three small things.

1. The setting
2. The story
3. All of the characters

OK, so maybe those things aren't that small.  But the story is so fundamentally broken that this is the bare minimum set of things that has to change to make it work.  Before I jump into my criticism, I should disclose that I did not finish the series, which is rare for me.



But it was just too bad to keep reading.  I read the first book and maybe half of the second before I gave up.

In the interest of writing a post that has a reasonable chance of getting read, I'm going to limit myself to writing only about problems with the setting (by which I mean the world in which Divergent is set).  I'll tear apart the characters and story another day.

Divergent is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future.  Following some un-stated cataclysm, society began again in Chicago.  Lake Michigan has dried up, presumably as a result of whatever happened to break the world.  So, without the lake there, what makes this an attractive place to settle?  To feed a population the size of the one described in Divergent, you would have to have a pretty big farming operation, but Chicago is a huge city.  In order to farm there, they would have had to demolish streets and buildings, haul away all the concrete and rebar, and irrigate the land (assuming that they found themselves a source of water).  Or, they would have to build the farms outside the city and haul all their food 20 miles. But if they're farming outside the city, and the city itself has no water, it would make more sense to settle out nearer the farms.

So, why found your society in a place with no source of fresh water and no farmable land?  There is actually a good reason.

Turns out Veronica Roth wrote this book while attending Northwestern University on the outskirts of Chicago.  This is really the only good reason to set it in Chicago: because it was the big city she saw right in front of her, and she couldn't be bothered to think up a different setting.  I might have overstated how good of a reason there was.

So, for whatever reason, the society was founded in Chicago.  But the founders of this new society disagreed about what principles this society should be built upon.  This lead to population being split into five "factions," each based on a different character trait (honestly, bravery, selflessness, love, and intelligence).

This one got left out for some reason

The Faction system is extremely silly.  It is the way a 13 year old would view splitting up the world.  For one thing, the five traits are all objectively "good."  There is no faction founded on "bad" principles like "ruthless self interest" or "we are stronger, so we take whatever we need from the weak."  There is not even a faction based on the neutralish principles like "whatever has to be done to survive" or "practicality."  All of them are bumper-sticker soundbytes of a classic utopia.  Were other ideas ever presented?  Were other ideas ever tried?  We never find that out.

When kids turn 16 in this world, they get to pick whether to stay in the faction where they grew up or switch to a different one.  Part of this ritual is a test where the kid is told which faction they belong in.

Think "Sorting Hat Ripoff," only more sciency

But that test is not binding, and the results are kept secret.  What, then, is the point of the test?  Everybody in the story freaks out about how this test will decide their future, but then they can (and in many cases do) choose to completely ignore the results.  All the test does, according to the story, is look into your mind/soul/personality and tell you where you would be the best fit.  It seems to me like Veronica Roth wrote the original draft more like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, then in later revisions, she decided that this didn't work.  So she decided to make the test results just a friendly suggestion, but didn't bother to change anybody's feelings and anxieties about the test.  The only purpose I can see to the test is for the story.  Our heroine has an unusual, surprising result, which makes her all angsty.  This makes it seem more like a plot device and less like an element of an organic, real world.

So, after the test that doesn't matter, the teenagers go to live with the factions that make no sense.  Whatever.  But some of the kids don't end up fitting in their new faction.  These kids are kicked to the curb and have to live the rest of their lives as "factionless" hobos.  We see these people a few times in the book looking like stereotypical homeless folk.

"Spare some change?"

These factionless are a huge sticking point for me.  We have a large portion of the population (I think it was even said that there were more of them than in any one faction) who live in refrigerator boxes on the street and no one wants to take them in?  There's even a faction dedicated to charity and taking care of their fellow man, and they don't do more than set up soup kitchens for the factionless.  But the future is a harsh world, so I get no one going out of their way to help these folks.  What surprises me is that nobody takes advantage of them either.  They don't conscript them into an army, or slave labor, or anything.

There are lots of creative uses for the factionless

They are just part of the scenery.  I know they play some role in the later books, but that's just not enough for me.  They've been there for decades, and nobody in the world seems to have noticed.

While we're on the subject of the factionless, why do they stick around?  I get that you will always get some small percentage of any population that just gives up and doesn't have any initiative, but are there no factionless who just leave Chicago?  They could go set up their own civilization somewhere else.  Or why don't they revolt?  There are enough of them that they could take over the farms that feed everybody else.  Just because this society has chosen to cast them out doesn't mean they have to accept it.  This is post-apocalyptic fiction, for goodness sake.  There should be plenty of de-populated places to go and settle, plenty of outcasts to join, and plenty of weaker parties to conquer.  What is keeping them there, living on the streets?  I'll give you a hint: the plot.  These people exist because Roth needs them for the future books.

OK, this post is getting long and there's so much more to say about why the world of Divergent doesn't work.  For now I'll leave it with this.  The world centers around a society that inexplicably started up in a concrete jungle with no water.  The people are divided into five factions that seem like they were founded by a group of 13 year olds.  At a certain age, people take a meaningless test that is more like a high school aptitude test than a life changing event, but it is treated like the biggest day in anyone's life.  And there is a whole group of homeless people who nobody (least of all the factionless themselves) seems to notice.

This world just doesn't work.  I would much rather read a story in which the factions were realistic.  Or where the factionless were a part of the story instead of a part of the scenery.  These things feel like the cheap cardboard sets in the old Star Trek series - they're just there so that the main characters can say "wow, what a strange alien world!"