Divergent is marketed as a Dystopia, but it seems to miss the fundamental part of dystopian literature, which is commentating on an aspect of society that could lead to it’s downfall. It’s supposed to be relevant to our current world to some extent. In The Handmaid’s Tale, misogyny/the dehumanization of women is talked about. In Hunger Games, it’s about our society’s love for violence and war/how easy it is to dehumanize people, which is relevant to today’s society. In 1984 it’s a lack of individual thought. What exactly is Divergent’s overarching message? How did we get to this world in which people are divided into 4 groups based on one personality trait?
Idk the series should’ve been marketed as maybe a fantasy or action but even then it misses the mark. It just seems very shallow. Like the characters are not well thought out at all, not even Tris and Tobias who are supposed to be since they’re divergent. The writing also isn’t great, it honestly just seems like the series was just a cash grab because YA dystopian literature was popular at the time
It’s so stupid, I’m so annoyed with it. It almost has a message that could make it a proper dystopia (we shouldn’t divide people into factions/divide people based on genetic biases), but Veronica Roth really dropped the ball (there’s a lot of shit so I’ll keep it to just the major points). It’s too bloated with stuff in the middle (why should we care about the uprising of the non-faction people when the evil scientist lady is still trying to kill everyone?!), and she created cartoonishly evil scientists as all of her villains. And they’re shitty scientists! The one in charge of the science faction wants power for power’s sake, and is trying to kill “divergents” for not being normal faction members while trying to upend the whole balanced system the factions were created for; why would she care about divergents when she’s trying to take over the city?? Then the outside scientists apparently messed up human dna and made people have fewer personality traits? (it doesn’t work like that mtherfcker, do some gddmn research). And they are running the city as an experiment to “fix” the dna and make more “divergents”, but even though they have been watching everything they didn’t step in when the science faction lady messed everything up and started killing their divergents. Like, any normal scientist would send you into the sun if you messed up their experiment, especially a long-running one, and we’re supposed to believe they just sat back with popcorn until our protagonist found them?!?
I haven’t read the books but now have to read some Wikipedia pages.
The cartoonishly evil scientists made sense once I found out the author was a Christian Fundie and how those beliefs play into a negative view of science. But the whole thing was super over the top.
whispers oh my god, that would explain the messed up relationship with guilt 🤯🤯🤯