So today I discovered that I have apparently completely misremembered the ending of allegiant for about a decade.
I read the books right after the movie first came out. Bought the complete trilogy and binged it in a few days. Like most I had a pretty hard time getting through the last one which everyone agrees isn’t good, myself included. But I still always held on to the fact that it had quite a good ending, or at least an ending that I enjoyed. Then today, I just so happened to get into a conversation about it with a friend.
Turns out… yeah no. It’s actually very bad.
For a decade I thought it went like this: Tris survives the death serum just to be shot by David and subsequently dies, failing her mission. The memory serum is released over Chicago and the experiment is reset, the factions reestablished. Our “group” loses all knowledge of what happened and they move on (or just continue on with their lives from their perspective) and forget Tris ever existed, except for Four, kind of. Being divergent he doesn’t remember her but has a feeling deep down that someone he once knew or something important is missing. It ends with them looking over the city, watching the sunset/sunrise as if it was any other day.
I thought it was a brave choice and interesting concept. Killing off the main protagonist and making it so that nothing they had done had actually mattered. But maybe thats just because I like sad, pointless, despairing endings like that.
To be fair to myself, I was like thirteen at the time and I haven’t really thought or talked about the books since maybe after the second movie came out. I do remember though being quite fed up and just wanting to get to the end of the books so I probably glossed over some things or maybe just morphed them to fit into something I enjoyed. So definitely my fault, disappointing nonetheless to discover what the real ending was. I still like mine better.
Anyways, have you ever misremembered an important detail in a book? One that even changed your whole opinion about it? I’d be very interested to hear :)
Your ending is so much better??
I grew up in a really religious place that censored all our movies for spicy, political, or religiously unapproved scenes. Their edit of The Matrix famously gave us a MUCH better ending (spoilers for the fake ending of a decades old movie):
Neo’s body dies, but being The One he is able to live on as a program. He is going to free humanity, but can never escape, himself. He is a god in the Matrix, but cannot leave, and has nobly decided to liberate everyone else, freeing them and dooming himself.