Warning: Spoilers Ahead
I love Divergent.
I discovered this trilogy of books last years a few weeks before the third one came out. Because I work at Hastings and love to read, I make it a habit to go to the book manager and ask what books she'd like me to read. Now I can't remember if this one started out with me asking or with her making the request. But the book was set to come out on Tuesday. It was a Friday when I bought the book and started to read it. And by Sunday I had it finished.
I wait, putting off reading the second one and picking up a copy for myself until about two days before the third, Allegiant came out. It was a very long and torturous wait. Even worse was having to wait the hours after I finished Insurgent, sleeping, going to work, and buying the book to go home and finish it within about twenty-four hours. I'll admit, without shame or want of pity that I cried. I sobbed whilst reading the last 100 other humans. pages of Allegiant and talking to my friends online.
And then there was news of the movie and I was giddy and worried at the same time. Sure there were changes, but overall, I truly think that the Divergent movie has done a very good job at staying true to the story and to its characters. But that isn't what I want to talk about.
I thought of something very interesting today.
Due to being a cashier and my great passion for books, I get to talk to a lot of people about Divergent and their views on the series. It's a pretty even split for those who love the ending, those who hate it, and those who haven't read it yet. But there was something that one customer said that struck me. He said that he liked it, but that the end disappointed him. Not because of what happened, but because it was the real world in the end. It was our world. So...ordinary.
Listening to the commercial for the movie that plays and it talks about the factions and how being Divergent means not being able to be controlled. Being able to think and make decisions. Being able to overcome. And I realized that Divergent is about an ordinary girl. Tris is a girl who is fully human. She lacks the mutation that makes the Chicago experiment "necessary" in the eyes of all the humans that live outside of this forbidden, closed off world. The thing is that given the way that the story progresses, you never think of Tris as ordinary.
But she is.
The Divergents are ordinary men and women who are simply human. They are not limited. Normal people are extraordinary. We can think and feel on a spectrum unknown to any other species. We are diverse and strange. We don't even understand each other most days. And I think its rather beautiful actually. That the ordinary person gets to be the hero in a great adventure. A wonderful adventure full of wonder and terror and humanity. And I think it's beautiful. Truly beautiful, but most people don't notice it. They were too busy complaining and saying that the author sold out or simply let people down.
I wasn't actually intending to go on a rant, but now that I'm here I should say that: How many of you write? Not just blog posts or critics, but write. Write stories and create characters and worlds and become immersed in them? Have you ever killed a character? It kills you inside. It doesn't matter that they're not "real". That they don't walk around in every day life because in that time you are writing them, they come to life. They become real and it kills you to think of them dying. It's even worse when you do have to kill them because there is no other way.
And there wasn't.
In
Insurgent, Tris has a very human response to a very dark moment in her life: She gives up. She comes to believe that in sacrificing herself she's doing the right thing, but in all reality, she's lost hope in her world. She's not doing it because it's the right thing but because it's easy. With help she overcomes that way of thinking only to find that her brother has fallen into the same thought pattern and that is why she stops him. She would never have forgiven herself if she had let him die and I adore her for that. As much as I sobbed (and Lord did I blubber) over her death and the ensuing pages, I know that it couldn't have ended any other way because if it had, that would not have been Tris and that would have been the true sell out.
The true disappointment.
Thank you Veronica Roth for writing a story where an ordinary person gets to be extraordinary. A story where we get to have an adventure no matter how ordinary looking or humble our background.
Thank you for creating a beautiful world and making yourself vulnerable.
Thank you for giving us Divergent.
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
