Last time, they’re arrested!
No matter how many times I ask why we are under arrest, no one says anything
FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT BOOK
Blah blah blah Did I do anything that could have been interpreted as siding with Erudite? My teeth dig into my lower lip so hard I wince. Yes, I did. I shot Will. I shot a number of other Dauntless. They were under the simulation, but maybe Candor doesn’t know that because my boyfriend and I are fucking idiots who ran away after winning blah blah when is this over blah blah seems like there’s something you’re not telling me blah Tris doesn’t want to tell him about killing Will for no reason at all seriously Tobias barely knew the kid it’s not like he was Tobias’ boyfriend here.
STILL MORE PARAGRAPHS OF NOT TELLING US WHY THEY’RE ARRESTED FUCK
Jack Kang, representative of Candor. By most faction standards, he is a young leader—only thirty-nine years old. But by Dauntless standards, that’s nothing. Eric became a Dauntless leader at seventeen. But that’s probably one of the reasons the other factions don’t take our opinions or decisions seriously.
1) It’d help if you ever told us who the older faction leaders are. They seem to be like forty-something, fifty at most.
2) There is no fucking “our” Tris. You were not with Dauntless long enough for the other factions views about your leaders to matter or, in fact, even exposed to the politics long enough to see that happen. Also only one faction even makes decisions so no one else even gets to decide if they want to take you seriously and also also Dauntless like a rockstar life of clothes, food and booze.
3) FUCKING TELL US WHY THEY WERE ARRESTED
IT’S NOT EVEN SUSPENSE BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO BE STUPID I JUST WANT TO GET IT OVER WITH
“They told me you seemed confused about why you were arrested,”
SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET TO THE POINT
oh jesus christ now they’re dragging it out further by saying it’s crimes against humanity and otherwise going on and on about what the crime’s classification is instead of fucking spitting it out.
“All we saw was you running the simulation and her nearly getting punched to death before she gave up. Then you stopped, had a rather abrupt lovers’ reconciliation, and stole the hard drive together. One possible reason is because the simulation was over and you didn’t want us to get our hands on it.”
“We think you were running the simulation.” Was that so fucking hard.
Tris starts to defend them and Jack is all do you not realize we have truth serum just wait a sec.
Christina told me about truth serum once. She said the most difficult part of Candor initiation was being given truth serum and answering personal questions in front of everyone in the faction. I don’t need to search myself for my deepest, darkest secrets to know that truth serum is the last thing I want in my body.
“Truth serum?” I shake my head. “No. No way.”
Tris, you also need to shut the fuck up. Even your memory recounts that this is magic truth serum that only makes you answer the questions put to you. They have better stuff to do then find out everything else about you and if that’s what you’re worried about you could just say that you demand to only be asked about the case and not any other stuff. For that matter, you could just let Tobias go since his testamony will be enough.
All her being stupid accomplishes is making Jack suspicious so she immediately goes along with it making this whole section pointless.
“It is now noon. The interrogation will be at seven. Don’t bother preparing for it. You can’t withhold information while under the influence of truth serum.”
It’s like the editor also just went fuck it I’m out at the start of this chapter. Then we go on and on about them waiting.
“What are you afraid of saying?” he says.
“Any of it. All of it. I don’t want to relive anything.”
That sounds like something even the people obsessed with truth would respect, and that’s before we consider that given the factions haven’t been dumping their respective serums into the water, they must all be used to respecting other factions and not demanding those hold to their standards. If the author really wanted to have Tris getting all upset, the obvious is to have Candor make it a requirement to stay under their roof, meaning Tris has to choose between admitting what happened or leaving Dauntless.
There’s no clock in the room, so I can’t count down the minutes until the interrogation. Time might as well not exist in this place
God do I know that feeling. Fucking book.
Tris then starts waffling on if maybe she’d be happier if she told the truth, then she meets Christina and continues to angst. Christina tells her Will died.
She gives me a worried look, and an expectant one. Expecting what? Oh. I am not supposed to know that Will is dead. I could pretend to be emotional, but I probably wouldn’t do it convincingly. It’s best to admit that I already knew. But I don’t know how to explain that without telling her everything. I feel suddenly sick. Am I really evaluating how best to deceive my friend?
“I know,” I say. “I saw him on the monitors when I was in the control room. I’m sorry, Christina.”
Christina, Candor-trained lie detector, is totally fooled by Tris’ masterful act of freezing up, spending five seconds evaluating the situation, then roboticly claiming to have seen it on the monitors.
“Don’t worry about the truth serum,” she says. “It’s easy. You barely know what’s happening when you’re under. It’s only when you resurface that you even know what you said. I went under when I was a kid. It’s pretty commonplace in Candor.”
Your stated reason for leaving Candor was not wanting to go through initiation and tell all your secrets. Now you’re fine with it?
Also, what sort of lame-ass honesty is this? You don’t even have to really go through the act of telling the truth, it’s just a thing that happens to you.
Everyone else with names we know made it, but apparently Zeke is a traitor, because it’s impossible Erudite could just be catching Dauntless and putting them under again.
Finally, they get to their truth seruming. We learn that in Candor, they use antiseptic wipes.
We didn’t bother with that kind of thing in Dauntless.
Tris did you ever consider that maybe it’s not your young leaders that make the other people think you’re idiots, it’s just the fact you’re idiots?
Tobias, having failed to ask how this will work let alone negotiate anything, gets blindsided by the fact they normally open this with a bunch of simple questions, like name and parent’s names.
Tobias opens his mouth to answer, and then clenches his jaw as if to stop the words from spilling out.
“Why is this relevant?” Tobias asks.
The Candor around me mutter to each other, some of them scowling. I raise my eyebrow at Christina.
“It’s extremely difficult not to immediately answer questions while under the truth serum,” she says. “It means he has a seriously strong will. And something to hide.”
“Maybe it wasn’t relevant before, Tobias,” Niles says, “but it is now that you’ve resisted answering the question.
Ah, yes, here we go.
I was willing to accept that Tris has the superpower of pushing through the serum, because that was a divergent thing. Acting like the happyjuice worked on the same principles was stupid, but given the level of science in these books, well, they both had “serum” in the title so in this universe they work the same.
But now we’ve being told divergence in fact equals willpower and general superiority.
Also I probably should’ve seen this coming, but god, the serum’s stupid too. In the real world, truth serums can work by making you not aware of what you’re saying. That sure sounded like what Christina was saying. It makes you super suggestible so you end up saying stuff without thinking up lies. But evidently the going under affect is totally irrelevant beyond being yet another way divergents are special. Neither does it work by shutting down your ability to make up a lie, because in that case you could refuse to answer just fine. No, it apparently actually forces you answer the truth rather than going through any of the existing routes to get people to tell the truth, because it is not only magic, it’s particularly shoddy magic.
At no point do the Dauntless get annoyed by the fact the Candor are clearly stomping all over faction boundaries with this stuff. Asking this was totally reasonable because they had no way of knowing it would be an issue, until the last bit about how they insist on all the details if you object, which is obviously Candor taking advantage of the situation to satisfy their own issues about truth.
Moreover, we even know the Dauntless particularly respect people’s rights to keep secrets, because they don’t broadcast the fears despite how easy that’d be but instead have the minimum number of people see them. Tobias giving his surname is a big deal because apparently even the rest of Dauntless didn’t know who he was, and that only makes sense if Dauntless as a group is actively supporting people’s rights to keep their private lives private.
Incidentally, Tris explains that surnames are rarely used but still around, which actually makes sense for a third-gen community.`Even if they were completely irrelevant they’d persist for quite some time.
I bite my lip. He should calm down; he is giving away too much. The more reluctant he is to answer a question, the more determined Niles will be to hear the answer.
Right. Which is why you should speak up and say this is Candor bullshit. Instead of determining what happened, they’re basically turning this into Candor initiation.
I kind of hate Candor for this, but for people into truth they sure seem lackadaisical about getting to the truth they started off looking for, so mostly, this just comes off as the author wanting to hit the characters with the unfair suffering stick for a bit.
They ask why he transferred and he tries to stay quiet.
“This is horrible,” I say hotly to Christina. “Wrong.”
“What?” she says. “It’s a simple question.”
No. This would have worked back when he was trying to keep quiet about his parents, because no one but Tris could see why. But we spent chapters on the fact faction choice is a private matter and no one is even allowed to discuss it during the event.
Tobias says he transferred to protect himself from his father, which is stupid. If he solely wanted to escape Marcus, he could’ve gone to Amity. They’re practically the same thing. He was even cooing over how beautiful their faction system was up until the happyjuice came out.
If the author really wanted this, all she had to do was spend an extra few seconds on wording. “Why did you leave Abnegation?” could conceivably have the answer of “To get away from my evil dad.” But the question was So why did you transfer to Dauntless, Tobias?” and the answer to that has to involve why he picked the damn faction.
“Thank you for your honesty,” Niles says. The Candor repeat the phrase under their breath. All around me are the words “Thank you for your honesty” at different volumes and pitches, and my anger begins to dissolve. The whispered words seem to welcome Tobias, to embrace and then discard his darkest secret.
It’s not cruelty, maybe, but a desire to understand, that motivates them.
Bullshit. This was framed as a petty, petty thing, starting off with Niles mad Tobias identified himself by the name he’s used in the faction. Moreover, they’re forcing him to tell secrets he kept from the Dauntless in front of those people, so this doesn’t even work under the Candor’s policy of everyone being exposed together. And from his reaction at each and every last question, it’s clear this wasn’t what he thought he was agreeing to, which just brings up the issue that this whole scene relies on the idea the truth faction wouldn’t tell people the truth of what they were about to do.
Only after all this do they just ask where his loyalties lie.
Tobias starts to go into the whole simulation attack, divergent immunity.
“I heard about it when I was young,” she says in a reverent whisper. Definitely awe. “Like it was a fantasy story,” she says. “‘There are people with special powers among us!’ Like that.”
Oh god book.
Tris starts saying it’s not a big deal, but this is totally where it’s going, isn’t it.
To confirm:
“It’s like the fear landscape simulation—you were aware while you were in it, and you could manipulate it. Except for me, it’s like that in every simulation.”
“But Tris,” she says, setting her hand on my elbow. “That’s impossible.”
It’s impossible that one thing that’s almost identical to the other could work exactly the same for a subset of people. Because Tris is incredibly special. And it’s not just Christina, the whole crowd starts going nuts over this, some hostile, some terrified, and some awed because divergents are so awesome you guys. So awesome.
Tobias then explains how it works and repeats Tris’ explanation. Tris, deciding she hasn’t been stupid enough and someone might mistake her for an Erudite, helpfully informs that He seems to have an easier time with the truth serum when he answers factual questions instead of emotional ones. despite the fact that “what’s your name” is factual as fuck, but I guess “he seems to have an easier time answering questions when he isn’t trying not to answer the question” would be too on the nose.
“But the attack simulation was different, using a different kind of simulation serum, one with long-range transmitters. Evidently the long-range transmitters didn’t work on the Divergent at all, because I awoke in my own mind that morning.
…right. It can’t possibly be that the kind of simulation required to get people to march in formation and aim at moving targets is slightly different than the kind designed to make your brain generate scary pictures. It has to be the range.
Never mind that, given you weren’t under the simulation and ran off rather than talk to anyone, you have no idea what the simulation actually was like and if it bore the slightest resemblance to how the fear sims work. It could’ve been it did nothing but toggle the lucid/nonlucid switch and then give subliminal orders, which appear to be the two aspects of the simulations that just flat out don’t work in divergents.
He then explains that the other simulation was one that swaps information.
The nature of this new simulation was that it recorded my emotional responses to outside stimuli,” Tobias says, closing his eyes for a few seconds, “and responded by altering the appearance of that stimuli. The simulation made my enemies into friends, my friends into enemies. I thought I was shutting the simulation down. Really I was receiving instructions about how to keep it running.”
I really hope it also did something else to disorient him, because you’ll recall the sequence of events was Tobias being told the simulation would fuck with his head, Tobias getting injected with the simulation, and the enemies holding Tobias letting go of him to let him beat on Tris. No one actually moved around, so Tris and Jeanine swapping places should’ve been pretty suspicious, then his enemies turned friends dragged him off “Jeanine” and refused to help him bring “Tris” while dragging him bodily to the computer room.
Christina nods along to his words. I feel calmer when I see that most of the crowd is doing the same thing. This is the benefit of the truth serum, I realize. Tobias’s testimony is irrefutable this way.
You are really determined to disprove that Erudite qualification. Wow, really, using truth serum might have some sort of benefit when it comes to testimony?
All that’s really being done is highlighting how pointless the Tobias has to talk about his shitty childhood section was.
“I have a final question,” Niles says. “Among the Candor, before a person is accepted into our community, they have to completely expose themselves. Given the dire circumstances we are in, we require the same of you. So, Tobias Eaton: what are your deepest regrets?”
Seriously, there should be a riot. Should’ve been one before.
Even Candor should be unhappy with this, because instead of telling him this would be required, they’re springing it on him and forcing him into Candor. Even if we assume they had some reason not to bother explaining, they could have asked him if he would join their community and answer the question.
But Dauntless? This is forcing a Dauntless member to take the Candor initiation. It’s not even giving him a choice of join Candor or die trying to fight your way back out, which you’d think they’d value. This should be like sneaking in to baptize someone while they’re too sick to move.
Hell, even if they don’t care what’s being done to one of their members, it’s also highlighting that Candor can’t be trusted as allies. If this is how they act, then they’re doing to take over and absorb the other factions into themselves at first chance.
Anyway, it’s time to start to edge toward the shitty Tobias we saw in the short story. He says he’s totally Abnegation and regrets going to Dauntless, and in fact was planning on leaving and only stayed because of Tris. Because the fact he’s widely respected and liked there doesn’t matter. Nor does the fact he’s clearly helped many people, because being totally fit for Abnegation means you’re willing to abandon everyone in favor of sitting around and eating scraps.
“Choosing Dauntless in order to escape my father was an act of cowardice,” he says. “I regret that cowardice. It means I am not worthy of my faction.
This specific bit is more interesting, but it’s already tainted by the fact he opened by saying he’s Abnegation. He could be Dauntless yet regret that what pushed him toward it in the first place was fear.
I expect the Dauntless to let out indignant shouts, maybe to charge the chair and beat him to a pulp. They are capable of far more erratic things than that
Tris, meanwhile, channels her own Abnegation upbringing into constant, constant bigotry.
In a shocking turn of events, the people who are supposedly the military faction don’t act like a pack of insane monkeys and are just very “stony”.
I don’t know who starts the whisper; it seems to originate from nothing, to come from no one. But someone whispers, “Thank you for your honesty,” and the rest of the room repeats it.
Tris does not bother telling us the only important information, namely, does she mean the Dauntless are joining in and accept what she told him, or is it just the Candor all over the room? We know she doesn’t literally mean every last person in the room says it because she goes on to say she remains quiet herself.
I am the only thing that kept him in the faction he wanted to leave. I am not worth that.
That’s a pretty reasonable way to feel. Add in the guilt Tris is already stewing in over Will, and it makes perfect sense that she then thinks he should know (so he’ll realize she’s so terrible). Then she starts wondering if she can fight off the serum, then starts thinking again that she shouldn’t, because everything has to be repeated forever.
“I would rather do it myself,” I say, holding out my hand. I will never let someone else inject me again, not after letting Eric inject me with attack simulation serum after my final test. I can’t change the contents of the syringe just by doing it myself, but at least this way, I am the instrument of my own destruction.
I like this about Tris, though – as she says, this is pointless, but it’s a way of having some power even when you don’t have any choices.
Tris goes right under, but when her questioner obliquely references Tobias, she starts to willpower her way through it to remember him. She recounts all the information, but manages to avoid mentioning she killed Will.
“Tobias said you fought him, but then stopped. Why did you do that?”
“Because I realized that one of us would have to kill the other,” I say, “and I didn’t want to kill him.”
“You gave up?”
“No!” I snap. I shake my head. “No, not exactly. I remembered something I had done in my fear landscape in Dauntless initiation … in a simulation, a woman demanded that I kill my family, and I let her shoot me instead. It worked then. I thought …” I pinch the bridge of my nose. My head is starting to ache and my control is gone and my thoughts run into words. “I was so frantic, but all I could think was that there was something to it; there was a strength in it.
And in conclusion, that’s why the fear sims are terrible training for soldiers.
I suppose this also gets into the issue of what strength is. What Tris tends to do is really more like her “better dead than factionless” thing, where she’s presented with two options and she picks the least scary one. At least jumping off the building has something to it in that it showed she has the willpower to force herself forward rather than have a worst outcome happen if she froze up, but letting yourself be killed is the opposite, it’s the thing that happens if you freeze up.
Ultimately, she almost died and almost let her friends remain puppets and her family be murdered because she was more afraid of losing her boyfriend.
But they don’t care, because it worked, and anyway the attempt was super-daring.
“I think I speak for everyone,” he says, “when I say that you have earned the title of Dauntless.”
Shouts rise up from the left side of the room, and I see blurs of fists pressing into the dark air. My faction, calling to me.
And Tris finally grasps that bravery has an emotional aspect and she’s afraid of people finding out she shot her friend. She confesses.
And there is something else, something worse that I didn’t realize before. I was willing to die rather than kill Tobias, but the thought never occurred to me when it came to Will. I decided to kill Will in a fraction of a second.
Also, the Will thing wasn’t actually kill or be killed since you could’ve shot him just about anywhere else. Legs would’ve let you run, arm would’ve disabled him, torso would put him down with a wound he had a chance of surviving. Hell, even shooting him in the neck would’ve been more survivable than blowing his brains out the back of his skull.
Really, you shot him because he shot your mom. There’s really no other way the scene makes sense.