A flash of light catches my eye—lightning.

YA writing, everyone!

Jack the Candor leader is holding a meeting.

“I have heard many reports from a variety of perspectives, and have gotten a sense for what is straightforward and what requires more investigation.”
…
“What seems to me to require more investigation,” Jack says, “is the Divergent.”

I wonder how fiction would look in a world where there weren’t mandatory trilogies. It seems quite plausible to me that the idea was always for Tris to be divergent and special, but that the specialness was entirely connected to the primary plot of Divergent. She was special so the Bad People could threaten her because only she had the power to stop the Evil Plan. Imagine if we only saw writing where the author legitimately planned from the start for divergents to be society’s boogeymen.

Moreover, recent events have shown is that without divergents Abnegation and possibly everyone would be dead or controlled by Jeanine.

Divergence does warrant investigation in that you should want to see if you can replicate whatever protects them from technzombieing, but this is about suspicions against the divergent. It’s so obvious that when he asks for them to step forward, even Tris thinks This feels dangerous. and we know the only thing Tris hates more than admitting fear is thinking at all, what with it being a filthy Erudite pastime.

My Divergence is something I am supposed to hide. Admitting it is supposed to mean death. But there is no sense in hiding it now—they already know about me.

Annoyed she had to think, Tris soothes her injured pride by thinking really stupid stuff. We established last book she had to hide it because divergents were getting killed, and we just as thoroughly established that was because Jeanine felt they were standing in the way of her awesome zombie army. Even Tobias’ retcontastic sidestory makes it clear that prior to Jeanine, divergents were doing just fine.

muttering “Excuse me” to the people in front of me. They draw back like I just threatened to spit poison at them.

This may really be a personal thing, but I’m generally not too into the whole unfairly hated song and dance. I mean, X-men, those guys are great, because they make sense. Mutants are regular people who suddenly get superpowers and sometimes scary deformities, of course they’d be feared and hated, and the fact there’s more of them by the year and some of their leaders insist they’re a new species who’s going to replace humanity doesn’t help. But in a lot of stories, it seems to just happen as part of the checklist, and if anything the writing wallows in how incredibly unjustified and insane the response is to amp up how wrong it is.

But that just makes it frustrating. Once you’ve established people’s reactions make no sense, how am I supposed to root for the heroes to overcome? It’ll just disappear at another arbitrary point because we’ve established no degree of heroics will ever actually convince people for good given they’re happily ignoring all sanity to hate them in the first place.

Which is why I like Spiderman the character but only know the main comics through secondhand summaries and tidbits of posted pages. A character who will always see everything blow up in his face and always be mistrusted no matter what he does is exhausting over a long period, and while I assume someone out there is really enjoying Peter get treated like scum yet again despite saving the world hundreds of times, I am not that person.

Point is, this doesn’t engage me and make me want to read to get to the scene where everyone’s proven wrong. It just makes me hope it goes away as soon as possible so it’ll stop bugging me.

A few others step forward, in Candor black and white, but not many.

Candor really should have a bunch of people admitting to it given they’re the truth faction, to contrast how any surviving divergents in Dauntless are keeping quiet. Also, Tris’ superdivergence by not answering the question seems to be extremely Candor – they’re loudmouths who ask questions constantly and want to know what’s going on rather than obeying.

Of course, if the first thing you’re told after finishing the simulation is NEVER TELL ANYONE THIS OR SOMETHING HORRIBLE HAPPENS!!!! I guess that’d drive plenty of Candor-qualifying kids off…see, that’d be a good reason for there to be so many factionless divergents, it’s not that divergence makes you flunk out but that divergents have their decisions skewed by the YOU’LL DIEEEEE speech. But it seems unlikely that’s standard given we know that Tris was told to keep quiet specifically because the person who did the test had her brother die over people finding out she was divergent, and that doesn’t seem usual.

But then there’s also the problem that they should’ve all admitted to being divergent when asked to tell all their secrets. Sure, we know divergents can fight the serum, but we also know it’s really obvious and everyone thought it was weird, so that can’t be happening much in Candor. Besides, if your plan was to not admit to being divergent, you’d never pick Candor.

In conclusion, it should be many (if divergence works like last book where no one cared until Erudite started killing people) or none (if divergence is known and hated). Even if some people were willing to admit it, it still wouldn’t be a surprise to Candor leadership that it’s a thing.

Speaking of things, Marcus is also divergent. I feel like the book probably means this to be a wham of some kind but…so? All it does is suggest divergents are pretty damn common given how thick it is among major characters. And yes, I know that we’re mostly dealing with related people, but it doesn’t matter – this is supposed to be super rare and yet apparently it’s showing like it’s a simple dominent gene (both main divergents have at least one divergent parent). Even assuming the gene itself is pretty rare, it’s easy enough to track that there shouldn’t be any mystery. If you’re divergent, one of your parents was. If you have kids, there’s a fifty/fifty chance they’ll be divergent.

Being divergent has no bearing on anything else – we have no idea why he was beating Tobias yet, so his dad being divergent doesn’t go against any expectations there, there’s no reason to think it’s weird an Abnegation guy is divergent when we were told divegence is common in the group, and it’s not weird to think an major leader could be when we already knew he was beating his kid and everyone was fine overlooking that.

It just doesn’t matter.

“I understand that you are concerned—that you all are concerned. You had never heard of the Divergent a week ago

Except they had, because Tris had the whole conversation with Lynn or Marlene about it being supposedly brain powers she heard about as a kid but that Lynn/Marlene personally thought was a conspiracy. Going by last book, divergence wasn’t a big deal before they became a problem for Erudite’s plan, but that’s been retconned this book. Is this a remnant from a previous draft?

and now all that you know is that they are immune to something to which you are susceptible, and that is a frightening thing.

NO IT ISN’T!

This isn’t even like, Graceling level of stupidity. Sure, the majority of graces weren’t useful offensively, but some were either directly through murdering prowess or less directly (superiority at swimming likely gives you the advantage when it comes to drowining somone). A lot of physically talented gracelings could probably overpower any given normal person, and mental talents could accomplish similar things. It’s stupid for all gracelings to be considered creepy as a result, but it at least made sense there’d be unease around them, especially around those of unknown grace.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. They’re immune to a very specific thing being used against the group. They can’t use it themselves and it’s not a friendly fire sort of situation where being immune would give any benefit to using it in the first place. The only thing their immunity does for them is mean they can’t be compromised by their common enemy.

Marcus does not try to explain this part, just going with

But I can assure you that there is nothing to be afraid of, as far as we are concerned.”

To try to justify this non-explanation, Tris explains he sounds super convincing and like you should trust him.

Jack nimbly keeps the conversation on point, saying that obviously Erudite’s attack was to find divergents.

Do you know why that is?”
“No, I do not,” says Marcus. “Perhaps their intention was merely to identify us. It seems like useful information to have, if they intend to use their simulations again.”

1) It’s obvious why that is.
2) Eric shot a kid while monologuing about how they were going to shoot almost all of them. So that’s what they were planning to so.

Tris speaks up to point out the thing these idiots should already know. Sadly, she volunteers extra information, that the Erudites have actually been killing divergents for a while now.

“That sounds very much like a conspiracy theory,” Jack says. “What reason would the Erudite have to kill you?”

1) Truth serum if you don’t believe them.
2) What reason would the Erudite have to kill divergents when a divergent, because she was immune to the sim, screwed up their meticulously planned bid to destroy Abnegation, led to losing half their Dauntless army, and also exposed their whole plan to the other factions? I again see where Erudite get the impression they need to be in charge.

My mother said people feared the Divergent because we couldn’t be controlled. That may be true, but fear of the uncontrollable is not a concrete enough reason to give Jack Kang for the Erudite wanting us dead. My heart races as I realize that I can’t answer his question.

And that’s where we’ll be rage-quitting tonight. Join me tomorrow when hopefully my willingness to deal with this pile of shit has returned, or perhaps the next day. I can make no promises at this point.