Divergent? More Like "Why-Vergent"

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

Spoiler

"Young Adult Fiction" and the post twilight/hunger games boom of fantasy/dsytopia seems stuck in it's own little vacuum, not realizing that what it is doing is not only played out and redundant but also bankrupt of not only original ideas but can't even appropriate interesting ideas from other places.

A big problem i see is that Anime also has a very sizable genre "Crummy future = your high-school" but with much more visual flair, more eccentric, more human and a better sense of humor. Some of these books are obviously inspired by Japanese teencentirc fiction *cough* Battle royal *cough* but many simply fail to even rip more interesting things off. I doubt many of these 'writers' even have the wherewithal to rip something like Gantz off. Partly because that would require something above the level of PG13 but also because they probably aren't aware of it. The creative malaise that has led to this bland genre is seemingly total. It can't even be interestingly shit.

The odd thing is that the idea of a dystopia itself is not bad; 1984 is one of my favorite books and has a dystopian future that could easily be adapted for the teenage audience. The issue is that these YA novels seem to only be based on appealing to base teenage experience (discontent, rebellion and the like) and not anything higher like "social order, dichotomy of liberty/security" and the like which was probably what dystopian fiction was originally written for.

If you have to make a dystopian future try what some of Project Itoh [http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/03/21/noitamina-anime-movie-to-adapt-project-itohs-sci-fi-novels] has written: perfect health and enforced kindness gone wrong, a world of fear with murder on the rise. Hell, Psycho pass could probably be adapted into a YA novel given what those with high crime coefficients are treated as but no, we have to have the same old "high school dichotomy, and generational discontent". You know what did the themes of Hunger games better: Battle Royale due to its commentary on the generational difference between the old and young as well as the effects of being thrown in a death ring. We don't need another hunger games, another divergent, or another giver: we need YA novels that are willing to introduce tough topics to teenagers.

P.S. what is your opinion on Battle Royale? I can't seem to get a read on how you feel about it from your post.

Battle Royal was so good because it was so direct. "Ever felt like high school was a social engineered pressure cooker where you and your class mates are locked in a competition overseen by the oppressive authority of teachers? Well here is LITERALLY THAT taken to its logical, brutal extreme" It was also very Japanese and came with a ton of flair and most crucially didn't aim to be PG13.

The failure of the current crop of YA novels is complete. Its not just that we need new topics it's that the existing topics are not at all being done well. I think it is difficult to fuck up this genre to the degree most YA novels do. Battle royal again shows us that you don't need a 'chosen one', you don't need too much convoluted bullshit, you don't need to keep pulling things out of your arse and your ideas can be both as subtle and unsubtle as you like, sometimes even at the same time. Despite fountains of blood and a literal interpretation of the life or death feeling of the pressure in the Japanese education system some of the points BA made were actually fairly unspoken. A YA novel feels it has to spell everything out in the least original, most tedious and most PG way possible.

There is also the basic issue which is this; most of the people writing these novels are just awful at it. That's the crux of this. It's not the generic tropes or repetitive motifs and settings that really kills it, its simply that they are made by people who simply have no business writing their own name, never mind a book. In gaming terms it kind of reminds me of current smartphone games; lowest common denominator low effort cash cows to get money out of an audience who has no expectation of quality or even a way to discern it. A genre created not with making something great in mind but interested in fodder for a fickle trend.

So we basically need people who are not educated in fanfiction but actual classical literature as well as various complex socital topics. In addition, we need the narratives to have more human elements: instead of a chosen one, make it one who enters out of selfish needs and grows or one who is doing it out of family, something more human than a destiny

Edit. I forgot to add that we also need the novels to trust the intelligence of the reader

 

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

If you guys think this sounds bad, go take a gander at the first episode of the CW's new show "The 100". All teenage idiocy aside they should actually put a "stupid" tax on anything that patently doesn't do any research.

I looked that up on IMDB, and the premise sounds idiotic enough. But what research exactly are they ignoring? I'm guessing anything about genes, nuclear fallout and devastation etc., but if you could elaborate, I'd be pleased.

All of the research. From charting the effects a nuclear war _might_ have to...

Ok, I'll boil it down to a single point. So they're sending the kids down there to determine if the planet can support a long term recolonisation, if they go down they probably won't be able to get back up and there are certain levels of radiation/survival they are prepared to accept (all infeasibility of their century long survival on a bunch of coupled together space stations aside that isn't an entirely ignorant of the research motivation) and their primary goal is to check the radiation levels on the surface.

So they strap the kids into a reentry vehicle, all 100 in one vehicle (physics is rolling its eyes at this point), and slap an extremely complicated wristband on them that is capable of tracking their health. Wait... they have 100 disposable wristband things that are capable of tracking their health? Surely is just a simple "alive/not alive" thing.

No? It measures and transmits data about heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, body temperature, glucose levels, plasma osmolarity, pulse oximetry and capnography (how?) oh ok... wait why don't you just strap a dosimeter to that?

Never even seems to come up, the people on the station are constantly glued to the screens watching what is going on below in terms of health, actively fighting over whether the deaths are being caused by radiation or if something else is causing it, and no one thinks "Shit, we should have put a dosimeter up in that."?

This is before you start talking about how they sidestepped the coriolis effect with their rotation station and how that wouldn't replicate true g... I can't even man.

wow, this sounds stupid. If they were trying to go for a "the last hope of man is in the hands of it's outcasts" narrative, they seem to have failed just basic scientific research and will probably screw up the character arcs.

 

[JarinArenos]

For a movie about escaping from conformity, Divergent has a complete lack of interest in veering away from formula.

Shots fired.

Movies-based-on-novels (especially YA, but somewhat in general) are going through a remarkably, painfully dull period. I never thought I'd yearn for the heady days of the first Harry Potter movies...

 

[Ukomba]

At least the terrible writing can't come through the move, just the stupid world building and plot.

 

[Darth_Payn]

I had a notion this was clichéd to hell and back, and Bob confirms my suspicions. I also liked how you called it clap-trap and hogwash, too.

 

[Mangod]

Spoiler

"Young Adult Fiction" and the post twilight/hunger games boom of fantasy/dsytopia seems stuck in it's own little vacuum, not realizing that what it is doing is not only played out and redundant but also bankrupt of not only original ideas but can't even appropriate interesting ideas from other places.

A big problem i see is that Anime also has a very sizable genre "Crummy future = your high-school" but with much more visual flair, more eccentric, more human and a better sense of humor. Some of these books are obviously inspired by Japanese teencentirc fiction *cough* Battle royal *cough* but many simply fail to even rip more interesting things off. I doubt many of these 'writers' even have the wherewithal to rip something like Gantz off. Partly because that would require something above the level of PG13 but also because they probably aren't aware of it. The creative malaise that has led to this bland genre is seemingly total. It can't even be interestingly shit.

The odd thing is that the idea of a dystopia itself is not bad; 1984 is one of my favorite books and has a dystopian future that could easily be adapted for the teenage audience. The issue is that these YA novels seem to only be based on appealing to base teenage experience (discontent, rebellion and the like) and not anything higher like "social order, dichotomy of liberty/security" and the like which was probably what dystopian fiction was originally written for.

If you have to make a dystopian future try what some of Project Itoh [http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/03/21/noitamina-anime-movie-to-adapt-project-itohs-sci-fi-novels] has written: perfect health and enforced kindness gone wrong, a world of fear with murder on the rise. Hell, Psycho pass could probably be adapted into a YA novel given what those with high crime coefficients are treated as but no, we have to have the same old "high school dichotomy, and generational discontent". You know what did the themes of Hunger games better: Battle Royale due to its commentary on the generational difference between the old and young as well as the effects of being thrown in a death ring. We don't need another hunger games, another divergent, or another giver: we need YA novels that are willing to introduce tough topics to teenagers.

P.S. what is your opinion on Battle Royale? I can't seem to get a read on how you feel about it from your post.

Battle Royal was so good because it was so direct. "Ever felt like high school was a social engineered pressure cooker where you and your class mates are locked in a competition overseen by the oppressive authority of teachers? Well here is LITERALLY THAT taken to its logical, brutal extreme" It was also very Japanese and came with a ton of flair and most crucially didn't aim to be PG13.

The failure of the current crop of YA novels is complete. Its not just that we need new topics it's that the existing topics are not at all being done well. I think it is difficult to fuck up this genre to the degree most YA novels do. Battle royal again shows us that you don't need a 'chosen one', you don't need too much convoluted bullshit, you don't need to keep pulling things out of your arse and your ideas can be both as subtle and unsubtle as you like, sometimes even at the same time. Despite fountains of blood and a literal interpretation of the life or death feeling of the pressure in the Japanese education system some of the points BA made were actually fairly unspoken. A YA novel feels it has to spell everything out in the least original, most tedious and most PG way possible.

There is also the basic issue which is this; most of the people writing these novels are just awful at it. That's the crux of this. It's not the generic tropes or repetitive motifs and settings that really kills it, its simply that they are made by people who simply have no business writing their own name, never mind a book. In gaming terms it kind of reminds me of current smartphone games; lowest common denominator low effort cash cows to get money out of an audience who has no expectation of quality or even a way to discern it. A genre created not with making something great in mind but interested in fodder for a fickle trend.

Just out of curiosity, since you seem at least marginally knowledgeable about the subject; is there any YA novels out there you would actually recommend?

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Having seen the trailer a few times over the past few months of movie watching, I could tell that this movie just wasn't for me. Not because I could tell that it was just another book-to-movie Twilight cash-in meant for younger audiences, but because the trailer all-but said "We're marketing this to people who have read the book(s), and won't bother even trying to explain the plot, so just zone-out until you see the next green 'appropriate for all audiences' screen". The trailer establishes that she's "divergent", hence the name of the movie, but doesn't really establish anything beyond "that means you need to go into hiding". And then from there the rest of the trailer is shots of her training for what I thought to be some form of rebellion against... I don't know. The trailer just assumes that I had read the book and knew that she joined some police-type group of society. Well, at least now I have a basic idea of what the story is like, and since it's Young Adult, I don't need to see the movies or read the books to know how it'll end.

So basically, then, this is your standard geeks vs jocks story, only this time the paradigm has been shifted so that it can appeal more to the kinds of people you wouldn't expect to be able to finish even one chapter, let-alone the entire book. Seems odd to target the jock demographic with a book that doesn't have pretty pictures as 70% of each page. (I kid, I kid)

 

[ryukage_sama]

I liked the premise better in Toward the Terra (Japanese comic from the 70s with a television adaptation from 2007), where the "divergents" had latent psychic powers. The government, which was completely controlled by computers with a rigid AI, would murder any teens who demonstrated such powers. It takes place in outer space, on remote planetary colonies, space stations, and interstellar space craft. Also, the kids got telekinetic powers that enabled (at least some of) them to fly through space and engage in dogfights with star fighters. There was still plenty of angst and post-apocalypse stuff too.

 

[synobal]

The books were terrible, it would of never became a movie outside the YA dystopian fad that Hunger Games spawned.

 

[spartan231490]

So your complaints are "it was made to appeal to it's audience?" See, this is why I just can't take you seriously as a film critic.

 

[Random Argument Man]

Since when we started to use the terms "Young Adult" for "teenagers"? For me, young adult stands around the 18-25 age demographic because that's what they are: young and adults?

Speaking of Shailene Woodley and "Young Adult movies", I'm hoping that the Fault in our Stars will be like the book and not be a Nicholas Sparks movie.

 

[Mangue Surfer]

What Alan Moore said about fans of comics can be applied to fans of movies, books and games these days. Emotionally subnormal people.

 

[MrMunchies]

MOVIE: "Have you ever felt like you didn't fit exactly into the adult world's expectations of you and that society was just so much crushing conformity and phoniness that you can totally see right through and want no part of? Because if so, that means you're actually The Chosen One!"

AUDIENCE: "Why, yes! Because what you just described is called being a teenager - OMG! This story... is about meeeeeeeee and how my self-centered, hormone-driven sense of angst and isolation is actually what makes me The Most Specialest Person Ever!!!!!"

So basically, what you're saying is that it's Tumblr : The Movie.

 

[Callate]

I figured out why the snarky asides sort of rub me up the wrong way...

Thank you for writing this; doubly thank you for doing so in a thoughtful and respectful way. Much as I like some of what MB has to offer, I'm finding it increasingly difficult not to "snark back" when he approaches things this way.

In this case, part of my distaste for the article is that the contempt for Divergent seems to leech over into contempt for the intended audience of Divergent. For all that many of us have been teenagers, it's awfully easy to forget in our frustrations with "those kids" (who will never make anything of themselves and are a sure sign the world is going to hell and yatta yatta yatta) that a lot of being a teenager sucks, and that while it's easy to write off the gyrations of going from child to adult as "hormonal imbalance", it's a necessary "breaking off" from the images our families and communities implant on us to being our own persons.

Within that process, a little bit of sympathy- even if it comes from consumable culture and seems trite and shallow to us- can go a long way to making people who are prone to feel dangerously isolated feel less alone.

I don't care much about Divergent one way or another; it wasn't made for me, and I don't feel like cinema as a whole is being unalterably corrupted by its existence. That being said, it seems like the least I can do is not beat it with a stick for my own amusement. "Gee, doesn't it feel good to be so much smarter than those people who consume pap like this without realizing how shallow and manipulative it is" really doesn't seem so much nobler a sentiment than "Gee, this movie about alienation seems so much like my life".

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

Just out of curiosity, since you seem at least marginally knowledgeable about the subject; is there any YA novels out there you would actually recommend?

The "His Dark Materials" (As in the Golden Compass) series is good. It isn't one of the new breed of YA novels but it shares all of the hallmarks of what a YA novel SHOULD be. There are some irritating atheist overtones in some of it (we get it, you don't like god) but overall it is a very well realized universe. Great series of novels for any teenager.

The film was shit but don't let that put you off.

Well in all fairness, where else will you find a series of novels aimed at young people where the main villain explicitly represents the evils of the Catholic Church? Honestly, even if it is a bit heavy-handed at times, I'm kinda glad this series even EXISTS.

And it is very, very good, I agree.

 

[dante brevity]

Bob misspelled Erudite. Euridites sounds like a Greek playwright.

 

[RebelRising]

Spoiler

Spoiler

"Young Adult Fiction" and the post twilight/hunger games boom of fantasy/dsytopia seems stuck in it's own little vacuum, not realizing that what it is doing is not only played out and redundant but also bankrupt of not only original ideas but can't even appropriate interesting ideas from other places.

A big problem i see is that Anime also has a very sizable genre "Crummy future = your high-school" but with much more visual flair, more eccentric, more human and a better sense of humor. Some of these books are obviously inspired by Japanese teencentirc fiction *cough* Battle royal *cough* but many simply fail to even rip more interesting things off. I doubt many of these 'writers' even have the wherewithal to rip something like Gantz off. Partly because that would require something above the level of PG13 but also because they probably aren't aware of it. The creative malaise that has led to this bland genre is seemingly total. It can't even be interestingly shit.

The odd thing is that the idea of a dystopia itself is not bad; 1984 is one of my favorite books and has a dystopian future that could easily be adapted for the teenage audience. The issue is that these YA novels seem to only be based on appealing to base teenage experience (discontent, rebellion and the like) and not anything higher like "social order, dichotomy of liberty/security" and the like which was probably what dystopian fiction was originally written for.

If you have to make a dystopian future try what some of Project Itoh [http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/03/21/noitamina-anime-movie-to-adapt-project-itohs-sci-fi-novels] has written: perfect health and enforced kindness gone wrong, a world of fear with murder on the rise. Hell, Psycho pass could probably be adapted into a YA novel given what those with high crime coefficients are treated as but no, we have to have the same old "high school dichotomy, and generational discontent". You know what did the themes of Hunger games better: Battle Royale due to its commentary on the generational difference between the old and young as well as the effects of being thrown in a death ring. We don't need another hunger games, another divergent, or another giver: we need YA novels that are willing to introduce tough topics to teenagers.

P.S. what is your opinion on Battle Royale? I can't seem to get a read on how you feel about it from your post.

Battle Royal was so good because it was so direct. "Ever felt like high school was a social engineered pressure cooker where you and your class mates are locked in a competition overseen by the oppressive authority of teachers? Well here is LITERALLY THAT taken to its logical, brutal extreme" It was also very Japanese and came with a ton of flair and most crucially didn't aim to be PG13.

The failure of the current crop of YA novels is complete. Its not just that we need new topics it's that the existing topics are not at all being done well. I think it is difficult to fuck up this genre to the degree most YA novels do. Battle royal again shows us that you don't need a 'chosen one', you don't need too much convoluted bullshit, you don't need to keep pulling things out of your arse and your ideas can be both as subtle and unsubtle as you like, sometimes even at the same time. Despite fountains of blood and a literal interpretation of the life or death feeling of the pressure in the Japanese education system some of the points BA made were actually fairly unspoken. A YA novel feels it has to spell everything out in the least original, most tedious and most PG way possible.

There is also the basic issue which is this; most of the people writing these novels are just awful at it. That's the crux of this. It's not the generic tropes or repetitive motifs and settings that really kills it, its simply that they are made by people who simply have no business writing their own name, never mind a book. In gaming terms it kind of reminds me of current smartphone games; lowest common denominator low effort cash cows to get money out of an audience who has no expectation of quality or even a way to discern it. A genre created not with making something great in mind but interested in fodder for a fickle trend.

Just out of curiosity, since you seem at least marginally knowledgeable about the subject; is there any YA novels out there you would actually recommend?

The "His Dark Materials" (As in the Golden Compass) series is good. It isn't one of the new breed of YA novels but it shares all of the hallmarks of what a YA novel SHOULD be. There are some irritating atheist overtones in some of it (we get it, you don't like god) but overall it is a very well realized universe. Great series of novels for any teenager.

The film was shit but don't let that put you off.

Just to pitch in:

Of all the stuff I read back in the day, Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy (and its only marginally lesser prequel) remains for me the high mark of Young Adult fiction, in no small part due to the switches between perspectives (with Bartimaeus himself assuming the role of unreliable narrator and building the world around his vantage point). That and the main human protagonist has many of the markings of a potential poor man's Harry Potter, and he is arguably set up that way but ends up deliberately culminating into a bit of a prick with whom the reader has to actively struggle to identify. It's an all-round clever and imaginative series, made all the better by the fact its plot was contained and avoided being run into the ground. It avoids almost all of the worst pitfalls of this genre.

 

[Dandres]

BoB just needs to add the disclaimer "This review is about the movie and not the book because I have not read the book." Some of these movies are good books just not good movies. I liked the Harry Potter books and not the movies.

 

[PuckFuppet]

I don't think any of Bob's criticisms of the premise are invalid or would be altered significantly by exposure to the book. That of course assumes that the plot of the film isn't wildly divergent from the plot of the books.

 

[Mangod]

I don't think any of Bob's criticisms of the premise are invalid or would be altered significantly by exposure to the book. That of course assumes that the plot of the film isn't wildly divergent from the plot of the books.

Well, if Jim_Callahan is to be believed, the books are apparently decently written, they just don't make for a very good PG13 movie... and after reading his summary, I agree. HOLY FUCK!

Eh, the divergent system makes significantly more sense than the Hunger Games system. Tons of historical societies have had caste systems with limited trans-caste mobility restricted in illogical ways, but _no_ historical society has ever based its entire master plan on _intentionally_ starving most of its population without immediately failing no matter how much of a technology advantage the ruling class had. Bread and circuses, man.

That said, having read the books (I was bored, sue me) I can say pretty definitely that, like Hunger Games, they were far, far more genuinely dark than any tween-targeted movie could really reasonably be and still expect parents to allow their kids to see it. Bob's confusion over why the divergent people are immune to brainwashing, for instance, makes a lot of sense -- the book explanation is that simulations are how people train new skills and work out their psychological issues in a safe environment (they're post-apocalyptic so traditional resource-intensive power struggles are a bad plan), and the divergent are _literally clinically insane_ so they can't actually ever work out those issues. The instability gives them an advantage in the books only because the villains' evil plan involves hacking the simulations-- normally it's very unarguably a bad thing, because they can't learn anything from simulation (and have to waste precious resources actually thrashing things out the long way at best) and are mentally unstable (brooding sexy generic love interest #3141 has degraded into an outright psychopath that murders people for fun by book 2. I defy you to fit "both main characters are violently insane and murder innocents, but are for some reason still the good guys" into a PG-13 rating.

There are also a lot of unfortunate implications and outright horror elements in the reasoning behind the caste system... team Ghandi is actually kind of a Brave New World thing and the Dauntless are less team Jock and more team Morlock. And team nerd coming up with "wait a second, we write the programs that people have to plant in their brains to become functional human beings... hm..." is pretty classic Animal Farm.

Not that the books are good, they aren't particularly. But they're nowhere near as bad as the movie apparently is. And unlike Twilight, the author can at least string together a complete sentence without having some sort of weird grammatical seizure, so minimum standards achieved. Still better than "The Giver" basically.