Divergent? More Like "Why-Vergent"

[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.

 

[Charles Phipps]

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.

Eh, it was Pullman's attempt to do the Anti-Narnia so the atheist overtones were the point. The first book was entertaining but the second and third ones went completely off the rails and ruined what could have been a good series. Lewis did the same, ironically, with his series' last two.

So I suppose Pullman DID create the anti-Narnia.

 

[person427]

-snip-

The "Hunger Games" aside wasn't about quality though, it was about the originality of it's concepts. And you have to look at both sides of the statement, not just the one. The concepts of the Hunger Games weren't really that original, most of what it did had been done before. But ok, fine, let's say you can make a case for it's originality. It's still being compared to Cloud Atlas, which was far different from anything done before, so the comparison still works.

 

[PuckFuppet]

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!

So what you're saying is that the film IS divergent?

 

[Zen Bard]

Bob misspelled Erudite. Euridites sounds like a Greek playwright.

...or extremely cultured Europeans.

On topic...

"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!!!!!""

Most Specialest Favoritest MovieBob Quote Ever!

Seriously, doesn't every young adult novel just pander to the younger generation's collective ego by framing their common adolescent awkwardness as some kind of Superpower?

A more accurate depiction of what happens when the kids are in charge would be "Lord of the Flies" and "Battle Royal".

Honorable mention goes "Logan's Run" (the book) which asks; just what WOULD happen if the Youth Revolution of the 60's succeeded.

 

[Mangod]

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!

So what you're saying is that the film IS divergent?

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Never, ever make a pun that bad again. Thank you.

But yes, from the looks of things, the biggest downfall of the movie seems to be that it removed the really dark elements that made it at least somewhat unique in favor of imitating the Hunger Games. Granted, I don't think a straight adaptation would have gone over well with the PG13/YA crowd... but then again, this sounds like a great premise for a dystopian future/post-apocalyptic/urban horror story, and I'm not entirely convinced that crowd isn't relatively untapped at the moment.

 

[PuckFuppet]

I'll pun as I please!

Perhaps you're correct but, based on having eaten the books in the last few hours, there wasn't much to work with in the first place. I admit I went in with an existing expectation as to what I was going to get, something that I thoroughly avoid when possible if I'm dealing with something new regardless of genre, and to give the book its credit it delivered on my expectations.

That said I had an immediate impression about the whole thing, both while reading and after considering the books themselves. All plot elements, characterisation and setting considered the books were tonally dead. I didn't actually feel a significant sense of adventure when I was reading them, it felt like so much dry pretension trying to appeal, all the tension ruined by the just... mediocre presentation.

There is a moment towards the end of the first book where I genuinely felt like I was about to see why people seemed to think so highly of them, completely ruined by what I can only describe as some serious character recursion (wherein the main character effectively negates the actual significant choice of the entire novel by regressing to the norms expected of her from society determined by her caste rather than be divergent).

Don't even get me started on the eye-rolling bad "factionless" arc in the second book.

 

[rayen020]

Okay i'm going to kinda side against you on this one bob. My wife dragged me to this movie after seeing the trailer and reading 2 1\2 of the book trilogy. For the first i'm going to say 30 minutes, i was bored out of my skull, it's bland, cheap, cliche and boring. I don't know if just my taking a break and sitting on the toilet until triss was at dauntless training helped, but when i came back and they were jumping off the train i came back to a fairly enjoyable (if low budget) sci-fi movie.

Also the name "Triss" made me think of the redwall books so that might have helped as well. It was fun to imagine the main characters as chaotic Good otters.

 

[sarkeizen]

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,

Caste systems usually were about social stratification. Divergence isn't one. The Abnegations are "in charge" but at least in the first book (which is all I have the stomach for) they gain no social benefits for doing so. It's not just that the factions are illogical, they are pretty much impossible. While it's likely that you will be more brave than honest, studious, peaceful or selfless. You will probably be pretty close in all of them, things regress to a mean. Divergence is the norm.

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.

Please. a) It's 75 years. That's not a long time to oppress a people especially when you have machine guns and they have sticks and b) The idea appears to be to keep the people weak enough that it's difficult to rebel. What's more unbelievable is that nobody in whatever number of districts there were realized that the system is tragically easy to cheat. Suzanne Collins world seems to be devoid of people who took first year statistics.

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.

Except that's not what "clinically insane" means. Generally speaking someone who has a clinically diagnosed disorder means their ability to actually function in society - any society not just the moronic divergent one -is significant. You could argue that divergence (ignoring for the moment that people *should* generally test as divergent) is some trait that develops into insanity. However then you lose the ability to claim that insanity is somehow stopping people from controlling your mind because until your ability to function is impaired you are not insane.

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.

Assuming plotting isn't important. Then yeah. While Stephanie Meyer is a horrible writer. Veronica is only better because her sentence structure isn't that of an ten year old. It's still plotted like one.

 

[Grimrider6]

I haven't actually read it, but I've heard good things about Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"... I wonder if that'd make a good YA movie?