Mitch's Reviews > Allegiant

Obviously, I just don't get it.

What a Divergent fan apparently sees:
531 pages of awesome!

And what I see:
Faction crap. Faction crap. Faction crap. Tris and Four. Faction crap. Faction crap. Tris and Four. Some nonsense with genetics. Faction crap. Wtf moment. The end.

~

Admittedly, I've always been a skeptic of Veronica Roth's books - Divergent was nonsense dressed up as a dystopian, Insurgent pretty much failed at everything except piling on the bullshit - but, as I predicted in my Insurgent review, there was just something about Roth's end game that had me curious. Something I thought I'd either love or absolutely despise. Well, after finishing Allegiant, I think I've finally figured out why these books never clicked for me like they have for a lot of other people - Veronica Roth has some really good ideas and a good message, but the way she constructs her world to develop that message is just so heavy handed to the point the whole thing ends up flying in the face of common sense.

Here's the thing, Divergent as a series is built around one very simple, very obvious proposition: we should all be treated as individuals rather than stereotyped into some faction, Dauntless or Erudite or Candor (except Roth's doing the stereotyping anyway, like what's up with only the Erudite wearing glasses?). Don't believe me? That's straight up paraphrased from one of Tris's many lines to Four. The idea itself gets no argument from me, not when it's like one of those universal truths only a douche could disagree with, but, problem is, rather than writing the kind of story that makes me want to believe it, Roth writes the kind of story that so obviously shoves it down my throat in the most unpleasant way possible it hurts - starting with the whole faction system, which, at the risk of sounding repetitive, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Now, I'm not saying for a fictional book everything has to make perfect sense, but in this case, it's not so much that the factions make no sense (even after all the mumbo jumbo experimental crap Roth's concocted to force some logic onto the system - crap I saw coming ever since Insurgent's out of nowhere ending) as much as the factions are so obviously written the way they are to reinforce Roth's message of how stereotyping is bad that they make no sense outside of that context. In other words, Roth needs them so Tris can repeatedly tell me how everyone should be judged for who they are rather than for which faction they belong to (or, as is the case later on in this one, rather than for how their genes are), and not because the factions do anything for the whole exploration of human nature thing everyone tells me this book is really supposed to be about. Maybe that's not a flaw for anyone else, but as I see it, the whole thing is just a critique of a straw man spread out over three books padded by filler to make the straw man's existence nominally logical but not really, and that for me is the ultimate waste of time.

Nowhere is any of this more obvious than with the whole genetically damaged versus pure thing Roth's got going throughout the middle of this one. I hate to say it, but the damaged versus pure storyline is even worse than the regular faction A versus faction B storyline we've had for two books now, not only because it's basically the same thing she's been trying to sell for two books now only now a hundred times more obvious what she's doing (People are unique! The status quo is bad!), but also because to cover up how shoddily constructed THAT backstory is we've had to pile on even more bullshit and crap to hand wave it away that the whole thing falls apart like a house of straw anyway and the only thing left is a good idea surrounded by a whole lotta nonsense to validate it. I mean, the whole genes personality persecution angle? What? Does it make sense outside of Tris saying how people shouldn't be persecuted based on their genes? And doesn't it get on anyone else's nerves that Tris is always right, 'the system' is always wrong, yet despite how bad everything is certain characters still want things to stay the way they are? For apparently no reason whatsoever? Yeah. No.

Basically, I only liked two things - Tris and Caleb's relationship, and the ballsy ending (for like five seconds). For a last book so artificial most of it is spent on (poorly done) exposition to explain it all away, Tris and Caleb to me felt like the only thing real about any of it, the one character development success in a sea of plot development failure. And the ending, in retrospect, was the one last Hail Mary that could've done anything for the book, because let's be real, the fate of the factions was so tediously mired in poorly done backstory segueing into genetic nonsense the rest of this wasn't going to do much of anything anyway, so how else was Allegiant going to end with a bang? Too bad that's all it does though. Bang. Now go wonder how the heck all the pointlessness managed to get swept under a rug. While telling yourself how a better book wouldn't have had to resort to such a cheap tactic.

Bottom line, look, I admire creative world building, but it has to be organic, not so obviously constructed for the heroine to score sympathy points for being obviously right that there's just no payoff when the artificial construct's finally destroyed - finishing Allegiant feels like ending a pointless exercise that went nowhere.