Allegiant
discussion
Who else is boycotting this movie?
Emma, if you look back at subsequent pages, you'll see that many of us agree with you.
I would say its 50/50 for every person I see who hates the book because of the plot I see another person who hates it simply because Tris died. Same with amazon reviews which by the way are now almost evenly split between 5 stars and 1 stars so I don't think you guys can make the claim that VR betrayed her entire fanbase.
Not everyone here is saying that, Amanda.
A lot of 5-star reviews are fake.
A lot of ratings are fake, point blank. Before my latest novel was even released I had two ratings up from people who I don't know (and I would have known them if they'd manage to get a hand on the book before it was released) so it seemed they'd just put the ratings up for the hell of it. One was five star and one was only three! Weird. Why do that?
I think Allegiant is amazing! I surely had my share with tears and frustration (and lots of curses) when Tris died, but I don't think any other ending suits the plot. I am glad that Miss Roth finished her book that way and not gave away ridiculous ending in order to keep her fans happy.
@Lauren & @Lynne
Seriously????
Do you think all the readers who voted for Allegiant on Goodreads are fake too?
Amanda wrote: "I would say its 50/50 for every person I see who hates the book because of the plot I see another person who hates it simply because Tris died. Same with amazon reviews which by the way are now alm..."She didn't betray me. Surely I cried and was shocked enough to continue reading when my friends spoiled the ending about Tris' death (and cursing too) but I think Allegiant is awesome.
Some people hate Allegiant but some people love it. We just need to respect others who are not on our 'side'
Nurlely wrote: "@Lauren & @LynneSeriously????
Do you think all the readers who voted for Allegiant on Goodreads are fake too?
..."
Did I say anything about Allegiant's reviews in my post? No. I was merely pointing out that there a plenty of fake ratings/reviews out there, both positive and negative, because some people seem to like doing that. Heck, Allegiant had a high rating before it was even released because people were giving it five stars from nothing more than their anticipation. I know there are plenty of people who liked Allegiant and gave it a five star review because they thought it deserved it. I've spoken to a number of them on these sites. However, I also know plenty of people who didn't like it and gave it a bad review because they thought it deserved it. I also know that there are bound to be fake reviews and ratings out there as well.
"Lauren & @LynneSeriously????
Do you think all the readers who voted for Allegiant on Goodreads are fake too? "
I'm not talking about Goodreads, though it must be stated that the rating showing here might as well be "fake" because thousands of them were made before the book was released and their reviews amount to nothing more than "I can't wait until the book comes out." The same thing on Barnes and Noble's website, though they don't have nearly as many total reviews.
Yes, Amazon gets fake five-star reviews, to boost up a product's rating, particularly if it has a slew of low ratings. This is an actual practice; look it up. The way to tell that a review there is probably fake is that the review itself is very short (just to fill up the required number of words) and it is very generalized -- "This is the best series. I highly recommend it to everyone." If you click on the link next to the person's name that lets you see the list of other products they've reviewed, you'll see that this Allegiant review is the only thing they've done. When all of those factors are considered, it's a strong possibility that this review is fake.
What do I mean by fake? I mean publishing companies (and sometimes even authors, though I doubt Veronica Roth would be behind this herself) get their employees, or even contract marketing firms that specifically do this, to set up fake accounts and sprinkle in five-star reviews every now and again to help keep the rating up. It wouldn't surprise me if Lionsgate would be in on it -- they're the ones who really have something to lose if this turns people off from the movie; HarperCollins is done with the series. They have a lot of money riding on this "product" and the rating has a lot of influence on whether or not people decide to buy something.
Seriously, look it up. It's a real thing.
"I think Allegiant is amazing! I surely had my share with tears and frustration (and lots of curses) when Tris died, but I don't think any other ending suits the plot. "Well, yes, given the way the plot was written and what happened in this book, there was no other way for the story to end. Tris's decision makes perfect sense, given where the plot took her.
The problem is that the situation she found herself in was not authentic, because the plot was contrived. It was not realistic for any of the characters to arrive at the final decision they made; they had about 72 other alternatives and possibilities that didn't involve automatically accepting a suicide mission for no reason, and no one even bothers to think of anything. They just say they don't know what else to do other than this incredibly unethical plan that they would never even consider doing if they were acting in-character, and even then, they make no effort to think of a way to carry it out besides letting someone die. That is not believable and it does not ring true to the characters as they were in the previous books.
Yes, the ending made sense to the plot. The problem is that it only happened because, to paraphrase another review, the characters went out of their way to create a death scene for no reason other than to coax, cajole, and brass-knuckle the story into the prearranged conclusion.
what I think Nurlely is talking about is the Goodreads internal contest of the year's best books in which Allegiant won it's category. It was one vote per person so no faking or cheating.
and just to add, the Category in which it won was Fantasy and Sci-Fi, I looked it up and Divergent and Insurgent also won this Category so I still don't understand what is up with the rant about the science not making sense. In Sci-Fi you get to bend those rules.
In science fiction, you get to bend the rules to invent scenarios that are not likely -- but COULD be, theoretically, plausible. Science fiction, like ANY STORY ON EARTH, still has to make sense. The fictional science must be rooted in real science and, most of all, logic.Jurassic Park, for example, is fictional science based on 100% real science -- literally the only thing that's "fake" is whether any dinosaur DNA you would find in a 100-million-year-old mosquito would be at all intact. Every other aspect of what they did is a real science concept.
Allegiant is fictional science based on incorrect science, based on science written on a ninth grade biology test with a big red F on top. The story is based on the idea that genes will heal themselves through reproduction -- genes do not do that. Being "science fiction" does not give the author license to pretend that this is true. It's not true. If she wanted to invent a crazy future scenario, she needed to use something that could actually happen based on how DNA actually works. This won't happen because it doesn't do that.
I'm fairly certain these Goodreads awards are based on people liking the book, which happens to be categorized in the sci fi/fantasy section. They are not a quantitative analysis of whether the science is the book is correct. It's not the science fair.
Anyway, regarding the ratings, I wasn't talking about the votes for the Goodreads awards, so I'm not sure why Nurlely brought that up anyway.
Star Wars is science fiction, yet most of the science is flawed, so is Star Trek and Firefly. Yet both Star Wars and Star Trek are immensely popular and have movies, books, tv shows and merchandise. Unwind flies completely in the face of science yet it is very popular.
They're all nonetheless based on actual PRINCIPLES of science. Allegiant is based on nothing.The issue isn't that it's extremely exaggerated or unlikely, it's just plain wrong. The science described in this premise, the science behind the experiments, is actually the exact opposite of how the thing they are talking about actually happens. The experiment is dumb and can't be taken seriously as a plot point because the science behind its very purpose is inherently backwards. It's not good when just reading it, you can tell that the author did absolutely no research into her idea because what she is talking about is incorrect. Any D-student in biology could read the info-dump and notice how dumb it is on face value, because the very idea of creating "pure" people by having a bunch of "broken" people reproduce makes no sense.
Unwind is a stretch of the imagination, but not that much. The very basis of the idea is not fake -- transplant are, of course, real. It's not like the very idea of body parts being grafted and transplanted to other people was made up. We do that. It does work like that. But using every single part of the body (or 99% of it) for a functional transplant, and the implication that the part retains the ideas of its original body? That's the sci-fi part. But it says that a scientist invented a way to do it. That's all you need in science fiction. Tell me why this completely unlikely, maybe even impossible, scenario could actually happen in this fictional future world, otherwise I can't take it seriously. Tell me how the people in the future made this an actual thing. Shusterman did: They invented the technology to make body parts and transplants work that way. There you go. That's literally all you need to do. Why is this impossible thing possible? Because they figured out a way to do it.
Allegiant does no such thing. The idea of manipulating people's genes is a real concept, that part is fine, but the rest of it? Thinking that genes will fix themselves, that they will revert to their "original" status after generations of reproduction among people with broken genes? That will not happen, and the problem is that there is no such implication in the story that future scientists invented a way to make DNA do that, to make DNA work in a way that it simply doesn't, that they discovered a way for damaged genes to magically create pure genes through reproduction. The book reads like the author thinks it already works like that, and it doesn't. That's why the story makes no sense. It uses science incorrectly and asks the reader to pretend it's correct without giving any reason to think that. It doesn't succeed. It just reads like the author doesn't know how genetics work and didn't bother to look it up to find out.
I'm not saying you're wrong to not be bothered by any of it, I'm just saying that the problem is there.
But is Roth asking us to assume that the science is correct? I mean, the point of the Bureau is that they're wrong and delusional. Besides your issue that genes can't fix themselves, their entire theory about damaged genes is wrong from the get-go, so why is it unthinkable that they would continue to veer off into wildly misinformed directions? Their entire concept of "damanged genes" is flawed and incorrect- there are no damaged genes, because violence, war, criminal behavior, etc. are not genetic issues- they're societal issues. So any attempt to fix these genes is not going to work, because that's not what the problem is. So they're inevitably going to come up with wrong, scientifically inaccurate solutions to this problem, because the very scientific theory that they're basing their work off of is incorrect.The problems in the world of Divergent arise from an inequitable society rather than genetics, but the government is misguidedly trying to solve these issues through science. All of their attempts, then, are bound to be ineffective, so they'll just keep trying new things, even if to someone not so wrapped up in this ideology it would seem like there's no logical reason to think that they will work. I don't think the faction system is supposed to seem to the reader like a sound attempt at fixing human nature- we're supposed to be frustrated with the Bureau for wasting resources on something that has no chance of success.
It raises the question, certainly, of why would these intelligent scientists not see the flaws in this experiment, but they can't even see the flaws in the concept that things like war and criminality have a genetic basis, so why wouldn't they pursue other scientifically flawed and unreasonable theories?
As for them believing that war, poverty, and criminality can have a genetic basis, it's a theory that is pretty ridiculous, but it's one that exists in real life and was once widely accepted in the scientific community. It's called Eugenics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics) and it wasn't something just a few whacky scientists believed- it was a theory embraced by the international community and had devastating impacts on society, including the Holocaust. It's a theory that prompted not only genocide, but wildly insane and scientifically unsound science experiments. For example, the Nazis kidnapped and brainwashed hundreds of thousands of Polish children in an attempt to "make them German" or "Germanize" them in order to have them intermarry with Germans strengthen the German gene pool- regardless of the relatively glaring flaw that you can't really "de-Polish" a person, so technically the Nazis were introducing a "race" that they considered "inferior" to the German gene pool. It also spurred Mengele's infamous experiments on twins, including one where he had people break one twin's arm to see if the other would feel pain. What was the scientific basis for that? There have been plenty of scientific theories and experiments in real life that had no logical basis, but were carried out regardless, so I don't find it to really be a problem for this to happen in fiction.
Ultimately, we're not supposed to think that the Bureau's experiment and reasoning is correct, because it's not. It's supposed to be ridiculus and absurd and make you frustrated that no one's called it out as such yet...and scientific theories of this nature exist and have existed in real life. Just look at Eugenics, scientific racism, etc...it all seems so obviously wrong and flawed, but people- even extremely intelligent people- believed it and practiced it.
You misunderstand me. I have no problem with a story with scientists THINKING something incorrect or inaccurate is actually correct, or being misled in their usage. Of course the idea of blaming behavior solely on genes is ridiculous, and it's almost hard to believe that people in the future could be even dumber than they are today to actually believe so, but whatever. And of course there's no such thing as "damaged" genes. The story discusses this at length the whole time -- they're not damaged, they're just different the way every person is different. I don't have a problem with this science fiction story involving people thinking something stupid, and having an equally stupid idea of how to fix it. The basis of their stupid thought is a real idea -- eugenics is a real theory, untested and unproven, but a real topic of debate and so I don't have a problem with this idea being behind all of this, or the idea that they would take this concept and take it a step or two or ten too far. This is the hallmark of pretty much every sci-fi story: taking a real concept and taking it too far. This aspect of it is not what bothers me at all. Well, it does, because it is stupid, and it's a stupid explanation for the story we were actually following, but that is not what makes me think Veronica Roth failed high school biology.It comes down to the practice of how to fix it, with the experiment to have people with damaged genes eventually evolve into people with pure genes through inbreeding, and the results.
If the whole point of the story was that the scientists THOUGHT this was scientifically possible but it really wasn't, that their efforts were scientifically futile because the experiment did no such thing, that would be fine. But that's not what it was about and that's not what happened. My problem is that at no point is it implied that the science behind what they hoped to accomplish with the city experiment is supposed to be factually incorrect. It suggests the opposite.
The point of the story was about how they are wrong to WANT to do this. The morality and good sense of it all is in question from the get-go -- at no point does the book pretend that what they are doing is a "good" thing to do or a sensible thing to do -- but it is clear that the science of the actual experiment is supposed to be accurate. They had the idea that they could produce pure people from a bunch of damaged people mating, but the problem is that this incorrect science purports to be real -- they DID produce genetically pure (Divergent) people over the generations, they DID create "genetic healing." The experiment actually worked, when by definition it can't do any of this.
I don't have a problem with their flawed theories and ideas. And I can accept them foolishly THINKING that they could possibly create pure genes from a bunch of damaged genes, as long as it is understood in the story that they are actually wrong to think that genes will do that at all. What I have a problem with is the fact that the story says that it actually DID do that. That part is what makes it all just plain incorrect.
But honestly, the idea of just thinking any of this would work is, really, quite stupid as well. The idea that the scientists would even think they could create pure people in the first place by isolating a bunch of damaged people and forcing them to interbreed, the idea that they would choose to do that instead of just taking the exact same technology that allowed them to remove the genes in the first place and using that to simply put the genes back where they came from? It's ridiculously illogical. No, it's not "incorrect" for characters to THINK something so blatantly incorrect, something so stupid and illogical, but it makes the story a lot harder to swallow. Sometimes it's too much to just accept for story's sake that the reason people would do and think something so factually incorrect is because they're just dumb. Sometimes it just looks like the author doesn't know what they're talking about.
Suspension of disbelief can only go so far. At some point the story just becomes silly and unbelievable and you're just insulting the reader's intelligence.
I don't think the experiment actually worked though. I can't remember the quote, but Tris comes to the conclusion that being divergent doesn't actually mean anything, that her immunization to serums could be caused by any number of things. Divergent is simply how the Bureau understood and labeled a trait that is in all likelihood nothing more than the sort of immunizations we see among people today. Immunities to certain diseases or resistance to certain vaccines and anti-biotics have been known to emerge among the population, and it's often difficult to trace their exact cause. Tris' immunity to serums might really be nothing more than this, but the Bureau labeled it as divergence and an example of the success of their experiment. Simply because they labeled it as such, however, doesn't make it so. I'll admit though that Roth could have been clearer on this, but it does come across to an extent. That's how I read it.I think she does do a better job of showing that divergence doesn't really mean anything through the "non-divergent" characters. After all, look at Tobias. He's a very complex character and doesn't really conform to one way of thinking, but he's not actually divergent by the Bureau's definition. By their thinking, he's "damaged" and therefore more prone to violent outbursts and negative personality traits, but Roth makes it pretty clear that this isn't true. Tobias has a multitude of problems that make it easy for him to believe the Bureau's right about him, but almost all of his issues can be traced back to abusive upbringing- his personality flaws and insecurities, therefore, are pretty clearly depicted as resulting from the "nurture" side of the "nature vs. nurture" debate. After all, his main problems are that he doesn't trust others and he's unsure himself, which are common psychological traits of people who go through child abuse. Furthermore, although Tobias has these flaws, they're not really particularly destructive character flaws. They're flaws we see among countless people. Nowhere in the series does Tobias ever come across as being extremely violent, and bearing in mind that the majority of his relationships with other people were either abusive or negligent up until he transferred factions, Tobias is debatably a lot more stable than you would expect him to be, as opposed to being wildly and dangerously unstable as GDs are depicted by the Bureau.
For the Bureau to have produced genetically pure people (Divergent), there needs to be genetically impure people, but there aren't. Tobias is classified as genetically impure by the Bureau just as Tris is classified as genetically pure (divergent), but he's obviously not. He doesn't have any of the characteristics that the Bureau claims genetically impure people should have, and the flaws that he does have are clearly a result of his childhood and are not inborn. To think that they are inborn would negate Marcus' influence on him, and it was well established since Divergent that Marcus has had an extremely strong and negative influence on his son. It stands to reason, then, that Tris is incorrectly defined by the Bureau as well. Again, her immunity could be caused by any number of factors, but the Bureau is looking for something in particular, and people like that tend to find whatever it is they're looking for rather than search for a real solution.
I think the type of gene therapy they did many years ago had some kind of damaging effect, but possibly not one that could be passed on. So they started labeling people and understanding things incorrectly, which relates back to one of the larger themes of the book, which is that labeling and classifying people is dangerous and pointless. Besides Tobias, it's pretty clear that none of the other GDs are inherently bad in any way- they're all just depicted as normal people with normal character flaws. Even what Nita does is hardly beyond the purview of human behavior. So if Roth makes it clear that there are no genetically damaged people, then how can there be genetically healed or pure people? Certain individuals can't be "healed" or "fixed" unless there are people who are "broken" or "sick".
Of course, she probably could have made this clearer, but I did walk away as a reader with the understanding that even the notion of there being Divergents turned out to be bull shit and a fabricated theory. The scientists didn't create a pure people at all, they just thought that they did. I don't think Roth or any author would make the point that you can create a genetically pure people. That's an extremely dangerous idea. It has real life implications for historical events such as WWII and the Holocaust, and I definitely don't think that was Roth's message. I think it was the opposite, that there aren't any genetically pure/divergent people, but that society places value on attributes that don't really mean very much and that it can create warped explanations for things.
No, they didn't create "pure" people; no one is "pure" or "damaged" at all, they're not "correct" or "incorrect" genes. They're just different. My point is that they succeeded over time in creating, through generations of reproduction, people whose genes were of the "original" type their ancestors started with before they were manipulated. That won't happen. The whole idea of creating, never mind returning to, a certain genotype with a population consisting solely of people of a different genotype is what's wrong. It actually moves in the opposite direction.Yes, being divergent meant nothing, in more ways than one. It means you're nothing more than a person with "correct" genes, and since having "correct" or "incorrect" genes doesn't mean anything either, then it's really a pointless label altogether.
Tris was unusually immune to the serums, to a level not even found in other "divergents." Most serums do not work on divergent at all, but they did create some special serums that do work on them, and she alone was the only one they've found to be resistant to even those. They never did explore or explain this. I suspect it means nothing other than Roth's idea of Tris being a Christ metaphor.
Anyway, I'm not arguing that the experiment was a bad idea. Of course it was. The story makes it very clear that "pure" genes and "damaged" genes mean nothing because it's just the way people are all different. But whether you want to call them "pure" or "damaged," the different DNA codes, the different genotypes, although they mean nothing, were there. My problem is the idea that you can actually develop the one type from a population with zero people having it. I'm not at all arguing about the ethics of the gene issue, eugenics and society. The book is quite clear that the ethics of their way of thinking is wrong and dangerous and that what they hope to accomplish is pointless because people's genes mean nothing and people are who they are and do what they do because people are individuals. However, I'm literally just talking about DNA science and about population genetics and the founder effect. I am literally just talking about how the story gets these principles of biology wrong in how it says people's genes evolved through heredity.
I agree with you, Lauren. The only way it would be even remotely plausible would be to include genetically "pure" people in the founding members and continually pump more into the city. It is pretty far fetched to think that a group of scientists so far in the future would not be aware that inbreeding makes genetic disorders more likely, something that is well known now.A similar situation has happened with very closed communities, as Lauren mentioned the "founder effect." For example, most Amish in the US today have descended from a group of about 200 people who immigrated in the 18th century. Because few outsiders have joined the Amish, there is not a lot of genetic diversity. As a result, there is a whole host of illness/diseases that the Amish are predisposed to. They have been adopting children from the outside, especially those of a different race, to try to add some genetic diversity. I grew in a community with a large population of Amish (about half my neighbors), and I have been told that genetic specialist have instructed them to do this (adopt children from other races). (I should add, they are not adopting for this sole reason, it is just why, when they do adopt, they choose from other races.)
It is really hard to believe that something that is so well-documented and known today (who doesn't know that inbreeding causes genetic issues?) would not be known by a group of scientists from about 200 (or more) years in the future. I also find it hard to believe that a smart guy like Caleb, or one of the others, would not have noticed this flaw in their reasoning and said something about it.
I didn't think you were arguing that point, I'm just using those examples of why it's plausible that people would think this way and carry out and believe in the results of experiments that are unsound and ill-reasoned. I just disagree that the experiment was successful. I don't think they created genetically pure people or really did anything. We are told by the Bureau that after they did this gene therapy that the people who had their genes altered became even worse and more violent, but we can only take their word for it, and their word isn't worth a whole lot, because they're a bunch of delusional ideologues. It's possible, then, that their experiment from the very beginning, the one where they tried to alter people's genes and behavior didn't really do anything, and the war that emerged after emerged in the same way that wars typically do, but it was simply attributed to this "genetic damage" that may have never existed in the first place. After all, they were trying to alter genes for violence and criminality...but those genes don't actually exist. That was my point in bringing up Eugenics, which was discredited for the same flaw. So if the initial experiment was to alter theses "criminal and violent genes", but the genes aren't there in the first place, what did they even do? Probably not much. Certainly they didn't create a new genotype, they just thought that this is what happened.That's what I thought of the plot, I thought everything about what the Bureau said was a mix of propaganda and misinformation. Like Tobias and the other "GDs", the people who originally went into the city experiments like Edith Prior may never have actually been damaged, they just were made to believe that they were, just as Tobias started to believe that he was damaged as well. Even when they look at Tobias and Tris' DNA strands, Tris(at least I think this was her chapter) noted that she had no idea what he was looking at. The differences in their DNA then could have been anything- they could only accept whatever Matthew told them, and he was raised to believe in the Bureau's work (even if he did start to question it later). It's similar, in theory, to how Eugenics and genetic racism worked, because you have a scientist who presents the general public with scientific evidence and says "This is what this is and this is what it means" and people accept it and believe it, because they don't know any better. The differences in Tobias and Tris' DNA could have been any number of things.
Also, Tris not understanding the DNA comparison brings up another point. Since the story is told through the first person, the reader can only get the information that the narrator would feasibly know and comprehend. So everything about the alteration of the genes, the purity war, the factions, the whole theory, all of it comes from the Bureau. All of this information is their understanding of these events, so I think you have to take every aspect of the experiment- including the idea that in any point in time there were people with damaged genes- with a grain of salt.
Emily wrote: "I think the type of gene therapy they did many years ago had some kind of damaging effect, but possibly not one that could be passed on. So they started labeling people and understanding things incorrectly, which relates back to one of the larger themes of the book, which is that labeling and classifying people is dangerous and pointless. Besides Tobias, it's pretty clear that none of the other GDs are inherently bad in any way- they're all just depicted as normal people with normal character flaws...."There was an actual gene they isolated when examining Tris and Tobias' DNA. So the gene must have been inherited. Of course, labeling one group of people as less than the others is wrong, but that doesn't mean the gene does not exist. I do agree that their understanding of the gene was flawed, as you pointed out Tobias was a complex character.
We all have "genetic flaws." My family has a predisposition for diabetes, other people have a predisposition for breast cancer, etc. There are countless genetic disorders. Trying to isolate those specific genes and lessen a predisposition for it is not necessarily wrong, if the motives for doing so are correct. However, deciding that one group of people is superior to another because of their DNA is wrong.
Right, but so couldn't they have been examining normal genetic flaws and interpreting them as something else? Specifically, to be indications of behavior and temperament? What I was saying before is that if you're looking to find something in particular, you can misunderstand something else to be whatever it is that you want to find. This happens in research- scientific and otherwise- all the time. If you go into it with a conclusion already in mind that you're 100% convinced of, then you're prone to misinterpret things and disregard any evidence that might negate your thesis. That's what I think happened with the bureau. The difference in Tris' gene and Tobias' could have been anything, not necessarily what the Bureau was looking for.
"I'm just using those examples of why it's plausible that people would think this way and carry out and believe in the results of experiments that are unsound and ill-reasoned. I just disagree that the experiment was successful."When I say the experiment was "successful," I am referring to nothing more than the fact that people were somehow born with the "unadulterated" gene type they were looking for. And this part doesn't make sense, because the population had absolutely no people with this gene type to pass on. That's what's wrong with the science.
But, as we both agree on, these "pure" genes mean absolutely nothing, nor do the "damaged" genes, as there is no pure or damaged or correct or incorrect or healed or broken, just different. No more important than the genes for blue eyes or brown eyes.
I do hate the whole idea of them labeling this as "pure" or "damaged." It's just dumb and blatantly destructive, and another reason why I was disappointed in the story right as I was reading it. I mean, I guess I can see how they could use the term "pure" to identify the genes of a person who did not undergo the gene manipulation -- it's pure, unadulterated. But to afterward call them "damaged"? Doesn't sit well with me.
"After all, they were trying to alter genes for violence and criminality...but those genes don't actually exist. That was my point in bringing up Eugenics, which was discredited for the same flaw. So if the initial experiment was to alter theses "criminal and violent genes", but the genes aren't there in the first place, what did they even do? Probably not much."
They weren't trying to alter "criminal" genes or "violent" genes. I can't remember exactly -- and I refuse to ever open this book again to look -- but it said that they discovered the root cause of these societal ills came down to "personality flaws" of selfishness, cowardice, aggression, etc. Is there such a thing as the selfishness gene, etc.? I doubt it. But I can pretend it does for the sake of science fiction. Roth did miraculously get one concept right: the idea of the "murder gene" is a real concept -- a concept only, no proof whatsoever that it's real, but the idea is already here. We can just pretend that they later made similar theories about those other traits. I can suspend my disbelief quite a bit, believe it or not. There is no proof whatsoever on earth that any such thing exists, and if we operate on that mentality, then yes, the entire experiment makes no sense because they are trying to fix something that never existed in the first place. But I am not arguing the validity of the experiment on those grounds. I am willing to play along to the idea of these being real genes. It's the idea of manipulated genes somehow unmanipulating themselves, and a population comprised solely of one specific genotype magically creating people with the lost genotype, that I can't really get on board with.
"I don't think they created genetically pure people or really did anything. We are told by the Bureau that after they did this gene therapy that the people who had their genes altered became even worse and more violent,"
Are you talking about the original experiment or the city experiment? The original experiment was done to create "better" people who weren't selfish, aggressive, etc., and we are told that this backfired. The city experiment was to essentially undo this, to weed out this genetic manipulation and create people whose genes did not show signs of the alterations.
Emily wrote: "Right, but so couldn't they have been examining normal genetic flaws and interpreting them as something else? Specifically, to be indications of behavior and temperament? What I was saying before i..."I was actually working on this comment when you posted the above. I think that they simply needed someone to blame for their problems. It was so easy to point the finger at this group of genetically modified people and say "your fault." Then the government did some skilled propaganda in that direction. Stereotyping a group of people is not new. They used to claim that slaves had a lower intellect than whites, that they were like children, and needed white people to guide them. They also used the fact that women have smaller brains than men as proof that women were not intellectual equals to men. This was completely made up, any so-called "science" was contrived to support an existing bias. This is what I believe happened in Allegiant. The gene did exist, it just did not affect people in the way that the government claimed. They used the existence of this gene to "scientifically prove" that "GDs" were inferior to "GPs." They manipulated "science" to support their preconceived notion. It was not fact, it was bias.
How many people here are wondering why in the world we're talking about this in a boycott-the-movie thread? :)
"The difference in Tris' gene and Tobias' could have been anything, not necessarily what the Bureau was looking for."True. We have no idea if any of this means anything, mainly because these things aren't real anyway and so we have no real proof that it's correct in their world. But playing devil's advocate, apparently there are specific identifiers of genes that are free from signs of manipulation and genes that are not. Apparently Tris and Tobias's genes are different in that respect. (Again, I can play along.) Does that mean that Tris really has "pure" genes, or maybe just genes that simply different from the ones that show signs of gene therapy? Do they take into account that people are just different? (Well, clearly they do not.) Does that mean Tobias has genes indicative of the removal of the selfishness gene (since he is apparently not really divergent and therefore he really did get an Abnegation aptitude result, supposedly, kind of, in Roth's crazy retconned nonsense, I can't even take any of Tobias's story seriously in this book so whatever)? Do they think that he must therefore be predisposed to selflessness? Who freaking knows. It's all a bunch of nonsense and it doesn't even mean anything anyway. I literally cannot take one word in this book seriously.
What I'm trying to say is what if they never really altered the genes at all and they only thought that they did? The Bureau believes that they did something to people's genes to make them more hostile, and that's why there is war and crime and all these terrible things, but obviously that's not really what they did. So what if the gene alteration was not really that significant at all and there is no "unadulterated" gene type? The whole experiment sounds similar to gene therapy, and we know that gene therapy doesn't always work. So basically, the Bureau misinterpreted their results from the very beginning.I definitely find the idea of "pure" and "damaged" people detestable, but I don't necessarily dislike it as a plot point. As horrible as things like Eugenics and Nazism are, I think it's interesting when fictional books mirror historical events. I always enjoy that. Harry Potter did something very similar with the explanations for pure, half, and muggleborns and the ideology of the Death Eaters. It's all horrible, but I think it's interesting to see actual historical events used as a basis for very fictional stories. So I will admit that I'm perhaps not as critical of the scientific aspects of the plot, because I do enjoy the historical parallel to Eugenics that Roth makes. The whole concept of perfecting the human race through crazy experiments (both scientific and social) is something that I find really frustrating, but really interesting. Could this story have been done better? Absolutely, but it is YA. Don't get me wrong, I love YA, but I don't expect the same level of research and preciseness to go into YA than I do in other types of fiction. I understand that some people do, so I guess I can see how that's frustrating, but I just don't go into YA with those kind of expectations. I can and have read 1984 and Brave New World for that sort of experience. Maybe we should hold YA to these standards, but Divergent is not the only series that doesn't meet it, so I didn't expect it to. It's not wrong to want and demand more, but I, personally, don't, so that can explain maybe why we have differing opinions on this. I don't think the plot is completely sound, but it's about as sound as I would expect, and I'm just not sure we can take anything the Bureau says about either experiment to literally. For all we know, nothing changed with anyone's genes and it was all just a massive waste of time.
I'm pretty sure they were trying to alter "criminal" and "violent" genes. I'm pretty sure they explain it as doing just that. They were trying to eliminate people's negative qualities through their genetics. There is no gene for selfishness, but there are no genes for intelligence or criminality either, but eugenicists believed that there were, so it's not at all implausible that a scientist might believe the same thing about attributes such as cowardice and aggression.
I was talking about the original experiment. We can't really be sure that they altered anything in the people that they experimented on, because they have a warped understanding of where things like selfishness and aggression originate from in the first place.
"What I'm trying to say is what if they never really altered the genes at all and they only thought that they did? The Bureau believes that they did something to people's genes to make them more hostile, and that's why there is war and crime and all these terrible things, but obviously that's not really what they did. So what if the gene alteration was not really that significant at all and there is no "unadulterated" gene type? The whole experiment sounds similar to gene therapy, and we know that gene therapy doesn't always work. So basically, the Bureau misinterpreted their results from the very beginning."I presume they really did in fact alter people's genes. The question is whether these altered genes had anything whatsoever to do with those people's behavior afterward. The scientists think it did. We have no idea if that's true. They are wrong and misguided about everything. I guess I can twist and contort myself into seeing how it could be possible, the ideas they presented: taking away selfishness causes a lack of self-preservation; a lack of aggression leads to a lack of motivation; and all the other negative side effects they said came out from removing traits. Perhaps it did cause people to act out. For the sake of science fiction I could pretend it did. It's no more unbelievable than the idea of removing genes for personality traits in the first place, I suppose.
But we do know that they are entirely wrong to blame the issues of human behavior on people having altered genes, because it was the behavior of people long before these alterations were invented that led to the manipulations in the first place. People are assholes because they're assholes, not because of a flaw in their genetics. It was foolish of them to blame the problems of the world on people with "damaged" genes because problems happened long before they started messing with the genes at all. (I'm not sure how they got away with tricking the rest of the world into forgetting that fact...) So they ignored a mountain of variables in determining that these altered genes were the cause of the subsequent bad behavior because people could act motivationless, vain, overly aggressive, etc., even without having their genes altered, because that's just how people are because the scope of human personality is so obviously varied.
Anyway, whatever altering people's genes actually DOES is debatable -- they really had no proof that having different genes does or means anything, they just assumed it did. But I'm just saying that I have no reason to doubt that actually did alter them -- as in, they did in fact physically do something to people's genes and that whatever they did did show up under the microscope or whatever -- although that's literally the only thing it all means, that it's nothing more than something you can see under a microscope.
No, they weren't altering specific "criminal" or "violent" genes. They never said that. Those were not the genes they were after. It says that they determined (how? why? I don't even care anymore) that a predisposition to those types of behaviors comes from the (imaginary) genes for selfishness, aggression, cowardice, low intelligence, and dishonesty. They targeted and removed the genes for those five traits in the hopes that it would make people less prone to bad behavior. It's at this point that SUPPOSEDLY it backfired and the absence of these genes just enhanced other undesirable qualities. Is there any proof at all that these undesirable qualities had anything to do with those missing genes? Nope.
"(I'm not sure how they got away with tricking the rest of the world into forgetting that fact...)"Hah, I feel like the "rest of the world" is always a huge issue in dystopian YA books. I've read Divergent, Hunger Games, and Delirium, and they're always incredibly vague or simply don't mention at all what's going on in the rest of the world. It's probably my biggest pet peeve with these books. So I don't think we know that the rest of the world forgot about the causes of the world's problems. For all we know, the rest of the world is going about business as usual and looking at the U.S. like they're a bunch of nut jobs.
But isn't that sort of like the same thing? Genes that reflect a predisposition for negative behaviors that result in criminal or violent behavior. Maybe I phrased it wrong. Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because they're still looking for human behavioral patterns in a person's genes, which is misguided, but hardly limited to fiction.
True. I'm just saying that they weren't specifically targeting the genes for "violence" or "criminality" -- although, come to think of it, they probably should have just done that instead. I mean, why not? It's just as fake as the other ones. What they were doing was getting right down to the source, what causes people to do bad things in the first place, what aspects of people's personalities makes them prone to doing these things. (It's not at all a bad concept to ponder, really.) Somehow they determined that a tendency to bad behavior, or maybe even just bad thinking, comes down to one of five vices, and apparently there were specific genes for them. (Oooookay. But whatever. Fiction.) So they thought that if they could remove the source (genes), they could eliminate the effect (behavior). Smooth move.You know, it's not so much the idea of thinking these altered genes just brought out other behaviors and that they needed to fix the genes to bring people "back" to normal, but I'm not sure why they eventually started thinking that the reason people do bad things, period, is because of their "damaged" genes when bad things happened before that ever happened. It's the reason they started screwing with people's genes in the first place. Who's to say that a "pure" (ugh) person doesn't have an unmanipulated but nonetheless "dangerous" gene for, say, aggression just like the pre-manipulation people did? Obviously, the point of the story is that they very well could be just as evil, because it has nothing to do with DNA, but it's annoying to read about people being so ignorant and feel like the author actually expects me to think that people really would be this stupid. I just wasn't feeling this dystopian world that existed "outside the fence" because I couldn't quite suspend my disbelief that society would operate on such stupid beliefs, that people would be segregated and oppressed this way on these ideas.
I hate this book.
And I too have no idea why the rest of the world is hardly mentioned in other dystopias. I often wondered in The Hunger Games why people don't just try to escape to another country. If they can't, fine, but it's like the rest of the world doesn't even exist. Weird.
Discussing the science a little more critically though has made me realize it's a bit convoluted. Or I guess I always knew that but was focused on other aspects of the book and hadn't thought about it much until now. A lot of my points have to be phrased as "could be" and "might have", because it's not really set in stone. I think maybe she would have been better off not focusing on science so much. This wouldn't have necessarily altered the book in any dramatic way, because it could have all have been a psychological experiment instead. The Bureau still could have been trying to eliminate these elements of human behavior, but instead of going about it through this genetics stuff, it could have been much simpler. The factions could have been exactly what everyone was raised to believe that they were, but they were simply orchestrated and monitored by an outside force, which still would have been disconcerting for the main characters. Of course, some things would need to be changed. There would need to be another basis for discrimination and inequality without the GD/GP thing, but this probably wouldn't be too difficult to come up with.
It wouldn't even eliminate the Eugenics parallel, because Eugenic theories were practiced in psychological experiments as well- for example, the Germanization of Polish youth by the Nazis.
I guess, in a last defense of the science, was Tris' mom definitely the only person from the outside who intermarried with someone from the experiment? I can't remember if she was the only one to ever go into the experiment- I don't think it mentioned that she was. So there might've been others like her which could explain your issue with not introducing new genes to the gene pool. Even if it was only a few people, that would be consistent with the fact that there aren't a lot of people like Tris. Then again, Tris' mom wasn't really supposed to intermarry and reproduce, so I guess not. This also could have been an easy fix for the plot.
And that's another thing I hated about this book. Because Divergent was very much dystopian fiction -- the only sci-fi element was in the serums, and that's okay, because it's the future and people invent things. What annoyed me about Allegiant and the Big Revelation is that it suddenly turned the story into a straight-up science-y science fiction story -- and still made no sense. I was disappointed to hear the science revelation altogether before we even got to the stupid way the science was being explained. It just turned the story into something different altogether and it just didn't quite fit in itself.I wonder if the folks behind the movie have read this book yet. (See? See how I brought the discussion back to the original topic?) From what I've seen and read from Neil Burger, this is clearly not what he had in mind at all as the backstory for all this -- him and the rest of the universe. How in the world are they going to adapt Allegiant into a movie? The premise of this book doesn't fit into the rest of the story at all.
"I think maybe she would have been better off not focusing on science so much. This wouldn't have necessarily altered the book in any dramatic way, because it could have all have been a psychological experiment instead. The Bureau still could have been trying to eliminate these elements of human behavior, but instead of going about it through this genetics stuff, it could have been much simpler. The factions could have been exactly what everyone was raised to believe that they were, but they were simply orchestrated and monitored by an outside force, which still would have been disconcerting for the main characters. Of course, some things would need to be changed. There would need to be another basis for discrimination and inequality without the GD/GP thing, but this probably wouldn't be too difficult to come up with."Yes! This! Exactly! There was no need to make this some crazy convoluted science experiment gone wrong (especially if she wasn't going to bother to research it to make sure it at least made sense). The premise didn't need to have a scientific basis. It was always a purely psychological and sociological story -- if it had to be all an experiment, it should have been just on those grounds.
I think the main reason Roth wanted to make it scientific was because (and I saw this in an interview) she realized she needed to find an explanation for Divergence and how they were different from other people. She says she realized that everyone should be divergent if it's just about having more than one personality trait, because all people have different personality traits. That's nice of her to catch on two years later that her entire premise is inherently nonsense. So she wanted to come up with a scientific basis for Divergence.
I think the moment she first came to this conclusion was the official death knell for this story.
"Obviously, the point of the story is that they very well could be just as evil, because it has nothing to do with DNA, but it's annoying to read about people being so ignorant and feel like the author actually expects me to think that people really would be this stupid. I just wasn't feeling this dystopian world that existed "outside the fence" because I couldn't quite suspend my disbelief that society would operate on such stupid beliefs, that people would be segregated and oppressed this way on these ideas."Although, I have to say, I don't really agree with this. People can and have been that stupid and ignorant and oppressed and segregated people on equally stupid ideas. Just look at Jim Crow South. Skin color was believed to make someone fundamentally inferior in all ways (intelligence, behavior, health, etc.) to someone else and they segregated and oppressed people on this ridiculous and completely unfounded theory. In Nazi Germany, being Jewish was thought to make people genetically and psychologically inferior and it was believed that Jews were predisposed to criminal behavior, and in this case too they were segregated, discriminated against, and systematically murdered based on this belief. So I found that aspect of Allegiant to be 100% believable.
As for the Hunger Games, yeah, you would think some people would've managed to make it to Canada or Mexico at least if they could get to District 13, or why not just fly that hovercraft to Asia, Africa, or Europe?
"I guess, in a last defense of the science, was Tris' mom definitely the only person from the outside who intermarried with someone from the experiment? I can't remember if she was the only one to ever go into the experiment- I don't think it mentioned that she was. So there might've been others like her which could explain your issue with not introducing new genes to the gene pool. Even if it was only a few people, that would be consistent with the fact that there aren't a lot of people like Tris. Then again, Tris' mom wasn't really supposed to intermarry and reproduce, so I guess not. This also could have been an easy fix for the plot. "The whole retcon with Tris's mom was so ridiculous that I refuse to even entertain any thought about it.
Lauren wrote: ""I think maybe she would have been better off not focusing on science so much. This wouldn't have necessarily altered the book in any dramatic way, because it could have all have been a psychologic..."Yeah, I mean the entire idea came from her psychology class anyway. Dauntless is rooted in a treatment for phobias were people are exposed to their fears until they get over them, so that's very much a real and believable concept.
With needing to explain divergence, I see how that's difficult, and I think I read or watched the same interview. Her non-divergent characters turned out to be just as complex, maybe more complex than she intended them to be, which is a good thing, but it compromises that plot point. I'm not sure how to fix it, but I'm sure it's possible to come up with more of a psychological/sociological explanation for it rather than a scientific one.
"Although, I have to say, I don't really agree with this. People can and have been that stupid and ignorant and oppressed and segregated people on equally stupid ideas. Just look at Jim Crow South. Skin color was believed to make someone fundamentally inferior in all ways (intelligence, behavior, health, etc.) to someone else and they segregated and oppressed people on this ridiculous and completely unfounded theory. In Nazi Germany, being Jewish was thought to make people genetically and psychologically inferior and it was believed that Jews were predisposed to criminal behavior, and in this case too they were segregated, discriminated against, and systematically murdered based on this belief. So I found that aspect of Allegiant to be 100% believable. "I don't know, maybe if the story had fleshed out a little better how society actually views all of this. The worldbuilding is so poor in this, so that's probably why I couldn't buy it. I agree that people have fallen for far stupider ideas. The idea that society -- the whole nation, or what's left of it -- would adopt a stance based on "damaged" genes based on aggression or selfishness and so on meaning you are apparently borderline retarded? It's very iffy, partly because the whole thing that started it (blaming the bad behavior on genes and trying to correct that) was already iffy itself. I guess I can see prejudice coming from the fact of the Purity War, the army of pure versus the army of damaged, and society then becoming indoctrinated on the notion that damaged people are bad and inferior because just look at all that trouble "they" caused. Eh. Again, maybe if the world was fleshed out better it might have been a little less implausible. The world in the first two books is very fleshed out and so you can very much get on board with the idea of people living this way even though, if you think about it, it makes zero sense. (It's very hard for me to "sell" this series on my friends because I realize just how silly the premise of Divergent sounds just describing it to them, heh.) This book three world, though, just seemed really dumb and unlikely just on a glance.
It's just a book. And Veronica Roth is a great writer, by you-guys (her fan base) getting so attached to these characters means that she did something right. And you have to take in consideration the world that they live in; they have been in conflict throughout the entire trilogy so you should've expected that characters would be sacrificed. By her ending Allegiant the way she did also sent a great message about coping and moving on with your life
Yeah, I can see that.Talking about the issue with divergence though sort of make me wonder if the entire series would have been better off without it, which seems crazy, because that's the whole point but it did sort of wind up not being so central. Maybe the books would have been better if people like Tris, Tobias, and Amar were just dissatisfied with how society functioned (which Tobias definitely was and Tris to a lesser degree), but not necessarily as radical as Evelyn who ran off to rally the factionless to revolution. That would be a pretty legitimate way for people to feel. I don't think the factions are really that bad of a system compared to other dystopian setting, but it can be a pretty stifling way to live- especially for the Abnegation who sort of remind me of ultra-conservative religious groups.
It all still could have escalated into the same conflict that we see only for people to find out that the factions did not develop naturally as they thought, but through the implementation of the government. Maybe you don't need to invent any sort of inequalities between groups- the world outside could have been entirely like our own, and the people inside were just being monitored, and it's extremely dystopic to turn thousands of people's lives into an experiment without their knowledge.
With world-building though, I think this is also a common issue of dystopian trilogies. Three books aren't enough to build this insane world that is so different from our own, have a revolution, then solve the revolution. I think they all could have done with more books. Like Harry Potter's world is very rich, detailed, and well-thought out....but there are seven books. I don't think these series need seven, per se, but more than three for sure.
Folake wrote: "It's just a book. And Veronica Roth is a great writer, by you-guys (her fan base) getting so attached to these characters means that she did something right. And you have to take in consideration t..."I agree with you. I still enjoyed the books because I felt attached to the characters and the book still evoked some major emotions in me, and that is a testament to her skills as a writer. That doesn't mean I can't like something overall and still criticize and find issue with certain aspects of it. That's pretty normal, actually.
Folake wrote: "It's just a book. And Veronica Roth is a great writer, by you-guys (her fan base) getting so attached to these characters means that she did something right. And you have to take in consideration t..."As you can see throughout the majority of this entire website, most people don't really have issue with the fact that Tris died, just how pointlessly it was done.
"With world-building though, I think this is also a common issue of dystopian trilogies. Three books aren't enough to build this insane world that is so different from our own"I think worldbuilding can be done in a short amount of time (aka small number of books). I think the issue here is that we spent two books living in the world of the Chicago factions, and then we are dropped into the outside world, which is somehow a dystopia unto itself, and we got absolutely no hint in the previous books that any of this was happening or existed. She had three books to build up the world -- the whole world -- but she crammed all of this particular one into one book without warning.
I think it must have been at least half a dozen times I muttered out loud to myself "What the hell does any of this have to do with anything?" at various points as I was reading this book. Like a lot of reviews have said, it really does all feel like a random book out of a completely different series.
Yeah, maybe they should have gone beyond the fence sooner, or maybe the world should have been kept insular and the last book was just the battle with the factions and the factionless.
Emily wrote: "Yeah, maybe they should have gone beyond the fence sooner, or maybe the world should have been kept insular and the last book was just the battle with the factions and the factionless."You have no idea how much I am praying that this is exactly what they'll do for the movie, if they get to make the whole series.
I guess we'll see, I mean, I've definitely seen movies where they blatantly changed the entire ending of a book....not always for the better though. I don't know if you've ever seen/read "Everything is Illuminated" (great book, and a good movie too, just strange decisions at the end...) but they completely changed the ending for really no apparent reason. Not just like, left out some details or added a scene, like completely changed the resolution of the book.I think the success of the movie though is still ultimately contingent upon the Divergent film itself, and I think the Allegiant controversy won't have too big of an impact. Divergent has a strong cast and it's coming out during a pretty dead time for movies. If it's exciting and well-acted in its own right, it'll make money and then they'll make the others. I'd be pretty surprised if it was bad. Shailene Woodley is a good actress and she's been in some pretty serious films like the Descendants, Kate Winslet is a great actress and a huge celebrity who will always bring audience, and Theo James is kind of a newbie, but a newbie who got a slot on Downton Abbey, which is a huge show and sets really high standards for actors. In terms of getting people to buy tickets, it also doesn't hurt that Theo James is extremely attractive.
She had to do something upsetting, you kind of knew it was coming. Just because something happened that upset you in Allegiant, it really doesn't affect the way her books were before. Her writing didn't change, it was just what she wrote. If that was what she wanted to happen, then let it be. It very much upset me but I'm not going to go "Boycott." seriously, that's just stupid. If you liked the books before, it didn't change.
I think they're changing books' endings less and less, though, because there's often a backlash from fans, and frequently, these days, the author is involved as well, so that makes it even more tricky.
The first book is a very engaging story, and from what we've seen so far the movie looks like they put it together pretty well. I don't see it at all being a flop like so many naysayers like to say just because it's another YA book-to-film adaptation like all the others.As far as Allegiant, it's not so much the ending as the whole story (obviously, from this discussion). I'd be happy if they literally threw out the entire story, the ridiculous explanation for the premise, and just made the entire movie about the faction war inside the city. I just can't see this translating well as a movie with the other two -- the story doesn't flow properly at all. And on top of that, it's boring. They literally spend half the book sitting around the airport. I would almost rather actually sit in an airport for two hours than watch that in the theater.
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Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but Tris' death wasn't what made me dislike Allegiant. I disliked the book because it was poorly written, the characters' (and plot) were not consistent with the first two books, and the plot was terrible. Tris, who I really liked in the first two, turned into a whiney, self-righteous prig. Her death was completely unnecessary. And her so-called "plan" was poorly thought-out, badly executed, and consisted of doing to David and Co exactly what they had planned on doing to Chicago. She didn't even come up with a plan to keep the city from killing each other, nor did she seem to care to. Tobias came up with a plan that would most likely fail and then everyone in the city would be dead rather than just lose their memories. And I hated how everything just happened to work out in the end. Yeah, that's how the real world works.
I already figured out that Tris died before I even read the novel, and honestly that was part of why I was so eager to read it. I was really hoping it would be good. Sadly though, this book was terrible. I had to force myself keep reading it because of how badly written it was.