Characters were so flat

[Andi]

I know I'm not the only one who has mentioned this before, but I find a great worrisome amount of characters in this series to be so flat and stereotypical.

I don't know if I can articulate exactly why the entire supporting cast of characters (and sometimes even Tris and Four) feel flat to me, but I've always felt like something was missing from their characterization.

Maybe it's just that they fail to surprise me (Uriah, Christina, Cara, Marlene, etc, etc). Or when they do surprise me, there's no rational explanation for their behaviour so I'm just left with a "wtf was that" feeling (Caleb, Evelyn, David). Or maybe it's just that I find the writing to be so...amateur.

[Line]

I'm completely with you...

[Rose]

Yep. Sadly, I thought that the books kinds went downhill as the series progressed.

[Monica]

The series just isnt good imo. I think it was the story itself that fell flat and was not interesting. In book 1 though i liked her character development that is the only reason i read book 2 but from the beginning of insurgent i got the feeling that maybe the author really didnt know where she wanted to go with the series and the characters became very sterotypical as u mention

[notyourfriend]

I completely disagree with you all. There was a reason for all those things and when it came to an end people ignored them and just got mad and upset. But if you read the authors reasons are, it makes perfect sense why it's all written the way it was and personally it gave me a new found respect for the series, characters, and the author. It made the storyline beautifully written.

[Drew]

Haha I agree! I thought the characters were pretty flat throughout the series, although I really liked the first book.

Rose wrote: "Yep. Sadly, I thought that the books kinds went downhill as the series progressed."

I totally agree! Insurgent was so bad I could barely get through it. And Allegiant felt . . . unsatisfactory to me.

[Andi]

Monica wrote: "The series just isnt good imo. I think it was the story itself that fell flat and was not interesting. In book 1 though i liked her character development that is the only reason i read book 2 but f..."

Yup. Hated Insurgent as well. I was waiting for Allegiant to redeem the series, but clearly it went downhill from there.

Paigetwo *Caitlyn* wrote: "I completely disagree with you all. There was a reason for all those things and when it came to an end people ignored them and just got mad and upset. But if you read the authors reasons are, it makes perfect sense why it's all written the way it was."

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree? I read her blog post explaining the end, though to be honest I wish she had spent more time explaining why the book had so many plot holes and why some characters seemed off. Parts of her reasoning don't really make logical sense to me, but the biggest problem by far is that she was clearly killing Tris off for the sake of killing her off. Her death doesn't add anything meaningful to the big picture, so it just falls flat.

And that's not mentioning all the plot holes and characters acting out of character to bring the story to that moment (i.e. Tris just conveniently forgets her gun, David decides to inflict a mortal wound even though he's supposedly been obsessed with protecting Divergents his whole life and Tris is an exceptional example, they decide on the dumbest plan possible even though they could have just as easily procured some memory serum from Amity, truth serum from Candor to get the password out of David, or death serum from Erudite to wipe out the Bureau, etc)

I think the author had things planned out for Divergent but didn't bother thinking too hard about the bigger picture until her publisher wanted her to write a trilogy. So the story feels incredibly disjointed and like she was making it up as she went along after book 1.

[Lauren]

She was totally making everything up as she went along. She has confirmed that she wrote the first book completely blind with no planning. She did not know what outside the fence was, she did not know what divergence was supposed to be, nothing. She had to pull stuff out of thin air because her agents/publisher asked her to make her story into a series.

I don't presume to know if most authors really do plan out all of their stories ahead of time, but if they play it by ear with each book, you'd never be able to tell by reading them because the storylines flow seamlessly. With Allegiant, well, I've never before read a book that made it more clear that the author had been making everything up as she went along. The storyline and revelations made in this book are so poorly executed, so clumsily introduced that it's painfully obvious that the author didn't actually think of these things when she wrote the other books. It was almost uncomfortable to read.

I don't mind the IDEA of Tris's death in an act of sacrifice - it's a perfect full circle kind of thing - but the way the story is executed is simply horrid. It's most distracting how the characters seem to go out of their way to pick the absolute stupidest plan to lead to the sacrifice moment. The way so many obviously better alternatives are blatantly ignored makes the whole storyline nothing but contrived. And even in the end, the actual death was contrived. How convenient that Tris just happens to forget her gun! How convenient that David is suddenly well enough to wheel himself into a room being attacked when he couldn't even make it to a staff meeting before! How convenient that he expects any intruder to die in the death serum and yet he is lying in wait with a gun to, what, kill them again? How convenient that he takes note of the fact that Tris is resistant to the death serum and yet makes no hesitation to kill her, even though his sole mission in life is to study people like her. Yeah. Whatever.

I get what Veronica was trying to accomplish with Tris's story over the three books, but the problem is it was not executed well, and the final situation was too thin, contrived, and just plain ridiculous to properly convey her message. From the final sacrifice storyline, to the revelations about the city, it seems there was great potential for a lot of elements in this book to go in better directions, have a better purpose. There were so many smarter options for the story to go, and Veronica seemed to have gone out of her way to pick the dumbest one for all of them.

More to the topic at hand, yes, the characters were absolutely flat and pointless in this book. It was like Veronica forgot all about them and they just walk into the scene to offer wry comments or dirty jokes and then walk back offstage again until she remembers that she needs to show them every once in a while. All of the characterization in this book either makes an inexplicable 180 or just becomes flat out nonexistent. One of the 47 reasons why I feel like this book is actually some fan fiction that Harper Collins published by mistake.

[Jo]

I'm just about to start Allegiant (probably). I read the first 2 books over the last few days and I think I want to finish the series although I have been spoiled and have read a lot of criticism of the 3rd book.
I was going to ask my friends if they had the same problem as I did - I couldn't keep most of the secondary characters straight. I kept having to search for earlier references to the character to figure out who they were, especially Marcus (before he became more crucial to the story) and Cara and Marlene and some of the others.
I thought maybe it was like The Hunger Games where the main character doesn't get to know the other tributes very well and so people get nicknames or are referred to without a lot of detail. It makes it harder for the reader to keep track of characters.
But now I'm also thinking that it was just poor characterization and writing.

[Andi]

Lauren wrote: " It was like Veronica forgot all about them and they just walk into the scene to offer wry comments or dirty jokes and then walk back offstage again until she remembers that she needs to show them every once in a while."

Thank you so much for articulating that!

This is exactly the problem I was trying to explain. The characters in the story (esp the ones that are not Tris and Four) don't have any agency of their own. They are simply used by the author for choppy scenes of comic relief, to explain major plot points at length, or simply to do things that move the plot forward in a certain direction--regardless of how little sense it makes for those particular characters to be making those particular actions (Four trusting Nita's idiotic plan, David shooting Tris, Evelyn giving up, Peter just randomly coming along to do absolutely nothing, etc).

I think about all these characters that came with them outside the fence (Uriah, Peter, and Cara in particular) and I wonder what was even the point of them if they weren't even going to do anything???