Tris stands with her new faction, who are all taller than her for some reason.  She hasn’t been noted as exceptionally short before now.  Do idiotic acts of peer pressure make you taller now?  Anyway, she’s sad because her dad is glaring at her now.  Because, you see, the way to peace is to divide up into groups and then hate all the other groups with a fiery passion, to the point where you refuse to associate with them and disown any children that leave the nest.

Because, you know, it’s not like humanity has a sordid history of tribal and clan groups engaging in long, drawn out, bloody confrontations that can last for centuries or anything like that.  Nope, insular clans are clearly the way to social harmony.

Seriously, author, have you ever cracked open a history text?  If she comes up with an excuse for how this came about, I still won’t be happy, because unless that excuse comes with a side helping of ‘lobotomy,’ then there’s no way this system would have lasted past the first couple of years.

At least her mom is happy for her, so we don’t have the whole dad-good/mom-evil trope again.

My father’s eyes burn into mine with a look of accusation. At first, when I feel the heat behind my eyes, I think he’s found a way to set me on fire, to punish me for what I’ve done, but no—I’m about to cry.

So…has Tris never cried before, or does she really think telepyrokenisis is actually the more viable option?

I twist my head around to find Caleb in the crowd of Erudite behind me. […] The easy smile he wears is an act of betrayal.

Where’s the faction that thinks wars are created by ethnocentrism?  I want to join that faction.

That’s it.  I’m starting a sixth faction.  We’ll be called “Fred.”  We’ll be Freddites.  We’ll be hyper-inclusive and tolerant.  If you leave to join another faction, we won’t care, we’ll still invite you over for Sunday night dinner and ask how you’re liking your new group of friends.  We’ll respect your personal boundaries, cultural sensibilities, and unique priorities.  We’ll make efforts to understand each other and live by compromise and make people as happy as possible, while still understanding that, well, some things do require a compromise, so you might have to give a tinsy bit.  We’ll basically be all the factions except Dauntless rolled into one, but you can also be brave if you want, we just won’t require you to jump from a moving train to prove it.

Freddites Unite!

Tris did not have the foresight to join Fred, so she’s stuck with a group of people who all run down the stairs.  Because…um…fuck if I know.  I guess this is supposed to be an act of ‘wild abandon,’ but it’s mostly just striking me as silly and juvenile.  Then they all run outside and across the street to catch the train. 

I have not run anywhere in a long time. Abnegation discourages anything done strictly for my own enjoyment, and that is what this is: my lungs burning, my muscles aching, the fierce pleasure of a flat-out sprint.

Apparently Abnegation also has a thing against cardiovascular health.  I guess they expect other people to exercise for her.

I bet Abnegation is anti-sex-for-anything-but-procreation, too.  Does anyone in Abnegation do anything nice for anyone else in Abnegation?  What if a guy wants to be nice and go down on his girlfriend, thereby giving her pleasure?  Would she be forced to refuse him, because she’s not allowed to enjoy herself?  Or maybe it goes the other way and they have sex all the time but constantly fake orgasms, because it would be selfish to make your partner think they aren’t sex gods?

Well, the end result is always the same.  Abnegation people are severely serotonin-deprived.  No wonder they all turned evil.

They run for the train and jump onto it while it’s still moving.  One boy is too slow and gets left behind.

I feel uneasy. He just failed Dauntless initiation. He is factionless now. It could happen at any moment.

Um…but he wasn’t so much cowardly as he was out of shape.  Do the Dauntless believe that one has to be particularly strong or fast in order to be brave?  I mean, the boy was clearly willing and trying to jump on the moving train, so bravery wasn’t an issue, just his body failing him due to an apparent lack of PE classes.

And why doesn’t the train stop?  Is this a train used solely by the Dauntless, and since they use jumping on and off as a test of character, they decided to never stop it?

Do you know what trains are?  AWESOME.  Compared to buses, they need less upkeep, less fuel, and they produce less pollution and are less prone to catastrophic accidents.  But in this world where they can’t even pave all the roads, the trains are restricted to only 1/5^th of the population. 

You know, these people would probably be perfectly fine if they’d just stop wasting their resources on stupidity.

Tris sits on the train and talks to another new girl named Christina.  Then she thinks about her book-loving brother.

And when they clear out his room, what will they discover? I imagine books jammed between the dresser and the wall, books under his mattress.

Dude, books are evil, alright?  But a different evil than our normal fun-loving evil, so I won’t have them in this Abnegation household!

What a good actor he was. The thought makes me sick to my stomach, because even though I left them too, at least I was no good at pretending. At least they all knew that I wasn’t selfless.

Why does it have to be an act?  Why is this such an all or nothing thing?  Why is she talking as if one moment of thinking about yourself here and there makes you uniformly selfish and incapable of any altruistic act?  Why does everything in this world running on a binary assumption?  Your either selfless or selfish, one or the other, all the time, that’s it.  No spectrum of behaviors, no consideration given to specific circumstances, none of that.  It’s really quite sad.

You know, we’d never treat people like this in Fred.

They get to where they’re going and have to jump off the elevated tracks and onto a roof.  Why?  Because fuck logic, that’s why.

You know, the Dauntless think that cowardice is the cause of war and bravery is the cure, yes?  Well, I can certainly see this working, then.  If everyone dies from idiocy, there’s no one around to fight.  I mean, not an ideal solution, but certainly a solution.

My main problem with all this isn’t that it doesn’t uphold their claim of bravery.  Sure, you have to be brave to jump off a train.  But you have to be brave to do a lot of other things, too.  You know, things like bucking peer pressure and advocating for social change.  So this isn’t the one and only way to show bravery.  On top of that, this serves no purpose.  Bravery without intelligence or temperance does not achieve anything.  It does not benefit anyone or serve society in any way.  So, yeah, they’re brave.  So what?  It’s a meaningless trait by itself.

If you want your bravery to mean something, you have to match it with a goal.

This is just dumbasses doing something they saw on YouTube.

One girl even falls off the roof and dies.  Congratulations, dumbasses, the most your bravery has actually accomplished today is to kill someone.  Yes, this is so much better than war, clearly.

I tell myself, as sternly as possible, that is how things work here. We do dangerous things and people die. People die, and we move on to the next dangerous thing. The sooner that lesson sinks in, the better chance I have at surviving initiation.

So war is hell and we should eradicate it from our society, but people die pointlessly and we have to just accept that and move on?

No, fuck you. 

Really, Tris, this is your reaction to the senseless death of a young woman?  To shrug and treat it as just something that happens?

Go sit in the Sociopath’s Corner with Katniss until you learn some empathy.

Some idiot named Max tells them that the entrance to the compound is at ground level, but they’ll have to jump off the roof to get to it.  The seven-story roof.  In fact, it’s more than seven stories, because there’s a deep dark hole in the ground where the floor isn’t even visible.  For some reason Tris takes off her shirt before jumping.  No, I don’t know why, she just does it.  Apparently wearing a skin-tight undershirt makes her more brave.  She jumps…

…and lands on a net.

Seven stories + a few more.

Into a net.

And she’s fine.

DAMNIT, AUTHOR, AT LEAST WATCH A FEW EPISODES OF MYTHBUSTERS OR SOMETHING, NO, YOU CAN’T JUMP THAT FAR INTO A FLIMSY NET AND BE FINE, THAT’S NOT HOW REALITY WORKS.

One or two stories into a net, maybe, if you’re not trained for it.  More if you’re trained for it and know what to expect.  Because, you see, when you fall seven-plus stories, you’re falling really fast.  And a net is still going to leave you with a lot of force.  If you land on them wrong, you can easily crack something that shouldn’t be cracking, like your neck.  Plus, they bounce, leaving you plenty of opportunities to do stupid shit like run your knee into your nose.

I can only assume that the Dauntless don’t really give a shit about bravery.  They’re trying to kill everyone who doesn’t have their own personal luck god watching out for them.  None of this has anything to do with overcoming fears, because successfully jumping off a train still gets you a result of DEATH.  This?  Their survival is all based on luck.

You know what I did to prove my bravery when in BCT?  Well, nothing, because we were more trying to prove our ability to get shit done in a timely and efficient manner.  The goal was to accomplish a task and live long enough to accomplish the next task.  But moving on.  I rappelled off the side of a 30-ft tower.  With a safety harness on and after sufficient instruction.  It was scary even with that, so much so that one fellow soldier freaked out and got stuck on the ladder on the way up.  Another started to rappel and just absolutely refused to move after getting ten feet from the top of the tower.  No one could convince them to go down, and they were too far from the top to be pulled back up.  But we all survived that day and moved on to that lovely time we had to low crawl across a sand pit at 2am while the drill sergeants fired live rounds over our heads.  And then we all survived that, too.  And we moved on to doing even more stuff, like being deployed to Iraq and actually getting shit done.

Displaying bravery and overcoming fears can be accomplished without a disregard for personal safety.  In fact, at the end of it, if you are safe, you end up with a cadre of personnel who are both braver and alive/able to contribute to society.

See, in real martial organizations, bravery isn’t an end unto itself.  It’s just a tool that we use to accomplish dangerous tasks while not wasting time with panicking.  The end goal is still just “get shit done.”

So, back to the story.  Tris gets off her magic net with the help of a young man whose eyes are so over-described that I can only assume he’s the love interest.  His name is…Four.

Yeah, I don’t know either.

So all the Dauntless come out to congratulate Tris on being the first to jump.  And on not cracking her face open with her own misplaced body parts, but that’s in the subtext.

After everyone jumps, they split up into new-people and born-here people, so that the new people can get a tour of their underground facility. 

The walls are made of stone

So, are we talking shored up/covered with stone, or dug into the bedrock and left bare?

Does Chicago have a set of underground tunnels/facilities that they appropriated, or did they dig this new?

Hey, I think I found out where all the asphalt went.

Four takes them on the tour, and Christina makes a sarcastic remark, to which Four tells her to shut her pie-hole.  I guess it’s considered brave to be a jerk to people.

It is an underground cavern so huge I can’t see the other end of it from where I stand, at the bottom.

Oh, cool, so it’ll cave in soon and put an end to all this stupidity.  In fact, since it should have caved in immediately and only dark demon magic is keeping the roof up, I’m sure mass death is pretty imminent. 

Maybe that’s why they keep doing stupid shit that gets children killed.  They need human sacrifices to keep their cavern whole.

I can’t tell for sure about Chicago specifically, but northern Illinois has mostly limestone and shale, both of which are incredibly soft for rocks and would not put up with this sort of structure.  The town was originally a swamp, after all.  Why do you think they have an elevated train instead of a subway?

A slant of orange light stretches across one of the rock walls. Forming the roof of the Pit are panes of glass and, above them, a building that lets in sunlight. It must have looked like just another city building when we passed it on the train.

You can’t even argue that this monstrosity was dug into the bedrock, because it’s clearly right next to the surface.

I don’t see any elderly people in the crowd. Are there any old Dauntless? Do they not last that long, or are they just sent away when they can’t jump off moving trains anymore?

My guess is that they die before reaching middle age.

The smart ones just say “fuck this, I’d rather be factionless.”

The really smart ones join Fred.  We took over Jackson Park.  My room is in the Museum of Science and Industry, but there’s plenty of room in here for others.  On weekends, we show movies in the Omnimax.

Anyway, on one side of “the Pit” is an open hole leading down to a fast-moving underground river.

“The chasm reminds us that there is a fine line between bravery and idiocy!” Four shouts. “A daredevil jump off this ledge will end your life. It has happened before and it will happen again. You’ve been warned.”

Honey, you missed the fine line between bravery and idiocy a long time ago.

Do they think that jumping off trains and getting children killed is…smart?

Then they go to a dining hall, where Tris has never had a hamburger before, because they’re considered ‘indulgent.’  It’s just meat and bread, how is it any different from what she’s been eating at home?

Then some guy named Eric comes by, and it turns out he’s the leader of all the Dauntless, despite being very young.  Oh, and I guess the factions have leaders now.  Good to know, book, thanks.  I guess that government that Mr. Prior sits on is, what, just for show?

I don’t understand why, but I don’t want Eric to look at me any longer than he already has. I don’t want him to look at me ever again.

Why don’t you just hang a sign on his head that says ‘bad guy’?  All he’s done so far is sit down and say two lines of dialogue.  He has a short conversation about Four’s lack of any desire for a new job, then leaves.

Tris asks two simple questions, and apparently this is unusual, because no one outside of Candor asks questions.  (How does Erudite learn anything, then?  Do they just study things that have already been discovered and leave all the rest?)

Questions make Four mad.

“I’m developing a theory.”

“And it is?”

She picks up her hamburger, grins, and says, “That you have a death wish.”

Ooo, yes, Tris is just so daring and special for asking two very basic questions.  Let us all marvel in awe at her specialness.  Truly no one in the history of the world has ever been so special.

You know.  Except five year olds.

After dinner, Eric takes over the tour.  Turns out there’s actually five leaders of Dauntless, and he’s only one of them.  He shows them to a dorm room and gives them a basic run down of the schedule, then says they’ll be ranked during and after training.

Eric smiles, and in the blue light, his smile looks wicked, like it was cut into his face with a knife.

Book, we get it.  Stop trying so hard.

Turns out only the top ten ranked initiates will actually make it into Dauntless, and the rest have to go be factionless.  Why?  I don’t know, maybe because they don’t have any room for expansion in their stupid Pit thingy.