The next day at training, they’re going to learn how to throw knives.  Oh, goody.  Can it be the same as when they ‘learned’ how to shoot, where they randomly toss shit around for an hour or two and then never receive any instruction, significant practice, or evaluation? 

Think about it.  Has Tris touched a gun since that first morning practice?  The paintball gun doesn’t count, because she didn’t fire it.  They seriously had a bare couple of hours, then nothing further on the matter.

Winning capture the flag is a matter of pride, and pride is important to the Dauntless. More important than reason or sense.

Yeah, we figured that out.

And stop acting like that’s a good thing.

Once again, they simply watch Four through knives two times, receive zero instructions, and then spend several hours just guessing until they stumble onto the correct way to do things.  Tris figures she’ll practice throwing without a knife to get the hang of it first, which is moronic.  Yes, many sports are a largely mental exercise.  Yes, visualizing and going through the motions can help you practice just as much as doing things full-force.  BUT YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING FIRST.  Tris can’t figure out if her throw is right or wrong if she has no results to judge it by.  She doesn’t know what she’s doing, so this is simply an exercise in futility.

Except in fictionland, where it means she does a perfect thrown on her first try with a real knife.

Eventually everyone starts hitting their targets with the knives, because reality and reasonable instruction?  What’s that?  Everyone except Al, who is a poor shot.  Eric gets mad at him and tells him to go retrieve his knives while everyone else is still throwing.  Because fuck you, this is Dauntless, LOGIC IS NOT ALLOWED IN THIS HOUSE, ALRIGHT?

Al refuses to do it and admits that he’s afraid of being hit by a knife.

Eric flips his shit over this. 

You know what the problem is?  The problem is that this book completely fails to understand the point of fear.  Fear is an agent of self-preservation.  Fear is what keeps you from putting your hand in a fire, or walking blindfolded across a street, or…you know, jumping off moving trains.  Fear only becomes a problem when it stops you from doing needed things, but it’s a good trait when it stops you from doing stupid, self-harming things.  Fear keeps you alive long enough to do shit that actually matters.  Fear is a tool, to be judged by the circumstances.

This book has all the nuance and subtlety of a brick to the face, so it rolls along with the idea that all fear is bad all the time, even when it serves a good purpose.  It’s just another aspect of the book’s binary world-view, that something has to be all good or all bad, and there’s no considerations to be taken or shades of gray to be had.

The worst part is that it pretends like this could actually work.  In reality, someone trained to be fearless like this would die before reaching reproduction.  Add that to the fact that they only keep half their initiates, and they should be dying out with every generation.  There shouldn’t be any local-born initiates, because all the kids should have died a long time ago, and the adults should be dropping before they can pop out any new babies.  When they’re willing to kill people in the process of just getting home at the end of the day, then that’s natural selection’s way of saying “your genes are too shitty to keep around.”

Anyway, back to the story.  Eric gets mad and makes Al stand in front of a target so he can throw knives at him.  Tris objects, says that Eric is just acting the bully, and says that bullying is a sign of cowardice.  Good job, Tris.  You’ve finally said something both brave and intelligent.  It just scratches the surface of Dauntless’s stupidity, but at least it’s something.  Anyway, for her trouble, Tris gets to stand in front of the target in Al’s place.  Four throws knives at her and tries to goad her into flinching or running, and on the last knife he nicks her ear.  On purpose.  Wow, what an ass, Four.  A mere inch or two off, and she’s missing an ear or an eye.  Champion knife throwers don’t get that accurate.  I don’t think there’s a standardized size for bullseyes, but they look at least six inches wide to me, and champions will hit all over that circle, when they hit it at all.  (If they could consistently hit the bullseye every time, then we’d need a different method of scoring, because at a high enough level everyone would have the same score.)

All of which means that Four could have easily blinded or killed her and took that risk just to prove some point, and the only reason he didn’t grievously injure her is pure luck.

Most of this book seems to run on ‘pure luck’ masquerading as skill or smarts or a mistaken belief that physics actually works like that.

Eric congratulates her on being brave and says he’ll keep an eye on her.  Tris has a passing thought on wondering if she’s been exposed as divergent (not sure why, she didn’t display non-Dauntless actions there) and…you know, for being the title concept of the book, that divergent shit really has gone quite forgotten since it showed up.  What kind of impact was it supposed to have, anyway?  All it does at this point is pop up in her thoughts at random.  I guess to remind us that it’s there, since we’d easily forget otherwise. 

Really, nothing has happened so far.  There’s no plot to this book.  It’s just a training montage set in a really stupid world.  I understand that the first bit of a book is supposed to be set up, but there should be a hint of a plot, something that we know we’re building up to and that we can look forward to it.  All we’ve been promised in this book so far is more training.

Four stays behind when everyone leaves and tells Tris he cut her to help her.  But he doesn’t say why, he just expects her to get it.  Somehow.  He gets pissed off when she can’t read his mind, because that’s just how Four rolls.

Today is the day before Visiting Day.

Okay, but last we heard of this it was ‘less than a week’ away, and that was two days ago.  Is this the day after the knife scene, or several days after?  In fact, during that knife scene, Eric said that the next day (today?) would be the last day of Phase One of training.  Did we skip that or not?

I try to pull a pant leg over my thigh and it sticks just above my knee. Frowning, I stare at my leg. A bulge of muscle is stopping the fabric. I let the pant leg fall and look over my shoulder at the back of my thigh. Another muscle stands out there.

*sigh* Okay, let’s stop and work out this timeline, assuming we didn’t skip any days in that previous sentence.

Day One – Choosing Ceremony, tour/intro

Day Two – gun lesson (shudder), first fighting lesson, shopping for new clothes

Day Three – Fighting (Al vs Will, Christina vs Molly), Peter bullies Tris

Day Four – Fighting (Tris vs Peter)

Day Five – Field trip to the fence

Day Six – Fighting (Tris vs Myra), capture the flag after dark

Day Seven – Knife throwing

Day Eight – Last day of phase one of training, day before Visiting Day

That means that she had, maybe, three days of physical activity.  (First fighting lesson, capture the flag, and knife throwing; since she on the fighting days she only did one fight each, and they were brief.)  Unless she’s hitting the gym in her spare time, she shouldn’t be gaining muscle mass.  Even if she is, she’s not going to gain enough to keep her pants from fitting in one fucking week.  If she noticed any visual change at all in a single week, it would be very slight.  Even if it was a significant change, what, did these hamstrings pop up overnight?  Was she wearing skin-tight jeans?

Plus, that description makes it sound less like a muscle and more like a tumor.

Tris goes back into the dorm to get her dress instead, and she gets cornered by Peter.  He steals her towel and then he and his cronies laugh at her nakedness. 

Before training that day, she goes to get new clothes.  I hope they’re roomier than her last set so she doesn’t hulk out every time she breathes too deep or something.  That day she fights Molly, and she’s eager to get some payback for the laughing thing.

Wait, is that the purpose of that scene?  It was really fucking creepy and actually good at what it was: a scene with three people bullying a smaller target.  I didn’t comment much on it because, though it was nasty, it was supposed to be nasty.  I can’t fault something for showing bullying as being bullying.

What I can do, however, is scream and rage at it for including a fairly triggering scene just to give Tris some cheap motivation for her fight.  Bullying is a big deal.  Kids lose their lives over this stuff.  It’s traumatic.  Anyone who went through something similar to what Tris went through would have a lot to deal with.  To take all that and reduce it to a cheap plot point?  To take all that and…what, say it’s okay because maybe later you can punch someone in the face?  It severely devalues the emotional pain and suffering of real-life bullying victims.  This is just another flavor the same idiocy that brought us rape as a cheap villain point and fridging as a cheap character motivation. 

Oh, but it gets worse.  Because it can always get worse.  Tris ends up beating Molly in their fight, but once Molly is down, Tris takes out her anger by repeatedly kicking her in the ribs.  Yes, Tris has been bullied and hurt.  Yes, it often happens that hurt people turn into bullies themselves.  No, this is not a good thing and I demand that you display it as a bad thing instead of as justice.

That’s really the biggest problem I have with books.  Of course you can show people fucking up and doing bad things.  That happens.  But admit to what you’re doing instead of pretending like it’s high praise or some shit.

Although, in this book, it really could go either way.  Four pulls her off Molly and tells her to go take a walk to clear her head, but then again, Tris doesn’t feel the least bit sorry and thinks of it as comeuppance for the earlier bullying.  I guess it could be read as going either way, I’m just not in a very forgiving mood at the moment.