Tris and Tobias (she makes the switch to the new name immediately) walk around holding hands and talking.  I’m still not buying this romance.  Maybe because I buy every other part of their relationship, and the romantic bits just seem tacked on.  Like, it’s not enough for her to be friends with this guy, or to be intrigued by him, or to have a connection (real or made-up) based on both being Divergent.  Nope, that’s not enough, we need to throw in kisses and hand-holding as well.  But it’s just not handled well enough, so it all feels really tacked on.  I guess what really gets me is that a platonic relationship between these two would be fascinating and worth-while, but we can’t have that.

Tobias doesn’t admit to being Divergent, but they talk about his dad and about how the whole child-beating thing is the reason he switched to Dauntless.

Know what’s missing from all this?  Any thoughts from Tris on how Erudite was absolutely correct.  Remember way at the start, when they guessed that Tobias left the faction because of abuse?  Well, here’s confirmation that they’re right, in spite of a whole book of Tris telling us Erudite is bullying the Abnegation faction.  And she doesn’t even bat an eye.  She doesn’t wonder what else they were right about.  Nothing.  It’s almost like…well, like she never doubted the facts, she just didn’t want them published.

Because apparently freedom of the press is…bad?

“I mean, by Dauntless standards. Four fears is unheard of. How could you not belong here?”

Come on, Tris.  What are you basing this on?  We haven’t had one single word on what the average number of fears are, nor do we know what even qualifies as a fear.  How the hell are we supposed to be impressed by this?

They spout off some philosophical talk about selflessness and bravery being pretty close, though they don’t take it any further than just saying that, which makes all fall pretty flat.  Then they talk about how Tobias likes her, even though *gasp* she’s a whole two years younger than him and not pretty!

Tobias counters by saying she’s got nice personality points that he values, and…why does Tris care if she’s pretty?  I know that in this world, there’s a lot of pressures on girls to value their looks, and it’s all pretty messed up and shit, but in the book, there’s no indication that anyone puts value on appearances.  Certainly her old faction doesn’t.  The biggest part about their society (faction placement) is entirely personality-based.  Their ranking system is merit-based.  There’s been no hint of visual media so far.  So why isn’t Tris basing her personal value on something other than looks?

It’s all well and good to reassure young girls that they don’t have focus so heavily on prettiness, but something like this kind of borks things up when it suggests that girls do this naturally, rather than admitting that it’s an artificial system held up by our culture and media.

Aaaand time for more teenaged make-outs.

Hey, didn’t we have some kid commit suicide a few chapters ago?

What happened with that?

Completely ignored in favor of romance?

Awesome.

THE NEXT MORNING I am silly and light. Every time I push the smile from my face, it fights its way back.

Yeah.  Nothing about Al.

You know, she’s not even questioning Dauntless more than usual.  There’s the normal run of comments about how it used to be different and now it’s more selfish and hostile and dangerous, but absolutely none of this has changed or intensified since Al’s death.  There’s no payoff for that, no reaction, no questioning of the tactics used for their training or by the leaders, no attempt to change things to ensure that further suicides don’t happen.  Basically, a young man was driven to commit suicide, and the novel is going to completely ignore that fact and focus instead on teenaged make-outs and how awesome it is that Tobias likes Tris.  Because…yeah, that’s just so important.

So, on to training for that day.  They’re going to go through the holodeck, but using someone else’s set of fears.  Seems they don’t get to face their own until the final test.  We finally get an average number for fears (10 – 15).  Oh, also, there’s some bullshit angst with Tris being all cry-y because Tobias won’t come over and be a lovebird with her in the middle of the workday.  Because Tris has priorities.  Or something.

The kids are going to face only one fear each, since this is just a trail run, and Tris gets kidnapping.  (Would Tobias be totally chill while getting kidnapped?  Maybe he’d chuckle and make idle chit-chat with his captors.)  When Tris goes under, she doesn’t just hallucinate kidnapping, but the specific kidnapping that happened to her when she was almost thrown into the chasm.  She fails the event, Tobias yells at her for failing, and she slaps him and walks away.

I can’t tell who to be mad at.  If I go with the book’s notion that mentally torturing kids isn’t a big deal, then shut up, Tris.  This is the first time one of these events has actually been any sort of personal challenge to her, so technically she failed the first time something wound up being hard.  Wow, boo-hoo, get over it.  On the other hand, if I live in the real world where mental torture is STILL A BIG FUCKING DEAL, then fuck off, Tobias.  She has every right to be afraid of the traumatic thing that happened to her.

Really, this whole scene fails on so many levels.