Time for the Dauntless initiation day.  Tris says that most people in the faction are drunk from partying before it even begins.  Hm, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really associate “drunk before noon” with “anything even remotely good.”  Especially since it’s not the first time Tris has casually mentioned the entire faction getting drunk.  Sounds more like they’re jumping at any chance to get messed up because their lives are craptastic and they have to jump off a moving train just to get to work and back.

On the way I see someone fall off the path on the Pit wall and, judging by his screams and the way he grabs at his leg, he broke something. 

Forget work, they can break legs just walking around town.  I’d look for any excuse to get drunk, too.  Which, ironically, increases the chance of falling off the street and breaking a limb.

In Fred, we understand and appreciate the need for safety rails.  Also, we don’t live in an impossible underground cavern held up by demon magic that requires a constant sacrifice of pain and blood to keep going.

Abnegation is what I am. It is what I am when I’m not thinking about what I’m doing. It is what I am when I am put to the test. It is what I am even when I appear to be brave. Am I in the wrong faction?

First of all, she’s having this crisis of faith because of her food choices.  She absent-mindedly picked food that was close to what she ate in her childhood.  That’s a matter of habit, not personality, and also it’s just food.  Second, the only ‘selfless’ thing she’s done has been to stand in place of Al when Tobias was throwing knives, and that pretty much counts for being brave.  It’s only by authorial decree that we’re calling it selfless instead.  It’s not like she’s done any clearly selfless acts, live give up her free time to help a friend with training, or sacrifice her personal comfort to forgive Al, stick around, hear his problems, and maybe talk him down from suicide. 

I’m not saying she has to do those things, but they’d be more selfless than one single act that was prompted more by indignation than anything else anyway.

The torture will be over soon, but can we forget the simulations?

When have you ever remembered them, Tris?  I think we got, like, one paragraph about how she’s a little restless and fidgety, but we don’t see that at any point.  She walks around doing stuff like she’s just fine, and they haven’t been on her mind so far as we’ve seen.

Again, this book says good things.  I’ll grant it that.  But it doesn’t apply them well, and it doesn’t explore the deeper meanings.  So in the end, all it does it say good things, while showing completely different stuff.

I can’t see daylight because the soles of shoes cover every inch of glass above us. For a second I think I hear the glass creak, but it is my imagination.

Oh, really?  Are you sure it wasn’t the demon magic spell wavering for a moment, threatening to send everyone plunging to their deaths?

There’s a reason we don’t build floors and ceilings out of glass.  Well, we’ll do small sections, but not floors big enough for an entire faction to stand on.

So all these drunk faction people are watching the kids go through their holodeck tests and cheering when they pass.  They’re to go into the test backwards by rank, so Tris will go last since she’s ranked first.

When she goes in to her hallucination, the first thing to attack her is a group of crows.  Tris helpfully explains to use that she doesn’t really have ornithophobia, but rather she’s afraid of a loss of control.  Um…okay, but why is that manifesting as a murder of crows?  Why not have her hallucinate being magically frozen, or tied up, or whatever?  It’s all well and good to say that the crows represent something else, but a lot of things represent ‘loss of control,’ so where the fuck did the birds come from?

She hallucinates a gun into her hands and starts shooting birds.  Because…um, yeah, that’ll work great.  Have you ever fired into a flock of birds?  It’s pretty useless.  They’re small targets, and even if you hit one, there’s still the rest of the flock to deal with.

But, I guess since it’s a hallucination, firing into the “cloud of dark feathers” and killing crows one by one actually works.  Somehow.  Maybe the other 95% of the flock dropped dead from heart attacks or something.

As I aim and shoot, I feel the same rush of power I felt the first time I held a gun. My heart stops racing and the field, gun, and birds fade away.

So…the rush of power (aka, adrenaline) makes her heart rate slow down?

In fact, these people place an undue amount of importance on heart rates.  Here, she has to either defeat the obstacle or slow down her heart.  In the last simulation, she had to slow down her heart.  Why would you even want to do that?  Our hearts speed up when we’re in danger for a reason.  It’s part of the body going into overdrive so you can deal with the threat.  Removing that reaction is basically saying “nah, you should react to everything like a pot head.  Just be chill and take a whatever-attitude towards people trying to kill you.”  It makes no sense.  There’s no advantage to having a slow heart in these situations.  It’s not like a fast heartbeat fucks with your brain.  In fact, it gives your brain more oxygen so you can think and react faster.

For a faction that’s all about dealing with fears, they have no idea how fears and physiological reactions even work.

Next she’s in a tank of water, which apparently represents weakness.  In other words, being unable to break the glass of her tank because she’s too weak.  So…how is this any different from ‘loss of control’ with the birds?  She said she needed power to beat the birds, now she needs power to break the glass.  If we’re talking about deep, symbolic meanings and not taking things at face value, then these two are basically the same thing.

She breaks the glass with only a couple of paragraphs of minor doubt.  I think it’s supposed to be a moment of “oh, no, this hallucination is more powerful than the rest because she didn’t beat it on her very first try!”  But really, she still beat it, she beat it quickly, and she beat it by simply doing the same thing over again until it worked.  Um…drama?

Next she’s drowning in a turbulent sea.

I must not really be afraid of the water. I must be afraid of being out of control. To face it, I have to regain control.

So…same as the first two fears, just a different flavor.

Look, either just make her be afraid of drowning, or give us something that’s actually new.

She beats that through the power of unicorn farts or whatever and moves on to the next.  She’s tied up, and Peter is leading a mob that’s out to set her on fire.  So she hallucinates up a rainstorm to put out the fire.

How does that work?  She imagined rain, fantastic, but that only works in this specific hallucination.  What if there’s a fire in real life?  Or, you know, any other situation where an antagonist comes after her.  Is she supposed to just magic up a tornado to blow them away?

Next she’s in her room in her old faction, and faceless men come to…um, stand around in a vaguely threatening manner?  She says they’re there to kill her, but really all they do is exist.  So she shoots them all, but…there’s…um, zombies?  I don’t know, there’s a mass of more faceless bodies outside and they’re all trying to crawl in through her window and she doesn’t have enough bullets to kill them.  Hey, genius, you hallucinated up the first gun.  Why not hallucinate yourself a machine gun with an unlimited magazine?  So she hides in a closet until her heart rate slows down, because…yeah, that’ll help during the zombie apocalypse.

Hey, Tris, what was that fear about?  You took the time to explain the first three, but not the next two?  Are you thinking that you’re just actually afraid of being burned alive and mobbed by faceless zombies?

Next, she’s seeing Tobias and a four poster bed.

Book.  Book, no.  Stop it, book.

He starts kissing her and undressing her, and she tells us she’s afraid of affection.

Book.  Book, look at yourself.

You’ve got a bed.

He’s taking her clothes off.

This isn’t a fear of affection.  This is fantasy-Tobias trying to sex her.

Please, please, please stop equating sex with love and closeness.

See, the problem here is that Tris’s issue has always been specifically about public displays of affection.  She’s uncomfortable with other people holding hands and kissing in public.  There’s been no hint so far that she would be upset with that in private, or that she has any issues with emotional closeness.  Hell, she was fine sleeping in Tobias’s bed and making out with him, and she was fine having intimate conversations with him. 

To say that physical touch is the same as love, to imply that someone who doesn’t have sex or kiss in public is somehow afraid of love or incapable of love, is a very damaging message.  It pressures people into doing things that they either aren’t comfortable with or aren’t ready for.  Furthermore, the book is basically saying that there’s something wrong with Tris for not wanting to kiss and hold hands in public.  That it’s some sort of personal flaw she has, instead of simply another way to handle interpersonal relationships.  And she’s being ‘fixed’ of this ‘fear’ through public shaming.  (Everyone is watching her test, after all.)

She doesn’t actually have hallucination sex, she just say that she won’t have sex, and then…fake!Tobias makes out with her until she gets hot and tingly, then it moves on.  She ‘beat’ this fear by giving in to a pressure to get physical and aroused.  So.  Fucking.  Creepy.

So, her last fear.  Jeanine is there holding a gun to her head, saying she has to kill her family or she’ll be killed instead.  Because, yeah, we can’t let go of the idea that Jeanine is pure evil.  I know it’s just a hallucination and this is all Tris’s subconscious talking, but still.  It’s not like we need that hammered in more.  She gets around this last fear by saying “lol, nope, I won’t shoot them, you’ll have to shoot me instead.”

And that’s the end of the test. 

Okay, so.  Let’s talk about this scene back when it was done right, when it was written by Tamora Peirce, and when it was called the Chamber of the Ordeal.

By the way, go read the Song of the Lioness quartet and the Protector of the Small quartet.  Excellent books.

For those who are unfamiliar, here’s a rundown: to become a knight in this world, you have to enter a magic chamber that shows you your worst fears.  You don’t have to beat them or anything, you just have to remain silent and survive.  If you scream, you fail.  Or you can die through some way that’s never fully explained (magic?) or break mentally or end up with some other magical maladies if the Chamber finds you lacking.  It’s magic; it can do that.

But I’m not talking about mechanics here.  When Kel went into the chamber, she faced a fear of heights and a fear of being useless and unable to stop injustices that she saw.  (And some other sundry things.)  Both of those were major points of her story, things either drove her or that she had to work around.  These were things that we knew about Kel, that we saw her struggle with and face down already, and thus we knew what it meant to her.  When she dealt with the impossibly high tree, we knew just how scared she was of that.  When she experienced being injured and helpless, we knew why that was a struggle for her, specifically.  We could connect with her and sympathize with her, and we could appreciate that here was something that was specifically designed to try and break her and test her.

Alanna had the same deal.  She faced things that we knew she was afraid of, because we’d seen her deal with them.  We knew what it meant for her character, we knew the guilt she felt over those lost in the plague and the reasons she was scared.  Even when it came to simple phobias, that’s fine, because we knew she had that to deal with.  The giant spider wasn’t symbolic, it was a giant fucking spider.  And we knew that Alanna, specifically, would lose her shit over it.  It was there for a reason, to target her fears in particular, and we knew that because we knew her.

In this book?  It’s like the author just reached into a hat and pulled out random scary scenes.  The bit with her family and with Peter leading a mob, those can arguably be said to represent things we already know about her.  But the rest?  Why crows?  Why is she afraid of losing control?  When have seen that with her so far?  Her family’s death?  When has she worried for their safety?  That she’s concerned about them, fine, but why does she think she’ll be responsible for them dying?  Drowning in the turbulent seas?  She’s never even seen a large body of water, so what the fudge?  And intimacy?  We’ve not seen her be afraid of getting intimate with Tobias.  We’ve seen her be uncomfortable with other people being gushy, but that’s not even fear, that’s just cultural sensibilities.

These things are all random.  They’re not tied in with her character, because frankly, Tris has very little character at all.  One can argue that this is revealing her character.  And it’s perfectly fine to have a character who is afraid of all these things.  But we’re ¾ths of the way through the book.  We should not be discovering all these things right now.  This should be the point at which we see her overcome things that she’s been dealing with all along, not discover these bits of her personality right now, only to have her brush them off right away. 

It’s not necessarily bad characterization, but it sure as hell is bad writing.

And also, really, what is up with that heart rate stuff?