Tris wakes up to another nightmare.

I OPEN MY eyes, terrified, my hands clutching at the sheets. But I am not running through the streets of the city or the corridors of Dauntless headquarters. I am in a bed in Amity headquarters, and the smell of sawdust is in the air.

I shift, and wince as something digs into my back. I reach behind me, and my fingers wrap around the gun.

For a moment I see Will standing before me, both our guns between us—his hand, I could have shot his hand, why didn’t I, why?—and I almost scream his name.

Then he’s gone.

I get out of bed and lift the mattress with one hand, propping it up on my knee. Then I shove the gun beneath it and let the mattress bury it. Once it is out of sight and no longer pressed to my skin, my head feels clearer.

I love it. I do. Awesome. Perfect. Except for one little detail.

Johanna asked you to give up your weapons last night. Even if she assumed you’d operate on the honor system, no one even showed up later to say “and this is the contraband crate where we hope you’ll voluntarily stash your weapons until you leave”? What gives?

Tris finds the hard drive with the (improbably) only record of both the simulation and the events of the previous night. She’s torn. She doesn’t want to carry it around because bad memories and such, but she doesn’t want to get rid of it because her parents’ final moments are recorded on it. So she hides it.

Except for a few moments of just pure “your author forgot some shit and is messing up logic because of it” moments, I’m pretty on board with this book so far.

Tobias comes in to drop of pain meds and have a cute moment.

I was about to rattle off a few more holidays, but only the Abnegation celebrate them. The Dauntless have holidays of their own, I assume, but I don’t know what they are.

Your society is not stratified enough for this. It’s just…it’s just not. You have to work together to function, but you keep throwing in worldbuilding details as if the factions never interact. YOUR CHILDREN ALL GO TO THE SAME SCHOOL. You go to see each other for different professional needs. You cannot have this level of cooperation and integration and still say “I have no idea how Candor works, they are a total mystery, I think they sacrifice goats on the solstice or something.”

They bond over being sad for a moment, then Tris goes to a shower that for some reason only runs cold and stops after five minutes to conserve water. They talked in the last book about conserving electricity after a certain hour, but outside of those two points, there’s not really been any particular effort towards conservationism. Nor has there been any sign of shortages. The Dauntless are certainly wasteful as fuck. Like so much else in these books, the worldbuilding details are just that: random details, things that don’t have any sense of continuity or building up to anything.

When I get out of the shower, a stack of clothes waits on my bed. It contains some yellow and red, from the Amity, and some gray, from the Abnegation, colors I rarely see side by side. If I had to guess, I would say that one of the Abnegation put the stack there for me. It’s something they would think to do.

But the Amity people who took you in, gave you medicine, and housed you for the night all way being totally kind and accommodating…they wouldn’t think to also provide clothing? Their kindness stops at showers and then Abnegation has to take over from there?

I’m starting to wonder if Amity was an afterthought in the first book, and that’s why they’re so close in function to Abnegation.

Susan comes in to give her a hand with getting ready, since Tris has got a bad shoulder, and she does so quietly and without pressing for any information.

I get the sense that if I were to whittle her down to her core, she would be Abnegation all the way through.

Yeah, so? Does that actually mean anything other than that she won’t pry into your life and ask personal questions literally hours after the traumatic event happened? Also, we’ve seen a lot of variation in personalities in Dauntless, and a little bit in Abnegation with her parents and Marcus, and I think the only reason we haven’t seen more is that we left that faction so early, so what does it even mean that she’s “Abnegation all the way through”? You can’t keep showing totally normal, naturally varying people and then use factions for shorthands like it actually means anything.

Well, I guess you can do that, but it’ll only mean that Tris is pretty shortsighted. That does happen in real life. I’m not sure that’s what I’m supposed to be getting from this, though.

“It’s a shame this happened when it did,” Susan says. “Our leaders were about to do something wonderful.”

[…]

And I can’t help but marvel at Susan’s assumption that whatever they were doing was wonderful. I wish I could believe that of people again.

Okay, but, why does she think it was something wonderful? Tris frames it here like Susan is a dolt who thinks that as long as the leaders are doing it, it’s good, but also she doesn’t say anything like “of course Abnegation kids are raised to think that” or “Oh, classic Susan, always saying that.” So, what if she thinks it’s wonderful because she knows something that points to wonderful?

I feel like Susan is highly underutilized in this scene. She’s got tons of potential, even if you keep the blank-faced facade, but it’s all being swept under a rug of “dull Abnegation person.”

After Susan leaves, Tris decides to cut her hair in a fit, because having someone brush her hair felt a lot like when her mom did that and she’s got to do something to respond to all the emotions that got stirred up from that. Yes! Awesome! I mean, sad, but awesome!

“You cut your hair,” says Caleb, his eyebrows high. Grabbing hold of facts in the midst of shock is very Erudite of him.

You’re really grasping at straws with this whole “declaring certain things to be faction” shtick, book.

They go into a greenhouse which has a giant tree in the middle, roots tearing up the ground, and in between the roots instead of dirt.

I should not be surprised—the Amity spend their lives accomplishing feats of agriculture like this one, with the help of Erudite technology.

…but what are they accomplishing? Just making something pretty? I don’t get it?

Amity recognize no official leader—they vote on everything, and the result is usually close to unanimous. They are like many parts of a single mind, and Johanna is their mouthpiece.

Sounds more like dissenting opinions are subsumed into the group. If they’re ‘close to unanimous’ on every first vote, then that it’s probably that no one is voting to their own opinions at all and instead they are all trying to think “what would the group agree to,” which is how a government stagnates to the point of being useless.

“We have before us today an urgent question,” she says, “which is: How will we conduct ourselves in this time of conflict as people who pursue peace?”

And that’s all Johanna says before everyone starts talking amongst themselves. Wow, that’s even worse. How are they supposed to get any real information or facts to debate about if everything is just ‘chat with your neighbor’? This is…this just gossip. This is like writing your term paper with early 2000’s era Wikipedia as your only source.

Tobias and Tris sit in a corner and debate about whether this is even a good form of government at all, until Johanna (been talking to everyone) announces the decision.

“Our faction has had a close relationship with Erudite for as long as any of us can remember. We need each other to survive, and we have always cooperated with each other,” says Johanna. “But we have also had a strong relationship with Abnegation in the past, and we do not think it is right to revoke the hand of friendship when it has for so long been extended.”

So….your faction doesn’t work off of a moral belief about the intrinsic need for peace but instead operates on “well, we like you and all, so I guess we’ll be nice to you.”

Amity has decided that they’ll be neutral to all faction runaways as long as everyone agrees to play nice, do chores, and they get kicked out if there’s any fighting.

The third is that [any future interpersonal] conflict may not be discussed, even privately, within the confines of this compound.

….o.O How do you function?

Well, Amity is going to tell the other factions of this decision in case anyone still in town wants to join them. Tris and Tobias decide there’s no way they can stay for long, although whether this is because Erudite is about to learn where they are or because they can’t abide by ‘no fighting’ is unclear.