The Town of Odyssey

She’s not doing this from the clichéd ‘I’ll take over and be able to control everyone’ she really believes this is the way to ensure humanity survives. So she’s not really a villain, she’s actually a misguided hero.

I totally get the idea behind the Faction system. It’s based on five key elements of personality, good elements, and if it were possible to actually have these different people focus on their specific quality then it would indeed produce a perfect society because everyone would be contributing their parts to create a good world on the whole, and because of the division of focus there wouldn’t be people looking to do their own thing and causing problems, whether out of actual malice or simply out of personal ambition.

The problem with the idea is that not everyone would or could conform because of human nature, as they said. And the problem with the system is in how they react to that fact. Instead of trying to work with human nature they want to just suppress it. If they could accept Divergents as the special perspective they are and use them to help improve the system everything may actually work out. But instead they choose to see them as threats because they refuse to acknowledge that the system does need improved and so they want to just kill them all.

What’s a bad thing is the system as it currently is, not the actual idea behind it. It’s really interesting to think about.

It all centers around what I pointed out in my first thoughts, of the villains not acting out of desire for control, but out of misguided pure desires. I’m on the verge of declaring that I actually liked this movie better than Catching Fire all because of this one detail. As I said before, this and the Hunger Games have strikingly similar basic plots, but the difference is in that key distinction.

Panem is your typical dystopian society. They control everything because they’re overlords, it’s what they do. So when Katniss fights back it’s against oppression. She’s the clear good guy battling the clear bad guys. This can make for a compelling plot, but there’s not much room for different viewpoints along the way. You just go along for the ride with her and cheer her on and boo the bad guys until the conclusion.

The world of Divergent is not your typical dystopia. There are corrupt and controlling powers, but they’re not doing it purely out of the desire to control, but because control is a necessary effect of the way they believe society needs to function to bring, in their twisted view, the greater good. When Triss fights back it’s not hero vs. villain or freedom vs. oppression, it’s a clash of differing ideologies. Under the way society currently operates there cannot be deviation; that is the only reason they make her an enemy. It’s not anything personal against her, it’s simply because of what she is and what she can do. She can subvert the system and cause them to lose control. So they have to stop her to maintain their control. But again, not because they want the control for the sake of being controllers, simply because they must maintain control to maintain what they see as the insurance of human survival.

This story isn’t a clear cut good vs. bad that you just watch for the ride, it makes you really think. The bad here isn’t in anyone’s motivations, only in methods. This isn’t just a typical teenage protagonist vs. the oppressors story, it’s a study of what human nature really is and different philosophies of how to approach the issues, both good and bad, that humanity causes for itself. It’s a story that’s intriguing, engaging, and at least for me incredibly captivating. It just took a little time to fully realize it.