Back in May, I wrote a long list of what I thought would happen in Allegiant. Now, I decided it was time to see how many of them I got right. If you have not read Allegiant yet, stay away from this post because it has MAJOR spoilers. Take a look at the list and see what I have to say now that I've read this book. You'll be surprised of how good of a guesser I actually am. What about you? Did you guess anything correctly?
They are definitely going to go outside the fence. If they go out of it at the first of the book, I predict that they will either find another and better civilization of people, or that Tris will meet another boy on the other side and Tobias will have to fight for her. (Just because the author will love to bug us/love triangles are popular/so there are complications in the relationship.) Enough with the romance, though! I definitely think that their next conundrum (love that word) will be the horrors that wait for them on the other side of the fence, and also the shocking secrets about their society.
Wow, I was definitely right about this one. Except for the love triangle part, although I guess Nita could count because Tobias thought she was pretty and Tris was jealous of her. They did go outside the fence! This one was kind of obvious because if they didn't go outside the fence, the book would not really have a point. There was another civilization, but I'm not sure it was better than the faction systems.
There has to be a fight! I know most girls are like, I am a lover, not a fighter, but I am a fighter and a not-so-big of a lover. And plus, every series except for Twilight, of course, I hated the Breaking Dawn ending, has an EPIC fight at the end. I hope nobody that I really love dies or gets hurt, though. I do know that good always wins, but that doesn't mean that the journey to get there is always easy. Please let there be a long, descriptive fight and a lot of obstacles!
Erm... there was a lot of action parts, although I'm not sure if there was an actual "fight." I mean, there was, but it wasn't described too much and it didn't last for very long. What do you guys think? Was there the great fight I was expecting?
I have this feeling in my gut that someone is going to betray everyone else, and I bet that it is actually going to be Susan. WHY SUSAN, WHY? Think about it.... she is the nice, beautiful girl that is Tris's friend. Why would she be a traitor? Mwhhahhaha that is the best part because I, my friend, am no ordinary girl. And so I am thinking outside of the box, and yes, crossing the line. Susan is the perfect traitor. Nobody sane would suspect her, but she left for Amity in Insurgent and never came back. Plus, she is big time in love with Caleb.
This was one part that really bugged me. Susan was not even MENTIONED in Allegiant. Did something happen to her in Insurgent that I forgot about, or did Roth just totally forget about her? Yeah, so I was totally wrong about this one.
Caleb. Boy do I have a lot of predictions about him. First of all, not expecting the huge bomb that he was a freaking traitor. I see a lot of 'em but I did not see that one coming. I hate the rule of their society "Faction before blood." Families are the strongest bond of love there can ever be, especially with parents like Tris's where they loved her so much. I can not believe he betrayed his own sister that he used to love for some Erudite scum. Ugh. Okay, enough ranting about the past in Insurgent and more on the predictions. There are really only three main ways that he could go. The first one is he stays a evil traitor to his family. Tris must be heartbroken because we all know how much she loved her brother. He could be the nefarious villain in the finale to my favorite series. And if he is the villain, at least he is a smart one. I know that if he is the bad guy, that is going to be a tense quarrel between brother and sister. The second one, which would be my third choice out of the three to happen is that he redeems himself at the end by sacrificing himself for one great big cause. At least then he can be a good guy again and he helped save the world. The third option, my second favorite after the first option is that he was possessed that entire time by some evil Erudite injection but they find some way to cure it and he becomes good again. And yes, also ends up with Susan.
Caleb was a pretty important part of this book, but I didn't feel like he was a nefarious villain or a superhero. He was the guilty brother that felt bad for betraying his sister. Sure, he tried to redeem himself in the end, but he didn't even succeed in that. My overall opinion of him? I think he is a lame character. Sorry. He just didn't have as much character development in Allegiant as I hoped he would. I still don't know his true motives for betraying Tris.
I definitely think some things will be revealed about Tris's parents in Allegiant. Her mom has always been one of the most secretive and alluring characters in the Divergent trilogy. I definitely want to find out a whole bunch more about her. Why is she so interesting, you say? Well, for starters she was Dauntless before she transferred to Abnegation, of all places. That is definitely an interesting switch. From fearless and brave and strong to humble and selfless? That is a really big jump, and I think it is quite interesting that Tris went from Abnegation to Dauntless and her mom went from Dauntless to Abnegation. That just shows that Dauntless is in Tris's blood and bravery maybe is just an act of selflessness, like Tobias said. Also, she was a big part of the data that Tris found at the end of Insurgent, and a big part of whatever is on the outside of the fence. I don't think her father was a very big part of the book, or at least not as big as a part as Tris's mom, but we will have to see, I guess.
Boom! I was totally on with this prediction! We found out A LOT about her mom. A lot of ninja, whoa, totally awesome things about her. She was a very important part in this book, I thought. Tris felt more connected to her mother than she ever could have. This sentence was also spot on, (I think) "I don't think her father was a very big part of the book, or at least not as big as a part as Tris's mom, but we will have to see, I guess." I was so glad when Tris realized in Allegiant that her parents chose each other, ( like Tris and Tobias chose each other) and they loved each other.
Veronica Roth has always been good at dropping what I call the W-bombs.... whoa bombs. She actually surprises me and leaves major cliffhangers much more often than regular books. I think that in Allegiant, we are going to find out a lot of secrets about the characters and the society/world outside of them, although I have said that already. I really hope that we learn why those with Divergence are immune to the stimulations. I think it is because they cannot be brainwashed by society into one value of life, and therefore cannot be brainwashed into something created by society. So, basically, I think all the ties are going to come together and there will be a lot of W-bombs.
I really hope that the ending will surprise me. Like The False Prince by Jennifer Neilson kind of surprise ending. So many books are SOOOOOOOOOOOOO easy to predict when it comes to the ending. So I hope that something happens in the end that makes me throw the book against the wall, pick it up again, and read the passage over and over again. I hope it is gut-wrenching and cruel of Roth and I hope that I will hate it at first, but most of all, I hope that I will never see it coming, You must think I'm crazy, but I hate books that I can guess the ending and be spot on.
I definitely, never in a million years, would have guessed the ending. It was very cruel of Roth, and it tore my heart out and made me cry. *MAJOR SPOILERS***** I still can't believe that she killed Tris. I have said this more than once: Tris was my all time favorite heroine. WHAT THE HECK? I am still devastated over her death. I suggest reading the below from Veronica Roth. It explains why she wrote the ending why she did. I'm still angry, but I understand more about it now.
"ALLEGIANT SPOILERS BELOW
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In my college creative writing program, we had a rule: during workshop, when your story is being critiqued, you aren’t allowed to say anything. This is to give your peers the freedom to interpret your work and point out the flaws in it without you shouting them down; it’s also because your defense doesn’t actually mean anything, though you might think it does. If your explanations and intentions are not clear to the reader, buried inside the text, that isn’t the reader’s fault, it’s the author’s.
Responding to readers' comments about the Divergent books has always felt the same way to me, like it would just be me shouting other people down when I should be letting them speak freely, and as badly as some criticism hurts (and it does, because I’m only human, after all), I never, ever want that.
So that’s not what I’m trying to do here. A lot of people have been asking me why Tris died at the end of Allegiant, and what I do want to do here is answer that question as well as I can. But if you’re concerned about my voice imposing itself over your own, please stop reading this post-- that's the last thing I want. I don’t want to tell you how to read these books or even to tell you there’s one right way to read them. I just want to offer you some insight into how I personally found my way to this ending, if you’re interested in hearing it.
Before I get into it, I'm going to say a few things, though:
1. You are allowed—encouraged!— to continue to feel however you want to feel, or think however you want to think, about the ending, no matter what this blog post says. I’m the author, yes, but this book is yours as well as mine now, and our voices are equal in this conversation.
2. Just because I try to do something with my writing doesn’t necessarily mean that I do it well, so there is also room to say “Okay, I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think that what you were trying to do worked.”
I’ve said before that this ending was always a part of the plan, but one thing I want to make clear is that I didn’t choose it to shock anyone, or to upset anyone, or because I’m ruthless with my characters—no, no, no. I may have been ruthless with other characters, in the past, but not with her, never with her. And I wasn’t thinking about any readers when I wrote this book; I was thinking about the story, because trying to meet the expectations of so many readers would be paralyzing. There’s no way to please everyone, because that mythical book with the ending that every single person wants can’t exist—you want different things, each one of you. The only thing I can do, in light of that fact, is write an honest story as best I can.
What happened to Tris’s parents at the end of Divergent was in some ways the catalyst for the rest of the series. Before that point, Tris had rejected her parents’ values and beliefs in a very tangible way by choosing Dauntless. She struggled throughout Divergent to reconcile two identities: her Abnegation identity, which Four points out to her, and her Dauntless identity. It’s just before her mother gives up her life that Tris figures out how those identities fit together, combining selflessness and bravery and love for her family and love for her faction all together under one umbrella: Divergent. It’s a moment of triumph followed by a moment of total devastation, when Natalie dies so that Tris can escape. And then Andrew follows soon after.
Tris’s parents’ deaths were revelatory moments, both for Tris and for me. For Tris, they seemed to awaken her to the power of self-sacrifice out of love; she later handed over the gun to Four rather than kill him, essentially giving her life rather than taking his. She said something in that moment about the power of self-sacrifice, but her actions don’t quite apply that power in the best way—letting herself get killed, at that time, was maybe noble from a romantic perspective, but wouldn’t have saved the Dauntless from being simulation-controlled zombies, and wouldn’t have saved Tobias from his own simulation.
For me, Tris’s parents’ deaths made me realize that though Tris had tangibly abandoned her parents’ faction, she was never quite able to separate herself from them, never quite wanted to; that the true struggle of her character, the one she had never been able to let go of, was to figure out how to honor her parents while still maintaining her distinct identity. That was her struggle in Divergent in a more subtle way, but it was also her struggle in a far more obvious way in Insurgent.
Tris spent Insurgent warring with grief and guilt in light of her parents’ deaths and of her hasty actions in shooting Will to save her own life (which is the opposite of what she does for Tobias, further showing that Tris hadn’t quite figured out how to be selfless at that point). The “selfless” acts she thought she was performing in Insurgent—charging upstairs during the Erudite-Dauntless attack unarmed, spying on Max’s conversation with Jack Kang without a weapon, and then handing herself over at Erudite headquarters even when she’s asked not to—were more self-destructive than anything. She rationalized those self-destructive acts by calling them selfless, but when she was about to be executed, she realized that her parents didn’t give their lives for her just so that she could die when it wasn’t necessary. She realized that she wanted to live.
She emerged from that near-execution with new maturity: she valued her own life, she wanted to solve problems without resorting to violence, she sought truth over destruction. That Tris had not quite figured out what selflessness was to her, but she had discovered what it wasn’t: self-annihilation.
That was how Tris was at the beginning of Allegiant. She was no longer risking her life for no reason. She was still struggling with her beliefs about selflessness—but this time, she was wondering whether Caleb, when he volunteered to go on the one-way mission to the Weapons Lab, was motivated by love or guilt. She struggled with whether it was ethical to let Caleb’s sacrifice happen throughout the rest of the book. And while she was struggling with his decision, she was also struggling with her own identity; her constant questioning about what selflessness is was inextricably linked to her sense of self, as it had been for the past two books. This struggle finally came to a head when she and Caleb were running toward the Weapons Lab, and she said this: “He is a part of me, always will be, and I am a part of him, too. I don’t belong to Abnegation, or Dauntless, or even the Divergent. I don’t belong to the Bureau or the experiment or the fringe. I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me—they, and the love and loyalty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could.” (455)
After that, Tris entered the same role her parents played when they died for her. She loved and gave her life for Caleb even after he betrayed her, the same way her parents loved and gave their lives for her after she left them for Dauntless.
But this time, unlike in Insurgent, the act wasn’t self-destructive. Tris’s peculiar relationship to the serums was that she was able to overcome them (like the Dauntless fear simulations and the Candor truth serum) unless on some level she wanted them to work (like with the Amity peace serum). So when she passed through the death serum outside the Weapons Lab and it didn’t kill her, that suggested she wasn’t seeking her own destruction. She was truly acting out of love for Caleb.
At the end, she had a conversation with David where she told him her beliefs about sacrifice, that it should come from love, strength, and necessity. That was a Tris who knew what she believed about selflessness. Who knew who she was. Who knew what she wanted to do. In each book she tried to emulate her parents’ sacrifice, and in each book she didn’t seem to understand what that sacrifice really was, until Allegiant. And it’s only in Allegiant, when she had a strong sense of identity, when she had a keen understanding of what she (and her parents) believed about selflessness, that her journey was over.
I thought about reaching out with my authorial hand and snatching her from that awful situation. I thought about it and I agonized over it. But to me, that felt dishonest and emotionally manipulative. This was the end she had chosen, and I felt she had earned an ending that was as powerful as she was.
In Insurgent, before she’s “executed,” she screams into nothingness, “I’m not done yet!”
In Allegiant, she asks her mother, “Am I done yet?”
And her mother says, “Yes. My dear child, you’ve done so well.”
I understand being upset about the loss of a character you care about, and I’m so glad you care about her, because I do, too. I am proud of the way this ending mirrors those of the other books, of the way it reflects the realistic (given the dystopian, dangerous setting) losses of those books, the way it shows what Tris is truly made of, and the way it concludes her hard-earned transformation. I think her love for her brother is beautiful, powerful.
I have heard a wide range of reactions to the book, and I accept and respect all of those reactions as valid. But my personal feelings about the ending haven’t changed. I will miss her, that Tris voice in my head. But I’m so, so proud of her strength."
For all the girls out there reading this list, I know what you are saying, what the boys out there are begging me not to say. "Please, Sarah, please." Okay, okay, I will say it: There is definitely going to be some mushy gushy lovey dovey stuff. Like kissing, and romantic things that will be said etc. etc. I really hope I get a new romantic quote because the last one was from the Forgotten Locket that I read ages ago. It goes something like this:
"I won't catch you if you fall because I won't need to. You were always meant to fly."
Well anyway, anyone who hopes that this is not going to happen, all the kissing and hugging scenes, it is going to happen. This is partly a romance book and in a romance you don't just do nothing.
Yes, there was a lot of romance between Tris and Tobias. I enjoyed MOST of it. I didn't get a new favorite romantic quote. What about you? Any romantic lines that you particularly liked? I'd love to hear them. :)
I know there are going to be relationship problems between Tobias and Tris. There has to be. Tobias is not the romantic all the time guy like Edward Cullen. No. He is a bad boy who is learning to be fearless and loving a girl in the process. Everyone has been saying they hated Insurgent because there were so many romantic complications. My reply to that on Goodreads was:
"I mean geez everyone I knows complains about the complications with the relationships and the character development. News flash: This is a book about real life, people.
And yeah, it is a romance, but that's not the whole point of it. Part of it is a crumbling society trying to find bravery.
As for the relationship complications, I loved them. It kept me hooked, and I always feel like romances in books nowdays are too perfect. This one was great because in real life, you are never not going to fight with the one that you love. It was much more real, and they actually have LOVE, not some mushy teenage hormones."
I really hope Veronica Roth keeps it that way but also gives us some romance that we want.
Yes, this one was also correct. There were plenty relationship complications, including the fact that TRIS DIED!!! I don't care what Roth wrote. I wrote an Epilogue where Tobias dies of old age and sees Tris again in heaven. Their kind of love doesn't just last for their mortality. I do believe in an afterlife, because I'm LDS. (You can see more about my religion at www.lds.org) Ugh. Just ugh.
I hope to see Tris overcome some of her fears..... and her depression over loosing her parents. I felt so sad for her when she lost them, and I really hope that Tobias will stop being a jerk about telling her to stop being so depressed. I mean, geez. Plus, she really should get over some of her fears and maybe Tobias will stop being afraid of loosing her and just love her instead. (In case y'all don't remember, his fear of his father was replaced by loosing Tris. I know that they can't become fearless, but I hope they will become brave.
Um, there wasn't really any eliminating of their fears, but they did become brave.
Let me know what you thought about Allegiant in the comments below. Did you guess anything correctly?
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