\n\n"}\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDivergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled\u00a0the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature\u2019s long-term survival\u00a0
please elaborate
\nSure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.
\nSo you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can\u2019t\u00a0get in the way of the audience\u2019s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly\u2013yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.
\nYou think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games\u2019 titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses.\u00a0
\nSo the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic\u2013they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they\u2019ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or\u00a0Dauntless\u00a0alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw\u00a0and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made\u00a0having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding.\u00a0
\nYour readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don\u2019t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn\u2019t need to be anything else.\u00a0
\nThe villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid\u00a0plan.\u00a0You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf.\u00a0
\nAnd you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about\u00a0system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave\u2013no, special\u00a0enough to stand against it.\u00a0
\nAnd by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the\u00a0\u201crule of cool\u201d and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you\u2019ve done.
\none quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong.\u00a0
\nbut divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn\u2019t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn\u2019t know what it was talking about, so she didn\u2019t have anything worth listening to.
\nthere\u2019s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so\u00a0divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today.\u00a0
\nThis is the second branch of this post I\u2019ve reblogged and like the fourth I\u2019ve seen and I\u2019m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because\u2026with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn\u2019t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is\u2026part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.
\nYou contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.
\nThere\u2019s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn\u2019t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don\u2019t\u2026know how to expand on that point.
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