Divergent Chapter 9: I'll be funnier when this book actually gets interesting.

Hi guys! I could apologise but let’s be real you all knew what was coming when you started following this blog. Academia owns my life and heart so it’ll always come first.

That being said, I have a few changes in store!

I will be re-capping both City of Ashes and Divergent by blog from this point onwards-- I just don’t have the time to edit videos this year! I’ll still be making book reviews and using my youtube, though.

With that being said, here’s a short recap! Chapter 9 is here! This gif is low on the gifs (as in, there are none), because it was really hard to find anything humorous to be perfectly honest. Not because I'm not funny (obviously I'm hilarious let's all be honest) but because this book is getting slightly boring.

So last we left off, we were doing the training montage, and Tris also just got some eyeliner and a tattoo. Basically she moved out of her parents house and took a trip to Hot Topic. I get it, Tris, we've all been there.

The training montage continues, with everyone being paired off with a fighting part (except Tris for some reason).

Her friend Christina finds out she’s against ‘The Tank’:

“The Tank?” I find Christina’s name on the board. Written next to it is “Molly.”

(sidenote, please for the love of all that is holy put your periods outside of the quotation marks unless it is dialogue. I guess this is inner dialogue but that one up there is really irritating me.)

“Yeah, Peter’s slightly more feminine-looking minion,” she says, nodding toward the cluster of people on the other side of the room. Molly is tall like Christina, but that’s where the similarities end.

If you asked me at the beginning of this book if I thought there would be a token ‘muscle’ female character like this, I would have said yes.

She has broad shoulders, bronze skin, and a bulbous nose.

So I guess I wanna pause here for a few reasons. One, to highlight a pet peeve of mine, and two, to talk about why characters like this (specifically female ones) need to stop being a thing.

The pet peeve is when an author chooses to describe something about a character, and then focuses in on really disconnected parts of them. So, for instance, I only have skin colour, nose size, and shoulder width to go on for Molly; I understand that it isn’t the easiest to describe people, but generally you can get around that by only describing one part of the character (ie, the face) or making more broad generalizations about them (ie, “she had a hard, rather unattractive face and a body that told me she lifted weights) or something to the effect.

The reason I think characters like this need to die is that they serve no purpose to the narrative other than to show how dainty and delicate the main female characters are, and also, just to be the token female villain. And they always/ look like this, no matter what literature you find them in. You’ll have Pansy Parkinson, with a pug face (similarly, Millicent Bulstrode, who was built like Molly is); the point is, it’s irritating to read ‘beefier’ girls being put into such angry villainous roles. Also the fact that "slightly more feminine" is used in a derogatory way really makes my hackles rise.

Anyway, rant over. They’re all terrible people according to Christina anyway, so no harm done I guess.

Will and Al are fighting while Tris and Christina chat, and then we witness a bit of a verbal match between Four and Eric; Eric, you remember, is the scary Dauntless initiate leader who basically wants everyone to die. Eric says that the fights end when someone can no longer fight, and Four says that you may also concede. It helps Tris see how noble and honourable Four is or some shit.

Look, I don't know, I'm just still trying to deal with both of their names when everyone else has perfectly normal ones.

There are some more fights, and Molly and Christina enter the ring.

All-in-all this chapter is starting off really mega-boring.

Christina eventually gets so beat up that she concedes, and Eric like the complete MADMAN gets upset that she gave up, marches the whole damn class to that river chasm, and demands that she hang off the side of it for five whole minutes or she cannot continue her initiation.

As Tris puts it:

Either she decides to be factionless, or she risks death.

She eventually does it, and it serves as a backdrop to Tris feeling cowardly, yada yada yada. Seriously, Tris has had this same inner monologue going this whole book-- am I actually going to get a pay-off of character change from this? I know you're not your family, I know you've grown up feeling cowardly your whole life: DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

And that’s it. That’s literally the end of that small chapter. Honestly, this book is starting to really bore me. Oh well! Hopefully an actual plot makes its way into the chapters eventually.

I'll have Chapter 10 up sometime this week maybe, and another City of Ashes one up around the same time.

Until later!