The worldbuilding of Divergent makes me vomit

I've made no secret of the fact that I hate the divergent trilogy both the books and the films are such blatant attempts to ride the coattails of the Hunger Games that if someone told me it was created by people who had never consumed another piece of media in their lives I'd be inclined to believe them the badass teenage girl protagonist the post-apocalyptic setting the obvious allegories for growing into adulthood the world that structured into easy-to-understand groups it's uncanny how similar they are but where The Hunger Games was clearly written with passion behind it and an actual idea of where the plot would go after the first 30 pages divergent has pandering pure uncut pandering to teenagers while I will defend the first book as decent the others are giant piles of steaming [ __ ] I meant it when I said that Allegiant was one of the worst books I've ever read it didn't just bore me it made me slam my forehead into my desk at the sheer stupidity you're not here to listen to me complain about the plot and characters though you're here so I can explain why the world they exist in makes no sense and after my last world building analysis on a series that I actually like it'll be therapeutic to rag on something that I hate and has actual clips I can use even in the first kind of good book the world building was one of my chief complaints in divergent the characters live in the remains of Chicago after some unspecified apocalyptic event the city has a fence around it and has no contact with the outside world whatsoever as far as the people there no they are the only humans still alive in the entire world later information shows this to be inaccurate but I'll get to that in a few minutes oh yeah spoiler warning for a book that came out five years ago if you want to read this series but haven't yet you should probably stop watching the people of Chicago have created a new society which is divided into five factions each defined by a particular personality trait and given a specific job to do they are dauntless the brave faction that acts as a police and military force amedy the kind faction that farms Chicago's food erudite the smart people that work on new science and technology abnegation the selfless ones who run the government and candor the people who value honesty above all else and so run the justice system there are also the faction lists people who don't belong to any faction either due to choice or being kicked out they don't have any job in society at least none mentioned in the books or movies and I guess there are the divergence who are people that fit into more than one faction because we need a way to label the protagonist specialness each faction also operates as its own subculture within the greater society they don't interact with one another unless they need to they live in their own areas of the city don't work with one another since they have separate jobs and people seem to exclusively marry within their own faction when people in this society are 16 they get tested to see what faction they best fall into then at a different ceremony they choose what faction they'd like to belong to for the remainder of their life you know trying to describe this has made me realize that the premise for divergent story sounds like a high school àyou fanfiction for another series an odd dystopian high school but a high school nevertheless the big issues with this system have already been brought up by every critic Under the Sun I'm just going to go over them real quick so we're all on the same page number one do the people in this world really only have one personality trait apiece I guess that the culture they're brought up and would affect how they act and what they value if you took a normal person and made them grow up in the stupidly macho culture of dauntless they'd probably start to think that everyone who didn't like to climb up buildings with no equipment was a [ __ ] even with that in mind the characters in this book clearly displayed traits of multiple factions Tori the woman who gave Tris the aptitude test in the first book was raised in erudite and later moved to dauntless but she also chose traits of being selfless when she risks her own safety to protect Tris there's a similar story with Tobias showing signs of intelligence and brutal honesty and yes I'm calling him Tobias because for sounds [ __ ] stupid so are the factions just based on which trait they put the most value in then how does the aptitude test work if you can have multiple traits be equally valued it seems like a pretty shitty test then number two if kids can choose whatever faction they want why bother testing them to see which one works best it would be cheaper and easier to just hold some sort of job fair where all the kids speak to representatives of each faction and decide on their own what would work best for them you could even still have the fancy ceremony where they cut themselves I know that the test was designed by Jeanine in order to try and weed out divergence so that they could be killed but that doesn't explain why the other factions would agree to this sort of process especially since they must have gone several generations using some other form of testing and it worked fine and it doesn't even make sense as a way of finding divergence not only can the test be fooled we find out later that divergence are different from the others because of their DNA so it would be much more foolproof and cost-effective to just take a blood sample from everyone and find them that way number 3 how come no one marries outside their faction history has shown that the only thing that keeps groups of people from boning each other is geography if you put two different cultures or ethnic groups close by each other then they're going to have relationships and children even if society discourages marrying outside of your group and as far as I could find it's never mentioned that it's forbidden for someone to marry outside their faction either by law or by culture there should be way more crossbreeding here and number four based on the training dauntless would make an extremely ineffective military force real military training teaches their soldiers some basic combat skills but it's mostly focused on hammering in the idea that they are at the bottom of an unassailable hierarchy and they must always obey orders there's some jingoistic propaganda thrown in there too but that's a discussion for another time in contrast dauntless training consists of learning to fight and learning to be as macho as possible [Music] points for bravery stick yeah standing still while someone throws a knife at you sounds like a very useful combat tactic however while this would make them a less effective fighting force it does make sense in the context of the setting the members of dauntless are meant to be a stupidly brave and tough as possible it's literally in their name so this sort of training isn't just about making them a fighting force it's about making them fit in with their new lifestyle so this is the one common complaint then I'll say people are wrong about here's my big question that no one else has asked yet where are all the low skilled laborers the janitors the cooks the factory workers the people that keep society moving all of the factions have their own roles to play and all of them are noble but those rules would be impossible to play if the streets were overflowing with garbage and they all had to make their own clothes my first thought was that maybe each faction makes their own clothes and equipment but that doesn't make sense either during chrises dauntless training the recruits are only trained to be soldiers and the people that don't make the cut are thrown out of the faction altogether they aren't forced to become gunsmiths or tailors and if they are it's never mentioned the factionless certainly aren't doing this work they're completely shunned by society almost like Untouchables in India they're homeless and completely dependent on the charity of the factions at least in the first entry apparently they became commandos slash Abercrombie & Fitch models between divergent and insurgent they seemed like they would be perfect for this type of work but no they just sit around being a bad metaphor for poverty and if the faction lists are outcasts how are they living in such a cool hideout granted in the book their living conditions are described as being much more modest than shown in the film just a bunch of tents really but it's never explained how they're able to feed or clothe themselves they clearly aren't farming or running textile mills are they stealing everything and why are there seemingly no kids among the factionless are the factionless not [ __ ] when abnegation passes out food do they pass out condoms too if a kid is born factionless do they still attend the ceremony to choose a new faction I'm just going to stop there because I know I've already put more thought into this than the author and editor combined now we get into the events of allegiance in this book we find out that before the plot started there is an attempt to genetically engineer humans that went badly this resulted in a large number of people becoming genetically damaged and having their personality defined by one characteristic and then a conflict called the purity war started because sure [ __ ] it so in an attempt to create more genetically pure people the US government fenced off Chicago set up the faction system and then just left them to make babies I guess most of the people there were genetically damaged and when a genetically pure person pops up they're known as divergence this is a horrible twist for both character reasons and world-building reasons in terms of character it means that Tris is literally only special because she's a normal person and in terms of world building it makes the already fragile system completely fall apart for starters a person's personality is not totally shaped by their genetics it certainly plays a part but so does the culture they were raised in and their personal experiences and at the beginning it seemed like that was how people were sorted into their factions they specifically say that most people stick with the one they were born into but apparently know it's all because of some [ __ ] up genes then there's the fact that the government was hoping that genetically damaged people would make genetically pure children if someone has something wrong with their DNA they're going to pass that on to their children that's how reproduction works and with so few divergence around the genes for it would eventually be bred out of existence altogether in what world would the US government do something so stupid okay that part's actually pretty realistic but then when the people of Chicago started murdering all the genetically pure divergence the government didn't do anything to stop them wasn't the whole point of their experiment to make more of them for the population to breed the damaged genes out of society let's just move on it seems doubtful that Chicago would be able to produce enough food to feed a large number of people the city nowadays has to import several hundred thousand tons of food every day to feed itself the fenced-in area that the story takes place in seems to be limited to the Chicago city proper which is 234 square miles Amity and all the farms are outside of the fence though so they have a bit of extra room to work with now the current population of Chicago as of 2018 is two million seven hundred and five thousand people it said that half the u.s. population was killed during the purity war so we'll cut that down to 1 million three hundred and fifty two thousand five hundred then we'll say that due to economic collapse and the fact that the city was turned into a giant experiments that the population was cut in half again to six hundred and seventy six thousand two hundred and fifty people the average person needs around 2000 calories of food a day but some people need more and some food is always going to be destroyed or wasted so we'll say that they need to produce 2200 calories worth of food per person per day to keep everyone fed this comes out to 1 billion 487 million 750 thousand calories per day or 543 billion 28 million 750 thousand calories per year Illinois produces a lot of food and a lot of varied food that's wheat corn soy beans fruits and vegetables are all grown there the northern half of the state has soil that is literally some of the most fertile in the entire world in Morgan County in 2004 two hundred bushels of corn were produced per acre which comes out to 17 million five hundred and thirty nine thousand two hundred calories per acre so if we assume that a similar amount of food can be produced by a Mandy than they would need 30 thousand nine hundred and sixty-one acres to make enough food for the city which is only forty eight point three eight square miles of farmland they would just have to clear out a small section of the city suburbs and that would give them enough land to produce their own food and if they added just a little bit more land they would have wiggle room in case they grew crops with Ag lower caloric yields which they would need to for proper nutrition so let's say that a madhi's homes and farms cover about sixty square miles or thirty-eight thousand four hundred acres what about the numbers of workers needed to farm that much land though if there are six hundred and seventy six thousand two hundred fifty people in Chicago and they're more or less evenly divided among the eight actions and the factionless then a MIDI would have around 112 thousand seven hundred and H people not all of them could do farm work though there would be a lot of children old people cripples and people that focus on making clothes or furniture remember there aren't any factories that we see so most everything would have to be made by hand so only around 1/4 of amity which is twenty-eight thousand one hundred and seventy-seven people would be able to work the land the technology used by a MIDI seems pretty primitive and a general rule of thumb is that a single man can farm two acres just needing extra help during the harvest by that measurement there would need to be nineteen thousand two hundred farmers to feed Chicago and if there are any pack animals or tractors that just aren't mentioned the number would be even lower so it looks like both the land and the number of workers is in their favour as long as there wasn't a plague of locusts or something else equally huge there should be plenty of food for the denizens of the city huh I guess I was wrong Chicago could definitely feed itself in this situation it's odd that the suburbs were so thoroughly demolished that there's no traces of them but I'm actually willing to let that one go here's what I'm not willing to let go Lake Michigan when reading these books I remember thinking that it was odd that Lake Michigan was almost never mentioned I mean it's huge and it's a big part of Chicago's geography it was only through research for this episode that I learned the whole lake was apparently turned into a gigantic Marsh around the time of the purity war okay so bodies of water turning into swamps is a real phenomenon it's called pond succession plants and algae grow in the water and when they die they float to the bottom and create a new layer of sediment over time this makes the water more shallow and completely changes the ecology of the pond until it becomes a marsh this process takes hundreds of years with a small pond how long do you think it would take for something as big as Lake Michigan it's the size of West Virginia it's over 900 feet deep in some places succession would take millions of years at the very least and let's consider how that would change the weather the Great Lakes are gigantic big enough to cause the precipitation downwind without them the Chicago area would have much less rainfall than it currently does which would really hamper all the farming attempts that we talked about earlier and it's not like irrigation is really an option either even if they could take that swamp water and purify it so it wouldn't kill their plants they would need to dig canals miles of asphalt and concrete before it could reach the crops not only that but the lake currently absorbs heat during the summer which cools the area down and releases it during winter which warms it up summer would be hot and muggy and full of disease-carrying mosquitoes but winter would be horrific those of you who have been in Chicago during winter imagine that only worse it would be damn near uninhabitable and the cold would kill half their crops there would be fewer blizzards but beyond that the lack of a lake would make life in Chicago absolutely miserable throughout the entire year I'll be the first to admit that even for me focusing on details like this is a little much however the instance I saw that the lake had supposedly turned into a marsh something felt off to me and the whole point of this series is for me to find the reason why things in fictional worlds feel off look it's no secret that I hate these books for a variety of reasons and I won't pretend it's not nice to complain about them for a little bit and after my last video where I explained that world building isn't always important they also work great as an example of how a lot of times world building is important the themes and character development of divergent are tied into the setting so if the setting makes no sense than everything around it suffers as well the small amount of goodwill that was built up by Trish's character and the desire to learn about the mystery of the outside world was all pissed away once the secrets were revealed books like the Ember quartet have bad worlds that don't make sense when you dig into them but they at least make sense on the surface divergent doesn't make sense on any level so it fails at realism and the reasons for the odd social structure are too strange for it to make sense as any sort of allegory or social commentary so while my complaining is often just looking for reasons to justify my annoyance at small things in this case I hope I've encouraged some of you to examine the art that you consume from more than one angle if you like or dislike something try and figure out why did the message of that book just not connect with you personally or did it really not make any logical sense did you like that fantasy series because the world was fully developed or was that inconsequential and really you just enjoyed the plot either way you should subscribe if you want to see more of this [ __ ] see you next time you

Channel: James Tullos

Views: 3,192,335

Keywords: YA, dystopia, book, trilogy, worldbuilding, movies, video essay, Divergent, Divergent trilogy, shitty worldbuilding, James Tullos

Id: 7SvSni7xR5o

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2018