#Goes against the canon characterization of one of those characters—and that’s fine. Just fucking ACKNOWLEDGE IT.

[waterberry-strawmelon]

just gonna go ahead and say this in advance—

if Riz does indeed come out in junior year, and he says, “I’m ace” or “I’m asexual” when referring specifically to his lack of romantic attraction, aromantic people are allowed to be upset about it.

#because yes of course some people irl say ace to mean both bc that’s how they personally identify #but in fictional media the distinction is necessary. especially with how few canonically aromantic characters even exist in ANY mainstream/ #popular media. #I assure you I’m not invalidating anyone who is ace and they mean that to include lack of romantic attraction. #But to look at this from a MEDIA PERSPECTIVE its irresponsible to do this w/out clarification that they also know the word aromantic exists #because otherwise that’s just a conflation of asexual and aromantic without any nuance #and an erasure of aromantic people who are not asexual. #Plus—name a single fucking time a character in mainstream/popular media has said the word aromantic. #Because I can name several instances where they say asexual. But I can’t think of ONE where they say aro or aromantic. #(Maybe that Isaac kid does in season 2 of Heartstopper? But I haven’t seen it so I’m not 100% sure.) #anyways. #the way this fucking fandom—and ANY fandom with a canon aro character—discusses the aromantic spectrum #is blatantly just to remove their own personal guilt for shipping that character with other characters and erasing their orientation. #because yes aromanticism IS a spectrum!! But when people talk about fabriz and say ‘he can still be ace!’ (Which is aro erasure) or #‘he can still be aro!’ They never SHOW riz still being aro or having any kind of complex relationship with romance. #I’m angry and I’m allowed to be. #I get that a ship you liked may be hard to let go of or something #But I’d be much less mad if all the fabriz fans said ‘yeah I know Riz is aro in canon and he and Fabian would never get together. #I just like to imagine it sometimes in fiction/fanon!’ Then that would be a WHOLE different conversation #Because then they’d at least be acknowledging that riz doesn’t feel romance in canon. That fabriz is something that actively #Goes against the canon characterization of one of those characters—and that’s fine. Just fucking ACKNOWLEDGE IT. #But most of these people either WANT fabriz to be canon/believe it WILL BE canon #OR I guess feel uncomfortable confronting the fact that they ARE erasing riz’s aromanticism so they don’t even acknowledge it at all. #fhjy #fantasy high #d20 #dimension 20 #riz gukgak #aromantic riz gukgak #fhsy

[dgcatanisiri]

So... I have had THOUGHTS swirling in my head, and, well, I need to word vomit some. This gets LONG. I apologize for the lack of a cut, but nowhere really seemed fitting during my writing.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s going around - an article about fandom hating on women. A very long, very researched article. And I absolutely do not dispute that core premise. I am not going to dismiss the work that the writer put into it. I am not standing here saying to dismiss it at all. And, hell, I DO feel a little uncomfortable, writing this massive response to it, being a man writing something that is directly responding to a female experience. Just... My brain would not let me focus unless I wrote this all down, and wrote out my feelings on the matter to a conclusion.

When I first saw it the other day, it sparked a rant of my own, because something about it didn’t sit right. Its focus is on how this hatred of women has gone after those who ship a certain ship, one I avoid calling by name for a very specific reason. That reason being I legit fear being bombarded by people who search the tags for that ship getting a ping of me commenting about it negatively and lashing out at me.

Now, I am not saying that I discount the article writer’s experience or research. Far from it. This is, much as I am loathe to use the term, something I am willing to say that, within the fandom, develops an element of “both sides” to it, where an incident with one side (those in favor of the ship) leads the other (those against it) to respond on the defensive, and back and forth and back and forth, intensifying in each volley, because one random stranger attacked another random stranger and made them hostile to a third random stranger saying things similar to the first, and so on down the chain. It’s like the game of Telephone, just played with tactical nukes.

But, the thing for me in that rant, is that there is a very blatant MISSING of the element of racism that fueled that ship that will not be named, of there being a significant element of the fandom around that ship transplanting the characteristics and even history of the character played by the black man onto the character played by the white man. Like, talk about sock puppet accounts fanning flames and all, but I’ve SEEN fics for this pairing that vilifies the black man and props up the white man. I have SEEN the massive metas that try to explain how the white man kidnapping this woman involved a bridal carry that expresses his true love for this woman he’s just met, interpreting and reinterpreting and pouring over the screentime they have, and only a fraction of it being spent on what seemed like, in the first appearance of these characters. I have SEEN the ignoring and transferring of character backstories repeatedly. Like... Those are a lot of work for it to be mostly the work of sock puppet accounts - A Tweet is easy. A 15000 word fanfic takes time and effort. A meta dive that rivals the length of this post takes time and effort. 

That’s been MY experience in seeing this ship. That’s why I’m being non-specific, because I’ve SEEN the hostility come in and I am taking the steps that I can to avoid that coming in to my inbox. And even when it’s not hostility... I’ve gone and explored the tag for the female character in this pairing. On those occasions, frequently content solely for her is drowned out by the content for the pairing, or about her influence on him. His tag does not have the same issue - there, it’s probably around half shipping content, half individual character content. What I see is that she is neglected by those who claim to see her as part of the pairing they love, and he gets glorified. 

That’s the sexism that I see. That’s where I see the hatred of women happening. On the part of those who claim to love this pairing, but that really seems to just mean that they love him and want to make her stand in emotionally for everything they want to give him. That those who are against the pairing, at the least, want to see that character in particular, her unique characterization and dynamics, in a relationship with someone who is going to treat her with compassion, consideration, and respect.

And, of course, there’s the issue of the fact that this pairing EXPLODED in popularity, while her relationship with another character, with a black man, was from pretty much day one minimized and reduced and ignored, and the damage reflected into the on-screen portrayal so that they never really had any character rebound from the imposed separation in the middle of this content, while strengthening the reduction of this female character to the white guy’s sexy lamp.

It’s not that I’m opposed to women in fandom or that I see something inherently wrong with whoever ships this pairing. It is that I have seen the blatant and thinly veiled racism implicit in the ways that these people go about shipping it, dismissing and denouncing the canon portrayal of an interracial relationship, to the point that when even the (notoriously tumultuous) production came back to write the stories that followed up on their initial appearance, that black man and his relationship with this white woman was downplayed and rendered “less important” to her connection and relationship with the white man - the white man who, in that first appearance, had kidnapped and tortured her, greatly wounded her friend, and killed her mentor. 

Like, I’m just saying, I do not see how one goes from that point to everlasting true love, but I CAN see how that leads to a deep abiding hatred. And yet, you know, nearly 16000 fics for it on AO3, while only about 10% of the other pairing. So, hey, I guess I’M wrong.

This is, again, to say nothing of the reductionary way many portrayals of this ship approach the female half - she loses her characterization in their portrayals to become a stand-in for the (predominantly) female writer/reader, whose love redeems the bad boy from the darkness in his soul. Her contribution, as a singular, unique character vanishes so that she becomes his reward for turning around, and she cheers him on, supporting him while never upstaging him.

It’s the Twilight phenomenon all over again. And I say that as a fact statement, not a value judgement, that this is the kind of thing that we saw within the reactions to Twilight, a vocal segment dismissed it entirely, and we saw a relationship be romanticized when you could actually use it as a bullet-point list of abusive behavior (I say this because it has been - there are plenty of articles using those characters as such). 

I mean, I can easily see this whole thing basically as being “well, the Twilight readers are now adults, let’s throw them a bone and “grow up” the characters for them” on some level. And... Actually, this is going to get off topic, let’s stick a pin in this and come back.

So, look, if this ship is your jam, fine, okay? I’m not making any individual value statements on the subject. You do you. I’m not shaming that act in and of itself, even if, as I’ve made very clear, it is very much NOT my thing. Likewise, I won’t discount that it was investors and shareholders, a notoriously conservative group, who got cold feet and basically wanted to excise the “risk” of an interracial relationship, as opposed to trying to “appease the fans” or something like that.

Like, I know I’m not immune to propaganda. I know I don’t look too deep when a random post crosses my dashboard and talks about this group of people behaving badly - because I’ve seen fandoms and productions be racist. I’m not trying to start a round of victimization Olympics here, but in this case, this is discussing an issue that is wrapped up in BOTH sexism and racism. And on the one hand, that certainly makes it all the easier for bad faith actors to kick up dust and turn people against one another.

BUT...

As important as it is to bring up these issues on their own, you CANNOT. DISENTANGLE. THEM. FROM. EACH OTHER. Like, there are patterns to fandom. You see this repeat itself in every fandom. Fandom at large latches on to a pairing, and shoves most others to the margins. And frequently, when the media in question centers on a character of color, THEY are shoved aside in order to prop up a pairing of white characters. Major canon characters who are not white become secondary - or tertiary - characters in terms of their fandom’s creative output. This happens frequently enough that to try and say “well, maybe the character is just not appealing to the fandom” is actively ignoring the issue.

And this often takes the form of shoving aside healthy relationships and solid, established friendships in the name of pairing up antagonistic characters, declaring the antagonism to be “sexual tension,” that the characters dislike each other not because... y’know, they dislike each other, but because they’re repressing a deep-seated desire to fuck, and THEN they’ll miraculously starting being nice to one another.

Like, this is NOT an isolated thing, you can look beyond the scope of this particular fandom and this pairing and see the pattern repeat itself across media. It is still the outlier when the main fandom pairing is an interracial M/F pairing. 

It’s not isolated. But it’s magnified given the massive size of this fandom in particular. This is a generational fandom, where parents - even grandparents - are sharing it with their children. And those biases we as an audience have reinforce themselves on subconscious levels, we don’t even acknowledge these things until we finally have it pointed out to us - and then we see it everywhere, because we have been blind to it, but it is all over our media, our fiction, baked into the very tropes we are using to assemble our stories.

Pull out that pin, we’re back. When something engages with multiple generations, when this is something you can look back on as a fond memory you shared with prior generations, with people you love, you will become protective of that thing. So when someone comes along and says “hey, [thing] has issues with [whatever],” a gut reaction is to get defensive, coil protectively around it. 

I mean, tell a millennial you don’t like The Lion King (original animated version, I mean), and you’re liable to get crucified. And it traces its lineage to (at a minimum) Shakespeare and probably further. So if, for example, you want to criticize it for, say, only have three female characters of note, none of whom actually interact, in opposition to the nearly three times as many male characters of note, you need to approach the subject with some delicacy (okay, maybe not the most fitting example, since this was part of the reason that the Broadway version made Rafiki a woman, so the issue Is Known, but it does get the point across, okay?).

And it’s the same when it comes to a subject like this particular fandom and media that isn’t just something many get hooked on in their childhood, but is also something that may be among the fond and cherished memories of family figures, some who may have passed on. To say “that thing you love is flawed” becomes a personal attack, not just on you for loving it, but also that beloved family member who brought it into your life.

And absolutely, this is not a rational reaction. It’s pure emotion. But we are emotional beings, and we need to acknowledge that emotions will make us respond and often respond quickly and respond poorly.

Here’s where I think the bigger issue lies if what you want to talk about is how fandom hates women - rather than look at it in the lens of “this ship is called abusive and racist,” go in the direction of “why is THIS ship the one that seems to resonate?”

Because this is the kind of ship that fandom, as a monolithic entity, often gravitates to - the dynamic that says that being enemies will inevitable lead to being lovers. 

Once again, I do not want to shame anyone for enjoying this dynamic. Lord knows my search history has instances of them. BUT... We don’t really know how to approach the dynamic. It is frequently reduced to “well, we made out, so now I’m gonna become the snarky asshole friend no one likes and we’ll bone.” 

Like in general, writing redemption arcs seems to be a hard thing for media, but it really seems to only work when the active narrative endpoint does not end in a major romance - when a romance becomes a major narrative element in said redemption arc, it frequently reduces the subject to “[character] was bad, now they’re in love, so they’re good!” No further work needs to be done.

And so when you have a character who is in need of redemption, it is a problem to just toss them at another character and have them make kissy faces. But that’s what you can sum up much of the concept of enemies to lovers in this fashion. The work isn’t done to show the earning of redemption, just declaring it attained because of another character’s love.

And I’m being intentionally non-specific with gender, because I do have a prominent example of this happening in a female/female fanon relationship in mind, which I am also avoiding mentioning in the name of discretion. So this isn’t solely a M/F phenomenon. This is a media thing, this is an “our understanding and approach to these dynamics and portrayals in media seems flawed and needs examination” thing. 

I mentioned Twilight above, and how that features a relationship that is used as an example of domestic abuse. Now, look, we can go back and forth about interpretation, the thing to acknowledge about it is that there are a great many who walked away from these books, their movie adaptations, and saw this particular interpretation. While you can probably take any relationship in any media and spin it in such a way, I think there is something to be said for the ensuing argument: When this is exposed to young people who are beginning to seek out romantic relationships, if their example for what love is, what love looks like, has a basis that, based solely on interpreting the text alone, the actions and words of the characters involved, the narrative text, the exploration of their thoughts, is unhealthy, is something that doesn’t need to have a word or action changed to be legitimately cited by experts within domestic abuse counseling as the warning signs... What does that say about our perceptions of what love even is?

And this isn’t getting back into the element of racism, either. Because we could go in that direction, where the black characters in fandom see this selective reinterpreting of their characters, turning what are gentle, caring, loving men into scary figures who loom ominously when they feel threatened, which starts to seem like all the time. There are a set of stock characterizations for black characters, for really any minority character, and the fandom will make them exhibit them in their interpretations, even if it does not fit anything established on screen.

There are a lot of threads that tie into the problems within this fandom and in the approach to this ship in particular. I feel like just pulling at one of them is doing so at the expense of the others, ones that run as deep if not deeper. And it seems like a disservice, both to the complexity of the issue and to anyone impacted by these matters, to only do that deep dive on the one. And, if you are not capable of doing it alone, which, I understand, this is a tall order, then I think it also is important to acknowledge this and actively seek out the alternate views and perspectives that aren’t just total opposition to you (meaning the references to the groups that sprung up in alt-right forums and such), but also those who are going to say “okay, maybe you’re right about x, but your statement on y are missing a lot of context you do not have from your position,” and seek the necessary education.

While I can appreciate the time and effort put into this article and the points it wants to make, it IS wrapped up in elements that run far deeper than any single ship, and just really seems to ignore the intersectional element of fandom at large, how fandom’s problem run deeper than just hating women. To talk about how fandom hates women, you are also needing to open the door to how fandom hates black people, hates people of color.

There is a hierarchy to this, and at best, you are missing a lot when you only focus on the top layer of the issue, rather than even acknowledging the deeper dive that inevitably comes from this. Like, it’s bad for a white woman, dealing with sexism. It’s worse for black women, dealing with sexism AND racism. It is something of a position of privilege to only examine the sexism in fandom, without exploring or acknowledging the racism.

Fandom’s hatred of women IS real. I am in no way disputing that. But I do not think that this is the best example to that point, because it becomes all too easy to dismiss the valid complaints and concerns with the trolls and bots and sock puppets found in the process that deserve legitimate consideration - this is one of the things I have been over when I have (oh god, I’m about to break the self-imposed rule and directly reference the media and characters in specific...) been over the problems I have with The Last Jedi. It’s not that I dislike Rose or Holdo, but I feel like they came into the narrative to teach Finn and Poe (both men of color) lessons that either comes at the expense of the previous’s movies arc for Finn or the previous movie’s characterization for Poe. It is not the characters themselves, it is the utilization within the narrative, using these women to impose a lesson on these characters. That, as I said above, Rey is reduced to a sexy lamp, there to try and bring back to the light a character she has no reason to ever even care about.

That was my experience with The Last Jedi - I had honest issues with the film that weren’t “women? In my Star Wars? Unpossible!” But the surrounding discourse CONSTANTLY felt so toxic to anyone who disagreed with the idea that it had been a win, that it was a bold new direction for the series, and that anyone who disagreed MUST be a sexist/racist/whatever who couldn’t take a changing face to the franchise. 

Hell, that may even be why I got this ultimate feeling of defensiveness, both in my opinion of TLJ and the ship in question (yeah, that one I’m still not acknowledging), because what I saw was a lot of really prominent voices not seeing the issues I did, and making it come across like the people who disagreed with them HAD TO BE the ones who were mad on the basis of characters like Rose and Holdo existing, or complaining about Leia’s Force use, or things like that. But... THOSE things weren’t my issues. But I couldn’t talk about those issues on any platform where there was regular engagement on the subject, considering the amount of explanation I would have to do.

Probably also explains some of my inherent response of trying to figure out how I feel about this article, too, come to think of it...

That was how things were after TLJ, and that’s when a lot of this push and pushback really started to gain traction as far as I can see. And maybe we could go and blame this on *ahem* bigger issues that were happening in 2017/2018 that proceeded to exacerbate matters. Like, we’re still in the midst of cleaning up the worst of all of what went on because of the time we live in, since things are still getting messier while we deal with prior fallout.

So... I honestly don’t know how to sum this up as a TL;DR. It was kind of a process for me to get to this point, and I don’t even know if I really have a conclusion. The best way I can go about summarizing is that I do not disagree with the article’s core idea. But I do not agree with its focus, while I understand that a portion of it, if nothing else, justifies why it is the focus. We are dealing with a very complex and complicated web of issues on this, and while I understand focusing on a single thread of that web, it feels like doing so also fails to acknowledge the various connected threads that wrap around that singular thread, in particular the racial elements, which, considering the profile image included, I do not believe this article was written by someone who is inherently aware of these aspects (while I’m also aware that, as a white person myself, I only have so much room to talk). This is all a very long way for me to go about saying “fandom has a lot of issues.”

#dg rants #long post #like seriously if you made it through all that in one sitting go get yourself a cookie or something

[the-erudite-library]

Black or White

i guess that it’s time for me to complain about this in post form. after reading the divergent series multiple times i have come to the realization that there is no such thing as gray morality in the narrative, not at all. There are characters that are morally gray, but they are neither presented as such nor acknowledged as such; Caleb, Nita, and Evelyn come to mind. It is made quite clear from the moment that any of those characters dare to go against tris’ agenda whether through their actions or through her own paranoia about certain subjects (Nita) that we as the audience are meant to despise them. Now, some of that can be chalked up to the fact that it’s told from the first person perspective and Tris is obviously a highly emotional person who has some very real trust issues. But i kind of want to talk about those three characters in particular because Caleb gets the most shit from the fandom, Nita is almost forgotten about entirely, and Evelyn seems to be either watered down to the role of The Mother or The Evil Mastermind when neither of those are really true and that’s when people aren’t viscerally hating her.

By nature, humans are multifaceted people who’s actions can be regarded as morally gray. Few people are completely on one end of the spectrum or the other (though i would say that it is much harder to be completely good than it is to be completely evil, if such things even exist). But one of the things that really, really bugs me about the Divergent series is that pretty much every single one of the characters is pretty morally gray (which is fine, morally gray characters are actually probably the most interesting ones) but they’re all presented like they’re not. 

The easiest examples of this are Tris and Jeanine. Something that the narrative fails to acknowledge pretty much entirely is that Tris kills people, and I’m not just talking about named characters like Will, she spends most of the series killing people. It’s not really discussed, but all those “Dauntless traitors’ (I fucking hate that phrase, but I digress) and Erudite guards were people. People with lives, families, and maybe even very complicated reasons for doing the things that they did. I believe that in the first book it is also stated that most of the people Tris kills are also under the influence of the simulation; people that don’t have any free will, people who probably don’t even count as awake, people who fell asleep after being injected with the attack serum and never woke up again. When Tris kills Will she internally deliberates whether or not to shoot him because she knows that it’s not him that’s in control (she shoots him anyways, but that is both beside the point and pertinent to it), but it’s like anyone that she doesn’t know is suddenly fair game. She has trauma following that pertaining to killing Will, but never spares all the others she murdered a second thought. It’s like they’re no different from the targets she practiced on during initiation, and we as the reader are just supposed to be okay with that and, for the most part, it seems that we are. So is everyone else, no one ever seems even remotely uneasy about the thought that Tris and Four killed dozens of people and so did they. It’s never a big deal, because they just deserved it. And she kind of says that on multiple occasions, but no one ever so much as insinuates that that is anything but completely justifiable. I could and probably will make an entire post about the dehumanization of the Erudite and “Dauntless traitors” and how that affects the plot and Tris’ character, but for the moment I’ll just leave it at that and move on.

Jeanine is just as morally gray as Tris is, especially if you believe that actions and intentions carry equal weight in a character’s morality. There’s a thing I wrote about Jeanine’s reasoning and beliefs as implied by her characterization in both the books and movies that can be found here and I’m going to absolutely reference some things in that post. Fictional characters really are complicated in the sense that their actions and intentions can be equally weighted because it’s fiction and doesn’t quite have the effect on real people that an actual person’s actions do. So I’m going to be weighting things like that, because if I don’t than Tris and so many other “heroic” characters look just as bad as Jeanine because again, they kill people. Objectively, what Jeanine did was wrong; it cost a lot of people their lives and the entire city its peace. But as has both been outright stated and implied by dialogue in book and movie canon, the things that she did weren’t malicious, terrible, but not malicious. Maliciousness, like villainy, describes intent; a desire to to cause harm because they can or because it puts them in power. It is a selfish desire and one that makes them reprehensible. But that’s not Jeanine. I’m not joking about that either; she’s not a villain, an antagonist yes, but by book and movie canon her ultimate goal isn’t because it puts her in power or simply because she can. Power hunger is part of it, but that’s not really why she goes after the Divergent specifically. In the movie she says, “You may not believe me, but I am serving the greater good” and in Insurgent she says, “This is not about you. It is not about me. It is about keeping this city safe from the people who intend to plunge it into hell!” (an emotional outburst that seems kind of ooc given the way that she was established as a very closed off and controlled person who didn’t really trifle with emotions but w/e). Her intentions seem to be actually rather altruistic; she doesn’t care what she has to do, she’ll do it if it means ensuring a better future for the majority of people that live in the factions. Even her slaughter of the Abnegation was something that was based in a desire for power, yes, but they also had the highest Divergent concentration in the city and therefore posed a threat to the system as a whole. I’m not saying that she was right, I’m not saying that she wasn’t a terrible person; but much like Tris isn’t exactly morally pure, Jeanine isn’t exactly morally impure.

wow, those analyses went on a lot longer than I thought they would. Back to the morally gray characters at hand. I picked them out specifically because they are sort of the only three people to go against Tris, not really atone for it in someway later, and also manage to survive. I say that because there really is sort of a phenomenon that goes on over the course of the three books where the people that disagree with Tris tend to die (and I’m not just talking about the villains, but that’s another post).

Caleb’s actions within the series mostly seem to be the result of heavy conditioning as is implied every time he tries to explain anything to Tris and she interrupts him (again, another post for another day). His actions seem to display that he doesn’t exactly know what to believe; unlike his sister he doesn’t really know what he’s doing all that he knows is that he doesn’t want to die and that he wants to fit in. He says that he believes that the Divergent pose a danger to their society, but he’s called out in the first movie and second book for just kind of regurgitating what people tell him. Whether he actually believes in anything he says at any point is left a little ambiguous. He lets go of the idea that the Divergent are dangerous but that’s after it’s proven wrong. From what little we actually know of him, it can be inferred that he has a rather flexible personality and will. He first defected from Erudite and ran back to Abnegation after finding out the truth (though it’s left really ambiguous whether he was doing that because he was afraid or because he was told to, though i lean more toward the former. like i said, we don’t know much about Caleb), then he seemed to change his mind and reappears later in the second book back on Erudite’s side (again it’s left unclear whether he was simply a spy that returned or whether he actually went and begged to be taken back) and spouting off Jeanine’s ideology almost verbatim to what she said in her pseudo-monologue in the first book. Following that the next time he really does something important and revealing about his character is kind of late in the third book when he tries to ask Tris to forgive him and tries to tell her about why he did what he did. “You can’t say that,” he said in response to Tris talking about how she would never deliver him to his own execution (foreshadowing much) and kind of implying that she never would have betrayed him in the first place either. He goes on to say, “You have no idea how persuasive Jeanine was-” and he’s cut off by Tris punching him in the face. We’re meant to hate Caleb for being so weak willed and malleable. but imagine being put in his position for a brief moment. He transfers to Erudite and couldn’t have possibly had an easy time given that he was an Abnegation transfer, but sticks it out because he has a passion for learning and just really wants to be there. He works hard and stays timid, making himself as small a target as possible; but then he somehow manages to catch the attention of the fucking faction leader. It’s kind of a big deal, right? And he finds himself in her good graces as well, and given that this is supposed to be his new home one would think it would behove him to stay there. Suddenly this Stiff is someone of note, not just to his fellow initiates but probably to other important Erudite. We don’t know much about Erudite initiation in general, but one can assume it was a rather competitive environment. So Caleb is no longer a joke or a washout waiting to happen, he’s a contender and maybe even a threat. But he makes it out alive, and the faction leader offers him a job; there was no saying no in that situation, not for Caleb. Factions are supposed to be a person’s entire life, and it’s shaping up like Caleb’s got a pretty good future ahead of him in Erudite, where it’s strongly implied that he has always wanted to be. So yeah, he takes the job, and yeah he does what he did to Tris, but he also seemed truly remorseful especially in Allegiant. Which leads me to think, and maybe I’m totally off base here, that he knew what he was doing was wrong the whole time that he did it and maybe he even felt bad about it, but it was what he had to do to keep his head above water. You could say the same of Tris’ killing, it kept her alive. Like with Jeanine, the things that Caleb did didn’t come from a place of malice or sadism; he wasn’t exactly doing what he did for other people, but he was doing what he did for himself and maybe that’s unforgivably selfish and maybe it’s not. But it does seem like all that Caleb did revolved around the goal of keeping himself alive and was possibly the result of being conditioned during initiation to think and behave a certain way to make him “Erudite enough”, either way not necessarily any real desire to hurt people. He’s no hero, but he’s certainly no villain. Antagonist, but not a villain.

That doesn’t stop Tris from making him one though. His betrayal was something awful and painful for her that she, understandably, had a hard time getting over. Because the book is told from her perspective and only her perspective, until we also get Four’s point off view but he’s biased too, we read all of her pain and it breaks our little bookworm hearts. Our first impulse as the reader is to turn all our hatred onto Caleb because from the very first page we are made to empathize with Tris; so clearly Caleb is The Worst. It doesn’t help in any way that nothing about Caleb is ever contextualized; the plot doesn’t allow it. On the two occasions he tries to explain himself (when Tris was imprisoned in Erudite and the time when she punches him in the bureau) Tris has already shut him out so we never get to hear it. He never speaks of anything that took place during the time he and Tris were apart during their respective initiations that may have shaped him and neither does anyone else (Fernando touches on it briefly but vaguely). And he sure as shit doesn’t have a POV in the main books or a novella detailing his backstory and what got him from the boy who didn’t know what to think and was incredibly panicked by what was going down in Erudite, as shown in the scene where Tris goes to visit him in the first book, to the young man that betrays his sister for a cause that he may or may not believe in. In some ways the two seem like separate personalities; Tris once or twice says something about him being an amazing liar, but I would just like to bring up that Caleb is sixteen years old. He’s not exactly a grown adult with a concrete identity and fully developed brain. He’s a teenager who’s jumped from one way of life to a radically different one based on a passion and a personality type. I don’t think that it’s so much that he’s an amazing liar as it is that he’s still becoming. Tris went through all sorts of internal evolutions and changes, but the difference is that we got to see them. We saw the events that shaped her actions and personality and could very clearly map from point a to point b (most of the time). There’s too many pieces of Caleb’s story missing for anyone to make an accurate judgement on who he actually is as a persona and what sort of morality he possesses; but i think that it can be said with confidence that though he exists in the gray area that gray is neither silver nor charcoal, and that our interpretation of him is kind of skewed given the fact that we’re seeing him through the eyes of someone that hates him.

Evelyn’s a hot mess, i’m just going to open with that. There’s a lot going on there that in many ways makes her one of the most complex and multi-faceted characters in the entire series. She obviously cares for her son (enough to totally forego her plans for Chicago to make things right with him) but it doesn’t change the fact that she left him alone with his abusive father after she fakes her death. When she tries to reconnect with him it seems to be rooted in her desire to have him join her army. Still, despite all of this she loves him. And then there’s her relationship to the city at large; when she demolishes the faction system it’s a power thing, yes, but this is a woman who has lived factionless for more than a decade. She knows firsthand the cost of upholding that system. It was an oppressive and stifling system that held down people who might have been amazing if they were only given the chance and was the cause of quite a bit of her own misery (both the poverty of living factionless and the way that abnegation’s norms and values trapped her with Marcus to the point where she had to fake her own death to escape). She made it pretty clear that she felt she was doing a service destroying the faction system because it meant sparing potentially thousands of people from inescapable poverty. Despite the violent way that she went about it, the end result is good (or at least it’s presented that way). Would the factions have collapsed on their own if Evelyn never did anything? Well, maybe; it’s a little difficult to say but the point is that ultimately Evelyn put an end to a system that oppressed hundreds if not thousands of people and there’s something to be said for that. Evelyn is a flawed character, I don’t think that there is ever a point in the story in which she ever says she’s not. She never openly admits to making mistakes (unless i’m forgetting something) but she never once claimed to be the only solution. If I recall correctly, her whole thing is that it’s her cause that is what will save the city, not necessarily her.

But due to the nature of the biased first person narrative (in both Tris and Four’s case) Evelyn can come off as little more than a tyrant driven to extreme measures by a survival instinct gone horribly wrong, rather than the complex and multifaceted person that she really is. Tris and Four’s anger toward Evelyn is completely understandable, the things that she did very deeply affected them. But both Tris and Four, but especially Tris, seem to have a not-so-little problem with their thinking in that once they hate someone they kind of stop seeing them as people. Caleb seemed to have feelings and humanity for what little attention he was given right up until he betrayed Tris. One can almost feel her hatred and apathy for him in that he suddenly seems to lack personality or complexity until the end of Allegiant, but I digress. Evelyn is the same in some ways, an unfortunate cocktail of the narrators’ hatred for her and lack of knowledge about pretty much everything involving her leaves her narrowed down to just a few traits that may or may not actually be true. Four mentions time and time again that Evelyn is a person driven by fear and anger, but to put it bluntly, what does he know? He’s only really been in contact with Evelyn as an adult for about three years and they weren’t exactly close during that time, the last time they were together he was a small child. He knows what he remembers of watching Evelyn suffer from Marcus’ abuse as he did, but upon reconnecting it’s not like either of them really made any moves to get to know each other until (i assume) the epilogue. They’re practically strangers, which makes Four’s narration unreliable at best and wildly inaccurate at worst. Tris isn’t any better, she doesn’t know Evelyn at all but viscerally hates her and that’s it. That’s the entire scope of her personal experience with Evelyn (as in it didn’t come from something that Four told her); she’s not exactly in any position to be passing judgements either. But she does, and we as readers are inclined to take these feelings as fact because Tris is character that many people love and empathize with (not me, but that’s beside the point).

Nita is a ridiculously complicated subject too and I think that that might tie into why she’s ignored by the vast majority of the fandom (not to mention that she’s one of the few characters of color that actually manage to survive, but race issues in the divergent fandom is another topic). Nita is an even more exacerbated version of the exact problem Evelyn (and most of the characters tbh) has; we know so little that we have little choice but to go off of Tris and Four’s interpretation. I’ve gone over the broader problems with that over and over again, but there’s something unique about Nita and the reason that we can’t trust Tris and Four’s judgements on her. Tris and Four are all but foreigners to the reality that Nita and the others who live at the Bureau live. It doesn’t matter how much things are explained, that doesn’t mean that either of them can really hope to understand all the unique aspects of their experience as a GD or GP. But Nita’s experiment collapsed when she was eleven and from there she took up residence in the Bureau because that was her best bet at scraping by some meager existence. She was hardly more than a child and I would wager that it was a bit of a culture shock; but more importantly, she was born GD and so she grew up all too familiar with the injustices that damaged people face. She didn’t have to be told about the discrimination that damaged people face and the way that they are seen as lesser beings; she lived it, it was her day to day. She most likely spent years enduring both outright discrimination and micro-aggressions from genetically pure people. I would wager that an experience like that would make one pretty wary of if not outright hateful of genetically pure people. It wasn’t like David or any of his council were going to help them, they were all genetically pure, they were the exact oppressors that held her and her people down. So maybe she decides to stage a revolution; maybe she comes up with it on her own and maybe she doesn’t, either way I can’t help but think that she and her people might have been emboldened after seeing what went down in Chicago.It was their hope, it might have even been their inspiration.

And then comes Tris, genetically pure and self-righteous with a dash of possessive jealousy regarding her boyfriend. So she tries to get aforementioned boyfriend to join her cause; he’s one of them and he fought a war before, maybe he’d be willing to do it again. But then he drags along Tris and she, this genetically pure teenager who doesn’t have half an idea what she has had to endure as a genetically damaged person and a product of an experiment, and Tris tells her that her measures are Too Extreme and Wrong when she herself basically started a civil war to fight for her rights. And then she shoots her. So yeah, it’s kind of understandable why Nita doesn’t like Tris but Tris has no such excuse. Unfortunately, Tris is the narrator and one who doesn’t exactly take very kindly to being told she’s wrong by literally anyone (I’ll write something up regarding all her personality flaws at some point). But Tris and Four’s perspectives are the only ones we see Nita through. So what we see through Tris’ eyes is a manipulator and quite possibly terrorist when it would probably be more accurate to call her someone who has endured a lot of pain in her life that those from the chicago experiment, genetically pure or otherwise, could never really quite grasp and took very arguably misguided and extreme action against her oppressors. I didn’t quite mean to call out VRoth in this post, but i’m going to anyways because I’m a salty fuck; the entire way that the genetically damaged were handled was wrong and shitty. You can’t just create a very blatant metaphor for oppression and then paint the angry oppressed who want to take drastic measures in hopes of achieving true equality as Wrong and Bad, especially when the protagonist just assisted and was pretty much a figurehead for a war that destroyed life as anyone knew it.

In conclusion, the black and white morality in the text that leaves absolutely no room for anyone to disagree with the narrator (Tris) or do something that she doesn’t like because that makes them Evil™, obviously. I’m not defending the actions of any one of the characters mentioned in this post, but I do think that it’s worth considering that when we look at these characters we are seeing them through the eyes of someone who has already made judgements on their morality when in fact morality is a complex matter and completely subjective. Furthermore, this narrator also has a terrible habit of smearing and dehumanizing those that she doesn’t care for if not directly through her words than simply through the fact that she can’t be bothered to give a shit about killing them. In my opinion, these characters don’t really deserve all the hate that they get, not when we honest to god don’t know anything about any one of them. 

#divergent #caleb prior #tris prior #evelyn johnson #nita (divergent) #jeanine matthews #theories headcanons and meta #a little candor of me #honestly i could go on and on #peter is a seperate post all on his own because that dude is a goddamn mess #i could go on about caleb forever too