On my world, it means hope.

None of the factions (besides Amity and possibly Erudite) seem to be that psychologically healthy for people, but Abnegation probably takes the cake.

Selflessness is, in theory, a good virtue to have. The problem is that it's rare and it's basically impossible to be selfless on a regular basis, because human beings are just not built for that to be possible. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, to pay attention to your own needs and take care of yourself. Selfishness is really only terrible if you end up hurting other people in the process, not because there's something inherently sinful about having personal needs and wants.

It's possible to be nice to other people, but being nice to people because it's the decent thing to do does not equal selflessness. For example, it's perfectly possible to be nice to other people and have some ulterior motive. You might be nice to someone because you want something from them, or you might be nice to someone because you get a feeling of gratification from doing so. Which, it seems, would kick you out of the zone of selflessness.

Perhaps more seriously, being raised never to think about yourself can have serious psychological consequences.

I didn't think about this too much while I was reading the book—I vaguely got what the author was trying to convey and kind of just rolled with it, but something about Abnegation struck me as unpleasant. Now that I really think about it, it is severely unpleasant. Like I mentioned, human beings aren't built to never think about themselves. One possible consequence of being raised this way is you might end up unconsciously developing a backlash to that kind of thinking and end up constantly craving recognition, while simultaneously feeling like you're not "supposed" to think this way, and ending up with a metric ton of self-loathing. Or you might end up actually becoming a very selfish person because you're constantly denied the opportunity to think about yourself. Or you could end up with screwed-up and possessive attitudes about love, because you wind up craving from others what you're unable to give to yourself (self-love).

That's the worst part of being raised this way: when you're taught not to value yourself as an individual, you become unable to value yourself. But everyone has a basic instinct to want to like themself and want others to like them, because no one wants to be hated (by themself or by others), and so you end up with constant mental stress and irreconcilable tension. You become unable to think of yourself in positive terms, and even if you were transplanted to an environment in which people sang your praises every day, you'd desperately cling to it, but at the same time you wouldn't know what to do with it and you'd feel like you don't deserve it. Speaking from personal experience, having zero self-esteem really, really sucks when it comes to emotional healthiness. I mean "you could end up with colossal intrapersonal and even interpersonal issues, not to mention depression" levels of suck. It's not something to be desired at all.

[Tangent: I wrote about something similar to this, a person being unable to value themself as an individual. I accomplished that through a combination of memory loss and psychological conditioning. Needless to say, said character had massive psychological problems. It was difficult to write and, based on some people's reactions, rather distressing to read.]

And that's not even getting into the most extreme form of selflessness, when it becomes self-destruction. Which is kind of what happened to Tris in Insurgent, and if the author wanted to point out the flaws in the factions, that was a good place to get up on a soapbox and talk about how Abnegation is kind of warped. But unfortunately the book wasn't self-aware enough to go there.

Taking pride in your accomplishments is a good thing. Being able to recognize your strengths is a good thing (I think there's some kind of saying that false modesty is a form of lying, or something like that). A little bit of selfishness isn't bad. Being able to pay attention to and take care of your own needs is a good thing, because the alternative is an unpleasant and unhappy way to live.


...That was a little less coherent than I intended. Oh well.

So I'm trying to do something a little different here. This will be sort of like a book review, except with a focus on the educational aspect and what we can learn on what not to do when writing stories. As someone, I forget who, once said, you can learn a lot by reading bad books.

This summer, I've been thinking a lot about Veronica Roth's Insurgent and Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone. The reason is that both of these books have been very hyped up before their release, they're praised for having strong female protagonists, and both of these books I've found rather disappointing, to say the least. They are similar in some aspects and dissimilar than others, and they've triggered a lot of my pet peeves.

1. "Strong" heroines who aren't actually "strong." No, seriously, how is someone like Alina Starkov a "strong" character? She's crippled by insecurity, pining away for the affections of her flirty, flightly childhood friend, and pretty much has no self-confidence whatsoever. What's worse is that Alina is a character who is very much defined by her relationships to men. When she's first introduced, her predominant characteristic is that she's in love with childhood friend Mal, who apparently doesn't return her affections because he's too busy flirting with others. Ignoring the question of why the protagonist would deeply love someone that superficial, there's literally nothing else to distinguish Alina. She's a cartographer, but apparently not very good at it. She's snarky, but only around Mal or when she's being mean to others. Later on, you could argue that Alina gains a characteristic--her Unique Special Power of Sun Summoning--but again, she is driven to master it in order to aid the Darkling (a dude with an unfortunate name, I should say), not really for herself.

Point #1: Nobody likes to read about incompetent wimps who have no interests or goals and can't accomplish anything, or even feel like they can't accomplish anything. Crippling self-doubt is a valid character flaw, but as with all other flaws, it must be handled well; by itself, it doesn't not automatically make a character "deep," particularly once it veers into angst territory.

Point #2: A protagonist must be able to stand on his/her own as a compelling character. A protagonist who is primarily defined by his/her relationships to other characters is a weakly conceptualized protagonist. I read a few reviews of Shadow and Bone in which people expressed more interest in the Darkling than in Alina. You know you have an issue when people think your villain is more complex, deep, and interesting than your protagonist.

(For the record: I'm talking about female protagonists here because both books feature heroines, but I should add that none of these are excusable in male protagonists, either.)


2. The plot isn't driven by the protagonist. Oftentimes, in both Insurgent and Shadow and Bone, I felt that the protagonists were drifting around aimlessly without any particular goal. In both, to a certain extent, the plot moves the character rather than the other way around.

In Shadow and Bone, the problem is that there is no sense of urgency, and Alina is very much a pawn. She's taken away from her old life to be trained by the Grisha Because The Darkling Said So. She tries to master her power Because The Darkling Said so. The Darkling says that she'll be crucial to eliminating the Fold/Unsea (an unholy, dangerous barrier between the rest of the country and the coast), but for most of the middle Alina sort of meanders through her training without any sense of danger or high stakes. Yeah, maybe the book vaguely hinted that people are dying in the Fold all the time, but who cares when Alina is attending tea parties with her Grisha pals?? The only way the middle finally gets a jumpstart is when another character drops a bombshell, the Big Reveal, on Alina, forcing her to finally do something.

In Insurgent, unlike in S&B, there is a sense of urgency and high stakes--the Erudite are after Tris, people are dying, lots of action, etc. etc. The problem is that all the action feels incoherent because Tris doesn't have a particular goal of her own and her actions aren't triggering the plot, the plot is happening to her. Tris and her band of friends move from place to place seemingly without much reason, or at least not for any significant reason, or at least for not any reason important to her. Tris hardly gets to make any decisions about where they go or what they do; in fact, she deliberately refuses a position of leadership among the Dauntless. Pull at one thread on the tapestry of the plot--what is Tris trying to get out of everything that's happening?--and the entire structure comes apart.

In one, there is no momentum in the plot; in the other, the momentum is unfocused and misdirected.


3. Shoddy, vague worldbuilding and simplistic morality. I don't demand complex morals and explorations of the ambiguities between good and evil from every book I read. I'm fine with books with clearly defined Good and Evil sides, such as in Harry Potter and Rick Riordan's novels. I do, however, ask that a book not insult my intelligence. I don't want to hear that another country is TEH EVULZ just because it opposes the protagonist's country without any other context. If I have to read another book where Light Is Always Good and Dark Is Always Evil, I just might break a window. Explain to me fully the villain's motives and why they are so morally questionable.


4. Flat secondary characters. Minor characters are almost always used to either make life difficult for the protagonist, or to show how Deep and Genuine the protagonist is compared to everyone else.

Let's look at Shadow and Bone. (And apologies in advance if I get the character names wrong, my memory isn't that great.)

- Mikael: Exists just to be a lech and a slimeball, so Alina can bash him (in her thoughts, not out loud).
- Alexei: Exists just to die.*
- Genya: Exists just to make Alina pretty.
- David: Exists just to give Alina stuff and be Genya's (oblivious) love interest.
- Random Grisha girls: Exist just to be gossipy and be Alina's superficial "friends."
- Random Grisha girl (whose name began with Z): Exists just to be Alina's "rival" and to be mean to her.

Do any of these characters have lives outside of Alina? Not really. Do they have their own goals, and do they impact the plot in any significant way? No. Are they memorable? Hell no; they're so flat, they're nearly one-dimensional.

I've learned a lot about making minor characters come alive in my own writing. If you're not quite as gifted as Rick Riordan or JK Rowling, who have a special talent for making minor characters memorable, the easiest way is to simply make sure the minor character has an objective, and then let him/her lose in the plot and see what happens. It's a way to rapidly complicate your plot and add new levels of conflict. The downside, of course, is that if your cast is too big, you may end up with something the length of GRR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire.

But at the very least, don't create characters who only revolve around the protagonist with no life of their own. Or, even worse, don't create characters whose sole purpose is to die.

* [By the way, now that I think about it, Alina is at first traumatized by his death, but later completely forgets about him. Wow, talk about being a terrible friend. It could have been interesting if Alina felt a bit of responsibility for his death, thus spurring her efforts to master her power, but no...maybe the author felt that it would've detracted too much from Alina's "love triangle" with Mal and the Darkling. :/]

A few more thoughts came to me after I'd finished the book.


( Cut for spoilers )

I must be on a book/movie/videogame general withdrawal or something. As soon as Insurgent was released, cue me taking three and a half hours out of my busy finals schedule to sit down and read it.

Insurgent by Veronica Roth

Overall Verdict: It was okay.

What I liked:

As usual, Roth's writing is extremely smooth and easy to read. Insurgent has quite a bit of action in it--moreso than Divergent, whose plot could be summed up as 400 pages of Dauntless initiation training, then 100 pages of action. The Amity and Candor finally get a chance in the spotlight, and we learn quite a bit more about the world, including what it means to be Divergent. Finally, we're starting to get hints about the "dystopian" side of this dystopian series, even though the book ends on a cliffhanger after the Big Reveal. Also, a few minor characters, such as Christina and Tris's father, get fleshed out, which I really liked.

What I didn't like: (divided into two parts, spoiler-free and spoiler-full)

A big factor in how I judge books is what the book made me feel, both during the story and particularly at the end. I never felt anything while reading Insurgent. Whereas Divergent tapped something within me--this idea that someone can transcend his/her fears--Insurgent left me unable to connect. I found myself never really worried about Tris, and I wonder whether it was because I know she's going to survive, or...something else. Four was a really opaque character in the novel--a lot of his actions seemed out of the blue--and I'm not sure why, except to add romantic tension. Speaking of which, there is a whopping ton of romantic tension in the novel. Tris and Four's relationship is intensely physical. I'm a bit of a wacko when it comes to reading romance in fiction, but I thought the descriptions were excessive and borderline cheesy.

Most of the book dealt with Tris's angst about a certain event that happened at the end of Divergent, and I still can't decide whether the angst was justified or overblown.

A few "plot twists" made me scratch my head. I said that there was more action in this book, but a side effect of that was that the plot felt really fractured, in certain ways. And maybe that's my main problem with the book: it didn't feel entirely coherent. It was hard for me to figure out the theme--maybe because the cover and the epitaph pointed to different messages. The cover and tagline, with the emphasis on Amity and destruction respectively, made me anticipate that consequence would be the main theme of Insurgent and that the Amity would be the drivers of that, somehow. The epitaph, however, and I think the book in general, made me think that Candor should have been the cover (although I guess a set of scales doesn't look as awesome as a tree, or something), because the theme of the book seemed to be truth. But still, it wasn't emphasized enough for me to figure it out until after I finished the book.

More specifics in the spoiler section.


( SPOILERS )