The Sixth Faction: Parts 2 & 3: Spoilers for Chapters 1-23:

I'm continuing my look at the alternative Divergent story-telling: The Sixth Faction. First, a quick follow-up to the question I posed last time re: the missing Abnegation initiate.  I say this Substack posting of Veronica Roth's from July where she mentions that a translator caught an error in the final draft, then shares some notes about how many teens were in Tris's Choosing Ceremony, which leads me to thing the eight-that-should-have-been-nine is an error. So much for my idea that we might eventually meet some unfortunate classmate of Tris's that the Abnegation leadership abducted and disappeared on the walk to the Memory Vault.

How a Sixth Personality Factor Relates to the Five Factions: Plus, how Tris is more like Hermione than Katniss. No spoilers for The Sixth Faction!

 

Of all the YA blogging I did in the mid-2010's, I am probably proudest of my work with the Five Factions of the Divergent series and personality theory.  In a series of posts, I argued that the Five Factions of dystopian Chicago were based on the Five Factor personality model (aka OCEAN) with Erudite corresponding to Openness to Experience (once called Intellect), Abnegation to Conscientiousness, Candor to Extraversion, and Amity to Agreeableness. Dauntless, Tris's chosen Faction is a bit of a special case, with Four's old Dauntless representing the Mental Stability end of the Neuroticism spectrum, and Eric's new Dauntless the Mental Instability end.  Dauntless's slide from one pole to the other is nicely visualized in their ziplining hobby, in which Four refuses to participate. This idea worked so well that I convinced my university colleague who taught personality to hold a department-sponsored trip to the Divergent movie premiere. 

The Sixth Faction, Part 1: "Stiff" (CH 1-8)

Note:  This post includes spoilers only for the first part of The Sixth Faction:  "Stiff" or Chapters 1-8.  Please do no spoil any later part of the book in the comments. 

My hardcover arrived today and I just enjoyed a reading of the first part, "Stiff," comprising Chapters 1-8.  While my entire being is telling me to proceed to the next part, I thought it better to record my thoughts now. 

This wasn't exactly what I had expected.  I was expecting the exact same Divergent world I fell in love with back in 2012 or so, with the only changes being the "tragedy" at Tris's Choosing Ceremony, which leads to her making a different Faction.

Instead, there are multiple changes from the original series, starting from the initial haircut scene, where Beatrice asks to take the scissors from her mother and trim her locks herself. This version of Abnegation apparently considers private home occupancy excessively selfish, resulting in the Priors sharing with Robert and Susan Black's family. 

Goblet of Fire-Running Grave Links, Part 3. Arrivals and early days at Chapman Farm and Hogwarts.

As Ed Shardlow pointed out a few posts ago, Chapman Farm has quite a few parallels with Hogwarts, so it should not surprise us that more GoF-TRG connections spring up once Harry and Robin reach their destinations.  Of course, many of the similarities could be said to link to any of the Harry Potter books, except, ironically, Deathly Hallows (the book most similar to TRG, see here also) in which our Trio does not return to Hogwarts.  Still, I think we can make some reasonably specific connections to GoF. Here, I am going to compare the book sections that start with arrival (Chapter 22 in TRG; Chapter 11 "Aboard the Hogwarts Express" in GoF) and ending with Robin joining the UHC (Chapter 35) and with Harry's name coming out of the Goblet of Fire (Chapter 16: "The Goblet of Fire.") 

Goblet of Fire-Running Grave links, Part 2. Slim pickings at the World Cup and at Rupert Court.

It appears we have another piece of evidence against the "Louise can find connections between anything" hypothesis because I am hard-pressed to see much similarity between Chapters 4-10 of Goblet of Fire and Chapters 4-22 of The Running Grave, other than that a lot of stuff happens before Harry travels to Hogwarts, and a lot of stuff happens before Robin travels to Chapman Farm. 

Confessions of a Past and Present Erudite: Revisiting a 2015 book chapter in light of The Sixth's Faction's impending publication.

    The following is the introductory chapter of what I had hoped, in 2015, would become an entire book on the psychology and behavioral neuroscience underlying Veronica Roth's Divergent series.  Three factors converged, resulting in that project never getting off the ground. 

1. First, the Allegiant book disappointed a lot of readers; personally, I liked the ending, but hated the genetics after being so enthralled with the psychology and neuroscience of Divergent and Insurgent. 
2. Second, the movie-makers clearly overplayed their hand thinking they could squeeze four books out of the series and deviated so far from the source material that the third installment, Allegiant, was barely recognizable as Roth's book, and was a box-office flop. The result was that the fourth installment, Ascendant, was never made. The fizzling out of the movie franchise would make if much harder to market any sort of scholarly book on the series and made it less likely that Divergent would join the Harry Potter and The Hunger Games as topics of study in universities.  
3. Third, I became enraptured by "Robert Galbraith's" detective series, Cormoran Strike, and began focusing most of my blogging and analysis on that.  A quick look at this blog will show about 99% of my writing is on that series. 

    Still, if Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth can go back and revisit stuff they wrote in the mid twenty-teens, so can I. The impending publication of The Sixth Faction, an alternative-universe retelling of the story in which Tris chooses a different Faction, has Divergent-fangirls and made me interested in at least sharing the first chapter of my aborted book.  Who knows, The Sixth Faction may be so brilliant it ignites an entire new generation of Factioneers, and the book could be marketable again. 

    A lot has changed in the 11 years since I wrote this, for both me and Veronica Roth. She is no longer a straight-out-of-college first-time writer, but a seasoned author with many other volumes published. My own career diversified in ways I never thought possible in 2015. I took early retirement from my professorship in 2023 and now run my own behavior analysis business. And the teenager with whom I read dystopias recently had a child of her own. The numerical footnotes below are original to the piece; I have added some new notes in red print and with asterisks. 

A new Divergent book, ten years later: Can Roth capture the magic again?

Perhaps it should not surprise us, after the book and movie success of the Hunger Game Prequels, that a new offering of arguably the second most popular YA dystopian series of that era, Divergent, would also get into the new-books-a-decade-after-its-heyday game. Thought the bulk of my blogging and published work has been on Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike, my first efforts at YA blogging and my first published book chapter were actually about The Hunger Games,  Back in my Hogwartsprofessor days, I became the resident Divergent expert/junkie/fangirl. Like a lot of folks, I really enjoyed Divergent and Insurgent, then was quite disappointed in Allegiant, more because of the less-coherent science behind the fiction than the controversial ending.  And the less said about the way Lionsgate overplayed its hand, tried and failed to squeeze four films from the trilogy, the better. 

While Roth expanded her Divergent-verse in some follow-up short stories (compiled in Four and We Can Be Mended) The Sixth Faction is being billed as something quite different:  an "alternate version" of the story where Beatrice chooses a different faction.