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. 

Goblet of Fire-The Running Grave Links, Part 1: A look at perspective and content in the first three chapters.

As I go through this somewhat strange exercise of testing the Double Wedding Band model with a look at potential connections of the seven Harry Potter books with the last seven Strike books. one thing that is becoming clear to me is that some of the clearest thematic connections turn up in the openings of the books. See here, here and here for examples. In a way, this makes sense, given that some of the most obvious examples of chiastic structure in the Harry Potter series show up in the opening Dursley segments. See the illustration from my chapter on humor in Harry Potter from Harry Potter, the Ivory Tower and Beyond for examples. 

Happily, as I started my look at The Goblet of Fire and The Running Grave, I saw that this pairing is no exception.  The most notable similarity is that both books start with a somewhat unusual point of view, one of someone other than the protagonists. Goblet of Fire sets up the main storyline by providing first a newsreel-like history of the Riddle family murder in Little Hangleton, followed by the suspicion cast on Frank Bryce and his subsequent discovery of Wormtail and Voldemort hiding out in the old Riddle house.  Interestingly, though the end of the scene cuts into Harry Potter's scar-tingling nightmare that he presumably sees through the mental link with the Dark Lord, the narrative presented to the readers is from the perspective of Frank Bryce, including events and thoughts of which Voldemort was unaware. Chapters from the perspective of someone other than Harry are very rare in the Potter series, occurring only in the first chapters of books 1, 4 and 7 and in the first two chapters of book 6. 

The Strike series is also usually from the perspective of one of the lead detectives, although other perspectives are more common than in Harry Potter. For example, Book 3 has multiple chapters from the killer's perspective, while Book 6 shows many online chats among the moderators of Drek's Game. The Running Grave opens with a Prologue setting up the detectives' major case, delivered through a series of letters between Colin and Sally Edensor, their son Will, eventual murder victim Kevin Pirbright and Edensor's lawyer, along with some interview excerpts with church principals Noli Seymour and Giles Harmon. 

Both of these opening, alternate-perspective segments end with a relatively abrupt death. Frank Bryce, like the Riddles of fifty years prior, is Avada Kedavra'ed by Voldemort, and therefore "is dead before he reached the floor." Sally Edensor succumbs fairly quickly to her brain tumor, even though "the doctors thought she had longer." Although neither of these deaths is the major murder our heroes will eventually solve in these books, the story of both deaths is used to set up the major storyline. 

Prisoner of Azkaban-Ink Black Heart links, Part 2: Howlers, bombs and not falling over on purpose.

As I expected, once we got past the book introduction, there weren't as many clear connections between PoA and TIBH.  Notice, then that I was able to complete the blog series in only two parts, as opposed to the six I needed for PS-LW and the four for CoS-TB. 

The closest character parallel I saw was between Strike and Hermione. Strike  foolishly keeps pushing the limits of his bad knee and hamstring until he collapses and has to get treatment in the hospital for not just the stump itself but the stress-induced muscle spasms in both his leg and face. Hermione, by trying to take every subject Hogwarts offers, drives herself to the breaking point, culminating at the DADA final exam when she falls apart and fails to recognize the boggart, much less defeat it. By book's end, Strike has finally resolved to address the issues and take some steps to improve his health by losing weight and stopping smoking. Hermione decides to turn in the Time-Turner, drop Muggle Studies and Divination and take a normal schedule. 

Prisoner of Azkaban-Ink Black Heart links, Part 1: Interrupted birthdays and well-deserved vacations.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Career of Evil (Books #3 in their respective series) have one very clear over-arching connection: both stories involve a deranged filler out to kill one of our major protagonists. Of course, there are also some contrasts: in PoA, the identity of the "killer" is known (Sirius Black) but the popular belief about him is false (he is not actually a killer, but a wrongly convicted prisoner and he does not want to kill Harry, but rather to save him from the real killer, Peter Pettigrew). No one knows the identity of the man stalking and planning to kill "The Secretary" (Donald Laing) until the book's end, but everyone is 100% about his plans to murder Robin; he, unlike Sirius, is actually responsible for multiple other deaths as well. 

Will Prisoner turn out to also have major connections to The Ink Black Heart, Book 3 on the hypothesized second ring that closes the Cormoran Strike Series?  That remains to be seen.  Here, I am going to examine the "prologues of both books." This means the part literally labelled "Prologue" in TIBH, covering the Ritz and the aftermath of the missed kiss, Strike's New Year's Eve stakeout and taking up with Madeline, and Robin's trip to Zermatt. For Harry Potter, it is the first four, pre-Hogwarts chapters: Harry's birthday, the visit from Aunt Marge, his flight from Privet Drive via the Knight Bus after blowing her up and his subsequent three-week vacation in Diagon Alley. Obviously, I am taking a risk comparing four chapters each to start with, given that PoA has 22 chapters and TIBH 107. But, so far, the strategy of grouping the pre-Hogwarts segment with the pre-main-mystery section has served me pretty well.

Chamber of Secrets-Troubled Blood Links, Part 4: Who are the TB equivalents to Lockhart, Aragog and Riddle?

I'm finishing up the look at Chamber of Secrets-Troubled Blood connections, looking at the last three chapters of CoS (covering Harry and Ron's discovery of where the Chamber is, Ginny's abduction, Lockhart's confrontation and eventual obliviation, Ginny's rescue, the debrief with Dumbledore, the encounter with Malfoy, Dobby being set free, the celebratory feast and the journey home) and Chapters 49-73 of Troubled Blood. 

TB, being much, much longer, naturally, has a lot more happening: 

• Strike's second interview with Janice
• Robin's meeting with Brian Tucker
• the joint interview with the Bayliss sisters
• Strike's Easter journey to Cornwall for the scattering of Joan's ashes
• Charlotte's suicide attempt
• Robin's divorce settlement
• the interview with Betty Fuller
• the disaster with Oakden at the American Bar
• the wonderful Chapters 58-59 with both Strike and Robin's declaration of friendship and Morris's sacking
• Robin's visit to Mucky Ricci and the subsequent row with Strike
• Robin's meeting with Jemma and the resolution of the Shifty case
• the trip to Skegness and meeting with Douthwaite
• the Facetime with Gloria Conti and subsequent resolution of the conflicting clues
• Strike's masterful showdown with Creed, which leads to Louise Tucker's remains
• the discovery of Margot's body at the Athorns and 
• the final confrontation and arrest of Janice. 

The novel then gives us a two-part conclusion, first the detectives' meeting with the Phipps, Kim and Oonaugh Kennedy, then Robin's birthday, with Strike finally putting some sentiment into gifts and taking her to buy her own perfume. 

The major point that struck me as the resolutions of all the mysteries unfold is that, once the truth about characters is revealed, some of the major villains start making pretty strong matches for each other. Take Lockhart, for instance,  When comparing CoS to The Silkworm, it is clear from the beginning that Lockhart is an analog to Michael Fancourt, the "vainglorious" bestselling author. We can even connect their names: Fancourt is described as having a shard of ice in his heart, while Lockhart spends a lot of energy courting his fans. But, once unmasked as a fraud, I thought dear old Gilderoy made a convincing match with a superficially unlikely TB baddie.  Find out who after the jump. 

Chamber of Secrets-Troubled Blood Linkages, Part 3: Floods, hearts and visits to the past.

Todays segment covers three chapters of Chamber of Secrets: "The Very Secret Diary" "Cornelius Fudge" and "Aragog" and Chapters 31-48 of Troubled Blood, which takes us to the end of Part 5, and from Strike's post-Christmas visit to Cornwall to Joan's funeral. My start-and stopping points are a bit arbitrary, but I like that the Harry Potter segment is bracketed by Moaning Myrtle, and the Strike segment by Aunt Joan. 

Chamber of Secrets-Troubled Blood Connections, Part 2: The cauldron runs dry.

One question I am regularly asked when I am documenting book-to-book connections is, "Can't you find connections between any two books if you look hard enough, especially when they are by the same author?" My answer, so far, has been a truthful, "I don't know," because I have never gone done this type of detailed, side-by-side analysis between two books for which I had not expected connections. 

However, I do now have at least preliminary evidence that I am capable of going through at least two sizable chunks of JKR/RG books without *automatically* seeing connecting elements.  It helps that TB, alone among the Strike books, starts in August and runs a full year, so the timeline roughly approximates that of a Hogwarts school year. It also, like many of the Harry Potter books, marks major holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Valentines Day, Easter). Thus, I was able to do the first comparison starting in the summer and finishing with Halloween, and I found quite a few parallels. 

Chamber of Secrets-Troubled Blood links, Part 1: Books of dark magic and mysterious, spooky messages.

Today is the sixth anniversary of the publication of Troubled Blood, so it seemed a good day to start the look at connections between Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Troubled Blood. It also seems as good a time as any to distinguish between the type of connections I am looking for in these re-reads. When we talk about parallels between Harry Potter and Strike, there are a few broad categories.

Philosopher's Stone-Lethal White connections, Part 6: The Trapdoor and the Dell

This is the last in my series of posts on Philosopher's Stone-Lethal White connections. I was pleasantly surprised with how many I found: enough to make me think this isn't completely a pointless exercise and to make me interested enough to continue on to Chamber of Secrets- Troubled Blood links. In the meantime, here's a quick look how the last part of PS ("Through the Trapdoor" and "The Man With Two Faces") compared to the end of LW (Chapter 61, the breakdown on the verge through the epilog. 

• 
  I had previously compared Aamir's attempt to attack Strike to Neville's attempt to attack Crabbe and Goyle, but it even more closely resembles Neville's failed attempt to fight the Trio in "Through the Trapdoor." Both rather inexpertly put up their fists in a boxer's pose. And, Hermione's expressed regret at putting the Body-bind Curse on Neville ("I'm really, really sorry about this") is like Strike's guilt at knocking Aamir over. ("If it makes you feel any better, I don't feel good about it.")

Philosopher's Stone-Lethal White links, Part 5: From athletics obsessions to hidden notes.

Interestingly, the connecting factors I see in this section (Harry Potter Chapters 11-14, "Quidditch" through :Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback"; Strike chapters 36-55, from the aftermath of Chiswell's murder to Robin's leaving Matthew) are many, but fairly non-specific.  Are they significant enough to count?  You be the judge. 

Philosopher's Stone-Lethal White Connections, Part 4: Rule-breaking, Catullus, asphodel and the ICU

The connections between Philosopher's Stone and Lethal White are becoming more and more tenuous as we move into the story proper: in which a bad-tempered government minister in charge of a major international sporting event gets murdered by the son that he had previously gotten out of prison. It is only natural that the many, many Goblet of Fire parallels start taking precedence.  Still, as I reviewed the part of the story between the Hogwarts/ Parliament arrival and what I consider the turning points of both books (the Great Troll Knock-out, Chiswell's murder), I saw a few points of connection.  

Philosopher's Stone-Lethal White connections, Part 3: The adventure begins with nightmares, open-sky ceilings and lots of corridors.

This section picks up with Chapter 6 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, "The Journey from Platform 9 3/4," and Chapter 12 in Lethal White. In the last installment of this series, I reviewed the similarities between Harry's trip to Diagon Alley and Strike's visit to Pratt's. What struck me in this section is how similar Harry's first view of Hogwarts is to Robin's first visit to the House of Commons.

It starts with a bit of domestic tension for both our protagonists. The Dursleys, of course, are furious that Harry is going to Hogwarts; Matthew is equally angry that Robin is going undercover in Parliament, considering it tantamount to treason. Both Harry and Robin wind up isolating themselves in their bedrooms as they prepare, Robin by practicing her disguise and reviewing Chiswell family trivia with Strike, and Harry by perusing his books. Both approach the big day with a combination of excitement and nerves. Robin has two panic attacks on her first day; Harry also gets a little panicky, first when he can't find Platform 9 3/4; second when he is thinking he would have to do magic for the Sorting. And, just as Robin awoke with a nightmare on her first day at Parliament, Harry awoke with a nightmare on his first night at Hogwarts. 

Philosopher's Stone-Lethal White connections, Part 2: Moving forward, looking back and why Sam Barclay is Hedwig.

One challenge in working through Harry Potter and the Philosopher's  (or Sorcerer's) Stone and Lethal White for start-of-ring connections is trying to figure out where to divide the book sections.  For the first post, it was logical to do the opening chapters, but that 1-to-1 obviously cannot continue, given how much longer LW is than PS. Just taking a guess, I'm going to next look through the part of the story that occurs after the time-jump, but before the major adventure (Hogwarts/Robin's undercover mission) begins. For Harry, this is Chapters 2-5: the zoo trip with the vanishing glass, the letters from no one, the Dursley's flight to the Hut-on-the Rock, Hagrid's rescue of Harry on his 11th birthday and the subsequent trip to Diagon Alley to prepare him for Hogwarts. For Strike and Robin, this is Chapters 1-11: beginning  with Strike's hiring of Barclay and going through Billy's arrival at the office, Robin's ending of her therapy and move to the new house, Strike's visit to the CORE meeting, Robin's housewarming party, Robin's return to the office and the unexpected calls from Billy and Chiswell, Strike's lunch with Chiswell in Pratt's, followed by his meeting with Robin, overnight with Lorelei and his delivery of listening devices to Chiswell's London House. 

A Return to Blogging with a New Test of the Double Wedding Band Model: Looking for connections between Philosopher's Stone and Lethal White.

 Greetings to my readers and other Strike/Potter fans! I am back from the longest blogging break I've taken in a while. I am happy to announce that I return with the new title of Granny to CJ, the, in my unashamedly biased opinion, the most perfect and beautiful granddaughter ever born. Since I have chosen to keep her full name private, and respect her parents' wishes not to display her face on social media, you'll simply have to take my word for it that she is absolutely and completely adorable. 

During my break, I've been mulling over what to blog about as we continue to wait for Sleep Tight, Evangeline. I finally drew inspiration from:

• first, the new series of Three Broomsticks podcasts I've been doing: looking at connections between the Strike books and the corresponding Potter books, so starting with Philosopher's Stone and Cuckoo's Calling and
• second, the Double Wedding Band model for the Strike series, which hypothesizes that tha last seven books of the series will form a ring structure, much as the first seven did, and as the seven Harry Potter books did. See here, here and here for more information. 

As I have noted before, one of the strongest arguments in favor of DWB is the fact that it predicted connections between THM and Order of the Phoenix, of which there were many. This gives me hope that the final three books of the Strike series will connect to the final three Potter books both alchemically and thematically.

But, what of the earlier books of the putative second ring? That's what I have decided to explore for the next few months.

Everybody raise a glass! Two new posts with insights into the past and future of the Cormoran Strike series.

 I'm spending lots of time with my butt planted on the Farting Sofa these days, trying to get both some work for my business and some needlepoint completed before the birth of my new granddaughter, now due in slightly over three weeks.  But I had to pop in for a couple of celebratory toasts. 

First, the latest installment of the Three Broomsticks Podcast has dropped, where I had the privilege of appearing alongside my good friends and fellow Strike Scholars Beatrice Groves and Nick Jeffrey to discuss character and thematic connections between The Cuckoo's Calling and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.  Even better, my trademark nickname for Matthew made it into the episode title. This is the first in a series of podcasts that will look at each of the Strike books and their connections to the corresponding volume in the Harry Potter series. 

Second, "Mr. Galbraith" tweeted the above picture today, with a notation that Robin has one in Sleep Tight, Evangeline.  The drink is called "Churchill's Courage" and is a speciality of the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz. What we do not know is if Robin has her drink at the start of STE, when she goes to meet Ryan for his birthday/potential proposal, or later in the book. JKR/RG tweeted some weeks ago that STE was 2/3's complete, and historically, tweets have come from the part of the book currently in progress.  It does seem like a pretty powerful drink to have in front of a known alcoholic who is struggling with his sobriety.  But then again, we can't deny that Robin needs one after the events of THM.