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.

I certainly wasn't surprised that Tris did not last long in Abnegation and that her mother was the one who helped her escape. I thought the attempt to memory-wipe her was well-done. I wonder if we will eventually find out that Andrew knows of Tris's divergence and deliberately let her keep her memory.  

Seeing the attempts by the Factionless to organize into their own, self-sustaining city-within-a-city is certainly interesting, as are Caleb's initial struggles in Erudite. It appears that Faction is, in its own way, as ruthless as Dauntless in its Initiation; throwing out one of their own for failure to answer one riddle?  Yikes. 

I also really like the fact that the original relationships are gradually being re-established, including Tris and Four's initial attraction and Christina and Tris's friendship. It was very interesting that, in the absence of Tris, Peter choose to target Christina with his butter knife plot, instead of Edward.  It's nice that we are still meeting Tris's initiate class from the original series, as well as the extended members of Dauntless like Zeke and Shauna. The closer look at Uriah and Zeke's mom and her apparent care for Four was particularly intriguing. The new characters are also interesting, especially the Mender and Mae. 

I’m interested to see what will happen when Tris encounters her father again.

Please comment, but remember that there should be no spoilers for The Sixth Faction Chapter 24 and beyond, please

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. 

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. 

Divergent as YA Wednesday Weekend Pick, The Harry Potter Academic Conference and Author Chat on The Running Grave

 I'm still hard at work on my cratylic names post, which is taking a while, given the number of names in The Running Grave, but I wanted to share a few bits of news that I am excited about. First, although The Running Grave and other Strike posts have understandably dominated here for the last few weeks, I never intended this blog to center exclusively on Strike, or Strike/Harry Potter connections. My first love is young adult literature and, while my scholarship into psychological themes in YA literature was triggered by Harry Potter, my interests spread well beyond that series. 

I was delighted to see on Facebook that Veronica Roth's Divergent was the featured weekend pick on Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday page. If you teach YA literature or, like me, simply enjoy reading it, this page is well worth following. For Divergent enthusiasts out there, here are some links to some of my earlier posts on that series, as well as to some talks and podcasts I have done on the topic. 

Two key posts on the Divergent Factions and their connections to Five Factor Personality theory. Part I and Part II. 

Those posts became my first Hogpro material ever cited in in a scientific conference paper.  That research was eventually published in a peer-reviewed journal.

I wrote about a few other Divergent-based topics, too:

The use of mirror neurons. 

The significance of the zip-lining adventure,

The movie screening with the Mary Baldwin psychology department. 

Why Allegiant might have worked better with epigenetic rather than genetic experimentation. 

Finally, for those interested in Divergent-Harry Potter connections, I will point you to:

My Mugglenet Academia appearance:  Tris Transfigured!

And 

My Chestnut Hill presentation on Tris Prior and Hermione Granger as twin personalities. 

Speaking of the Harry Potter Academic Conference, we are only a week away!  It is all online this year and, though I will miss seeing all my favorite Potter buddies in person, it is a great opportunity for anyone to attend, without the expense of travel. For $15, you can get two days of amazing Potter and Rowling scholarship. My own talk, which, I believe, will be the first-ever academic presentation on The Running Grave, is Friday morning. 

Finally, speaking of TRG, there will be a Facebook discussion with the author on Thursday, October 19th, at 7 PM BST, (2 PM EST, for those of us in the US).  I may well be on the road from Tennessee to Virginia then, but maybe I can time lunch at a fast food joint with Wifi and tune in then, 

That's it for now; back to the name game.