It’s a bunch of years after the war. It has been exactly seventy-seven years since the war. It’s been two generations now, since the war. It’s like a mabrillion years after The War. Ohhh my Godddd, it’s so many years after the war.
Ever since the war, things have been different. After the War, everything changed. Nothing was the same after the war. The war changed everything.
Now, society’s bad. There was only one way for society to survive. Society’s real bad. Our society was bad after the War because of bad things. Remember all the things about your society right now? Just make ‘em worse, that’s our society. Nothing’s trees but everything’s brown leggings and government.
Today’s the day the thing happens. The one big thing that happens to you nowadays — only one Thing happens to you, and it happens to everyone. Today’s the day of the test. Today’s the day of the Sorting. Today’s the day we are Chosen. Today’s the day we go to the City and get selected. Today’s the Thing Day. Normally one thing happens, but this time a different thing will happen, because of how different we are, which is unusual. There’s only five things you can be, but I’m a different thing. Society just made everyone pick one thing, somehow. You have to wear the matching jumpsuits or else you’re the wrong thing.
You’re so different. You’re so strong. You’re so brave. You don’t know how brave you are, which is what makes you so brave. You’re not like all of the others. You’re different, the way that you are. Not like the way things normally are. Which is bad, because here in the future, everything’s the same except for you and your sensible ponytail.
We can’t trust anyone. No one can find out about this. There’s no one else we can trust. If they knew the truth, they’d kill us.
I told him I can’t trust anyone, and he said Okay but you can trust me so I did so now I guess I trust one person and it’s him. How can I be different? I’m not different. That’s what makes you the most different of all, he said. I don’t trust anyone either, he said, but let’s take our shirts off in this abandoned old building that probably used to be a warehouse and then trust each other.
You’re a threat to the system. You’re the problem. Don’t you see? The glitch is you. They never expected someone like you to come along. The game doesn’t work if you don’t play.
They’re always watching. They can see you right now. Their eyes are everywhere. You have to hide. You can’t let them find you. You have to hide in the last place they’d look. You have to hide where everyone expects but no one would think of; you have to hide in plain sight where everyone can see you but no one can recognize you. Your weaknesses are what make you strong, because of how different you are. From society, which is bad, and also the government, which is worse, but especially your friends, which you weren’t expecting.
You’re going to have to choose. You have to make a choice. The time will come when you have to pick a side. Whose side are you on? What do you stand for? What will your choice be? Your choice, when will you make it? You can’t hide forever. This is the future and you’re wearing a tunic and you’re making choices right now. Let’s stop being just one thing, let’s be all the things, and let’s do it together. Let’s get rid of these state-issued tattoos. Take off that wristband. Remove your government tracking device. Lose the virtual reality helmet. Let’s be clean slates. Let’s jump together. Keep jumping across those rooftops. Don’t stop jumping.
They’re looking for us. They’ll find us. We can’t hide forever. We’ve got to fight back. We have to fight back. We’ve got to stand up. We’ve got to take a stand together. They can’t fight us all. If you’re different, maybe we can all be different at the same time, together, here in the future, wearing our tunics.
“Are you ready?”
“Not really.”
“That’s how you know you’re ready.”
Tags: battle royale, brave new world, children of men, divergent, elysium, everything’s different and bad now, in time, squinting and lens flares and unisex leggings that’s what the future holds, the before time, the future, the giver, the hunger games, the road, ugh the future’s so bad now, uglies
Ah, YA fiction. My one true love.
Invitation To The Game also, although really Liss wasn’t special at all was the point. A+
That’s what made her… the most special of all.
Hahaha but she is for real an english major surrounded by notably cooler friends who are uniformly better than her. She manages to get hideously ill near the end.
HER SPECIALNESS IS TO WRITE IT DOWN, too.
In retrospect the mary-sue-est thing.
Ah, I just noticed you followed my request (directive?) and changed your username. I feel so powerful…or perhaps just the most special of all.
IntenseDebate’s habit of posting my deleted drafts is making me consider dystopian bodysuit options as well.
*dies a little inside* BUT THERE WAS NO WAR, JUST A RECESSION THAT NEVER STOPPED *clutches books, hisses like namesake*
“namesnake”
I have loved that book since I ordered it from one of those Scholastic mail-order catalogs at school!
God, those books enraged me. But if I had been 14, damn, I would have loved them.
you also forgot the “matched” tags and godDAMN what does it take for a book about someone who’s part of the system watching other people dismantle it?
Matched was SO IRRITATING IN EVERY WAY. Just so you know.
I cannot decide if Matched was supposed to be a Mormon critique of liberal, nanny-state societies or a covert critique of Mormon society (coming as it does from a writer smack dab in the middle of Utah). This inability to decide makes me feel dumb; it also makes it obvious I am not Special.
I read the first book in the trilogy, really liked it, barely finished the second, and only flipped through the last chapter of the third. GOD those were wretched.
I listened to the 1st with my son & niece while we commuted to work one summer, which is the only reason we finished it. We bonded over all the irritating things. At this point, NO ONE CARES what color Ky’s eyes are, okay? Quit talking about it!
Oh god, I picked up that book in a bookstore and was completely horrified by this blurb.
THAT IS INSANE – but probably accurate – which makes it even more insane.
Tunics and armbands and unisex leggings
Mutants and authoritarian neggings
Societal collapse and the fun that it brings
These are my hellish dystopian things!
This is genius.
(just realised the next bit)
When the fuel’s gone
Get my walk on
And I’m feeling sad
I simply remember that in a society fallen into despair I have been given talents that indicate I must rise from my lowly origins through a series of increasingly daunting and violent tests to save the people and lead them into a new hopeful dawn that may last a generation or two before the inevitable return to a crushing feudal oligarchy
And then I don’t feel *quite* so bad!
(look it’s not every day I get +119 on a post, let me just have this, dammit)
“From society, which is bad, and also the government, which is worse, but especially your friends, which you weren’t expecting.”
I’m dying over here – hilarity. Mallory, I don’t know what headspace you get into to write these, but it’s glorious.
Someone will die tragically along the way. Not you! You’re too special. No, it will be someone society didn’t recognize as special, but you did, and it is their tragic lost specialness that builds in you the courage to fight the power!
(To be clear, they weren’t quite as special as you, though. If they were, they wouldn’t have died.)
“This is the future and you’re wearing a tunic and you’re making choices right now.”
OMG dying right now.
You don’t want to be different. You wish you were undifferent like everyone else. He tells you the only reason he respects you or your decisions is because you are so scared to be different. You only want to fit in, but your differentness makes you stand out. Hide your shine, you different diamond, he tells you, hide it from everyone but me, but we’ll show everyone when the time is right, and we will probably destroy your emotional and mental state but it will be for the Greater Good, which is better than everything else right now because it’s bad.
yes but is there a cute blond boy who will make me bread
Did Hassan Jalaita’s story from the Times today immediately remind anyone else of Matt Damon in Elysium?
So, not that far off, I guess! (Though Elysium is more of an allegory for the present than a 1984-style warning about the future.)
Delivered with all the subtlety of a glow-in-the-dark grand piano.
I can’t say for sure, only having ever been who I am, but I’d guess that allegorical subtlety probably seems a little less important from the other side of the Border Wall.
You are *not* a teenage power fantasy of individual exploration of the self and your ensuing actualization… you are a super-powered woman. No one is like you, your parents don’t understand. You must fight, or at least wave your arms at the powers that be. Here’s where the black eyeliner and nail polish are located – I’ll be at the register when you’re ready to check out.
I’m not convinced there are enough Proper Nouns in this Society.
Is it wrong that, instead of coming away laughing critically at dystopian things, I am just inspired to be clean slates and jump together and be different together and also wear leggings?
I don’t know why the Divergent books bothered me so much more than the Hunger Games, but I get so mad when I think about how dumb they are. People don’t like having to feel one emotion upon pain of exile or death? Why, you don’t sayyyyyy. Weird how that didn’t work out.
Me too. It didn’t really bother me that Hunger Games was a mish-mash of existing stories about leggings and Thing Days, but I just could not get on board with the “There’s only five things you can be, but I’m a different thing” aspect of Divergent.
I knew I couldn’t trust this book the moment its protagonist was presented with a plate of cheese and her reaction was not “eat all the cheese”
Exactly. Also “Oh man, the last time I did that thing it was TERRIBLE, I guess I better GO DO THAT THING AGAIN REAL QUICK.”
Yeah, exactly. It’s just such a stupid concept to begin with that the “twist” was even more obvious – because what else could it be except government intervention? At least the Hunger Games had a modicum of cleverness in the way it directly addressed the how Katniss’ “specialness” was a threat to society, and how it was manipulated by both sides – in the Divergent series, Tris’s Divergence ends up being pretty much meaningless because of external manipulation. (I think – I got really bored 1/3 of the way through the last book and mostly skimmed to see how it ended. Also, caveat, I’m a Hunger Games apologist.)
Also Katniss is not really all that special – it’s clear she has some natural leadership qualities and a great deal of internal strength and is good with a bow, but literally NONE OF THAT is what makes her a figurehead for a revolution. It is literally the simple fact that she somewhat thoughtlessly performed what to her seemed like a small act of personal defiance in front of the entire country, which unbeknownst to her was already on the brink of revolution. She is only special because there are political machines making her so, and she just wants to go home (until there is no more home and she realizes she is being played by both sides and just says FUCK ALL THIS I DO WHAT I WANT). Which doesn’t make her or her actions meaningless (and oh how I love that we have a teenage female protagonist who is reserved and, you know, has PTSD, and is not very feminine but does not run around thinking about how she’s “not like those other silly girls” and such nonsense) but it does avoid a certain amount of the “chosen one” narrative.
DiBLERGent.
A substantive comment.
A friend of mine–the type of person who is ALWAYS right–recently complained that Divergent stole stuff from The Hunger Games. I haven’t read Divergent, but I said that you could also say that The Hunger Games stole stuff from Soylent Green and Logan’s Run and Uglies and and and. She just sort of stared at me without comment.
This needs a Cloud Atlas tag.
All the Wachowski movies, really
“…let’s take our shirts off in this abandoned old building that probably used to be a warehouse and then trust each other.” Yes, let’s.
Also The Island (2005), Gattaca?
“Long ago, the four nations lived in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.”
This is ALL I could think about during the intro.
But A: TLA is the best of everything including Special Chosen Boy tropes and weird societal sorting hats.
Oh, fo sho. A:TLA does everything best! It’s amazing and I love it. It’s just the title of this piece is “It’s a Bunch of Years After the War and Everything is Different.” I mean… the fruit. It is hanging low.
Some of the youth at our UU church like to end every sentence I say with “But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.” Then they laugh hysterically. I love them.
“weird societal sorting hats” YES
YA as a genre would collapse but for the OHMIGOD YOU’RE SO DIFFERENT AND YOU’RE CHOSEN trope.
This is missing a City of Ember tag too btw
UGLIES. We had to read that FUCKING BOOK my junior year of high school. Junior year! In an honors English class! I’ve never really gotten over the indignity of having to read that stupid book for school.
So many people like it! I couldn’t finish it. Scott Westerfeld has done better.
c.f. his Midnighters series, even though legit ALL the midnighters are convinced that they (and not their midnighter friends) are the most different and special.
I approve of most Dystopian novels, but Margaret Atwood really does them perfectly. They terrify me, constantly and forever, and I love her for it.
She gets in my head, man. Especially the MaddAddam trilogy, probably because nobody’s Special in those except the Crakers (and possibly Zeb), so it’s not so much escapist adventure as terrifying glimpse of an all-too-possible future.
yes — it’s hard to look at the names of new chain businesses without hearing Margaret Atwood in my head now, and the MaddAddam versions of them.
LOVE.
Nobody’s talking about The Tripods and that makes me sad. France! Abandoned trains! Ozymandias!
I was SUPER INTO The Tripods (but I think the classroom library only had the first? There were more, right?!) I still think about it occasionally. Abandoned cities!
Yes yes! First was The White Mountains, then The City of Gold and Lead (which I really want to talk about Eloise but I will not because you should read it) and The Pool of Fire
The Tripods were the GREATEST and I read them UMPTY TIMES. Although there was a dire shortage of girls doing stuff as I recall, being still back in the days when girls got Done To in most SF books instead (Eloooiiiiisssseeeee!).
The first thing I thought of. I’m old.
You are one of the Otherlings. Everyone else is a FittingIn. It is The Future, so there are New Terms for Everything.
Thank you. I needed that.
I was going to say something nasty, because my head feels bad. But, I am glad I didn’t, because this is really good.
Back in the '70s, people figured we'd already have those by The Year 2014 (though day-glo and psychedelic instead of copper-colored). Then Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan happened, so now it's khakis and crewcuts (even on our so-called rockstars–well, the crewcuts anyway) and no one knows how to stop without getting called GIRLY or GAY or something.
And there are two boys and you love them both and you can't decide because you're with one then the other in a kind of braving your feelings, as they plead with you to start thinking about yourself instead of everybody else…
This is perfect. You are perfect.
DIVERGENT SPOILER
you know that Tris dies in the end, right?
Just spit my coffee onto my keyboard, laughing so hard. OMG, thank you for the obvious truths!