The Ending of Allegiant by Veronica Roth

Image of The Divergent series
Divergent

IMPORTANT: Please do not read this article if you have not finished reading Allegiant by Veronica Roth yet, as I will be openly discussing the ending, which will wreck the Divergent series for you if you have not yet finished reading it. I could spend all day telling you how much of an amazing book Allegiant is, and how much I think it is worth every second of the time it will take to read it, so please…  go finish the book and then come back.

Okay, now I’ve removed the possibility of wrecking the ending for people, I’ll go ahead and say it: I can’t believe she killed Tris! I mean, how many authors kill off their main characters? So maybe there are a few, but I think as readers, we sort of have the expectation that the main characters at least, will make it out of situations that most normal people could never survive. So when Tris died, everyone was shocked.

I would go as far as to say, that of all the books I’ve read, Allegiant upset me the most, closely followed by We Were Liars by E. Lockhart and Wolf Cry by Julia Golding (which I have to point out for those who are familiar with Julia Golding, that Wolf Cry is completely different from and way more serious than her Cat Royal books).

Anyhow, it was a big shock to the book world when Tris died. The amount of reaction that ending evoked in fans was pretty massive. It’s emotional. Veronica Roth certainly left her mark.

To start with, I was shocked and annoyed that Tris died. I think it was so well written, that it was almost like she was someone I knew, therefore in ways, I felt I’d lost a friend to death. For months, I thought, why did you do that? What a stupid choice.

Tris Divergent
Source: Divergent Wikia

A few months back, I read Veronica Roth’s blog post on the subject. She explains she didn’t feel that it was right for her to save Tris from death, even though as the writer, she could have done so. This was because, she felt that it was right for Tris as a character to die to the extent that the ending would not have been right otherwise. To her, that ending felt right. To be fair to her, it sounds as if she spent a considerable amount of time deliberating the subject.

What made me go from being annoyed about it, to actually agreeing with Veronica Roth on the subject and fully understanding why she’d done it, was an interview I listened to where Veronica Roth’s agent discussed the Allegiant ending. She said that perhaps the reason why there was so much anger and upset was because people were actually grieving for Tris, because she had meant so much to them. And I think she’s right.

Readers of Divergent have watched Tris grow from a girl who had to spend her life being selfless, to a girl who had to overcome her fears. We have seen her go through physical training and mental testing. We have seen her try to overcome her fears. We have seen her start to form a relationship with Four, which was not, like a lot of book relationships, based on appearance, but based on friendship, despite the fact that she was afraid of that relationship.

We have followed her through her efforts to save Abnegation from Erudite, her losing her parents and her risking her own life to save her city and Four. We have also seen her kill Will who was close to her and deal with how that affected her psychologically as well as how it affected her relationship with Christina, her best friend.

She has had conflicts with Four, gone on a suicide mission because she felt like dying, teamed up with her enemy to find out the truth about her city and then eventually found the truth. She has then escaped the city, and tried to understand the bigger picture of the wider world into which her city fitted, lost many friends and, ultimately, died trying to prevent the people who control her city, The Bureau of Genetic Welfare, from wiping the memories of everyone in the city. We have followed her through a lot. So, she means something to us. Which is why it’s emotional when she dies.

Four and Tris Divergents
Source: Fanpop

It’s not just that we’ve followed Tris through all this drama, it’s that Tris is not unlike us. She is a girl who was trying to work out who she was, overcome her fears and try to change the world in which she lived. Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do, even if it’s on a smaller scale? Therefore, I think when Veronica Roth kills Tris, it’s personal because she’s such a relatable girl.  To us as readers, she could have been anyone, anyone we could have known or even ourselves.

In addition, it drives home the reality of dystopia. Tris’s world was messed up, therefore making it better cost her her life. There is a lot wrong with the world we live in today and there are people who are selfless enough to devote their lives to the things that matter, just because those things are  important. A lot of these people could easily die and they know that, but they still do what they do anyway.

Tris died for what she believed in and she died because the world’s not perfect. Tris knew what she was doing and she made that choice. People forget this too much these days. They may pass comment on how heroic something was that someone did, but it’s not personal, so they can never fully understand it. However, when you kill off a book character that they’ve invested in to the extent that they love, it results in them sending the author hate mail.

What gets me mad about people sending Veronica Roth hate mail, is that anyone who’s read her blog will know that she’s written about her personal experiences and fears of having published a book. She’s put so much of that in to Tris, in to a girl that’s different, a girl that’s not quite like everyone else yet a girl who can overcome her fears, a girl who can see through the way her society is trying to corrupt her and fight for what is right.

I think, if people are honest with themselves, that’s why they like her. I can’t say I was surprised when I read Veronica Roth’s articles about her personal life, in fact, I remember wondering throughout Divergent if she had any involvement in disability or mental health, because those are the sorts of people I would definitely recommend the series to. I think it takes someone like Veronica Roth to write a book like this. Yet, it’s sad that the way her fans thank her, is to send her hate mail about an ending, which is the way it is, because that’s the way of the world! You can be upset, you can be annoyed, but don’t take it out on the author.

Insurgent
Source: Gawker Media

If you think about it, killing Tris empowers her. It shows a girl who was willing to die for what she believed in. It shows a girl who had the courage to do what was right no matter what. It shows a heroine. For these reasons, we should admire Tris even more, not hate Veronica Roth.

There’s talk of changing the ending for the films, which I think would be really sad, but know will probably happen. I genuinely think the films have made Divergent into something it’s not. Divergent was okay, I guess, but Insurgent was just a total wreck. They look like they’re going to go and do the same with Allegiant. The trailer suggests that they’re changing the storyline in which Tris gets killed, where the Bureau of Genetic Welfare are trying to reset the city by wiping everyone’s memories, into a storyline where they are instead trying to kill everyone in the city. I seriously think that cheapens such an intellectual storyline. Should someone die to save thousands of memories and to end a really ethically wrong experiment is an interesting question. You simplify that by saying should someone die to save thousands. I think it’s really sad that they’re making Divergent into something it’s not.

This was not the story Veronica Roth wrote, yet it’s being changed for the films. A lot of this, has to do with the hatred that fans expressed about Allegiant. The thing is, it’s the writer, not the fans, that writes the story. She has worked hard on it, created a character that we all love, and we should respect her for that.

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