Anyway! Enough self-pity

[yvannairie]

Here's a take that probably would have been controversial in like 2014 but Divergent is a good movie.

I don't know about the book? I honestly have very little interest in the book, but the movie speaks to me as a neurodivergent "twice exceptional" kid who always had a lot of expectations projected onto me and then either proceeded to meet those in a weird way or fail for reasons that seemed completely incomprehensible, the story of someone being able to overcome and separate from a society that can literally get inside your head, and doing so with the help of others who can do the same, as long as they're aware of that twice exceptional status, will always hold meaning to me.

Being Divergent as an allegory about being neurodivergent in a neurotypical society (and also genderfluid in a binarist, cis-centrist, heteronormative society) and being able to survive and prosper because you break convention is not something I expect anyone who wrote the movie off as being yet another YA story about a girl who thinks she's special to get, but then again, I don't care for the opinion of anyone who cannot parse specialness narratives as being about marginalisation in the first place.

The movie also has an amazing soundtrack, Shailene Woodley makes a good call of not bothering to act like a sixteen-year old but rather turns up the young adult in her performance... and Four's actor is hot.

Divergent is a good movie.

Comments

[autobotscoutriella]

Divergent is a good movie and I am VERY glad someone else shares my take on it, because I really enjoyed it for some of the same reasons you're talking about here. (I was baffled and annoyed when other people DIDN'T approach it as an allegory for being neurodivergent in a neurotypical society, because it was Very Much There for me.) I should probably watch it again, it's been too long.

(I also very much enjoyed the books, but it's been even longer for those, so I don't feel I can comment without a reread.)

[yvannairie]

I'm not super into statements like "[non-marginalised class]'s opinions don't matter" but I truly don't think any single allistic person's opinion on Divergent matters. It's in the name, it's in the text, and I'm pretty sure we even exist largely in the same portions as Divergents do in the books. Hell, the series turns out to have been about eugenics, if I remember correctly, and Tris and Four have their own trace of Socially Blunt Object that is very telling and recognisable to me.

[autobotscoutriella]

Yeah, I honestly couldn't understand why people DIDN'T see it--I mean, if anything, I thought it was sometimes hammering the point home a little TOO heavily. I'm going to have to do a re-read/re-watch for specifics, but I remember identifying pretty heavily with Tris and Four and appreciating the plot because of the parallels to neurodivergence. It's not really what I'd call subtle.

It doesn't hurt that it's a pretty good movie in general, too.

[yvannairie]

The metaphor falls apart really bad in movie 2 (which is the biggest reason I didn't bother watching/reading forward) and ends up squandering the set-up by turning more into a story about general territorialism and "human nature", but yeah, the first movie works so well I genuinely thought the coding was deliberate. What is there for neurotypicals to relate to, even??? |D

[autobotscoutriella]

I never watched the second movie--it's too bad that didn't hold up. (Though I've now requested the books from the library to see if the books do the same--I think they did. It doesn't seem like it would be a hard metaphor to keep going with, but...huh.)

I wonder if that's why it didn't do quite as well as some of the other YA-audience stuff coming out at the time--just too hard for neurotypicals to relate to :D Here comes the overwhelming urge to rewatch it!

[yvannairie]

Hell yeah, the reviews I watched it at the time were criticising the faction system for being nonsensical and arbitrary from a neurotypical standpoint but MY autistic ass was like "yep, that's just what social groups are like lol". Truly, a movie lost to the mainstream.

[autobotscoutriella]

I remember being BAFFLED by the people who thought the faction system was arbitrary. "This is exactly what high school looked like to me, are you saying that it didn't work that way...?" and then I found out I was autistic and suddenly a whole lot of things clicked. I wish the whole series had followed up with the metaphor, because I would read the shit out of an entire book series (beyond a trilogy) with a blatant neurodivergence metaphor.

[stardust_rifle]

Yeah, fair.

I haven't seen the movie and basically put the first book down the moment Tris started calling a suicide victim cowardly, so if she's less of a shithead in the movie, that's nice.

[yvannairie]

They shuffle the parts of that sequence around, so it shakes out that she calls him a coward to his face and never speaks of him after his death. The next time it comes up is movie 2.