I am not a fan of the Divergent trilogy. Not only is it essentially soft porn for teenagers, but the main character, Tris (short for Beatrice because she’s just soo edgy), has one of the worst mental health arcs I have ever read. Throughout the series (especially in book 2), she is a whiny, selfish moron who is intentionally trying to get herself killed, thus putting the people she claims to love in danger. That said, here’s how you don’t write a character with trauma.
One of my main pet peeves about inflicting emotional damage on characters and then having their entire plot arc revolve around it is that it’s often done for shock value. Usually, it seems that the author knows that his/her book is incredibly boring because the character is boring, and so feels the need to make a feeble attempt to highlight every slightly traumatic thing in that character’s life to make them have a mental health arc that’s incredibly vapid.
Tris is no different.
In the first book, her mental health is pretty much what you would expect from a cookie-cutter, YA, female protagonist. She’s shy and quirky (i.e. has overly sweaty palms and bites her lips way too much), but becomes more confident as she makes her way through the Dauntless initiation and starts a steamy relationship with an emotionally abusive edgy guy with tattoos (because that’s how you know he’s a bad boy.) Then her emotional health starts to decline as some dudes attack her and start groping her chest, mocking her for not being as curvy as the other girls, and it declines even more as she gets both of her parents killed at the end of the book.
While I thought her initial grieving scenes at the end of the first book was fine, especially given the context, apparently some idiots pressured Veronica Roth (the author who cursed us with this trilogy) to make the grieving process more intense, and thus, more realistic, so much so that at the back of the book, she had to apologize to those people for not doing that in the first place.
What actually ended up happening was Tris’ grieving process in book two (Insurgent) becomes so incredibly ham-fisted and over the top as she constantly tries to kill herself and experiences PTSD from holding a firearm. Her inability to get over herself and keep moving (especially in a world where fighting for your life is now essential), detracts so much from the story and from the character herself (an amazing feat since there was barely anything to her in the first place), that instead of feeling sorry for her, you end up rooting for the bad guys to put her out of her misery.
On top of that, the “coping mechanisms” that Tris then uses to try to get over her depression and PTSD seems more like its just there because Veronica Roth wanted to write some spicy scenes. Within the first few chapters of the book, we get to hear about Tris having a nightmare and then coping with it by going into Tobias’ room wearing nothing but her underwear and an oversized shirt, and making out with him for several paragraphs, then giving us a lecture about how she just can’t bring herself to do the deed if its just to cope.
She just so pure everybody, even in her trauma!
Finally, in book three, she has a somewhat okay ending to her mental health arc in that we no longer have to deal with it…because the story’s over and she’s dead doing something that was actually good.
While people will look to different things to try to numb their emotional wounds (in the forms of drugs, alcohol, sex, etc.), thus making Tris’ coping mechanisms somewhat realistic, the number of times that her trauma is mentioned to justify her behavior is astounding. If you are going to write about a character who has emotional damage from something that is traumatic, please do not have them use harmful coping mechanisms to try to get out of it, especially when you’re writing for an audience of teenagers. The only time where I would consider that to be okay is if the character isn’t actively promoting it and is trying to get out of it and the reader knows that what the character is doing is bad.
Additionally, don’t make such a huge deal out of the emotional damage a character is experiencing unless it actually adds to the story. If it is a story about someone fighting their inner demons, its okay. But in any other context, I would say that it takes away from your story. Don’t let your characters just sit around and mope about it for the entire book. Have them do something productive with it. If you’re writing a book about a world that’s constantly at war, there will be plenty of ways for characters to turn their emotions into something productive and interesting to read, which was an opportunity that Veronica Roth unfortunately missed.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 
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