Hogwarts Professor

I asked Dr. Louise Freeman, our resident Divergent authority, to share her predictions last week and she wrote me to say that what she’d already written would suffice. In bullet point form, her predictions were:

• Marcus redeemed and dead,
• Caleb probably just dead,
• Pit flooded and
• Tris leading a group of Dauntless back up the Hancock tower.

That’s about 50%, I’d say, depending on how you score Tris’ trip up the Tower. If you think that’s bad forecasting, (a) that’s very good for a HogwartsProfessor and (b) we specialize in exegesis, not tea leave reading. Read Prof Freeman’s brilliant A Dip in the OCEAN: Divergent Factions and the Big Five Personality Factors and A Dip in the OCEAN II: Double Dipping Dauntless: Can the neurotic be brave? for more along those lines!

In her alchemical predictions about the Rubedo elements to look for in Allegiant, Christine Wesley forecast so many details of the finale that I’m obliged to urge you to follow the link! No bullet point list could do it justice. I hope Christine will share her own scoring of her prediction in her hermetic follow-up to these predictions.

Her biggest hit, I think, was her writing that there would be a Marcus-Johanna alliance and her biggest miss was her Serum Theory of what caused the Chicago Experiment in Faction Living. I’m not sure I agree with the readers who wrote on the day of release that they wished Christine had written the ending because they were so disappointed in Allegiant and thought the Rubedo described here would have been more interesting, but I share their admiration for the alchemical alternative.

I didn’t make predictions except for a playful listing of possibilities of why there was a Five Faction World in the first place:

We are in the last months before Allegiant is published, which publication will reveal at last the secrets of the post-apocalypse Divergent psycho-drama theme park in Chicago.

Is it a mad scientist turned voyeur experiment for broadcasting a la The Truman Show? Are Tris and Tobias starring in another re-make of Special Service?

An Art Farm for human beings set up by aliens akin to King’s Under the Dome?

Or is this something like the Chicago ‘Projects,’ urban renewal and political correctness become self-perpetuating nightmare? Is Divergent something of a psychologist’s Cabrini Green?

I think that last one is close to a bulls eye strike and the first one came to mind a few times when we sat with those out at O’hare airport monitoring life in the Factions Project. Just sayin.’

Please share your thoughts in the comment boxes below, especially if you know of a Divergent expert who guessed, I mean, predicted a good deal of what we saw in Allegiant — without, that is, having procured a copy in advance…

I was disappointed that my favorite local book store didn’t have a copy of Allegiant on Tuesday afternoon when I biked over to Full Circle to pick up the finale on the day of publication. They called later in the day to say “the afternoon truck” had brought it to Oklahoma City.

I was delighted, consequently, to purchase it the next day after work — and to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening, well past my bed time, reading Veronica Roth’s surprising conclusion to her Divergent trilogy.

In keeping with our HogPro custom of throwing up (ahem) twenty or more threads after the arrival of a much anticipated novel, let the fun begin here with you comments about your delight and/or disappointment with Allegiant. Tell us how the concluding novel met or failed to meet your expectations, what you loved, what you hated, what you wished had happened, what happened that knocked you off your tuffet.

And, then, of course, please share your thoughts after the other 19 or so threads… Feel free to talk openly about the book’s plot points and twists; if you’re reading this, it’s upon you to have read the book first or to forgo complaints about “having been spoiled.”