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[thenerdish-writer]

The Selection: An Unholy Mishmash of The Bachelor and The Hunger Games (Part I)

The Selection trilogy is a popular YA trilogy, released as yet another cash grab by someone who seems to have barely skimmed The Hunger Games without much thought over what makes the series work so well. Its eye-catching covers and promises of a dramatic romance made it an instant hit, and yet its flaws are clearly visible from even a mile away.

Plot

Buried beneath the elaborate (and bad) descriptions of dresses and kisses, the main focus of the trilogy is America’s choice between Aspen and Maxon. Kiera Cass tried making this an important decision to make by showing that choosing Maxon would mean life as a princess, which comes with its hardships of being under constant scrutiny by the public and having to follow laws, while choosing Aspen would mean a life of poverty. But halfway through the first book, Aspen is conveniently drafted as a palace guard, which effectively makes either choice the same, considering the fact that America has literally no aspirations other than being a wife. At the end of the first book, America has a girlboss moment and says ‘I choose me’, which falls completely flat since she does absolutely nothing except linger around in the palace, jealous of other girls who are taking the Selection seriously and alternatively make out with Maxon or Aspen.

The trilogy is complex enough to have a subplot – there are rebels threatening the monarchy. Aside from the fact that it’s so unoriginal and overdone, it feels like an afterthought placed in only to make it seem more like The Hunger Games. The rebels are organized enough to raid the palace multiple times, and yet unable to do any real harm. There are absolutely no stakes, so the palace raids serve as nothing except for page fillers. The threat of the rebels is poorly resolved – America invites a leader of a faction of the rebels to a tea party and has her meet with an Italian princess who agrees to supply weapons to them. At the end of the story, this faction saves a lot of the characters when the palace is raided by another, more violent faction. However, this time, some damage has been done – both the king and the queen are killed, and some other minor characters that no one cared about in the first place as well.

World-building

The distinguishing element of the dystopia genre is that a flaw that currently exists in society is taken and exaggerated in order to fully criticize it. There is no such exploration of dystopian themes in the Selection trilogy. The caste system would serve as an excellent way of exploring themes like poverty and for criticizing capitalism, but since Kiera Cass seems to be unable to write anything that’s actually insightful, it becomes nothing more than a way of assigning personalities to characters. This is, of course, when suspension of disbelief is being employed, since the structure and origin of the caste system is barely given any thought. The end of the series itself shows how ridiculously easy it is to get rid of the caste system and the country faces no repercussions, which leads to the question of why the caste system was even enforced in the first place, or how it helped the country at all.  

The Selection series is set in the future, and yet the world itself is backwards in the most confusing ways possible. Cellphones and live television broadcasts exist, but computers don’t except for one hidden in the palace, that somehow still seems to work. History books are burned and all of the country’s real history seems to be forgotten except for glorified stories of the country’s founder. Again, this could be explored in more detail, but it’s dismissed as a subplot. There are some flaws in this element too; since the country is only 80 years old, people who lived during its foundation could have easily passed down stories of what happened to their descendants – that’s literally how most of human history was recorded. This could have been fixed by saying that children are taught propaganda at school, except that only the lowest castes go to school; everyone else is homeschooled, so parents and grandparents could easily pass on their beliefs and experiences to their children.

That’s it for Part I now! Part II will be out soon.

[thenerdish-writer]

Reverberations

Kirov surveyed his surroundings. A practiced sneer distorted his normally handsome features, twisting and menacing his visage to monstrous proportions. He exhaled heavily and raised himself from the weathered concrete slab he had been sitting on.

Kirov arched himself in one rapid movement and critically surveyed his latticed coverlet. It was stained with a dash of crimson on one edge. Nubile appendages rubbed the offending mark between his fingers to no avail. He violently shoved it off his imposing frame, the coverlet falling to the ground with all the tenderness of a mother lovingly stroking her son's cheek.

His eyes were once again drawn to his surroundings, rubble stretched around far and wide as his eyes could see. Eyes narrowed down into slit as they took in the crimson stains on the fine concrete. A sudden bone-aching weariness overtook him, leaving his hulking form limp as he was forced back on his posterior.

A gentle tremor reverberated across the ground. Suddenly a shrill scream erupted from the ground with his foot as if to stop it through his own force of will. He continued sitting there until he had regained enough stability to walk again. Under the dying embers of the sun, he turned his back on his childhood home and walked down the stone path to shelter. Alone.