How Long Would the Choosing Ceremony Take? - Divergent

Allegiant is being released next week in the UK, so in honour of the thinking girl's Twilight, that's broken the mold of every teen series since Harry Potter by not stretching its final book out into two movies, lets just see how long it would take each year for the Choosing Ceremony.

So, what is the Choosing Ceremony? Basically each 16 year old takes it in turns to walk up, cut their hand and let the blood drip into one of the five bowls on a table. I guess no-one's afraid of blood in this universe.

Honestly, I'd just prefer the sorting hat. This just seems needlessly
insane. I mean, I like the series and all, but still, needless stage fright.

In the books, it's said to take all day, because it's morning when they arrive and the sun is setting when they leave. Could this be possible?

Well, first you'd have to consider how long it'd take for one person to do it. In the movie, they never show how long it takes to get down the steps (because unless they have some mystical teleportation skill never shown, they can't go from near the middle to right at the front in the space of time of one meaningful glance), so lets assume it takes about 40 seconds, considering that some are sitting at the top, which would take longer, and some would spend the time having surprised looks like they haven't had a bunch of people before them do the exact same thing (Tris...).

After that is the actual sorting. This is actually shown in full, by multiple people in the movie. This takes a very short amount of time, about 12-15 seconds depending on hesitation, then about eight seconds of walking off and the stuff being replaced before the next is called.

So, all in all, each person takes about a minute to choose their faction.

The only faction which its shown the number of initiates is Dauntless, which has 34 (33 plus the one who immediately becomes factionless because he doesn't jump). If we assume every faction has equal numbers (despite the fact that means you advertise either having fun and excitement or spending your life studying to teenagers and expect them to equally choose), that means you have 170 people to go through every year (which raises questions about how they survive with a population that has only enough people to fill one year of a small high school born each year). There's also basically a minute of pure talking by the leaders, which is oddly short considering they're meant to be leaders (seriously, look at any ceremony. They will have ages of speaking by random officials, or at least it'll feel like it).

So that's just 171 minutes, or nearly 3 hours. If anything, the amount of time it's taken is far overestimated. Huh, I thought it'd be the opposite way around.

That's still 3 hours of watching people drip their blood into bowls. I'd bring a book. It's about to get very boring after the 20th.