[Just found a link to this, and since the movie just happened. I’ll post even though it’s years later.]

If Ender has to be a “paragon of goodness” in order to satisfy “good people can do evil”, then you are setting the bar out of reach, from a literary perspective.

I read Ender’s Game as a teen and loved it too, and wouldn’t dispute any of the power-fantasy things that go along with it. I just re-read it last month before seeing the movie (to get some visuals to go along with it, it was basically like a slideshow of a movie), and I still enjoyed it.

The issue at hand with his personality, IMO, is that the story is on rails. He is an an overriding scenario: All humans in jeopardy, a system is set up to deal with this, he is a cog in the machine.

If you have ever spent any time around people completely locked in an environment, like a military school (bootcamp or other training), where everyone is around all the same people all the time, some are vets and some are new, then there is a lot of truth to people not acting with a lot of depth, because they are playing a role.

They are the role of the enforcer, who will tell the new people they suck and they aren’t worth anything. This actually happens, and they have people who want to share in being on the top of that particular mound by agreeing with them and giving it more force and eyes to collect information about failures.

With any work, what the author intends is less important than what you take away from it, IMO. Card may have wanted to set up a perfect-boy-warrior who does the worst things, and is still likeable, but whether you take away more than that is up to your response to reading it. Art inspires emotions, regardless of it’s intent or pedigree.

For me, it gave an interesting and clear picture of many scenarios of control and violence, and let me respond to them in my own way. When I followed along with Ender’s path, then and now, I got to empathize with his situation of being in a low-power scenario, coming out on top through violence or manipulation, and living with the result. Clear cut scenarios allow for their own interpretations exactly because things are laid so open. Muddled scenarios may invite more nuanced inspection of the material, but it does not mean it produces a more nuanced introspection.

The book allowed me to watch with empathetic eyes as genocide was committed, and I think when I first read it at 13 all in one sitting on an airplane, I wasn’t ready for what happened at the end because I didn’t spend time thinking about it. Letting it sit that none are left, and then finally 1 is left (hope for rebirth), was an interesting perspective for me to be in. That they were so alien and enemy throughout, and then they turned into the vulnerable ones at the end allowed, or perhaps demanded, for a change in perspective as a reader.

So while you say you think Card meant it to be shallow, you can’t say that what people will take from it will be a shallow experience. I had no illusions coming away from this that genocide was something that could be justified or excused, and also with a strong feeling that things that are not like me, that I cannot understand, still deserve to exist, and I could get lots of interesting perspective from learning more about them.

I actually fit the expected fan criteria perfectly: I’m a 17 year old white girl. With that in mind, let me say that I found this book completely horrendus. My view on the story and writing style was probably affected by my finishing a well-writen drama before reading it, but I could barely finish this book. I know the point of this book is mushy romantic scenes for women to squeal over, but the delivery was bad enough that I skipped about 4 chapters total of pages. Bella makes the entire female sex look like morons who overlook things like stalking and hostility when the guy is hot enough. I had better ease relating to Hannibal Lecter than this Mary-Sue and the only reason I finished this book was because someone told me that Bella was gruesomely murdered by a vampire at the end. I really wish I had just read the synopsis on wikipedia instead of the book, because I all I want to do now is lie down and scrub every one of SMeyer’s purple prose sentences out of my brain.

Ender Will Save Us. wrote:

“Good people can do evil things and evil can do good”

See, this depends. Is Ender really a good person? I mean, he means well most of the time, but I wouldn’t really characterize him as the paragon of goodness. At the end of the day he is a calculating opportunist and when cornered he turns into a vicious little pittbull who is not afraid to beat a kid into a bloody pulp to make a general statement of “don’t fuck with Ender”. Granted, there is nothing wrong with that but it does not necessarily put you in the same bracket as Ghandi, Mother Theresa and etc…

Not to mention that even though Ender takes the full responsibility for the Xenocide, Card makes sure to let us know that Ender really was tricked into it, and he never meant it.

The way I understand the book is that Card set out to show how a ordinary, mostly good natured person could be pushed into committing a horrible act of genocide. But he cops out at the end and Ender is tricked to “accidentally the whole species” while thinking he is just participating in a training session. Which is sort of disappointing.

Ender’s brother is almost cartoonishly evil in the first book. Again, as I mentioned there is just not much to these characters – they are just pale shadows and rough sketches based on their chosen alignment. But if he got more stuff to do in the later books, that’s great.

Ender Will Save Us. wrote:

Twilight really does suck and Card is an award winning writer.

Absolutely. He has much better style, technique and flow. He is unquestionably much more talented than Mayers who writes like a high schooler. Ender’s Game is incomparably better than Twilight in every way imaginable.

My whole point was not to compare the quality of the books but rather their somewhat nasty subtexts. Twilight is deeply sexist and misogynistic – Ender’s game is a nerd revenge fantasy and genocide apologia – but a fairly well written one so there.

Overall the Ender series says this
“Good people can do evil things and evil can do good”
Ender, with his Xenocide (evil)
Peter, with his Hegemony (good)

p.s. Twilight really does suck and Card is an award winning writer.

[…] and sought after. You could say that this was probably caused by a bunch of very poorly written “wish fulfillment” novels that drove teenage girls crazy. But Twilight novels seem to be just the most recent manifestation […]

Luke Maciak wrote:

@ Victoria:
Hey, I guess you could add Aeryn Sun from Farscape to your list. She was pretty much Zoe protoplast chatacter.

Of course, and her too :) one of my fave episodes was the one where everyone went insane because of some stars radiation and she and John Crichton had a standoff :)

One of the reasons I always liked Conan saga (original and with some followers) that there were really tough female characters. Ahh, my first fantasy book :)

@ Victoria:

Hey, I guess you could add Aeryn Sun from Farscape to your list. She was pretty much Zoe protoplast chatacter.

@ Steve:

It won both Nebula and a Hugo actually. But award winning != beyond criticism.

@ Alphast:

I’m pretty sure I read the interview with Card in which he flat out said his intention was precisely to create a character who could commit genocide and still be likable and have reader’s support.

@ Chris Wellons:

Heh.. Leslie Nielsen pretty much just makes the same movie over and over and over again. So you don’t necessarily need to mature to get this effect. Just watching 2-3 of his movies in a row will do it. :P

Which movies got ruined for you?

Hard to remember since I’ve tried to forget them. :-P Any silly slapstick stuff, like Leslie Nielsen films. The Patriot. There are a few more, but I can’t remember them …

I haven’t read Ender’s Game in years, but I remember that I enjoyed it. Didn’t it win a Hugo?

Luke Maciak wrote:

Ah, Gor. I haven’t read any of these books but I heard of them. And what I heard of them was that they were pretty much “space opera meets fantasy meets porn”. I was expecting something worse. Then again I’m blissfully ignorant with regards to how bad the Gor novels really are.

Trust me on this: they were really bad :) At the time of reading I was suspecting the author to be a total loser who turned his misogynistic fantasies into books. When I got access to internet I went to check him out and found out he was a Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University, married and with kids. I stopped reading the books when one of them turned out to be real torture p*rn and I finally was more disgusted than angry.

Luke Maciak wrote:

Care to elaborate on how being a Xena fan makes you impervious to true love fantasies? I’m asking because I never really watched the show. I mean, yeah – I’ve seen few episodes here and there but I wasn’t regular viewer, or member of the fandom. Is it because Xena was a strong, assertive female role model, whereas Bella from twilight is a flaky damsel in distress who can’t ever tie her own shoes without Edwards’ assistance?

Basically, yes. I loved me some vampire flicks back in the day, with Anita Blake being the favorite (before it too went to the dogs became all orgies and stuff. When I read Sookie Stackhouse books after Anita’s, I found so-o many similarities but Sookie was much weaker than Anita in the beginning and it felt annoying. So, Bella, being not only incapable of fighting back but even walking straight without falling, would annoy me to no end. And telling me what to do is not the best way to make me do it :) So, while I find the idea of ‘true love’ sweet and romantic, any attempt to impose control like Edward’s would freak me out instantly.

As for Xena, I watched it several times (I was 16 :) ) and I think Xena was my one and only girl crush. I now understand that I wasn’t so in love with the show (mostly cheesy) as I was with idea of Xena. When I saw the show opening credits with that wild music and voiceover saying ‘mighty princess forged in the heat of battle’ I thought: ‘Finally, someone got it right’ :) I watched Buffy for the same reason. Suzan Ivanova from Babylon-5, Zoe from Firefly – you catch the drift :)

The funny thing is that I myself am not strong and fearless. So those women were who I wanted to be. And I hate it when something reminds me of my own weakness, so that would be another reason why I wouldn’t like Twilight.

As for adult women who love Twilight – some of the most successful and independent women are sometimes tired of fighting. I have a friend like that – she got everything on her own, two degrees – computer science and finance, job, looking after her incapacitated mother. And sometimes she says she is SO tired of it all that she would like someone to appear and solve all her problems. Maybe such a book (only better written) would secretly appeal to her.