despite everything, it's still matt

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despite everything, it's still matt @elementnumber4612/1/2023, 1:41 PM

godspeed you! yuri warrior @citriccenobite

The Pnictogen Wing @pnictogen-wing12/1/2023, 6:14 AM

making ourselves read Orson Scott Card's introduction to Ender's Game. we need to get better at digesting that sort of...mindset.

Card says he stopped enjoying chess because of Bruce Catton's Civil War writings, and that's so bizarre to me. but I have never gotten along with people who take an excessive interest in war.

~Chara

#reading #Ender's Game #fuck Orson Scott Card

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy12/1/2023, 12:45 PM

I liked Ender's Game so much as a kid, but every time I try to re-read it as an adult, all I see is this toxic mix of self-pity and revenge fantasy. Ender is constantly being placed in situations where even though he doesn't want to hurt anyone, tragically circumstances give him no other choice than to be a badass who destroys all his enemies. "His enemies" are mostly children, until eventually it's the population of an entire planet.

And while the narrative does agree that the planet thing is Bad, Actually--it's mostly bad because of how sad it makes Ender. And how he never got a real choice to not be used for violence. There's, like, four lines about "dang, that's a lot of civilians" vs. pages and pages about Ender's mental breakdown from the terrible burden of killing civilians. The book ends when he rescues the last survivor from the planet he Alderaaned and she immediately forgives him and entrusts him to help her carry on her species.

(she was secretly communicating with him via a video game he was playing in between child murders, so she knows he has a Good Heart and that's what Really Matters)

The whole book is the violence equivalent of those sex pollen stories where everyone goes on about "oh no! we are compelled to act out the author's fetishes! certainly no one wanted this!" Sure, Ender couldn't have opted out of curb-stomping a six-year-old, but the author could have opted out of contriving the scenario that forced this choice.

(also, Ender totally could have opted out of curb-stomping that kid. he'd already won the fight and his Art Of War internal logic about "it is not enough to win, you must win completely" comes off as creepy self-justification even within the book. but I don't think this is intentional. the intention is always to force Ender into situations where he gets to be even more of a victim than the small child whose face he just smashed.)

I would like to believe the reason I liked this book as a kid was just the undeniably sweet as heck zero G laser tag scenes, but it was definitely also the "it's hard to be a Gifted Child" self-pity, so... well, I'm glad I see it now.

#Ender's Game #long post

@elementnumber46 shared with:

#what a terrible book lmao

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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

Aisling @DiscoDeerDiary12/1/2023, 1:01 PM

I picked up a copy of Ender's Game because my therapist suggested I read it after I had to explain what "get in the robot" means (she had not seen Evangelion). Never got around to reading it though.

Devin Singer @devinsinger12/1/2023, 1:34 PM

I do respect that he nailed the rise of internet pundits, although their actual intelligence is vastly overrated.

It is such an intensely homoerotic book, though, that as an adult the fight scenes all read like pure distilled Gay Panic.

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy12/1/2023, 1:41 PM

no, no, he had to fight Bonzo buck naked and soaped up, because of... because of the pollen

Gints Halcejs @Halceon12/1/2023, 1:45 PM

I prefer the Ender's Game that I remember to the one that is actually on the page, so I just refuse to re-read.

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy12/1/2023, 2:53 PM

The zero G laser tag really does hold up. If it was 300 pages of nothing but that - as it lives in our memories - it would have been perfect

@garak12/1/2023, 3:17 PM

Have you heard of the theory that Ender's Game is intentionally an apologia for Hitler? It's... borderline conspiracy theory, but has some textual justification.

If nothing else, it's on the nose that the main thrust of the book is trying to say that someone can be a good person while doing a genocide.

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy12/1/2023, 3:20 PM

I saw it as more of an apologia for the US (probably re:Vietnam but it works for almost every war we've participated in) - we must think of the emotional toll it took on Our Boys to have to shoot all those people!

Potato, pohtatoh really, Ender is an all-purpose cuddly genocider

Edit: oh, I guessed right, turns out he explicitly said it was about Korea and Vietnam. and my analysis was not uncharitable:

But our entry into the Korean and Vietnam wars reflect very well upon the American people. The motive was not imperialistic at all, but genuinely altruistic. We were willing to send our children off to war to protect, as we saw it -- as we were told to see it -- to protect the freedom of other nations. And like Ender, if we were lied to, we're still not responsible for the actions we took based on what we believed.

(from this interview via @Kortney)

@hexiv12/1/2023, 8:43 PM

I am trying so, so hard to resist the urge to engage in Ender's Game apologia at noon on a Friday, and, friends, I am failing.

I don't think it's only a revenge fantasy. I think, as a writer and as a reader, there is a certain appeal to "this character was forced into the worse thing possible through no fault of his own, and now has to feel ALL of the guilt." I think the fantasy aspect here is less about the violence and more about delivering this intense and unusual emotional experience to the reader. It's about the angst, I think.

Mind you, I haven't read it since I was like 8 and I don't think I could re-read it now. I can re-read JKR okay still, even though I feel pretty angry and betrayed by her, but OSC is on a whole nother level when it comes to bigotry.

@PhilippusAureolusTheophrastusBombastus12/2/2023, 10:29 AM

I was so excited in middle school when we finally got to read a Sci-fi book full of space battles for class...and then it turned out to be Enders Game and I absolutely hated it. For many of the same reasons you described above, but also

This book has the worst case of "this character is a genius, but his genius is limited to the intelligence of the author" I'd ever seen. Everyone in the book remarks that Ender is a genius (or is punished for failing to respect his genius). How is this intelligence demonstrated? By Orson Scott Card making everyone else in the world so stupid as to not notice obvious things, just so Ender can be the First to Invent the idea.

I don't understand how Ender's amazing discoveries that break the flash tag meta are anything other than the most obvious things to do in a zero gravity environment. So obvious you'd have to actually work to avoid doing them. (You mean to tell me that EVERY SINGLE PERSON playing Zero Gravity laser tag has been awkwardly maintaining the same definition of "down" as the artificial gravity in the corridor they came in from? How would you even do that if you were trying to?)

His successes in military strategy are the same way.

I resented being told over and over that I'm supposed to be in awe of this garden variety schoolhouse bully, sticky with angst. And expected to feel so sorry for him over how much pain he feels for wiping out an entire civilization
Almost as sorry as the story thought I should feel about his loneliness in the school where everyone was too jealous of his genius to understand him...ugh.

I could talk about the things that were upsetting about this book for hours.

/Rant

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy12/2/2023, 4:23 PM

This is a good point and also got me wondering:

How does "everyone hates Ender" fit together with "Ender is a natural leader?"

If this were a book about a kid organically growing from an outcast to a leader, that would be fine, but the whole reason he's taken to Battle School and given special treatment is because the government recognized his special talent in... being friendless and miserable? Super sulking powers?

like if he were a normal kid I'd be sympathetic, but you'd expect a six-year-old who is selected to be the mega-general of the ultra-war to not be a complete fixer-upper in the social skills department

@PhilippusAureolusTheophrastusBombastus12/2/2023, 5:59 PM

I wrote an essay about this! Or something close.

Ender only exists because the government believes so strongly in eugenics. His parents were supposed ethno-geanio-magically preditermined to make perfect genius children. But the first kid came out "too mean" (idk, he sounds kinda perfect for "child soldier to use to do genocide with") and Valentine came out a girl, so she obviously can't be hard or intelligent enough to be a military leader. So they had the parents try again.

The only thing the narrative uses this for is "another unfair reason that other kids don't like Ender that isn't his fault" and milks it for angst. But it's important! The only reason any of this is happening is because all the adults here believe in eugenics.

All the adults are talking about his genius potential. But we just have their word for it, and are actually shown is the opposite. Ender is obviously not good at this. He's reasonably booksmart and does well on exams, but is shown to be terrible at everything a general needs to do. Like dealing with people. Or logistics. Or making hard decisions with terrible costs in favor of the country's military interest and then moving on quickly the next hard decision. (Without handicapping themselves by brooding on their guilt endlessly.)

I was so ready for this to be a book about how the adults are wrong. About the eugenics, about the toughness-building power of constant emotional pain, etc. We must be watching these adults fail to create the perfect general--but they can't see it isn't working because they are fully invested into this scheme. So they psychologically break a group of children according to their values, but the kids aren't becoming military geniuses they're just breaking.

But no. We're in a story about how Eugenics is real, Ender is a perfect genius. The author is one of the fucked up adults in the book, except he's also in love with his perfect main character and intensely interested in his lonely misunderstood genius pain which is never his fault.

The reveal that they've actually been fighting and winning the war all among in their war games is exactly the same kind of cop out, based on exactly the same kind of misunderstandings. It's that way in the book so precious Ender can single handedly win the war while keeping his hands clean and also shed pure tears of guilt later.

But it's also in the story because the narrative has gone all in on a bunch of unfathomably terrible ideas. Generals don't need to know the context of their decisions to weigh the options. They just need to kill. The ideal ingredients for military genius are being from good stock, not imagining himself to have friends among his inferiors, trauma, and being a hairs breadth away from becoming a school shooter.

Seriously, fuck this.

(Oh jeez that's an even bigger rant. This is one of my pitbull topics. Whenever Enders Game comes up and my brain latches on and doesn't want to let go.)

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy12/2/2023, 6:55 PM

Sorry, this is definitely also a pitbull topic for me, but... good point, it should have been Peter! Because it turns out that he does in fact develop restraint and charisma as he grows up, and does become a leader, without even needing all the help Ender got.

(Admittedly this is mostly because Shadow of the Hegemon Peter bears no resemblance to Ender's Game Peter, but still.)

(...dang, ballsy move for an author to show a character torturing small animals, then to turn around and be like "yeah actually it's cool that this guy is President of Earth")

And yeah, I would love if this was presented as a hint that the scheming adults don't actually know what they're talking about and their plan isn't as scientifically perfected as they think

but let's be real, that's definitely not the intent here.