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
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.
