The Liveblog of Impossible Things: Doctor Who, season eight, episodes 1-3

Oh my stars and round things, have I never made a Doctor Who post on this site before?  That is amazing.  Let's fix it really hard this week.

My abiding love of Doctor Who was once so strong that I watched The Impossible Astronaut (episode 6.01) and said aloud to my mother "If it were anyone else writing this show, I would be worried that the plot twist for this season was going to be terrible, but I know that Moffat has something great planned."  Doctor Who was as close to religious ritual as I got: new episodes were like holy days, brief periods of time in which we imagined what could be and what was and what we would do in the worst possible moments of our lives.  Rose becomes a god.  Martha laughs in the face of armageddon.  Donna shines brighter than anyone in the universe.  Jack lives.

My adoration of the show even let me look past the varied weak points of the fifth season and brush off (as rough edges to be soon fixed) the perennial flaws of Moffat's writing.  To this day, while I won't argue with anyone who says the Eleventh Doctor is a terrible person, I personally like to maintain that he was a great man and his actions were unfortunately misrepresented by inept writers who meddled with the truth.  (This applies triply to the 50th Anniversary episode.)

The show has since devolved into a case study in Special Smart White Guy Privilege about a man who travels the universe being rude to everyone and getting away with it because he's good at his job, also known as 'that plot you've seen a million times before', but now with more rayguns and women who literally tear apart the universe over their infatuation with Our Hero.

So while I downloaded Deep Breath (the first episode with the Twelfth Doctor) and watched it immediately when it was released, I then set about a strict regimen of completely forgetting about the show for the rest of the year.  I am told I didn't miss much, but it's the holidays and a friend has lent me the boxed set that she just got for Christmas, so let's just marathon the lot of them and get it over with, shall we?

Episode 8.01: Deep Breath

I'm skipping rewatching this one.  Summary: the Twelfth Doctor is rude in that way that's supposed to make white male heroes charming, his human companion Clara is a spunky young lass who puts up with his antics out of loyalty to his previous self, the Doctor definitely would/wouldn't voluntarily kill someone, and he has a new hidden nemesis who is a vaguely posh pretty thin middle-aged governess-type woman, also known as 'the only kind of female villain Moffat knows how to write', and the word 'knows' in there is generous.  Come with us on a journey of discovery to find out why the Doctor's new face has previously been seen on a patriarch in Pompeii and a government monster in modern London.

Final score: Creepy, striking, weird, pointlessly adoring of the cranky old white man, Vastra and Jenny's kiss didn't need an overlay of 'we must share oxygen' to justify it.

8.02: Into the Dalek

The episode opens with the crew of a not-X-Wing ship trying and failing to escape a Dalek mothership in space.  The surviving pilot awakens on the TARDIS, where the Doctor is Charmingly Rude to her about saving her life and how she can't kill him and claim his ship because "you'd starve to death trying to find the lightswitch".  I'm trying to imagine the Ninth Doctor acting like this around someone whose brother just died beside them, victim of Dalek cannons, and I take a moment to shake my fist at the uncaring gods who let Moffat do this to us.

He returns her to her warship, where they intend to kill him for security purposes but decide instead to zap him with a shrink ray and jam him inside a captured Dalek.

The new intro graphics look intentionally low-budget, like they're trying to find the most expensive way of simulating a papier-mache model dangling from a string in front of the camera.

We then cut to a dude pretending to be a drill sergeant but proving to actually be a gym teacher at the same school where Clara works.  He's also an ex-soldier, and tears up when a student asks if he's ever killed someone who wasn't a soldier.  He's running a cadet program at the school, which he insists includes a moral element beyond shooting people, which Clara summarises as "Ah, you shoot people and then cry about it afterwards", which puts me much more on Clara's side than his so far.  He is all awkward in ways that clearly are supposed to be adorable, but luckily for him they are in mutual boners for each other.

Clara gets whisked off to join the Doctor on his new journey, because the captured Dalek has declared its intention to destroy all Daleks, which has the Doctor thinking about saving it.  (He asks Clara if he's a good man, she says she doesn't know.  I'm not sure he's an anything man anymore, myself.)  He guesses that it's so damaged its hatred toggle flipped around in the wrong direction  The lot of them get shrunk down and injected through its eyestalk.  They're not actually that small; maybe five-ten millimetres tall?  I'm pretty sure this is all in the realm of normal slicey-slicey surgery, not even futuristic robot surgery.

The inside of the Dalek body turns out to be a 'perfect analog' of a living body, and therefore firing a grappling hook into the metal plating summons antibody drones.  The Doctor tells their unfortunate redshirt to eat a pill before the drones vaporise him, which lets him track the residue to some waste tube.  Trying again to imagine Nine's response to an about-to-die man being "Hey, chew this and you can still be useful to me" rather than any kind of apology or sorrow.  Who the fuck is this man?  (Also, what kind of internal sensors react hostilely to a tiny puncture in a metal plate but ignore complex radio communications beaming in and out of their robo-intestines?)

A radiation leak is killing the Dalek, but also caused it to reach a reversal of the normal conclusion: it saw a star born as concluded that 'resistance is futile', but not resistance to the Daleks, resistance to life, which keeps coming back and keeps fighting.  Ten seconds later, the Doctor seals the radiation leak and the Dalek immediately sets about slaughtering everyone on the ship in dramatic slow-motion.  Clara slaps the Doctor for being pleased that he was right that all Daleks are evil, but they have the dramatic realisation that good Daleks are possible and set about mucking with its robo-brain and its memory banks.

Sidenote as I watch the actiony climax: this episode is rubbish on any kind of mental health-relevant philosophy.  The Daleks "are" evil, but the Doctor points out that they have mental suppressor tech that quashes any hint of empathy, but then the mentally-damaged Dalek "is" good, and when fixed it proves that it always "was" evil.  It's not clear to me either that the Dalek ever "was" any of these things, given that we have no idea what it would be without its suppressor working.  (Why did no one think of breaking the suppressor to start with?  Why was anyone surprised that it would start murdering people as soon as the leak was repaired while its suppressor was still running?)  The conclusion appears to be that if someone has any kind of factor impairing their ability to be kind or polite or generous, this reflects on their innermost morality and nature.

The climax seems to lean pretty hard on this as well, when the Doctor mind-melds with the Dalek to show it the beauty of the universe and it instead latches onto his hatred of the Daleks and goes on a rampage to rescue the remaining redshirts.  So, even a Good Dalek is fundamentally evil and destructive after all.  The Doctor says this isn't victory, "victory would have been a good Dalek", and it responds "You are a good Dalek", referencing episode 5.06, 'Dalek', a vastly better episode that covered basically all the same plot and philosophical notions, on a lower budget, with a more family-friendly script and kinder Doctor.  Moffat fucking loves referencing old episodes in a way that he has not narratively earned.

The soldier girl from the beginning, Journey Blue, asks to leave with the Doctor, and he sadly lists all her good qualities before saying he wishes she hadn't been a soldier, and turns away.  Apparently forgetting that his own daughter Jenny was literally born a soldier, Dalek-style, and in the space of a day grew to be much more heroic.  (Clara should know this, Clara knows the Doctor's whole life, or maybe she doesn't, I don't even know anymore.)  The important part of course is supposed to be that the Doctor doesn't like soldiers and Clara's new boyfriend is a soldier, oh noes, what tension shall this create.

Final score: Doctor Who is always supposed to be accessible to children, no matter how grim it gets; who was this episode for?

8.03: Robot of Sherwood

Clara reveals that she's always wanted to meet Robin Hood and the Doctor informs her that he doesn't exist, so I just want to take a moment to note that the legends are very liked inspired by the locals who became guerrilla insurgents to resist the Norman invasion of England.  These people, the ones who left behind their families to live in the wilderness and fight the conquerors, were the first Wildmen, and I am their descendant, so fuck you very much, Mr I-Know-Everything, Robin Hood was my nth-great-grandfather.  Naturally, the TARDIS lands in Sherwood Forest and immediately gets an arrow in the door from Robin Hood, who is realistically scraggly for a man who lives in the woods but oddly well-bathed.  Robin Hood declares his intention to take the TARDIS, as "all property is theft", so apparently he got to that line about 650 years before Proudhon.

The Doctor fences with Robin Hood, but using a spoon, which is at once incredibly stupid and charmingly weird.  It's the type of thing I would let go without a blink from the Ninth or Eleventh Doctors; weird for Ten or Twelve.

There is also a Sheriff of Nottingham pillaging the locals villages, stealing daughters and shanking old dudes.  Straightforward enough.  We meet the Merry Men and the Doctor goes around stealing hair and blood and such to try to prove they're not real.  There is the traditional archery competition to capture Robin Hood and the Doctor steps in, also a master archer in addition to master fencer.  When did the Doctor suddenly start studying all the weapon arts?  They do the 'split the arrow' trick about five times total, so I guess this is supposed to be a funny episode?  I should not have taken this long to realise that.  The Sheriff's soldiers are revealed as robots, everyone gets captured, Robin Hood and the Doctor squabble in their cells, and Clara is identified as the ringleader and taken away to be interrogated.

This is the kind of episode that sets out to be all 'women are the truly competent people and very badass' and comes out 'men are infants and need women to mother them forever'.

Down in the dungeons, the slaves are seen running forges, and one of the robo-guards pours the metal into an enormous circuit-board-looking mould.  Uh... that's not how circuit boards work.

Clara has dinner with the Sheriff in traditional villain manner, where he demands to have the screwdriver explained to him.  Clara instead bluffs him into revealing what deal he made with robots from the sky.  They crashed, offered him power, and he now intends to conquer the world.  The Doctor and Robin somehow break free (no explanation how, after a long scene of them utterly failing) and find the hidden ship at the core of the castle.  The robot needed gold to fix their engines, but the Doctor declares they're too far gone and all he can do is blow up half of England.  Et cetera et cetera action scenes, banter.  There's a moment after the Doctor has helped the slaves free themselves by reflecting their laser back at them with gold plates, and the last girl to escape gives the Doctor a kiss on his cheek.  He looks startled, reflected, and I begin to hope that this Doctor is supposed to be seen as a cantankerous jackass who needs to remember that he loves people and they are the purpose for his whole journey, as opposed to self-aggrandisement.

When the world is saved with improbable archery, Robin (who is real after all, not a robot) and the Doctor have a last chat about people and legends and pretending to be a hero and inspiring others, it looks like a pretty good show for a moment, and then the TARDIS leaves and Marian appears behind it for her one line, "Robin!", so that Our Hero gets his Love Object Reward.

Final score: A roundabout, slapdash mess that destroys any shot Twelve has had so far at character consistency, but also less conceptually offensive than the first two episodes.  Terrible, yet charmingly so.  Quoth Rosa Diaz, "And the night gets even worse-better!"

Probably come back tomorrow for the next episodes!  Happy imminent New Year!

Ender's Game, chapter fifteen, in which the victims blame themselves

It's eight months to the day since I started this thing.  For those of you who have endured from day one: thankya kindly.  For those of you who dropped in along the way: welcome.  For those of you who have some sadomasochistic tendencies and are really excited to see me continue with either Ender's Shadow or Speaker for the Dead, leave your preferences in the comments below.  The Ender's Game movie (which was in development hell back in the late 1990s when I first read this book) opened Friday and everything I have seen, such as Ana Mardoll's film corner, suggests that it is terrible.  So I'll get you some commentary on that as well in due course.  You know; once I somehow obtain completely legal access to the film.  But first, the final chapter, which gets better as it goes along.

(Content: abuse apologetics, ableism, colonialism apologetics. Fun content: pirates, Phoenix Wright, aliens Jesus.)

Ender's Game: p. 305--324

Chapter Fifteen: Speaker for the Dead

The featureless plane of disembodied dialogue is gone; Graff and Anderson are hanging out at the lakeside.  We open with some gratuitous fat hatred because obviously--Graff is apparently slim again, stating that while the stress of the war caused him to gain weight, the stress of being court-martialled took it off again.  He explains that he was never worried that he wouldn't be acquitted:

"As much as anything, I think the videos saved me.  The prosecution edited them, but we showed the whole thing.  It was plain that Ender was not the provocateur.  After that, it was just a second-guessing game. [...] We got the judges to agree that the prosecution had to prove beyond doubt that Ender would have won the war without the training we gave him.  After that, it was simple."

OBJECTION!

It's like some kind of nightmarish reversal of presumption of innocence.  Graff has apparently been acquitted because no one can prove that murdering Stilson wasn't a completely essential module of Ender's curriculum.  Murder is presumed necessary unless proven optional (which I guess fits with the rest of the military philosophy we've seen so far).  I hope Ender wore a helmet in the courtroom.  You know, to protect him from all the kangaroos.

They also discuss how Ender is never coming back to Earth, despite Demosthenes pressuring the Hegemon.  Graff says Demosthenes has retired, and refuses to reveal Valentine's identity, which I guess is a not-terrible thing to do.  He does say that Demosthenes wasn't really the one who wanted Ender back on Earth--Locke did (while publicly arguing that Ender needed to stay away) and Demosthenes talked him out of it, what with the whole Invincible Warrior God-Child thing Ender would have had have going for him.  They're all going to rest instead.  Anderson's the new football commissioner.  Graff is the first Minister of Colonization, because clearly a life in military education makes him... an ideal policy-maker for the appropriate way to organise and disperse the human population?  ("The second rule of Colony Club is you do not talk about Colony Club.")  Mind you, Graff does have the mind of a colonist in the old meet-new-people-take-their-land-and-commit-war-crimes style.

"As soon as we get the reports back on the bugger colony worlds.  I mean, there they are, already fertile, with housing and industry in place, and all the buggers dead.  Very convenient.  We'll repeal the population limitation laws [...] and all those thirds and fourths and fifths will get on starships and head out for worlds known and unknown."

You know, I hadn't thought about it until last week's comment thread, but why aren't there queens on any of the formic colony worlds?  Why didn't Ender have to bust planet after planet to eradicate them all?  And why in the world would formic housing and industry be remotely suitable for human use?  Colonists are going to get to these worlds and find decaying, rusty cemetary-cities filled with the desiccated husks of millions of nightmares.  Honestly, who wants to sign up for that instead of, you know, base camp?  I want to hang out at base camp.  Forget hive cities.

Back in space--Ender's remained on Eros for a year.  He's been awarded the rank of admiral, because that's how the space navy works, obviously, and that gave him the authority to watch Graff's trial, so he knows everything now, knows how Stilson and Bonzo died, hears the case made against him by eeeeevil psychiatrists:

[He] listened as the psychologists and lawyers argued whether murder had been committed or the killing was in self-defense.  Ender had his own opinion, but no one asked him.  Throughout the trial, it was really Ender himself under attack.  The prosecution was too clever to charge him directly, but there were attempts to make him look sick, perverted, criminally insane.

Trying to court-martial a colonel by instead expounding roundabout ableist psychological slander against the colonel's prize student who is the favourite person of everyone on the entire planet does not sound like the actions of someone 'too clever'.  That sounds hilariously inept.  You court-martial Graff by asserting that he gambled humanity's survival on the belief that a miraculous military strategist would find a way to survive a fistfight to the death, and put it on Graff to somehow prove that it was necessary to do this, despite the thirty-six other genius commanders all performing so well without killing two classmates.  Then you move on to handling Ender by screaming "THERAPY, THERAPY FOR EVERYONE, IS ANYONE PAYING ATTENTION" and so forth.  Obviously.

All of Ender's friends go home, one by one, and he watches the videos of their triumphant returns, but then nothing more until the first colonists start to come to Eros, because apparently the secret headquarters of the International Fleet makes a much better docking hub than, say, the other non-secret place we know to exist that is called Inter-Stellar Launch.  My god.  Did they just cancel the military now that the formics are dead?  Is that how that works?

The one thing he could not bear was the worship of the colonists.  He learned to avoid the tunnels where they lived, because they would always recognize him--the world had memorized his face--and then they would scream and shout and embrace him and congratulate him and show him the children they had named after him and tell him how  he was so young it broke their hearts and they didn't blame him for any of his murders because it wasn't his fault he was just a child-- 

He hid from the as best he could.

Sounds about right, yeah.  Ender refuses to let himself off the hook for Stilson, for Bonzo, for the entire formic civilisation, and I suspect we're supposed to think he's being too hard on himself, but anything less would be even more terrifying, and so this rings true.  All too much of human history (and present) tells us how quickly we forgive murderers if they're on 'our side'.

And then one day, as Ender is helping with starship construction--he's decided he needs a new profession, also a good move--Valentine appears and asks him to go with her on the first wave of colony ships.  Two years from their perspective, fifty years to the rest of the universe.  Valentine implies that it's quite intentional that they would never see Peter again, and apologetically adds that she made sure Ender can't go back to Earth, because Peter is halfway to ruling the Hegemon's Council already.  The war on Earth a year earlier was ended by the culmination of Peter's plan, Locke and Demosthenes combining their forces like the Wonder Twins: Shape of--an insufferable snob!  Form of--a screaming racist mob!

"He decided to be a statesman?" 

"I think so.  But in his cynical moments, of which there are many, he pointed out to me that if he had allowed the League to fall apart completely, he'd have had to conquer the world piece by piece.  As long as the Hegemony existed, he could do it in one lump." 

Ender nodded.  "That's the Peter that I knew."

Yeah, Ender, that does sound like someone you'd feel superior too.  That rat bastard of a brother of yours who just goes and benefits from saving the world.  I have a wild guess that exactly zero of those still-breathing civilians would prefer to be dead as a statement on Peter's supposed moral vacuum.

"Funny, isn't it?  That Peter would save millions of lives." 

"While I killed billions." 

"I wasn't going to say that."

Well, what were you going to say, Valentine?  Because that's a really weird thing to just throw in there.  Peter has always been about power over people; wanting to have as many subjects as possible is exactly in-character for him.  Your conviction that he's made of murderousness is fanon.  But Valentine explains that Peter intended to use Ender as his last stepping-stone to planetary domination, so she threatened him with compilations of videos of him tormenting Ender as a child and pictures of slaughtered squirrels, "enough to prove in the eyes of the public that he was a psychotic killer".  Remember what I said before about this book being consistently sympathetic and positive about having and handling mental illness?  I take it back.  Mental illness is only a reason to be sympathetic to people we like; for the people we hate, it's an incurable condemnation and a weapon to be used against them.

Valentine further explains that in her final Demosthenes essay she announced that she was going to take the first colony ship out, and for some bizarre reason Graff announced that Mazer Rackham was going to be the pilot, which probably confused a hell of a lot of people who aren't very familiar with relativistic time dilation or who would like to know what qualifies a military tactician from eighty years ago to drive a modern civilian space ark, and that Ender would be the colonial governor--though Valentine quickly adds Ender has time to cancel the announcement if he doesn't want to, which is I guess the kind of agency that you get when it's your loving sister manipulating you instead of the military dictatorship.  Ender agrees, he says, because he wants to see the formic worlds and try to understand where they came from.

Just saying: not hard to empathise with a corpse.

The voyage passes uneventfully (hah, no, Card went back and wrote an entire interquel about it, which I made the mistake of reading) and years pass on the colony world as Ender learns to govern and sets up an economy and tries to study what remains of the formics.  There isn't a lot, because their species had a literal living social memory and so they never kept books or whatever--though I wonder if they didn't have, say, specialised drones whose job it was to maintain continuity of thought, or if they just had flawless/eidetic memory or what.  Regardless, Ender looks at their architecture: strong roofs hint that winters were hard, staked fences show that there are wild animal problems:

And from the slings that once were used to carry infants along with adults into the fields, he learned that even though the buggers were not much for individuality, they did care for their young.

So, the vast majority of the population are made up of female drones that can't reproduce anyway, and all young are derived from a tiny handful of queens, but they lack the specialised labour to maintain nurseries and instead prefer to have random drones haul larvae around while they're doing agricultural work?  I'm guessing this is a remnant of the original story where the aliens functioned in some completely different, vastly more humanoid way?

The colony stops caring much about what things are like back on Earth, although they hear that Peter finally becomes Hegemon.  Valentine, still writing under the Demosthenes name, writes history books, seven volumes of the human-formic wars.  She says she'll write one more, the life of Ender Wiggin, but Ender tries to talk her out of it.  When there's a year left before the next colony ship arrives, Ender goes to scout out a new place for a village, and takes an eleven-year-old kid named Abra with him as his, I don't know, caddy.  Three days away from their town, they find strange hills:

A deep depression in the middle, partially filled with water, was ringed by concave slopes that cantilevered dangerously over the water.  In one direction the hill gave away to two long ridges that made a V-shaped valley; in the other direction the hill rose to a piece of white rock, grinning like a skull with a tree growing out of its mouth. 

"It's like a giant died here," said Abra, "and the Earth grew up to cover his carcass."

It looks, in point of fact, exactly like Fairyland in the mind game.  There's an overgrown playground nearby, like the one where Ender fought the child-faced wolves.  The formics built it, fifty years earlier, during the war.  Ender tries to send Abra away; Abra warns Ender that it might be a trap; Ender says he doesn't care if they want revenge.  They keep flying (apparently they've been in a helicopter all this time?  Three days by helicopter seems like a hell of a long way between the only two human settlements on the planet) and find the cliff and the ledge and the tower at the End of the World.  Ender leaves Abra in the chopper and climbs the wall. The same room is there, with the mirror that showed Peter's face, though it's just a dull sheet of metal with a rough humanoid face scratched into it.  Behind that, a dormant, silk-wrapped pupal formic queen, and Ender instantly knows that she carries enough fertilised eggs to start a colony on her own.  She links to his mind, the philotic effect, and Ender realises why he had so many nightmares at Eros--as the formics traced his mind back through the ansible and tried to understand him.  She shows him her birth, the old queen preparing her, memories of the campaign as the human fleets destroyed the formics over and over.

She had not thought these words as she saw the humans coming to kill, but it was in words that Ender understood her: The humans did not forgive us, she thought.  We will surely die. [....]

We are like you; the thought pressed into his mind.  We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again.  We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams.  How were we to know?

Ender takes the cocoon and promises to find her a world to start again.  When he returns to the colony, he writes a book, a history of the formics from the memory of the queens.  They lament the tragedy of the wars, and it's really very beautiful aside from the terrifying undercurrent of pro-colonialist appropriation apologetics:

But still we welcome you as guestfriends.  come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us.

They did 'start it', as wars of annihilation go, but it's hard not to see this as the kind of thing that makes people think it's okay to co-opt the possessions of subjugated cultures, dressing up in warbonnets for Halloween and fracking for oil on sovereign First Nation land because, really, it's all our country now and all that killing happened a long time ago and it's not like those people are really around anymore, right?  And now we have the slaughtered people literally forgiving and welcoming their killers.

Ender signs this book as the Speaker for the Dead and it starts a tradition back on Earth, people who arrive at funerals and say "what the dead one would have said, but with full candor, hiding no faults and pretending no virtues", which just sounds like the most passive-aggressive eulogy in the history of I'm-just-being-honest-here.  The religion spreads; among the colonies, it's the only one that matters, because apparently Jesus' jurisdiction doesn't extend into space.

When Peter reads the book, he calls Ender by ansible, seventy-seven years old to Ender's twenty-three, asks Ender to write his biography as the Speaker, and pours out his life story.  (It's not told here, obviously, because it's a retcon in addition to being a huge spoiler, but since there is no way I'm wading through the entire Shadow series, I'll mention that at this point Peter is married to Petra and they have like a dozen kids.)  The Hive-Queen and the Hegemon become "holy writ", because in addition to being the greatest general of all time and a starshipwright and a governor and a judge, Ender is also a prophet and poet, I guess?

One day, Ender asks Valentine to leave, says they should skip across the galaxy at lightspeed and let centuries fall away.  Especially disturbing:

"We have to go.  I'm almost happy here." 

"So stay." 

"I've lived too long with pain.  I won't know who I am without it."

Gluuuuuuuuuurge.  Apparently no one else in the last decade has thought to suggest that Ender should get a therapist either.  But he does have a real goal, because he needs to find a world for the formic queen to hatch, so they travel, Andrew Wiggin the Speaker for the Dead and Valentine Wiggin "writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead".  And for once I don't know what happens next.

I will confess that I hated this chapter the first time I read it.  What a backhand, what a theft, to have everything that the heroes suffer for be taken away: it didn't have to happen, it was a tragedy that it happened, it would have been better if they had failed.  That is a bitter fucking pill to swallow, especially for a teenager who thought he was smarter than everyone else and wished he could make the bullies see just how much better he was than them.  (By 'he' I mean 'me', if that could be more obvious.)  In theory, it's what gives the book its weight and teaches kids the value of compassion and communication, and rescues the book from the last 300 pages of 'I have to torture him to make him stronger and save everyone' by explaining that it was all for nothing.

Except... well, the last-minute twist comes in the final ten pages and the "I did what I had to do" abuse and endangerment and murder got the whole book.  They say that François Truffaut once claimed it was impossible to make a true anti-war movie because any war movie by its nature glorifies war.  (I'm going to crack again and just link to TVtropes' "Do Not Do This Cool Thing"--they may be stamp collectors, but that's a hell of a collection.)  The pro-empathy, anti-abuse, anti-violence message at the end of this book is about as compelling and hilarious as an abstinence message would be at the end of Fifty Shades of Grey.  (Worse, actually--Fifty Shades does make sex look terrifying.)  And while we might be told the war wasn't worth it, nothing has yet tarnished Ender's flawless goodness in the eyes of the narrative, despite that time he murdered a boy on the playground because they shoved him, and everything he's done since then.

After this comes Speaker for the Dead, the story that Card actually wanted to tell, for which he turned Ender's Game from a short into a novel-length backstory.  In theory, that whole book is the response to this one, and I'm curious enough to keep reading it, though I'll have to track down a copy first--I think my mother still owns one.  (I'm sure as hell not giving Card any more money.)  And there is also Ender's Shadow, which tells Bean's story during these same few years, from childhood to the destruction of the formics, which I do own.  Bean is a better person than Ender in most ways, and I think I might actually enjoy that one, which makes me want to leave it until I've endured Speaker.  Not sure.  Thoughts from the audience?

As a terrifying epilogue, next week I'll go back and look at the introduction to Ender's Game.  It might seem weird to leave it for now, and I've wanted to make reference to it in just about every post since I started, but I've left it this long intentionally.  After all, everyone in the introduction has already read the book--that's why I wanted to do so as well, and that's why it scares the hell out of me.  So that'll be fun.

Ender's Game, chapter eleven, in which we get down to the WINNING

This chapter mostly consists of Ender winning at everything.  To my shock, the first half is probably my favourite part of the entire book.  Honestly didn't see that coming.

(Content: bullying, fat shame.  Fun content: this chapter is actually mostly not awful.)

Ender's Game: p. 173--199

Chapter Eleven: Veni Vidi Vici

Ender has had Dragon Army for three and a half weeks and Major Anderson has delivered the schedule of battles to Graff, to begin immediately--from Graff's reaction, we may conclude that it is rickdiculous.  Anderson and Graff discuss the reliability of the computer projections, with Graff protesting that the computer is famously merciless:

"I just have this picture of Ender a year from now.  Completely useless, worn out, because he was pushed farther than he or any living person could go." 

"We told the computer that our highest priority was having the subject remain useful after the training program." [....] 

"My eagerness to sacrifice little children in order to save mankind is wearing thin."

This shocking turn for the not-supervillain in Graff is inspired by the work of Peter and Valentine, more specifically Demosthenes, as the nets are now filled with people speculating on how the first post-alien job for the Fleet should be to dismantle the Russian empire.  Graff considers this to be a stupid nationalistic rivalry that brings into question whether humanity deserves preservation.  Huge irony, given that the human-Formic war is ultimately a nationalistic rivalry brought about by failure to communicate; I'm going to be nice and assume Card means for it to retroactively appear that way.

Ender lies in his bunk at night, mulling his army--apparently he never sleeps more than five hours a night now, and so has plenty of time to think.  His ten outcast veterans have, in three weeks, transformed into capable leaders, so he's broken his 40 soldiers into five toons of 8, which can then split into half-toons of 4 under the the leader and secondary, which does sound interesting, although the narrative must belabour for us how most armies only practice huge mass formations with "preformed strategies":

Ender had none.  Instead he trained his toon leaders to us their small units effectively in achieving limited goals.  Unsupported, alone, on their own initiative. [....] He knew, with less than a month of training, that his army had the potential of being to best fighting group ever to play the game.

 (Ender's Classmates Are Legitimately As Smart As Him tally: 3)

Ignoring the fact that three weeks with Ender apparently turns a green seven-year-old into a devastating war machine, this is actually one of the parts I rather like, and we have been setting up for it.  Most of Ender's genius through this section of the book applies outside the battleroom: instead of constantly directing soldiers to move as he wills, he focuses heavily on training subcommanders, figures out a general shape of approach on the enemy, and then unleashes them and trusts them to do well.  There still won't be much discussion of coordination and communication during battle, but it's at least hinted at.

Ender wonders whether his army was secretly stacked in his favour with hidden potential, "or was this what any similar group could become under a commander who knew what he wanted his army to do, and knew how to teach them to do it?"  Ender's Shadow spoiler: it's the first one.  I'm a bit curious now what would happen if Ender had to work with seriously unhelpful and unsuitable soldiers.

Anyway, in the middle of the night he gets the notification that he's fighting Rabbit Army in the morning, and at 0601 next morning he's at the Dragon barracks to tell them it's time to run through the halls naked.  [Drink!]  Anyone who doesn't already sleep naked strips down, tucks their flash suit under their arm, and they jog down to the gym to warm up, obstacle course and trampoline and such.  The excitement of the incoming battle gets so high that some of them start wrestling.  Still naked.  Just sayin'.

They dress and jog to the battleroom, and along the way Ender occasionally jumps to touch the ceiling and everyone in line behind him touches the same point, and I actually kind of love this bit.  Forgetting where I am for a moment, this whole sequence evokes the atmosphere for me well--it has the energy that I love about waking up early in the morning, well-rested with the day full of potential and something big to anticipate.  The camaraderie even comes through, now that Ender has stopped with the regulation shouting.  Even the battleroom is grey-lit like the midpart of dawn.  I dunno if this bit works as well if you're not a morning person.

Ender sizes up the grid of stars in the battleroom, gives some basic directions and contingencies, and they deploy, while Rabbit Army creates their formation at the far end.  Ender reflects on how in any previous army he'd be worrying about his own place in the formation at a time like this, and I wonder why three years of following the stolid old tactics haven't damaged his genius, if we're supposed to think that actually reading about existing military theory somehow would.

The battle lasts for about a page, three minutes, and mostly consists of Ender's forces feeling bad that Rabbit Army doesn't realise how completely out-of-date formation warfare is.  We briefly meet Crazy Tom, leader of C toon, and Han Tzu/"Hot Soup", D leader. They carve up flawlessly, losing only one Dragon, even better than Ender expected.  Obviously.

Carn Carby is mild about his defeat, having only been promoted at age 12 instead of them cocky 11-year-old whippersnappers.  Ender makes a mental note to have similar dignity when he is defeated someday, a remarkable flash of humility--I said this was a weirdly good chapter.  Ender skips breakfast because food is for losers (it's not all good) and showers twice while thinking about how awesome he is.  At practice, he's back to being a hardass, but still no shouting: he just observes that their aim is still wretched and sets them to groups, and the narrative points out that one-on-one Ender is infinitely patient and constructive, drifting around dispensing advice, presumably sitting on a lotus blossom and radiating sunlight.

At lunch, he arrives at the commanders' mess, and of course on the scoreboard Dragon is top in everything, since it ranks by unweighted percentages: zero defeats, few casualties, shortest victory.  Everyone forcibly ignores Ender until Dink Meeker arrives halfway through lunch.  Sadly, the Dinktron 4X Victory And Friendship Unit continues to be a pale shadow of the original.  Ender insists that his victory was not a fluke or easy:

"Carn Carby isn't exactly on the bottom of the rankings."  It was true.  Carby was just about in the middle. 

"He's okay," Dink said, "considering that he only just started.  Shows some promise.  You don't show promise.  You show threat." 

"Threat to what?  Do they feed you less if I win?  I thought you told me this was all a stupid game and none of it mattered." 

Dink didn't like having his words thrown back at him, not under these circumstances.  "You were the one who got me playing along with them.  But I'm not playing games with you, Ender.  You won't beat me."

So much for characterisation.  Dink moves on and Ender scans the other commanders, including Petra and Bonzo.  Math interlude: commanders normally get promoted at 11 or 12, and students normally graduate at 13.  Bonzo was a commander, and not brand-new, when Ender was less than 7.  Bonzo can't be younger than 14 now, plausibly 15.  Graff is keeping him in the school for years extra for the sole purpose of being Ender's nemesis, even though they haven't apparently interacted since Ender was 8.  Graff might have sympathy for Ender still, but he's quite literally plotting Bonzo's death.

Carn Carby, at least, is a cheerful guy:

"Right now I'm in disgrace," he said frankly.  "They won't believe me when I tell them you did things that nobody's ever seen before.  So I hope you beat the snot out of the next army you fight.  As a favour to me."

He goes on about how commanders normally get a cheer when they first arrive, because they only join the commanders' mess after their first win and have several losses, but Ender obviously deserves a cheer and instead he's getting frozen out.  Ender "mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings", because apparently the only way Commander Empathy grants you personhood is if you're kind of obsequiously nice to him personally.  Idea, Ender: maybe Petra's just wondering why the hell you didn't share your god mode strategies with her at some point over the last two years when you were her second-in-command.

Next morning, they're immediately sent up against Petra and Phoenix Army, and the Dragons are upset about the late notice and getting battles two days in a row, not believing it until A toon leader Fly Molo reads the order himself.  There's more banter and Ender and Bean snark at each other a little, in case we thought they had become friends off-page.

Phoenix Army takes out 12 Dragons before they're down, and Petra is predictably furious, but Ender figures that once he steamrolls a few more armies she'll realise she hit Dragon harder than anyone will again.  A week later, he's right--they've fought a battle every day, won all, and none have done better than Phoenix.  Ender freely tells anyone who asks how he won his latest battle, because he's done with humility and he's "confident that few of them would know how to train their soldiers and their toon leaders to duplicate what his could do".  Ender, your secret shouty training methods are basically stolen directly from TVtropes.  Tone down the ego.

There were many, too, who hated him.  Hated him for being young, for being excellent, for having made their victories look paltry and weak.

Possibly also for being insufferably smug about it?  Despite Ender's conviction that people are only people if he says so, other meatbags do have feelings and brains, and Ender strikes me as the type who thinks he's far more poker-faced and enigmatic than he really is.  The sort to think that no one around him can tell how much contempt he feels for them.  He starts getting bullied again in traditional grade school manner, shunned in the lunchroom and shoved around in the halls and pelted with spitballs.

Ender despised them--but secretly, so secretly that he didn't even know it himself, he feared them.  It was just such little torments that Peter had always used, and Ender was beginning to feel far too much at home.

I'm not buying this.  Peter is a Machiavellian egotist, a manipulator and a psychological abuser.  When would he ever have thought spitballs weren't beneath him?  Jostling people in the hall?  This is just more of the Peter-is-bad-therefore-everything-bad-is-Peter illogic.  I notice that it consistently pops up in the times when Ender is most obviously supposed to be the reader-insert for Underappreciated Smart Children.  Need to think about whether there's a clearer link there beyond simple projection of all Ender's issues onto his Evil Brother.

Ender's techniques have begun to suffuse the school again, kneeling attacks (didn't that one already become standard years ago?) and sliding along the walls to prevent flanking.  Since Ender has nothing to learn from other people (Alai is still kept away by narrative fiat) he starts spending more time in the video room, watching films of Mazer Rackham and the battles of the previous two alien wars.  He has to skip a lot of propaganda:

But Ender began to see how well the buggers used seemingly random flight paths to create confusion, how they used decoys and false retreats to draw the I.F. ships into traps. [....] He began to see things that the official commentators never mentioned.  They were always trying to arouse pride in human accomplishments and loathing of the buggers, but Ender began to wonder how humanity had won at all.

You and me and all our readers, Ender.  He tries to learn strategy from watching the aliens instead, though their overall strategy is straightforward and he sees no sign of individual ingenuity, which he blames on strict discipline.  Mazer Rackham's actual victory is also blatantly censored, with videos that show the huge alien fleet victorious over the human defences, Mazer's tiny strike force darting in, firing the first shot, and then cutting away.  This is pretty good foreshadowing on Card's part, but given the tremendous secrets involved, I am baffled as to why they'd even show that much.  Alternatively, it's at least the 2100s by now if not 2200s; they can't CGI something together for a fake battle?  After all his forethought about the internet, Card seems to have missed the potential of Photoshop.  Narratively, instead of being a big question mark, it would be an opportunity for Ender to be deeply unimpressed by the apparent ultimate final battle, and become convinced that it was fake because it looked so amateur.

Graff calls Ender into his office, where there is some notice about how super-fat the Colonel has become because god only knows; evil makes you fat or vice-versa.  It's a rather boring conversation and Ender gives terse answers to everything: how is he, how are his soldiers, why is he watching invasion vids, why doesn't he play the mind game anymore.  Ender bitterly laughs off the idea that they want him to be happy and assures them that they are succeeding at turning him into the greatest soldier ever, and asks to be given a real challenge.  They hand him the order to fight Salamander Army in ten minutes.  Dragon is still in the showers from their morning battle and practice, and again unwilling to believe it:

"Same day nobody ever do two battles!" said Crazy Tom. 

Ender answered in the same tone.  "Nobody ever beat Dragon Army, either.  This be your big chance to lose?"

I feel we're missing some fingersnaps in here, maybe a 'gnarly'.

When they arrive, the gate has been open for at least five minutes and Salamander is nowhere to be seen.  The room is bright and cavernously empty, and Ender immediately figures out that Salamander has deployed around the Dragon gate, ready to open fire as soon as they come through.  He has Crazy Tom kneel and freezes him, then has Bean kneel on Tom's legs, stick his arms under Tom's, and the result is that Bean is dual-wielding lasers inside a human armorsuit.  They set up a bunch of these, have other soldiers toss them through (facing the gate) and immediately start firing.  It takes less than a minute for the Dragons to wipe Salamander out.

Ender is furious with Anderson and has Bean describe how he'd have fought Dragon (constantly shifting movement around the door), apparently not caring that adding "As long as you're cheating [...] why don't you train the other army to cheat intelligently" will enrage Bonzo even more.  Seriously: this battle, these circumstances, it could not be more obvious that Graff meant to re-ignite their rivalry.  He is trying to get Bonzo killed.

Ender texts Bean to see him that night, ten minutes before lights out.  Bean thinks like a normal soldier, exhausted, average, which will look very weird when this scene comes back in Shadow.  Ender queries him about his performance, whether he should have been made a toon leader after all, and Bean thinks he's being baited.  Ender presses Bean to remember what the school is actually for, and Bean bursts out that it's about the war, and Ender agrees that this is why they're trying to hard to see if the students can break.

"They can't break you." 

"You'd be surprised."  Ender breathed sharply, suddenly, [...] Bean looked at him and realized that the impossible was happening.  Far from baiting him, Ender Wiggin was actually confiding in him.

Ender explains: Bean is research and development, toon leader of a special squad that's not so much Special Ops as Ridiculous Ops, because Ender realises he can't be the only source of genius in the army.

"What's the worst that could happen?  You lose one game." 

"Yes.  That's the worst that could happen.  I can't lose any games.  Because if I lose any---"

He doesn't explain, and I really wish he did.  (Bean wonders in Shadow, of course, particularly if this is just about Ender the Legendary Soldier.)  Earlier in this chapter, Ender looked at Carn Carby and tried to remember how to be dignified in defeat.  Now he's convinced that defeat means the end of all hope.  What has changed?  It's got to have something to do with the incoming war, the vids, everything.  Bonzo and Dinktron 4X are upset because of the game, while Ender trusts Bean because he remembers the alien menace, but Ender still can't afford to lose at laser tag.  The best I can slap together is the idea that Ender knows he has the potential to win everything, so if he ever loses, that means he has stopped trying as hard as he could, and he can't stop doing that because there is a war that he has to win.  That makes a certain amount of motivational sense if we assume both that Ender is right that he has the potential to beat every other commander under every possible circumstances, and that the battleroom still should be his priority while he learns more about aliens and actual space combat.  If he's wrong about either of those things, then losing a single match either means that someone else has skill comparable to his, or that he has intelligently put his efforts into fighting what he believes to be a war of survival instead of varsity laser tag.  I think these assumptions could probably use some contestation.

The lights go out; Ender gets into bed and Bean climbs in with him and for a change it doesn't brim with queer romance.  See, I don't read everything as gay.

Next week: Graff successfully reinstates gladiatorial arenas IN SPACE.

Ender's Game, chapter eight, part two, in which things are very briefly not awful

(Content: bullying, violence. Fun content: Canadian linguistic metanyms, Dink Meeker.)

Forging ahead from where we left off last time, when we and Ender and Card were just hangin' out after practice, watching Dink Meeker float naked for like ten minutes.

Ender's Game: p. 107--119

Once Dink gets dressed again, he explains to Ender what the deal is, because Ender is a nosy twit with no respect for his friend/commander/rescuer's* privacy.  Dink breaks the awkward by joking that Ender now knows why Dink's not a commander, despite being promoted twice:

"The second time they took away my old locker and bunk and desk, assigned me to a commander's cabin, and gave me an army.  But I just stayed in the cabin until they gave in and put me back into somebody else's army. [....] These other armies, they aren't the enemy.  It's the teachers, they're the enemy.  They get us to fight each other, to hate each other.  The game is everything.  Win win win.  It amounts to nothing.  We kill ourselves, go crazy trying to beat each other, and all the time the old bastards are watching us, studying us, discovering our weak points, deciding whether we're good enough or not.  Well, good enough for what?  I was six years old when they brought me here.  What the hell did I know?" [....] 

"So why don't you go home?" 

Dink smiled crookedly.  "Because I can't give up the game."

I always liked Dink, but it wasn't until this read-through that I realised he's probably the most comprehensively believable character in the story.   He's legitimately smart--enough so to be the first person to explicitly notice that the teachers are supervillains and the entire Battle School is founded on hideous unproven principles that abuse creates strength--and so his being taken to the school makes sense, but he hates it there, except for the game.  Given how harsh they are about Ender's chances, you'd think Dink would be washed out by now, except that he's still talented and so teaches others--ironically, he is kind of 'a teacher' now if that's the case.

He goes on about how command just breaks people, noting that Rose sleeps in the dorm with the rest of them because he's still afraid of the dark, and "isn't some magic Israeli general who can win no matter what.  He doesn't know why anybody wins or loses.  Nobody does." Dink argues that the children aren't so much trying to be commanders as they are playacting at what they think commanders should look like--which sort of makes sense except that you'd think after a few decades the teachers might have noticed this and realised they're failing tremendously.  Battle School sounds less like a prestigious military academy and more like a trillion-dollar playground.

Once again I feel like Card has forgotten all these kids had normal childhoods until 6ish, because Dink goes on about how by reading old books he has figured out "what children are", and it doesn't involve commanding forty other kids and having adults screaming at you that you must win at any cost.  (Dink comes from a country that doesn't have high school sports, apparently.)

Dink goes on about what it's like back on Earth, their families, his Illustratively Normal Hetero Jock older brother, which causes Ender distress when he thinks first about Peter and then Valentine (in case we have forgotten they exist, since they'll be back next chapter).

"That's right, we never really cry.  I never thought of that. [....] But look at Bonzo, your old commander. He's got an advanced case of Spanish honor.  He can't allow himself to have weaknesses.  To be better than him, that's an insult.  To be stronger, that's like cutting off his balls.  That's why he hates you, because you didn't suffer when he tried to punish you.  He hates you for that, he honestly wants to kill you.  He's crazy.  They're all crazy."

Perhaps the most telling thing about the evil Bonzo, in this straightforward we-don't-need-your-fancy-lit-profs just-folks story, is that people keep on having to tell us what's wrong with him.  I read one of Card's essays recently that explained that Bonzo hated Ender because he was afraid of Ender's obvious leadership ability (which is obviously not true, since he starts with the abuse right out of the gate), and now we've got Dink explaining that Bonzo hates Ender for being better than him (which was not true and Ender had not demonstrated when the abuse started).  It's probably time to accept that Bonzo hates Ender because he was told to by narrative fiat and we needed an author-disapproved antagonist to be unfair to Ender.

Also, to the surprise of basically no one, Card/Dink sees no reason to distinguish 'mental illness' from 'jackasses tormenting people to cope with their personal fears'.  I hate this.  But I do like and occasionally reflect on what Dink says next, which is a better statement about rejecting stigmatisation and accepting that you need to care for yourself and accepting that there are still going to be hard times and relapses ahead:

"And you aren't?" 

"I be crazy too, little buddy, but at least when I be craziest, I be floating all alone in space and the crazy, she float out of me, she soak into the walls, and she don't come out till there be battles and little boys bump into the walls and squish out de crazy."

The last thing Dink has to say is simultaneously wrong and true, as well as being another reminder (BY THE WAY ENDER HAS SIBLINGS) that there is a whole huge situation back on Earth while they're up at school (BY THE WAY POLITICS ARE A THING).

"Listen, Ender, if the buggers were coming back to get us, they'd be here.  They aren't invading again. [....] It's all a fake.  There is no war, and they're just screwing around with us [...] because as long as the I.F. is in power, certain countries can keep their hegemony.  But keep watching the vids, Ender.  People will catch onto this game pretty soon, and there'll be a civil war to end all wars.  That's the menace, Ender, not the buggers.  And in that war, when it comes, you and I won't be on friends.  Because you're American, just like our dear teachers.  And I am not."

(Ender's Classmates Are Like A Million Times Smarter Than Him tally: 1.)  Dink is right about every single part of this save one, which is his theory that the Battle School kids are meant to be hostages/champions in that war.  Every other bit is right.  Dink Meeker: Too Smart To Be The Chosen One.  I love this guy.

Also, since when are all the Battle School teachers American?  Later in the Shadow series, Card will retcon all of this and indicate that the USA isn't actually that important anymore, due to the reunification of Russia and the democratic ascension of China.  But I guess for now the Americans still rule the world?

Ender muses on all that Dink has said, and decides he's wrong, that the aliens are still the invading horde at the gates and must be stopped.  (He also believes that the American media wouldn't lie to him the way the Dutch media might lie to Dink.  Cutting edge commentary on the modern world.)  But the 'seed of doubt' has been planted:

It changed everything, to have that seed growing.  It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said.  It made him wise.

SHOW DON'T TELL, CARD.  God.  This book won a Hugo and a Nebula.  Apparently the mark of great writing is just saying "So now character development happens, trust me."

Ender finds that hardly anyone shows up to his free practice that night, because commanders have started declaring that they won't take launchies who have been 'damaged' by Ender's training.  Can you imagine how incredibly effective Battle School might be if the teachers didn't work so hard at trying to make the students hate and mistrust each other?  Worst administration ever.

"But the way I brain it," said the Launchy, "I be the best soldier I can, and any commander worth a damn, he take me.  Neh?" 

"Eh," said Ender, with finality.

This just makes me giggle is all.  As a Canadian.  EH.

Commanders show up during practice to write down names menacingly, and Alai taunts them about misspelling his.  The next day, Ender starts hearing about kids in his practice getting bullied, physically abused or having their computer files hacked, and so tells the last few who show up to put it off, but Alai won't let him:

"If you stop, even one night, they'll figure it works to do this kind of thing.  Just like if you'd ever backed down to Bernard when he was being a swine."

I would go off on a rant here about Alai (Bernard's best friend) not stepping up and now distancing himself from the bully in retrospect, but I have to cut him a little slack since he only sprang into existence a chapter later because Ender needed a Black Best Friend since the most plausible explanation for Alai's behaviour is that he was a victim of bullying and so was trying to protect himself by avoiding confrontations.  Anyway, I kind of agree with Alai but this whole 'Lord of the Flies' deal where the teachers don't intervene ever for any reason really sucks.  "Should we protect these fresh six-year-olds from the torments of the older jackwagons?"  "No, then Ender might feel like he's protected from the consequences of his actions."

But forgetting for a moment that we're supposed to be saving the world IN SPACE, this sequence of scenes is about being bullied and finding ways to endure it, especially if you're the kind of person who copes by reminding yourself that you're better than the people who hate you (which I was and still am, if hopefully to a lesser degree).  First is not backing down and letting bullies tell you what you can and can't do.  Second, after the bullies show up again and start shouting insults and ridicule:

"Listen to them," Ender said to the other boys.  "Remember the words.  If you ever want to make your enemy crazy, shout that kind of stuff at them.  It makes them do dumb things, to be mad.  But we don't get mad." 

Second is: if you can ignore verbal abuse (if if IF, and it's up to each individual to determine whether they can or can't, incident by incident) then it's not the worst move.  If you can tell yourself that the people harassing you have neither the right nor the standing to judge you, that their hatred is invalid and irrelevant, that can help.  It's not the way things should be and it doesn't mean that bullies and harassers shouldn't be confronted and shut down, but--it's first aid for mental wellbeing, if it works.  It helped me.

Shen [he exists again!] took the idea to heart, and after each jibe from the older boys, he had a group of four Launchies recite the words, loudly, five or six times.  When they started singing the taunts like nursery rhymes, some of the older boys launched themselves from the wall and came out for a fight.

Dammit, Shen, I meant confronted by someone who has the authority and power to actually shut them down, not by kindergartners.  Half the kids are currently frozen, which makes them helpless, but Ender has no problem instead treating them as blunt instruments.  (Remember, the helmet clamps down on your jaw to prevent talking, so if any of the kids aren't okay with being used as a weapon to severely injure another kid, they can't prevent it or even protest!)  Ender and Alai nail one of the bullies in the chest with a frozen kid, causing him to howl in pain, and the whole gang charges out to attack.

Ender shouts for them to 'go nova', meaning the kids cluster together and then push off each other to fly in all directions and ricochet around the incoming bullies (who can't change direction mid-flight).  When attacked, run: this is always the best self-defence advice.  It's like dodging, but way bigger!  I trained in five or six kinds of martial arts (some combined, some specific) for over a decade, and the first rule whenever we discussed self-defence was: freaking book it.

Again not being terrible for the moment, Ender makes sure to end up near the kid he and Alai used as a missile so he can toss the kid to safety, but this sends him flying back towards the bullies, alone.  Usually heroic sacrifices of the form "I'll take care of myself; y'all get out of here" work for me, but in this case it's not about the suffering Ender is willing to endure, because, lest we forget, Ender is Dangerously Hardcore.  His suffering takes the form of "Why am I constantly forced to totally kick people's asses when I don't want to?"  After escaping one bully by mangling the kid's ear with his boot:

I'm doing it again, thought Ender.  I'm hurting people again, just to save myself.  Why don't they leave me alone, so I don't have to hurt them?

How fucked is this?  In theory, this is Ender's empathy showing--his wish to be kind and peaceful even to the people he is actively destroying--and people do have the right to defend themselves.  All of that is okay.  What's unsettling to me is that people identify with Ender after seeing him do things like this, because "Why are you making me hurt you" is also, y'know, the rallying cry of the abuser.  And particularly in the broader context of Ender's Game, in which it will ultimately turn out that all of the suffering and violence was a meaningless misunderstanding, the lines between self-defence and unprovoked abuse get blurred to all hell.

More fighting; it is violent and not particularly interesting.  Ender escapes, gets cheered by his friends and insulted by his enemies (we find out Bonzo was among the bullies), and makes it back to his dorm.  That night, he's able to look up medical reports (hacking, I guess) and see that all of the injuries are cited as "accidental collision in null G", to remind us that the teachers are not going to help.

Back to the mind game.  He passes all of the Fairyland obstacles, passes the now-abandoned playground of the wolf-children, returns to the castle tower where the snake waits for him, and crushes it underfoot.  It takes some grinding until it stops moving, but it's dead.  No escape presents itself, so Ender goes searching:

Instead, he found a mirror.  And in the mirror he saw a face that he easily recognized.  It was Peter, with blood dripping down his chin and a snake's tail protruding from a corner of his mouth. 

Ender shouted and thrust his desk from him. [....] Ender threw the snake at it.  The mirror shattered, leaving a hole in the wall behind it.  Out of the hole came dozens of tiny snakes, which quickly bit Ender's figure again and again.

Ender shuts the game off.  The next day, other commanders show up to tell Ender not to stop his practices, and start sending some of their own soldiers to get extra practice as well as acting as bodyguards.  (We have no idea who these people are or who might have organised them.  I would have liked to have found that out, since it seems like they should be a kind of community Ender would join, but Ender must be lonely so these guys are again faceless NPCs.)

As the chapter closes, Ender can't shake the game from his dreams, and he fears that it is telling him the truth: that on the inside, he is the same as Peter and that he was born to kill.  Repeating myself: Peter: not actually a killer--in fact, he is possibly the only person who makes it to the end of his story without killing a person.  He might be a sadist, but as Ender continues to remind us, Ender is not a sadist, and instead brims with self-loathing for hurting people.

I don't understand what all of this is for, to be honest.  I get the symbolism and the schism as Ender sees it, the dissonance between wanting not to hurt anyone and yet devoting yourself to protecting humanity no matter who you have to hurt to do it.  But none of this will matter in the final arc of the story, or really at any time except the interlude when he considers dropping out.  Ender's final campaign won't be affected in any way by his desire not to cause harm.  When his great revelation in the mind game occurs, it won't apparently change anything other than breaking his depression, and we won't get an explanation of that or any meaningful changes in his behaviour to follow-up.  It's all just a bunch of tormenting him so that later the story can tell him that he's wrong, that he's the good guy, not like his brother.  It's a fractionally more literary take on a hurt/comfort fanfic.

The whole purpose of this subplot appears to be to take the guy who tightropes the line between defender and bully and assure him that he hasn't done anything wrong and he's a good person.  Who then goes on to commit genocide but it's not his fault.  I'm creeped out by the thought of people identifying with this and finding comfort in it.

Next week: the long-awaited return of Valentine and Peter!

---
*'Rescuer' of course refers to Dink having requested Ender be transferred in from Salamander.  Given that apparently no one else was going to help him, and Ender was taking no actions to get himself transferred, we have no idea how long Ender could have been stuck with Bonzo abusing him if not for Dink's intervention.  In a rare bit of what I think is quite clever storytelling, it might seem at first that this makes Dink a sort of 'parent' figure to Ender, except that what we see Dink doing here is isolating the hell out of Ender by solidifying his distrust of the teachers and making him feel that he can't really trust any of the other (oblivious, NPCish) students.

Ender's Game, chapter five, in which Ender SHOWS THEM ALL and Will says 'whatever' a lot

(Content: emotional abuse, cyber-bullying, homophobia.  Fun content: non-Euclidean architecture, one of limyaael's rants, and an important Spaceballs lesson.)

Ender's Game: p. 37--53

Chapter Five: Games

There are a lot of people on the web doing this analytical thing like we do here, and there is one thing that basically all of them eventually run into, which is that when books are bad, they eventually cease to be entertainingly bad and instead become gruelling.  Those of y'all who read Erika's Fifty Shades posts have long been familiar with these times (I once joked that people looked forward to the sex scenes because it meant the characters would stop talking--I no longer view this as a joke).

I do actually believe Ender's Game is mostly well-written.  I think the ideologies it promotes are abhorrent and it has a tendency to tell us things about the characters that are contradicted or not backed up, but if you ignore the authorial fiats, characters are actually painted well and in interesting ways.  I know, for example, that Card's whole thesis is that Ender and Peter are exact opposites, but I'm finding them much more interesting when I read them as presented, nearly identical (and Ender being the vastly more dangerous one).  Ender's Game is a novel of ideas, and when it focuses on those, if nothing else, it can be fascinating.

This chapter is not fascinating.

This chapter is basically Ender As Chosen One/Outcast Nerd Revenge Fantasy, the most boring and uncomfortable side of his character.  We open with a dose of Graff's characterisation being contradicted, which maybe is supposed to make him look less perfect, because obviously that is a thing we would be in danger of thinking.  It turns out Graff didn't mean for Ender to get into a physical fight on the shuttle last chapter, but to call for help.  I have no idea why Graff thought this would happen, or why he wanted it to happen, since he and the "mastermind" (Graff's own sarcasm) he's talking to agree that Ender must never believe he can count on anyone else to bail him out.

"His isolation can't be broken.  He can never come to believe that anybody will ever help him out, ever.  If he once thinks there's an easy way out, he's wrecked." 

"You're right.  That would be terrible, if he believed he had a friend." 

"He can have friends.  It's parents he can't have."

 So, Ender can't be allowed to escape any situation by asking for help, but Graff was expecting/hoping that the fight on the shuttle would be resolved by Ender asking for help.  What.

Whatever.  Ender arrives at his Space Dorm at Space School.  The room is child-scale; six-year-old Ender can reach up and touch the ceiling.  That would seem dangerous--adults will have trouble getting into the room if they need to intervene in something--but a couple of pages later we'll be told about adults hanging out in there like it's whatever, so... I don't know.  Non-Euclidean architecture.  Careful use of baked goods from Wonderland.  Battle School was built by Time Lords and the rooms are taller from the top down than from the bottom up.  Take your pick.

Ender is the last one to arrive, and the only bunk left is the one at floor level by the door, which he immediately determines is the Worst Bunk (I guess you get the most traffic?), but he plays it up like this is exactly what he had been hoping for, because, as previously noted, everyone except Ender is incredibly stupid and of course they will assume his "Gollygosh thanks guys!" is sincere.  (Or maybe it's just supposed to Ender telling them he refuses to suffer?)  Their supervisor shows up, a young man named Dap who tells them that he is their 'mom', because apparently that's the only possible name for a nurturing parental figure.  Whatever.  Battle School has now canonically endorsed genderqueer expressions in their supervising authorities!  Well done, Battle School.  Maybe there's hope for you yet.

Dap informs them that the bunk Ender is now in is usually reserved for their elected Group Leader, which seems like a weirdly unnecessary detail unless it's a metaphor.  Ender has, as a result of bullying, been forced to take the position of power and authority without even knowing that was what he was doing.  ...Huh, yeah, that's this entire story in one sentence.  Pointlessly twee, but I guess points to Card for condensing it so neatly.

Ender checks out the equipment in his palmprint-encoded locker: jumpsuits, a school desk, and a practice laser, which Dap tells him is for "one of the games".  Credit where due, Card has been doing a good job of building up to the introduction of the Battle Room (which we still won't see this chapter).  We've been told that it's a big deal, the core of the school, we're seeing some equipment, and when the kids go to dinner, they see the team standings on the leaderboards and all the older boys are wearing flashier team uniforms, Scorpion and Manticore.  It's a solid example of sprinkling information to entice our interest.

Ender of course has to sit by himself in the lunchroom, until a 12-year-old named Mick shows up to tell Ender that if he's the 'bugger' in his class, he needs to start sucking up to people if he wants to get anywhere.    (I thought Card was opposed to buggers making friends by sucking.)  Mick apparently puts the lie to Graff's claim that anyone who sticks with it ultimately gets a great job, as he is certain he won't be going on to Tactical School when he's finally forced out sometime soon.

Mick is also the only goddamn person in the entire series who observes that 'Ender' is an absurdly badass name for a soldier.  At least someone said it, but seriously, how does everyone not just laugh in his face when he tries to introduce himself?  Nicknames are normal at Battle School, but no one calls themselves Commander Manlybeard or McBearchest or Shark Week.

Mick leaves (taking Ender's dessert, because losers fucking love junk food, I hate Card so much sometimes) and Ender decides that no, he will succeed through awesomeness, although he then gets struck with debilitating homesickness for the rest of the day.  At night, Dap patrols the room, trying to offer a comforting hand here and there, but it backfires:

The touch of kindness in this frightening place was enough to push some over the edge into tears.  Not Ender, though.  When Dap came, his crying was over, and his face was dry.  It was the lying face he presented to Mother and Father, when Peter had been cruel to him and he dared not let it show.  Thank you for this, Peter.  For dry eyes and silent weeping.  You taught me how to hide anything I felt.  More than ever, I need that now.

So, the old cruelty was beneficial because now it helps him pretend that the new cruelty doesn't bother him, which is important because if he showed that cruelty bothered him, it would cause people to be more cruel to him.

Sigh.

They start classes the next day, interspersed with weirdly propagandic videos of marines getting torn up fighting aliens aboard ships, and ships in space firing on each other.

Ender worked as hard as anyone; all of them struggled for the first time in their lives, as for the first time in their lives they competed with classmates who were at least as bright as they.

Except when they are not, which is all of the time, because Ender is so, so much smarter than them.  As he proves on his second day, when Dap takes them to the arcade, a vast shining vault of lights on the upper levels of the school, where gravity is weaker: when Ender gets pushed around, he literally gets knocked off his feet and drifts across the room.  This happens a lot, because he immediately heads into the 3D game tables, where older boys are playing commanders of holographic fleets.  He watches them play against the computer for an hour, at which point he is certain that he could easily beat the computer on any humanly-feasible difficulty setting, because that is not at all hilarious.  "Eh, I don't think I need to play this game, I'd pretty obviously be able to beat it already if it was a fair match."

Ender wants to play against another boy instead, and asks for a turn.  The older students mock him in some realistically vapid dialogue that only partially feels like a forty-year-old trying to use teenager slang.  It helps that they don't really use slang much, but a kind of cadence.  It does not help that this cadence sounds vaguely like a stereotypical urban hoodlum (and by 'urban' I mean 'black', and by 'hoodlum' I mean 'one-scene TV knockoff').

"I'm Ender Wiggin." 

"Listen up, scrunchface.  You nobody.  Got that.  You nobody, got that?  You not anybody till you gots you first kill.  Got that?" 

The slang of the older boys had its own rhythm.  Ender picked it up quick enough.  "If I'm nobody, how come you cared to play me two out of three?"

Ender loses the first match, then:

They played again, and this time Ender was deft enough to pull off a few maneuvers that the boy had obviously never seen before.  His patterns couldn't cope with them.  Ender didn't win easily, but he won. 

The bigger boys stopped laughing and joking then.  The third game went in total silence.  Ender won it quickly and efficiently.

 There is a woman who went by the name limyaael, and she wrote this extremely valuable essay on "Moments when the protagonist awes other characters, curing the addiction to".  This scene gives us a little characterisation of the social order at Battle School, and a little sense of how Ender thinks, but more than either of those things it shows us the quiet smart kid who just sits back and watches and then when he gets his turn he is totally awesome and all the bigger boys have to shut up because they can't handle the truth.  Harmless 'nerd revenge' fantasy on its own, but this is only the first instance thereof, and it's only going to get worse, and for anyone who doesn't harbour their own nerd revenge fantasies, kind of incredibly boring.

So the boy whose arm Ender broke last chapter is Bernard, who is French and therefore an arrogant Separatist--no idea what this means, since he's probably not talking about Québec separatism.  (To my knowledge, Canada is never mentioned in these books.)  Maybe they want to separate from the EU, which apparently still exists in the same format centuries from now and which was largely born out of French diplomacy with Germany?  Whatever.  Bernard is King Bully of the class, and Ender watches and figures out who's who in his hierarchy, the lieutenants and the hangers-on and the people who actively resent him.

Ender's first potential ally is Shen, whom Bernard calls 'Worm' because he supposedly wriggles his butt when he walks.  (I'm going to do my best to ignore the homoerotic/homophobic subtext throughout this section.  I'm just going to note that 'he shakes his ass and it offends me' is a very specific thing to single someone out for.)  Ender plays with the student instant messaging system and cracks enough of the code to invent a new student identity, named God, for anonymity.  With this, he sends everyone the same message every 30 seconds: "Cover your butt.  Bernard is watching. --God".  Bernard freaks, sends a message to Ender accusing him, Ender plays it cool, Shen is just delighted.  Bernard's bullies torment Ender more over the following days; Ender ups the ante by figuring out a way of faking another's ID and sending a new message, this time when Dap is around:

I love your butt.  Let me kiss it. --Bernard

Bernard freaks harder; Dap is slightly amused and just says he knows who did it; Ender concludes that the teachers mean for the students to break into the system a little bit, which is why their security is literally weak enough for a six-year-old to crack.  His first clue was the root directory password.


Dap shuts Bernard down mid-rage, everyone laughs at him, and the next day Shen gleefully informs Ender that Bernard has been nicknamed 'Buttwatcher' and his power is broken and I guess the Rohirrim have driven the orcs out of the Pelennor Fields or something.  Only the most vicious kids are staying loyal to him.

(We can take this moment to note that Alai will pop into existence next chapter as one of Bernard's close friends who is also intelligent and highly compassionate.  Where is he in this chapter?  Where did he fit in Ender's observations of Bernard's hierarchy?  Was he built by monks to hold a cosmic key?  Whatever.)

The novel of Ender's Game is as old as I am, so I can understand Card not predicting the advent of cyber-bullying or that it would be a meaningful contributor to teenage suicide.  What I am less kindly disposed towards is the idea that bullying + MORE bullying = justice.

There are (at least) two ways to read this part of the chapter.  One version is that Ender was targeted for vicious treatment by a sadist who tried to turn everyone against him, but through the clever use of his brain instead of physical violence, Ender disassembled the sadist's social power and helped his victims.

The other version is that Ender broke another kid's arm for attacking him, FOR SOME REASON got ostracised by the rest of the class, and so retaliated with the help of computerised anonymity to make accusations of homosexuality (ha ha I lied) and promiscuity against that same kid to humiliate him and ostracise him instead.

Neither one of those stories is complete, but I think they're about equally true.  Ender and Shen become friends, and a couple of other kids join their table at lunch, all brought together by how much they hate Bernard and how much he totally deserved to get bullied.  This apparently comes as a shock to Card, but it turns out that you can't actually fight fire with fire without getting fire on your hands.  Ender is no less a bully than Bernard; he just picked a victim people resented even more than they resented Ender.

On the plus side, maybe now that Bernard has been dethroned, we can be done with the nerd revenge fantasies for a while and move on to--

Ender's isolation was over.  The war was just beginning.

 Goddammit.

Ender's Game, chapter three, which is much less terrible than previous chapters, or maybe I'm just getting inured to it all

So, for the sake of pacing, the first Book Club post on Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut will be next Sunday, not today.  All you dedicated people get for today is the next episode of Ender's Game.  How will you ever bear the deprivation?  I recommend lying back and being happy that you're not the one who has to pour over every word of this and try to figure out what Card was thinking and not-thinking at the time.  Also, there was a corgi in a scarf two weeks back which really does help quite consistently.

(Content: sexism, gender essentialism, reproductive coercion. Fun content: the mighty warrior Stefen Colbear.)

Ender's Game, p. 16--26

Chapter Three: Graff

This chapter's exchange on the Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue is brief and regards how much Ender loves Valentine ("our weak link" who "can undo it all"), and Graff's plan to ensure that she does not:

"I'll lie to him." 

"And if that doesn't work?" 

"Then I'll tell the truth.  We are allowed to do that in emergencies. We can't plan for everything, you know."

Excellent work, unaccountable military authorities!  I appreciate a we're-allowed-to-tell-the-truth-in-emergencies joke as much as anyone, but I think it's worth noting that your lies have, within the last twelve hours, resulted in the unanticipated murder of a child by another child and, within the last few years, probably psychologically and emotionally warped untold numbers of other children, so your continued casualness mostly reads as pure sociopathy.  I get using grim humour in order to stomach doing terrible things, but so far, given the way you've talked about your monitoring technology allowing you to experience the sensations and emotions going through these kids' heads, this entire testing process looks hideously gratuitous.  They really have not made it clear what made this last series of brutal events so important.  This should be the part where Graff explains it all.  (Spoiler: NOPE.)

It's the next morning, Ender is having breakfast and reflecting on facing Stilson and his gang at school.  At long last, it appears to have occurred to him that he can't really guarantee that they won't just beat the hell out of him in revenge today.  He's pretty sure they won't, but he's still afraid and doesn't want to go.  There's some plausible banter between the sons and parents, although Mrs and Mr Wiggin remain about as deep as a lunch tray--he's reading the paper and responding only when needled (Peter makes a joke about obviously getting all of his genius genes from mom); she's trying to convince Ender to eat more and he's suggesting she should hook him up to a breakfast IV.

The table beeps, meaning someone rang the doorbell, and the camera shows a man from the International Fleet, "the only military uniform that meant anything anymore".  Which is kind of strange, since later books and even later events in this book will make it clear that Earth still has a lot of big, well-equipped, highly trained militaries that aren't the IF.  Why don't those mean anything?  I guess because the IF gets to make shadowy decisions to let people die at their whim?  Also because they're in charge of maintaining the shields that prevent international nuclear attacks.  They have their fingers on the buttons that make all the other The Buttons irrelevant, which sounds like a good job to be in.

No one says it, but everyone makes it clear that they think the IF dude is here for Ender, which of course sets Peter off a bit, but that gets cut off when they reveal that Stilson is "in the hospital".

Ender shook his head.  He had expected someone from the school to come about Stilson, on an officer of the fleet.  This was more serious than he had thought.  And yet he couldn't think what else he could have done.

We've already belaboured everything else he could have done, with options heavy on 'running' and 'getting help from the many nearby adults'.  But no, the world's greatest strategic genius can only think of one hyperviolent way to solve his problem.  What the hell.  Anyway, the IF dude asks if Ender can explain himself, and Ender cannot, because "he was afraid to reveal himself to be any more monstrous than his actions had made him out to be".  Ender hopes they'll just punish him and get it over with.  This is the same kind of self-loathing (but lack of repentance) that Peter displayed at the end of last chapter, not that I'm surprised neither of them realises it.  THERAPY.  THERAPY FOR EVERYONE.

Time for some longer quotes, because this is another foundational chapter.  Card lays the groundwork early and thick.

 "We're willing to consider extenuating circumstances," the officer said.  "But I must tell you it doesn't look good.  Kicking him in the groin, kicking him repeatedly in the face and body when he was down--it sounds like you really enjoyed it." 

"I didn't," Ender whispered. 

"Then why did you do it?" 

"He had his gang there," Ender said.

"So?  This excuses anything?" 

"No." 

"Tell me why you kept on kicking him.  You had already won." 

"Knocking him down won the first fight.  I wanted to win all the next ones, too.  So they'd leave me alone. [....*] You took away the monitor," Ender said.  "I had to take care of myself, didn't I?"

Mr Wiggin says Ender should have asked a grown-up for help, but the officer cuts himself off and introduces himself as Hyrum Graff, director of the Battle School, and invites Ender to enter their program.  Mrs Wiggin rightfully freaks out and ironically asks if they'd be offering him a medal as well if he'd killed Stilson.  Ender asks why they're letting him in now.

"The final step in your testing was to see what would happen when the monitor came off.  We don't always do it that way, but in your case[...] It isn't what he did, Mrs Wiggin.  It's why. [...] It wasn't a charade, Mrs Wiggin.  Until we knew what Ender's motivation was, we couldn't be sure he wasn't another--we had to know what the action meant.  Or at least what Ender believed it meant."

I suppose that Graff is stopping himself from saying "we couldn't be sure he wasn't another Peter", reminding us of course that there is a vast difference between Ender, who dispassionately murders an incapacitated child in order to intimidate the others, and Peter, who threatens and torments his siblings to cope with his inferiority complex.  Those are clearly totally different things.  INTENT: STILL MAGICAL.

If I wanted to be charitable for a change, I'd suggest that Graff is pleased that Ender is thinking in terms of long-term strategy, but knows that they will have to school him in discipline and threat assessment and considering all tactical responses, but the book is going to remain pretty consistent on the idea that Ender's limitless willingness to destroy is exactly what they want.  I'm not sure why that's supposed to be so valuable, since there are lots of people obviously willing to destroy pretty much anything to win, and Ender's real gift is supposed to be his empathy, which he has tremendously failed to display in this incident.

Graff explains that Mrs and Mr Wiggin already gave their consent for Ender to go when he was born, so now it's just Ender's decision, since they only take volunteers for officer training.  There's some sales-pitching; Graff says that any student who's ever made it through first year at Battle School has become a commissioned officer, and none has ever retired from a position lower than CEO of an interplanetary ship, and also I guess when they hiccup they emit a flock of eagles?  It's pretty obviously the greatest thing ever for anyone, the only job worthy of Ender's time, and everybody will be ashamed to be so much less awesome when they meet him.

The only extant portrait of Commander Mazer Rackham.

Graff and Ender speak privately, and Graff admits that Ender won't be able to see his family again for a decade if he goes.  Ender privately thinks that this is a good thing because Peter presents a legitimate threat to his life.  Graff adds that he has seen enough of the monitor recording to know that Ender won't miss his parents, which brings up yet again: what do those monitors actually monitor?  Do they get feelings?  Are they straight-up telepathic bonds that let people hear his thoughts?  Because it's very weird that they seem to be able to read his mind but they still think they don't know how his brain works.

"You'd be amazed how sensitive the instruments are.  We were connected directly to your brain.  We heard all that you heard, whether you were listening carefully or not.  Whether you understood or not.  We understood."

Graff also says that Ender's parents won't miss him for long--not because they don't love him, but because they are Secretly Religious and have a complicated relationship with family size.  Dad, John Paul Wiggin (formerly Wieczorek) was seventh of nine children.

Nine children.  That was unthinkable.  Criminal.   

"Yes, well, people do strange things for religion.  You know the sanctions, Ender--they were not as harsh then, but still not easy.  Only the first two children had a free education.  Taxes steadily rose with each new child.  Your father turned sixteen and invoked the Noncomplying Families Act to separate himself from his family.  He changed his name, renounced his religion, and vowed never to have more than the allotted two children.  He meant it.  All the shame and persecution he went through as a child--he vowed no child of his would go through it.  Do you understand?"

Except not really, because John Paul and Theresa Wiggin are still religious (she's Mormon and tries to hide that she was born in Utah).  They gave their kids saints' names, and one of the things their religions agreed on was big families, which Ender simultaneously symbolises (a forbidden but permitted Third) and shames them for (because they dare not have more kids and they feel like they should).  What could be more fun than competing forces of cultural and governmental reproductive coercion?  This is all very interesting backstory and could make for a good premise for a book.  Too bad it won't be relevant ever again in this novel!

Graff further entices Ender by describing the Battle Room, the original concept from which the rest of this story sprawled out, but we don't need to cover that yet.  Ender asks if all the students are boys.

"A few girls.  They don't often pass the tests to get in.  Too many centuries of evolution are working against them.  None of them will be like Valentine, anyway.  But there'll be brothers there, Ender." 

"Like Peter?" 

"Peter wasn't accepted, Ender, for the very reasons that you hate him." 

"I don't have him.  I'm just--" 

"Afraid of him.  Well, Peter isn't all bad, you know.  He was the best we'd seen in a long time.  We asked your parents to choose a daughter next--they would have anyway--hoping that Valentine would be Peter, but mildly.  She was too mild.  And so we requisitioned you."

Girls: evolutionarily predisposed to not be useful.  And let's again be clear here, Valentine and Ender are both empathetic, but Ender sometimes chooses to be brutally violent and Valentine does not.  That's why they're taking him and not her.  I get that they only want soldiers who will commit to battle, but the case so far for Ender Wiggin being their greatest hope ever seems really patchy.

"Our tests are very good, Ender.  But they don't tell us everything.  In fact, when it comes down to it, they hardly tell us anything.  But they're better than nothing."

Stilson: dead because 'well, this test won't tell us much, but it's better than nothing'.

Graff goes on, saying that the IF has a much better fleet than they did eighty years ago when the aliens first ravaged Earth, but they need a general, and the only reason they defeated the Second Invasion was because they had the most brilliant commander in history, Mazer Rackham.  It's a pretty good speech, but I think this post has been quote-heavy enough already.  Card is a capable writer and he knows how to make this kind of propaganda and declamation shine.  (Backhanded compliment, but so it goes.  I do sincerely think these sequences are done well, though.)

"I'm afraid," said Ender quietly.  "But I'll go with you." 

"Tell me again," said Graff. 

"It's what I was born for, isn't it?  If I don't go, why am I alive?" 

"Not good enough," said Graff. 

"I don't want to go," said Ender, "but I will." 

There's no packing, just tearful goodbyes and dad promising to write and Peter shouting 'kill some buggers for me' and Valentine begging him to come back some day, and then they're gone.

While rife with the usual sexism and excuses for needless cruelty that suffuse the book as a whole, this chapter is easily my favourite so far, and pretty much where I think the book actually begins.  Chapter one exists so Card can make a statement about how personal virtue can excuse stunning atrocities, chapter two exists to try to convince us that Ender and Peter are radically different.  Chapter three gives us backstory, worldbuilding, and presents Our Hero with a real choice to jump at the call of adventure and try to save the world, or stay in that which is familiar and safe where people love him.  It's relateable, it's sympathetic, and it doesn't depend on us thinking that Ender was totally justified in murdering a bully.  If this novel were about the story instead of The Philosophical Point, this would be chapter one.

And I should note that Card agrees with me there.  I mentioned in comments previously that I once met Card; I was at a reading/signing when Ender's Shadow was published, and he was talking about the various iterations of the Ender's Game movie scripts that were cycling along.  He noted that, in the script, he'd had to cut Stilson because in a movie that level of violence wouldn't work for introducing the main character.  As much as I support the idea that books can tell stories that movies can't, I think it's important to note that books put us inside characters' heads and in movies we just watch them like they're other people.  In this, movies are vastly more like the real world than books are.  And I think there's a big point to be considered when the daring and brilliant opening chapter to your novel falls flat when presented in a format that more closely resembles reality.

Come back next Sunday for the first installment of the Book Club with chapter one of Cat's Cradle, and of course don't miss the unbearable writing of EL James in Erika's next Fifty Shades post this Thursday!

(Also, we appear to have adopted rot13 for ciphering spoilers on this blog, which can be translated on rot13.com if needed.  That's just for things that aren't Ender's Game, though; spoilers for the book are free game.  Stilson is dead, by the way.)

---

*This snips a passage about how Ender hates to cry and is ashamed to be seen doing so by his parents and a military man, because that is obviously a healthy sentiment to have been instilled in a six-year-old boy.  No one says anything about it--his father doesn't reprimand him for showing weakness--so how the hell did he get this idea established in his head?  Manly warfare?  Don't cry?  Who is teaching him these things before the age of six?