Ender's Shadow, chapters nine, ten, and eleven, in which Bean is a god and Ender is a messiah

(Content: ableism, homophobia, Nazi war crimes. Fun content: spaaaaaaace.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 139--174

Chapter Nine: Garden of Sofia

The tagless dialogue blocks are back to vaudeville style as Dimak and Graff discuss Bean, starting with his investigation of the emergency maps, which Graff thinks is alone worth sending him home:

"After three months in Battle School, he figured out that defensive war makes no sense and that we must have launched a fleet against the Bugger home worlds right after the end of the last war." 

"He knows that? And you come telling me he knows how many decks there are?"

But of course they are confident that they can deceive the infinite supergenius of Bean as long as they can find a lie he will believe, so that's no problem and he can stick around because his supergenius may yet be useful.  All I can think of right now is that tugboat captain whose life Graff casually derailed into indefinite isolation because Graff couldn't be bothered to schedule his ride in advance or ask for volunteers.

Sister Carlotta, in the meantime, has met with Anton, who doesn't have a last name, ever, despite appearing in later books.  Anton is another supergenius and thus very adept at exposition:

"I'm just an old Russian scientist living out the last years of his life on the shores of the Black Sea."

Said no actual human ever.  Anton tries to shock Carlotta by indicating that he's fantasising about her, but Carlotta is unflappable and/or has excellent gaydar*, so she just goes on to tell him what she learned: that he is cited constantly by academic papers on the subject of genetic engineering on human intelligence, but none of his papers actually exist in any other record; he never published.  Now, I mean, I'm sure back in the dark ages (1999) when this book was published these things might have been less automated, but here in the modern world, Google Scholar (the godsend of students writing academic papers everywhere) can track citations in a fraction of a second, so I'm struggling a little with the idea that the government obliterated this guy's life's work, placed a chip in his head to prevent him from ever talking about it again, and put him under permanent armed guard, but they decided editing other people's bibliographies was a step overboard.

Carlotta "hypothetically" describes Bean's situation, absurdly smart and perhaps modified, and asks how she could "hypothetically" test for the change, and Anton's explanation leaps cheerfully back and forth over the ableism threshold as he describes 'savants' in less-than-clinical terms that I won't quote here and sums up with "How can they be so brilliant, and so stupid?"  He almost goes on to explain his discovery, but cuts himself off, "because I have been served with an order of inhibition."  Basically, he's wired into an anxiety feedback loop so that if he ever gets stressed out--for example, by talking about his work--he immediately falls into an incapacitating panic attack.

Of course, much like the bibliographies that were too much effort to scrub, this too can be overcome with a calming ritual and some roundabout dialogue, so Anton starts bantering with Carlotta about theology, and it's actually kind of entertaining (I kind of wish the later books were just about them on adventures).  It's also an excuse for more of the Biblical allusions that Card never tires of, but after a couple of pages he gets around to the point, that humanity could be immortal, "but God made us with death inside":

"Two trees--knowledge and life. you eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying."

He doesn't last much longer before he stops being able to trick his own brain into believeing that he's not revealing forbidden secrets, and he collapses; Carlotta turns him onto his back--no, wrong, wrong, you turn people onto their side, Carlotta--and waits for the guard to come running.

The man was youngish, but not terribly bright-looking. The implant was supposed to keep [Anton] from spilling his tale; it was not necessary for his guards to be clever.

Oh lord, not only is intelligence the only metric of human worth but now we can see it by looking at people.  (The guard racks up several more insults from the narrative for the rest of the scene.)  Carlotta diplomatically gets out of there rather than wait for him to wake up, which seems cold at first, but maybe she figures she is herself now a panic trigger for Anton.  More importantly, she understands Anton's Key now, a genetic tweak that makes Bean an ultragenius but cuts his lifespan short, and resolves to find the person who used it.

Chapter Ten: Sneaky

Carlotta and Graff also continue bantering and it's much less entertaining (she wants more clearance, he wants her to psychoanalyse Bean), but at least for once someone points out:

"There's a war on, yet you fence me around with foolish secrecy. Since there is no evidence of the Formic enemy spying on us, this secrecy is not about the war. It's about the Triumvirate maintaining their power over humanity."

This really should be a bigger deal.  If Carlotta knows the Formics aren't spying on humanity, presumably everyone knows that.  If everyone knows that, then the secrecy around everything--the hidden asteroid base, the fleet supposedly in the asteroid belt which nevertheless no one on Earth can see--should raise some serious questions about the decision-making processes of the people in power.  Now, one meta level up, they put a chip in Anton's head rather than killing him because we're still supposed to see humanity's leaders as good people, and two meta levels up, he had to be alive so Carlotta could talk to him, but if I wanted a Doylist interpretation here, I wonder if the point of the incredibly circuitous and resource-intensive 'order of inhibition' isn't just to be able to show people that of course the government cares most of all about protecting human lives, look at all the trouble we go to, and so don't bother asking tricky questions or looking too hard at the gladiatorial arena we're building in the school showers.

Bean is finally ready to make his exploratory spelunking expedition through the Battle School air ducts, and it goes on for pages of twisting and crawling that we don't need to detail, up and down, inconveniently placed ducts that let him see teachers' quarters but not their computer screens, hot vents and cold walls (Card runs with the usual assumption that vacuum is 'cold', which is not quite as true as he'd like, but whatever).  Oh--and Bean is naked the whole time.  Get out your shot glasses, people, we're back in Battle School and pants are for losers who aren't secure in their heterosexuality!

Bean finds a teacher headed for a shower and decides to wait until the guy comes back and logs into his computer again (so Bean can get his password) but he hears a conversation further up the duct and goes to find Dimak holo-skyping with Graff.  (Are holograms really that cheap now?  Would a flatscreen not do the job?)

They're talking about 'giving her access' and 'whether the boy is human' and 'can't get him into the mind game' and 'what makes him tick, and after a page Bean realises they're talking about him: "New species. Genetically altered. Bean felt his heart pounding in his chest. What am I?"  They also talk about a security breach and needing to lock him down, and, in clearly the best moment, Graff wonders if it counts as saving humanity if they only win the war by replacing themselves with a new species:

"Foot in the door. Camel's Nose in the tent.  Give them an inch." 

"Them, sir?" 

"Yes, I'm paranoid and xenophobic. That's how I got this job. Cultivate those virtues and you, too, might rise to my lofty station."

This is as good a time as any to remember that, according to the story, no one but Ender could have won the Third Invasion, and no one but Graff could have made him do it, and the formics weren't planning to invade Earth again anyway, so Graff's hilarious paranoid xenophobia is the literal sole driving force behind the whole xenocide.

Bean mulls which secret he might have guessed (he suspects it's the invasion fleet, or that Battle School was created to strip Earth's nations of their future military leaders).  He goes back, memorises the now-showered teachers' login, and heads back to bed, mulling his luck and figuring out very rational reasons that it was actually all a result of his own good decision-making.  With that ego-stroking settled, he decides on his new plan to allay the teachers' suspicions about his character:

He had to become Ender Wiggin.

This book would be both spectacularly awful and utterly amazing if the rest of it consisted of Bean's slow Talented-Mr-Ripley absorption of Ender's identity, but no luck.  I'm honestly not sure what this means; I don't remember Bean doing anything to make himself look Enderier.

Chapter Eleven: Daddy

The teachers figure out what Bean's done as soon as he makes himself his own teacher-class identity, but they resolve to let him have it--if he won't play the mind game, they can see how he plays his own games, and Dimak insists he's the look-not-touch type of snooper.  Bean's first priority is apparently reading every student's profile.  He scored better than any of them, but he realises that everyone in Battle School is a genius, and he's not necessarily any more charismatic, courageous, cautious, or able to outguess his opponents than they are.  He sets about trying to solve the mystery of Ender Wiggin, who gives so much of his time to newer, inept students instead of focusing on building himself up.  There's another page of talking about how wonderful and mysterious Ender is, then bro-time with Bean and Nikolai bonding (Nikolai is dubbed "a place-holder" in his profile, sparking Bean's ire and sudden uncertainty about whether the teacher's evaluations mean anything, for Bean is a protective unknowing brother), and then it's time for another cameo, when Bean tracks down Ender's oldest friend, Shen.

Shen stumblingly explains how wonderful Ender is, trying to describe how he unified his launch group by making friends with Alai to then neutralise Bernard, and this is such an Ender-worship chapter I almost forgot which book it was:

"Ender's good, man. You just--he doesn't hate anybody. If you're a good person, you're going to like him. You want him to like you. If he likes you, then you're OK, see? But if you're scum, he just makes you mad."

This is the verbatim definition of protagonist-centred morality, and the person it's centred on once murdered a child on the playground for shoving him.

All of the charisma talk makes Bean fear that Ender is Achilles again, secretly ready to kill anyone for crossing him, but that's not enough to stop his obsessive research, as he apparently continues interviewing Ender's friends and reading all the files.  The deadline is closing in on war, Bean decides, as the teachers focus their attention on their favourite students ever more.  Bean puts it down to career militarism, the popularity contest that gets entrenched in any institution that favours a particular attitude and look.  This is interesting mostly because of Bean's thoughts on Petra Arkanian:

...who had obnoxious personalities but could handle strategy and tactics in their sleep, who had the confidence to lead others into war, to trust their own decisions and act on them--they didn't care about trying to be one of the guys, and so they got overlooked, every flaw became magnified, every strength belittled.

This whole book is kind of a saving throw for Petra, telling us she's actually much better than her girls-can't-cut-it presentation in Ender's Game would suggest, but who is Card talking to at this point?  Is he arguing that Petra was always good enough but people focus on the negative aspects of her character's presentation because she's a girl?  Or is this just a throwaway line telling us that Petra is underappreciated in-universe?  There isn't much evidence for that, since she's been promoted to commander of Phoenix Army by now and stomping all over the competition in laser tag.

Last scene for this week: Carlotta has a new security clearance and very quickly sherlocks her way back to Volescu, the scientist who ran an 'organ farm' in Rotterdam that was actually a genetic engineering lab.  He's amused by her questioning:

"This is like those Nazi medical crimes all over again. You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research."

The historical significance of Nazi medical experiments is something I'm not informed enough to give any kind of lecture on, although if you can stomach it there are essays worth reading.  The one point I want to include is that we tend to have this idea that there are incredible secrets, the Forbidden Knowledge of the Universe, that we could get if only we were unethical enough to test it, and the reality is that this is rarely true.  Humans are bright enough creatures that if we can figure out what information we're looking for, we can generally also figure it out how to get it without destroying a person.  This is why Mythbusters is a great show and not a carnival of horror.  Do not trust anyone who thinks the only way to learn something is via atrocity.

Volescu fills in the last blank: with Anton's Key turned in Bean's genetics, he is permanently in child-mode, learning at lightning speed, always forming new brain pathways, and always growing at an accelerated rate.  By his mid-twenties, he'll be a giant, and his heart will give out from the strain.  Volescu claims that he made all the embryos with his own genes, and he is therefore Bean's father, but Carlotta vows that Bean will never find this out, because dad's a monster.  Quest complete!  The new quest is to save Bean's life.

Next week: turns out Anakin built C-3PO Bean created Dragon Army.

---

*I thought it was in this book, but no, here he pretends to flirt with Carlotta; it's not until book three, Shadow Puppets, that Anton says he's gay, although of course he says it in the most amazingly offensive way possible:

"...I was of a disposition not to look upon women with desire. [....] In that era, of my youth, the governments of most countries were actively encouraging those of us whose mating instinct had been short-circuited to indulge those desires and take no mate, have no children. Part of the effort to funnel all of human endeavor into the great struggle with the alien enemy. So it was almost patriotic of me to indulge myself in fleeting affairs that meant nothing, that led nowhere. Where could they lead?"

I--wow.  I had forgotten just how incredibly bad this was.  I don't know if Card is obsessed with genetic continuity because he's a huge homophobe or vice-versa, but if we had any doubt, that should be gone now.  Where do I point to show how incredibly wrong this is?  Ellen Degeneres and Portia di Rossi?  Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka?  Wanda and Alex Sykes?  Alan Cumming and Grant Shaffer?  No wonder Card is terrified of same-sex marriage; it's providing more and more concrete proof that he's been lying his whole life.

The pages that follow this are no better and maybe worse, explaining how everyone (including those rascally gays) feels an absolutely incontrovertible bone-deep desire to marry someone of the inscrutable 'opposite sex' and create children, and basically that's why Ender's Shadow is the last Orson Scott Card book I will write about on this blog.

A rallying cry and a colourful flag

So, between life events and exhaustion and a bout of depression (now lessened), I've been failing at getting Speaker posts done.  Should get back on track for next Sunday.  In the meantime, have a post on a couple of my favourite subjects: language and queer politics.

'Queer' is a contentious word.  I'm a fan of it--I refer to myself as queer on a regular basis--but not everyone is, because for some people it's a slur and it always will be.  Which is awkward mostly because it's the only word we've got right now that isn't an acronym (or worse, an initialism) for trying to collectively refer to the many demographics that aren't heterocis.  LGBTTQIAP+.  QUILTBAG.  What's we're getting at is basically:

• Homosexual (comprising lesbian and gay, but there's never an H in these things)
• Bisexual (hello!)
• Pansexual (neither identical to nor exclusive of bisexuality)
• Asexual (encompassing a whole spectrum of grey/demi variations)
• (also any of the above can have '-romantic' swapped in for '-sexual' for finer delineations)
• Trans (without the asterisk, for several reasons)
• Genderfluid/genderqueer (these are both themselves big umbrellas)
• Two-spirit (all across North America)
• Intersex (which is related but in many ways very different from these other things, which is part of what I'm getting at here)

There's also GSRM for 'Gender, Sexual, and Romantic Minorities', which has its own set of problems and isn't even whimsically pronounceable.  (I'd get into why, but that's a whole post on its own--if you're not familiar with the subject, it's worth a google.)

I would not call a person 'queer' if I don't know if they reject it for themselves.  I wouldn't use it to refer to a group in any situation where it might sound like I was 'othering' people rather than referring to my own group.  I know it's a slur--I've been getting called queer by people as an insult at least since I was eleven.  (People who had no idea whether I was or not, of course, because it's intended as an insult, because who would want to be queer?  Yo.)  That's not the kind of thing that a person can toss around lightly.  (I had a whole knife-juggling metaphor about this, like two years ago.)

But I claim 'queer' for myself, and I do tend to use it for those other groups too, because that's part of the point that I'm getting at when I mash all those many different identities under one term: their problems are not separate from mine.  The oppression of trans people is not some side issue I can choose to ignore because I'm cis.  The right of pan people to define their identities as precisely as they want to is not something I can ignore if I want to be able to define my terms either.  The existence of ace people is not something I can pretend is up for debate if I want anyone to care that bisexuality is a real identity.  Queer is, for me, a matter of solidarity, and a reminder that as a white cis allosexual bi man I'm actually doing pretty well privilege-wise and there's a much bigger community that I need to listen to and support.

And it's a bit weird, isn't it, that the word I'd latch onto for this is a synonym for 'weird', but that's a reminder for me as well.  I imagine most of us in one of the above demographics have heard a variation on "Oh, for a moment I forgot you were _____".  The thing is, on good days, on the best days, I forget I'm queer too.  I don't forget I'm bi; there are entirely too many pretty people in the world for me to forget I'm bi.  But I've known I'm bi for about two years now, and I asked a guy out the other day (no luck) and I remarked to a friend afterwards that the weirdest thing about it was that it didn't feel weird at all.  I don't know what anyone else in the area might have thought about a couple of dudes potentially going on a date, but as far as we were concerned, this was life as usual.

When people say to me (with blessed infrequency) "Oh, I forgot you were queer", what they're saying is "I forgot there's something weird about you".  What I mean when I say I forget I'm queer is "I forgot that the way I am is considered abnormal, my identity is up for debate, and my rights are privileges to be granted by the majority".  To call myself queer is to remind myself that there are two angles on my identity; one is just about who I am and the other is about how I'm treated, how I'm viewed, how society at large ranks me.  One is immutable and the other is not.

If you're any of the things on that list up there, or more than one of them, or some very specific thing that doesn't have the kind of media attention cis white gay men have managed to gather, there's a good chance you've been called a special snowflake at some point.  The idea here, obviously, is that marginalisation is such a rollicking good time that people declare themselves to be abnormal in order to boost their egos.  So, if I'm going to talk about queer, if I'm going to talk about 'weird', then let's not leave out its obverse, because it takes a whole lot of chutzpah to take one particular body shape and one particular pattern of attraction and one particular aesthetic presentation and one particular set of pronouns and tie all those things together and declare that's normal.  If you're looking for a 'special snowflake', consider the person who says that they're the only kind of person in the world that isn't 'weird'.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter ten, part one, in which that which is not forbidden is mandatory

(Content: marriage coercion, homophobia, slavery, declaration of intent to revolt, and some incidental fat hatred.  Fun content: definitions of adulthood and marriage, and THE BISHOP!)

Speaker for the Dead: pp. 152--158

Chapter Ten: Children of the Mind

This time we open with a delightful Q&A with San Angelo, that not-quite-heretic saint whom I assume is made of wisdom and unicorn giggles since he got Ender’s stamp of approval.  San Angelo founded the Children of the Mind of Christ, and while Rule Two is that you don’t talk about Christ Club, Rule One is that Y’ALL GOTS TO BE MARRIED.  You’re not allowed in the order unless you’re married, but you also must not ever have sex with your spouse to whom you are bonded in holy chains.  (Or anyone else, obvs.)  And the explanation for this is hilarious when you consider the kinds of arguments Card has made against marriage equality.

Question 1: Why is marriage necessary for anyone? 

Fools say, Why should we marry?  Love is the only bond my lover and I need.  To them I say, Marriage is not a covenant between a man and a woman; even the beasts cleave together and produce their young.  Marriage is a covenant between a man and woman on the one side and their community on the other.  To marry according to the law of the community is to become a full citizen; to refuse marriage is to be a stranger, a child, an outlaw, a slave, or a traitor.  The one constant in every society of humankind is that only those who obey the laws, tabus, and customs of marriage are true adults.

 Let's get the obvious point out of the way:

There's so much here I barely know where to start.  I mean, Card's views on same-sex marriage are thoroughly documented and helpfully summarised by GLAAD, so it's kind of hilarious to read him here arguing (through the voice of a literal saint who was a personal friend of Ender Wiggin) that marriage is not about children or even about consecrated hetero fucking, but purely about position in the community.  From this perspective, where marriage is thoroughly detached from sex and signifies only your commitment to maintaining the community, it would seem like we should want everyone to get married, because that represents them stepping up to responsibility.  But then we get to the "laws, tabus, and customs" line and it becomes clear that what Card is arguing for is pure circular privilege.  Male/female couples (I don't say 'different-gender' here simply because there's no way Card thinks there are any other genders) get special privilege because they follow the Marriage Rules, and they should follow the Marriage Rules because they will get special privilege.  It's amazing; he might as well be saying that you're a traitor to the state unless your favourite colour is red, and if your favourite colour isn't red it's obviously because you have willfully chosen to tear down civilisation if it's the last thing you do with the final sinews of your flesh and shards of your bone.  So obviously you couldn't have ever been trusted with the privilege the proper Red-Appreciators have.

(I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone spend their time reading things Orson Scott Card has said, but if you did click on that link there, you'll find the quote where he literally states that marriage equality does nothing to elevate same-sex couples but steals the rightfully-earned privilege of male/female couples.)

I have said all of this without touching on the other patently stupid things that Card asserts in there, like saying that in every culture 'true adults' are the ones who follow the laws of marriage, as if child marriage isn't a thing that has always existed and still exists, as if the Mosuo don't exist, as if the definition of adults haven't been written and rewritten a million times in every different culture.  As if it's meaningful to declare that 'not getting married' defines someone as an outlaw, when the privileges of marriage have been denied to so many people so many times specifically for the purpose of declaring them less-adult, less-human than the people in charge.  (Marriage for enslaved people in the USA's so-recent past leaps to mind.)

It's so, so appropriate that we get this howlingly stupid monastic law in the same book that gives us the Hierarchy of Exclusion, which is supposedly about empathy but is demonstrated to mostly serve to let people say "I don't understand you, so you're not a person".  Card declares groups of people to be traitors and outlaws, then establishes laws that they are forbidden to follow, then declares it's obvious that they're outlaws because they won't follow his laws.  It's like watching a particularly malicious six-year-old inventing new rules halfway through a board game, only it results in couples being denied visitation rights in hospital or being deported.

Anyway.  I'm like 30% sure this blog is actually about eviscerating terrible books.  Don't I have one of those around here?  Hey, look, it's Speaker for the Dead!

Question 2: Why then is celibacy ordained for priests and nuns? 

To separate them from the community.  The priests are servants, not citizens.  They minister to the Church, but they are not the Church.  Mother Church is the bride, and Christ is the bridegroom; the priests and nuns are merely guests at the wedding, for they have rejected citizenship in the community of Christ in order to serve it.

Again, not a Catholic myself, but I'm pretty sure nuns are considered 'married to Christ', even if it's only spiritual and not legal.  (Card is on record that "regardless of law, marriage has only one definition", but apparently changing the definition of 'Catholic nun' is a-okay.)  But now it's time for the best part: Card's obsession with genetic lineage to the exclusion of all other meaning in life, to the point where it requires a special monastic order just to get a footnote.

Question 3: Why then do the Children of the Mind of Christ marry?  Do we not also serve the church? 

We do not serve the Church, except as all women and men serve it through their marriages.  The difference is that where they pass on their genes to the next generation, we pass on our knowledge; their legacy is found in the genetic molecules of generations to come, while we live on in their minds.  Memories are the offspring of our marriages, and they are neither more or less worthy than the flesh-and-blood children conceived in sacramental love.

But by God the only acceptable form of non-child-bearing marriage is a sexless union of woman and man and if the state tries to allow any other kind of legal marriage then Card has literally declared that he will devote himself to destroying that government and re-instituting privilege for himself and his kind.  (Note: making a lifelong loving commitment to someone you're not allowed to marry makes you a disgusting outlaw traitor who wants to destroy society, but living in a society in which marriage is open to all adults requires that you become an outlaw and destroy society.  Don't get those two confused, because they're obviouslly completely different.)

So I'm not sure if the best part of this is the bit where reproductive couples apparently only contribute via genetics, and their intellectual legacy is irrelevant, or if it's the way this whole thing has managed to extensively examine who is not allowed to have sex without actually ever explaining why.  Like, you'd think in a page-long dissertation on priests being forbidden to marry or have sex and the COTMOC being required to marry but not have sex, they might get around to the rationale, but nope.  I wonder at this point vaguely if this is Card trying to be generous (from his perspective) by presenting gay and lesbian people with a socially-acceptable sexless marriage, since remaining unmarried is also considered literal treason.  Speaker is of course almost three decades old; it was published years before his first famous homophobic rants, and he used to occasionally throw a patronising nod in the direction of us queers.  Lacking any indication otherwise, I'm just going to assume that every COTMOC we meet is 100% homosexual.

And that's all I can take of discussing Card's views on marriage, so let's move on to the actual chapter.  We open with some passive-aggression between a priest and Dom Cristão the COTMOC abbot and school principal, which is too boring to detail; the point is that the bishop wants to talk to him.  Dom Cristão follows instantly and obediently, silently predicting what stupid decisions the bishop will have made in response to the rumours about Andrew Wiggin and repeating his monastic name, "Amai a Tudomundo Para Que Deus Vos Ame. Ye Must Love Everyone So That God Will Love You."  It's a tradition to name yourself as a warning against your failings, and Dom Cristão hates stupid people.  That's not a joke; that's the canonical explanation.  Now, don't get me wrong, stupid people frustrate me too, so at first I was going to be totally on-board with this guy, but it turns out he's a colossal jackass

The bishop is waiting with Navio the doctor, whom we are told got fat because he was lazy and is now lazy because he's fat, because fuck you Card, and there is more passive aggression et cetera et cetera.  Navio angrily reports on Ender's threats, and Ye Must Love Dogs silently judges him for his hypocrisy when he won't go to mass every week but he gets so incensed about little things like a total stranger threatening to destabilise the entire colonial government and religious contract resulting in forced deportation of its community.  No priorities, this guy.  Ye Must Love Dogs also doesn't apparently care that Ender literally opened with threats of inquisition, and blames Navio for provoking him and making him more dangerous.  Ye Must Love Dogs says that they should strike first to neutralise the threat, pleasantly surprising the bishop.

"The Filhos are as ardent as any unordained Christian could hope to be," said Dom Cristão. "But since we have no priesthood, we have to make do with reason and logic as poor substitutes for authority." 

Bishop Peregrino suspected irony from time to time, but was never quite able to pin it down.

Oh, please, a stunned duck could spot that insult.  To an ever-increasing degree, I appreciate that Ender's Shadow has an antagonist who's actually as smart as the hero and more charismatic.  The parade of stupid evil people opposing Our Heroes in these books are exhausting.

Of course, Ye Must Love Dogs' secret plan to neutralise the threat from Ender is to do exactly what he says so that he can't call an inquisition.  The bishop is furious and asks if he doesn't see how dangerous Ender is, and Ye Must Love Dogs counters that he does, of course, since COTMOC was founded "precisely because the telling of truth is such a powerful act".  They note how the speakers have cleverly made themselves seem like they aren't a religion, by having no organisation, not performing sacraments, and denying that HQ&H is scripture.  Almost as if they bear no similarity to Catholicism or most religions at all, and calling it a religion is a weird affectation on Card's part.

They discuss the consequences if there was an inquisition and their Catholic License were revoked: immediate recolonisation by twice as many non-Catholics and immediate deportation of a large part of the Catholic population in order to keep the planetary population below the maximum.  There have always been shuttles in orbit ready to cart excess people away, as they expected to start doing in a couple of generations.

"They wouldn't." 

"Starways Congress was formed to stop the jihads and pogroms that were going on in half a dozen places all the time.  An invocation of the religious persecution laws is a serious matter."

Wait, really?  Is the primary purpose of Space Congress supposed to be secular mediation of sectarian violence?  How have there ever been "jihads and pogroms" in this galaxy when every planet has been colonised by a single demographic and official religions are allowed?  Is this book telling me that even thousands of years in the future, when whole planets are up for grabs and colonisation is specifically planned in order to homogenise populations, there is still a Jewish diaspora minority?  (I know 'pogrom' doesn't have to refer to persecuting Jews, but 'jihad' just means 'struggle' and refers to the conflict inherent in trying to balance the practicalities of life with religious duties and virtues, so let's not pretend this isn't racialised and bordering on racist already.)

Ye Must Love Dogs says that no matter how much it sucks, Congress has all the guns, so they've got to do what they say.  He suggests that the bishop, rather than retract his remarks, announce that he has delegated the task of handling the speaker to the COTMOC, so that the rest of the town can go on ignoring him and Card doesn't have to keep coming up with clever name puns in Portuguese.

"In other words," said Peregrino dryly, "the monks of your order will become servants of the infidel." 

Dom Cristão silently chanted his name three times.

I increasingly suspect that Starways Congress has carefully orchestrated the colonisation of Lusitania to put all of their most terrible and incompetent people on one planet and then lock it down forever.  Getting Ender Wiggin in there was a stroke of luck they could never have hoped for, and even now they're preparing the EMP to burn out all of their shuttles.

This is shorter than usual, but that's all I can handle for this week.  Next week Ender meets Ye Must Love Dogs, but it's from Ender's perspective, so we don't get to find out if I'm right that he instantly sees in Ender all of the flawless manly beauty that he joined the COTMOC to get away from.

Interlude: More of the math of dudes kissing

(Content: biphobia; transphobia and rape culture at the Dan Savage link.  Fun content: math!  No, really.  Come back!)

This may be considered a sequel to another 'enrich your life through queer math' post from my old blog.

This isn't a post about Dan Savage, but it was inspired by things he's said that really neatly embody one of the major forms of biphobia.  (He's also painfully transphobic and sexist and so many other things; I am not a fan.  I am sure he's done good things, yay for him, but he desperately needs to not be The One Mainstream Queer Voice.)

This specifically is about the idea that bisexuals--both men and women, though Savage speaks more often regarding men, obviously--are just playing around and are still going to settle down in a hetero relationship once they've had their homo fun.  The specific quote is thus: "And here’s another thing that is: Most adult bisexuals, for whatever reason, wind up in opposite-sex relationships. And most comfortably disappear into presumed heterosexuality."  The implication (often made an explication) is that we bi people are users, happy to get all countercultural with our sexytimes but ultimately intending to ditch a same-gender partner and spend the rest of our lives taking advantage of all that sweet, sweet straight privilege while leaving said same-gender partners adrift and emotionally abandoned.  (This feeds nicely into the similar claim that bi folk are all promiscuous sex-fiends, which I have laughed at enough for the time being; just noting the way one line of bigotry usually supports another.)

Now, it's difficult as hell to get actual reliable numbers on the proportions of queer folk in the world, for obvious reasons: first being that no matter how many times you swear that your survey is completely anonymous, queer people are generally going to need a good reason to single themselves out in a crowd, and 'the curiosity of straights' tends not to be it.  A quick scroll through this wikipedia page on orientation demographics shows the hilarious level of variation in surveys, ranging from 1 in 7 to 1 in 200.

Fortunately, this is napkin math, so we don't need exact numbers to prove my point.  Let us once again oversimplify tremendously and go with 10% of the population, all else equal, being in some way attracted to people who are theoretically the same sex as them (so including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and gender variants that tend to have trouble getting recognised, let alone catalogued).  That's our starting assumption: 90% straight (P = 0.9), 10% queer (P = 0.1).  You may see where I'm going with this.

I was waiting for a bus the other day and I saw this guy: gangly and a little stubbly and just generally ridiculously attractive and reading Perdido Street Station.  Knucklebite.  And I did some quick math in my head: the independent chance of flipping heads on a coin is 0.5, so the chance of getting two in a row is 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25, the chance of getting three is 0.5 ^ 3 = 0.125, and the chance of getting four is 0.5 ^ 4 = 0.0625.

Say the chance that this ridiculously hot dude waiting for the bus next to me was interested in dudes is 0.1, like we said.  That means that, the moment I see him, if I grab a quarter from my pocket, I have a better chance of flipping three heads in a row than I have of even being the right gender for him to be attracted to me.  If any of the three are tails, sorry, he only likes women, better luck next time.

Whereas every time I meet a woman I find attractive, the probabilities are reversed: keeping in mind that both straight and bi women might be interested in me, I'd likely have to flip four heads in a row for her to say "Sorry, I only like the ladies."  (So far this has only happened 1.5 times.  The 0.5 is for when I didn't even have time to start flirting before she brought it up of her own accord.)

Most people have more than one romantic relationship in their lives before they settle down, if they are the settling type, meaning that, if not restricted by institutional homophobia, bisexuals will probably date a range of people with differing genders and orientations over the course of their lives.  And while I might be equally attracted to men and women, the feeling is not mutual.  Should I be fortunate enough to meet someone so perfectly matched to me that we decide to spend the rest of our lives together, raw probability says that person is probably going to be a woman.  That's not my evil bisexual heartless fucklust driving me to use and discard innocent gay men: that's all that math will allow.  Most of the people I'm attracted to in my life will probably be straight.  I am as upset about this as anyone I mean seriously you should have seen that guy's face I just wanted to congratulate him on owning it--

Where was I?

Oh, right.  Biphobes can shut the hell up and either do their math homework or (should they unfortunately be afflicted with dycalculia, like my lovely and non-biphobic sister-in-law) just start flipping coins every time they see someone hot, until the lesson sinks in.

Ender's Game, chapter ten, in which Ender rejects redemption and loses his boyfriend

So this post is a week late because I thought I forgot my book at home while in Hawaii, and only discovered too late that I had actually packed it more securely and secretly than I remembered.  This will push our schedule back a bit; I've lost all hope of finishing before the movie comes out, but it'll still be in the ballpark.

On the plus side, we have reached the halfway point!  (Pagewise, specifically.  Chapterwise this is 10 of 15, but they're often twice the length they have been up to now.)  Are you as excited as I am?  Up until now, there have been limiting factors on Ender's awesomeness, because he is always under someone else's command.  Now he takes command and the indulgent "I am so awesome I broke the winometer" is going to rev up and roll for most of the rest of the book.  Except for this chapter, which introduces Bean, who is the protagonist of Ender's Shadow, and that means that this chapter is one in which Ender screws up (maybe) and everyone acknowledges it.  (They even acknowledge it in this book, although it gets compounded in Shadow.)  So, there is some hope of refreshing narrative-supported critique here.

Some.

(Content: bullying, bully apologism.  Fun content: blatant queer fanfic fodder.)

Ender's Game: p. 154--172

Chapter Ten: Dragon

Today's fifteen minutes of Ender Time contain the order to go ahead and promote Ender to command.  Graff is a little reluctant to give the order, because, as he explains:

"I'm not a commander.  I'm a teacher of little children."

Good lord'n'butter, Graff, you are a colonel and a godawful teacher; you'd better have some kind of command skill.  Anyway, having received Valentine's letter and conquered the End of the World a couple of months ago, Ender is apparently happy now, and so ready for command.  There's some of the typical supervillain banter between Graff and Anderson about how they're doing terrible things to him in order to save the world, but it just bores me now.

Ender has apparently been top of the standings for three years now, so no one is surprised that he's getting promoted at age 9.5 instead of 11 (apparently the normal age, except that makes Bonzo even more ridiculous).  Given that Ender's big thing is supposed to be tactics and strategy, it just seems completely gratuitous to me that he's also the best soldier of all time.  In three years no one has shown up with even the physical potential to surpass Ender?  No one's a better shot, or more coordinated and thus better at maneuvering in zero-G?  I'm all for emphasising the importance of hard work, but Ender being The Best At Everything is tiresome.  Anyway, while being fitted for his new suit, he checks the name on the form: Dragon.

"I've never heard of Dragon Army," Ender said. 

"That's because there hasn't been a Dragon Army in four years.  We discontinued the name because there was a superstition about it.  No Dragon Army in the history of the Battle School ever won even a third of its games.  It got to be a joke."

We've discussed this before: armies have names like Rat and Rabbit and Salamander and then Ender gets goddamned dragons.  It's such a blatant cool-factor thing.  How does Card justify giving the Ender the ridiculously cool name?  By making it the in-universe loser name.  I'm a bit torn on this, and I think it's the type of thing I'd probably let slide in a book that wasn't already causing me to primal-scream so often.  Occasionally, by being good, an author earns the right to indulge in simple cool factor.  Ender has more than tapped his supply and everyone else's.

Graff issues him his commander 'hook'; a gravity-warping hand gadget that will basically allow him to fly freely in the Battle Room during his regularly-scheduled practice sessions, and delivers the usual congratulatory speech, then adds that they've done something funky with Ender's new army by giving him a specially-selected roster mixing extremely fresh students with moderate veterans.  I'm not totally sure what the point was of this aside in this book; it'll be explained in much more detail in Shadow, possibly just to retcon more importance to Bean.  Right now it just looks like more emphasis on how special Ender is.  He's also forbidden to trade any of his soldiers, and told that if he has any problems with them, he'll just have to "get along with him" (foreshadow foreshadow).

Ender arrives at his new barracks and "took charge at once", telling his soldiers to arrange themselves so that the most senior are at the back and the newbies are at the front, the opposite of the usual.  He's so brilliant!  He has even revolutionised the dorms.  On his initial assessment, he guesses he has 30 straight out of their launch group and the remaining 10 are soldiers, but not standouts, not toon leaders, and not older than him.  As soon as they're bunked, Ender orders them into their flash suits for morning practice, and we get the hilarious introduction of Ender the Hardass Drill Sergeant:

"Officially you have a free hour between breakfast and practice.  We'll see what happens after I find out how good you are."  After three minutes, though many of them still weren't dressed, he ordered them out of the room. 

"But I'm naked!" said one boy. [Drink!] 

"Dress faster next time.  Three minutes from first call to running out the door--that's the rule this week.  Next week the rule is two minutes.  Move!" [....] 

Five of the boys were completely naked [drink!], carrying their flash suits as they ran through the corridors; few were fully dressed.  They attracted a lot of attention as they passed open classroom doors.  No one would be late again if he could help it.

 Just in case anyone was still holding out hope that when Card says 'naked' he actually means 'only wearing their longjohns' or something like that: NOPE.  I know that it's pretty normal in armies for soldiers to become completely inured to each others' nakedness, but that's, y'know, infantry who are expected to face a huge variety of dire circumstances where modesty can't be a priority.  Ender and his classmates are proto-generals who need to embrace their nakedness about as much as law students do.  This isn't about breaking down inconvenient cultural baggage, this is about shaming and bullying.

They get to the battleroom, the naked ones finish dressing, and Ender tells them to deploy into the room as if they were attacking the enemy gate.  They're expected to leap up to use the ceiling handholds for this, which makes no sense to me because they're leaping into zero-G and there's no obvious reason why the ceiling (in the gravity-bound hallway) would give them a better controlled launch than taking off from the floor, but apparently it does.  They're all bad at it, shockingly.  The last one to take off is the smallest boy, "obviously underage", whom we shall discover is Bean, and he immediately wins my heart:

"You can use a side handhold if you want," Ender said. 

"Go suck on it," said the boy.

This whole scene appears in Ender's Shadow as well, from Bean's perspective, where it is even better, but the important thing is that at last we have a character who is even more the underdog than Ender, is his intellectual peer, and has no awe whatsoever for the Legendary Soldier.  (Of course he'll be won over in time, but never to a worshipful degree.)

Bean is also bad at flying: he misses the handhold, twirls off like a gyroscope into the room, and Ender muses on whether he likes the kid's determination or disapproves of his insubordinate frownyface.  All of the soldiers eventually form up at the far end and it's time again for Gravity Games With Ender Wiggin as he 'stands' upside-down in the battleroom and demands to know why everyone else is standing on their heads.  Someone eventually dares to say it's the hallway orientation, and Ender continues his loud rant about how directions work in zero-G: "Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember--the enemy's gate is down."  Then we get some typical drill sergeant shoutiness about how bad they are at flying, Ender tells them to form up again on the ceiling, and starts mentally grading them based on how quickly they realise that by 'ceiling' he means the wall their own gate is in, and not the wall that he now calls 'north'.  Bean gets it first, and Ender judges him to be smart, cocky, rebellious, and probably resentful because he had to run through the halls naked.  Uh, exactly as planned?  Or something?  I'm sure resentfulness is part of the plan.

Ender quizzes Bean, who responds quickly and correctly, and Ender finally asks:

"Name, kid?" ['Kid'.  Ender is nine, Bean is six or seven at this point.] 

"This soldier's name is Bean, sir." 

"Get that for size or for brains?"

Et cetera.  Ender immediately goes on to praise Bean, and starts explaining his maneuvering methods in zero-G.  At first I wondered why Ender would need to explain these things as if they're secret, given that he's been working with armies for two years and he explicitly notes that his 'sudden assault' methods have permeated the entire school, but then I remembered that this group is 75% newbies.  Maybe that is why Card decided to give Ender a weirdly fresh army; so that he could justify explaining techniques starting from first principles (his personal fetish).  In addition to making it clear that Ender has the deck stacked against him and all his victories are through personal awesomeness, obviously.

At last Ender realises that his simultaneous verbal abuse and pointed praise of Bean ("At least I have one soldier who can figure things out") is exactly what Graff did to him back in the day, making the rest of the army hate him for being the commander's favourite.  He suffers an attack of conscience, wishing he could somehow tell everyone to support the little kid and not hate him:

But of course Ender couldn't do that.  Not on the first day.  On the first day even his mistakes had to look like part of a brilliant plan.

People with training in real leadership positions are free to comment here, but is projecting an aura of infallibility (especially when your subordinates already think you're screwing up) really that vital to leadership?  Or is this just Ender buying into his own PR and worrying that he'll be considered inadequate if he admits mistakes?  (Everyone loves and trusts commanders who refuse to reverse and adjust when they realise they've made a mistake, right?  LEADERSHIP.)  But I suppose the real message here is that Ender's conscience is wrong, that picking on Bean really will make him stronger, and that he must learn to stamp down on softness in order to be a good leader.  Sigh.  At least there's some brief acknowledgement that Ender is being a total jackass here and might not always make the perfect decisions every time?  I'm not sure anymore.

There's more demonstrations and training, which will be way more interesting in Ender's Shadow because Ender is actually being deeply unreasonable and not thinking things through--he quizzes them and asks them to describe their attack position, because apparently he thinks forty boys will be able to improvise in unison a description of a stance with their legs folded up against their chest and their arms stuck between their knees with their gun pointed straight ahead as they descend face-first towards the far wall.  Bean just demonstrates and everyone else follows when Ender shouts at them more.  I'm not sure, reading this, whether Card actually had Bean's side going on in his head, or if he went back later, re-read, and constructed the parallax scene to match.  There are moments when Bean just stares at Ender for a moment before answering questions, which in Shadow will be filled with paragraphs of internal monologue that make much more sense.  If Card wasn't imagining a whole lot going on in Bean's head, I'm not sure what those silences are meant to indicate--yet, in the one scene in this book from Bean's perspective, he's very obviously not the same character.  Questions for the ages, but mostly of interest to me as a writer rather than a reader.

Training goes on, Ender muses that he has to work fast because the teachers will probably not give him the usual three months' prep before his first battle.  Bean sticks around after practice to continue mavericking:

"Ho, Bean." 

"Ho, Ender." 

Pause. 

"Sir," Ender said softly. [....] 

"I want a toon." 

Ender walked back to him and stood looking down into his eyes.  "Why should you get a toon?" 

"Because I'd know what to do with it." 

"Knowing what to do with a toon is easy," Ender said.  "It's getting them to do it that's hard."

Ender explains that his shoutiness and singling-out helped Bean because otherwise no one would have noticed him, but now he's going to be the centre of everyone's attention and just has to be perfect in order to win their respect.  After all, that has clearly worked so well for Ender.  It's not like Ender's life is (Stilson) riddled with strong and (Peter) aggressive people who saw his perfection and hated it and wanted nothing (Bonzo) more than to hurt or destroy him, cough.  (In Ender's Shadow, Bean of course gains an archnemesis, but shockingly it has nothing to do with this.  It's a completely different context in which Bean's genius earns him someone's malice.)

Now my unfavourite part, because verbal abuse just isn't the same without its complement--as he lectures Bean, Ender pushes him back into the wall to remind this tiny six-year-old which one of them is the Legendary Soldier, and when Bean is awesome and refuses to let Ender's loomingness intimidate him and just snarks back, Ender grabs him by the collar and shoves him into the wall.  (Bean continues to smirk.)

Ender let go of him and walked away.  When he got to his room he lay down on his bed and trembled.  What am I doing?  My first practice session, and I'm already bullying people the way Bonzo did.  And Peter.  Shoving people around.  Picking on some poor little kid so the others'll have somebody they all hate.  Sickening.  Everything I hated in a commander, and I'm doing it.

This is the kid whose superpower is his ability to get inside someone else's head so completely that he fully understands their worldview and can't help but love them.  This is him in a moment when he seems, for just a moment, to realise that maybe the world is more complicated than warrior-saints and reavers.  This should be the moment, in a less-monomaniacal book, in which it occurs to Ender that maybe his 'enemies' aren't that different from himself, that maybe people sometimes make bad decisions because they followed the wrong whim and they aren't strong enough to admit their fault now, that a bully might need to be healed instead of destroyed.

Picture my hand sweeping over my head with a great voom.

Why had he done to Bean what had been done to Ender by commanders that he despised? [....] It wasn't an accident.  Ender realized that now.  It was a strategy.  Graff had deliberately set him up to be separate from the other boys, made it impossible for him to be close to them. [....] Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle.  To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else.  That was the only way he could win respect and friendship.  It made him a better soldier than he would ever have been otherwise.  It also made him lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting.  And maybe those traits, too, made him a better soldier.

Ender, one chapter ago you were in the Pit of Despair because you realised that all of your respect and reputation had done jack-all to help you form or maintain legitimate friendships.  You hated the respect and you fell into an ineffectual funk until your favourite psychic video game gave you a virtual doll shaped like your sister to be your friend.  I don't know how to make that situation sadder.  Talk to any real and competent soldier, anywhere.  Ask them if directionless fear, mistrust, anger, and a disconnection from their comrades makes a soldier more effective.  Please upload their reaction to youtube.

Ender's elite practice sessions are brought to an end by teacher fiat, and anyway other commanders don't want their soldiers practicing with Ender now that he has his own army.  I'm not really sure why being commander is considered a much bigger conflict of interest than being Petra Arkanian's second-in-command, but whatever.  (At least the book acknowledges this too.)  Ender complains to Major Anderson, who dismisses Ender's concerns and tells him to grow up and take responsibility.  He holds another practice, then goes to the arcade to mess around a bit before bed, where he finds Alai.

"Don't you know?  We're enemies now.  Next time I meet you in battle, I'll whip your ass." 

It was banter, as always, but now there was too much truth behind it.  Now when Ender heard Alai talk as if it were all a joke, he felt the pain of losing his friend, and the worse pain of wondering if Alai really felt as little pain as he showed. [....] 

"Salaam, Alai."

"Alas, it is not to be." 

"What isn't?" 

"Peace.  It's what salaam means.  Peace be unto you." [....] 

Ender turned around.  Alai was already gone.  Ender felt as if a part of himself had been taken away, an inward prop that was holding up his courage and confidence.  With Alai, to a degree impossible even with Shen, Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips much more easily than I. 

But Alai had left something behind.  Ender lay in bed, dozing into the night, and felt Alai's lips on his cheek as he muttered the word peace.  The kiss, the word, the peace were with him still.

I complain on occasion that the lack of same-sex romance in media is one of the reasons it took me so long to realise I am bi, but reading something like this, I wonder just how gay a scene would have to get before my teenage self would have noticed.  The fanfiction writes itself so easily that I think my desktop is spontaneously generating textfiles of extended makeout scenes after Ender and Alai are teenagers at Command School within the dark tunnels of the asteroid base Eros.  (Note to those who haven't read the book before: except for the makeouts, all of that happens.  Yes, Eros.  No, I don't know what Card thought it symbolised.  We'll see when we get there.)

The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy.  For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.

So awkward when you're just walking around space military school and you see your ex and they're with their new commander.  I legitimately can't see any other way to interpret this--the only times I can think of when I have felt I had to choose between the most intense closeness or staying as absolutely far away as I possibly could were romantic relationships (or failures thereof).  I wish this had been written by another author, so that I could just call it good.  Instead we've got this weird scenario where I have to take joy in the fact that plenty of queer readers picked up on this, simply read Ender as a gay hero, and Card has accidentally given support and succour to the people he so desperately wants to erase.

When they had turned Valentine into a stranger, when they had used her as a tool to work on Ender, from that day forward they could never hurt him deep enough to make him cry again.  Ender was certain of that. 

And with that anger, he decided he was strong enough to defeat them--the teachers, his enemies.

Yes, Ender.  Defeat your enemies, the teachers, by following all of their rules and doing everything they say, falling directly into the agony and mortal danger they intend you to face, and doing the shockingly immoral jobs they have planned for you.  That'll defeat 'em real good.  Mon Dieu, the pretension of badassery here is incalculable.  I can only guess that Ender's 'victory' consists of hanging onto his sanity and reputation through all of this, but if you want to be considered a defiant hero, you actually have to defy.  Otherwise you're just a Left Behind protagonist and people make fun of you on the internet.

Next week: Ender wins at everything because obviously.

Ender's Game, chapter seven, part two, in which everyone gets naked

If this were a normal month, I'd have powered through to the end of the chapter, although chapter seven is about three times as long as they have been up to now.  However, it is a National Novel Writing Month, specifically Camp NaNo, and I have like 2000 words to go today, so this normal-length post will have to do and we will still have a third part two weeks from now.  Chapter is long, y'all.

(Content: violence, bullying, implicit sexism.  Fun content: the Mighty Ducks, Schroedinger's Nudity, a Spanish pop quiz.)

When last we left Our Heroes, psychic video games told the shadowy military authorities that this seven-year-old child murderer they have brought to their space school to learn to attempt genocide on inscrutable aliens might be somewhat emotionally messed up.  (Also, sexism is scientifically justified, white kids are more racism-sensitive than minorities, and being a sadist who controls himself is worse than being a killer who didn't mean it.)

Also I guess Ender transferred to Salamander Army.

Ender's Game: p.74--84

Ender arrives in a room half-full of naked boys.  Which is to say that he arrives at the Salamander Army dorm/barracks, a team of 41 kids (40 soldiers and their commander), and his attempt to figure out which one might wear commander tags is somewhat stymied because half the kids are in their regular uniform and half are in their "sleep uniform", which is to say naked.  (I have trouble imagining eight-year-olds thinking 'sleep uniform' is the best slang for nakedness, but whatever.)  They're all talking about battles, because we are told that is all the older students ever talk about.

Finally Ender gets spotted and explains that he's transferring to the command of Bonzo Madrid--he says it as 'bahn-zo' and a student only slightly larger than him corrects him: "Bone-so. The name's Spanish.  Bonzo Madrid.  Aqui nosotros hablamos español, Señor Gran Fedor."  (My mighty intellect and Google Translate can get as far as "Around here we speak Spanish, Mister Big ____", but I don't know what Fedor is.  In Portuguese it might be 'stench'?  Anyone know?)  Ender guesses that this person is Bonzo, but is again corrected:

"No, just a brilliant and talented polyglot.  Petra Arkanian.  The only girl in Salamander Army.  With more balls than anyone else in the room."

This is hilarious--not Petra's joke, but the context around it, given that we will learn in a couple of pages that Petra has been naked this whole time.  She's probably nine years old, okay, but... I'm just saying Ender failed a spot check if he thought there was a chance she was Bonzo.  I'm going to choose to believe that Ender was totally open to the possibility that Bonzo was a trans boy, but there is absolutely zero chance Card would have been onboard with that.*

The other Salamanders mock Petra, and Petra continues to scorn them, causing Ender terrible despair because he has clearly "made exactly the wrong friend".  But then he looks at the other jeering kids, and thinks of the wolf-children from the game, then thinks of Alai and decides that there must be at least one worthwhile person in the room.  Everyone falls quiet at once, and:

Ender turned to the door.  A boy stood there, tall and slender, with beautiful black eyes and slender lips that hinted at refinement.  I would follow such beauty, said something inside Ender.  I would see as those eyes see.

This is the second preteen boy described as "beautiful" in this book and we're not even 80 pages in.  I'm not sure we'll meet any major female characters from here on out, but suffice to say we won't even get physical descriptors for them, let alone superlatives.  All of the attractiveness is saved for the boys.  The often-naked boys.  This is what I was talking about when I said it was hard to tell if this book was more homophobic or homoerotic.  (I'm sure Card would be horrified that I would dare to hint there could be something sexual about the endless parade of naked boys in this book, but--look, if this were written by an out gay author, people would be asking him to tone down the queer.)

The extra sadness occurs to me that this would probably be a good way of writing a book with a young gay hero.  He doesn't even need to know he's gay to start with, and he doesn't need to actually lust over anyone--just save the poetic descriptions for other boys, and let a naked girl literally walk right up to him and not register in the slightest.  (For real: Bonzo's beautiful eyes have now received more narrative attention than the fact that Petra is not wearing a stitch.  I'm not saying there should be any kind of lusty lingering on that, but it quite simply hasn't been noted.  She's as naked as Stilson is dead**.)

Bonzo is not impressed with his new transfer.

"How long have you been working in the battleroom?" 

"A few months, now.  My aim is better." 

"Any training in battle maneuvers?  Have you ever been part of a toon?  Have you ever carried out a joint exercise?" 

Ender had never heard of such things.  He shook his head.

He knows the rules of manly warfare, he'll make references to great figures of military history, he's at military school, and the entire planet is currently ruled by a highly militarized government gearing up for global war, but he's never heard of "battle maneuvers".  A phrase that could not conceivably be more straightforward without being on Simple Wikipedia.  "Joint exercise" is about the same, and "toon" is just a bit of slang (short for 'platoon') to disguise the question "Have you ever fought in a group before?"  I am underwhelmed, and I think if the point of this scene weren't specifically to make Ender look out of his depth, he'd have worked at least half of this out.

Bonzo goes on to explain that Salamander Army is on the rise, at a 60% win rate and with key victories over well-regarded teams, and so he thinks Ender has been sent to drag him back down to obscurity.  Petra snarks a bit ("He isn't glad to meet you") and is told to shut up as Bonzo turns the incident into a rousing speech:

"To one trial, we now add another.  But whatever obstacles our officers choose to fling in our path, we are still--" 

"Salamander!" cried the soldiers, in one voice.  [....] 

"We are the fire that will consume them, belly and bowel, head and heart, many flames of us, but one fire." 

"Salamander!" they cried again. 

"Even this one will not weaken us."

Ender tries to join in by saying he'll work hard, but Bonzo is having none of it, intends to trade him away as fast as possible, and has no faith in him, telling him that he'll get his training at someone else's expense.  Petra snarks again, and Bonzo slaps her, drawing blood with the tips of his fingernails, before telling Ender that he won't join a toon, won't take part in training, and will stay out of actual battles as much as possible.  Ender realises that he has no hope of getting Bonzo's support, and so turns to Petra again.  She didn't flinch at all from the slap, which Ender takes as a sign that she is a person worth befriending after all, because as we have thoroughly established at this point showing feelings is a mortal flaw.

Bonzo banishes Ender to his bunk at the back of the room--because the station is a wheel, the rooms curve slightly, and Ender is so far back that he can't see the door anymore.  Petra appears, and Ender, who didn't know what a 'toon' was three minutes ago, is corrected on his assumption that she's a 'toon leader'.  His exact words.  What the hell.  Anyway, Petra explains that she has a bunk near the front of the room because she has prestige (she's a sharpshooter) and because Bonzo is afraid she'll start a revolution if he takes his eye off her.  (This, of course, is the actual reward for being 'so good they can't ignore you'--begrudging recognition and resentment and having to take abuse without a word.)  Petra wants to be friends too:

"I'm a girl," she said, "and you're a pissant of a six-year-old.  We have so much in common, why don't we be friends?" 

"I won't do your deskwork for you," he said. 

In a moment she realized it was a joke.  "Ha," she said.

Petra reacts the way someone with an actual sense of humour would in these situations, and I cheer her for it.  Because she's also always awesome, she offers to help train him in their spare time.  I mean, take it as you will that the one girl in the room is the one to take a compassionate and generous stance regarding the little new kid, but it's still a completely good and unselfish thing to do, which is possibly a first for this book.  Ender says that the battleroom will be full first thing in the morning, but Petra explains that there are actually nine of them, and SFs a bit about how allowing the battlerooms to float freely from the rest of the station is how they achieve zero-gravity.  That doesn't quite make sense, and Petra knows it--the actual takeaway is that the Battle School is lying about how advanced their technology is.  Shockingly.

Ender thanks her, which she accepts in the traditional manner of the badass (pausing briefly to look at him as she slow-mo walks away, and possibly there are explosions in the background) and Ender starts playing with his desk, discovering that the security system he built for himself is gone and he can't make another--his desk is no longer secure against anyone.  The lights start to go dim, bedtime, so Ender asks for directions to the bathroom, and the boy who answers tells him he can't go naked, he has to wear his uniform at all times and he is forbidden to speak to student in any other army unless told to do so by a teacher.

"And, uh, Bonzo get mad if you skin by Petra." 

"She was naked when I came in, wasn't she?" 

"She do what she like, but you keep you clothes on.  Bonzo's orders." 

That was stupid.  Petra still looked like a boy, it was a stupid rule.  It set her apart, made her different, split the army.  Stupid stupid.  How did Bonzo get to be a commander, if he didn't know better than that?  Alai would be a better commander than Bonzo.  He knew how to bring a group together. 

I know how to bring a group together, too, thought Ender.  Maybe I'll be commander someday.

So, for the record, maybe half an hour ago Ender watched Bonzo slap Petra across the face so hard that he drew blood, but this is the part that makes Ender think Bonzo makes bad decisions.  Bullying and physical violence are one thing, but people should be allowed to wander around stark naked if they want!  (Seriously, how did Bonzo slapping Petra like that not trigger every last one of Ender's 'Peter' alerts?  Physical bullying is supposed to be the kind he's not okay with!)

Ender is taunted at first in the bathroom for being six, but then recognised as 'the kid from the game room', and smirks to himself that soon, if not in Salamander then in some other army, he'll be known as a good soldier.  He'll show them all.  SHOW THEM A--

The next morning, he and Petra are waiting for their battleroom and continue talk about advanced technology.  Ender observes that there's gravity in the corridor right outside the room, and Petra adds that the rooms still stay zero-G even when they're linked to the corridor, so it can't really be about the free-floating.  She also teasingly warns him that terrible fates have befallen those students who dared to investigate these mysteries of the universe.

"So I'm not the first person to ask the question." 

(Ender's Classmates Are Legitimately As Smart As Him tally: 2)

"You remember this, little boy."  When she said little boy it sounded friendly, not contemptuous.  "They never tell you any more truth than they have to.  But any kid with brains knows that there've been some changes in science since the days of old Mazer Rackham and the Victorious Fleet.  Obviously we can now control gravity.  Turn it on and off, change the direction, maybe reflect it--I've thought of lots of neat things you could do with gravity weapons and gravity drives on starships."

Petra goes on a bit about gravity weapons being used to tear planets apart, but Ender feels he already has the most important information, which is that the teachers do not tell the truth.  Which is a bit of a strange specific conclusion--the teachers are very manipulative, to be sure, but I can only think of two other outright lies they'll tell him, and both are major plot points.  Admittedly, keeping gravity-warping technology secret is also a very big deal, but it seems like a big deal for everyone back on Earth too, scientists and engineers, not just the students of Battle School, so maybe 'the teachers' aren't really the ones to focus on here, except to the extent that 'the teachers' represent the military oligarchy?

They practice; Petra observes that he has no bad habits and she will give him all his good ones, so she's pleased, and they cover a lot of advice for how to play laser freeze tag in zero-G, which is a fun thought experiment but not really super-relevant to our purposes here.  He is indeed benched for Salamander's actual training session, which means he sits off to one side with his desk.  Rather than doing schoolwork, he watches them, and he admits to himself that he's not nearly coordinated enough to perform the techniques that the older students can, or the formations they move in.  He is, however, the ultimate military mind, so he notices the weaknesses as well: the inflexibility of formations to respond to changing situations, the inability for individual soldiers to make decisions and take actions.

So this criticism isn't based in analysis of any kind of bigotry or unrealism or cruelty on Card's part, but a straightforward tactical question: have real armies worked like this since we left behind the age of the musket?  Formations are fine in hand-to-hand combat, but when everyone's got lasers and you can be attacked from literally any direction, surely the value of your exact arrangement is not that high?  Has anyone ever won a firefight through timely use of the Flying V?  The main purpose of a formation in the battleroom would seem to be that your frontline soldiers can act as shields for the back, but that doesn't seem to be a common technique, since the enemy is mildly surprised when Ender (obvs) eventually uses it.

Ender might feel that it's stifling for individual soldiers to not be able to improvise on the fly, but he doesn't seem to be considering the value of coordination, the impact of having many parts moving in concert, which is the actual point of having a commander on the field.  I suppose it could be a matter of degree--maybe Bonzo literally forces his soldiers to not move within their formation at all, like the boys in the gameroom kept using their same rigid patterns against Ender--but Ender sounds like he's in favour of letting soldiers constantly improvise, which sounds to me like the ongoing fantasy of the rank-and-file soldier who thinks he's much smarter and more aware than his commander and he's being held back by stupid commands.

So yeah, basically the same 'ugh it is so hard being the smartest guy in the room' as usual.

That's where we'll have to cut it off for this week, folks--tune in next time to see how Ender resolves his training dilemma, manipulates Bonzo's brawn with his brains, and how he next gets to SHOW THEM ALL when he gets into a proper battle/game.  (Spoiler: there will not be enough Petra.)

---

*Flash forward horror: In Shadow of the Hegemon, ages from now, it is revealed that Petra ranked so high on aggression in early observation that her parents had her genetically tested to see if she was 'actually a boy'.  Petra considers this a matter of deep shame.  I consider the fact that Card wrote all of this and editors approved it to be a matter of deep shame.  [See bekabot's comment below on why this makes no biological sense regardless.]

**I mean this comparison very literally, in the sense that both things are true but hidden from us at the time because they make the rest of the story make no sense in context.  We're told later that Stilson had been dead all along, we're told later that Petra was naked the whole time, and then it's like the waveform collapses and the book retcons itself and hopes we don't notice.  Schroedinger's plot point.

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.