Storm Front, chapters 24 and 25, in which the race against time pauses for exposition

(Content: violence, implied animal abuse. Fun content: Douglas Adams' style of magic, linguistic history, and benevolent moss.)

Storm Front

Chapter Twenty-Four: So Spooky You Don't Even Know*

Dresden speeds away in  an '89 TransAm, and I wonder again briefly about the supposed rules of his techbane (we could have had a line anywhere about how Mac's car never breaks on wizards and no one's figured out why, and even that would have done something for me) as he tells us about the eldritch dusk approaching, oversaturating the greens and muting yellows and such.  Dresden's pushing over 130mph, he tells us, but "I must also have been driving during the watch rotation for the highway patrol, because not one of them tried to pull me over".  Given how little Butcher cares about the implications of his worldbuilding at this point, I'm surprised he doesn't have Dresden weave an SEP field or something around the car.  Recommendation: if you're going to "luckily" have an obvious problem not be a problem, maybe don't draw attention to it for the reader?

I hit the brakes to slow for the turn onto the lakefront road that led to the Sells house, started hydroplaning, turned into the slide with more composure and ability than I really should have had, and got the vehicle back under control in time to slide onto the correct road.

Dresden the car-slayer is nevertheless a preternaturally talented driver.  Such shock.

Dresden limps quickly up the half-flooded driveway to the house, stops, reminds us all that there are unknown numbers of mystical dangers and traps and suchlike ahead, and so Goes Loud:

So I opened my Third Eye. 

How can I explain what a wizard sees? It isn't something that lends itself readily to description. Describing something helps to define it, to give it limits, to set guardrails of understanding around it. Wizards have had the Sight since time began, and they still don't understand how it works, why it does what it does.

This is not something I'm against, in principal, because I am all for magic being a concept too vast for us to adequately understand.  Terry Pratchett wrote 'it's very hard to talk quantum in a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is' and I don't need to understand Dresden's magic sight as long as I understand the rules he personally uses to interact with it.  Let's see how that goes.

All of his normal senses are heightened ("I could abruptly smell the mud and fish odor of the lake, the trees around the house, the fresh scent of the coming rain") and into the past (he sees the house across all seasons, and each part resonates its origins, windows made from far-off sand and timbers from distant forests) and future (he sees that there are a number of possible timelines in which the house will be a giant bonfire within an hour).  Not bad for a start.

Then we get into the weirdly subjective?

The house itself was a place of power. Dark emotions--greed, lust, hatred--all hung over it as visible things, molds and slimes that were strewn over it like Spanish moss with malevolent eyes. Ghostly things [...] moved around the place, drawn to the sense of fear, despair, and anger [...] like rats in granaries.

Pictured: an oak draped with Spanish moss that bears no one ill will.

We've already picked up on Butcher's choice that, in this world, 'lust' is the mindless desire for sex with no other concern for anything and is Objectively Bad (so why was that thing called a love potion and not a lust potion?) but my actual question here is: why do greed and lust look like mold?  Transitivity of grossness?  All uncomfortable things are equally interchangeable?  I mean, we had some interesting visual representations in the potion-brewing scene, with 'fiery passion' represented by ashes of a love letter and all that jazz.  Wouldn't it be more interesting if greed were represented by--I don't know, swarms of parasites, or chains wrapped around the house to protect it--MINE--from anyone else who might take it?  But no, we are not to befriend Mr Subtlety here:

Skulls were everywhere, wherever I looked, just as the edge of my vision, silent and still and bleach white, as solid and real as though a fetishist had scattered them around in anticipation of some bizarre holiday. Death.

TL;DR--every time a wizard looks at a suburban house where the family just cleared out the Halloween aisle at Wal-Mart, they are stricken with fear that this might be the home of the most evil wizard they have ever met, who is soon to kill again.

Death lay in the house's future, tangible, solid, unavoidable. [....] the future was always mutable, always something that could be changed. No one had to die tonight.

Definitely except maybe not but probably?  'This event is completely unpreventable except that it is' is a personal peeve, I guess.  Don't get me started on Doctor Who series 6.

Anyway, it's time for the Temptation of Harry Dresden, as the old flavour of evil magic calls out to him and reminds him that rejecting it once before had only earned him the suspicion and ire of wizard-kind.

 This was the sort of strength that could reach out and change the world to my will, bend it and shape it to my desiring [....] I could kill the Shadowman, now, before he knew I was here. I could call down fury and flame on the house and kill everyone in it, not leave one stone upon another.

I admit I was wondering why Harry didn't do that.  I'm not generally in favour of killing, but I don't necessarily condemn it in the name of protecting oneself or others.  If Harry had at least left word with Morgan (maybe a sticky note on his unconscious chest) that the real killer is Victor Sells, then he would only at this point be risking his own life by going in and trying to talk Sells down nonviolently.  That could be admirable.  (Though, again, Sells is like a triple murderer at least by now, so I'm pretty sure the Council is going to confiscate his head?)  But it's not quite that, either:

The energy was all there, gleeful within my anger, ready to reach out and reduce to ashes all that I hated and feared. 

The silver pentacle that had been my mother's burned cold on my chest. [....] Another hand took mine. The hand was slim, the fingers long and delicate. Feminine. The hand gently covered mine, and lifted it, like a small child's, until I held my mother's pentacle in my grasp.

There is apparently not a woman in this world who doesn't have dainty little doll hands.

Magic came from life itself, from the interaction nature and the elements, from the energy of all living beings, and especially of people. There is no truer gauge of a man's character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power.

(Wow, I have some terrible news for you, Dresden.)

We have here the first clear declaration of something that's been implied previously: magic has its own morality in Dresden's world that does not directly relate to our world or indeed to mundane morality in his.  Dresden doesn't want to magically nuke Sells' house because that would be Bad Wizardry, perverse and corrupted.  Dresden does declare "I was not a murderer" but everything else he says is about not killing with magic specifically, so it's not clear to me what the repercussions would be if he, say, brought a gun or a knife and used magic only to shield himself until he could finish Sells the old-fashioned way.  Would his magic abandon him?  I have to assume not, because Morgan ostensibly has a few magic skills in his toolbox and a sword specifically designed to kill wizards, so beheading people clearly doesn't bar him from wizardry forevermore.  And Victor has literally been magic-murdering people and his power has only grown, so clearly the power itself doesn't care how it's used.  So why is any of this about killing with magic as opposed to mundane weapons?  That seems to be a value system overlaid onto it by wizards themselves.  There could, plausibly, be some way in which using magic to kill people literally corrupts the magician, but that's not the concern at hand.

Dresden is making a solid moral choice here--I won't blow up the house because I don't want to be the kind of person who blows up houses--but he frames it in this weird paradigm that is all about magic and being different and special, rather than framing it as 'no one should murder, no exceptions for wizards'.  It's not even the Spider-Man principle that great power brings great responsibility, because Dresden clearly doesn't feel all that responsible to use his magic to benefit people.  He won't fleece them, we know this, but he'll also sit around his office for weeks at a time doing nothing, rather than (all groan as I get back on my hobby horse) asking Murphy for bits of evidence so he can track down missing persons for her.  He doesn't particularly try to educate people (except the people who come directly to his office and are easily convinced by pamphlets) on the existence or dangers of magic.  He just puts an "I'm A Wizard" ad in the phonebook and assumes this is the greatest good he can do in the world?

Anyway, with the pentacle reminding him of all the goodness of White Magic that he believes in (ew), the temptation passes, he reminds us all again how alone he is, and he walks into the skull-strewn hypno-scape.

(Maybe-final complaint: did Dresden actually learn anything from using his Third Sight here, apart from confirming that This Place Is Spooky?  I guess he confirmed there aren't any traps outside?)

Chapter Twenty-Five: I Don't Love Money, I Just Say That To Get It Into Bed

Dresden tells us more about how the capital-S Sight of the house will haunt him forever: "It seethed with negative energy, anger and pride and lust. Especially lust. Lust for wealth, lust for power, more than physical desire."  I'm no longer sure what lust is, if it's distinct from greed or envy or avarice or hunger or indulgence.  I mean, you can probably have sex with money, but if Victor Sells has a plan to get it on with power itself, I want to at least hear his weird scheme before they take him down.  Why is wanting an inherently negative emotion?  (Is there such a thing as lust for justice?  Truth?  Can you, in fact, lust for love?)

I limped up the front steps. My Sight revealed no alarms, no sorcerous trip wires. I might be giving Victor Shadowman too much credit. He was as powerful as a full-blown wizard, but he didn't have the education. Muscle, not brains, that was Victor Shadowman.

Why does Dresden keep calling him Victor Shadowman?  His name is Sells.  He gets this supervillain epithet purely because he once appeared to Dresden as an obscured figure in the rain, no one else has used it, and yet Dresden repeats it almost obsessively in his head.  It feels like he's trying to build up his opponent here into a more mythic figure, like a little kid narrating his daydream struggles against the Dark Lord of Clavaldorf (his step-dad, who means well).

The front door is unlocked.  The inside of the house is also slathered with spectral slimes-with-eyes feeding on the residual magic and slithering away when they touch Dresden's aura.  I guess he has already completely purified himself of all the power/justice-lust he was feeling a minute ago.

Dresden creeps through the completely-undefended house and catches the sound of the same music that was playing at the first murder scene with Tommy and Jennifer.  The system is in a living room at the back, connected to an upper-level kitchen/dining room that is apparently Victor's preferred ritual space.  (Maybe linoleum is easy to hose down.)  Dresden's Sight shows more of the evil slime creatures all over the speakers, feeding on the music, causing me to wonder if this is supposed to be, like, inherently evil music, or if the music itself objectively contains emotional energy, or what.  Because he needs to get some more exposition in right now, apparently, Dresden easily sneaks through to the space under the upper room, where Victor's crates of ThreeEye are just lying around, along with their raw materials.  In case we hadn't guessed, ThreeEye is a potion of Victor's own creation, starting with absinthe and then adding everything from peyote to glitter.

(Nitpick: if it weren't for Dresden outright insisting so, we would have no evidence that potion strength depends on whether the ingredients are tailored to the drinker.  Susan got full effects from Dresden's love and wind potions, and Victor's drugs apparently work fine even when mass-produced.  Aren't these things only good for a day or two?  Who's coming to pick up and immediately deliver all of this stuff?  Or is he selling this batch to other local bored rich people?  Time is money, bro.)

Dresden explains that the potions are basically inert until they're inside someone, thus he wouldn't notice their magic without full Sight, but now he's overwhelmed by all the potential suffering they radiate.

Thunder came again, more sharply, and above me, Victor's voice rose in pitch, to something audible. He was chanting in an ancient language. Egyptian? Babylonian? It didn't really matter.

Just as long as we know that it's something super exotic.  (Unless Victor also invented a potion of Duolingo, becoming fluent in ancient Coptic just to murder people seems like a lot of effort.)  He can also hear "soft sighs of pleasure from a woman", as the Beckitts are apparently providing the fornication fuel for this particular kill-spell.  Victor's chant becomes a scream just as Mrs Beckitt fakes an orgasm because this is seriously the least sexy ambience ever rises "to a fevered pitch" and Dresden (paralysed with fear for the last couple of paragraphs) leaps into action at the last second and fireballs the stereo.

Not quite as good as if he'd switched tracks over to Blinded By The Light, but I guess that'll do?

He then calls up wind to carry him to the upper level ("making my duster billow like Batman's cloak" oh my god) and sees the ritual scene, where it looks like Victor is about to kill a rabbit with Dresden's hair tied to its head.  Rude.  Shocked by Dresden's appearance, Victor moves to finish the spell, but Dresden tosses the empty film canister through his magic circle.

As a weapon, it wasn't much. But it was real, and it had been hurled by a real person, a mortal. It could shatter the integrity of a magic circle.

Okay, forget murder, how does Dresden not carry a gun just for the sake of being able to break someone's magic circle at will from a block away?  The circle bursts and hurls magical chaos in all directions; Victor tries to flamethrower Dresden but Dresden grabs fistfuls of overflowing power and conjures a shield in time.  Dresden then (reminding us again how clever he is to not get completely focused on magic like most wizards do) bodily tackles Victor to the ground and begins kicking the hell out of him, but catches a bullet in the leg from a semiautomatic gun that Mr Beckitt had on hand and has to scramble for safety in the kitchen.  The gun immediately jams, because techbane, but Victor now has enough time to let loose a tube full of his little scorpion minions and animate them.  The chapter ends with Dresden huddled behind the counter as Victor, the "naked, lean and savage-looking" Beckitts with useless guns, and a horde of expanding scorpions bearing down on him.  But Butcher very specifically mentions a broom falling into Dresden's lap, so I'm pretty sure he's going to be fine.  As usual, the action sequences in which no one says anything about human nature are the best part.

Next week: the gripping conclusion of my suffering.  Feel free to also make suggestions on what we should start in on next.  (As much as I love everyone telling me 'Will, maybe think about not torturing yourself with this stuff for a while', my personal feeling is that dissecting why a story works is usually a lot less intricate and interesting than talking about why one doesn't, so I'm skeptical how much blogworthy material I could get out of analysing my favourite books.)

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*I suppose I should make a consistent note that these books don't have chapter titles and I'm just making them up for funsies, lest new readers be confused that the titles are so much more entertaining and thoughtful than the text.

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 twelve, in which Our Hero gets his second kill

It's been a long time coming; here at last is Ender's completely unnecessary orchestrated deathmatch with Bonzo Madrid, Graff-designated archnemesis.  Ugh, this chapter.

(Content: adult negligence, violence, death, minor self-harm.  Fun content: the Patrons.)

Ender's Game: p. 200--227

Chapter Twelve: Bonzo

Dap, who still has a soul, has caught on to Graff's plans and filed a report, so today's Ender Time for Graff is about playing stupid.

"He feels--paternal toward the students here.  He feels your neglect of a potentially lethal situation is more than negligence--that it borders on conspiracy to cause the death of serious injury of one of the students here."

DING DING DA-DA-LA FUCKING DING.

"Colonel Graff, the name of Ender Wiggin has percolated through the high command.  It has even reached my ears.  I have heard him described modestly as our only hope of victory in the upcoming invasion. [....] You have known for eight days that there is a conspiracy among some of the more vicious of these 'children' to cause the beating of Ender Wiggin, if they can. [....] And you, fully warned of this danger, propose to do exactly--" 

"Nothing. [....] Ender Wiggin has been in this situation before."

Graff and General Pace--just a second here.  This guy's name is General Pace.  PACE.  The person who is trying to stop Graff from getting Ender to kill Bonzo is named for an old word that means 'peace' and is used in the modern day to indicate 'person whom I acknowledge but disagree with'.  That is an impressive amount of meaning to fit into four letters, but seriously, Card, you named the guy who tries to prevent Bonzo's death COMMANDER WRONG?!  I am no longer sure I believe this book is real.  Am I being punk'd?

Apparently not.

So they both know that Ender has been harassed by bullies before, and Graff specifically cites Stilson as precedent that Ender can take care of himself, which is interesting to me because Stilson is also precedent that Ender absolutely will murder a kid to make himself feel safe, so I can't figure out what Graff thinks he's going to learn from this second kill.  Graff goes on about how Ender needs to know when he holds the future of the fleet in his hands that no one will come to save him, and that if he graduates Bonzo now Ender will know that he was rescued, because "heaven knows Bonzo isn't a good enough commander to be promoted on merit".  This at least collapses the waveform--we were introduced to Bonzo as hardass but reasonably effective, then told how stupid he was, and now we're told that he just sucks in general.  Yet somehow he's been able to hold command for over four years.  Graff, you know that demotions are a thing too, right?  Bonzo has been in command twice the normal length of time and we've already done the math that command positions should be rare and coveted; how has no one else taken command of Salamander?  How has Bonzo not gone wherever it is that non-commanders go when they graduate?  Where would Bonzo be if you had actually graduated him two years ago like you should have?  Is it possible he'd have found something else in life that he's actually good at, and his honor obsession might have been redirected?  What would have happened to Bonzo if he'd been given a fraction of the attention and special treatment you're giving Ender?

Graff snarks that, while he will deserve to get court-martialled and globally shamed if he is wrong, he deserves a few dozen medals if he's right, "for keeping you from meddling".  He is, without question or mitigation, a monster.

Ender is watching Bean's Ridiculous Ops toon practice weird techniques, like disarming an enemy with their feet in close combat.  Bean has somehow acquired a deadline, the near-invisible near-indestructible cord used to anchor objects in space during construction.  By tying himself to a wall, he can take a great arcing leap at ridiculous speed.  We don't find out until Ender's Shadow how he got this, but it's a bit bizarre--I can only think that Card either felt he had run out of ideas or he was just deadset on using particular scenes that he couldn't justify any other way.

As they leave practice, they start noticing the students in the halls are improbable--too many older students, too many Salamanders and others known to hate Ender, all just casually hanging around or pretending to very slowly leave the area.  The Dragons catch on, but fake relaxation.  Ender knows his army is young and worries what will happen if they're attacked now.

Petra shows up to look like a complete fool and this, again, will not be explained until Shadow.  She asks to talk to Ender, who refuses to break his stride, and when she finally jogs to catch up, she warns him that there are students planning to attack him--she admits that she hated him too after he beat Phoenix, and Ender says he doesn't blame her, which is still weird to me.  Why is the immediate reaction to losing a game in this school to hate the other commander with the fury of ten thousand suns?  Is this supposed to be part of them being realistic children?

Ender points out that they just passed a tons of kids waiting to ambush him, and asks if Petra really didn't notice them.  She angrily declares that she did not and that Ender should learn to recognise his friends.  Given that this message was useless and her attempt to deliver it was dangerous, the options are that 1) Petra is supposed to look totally incompetent here or 2) Card knew all along what she was really thinking (get in a fight, take a few punches, win, everyone will have vented their feelings and no one dies) and just waited a couple of decades to let everyone else know.  2 seems implausible but 1 seems excessive even for him.  I dunno.

His toon leaders honor-guard him to his private cabin, where he finds a text from Dink Meeker: Don't be alone.  Ever.  This is our first hint that the Dinktron 4X Victory And Friendship Unit has broken down and the real Dink Meeker is back to remind everyone that they're playing goddamn laser tag so chill out.  Ender dreams of Stilson, and sees him now as a posturing 6-year-old bully rather than a monster, but in his dreams they beat him anyway, and when Ender wakes up he reassures himself that he's too brilliant for the teachers not to protect him against real threats even if they skew the game against him.  It's a fairly neat bit of work--in a couple of paragraphs Card undercuts Ender's first kill to tell us that murdering Stilson isn't actually proof that he will still kill freely, and he assures us that Ender really is in fact counting on protection from the teachers just like Graff suspects.  Which will apparently hold him back from reaching his full potential, somehow?  That part still isn't clear, even if you buy this part.

The morning's battle is a long slugging match with Badger Army, in a thicket of stars and with Badgers recovering from partial damage over time--only complete freezes are permanent.  Dragon wins, obviously, but they've missed breakfast and Ender cancels practice, and instead naps all morning, which--upon waking--he considers "slacking off" and so forces himself to climb the rope in the gym three times before finally going to shower.  He's alone in there for some time before seven people arrive at once, led by Bonzo.  He reaches for his towel.

It wasn't there.  One of the boys was holding it.  It was Bernard.  All it would take for the picture to be complete was for Stilson and Peter to be there too.  They needed Peter's smile; they needed Stilson's obvious stupidity.

Taking a moment to note that Stilson's intelligence can apparently be judged by looking at him and that stupid people hate Ender.  Yes, folks, we're back into the Sullen Judgmental No-One-Understands-Me Smart Kid Fantasy mode.  Ender quickly decides that Bonzo is the only one he really needs to worry about--the others want to humiliate him; Bonzo wants him dead.

"You can go home and tell your father, Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen."

Not to interrupt the drama, but seriously.  Ender was "six years, nine months, and twelve days old" when he transferred to Salamander Army.  That was three years ago--almost exactly three years, based on the age estimates we've been given and the duration Dragon Army has been in operation (which is, near as I can tell, less than two months).  In order for Bonzo to be 13 now, he would have had to have been 10 then.  He wasn't a new commander, either--Ender told us earlier that armies normally have a game every two weeks, Bonzo declared in his first appearance that Salamander was rising out of obscurity by winning twelve of its last twenty games, and Ender also told us that commanders don't inherit the records of their predecessors, which means at minimum Bonzo had been commander for a full year at that time (40 weeks of games plus the two-month warm-up period after promotion).  In order for Bonzo to be 13 now, he would have had to have been promoted at age 9, the same as Ender, and Ender's promotion was unheard of, whereas Graff assures us that Bonzo is an incompetent fool.*

All of this can be avoided by two things: either make sure your timeline is vague, or don't seed incredibly specific information throughout the book that adds up to a blatant contradiction.  (Option three, of course, is that no one actually cares, which I imagine is what Card would say really matters--it's about the story, not about being fussy over details.  Except that this is the kind of story that falls apart because of details, and in point of fact that's perhaps the most important thing about this story: it only works if you want to believe it does.  Very meta.

"You shut up," said bonzo.  "Shut up and stand out of the way."  He began to take off his uniform.  "Naked [drink!] and wet and alone, Ender, so we're even.  I can't help that I'm bigger than you.  You're such a genius, you figure out how to handle me."

I'm going to skim the fight proper, because it is of itself just not that interesting.  There are plumbing fixtures everywhere which they realise are the key weapons.  Bonzo's stance shows that he's taken ground fighting classes more recently than Ender.  Ender starts turning on faucets for the steam, so that he'll be more slippery, with the soap and the sweat.  Bonzo declares that he's not afraid of hot water, and moves in.

If there isn't yet a pornographic parody based on this scene, there will be by the end of the year.

Dink Meeker bursts in and begs Bonzo to stop, which feeds Bonzo's need for power, but then screws up by declaring that the games don't matter, the point is the war with the aliens, and Ender might be the only one who can win it.  Dink has regained perspective, but the thought that Ender is important and Bonzo is not just locks Bonzo into murder mode and the brawl begins.

"If you touch him you're a buggerlover!" cried Dink.  "You're a traitor, if you touch him you deserve to die!"

Etc.  There is much talk of being "too slippery" and how "Bonzo's tight, hard ribs came against Ender's face" and Bonzo thrusting his hips away "to keep Ender from reaching his groin" and finally Ender smashes Bonzo's nose with his face.  Ender does his whole 'I must win extra-hard or I will have to fight this fight again' rationalisation and so sets in with further savage kicks (specifically including the groin), until Bonzo collapses under the hot spray and doesn't move.  At last the medics show up and Dink hauls Ender away to his room and tries to comfort him by telling him how awesome he is.

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind.  There was no help for him.  Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it.  Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

Within the context of the school, sure, okay, but only to the extent that he is in an environment completely controlled by people who are actively trying to destroy him.  What isn't at all clear to me is how this is supposed to make Ender a better commander in an environment where he is supposed to lead and plan and be brilliant and, above all else, count on other people to back him up.  If I wanted to dwell on this longer, I would point to nonviolent resistance and to basically every part of human history that shows how the threat of destruction is useless against those who would rather be dead than surrender their ideals.  The power to destroy is the greatest power only as long as you assume destruction is the worst fate.  But addressing that would be another novel.  Ender bursts out again that "I didn't want to hurt him! [...] Why didn't he just leave me alone!" and eventually falls asleep.

Ender awakens again at 1820 that same day to find another battle notification--Dragon versus Griffin and Tiger at once.  The Dragons are excited; Ender goes to shower again and wash off Bonzo's blood.

In the dark battleroom, their view is immediately blocked by stars, so Ender sends Bean's Ridiculous Ops squad to scout by using the aforementioned high-speed deadline arc flight hurricane howling scorpion strike technique art move.  Bean reports that, after the first block that Dragon is assembling on, the battleroom is completely empty until they reach a fortification of stars on the far side where the enemy has gathered.

"In a real war, any commander with brains at all would retreat and save this army." 

"What the hell," said Bean.  "It's only a game." 

"It stopped being a game when they threw away the rules." 

"So you throw 'em away, too."

I can't believe they didn't use that dialogue in the film trailer.  It sounds exactly like every action movie with a maverick hero.  Anyway, Griffin and Tiger lie in wait and are eventually baffled to see a huge formation move out from Dragon's blockade--a literal wall of frozen soldiers, with a cylinder stretching back from it, tied together in a close formation with active Dragons shielded inside and firing.  Bean has used the deadline to make a giant (phallic, sorry to say it but it is) armored vehicle of boys to penetrate enemy lines.  The formation abruptly splits apart and most of it reverses direction, drawing enemy attention back towards the Dragon gate.  The Griffin leader realises something is weird, scans the room, spots a bunch of Dragons near his own gate, takes aim, and the lights come up because Dragon won.  They skipped the actual fighting portion of the battle and sent a little squad to dash through the gate.  (This is a very thematically-inspired battle, with the sacrificial shields and the complete disregard for normal safety in favour of laser focus on the goal.)

In several decades of Battle School operations, apparently no one has ever thought of just going straight for the goal.  Does Earth no longer have capture-the-flag games?  This is such a revolutionary tactic that Anderson declares they're going to change the rules so you can't go through the gate until the entire enemy army is out of commission.  Ender is first calm, then furious when Anderson walks away, but everyone (Tiger and Griffin included) just start cheering him and saying that as long as he's on one team, no match can ever be equal anyway, so forget the rules.

Ender cancels practice forever, declares he's finished with the game, and hides in his cabin until Bean arrives to tell him Dragon has been dissolved--all of the toon leaders have been promoted to command of their own armies, including Bean, the new Rabbit Leader.  Ender rants at Bean while Bean fumbles at being a comforting friend, and again I'm skimming this because it's more wallowing in Ender's angst at how he was 'forced' to beat Bonzo, and this is a much more interesting scene in Ender's Shadow.  Anderson arrives, rebukes Ender for his 'insubordination' in the game room, and then gives him a graduation slip--he's going to Command School, which Bean assures us never happens before age 16.

They leave, and Bean goes back to his bunk and tries to understand his own sorrow, until at last he realises that it's Ender, Ender is gone and Bean will never see him again.  "He bit down on his hand to stop the feeling, to replace it with pain.  It didn't help."  Wow, okay, so this version of Bean medicates with self-harm.  I had not caught that before.  That'll get retconned out.  He forces himself to calm down and fall asleep:

his breathing was quick and light.  He was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant.

Bean is maybe age seven.  He's been at Battle School for a year.  We don't know it yet, but Battle School is a goddamn paradise compared to his early childhood as a starving scavenger in the Netherlands.  This school is absolutely unconscionable child abuse, but the idea that it's converted him into an adult in a matter of months still doesn't make sense to me.  It's possible to abuse people without magically causing them to mature as well.  That which does not kill you does not necessarily make you stronger.

Ender gets onto a shuttle to go home, and Graff is coming with him.  They have to return to Earth to get a long-range shuttle to fly to Command School,  and that means Ender gets to see family.  They land in Florida, and Ender finds it strange, and it's the best and truest bit of the chapter:

Everything was far away and flat; the ground, lacking the upward curve of Battle School floors, seemed instead to fall away, so that on level ground Ender felt as though he were on a pinnacle.  The pull of real gravity felt different and he scuffed his feet when he walked.  He hated it.  He wanted to go back home, back to the Battle School, the only place in the universe where he belonged.

We get a final scene with Imbu and Anderson, the new principal, discussing how Graff has been maybe-arrested by Pace and ordered to report to the Polemarch, and we get the Shocking Reveals that Bonzo is dead, not that they will tell him, and that this is the second time:

"They didn't tell him about Stilson, either." 

"The kid is scary." 

"Ender Wiggin isn't a killer.  He just wins--thoroughly."

If we're not defining 'killer' to mean 'person who kills' anymore, I am seriously not sure how to English.  Ender absolutely is a killer.  What they're saying is that Ender doesn't kill anyone they care about.  If Ender really wanted to win, if he wanted freedom, he would kill Graff, and that would scare the fuck out of them.  Then he would have taken out the greatest threat to his own safety and health.  Ender only kills the people they throw into the arena with him, and that is what makes him useful, but it does not make him innocent.

Next week: Ender breaks, Valentine fixes him, rinse, repeat.

---

*How much more sense would all of this make if Bonzo wasn't incompetent, but was in fact a potential Chosen One?  What if he was almost Ender, but not quite good enough, and his ego had only become his fatal flaw when Ender appeared and he realised that he wasn't Graff's favourite anymore?  What if he had gone through all of these same trials that Ender has gone through, but sometimes he slipped up, he never made it past The End of the World, he made it through two unfair fights but lost his third one, and Ender arrived and suddenly Bonzo was told that being the best student Battle School had ever seen up to now meant nothing, because they only needed one supreme commander?  What would Ender have become if, just now as he's become a commander and weathered all this abuse, some new kid showed up and was even more brilliant?

Ender's Game, chapter four, in which Ender Wiggin becomes the blatant reader-fantasy-insert

Before we get down to this week's unrelenting horrors in Smarterthanyouville (Population: Ender Wiggin, Not You, Neener) I want to make sure everyone's seen last week's Sunday post, the very first Book Club post on Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.  The whole point of the Book Club is to get more interactive discussion going (as opposed to these Ender's Game posts where it's more like I've done some kind of hideous dissection experiment for science and now I'm delivering my findings to my learned peers for their review), so if you have ever had thoughts about Cat's Cradle or Vonnegut or the fundamental purpose of religion, get over there and share them.  SHARE MORE THAN YOU ARE COMFORTABLE WITH SHARING.  That is how we do, 'round these parts.

(Content: bullying, physical violence, reference to suicide.  Fun content: Manly Rules of Warfare, a consideration of how Card is to Ender as Meyer is to Edward.)

Ender's Game, p. 27--36

Chapter Four: Launch

We begin with the Faceless Powers That Be discussing how important it is for Ender to be simultaneously isolated so that he doesn't just adopt the same kind of system everyone else lives by and lose his creativity, but also to keep him integrated with the other students (so he learns how to be A Leader).

"I'll have him completely separated from the rest of the boys by the time we get to the School." 

"I have no doubt of it.  I'll be waiting for you to get here.  I watched the vids of what he did to the Stilson boy.  This is not a sweet little kid you're bringing up here." 

"That's where you're mistaken.  He's even sweeter than he looks.  But don't worry. We'll purge that in a hurry."

Just in case we forgot that Ender is not merely a murderer, but also the pinnacle of benevolence and virtue.  Since Graff already knows Ender is perfectly willing to use lethal force (at least when he doesn't know it's lethal, which is all part of their plan), I'm not sure what sweetness they intend to break him of.  I suspect, based on various things, that they mean he's too nice to his friends, and he will need to be more of a stoic hardass in order to be a good commander.  Possibly true, commanders do need to make painful decisions with conviction, but it feels surreal to be discussing that in regards to someone proven willing to kill.

I'm also kind of vexed by the implication that the normal training system is broken (or at least not good enough) and so it's vitally important to make sure Ender gets special treatment.  Partly this bugs me because it's more all about how special and important Ender is, and how even when he goes to a school for impossible geniuses he has to go in Abusive For The Greater Good Advanced Placement.  The other reason it bugs me is that it means the administrators like Graff already believe that the current 'system' is not as good as it could be, but they're not apparently trying to make it any better.  They're not trying to improve the training of any of their other students because it's all about Ender.  And it's not like these are footsoldiers--Battle School kids, as we were told last time, are the best and brightest of everything, and we've just been reminded that Ender will rely on them as subordinates in the coming war, so why does Graff not care if the current Battle School culture is giving them inferior training?

Anyway.  The chapter opens with some competent sci-fi of the twenty boys (including Ender) getting into the shuttle to go to Battle School.  There are video crews filming them leaving, which seems kind of weird--Battle School has hundreds of students and has been operating for decades, so shouldn't this type of thing be incredibly routine?  We will still have slow news days in the future, I guess.  Ender doesn't talk to the other boys, who are joking with each other--he doesn't think less of them, but he can't think of how to join in, so he stays apart.  He does talk amiably with Graff, who reveals himself to be the Administrator (principal) of Battle School, and Ender thinks about how glad he is that he will have a friend there.  Ender is six and doesn't know what foreshadowing is because he was too busy learning the rules of manly warfare (Rule #5: If this is your first night at Xenocide Club, you have to xenocide).

There's a fairly involved physical description that I always find confusing, so I will summarise rather than quoting directly.  The shuttle stands upright on its launch pad, so the kids walk inside and then climb a ladder up the aisle to their seats, which are facing upward toward space.  Ender notices that the walls tend to be carpeted as well so they're easy to walk on regardless of which way the shuttle orients itself in a gravitational field.  He starts playing gravity games in his head, imagining that he has to keep a strong grip on his seat to avoid falling upward and out into the sky, or picturing the shuttle clinging to the bottom of the world and preparing not to launch but to plummet.  Inertial reference frames are fun!  On this, Ender and I do not disagree.

The shuttle launches, they rapidly escape Earth's gravitational field and become weightless, and Graff appears again, climbing 'upside-down' along the ladder and then flipping himself around because it's zero-G and you can do that.  Some kids start retching from the nausea of reorientation.  Ender just thinks it's funny, and giggles when he imagines opposite gravity so that Graff is standing on his head, so to speak.

DEPLOY TROPE.

"What do you think is so funny, Wiggin? [....]  I asked you a question, soldier!" 

Oh, yes.  This is the beginning of the training routine.  Ender had seen some military shows on TV, and they always shouted a lot at the beginning of training before the soldiers and the officer became good friends.

Ender explains how he amused himself by mentally rotating gravity as a god would do, and Graff seems like he's going to rip into Ender for not being serious, but this book is too smart for anything that obvious.

DEPLOY TROPE SUBVERSION.

"Scumbrains, that's what we've got in this launch.  Pinheaded little morons.  Only one of you had the brains to realize that in null gravity directions are whatever you conceive them to be.  Do you understand that, Shafts?" 

The boy nodded. 

"No you didn't.  Of course you didn't.  Not only stupid, but a liar too.  There's only one boy on this launch with any brains at all, and that's Ender Wiggin.  Take a good look at him, little boys.  He's going to be a commander when you're still in diapers up there.  Because he knows how to think in null gravity, and you just want to throw up." 

This wasn't the way the show was supposed to go.  Graff was supposed to pick on him, not set him up as the best.  They were supposed to be against each other at first, so they could become friends later.

This part is an interesting parallel to the real world, and for a fair number of readers, probably familiar.  If you're the smart kid in class, or the good kid, someone who behaves, and your classmates are not, any teacher who tries to set you up as the example to follow is often just painting a target on your back.  Role models we don't choose for ourselves are an imposition, not a support.  If this is a book for people who think they're smarter than everyone else, a book for gifted kids who resent the unwashed masses, then this moment barely feels exaggerated: the teacher just told everyone that you're awesome and they suck, which is obviously objectively true, but now you're going to suffer for their shortcomings.  Card knows his audience.

Graff leaves, some other kids snark at Ender, who is flummoxed but tries to distance himself from it, and then the kid in the seat behind him starts smacking him on the head.  Ender tries to suffer in silence, Graff does nothing, and Ender realises that this hostility is exactly what Graff wanted to create, because Ender is a super-genius, but all of the other super-geniuses sitting around haven't given that any thought at all because they aren't viewpoint characters.  Ender decides that, since Graff wanted this, he is once again On His Own, and so he waits, figures out the timing of the kid smacking him in the head from behind, and the next time a blow is incoming, Ender grabs the arm and yanks.  Ender has forgotten about the null-gravity thing and so his assailant hurtles through the air and slams into a distant wall, badly.   (Manly Rule of Warfare #37: If someone taps out or demonstrates that the author's military philosophy is the absolute truth, the fight is over.)  Graff arrives instantly and a medic starts first-aiding the kid's busted arm.

Ender felt sick.  He had only meant to catch the boy's arm.  No.  No, he had meant to hurt him, and had pulled with all his strength.  He hadn't meant it to be so public, but the boy was feeling exactly the pain Ender had meant him to feel.  Null gravity had betrayed him, that was all.  I am Peter.  I'm just like him.  And Ender hated himself.

'Peter' continues for some reason to be shorthand for 'incredibly violent outbursts', despite all on-page evidence suggesting that Peter's violence is premeditated, easy to predict, and seemingly has never left a lasting injury.  (Again, I'm not saying Peter is a stand-up guy, but these aren't minor distinctions.)  Maybe Peter has done this type of thing, but if so, we've never seen it.  And if 'Peter' here actually just means means 'sadist', then Ender's recriminations are weird, because he seems to think that 'hitting someone harder than you meant to' is the same as 'cackling hell demon'.  Violence is bad, discipline is good, but context matters.  Does Ender hate himself for occasionally having a fleeting desire to cause pain?  Because I have a lot of those too, but I have not murdered anybody, so I think he's focusing on the wrong facet of his morality, y'know?  Worry about causing harm, not about wanting to cause harm.  Inner purity won't actually get you very far in practical situations.

Graff tells the other kids, again, that they suck.

"You were brought here to be soldiers.  [....]  And when I tell you Ender Wiggin is the best in this launch, take the hint, my little dorklings.  Don't mess with him.  Little boys have died in Battle School before.  Do I make myself clear?" 

There was silence the rest of the launch.  The boy sitting next to Ender was scrupulously careful not to touch him. 

I am not a killer, Ender said to himself over and over again.  I am not Peter.  No matter what Graff says, I'm not.  I was defending myself.  I bore it a long time.  I was patient.  I am not what he said.

Not Peter: confirmed.  Not a killer: *bzzt*.  We will eventually find out that the one previous death in Battle School was a suicide, which is not remotely surprising given that this is apparently how they treat six-year-old children.

This last bit really highlights the false dilemma that keeps ruining everything around Ender: the only responses he seems to be able to imagine are 'take all the suffering right in the face', or 'destroy them and burn their crops and hear the lamentations of their goats'.  Bear it and be patient, or default to murder.  I get that he's supposed to be malleable, but he instantly and completely assumes that there is never any help from anywhere and his enemies are completely implacable, on the basis that someone told him so.*

They arrive at Battle School; Ender is the last one to leave the shuttle and confronts Graff, who explains that Ender should not count on him to be a friend because his job is to make the perfect general and subordinates.  (There's a bit about 'Napoleon lost and Alexander died young and Caesar made himself dictator', which I can't read without hearing Meyer talking about how much better Edward is than Romeo and Tristan and Rhett.  This might be a comparison we come back to in future.)  Graff tells him outright: "There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you, and that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you."

And... well, no.  Anyone who's ever had any luck with that strategy is welcome to speak up, but that is not how things work in my experience: being awesome at what you do hopefully gives you the freedom to get the hell away from the jackwagons and only hang out with decent people, but I am skeptical that any bully has ever thought "Wow, that kid I torment regularly is way smarter than I thought; clearly we should be friends". Part of the problem here is that Graff's advice doesn't even logically flow--he's telling Ender that being awesome will make him impossible to ignore, but Ender's problem isn't being ignored, it's being hated.  These are not synonyms!  Maybe they are in whatever futurespeak language Graff uses.  They should fix that.  Invent more words.

Graff speechifies SFFily more about how the aliens are an unknowably huge threat and the rest of Earth's biosphere doesn't care whether humanity survives so their only hope is to produce the kind of genius that completely transforms the direction of human history, like the inventors of wheels and airplanes and empires. It's well-written but mostly just about telling us how important Ender is.  Et cetera.

Ender moves on, and Anderson, another teacher, stops to talk to Graff, asking if 'that's the one'.  Graff basically says that if it's not Ender, then the chosen one had better show up soon or they're all boned.

"Anderson." 

"Mmm." 

"The kid's wrong.  I am his friend." 

"I know." 

"He's clean.  Right to the heart, he's good." 

"I've read the reports."

I like to think that when Anderson says "I've read the reports", he's actually thinking

But probably not.  I don't know, maybe Meta-Anderson will turn out to be a good and reasonable person.

"For his sake, I hope it isn't him.  I do." 

"Cheer up.  The buggers may kill us all before he graduates." 

Graff smiled.  "You're right, I feel better already." 

Spoilers: they won't.  DOUBLE spoilers: if the aliens just killed off a handful of the top military leaders, somewhere between thousands and billions of lives would be saved.

I no longer know what this book is about.

Leave your own Manly Rules of Warfare in the comments!

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*If I keep referencing Ender's Shadow there won't be any point in analysing it directly after Game, but this is another reason that Bean is a vastly more likeable protagonist: for all that he's supposedly aloof and smug and isolated, he believes other people can help and he forms teams, he goes for backup, he works collectively.  His biggest victories aren't about being twice as awesome as everyone else, but about bringing people together to find a third option that isn't self-destruction or outright murder.  (And once again, this is something that Card himself notices, and has Bean ponder as well.)  And yet we're told Ender is the great leader whose esteem everyone hungers for and who wields deadly empathy.  Does not compute.