Ender’s Game 

So I read the book which is supposed to be thought provoking for the way it handles the concept of the Chosen One. It takes awhile to make you realize that, since the first pages are hell bent on victimizing a super genius protagonist. Everybody is against this guy because he is special. This is the kind of wish fulfillment shit you would encounter in light novel adaptations like Mahouka.

The thing which makes the difference, is how bullying in this story is means to toughen up someone. Since there is a war with aliens coming up, the military checks out which children are smart and take no shit from anyone, and sends them to an academy where they can train to become military officers. 

Meaning, this is not a typical story where bullies are just one-dimensional villains, used so the audience can feel sorry for the protagonist. They are not people the system can’t reform, but rather generated by the system, so they will push the gifted ones beyond their comfort zones. This is a crafty way of using throw away villain archetypes as part of character development, and the plot in general.

Of course that means that this sort of society is essentially creating vengeful children who are raised to be ruthlessly pragmatic. If someone attacks you, you attack back until he will never be able to fight again in his life. The academy wants to dehumanize them, so they will be ready to kill the enemy when the time comes without hesitating. But it’s also not trying to drive them nuts, since it needs sane people who want to defeat the enemy and not to destroy the world. And yes, some of them get killed by being assholes to each other, but it’s all excused since you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Plus it’s the military; of course and people die all the time when they train for life threatening situations. It’s nice to see mistakes having consequences instead of being easily undone or forgotten like they don’t matter.  

Although this concept is great, its execution is not exactly the best. Everybody in the story is self aware of what is going on. The author is using Machiavellian tactics when it comes to the training, which makes little sense since that would require deception, and the children know they are being manipulated. So, why are they still being bullies when they know that this way they are nothing but tools? Or why are they even bothered by bullying when they know it’s all part of an obvious trick? The book doesn’t get to details when it comes to what anyone besides the protagonist is feeling about this situation but calling them ignorant or stupid is not the answer. They wouldn’t be chosen to be in the academy if they were ignorant or stupid.

It’s also very cringy when the author’s notorious chauvinism and homophobia become too apparent in his narrative. If he had bothered to make it seem like the whole setting is chauvinistic and homophobic, it wouldn’t be that much of an issue. But he doesn’t; he just randomly has girls being genetically inferior, and homosexuals being assholes waiting to rape you when you are naked in the bathroom. Just like with the victimizing, there is no subtlety and doesn’t feel like it fits the setting. 

Anyways, the big twist in the story is that the training in the academy was not just games but actual combat. They were really fighting the aliens all this time with videogames. That’s right, videogames are real and you can die by playing them. Thank you Tron. This revelation was stupid. Wasn’t the point of all this training to be ruthlessly pragmatic and fighting the enemy to the death? Where was that even necessary? Why did you need bulling and anti gravity laser battles, and letting little children beat each other to death, when all you needed to do was teaching them how to be good at videogames? Just have Starcraft tournaments and pick the best players. And yes, I know strategy war games did not have the complexity of today when the book was written, but that does not make it any less stupid in retrospect. The Koreans would have won this war in a few hours.

I am also calling bullshit on the giant’s cup game. Any kid would have tried to mess with the system once it lost a dozen times. Heck, I was messing all the time with my videogames, even when I wasn’t stuck. I just wanted to see if I can fool and abuse the programming. I find it impossible to believe that from the hundreds of intelligent children in the academy, nobody else tried to pass the test by simply killing the giant. And by the way, if the test was really made to be unsolvable, the giant wouldn’t be programmed to be mortal. Nothing would be able to kill him. You don’t fool me with your bull, mr. author.   

A nice twist is that the story does not end with the revelation. It keeps going and shows the aftereffects, something not many authors are willing to do. We don’t get a happy ending once the evil aliens are destroyed. Instead, without a common enemy to keep them united, humans are now back to fighting each other. Many of them even want to kill the protagonist because they are afraid of his talents. This is good stuff, and it’s pretty disappointing to see it getting resolved out of screen and in just a dozen pages. It totally went Stellvia. How the hell did that psychotic brother even became the world leader, anyways? Stop the bull, mr. author.  

The final twist is how the aliens turn out to be tragic characters, once they reveal that they didn’t know humans were intelligent beings all this time. They ask for forgiveness and a second chance now that they realized their mistake. It’s nice to have them fleshed out to more than faceless bug monsters, but just like the previous case, it all happens at the very end and doesn’t last very much to care about it. 

And yes they do write a book about it which is meant to teach tolerance and understanding amongst races but again, it don’t fit with the rest of the book. Most of it is spent on bullying, and videogame battles, this was what was defining the whole setting, so why are you going 180 on the themes at the very end? All of a sudden everything was a mistake? Too late to make me believe that.

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Speaker for the Dead

Speaker for the Dead is the sequel to Ender’s Game, taking place after thousands of years when humanity has found another sentient life form and wants to amend for the genocide of the bug aliens. They treat the primitive pig people as kindly as they can and it was fairly interesting to see how they are slowly learning their language and customs, or how they try not to influence their culture too much and alter their natural progress. The first dozen pages were a great set up. 

And then it all falls apart, since everything plays out in a juvenile way. Despite possessing technology that allows them to travel throughout the stars, humanity behaves like it’s still stuck in the Age of Exploration. They colonize planets without checking out for any possible dangerous diseases, which results to most of them getting killed from a virus that exists inside every living being at that place. Nowadays, we get vaccinated every time we travel to another continent, and they travel to other solar systems without a single percussion? Bullshit!

And then it’s the whole interaction with the aliens. Humans have zenobiologists who barely do any scientific research. They are just talking with the aliens without ever being allowed to check out their biology. Meaning, everything is based on observation instead of science with even that one providing close to zero results. And it’s not like they lack the equipment; they clearly have satellites around the planet which monitor the surface and take pictures of the aliens. Despite that, they still have minimum knowledge about their culture. Bullshit! 

In Ender’s Game, it made sense for the humans not to understand the aliens, because they were at war with them, and were technologically inferior. Over here, it is not excused because they are a hundred times more advanced since then, and the aliens are still stuck in the Stone Age. There is absolutely no excuse for not knowing everything about them in a few days. And since the entire conflict of the book is a cultural misunderstanding, means that everything you are reading is bullshit. 

Speaking of the misunderstanding, it has to do with the pig aliens gutting humans and their own kind slowly while they are still alive, and instead of clearing this mess by explaining why, everybody is acting like a complete retard who doesn’t want to exchange fundamental information. This for some reason means that they need external aid from Ender himself, who is still alive after 3000 years because he travels a lot in high speeds and that makes him age much slower than normal. 

Just like in the first story, he is perfect in everything, to the point he becomes a Jesus figure. Aside from being a genius tactician, he also wrote a religious book that everybody loves, his sister wrote another book that everybody considers a masterpiece, he has an artificial intelligence being in love with him for outsmarting it, and carries a cocoon that can revive the bug aliens he wiped out, as well as communicate with other species through telepathy. There is nothing remotely relatable about him.

And yes, they do wave the guilt card a lot, in the sense he killed all the aliens (even though he was being manipulated by others) and mankind feels bad for what they had to do (although they were at war against an enemy that almost wiped them out). Victimizing everybody doesn’t give them more depth, it just keeps hammering the fact that most problems are the result of ignorance, and the solution is simply sharing information. It’s obvious, and yet nobody does it. Nobody, until Ender appears and shares information, which quickly resolves the conflict. Turns out the aliens are gutting people because this way they evolve into higher forms of life. Problem solved and all it took was asking.

What makes things worse, is the fact that the alien cocoon was using telepathy to speak with the aliens, which made it extremely easy for the protagonist to be trusted immediately for using an ability none of the other humans had in possession. He didn’t have to try convincing the pig aliens, since they knew everything about him the second he arrived. This took away most of the tension, since his victory was secured.

And you may be wondering, if it was so easy, why wasn’t the book over a few dozen pages? It’s because most of it is spent on slice of life, where we simply see how the colonists are living. It fleshes them out and we get to know a lot about the setting, but eventually it’s pointless since it has nothing to do with the solution to the conflict, and everybody is overshadowed the second Ender arrives. Seriously, you will forget everybody besides Ender and a couple of aliens. Plus, even the world building feels boring because, as I said, it is not fitting the era and everybody behaves as if they are still stuck in the 16th century. I mean, seriously, they honestly thought they would interact with aliens without ever affecting their way of living? What kind of a five year old actually believes that?  

As a whole, it was a boring book, consisting mostly of filler slice of life, and with the rest being a ludicrous plot that was insulting my intelligence. Just like in the first story, it leaves some things open for a sequel, such as what will happen to the bug alien civilization, or what will the rest of humanity do to prevent the pig aliens from going to other planets and spreading the deadly virus. I am not thrilled to read any further since I found it ridiculous. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbaHR4HVqAI