#ender's game

[knightotoc]

I picked 1-2 things from all the authors/directors I could think of, but let me know if I've forgotten something interesting. I was thinking about this topic because this year's bestseller Fourth Wing was apparently written by an ex-Mormon who now loves coffee and smut, which I think is pretty funny.

[f-arelos]

god, i never felt young

percy jackson and the olympians (2023) / first love/late spring - mitski / jackie and wilson - hozier / daria (1997) ender's game - orson scott card / daisy jones & the six (2023) / caesar on a tv screen - the last dinner party / stranger things (2016) / arsonist's lullaby - hozier / the picture of dorian gray - oscar wilde / omori

[transrevolutions]

"ender wiggin is ontologically evil and the real villain of ender's game" ender is like. eleven years old. neurodivergent and a minor in the most literal sense of the term.

[bengiyo]

Do you mind if I ask your top 10 favorite characters (can be male or female) from all of the media that you loved (can be anime/manga, books, movies or tv series)? And why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before.....Thanks....

10 Favorite Characters

You asked a broad question, so I hope you’re okay with answers outside of my daily posting. I post a lot about BL on here, but this list is a mild reminder that I am Black. As I’m putting this list together, I’m recognizing a common thread of ruthlessness in these characters that I will have to unpack at some point.

Omar Little (The Wire)

Omar is one of my favorite characters of all time because he was the first sympathetic gay character I ever watched on TV with my dad. As I got older, my dad decided I was old enough and wanted me to watch what he considered to be one of the greatest shows ever made (NOTE: He is correct). I was obsessed with Omar because of his strict code and how gentle and loving he was with his boyfriends. It was amazing to me that we had this powerful gay character in the middle of a modern Greek tragedy and he is one of the most compelling characters ever created in American television.  

Ender Wiggin (Ender’s Game)

One of the sad thing about growing up queer is the people who wrote a lot of your formative works hate queer people. Orson Scott Card was my first major disappointment in this regard. In the 7th grade, I discovered this book in our school library and ended up reading it and the related books multiple times throughout my adolescence.  I was a weird kid who was too smart for my own good. In middle school I struggled with feeling out of place because I was relatively new compared to most of these kids, and my family had me on a specific life track that meant that I had to perform at a high level constantly. I connected with Ender’s isolation and his brilliance. I also connected to his ruthlessness.

Marco (Animorphs)

Animorphs is a pretty dark series for a bunch of elementary school kids to read, but that was K. A. Applegate’s point. War is horrible, and should be avoided. Reading this series is a reading the perspective of child soldiers. There was something about the way Marco always masked with jokes, but was quietly the most ruthless member of their group that means he’s always the one I remember first. There were also the ways he commented on Ax and Jake that just didn’t read straight, and I’ve been relieved that Applegate and the ghost writers have acknowledged the fan read on Marco’s bisexuality. I just love how from appearances at the end of the series Marco is actually okay after all the war, but he absolutely is not.

Benjamin Sisko (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

He was our first Black captain in Star Trek and I will love him forever. He’s also from New Orleans and cooks our food. He’s a devoted father, which was something Avery Brooks requested for the role to make sure we had a positive depiction of Black fatherhood on TV in the 90s. He has an understated spirituality to him. He has grit from facing the ugly side of maintaining a utopia and has an incredible temper that he holds most of the time. He’s a nerd about baseball. He cares about his people and holds firm as their commander. This isn’t a committee for him. He can be so brutal. I love him.

Ghost Dog (Ghost Dog)

Ghost Dog (1999) is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I’ve always loved the version of masculinity Forest Whitaker put into this character. He has a sense of style and flair, and also follows a strict code of conduct. His adherence to his way earned him the respect of everyone in his community, and gangsters in his neighborhood show him admiration and respect. I loved his friendship with Raymond, in which neither knows what the other is saying and yet they are actually on the same page constantly.

Raymond Holt (Brooklyn Nine-Nine)

Yes, this show is copaganda, but I love Raymond Holt so much. I love that Andre Braugher played the Straight Man role in a comedy as a politically out gay man who has such a serious exterior. Holt was so gay in so many ways and I am obsessed with him. He is so deep into his niche interests (like me) and yet he was actually such a great mentor figure to everyone under him. I loved that he and his husband were so devoted to each other but were never depicted as the perfect couple. I love that he has a petty beef with another colleague. He’s just an incredible character.

Kiram Kir-zaki (Lord of the White Hell)

Kiram is the first time I ever realized how deep the programming in speculative fiction to read the protagonist as a white man with brown hair and brown eyes. Kiram is a dark-skinned Haldiim youth with curly gold hair and light eyes. It took me three readings of this book to perceive Kiram properly, and it’s something that has shaken me for a long time. Kiram is brilliant, snarky, and too gay for his own good. He’s also not stupid. I love reading a smart gay character who generally cannot hide who he is doing the work to blend in to a homophobic setting. Ginn Hale also writes gay sex better than some gay male authors.

Kakei Shiro (What Did You Eat Yesterday?)

Honestly, when am I ever not thinking about this man? I love how, even if he can’t immediately give Kenji everything he might want, he gives Kenji all that he can. He couldn’t say he loved Kenji for a long time, but you could feel the love in his cooking. I’m so happy to have this man and his partner back on my screen again. It is just so hard to be gay. I am so relieved that many of the folks reading my posts didn’t suffer The Knowing, because I know that Shiro and I will never be able to get away from what it did to us.

Chiron (Moonlight)

The terrible intersection of poverty, race, and sexuality has never been better exemplified for me than in this film that has no white people in it. There are just so many fewer choices for us, especially if you can’t hide who you are. I love Chiron so much because we see so much of what he was forced to be pushed onto him. There’s something heartbreaking and beautiful that as an adult he resembles Juan, and that he never got over Kevin.  I find it hard to explain why Chiron means so much to me, but I’m black and gay so I don’t always feel like I have to.

Max (Black Sails)

I love Max because she consistently chose to not be cruel when so many others would have. She is not accumulating power for her own ego or to punish those who wronged her. She holds power as a facilitator. History doesn’t remember the facilitators who keep the lights on and make sure the bread gets made every day, but you notice their absence within two days when they’re gone. Max is also funny to me because she and Flint almost never encounter each other, but have caused the other so much grief.

Thank you for the ask!

[staringdownabarrel]

Based on the sci-fi fandoms I've had interactions with, here's how I think about their level of chillness.

Star Trek: Honestly? A very mixed bag. Sometimes Star Trek fans will be the most chill people on the face of the planet, and sometimes they're really annoying. Asking their opinions about Discovery is a good way of finding out which category they're in.

Star Wars: Absolutely the worst. Zero chill. Sometimes they vindicate how I felt in 2012 when I actively wanted for the franchise to die out.

Farscape: Genuinely the most chill fandom I've ever encountered. I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with a Farscape fan.

Stargate: These guys had varying levels of chill back in 2009 or so when Universe was first being aired and when Beckett being killed off on Atlantis was still a hot button issue, but they've chilled out a lot since then. The lack of new content has done them some good.

Battlestar Galactica: Pretty much the same as Stargate fans because they didn't have a lot of chill back in '09 or so because the ending was so contentious, but have chilled out a lot since then.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Out of the sci-fi comedy fandoms, this one has the least chill. They're still okay most of the time, but they can be a bit annoying sometimes.

3rd Rock from the Sun: Chill, but this is probably somewhat related to how small the fandom is.

Resident Alien: From what I've seen, they're chill.

Red Dwarf: Also chill.

Starship Troopers: Honestly, these guys can go either way, too. Some of them lack chill because they're fans of the Robert Heinlein book and don't like that the movie parodied it, and sometimes they're a bit dense and think the movie is nudge nudge, wink wink real talk. The more chill ones kinda know what the movie's about though and actively prefer it to the book.

Ender's Game: How chill these guys are is an inverse correlation of how much they agree with Orson Scott Card.

Deus Ex: Chill. The JC Denton memes are great.

Doctor Who: Lacked chill in the SuperWhoLock days, and now it's a mixed bag on whether or not they'll be chill or not.

[dogstomp]

Dogstomp #2970 - February 17th

Patreon / Discord Server / Itaku / Bluesky

[jodjuya]

Progressing through Orson Scott Card's Ender Saga. Currently up to "Children Of The Mind", and good fucking lord these chapters with Wang-mu and 'Peter' are such an utterly fucking atrocious trainwreck.

Can anyone in the Ender's Game fandom explain this to me please??

Why are these characters in the Sixth fucking Millennium A.D. talking about "Asians", "Europeans", and "Americans"; and their identities thereof, as if those are even REMOTELY meaningful categories of culture to the peoples of a humanity that have been spreading out into and colonising outer space for over three thousand years?????

Like, right now where I'm up to, Wang-mu and 'Peter' are having their first little conversation with Ainmaina Hikari, and Wang-mu is breezily bullshitting about Ancient Egypt/China/Mesopotamia or whatever

And, like, those ancient cultures are as far-removed from me, the reader, as China/Japan/America are from Wang-mu/Hikari/'Peter'!

If you were to squint hard enough, yeah, it could be said that my distant ancestors came from the Roman Empire, but, fuck no there is no way in heaven or hell that the culture of those 3500-years-ago ancestors and their neighbourly relations with other cultures and peoples has ANY kind of bearing on my life or cultural outlooks.

Like, I'm not gunna give the side-eye to some random stranger I meet whose culture mores seem different to mine and start waxing poetic about "oh he's just like that because he's a Carthaginian. 🙄😒 You all know what Carthaginians are like amirite?? "

(I guess 'Peter' is technically an American—or a 'cloned' caricature of one, at least—so he gets a pass on this)

The Doyleist explanation is that Orson Scott Card simply didn't have the sci-fi chops to imbue his creation with coherence; he's just trying to tell a story here and doesn't have the Tolkienian level of galaxy-brain required to convincingly pull off the 3000+ years of history and sociology experienced by his humanity across its umpteen number of colony worlds, so he's just sticking to what he knew and is hand-waving away the shockingly breathtaking levels of cultural stagnation his humanity has wallowed in.

But what's the Watsonian explanation for that cultural stagnation?? Is there a Watsonian explanation??

(also, what's with Miro's latent homophobia?? Is he Like That because of Card's own intense homophobia shining through, or is it simply because Miro grew up on The Catholic Planet?)

[thelastofthebookworms]

Enjoy :)

[therealslimshady]

why is ender wiggin named that. worst name ever. there's literally no winning for him. except for. you know

[kenonade]

hi everyone i introduce you to my peter

[chilled-ice-cubes]

ender wiggin and paul atreides meeting up at the genocidal teenaged war criminal support group

[yesterdays-xkcd]

Bean actually sabotaged it just to give Dink the excuse to make that joke.

Battle Room [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[A scene is depicted from the Battle Room of the novel Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The boys are floating in a room with random cubes.] Dink: Sorry, Ender — seems like there were some system crashes. The battle's gotta be cut short. Ender: The lasers still work. Dink: Yeah, but the enemy's gate is down.

[transrevolutions]

ender wiggin would start a twitch gaming channel for whatever game he's hyperfixated on at the moment but then become scarily good at each one scarily fast. everyone thinks he's hacking and it makes him sad because he just wanted to have fun playing video games online. he ends up getting extremely famous but also controversial (because of the hacking allegations) and eventually he collabs with petra (who plays combat games exclusively but is an incredible shot), alai (who specializes in rpgs but branches out occasionally) and bean (who actually just hacks but it's his coding skills he shows off not his gameplay). they end up starting the most batshit insane minecraft smp in the history of the universe.

peter and valentine are still highly popular anonymous political influencers in this universe btw

[fortunaegloria]

Harrison Ford in Ender's Game (2013) dir. Gavin Hood

[booktomoviebrawl]

We are not judging how bad the movie is, we are judging which adapted the book the worst. There are good movies that are bad adaptions.

Propaganda below the cut (spoilers may apply)

Ender's Game:

The changed so much stuff and completely left out the plot with Peter and Valentine and their political endeavors as Locke and Demosthenes. Leaving that out made it basically impossible for them to adapt the other books as this becomes very important in subsequent books.

While the movie wasn't terrible, it was just kind meh. Multiple plot points were taken out or changed in the film. It's understandable why some things were taken out or changed (keeping them in would have made it much more difficult to adapt into a decent film). Really the book should never had had a film adaptation, or at least a movie adaptation. The story just doesn't work as a movie; maybe it would have worked as a show, but probably not.

They only thing the same is the general idea and the clips they used for trailers TO TRICK US INTO SEEING IT

The Giver:

Completely changed the book making a story with great characters and subtle themes into a generic ya dystopia with stupid teen characters and no themes

They turned it into like this teen angst dystopia that missed all the nuance and love that poured into the original book. They were clearly trying to capitalize off of Hunger Games/Divergent and failed miserably. The original book was a message on totalitarian governments and how history repeats itself. It's so frustrating to see movies strip away messages like that and just make it a cash grab.

Shallow interpretation, tried to please everyone, also Taylor Swift was there?

[theotherpacman]

orson scott card: there is no tragedy greater than the violence we teach to our children before they can understand it - violence against those who, despite how completely and irrevocably different from ourselves they may seem to us, deep down, are people and that's what matters

orson scott card: homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to be members of society <3 and I also hate black people