Ender's Game ~ Lost in Adaptation

Did the underwhelming Ender's Game movie have much in common with the novel by Orson Scott Card?
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[@pedroxqui]

One aspect I don't think Dom mentioned enough, is that on ender's last "simulation" he was so done with everything, tired and burned out that he decided to do the unthinkable, meat shield operation and genocide, it wasn't a "brilliant" maneuver, he did it because it was a simulation and wanted to be done with it, but turned out, it was real and beside the genocide of the aliens, he killed hundreds of thousands of humans, sacrificing them without a second thought because they weren't supposed to be real

[@HoraceSteve]

Exactly; he wanted to wash out at that point. He was channeling Peter’s bloodlust in the hopes of being kicked out.

[@michaelyoung7261]

I think it was realizing that his apathy and bloodlust that he channeled in the final “exam” that killed real humans on top of the xenocide is what really broke Ender. He was already cracking, but those two straws destroyed the camel

[@Agent29416]

It's also why he was able to win against them when no adult general could, yes he was intelligent, but his biggest advantage was he just didn't see what he was doing as loosing human life so did moves no one else would do.

[@GeneralTaco155555a]

​@@Agent29416 ...I mean yeah, that's why the kids were all lied to and told it was just a simulation. That wasn't some secret advantage, that was literally the whole point of them not being told that there were real lives being lost.

[@timothymclean]

Ender did a war crime so horrible he assumed it would get him fired at last, and it was exactly what his commanders wanted all along.

[@Denverl8868]

I think the movie doesnt mention a central part of the books for me : cultural differencies leading to misunderstanding. In the books it is mentionned that formics not only speak telepathically but also that those who cant (the drones of the hive) arent living thinking creatures, just extentions of the queens. As such it is customary for formics to get each other attention by killing a bunch of drones. It is kinda like poking someone on the shoulder by their standards. So when they came upon the humans their first reaction when seeing that humans couldnt hear their messages was to assume they were drones and kill them to get the human queen attention. It started the war and it is only later that the formics realized their mistake and were horrified by it.

[@KnugLidi]

formic drones have no genetic future, only queens do. They did not realize that individual humans were were genetically unique.

[@Duiker36]

Reminiscent of the story where a bunch of aliens accused everyone of having death rays, and it took us a while to realize that *radio* was extremely harmful to them. And guess what everyone was using for basic long-distance communications?

[@RabbitShirak]

Sounds a bit like first encounter between humans and the Minbari in Babylon 5.

[@Hawkido]

@@Duiker36 Crap what was the name of that story... I remember reading it as well a long time ago... It also was a short story that got expanded to a full book wasn't it?

[@thelastdictator482]

@@Hawkido Conquerors' Pride by Timothy Zahn. First contact goes wrong because the first contact broadcast hurts the aliens and they perceive it as an attack.

[@lokuzt]

The worst misunderstanding the studio and directors made was that Ender's Game is *not* a story of supersmart children saving the world in a cool future of advanced space technology - it's about the horrible need of humanity to systematically de-humanize everything pure and kind from a near-perfect version of a human child because nobody could be bothered to find ways to understand and communicate with someone perceived as _different_ despite knowing that they're intelligent... in order to survive.

[@DycuswasHere]

Card put this all to page and still came out homophobic

[@Terminalsanity]

@@DycuswasHere Yes well while the trauma of having been conscripted and gulled into the Vietnam war through patriotic indoctrination/nationalism taught Car that racism and warfare are f_cked, sadly on account the fact that cognitive dissonance is a feature of humanity, he was unable to apply those sames lessons to homophobia and the dangers of religious indoctrination.

[@teaandlace1472]

This is also why I was disappoited about the decision to age up thr characters. It made the story less horrible when its supposed to be horrible

[@annelooney1090]

​@@Terminalsanity Where did you hear OSC is a Vietnam veteran? I think he got out of it by being a university student and then a Mormon missionary. Which, no hate to that, but I don't think he was in the military.

[@anyaabusable9888]

"Humanity does not ask us to be happy. Humanity asks us to be brilliant on its behalf."

[@wfbgenius]

When I saw the movie, the thing that infuriated me more than anything else was that when they win the final battle the kids all start cheering and celebrating and the adults look mildly horrified. In the book, ender just kind of deflates with relief that he has *got* to be fired by now and is pretty confused by how enthusiastically the adults are celebrating. Then he spends several days in an exhaustion/depression coma while the civil war on earth rages.

[@mandeljhill]

Q 😊

[@LuaanTi]

To be fair, I got the same feeling in some real-life incidents too. One guy horrified at what is happening, while everyone else is cheering because "the good guys won, right?"... Ender's Game (the book) is pretty optimistic about how rational people tend to _actually_ be in real-life :D

[@Maddinhpws]

Wasn't it even that basically everyone already prepared for war the moment the aliens were defeated and literally started killing each other on the base within minutes of Enders win?

[@LuaanTi]

@@Maddinhpws And kidnapping the students for their own militaries, yeah. Though we don't see any of that from Ender's POV, because he's in his heroic BSoD during all that, and of course he's under particularly close guard.

[@hyrinshratu]

The Meatshield issue was addressed in the book. The adults knew that the ships were crewed by real people, and many of them were Mazer's friends. Because of this, they couldn't bring themselves to make the sacrifice play. Ender, seeing them as just video game sprites, had no issue with throwing them away to accomplish the mission. Mazer almost gives the whole thing away by yelling at Ender over 'unnecessary losses' in one battle because he watched his friends die.

[@Mohenjo_Daro_]

I've only seen the movie, but yeah. It wasn't that Ender's strategy was profound and amazing, it was that he didn't know the people were real, and therefore didn't have an attachment to keeping them alive like the adults. 100,000 lives mean very little in a game, but very much in reality

[@LP-tf7cy]

​@Mohenjo_Daro_ he does have profound and amazing strategy, but he's able to keep pace with the formics because of his detachment.

[@Ryzard]

Dang, I didn't remember that he knew the people there.,,

[@gags730]

This is a biased review... he made his hate known for the author and he can't get passed it.

[@SA80TAGE]

the only real battle in climax is the actual final exam.... the rest of those other battle were just simulations.

[@caseyglick5957]

"Oh no, Ender might get seriously hurt by this dangerous older bully, who is over a foot shorter than him" does not have the psychological impact you might want. "Taller, stronger kid accidentally kills smaller, weaker kid in a fight" is not a thing that makes the taller, stronger kid look good.

[@dopaminedrought395]

it's like they completely turned it on its head without realizing, like... did they even understand what that was meant to convey? probably not.

[@jacklawsen6390]

Absolutely incompetent casting.

[@tomraineofmagigor3499]

Yeah that casting was laughable

[@jefferyjohnson2473]

It feels like they couldn't include Rosen and Bonso, so they just cast an actor who matched Rosens description as Bonso.

[@rmsgrey]

Something Dom appears to have missed from the book is that the timing wasn't all accidental - the plan was always to put a kid in command of the invasion because anyone intuitive and empathic enough to understand and anticipate the Formic tactics and strategies would not be capable of knowingly xenociding them (which is why they couldn't just reuse Mazer Rackham) - they needed someone young and naive enough that they could be tricked into believing it was all a game. If they'd launched the invasion five years earlier, they would have used Peter instead. Five years later, and Ender would have been off the hook (or they'd have delayed a few years in asking his parents for a Third so he'd be the right age).

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

nah, they were trying to groom commanders before Ender (and refuse to say what happened to those who washed out) - if they'd found their commander earlier and thought they'd outgrow their capabilities by the time of the invasion, they could've done the relatavistic out-and-back trick again to keep the commander on ice, same as they did for Rackham

[@robbybevard8034]

The timing was the timing. They'd always planned to use a kid yes, but they put all their chips in on Ender. They decided he was the one and *broke* the school in making him what he needed to be. They could have gotten the timing right with *any* kid along the way with time dilation space travel. They didn't want Peter. If Ender didn't work they didn't have time to fix it and start over with a new generation of cadets. Their backup plan at that point was Bean, but that's *all* they had.

[@sorenkair]

and what's so cruel is that even though they bet on the right kid, they never realized that their method had little to do with it. they tried to brutally teach him the lesson that no one will ever help him, but that just made him give up and essentially troll the final battle and pretend its a casual game and have fun with his friends; it just happened to work out in their favor.

[@cdmonmcginn7561]

@@robbybevard8034 and Bean was a genetic freak, made by loose cannons in Amsterdam.

[@ХорхеГарсия-э5е]

I might not remember it that well because I only watched film once a long time ago, but wasn't one of the reasons for his trauma not just genociding the space bugs but also that the strategy he used in that final battle was suicide charge that sacrificed his entire fleet, a fleet that was made of real humans manning all the battleships and such that comprised it? So he not only unknowingly killed all the aliens but also tend of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, men and women under his command.

[@wingracer1614]

Yes

[@beartankoperator7950]

yeah he kind of forgot to mention that a massive plot change was that they used drones instead of real people in the movie which moves the ending message from war is terrible for all involved to xenocide is bad, like yeah but they really lost a lot of the impact like you said. Not only that but the concept that in every battle people were out there knowingly sacrificing themselves including the last group that just completely kamikaze attacked the planet is in itself a commentary on war and soldiers.

[@MNbenMN]

​@@beartankoperator7950I just watched the movie to check this. It was not only drones, there were thousands of personnel lost in the final battle.

[@sorenkair]

yup. he thought that maybe he could have saved some of them at least. but everyone in the fleet knew it was a suicide mission, and that the best thing they could have hoped for was maybe colonize the defeated alien planets.

[@usmcjawbreaker97]

“Bonding through the casual exchange of racial slurs” is actually pretty common in the military. It kind of indicates a familiarity and comfortability with each other. Kind of a ‘we both know the other has no bigotry and we’re able to say harsh things to each other that would otherwise cause problems’

[@redleg1376]

You feel worse if they don't call you racial slurs; that means you haven't been accepted by the group.

[@Ripsaw51]

In the field, yes. Don't try that shit in an Operations Center

[@darkspire6710]

​@@Ripsaw51 In my experience, that's because there is little comraderie among officers. The ones that were previously enlisted will set a tone that allows for that kind of interaction, but the ones who directly commissioned tend to be hard-asses. Not the case 100% of the time, of course, but there are many such cases.

[@happydappyman]

Yeah I found it interesting he doesn't understand this in his review. He even proves the point the book was trying to make 5 seconds later when he makes a French joke. In the book his "Grandpa would have killed you for that" but things in the book have come to a point where the slurs have lost their power to grievously offend. It's essentially a best case scenario our reviewer here is saying he's glad hasn't happened in real life.

[@paulsoldner9500]

It's pretty common in any non-toxic and non-leechy friendships.

[@carolineartley2703]

I remember reading this in middle school, and enjoying it enough to make me see it in the theater. Of all the disappointments, the thing that was the worst was that they didn't even bother to show the elation of the command staff at Ender's "victory". In the book, he looks back hoping to see them upset, angry, at least disappointed, and instead sees them celebrating and hugging each other in triumph. That's what finally makes him realize what he's done, and he's destroyed by it. I don't know why that specific omission irked me so much, but it did.

[@jasonbolding3481]

I say it's because a film needs that visual even more than the book. We aren't in his head so we don't get the full impact of how broken he was, how deeply his actions in the finale battle was yet again refusing to play the "game"

[@mountainjew1474]

And it would worked perfectly with scene horrified children watching images of scorched planet.

[@mu8242]

One good thing to come out of this film: a friend of mine was Ender's stand-in, and he later used some of his wages to purchase a full suit of armor which he would then wear to Renfest.

[@kami_in_the_skye]

That right there, that's legend shit. 👑

[@mu8242]

@@kami_in_the_skye Dude was a legend. He also threw a yearly Hobbit party on Bilbo's birthday and cooked all the food himself. One year he made a giant Oliphant cake with the Oliphant's body made out of red velvet cake. Definitely inspired me to lean into my interests whole heartedly

[@charleston1789]

That is baller

[@zerospace101]

When enthusiasts get money lol

[@ohkaygoplay]

okay, that's cool.

[@GigiC4]

The biggest difference I found between the book and the movie was that when I was reading the book I kept forgetting how young the kids were because they acted much older but when watching the movie you see them, and that they were actually older in the movie than in the book.

[@merphul]

it's the usual hollywood effect of aging up children. not many "teenagers" actually played by teenagers. that being said, the clip where Peter is slowly asphyxiating Ender is MORE creepy as in the book it was something like a 9 year old being too rough with a 6 year old. Not that violence in little kids is ok, but sometimes little kids don't fully understand or can apply much force so watching younger children roughhousing isn't as immediately alarming as malicious or potentially harmful. wheres in the film it looks like a late teens boy (who of course is played by a 20 something so he looks huge) trying to hurt an early teens boy. It feels like a murder attempt, flat out.

[@LynnHermione]

Also the kids were always naked in the books! Which is super creepy

[@robbybevard8034]

I read the book originally at *exactly* the right age when I was about 10 and in the age range of the kids, and at the time remarked to myself "wow, this gets it, the kids are actually written exactly as smart as we are! Not the way tv always makes us dumb!" I reread it a few times over the years and on my last re-read I thought to myself "this is so poorly written. Kids don't actually think or talk like that." And had a real disconnect because I *knew* what I had once thought and it was a very strange case of young me having a direct conversation with old me.

[@Cryten0]

@@robbybevard8034 Children like smarter children, its inspiring and shows what can be achieved, even when you do not realise how complex it would be to really think like that unprompted.

[@jasonblalock4429]

@@merphul Well, the teenagers thing is more about getting around child work laws. When they age up actual kids, it's usually just because it's incredibly rare to find a child actor who can sell mature behavior. There probably isn't a 6 year old on earth who could properly play young Ender as described in the book. The one time I can remember that sort of thing actually working out would be Kirsten Dunst in Interview With The Vampire, and even then, the character was still aged up from 6 to 10.

[@billuraral1870]

Fun fact: Ender is an actual name in Turkish. It means "exceptional"

[@caracrotalus]

Thank you for that fun fact ❤

[@VadBlackwood]

Cool!

[@noah_j_mc]

That is indeed a very fun fact

[@TeruteruBozusama]

In Norway we have Stein, it means stone. I just find it fun how different naming cultures can be 😅

[@claytongriffith8323]

Very fitting, I wonder if that was known considering that the stated reason was that he would be the end of things

[@hughmilner7013]

It's worth noting that the space travel mismatch between the books and the films undercuts one of the main ways the truth of what's happening is hidden from Ender. The existence of the ansible (the ftl communication device) is hidden from everyone, Ender included, so as far as he knows there is absolutely no way for him to be leading the attacks. This is a major plot point in the first of the Bean books - Bean realizes they aren't bothering to compensate for lightspeed delays to the simulation on an otherwise-perfect simulation, realizes this implies ftl comms, realizes this probably means they're midway through actually leading the assault, then goes to Graff to confirm his suspicions and promises to not tell Ender because he knows Ender can't win the war if he knows. It's one of the few moments where Graff gets truly off-balance, but also another instance of Card managing to actually write a smart character. The best part of it all is that it's implied to be theoretically possible, because there was no queen in the First Formic War and the fleet was clearly operating at range. It's such a needless change that detracts so much from the film.

[@l.scales7516]

there Was a queen with the 1st bug fleet encountered just not in every planetary attack because there was only 1 queen sent per galactic discovery because they were colonization ships , not scientific such as we would send because the queens thought there was no other kind of life cause they couldn't sense any other when the extend their ' aiua ' into ' unspace' in an attempt to draw a mind/ being /individual strong enough to create an understanding with.then draw that ' it ' into the shell of the immature shell of the infant queen. OUR souls are more like seeds of souls. yet both aiua's are without morals or ethics. queen bugs don't need either thing. in many ways they are more trustworthy than us because they haven't yet learned to attempt to deceive because there was no other being to deceive . IF mind to mind allows deception.

[@l.scales7516]

the ' whole field , every angle ' has nothing to do with space as in OUTER, BUT BECAUSE BUGS THINK IN PAN-DIMENTIONAL ( SP?) BECAUSE BUGS ,FLIES, WALK ON EVERY POSSIBLE SURFACE AS THOUGH THERE WAS NO GRAVITY ! so they piloted the same way! critic, for the film remember they couldn't have the battle room in free fall because the equipment ( andibles) were the TO BE ansibles ,which the battle school don't have until it gets close enough to the advancing ships for their fastest ships to have sent an unmanned ship back at the bugs's top MECH SURVIVABLE SPEED!to tell the human worlds about itself, that it was THE SHIP TO BE REVERSE ENGINEERED so they'd have ships to put the school in with time for the brand new fleet made using the 1 ship that brought the ANSIBLE to be reinvented to work with a keyboard or microphone so that humans could make their versions possible to use within ship to ship when the queen bug just spoke to each bug mind to mind, seeing through their eyes in real time , as many as she needed to at a time ! NOW DO YOU SEE?! THE EQUIPMENT FOR WHAT THE BOYS DID IN THE BATTLE ROOM wasn't stuff the ships who got the data THROUGH A DRONE WITH THE BUG FTL( as long as human or other living tissues weren't involved, didn't need re engineering just aimed so the fleet could stick a net out to catch it at the right spot! & new data sent right back to the planetary controllers of the human fleet & / or whatever ' power's were controlling the star congress.

[@Curious5368]

To be fair, the aliens aren't crazy. They really do turn into trees, and the book gets a lot out of our difficulty to understand them.

[@marshallc6215]

And they only turn into trees when the torture ritual is performed.

[@galion1991]

I read these very long ago but isn't the final twist in that saga that the virus basically merged the monkey pig aliens and the trees into a continuous life cycle (which was also true for everything else in that planet)? That the trees, like, inseminate the monkeys or something??

[@EzaleaGraves]

It's not necessarily the final twist in the saga, I think it's in the end of book two. But yeah, the Pequeninos are born as larvae inside of the mother trees. Eventually they die and turn into the Piggies, then if they do something really good for the tribe they're killed in a ritualistic way and they turn into a tree.

[@pieter_kok]

Just a reminder that 2nd hand bookstores are lovely places to get books for often fairly reasonable prices without giving money to authors you don't want to and reducing paper waste while supporting your local community.

[@jtilton5]

Also, libraries.

[@lisaboban]

I came here to say exactly this.

[@SingingSealRiana]

This!!!

[@wildste]

I was thinking this. Completely understood what Dom was saying, but also thought "Wait, libraries and second hand stores exist and we want to support them as well"

[@sebastianevangelista4921]

That's how I read the first three sequels. Card's work can be frequently found at used book stores because they were questionably written in places. I ultimately put those books in the mini free library in my neighborhood.

[@omniunown]

It's so weird that Card of all people is largely remembered for writing a character who has the superpower of Compassion, Understanding and Ethical Treatment of Everyone

[@alyssalewis8421]

It's bizarre. He must have had a brain injury at some point.

[@jamespryor5967]

@@alyssalewis8421He’s said in essays that he was deliberately trying to hide his religious influences in his early works.

[@MorgenPeschke]

​@@jamespryor5967 I'm pretty sure reading Treason as a kid was my first exposure to the idea that people could exist outside the gender/sex binary, and Lanik was written with enough empathy that it blew my mind when I found out Card was so deeply bigoted.

[@jamespryor5967]

@@MorgenPeschke Remember that the characters in Treason were literally supposed to be criminals, and everything they did could be read as “wrong” from the author’s perspective. But I’m glad his story actually helped people by accident.

[@MorgenPeschke]

@jamespryor5967 Bigots don't generally write stories in which the character from a group marginalized specifically due to a circumstance of birth end up arguably saving their world - but that's kind of what happened and I did not expect that. It's especially weird as Card advocates for the IRL equivalent of (admittedly hyperbolic) ficional laws that were shown to be abhorrent in his story because of how they affected Lanik. (To clarify: the characters are all descendants of traitors, not criminals themselves - it's basically space Australia. I'm specifically talking about the laws of the Kingdoms of Treason, not the laws of the wider universe.) To be clear, it's not like Treason would hold up in comparison to even average Queer Literature, and there's probably stuff in there that more subtly shows his bigotry that I didn't pick up when I was a kid. It's the dissonance of the broad strokes of the story supporting someone Card would never support IRL.

[@krankarvolund7771]

Okay, small defence of the Pequerinhos, the pig people that get tortured to death to become trees: It's not torture, they're under anesthesia (that sadly don't work on humans so when they did it to humans, that was torture ^^'), and it's a great honour, because taht's their way of reproducing. It would be like every childbirth had to go through a caesarean, and metamorphed the mother into a tree, so yeah it seems weird to us, but for the aliens, it's perfectly normal and a great thing, they're still thinking after their transformation and can communicate with the other member sof their species, throughout the whole planet. THat's the point of the Pequerinhos, they're supposed to be weird and seemingly horrible for us, because they're aliens, but when you undersand them they're normal people ^^

[@Dominic-Noble]

Only thing I'd maybe disagree with is the anesthetic. The little dude that Ender personally cuts up tells him he won't take too much of it, because the pain was an inportant part of it.

[@krankarvolund7771]

@@Dominic-Noble There's some women today that don't want anesthetics to give birth ^^

[@hendrsb33]

The sense I got was the effect of the grass that the piggies chewed was like nitrous oxide-- they could feel what was going on but they didn't care.

[@AW-uv3cb]

That's one of the things I love about these books - Card managed to create not one, but two species of aliens that are actually ALIEN, not just in the way they look, but also in how they think and how their societies work (as opposed to alien in principle, but thinking and acting exactly like humans - I'm looking at you, Liu Cixin with your Trisolarians!). And yet still able to and worthy of making the effort to mutually communicate.

[@fatal-vice8145]

​@krankarvolund7771 my oldest 2 kids mom refused it. She said "they are my kids and I want to feel having them". Before she died, she was one of the strongest moms I've ever come across. She was proud to be a mom.

[@calemr]

When I went to College, I met a guy who was writing Sci-Fi, and had "Intergalactic standard up" as a minor plot point to explain why every ship doesn't meet at an odd angle. All the various groups met up at the soace equivalent of the UN, and picked a direction, seemingly at random, to be considered "Up", and space ships orient to that during normal travel.

[@javieraravena5345]

Seems like the type of stuff a conference would have been called upon ngl. More real if it took longer than expected due to bickery among the attendees

[@Syberz2]

Lateral to the galaxy's sun just makes sense. I think the space thing loses out because they're mirroring navel battles. It doesn't actually make sense to orient yourself linearly when defending a planet, but no one has managed to explore that and expand upon this reality in a way to shift popular culture seeing as the work it would take to map all this out would be insane.

[@Ryzard]

​@@Syberz2there isn't a single sun for the galaxy though, and not all Galaxies are discs, nor are all solar systems

[@Syberz2]

​@@Ryzard What does your comment contribute?

[@felipetorres7489]

@@Syberz2 he has a point, though. you could have said the center of the galaxy, or the black hole there. also, it would be a star, the sun is jyst the name we have for our star.

[@celinelia8127]

Religion was banned in the world, Alai saying "salaam" to Ender was basically his secret. Ender realized it's a religion thing but didn't know that it means "peace"

[@cool_grol7506]

Kindaaaa. Religion was banned in the hegemony. The hegemony wasn’t the entire world yet.

[@TheChaoticAsexual]

Other ways to consume media without letting the creator directly profit besides sailing the seven seas: Either get it from your local library, borrow from a friend, or purchase secondhand!

[@ayamamotohaha5235]

Or watch a Brit summarize it

[@atlantefou566]

I bought Ender Game second hand, but I do that for all old books.

[@LynnHermione]

Or not read it. It sucks

[@jamesatkinsonja]

Charity shops

[@EnbyGaemer2005]

I use my library to get anything I want to hate-read. "Robert (Joanne Rowling using a man's name) Galbraith" won't get any money from me. But I can still see for myself how crappy her writing is.

[@pomaceous2056]

Okay but the planet of Asian people with OCD was terrifying in a way that really stuck with me. I remember very little of the sequel books because of how trippy they were, but the visual of a woman spending decades of her life crawling on the ground to prove her loyalty to something that doesn't exist is something I think about to this day

[@MistyWarden]

Weaponizing a mental illness as a way to control the potential intellectual power of an entire planet was wild.

[@wingracer1614]

It was a very moving story in it's own weird way

[@syeina]

I go back to Xenocide sometimes specifically for her story. It's definitely made me think a lot about how our biases and what we rely on to make sense of the world are formed when we're very young

[@TrekBeatTK]

That part annoyed me so much because it has nothing to do with anything. By the end of the book, she’s not important at all. Felt like I wasted my time.

[@nataschavisser573]

This has stayed with me to.

[@meinorha9370]

The biggest reason I loved the book (only read the first one) was because of the idea of ‘if you truly understand something, it removes hatred’. As an angry kid, I felt that to my bones. So it’s of course very fun to find out how the author absolutely doesn’t practise what he preaches, which seems to be entirely too common with overly religious types. I had terrible people in my life growing up and spent most of the time feeling angry and confused, but understanding others and where they were coming from helped me separate their issues from my issues, and helped me determine what things were actually my responsibility and what was just other people’s bad behaviour they were blaming on me. After understanding them I didn’t hate them any longer, but also didn’t struggle with cutting them out of my life. Knowledge saves lives

[@venomousspecifics45]

Congrats! I’m glad you were able to make a life for yourself on your own terms. I don’t believe that forgiveness is mandatory, but living a life not consumed with hatred is a good goal. Even hating someone gives them too much space in my life.

[@meinorha9370]

@@venomousspecifics45 Complete agreement! Hating them leaves you stuck in the situation that is often in the past. It doesn’t mean forgive&forget (those are up to the individual themselves). Personally, I haven’t forgiven, I’ve just accepted things will never change. Leave those people stuck in their mires if they don’t have the will to do better, it’s impossible to pull them out.

[@venomousspecifics45]

@@meinorha9370 Oddly I’ve forgiven a person for some things but not others. Some things can be forgiven but others can’t. Those categories probably vary for each person. I’m not against forgiveness if the survivor wants to do so, but it’s not the goal. Living a life free from the harm (or as free as possible) is my goal. Letting go of the anger and hatred was wonderful, I’m much happier now. I live my life for me now, not anyone else. I am the only one who can make demands of me or give me goals. Letting go of other people’s expectations has been so freeing! I like being an adult. All the best.

[@meinorha9370]

@@venomousspecifics45 100%! I still have people in my life that are teetering on the edge of growing or going back to their toxic patterns, but regardless of what they do, it’s their business and I’m doing my best not to get sucked into it. It is very freeing to let go of pointless drama. Glad you’re doing so well too! Keep thriving

[@calebgibbons-eyre8602]

As someone raised religious, religion itself has the same dichotomy; Jesus loves everyone, we are all sinners, all of us should experience disphoria in our bodies because the fall supposedly means we are all not the way we are supposed to be and going to heaven will give everyone a new body (everybodies trans in heaven! if not transgender, trans-something!) and yet most of the people from my childhood who spoke about this the most were the biggest bigots. I'm very very lucky to have amazing parents who are very willing to grow and learn from their children as well as teaching them.

[@johnpotts8308]

In the sequel, the aliens weren't being tortured to death, it was part of their life cycle that they would essentially plant a sapling through their abdomen to enter their final life stage by becoming sentient trees (really!). Unfortunately they then "honour" one of the humans they meet in the same way (who being human, doesn't ascend like they do), which causes another xenocidal war to break out. Kinda like how a caterpillar will enter a cocoon to become a butterfly but if you wrap a human up in silk and hang them from a branch they will just die.

[@aeldariambitions6334]

The piggies are such an interesting species and are explored really well, IMO. My only gripe is that ENDER has to be the one that explains that humans die when they are killed; ya know, instead of the YEARS of solid peaceful contact they had with humanity where everyone could have been asking questions. Especially because of the legend of "The Super Evil Mastermind Ender who didn't ask questions and killed everyone" has become so ingrained in all human cultures that everyone knows about it. At NO POINT does anyone figure to actually sit down with a cup of coffee and TALK until Ender shows up.

[@cygnahoshiko4629]

Orson Scott Card is a fascinating object of study. His best works are about child abuse, cults, institutional cruelty...and it's like he refuses to admit to himself that he has personal experience of any of that. Even while he's writing it down in ways that make other victims feel so incredibly seen. And not admitting it to himself, doubling down on bigotry instead, makes him a worse writer as time passes.

[@DrPeppering]

"bonding through the casual exchange of racial slurs" is not part of the future but definitely the past and present, especially in a military setting. One of the many accurate things about military life in Ender's Game.

[@Hawkido]

Bold to think that a practice that extends back as far as the fraternity of the military brotherhood does (thousands of years) and continues to this very day would somehow just stop at some point in the future. Brother's mock and prod each other for weaknesses, both to find them and to expose them so our brother might see where he is weak or too sensitive. Your enemy will do this too, but when he finds the weakness he will plunge a dagger into it. "Your enemy is the only teacher you will have from now on." -Mazer

[@redleg1376]

As someone who has been in combat with military people; I'd feel worse if they hadn't called me by racial slurs. That's how you know you've been accepted.

[@Hawkido]

@@redleg1376 Accepted and digested, now you are all the same shit. Basic/Boot spends a lot of time hammering the "Unique" out of you, then it hammers the "cooperation" into you. You are all meat, once you realize that, you can really joke about anything with each other.

[@thelazarous]

​@@redleg1376 If they are comfortable enough to say it to your face it either means they fully love you or fully hate you, and it's pretty easy to tell which is which.

[@AstralBelt]

what do you mean "is not part of the future"? racial slurs aren't going ANYWHERE for a VERY VERY long time

[@caseyglick5957]

Dom didn't mention the extremely obvious, but dear-god-correct, adaptation choice of not having a bunch of children run around naked all the time.

[@marocat4749]

Yes, that was odd. I mean it deserved a mention at least. And yes it was correct, And they ciuld have shown peter as not that over tge top but mean?

[@johnnyferalcat896]

Wait what?

[@caseyglick5957]

@@johnnyferalcat896 in the 80s, nudity was just less of a problem, and kids were somewhat more likely to go swimming naked and whatever. They're all like 7-12 year olds, so there wasn't anything sexual about it (like, it's pretty clear Card wasn't being prurient or whatever). But in adapting it, yes, you put the clothes on the children...

[@mattrobson3603]

There are a lot of small things in Ender's Game that really seem...off. Just the way the narrative looks at boys versus how it looks at girls. It makes me rather suspect that Orson Scott Card's antipathy towards homosexuality (which goes above and beyond what you would expect from the average Mormon) stems from 'I chose to be straight, and if I can do it you have to be a complete loathsome degenerate not to be able to do it too'.

[@punkducky69]

@@mattrobson3603 It's said in the novel a few times that girls are allowed into Battle School, but they generally test lower on some of the tests that are performed, citing that they aren't aggressive or willing to do-or-die as much as boys do. It's a fairly common assessment - girls are naturally more likely to tender, nurture, and support, while boys fight, build, destroy and kill - and the sequels expand upon why Petra and a few other girls were brought into BS.

[@adamgrogory]

36:48 Just a quick note about "psychotic" versus "psychopathic". "Psychotic" is when someone is having a break with reality - a psychosis, where they can't determine what is real or not. "Psychopathic" is when someone is displaying symptoms of a psychopathic personality, such as lack of empathy. What Peter displayed is probably more accurately called "psychopathic" than "psychotic".

[@sebastianevangelista4921]

Thanks for the info 👍!

[@sorenkair]

they made the same mistake in dune pt 2

[@sebastianevangelista4921]

@@sorenkair That immediately came to my mind as well that I saw this comment!

[@Syberz2]

I was young and ignorant reading this series. That pocket dimension thing in Speaker of the Dead where a character goes in crippled, gets a new body, then looks upon the old body with disgusts is probably something that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

[@CuleChick11]

"Author bad, book good, film pretty" is my favorite review summary to date.

[@ynraider]

Author controversial*...he's NOT a "bad author", that would be JRR Tolkien, a GASLIGHTING RACIST, with no scholarly talent except for regurgitationg reheated Nazi Mythologies... AND Card is not even wrong. His stance is common to c800BC philosophers of ANCIENT GREECE/KEMET!(Anti-Homosexuality/-Slavery/-Pederasty WAS THE NORM FOR CIVILIZED THINKERS!)

[@ryat66]

I remember my main thought with this movie was that the kid cast to play the bully was entirely the wrong height. In the book, he's described as almost twice as tall as Ender, making him a physical threat even with Ender's advanced martial arts training. In the movie, we get a kid who, while a talented actor, is half the size of Ender's actor. Whenever he threatened Ender, all I could think was Ender laughing and saying back "Oh no! It's a Smurf! Whatever will I do!? Oh right, kick the shit out of him like I did the last six times..."

[@Elora445]

Yeah, I'm tiny, and that's how I've been treated my whole life. It's actually great when people really don't expect you to know anything about fighting just because you are tiny. That's why they are so surprised when you actually do. Would have loved to see a scene like that. But can't have that, apparently. Because it's not "realistic", or some bullshit like that.

[@lucianfrostbane]

​@Elora445 to quote sir terry pratchett: "when you head is level with their knees, your teeth are level with their groin". As well as "all trees are felled at ground level

[@Elora445]

@@lucianfrostbane Love those quotations. Perfection.

[@l.scales7516]

​@@lucianfrostbaneI think it's more ' they never seem to realize that by forcing you to your knees they are bringing your teeth into 'the perfect* '1' move wins the whole ball game in a 'snap' ! *position ' proximity sometimes needs a hint, or a shove!

[@TrumanTheGrayMerchant]

It's fascinating that the guy who wrote about the dangers of someone using bad faith, regressive arguments has also spent decades saying that gay marriage will cause society to collapse

[@SelkieGirl]

Mormons aren't known for being self aware...

[@SingingSealRiana]

Same ironybas with jk, she wrote books that champions values she very much lacks and opposes

[@eileensnow6153]

As a gay, I’m flattered that he considers me so powerful 😂

[@dopaminedrought395]

@@SingingSealRiana I have a good faith argument to make about this as someone who used to be a fan and also used to think that about jk in the beginning of the controversy. I think the reason a lot of people don't realize it is because they remember the movies more than the books. Her books have always (unintentionally) reflected her values, unlike the complete cognitive dissonance of Card. She made HP an "outcast" in the way she herself felt, but the "accept the status quo and conform" value was very much present in Dumbledore, the whole house elves plot, and HP being a magic cop as his happy ending. The characters never question the rigid moral hierarchy of magic - muggles and magical creatures other than magical humans (wizards) are overtly considered inferior, treated as such, and this is considered "just the way things are" in society. There are quite a few in-universe examples of things being treated as "of course *children* would rebel against this, but that's because they don't understand why we need things to be the way they are". One example is, again, the house elves plot. Another is being sorted into rigid houses that dictate their social standing based on innate/biological traits at 11 years old. The characters SAY that all the houses are good/equally valuable, but that is not reflected in practice and how they are actually treated. I don't think I need to mention the extremely obvious anti semitism and the names she gave to certain characters and places. Lycanthropy is an allegory for AIDS. Oh, and the most clear example of her transphobia can be seen in Rita Skeeter's book description. The films cut out a lot of unsavory descriptions and smoothed things out.

[@robbybevard8034]

It's extra weird because the entire theme of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead is love and understanding, that all different cultures and religions are right, and in understanding the other, no matter how (literally) alien. That someone could write that message and be so convincing about it, and then have such a huge blind spot in their real life is sad.

[@christinewatson5205]

Buy the books secondhand! After the original sale authors do not get royalties from resale, so support your local used and secondhand bookstores. Seriously, they need it. Buy a bookmark or two while you're in there.

[@keanuxu5435]

I did the same for 50 shades of grey

[@Jarakin]

Support your local libraries folks.

[@TeroTheShortOne]

I came here to say this. My local store has at least half a bookshelf of just OSC secondhands.

[@joelmole3157]

@@JarakinOr charity shops

[@Grim_Sister]

PDF drive is also available

[@johnbradley1139]

Is it a fun book? Not really. But if you were ever in a "Gifted and Talented" program during the '80s or '90s, this book spoke to your soul (and we didn't really understand what a piece of shit Card was).

[@benbrands4896]

What I liked so much in the series is the exploration how obvious universal truths may not be true for an alien species and how our tendency to misinterpret others leads to preventable conflict. The Buggers don't consider murdering a human evil, because they assume that drones are sent out to explore. Killing these is as harmless as snipping some hair from a captured mammal to do research on their DNA. It's not until the humans kill a queen that they start realising something more is going on, that they feel the loss and start trying to communicate with humanity (eventually reaching Ender). They have to learn that humanity views each specimen as a queen, and are horrified by what they have done so far. Likewise, the pig people have a literal afterlife (/second life), which they assume is true for everyone. They give a human the honour of going to that afterlife, while the humans then desecrate the body before it can happen. The concept of death is so different between species, that fundamental values are different. I don't think I've ever seen another author take this on so specifically and succesfully. Also, Ender's 'exactly right porridge' was a combination of Peter's ruthlessness and Victoria's empathy. Ender needed enough empathy to completely and fully understand his enemy, and then enough ruthlessness to destroy them. Peter would have been incapable of predicting the enemy enough to defeat him. Victoria would have been incapable of destroying them after she'd learned about them.

[@AleksoLaĈevalo999]

It all seems to come from a common confusion that empathy and compassion are the same thing. People might be very nice to others and yet bad at understanding them. Likewise greatest manipulators of all time were intimately familiar with the functioning of human minds, they just did not care about the well being of others.

[@helicopterharry5101]

The Formics didn't remove the human base because they weren't hostile towards humans anymore. Theyd realized they'd made an oppsie and were just hoping the humans leave them alone from then on. Ender only realizes that he has been the aggressor after realizing they were real battles. It was an irrelevant detail when they were just games. Now attacking ships gathering water makes him a space terrorist and he notices that the formics were only defending themselves to his attacks to show their peaceful intentions. Not sure I understood the question Edit: Okay. That might not be entirely correct. But it should be pretty close. And that's the book reason.

[@EndertheWeek]

The only important beings were the Queens, they thought humans were the same. When they realised their mistake it was too late.

[@Iudayus]

the misuse of Bean showed me no one on the film knew or cared about the source material.

[@CorwinFound]

One of the problems is that if you read, "Ender's Game" and "Ender's Shadow" (Bean's origin story) back to back, they don't line up. Not just perspective, actual plot points. And certainly Bean's character is hugely changed from Ender's book to Bean's books. The movie messes with Bean unquestionably, but it's definitely more of an original Bean than later Bean. There's really no way to do Ender's story and have Bean be done right. It's two different characters honestly. Not saying saying that the movie makers understood Bean in any context. You are absolutely correct on that. But even if they had it would have been (haha) a struggle.

[@JonathanLundkvist]

@@CorwinFound Yeah, when I read Enders Shadow, the general takeaway I had was "Oh, so now he contradicts how own novel". I thereafter lost any sort of desire to read any other books. Having Bean be a "backup" to Ender was stupid.

[@steveanton763]

I loved Enders shadow. I read them years apart so i didnt realise any of this. I was also 20 years old. I though Beans though process was incredible and the best written genuis id ever read. Now i feae reading it again.s​@@JonathanLundkvist

[@amymak93]

Yeah, when I read Ender’s Shadow, it felt like an alternate universe to me, rather than something that directly lines up with Ender’s Game. (Card does admit in the foreword that the events don’t quite line up, and that Bean in the original wasn’t written with the Shadow stories in mind.)

[@JPH1138]

​@@CorwinFound My favourite bits of Ender's Shadow is where it runs into a scene from the original plot that don't fit anymore, and it reads something like this: This was it. Now Bean was face to face with Ender Wiggin himself. The great hope of the Battle School. Bean knew that it would be vital to communicate his worth, his tactical genius, and his indispensability to command. The future of the human race depended on it. "Wow, that was cool, Ender" Bean blurted. Damn, how could he screw that up so bad?

[@Bill_Door123]

'Especially naughty non-binary' might be how I describe myself from now on

[@Grim_Sister]

Pirate is a gender neutral term, Just saying

[@JackieTheCatfox]

Same

[@InfinityLighthouse-kt7xj]

There 100% were non-binary pirates too.

[@Guimhj]

Alas, thanks Mr Noble

[@hendrikrozijnenblad8666]

Well, now Dom's gone and done it. Even with a secondhand paperback on my shelf, i'm going to have to set sail. If only to unlock this achievement, and the highly coveted rank that comes with it.

[@garethspotfur1]

Cards work is definitely weird. The worthiness saga starts with a society that uses a special type of cryosleep to travel to the stars, and ends with the protagonists descendants using their godlike powers to control minds on a multi-planet scale!

[@GaneshTulshibagwale]

When I was a little kid, I had the Ender's Game audiobook on my mp3 player. I was never very interested in music, so Ender and a couple Sonic the Hedgehog songs were the only files I ever put on it. I listened to it multiple times over my childhood and accidentally convinced my family I was a psycho; I tried to share it, and they shut if off after the very violent prologue (Ender maiming the bully, Peter beating up Ender, I can't remember if the squirrel crucifixion was that early as well, but it was probably the last straw). I don't think anyone remembers the incident anymore, but my mom's been convinced ever since that reading is sign of schizophrenia and sociopathy (school textbooks get a pass). The audio format let the readers emphasize the bizarre Battle School language (being an international community of isolated children, the students develop a unique dialect, and the made up accent the reader put on to represent it was a key part of the experience for me). Some stuff might have been cut for the audiobook: I have no memory of the Alai scene you discussed (though I think I remember "butt-wiggler" being used as a common launchie insult so I'm not certain), and I think the passage on Rose the Nose was cut down to a simpler introduction that avoids mentioning him being Jewish, which accidentally also hid Mazer Rackham's ethnicity from me (I was today years old when I found out him being Maori wasn't invented by the movie). What it definitely DID have, however, was a prolonged foreword written and iirc voiced by Card where he discussed some of the history of the book, it's adaptation from a short story (focused specifically on the Dragon Army part of Battle School) to a full novel, his attempts to get it to film, how he wanted the film version to work, and why the movie wouldn't happen (this would have been mid 2000s, I think). A wise old guy explaining his creative decisions to my nineish year old self in relative detail was at least as huge a formative experience for me as the actual book was, and it was so weird to grow up and find out Card was a nutball. The main point on the film is that Card believed that adapting Ender's Game to film was straight up impossible: too much of the book's drama takes place in Ender's head, and Card believed that the medium of film was unsuited to depicting a character's internal thoughts without clumsy voiceover monologues. Instead, in an appropriately Ender-like out-of-the-box solution, Card insisted that the perfect Ender's Game film would NOT be an adaptation of Ender's Game, but a simultaneous adaptation of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow (the spinoff novel that retells the story from Bean's viewpoint), in a retooled story that emphasized Bean's role as a peer and rival to Ender. This moves the drama outside of Ender's head into the relationship between Ender and Bean and the pressure they put on each other and get put on them from outside. They'd be constantly one-upping each other and competing for mastery until, as Card put it "We don't know who's going to save the world." "Well, THAT'S a story Hollywood can tell," I remember him saying. He wanted to reframe the central tension and stakes of the story from "Can Ender become the person who is capable of defeating the Buggers? (And what will it do to him?)" to "Which of these two kids is the Chosen One? (And what happens if we guess wrong?)" He went on to say that he'd been trying to get a movie going, but without fail every moviemaker insisted on aging the characters up to eighteen and giving Ender a girlfriend. Obviously, the tragedy of the story, the cruelty of Battle School, and the twist ending are somewhat dependent on the characters' youth and innocence, so this was always a dealbreaker for Card. The one time he pushed and wheedled enough to get a verbal promise to keep the characters children, he found buried some four hundred pages deep in the contract, at the end of a completely unrelated paragraph "We reserve the right to make Ender whatever age we wish." He said, "Well, not only was I not going to sign it, I also couldn't keep working with these people." Card basically closed out his section of the audiobook saying he'd given up on the movie and it wasn't going to happen, so you can imagine my surprise. And of course, I saw the movie and Card's prophecies almost came true again. The movie DID suffer from sidelining other characters and their relationships with Ender in favor of a character we could no longer see the thoughts of, and while the movie DID avoid voiceover monologues, the awkwardly long "meaningful" shared looks weren't much better, especially the final scene with the queen where we get like four minutes straight of the camera rapidly switching between two motionless characters. The movie DID keep the characters as young as the difficulties of child actors would allow but it's clear we narrowly avoided a completely out of place Petra romance. Also completely unrelated, while I actually really like Moises Arias as Bonzo Madrid, I'd only ever seen him before as the wacky beach bartender Rico from Hannah Montana, and while I'm surprised that he was as menacing as he was, I was definitely giggling when he had to yank people down to his level to intimidate them.

[@GaneshTulshibagwale]

I also just remembered there was also a section where he said that Speaker for the Dead was the book he actually wanted to write, but figured it would be more popular with Ender as the protagonist, which motivated him to turn the original short story into a full novel that would serve as a prequel for Speaker, where Ender's story "really" starts. Ironically, Ender's Game outshines everything else he ever wrote.

[@johannageisel5390]

@@GaneshTulshibagwale Intesting! Because my favourite book of the series is Speaker for the Dead. Ender's Game was just a prequel and the ones afterwards are just weird.

[@feanaro2712]

"I wouldn't know, I have a Bachelor of fucking Arts" - As someone with a Bachelor of Arts, this is possibly the most relatable thing I have ever heard in one of your videos.

[@hershmergersh6733]

it's nice to know i'm not the only one who wasted my life getting one

[@triciahutchins5407]

Not paying for books that you want to read without supporting their authors is exactly what libraries are for.

[@matthewparker9276]

Libraries still pay a royalty to the author. It's less than a sale, but still not nothing.

[@blablablubb7623]

​@@matthewparker9276 that depends on where you live. As a german librarian I can only speak for german libraries, but we don't pay royalties. Once we bought a book, it's payed completly. From what I've gathered, library royalties are a british or american thing?

[@helenkord6244]

@@blablablubb7623 i dont think its just that, here in czech republic royalties are paid too

[@sebastianevangelista4921]

@@matthewparker9276 Used book stores are a good alternative because the discounted prices go entirely to the store.

[@eyesofthecervino3366]

Or just buy secondhand.

[@Gyrono]

Y'know, after reading the sequel books I always thought everything after Ender's Game besides the Bean stuff was just Ender going on a PTSD induced, mental breakdown driven hallucination where he somehow gets to live out his life with the one family member who actually liked him and get to fix the xenocide he caused.

[@brckshouse3660]

My favorite thing he invented was the quantum entangled self-aware girlfriend computer nodes that were spread through the universe with humanity

[@robertgronewold3326]

I remember something else you brought up very pointedly in your original video on this adaptation, and that was Card's obsession with people having children. Characters in the book are constantly told to become special by having offspring, those that don't are lonely and forgotten, and even Ender becomes a sad wreck because he never has children of his own, and merely 'adopts' a wife's. Yet another issue Card has.

[@astrinymris9953]

The LDS is very pronatalist. That's the only reason they've kept their percentage of the U.S. population at the same level over the decades: Massive family sizes. That's because despite all their earnest missionary work, very few adults convert to Mormonism. That's because if you haven't been indoctrinated into their very strange belief system from the cradle, it sounds like lunacy. In fact, given the high defection rate from the LDS church by kids who realized as adults that their belief system is incompatible with reality, each couple has to reproduce at above replacement rate to make up for the inevitable losses to rational thinking.

[@jasonbolding3481]

The shadow series having a gay character who marries a woman so he could fulfill his role in life and raise her children is something that always has stuck with me and not in a good way.

[@robertgronewold3326]

@@jasonbolding3481 Oh yeah, I had only just realized I was gay when reading through those books, and it was instantly rubbing me the wrong way.

[@Duiker36]

I mean, belonging to a religion that actually *tracks* genealogical records will do that.

[@FullOnStriker]

@@jasonbolding3481 That was real and happened with nobility. You had a duty to continue your lineage, thousands and thousands of years of evolution, personal struggle, prosperity, poverty, pain, sorrow and happiness generation after generation lead to you, casting that heritage aside to vanish into the depths of time, forgotten, SHOULDNT be taken lightly. It's really not a difficult concept unless youre too self absorbed to be grateful for your existence.

[@christoferlothe]

My parents bought the ender series for me when I was 12. Read them all. Then learned about Card himself and ended up donating the series to my public library.

[@Ty-wy7yq]

I always piss my girlfriend off by reminding her Card is Mormon 😂

[@kathrynolsen1256]

I got the series from a library discard pile.

[@kathrynolsen1256]

1:59 thanks for correctly identifying it. 😊

[@cicibrown5979]

I was able to read the series because of a local library, so thank you for your donation! Also, was terribly heartbroken that OSC turned out to be a trash human.

[@DeadManSinging1]

@@Ty-wy7yq Doesn't matter if he's Mormon, they exist on different levels. What matters is his appalling politics and fundimentalism.

[@CruelDwarf]

Listening to Dom's description of Ender's Game plot points I came to a realization: Card actually invented modern Young Adult Dystopian novels. We have plucky teenage protagonists with hidden talents, oppressive government that puts that protagonist into series of battles for survival against other teenagers and the story (kinda) ends with overthrow of the oppressive government. Dude is an asshole but was clearly ahead of his time.

[@xilj4002]

Ender is not a teen. He's 6, ages to tweens. He may hit being a teen on a technicality a little but I don't think that makes him count as a teen protag And he's not the youngest. They're graduating battle school by 14, some of the army commanders were in the single digits

[@Val-wj3vy]

I think animated kids shows were doing that before ‘85, just without the self conscious critique of it

[@ChristianNeihart]

I wouldn't call Ender plucky, just very prone to over analyzing and catastrophizing. Peter and Valentine fit that description more.

[@wcoleman99]

But the other dystopian novels the government in power was usually the reason for the oppression whereas the world government was formed to fight an actual alien threat that was bent on exterminating humans.

[@EphemeralTao]

@@Val-wj3vy Not just kid's shows. The Young Adult Dystopian genre easily goes back farther than that, and has its origins in sci-fi and fantasy literature of the '60s and '70s.

[@Agent29416]

If i remember correctly stasis wasn't really a thing in any of the books and to keep himself alive the general literally kept himself at near life speeds for over a centurie

[@jasonbolding3481]

By him you mean Mazer? then yes but eventually they did develop some form of stasis. The colony ships used it and Graff would spend most of the year in stasis near earth to have even a chance to be alive when the colony ships reached where they were going

[@punkducky69]

@@jasonbolding3481 It's said by Mazer in the book that he had an uninteresting near-relativistic voyage of 5 years out and 5 years back, while decades had passed back on earth. While stasis chambers were eventually created, Mazer was sent out supposedly very soon after his victory, so the tech probably wasn't invented yet for him. Graff was the one who put himself into stasis repeatedly to oversee the colonies' growth and expansion, and was eventually forcibly retired for doing it.

[@rttrttyan]

8:14 Harrison Ford doesn’t “disassociate” here. His character is looking at a group of kids floating in front of him. The group isn’t spread out far vertically, but is horizontally. Thus you see his eyes dart slightly up and down, and side to side as he is probably making sure everyone is paying attention. That is great attention to detail by Harrison Ford, and is what a co-instructor would be doing if they aren’t the one talking.

[@OrKkTeKk]

It should have been 3 movies. The book required room to breath and we needed to watch ender experience his entire childhood a trainee.

[@cool_grol7506]

Should have been a series

[@superiorgo2368]

It's crazy how Speaker is so heavy handed in telling people you need to accept people for what they are and strive to understand without judgement.

[@UnrealMisterD]

Speaker for the Dead was the book that got me into Card before I found out what a piece of shit he was, my mom had bought it for me as a gift when I was like 10, and yeah...between the open adultery subplot among a planet of Catholics and the whole thing with the Piggies, never would have guessed that it was written by a conservative douche-nozzle.

[@ericmilnesoto2727]

Yes. I really loved the book and the series for these kind of messages. Finding out about what the author was doing irl was... Discouraging to say the least.

[@Talenel]

Maybe OSC should try reading his own books, he might learn something

[@superiorgo2368]

@@ericmilnesoto2727 it’s just so at odds what the message he puts out there.

[@superiorgo2368]

@@Talenel lol might help

[@gabbodelaparrawrites]

Orson is the creepy uncle disrupting the Thanksgiving reunion with his recalcitrant views.

[@romanmccoy5074]

You do realize that Obama, Biden, and both the Clintons have been publicly against gay marriage for decades right? Its not just one side lol

[@jamespryor5967]

And charging you for it, while donating the money to his problematic causes.

[@milicadiy]

Learned a new word today!

[@Kurotaisa]

He's the kinda cool uncle who is *also* very, very outspoken about having regressive views. And keeps getting worse with age.

[@darklordofsword]

I've encountered him on Quora. He's a dick.

[@onbearfeet]

Speaking on behalf of The Gays(TM), you're good, Dom. Sir Terry vouched for you. (Sir Terry isn't gay per se, but we gays recognize our feline overlords.)

[@nancyjay790]

Always genuflect to the Feline Overlords. You are merciful, Future Conquerors.

[@j.munday7913]

Ah so the chain of command is Feline Overlords > The Gays(TM) > Theater Kids > The Rabble

[@katharineeavan9705]

Please tell me you've watched (or I suppose read, though I don't know what the Cat King is like in that version) The Dead Boy Detectives

[@ruthspanos2532]

Thanks for this. I loved the book back in the day, but have refused to see the movie because of the author’s bigotry.

[@dharusiokay9426]

For a second, my brain blanked and i thought you meant the human version of Sir Pterry.

[@IcarusTyler]

The best concept in the stories is "The Enemy Gate is Down" - I love that idea! And then movie barely shows this. In the arena they are barely shown fighting downwards. At the end battle there is this big moment where Ender rotates the view to make it an attack from above, finally! But somehow the movie then inexplicably shows everything as a left-to-right battle again

[@barnabusdoyle4930]

The main thing they should have focused on but didn’t was the training Ender got from Petra for the Battle Games and how Ender made group commanders so he didn’t have to focus on all aspects at once. A common tactic used by military commanders throughout history.

[@obsidianagent]

I was one of the people who read the whole series as a teen before knowing what an... unpleasant... person Card is. To hear the sequels described like this: YES, they where weird, and YES I enjoyed their weirdness. I wish fewer people that shaped my youth with their work would turn out to be... not good.

[@edgarallenhoe3518]

I read enders game, speaker for the dead, and xenocide as a kid, and the latter two have lived in my head rent-free for the last decade. I don't know anyone else who's read them but my dad. We both loved speaker for the dead (I've always been a sucker for a good mystery, and that book does NOT disappoint). I have no idea what other ppl thought of them. It was frustrating to me as a kid that whenever I talked abt "the sequel to ender's game" they thought I meant a different book I never read, but as an adult I take great enjoyment in describing the plot to people who haven't heard of it.

[@ConerdFrederickson]

Yeah my wife read them as kid and introduced them to me when we were in college. I liked Ender's Game a lot but Speaker for the Dead is honestly one of my favorite sci-fi books. I really liked how weird the sequels got and even though I'm an atheist I thought the religious aspects of Speaker were interesting. It was definitely a bummer to find out about Card's homophobia and how that pushed him farther to the right.

[@TwilightRogue15]

I love this series! Sure, there are certainly undesirable elements, but I think that he created a fantastic world and cast of characters that ironically go against most of his personal beliefs. One aspect I actually loved is Valentines whole religious journey, the questions that arose from it, the scientific explanation of it, and how both the science and the religious sides can both coexist (and the wonky 'cure' can be seen as both good and bad, scientific or faith based, depending on interpretation). A lot of these books are questions about faith, science, and philosophy, and there are arguments made on all sides, even down to the misery one character feels after technology allowed them to talk again because people keep finishing his sentences for him, sometimes erroneously, and he often feels like it might be better if he doesn't talk at all (if not for one person who actually lets him speak without interruption). There are a lot of fantastic points brought up in the book that is explored through a great science fantasy setting, and I think that deserves a lot of credit. Death of the author and all that jazz, I suppose, if you want to take that route.

[@mellowthm566]

He's a pretty good writer with a strong narrative style from what i recall. I loved Enders Shadow line of books and read a couple of the enders sequels. Read a lot of his other works and they were kinda ruined not just soured because of his bigotries but also his Mormonism. And I'm not talking ideological disagreement he relied a lot on troupes and narrative patterns of Mormonism and it kinda ruined the general weirdness of his books while explaining some parts that annoyed me (many of his characters becones obsessed with legacy and being a family patriarch at young ages). The Seventh Son series became less than palatable after i became a teen and learned more history, especially the missionary elements and most of everything to do with indigenous characters and non-white characters.

[@bobjoemac1]

I adored Enders game and Speaker for the Dead... couldn't enjoy the later two books though and never gave the 100 spinoffs a shot.

[@CouncilofGeeks]

Your allyship has been noted. ~ The Gay Overlords

[@HangryOnPaws]

All hail the gay overlords! 🙌🙌🙌

[@alabastergiant]

Dont forget the rest of us Overqueers!

[@Mobysimo]

Fun fact about another weird thing Orson Scott Card has done He was hired to write Ultimate Iron-Man for Marvel, and instead doing something reasonable and logical, like updating Tony’s backstory to a modern conflict like the movies did, instead made it so Tony is some kind of freaky mutant baby with hyper regeneration powers who feels never-ending pain unless he’s coated in magic blue goop that constantly eats his skin, but he can wear it because his hyper-regeneration makes it so it grows back before any real damage is done. No I did not make any of this shit up. Naturally it was later retconned into something that actually makes sense and this was written off as a really really bad in-universe Iron-Man anime.

[@HangryOnPaws]

"Blue gloop on a mutant baby" (sung to the beat of the David Bowie line "Freak-out in a moonage daydream")

[@legomaniac213]

I've seen that. It's like he thought that when Ultimate Nick Fury called Ultimate Tony a "double-brained freak of nature", he thought Fury was being literal...

[@Mobysimo]

@@legomaniac213 Im still confused how he saw “Rich Guy in Power Armor fights crime” and came out with “Skin-Eating Blue Goop coating hyper-smart mutant baby”

[@christopherb501]

Considering Bean, the Card has a fascination with oversized brains and cancerous growth.

[@HangryOnPaws]

@@christopherb501 Well considering his personality and views he is very comparable to a brain cancer. Must feel a sort of kinship with them. Lmfao.

[@chrisblake4198]

I boycotted the film so had no idea about Bonzo, but wow. The entire point of the character was he and his cohort were on the edge of aging out and heading to their next schools. Ender, until Bean arrived a few months later was supposed to be the youngest admitted to the school. If they couldn't get 10 vs 15 year olds, at least get 13 vs 17.

[@victoriajankowski1197]

The weird thing, the filmed failed utterly to express how terrifying Ender's brain is, except in the one place the book did. A weird reversal, the Game in the book was to confused to be terrifying, the movie communicated just how unhinged but logical his solution was perfectly!

[@unacomn]

Weddings, Dom. They're planning weddings.

[@rneumeye]

Lol 😅

[@scouttyra]

+

[@khartog01]

Not just wedding but amazing weddings

[@drunktransdragon]

Yeah pretty much

[@fillosof66689]

If you excuse some mild sperging for a moment: Not according to the stats and surveys they are not. The legacy of existing for decades on the fringes of society, designated as deviant counter culture, left a good chunk of the LGB community jnifferent to the actual practice of monogamous marriage, if not ideologically opposed to it. The people fought for the their right to engage in marriage only to trail behind even the currently plumetting mariage rates of heterosexual couples.

[@danielsantiagourtado3430]

You're my hero dom! You always come back when you're needed the most! Thanks 😊😊😊😊

[@jackwriter1908]

So what I get from this video is that we only have to wait for 10 years before Dom can make a new Lost in Adaptation for the same books 😂

[@AlleonoriCat]

We do indeed live in the remake era 💀

[@jackwriter1908]

@@AlleonoriCat definetly! Remake everything! Every Movie in the Top 100, with TikTok-Influencer as Actors (we need to get the kids into the cinemas!) and with the budget of a Wallmart Christmas movie (don't know how they are called, but these love/christkas movies that for some reason have 60% of the time a hidden prince/princess in the beginning...

[@robertstull8759]

Don't give Card too much credit for understanding the power of agitation and propaganda in social media, because it's not unique to social media. All he did was reflect the history of newspapers, radio, and television as it really was, because agit-prop has ALWAYS been more effective in the short-term than accurate, earnest information ever has been. There's nothing in his predictions that are unique to social media. So was he a student of history? Yes. Was he super prescient about politics in social media specifically? No.

[@Tuned_Rockets]

this summary is making me like the version of the book in my head more than before but also proving that if i actually reread it that vision would shatter. Excellent work as always!

[@zenagitana]

The "No one thinks of up or down in space" strategy was used perfectly in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan". It's the first thing that came to mind when I first watched the movie.

[@marcus3d]

Perfectly? Really? It was literally 2D with a portrayal of "genius" to even consider another dimension. And even then they went "up" and "down", instead of just accelerating in a different direction and turning around, which of course shows that the director and everyone involved are unbelievably ignorant about the lack of a ubiquitous gravity. Almost as bad as the star wars space ships flying by pushing non-existent air, so almost as far from perfect as theoretically possible.

[@KelciaMarie1]

WOAH. I'm realizing that my copy of Ender's game was HEAVILY edited. The whole conversation about Ender calling Alai the n-word is nowhere in my copy. I re read it recently and I would have REMEMBERED that shit. Wonder what else got changed?

[@skibot9974]

Same

[@FlyingCircles]

When I realized who Bean was in this movie, I knew it was over

[@KelciaMarie1]

@FlyingCircles I didn't super mind the kid who played Bean, he just suffered from the same bad choices as the rest of the movie

[@benjisaac]

Did yours have Rose calling himself a “jew boy extraordinaire?” (let’s see if this comment gets auto deleted immediately lol)

[@KelciaMarie1]

@@benjisaac it did, actually!

[@rogueprince1341]

Mad props for owning your mistakes and taking accountability for them. Its refreshing to know that accountability is still out there and hasnt disappeared completely.

[@sobruhkey]

You OK? 😐

[@honestlordcommissarbrighte7921]

"Bonding through the casual exchange of racial slurs-" Ah yes, Asians in a Discord server. He definitely had that prediction down even if it came from a different angle 😂😂😂

[@crowonthepowerlines]

Once I started reading Ursula LeGuin, I realized many of Card's sociological sci fi ideas came from her work. If you read something with a bit more depth, The Hanish Cycle is great fun.

[@fangthedergon1863]

Don't call yourself stupid we all do dumb stuff. Also it legitimately really hurts to love a book so much and have the author say and do the things they have done.

[@cirthador1453]

Fun fact: Orson Scott Card is my great uncle. My parents are lesbian and bisexual, and let's just say that while he sent my mom all his books, they happened to have homophobic messages written in all of them. So, maybe not so fun.

[@venomousspecifics45]

@@cirthador1453 Everyone has embarrassing family members, I’m sorry yours is so well known and offensive. My dad was on a committee that made a very sexist decision and then I accidentally meet people adjacent to the case and they recognized my last name. There’s nothing I could say. I honestly thought he was a good person at heart until then.

[@cirthador1453]

@@venomousspecifics45 That is awful, yeah. At least my great uncle has stopped talking to us completely, so that is a welcome relief.

[@venomousspecifics45]

@@cirthador1453 That definitely sounds like a good thing! I hope you all made it through in one piece, more or less.

[@lukepearson5931]

​@venomousspecifics45 So true like it blew my mind to find out ben shapio (misspelled his name on purpose) is Mara Wilson's cousin, it must be so terrible for her.

[@andrewgwilliam4831]

What an arse. Sorry to hear that.

[@ramirezthesilvite]

32:45 Not a middle name, often nicknames are stated in the middle of a full name. Andrew "Ender" Wiggen, Dominic "The Dom" Noble, Orson "Dickbag" Scott Card.

[@icaruskarin]

It REALLY should be Orson "Oh My God, He's Awful, But Not As Repugnant As Frank Miller" Scott Card?

[@Duiker36]

They're not usually stated over the PA system by authorities acting in their official capacity.

[@bexthewitch87]

I swear, Harrison Ford hasnt seriously acted in anything since Air Force One. Except for Indiana Jones. He just really loves Indiana Jones.

[@leowilliamson1573]

When you're the only actor who doesn't get their career destroyed by being in a movie so massive that casting directors will never touch you again for decades because it's all anyone can think about, you sure af are gonna light up for the other massive movie that allowed you to avoid that fate and probably still have a lot of problems working yourself up for anything else.

[@juliastrawn2113]

Don't worry Dom, we have you on the list of "Cishet allies we will spare during the takeover."

[@Soguwe]

This is the movie that gave me my first celebrity crush with Asa Butterfield Suck it, Orson Scott Card, your work made this gay boy very happy

[@Ty-wy7yq]

Sameeeee, then I saw ‘the space between us’ and got an even bigger crush

[@Soguwe]

A shame he's so tragically straight He'd make a _killing_ playing the lead in gay stories ​@@Ty-wy7yq

[@LFielding07]

19:40 "Ender's one strategem is... meatshield". Thank you Dom for putting it so succinctly. I had liked the film until this fight, dumbing down Ender's tactics because they didn't trust the audience to follow the strategy of the final fight against the formics. What an insult to the premise of a genius warfare school, and to the skill of the book's characterization of the students.

[@Duiker36]

In fairness, meatshield *is* one of the tactics that Ender uses in the books. IIRC, it was one of the ways that he used the Launchies: a bigger kid would act as a meatshield and the smaller Launchy would ride them and use them as mobile cover. But it was basically part of the montage of "the admins kept cheating and Ender kept finding loopholes", not one of his actually genius plays.

[@punkducky69]

@@Duiker36 This was in the section where Dragon goes against Salamander, and he uses Bean as the 'rider' to shoot two guns simultaneously. What made this particular battle scary was that Dragon was not given notice of the battle until it was almost too late, and Salamander had bunched up around the Dragon entrance to shoot anybody that came out as an ambush tactic. Ender's 'genius' was to use the literal meat-shield ploy and deny the enemy their advantage, turning it into a disadvantage. And Ender's actual strategem is 'F**k the rules' in the last battle with the Formics, as it was in Battle School. It's noted in the books that the Formics never went after Earth with the intent to destroy it, but to neutralize it for their own use. Ender did the unthinkable to the Formics and the Earth military and went after their world with no thought but to destroy it - to win this game, and every game, forever after.

[@lamnad]

I want to say that the Ender's Game books (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Children of the Mind, and Xenocide) were the only books that my dyslexic self could read from cover to cover. As such, even though they are just as weird as Dominic said they are (Ender missed the part where Pig people reach sexual Maturity by becoming trees) I still can't help but have a special place for them in my heart.

[@tuschman168]

I bought and read Xenocide as a kid without knowing it was part of a book series. One of the weirdest book reading experiences I've ever had. I do believe I finished the book though.

[@phoenixanne8126]

I loved the piggies!! Speaker for the Dead gave me much sci fi inspiration.

[@edgarallenhoe3518]

Yeah, obviously it doesnt matter for this video but the way he oversimplified the piggies is a little disappointing to me lol. They aren't tortured to death, the process is horrfying but they have extremely effective anesthesia (that tragically doesn't work on humans), and they don't die, they literally metamorphose into sentient trees because the life cycle of every native species on the planet involves spending time as both an animal and a plant. That revelation is still so cool to me, and really drives home the point that without direct and frank communication, our unquestioned assumptions about others will lead to tragic misunderstandings and preventable disasters.

[@UnrealMisterD]

@@edgarallenhoe3518 To be fair, he also way oversimplifed the Children of the Mind reveal. They weren't just tricked, they were actually genetically modified to have a higher rate of geniuses than normal, but those who were gifted also had crippling OCD by design as a way to control them. And dont even get me started on all the mind-fuckery that happens in Wyrms, although that's an independent novel that has nothing to do with the Ender saga.

[@look4lec]

The biggest let down was not selling the twist, as you pointed out. Half of the reason I wanted to see it was to bring my family to see how they would react to "no this was for real, he just did the Xenocide." I had to explain the twist to them after the movie to show why I thought it would be better but if you have to explain a spoiled twist, that's a loser.

[@DabbleDo]

Such a missed opportunity to have an awesome battle school scene where the perspective of Ender’s opponents is horizontal, while the Dragon army is vertical.. Could’ve looked so cool

[@gabbodelaparrawrites]

(Thumps his forehead) I just realized the meaning of the protagonist name... Ender (one who ends stuff) I blame it on English not being my first language 🤣🤣🤣

[@lasseehrenreich5502]

It's exactly the same with me

[@fictionalcricket6789]

…wait, WHAT? My excuse is that after playing a lot of Minecraft, in my subconsciousness the word ‘ender’ is automatically followed by the word ‘dragon.’

[@GeneralTaco155555a]

​@@fictionalcricket6789 I'm pretty sure it's even mentioned in the book... Valentine starts the nickname as that's how she pronounced "Andrew" when she was very young, but the way Peter uses it is almost as an insult every time.

[@fictionalcricket6789]

@@GeneralTaco155555aInteresting. Still, I read the book when I was younger and not as good at consistently focusing on descriptions, so I’m not surprised that I missed it.

[@MistyWarden]

Third also rhyming with “turd” and making a perfect insult stuck out to me as a kid too

[@Donttrustthatburger5144]

**are the gays planning something** This is living rent-free in my brain for at least the next six months

[@mirjanbouma]

I hope whatever it is, they use biodegradable glitter.

[@rneumeye]

It DEFINITELY needs to be a book. 🧐 Then adapted into a movie, so Dom can rip it to shreds. 😈

[@gregwynn3975]

We are. But it’s a surprise. Because of course it is!

[@venomousspecifics45]

@@gregwynn3975 This was not mentioned in last month’s very gay newsletter! I’m always the last to find out these things.

[@fabrisseterbrugghe8567]

I know. They changed the meeting dates for setting the gay agenda, too.

[@w1q2e3r4t5]

Huh I was wondering "Didn't he already do this...?" but then the explanation nails it. NIce to have an updated one!

[@NinjaMatt2201]

Regarding Harrison Ford's performance in this movie. This is why I respect Sean Connery's decision to turn down the role of Gandalf in LotR. "I don't get the script, I don't understand it. I don't care how good an actor you think I am, someone who gets and understands the script will give a better performance. I don't care how much you offer to pay me. It's not fair to others for me to take this role if I can't give a good performance".

[@BrendanMoran-je4gi]

Planets are held together with gravity, not chemical (molecular) bonds. "Breaking" these molecular bond would destroy everything on the planet, but the actual celestial body would remain in space. In this sense, this is really consistent throughout the film. Large bodies can use internal gravity to be held together, but smaller bodie can't.

[@JeantheSecond-ip7qm]

I read Ender’s Game in college. I was impressed with Orson Scott Card for about 5 minutes, then I read the rant he had printed *in the book* about how he totally accurately portrayed genius kids exactly how they are and how dare anyone criticize his portrayal. What a condescending control freak.

[@alantheinquirer7658]

The initial concept is a fascinating discussion point. Oh, and how a grown man can't wear a beret. Remember "The Last Starfighter"? Kid playing games ends up being saviour of humanity.

[@wikimody5013]

One thing I really dont like in the movie is thr fact that they made litle doctor into a superweapon. It was much more terrifying in the book because every figther had fully functional version. In last battle Ender had 4 ships carrying 36 figthers total, all of them being oldest tech they had and he still puled out a win after he managed to get 7 of them to the planet. Every single one of them coudl destroy the planet with one use of doctor. It was planet kiling wepon, fully mass produced, that coudl be installed on equivalent of a single fighter

[@wikimody5013]

For a comparison: What is scarier, Death star or every single ti fighter shooting Death star lasers

[@jamespryor5967]

@@wikimody5013 The later books actually retconned that, so it wasn’t just the movie changing it.

[@wikimody5013]

@@jamespryor5967 Sad

[@lmnisop5516]

Which is really silly when you think of Newton's Laws of Motion. Every missed shot is going to disintegrate something somewhere

[@jamespryor5967]

@@lmnisop5516 Originally it wasn’t projectiles, but rather a field effect.

[@freshoffthehook904]

Our middle school had a joint project between the science class and literature class where we analyzed the book from both perspectives which was a really memorable project because it was one of the first and only times the subjects were taught as concepts that could overlap and influence each other. I also found the book really facilitating as it helped me reflect and understand how my dyslexic brain was processing and interacting with the written word. Ender physically playing the game on a touch screen but visualizing it so strongly as a 3d interface in his mind that it was almost like he was there and this leading him to loose perception of what was physically around him is how reading works for me. The key to winning the games being to shift your reference points to reorient your perception is actually a way of thinking that comes naturally to me and its part of what makes me great at adapting to my disabilities. Ender not only being able to think this way but to be able to explain it so that others can make the same shifts also really resonated with me because I spend so much of my time walking people through my thought process so we can cooperate. This usually getting me put in a position of leadership that I don’t actually want (aka carrying every single group project ever assigned to me) also hit a little to close to home… This was one of the first books that felt like it was written by someone who understood how my brain worked, how to leverage how my brain worked, and the kind of consequences physical and mental that I face living in a society that feels like it necessitates perfection if they are going to put up with me being different.

[@evadoubravska5133]

I so agree with Dominic. Reading the book I couldn't get over how horrible and sadistic everyone is, including Ender- the primary school child

[@seanmcloughlin5983]

To be SLIGHTLY fair on the film, Enders strategy of “winning the battle not fighting the enemy,” has been tried multiple times throughout history and the reason it’s rare is that it’s INSANELY RISKY Like any number of things can go wrong with it, if the enemy notices you trying to get behind them and take whatever, then they’ll wheel around and attack you. If you don’t put basically your entire force against the enemy as a distraction to make them think it’s the real battle, your screwed, if the diversion force is pushed back or destroyed before you can get to the objective, your screwed. At least meat shielding isn’t a thing irl armies can really do because of how spread out land battles are.

[@RenaDeles]

And the point in the book is basically Ender has given up because of how hard the military has pushed him, and he thinks it's a game, so that's *why* he went for such a risky strategy. He was trying to get thrown out, and if he'd known how real everything was, it would all go down very different.

[@loorthedarkelf8353]

3:08 I remember a talk I watched where some of the books used for research turned out to be authored by an abusive git. To paraphrase what the speaker said in that talk; "If I spoil the book for you, you don't have to buy it. Give your money to someone who isn't a creep." For the curious: Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios

[@averynewtown2782]

Hank green jump scare got me

[@gregcourtney751]

The ai in the game, Jane, has a romance not with ender but someone on the pig people planet, who was previously unknowningly dating his sister (through their parents cheating). Also in the final direct sequel Jane solves faster than light travel. They come across the planet the virus the planet was quarrenteed for came from but we actually never meet the inhabitants. Th3 book does end with a "maybe humans with our tendency to distrust, violently even, any alien race we meet are the real monsters" speech. Thats why the pig people are important too. The pig people and the virus making planet are the second and third first encounters post the formics. Ender even goes to pig people planet in the first place to ensure a more peaceful first contact.

[@michellehell251]

I feel like Dom did not emphasize how weirdly homo-erotic Ender’s Game the novel is. Also, it was heavily implied that Ender has a weird sister complex/ crush on Valentine and that’s why only she was abled to get Ender to go back to battle school. When he eventually makes that clone of her in Speaker of the Mind, the clone was like super hot. So much so that all of Ender’s adopted children and Valentine herself (who by now is quite old and remembers what she used to look like) are all pretty weirded out by it. And then Ender’s AI girlfriend from Ender’s Game somehow puts her conciseness in the Valentine clone before marrying Ender’s oldest stepson. I cried really hard in the library when Ender died and turned into dust. That whole series feels like a bad dream to me.

[@michellehell251]

*He makes the clones in Children of the Mind (lol get it?)

[@Ultramatt17]

I think it's something of a disservice to talk about Card's homophobia without mentioning one of the *other* things from the books that was thankfully dropped: the constant underage male nudity!

[@KnugLidi]

it was necessary for the plot. It is also something you can do in a book that you can't in a move - not iif you don't want conservative nutcases nuking your movie.

[@timothymclean]

@@KnugLidi I don't think it's just conservative weirdos who'd criticize naked children in a visual medium. I'm willing to give more latitude in literature in the kids' naked bodies aren't given too much focus, which IIRC is true of Ender's Game. But I haven't read it in well over a decade, so don't quote me on that.

[@KnugLidi]

@@timothymclean As for the novel, they're having a shower. Naked is normal there. Its a multi-shower room, which is not out of the ordinary, especially as it was 'launched into space as a single unit' so presumably, mass may have been a limit. so no walls between shower heads. This arrangement was absolutely common 40 years ago in school locker room showers. Being naked during that fight represented vulnerability. Bonzo at least showed his honour by fighting him one on one and in the same condition. For a movie, you could film it just the same with the boys wearing towels around their waists to avoid puritanical thinking.

[@timothymclean]

@@KnugLidi Point 1: The Watsonian explanation for nudity is not a factor in how authors describe nudity. Point 2: There's something inherently absurd about a fight scene where one of the participants is wearing a magic towel that sticks to their skin. I don't want to say it's impossible to maintain the appropriate tone in that kind of scene-it would be easier than adapting One Piece to live action-but it makes more sense to move that fight out of the showers.

[@KnugLidi]

@@timothymclean So you don't film it with towels then. It doesn't take much to avoid 'the naughty bits' in a fight, regardless of their ages. Current fears would never consider filming this movie with the ages of the kids as written in the books. Moving the scene out of the showers changes the scene and the dynamics between the characters.

[@raym1477]

Card did a "re-imagining" of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" that involved the title character's father tricking several of the cast into committing murder so that Hamlet's dad could end up molesting them all in Hell. Like, WTF?

[@mcv2178]

That sounds wild!

[@marocat4749]

strangely enough he did an oddly sentitive tragic one?

[@ComradeMime]

When men wipe out a whole species of aliens they get celebrated, but when Jean Grey did it she had to go sleep on the moon for 20 years

[@monikasuszek3434]

Ended was not celebrated. Humanity immediately turned against him and did a kind of trial on him even though he was still a child. And he removed himself from humanity for enormously long time before he could redeem himself.

[@ComradeMime]

@@monikasuszek3434 oh so it was like a jean grey,,,, interesting. The movies ending rly makes it seem like humanity was just like "fuck yeah that kid did a genocide" lol

[@MistyWarden]

@@ComradeMimepart of his exile was because a certain portion of humanity would use him as a mouthpiece for their own interests if he ever came back to earth, not everyone hated him but they all wanted to use him.

[@ComradeMime]

@@MistyWarden damn, sounds like my ex

[@wingracer1614]

@@monikasuszek3434 He was celebrated at first. Then he wrote a book about the hive queen and only after that did humanity turn on him. He authored his own downfall. Which come to think about it, is exactly what Card did to himself. Everyone loved the guy until he started writing about the gays.

[@asteria9963]

Thank you so much for all the great work you've done. The world has become so cruel, there are times when I blurt out "I just want it to end". People like you help keep people like me alive. I appreciate it a lot. It also made me read more, so that's extra nice.

[@BleydTorvall]

While I don't dispute your greater points, your specific complaint of Rackham being in the observation area during the final exam didn't ever strike me as a problem. My understanding was not that Rackham was directly commanding the opponents, but rather had personally programmed the strategy and tactics the opponent in the final exam would use. After all, considering the massive size of the final fleet, it would never have been possible, let alone believable, that Rackham was directly controlling that entire force in the same way Ender was controlling his. What was unique regarding Rackham was that all possible time and effort had been expended to ensure the final exam was as close to accurate as Rackham, the expert on Formic tactics, could make it, something that probably hadn't been practical for the rest. And to be clear, that had been my belief based on reading the book long before the movie.