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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2360 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

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I didn't care for the character of Bean as a protagonist. He just didn't work for me and I didn't connect to him at all. It was a shame because I actually liked the idea of exploring the geopolitical situation on Earth. But rewriting Bean like that, besides the deficiencies in his character, really ret-conned Ender's Game, and not in a good way.

But if you never continued on to Speaker of the Dead, etc., I do recommend giving it a shot. SotD and its followups go in a very different direction from Ender's Game but really introduce some fascinating ideas about contact between alien species, different modes of consciousness, that kind of thing. And they have one of my favorite Christian characters in fiction, FWIW.

I completely agree, for me that book diminished the characters of both Bean and especially Ender, gutted the emotional impact of Ender's journey, and twisted the entire narrative of Ender's Game into a lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy. Weak.

When I said that I didn't continue the series, I meant the Shadow series, which I've edited my original post to clarify. I appreciated the different direction that the sequels took, even if I found the ending of Xenocide a little ham-handed and the portrayal of OCD a little stilted and one-dimensional. I have not read Ender in Exile, though I'd be open to checking it out if I had a decent reason to do so.

I completely agree, for me that book diminished the characters of both Bean and especially Ender, gutted the emotional impact of Ender's journey, and twisted the entire narrative of Ender's Game into a lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy. Weak.

Doesn't Ender think that the plot of Ender's Game constitutes him being the victim of lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy? The setup for the Speaker/Xenocide/Children trilogy is Ender's struggle to atone for/undo the xenocide he was the unwitting tool of.

Good question! I think from Ender's perspective the answer to that question would be a qualified yes. Explanation follows.

I referenced Xanatos with the trope of the Chessmaster in mind, and the main dramatic conflict of the original Ender's Game, ie the fate of the third invasion, just isn't a good fit for that style of character to begin with. It is true, however, that adults and leaders are repeatedly portrayed as a bunch of Manipulative Bastards shamelessly forging Ender into a weapon capable of defeating the buggers formics. This is absolutely a major theme of Ender's Game, as is his awareness and understanding of that even as he resentfully accepts its necessity. The motivation for this, however, is the survival of humanity itself; the formics are, in the parlance of the sequels, varelse for all intents and purposes. It isn't until the Biggest Reveal of the novel that we learn that the formics had come to understand that humans were sentient and that the third invasion was completely unnecessary. So while it was undoubtedly manipulative to frame the actual fleet battles against the formics as a continuation of the original battle school games with Mazer Rackham as an opponent, the third invasion as shown in Ender's Game was always portrayed as a desperate gamble for mere survival rather than a deliberately manipulated outcome and the lameness of the manipulations of the various adults and leaders is only visible in retrospect and was never something that any of the adults in charge could have predicted.

Now I'm going to slag on Ender's Shadow in a little more detail to show more of my overall thinking. One of the major challenges of telling Bean's tale is that the backstory of Ender's Game is a known commodity and so the dramatic tension of the original is absent. Achilles can't hold a candle to the extinction of humanity here. A second challenge to telling Bean's tale is that Bean and Ender share a lot of similarities in their overall character, which I think makes it exceedingly difficult to make Bean's story strong and compelling enough in its own right without diminishing Ender's character arc from the original book. Card fails to thread that particular needle, playing up the stress that Ender is under and portraying him as beginning to break down, thus allowing Bean to covertly ride to the rescue again and again. Bean's aggrandizement starts with drawing up the roster for Ender's Dragon Army and inserting himself into same but progresses to outsmarting the adults of battle school and the many unfair advantages they give the opposing armies. Later, by way of having Ender make more and more mistakes, Bean becomes an ever-better leader, tidying up by issuing his own orders and repeatedly saving the day. By the time that the oldest fleet has arrived at the final Formic homeworld, this angle has been so played up that Ender's initial disbelief at the impossible scenario is retconned into him being unable to come up with a plan and Bean is given the option of commanding the fleet himself, which allows him to formulate a strategy for victory. IMO Card never does a good enough job of showing us why Bean wasn't a superior leader and as a result Bean the character comes off as largely as a smarter version of Ender, who we are nevertheless told struggles to understand what makes Ender the better leader. There just isn't enough of an emotional or dramatic arc there for me. Hence, lame.

IMO Card never does a good enough job of showing us why Bean wasn't a superior leader and as a result Bean the character comes off as largely as a smarter version of Ender, who we are nevertheless told struggles to understand what makes Ender the better leader.

I mean, the answer is pretty simple, to the point of being implied- Bean is an alien(almost literally) who struggles to connect with humans and can't properly motivate or connect with his subordinates. I agree that Card didn't do a good job of showing this, but in backgrounds where leadership is prized(like Card's Mormon subculture) it just kind of comes off as obvious. Ender having an elan of leadership while others don't is a minor theme in Ender's game, so it fits with the way the series sees things.

I totally agree with this. I know I'm nitpicking in that particular complaint! Also, the detail about Mormons prizing leadership is one I hadn't thought about. Thanks!

Ender in Exile is an entertaining read. If you’re just a fan of the setting, or if you really want to bridge Ender’s Game and the sequels, it’s worth reading. But that being said, you can definitely go without it, and it’s thematically more like a shadow series than like either the original novel or it’s sequels.

I liked it. If you didn’t like Shadow of the Hegemon, you might not. It suffers from treating Ender like, well, not a person- it’s not that he doesn’t have flaws, it’s that he’s a vehicle for philosophical exploration and social commentary rather than a believable character. The scenes on the colony world are good, the love story on the ship is… more of a series of monologues.

TLDR, read it if you want to frame the sequels the way Card wanted you to. If you didn’t like the shadow series I’d not expect you to like this for its own sake.

Thanks! I'll keep that in mind if I ever see a cheap copy of it, or if alternately the Kindle version goes on sale.

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