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Notes -
In the preface to Speaker for the Dead Orson Scott Card writes about "adolescent" vs "adult" main characters. He doesn't deal with it in those terms, but in effect what he is saying is that the Campbellian hero can't be someone who is already playing a fully realised adult role in his community (in his worldview as well as mine, this is approximately synonymous with "married with kids") because the hero arc doesn't make sense. So to write a heroic story with "adult" main characters (OSC's goal in Speaker/Xenocide/Children of the Mind) you have to do something else.
In my view, OSC fails - but I still love the books for HFY/superversive type reasons. Speaker and Children are both carried off by "adolescent" heroes - the still-single Ender in Speaker with a number of pequinino "brother" pigs (who we later learn are literal adolescents when the pequinino life-cycle is revealed) as supporting characters; and young Peter, Si Wang-Mu and Jane-as-young-Val in Children. Xenocide is a relative stinker because it doesn't have this - the central plot conceit is that Ender's struggle to bring harmony to the Ribiera family as stepfather turns into a metaphor for the broader struggle to restore harmony on Lusitania and in the wider galaxy. It almost, but not quite, works.
As a separate point, in last week's thread we had the Barbie discourse which talked about the idea of the fundamental male (hero's journey) and female (abandon your demons and embrace your inner fabulousness) character development arcs as being about SMV increase. A happily married man who goes on a hero's journey is not going to develop into a man who gets the girl, he is going to develop into a man whose wife loves him less than the man she married. This works well as the apotheosis arc where the hero who we saw complete the journey and get the girl in series 1 is called away from "happily ever after" to perform one last act of heroism to pull out the good guys win in series 2, and normally gets himself killed in the process. (Think Tony Stark in *Avengers: Endgame). But it doesn't work well as a regular hero story.
Funnily enough, that reminds me of the Druss the Legend stories. A happily married man has his village invaded and his wife captured by slavers, so he goes off to rescue her and in the process changes so drastically from who he used to be, that when he finally finds his wife again (who has since remarried to a guy who treats her decently), the story doesn't give us a simple resolution to this.
I was more impressed by the series than I expected to be; I read the first book looking for something fun but stupid, just popcorn entertainment, and it sounded like it would fit the bill, but then the characters insisted on having (at least a little) depth!
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