Nov 22, 2012
Card sets up Ender to be the sincere, abused innocent, and rigs the game to make us accept that he does no wrong. I see the entire pupose of the "remote war by game" trick in the novel as a device to make this argument plausible. But in the real world genocide is not committed by accident. We see the immoral consequences of such a mode of thought in the heaps of dead bodies that history has piled up, committed always by leaders who tell us they only meant to protect us from evil.
Starting to see more and more marketing campaign material for the Ender's Game movie. Time to repost John Kessel's 2004 essay on why Orson Scott Card's novel is such a steaming pile of sadistic, genocidal bullshit.