41–50 of 102 posts
>It's a wonderfully guilt-free massacre, mass murder with a clear conscience I take it the reviewer didn't read the sequels?
Anyway, why would you expect the reviewer to read the sequels if he so dislikes Ender's Game?
Ugh. My kingdom for a submission down arrow. Citing Jesus and mocking Christianity as part of reviewing Ender's game totally jumps the shark. This is such an obvious troll, I am utterly disappointed that Hacker News has collectively up-modded this close to the top of the front page (as I write this). I thought this community was better than this.
Yeah, I thought the same thing. I considered killing it, but it didn't seem quite deliberately dishonest enough.
I just took "it's porn" out of the title. I suspect that's why this got so much attention.
Yes, even when you're right.
His basic argument holds truth though, there are pornographic elements in most created works, i.e. elements created strictly to gratify or comfort the reader in some specific way. This is why we instinctually pigeonhole and look down upon genre fiction writers, because their primary task is to comfort the reader, not to challenge or engage in a dialogue with him. Let's break down the different genre's and see what be…
You might be interested in the concept of Monomyth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
Further, the writings of Jung (and his intellectual descendants) on Archetypes might interest you. A further offshoot on this front is the Masculine Psychology movement of the latter half of the 20th century.
If we view psychology as the study of a set of stories and the way that people relate to stories, it is much more useful than dismissing it because of its (often) poor or nonexistant scientific rigor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I respect that he can write a book without selling dogma. I love Enchantment and Pastwatch, even if the Ender series has faded with time.
About the faded in time thing, I always felt Ender's Game was surprisingly precise in predicting the rise of online discussion communities, and how their anonymous celebrities can influence a lot of people, while just being a bunch of kids in their bedrooms. The book's from 1985 after all.
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Many of the things said about Ender's Game could also be said about Harry Potter: "...the plot is contrived to make sure that other characters always hate Ender. There is no obvious reason for him to be so despised, at every turn, by his peers: he's a confident guy who excels at games, the kind of guy who would typically be well-liked at school." "Geek wish-fulfillment is not the only fetish on display in Ender's Gam…
I don't get the self-pity thing off Potter, and I don't get the sense that the plot in the Potter books has been contorted to align most of the other characters in the book after him; there's a coherent set of adversaries for Potter, with understandable motives. It's harder to make that argument about all of Ender's adversaries.
since we're on the subject - what do you guys think of the essay 'Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman'? http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html Summary: Ender's Game is an apologia for Hitler.
I think that if you look at the claims in the essay through the lens of Card's Mormonism, a very different picture emerges.
Ender's celibacy until marriage is [ostensibly] normal in Mormon society, and the age at which he married then is just a number, which falls within the realm of coincidence.
You'll note that Ender killed the Buggers without knowledge of what he was doing, then became wracked with guilt.
This hints at Enders Game as a defense not for Hitler, but for Brigham Young, and his (disputed-whether-he-knew) role in the Mountain Meadows massacre.
This would explain Card's unseemly rage at the author of the Ender-as-Hitler essay: she had effectively Godwin'd a revered patriarch of Card's religion.
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That's also the secret to getting an interesting plot easily. It comes up so often in fiction because it's interesting. And it's possible to get things more complex and keep it interesting, but it's much, much harder. Even Ulysses, which is famous for being about an ordinary person going about an ordinary day, has the main character a Jew in Ireland - which is rare - and adds Dedalus, who is too smart for his own goo…
I have to disagree. The idea that we're going to wake up one day and something is going to happen that's going to make us better or more important than everyone else is pretty much the dictionary definition of masturbatory.
Linkbait formula: Take something that web geeks like (like Ender's Game). Then, publicly kick it in the nuts on your blog. Watch the traffic roll in.
...by comparing it to porn. That was the brilliant part.