Quote:
Originally Posted by GraceKrispy
I would let my 9 yo fourth grader read Ender's Game, but I wouldn't let him watch Starship Troopers. I guess my censor meter goes opposite of yours. I would rather my son read these things that, to me, have a deeper meaning than watch senseless violence onscreen.
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Starship Troopers isn't senseless violence, but I understand why some people think that it is. In fact, I think that there are some pretty basic similarities between the societies in the film and the book. The basic difference is that Verhooven is lampooning fascism while Card is exploring militarized society from the perspective of someone who can't see the whole picture but must win the final battle without even knowing that it's real. On one hand, Ender is a well-crafted tool, but Ender the person has to reconcile that he was a Xenocide, albeit an unwitting one.
How Ender deals with that down the road is an interesting topic, and was explored in a somewhat meaningful way in Speaker for the Dead. Midway through the next book, Xenocide, Card lets enough of his Libertarianism slip through to spoil my enjoyment of the story - retroactively even, my opinion of the first book was colored, after the fact, by stuff in the subsequent books. After reading this discussion, and the other one over in Reading Recs, I'm thinking I may pick up Ender's Shadow and check out what's going on with Bean. Could be an interesting Compare/Contrast. I don't think I'll read any more of the series after that.
Another issue that I've been thinking about relating to this topic is that here in the US we seem to have less problem letting children consume media with violent content than we do with sexual content. So say instead of being a potentially highly skilled soldier Ender was instead a potentially highly skilled prostitute. Who would let their kids read that? Note that our society currently finds neither of those professions appropriate for a child, however we're more willing to explore the killer nature of a child than his sexual nature.