[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Thanks for the links! Kessel's essay is especially lucid, though I don't agree with every point nor even your concern over Ender's morality. And, wow, Kessel dissects thoroughly.

That he does. There are other essays that go into Card's ethics and morality, mostly focused on his homophobia, but if I had to pick just one to recommend, it's Kessel's.

Stepping back for a moment, Ender saved the human race. We'll never know if it was the only way to do that.

The issue for me isn't whether there was another way, but how this way was portrayed: with Ender as undeniable hero, despite (1) deliberately annihilating a sentient race when compromise was possible or (2) being duped by his legal and moral superiors into doing it for them. Neither act is heroic.

You've got every right to control what your children read but I don't agree this series is so damaging on a moral level.

Probably not to most people; it's directly antithetical to many of my religious principles. It's sex-phobic, victim-blaming, and glamourizes ignorance as a state of purity. The more I considered the ethics portrayed in Card's books, the less I liked any of them. I fully understand that non-Pagans aren't likely to have nearly as many of their buttons hit.

Can't speak to Card's real-life phobias as I haven't studied the man's writing or interviews outside of his fiction.

He thinks that if gay people are allowed to marry each other, straight married couples should rise up and overthrow the US government.

I wish I were exaggerating.

If homophobia or apologizing for Hitler show up in his fiction then it is too subtle or derivative for me to detect.

I don't think he's a Hitler apologist, but I think Ender's story correlates strongly with Hitler's, and that Card denies it shows that he wants to believe that the victors have written the *correct* version of history. Hitler *believed* he was saving his homeland from an incomprehensible menace--just like Ender did. Like Ender, he was wrong about that. And while the public in the Ender series reviled him as "the Xenocide," we, the readers, are supposed to sympathize with him, are supposed to believe that since we know the *real* truth of what happened, we know that he's not an evil mass murderer. (We're also not supposed to think of him as a deluded figurehead pawn and consider Rackham and the government as evil mass murderers.)