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Tue, Jul. 15th, 2003 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceter!!! I just found out some people are trying to make The Last Unicorn into a live action movie! I desperately hope it will be good. I loved the animated version when I was a kid, and when I found it was a book first, I was ecstatic.
I finished rereading Ender's Game for the who knows how many time. I still love it. I first read it summer of sixth grade, and it affected me so much I felt unreal and disconnected for about a week, as though my world of summer school was the fantasy and Ender's world of Battle School and war games was real. I think I've finally figured out why Ender's Game continues to hit me so hard time after time and why I resent Ender's Shadow.
I love Ender because he's always alone. And he doesn't want to be alone, just like everyone else, he wants to be accepted, he wants to be liked. But he finds that his talents and his genius set him apart from others, and the teachers and administrators behind the war effort won't leave him alone and insist on setting him off. I love Ender because his abilities so often feel like a dead weight to him. It sounds horribly whiny, and in another story, I would maybe feel like Ender didn't appreciate all the good things he had and all, his brain, his insight. But Card somehow writes Ender so that I never do think that. Instead, Ender reminds me a lot of how I felt back in school, how everything was relentlessly focused on getting into an Ivy League school, of having the best grades and of never, ever failing. Unlike Ender, the earth wasn't about to get run over by aliens if I failed, but the pressure was still there all the time. And like Ender, when there's too much riding on something, I can freeze. I get so tied up in the need to not fail that I can't even begin. I hated being the smart one in my class even as I loved it. I hated that everyone expected me to keep doing well, that no one ever really believed that I was petrified of failure. I hated the distance that it could put between me and other people who wanted to be first.
Ender's isolation speaks volumes to me, especially the fact that he is utterly alone because only he can do what he's been trained to do, because he's been taught again and again and again that there is no one but him. There is no one he can rely on, there are no friends he can lean on. And that is his tragedy.
And that's why I resent Ender's Shadow, which tells the story of Bean. And while it may be a great book by itself, I refuse to think of it as the other side of Ender's Game. I think instead I'll think of Ender's Game, Speaker of the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind as one series, and Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets as another series taking place in a universe parallel to the one of Ender's Game. But still a different universe. Because Card seems to have gotten tired of Ender, and I haven't. He makes Bean smarter and faster than Ender, which completely ruins the thesis of Ender's Game for me. Because Ender's sadness lies in the fact that he has to be alone because no one else is as smart, as ruthless, and as empathic as he is. And I don't like how Card made Bean, the nice, almost normal child of the first book, into a strange, alien, almost mechanical character in his own book. Bean's too smart, he's too fast, and he has no real human emotions outside of a fear of Achilles. And I hated how Card undermined the weight of Ender's final decision to blow up the bugger homeworld by having Bean be the one who relayed the order. I just thought there could have been a book on Bean that would have made Bean interesting without having to tear down Ender's image.
And I'm not even going to get started with the issue of Peter.
I finished rereading Ender's Game for the who knows how many time. I still love it. I first read it summer of sixth grade, and it affected me so much I felt unreal and disconnected for about a week, as though my world of summer school was the fantasy and Ender's world of Battle School and war games was real. I think I've finally figured out why Ender's Game continues to hit me so hard time after time and why I resent Ender's Shadow.
I love Ender because he's always alone. And he doesn't want to be alone, just like everyone else, he wants to be accepted, he wants to be liked. But he finds that his talents and his genius set him apart from others, and the teachers and administrators behind the war effort won't leave him alone and insist on setting him off. I love Ender because his abilities so often feel like a dead weight to him. It sounds horribly whiny, and in another story, I would maybe feel like Ender didn't appreciate all the good things he had and all, his brain, his insight. But Card somehow writes Ender so that I never do think that. Instead, Ender reminds me a lot of how I felt back in school, how everything was relentlessly focused on getting into an Ivy League school, of having the best grades and of never, ever failing. Unlike Ender, the earth wasn't about to get run over by aliens if I failed, but the pressure was still there all the time. And like Ender, when there's too much riding on something, I can freeze. I get so tied up in the need to not fail that I can't even begin. I hated being the smart one in my class even as I loved it. I hated that everyone expected me to keep doing well, that no one ever really believed that I was petrified of failure. I hated the distance that it could put between me and other people who wanted to be first.
Ender's isolation speaks volumes to me, especially the fact that he is utterly alone because only he can do what he's been trained to do, because he's been taught again and again and again that there is no one but him. There is no one he can rely on, there are no friends he can lean on. And that is his tragedy.
And that's why I resent Ender's Shadow, which tells the story of Bean. And while it may be a great book by itself, I refuse to think of it as the other side of Ender's Game. I think instead I'll think of Ender's Game, Speaker of the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind as one series, and Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets as another series taking place in a universe parallel to the one of Ender's Game. But still a different universe. Because Card seems to have gotten tired of Ender, and I haven't. He makes Bean smarter and faster than Ender, which completely ruins the thesis of Ender's Game for me. Because Ender's sadness lies in the fact that he has to be alone because no one else is as smart, as ruthless, and as empathic as he is. And I don't like how Card made Bean, the nice, almost normal child of the first book, into a strange, alien, almost mechanical character in his own book. Bean's too smart, he's too fast, and he has no real human emotions outside of a fear of Achilles. And I hated how Card undermined the weight of Ender's final decision to blow up the bugger homeworld by having Bean be the one who relayed the order. I just thought there could have been a book on Bean that would have made Bean interesting without having to tear down Ender's image.
And I'm not even going to get started with the issue of Peter.
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Tue, Aug. 19th, 2003 02:18 am (UTC)I did indeed go to P-Rade. I took pictures, so I could take them back to my co-workers and show them the extreme orange-colored bizarreness that is Princeton Reunions. Isn't it crazy? But kind of moving, too. I have to admit, I always get a lump in my throat when the really old guys go by.
I was a little bitter about the rain this year, though. Didn't want to sit on the wet grass, so I had pretty sore feet by the end. Plus we were staging right by the calliope, and frankly an hour and a half of calliope music is more than anyone should have to put up with.
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Tue, Aug. 19th, 2003 05:27 am (UTC)Guh, the rain sucked. It went on through graduation weekend too. I ended up falling sick during the entire thing. Then we got drizzled on for pretty much everything.