Tag Archives: Enders Game

Ender’s Game ON

Okay, I know I made myself not update my blog in all this time because, well, I borked it always trying to clear out revisions and whatnot from the MySQL database (yeah, don’t do that DELETE a,b,c thing, although I don’t know if that’s what caused my comments to stop working on my custom theme), and I was trying to motivate myself to move it over to jeidai.com and clean everything up, but I really had to write this down somewhere. Nostalgia, oh hey, re-meet my blog.

Holy shnikt, holy shnikt, I finally saw Ender’s Game! After all these years! (Okay, the movie is not even three years old, but I first read the book in 2002/2003.) I loved most of it. Just seeing the story on the screen. Like, it just looks so good! Not what I saw in my mind reading the book, but it kept me watching. (Yes I have a bad habit of playing my iPad games while watching tv, missing a lot of nuances of movies and tv shows. But…it keeps away that braindead feeling after sitting for hours just…watching.)

My adrenaline was even going at the final battle scene. Although I recorded the movie on a channel with commercial interruptions, so gah, the impact may have been lessened by me having to focus on forwarding through commercials. (So many commercials.) Ugh.

But I can see how the movie wasn’t that great and how it didn’t do well. I liked it because I read the book and could fill in the whole (or most of the) story. It was a bit rushed, skipped over a lot of stuff (only two Battle Room scenes? *tear*), and they dropped the whole Valentine/Peter and Locke/Demosthenes storyline. (Sorry, I don’t know if I matched the writers’ names up correctly, haven’t read the books in years.)

Probably a lot of my complaints and questions can be answered with, “it wouldn’t have worked in a movie format,” but I will still complain and question.

Did they switch around the game storyline? Ender beat the giant the first time he played in the movie. He just…went straight to killing. Did not like. I want more psychology, more with the Formics.
Ender’s first Battle Room game under his command, they already had the rope with them. Buh. Not logical!
Petra wasn’t as brash and hard and, well, rock-like, as I remembered. She seemed more like… just a face, just a placeholder. And they slimmed down the storyline in Command School where it was so grueling that Petra fell asleep and had to be taken out, and how Ender relied on her too much.
I don’t know why, but I really wanted to see the little storyline about Graff becoming a nobody once they got to Command School. It would have served no purpose in the movie, but it kind of hinted at the whole conspiracy of what was going on, the head of Battle School going off with a kid (The Kid) to Command School just to become an old, unimportant man?
I liked how they designed the Formics in the movie. In my head they’re really creepy, huge ant-things. But in the movie the queen is almost…pretty? Like she’s not a completely scary alien we have to wipe off the face of the…universe.
Mazer Rackam was…Maori? (I can’t remember the book.)
Okay, why was there a dying queen there on the asteroid at the end of the movie? Booooring. There’s no way she could have stayed hidden with humans scurrying all over it anyway. I wish they’d focused a bit on Ender’s communication with the Formics too.
I saw the little nods to potential future sequals. I’m kind of sad we won’t see them. I’m partial to Bean anyway, having read his story first. ;P And I really like Speaker for the Dead. (Not that I’m saying they should make it into a movie.)
Who the heck was Bernard? (Not a complaint about the movie, I just can’t remember this character in the book.) They kept mentioning him…

In the end, I think this just means I need to reread the whole series again. I haven’t read Ender’s Game/Shadow since 2009, and I haven’t read the whole series since 2005. I think this time I’ll read them in chronological order. (Last time was Ender-focused, EG/ES/Ender series/Bean series.) (And whaaaat there’s a new Ender book and a new Shadow book? Must investigate if these are worth paying for…)

(Also, hah, this took me over an hour to write. Oh blogging, never change.)

edit: I wrote this little paragraph while trying to fall asleep after publishing this post. I never added it though because I didn’t think it quite fit. Maybe it goes after my Locke/Demosthenes comment? But… I can’t just erase it. So, here it is, a random paragraph:

I mean, in the book didn’t he mentally give up in the final battle, and his big innovative move was almost a ragequit? But in the movie it seemed as if he was facing the challenge, ready to not be a “failure” as they kept pushing, willing to go on to the next level the adults moved him to. Which kind of weakened the plot twist. “F—— all y’all, I ain’t playing. Destroyed your game. I quit.” “Uhh, Ender…”

the Real Ender Wiggin

I started reading Ender’s Game a while ago. Haven’t read Ender since 2005 (almost three years!) so I’ve got most of my mind clear and am now ready to meet the real Ender Wiggin.

Background: I first read Ender’s Shadow (for an English class) then read Ender’s Game. So yes, I have Ender completely backwards in my mind. Or as a reviewer on Amazon said, “Bean is smart, clever and clearheaded ‘always’ whereas Ender looks hesitant and overwrought…”

I don’t remember my original thoughts when I went from Shadow to Game and am too lazy to search through my journal archives, but generally I think I would have agreed with that reviewer’s sentiments. I was probably confused as to why people liked Ender so much.

Reading Orson Scott Card’s introduction to Game though, I picked up on this: “These readers found that Ender’s Game was not merely a ‘mythic’ story, dealing with general truths, but something much more personal…. They didn’t love Ender, or pity Ender (a frequent adult response); they were Ender, all of them.”

That explained a lot to me. I read Ender’s Game first when I was about 18, past the stage of outcast child. I pitied Ender. It explained why my feelings about Ender were different from my friends’. I was reading it from an adult’s perspective.

I was also reading from a perspective of someone who never felt like an outcast because of my intelligence. (No, I felt different because I’m a little weird. :P) There were lots of classmates smarter than I was. In fact, I felt stupid in elementary school and middle school … and high school … because those classmates excelled much more than I did. Sure, I didn’t struggle too much in school (except with writing), but that didn’t set me apart.

Knowing that, and not remembering Bean’s side of things, I can read the story with a clean slate. :3

One thing I’d like to comment on in that review; “Where does Bean get the experience to become Enders [sic] ‘supervisor?’ I don’t know but he is deemed fit enough with a couple months as a team leader to be fleet commander.”

Again, I don’t remember the specifics (and I’ve got horrible dizzying head~~ache~~ pressure and can’t think straight), but Bean was really smart, a super brain. He knew and understood a lot of things, practically everything. But he doesn’t have the “human” side to him that Ender does, which Bean knew. Wasn’t that also the reason why Bean knew Ender had to lead? Bean was more of a backup to Ender; if Ender failed, Bean would be there as one last chance to beat the Buggers.

But that thought doesn’t lead anywhere in this entry.

(Also, funny additional comment by the reviewer about Inda. XD)

Continue reading →

books about other books?

Hah! I knew I couldn’t be imagining things when I read about Neelgaimon in Children of the Jedi! (Although I didn’t catch the sandmine/sandman thing. Probably because I’m not a big fan of Barbara Hambly’s writing style. >_> It seems like not only is she telling too much, but she’s showing too much as well. [I don’t necessarily believe one should show over tell or vice versa, just whichever one works best for the situation.] No wonder it’s taking me so long to get through the book.)

Then earlier, when reading InterWorld, I was reminded of Ender’s Game/Shadow. I don’t remember if it was the school, or the Nowhere-at-All and flying/falling (down). Then there’s also a character named Jai. heh.

/end dork

Shadows of the game

I was reading Shadow of the Giant, and I really liked one part that I read. ^_^;; The part where … uhhh … possible spoiler ahead … Ender’s “jeesh” got together. I don’t know why. It was just … fun. Like going back to the beginning, back to when the story was good.

(I don’t know why I keep reading the Shadow series. I thought Hegemon was poor, other than the war plotting and logistics and codes and whatnot. And in Giant, I don’t even really care about these characters. I mean, sure, I care about them, but that’s just because I cared about them in Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow; it’s like they’re riding off someone else’s popularity. I just want to know how the kids from that story end up.)

2005 book list

Wheee, I remembered to update. :P Here’s a list of all the books I managed to read in 2005 (plus a few from 2004 >.>). (List started January 22, 2005.) I was trying to read 100 books in one year. I didn’t read that many, just half (including the few from 2004 ^^;). Another goal I’d like to accomplish in life is to read 100 books in one year! (Even though that would amount to reading one book every 3.65 days. …Unless I did it in a leap year, then it’d be 3.66 days…)

It’s kind of weird. I look over the list, and I think, Wow, I read that book then? It seems like so long ago… Like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I want to reread Ender’s Shadow again. XD (Even though I already have about a half dozen books on my to-read list, not including class required reading. *ack*)

Also, wow, I’m gone for only one week and WordPress is updated. Hmmm, maybe I should leave other things alone and maybe they’ll get updated too… (Note to self, upgrade WordPress after backing up current state.)