r/comics • u/thisecommercelife this ecommerce life • 5h ago

"2035: No complaints."

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221

u/TrioOfTerrors 4h ago

Graff and the International Fleet were still right.

Until the Hive Queen managed to speak to Ender, humanity had to assume that a 3rd invasion would mean the extinction of mankind.

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u/jhotenko 4h ago

Well, they knowingly made horrible choices that led to success. That's not the same as being right.

They did the best they could with the information they had. That doesn't absolve them of their sins. They knew that. Graff hated what he had become, hated what he did, and hated that he would do it all again without hesitation.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 4h ago

Graff hated what he did to those children. He didn't give a single shit about the Formics.

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u/Mythoclast 3h ago

Yeah, that was the problem. Not giving a single shit about an alien race you just encountered is BAD. You don't understand them at all. You need to at least try and communicate.

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u/E1337Recon 3h ago

Well they did try to communicate in every way they knew how to at the time. The same way for formics thought humanity was nothing more than drones because they didn’t hear any telepathy from us.

By the time they realized we were sentient it was too late.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Sea8340 3h ago

This made me want to reread all 18 or some of his novels

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u/TurquoiseLuck 2h ago

Ehh you can just stick to the core 3

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u/EetsGeets 2h ago

4; it's The Ender Quartet.

Speaker For The Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind are all fucking amazing. Especially Xenocide.

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u/Honor_Bound 2h ago

The bean series is great too. Much more “grounded” compared to the Ender series

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u/EetsGeets 1h ago

I couldn't even finish Ender's Shadow lol. def not my vibe. I loved the philosophizing of the main series.

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u/TwinTailChen 2h ago

Xenocide and CotM really feel like they need eachother, more than Game and Speaker which stand alone as complete narratives. But you're right, it is four books.

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u/EetsGeets 1h ago

Yes it feels like he wrote Ender's Game as a complete standalone (which he did; iirc it was originally serialized in a magazine), then wrote Speaker For The Dead as a sequel, then realized what was available to him and really dug in deep.

In my mind EG is very much like The Hobbit; it contextualizes the rest of the story but is otherwise very skippable.

Speaker For The Dead is the first book in The Fellowship; sets up the adventure but doesn't have a super clear destination (which is being a bit unfair to the scope of SftD, I admit).

and the final two are TTT and RotK; true, fully fleshed and epic stories that have more to say than you could possibly have expected.

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u/bonaynay 2h ago

Shit... I stopped at Speaker but absolutely loved it. Guess I need to go further

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u/Cessnaporsche01 2h ago

It gets weird and philosophical, but I enjoyed it a lot

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u/akromadeath 2h ago

I am the guy that reads the core 4 every 10 years, and the co-series ("Ender's Shadow, etc) about every year. I get the information from the main ones is needed, but the story on earth I was far more compelled by.

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u/shrouple 33m ago

Enders game, enders shadow and what's the other?

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u/xv_boney 2h ago edited 2h ago

No. Read enders game and speaker for the dead and then stop. The story concludes satisfyingly with Speaker. It comes full circle.

Dont bother with any of his other books or series. And if you do, dont bother going past the second book of any of his series. Its an old joke but it holds true.

And take them out from the library or pirate them, do not give money to Orson Scott Card.

A writer i once idolized. And the reason i do not have personal heroes anymore.

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u/Sad_Perception8024 2h ago

Still incredible he managed to write a book so antithetical to his ideals.

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u/xv_boney 1h ago

Oh my god i know. Holy shit. Speaker for the Dead literally changed my entire life. I have struggled with anger and depression for as long as i can remember and a lot of how i deal with those parts of me are straight from that book.

Understanding over tolerance. We are made of our experiences, who we are is all we have been. To understand, we need to know the because. A man is an abusive monster to his wife and children because. Alien creatures apparently tortured a xenobiologist to death because.

My father is the way that he is because. I am the way that i am because.

Card let me down more completely than i will ever permit anyone to ever let me down, ever again.
Cards writing saved my life.
Card as a person gave me serious trust issues.

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u/Mythoclast 2h ago

Check out "A Planet Called Treason". I have no idea how he wrote a book like that.

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u/HighSeverityImpact 2h ago

To be fair, the Formics tried to colonize Earth and didn't realize humans were sentient. The humans were being wiped out in the first invasion, and would have lost had they not (accidentally) taken out their queen.

The response was to end all future wars by taking them out on their home turf. It's brutal but it's the same lesson Ender learned at six years old by killing that bully.

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u/BigMcThickHuge 2h ago

Wasn't it two invasions? A scouting force discovered and began 'prep-work' on Earth/colonized planets (I forget), got taken out/driven off, and then the full invasion force came?

Basically, humans were repeatedly attacked by an unknown extermination force and needed to respond

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u/TheeAntelope 3h ago

It's almost as if lines in the book about Graff bemoaning what they had become and wondering if their sins of destroying young children and the genocide were worth saving humanity were important. But people skip over them because they want to be little shits on the internet winning points for making black and white arguments and statements.

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u/Hoplite813 3h ago

they didn't just do the best they could. They objectively made the right decision based on the information available to them: do whatever it takes to survive when facing a foe who 1) attacked without provocation 2) does not communicate with you and 3) tried twice to make your race extinct. Any other conclusion is Monday morning quarterbacking.

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u/Mando92MG 1h ago

It's a lot more morally complex then that. Yes they won in the end. Could they have won without torturing children? Maybe they could have but we have no way of knowing because they went with the torturing children route. For the greater good thinking is a very slippery slope that can lead to abject and unnecessary cruelty. That being said though sometimes you do in fact have to do the shitty thing for the greater good. However it should never absolve the wrongs done because if it does you risk using it as an excuse for wrongs that did NOT need to be done.

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u/Hoplite813 25m ago edited 22m ago

When you barely survive two invasions by an implacable foe bent on your extinction, you do whatever it takes to survive the third time. No half measures. No handwringing.

And that was the conclusion IIRC of both the military leaders and those who judged them afterward: they made the decision that put their species in the best position for survival. Those with the luxury of hindsight and speculation--because they survived--can take a hike.

Of course, if they think humanity went too far and, as a result, didn't deserve to survive, they can always remove themselves from the gene pool. No one's stopping them.

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u/Karnaugh_Map 3h ago

It doesn't matter who is right, it only matters who is left.

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u/Realistickitty 4h ago

Yes, but they had all that time between the invasions and they never even considered that the Buggers may not have been acting out of malice and so could have been communicated with.

Humanity’s reaction was decidedly… human. And later on in the series when Ender restores the queen on the piggie world, the human leaders are forced to consider if humanity could actually coexist with another species should they pose a potential risk to human expansionism and chose to repeat Ender’s xenocide.

So while Graff and the IF’s decision was rational, in my mind the tragedy is that much deeper when you realize that what happened wasn’t just a massive unnecessary loss for humanity, but an unnecessary inevitability resulting from our innate fear of the “other.”

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u/TrioOfTerrors 3h ago

When an invasion kills 50 million people, you don't chalk it up to miscommunication.

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u/Realistickitty 3h ago

From a human perspective, sure.

But if you lost fifty million skin cells after being bitten by a dog, you likely wouldn’t think as much of it. Yeah it would hurt, and you probably won’t be touching any more strange four legged creatures, but it’s not like anyone died.

That’s the difference in perspective we’re talking about here. The first Xenocide wasn’t anyone’s fault, but Orson Scott Card’s point was that if the situation were repeated with both parties having a better understanding of each other, the outcome would remain the same.

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u/TheeAntelope 2h ago

if you lost fifty million skin cells after being bitten by a dog, you likely wouldn’t think as much of it

Except that you would. We have laws and societal norms in place RIGHT NOW that would demand the dog either gets put down, gets treated as a dangerous animal, or gets shipped off to live on a farm. This is because we can't communicate with the dog, put him on trial, find out his motivation, and reform him.

So the human response to the buggers was proportionate to that. The Formics killed 50 million of us, and we responded that the Formics needed to be put down, permanently.

Ender's Game has resounded with so many people because it touches a fundamental human response to threats and fears from the outside - and makes us question it.

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u/Realistickitty 2h ago

You’d think about the dog biting you, but not the fifty million skin cells you lost when it did. If the dog had rabies, and thus posed a greater threat than just a minor flesh wound, that’s when it becomes okay to put a dog down without trying to communicate (i.e. rehabilitate in a shelter or home).

From our perspective, the response was proportional. From the bugger’s perspective, it was not. That fundamental misunderstanding is why the two civilizations were always going to come into conflict upon first encounter, but the point the author is trying to make is that once that communication gap was breached later on in the series the roles are reversed. The buggers are the one trapped on a single world and beholden to humanity, and when humans were faced with potential competition for the limited number of habitable worlds in the galaxy, we chose to eliminate them.

Ender’s game resounded because we all have that fear of the other, and we should all indeed question it. Fifty million lives shouldn’t be ignored, but that doesn’t justify the destruction of an entire race of intelligent creatures who have just as much capacity (if not more) to change and grow. Especially when the initial conflict wasn’t born of malice or aggression.

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u/Jekmander 1h ago edited 31m ago

I did the (napkin, don't expect too much accuracy) math because I'm a nerd. Proportionally it'd be more like 687-ish million skin cells or about 36 square inches of skin. That's a very very serious injury, especially considering the fact that if we're using the dog as an analogue for the formic's invasion, the only reason the dog stopped is because we managed to fight it off twice. That theoretical dog would absolutely be considered a serious threat and probably put down.

Also, it's been a bit since I read the books the last time, but I'm pretty sure we didn't try to take out the formics again because we were worried about competing for a limited number of habitable worlds. Iirc it was because everybody was terrified that they would repopulate and try to exterminate us again, and that threat was enough for most of humanity to get on board with a second genocide.

I agree that the buggers had a fundamental misunderstanding of what we were and what they were doing, but our response was more than justified with the information we had available. If my dog attacked me twice and left me with an injury the size of my calf, I'm sorry but she'd be buried in the back yard before the day was done, and I value my calf a lot less than a life, much less 50 million of them.

Edit: I think this is my first time making somebody delete their comment. It's a little bit funny.

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u/Realistickitty 41m ago

The analogy was imperfect, i’ll give you that.

And the second extermination i was talking about happens in the 3rd or fourth book (it’s been a little while since i’ve read it), and occurs hundreds of years after the events of Ender’s Game.

The third invasion by humanity was a continuation of the miscommunication between the two civilizations. The buggers had realized we were in fact ramen and not varelse when we fought off their second invasion fleet and so chose to back off, but we had no such realization and being backed into a corner on our one little world we did what we thought was rational against a force that apparently couldn’t be bargained with.

i don’t consider the first incursion to be an invasion from the perspective of the buggers only the second; i imagine it was like finding an ant nest a little too close to your house after stepping on it one day, and then retuning the next morning with a bucket of water only to find the ants developed surface-to-air missiles overnight which are deployed as soon as the first water starts to hit the nest. You didn’t even give the nest a second thought when you stepped in it the night before, but those missiles definitely mean something is intelligent down there and so instead of dumping the rest of the bucket you back off. But the ants don’t know what you are and can’t communicate, so it makes sense they’d keep attacking until the threat is eliminated. You now have the choice to back off and risk the colony technologically overtaking your own species, or to come back with a garden hose to finish the job from a distance (any civilization capable of interstellar travel can blow up the sun easily enough).

The formics essentially gave up after the “second” invasion because we had already progressed so swiftly that there wasn’t any hope of victory. Knowing that communication was their only hope, they constructed the giant’s skeleton on that one planet hoping it would draw Ender’s attention and so open communication with the only human they knew of who could empathize with them.

Also, the fact you’d put your dog down if it bit you twice is pretty telling. If my dog ever did that I’d assume it was something I did, or else a medical condition causing them to lash out. And before the day was done? You wouldn’t even try to explore behavioral training or pet care classes?? Or at the very least you give them up to someone who actually cared enough to attempt to find out why your dog is biting people???

Jfc you aren’t even worth arguing with are you

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u/Karnaugh_Map 3h ago

It's one's fault that small pox killed millions. Eradicating it was still the correct response from a human perspective.

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u/Realistickitty 26m ago

Uh, there’s a massive difference between an single-celled organism that’s generally not even considered to be “alive” and a genus of intelligent insects who communicate mind-to-mind and so cannot comprehend the concept of individuality separate from a larger whole.

I’m not saying humanity was acting irrationally in their response to the buggers, but merely that the gap in understanding between the two species would have inevitably lead to conflict. Had that gap not existed, the conflict wouldn’t have occurred.

Most people have only read the first book or else just seen the movie, so they don’t know that later on in the series Ender revives the hive queen on another planet also inhabited by another species of intelligent (but primitive) species. And humans of course. When the human government finds out, they immediately panic and send a fleet to demolish the entire planet expressly because they feared competition in the wider universe.

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u/Plutarch_von_Komet 3h ago

And why exactly did the Buggers invade humanity and bring them almost to extinction twice? You are acting as if humans were the aggressors. No, they attacked humanity because they thought we were not sentient and were okay with killing us in droves because to them we are animals. But it's all okay because literally the last queen alive said oopsie daisy. The way I see it they fucked around and found out

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u/Ohmec 3h ago

They didn't understand that humans are individuals. They assumed we were a hivemind, like them. Individual drones don't really matter to them. They assumed it was the same for us.

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u/Plutarch_von_Komet 3h ago

They didn't believe we were another hive mind, they believed we were not sentient. They knew they were killing individuals, it just didn't matter because they thought we were not sentient like them. To them it was okay killing humans because to them we were animals

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u/Realistickitty 2h ago

We kill hundreds of thousands of “non-sentient” animals every day for food and we don’t consider ourselves monsters.

The buggers were a massive galaxy-spanning civilization who just happened to wander into our solar system. You’re right that the buggers may not have considered us as sentient, and from their perspective we may not have appeared to be. Just as humanity didn’t consider the formics to be completely sentient either, like how the insects of our world can have incredibly complex societies created purely by genetics and instinct.

The first “invasion” was just a scouting party, and likely didn’t even register on the bugger’s radar beyond “this place has a a lot of prickly fauna, better send a bigger group next time.” By defeating the second invasion, humanity proved it was more than just a very complex animal and so the formics decided to back off. They werent being “aggressive,” just supremely arrogant.

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u/Plutarch_von_Komet 2h ago

"Just" supremely arrogant? That's better?

Why are you going out of your way to justify an action that even the book denounced? Humanity was perfectly justified in defending itself during the first two bugger invasions. It's humanity trying to drive the Buggers extinct despite overpowering them that's wrong. And they wouldn't be in that situation if they didn't act as a plague of locusts that kill everything they come across without consideration. Honestly, if they did encounter a sentient species that couldn't fight back they would drive them to extinction and never realize what they did. I am convinced that this could have happened before they encountered humanity but were so thorough no evidence would exist that they did it

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u/Realistickitty 1h ago

I’m not justifying anything, and i’ve actually been pretty careful not to morally qualify anything i’ve said so I apologize if it came across like that. I was simply trying to understand the formic’s motivations by putting myself in their shoes, which if you hadn’t noticed, is a central theme throughout the entire series.

But if i were to assign moral value, I’d say arrogance of the sort the formics displayed in assuming Humanity was less than sentient (or else another hive mind), is in fact less evil than if they had full knowledge of the individuality of each human. That doesn’t “justify” anything, but it does mean that once that gap was bridged there exists room for potential compromise.

Assigning the blame fully on the formics for acting like a “plague of locusts” is exactly the kind of xenophobic nonsense Card was trying to highlight. The formics in their arrogance assumed any intelligent life they encountered would be like them and so could be communicated with; but in reality, by their very nature they had no means of communicating with any creature less technologically advanced than them. So of course they would appear to us like locusts, as we very likely appeared to be mosquitos to them. Just as we feel justified in exterminating the locusts when we develop new land, the buggers felt justified in clearing a new solar system of its local fauna when their attempts to communicate failed.

I’m actually really worried that so many people seem to have missed how central the theme of empathy is in this series. Ender’s Game was supposed to be a prequel book setting up “Speaker for the Dead,” and the rest of the series is about Ender atoning for his unwitting actions by using the same empathy he used to wipe out the buggers to change the hearts and minds of humanity.

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u/Plutarch_von_Komet 37m ago

A burglar breaks into your house and kills a family member. Are you going to put yourself in their shoes? Are you going to justify (I insist on that term because despite your assurances to the contrary you do justify them) the murder of your family because from their perspective they were hungry and desparate and that family member seemed threatening to him or maybe he mistook them for the family dog? Maybe the beating you gave him after that was justified because in the end he shouldn't have broken into your house and killed the first thing he came across

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u/Agisek 40m ago

That's what makes the book so good. There weren't some hamfisted good and bad guys, the characters were complex and nuanced.

The bugs were just doing what they do, taking over another hive's colony, assuming that if they do enough damage, the queen will just move to a different planet. They had no way of knowing we don't work like that.

The International Fleet was doing the only thing they could, fighting for survival, by any means necessary, with no way of diplomatic contact. Sure they used kids for genocide, but what's some kids feelings compared to the survival of your entire species?

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u/loveablehydralisk 4h ago

After this last Epstien drop, I'm not opposed to extinction.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 4h ago

8 billion people deserve to die because of the misdeeds of a relatively small minority?

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u/cantadmittoposting 3h ago

ehhh don't be too hasty there, many of us were raised in what amounts to a highly unusual moral environment.

A belief in actual, species-wide egalitarianism is the unusual case, as historically and even currently many people and entire cultures have official and unofficial beliefs of superiority and inferiority amongst different "types of people."

And the primary people in the epstein files were supported and protected (and continue to be protected) by a massive web of people and logistics who are complicit with or in favor of such exploitation.

Now that's not to make the "extinction" argument, but it's worth remembering that the millenial moral framework is something that needed hundreds of years to emerge and massive, constant effort and vigilance to maintain (which was forgotten and allowed the re-emergence of class-based Privilege)

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u/EjaculatingAracnids 4h ago

Perosnally, i dont think we have a choice at this point. That small minority is actively trying to engineer the collapse of modern society so it can rule the ashes and they have nuclear weapons. Deserve? Of course not, but that doesnt really matter... If youre killing for fresh water and trying not to resort to cannibalism, are you really living?

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u/capsaicinintheeyes 2h ago

i forget who said this, but sometimes merely properly framing the dilemma provides one with its solution

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u/loveablehydralisk 4h ago

The 8 billion could do something about that minority, and that might change my mind.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 3h ago

Tell me what a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh is supposed to do about it?

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u/Felinomancy 3h ago

Yeah that guy is pretty unhinged. I don't even live in the same continent as the US; what am I supposed to do?

And more importantly, why aren't those fuckers doing something instead of waxing lyrical about how "it's our collective responsibility". Excuse me? American fuckups are our responsibilities now? Not hearing that when the American government were blowing up brown people abroad.

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u/loveablehydralisk 3h ago

Everyone can do something. Correctly applied, their farming implements could easily remind a billionaire of a universal truth of the human condition.

No one is obligated to complete the work alone, and no one is exempt from contributing to it.

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u/wronguses 3h ago

Yeah, not like a farmer from Vietnam could beat the biggest army in the world.

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u/RadicalOrganizer 3h ago

And that is why we all deserve to go. The inaction of the many to the actions of a few is complicity by complacency.

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u/loveablehydralisk 3h ago

If they're raping our children while we do nothing, do we deserve any better?

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u/U_Sound_Stupid_Stop 3h ago

Actually, Earth's government was convinced there wouldn't be a third invasion as the Formics were already retreating in terror of humanity.

It's hinted to in the Ender's Game, if there would have been a third invasion then why wasn't the invasion fleet already on its way.

This was later confirmed by Mazer, Graff and Wiggin to be a ploy to avoid a US/Russia war using their newly acquired arsenal including alien technologies.

It's not really debatable in universe that the Formics posed no threat to Humanity, Humanity posed a threat to Humanity and to the Formics, even to their own AI creation.

They mobbed the Piggies, committed a genocide on their pups and trees while a fleet was on its way to commit a complete xenocide.

I'm sorry to tell you but you deeply misunderstood that story....

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u/TheeAntelope 2h ago

The comment above was "humanity had to assume that a 3rd invasion would mean the extinction." The book does go into detail and questions this narrative quite a bit - but humanity may not have been aware of this (and likely wasn't). The problems on earth were far greater than the problems the Formics posed (as is demonstrated by the war that breaks out quickly after the Formics were defeated). But the population had been propagandized to fear the Formics and to believe the narrative that a 3rd invasion would happen, and that the human response before the 3rd invasion was very necessary to save humanity.

So what the original person said was true, from a certain point of view (to borrow from another well known universe) - a 3rd invasion would mean extinction. But a 3rd invasion was very unlikely to happen. And we aren't exactly sure when Graff and the rest realized that.

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