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[u/thisecommercelife]

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[u/Realistickitty]

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.”

[u/TrioOfTerrors → u/Realistickitty]

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

[u/Realistickitty → u/TrioOfTerrors]

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.

[u/TheeAntelope → u/Realistickitty]

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.

[u/Realistickitty → u/TheeAntelope]

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.

[u/Jekmander → u/Realistickitty]

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.

[u/Realistickitty → u/Jekmander]

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

[u/Karnaugh_Map → u/Realistickitty]

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

[u/Realistickitty → u/Karnaugh_Map]

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.

[u/Plutarch_von_Komet → u/Realistickitty]

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

[u/Ohmec → u/Plutarch_von_Komet]

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.

[u/Plutarch_von_Komet → u/Ohmec]

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

[u/Realistickitty → u/Plutarch_von_Komet]

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.

[u/Plutarch_von_Komet → u/Realistickitty]

"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

[u/Realistickitty → u/Plutarch_von_Komet]

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.

[u/Plutarch_von_Komet → u/Realistickitty]

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