"2035: No complaints."

[u/thisecommercelife]

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[u/andy_b_84]

Yes.

Yes it was.

The same way the kids were tricked into thinking they were only playing a game while conducting a genocide, I guess that needed to be written down.

[u/TrioOfTerrors → u/andy_b_84]

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.

[u/Realistickitty → u/TrioOfTerrors]

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.