Masters of the Universe, Gender, and Cautious Optimism

He-Man has always been about gender.

The Terrible Destruction Plaguing Our Planet

The new Captain Planet and the Planeteers series...is bad.

I know it's only two issues in, and I'm going to give it a fair shake, at least until the end of the first arc here, but it's not looking good.

And look, let's not be unrealistic here. It's not entirely surprising that a reboot of Captain Planet would turn out bad. The original cartoon wasn't exactly Citizen Kane. It wasn't even Gargoyles. It was perhaps the most incredibly early-'90s series that could possibly have existed, down to a multicultural cast that looked like the Burger King Kids Club and an opening narration that had to be hastily redubbed after the fall of the Soviet Union. The series was Oops, All Very Special Episodes, which is honestly admirable to a degree, even if they approached every issue, from air pollution to The Troubles to AIDS with the exact same degree of didactic bluntness and simplistic liberal moralizing. If you'd asked me to lay money on which cartoons from this era were least likely to rate a revival in one form or another, Captain Planet, despite its popularity at the time and enduring legacy, would have landed somewhere between Wild West C.O.W. Boys of Moo Mesa and C.O.P.S. in my ranking.

Actually, it seems I was about right.

But also... now is precisely the right time for a Captain Planet revival. There's a lot about the show that didn't age well, but the core concept—that the world is in peril, and that the only real solution to that is for young people from around the world to band together and take on the polluters who are actively making things worse—is far more salient now than in 1990. At the time, the monstrous, one-dimensional villains clear-cutting forests for fun and polluting for profit seemed unrealistic, but now? 

Now there is an entire subculture dedicated to damaging your expensive truck so that it will produce more smoke in ways that make it less efficient, and blowing that smoke at electric cars and bicyclists. Now, the world's richest man built an artificial intelligence that he turned into a Nazi and wants his eugenic progeny to live on Mars while the rest of us die on the hollowed-out husk of Earth. Now, the President of the United States is a doddering germophobic rapist who appointed a Secretary of Health and Human Services who does not believe in germ theory and is actively dismantling the federal apparatus dedicated to tracking and fighting disease. The EPA just released an order to "make gas cans great again" reversing nearly 20 years of regulations designed to reduce emissions and danger to children. The entire tech industry is currently dedicated to replacing the entire working and creative class with a pathological liar machine that runs on drained aquifers and uses more power than entire countries. 

Verminous Skumm spreading panic about AIDS so he can take over the world seems entirely reasonable by comparison.

It would be so easy to do a new Captain Planet series, one that draws from the examples of Greta Thunberg, from the Water Protectors who stood against the Dakota Access Pipeline, from Little Miss Flint Mari Copeny who raised awareness about the Flint water crisis, and those are just the first three examples I could come up with off the top of my head. You could look to Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Greenpeace, and other similar organizations; I may not always agree with the actions those groups take, but they would be easy fodder for stories about modern Planeteers. 

And that's without touching on issues of environmental justice, something any reasonable Captain Planet revival ought to be doing in the 21st century. One of the biggest problems with the original series is that its multicultural cast is a thin veneer pasted over a very white, liberal, America-centric view of the world. A Captain Planet who addresses how climate change hits the global south hardest, how communities that are already stressed by poverty and oppression become further marginalized as the temperatures and waters rise, how the capitalist drive for endless growth and cheap labor and resource extraction is ultimately the driving force behind all of this planetary degradation, is necessary to communicate concepts more complex than turning off the lights when you leave the room.

I take it back. It wouldn't be easy to do that Captain Planet series. It would require courage and research. It would likely require multiple writers and sensitivity readers. It would ruffle feathers. It would anger YouTubers. 

But it would at least be easy to tell a story there, one that meets the moment, one that has a solid foundation, one that feels timely and relevant. 

Instead, there's what David Pepose and Eman Casallos have chosen to do in Dynamite's Captain Planet and the Planeteers, which is to write a book that feels ashamed of every aspect of its source material. It's got all the hallmarks. Looten Plunder? That name's too silly, like "Victor Von Doom." Gotta change it, now he's "Lucian Plunder" and "Lootin'" is just what the protesters call him. While the original series was a goofy Saturday morning cartoon, this series is serious and grown-up and violent. The first issue kicks off with Plunder's paramilitary goons hunting Gaia with assault rifles from helicopters, and the second issue starts with her in restraints. Linka is a Pussy Riot-styled rocker who fights cops, and some fake cops kidnap Gi and Kwame when they arrive in New York City. 

Oh, and don't you dare think about making all the old jokes about this Captain Planet series. Because Ma-Ti, he's not the useless kid who talks to animals anymore. No, he's a deadly eco-terrorist who threatens loggers with jaguars. And Captain Planet himself? Well, if you ever thought that his tight midriff top and briefs ensemble with a mullet was a threat to your masculinity, don't worry, this Captain Planet is butch as hell, with a beard and way more of that blue skin covered, so you can rest assured in your mostly unassaulted heterosexuality. 

Everything about the aesthetics and execution of this book feels twenty years out of date, like it was printed in the same "what, were you expecting yellow spandex?" swaggering, irony-poisoned era that gave us Transformers with testicles and sex slave ThunderCats. 

That feeling extends to the guiding politics of the series, which feel like some kind of Bush-era, South Park-tinted centrist cynicism. Kwame is a former soccer star whose career ended due to an injury, seeking to recapture his glory days. Linka is not just an anarchist punk rocker, but a child of immense privilege, whose activism is framed as petulant teenage rebellion against her wealthy father. Wheeler is a Union auto worker whose carelessness with his new power ring causes his plant to burn down, amidst layoffs and protests driven by green EV initiatives. And while they've added a smidge of additional diversity by making Gi textually queer, they've also turned Wheeler's womanizing dialogue up to eleven. The overall effect feels like sneering at the idea of people sincerely fighting for the environment; instead, they're mostly deeply flawed and compromised, much like the environmental protesters we're shown in a couple of occasions. Our villain doesn't provide much contrast. While Plunder is clearly bad, he's not bad in a realistic way. He wants Gaia's magic power for himself, and his goons have robotic exo-suits. The only time this comic feels genuine is when cops apprehend our two heroic immigrants for no reason at JFK International Airport, but even they turn out to be fake cops, presumably to give some plausible deniability to all those readers with blue line flags on their SUVs. 

I don't think this cynical approach can work for Captain Planet. The original series was earnest to a fault, and I think the only way you can make Captain Planet work for a more grown-up, sophisticated audience is to lean right into that earnestness by having him tackle all the same problems that the original series tackled, and then some, but with added complexity and nuance. Not to demean our heroes or to humanize our villains, but to illustrate the realities of the world around them. There's no need for Wheeler to be sexist or for Ma-Ti to be violent, any more than there's need for Looten Plunder to be driven by something other than greed and lust for power. What's needed is a story that explores how the Looten Plunders of the world operate, and what a team of idealists could do if they were given the power to take them down. We can roll our eyes and suspend some disbelief when Superman says that it's not his place to step in and reverse climate change or dismantle capitalism. Captain Planet doesn't have an excuse. 

Yesterday, a person with a high-powered rifle murdered an executive of Blackstone (among other people), an investment firm whose holdings have been involved in logging the Amazon rainforest, making children work in slaughterhouses, and collaborating with ICE, and that's just what's in the Wikipedia controversies section. Now, I'm not suggesting that Captain Planet and the Planeteers should be about five teens and a glittering Pride float dancer gleefully using elemental powers to Luigi their way through the Forbes billionaire list.

But that would be a better book than this one.

Evil is Relative

The Superman Family of comics is on a hot streak right now, and are better overall than they've been in a decade-plus. But right now the one that I'm cracking open as soon as I get home from the comic shop is Sophie Campbell's Supergirl, which is quite possibly the best series ever to feature a character with that name, Kryptonian or otherwise. 

I want to highlight just one detail in the most recent issue, Supergirl #3, because it shows a story trope we've seen a lot in the last several years, particularly with Supergirl, but gets it right in a way that few creators do. 

See, Supergirl gets hit with a beam powered by Black Kryptonite. As a result she turns into Satan Girl (and Krypto turns into a bad dog who sadly isn't given a name) and goes on a rampage through Midvale. This is a bit de rigueur for Supergirl; Satan Girl was an evil duplicate of her created by Red Kryptonite back in 1963, and Black Kryptonite made its first comic book appearance in 2006's Supergirl #5, where it created an evil duplicate of Supergirl. Since then, Supergirl's joined with H'el, become a Red Lantern, and been Jokerized, and I feel like I'm forgetting a couple of other "Supergirl goes bad" plotlines. It seems to be the go-to story for a character that comic writers often don't have any other ideas for. Which is a shame, because there's plenty of other drama to mine from Supergirl's core concept. 

Black Kryptonite is likely inspired by the synthetic Kryptonite in Superman III, where Gus Gorman substituted "tar" for the unknown ingredient. After exposure to the synthetic Kryptonite, Superman went bad, until eventually he split into two individuals and had a fight until they reintegrated.

"Superman goes bad" is a pretty familiar story beat in recent years, too, whether it's his post-resurrection brawl in the Snyder Justice League film or the Injustice universe version of the character who jumped from video games to comics to a crossover with the main universe's Jon Kent, or the various evil alternate versions like Brightburn and Homelander. And I get the interest in exploring the horror inherent to someone truly sinister having the practically unlimited power that Superman has. We see variations of those stories even with characters like General Zod and Lex Luthor, remorseless villains driven by megalomania.

What I appreciate about Superman III and Supergirl #3 is what they tell us about Superman and Supergirl. When loosed from the bonds of their morality, what do we see them do? Not murder, not world domination, not horrific violence.

No, instead they just become jerks.

Superman straightens the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Supergirl pantses a bunch of people. They do pranks and acts of vandalism. They do the kind of "evil" that a villain in a Care Bears cartoon would do. 

And that tells us something interesting, something fundamental about the Cousins of Steel: That at their core, there's not some world-dominating villain just barely restrained by the bonds of their steadfast moral codes. Cruelty and domination aren't in their nature. The worst they can muster is mean.

To me, this rings a lot truer than the murdergod stories. I'm sure there are people who would, if given the power and the freedom from guilt, go on a rampage. The current political situation makes that abundantly clear. But I think a lot more of us would just be more lazy, petty, hedonistic, and immature.

Which means that even when they've been turned evil, Supergirl and Superman are better people than their villains. And I appreciate that.

The Waid Street Kids

...or "I'm too out of practice to come up with a decent James Gunn/Speeding Bullet pun." 

So, I just watched Superman (2025). I had the thought, in part because they played a trailer for Ick, starring Brandon Routh, that I've been doing this long enough (*cough* off and on *cough*) to have been able to write immediate post-theater thoughts now for five different Superman-centric movies spread across almost twenty years. 

Oh crap, the 20th anniversary of this blog was two and a half weeks ago. I meant to set a reminder. Hey, would it surprise you that in the two decades since I started writing here, I got an ADHD diagnosis? 

What was I saying? Oh right, Superman. It was good. Not perfect, but, like, really good. Almost everything I disliked feels like nitpicking. And having gone through the Superman film opus a couple of times now, I'd eventually landed on the position of "they've never made a truly good Superman movie." I was literally just telling my mom yesterday that the best Superman movie was Superman III, a position I have argued for (and against) on this very blog. 

And I will reserve final judgment until a second watch, but Richard Pryor may have just slid down the slope to second place. Spoilers after the jump. 

In fairness, I never said which November

Content Warning: Sexual assault, election stuff, violence, everything. Stuff is changing around here, sorry folks. 

Bent

As you might be able to tell by the lack of posting, this has been the most hellaciously busy month or so of the year. Planning to resume posting in November!

Ender Bender 18: Chapter 11, "Veni Vidi Vici" (Part 1)

Graff is worried that the battle schedule they've developed for Ender will burn him out. He says not one word about any of the kids under Ender's command, even though they presumably have the same schedule. As we all know, it's the commanding officers who work the hardest in war. There's that System of a Down song about it (2023 Tom's Note: I honestly have no idea what I was referencing here, but apparently at one point I knew a third System of a Down song). They also talk about how Russia is afraid of some Internet trolls destabilizing world governments and boy was it nice when that kind of thing was limited to dystopian science fiction novels.

Once we get past the ping-pong dialogue bit, we learn that Ender has been training his army in an unconventional way, breaking them into small groups with individual leaders that could act semi-independently, like some sort of chain of command. It's a brilliant idea that only a ten-year-old brain genius or literally any high school band director could come up with. Ender wonders why this happened.

Did they give him thirty Launchies, many of them underage, because they knew the little boys were quick learners, quick thinkers? Or was this what any similar group could become under a commander who knew what he wanted his army to do, and knew how to teach them to do it?

I think it's telling that both of these options center Ender. Either he's been assigned kids who are just really good at learning the way he was, or he's just so good at teaching that he could make any team just as effective in a similar amount of time. The possibility that his team members are contributing something to the process never merits serious consideration. 

They're assigned to battle Rabbit Army, and naturally they dominate over the veteran team.

Even with less than four weeks together, the way they fought already seemed like the only intelligent way, the only possible way.

The entire enemy team is frozen, while Ender's army is mostly unscathed. Before he unfreezes Rabbit Army, he assembles his team in formation to win the psychological victory. 

They may curse us and lie about us, but they’ll remember that we destroyed them, and no matter what they say other soldiers and other commanders will see that in their eyes; in those Rabbit eyes, they’ll see us in neat formation, victorious and almost undamaged in our first battle

This is, as it has been since the battle with Stilson, and as it will be through the end of the book, Card's most deliberate theme: Don't just beat your enemy, but beat them down, so they never even think about fighting again. It's the lesson that the teachers deliberately want Ender to learn, and in a more competent book, there might be some point where Ender repudiates it, but that never really happens. The book consistently validates this approach to warfare on both the large and small scale, in such a way that becomes utterly incoherent once you consider even some of the implications. But hey, let's leave something for the wrap-up posts.

He wages a similar psychological battle on his army as well, playing the hardass commander but telling his subcommanders to be lenient, as a way of binding the groups together. This is, ultimately, similar to what he did with Bean last chapter, giving the soldiers a common enemy to unite against. It's nice that he's putting himself in the line of fire here, but since we haven't heard anything about Bean yet this chapter, it feels like picking a teacher's pet and then directing the soldiers' ire at the teacher is likely to just make things worse on him.

And then there's this normal thought that a normal person would have:

He washed himself twice and let the water run and run on him. It would all be recycled. Let everybody drink some of my sweat today.

Hashtag just shower thoughts. 

There's some more training, Ender goes to lunch at the commanders' mess hall for the first time because it's been his first victory, which raises the question of where he's been eating for the last month, but apparently this is just how it works. More worldbuilding-by-retcon. Lunch is for winners. Naturally, he's at the top of the scoreboard. He has a conversation with Dink Meeker that causes Ender to question whether or not his friends are still his friends now that he's a hotshot commander. 

That's the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. You lose friends.

"We're going to win so much, you're going to be sick and tired of winning."

Meanwhile, the Rabbit army commander, Carn Carby, stops by to be a gracious loser again and shower Ender with some more praise. 

"I'll try," Carn Carby left, and Ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.

Deciding which people are worthy of being considered human? Well, that's definitely a good look that won't later look bad in light of some kind of genocide. 

Speaking of characters who are treated as second-class humans, Petra Arkanian is here. She deliberately ignores Ender all through Commander Lunch, and then the next morning he gets a last-minute announcement that he'll be battling her army. And here's where things get extremely frustrating, because Ender talks about how he was a member of Petra's army up until he received his command four weeks prior. 

We spent a fair amount of time with Bonzo and Rose the Nose, and how Ender chafed under their incompetent leadership. But then there's Petra, who by all accounts is clever and effective, who Ender considers a friend and a competent leader. He even almost gives her partial credit for how good Phoenix Army is:

Partly because of Ender's influence, they were the most flexible of armies, responding relatively quickly to new situations.

See, Ender's army is good because Ender is their commander. And Petra's army is good because Ender was a part of it, but also Petra being commander probably has something to do with it. Anyway, so much of these chapters have been belaboring Ender's lessons about what good leadership looks like, but when he finally gets a good leader? It merits two brief mentions three chapters ago, with nothing even approaching detail. We're told that Petra is one of a very small number of girls good enough to get into Battleschool (indeed, she's the only one we've even heard mentioned). We're told that commanders generally get some choice of soldiers, meaning she either deliberately picked Ender after watching him train launchies after hours or didn't ask to trade him when he was assigned to her. We're told that her army is really good and that she recognizes Ender's skills enough to make him a (sigh) toon leader. 

He spent at least half a year under her command, in an army that becomes so good it comes closer to beating Ender's than any other (which is still not very close), and none of his experiences, nothing that he learns merits a single mention.

But when Ender's army beats hers, well...

Petra was not gracious about bowing over his hand at the end, either. The anger in her eyes seemed to say, I was your friend, and you humiliate me like this?

Ender pretended not to notice her fury. He figured that after a few more battles, she’d realize that in fact she had scored more hits against him than he expected anyone ever would again. And he was still learning from her. In practice today he would teach his toon leaders how to counter the tricks Petra had played on them. Soon they would be friends again.

He hoped.

She's just irrationally angry, everyone! But it's okay, once she sees that she's the best of the people losing to someone who was her subordinate a month ago, all will be forgiven. Ender assumes.

Nothing about this makes any sense, not Petra's anger and apparent feelings of betrayal, not Ender's optimism that she'd be his friend again in the end. Part of that is because Petra hasn't had a line of dialogue since Chapter 7—the chapter that introduced her—and that doesn't change here. A competent writer would have realized what an important moment it would be for the story for Ender to have an effective commander, one he considered a friend, after a string of people who underestimated or loathed him. A competent writer would have given us character interactions to illustrate how Ender being subordinate to Petra might have strained their friendship. A competent writer might recognize that Ender and Petra both belong to marginalized groups in this world—Petra being a girl, Ender being a Third—so both have to be ten times better than everyone else just to be taken seriously, and that this could be a common experience that they bond over but also something that creates conflict when they’re pitted against each other. A competent writer would have laid some groundwork for this interaction, but Orson Scott Card mentioned Petra in passing once or twice in the last four chapters and then gives us this moment where a friendship that's been an afterthought at best breaks for no clear reason besides Petra being irrationally emotional and unable to see the bigger picture. 

And it all happens without her saying a word. Ender needs no input from her in order to perfectly interpret her state of mind. Our omniscient narrator, everyone.

Oh, and he trades some more barbs with Bean that clearly upset the younger kid. Leadership!

After seven straight days of victories, Ender is beloved by some commanders and reviled by others, but he's clearly better than all of them.

A few of them sat with him at every meal, carefully trying to learn from him how he had defeated his most recent opponents. He told them freely, confident that few of them would know how to train their soldiers and their toon leaders to duplicate what his could do.

And I'd like to contrast that quotation with this one: 

There were many, too, who hated him. Hated him for being young, for being excellent, for having made their victories look paltry and weak.

Yes, that's why they hate you, Ender. Because you're young and excellent and better than them, not because you're a condescending, supercilious ass who deliberately tries to demoralize your opponents. Like, Ender acts like he knows that the purpose of Battle School is to turn out precisely one Perfect Chosen General who is better than all the others. And narratively, he's right, just as Hogwarts was designed to facilitate the adventures of one Chosen Doofus and his pals, but it doesn't make sense for the character to behave like he knows that's the case. If the school's understood goal is to produce the leaders of the army that's going to protect the human race, wouldn't it make sense for him to try to train the interested commanders hard enough that they could understand his methods and communicated them to their soldiers and toon leaders? Wouldn't that be a natural evolution of the leadership he showed as a soldier, training interested launchies in his free time?

 

But why bother with character development when your character is already perfect?

Ender Bender 17: Chapter 10, "Dragon"

Oh cool, this is the chapter where Ender glues Colonel Graff to a wheelchair and lights him on fire. "Valentine: changing. Do you see?"

We begin, as usual, with a conversation between Colonel Swan and Murphy Anderson. They make explicit here at the beginning all the stuff that Ender's going to figure out in the chapter, because Orson Scott Card learned that the four r's of writing are repetition, redundancy, repetition, and really uncomfortable descriptions of naked children. It's important for military leaders to give firm direct orders, not to make suggestions. Ender's been deliberately given a taste of happiness and companionship just so he can be made isolated and miserable again. Oh, and they're making him a commander.

Entering the chapter proper, Ender gains command of Dragon Army, which hasn't existed in some time because it's cursed and boy does "kid is assigned to the cursed house in a boarding school in space" sure makes this book sound better than it is. As commander, Ender finally gets a hook, the symbol of his authority, the tool that every commander has which allows them to move freely in the zero-gravity environment of the Battleroom.

Many times during his evening practice sessions Ender had wished that he had a hook, instead of having to rebound off walls to get where he wanted to go.

Boy, wouldn't that moment have some gravitas if they'd mentioned the hook at any time previously in the book, or at least given an indication that Army Commanders had special abilities that the rest of their soldiers didn't? But instead, First-Draft Orson introduces it here, and further explains that it only works during scheduled practices which is why other commanders don't hold extra practice. But since Ender hasn't had one this whole time, he won't end up using it like a crutch the way all those other commanders do. 

 

They depended on the hook, and it wouldn't do anything for them during the extra times. If they felt that the hook was their authority, their power over the other boys, then they were even less likely to work without it. That's an advantage I'll have over some of my enemies, Ender thought. 

And this is just such frustratingly, characteristically bad writing at this point. It's like Card has read some book about story structure and understands that there needs to be an artifact to symbolize each transition to a new stage. When Ender became a launchie, he got his new desk. When he joined an Army, he got his uniform. And now, when he gets his own command, he needs something else to symbolize it, so they invent the hook. But the other artifacts had been properly seeded earlier in the story, and we're deep enough in the book that it feels strange to be introducing new elements, especially when you're retroactively saying that those elements have been present all along, that they've been vital aspects of strategy, and that Ender has been envious of them.

 

And it would be so easy to fix. Move the exposition about the hook to an earlier chapter. Insert a few lines describing how Bonzo uses it to soar around the Battleroom, elegantly dodging enemy fire, how Rosen always seems to use his as an afterthought but it often gets him out of imminent danger. A line of dialogue from Dink or Petra saying the commanders wouldn't be such hot stuff if they didn't have their hooks. 

But instead we get this, an exposition dump that tells us how Ender got a new thingy, and he always wanted the thingy, and all the other commanders have the thingy, but Ender doesn't even need the thingy, so that makes him even more betterer than them.

Ender is given the Island of Misfit Soldiers to command, rather than being able to choose or trade them. They're all younger and less experienced than him, but he decides to make the best of it, doing things differently from the other commanders he's served under by switching up the bunk assignments so he can get to know the younger soldiers as well as the veterans. 

And then he immediately sets in to berate and belittle them. He gives them three minutes to get dressed before practice, so...you know what's coming, right?

After three minutes, though many of them still weren't dressed, he ordered them out of the room.

"But I'm naked!" said one boy.

"Dress faster next time. Three minutes from first call to running out the door—that's the rule this week. Next week the rule is two minutes. Move!" It would soon be a joke in the rest of the school that Dragon Army was so dumb they had to practice getting dressed.

Five of the boys were completely naked, carrying their flash suits as they ran through the corridors; few were fully dressed. They attracted a lot of attention as they passed open classroom doors. No one would be late again if he could help it.

Ender is an abusive and bullying commander, re-enacting the same behaviors he's observed from superiors since he first strapped in on the rocket, down to berating his soldiers for their lack of understanding of zero-g physics, in case you needed the point driven home. He singles out the smallest kid, an underage boy named Bean (who Card helpfully informs us was one of the kids who'd been forced to run down the hall naked), a fast learner with an attitude, and isolates him just as Ender had been, both with insults and with praise. 

And to be fair to Ender, he realizes this is a problem even as he's doing it. 

Why am I doing this? What does this have to do with being a good commander, making one boy the target of all the others? Just because they did it to me, why should I do it to him?

To be less fair, he comes up with a justification for why he has to be a hardass on his first day:

On the first day even his mistakes had to look like part of a brilliant plan. 

Oh yeah, the sign of a great leader is pretending that every stumble is a part of their five-dimensional chess game. I can't possibly imagine how that could go badly, how pretending like a misstatement about drinking bleach or a typo about coffee is actually a brilliant secret message to supporters, could ever lead to any kinds of problems anywhere. 

 

2023 Tom's Note: Feel free to replace those timely 2018-2020 references with, say, "pretending that your joke about buying a social media site for the weed number was actually about protecting free speech and removing bots."

 

Also, wow, remember "covfefe"? Who would have thought that guy would be the figurehead of a fascist insurrection? Wild stuff.

A little later, Bean does some showboating, and Ender has to restrain himself from punishing the kid, instead turning the moment into a learning experience for the other kids. 

I don't have any military experience, but I do have some experience with managing kids, and I'm reminded of a story that a motivational speaker named Pat Quinn (not the former Illinois governor) told at a presentation I saw once. A teacher he'd once worked for would start the year, before any students arrived, by taking his trash can and putting it in the middle of the room. Then he would leave the room, let the students come in and find their seats, and would enter after them. Whereupon he would storm over to the trash can, say "Who the hell moved my trash can?!" and kick it across the room. 

He never had discipline issues. But it was because the kids feared him, because he'd shown himself to be irrational and unstable, not because he'd demonstrated any kind of good leadership abilities. It's hard to look at Ender's actions here, along with his and Grafderson's justifications, and not see an endorsement of the trash-kicking teacher model of achieving obedience, this idea that people will only follow you if they fear you.

Ender leads his group through some more practice, and plans to have Alai and Shen assist during the evenings. He has a confrontation with Bean wherein he physically assaults the kid for being arrogant and seeing through his tactics. He realizes that he's acting like a bully, just like Bonzo and Peter, and just like his teachers have taught him to do.

This could be a really interesting moment for Ender, recognizing that he's been abused and that he's perpetuating the cycle of abuse because it's all he knows how to do. This could be the moment where he decides that there's a better way. He almost gets there:

Why couldn't he talk like he always did in his evening practice group? No authority except excellence. Never had to give orders, just made suggestions. But that wouldn't work, not with an army. His informal practice group didn't have to learn to do things together. They didn't have to develop a group feeling; they never had to learn how to hold together and trust each other in battle. They didn't have to respond instantly to commands.

One thing that's been clear from the introduction to the book is that Card has a particular understanding of the military, that there is a commanding officer at the top and then a bunch of nameless interchangeable cogs that respond mechanically to the officer's commands, and that this isn't just the best system, but the only system that works. And this is why Ender can't break the cycle of abuse: because, at some level, Card seems to think that abuse is not just effective, but necessary. Bullies may not be fun to be around, but they get things done. We see this reinforced constantly. Graff's cruel manipulation molds Ender into the perfect soldier. Valentine is able to influence global politics using Peter's plan and tactics. Peter represents this extreme of cruelty; Valentine, the extreme of compassion; and Ender is the balance between the two. He's cruel to Bean and feels bad about it, but he's not going to stop, because cruelty works.

 

And given the trajectory of the rest of the story, the other things that are treated as unpleasant, but necessary because of their effectiveness, it's hard not to see this as a general endorsement that this is the way things ought to be. Leaders ought to be manipulating their followers, because only leaders can see the big picture and make the tough decisions. Problems only arise when the Wrong People become leaders; good leaders are Special People with Special Abilities who sound like Alexanders and Napoleons and Caesars even as children.

It represents such an abhorrent tangle of ideologies, and given Card's other stated ideologies, that's not entirely surprising.

 

(One positive thing about taking ten years to write this series is that I finally read Dune in 2021, and I strongly suspect that Orson Scott Card read it sometime before 1978, but we'll get into that sometime in the wrap-up.)

Ender's epiphany continues:

Graff had deliberately set him up to be separate from the other boys, made it impossible for him to be close to them. And he began now to suspect the reasons behind it. It wasn't to unify the rest of the group—in fact, it was divisive. Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else.

If Ender were a girl or a person of color or queer or disabled or otherwise marginalized, this would be some real on-the-nose allegory, but at least it would be making a statement. 

We're uncovering assumptions again: when people are forced to struggle, they come out stronger. It's a common variant on the just world fallacy, and here it's used as it so often is in reality: to justify abuse and cruelty. Recall again the Grafderson conversation that started the chapter: putting Ender through Hell has worked. Cruelty isn't pleasant, but it gets the job done. 

After practice, Ender learns that his evening practices are over because nobody wants their soldiers training with a different commander. This leads to an encounter with Alai. It gets uncomfortable really quickly.

"You're a full cubit taller than I am."

"Cubit! Has God been telling you to build a boat or something? Or are you in an archaic mood?"

"Not archaic, just arcane. Secret, subtle, roundabout. I miss you already, you circumcised dog."

They have a genuinely good, tender moment.

"Salaam, Alai."

"Alas, it is not to be."

"What isn't?"

"Peace. It's what salaam means. Peace be unto you."

And they part, knowing that in the future, the system would force them to be rivals. Their friendship has changed. Well, I say "friendship," but...

Ender felt as if part of himself had been taken away, an inward prop that was holding up his courage and confidence. With Alai, to a degree impossible even with Shen, Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips more easily than I.

But Alai had left something behind. Ender lay in bed, dozing into the night, and felt Alai's lips on his cheek as he muttered the word peace. 

There is certainly discourse to be had here about how toxic masculinity abhors intimacy outside the context of a heteronormative romantic relationship (and often even there), and how that can cause us to infer romance wherever we see intimacy. Ender compares Alai in this paragraph to Valentine, the other strong, unforgettable bond he has with another human being, his sibling. 

But there's also the fact that Ender's relationships with Shen and Alai are consistently described in very romantic ways. There's the scene where he watches Shen undress and float around, and now he's lying in bed remembering how Alai kissed him. Finding subtext here is not exactly a stretch. And it's fascinating how, in the midst of this very weird and creepy book by a raging homophobe, we are getting these intimate homosocial-if-not-homoromantic relationships. Are there Ender's Game shippers on Tumblr? 

 

2023 Tom's Note: I wrote that section above back in 2020, and the topic of Ender's Game and queerness is something I'm going to have to dig into in the wrap-up, because having gone back and re-read the book, I was only even scratching the surface three years ago. This is a rich vein, and my fumbling around on JSTOR has not turned up as much scholarship on the topic as I would have expected. 

Ender resolves to be strong enough to defeat his teachers, which puts us right back into that cycle of abuse issue. He recognizes that they are using his bonds with Alai and Valentine to isolate him and break him down, but he also thinks those tactics are useful enough to be doing them himself. If the manipulation he's felt from his teachers has made him strong enough to stand against them, doesn't that justify the methods? Doesn't that prove them right?

I wish I had confidence that the book was even aware of this question, let alone that it would eventually address it in a satisfying way. Ah well. 52%

 

2023 Tom's Note: Oh, you poor innocent fool.