Yep. Though in a weird way, Ender’s Game managed to thread that needle, but at the cost of making the hero a sadistic nerd-revenge-porn fantasy figure.
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Supposedly Ender’s Game is on military reading lists because of his “creative thinking”. But that’s BS because the environment is new and, to the reader, fictional. The lesson they should learn from Ender’s Game is Ender’s total war approach.
Everything Ender does when he’s faced with a threat, from the fight in the bathroom to the zero-g squad tactics to the final space fights, is about figuring out what he needs to do to make the threat go away.
The book tries to show that this is not without its costs. Arguably it tries to show in-fiction that he’s a broken person because of it. Certainly he’s a messed up kid, and real people should be wary of following his approach. OTOH, what’s the alternative?
Yeah. It always felt like a weird hero’s journey to me. Like Card was trying to subvert the standard journey to make some point about the real world or something, except all I got from it was the Ender was a really weird kid.