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Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 3:38 pm
by Malcolm
To address G's concern of the trailer giving shit away.
I've not watched the it, but I'm assuming it somehow gives away the fact that his final sim wasn't really a sim. Is this correct?
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 3:40 pm
by GORDON
They show Ender attacking the planet with Doctor Device.
Edited By GORDON on 1368042068
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 4:00 pm
by Malcolm
Just that bit?
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 4:19 pm
by GORDON
Yup. They showed the thing Ended did to win the war, against all odds.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 4:52 pm
by Malcolm
Soon as he decided he was going to tank the final intentionally, I kind of figured the IF pricks would pull something, especially given the tactics Ender normally uses to conduct battle.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 5:18 pm
by Troy
Basically suicide bombed the alien homeworld with the last of his ships, I thought?
Edited By Troy on 1368047947
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 6:03 pm
by Malcolm
He sacrifices the vast majority of his ships as distractions to engage the numerically superior Formic fleet. With that smokescreen in place, he uses the MDD to blast both their homeworld and their ships. I think there's even innuendo in the book which hints that it's not the first time IF had him run a sim that wasn't a sim. He drops off the egg at the end on some planet that reminds him of a previous training sim.
Edited By Malcolm on 1368050774
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 6:10 pm
by Malcolm
I'm also kind of annoyed they're going to be using teenagers instead of elementary school students. Going to get all kinds of Dawson's Creek angst shit shoehorned in.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 7:15 pm
by TPRJones
Malcolm wrote:I think there's even innuendo in the book which hints that it's not the first time IF had him run a sim that wasn't a sim.
More than innuendo, after it was over they admitted to him that he'd been fighting for real for months.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 9:32 pm
by Malcolm
TPRJones wrote:Malcolm wrote:I think there's even innuendo in the book which hints that it's not the first time IF had him run a sim that wasn't a sim.
More than innuendo, after it was over they admitted to him that he'd been fighting for real for months.
They admitted it? Eh, like I said, it's been a long, long, long time since I read it. Even then, my brain was not in the best of states to absorb information long-term.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 9:34 pm
by GORDON
Yeah, I don't remember there being a mystery that he'd been fighting real battles for weeks, after the fact. There was a time when the battles stopped coming at the usual times, and suddenly were all times of day and night. Those were the real ones.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 9:44 pm
by Malcolm
I just remember thinking Ender was a dumb-ass for not guessing something was up. I also remember thinking pretty much everyone in that book was an asshole. I believe Ender's sister, what's her name, was the only one I thought was a non-asshole.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 10:06 pm
by GORDON
You are correct in the asshole assessment, but that doesn't mean assholes weren't sometimes necessary.
They started sleep depriving Ender at the end. I can tell you as a parent that once you start losing sleep, you start losing the ability to analyze shit.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 10:31 pm
by Malcolm
You are correct in the asshole assessment, but that doesn't mean assholes weren't sometimes necessary.
It's the assholes who believe they can only accomplish their tasks by lying and dishonesty that tend to irk me. Misdirection more often creates work than eliminates it.
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 10:50 pm
by GORDON
Sometimes life is not a meeting of equals, and misdirection is required.
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 10:07 am
by Malcolm
Fuck that. More than one way to solve that shit.
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 10:15 am
by GORDON
Sure. And one can try to reason with a screaming child, too.
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 10:49 am
by Malcolm
I fail to see the parallel between that and straight up lying to a dude you're directly depending on.
Placed in a similar scenario, I would have torched every IF facility I could locate, just because they'd seem like bigger dicks than the bugs by then.
Edited By Malcolm on 1368111166
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 11:26 am
by GORDON
The kid was like 9. He was being trained, and the course of action they chose was to make him truly believe that the adults would never come to his rescue, that he had to do it all himself. If he believed that he would be saved from being a child, he would never have developed his abilities in time to fight the war.
This had 2 outcomes.
1. He killed a couple bullies under the age of 10 with his bare hands in order to decisively win a fight, and every other fight they would start in the future. (This is actually the reason I haven't read this book to my 7-year-old, yet.... while I believe in preemptive, decisive strikes, I know limits... my kid may not)
2. He burned out, completely.
Sometimes you can't say, "It is really important that you just do this nearly impossible thing. Like, so important that all humanity will be exterminated if you don't do it right." They led him to it so he could figure it out himself because they believed he had it in him.
Edited By GORDON on 1368113285
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 11:43 am
by Malcolm
They didn't tell him the two dudes he pummeled died until after he explodes the homeworld, although the reader gets tipped off before that. Ender's version of "doing it all himself" frequently involved turning a significant portion of his troops into fodder. He couldn't do shit without human shields.
"It is really important that you just do this nearly impossible thing. Like, so important that all humanity will be exterminated if you don't do it right."
In that book, both individually and collectively, pretty much human knowingly and willfully acted like a deceitful prick. By the end, I was of the opinion they deserved extinction, and I was pulling for the Formics.