Ender's Game Blogpost #3

     In today's last discussion about Ender's Game with my group, we talked about many things, but the one thing that caught my attention most was about how the Bugger's offered Ender a form of redemption.  When Ender goes to Eros and explores, he sees the Fantasy Game he played in Battle School turned into a real landscape. Eros is a planet where the buggers used to live and is now being inhibited by humans. The buggers built this Fantasy Game landscape to prove to Ender that they knew him and that they know him better than anyone.
     A question was how did the buggers know about Ender? Ender answers this question by saying that through his dreams and the computer system he used, the buggers grew to know Ender's mind and what his motives were. The buggers realized that even though Ender had killed their whole species, he did not do it on purpose. In fact, he was tricked into doing it. Building this for Ender proves that they were not ignorant to the things that he had been forced to do.
     After Ender defeated the buggers, he didn't want to face anyone again because he was ashamed of what he did even though it wasn't his fault. He felt like because it was him killing anything, it was automatically his fault it had happened. When the buggers built the place for Ender, Ender went to explore it. When he reached the End of the World, he normally just dies or the game continues and continues with no where else to really progress, but on Eros, when Ender reached the End of the World, he finds something else. At the End of the World, Ender always see a mirror where he sees either Valentine or Peter and then he opens the mirror and finds a snake that is there to kill him or at one point, become Valentine. In Eros, when he opened the mirror, he found a new beginning for himself and for the buggers. He found a form of redemption and forgiveness for himself that the buggers offered. Behind the mirror was the queen bugger egg. To start a new life for buggers, Ender has to take care of the egg and keep it safe. After killing their whole species and absolutely regretting every bit of it, Ender finds a way to redeem himself fully by helping the queen start bugger life again.
     Redemption is always given when someone makes a mistake. There isn't a mistake made that is completely unforgivable. No matter how people look at it, there are ways to redeem yourself when you make a horrible mistake. This is whether or not you prove to yourself and the other person that you are not this person who continuously makes mistakes. Ender finds redemption within himself and for the buggers.

Ender's Game Blogpost #2

     In this week's discussion with my reading group, we talked about how the process of Graff's decision to make Ender progress so quickly, how it has caused Ender to lose all his friends, how a new launchie named Bean has much more confidence than Ender, how there will always be competition in the real world no matter what, and how Battle School is like school in the US.
     I think that there is one main idea that is very important that we talked about and it is the combination of Ender losing his friends because of being too smart, and the competition in the world. Ender loses his friends because of how smart and how talented he is. Because Ender is considered with such high respect by everyone, people who used to be his friends don't think that they have the place or the caliber to be Ender's friend. They also think that he may be too dignified to have friends like him. Ender's consequence of being such an excelled student is that he cannot have friends. It isn't that he is incapable of having them, but it's a combination of people unsure of being his companion and his own awkwardness and his lacking of knowledge of how to created friends.
     Ender's situation is similar to those that people experience in the real world. In the world we live in, everyone has a goal they want to reach, whether it is winning a game or getting the best grade. Those who are the best, who are above anyone else in acquiring this goal, will be hated, respected, envied, and avoided. Because of this isolation, even if they wanted to make friends, they would become socially awkward and wouldn't have the ability to communicate or incorporate themselves into conversations like Ender couldn't.
     These were the two main things I wanted to add to the conversation we had, but wasn't able to because of time issues.