(Finally) decided to read Ender's Game and realized I didn't like it. The characters, while not particularly interesting, played their role of backed up a poorly-thought plot with solid execution. I'm almost inclined to say that the book is overrated, but I don't want to make myself feel like an insecure contrarian. The mental turmoil, though not as strong as what many of you are going through, is real.
Honestly I liked Ender's Shadow quite a bit more than Ender's Game (and really the best part of both of them was the game parts IMO, the other things tended to get a strange for me at times).
Yeah. It gets kinda weird as you go along. Like, VERY weird. Not WTF-thread level weird. Mostly. But close. The battles are interesting though.
Also, wasn't the guy who wrote it some kind of nazi or something?
Yeah, Orson Scott Card is a raving bigot. Which, ironically, clashes with Ender's Game, where the terrible alien foe that Ender genocided with Dr. Device was peaceful and trying to communicate with them, which is basically the opposite of xenophobia. Same with Lovecraft, where his characters empathize with sentient starfish-headed things, declaring them "Just men" while the author himself is quite xenophobic to their own species.
I'm glad there's someone else out there who thinks that Lovecraft's fiction was significantly less racist than Lovecraft himself. I got into quite a contentions argument over that matter recently on another forum.
"He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. He must have looked worse in life-but the world holds many ugly things."
I'm gunna go with whoever you were arguing with on this one.
Edit: Unless Lovecraft was like, really really really supremely racist, in which case I guess his stories could just be really really really racist, and thus less racist them him. That would make sense I guess.