I agree that a Characters page would be really useful. Ender's Game already had Loads And Loads Of Characters and the sequels only introduced more!
I see the Awesomeness.
Since Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? is being de-wicked, I came here. Unfortunatelly, the example didn't seem to fit into any of the normal subtropes, so I'm leaving the example here.
- [some trope here]: When Ender defeats someone, he makes sure they are never a threat again. While he didn't intend to actually kill the two bullies, his willingness to show he would fight back and be brutal meant he was never bullied twice in the same place. As for the Buggers, he sends the entire fleet on a suicide run to the bugger homeworld, in hopes of causing an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. In the end we find that he had killed all but one queen.
There's quite a bit of Natter on some of these entries, including Justifying Edits in particular in entries that present criticisms to the books, shouldn't we remove some of them?
waldosan
i had a bit of a fridge logic moment, near the end of the book ender can't sleep because he's having really bad dreams. later on it's revealed that the buggers picked his mind through the ansible. as he was having these dreams while he was "running simulations" but actually fighting the buggers i realized that it was them trying to make him combat ineffective.
that or they were trying to communicate to him, a recurring theme in the dreams when he's not being dissected seems to be taking the preemptive too far. as seen in the quote below "he screamed and wept over her, crying again and again that it was a game, a game, he was only playing!-"
i'm going to mars dammit. Hide / Show Replies
This is explicitly stated in the sequels so I don't see why it's fridge logic.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Lost in Space
Took all this from the main article because it's in dispute. Either Card's bad at adding up years or Bonzo's presence in Battle School was intentional. I'm inclined to think the latter.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Bonzo Madrid commands Salamander Army for the entire time Ender spends at Battle School, which lasts about three and a half years. This requires either that Bonzo made commander impossibly early (younger than Ender himself does), or that he is long overdue for graduation when he fights Ender in the shower (which Graff explicitly denies is the case just a few pages earlier).
- What Graff says is not necessarily the truth. This is even self-admitted very early on, stating that he is even allowed to tell the truth in extreme circumstances, and what's more, several of the other Battle School kids believe he is overdue for graduation. The popular opinion was that he was just good enough not to wash out, but not good enough to be sent off anywhere else.
- Alternately, it's possible that Graff kept him there precisely because he was a bad commander, to see how the other kids would respond to poor leadership, but didn't want to let anybody else in on it. Considering Graff, this is entirely plausible.
- Hell, it seems likely Graff kept him on at the school just because he knew sooner or later Bonzo would go after Ender, forcing exactly the kind of confrontation that occurred in the showers as part of Ender's Training from Hell. Graff is an asshole.
Zaklog the Great
Would the xenologers' death in Speaker for the Dead count as Poor Communication Kills? It isn't as egregious as some of the errors discussed there because it's rooted in a misunderstanding of radically different biologies, but it seems related.
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PCK is when people get the Idiot Ball in a plot and suddenly become unable to communicate effective, with disastrous results. In this case, there's a very good and well-justified reason for the lack of communication, so it isn't strictly that trope.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Can we have a "Characters" page?
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom! Hide / Show Replies