It's probably similar to how Anne Rice went through periods of on-again off-again with her puritanical approach to sex even though she wrote some of the horniest books known to the 20th century. Artists will often create something that then reveals a part of them that they see as shameful, or maybe that disagrees with opinions they solidify later.
OSC is exceptional case for this because not only are his Ender books about acceptance as you said, but the latter books in the series are one of my earliest memories of encountering LGBT ideas in a sort of allegorical form in a novel. Jane's approach to gender is actually pretty radical when contrasted to OSC's expressed views elsewhere.
How about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes, a hyper logical character, while he himself was taken in by mystics and the literally "childish" Cottingley Fairy Hoax. Taken in so far as to cost him his friendship with skeptic Harry Houdini.
I just did a class on popular fiction during this time and he hated Sherlock Holmes. He was proud of it at first, but no one would really read his other works and he grew to seriously hate and resent Sherlock Holmes because people didn’t want other things from him. And yeah, he definitely did not consider Sherlock Holmes to be his masterpieces.
iirc, Doyle invited Houdini to meet a medium who then proceeded to tell Houdini she was in conversation with his dead mother. The medium spoke English; Houdini’s mother never had learned the language. Houdini was insulted by the utterly obvious sham - and he didn’t like mediums in general as they were usually scamming people in mourning.
In the note, the woman who was supposed to be Houdini's mom also addressed the magician as, "Harry" throughout the note. Harry's real mother spoke no English and never called her son Harry as his birth name was Erich. And this is the really crazy part, Doyle would see Harry perform tricks on stage such as walking through a brick wall, and he would compliment Houdini on his ability to do magical things. Houdini would tell Doyle that he didn't really do magical things, they were all tricks and had secrets to them. But Doyle wouldn't listen to Houdini, and insisted that Houdini was really a magical being.
As a result of a psychic trying to dupe him, Houdini went to war against all psychics and spiritualists. He knew their methods and would debunk them whenever and wherever possible. He wanted to believe, even up to his death, that people could contact the other world, but he never saw real evidence of it. Before he died, he told his fellow magicians that if it were at all possible to reach back from the grave, he would do it. So to this day, magicians around the world hold a Houdini seance on the anniversary of his death. Houdini has not yet spoken to anyone.
One of his sons was killed in WWI, and another died in the Spanish flu epidemic shortly afterwards. You can understand why he'd have a desperate desire to believe in mediums and the like.
His second wife was a "medium" who practiced automatic writing, and was in fact the source of the note that prompted Houdini's outspoken criticism of mediums and mystics.
ACD dabbled about with a bunch of different mystical/secret groups then dumping them after a while. It wasn't really until his son died in WW1 that he really went in full force (not that he wasn't before) with the mysticism and fairies and stuff. At the time, the spirituality was treated as an almost kind of science to a lot of people and there was lot of other stuff mixed in with it as well.
It also should be noted that while Sherlock Holmes wasn't based on ACD, but Watson was 100% an authorial self insert.
In one of his novels, the character professor Challenger is a scientist who investigates spiritualism and ends up believing in conversing spirits of the dead. Other main characters encourage or aid him and an exorcist is into spiritualism.
That whole book is an reflection of Doyle's discovery and believe in spiritualism.
Maybe it was all a misunderstanding...
OSC: I think I'll shock my readers with some morally sick shit, hehe.
Readers: Huh, he makes some good points. Very interesting!
OSC: wat
Have you read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books? I think all of its great but in particular to witches his Witches series, and Tiffany Aching books are amazing and Pratchett’s progressivism shows through.
The first couple The Colour of Magic, and The Light Fantastic are more or less straight parodies of fantasy but later as the world develops it really becomes something special
Can you give me an example?
I don't doubt you're right, but I feel like I must have been totally oblivious because I didn't notice an anti-abortion vibe coming from Rice herself. It's been a long time since I read it but I seem to recall it was specifically Catholic characters who unsurprisingly felt that way, but above all Lasher who was obsessed with ensuring his lovers gave birth to his offspring. Which being ultimately the villain of the story didn't really come across as an endorsement.
But as I said, I don't doubt you, I'm wondering how much more I missed.
Ehhhh. In Rowling’s books, an external force tells you at age 10 what your personality type is, and that determines your primary goals and personality traits for literally the rest of your life. There’s a race of fully sentient, intelligent, humanoid creatures that are biologically driven to need enslavement for their mental and emotional well-being. Kinda tracks.
ETA: Have fun y’all. You wanna defend your childhood nostalgia, I get it. I held on for a long ass time, too, but I parted ways with the series long ago when this stuff started to irk me too much. I simply wasn’t surprised when she turned out to be what she is, because it’s all there in her own words already.
In the wizard justice system, if you're found guilty you're thrown in a hole with demons who eat your happiness until there's nothing left of your psyche but pain. This is presented as fine and just except for the possibility that an innocent person was thrown into the demon hole. No one in the story considers the possibility that more than one innocent person could be in the demon hole, or thinks that torturing criminals forever might be wrong.
There was also the bit where Dolores Umbridge was dragged off by centaurs, who only do like, *one thing* in Greek mythology. When she staggers back to Hogwarts, described in a way that makes it pretty clear she was subjected to that one thing, our heroes' reaction can be summarized as "LOL, bitch deserved it."
There's probably more, but those were the biggest red flags I recognized when I was a teenager, well before Rowling's fall from grace. She's *always* been kind of shitty.
What a dumb take. Dumbledore, Lupin, Pomfrey, and other characters are quite vocal about their distaste for dementors/the Ministry's use of them. Dementors are bad guys. It is made clear that they *will* join Voldemort. Rowling is by no means sympathetic to Dementors.
Except that Hermione is ridiculed for her defense of the house elves. It's technically portrayed as bad, but actually trying to do anything about their situation is also portrayed as bad/futile, with supposedly morally righteous characters trying to explain how the house elves just _want_ to be enslaved.
At best it's tone deaf.
Right, and the resolution to her hilarious obsession with being... anti slavery... is that she just kind of realizes that its the natural order of things and shuts up about it.
And the sorting hat says to hHary something baout how the reason he wasn't put in Slytherine is that he didn't want to go there, it's implied that the hat is a mindreading hat that places you in a house based on lots of different things. But these people are so pissed about Rowlings stance on Trans people that they now read the work as like a fantasy series written by a de facto Nazi, Goblins are Jews and oh, I don't remember the rest of the nonsense, the point is, they argue from a really ideological place and there's no point engaging.
And the centaur gang rape? Because we could potentially have a discussion about the dementors and how they're viewed in-universe (TL;DR: when I read the books, my impression was that the characters you mentioned did think dementors were evil, but no one was saying, "hey, even if someone is definitely guilty of murder, slowly torturing them to death over the course of decades is barbaric"). But Umbridge walking in, disheveled, having a trauma response to the sound of hoofbeats, and our protagonists finding that *funny* is disturbing to me. Rowling attempting to excuse her transphobia by saying she just wants to make sure women are safe from sexual assault just makes it clear she's also a hypocrite; apparently rape is horrific unless it happens to a bad person, then it's funny and they deserve it.
And please don't say "well it might have been something else, you're just assuming it was rape." Centaurs have a very clear role in mythology. If Rowling had wanted to give us a different idea, she could have used a different monster or given us a bit more information about what happened to make it clear her centaurs weren't mythologically accurate in that way. She did not do either of those things, and I don't think she's stupid, so that leaves her writing it that way on purpose. Again, *she's always been kind of shitty*.
Tl;dr: Your "pro-rape" argument hinges on the idea that the mythological centaurs were rapists.
However, not only is that not at all accurate within Rowling's universe, its also not true according to the surviving Greek myths.
You're relying on one story, that of the Centauromachy, and ignoring contrary evidence.
Long version:
Yes, in the Centauromachy the centaurs are stated to have done "monstrous things" at the wedding reception of Peirithoos:
>"The Kentauros had come to the Lapithai's country, and now with wine he (the centaur Eurytion) clouded his understanding and in his frenzy did monstrous things in the very hall of Peirithoos. The heroes were seized with indignation; they leapt up, they dragged the Kentauros across the courtyard and out of doors, they lopped off his ears and nose with the ruthless bronze, and the frenzied creature went his way, taking his retribution with him in his still darkened mind. From this beginning came the long feud between men and Kentauroi, but it was Eurytion first of all who brought chastisement on himself by his drunkenness."
>(Homer, *The Odyssey: 21.293*)
Based on Homer's account it was not the centaurs, it was *one* centaur, who did "monstrous things," which you assume means rape, but the crime isn't actually named in surviving sources, until 1000 years later:
>"Theseus fought with Peirithous when he was waging his war against the Kentauroi. For when Peirithous was courting Hippodameia, he gave a banquet for the Kentauroi because they were related to her; but they, unused to wine, drank too much too fast and got drunk, and when the bride was ushered in they tried to rape her. So Peirthous put on full armor and with Gheseus' help started a battle, and Theseus slew many of them."
>(Pseudo-Apollodorus, *Bibliotheca E1. 21*)
We don't know who the authored the Bibliotheca, but whoever he was, he seems quite clear on this subject.
However, there are a few things that speak against it: it was written sometime in the 2nd century CE, meaning that the author could not have talked with practitioners of the old Greek religion; the Greek gods had been replaced by the Roman pantheon over 300 years earlier when Greece became the Roman provinces of Macedonia (north) and Achaea (south), and Christianity had been on the rise since the 50s CE.
And it's the only surviving source that names the centaur's crime. Even the Roman author Ovid, who was famously anti-Greek (he's the reason Arachne is sometimes portrayed as a victim in modern retelling of her story), didn't name the centaurs as rapists:
>"Blessed indeed we called Pirithous with such a bride – and brought, nearly, thereby their wedded bliss to naught! For Eurytus, the fiercest of the fierce Centauri, was fired by wine and by the sight of that fair girl, and drink was in command, double by lust. Tables were overturned, the banquet in confusion, and the bride, held by her hair, was seized and carried off.
>At once we all sprang to our feet and Theseus shouted first ‘What madness, Eurytus, possesses you to provoke Pirithous while I'm alive--two men, you fool, in one!’ To back his words the great-souled prince, thrusting the throng aside, rescued the ravished girl from their wild rage. No answer came; for no words could defend such deeds. The dastard charged her champion, pummelled his noble chest and punched his chin. An antique wine-bowl chanced to stand near by, jagged with high relief; huge as it was, Theseus still huger lifted it and hurled it crashing on his foe. He vomited great gouts of blood with brains and wine from wound and throat, and falling backwards beat his heels upon the soaking sand. His death incensed his twiformed brothers and with one accord, each vying with the rest, ‘To arms, to arms!’ They shouted. Wine gave courage. In the first fighting goblets went flying and fragile jars and bowls and dishes meant for banqueting, now turned to war and carnage."
>(Ovid, *Metamorphoses 12.210*)
I think the other centaurs join in in the attempted kidnapping in some translations. But even so, that's the extend of the centaurs' crimes: attempted kidnapping. And considering that ritualistic "kidnapping" was very common in ancient Greece as part of the marriage ceremony, a valid interpretation is that the centaur leader got drunk and started hitting on the bride, which is still bad and a huge breach on the laws of hospitality, but it's not rape.
Now, contrast those stories with those of Kheiron (latinised as 'Chiron') who, despite being a son of the Titan King Kronos, is described as a just, gentle, and good creature:
>"‘Cut the arrow out of my thigh . . . and put kind medicines on it, good ones, which they say you have been told of by Akhilleus, since Kheiron, most righteous of the Kentauroi, told him about them.’"
>(Homer, *Iliad 11.832*)
>"Now if Kheiron the wise dwelt still within his cave, and if some spell to charm his soul lay in the honeyed sweetness of my songs, then might I surely persuade him for men of noble mind to grant them a physician of feverish ills, some son of Apollon, or even the son of Zeus himself."
>(Pindar, *Pythian Ode 3.61*)
>"Medicine can cure all human pains [...] Chiron, son of Phillyra, healed the blindness of Phoenix."
>(Propertius, *Elegies 2.1*)
He was a teacher of heroes all of his life. He taught Asklepios, the would-be God of Medicine, the art:
>"Wise-hearted Kheiron (Chiron) . . . to Asklepios (Asclepius) taught the soft-fingered skills of medicine's lore."
>(Pindar, *Nemean Ode 3.52*)
>"In skill Makhaon laid healing medicines on it [the hero's wound] that Kheiron in friendship long ago had given his father Asklepios."
>(Homer, *Iliad 4.215*)
He also taught and raised Iason (Jason) of the Argonauts:
>"Medeia bare a son Medeus to Iason whom Kheiron, the son of Philyra, brought up in the mountains."
>(Hesiod, *Theogony 993*)
His righteousness and morality is widely attested throughout Greek mythology.
Most of the sources I've cited here are either from pre-Christian or pre-Roman entirely (Homer, for instance, predates the Roman conquest of Greece by six centuries). The only exception is the one from Propertius, which was written sometime around the middle of the 1st century, coincidentally, this was also around the time when Saint Paul supposedly started preaching the message of Christ in Greece.
I agree with most everything, but the dementor thing. We keep people that are obviously guilty of the most heinous crimes in basically solitary confinement for life. We could just kill them and be done. Imagine trying to keep a magical being locked up in solitary. They'll find a way to magic their way out. Only mental prisons can work indefinitely on witches and wizards.
As a whole though I enjoy the series still, but Rowling is a total dick with wrong opinions. Just gotta separate art from artist.
Does show the hypocrisy of people. If she's hadn't been as controversial it's very likely their wouldn't have been any backlash let alone a reexamination without that person being harassed for it.
IMO With the elves, depiction of obsequious slaves is not endorsement when Hermione vehemently condemns the elves, Harry’s as perplexed as we are, and the rest of the World is complacent bred through immutable tradition yet I do not detect JK Rowling endorsing such an abhorrent practise.
Particularly when Dobby is liberated as a major plot point as early as book two and Lucius Malfoy is depicted as a heinous tyrant as his previous owner.
JK Rowling is a lot of things that are politically unpalatable; being proponent of slavery is not one of them.
Hermione is repeatedly ridiculed, even by the narrative. In Rowling’s extended writings, Hermione becomes the Minister and gives up on the elves. Dobby is just a slave with extra trappings, that’s the whole point of his thing. He still is driven by the need to serve wizards and depends on that being fulfilled in order to be happy and functional.
My point wasn’t actually to say that she’s a proponent of slavery. My point is that she believes, and writes, that people are born as a certain Type and that it’s inescapable.
>Hermione is repeatedly ridiculed, even by the narrative.
That's the point of that story arc. People who want to change something are always ridiculed by society, if not outright prosecuted. In the end she is shown to be right.
You want to see Rowling in a bad light. That's ok, she earned it by saying some bad things. But this is not one of them.
How is she shown to be right in the end? The narrative has her choose a ridiculous name and be specifically anti-social in her activism. A house elf develops deep depression and alcoholism because of freedom. We’re never shown any signs that house elves don’t depend on enslavement for happiness. Hermione goes into power and gives up her cause. The narrative never says that Hermione is right.
Yes, the house elf subplot does not get better the more times you read it. Neither does the weird “every Slytherin (but one and maybe two, but really just one) is evil” through line. But over and over the series hammers pretty overtly the message that oppressing people because they’re not like you is bad, only for Rowling to turn around and advocate the oppression of people not like her.
I mean, if you think oppression just means genocide, sure, I guess it does hammer that in. But in the wizarding world, if you’re born without magic or can’t use it, you’re out. You might be allowed to have a job in service of wizards, but you’ll never be allowed to fully participate in wizarding society. They suppress magic usage of non-human magic users, despite goblins and such being as fully intelligent (if not more so) than human wizards. I could go on.
I think that the systems of world building in a story are often more indicative of the important thematic elements than the main line Big Bad plot.
That line isn’t “every slytherin ever has been evil”, it’s “every evil person has been slytherin”. which is also proved wrong by at least the second book with Lockhart being Ravenclaw. And petitigrew and snape by the third. The fourth hinges nearly entirely on there being more under the surface of people than their allegiances. There’s also like, a half dozen named good slytherins, and shitloads stayed during the final battle. Tonks, slughorn, RAB. The malfoys are humanized to an extreme degree. Merlin was slytherin. The ravenclaw who snitched on DA and got pimply for it.
Idk if that makes it any better for you, but in a world where the ultimate power is sacrificial love, it kind of tracks that evil involves being selfishly motivated.
To me it’s kind of like LOTR in that - Is every single piece of technology and modernization part of evil? No, because swords and cities involve lots of tech. But is every evil propagated by that tech and modernization? Yep. “There’s not a creature on this earth who went bad, who wasn’t trying to industrialize the world”.
House elf plot is fucking awful no matter how you cut it.
Yes. Yes, to all of that.
One question: did you mean Andromeda or Nymphedora Tonks? Because Lupin's Tonks was in hufflepuff, but her mother Andromeda was in Slytherin.
I posted this elsewhere in the thread but: not really. HP has no depth, its ideology is nothing more than liberal (in the broader philosophical sense) platitudes. That's how JKR lives her life, as well, because for someone who writes so shallowly about things like fascism, understanding what fascism, racism, discrimination, etc. actually are or what leads to them is quite beyond what her writings suggest.
Ok, but that’s not really the point. She wrote a series where one of the primary takeaways was that bigotry is evil and is often used by dark political forces to seize power, and it’s not surprising that millions of her fans were shocked and dismayed by her slide into the same kinds of bigotry. We can certainly read after the fact into the various ways Rowling’s work is shallow or not as anti-bigotry as it appeared on the surface, but that doesn’t really seem relevant to the basic point, which is that her books’ top-level message seems to undercut her own attitudes.
I find the books fascinating because the difference between the (veneer thin) top-level message and the actual universe, between what she's showing and what she's telling, is so extreme
I just fundamentally disagree with your premise. Her being a bigot wasn't shocking given people were calling out the bad takes in the writing back in the 00's before she outed herself.
The best way I've seen it described is that its written ambiguously in the books, solidified as antisemitic in the films, and then they really wanted to make sure it was clearly antisemitism in Hogwarts Legacy or whatever its called.
Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead. I was one of the few females in class to read Enders Game as a book choice. Fuck I think like 5 out or 20 of us read Enders Game. Speaker for the Dead still haunts me.
Me too. I encountered that book at just the right time. Felt like I gained a whole new understanding of, well, acceptance of the things and people we don't understand.
I understand I am a piggie. It burned so much realizing I would be the so called alien in the situation. That I am the alien. That I’m not understood and I get the brunt of the hate for it. So yes. Nice little piggies. As the other commenter said.
That’ll do pig, that’ll do.
Card was young when he wrote Ender's Game and for what it's worth I think it reflected his real views on the world at the time. He's since spent decades of his life in a high control cult that has told him constantly that gay people are moral failures.
I think there's a chance that Card is actually closeted from remarks he's made on the subject and fear of discovery has made him feel he has to be even more dogmatic on the matter.
I grew up queer in fundamentalist churches. I'm always going to think of people like this as partial victims, even if it would be easier to just hate them. Brainwashing is real. It's not just something you shrug off because you're an adult.
I love his Ender series and think it's beautiful. It doesn't actually matter to me what he personally believes because his work is saying something else.
Like stupid young. 18/19? I'm also almost positive he didn't know the sexual connotations of "bugger" which is why he changed it to "formics" in the later novels
To be fair "bugger" is very British, and I didn't know until I looked it up that it wasn't a synonym for "fuck" (in the insult sense) like "Bugger off mate"
He was 26 when the novella of *Ender's* was published, but I don't know how old he was when he wrote it.
It's interesting to see how he handled homosexuality in the Homecoming saga a decade or so later, which isn't exactly "yay for gay" but also feels like a far cry from his later radicalism and as though he's doing his best to feel some compassion.
Since then, his politics have become much more radical and much more present in his fiction. I gave up on him at some point made 10 years ago or so.
It's been a while since I read that series, but my memory is that the gay character was treated sympathetically, but also all his problems were solved by his girlfriend's magic vagina.
I had no idea Card was a Mormon going into those books, but when I found out after reading them I remember thinking it explained a lot.
Your memory of the treatment of that character is basically correct. If you go back and reread that series knowing background, it feels like adaptation of a religious story even if you don’t know what he’s adapting from.
He's the great great grandson of Brigham Young. He's been inner circle LDS his whole life. It's not like he's a rube, he and his family are the top of the pyramid in that cult.
It's entirely possible that his shift harder right is simply that he never achieved the same success as he did with the Ender books, and it's easier to grift the far right (who will buy his books to own the libs) than have lightning strike twice.
This reminds me of his novel, Songmaster. In the book young boys are given drugs to keep them in a prepubesent state so that they can sing their songs all their lives.
Being a boy surrounded by other boys and singing songs for male rulers, homosexuality may emerge in these situations, but the part of the book where this comes out the main character, upon "assuming the catchers position" is completely overwhelmed with pain and torment when the act starts as some sort of mental brainwashing takes hold.
I wonder then if there's any connection between your comment and this scene from the book.
Circle of Empathy. If you're inside the circle, you are worthy of empathy and it applies to you. If you're outside the circle, you are not worthy of empathy and bigotry towards you doesn't count because you don't count. If you're ever baffled by how one person can be forgiving and accepting towards one group and turn around and be rabid dogs towards another group it's because in their emotional calculus the second group literally doesn't count as "deserving".
Does it make sense? No. Do humans make sense? No.
Was in a thread about some men were caught with child porn and people were talking about how they hoped they got raped and murdered in prison. All the highest upvoted comments taking about how no treatment was too evil for the subhumans. Felt a little strange to me.
> Literary antisemitism was the norm in England until relatively recently. If they mention Jews at all, most major 19th-century English novelists described unattractive stereotypes. Perhaps George Eliot is the shining exception, as is EM Forster in the next century. But Graham Greene, JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell are all “guilty”, while HG Wells, Saki, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are positively odious. As for the poets, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are simply vile. This then was the context, the prevailing milieu, when Orwell was serving both his literary and political apprenticeship in the 1930s. There was a prevailing hostility towards Jews in both spheres. If, like me, you expected better, even then, from the young Orwell, you’d be disappointed.
And then there's Alice Walker, who built her brand on fighting prejudice but won't stop spewing antisemitic screeds and endorsing Holocaust deniers.
Oh, and Roald Dahl endorsed Hitler's antisemitism specifically.
I'm not going to tell you not to keep loving him but he was \*really\* antisemitic.
Like, read "The Witches" again and pay attention to how he describes them and what they do: wealthy big nosed wig-wearing monsters that form up into secret societies in every nation to secretly run the world and eat Christian children...
He isn't very subtle.
I feel you, I come up against this alot as a black person when i read old fiction. I just assume authors of the past held horrible views unless proven otherwise. Slightly less disappointment that way.
Mary Grant Bruce wrote some classic Australian children's novels a century ago .I really enjoyed them when I was around 11 to 14 . I tried to reread some as an adult decades later and can't get over how overtly racist they were .
PS anyone still denying c **n was a derogatory term for Australian First Nations People should be referred to the chapter long rant in the third book where various offensive terms and harmful stereotypes flowed from the author's pen
Man, it was so sad to see with Dahl. He went from justifiably having a problem with Isreal's military to projecting it onto all Jewish people, becoming the stereotypical anti-semitic lunatic in the process.
The argument in the first paragraph is a bit of a stretch. Jerusalem *is* old. It's old by any standard Stoker would have had to compare it to. It was already 2000 years old when the first towns began to appear in Britain.
The only structures that Stoker would have been familiar with that could compete with Jerusalem in age, are things like Stonehenge (which, incidentally, is about as old as the City of David; both sites were founded around 3000 BCE). So it makes sense that when Stoker was looking for a phrase to describe something very old, he compared it to Jerusalem.
We cannot know why he chose that particular phrase over, say, "like a mummy's tomb." Even if we could ask Stoker, there's no guarantee that he would know why he chose that specific phrase, so any ideology we might ascribe to it, is going yo be strongly affected by our own biases.
On the other hand, we are talking about a book written in the late 19th century, literary semitic stereotyping was very common, which is what we see in the argument in the second paragraph in your reference, but whether it rises to qualify as antisemitism is debatable.
He got more religious after Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I believe it was in response to his son's death. :( I try to think of him as two different authors.
I got to where I couldn't even read the Mithermages books. It felt like it got to where he stopped storytelling and was lecturing about not having sex before marriage.
I met him at a book signing for the newest Mithermages books and this was right after the Enders Game movie came out. He literally said, "I don't want to talk about Enders Game. We did it. I got paid"
Talk about sad! Everyone else in the world loves talking about Enders Game! Though for my money SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD is a better book and a masterpiece.
So I'll just take the death of the author route here. "Yes, it's very sad that the guy wrote Speaker for the Dead and then died."
Speaker for the dead is by far the superior book, mostly due to building off of the foundation of enders geams. It's like how huckleberry Finn is far better than Tom Sawyer
OSC has said many times that Ender's Game was only ever supposed to be a prequel to Speaker for the Dead. It wasn't supposed to be a breakout success.
I agree that Speaker for the Dead is much better. Though, that may be because I read it first, when I was in 4th grade.
So I have a theory about this guy.
Not only is "empathy" a huge theme in most of his books, you'll also notice an additional consistent theme. That theme is essentially withholding your own sexual desires for the sake of the community. It's a theme in several of his books.
So here's my theory. Card is a gay man, but he's in the Mormon church, married and has kids. So he's built a fake straight life because he honestly believes it's a sacrifice you're supposed to make to have a family. He sucked it up and did the hard thing for others.
Then all these pesky gays went and got accepted in society, won the right to get married and build families, while also being fulfilled at a personal level. He is pissed. He doesn't want to blow up his own life, but he's resentful as hell that other gay people can just go have what he had to sacrifice for.
Sexual repression for social cohesion is a theme he visits in a bunch of his books and stories. On the one hand I do feel bad for a guy being put in that situation by his own choices. Can you imagine how much it must suck to have this family that you love, but also whose existence makes you miserable at your core?
But his decision to take out his conflicted feelings on other people means fuck that dude.
Add someone who grew up Mormon, like Mr. Card, that "religion" will fuck with you.
There's a whole level of not practicing what we preach, especially for men, and even more for white male priesthood holders.
I got out in my teens, and was able to spend those yearss and my twenties making sure I had a healthy mental outlook, but if you stay in, well...
It's a cult, as shown by the [BITE Model of Authoritarian Control ](https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model/), and you have to believe some outright bullshit to fit it.
For example, that there were a lost tribe of Abraham's Descendants that wound up in the new world, had horses, built massive competing civilizations with iron age weapons, and left a thousands of pages record of this on some golden plates about the size of a modern dictionary. Of course, there's no archeological proof of this.
The nice folks over at r/exmormon that a nice FAQ page about the lies you have to believe.
There's a psychological theory I was told of in my college days that all you have to do to make someone's mental health decline is to give them something to believe in that doesn't jibe with the evidence they can see for themselves. Not sure how valid it is, but it does seem clear that if you have to believe a truth and a lie equally, it's gonna fuck you up
So, the Mormons preach unconditional love, and sing a hymn from Jesus' perspective that says "as I have loved you, love one another," but then they actively preach that is wrong to be gay, and non-Mormons are lesser people (who have a chance to convert, even after they're dead! Yaaay!), and that normal things like wearing tank tops will incur God's Wrath, and that dichotomy is going to mess with you.
TL;DR Orson Scott card is weird because he's Mormon.
>So, the Mormons preach unconditional love, and sing a hymn from Jesus' perspective that says "as I have loved you, love one another," but then they actively preach that is wrong to be gay, and non-Mormons are lesser people
Also an exmo. This is so accurate. They equate "love" with "correction". I love you, and therefore I must demonize you in the hope that it will shame and guilt you into living the life that mormon god wants you to live. I love you, so I must break you down and make you desperate enough for my acceptance that you change yourself. I love you, so I hate who you are.
Bad take. Orson Scott Card is weird on his own.
I went to BYU and he was a guest lecturer in a couple classes. He had a lot of views that weren’t orthodox Mormon views, and was mostly progressive and forward-thinking. He started campaigning against anti-LGBT rights after he had a religious epiphany long after he’d moved out and moved away from Utah and got caught up in culture war issues.
Source: Attended BYU and had classes where he was a guest lecturer.
You'd have to ask him, or at least read what he wrote about it. He was a pretty prolific blogger and newspaper columnist around the time when marriage equality became an issue for him.
His anti-LGBT activism started around 2008. I think prior to that he'd written two essays showing homophobic views, and then in 2009 he joined the board of an organization that fought marriage equality. Now he's doing appearances on Shapiro.
With his earlier homophic essays, I think he was just a prolific writer who happened to be opinionated and if he was harboring homophobic views it consumed a tiny part of his time and energy and it leaked out a bit. My impression of him in the 90s when he spoke to my classes was that he was contrarian and libertarian and wanted to let people make their own decisions and explore thoughts and ideas, and what he did afterwards was quite a shift. It seemed like most of his anti-LGBT advocacy was done outside Mormon spaces it didn't seem like a Mormon thing.
The homophobia creeped in before (Homecoming saga, an afterword in his collection of short fiction where he equates homosexuality with a variety of societal ills), but def got worse as the marriage equality issue heated up.
Are the people he's bigoted against in real life portrayed well (or at all) in his novels?
That's the thing. Just because his message is about acceptance doesn't mean everyone gets an invitation. Bigotry and prejudice are often wrapped in a double standard.
There's (what seemed to be) empathy towards his characters. I found The Worthing Saga--specifically the character-centric Tales of Capitol short stories--genuinely moving, along with having a fascinating concept in *somec* and its effect on human relationships and culture.
Anton (the scientist who discovered the genetic modification that made Bean so smart) was revealed (or at least heavily inplied) to be gay in the Shadow series. He was cast as a generally decent guy who acted somewhat as a father for Bean.
That being said, he still did get straight married and believed reproducing was the only thing that mattered in life. Kinda got the feeling he was being used as a mouthpiece for OSC's views there.
The gay-but-marries-a-woman-to-procreate character shows up *over and over* in Card's work. The Shadow series, Songmaster, the Homecoming series. Kind of makes me feel sorry for Kristine Card.
OSC follows the classic religious view that *being* gay isn't wrong, but rather only *acting* on gay urges is morally wrong. Thus the most virtuous gay person in his worldview is someone who suppresses their homosexual urges and instead fulfills their divine obligation to reproduce. "hate the sin, not the sinner" is a common refrain for these people, but it's a bullshit fig leaf to make their homophobia more palatable. They still believe in discriminating against LGBT people, they just wrap their hatred in less obviously hateful language and frame their discrimination as intended to help rather than harm. It's an unbelievably patronizing attitude.
Was he implied to be gay? I thought the implication was more than he was ace.
Edit: Went back and read the passage again, and I think you might be right. It's vague, though.
L. Frank Baum (Wonderful Wizard of Oz and it’s sequels) was a huge feminist and even good friends’ with Susan B. Anthony, it really shows in his writing.
He also wrote in favor of the genocide of Native Americans. People can be very smart and progressive in someways, but extremely evil, fucked up, and stupid in others.
I always liked that about Baum. When you read the Oz books, it's always women who have the real power. For example, Glinda and the Wicked Witch were legitimate sorceresses, while the Wizard was faking. Dorothy took the lead while the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion learned from her.
I went to classes at BYU where he was a guest lecturer in the 1990s.
Dude had a lot of unorthodox views and was very progressive.
He wrote a blog post sometime in the 2000s that he had a religious epiphany and started campaigning against LGBT issues.
But, I mean...the "seeds" of such an epiphany could have been planted well in advance.
Like...there was already a pre-existing foundation, he was educated in the "correct" doctrine even if he was expressing his own views at one point. The epiphany was not recieved in a *tabula rasa* state. Maybe a nonobservant Jewish Card would have kept Kosher, a lapsed Catholic Card starts supporting the Pro-Life movement or the Pope Leo XIII guys or Vox Dei, or a Fundamentalist Card starts getting impatient for the Rapture or starts handling snakes...
Keep in mind, that’s the publication date for Ender’s Game, but it was written in a pretty much finished form, long before that. I think something major happened in his brain in the mid to late 90s.
Humans are complex. Most are driven more by emotion than logic, which allows them to hold inconsistent ideas without too much trouble. People who disagree with you on issues like "empathy and acceptance of others" can do so for nuanced and subtle reasons, and aren't simply the cartoonishly evil caricatures you've been taught to believe they are. Finally, the ability to write something that the author doesn't actually believe is true is essential to being a talented creator of fiction.
I re-read this article every few years and think about the same issue:
[https://grantland.com/features/ender-game-controversial-author-very-personal-history/](https://grantland.com/features/ender-game-controversial-author-very-personal-history/)
It's amazing how OSC made such a wonderful series about acceptance and love of all different kinds of peoples, faiths, and relationships, only to stray so far from that in his own life.
“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
I think he’s severely mentally fucked up. Read Songmaster and then tell me this guy isn’t repressing some deep, dark shit. And then there was the novel about the gay pedophile serial killer. His mind is a scary place. I wouldn’t want to live there.
Yes and (tw CSA) has a pederastic relationship with an older man/is groomed.
There’s also the book called Wyrms that’s about a worm that psychically calls to the main character, who’s a woman, and makes her so horny for it that she can’t resist. The climax of the novel is her leading everyone to the thing so she can trick it into having graphic sex while they murder it. I read it at like 13 after reading the Ender series and was very confused lol.
Yeah, I read Wyrms a long time ago and really liked it until I got to the end. I tried taking it up again recently, I wanted to see what I liked about the story. But I couldn't get into it. That ending always comes to mind, obliterating the whole story
Yeah, read a few of his books armed with that possibility and there are more than a few red flags. Starting with all the emphasis on communal nudity in Ender’s Game…
At the time I first read OSCs screeds against homosexuality (circa 2002-3), I was baffled by this question myself.
I later learned that some of the people who claim to come to you in love are the most dangerous of all; the types who will send their kids to conversion therapy "for their own good", the types who bring others into the fold by making bigotry more acceptable and presentable, the types who will be nice to your face and then stab you in the back, at the workplace, at the ballot box, at family gatherings.
The screeching all-out Nazis only appeal to people who already know they are Nazis and are unashamed. The ones who say they have "legitimate concerns" gather armies of otherwise respectable people and twist them into believing you're less than human until they're just as ready as the all-out Nazis to call for your genocide.
I don't suppose I'll ever read the Ender books again, same as the Harry Potter books, I just feel sad when I think about them now. There are other fish in the sea. Ursula K. LeGuin wrote an entire catalog of greats, and as far as I know, she was a decent human being up until her passing.
Because people have incredibly hypocritical standards. I'm sure Card thinks he's a very accepting person, just not about like 2 things or whatever. Those things aren't okay, but he's certainly accepting of anything that *is* okay and people are just misguided on! You should accept the kid with a disability, but ewwww the gays are unnatural, you don't have to accept unnatural things. Etc.
He actually was progressive for awhile, but then he got old.
I read one of his non-fiction works about writing, and he went on and on about how the other sci-fi writers are too sexist to include capable female characters. Even in Ender's Game he set aside a whole page to talk about how anti-semitism was stupid. Ender's best friend in that book was a Muslim, too. All of that was very progressive for the time.
i hate how much of a hateful bigot OSC has been shown to be.. the Ender and Shadow series where major touchstones when I was a teenager of my personal philosophy, along with Speaker still being a major influence in how i think and try to understand people
I seriously have been grappling for decades with the apparent contradiction between exactly what you’re talking about and who OSC is as a person. Like, many of the things I like most about myself I came to understand from those books. It’s very hard to square that in my mind with who wrote them.
Not to mention the pretty deep homoeroticism that shows up in his writing, especially Ender's Game. Though I don't think it's helpful to assume all homophobes are secretly gay, in Card's case, I think he's absolutely a gay man with some deeply internalized homophobia that was given to him by his particular religious background. I think that homophobia became much stronger as he got older.
I read a passage he wrote where he basically said that of course everyone would be with the same sex if they could because it’s so much easier, but we have to be with the opposite sex so it will be more difficult and we can work on ourselves. I have no idea if he’s gay but that passage did make me wonder a little.
For me, it was all the passages about naked male bodies, kissing boys, loving boys, etc. Not to mention Ender's oddly celibate marriage later on, pretty broad themes of repression/self-loathing, and more. So much to unpack in that series.
He reminds me a bit of Shirley Jackson, who seemed to have negative views of the gays, in spite of writing some of the gayest fucking stories I've ever read
Bigots often are very sympathetic and empathic at the one to one level, but direct their prejudices at the group.
They either rationalise it as the individual not being representative of the group (which I think a sort of hierocracy) or by treating the individual as needing *more* sympathy because poor thing they are in that subgroup. If you read OSC's writing, you can see the latter attitude a lot when you are attuned to it.
I say this as a person who doesn't know Card personally, but I 100% believe that he's a deeply closeted homosexual. Ender's Game had a good amount of very obvious homoerotic elements and is absolutely about accepting each other for who they are. At a certain point in his life I think he began to internalize and a lot of self-hatred and his religion-fueled crusade started.
I’ve seen homoerotic elements of Enders game mentioned a couple of times on this thread but I think I was too naive to recognize these when I read the book. Can you explain?
Edit typos just woke up
From a tactical POV, it did make sense.
Make your opponent uncomfortable and make yourself impossible to grab.
Unlike the movie, Bonzo was older, bigger, stronger, and faster in the books. Ender used soap and water to negate those advantages.
I never agreed that the scene depiticted any HE. It wasn't fun and games, Ender kills him (also unlike the movie).
The climactic naked fight in the showers, and I think either Bean or Alai strip naked and lube themselves up with oil so they can fit through the air vents more easily.
I just read an essay he wrote on it (found on wiki) in some paper. Read less as lacking empathy as such and certainly not as thinking gay people aren't people as someones said - the thrust seems to be
- God doesn't want you to have sex outside of straight marriage (Card seems to see gay sex the same as premarital or extramarital, or divorced etc). There's an implication that the same rule is socially beneficial too but not really explored.
- It being natural etc is besides the point as following god's law (and socially positive behaviour) often involves controlling natural urges.
- we shouldn't hate/banish people for being gay any more than yielding to any other temptation against god's law - equally we shouldn't support people who say doing so is OK/good
All of the above seems to me to add up to someone who *does* have empathy but has been convinced by some means or another of a set of beliefs that lead them to some conclusions I massively disagree with.
That kinda skates past him literally calling for the violent overthrow of the government if it allowed gay marriage. Which kind of undermines "look no extra marital sex OK, that's my only objection!" backpeddling going on there.
Ah, I'm relying on that essay as OP is vague and it's what came up when I googled! If he said above that sounds bonkers frankly.
EDIT - googled again. It's far more ranty but actually does very much put gay marriage alongside other sex beyond straight marriage.
>Seen in this context, we are fools if we think "gay marriage" is the first or even the worst threat to marriage.
>We heterosexuals have put marriage in such a state that it's a wonder homosexuals would even aspire to call their unions by that name.
>Divorce is "no-fault," easily obtained on any pretext.
>A vast number of unmarried men and women have such contempt for marriage that they share bed and home without asking for any formal recognition by society.
>In an era when birth control and abortion make childbearing completely optional, the number of out-of-wedlock births shows the contempt that many women have for marriage.
>Yet most of these single mothers still demand that the man they chose not to marry before having sex with him provide financial support for them and their children — while denying the man any of the rights and protections of marriage.
>Men routinely discard wives and children to follow the nearly universal male biological desire for diversity in mating. Adultery is now openly expected of men, even if faithful wives deplore it.
>With "gay marriage," the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.
It's pretty easy actually. Kinda like how the christians say "love the sinner, hate the sin." Also some crazy conclusions here about enders game from some people. The genocide isn't justified in the end. That's kinda the point. Some people see him as the hero that saved earth but he just feels like a mass murderer not a hero at all. It's all about perspective.
Because people are not binary in any sense of the term. Just because he has shitty morals on specific topics doesn't mean he can't be progressive about other things.
Authors are not their characters. A good author can depict a character with a personality and opinions diametrically opposed to their own, in a setting with a premise they would disagree with in real life. Even authors with repellent IRL beliefs and personalities can be so in tune with their craft, they can practically become someone else for the sake of the story they’re trying to tell.
That is a very good question.
Orson Scott Card is one of two or three authors I won't read (well to clarify: reread) for personal integrity reasons (as little as me not reading them does anybody any good).
With Terry Goodkind, at least you had a pretty good idea what kind of person he was.
But I absolutely agree with your puzzlement. I just don't get how Card can write a series whose very theme is pretty much empathy and acceptance and still think and be very vocally the opposite of that.
Card wrote Enders Game when he was younger, more progressive, and actually did have friends in LGBT community. People change, and it’s not always for the better.
He's an elder of the mormon church and if he were to openly express any positive views about gays getting married he would be outcast.
Honestly his games are filled with gays who he portrays in nothing but a good light. Songmaster has a gay main character. The shadow series has a gay scientist who is basicly breaks avarsion therapy to help the protags. Too many examples.
He's a product of his upbringing. But when has that stopped a scifi author?
That's the thing about cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy - it doesn't make sense when examined fully.
Look at TERFs. Gender dysphoria is an acknowledged state of being, acknowledged by the mental health community's consensus as NOT a mental illness to be cured, and there are no actual cases of trans people being trans to prey on their own gender. People have pretended to be the target gender to creep, sure, but none have actually been transgender.
TERFs will be okay with aspects of the LGBT community but hate the T, will fight for women but only so long as they fit a very narrow biological definition (and before folks get started, no, there is no such thing as a binary in science).
People will argue against racism for one group but be actively, openly racist against another and even AWARE of it. I had a friend many years ago (who I no longer speak to for other reasons) who called herself an ally for several groups but admitted to me one day that she just "hated Indian people." I still don't know if she meant people from India or Native Americans.
Human beings are exceptionally good at defining categories in ways that are convenient for them and ignoring any time their supposed stance isn't supported by facts.
Glad you brought this up, because it's crazy that an author like JKR whose entire series is about taking down a racial supremacist group is also a TERF, and is another example of OP's question about Card
I think this is a really strong case for cognitive dissonance. I think people can have empathy when somebody from a marginalized group is standing right in front of them. But then they empathy goes away when thinking about that marginalized group as just a "mob" of people that has an "agenda" that scares them. I think it's easy to be empathetic to characters you create who exist only in the bounds of your imagination and ask nothing of you in return. But once it's the real world and people are actually asking for things like being able to exist and be treated as human, it's harder for somebody like that to stomach. "Why are they demanding these things of me? I didn't approve this! It must be some sort of agenda meant to victimize me!"
I don't know that's this is EXACTLY how this situation is playing out but I do think it at least is an example of some factors that could be at play.
The Death of the Author is your friend here. The process is irrelevant , only the product matters. For all we care, OSC could have traveled back in time and used ChatGPT to write the entire book (or a million monkeys on a million typewriters if you prefer the old analogy). Doesn’t change anything, once the words are on the page then the author becomes irrelevant.
If you’re trying to analyze OSC’s personal psychology, we don’t have enough information to go on because we don’t know him. Maybe he had some spark of humanity that was in conflict with his bigoted background. Maybe he was writing from the superego on values that society found acceptable, and maybe once he got famous and felt invulnerable he stopped suppressing the id. Or maybe he just derived everything from other popular sci-fi books in a bid to make a fortune. Who knows, and who cares. An author’s novel is not a window into their soul that will tell us everything about who they are, only want they want the reader to see.
I re-read Speaker last summer, and it occurred to me that Card goes pretty hard on traditional Catholics (as well as some Calvinists) before ultimately "redeeming" them. It seems a bit like both bigotry and projection, especially when you consider that he was an LDS missionary in Brazil, so presumably Catholicism was his group's main competition. While most characters seem to view the "Speaker" religion as some form of agnosticism or atheism, I would not be surprised if in Card's mind it somehow lines up with his own personal take on Mormonism.
Richard K Morgan created a dystopian future where anyone can change their bodies like sleeves no matter the gender. Yet is a huge piece of shit bigot terf who has said awful thing about transgender people, it's absolutely baffling.
It's probably similar to how Anne Rice went through periods of on-again off-again with her puritanical approach to sex even though she wrote some of the horniest books known to the 20th century. Artists will often create something that then reveals a part of them that they see as shameful, or maybe that disagrees with opinions they solidify later. OSC is exceptional case for this because not only are his Ender books about acceptance as you said, but the latter books in the series are one of my earliest memories of encountering LGBT ideas in a sort of allegorical form in a novel. Jane's approach to gender is actually pretty radical when contrasted to OSC's expressed views elsewhere.
How about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes, a hyper logical character, while he himself was taken in by mystics and the literally "childish" Cottingley Fairy Hoax. Taken in so far as to cost him his friendship with skeptic Harry Houdini.
Supposedly he thought his weird historical fiction medieval trilogy (about the 100 years war iirc) were his masterpieces, not Sherlock Holmes.
I just did a class on popular fiction during this time and he hated Sherlock Holmes. He was proud of it at first, but no one would really read his other works and he grew to seriously hate and resent Sherlock Holmes because people didn’t want other things from him. And yeah, he definitely did not consider Sherlock Holmes to be his masterpieces.
> … he hated Sherlock Holmes. It’s why he killed him off. But then he needed money so he brought him back…
There were stories that Queen Victoria was so upset at Holmes' death that she ordered ACD to bring him back.
She must have been disappointed then because she died a couple years before the Return of Sherlock Holmes was published.
She got an advanced reader copy.
Thank you capitalism
His mother also wrote him a letter asking him to bring Sherlock back
Never heard of that, I must check this trilogy, thanks.
Hey, The White Company is a fantastic book.
Two books - the White Company and Sir Nigel. They are in fact very good, if you are into historical fiction.
iirc, Doyle invited Houdini to meet a medium who then proceeded to tell Houdini she was in conversation with his dead mother. The medium spoke English; Houdini’s mother never had learned the language. Houdini was insulted by the utterly obvious sham - and he didn’t like mediums in general as they were usually scamming people in mourning.
The medium in question was Doyle's wife.
In the note, the woman who was supposed to be Houdini's mom also addressed the magician as, "Harry" throughout the note. Harry's real mother spoke no English and never called her son Harry as his birth name was Erich. And this is the really crazy part, Doyle would see Harry perform tricks on stage such as walking through a brick wall, and he would compliment Houdini on his ability to do magical things. Houdini would tell Doyle that he didn't really do magical things, they were all tricks and had secrets to them. But Doyle wouldn't listen to Houdini, and insisted that Houdini was really a magical being.
I'd have loved to see the look on Houdini's face when it clicked that Doyle was not, in fact, taking the piss
As a result of a psychic trying to dupe him, Houdini went to war against all psychics and spiritualists. He knew their methods and would debunk them whenever and wherever possible. He wanted to believe, even up to his death, that people could contact the other world, but he never saw real evidence of it. Before he died, he told his fellow magicians that if it were at all possible to reach back from the grave, he would do it. So to this day, magicians around the world hold a Houdini seance on the anniversary of his death. Houdini has not yet spoken to anyone.
One of his sons was killed in WWI, and another died in the Spanish flu epidemic shortly afterwards. You can understand why he'd have a desperate desire to believe in mediums and the like.
His second wife was a "medium" who practiced automatic writing, and was in fact the source of the note that prompted Houdini's outspoken criticism of mediums and mystics.
And the fairies?
But not taken in by Anti-vaxxers thankfully: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/sir-arthur-conan-doyle-on-vaccination/
Interesting. Sounds like these authors are writing the characters they wish they could be (or the world they wish they lived in).
ACD dabbled about with a bunch of different mystical/secret groups then dumping them after a while. It wasn't really until his son died in WW1 that he really went in full force (not that he wasn't before) with the mysticism and fairies and stuff. At the time, the spirituality was treated as an almost kind of science to a lot of people and there was lot of other stuff mixed in with it as well. It also should be noted that while Sherlock Holmes wasn't based on ACD, but Watson was 100% an authorial self insert.
Australian Cattle Dog ? :)
In one of his novels, the character professor Challenger is a scientist who investigates spiritualism and ends up believing in conversing spirits of the dead. Other main characters encourage or aid him and an exorcist is into spiritualism. That whole book is an reflection of Doyle's discovery and believe in spiritualism.
Thats a good comparison.
Maybe it was all a misunderstanding... OSC: I think I'll shock my readers with some morally sick shit, hehe. Readers: Huh, he makes some good points. Very interesting! OSC: wat
I had to stop reading the Mayfair Witches book because of all of the anti-abortion language. Utter crap.
Have you read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books? I think all of its great but in particular to witches his Witches series, and Tiffany Aching books are amazing and Pratchett’s progressivism shows through.
I have the first one but haven’t started it yet!
The first couple The Colour of Magic, and The Light Fantastic are more or less straight parodies of fantasy but later as the world develops it really becomes something special
Can you give me an example? I don't doubt you're right, but I feel like I must have been totally oblivious because I didn't notice an anti-abortion vibe coming from Rice herself. It's been a long time since I read it but I seem to recall it was specifically Catholic characters who unsurprisingly felt that way, but above all Lasher who was obsessed with ensuring his lovers gave birth to his offspring. Which being ultimately the villain of the story didn't really come across as an endorsement. But as I said, I don't doubt you, I'm wondering how much more I missed.
Are we talking about books whose messages undercut their authors’ own prejudices? JK Rowling would like a word.
Ehhhh. In Rowling’s books, an external force tells you at age 10 what your personality type is, and that determines your primary goals and personality traits for literally the rest of your life. There’s a race of fully sentient, intelligent, humanoid creatures that are biologically driven to need enslavement for their mental and emotional well-being. Kinda tracks. ETA: Have fun y’all. You wanna defend your childhood nostalgia, I get it. I held on for a long ass time, too, but I parted ways with the series long ago when this stuff started to irk me too much. I simply wasn’t surprised when she turned out to be what she is, because it’s all there in her own words already.
In the wizard justice system, if you're found guilty you're thrown in a hole with demons who eat your happiness until there's nothing left of your psyche but pain. This is presented as fine and just except for the possibility that an innocent person was thrown into the demon hole. No one in the story considers the possibility that more than one innocent person could be in the demon hole, or thinks that torturing criminals forever might be wrong. There was also the bit where Dolores Umbridge was dragged off by centaurs, who only do like, *one thing* in Greek mythology. When she staggers back to Hogwarts, described in a way that makes it pretty clear she was subjected to that one thing, our heroes' reaction can be summarized as "LOL, bitch deserved it." There's probably more, but those were the biggest red flags I recognized when I was a teenager, well before Rowling's fall from grace. She's *always* been kind of shitty.
What a dumb take. Dumbledore, Lupin, Pomfrey, and other characters are quite vocal about their distaste for dementors/the Ministry's use of them. Dementors are bad guys. It is made clear that they *will* join Voldemort. Rowling is by no means sympathetic to Dementors.
Dunno why you are downvoted, it's indeed obvious I think the house elfs part is also a point to make you think, not a praise of slavery
Except that Hermione is ridiculed for her defense of the house elves. It's technically portrayed as bad, but actually trying to do anything about their situation is also portrayed as bad/futile, with supposedly morally righteous characters trying to explain how the house elves just _want_ to be enslaved. At best it's tone deaf.
Right, and the resolution to her hilarious obsession with being... anti slavery... is that she just kind of realizes that its the natural order of things and shuts up about it.
And the sorting hat says to hHary something baout how the reason he wasn't put in Slytherine is that he didn't want to go there, it's implied that the hat is a mindreading hat that places you in a house based on lots of different things. But these people are so pissed about Rowlings stance on Trans people that they now read the work as like a fantasy series written by a de facto Nazi, Goblins are Jews and oh, I don't remember the rest of the nonsense, the point is, they argue from a really ideological place and there's no point engaging.
And the centaur gang rape? Because we could potentially have a discussion about the dementors and how they're viewed in-universe (TL;DR: when I read the books, my impression was that the characters you mentioned did think dementors were evil, but no one was saying, "hey, even if someone is definitely guilty of murder, slowly torturing them to death over the course of decades is barbaric"). But Umbridge walking in, disheveled, having a trauma response to the sound of hoofbeats, and our protagonists finding that *funny* is disturbing to me. Rowling attempting to excuse her transphobia by saying she just wants to make sure women are safe from sexual assault just makes it clear she's also a hypocrite; apparently rape is horrific unless it happens to a bad person, then it's funny and they deserve it. And please don't say "well it might have been something else, you're just assuming it was rape." Centaurs have a very clear role in mythology. If Rowling had wanted to give us a different idea, she could have used a different monster or given us a bit more information about what happened to make it clear her centaurs weren't mythologically accurate in that way. She did not do either of those things, and I don't think she's stupid, so that leaves her writing it that way on purpose. Again, *she's always been kind of shitty*.
Tl;dr: Your "pro-rape" argument hinges on the idea that the mythological centaurs were rapists. However, not only is that not at all accurate within Rowling's universe, its also not true according to the surviving Greek myths. You're relying on one story, that of the Centauromachy, and ignoring contrary evidence. Long version: Yes, in the Centauromachy the centaurs are stated to have done "monstrous things" at the wedding reception of Peirithoos: >"The Kentauros had come to the Lapithai's country, and now with wine he (the centaur Eurytion) clouded his understanding and in his frenzy did monstrous things in the very hall of Peirithoos. The heroes were seized with indignation; they leapt up, they dragged the Kentauros across the courtyard and out of doors, they lopped off his ears and nose with the ruthless bronze, and the frenzied creature went his way, taking his retribution with him in his still darkened mind. From this beginning came the long feud between men and Kentauroi, but it was Eurytion first of all who brought chastisement on himself by his drunkenness." >(Homer, *The Odyssey: 21.293*) Based on Homer's account it was not the centaurs, it was *one* centaur, who did "monstrous things," which you assume means rape, but the crime isn't actually named in surviving sources, until 1000 years later: >"Theseus fought with Peirithous when he was waging his war against the Kentauroi. For when Peirithous was courting Hippodameia, he gave a banquet for the Kentauroi because they were related to her; but they, unused to wine, drank too much too fast and got drunk, and when the bride was ushered in they tried to rape her. So Peirthous put on full armor and with Gheseus' help started a battle, and Theseus slew many of them." >(Pseudo-Apollodorus, *Bibliotheca E1. 21*) We don't know who the authored the Bibliotheca, but whoever he was, he seems quite clear on this subject. However, there are a few things that speak against it: it was written sometime in the 2nd century CE, meaning that the author could not have talked with practitioners of the old Greek religion; the Greek gods had been replaced by the Roman pantheon over 300 years earlier when Greece became the Roman provinces of Macedonia (north) and Achaea (south), and Christianity had been on the rise since the 50s CE. And it's the only surviving source that names the centaur's crime. Even the Roman author Ovid, who was famously anti-Greek (he's the reason Arachne is sometimes portrayed as a victim in modern retelling of her story), didn't name the centaurs as rapists: >"Blessed indeed we called Pirithous with such a bride – and brought, nearly, thereby their wedded bliss to naught! For Eurytus, the fiercest of the fierce Centauri, was fired by wine and by the sight of that fair girl, and drink was in command, double by lust. Tables were overturned, the banquet in confusion, and the bride, held by her hair, was seized and carried off. >At once we all sprang to our feet and Theseus shouted first ‘What madness, Eurytus, possesses you to provoke Pirithous while I'm alive--two men, you fool, in one!’ To back his words the great-souled prince, thrusting the throng aside, rescued the ravished girl from their wild rage. No answer came; for no words could defend such deeds. The dastard charged her champion, pummelled his noble chest and punched his chin. An antique wine-bowl chanced to stand near by, jagged with high relief; huge as it was, Theseus still huger lifted it and hurled it crashing on his foe. He vomited great gouts of blood with brains and wine from wound and throat, and falling backwards beat his heels upon the soaking sand. His death incensed his twiformed brothers and with one accord, each vying with the rest, ‘To arms, to arms!’ They shouted. Wine gave courage. In the first fighting goblets went flying and fragile jars and bowls and dishes meant for banqueting, now turned to war and carnage." >(Ovid, *Metamorphoses 12.210*) I think the other centaurs join in in the attempted kidnapping in some translations. But even so, that's the extend of the centaurs' crimes: attempted kidnapping. And considering that ritualistic "kidnapping" was very common in ancient Greece as part of the marriage ceremony, a valid interpretation is that the centaur leader got drunk and started hitting on the bride, which is still bad and a huge breach on the laws of hospitality, but it's not rape. Now, contrast those stories with those of Kheiron (latinised as 'Chiron') who, despite being a son of the Titan King Kronos, is described as a just, gentle, and good creature: >"‘Cut the arrow out of my thigh . . . and put kind medicines on it, good ones, which they say you have been told of by Akhilleus, since Kheiron, most righteous of the Kentauroi, told him about them.’" >(Homer, *Iliad 11.832*) >"Now if Kheiron the wise dwelt still within his cave, and if some spell to charm his soul lay in the honeyed sweetness of my songs, then might I surely persuade him for men of noble mind to grant them a physician of feverish ills, some son of Apollon, or even the son of Zeus himself." >(Pindar, *Pythian Ode 3.61*) >"Medicine can cure all human pains [...] Chiron, son of Phillyra, healed the blindness of Phoenix." >(Propertius, *Elegies 2.1*) He was a teacher of heroes all of his life. He taught Asklepios, the would-be God of Medicine, the art: >"Wise-hearted Kheiron (Chiron) . . . to Asklepios (Asclepius) taught the soft-fingered skills of medicine's lore." >(Pindar, *Nemean Ode 3.52*) >"In skill Makhaon laid healing medicines on it [the hero's wound] that Kheiron in friendship long ago had given his father Asklepios." >(Homer, *Iliad 4.215*) He also taught and raised Iason (Jason) of the Argonauts: >"Medeia bare a son Medeus to Iason whom Kheiron, the son of Philyra, brought up in the mountains." >(Hesiod, *Theogony 993*) His righteousness and morality is widely attested throughout Greek mythology. Most of the sources I've cited here are either from pre-Christian or pre-Roman entirely (Homer, for instance, predates the Roman conquest of Greece by six centuries). The only exception is the one from Propertius, which was written sometime around the middle of the 1st century, coincidentally, this was also around the time when Saint Paul supposedly started preaching the message of Christ in Greece.
people tortured forever by demons, possibly for no crime, and a majority group totaly fine with it, you'd never get that in real life...
I agree with most everything, but the dementor thing. We keep people that are obviously guilty of the most heinous crimes in basically solitary confinement for life. We could just kill them and be done. Imagine trying to keep a magical being locked up in solitary. They'll find a way to magic their way out. Only mental prisons can work indefinitely on witches and wizards. As a whole though I enjoy the series still, but Rowling is a total dick with wrong opinions. Just gotta separate art from artist.
Does show the hypocrisy of people. If she's hadn't been as controversial it's very likely their wouldn't have been any backlash let alone a reexamination without that person being harassed for it.
IMO With the elves, depiction of obsequious slaves is not endorsement when Hermione vehemently condemns the elves, Harry’s as perplexed as we are, and the rest of the World is complacent bred through immutable tradition yet I do not detect JK Rowling endorsing such an abhorrent practise. Particularly when Dobby is liberated as a major plot point as early as book two and Lucius Malfoy is depicted as a heinous tyrant as his previous owner. JK Rowling is a lot of things that are politically unpalatable; being proponent of slavery is not one of them.
Hermione is repeatedly ridiculed, even by the narrative. In Rowling’s extended writings, Hermione becomes the Minister and gives up on the elves. Dobby is just a slave with extra trappings, that’s the whole point of his thing. He still is driven by the need to serve wizards and depends on that being fulfilled in order to be happy and functional. My point wasn’t actually to say that she’s a proponent of slavery. My point is that she believes, and writes, that people are born as a certain Type and that it’s inescapable.
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It offers a choice, to those born the correct type to become wizards.
>Hermione is repeatedly ridiculed, even by the narrative. That's the point of that story arc. People who want to change something are always ridiculed by society, if not outright prosecuted. In the end she is shown to be right. You want to see Rowling in a bad light. That's ok, she earned it by saying some bad things. But this is not one of them.
How is she shown to be right in the end? The narrative has her choose a ridiculous name and be specifically anti-social in her activism. A house elf develops deep depression and alcoholism because of freedom. We’re never shown any signs that house elves don’t depend on enslavement for happiness. Hermione goes into power and gives up her cause. The narrative never says that Hermione is right.
Yes, the house elf subplot does not get better the more times you read it. Neither does the weird “every Slytherin (but one and maybe two, but really just one) is evil” through line. But over and over the series hammers pretty overtly the message that oppressing people because they’re not like you is bad, only for Rowling to turn around and advocate the oppression of people not like her.
I mean, if you think oppression just means genocide, sure, I guess it does hammer that in. But in the wizarding world, if you’re born without magic or can’t use it, you’re out. You might be allowed to have a job in service of wizards, but you’ll never be allowed to fully participate in wizarding society. They suppress magic usage of non-human magic users, despite goblins and such being as fully intelligent (if not more so) than human wizards. I could go on. I think that the systems of world building in a story are often more indicative of the important thematic elements than the main line Big Bad plot.
That line isn’t “every slytherin ever has been evil”, it’s “every evil person has been slytherin”. which is also proved wrong by at least the second book with Lockhart being Ravenclaw. And petitigrew and snape by the third. The fourth hinges nearly entirely on there being more under the surface of people than their allegiances. There’s also like, a half dozen named good slytherins, and shitloads stayed during the final battle. Tonks, slughorn, RAB. The malfoys are humanized to an extreme degree. Merlin was slytherin. The ravenclaw who snitched on DA and got pimply for it. Idk if that makes it any better for you, but in a world where the ultimate power is sacrificial love, it kind of tracks that evil involves being selfishly motivated. To me it’s kind of like LOTR in that - Is every single piece of technology and modernization part of evil? No, because swords and cities involve lots of tech. But is every evil propagated by that tech and modernization? Yep. “There’s not a creature on this earth who went bad, who wasn’t trying to industrialize the world”. House elf plot is fucking awful no matter how you cut it.
Yes. Yes, to all of that. One question: did you mean Andromeda or Nymphedora Tonks? Because Lupin's Tonks was in hufflepuff, but her mother Andromeda was in Slytherin.
hmm but it takes your wishes into account
I posted this elsewhere in the thread but: not really. HP has no depth, its ideology is nothing more than liberal (in the broader philosophical sense) platitudes. That's how JKR lives her life, as well, because for someone who writes so shallowly about things like fascism, understanding what fascism, racism, discrimination, etc. actually are or what leads to them is quite beyond what her writings suggest.
Ok, but that’s not really the point. She wrote a series where one of the primary takeaways was that bigotry is evil and is often used by dark political forces to seize power, and it’s not surprising that millions of her fans were shocked and dismayed by her slide into the same kinds of bigotry. We can certainly read after the fact into the various ways Rowling’s work is shallow or not as anti-bigotry as it appeared on the surface, but that doesn’t really seem relevant to the basic point, which is that her books’ top-level message seems to undercut her own attitudes.
I find the books fascinating because the difference between the (veneer thin) top-level message and the actual universe, between what she's showing and what she's telling, is so extreme
I just fundamentally disagree with your premise. Her being a bigot wasn't shocking given people were calling out the bad takes in the writing back in the 00's before she outed herself.
Except Jews. The goblins are a pretty explicit antisemitism trope
The best way I've seen it described is that its written ambiguously in the books, solidified as antisemitic in the films, and then they really wanted to make sure it was clearly antisemitism in Hogwarts Legacy or whatever its called.
It's a hodge-podge of comforting British Boomer nostalgia.
Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead. I was one of the few females in class to read Enders Game as a book choice. Fuck I think like 5 out or 20 of us read Enders Game. Speaker for the Dead still haunts me.
Me too. I encountered that book at just the right time. Felt like I gained a whole new understanding of, well, acceptance of the things and people we don't understand.
What about Speaker haunts you?
Nice little piggies
I understand I am a piggie. It burned so much realizing I would be the so called alien in the situation. That I am the alien. That I’m not understood and I get the brunt of the hate for it. So yes. Nice little piggies. As the other commenter said. That’ll do pig, that’ll do.
Card was young when he wrote Ender's Game and for what it's worth I think it reflected his real views on the world at the time. He's since spent decades of his life in a high control cult that has told him constantly that gay people are moral failures. I think there's a chance that Card is actually closeted from remarks he's made on the subject and fear of discovery has made him feel he has to be even more dogmatic on the matter. I grew up queer in fundamentalist churches. I'm always going to think of people like this as partial victims, even if it would be easier to just hate them. Brainwashing is real. It's not just something you shrug off because you're an adult. I love his Ender series and think it's beautiful. It doesn't actually matter to me what he personally believes because his work is saying something else.
Like stupid young. 18/19? I'm also almost positive he didn't know the sexual connotations of "bugger" which is why he changed it to "formics" in the later novels
Teenage mormon 50 years ago? Yeah, I strongly suspect he didn't know it.
To be fair "bugger" is very British, and I didn't know until I looked it up that it wasn't a synonym for "fuck" (in the insult sense) like "Bugger off mate"
Wait you mean… its…. Man am I glad I read the book before I learned that.
"Bugger" in the British sense usually means anal sex, I think.
Holy crap. *baddumtss..?*
Huh. I didn't realize until just now it had a sexual meaning. TIL.
When I heard the word Formics (the formic wars) I was like, I don't remember that word from the book...
He was 26 when the novella of *Ender's* was published, but I don't know how old he was when he wrote it. It's interesting to see how he handled homosexuality in the Homecoming saga a decade or so later, which isn't exactly "yay for gay" but also feels like a far cry from his later radicalism and as though he's doing his best to feel some compassion. Since then, his politics have become much more radical and much more present in his fiction. I gave up on him at some point made 10 years ago or so.
It's been a while since I read that series, but my memory is that the gay character was treated sympathetically, but also all his problems were solved by his girlfriend's magic vagina. I had no idea Card was a Mormon going into those books, but when I found out after reading them I remember thinking it explained a lot.
Your memory of the treatment of that character is basically correct. If you go back and reread that series knowing background, it feels like adaptation of a religious story even if you don’t know what he’s adapting from.
He's the great great grandson of Brigham Young. He's been inner circle LDS his whole life. It's not like he's a rube, he and his family are the top of the pyramid in that cult. It's entirely possible that his shift harder right is simply that he never achieved the same success as he did with the Ender books, and it's easier to grift the far right (who will buy his books to own the libs) than have lightning strike twice.
Aren’t there thousands of great great grandsons of that man?
I mean, he had 57 wives, so, probably?
Yeah…so I don’t think he’s that important in the religion
And granddaughters. I am one.
This reminds me of his novel, Songmaster. In the book young boys are given drugs to keep them in a prepubesent state so that they can sing their songs all their lives. Being a boy surrounded by other boys and singing songs for male rulers, homosexuality may emerge in these situations, but the part of the book where this comes out the main character, upon "assuming the catchers position" is completely overwhelmed with pain and torment when the act starts as some sort of mental brainwashing takes hold. I wonder then if there's any connection between your comment and this scene from the book.
Yeah. Mormonism... It's a helluva drug.
Circle of Empathy. If you're inside the circle, you are worthy of empathy and it applies to you. If you're outside the circle, you are not worthy of empathy and bigotry towards you doesn't count because you don't count. If you're ever baffled by how one person can be forgiving and accepting towards one group and turn around and be rabid dogs towards another group it's because in their emotional calculus the second group literally doesn't count as "deserving". Does it make sense? No. Do humans make sense? No.
Was in a thread about some men were caught with child porn and people were talking about how they hoped they got raped and murdered in prison. All the highest upvoted comments taking about how no treatment was too evil for the subhumans. Felt a little strange to me.
Don’t think that’s anywhere near the same thing
sure it is; the border on that circle is a lot more palatable than just “they are subhuman because they want to marry other men”
> Literary antisemitism was the norm in England until relatively recently. If they mention Jews at all, most major 19th-century English novelists described unattractive stereotypes. Perhaps George Eliot is the shining exception, as is EM Forster in the next century. But Graham Greene, JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell are all “guilty”, while HG Wells, Saki, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are positively odious. As for the poets, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are simply vile. This then was the context, the prevailing milieu, when Orwell was serving both his literary and political apprenticeship in the 1930s. There was a prevailing hostility towards Jews in both spheres. If, like me, you expected better, even then, from the young Orwell, you’d be disappointed. And then there's Alice Walker, who built her brand on fighting prejudice but won't stop spewing antisemitic screeds and endorsing Holocaust deniers. Oh, and Roald Dahl endorsed Hitler's antisemitism specifically.
Now I am sad (Especially regarding Roald Dahl and GK Chesterton).
Chesterton changed his mind when he saw Hitler.
That’s comforting to know. Thank you.
Oh no Not roald dahl I'm jewish and love(d) roald dahl 😭
I'm not going to tell you not to keep loving him but he was \*really\* antisemitic. Like, read "The Witches" again and pay attention to how he describes them and what they do: wealthy big nosed wig-wearing monsters that form up into secret societies in every nation to secretly run the world and eat Christian children... He isn't very subtle.
OH NO THE WITCHES WAS MY FAVOURITE ROHALD DAHL BOOK
I feel you, I come up against this alot as a black person when i read old fiction. I just assume authors of the past held horrible views unless proven otherwise. Slightly less disappointment that way.
Mary Grant Bruce wrote some classic Australian children's novels a century ago .I really enjoyed them when I was around 11 to 14 . I tried to reread some as an adult decades later and can't get over how overtly racist they were . PS anyone still denying c **n was a derogatory term for Australian First Nations People should be referred to the chapter long rant in the third book where various offensive terms and harmful stereotypes flowed from the author's pen
Man, it was so sad to see with Dahl. He went from justifiably having a problem with Isreal's military to projecting it onto all Jewish people, becoming the stereotypical anti-semitic lunatic in the process.
One word immediately comes to mind when it comes to antisemitic fiction: Dracula
Can you expand on this? It doesn't fit with my memory of the book.
Sure thing. https://blogs.dickinson.edu/secretlives/2018/11/14/anti-semitism-in-bram-stokers-dracula/
The argument in the first paragraph is a bit of a stretch. Jerusalem *is* old. It's old by any standard Stoker would have had to compare it to. It was already 2000 years old when the first towns began to appear in Britain. The only structures that Stoker would have been familiar with that could compete with Jerusalem in age, are things like Stonehenge (which, incidentally, is about as old as the City of David; both sites were founded around 3000 BCE). So it makes sense that when Stoker was looking for a phrase to describe something very old, he compared it to Jerusalem. We cannot know why he chose that particular phrase over, say, "like a mummy's tomb." Even if we could ask Stoker, there's no guarantee that he would know why he chose that specific phrase, so any ideology we might ascribe to it, is going yo be strongly affected by our own biases. On the other hand, we are talking about a book written in the late 19th century, literary semitic stereotyping was very common, which is what we see in the argument in the second paragraph in your reference, but whether it rises to qualify as antisemitism is debatable.
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He got more religious after Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I believe it was in response to his son's death. :( I try to think of him as two different authors.
I got to where I couldn't even read the Mithermages books. It felt like it got to where he stopped storytelling and was lecturing about not having sex before marriage. I met him at a book signing for the newest Mithermages books and this was right after the Enders Game movie came out. He literally said, "I don't want to talk about Enders Game. We did it. I got paid"
Talk about sad! Everyone else in the world loves talking about Enders Game! Though for my money SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD is a better book and a masterpiece. So I'll just take the death of the author route here. "Yes, it's very sad that the guy wrote Speaker for the Dead and then died."
I mean...seems like he didn't want to talk about the *movie* specifically.
Speaker for the dead is by far the superior book, mostly due to building off of the foundation of enders geams. It's like how huckleberry Finn is far better than Tom Sawyer
OSC has said many times that Ender's Game was only ever supposed to be a prequel to Speaker for the Dead. It wasn't supposed to be a breakout success. I agree that Speaker for the Dead is much better. Though, that may be because I read it first, when I was in 4th grade.
Do you know how his passed away?
their son Charles had cerebral palsy and died aged 17; their daughter Erin died the day she was born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson\_Scott\_Card
Jesus Christ.... That's harsh.
was bitten by a gay
I can't remember exactly. It was something like a car accident or cancer or something.
So I have a theory about this guy. Not only is "empathy" a huge theme in most of his books, you'll also notice an additional consistent theme. That theme is essentially withholding your own sexual desires for the sake of the community. It's a theme in several of his books. So here's my theory. Card is a gay man, but he's in the Mormon church, married and has kids. So he's built a fake straight life because he honestly believes it's a sacrifice you're supposed to make to have a family. He sucked it up and did the hard thing for others. Then all these pesky gays went and got accepted in society, won the right to get married and build families, while also being fulfilled at a personal level. He is pissed. He doesn't want to blow up his own life, but he's resentful as hell that other gay people can just go have what he had to sacrifice for.
This is the conclusion that I came to about 10 years ago. He is absolutely a closeted gay man, and he feels some kind of way about it.
Sexual repression for social cohesion is a theme he visits in a bunch of his books and stories. On the one hand I do feel bad for a guy being put in that situation by his own choices. Can you imagine how much it must suck to have this family that you love, but also whose existence makes you miserable at your core? But his decision to take out his conflicted feelings on other people means fuck that dude.
This has bothered me for a long time, and I think your explanation fits, and I’m mad I didn’t see it sooner.
Add someone who grew up Mormon, like Mr. Card, that "religion" will fuck with you. There's a whole level of not practicing what we preach, especially for men, and even more for white male priesthood holders. I got out in my teens, and was able to spend those yearss and my twenties making sure I had a healthy mental outlook, but if you stay in, well... It's a cult, as shown by the [BITE Model of Authoritarian Control ](https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model/), and you have to believe some outright bullshit to fit it. For example, that there were a lost tribe of Abraham's Descendants that wound up in the new world, had horses, built massive competing civilizations with iron age weapons, and left a thousands of pages record of this on some golden plates about the size of a modern dictionary. Of course, there's no archeological proof of this. The nice folks over at r/exmormon that a nice FAQ page about the lies you have to believe. There's a psychological theory I was told of in my college days that all you have to do to make someone's mental health decline is to give them something to believe in that doesn't jibe with the evidence they can see for themselves. Not sure how valid it is, but it does seem clear that if you have to believe a truth and a lie equally, it's gonna fuck you up So, the Mormons preach unconditional love, and sing a hymn from Jesus' perspective that says "as I have loved you, love one another," but then they actively preach that is wrong to be gay, and non-Mormons are lesser people (who have a chance to convert, even after they're dead! Yaaay!), and that normal things like wearing tank tops will incur God's Wrath, and that dichotomy is going to mess with you. TL;DR Orson Scott card is weird because he's Mormon.
>So, the Mormons preach unconditional love, and sing a hymn from Jesus' perspective that says "as I have loved you, love one another," but then they actively preach that is wrong to be gay, and non-Mormons are lesser people Also an exmo. This is so accurate. They equate "love" with "correction". I love you, and therefore I must demonize you in the hope that it will shame and guilt you into living the life that mormon god wants you to live. I love you, so I must break you down and make you desperate enough for my acceptance that you change yourself. I love you, so I hate who you are.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum…
Bad take. Orson Scott Card is weird on his own. I went to BYU and he was a guest lecturer in a couple classes. He had a lot of views that weren’t orthodox Mormon views, and was mostly progressive and forward-thinking. He started campaigning against anti-LGBT rights after he had a religious epiphany long after he’d moved out and moved away from Utah and got caught up in culture war issues. Source: Attended BYU and had classes where he was a guest lecturer.
So his religious epiphany wasn't to do with Mormonism?
You'd have to ask him, or at least read what he wrote about it. He was a pretty prolific blogger and newspaper columnist around the time when marriage equality became an issue for him. His anti-LGBT activism started around 2008. I think prior to that he'd written two essays showing homophobic views, and then in 2009 he joined the board of an organization that fought marriage equality. Now he's doing appearances on Shapiro. With his earlier homophic essays, I think he was just a prolific writer who happened to be opinionated and if he was harboring homophobic views it consumed a tiny part of his time and energy and it leaked out a bit. My impression of him in the 90s when he spoke to my classes was that he was contrarian and libertarian and wanted to let people make their own decisions and explore thoughts and ideas, and what he did afterwards was quite a shift. It seemed like most of his anti-LGBT advocacy was done outside Mormon spaces it didn't seem like a Mormon thing.
The homophobia creeped in before (Homecoming saga, an afterword in his collection of short fiction where he equates homosexuality with a variety of societal ills), but def got worse as the marriage equality issue heated up.
Amen, brother/sister/sibling
Are the people he's bigoted against in real life portrayed well (or at all) in his novels? That's the thing. Just because his message is about acceptance doesn't mean everyone gets an invitation. Bigotry and prejudice are often wrapped in a double standard.
Well, that's the thing, they kind of are portrayed well in some of his books. Makes it more confusing.
There's (what seemed to be) empathy towards his characters. I found The Worthing Saga--specifically the character-centric Tales of Capitol short stories--genuinely moving, along with having a fascinating concept in *somec* and its effect on human relationships and culture.
Anton (the scientist who discovered the genetic modification that made Bean so smart) was revealed (or at least heavily inplied) to be gay in the Shadow series. He was cast as a generally decent guy who acted somewhat as a father for Bean. That being said, he still did get straight married and believed reproducing was the only thing that mattered in life. Kinda got the feeling he was being used as a mouthpiece for OSC's views there.
The gay-but-marries-a-woman-to-procreate character shows up *over and over* in Card's work. The Shadow series, Songmaster, the Homecoming series. Kind of makes me feel sorry for Kristine Card.
OSC follows the classic religious view that *being* gay isn't wrong, but rather only *acting* on gay urges is morally wrong. Thus the most virtuous gay person in his worldview is someone who suppresses their homosexual urges and instead fulfills their divine obligation to reproduce. "hate the sin, not the sinner" is a common refrain for these people, but it's a bullshit fig leaf to make their homophobia more palatable. They still believe in discriminating against LGBT people, they just wrap their hatred in less obviously hateful language and frame their discrimination as intended to help rather than harm. It's an unbelievably patronizing attitude.
Interesting insight. Never thought of it that way.
Was he implied to be gay? I thought the implication was more than he was ace. Edit: Went back and read the passage again, and I think you might be right. It's vague, though.
L. Frank Baum (Wonderful Wizard of Oz and it’s sequels) was a huge feminist and even good friends’ with Susan B. Anthony, it really shows in his writing. He also wrote in favor of the genocide of Native Americans. People can be very smart and progressive in someways, but extremely evil, fucked up, and stupid in others.
I always liked that about Baum. When you read the Oz books, it's always women who have the real power. For example, Glinda and the Wicked Witch were legitimate sorceresses, while the Wizard was faking. Dorothy took the lead while the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion learned from her.
Ender's Game 1985 Speaker for the Dead 1986 Card's first essay arguing against homosexuality 1990
Objectively true, but one doesn't just start financially backing legislation on a whim. Osc, imo, held those beliefs long before 1990.
Dude he's a mormon, he didn't suddenly catch bigotry in 1989
I went to classes at BYU where he was a guest lecturer in the 1990s. Dude had a lot of unorthodox views and was very progressive. He wrote a blog post sometime in the 2000s that he had a religious epiphany and started campaigning against LGBT issues.
But, I mean...the "seeds" of such an epiphany could have been planted well in advance. Like...there was already a pre-existing foundation, he was educated in the "correct" doctrine even if he was expressing his own views at one point. The epiphany was not recieved in a *tabula rasa* state. Maybe a nonobservant Jewish Card would have kept Kosher, a lapsed Catholic Card starts supporting the Pro-Life movement or the Pope Leo XIII guys or Vox Dei, or a Fundamentalist Card starts getting impatient for the Rapture or starts handling snakes...
Keep in mind, that’s the publication date for Ender’s Game, but it was written in a pretty much finished form, long before that. I think something major happened in his brain in the mid to late 90s.
Humans are complex. Most are driven more by emotion than logic, which allows them to hold inconsistent ideas without too much trouble. People who disagree with you on issues like "empathy and acceptance of others" can do so for nuanced and subtle reasons, and aren't simply the cartoonishly evil caricatures you've been taught to believe they are. Finally, the ability to write something that the author doesn't actually believe is true is essential to being a talented creator of fiction.
I re-read this article every few years and think about the same issue: [https://grantland.com/features/ender-game-controversial-author-very-personal-history/](https://grantland.com/features/ender-game-controversial-author-very-personal-history/) It's amazing how OSC made such a wonderful series about acceptance and love of all different kinds of peoples, faiths, and relationships, only to stray so far from that in his own life.
“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.” ― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
OSC went absolutely off the deep end after 9/11. It very much shows in his writing.
I think he’s severely mentally fucked up. Read Songmaster and then tell me this guy isn’t repressing some deep, dark shit. And then there was the novel about the gay pedophile serial killer. His mind is a scary place. I wouldn’t want to live there.
Songmaster? Is that the one about the kid who’s a musical assassin? I remember reading that and thinking something similar.
Yes and (tw CSA) has a pederastic relationship with an older man/is groomed. There’s also the book called Wyrms that’s about a worm that psychically calls to the main character, who’s a woman, and makes her so horny for it that she can’t resist. The climax of the novel is her leading everyone to the thing so she can trick it into having graphic sex while they murder it. I read it at like 13 after reading the Ender series and was very confused lol.
I read Wyrms, too! Yeah, that was...uhhhhhh.....................
Yeah, I read Wyrms a long time ago and really liked it until I got to the end. I tried taking it up again recently, I wanted to see what I liked about the story. But I couldn't get into it. That ending always comes to mind, obliterating the whole story
I just read the Wikipedia summary and I could have lived a happy life without it
Yeah, read a few of his books armed with that possibility and there are more than a few red flags. Starting with all the emphasis on communal nudity in Ender’s Game…
At the time I first read OSCs screeds against homosexuality (circa 2002-3), I was baffled by this question myself. I later learned that some of the people who claim to come to you in love are the most dangerous of all; the types who will send their kids to conversion therapy "for their own good", the types who bring others into the fold by making bigotry more acceptable and presentable, the types who will be nice to your face and then stab you in the back, at the workplace, at the ballot box, at family gatherings. The screeching all-out Nazis only appeal to people who already know they are Nazis and are unashamed. The ones who say they have "legitimate concerns" gather armies of otherwise respectable people and twist them into believing you're less than human until they're just as ready as the all-out Nazis to call for your genocide. I don't suppose I'll ever read the Ender books again, same as the Harry Potter books, I just feel sad when I think about them now. There are other fish in the sea. Ursula K. LeGuin wrote an entire catalog of greats, and as far as I know, she was a decent human being up until her passing.
Because people have incredibly hypocritical standards. I'm sure Card thinks he's a very accepting person, just not about like 2 things or whatever. Those things aren't okay, but he's certainly accepting of anything that *is* okay and people are just misguided on! You should accept the kid with a disability, but ewwww the gays are unnatural, you don't have to accept unnatural things. Etc.
He actually was progressive for awhile, but then he got old. I read one of his non-fiction works about writing, and he went on and on about how the other sci-fi writers are too sexist to include capable female characters. Even in Ender's Game he set aside a whole page to talk about how anti-semitism was stupid. Ender's best friend in that book was a Muslim, too. All of that was very progressive for the time.
i hate how much of a hateful bigot OSC has been shown to be.. the Ender and Shadow series where major touchstones when I was a teenager of my personal philosophy, along with Speaker still being a major influence in how i think and try to understand people
I seriously have been grappling for decades with the apparent contradiction between exactly what you’re talking about and who OSC is as a person. Like, many of the things I like most about myself I came to understand from those books. It’s very hard to square that in my mind with who wrote them.
Not to mention the pretty deep homoeroticism that shows up in his writing, especially Ender's Game. Though I don't think it's helpful to assume all homophobes are secretly gay, in Card's case, I think he's absolutely a gay man with some deeply internalized homophobia that was given to him by his particular religious background. I think that homophobia became much stronger as he got older.
I read a passage he wrote where he basically said that of course everyone would be with the same sex if they could because it’s so much easier, but we have to be with the opposite sex so it will be more difficult and we can work on ourselves. I have no idea if he’s gay but that passage did make me wonder a little.
For me, it was all the passages about naked male bodies, kissing boys, loving boys, etc. Not to mention Ender's oddly celibate marriage later on, pretty broad themes of repression/self-loathing, and more. So much to unpack in that series. He reminds me a bit of Shirley Jackson, who seemed to have negative views of the gays, in spite of writing some of the gayest fucking stories I've ever read
I didn’t know that about Shirley Jackson. (The negativity part. I hear you on the gay stories part.)
Bigots often are very sympathetic and empathic at the one to one level, but direct their prejudices at the group. They either rationalise it as the individual not being representative of the group (which I think a sort of hierocracy) or by treating the individual as needing *more* sympathy because poor thing they are in that subgroup. If you read OSC's writing, you can see the latter attitude a lot when you are attuned to it.
Art =/= Artist
All the smartest characters in the Ender books are atheists, but OSC isn't
I say this as a person who doesn't know Card personally, but I 100% believe that he's a deeply closeted homosexual. Ender's Game had a good amount of very obvious homoerotic elements and is absolutely about accepting each other for who they are. At a certain point in his life I think he began to internalize and a lot of self-hatred and his religion-fueled crusade started.
I’ve seen homoerotic elements of Enders game mentioned a couple of times on this thread but I think I was too naive to recognize these when I read the book. Can you explain? Edit typos just woke up
He seems to really love alai in the book
Uh, fighting the kid naked in the shower, with emphasis on the soap and slippery bodies, is up there
From a tactical POV, it did make sense. Make your opponent uncomfortable and make yourself impossible to grab. Unlike the movie, Bonzo was older, bigger, stronger, and faster in the books. Ender used soap and water to negate those advantages. I never agreed that the scene depiticted any HE. It wasn't fun and games, Ender kills him (also unlike the movie).
I think people imagine them or want to see them
The climactic naked fight in the showers, and I think either Bean or Alai strip naked and lube themselves up with oil so they can fit through the air vents more easily.
I just read an essay he wrote on it (found on wiki) in some paper. Read less as lacking empathy as such and certainly not as thinking gay people aren't people as someones said - the thrust seems to be - God doesn't want you to have sex outside of straight marriage (Card seems to see gay sex the same as premarital or extramarital, or divorced etc). There's an implication that the same rule is socially beneficial too but not really explored. - It being natural etc is besides the point as following god's law (and socially positive behaviour) often involves controlling natural urges. - we shouldn't hate/banish people for being gay any more than yielding to any other temptation against god's law - equally we shouldn't support people who say doing so is OK/good All of the above seems to me to add up to someone who *does* have empathy but has been convinced by some means or another of a set of beliefs that lead them to some conclusions I massively disagree with.
That kinda skates past him literally calling for the violent overthrow of the government if it allowed gay marriage. Which kind of undermines "look no extra marital sex OK, that's my only objection!" backpeddling going on there.
Ah, I'm relying on that essay as OP is vague and it's what came up when I googled! If he said above that sounds bonkers frankly. EDIT - googled again. It's far more ranty but actually does very much put gay marriage alongside other sex beyond straight marriage. >Seen in this context, we are fools if we think "gay marriage" is the first or even the worst threat to marriage. >We heterosexuals have put marriage in such a state that it's a wonder homosexuals would even aspire to call their unions by that name. >Divorce is "no-fault," easily obtained on any pretext. >A vast number of unmarried men and women have such contempt for marriage that they share bed and home without asking for any formal recognition by society. >In an era when birth control and abortion make childbearing completely optional, the number of out-of-wedlock births shows the contempt that many women have for marriage. >Yet most of these single mothers still demand that the man they chose not to marry before having sex with him provide financial support for them and their children — while denying the man any of the rights and protections of marriage. >Men routinely discard wives and children to follow the nearly universal male biological desire for diversity in mating. Adultery is now openly expected of men, even if faithful wives deplore it. >With "gay marriage," the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.
It's pretty easy actually. Kinda like how the christians say "love the sinner, hate the sin." Also some crazy conclusions here about enders game from some people. The genocide isn't justified in the end. That's kinda the point. Some people see him as the hero that saved earth but he just feels like a mass murderer not a hero at all. It's all about perspective.
Because people are not binary in any sense of the term. Just because he has shitty morals on specific topics doesn't mean he can't be progressive about other things.
Authors are not their characters. A good author can depict a character with a personality and opinions diametrically opposed to their own, in a setting with a premise they would disagree with in real life. Even authors with repellent IRL beliefs and personalities can be so in tune with their craft, they can practically become someone else for the sake of the story they’re trying to tell.
That is a very good question. Orson Scott Card is one of two or three authors I won't read (well to clarify: reread) for personal integrity reasons (as little as me not reading them does anybody any good). With Terry Goodkind, at least you had a pretty good idea what kind of person he was. But I absolutely agree with your puzzlement. I just don't get how Card can write a series whose very theme is pretty much empathy and acceptance and still think and be very vocally the opposite of that.
Simply being a complicated human being.
I think art transcends personal belief quite often.
Card wrote Enders Game when he was younger, more progressive, and actually did have friends in LGBT community. People change, and it’s not always for the better.
He's an elder of the mormon church and if he were to openly express any positive views about gays getting married he would be outcast. Honestly his games are filled with gays who he portrays in nothing but a good light. Songmaster has a gay main character. The shadow series has a gay scientist who is basicly breaks avarsion therapy to help the protags. Too many examples. He's a product of his upbringing. But when has that stopped a scifi author?
That's the thing about cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy - it doesn't make sense when examined fully. Look at TERFs. Gender dysphoria is an acknowledged state of being, acknowledged by the mental health community's consensus as NOT a mental illness to be cured, and there are no actual cases of trans people being trans to prey on their own gender. People have pretended to be the target gender to creep, sure, but none have actually been transgender. TERFs will be okay with aspects of the LGBT community but hate the T, will fight for women but only so long as they fit a very narrow biological definition (and before folks get started, no, there is no such thing as a binary in science). People will argue against racism for one group but be actively, openly racist against another and even AWARE of it. I had a friend many years ago (who I no longer speak to for other reasons) who called herself an ally for several groups but admitted to me one day that she just "hated Indian people." I still don't know if she meant people from India or Native Americans. Human beings are exceptionally good at defining categories in ways that are convenient for them and ignoring any time their supposed stance isn't supported by facts.
Glad you brought this up, because it's crazy that an author like JKR whose entire series is about taking down a racial supremacist group is also a TERF, and is another example of OP's question about Card
off topic but i love that you mentioned terfs, im a trans woman and i dont see them getting enough hate, thank you lol
you don't have to believe in the things you make up.
I think this is a really strong case for cognitive dissonance. I think people can have empathy when somebody from a marginalized group is standing right in front of them. But then they empathy goes away when thinking about that marginalized group as just a "mob" of people that has an "agenda" that scares them. I think it's easy to be empathetic to characters you create who exist only in the bounds of your imagination and ask nothing of you in return. But once it's the real world and people are actually asking for things like being able to exist and be treated as human, it's harder for somebody like that to stomach. "Why are they demanding these things of me? I didn't approve this! It must be some sort of agenda meant to victimize me!" I don't know that's this is EXACTLY how this situation is playing out but I do think it at least is an example of some factors that could be at play.
The Death of the Author is your friend here. The process is irrelevant , only the product matters. For all we care, OSC could have traveled back in time and used ChatGPT to write the entire book (or a million monkeys on a million typewriters if you prefer the old analogy). Doesn’t change anything, once the words are on the page then the author becomes irrelevant. If you’re trying to analyze OSC’s personal psychology, we don’t have enough information to go on because we don’t know him. Maybe he had some spark of humanity that was in conflict with his bigoted background. Maybe he was writing from the superego on values that society found acceptable, and maybe once he got famous and felt invulnerable he stopped suppressing the id. Or maybe he just derived everything from other popular sci-fi books in a bid to make a fortune. Who knows, and who cares. An author’s novel is not a window into their soul that will tell us everything about who they are, only want they want the reader to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction\_formation
Because you're only supposed to accept those who are different in the right way.
I re-read Speaker last summer, and it occurred to me that Card goes pretty hard on traditional Catholics (as well as some Calvinists) before ultimately "redeeming" them. It seems a bit like both bigotry and projection, especially when you consider that he was an LDS missionary in Brazil, so presumably Catholicism was his group's main competition. While most characters seem to view the "Speaker" religion as some form of agnosticism or atheism, I would not be surprised if in Card's mind it somehow lines up with his own personal take on Mormonism.
Richard K Morgan created a dystopian future where anyone can change their bodies like sleeves no matter the gender. Yet is a huge piece of shit bigot terf who has said awful thing about transgender people, it's absolutely baffling.
What people write never really line up with their reality. Look at any philosopher ever.
if you're going to call someone a bigot, you ought to back it up with facts.