Ender's Game By John Kussell

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game was published in 1985 and brought about many opinions and views. One such opinion turned into an essay by a person named John Kessel, who published Creating the Innocent Killer in Foundation, The International Review of Science Fiction in 2004. John Kessel detailed how Card created Ender for the purpose of garnering the audience’s sympathy to distract them from Ender’s bad deeds. But Kessel’s argument provides many facts and statistics from different qualified people, so whether people agree with him or not, he makes several true points and arguments that nobody can disagree with.
Firstly, Kessel’s essay opens with a quote by Mr. Card himself, followed by Kessel explaining how he would nuke his old high school,

These sources included Elaine Radford, Alice Miller, GraceAnne and Keith DeCandido, and Kate Bonin. Radford’s point was that Ender and Hitler were very similar, as they had many similarities. Miller is a psychologist who writes and speaks out about child abuse and how it can affect one’s psyche. Kessel uses this psychologist’s research and reasoning to prove his point that Ender was just used as something to beat up to make the audience feel sympathy for him; so when he did something bad, the audience would remember that he was abused by almost everyone he knew, and almost immediately forgive and forget. Whether he knew it or not, Ender was affected by his abuse, causing his outbursts of violence to be more extreme than they should be for a kid his age. Ender’s anger usually came in the form of “cold” anger, meaning he could use it to his advantage. When Ender learned he could exploit his anger for good, he decided that, “.... with that anger… he was strong enough to defeat them…his enemies “ ( 172). When all the pressure around Ender built up and finally came out, it was after he found out he had killed the buggers, and he had slept for “five days of the league war” (300). Ender has had smaller outbursts and reactions before this, but sleeping for five days while a post bugger-killing war is going on shows that he was really affected by his act of