Two problems I had with EiE (may be spoilers)

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Two problems I had with EiE (may be spoilers)

Postby Hegemon7786 » Sun Jan 25, 2009 1:23 am

First off, I haven't been on this website in a long time. A REALLY long time. I do, however, vaguely remember being offered lime-aide when I first posted.

Anyway...

There are two problems I had with the book. One was the characterization of Dorabella. She seemed to be the triumphant, loving mother one moment and then the spitting, cursing witch the next. The other was the space travel...egg...thing. I don't know, it just seemed...silly.

Am I missing something?

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Postby wigginboy » Sun Jan 25, 2009 8:53 pm

Dorabella was likely afflicted with bipolar disorder, otherwise known as manic depressive disorder. People who have this disorder are prone to periods of mania in which they are happy, optimistic, have a great outlook, feel like they can do anything. These manic periods are followed by periods of depression in which the afflicted person becomes irritable, fatigued and very down on themselves and others. I imagine OSC wrote her character to be this way without actually coming out and saying it. Too much information leads readers to expect too much.

As for the egg, we know that space travel at near relativistic speeds was taken from the Buggers. OSC needed some way to resolve this issue as he had not delved much into it beofre. As well, he needed to resolve the way in which the ships traveling that fast would avoid space debris. the egg provided a way for near-lightspeed travel and a way for the ships traveling that fast to displace what was in front of them.

One thing that I had hoped would be eleborated on more is the Park Shift, talked about in one tiny little portion of Speaker. Ender noted internally that no one knew how the Park Shift worked and that it felt to him like every time it was performed, a star blinked out of existence. Does this Park Shift have anything to do with the egg? And if so why couldn't OSC explain both at once?

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Postby elfprince13 » Sun Jan 25, 2009 10:07 pm

I actually liked the "Egg" as it offered a reasonable (by sci-fi standards) explanation for both the Little Doctor, and space travel at relativistic speeds.
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Postby margeman2k3 » Sat Feb 21, 2009 12:34 am

Does this Park Shift have anything to do with the egg? And if so why couldn't OSC explain both at once?
We only hear about the park shift in Speaker, so it probably wasn't called that yet.
It's a bit hard to explain something that (effectively) doesn't exist at that point.

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Postby wigginboy » Sat Feb 21, 2009 3:21 am

If it is called the Park Shift, in capitals, it is obviously named after someone, likely the person who discovered it. I would gather that if the 'egg' is the driving force behind the technology, the technology would have to have been discovered by someone named Park to have been called the Park Shift. If the egg was discovered and its power harnessed before the journey to the first colony then whomever Park is would have to have discovered the Park Shift around that time. So at the time of Speaker, the reference to said maneuver would be simply rote. My guess is that OSC just forgot about it as it has been over 20 years between Speaker and EiE.

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Postby Jeesh_girl15 » Wed Apr 15, 2009 6:41 pm

What the heck was the "Egg"?
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Postby margeman2k3 » Wed Apr 15, 2009 9:32 pm

I just finished reading Speaker again, and there is a major difference between the Park Shift and the egg.

The egg is used to gradually bring the ship up to near-light speed, the keyword being gradual.
The Park Shift uses the Park Instantaniety (sp?) Principle to function, which as the name suggests, probably brings the ship to near-light speeds instantly.

Anyways, the Park Shift may be an extension of the egg, but it is a distinct piece of technology.

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Postby Bean_wannabe » Fri Apr 17, 2009 1:39 am

Yes - from my understanding the Park Shift was not developed until much after the first few colonies. That's why Ender takes 2 years from his perspective to get to Shakespeare but only 2 weeks to get to Lusitania.

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Postby Gov%ShakespeareCol » Sat Apr 18, 2009 3:37 pm

What the heck was the "Egg"?
We are discussing the book Ender in Exile. It is (to my knowledge) the newest addition to the EnderVerse. It was published November of last year. The Egg is discussed in Chapter 4 when the captain of Ender's colony ship is giving him a tour and explaining how humanity developed interstellar travel.

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Postby Eskarina » Sun Apr 19, 2009 10:55 am

Re the characterization of Dorabella, I haven't thought of it, while reading the book, as bipolar disorder as was suggested, but close enough.

I rather thought of her being taken down by years of maternal abuse that it's worn out her lines of treating her own daughter, and as her daughter was probably her only real companion for most of the time, she was rather socially frustrated. Plus, not having any *other* space for training her sociability.

Later on, she is offered that chance aboard the ship. It's understandable she doesn't know what to do with the suddenly acquired 'freedom'. So she attempts to manipulate the people around her.

In a way, by doing so, she might have felt more secure about her own being. The reacting models of the people surrounding her would get judged by the standards she *has known* already. I can see how talking herself into 'things are going according to my scheme of things' might have happened, there.

After all, if she engages people in situations she herself has *set*, she could think she's the puppeter behind the act as well, not really seeing all she could have set was *solely* the settings and not the full act.

Not the way the people would play it in the end. I thought of that drama play of her as a kind of metaphor to her overall sense of treating people and some deeper aspect of her life.

To some degree, in my view, she couldn't play fair, or not entirely, because a] she hadn't known that sort of treatment b] even if she had imagined it right, she wouldn't be able to implement it within new structures because c] she was already working on getting back her set ways, not enabling her to get out of it.

If I think of her as a spider, her only option was to build new web, but she could have gone without fetching smaller animals into it, still... Yet, it hadn't crossed her thoughts, and once she started again with fetching, there was no way to stop it, as she was back on the track of usual behavior. Just so much missed the period her mind have had a chance to be flexible and change.

Finally she finds out not even her daughter takes her restrictions seriously. Kind of a fly that won't ever return to the web. She breaks because her own space didn't expand as planned and she is again left alone with depending just on *one* person. So similar to all the years of dependance on her grandmother, only the figure shifted. Another moot point for her already conflicted emotions.

I think she *has* realized it by that point, and her expressions of how ungrateful bitch her daughter really is might have been a good deal of anger her daughter had spotted the fix of the problem sooner than she has, and used it for an escape. A kind of nervous break down, if you will, just the reader couldn't have seen how that personal conflict continued and whether she snapped out of it or not.

It, her condition of whole the time, of course, could have been being bipolar. Chronic trauma reactions might have triggered it of all things if there wasn't already genetic predisposition (looking at her own mother, not knowing more on the father's side).

A thought it might have been being a sufferer from borderline personality disorder also crossed my mind. It's hard to tell which one it could be if we aren't provided more medical background for that character, only the social presentation clues.

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Last edited by Eskarina on Sun Apr 19, 2009 11:17 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Postby chromesthesia » Sun Apr 19, 2009 5:48 pm

I have so many problems with that book that folks will stone me with tomatoes over it.
First of all, it wasn't needed. I wasn't interested in most of the new characters, not Dorabella who went from defending her daughter to wailing on her. All I could do is feel bad for Dorabella and the captain's future kids. One guy wails on a teenage boy, the other forces her daughter to seduce said teenage boy and than wails on her. What a lovely family they will have!
All of the nagging and lecturing took away from the plot. There WAS no plot, just OSC taking over characters to nag about marriage and children and monogamy. I couldn't understand why anyone would want to live on that colony what with the lottery and all.

But it mostly annoys me OSC wanting to rewrite Ender's Game because of it when it's fine and good the way it is..... args!

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Postby Gov%ShakespeareCol » Wed Apr 22, 2009 1:28 pm

I didn't perceive Dorabella as a conflicted character at all. To me, she is never a "triumphant, loving mother." She is only ever a miserable person who pretends to be happy with such effort that her daughter gets sick of it. Keeping the grandmother(Isabella?) away from Alessandra is never really about what's best for her daughter, it's motivated purely by hatred for Isabella. Maybe it eventually gets to the point that it really is bad for Alessandra to be around Isabella because Isabella is so filled with hate for Dorabella, but would that have been true if Dorabella hadn't been so distant from her for so long?

The only reason we never see how manipulative Dorabella is before getting on the colony ship is because in order to manipulate, one needs power. The only power that Dorabella has stems from her incredible skills in deception. In Italy, Dorabella is a pauper who can't use her influence to get anything for her or Alessandra. The only alternative she has to being miserable is using her deceit to try to create happiness out of nothing for her and her daughter, thus the fairy princess act. Once on the ship, however, everyone starts at the same baseline. Everyone has more or less nothing. This means that Dorabella's deceit is now much more useful. She is no longer fighting to climb up from under everyone else to try to get to equal terms. Now she can use her manipulation to maneuver ABOVE those around her. Unfortunately, the formerly easily ignored poor woman now becomes the unignorable ambitious woman who is willing to do anything to get into power. Dedicating all of her attention to this new found craving for absolute power, she forgets the fairy princess act that has been her facade for so long that Alessandra assumed it was who she really was.

She was never bi-polar or dichotomous in any way, she was just a liar--covering up who she really was.

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Postby Gov%ShakespeareCol » Wed Apr 22, 2009 1:35 pm

All of the nagging and lecturing took away from the plot. There WAS no plot, just OSC taking over characters to nag about marriage and children and monogamy.

:lol: :lol: :lol:

How exactly would you define plot? My dictionary calls it a sequence of events in a narrative. Sounds like it could be used to quite aptly describe EiE.

And he took over characters? Do you mind if I ask from whom he took them? Were they sentient before he co-opted there actions to make them into marionettes of monogamy?

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Postby locke » Wed Apr 22, 2009 1:51 pm

I didn't perceive Dorabella as a conflicted character at all. To me, she is never a "triumphant, loving mother." She is only ever a miserable person who pretends to be happy with such effort that her daughter gets sick of it. Keeping the grandmother(Isabella?) away from Alessandra is never really about what's best for her daughter, it's motivated purely by hatred for Isabella. Maybe it eventually gets to the point that it really is bad for Alessandra to be around Isabella because Isabella is so filled with hate for Dorabella, but would that have been true if Dorabella hadn't been so distant from her for so long?

The only reason we never see how manipulative Dorabella is before getting on the colony ship is because in order to manipulate, one needs power. The only power that Dorabella has stems from her incredible skills in deception. In Italy, Dorabella is a pauper who can't use her influence to get anything for her or Alessandra. The only alternative she has to being miserable is using her deceit to try to create happiness out of nothing for her and her daughter, thus the fairy princess act. Once on the ship, however, everyone starts at the same baseline. Everyone has more or less nothing. This means that Dorabella's deceit is now much more useful. She is no longer fighting to climb up from under everyone else to try to get to equal terms. Now she can use her manipulation to maneuver ABOVE those around her. Unfortunately, the formerly easily ignored poor woman now becomes the unignorable ambitious woman who is willing to do anything to get into power. Dedicating all of her attention to this new found craving for absolute power, she forgets the fairy princess act that has been her facade for so long that Alessandra assumed it was who she really was.

She was never bi-polar or dichotomous in any way, she was just a liar--covering up who she really was.
very nice take on Dorabella, enjoyed reading it and agree with you.
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Postby elfprince13 » Wed Apr 22, 2009 6:01 pm

But it mostly annoys me OSC wanting to rewrite Ender's Game because of it when it's fine and good the way it is..... args!
Which re-writing? He changed the name of...wait for it.....one planet, and named its primary settlement with the old name anyway. Or is there something else I'm forgetting?
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Postby neo-dragon » Wed Apr 22, 2009 7:49 pm

There WAS no plot, just OSC taking over characters to nag about marriage and children and monogamy. I couldn't understand why anyone would want to live on that colony what with the lottery and all.
Isn't it ironic that a Mormon keeps getting criticized for pushing monogamy in his books? :)

Yes, Card thinks it's really important to get married and have kids. Maybe even the most important thing that someone can do. Agree or disagree, there are certainly worse values that he could be promoting.

As for why people would want to go, the first generation was made up of the invasion force. They couldn't really head back to Earth after the war was won. Staying on to colonize was part of their mission. I think that by the time civilian volunteers like those that came with Ender got there the population was stable enough that the rigid mating rules could be relaxed. Even so, as Graff (I think) said in EG, there are always people who are desperate enough to start over in a new frontier that they'll face any hardship. That's why the ministry of colonization didn't even bother to do in depth background checks on candidates, beyond ensuring that they weren't serial killers or something.
Which re-writing? He changed the name of...wait for it.....one planet, and named its primary settlement with the old name anyway. Or is there something else I'm forgetting?
I think she's referring to his intention to revise the final chapter in future editions.
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Postby chromesthesia » Wed Apr 22, 2009 7:58 pm

But it mostly annoys me OSC wanting to rewrite Ender's Game because of it when it's fine and good the way it is..... args!
Which re-writing? He changed the name of...wait for it.....one planet, and named its primary settlement with the old name anyway. Or is there something else I'm forgetting?
I don't have the book right in front of me, but he said he's changing the last chapters of Ender's Game to reflect EiE, and there were some details changed that bugged me because it worked better in the original I thought.

There's nothing WRONG with monogamy. I'd like to get married in the future and have babies myself, but, lately, now more than ever in EVERY BOOK just about the whole ensemble of characters has to stop whatever they are doing and say, monogamy is best for the family and society.
It's starting to remind me a bit of Chinese propaganda films that talk about the evils of luxury or something like that.
And does EVERY single character have to have that same value except for the evil characters? I just find it hard to believe that everyone from Graff to that random scientist guy will all say the exact same thing as if they aren't distinct characters with their own opinions but just characters that are written to spout out OSC's point of view.
But it depends on how it's done I reckon. It's annoying when ANYONE does it to excess. It's like the cayenne pepper of sex scenes in Laurell K Hamilton's stuff, only in OSC's case it's the salt of Mormon values and I want to hide that box of salt from him just as I want to hide LKH's cayenne pepper because how much of that stuff do you need? It's on every two pages.
But I should just ignore it and switch to either the older books or something else so I don't get super annoyed. There's always American Gods, but I am an optimistic ultimately and really hoped I'd like this book, but it's a large percentage of the stop reading this book and get married and have babies hammer...

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Postby zeroguy » Wed Apr 22, 2009 10:49 pm

Yes, Card thinks it's really important to get married and have kids. Maybe even the most important thing that someone can do. Agree or disagree, there are certainly worse values that he could be promoting.
It's not whether it's good or bad values he's promoting, it's that said promotion starts to eclipse everything else.
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Postby neo-dragon » Thu Apr 23, 2009 8:29 am

Fair enough. It's just never really felt that way to me personally. Certainly not in E in E. I admit that he was laying it on a bit thick in "Shadow Puppets" though, when even a gay man was pressuring Bean to marry a woman and father children since he had done so himself. :?
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Postby ^Peter » Fri Apr 24, 2009 11:22 am

I just finished EiE roughly five minutes ago, so I can finally understand this thread :) .

I have noticed on my own that Card promotes monogamy. I think, Why not? except if you do pay attention to it, it comes up as a ''theme'' like the ones they make you learn in high school English. Does anyone want to think about school work when reading your favorite series?

What I liked about Exile, on a positive note, was how Ender recognized Bean's worth and spoke of Bean as a friend instead of a... well, bean I guess. And speaking of Bean: He wasn't in the story at all! I was hoping we would get some paragraphs at least telling about the progress of research on the giantism problem, or maybe even a chapter of what was happening on Bean's and his children's ship.

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Postby Jeesh_girl15 » Fri Apr 24, 2009 3:25 pm

Ooooh, that Egg.

I reread EiE, and I think the egg was kinda weird, though I agree with Eflprince13 that the Egg offered a reasonable explanation for the M.D. and space travel.
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Postby neo-dragon » Fri Apr 24, 2009 4:26 pm

And speaking of Bean: He wasn't in the story at all! I was hoping we would get some paragraphs at least telling about the progress of research on the giantism problem, or maybe even a chapter of what was happening on Bean's and his children's ship.
E in E is certainly not Bean's story, and while the closing chapters that dealt with the loose plot thread from SotG were some of my favourites in the book, I would have been pretty disappointed if OSC had horned in more elements of Bean's story in the first book actually about Ender in over a decade.
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Postby elfprince13 » Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:40 pm

I would have been pretty disappointed if OSC had horned in more elements of Bean's story in the first book actually about Ender in over a decade.
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Postby zeroguy » Fri Apr 24, 2009 11:39 pm

Fair enough. It's just never really felt that way to me personally. Certainly not in E in E.
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Postby locke » Sat Apr 25, 2009 2:34 am

is monogamy the right word here? I find it bizarre that every one of card's adult character's have attitudes towards sex that were outdated in Jane Austen's day and that the girls don't seem to be much interested in it (unless to use it to nefariously trap unsuspecting boys into marriage) and boys are always standoffish towards the prospect of the act, "sigh, yeah, I mean it might be fun and all, sigh, but geez, do we HAVE to do it, gosh, such a chore." as such its sort of a bizarre to read, and it becomes increasingly unrealistic and sort of desperate.

The shakespeare colony is another thing that bugs me. For one, I seriously doubt we'd have more men then women in the fleet. and two I wouldn't be surprised if there was a slight majority of women (52-55% perhaps) in ships where there was a contingency plan of settling conquered planets. Doing it Card's way makes about as much sense as instituting population controls during a war. ;)
It's starting to remind me a bit of Chinese propaganda films that talk about the evils of luxury or something like that.
Oh, wow, you are awesome. Now every time I think of Ender in Exile I'm going to think of Two Stage Sisters. Nice.
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Postby Gov%ShakespeareCol » Sat Apr 25, 2009 7:28 am

It may be because I am a man in love and not a slave to my hormones, but I thought that the "get married and have kids" theme was quite nice. If you'll recall, it started back in CoTM, when Olhado and Ender are discussing Olhado's only goals in life being related to raising his family. That was one of my favorite parts of the Speaker series. To me, the message isn't so much one of monogamy as it is biologically justified love. OSC is suggesting that our propensity for marriage, in addition to being a beautiful part of what makes us human, may also be derived from a biological desire to contribute to human genetic drift.

Granted, Anton getting married and struggling to naturally conceive the child was a bit preachy, but I have to admit, I grinned when he seemed so proud of himself.
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Do you know why you read books with motifs in school? Because that is the mark of a writer who is talented enough to not only tell stories, but to weave morals and purposes into those stories. If you've not read a single book for pleasure that had any motifs in them, I recommend it. You tend to get more out of them than you would get out of what my friend at the book store calls "And then" books.
I find it bizarre that every one of card's adult character's have attitudes towards sex that were outdated in Jane Austen's day
Is waiting to get married to have sex really an idea that was outdated in Jane Austen's day? (I'm not on Orson's side of this particular issue, but there are throngs of Americans who are.) The characters in this universe are not puritanical about sex--once they are married. John Paul and Theresa Wiggin openly and jokingly discuss their love-making with Peter when they are briefly hiding out in Ellis Island (Battle School).
and boys are always standoffish towards the prospect of the act, "sigh, yeah, I mean it might be fun and all, sigh, but geez, do we HAVE to do it, gosh, such a chore." as such its sort of a bizarre to read, and it becomes increasingly unrealistic and sort of desperate.
It's been a while since I've read them, but this isn't at all how I remember it. I seem to remember Ender's encounter with Alessandra causing him to physically ache with desire. And when Virlomi presented herself to Alai, I thought I remembered a specific description of how intensely his desire flared. If I recall, there was even a description of how much Bean and Petra reveled in their first time together, not to mention that kissing in the park in Poland scene (are there scenes in a book?).

I think the Battle School kids resist sexual situations not because they don't desire them, but because they are so intelligent that they realize that in most cases, sex is distracting. I imagine it's a microcosm of monks who have been celibate for so long that they simply no longer think about sex. These kids realize that if they indulge in sexual desires during the throes of puberty, they may become very distracted and unable to accomplish the tasks before them. This isn't a life philosophy I would recommend for most teenagers (the exploratory times of puberty are a very important time of sexual maturation in my opinion), but most pubescent teenagers don't make daily decisions that affect the state of war in the entire world.

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Postby neo-dragon » Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:39 pm

The shakespeare colony is another thing that bugs me. For one, I seriously doubt we'd have more men then women in the fleet. and two I wouldn't be surprised if there was a slight majority of women (52-55% perhaps) in ships where there was a contingency plan of settling conquered planets. Doing it Card's way makes about as much sense as instituting population controls during a war. ;)
What's the ratio of men to women in real life armed forces? Why would you expect there to be a female majority in the I.F.? Yeah, they planned to establish colonies on worlds that they captured, but first and foremost they had to capture them. They could always ship in a bunch of fertile females with the first group of civilian colonists after the war was over, which is exactly what they did.
To me, the message isn't so much one of monogamy as it is biologically justified love. OSC is suggesting that our propensity for marriage, in addition to being a beautiful part of what makes us human, may also be derived from a biological desire to contribute to human genetic drift.
I agree. As I've discussed in another thread, love, marriage, romance, etc. is genetically hardwired into us to ensure genetic continuity. Perhaps Card's frequent insistence that people are generally made happy by getting married and having babies doesn't seem so preachy to me because I don't think of it as him pushing his religious and personal views on the reader, it's more like acknowledging how even current social practices are products of millennia of evolution.
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Postby chromesthesia » Sat Apr 25, 2009 3:24 pm

I hate that evolutionary psychology stuff. People are so much more complicated than that. :?
Not every person WANTS to get married and have babies and not every man wants to chase skirt all day long.
That stuff doesn't make for interesting enough stories. Especially since he nags about it in every book these days. Which waters it down too much like Anita Blake pouncing on every guy in her Blake-verse.

but I really should try to ignore it and read something else. But it feels like he'll start having a preface that says, stop reading this book and get married and have 10 babies right now.

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Postby neo-dragon » Sat Apr 25, 2009 4:12 pm

Not every person WANTS to get married and have babies and not every man wants to chase skirt all day long.
That evolutionary psychology stuff is also so much more complicated than that.
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Postby Eskarina » Sun Apr 26, 2009 4:02 am

I didn't perceive Dorabella as a conflicted character at all. To me, she is never a "triumphant, loving mother." She is only ever a miserable person who pretends to be happy with such effort that her daughter gets sick of it. Keeping the grandmother(Isabella?) away from Alessandra is never really about what's best for her daughter, it's motivated purely by hatred for Isabella. Maybe it eventually gets to the point that it really is bad for Alessandra to be around Isabella because Isabella is so filled with hate for Dorabella, but would that have been true if Dorabella hadn't been so distant from her for so long?

The only reason we never see how manipulative Dorabella is before getting on the colony ship is because in order to manipulate, one needs power. The only power that Dorabella has stems from her incredible skills in deception. In Italy, Dorabella is a pauper who can't use her influence to get anything for her or Alessandra. The only alternative she has to being miserable is using her deceit to try to create happiness out of nothing for her and her daughter, thus the fairy princess act. Once on the ship, however, everyone starts at the same baseline. Everyone has more or less nothing. This means that Dorabella's deceit is now much more useful. She is no longer fighting to climb up from under everyone else to try to get to equal terms. Now she can use her manipulation to maneuver ABOVE those around her. Unfortunately, the formerly easily ignored poor woman now becomes the unignorable ambitious woman who is willing to do anything to get into power. Dedicating all of her attention to this new found craving for absolute power, she forgets the fairy princess act that has been her facade for so long that Alessandra assumed it was who she really was.

She was never bi-polar or dichotomous in any way, she was just a liar--covering up who she really was.
I don't see her as 'triumphant', nor saying she couldn't have been selfish, because she was one. But I doubt she didn't for a second consider well being of her daughter, even if she put her own interests before everyone else's.

She doesn't want happiness for her daughter as Alessandra may need it, but even with the insisting on Dorabella's version of 'happiness', it still is a kind of acting that may be considered caring, or a show of affection, love in some sort. I believe with Ender, Dorabella was primarily targeting him as her dreamed powerful boy. But I also think she might have honestly believed Alessandra will be happy with him, eventually, so it will be something Alessandra will be content about.

To the assessment of her motivation for pulling Alessandra away from the grandmother, I believe though you're quite right. At least there wasn't anything else than her own hate motivated revenge seeking I could see in that.

Edit, I am aware the post hadn't been addressed to me, I'm mostly following with thought on the points you have made. :wink:

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Postby Gov%ShakespeareCol » Sun Apr 26, 2009 10:07 pm

Not every person WANTS to get married and have babies
Humans are in a unique evolutionary position. We are the only creatures to have thrown off the shackles of natural environment. We no longer have to evolve to survive in the harsh natural world, because our environment is the culture in which we live. This means that survival-oriented evolution no longer dictates everything that we do. It would be equally foolish, however, to discard evolution as the cause of any of our behavior. Individuals may not all desire to get married, but human cultures all value marriage as a crucial part of their traditions. Doesn't the fact that every single known and studied human culture has some kind of "marriage"-like tradition indicate to you that maybe marriage is derived from part of what it meant to be human before culture was part of that definition?
What's the ratio of men to women in real life armed forces? Why would you expect there to be a female majority in the I.F.?
There was a line in the beginning of EG when Graff first comes to take Ender in which he says to Theresa,
Conscripts make good cannon fodder, but for officers we need volunteers.
Can we infer from this that the I.F. uses a draft for it's supply of enlisted soldiers? If so, the next question is, 'Are there any enlisted soldiers on the attack ships that were sent, or is it like Star Trek, in which every person on board an interplanetary vessel is an officer?' (I think, anyway. I don't watch a whole lot of Star Trek).

Now let's crown this house of cards. If there is a draft for the International Fleet, and If there are enlisted on the interplanetary attack vessels, then couldn't the I.F. have thought ahead and supplied each ship with enough female enlisted to make a colony work? Maybe. But it seems to me that even if there are draftees in service of the I.F., they wouldn't be very useful on a ship in any job that would require anything other than basic life skills (cooking, cleaning, etc.). After all, there probably isn't time to cover piloting starfighters in basic, and they certainly don't have the resources to be ferrying a bunch of people who aren't crucial to the operation of the ship. Not to mention, how cruel would it be to force someone to join military service against their will, and then force them to perform a mission that would guarantee never seeing or hearing from any of their loved ones again?

So: I think you're right Neo-dragon. I can't imagine a situation in which the female population of a war ship would be anywhere near 50%.

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Postby zeroguy » Sun Apr 26, 2009 11:35 pm

boys are always standoffish towards the prospect of the act, "sigh, yeah, I mean it might be fun and all, sigh, but geez, do we HAVE to do it, gosh, such a chore."
I haven't really gotten that impression. Miro, Libo, Olhado, and Jakt are counterexamples that come to mind for the Ender series. Or maybe OSC's just trying to say something about the brazilians and scandinavians...
Do you know why you read books with motifs in school? Because that is the mark of a writer who is talented enough to not only tell stories, but to weave morals and purposes into those stories.
wth? You read books with motifs in school because then you can analyze their effect on society and such.

And I'd say it'd take quite a skillful author that can write a large, significant work without such messages. It's difficult (or impossible) to remove your own agenda* from things you write.

* By which I of course mean giraffe.
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Postby Gov%ShakespeareCol » Mon Apr 27, 2009 12:12 am

wth? You read books with motifs in school because then you can analyze their effect on society and such.
I heartily disagree. But as this is pretty far off-topic, let's continue the discussion here: http://www.philoticweb.net/phpBB2/viewt ... 8565#58565

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Postby locke » Wed May 06, 2009 12:48 am

Is waiting to get married to have sex really an idea that was outdated in Jane Austen's day? (I'm not on Orson's side of this particular issue, but there are throngs of Americans who are.) The characters in this universe are not puritanical about sex--once they are married. John Paul and Theresa Wiggin openly and jokingly discuss their love-making with Peter when they are briefly hiding out in Ellis Island (Battle School).

It's not the waiting to get married to have sex part. it's the idea that sex only happens within marriage. and if it doesn't there are always dire consequences. Sex is not enjoyable for people who are not married in OSC's books, Sex outside of marriage is only a horrible emotionally fraught terrible choice. The dire consequences aspect is a fairly reliable puritan tradition in literature and film but that is not necessarily reflective of the reality. Saying Jane Austen's era is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but people were having sex outside of marriage then without the horrific consequences we associate with the literature of the period. Yeah there were bad consequences at the time, but by and large people have been f****** who and when they wanted to throughout history, and more often then not, I imagine, things did not turn out all that badly. Specifically, few men were waiting to get married to have sex in Jane Austen's day, although women with prospects were usually expected to wait, even then, one only has to look at the little sister in Pride and Prejudice who runs off with a soldier to see that women had an itch they needed to scratch pretty often, back in the day. I'm sort of rambling, but the point I want to make is that sex happened a lot, just as it has throughout most of human history.
What's the ratio of men to women in real life armed forces? Why would you expect there to be a female majority in the I.F.? Yeah, they planned to establish colonies on worlds that they captured, but first and foremost they had to capture them. They could always ship in a bunch of fertile females with the first group of civilian colonists after the war was over, which is exactly what they did.
Why would anyone expect the ratio of men-women in real life united states armed forces to have any bearing on a future interstellar fleet? To not recruit and conscript women heavily in a war such as this, when your contingency plan is to establish a colony, would be the height of foolishness. We have examples of universal conscription in our current world (Israel) I expect some variation of that would be used. Everyone has to apply for military service, those with aptitude are trained and selected and advanced into the fleet or shunted into support jobs, or dropped. (Were our own draft ever to be reinstated, I would expect there would be protests and an enormous effort to include women in the selective service, rather than having it be only men.) I've also always thought that the explanation for lack of girls in the Battle School was fairly BS, and not for politically correct reasons either, continuing the idea to the fleet makes even less sense, imo.
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

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Postby neo-dragon » Wed May 06, 2009 6:25 pm

What's the ratio of men to women in real life armed forces? Why would you expect there to be a female majority in the I.F.? Yeah, they planned to establish colonies on worlds that they captured, but first and foremost they had to capture them. They could always ship in a bunch of fertile females with the first group of civilian colonists after the war was over, which is exactly what they did.
Why would anyone expect the ratio of men-women in real life united states armed forces to have any bearing on a future interstellar fleet? To not recruit and conscript women heavily in a war such as this, when your contingency plan is to establish a colony, would be the height of foolishness. We have examples of universal conscription in our current world (Israel) I expect some variation of that would be used. Everyone has to apply for military service, those with aptitude are trained and selected and advanced into the fleet or shunted into support jobs, or dropped. (Were our own draft ever to be reinstated, I would expect there would be protests and an enormous effort to include women in the selective service, rather than having it be only men.) I've also always thought that the explanation for lack of girls in the Battle School was fairly BS, and not for politically correct reasons either, continuing the idea to the fleet makes even less sense, imo.
I don't recall there being one mention of the I.F. drafting anyone (with the special exception of Ender). They certainly couldn't send conscripts with the invasion. I'm not arguing that women can't be as good soldiers as men or that I.F. was against having women serve. I'm saying that not nearly as many women as men choose to join the military in real life, so I don't see why you would assume that this is different in the Enderverse.
"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."
- Frank Herbert's 'Dune'


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