Ender's Game

"The enemy's gate is down."

- Ender Wiggin

The book that put Orson Scott Card on the map, and remains his most famous work ever.

In the not-too-distant future, mankind has barely survived two invasions by an insectoid alien race, formally known as Formics, but called Buggers by most of the viewpoint characters. As the threat of a third invasion looms nigh, the world's most talented children are taken to an orbiting Battle School. There they study physics, mathematics, history, psychology, politics, and play a lot of games. And the biggest, best game of all is the Battle Room, where they organize into "armies" and play 41-on-41 zero-G laser tag as the adults look on, searching for future commanders against the incoming menace.

Enter Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, six-year old and third child of his family, a stigma due to the population restriction laws. He is the only one of his family to be accepted to the school, and so, leaving behind his parents, his loving sister Valentine, and his sadistic brother Peter, he leaves for Battle School... and things won't be at all easy.

The novel acted as a springboard for not one but two series, dealing with different time periods in the same canon. The first, consisting of A War of Gifts: An Ender Story, Ender in Exile, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind follow Ender in the far future and focus on worldbuilding combined with a major dose of morality. The second begins with Ender's Shadow, a retelling of Ender's Game from the viewpoint of Bean, one of his friends. The Shadow series then follows Bean in the Twenty More Minutes Into The Future Earth, consisting of Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, and Shadow of the Giant. The Shadow series--whose novels might accurately be described as Thrillers--is a more direct continuation of the original novel and its themes of war and politics (with Hegemon being described by its author as "a giant game of Risk"), and many more characters from the original book appear in it. There is also a short story collection called First Meetings. Marvel Comics is currently publishing comics adaptations of the books and Formic Wars series, which, according to Card, will be official prequel to the books.

The novels have been quite well-recieved, though not without their share of detractors; Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead in particular put Card in the Guinness Book of World Records as the only person to win both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award for best novel in two consecutive years.

A movie adaptation of Ender's Game has long been rumored, but was stuck in Development Hell for the longest time. However, the project finally saw movement in late 2011, with the announcement of a tentative production schedule and definitive cast: Asa Butterfield as Ender, Hailee Steinfeld as Petra, Abigail Breslin as Valentine, Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff and Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham. Oh, and the executive producers are Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the minds behind the Star Trek reboot. We're in for a ride...

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Ender's Game
""...I can't help it. I like the kid. I think we're going to screw him up."

"Of course we are. It's our job. We're the wicked witch. We promise gingerbread, but we eat the little bastards alive.""

""The humans have not forgiven us. We shall surely die.""
 * Action Girl: Petra. A great shot who has much to teach Ender early on, and who proves to be one of the most competent fighters throughout the book. She suffers a breakdown later by pushing herself too far, as a direct consequence of being so valuable to Ender.
 * Adaptation Expansion: The novel is this to the original short story. It gives Ender a family and elaborates on his life before he was sent to Battle School, and it provides details about the enemy aliens and the background of the war. In the short story, Ender has no memories of life before Battle School, and the aliens are never named or described.
 * Adults Are Useless: Justified as being part of Ender's Training From Hell. Alternatively, averted, as the adults are disturbingly good at what they do: making Ender's life suck.
 * Alas Poor Villain: Ender's combination of empathy and pragmatism leaves him constantly feeling this way. By extension, after Ender writes his book about the buggers, the whole of humanity experiences this toward them, to the extent that in the sequels, humanity considers Ender the villain for fighting them and his name is a taboo word.
 * Alternate History
 * And You Thought It Was a Game: In much of the later quarter of the novel, Ender and his friends.
 * Angst Coma: Ender enters one for a few days when  Justified in a number of ways: physical and mental exhaustion, the fact that he was trying to convince the military that he was a Complete Monster ethically unfit for command, and possibly
 * Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: The Buggers made this faulty assumption.
 * Arc Words: "The enemy's gate is down."
 * Asshole Victim: The time that we know don't really make us feel sorry that they're gone. Ender, however, still feels guilt over their deaths.
 * The Atoner: Ender at the conclusion of the original novel
 * The Buggers themselves

"Ender: In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them-..... I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist."
 * Badass Israeli: Invoked and subverted. There is a legend at Battle School that Jewish generals cannot lose; on the other hand, Rose "de Nose" of Rat Army is portrayed as not really being that great, and several characters make the point that despite an all-Jewish triumvirate (American Jewish Hegemon, Israeli Jewish Strategos, and Russian Jewish Polemarch), it was the half-Maori, entirely non-Jewish Mazer Rackham who drove off the Second Invasion.
 * Big Brother Bully: Peter, oh so very much.
 * Blessed With Suck: His ability to empathize with his enemy gives him what he needs to destroy them.

"Ender: It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn't fight with honor... I fought to win.
 * Bug War
 * The Chains of Commanding
 * Chekhov's Gun: In his first battle, the other army is able to pass through the gate even though Ender isn't frozen. In his last battle,
 * Chekhov MIA: Ender's surprise guest on Eros:
 * A Child Shall Lead Them: Invoked. The military commanders are searching for child prodigies specifically due to their lack of awareness of the larger picture, so they won't be subject to fatal hesitation.
 * Child Soldiers: Every Battle School participant joins under the age of 12.
 * Combat Pragmatist: Ender. There is NOTHING he won't do to win a fight and ensure it never happens again. He learned this lesson when he was five.

Bean: And you did. Kicked him right out of orbit."

"The humans have not forgiven us. We shall surely die."
 * Mazer Rackham reinforces the same lesson. War is about doing whatever you can to win. There are no rules except what you can do to your enemy and what you can stop him from doing to you. (Apparently there's no Geneva Convention in a war against aliens).
 * Common Tongue: Stark, an English-based language.
 * Derived from "STARways Kommon."
 * Curb Stomp Battle: Pretty much any battle Ender walks into. Nicely justified, since Ender was born and conditioned his entire life to be the best military commander humans have ever had.
 * Mazer Rackham had one of these as well: . The fact that he was the only human on Earth to figure out how to do this is why he was kept around to be Ender's teacher.
 * Deconstruction: Essentially this is the Neon Genesis Evangelion of Space Opera.
 * Plus it deconstructs the concept of the Boring Invincible Hero.
 * Despair Event Horizon: It's revealed at the end that the Bugger queens crossed it the moment they lost the first battle of the Third Invasion. Summed up succinctly by the thought:

"Ender: Be proud, Bonito, pretty boy. You can go home and tell your father, "Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen. And I had only six of my friends to help me, and somehow we managed to defeat him, even though he was naked and wet and alone - Ender Wiggin is so dangerous and terrifying it was all we could do not to bring two hundred.""
 * Disproportionate Retribution: Many examples from the original novel, specifically the outcome of the Third Invasion and Ender's retaliation when ambushed.
 * Dramatic Irony: Ender, one of the most compassionate people ever born, is a mass murderer. Peter, a sociopath, gave the human peace and unity. This is not lost on Ender.
 * Drill Sergeant Nasty: In general, the teachers in Battle School are this. Ender is Genre Savvy with regard to this trope, except that his instructors take it much farther than the TV shows he's familiar with.
 * Graff also subverts this. One purpose of the Drill Sergeant Nasty is to give the recruits a common adversary: they all hate him, and it draws them together into a team. He picks on someone so the rest will sympathize with him. Graff, on the other hand, tells the rest of the recruits that Ender is the greatest soldier ever, and none of them have a prayer of measuring up to him. This turns them against Ender and isolates him, forcing him to develop the leadership and command abilities they need from him.
 * Earthshattering Kaboom: The MD Device actually causes an Earth Dissolving Kaboom, but considering a single firing will wipe out a planet, this qualifies.
 * Eating Lunch Alone: Ender at the beginning of his time at Battle School.
 * Expanded Universe: Launched with Formic Wars - first Ender-related comics that is not an adaptation, but official prequel.
 * Faster Than Light Travel: Subverted; ships can travel at significant fractions of the speed of light, but relativity means that going to the nearest star is still a one-way trip decades into the future.
 * However, secretly,
 * Played straight.
 * There also appears to be some confusion with the relativistic travel. In Speaker for the Dead, the Park Shift is mentioned, which allows a ship to go from standing still (relatively-speaking) to near-light speeds in an instant with almost no energy drain. In Children of the Mind, the Lusitania fleet exits the Shift at slower-than-relativistic speeds in order to avoid spending months slowing down. Then again, the admiral treats it as if there's some sort of threshold for relativistic travel, when it's really a matter of perspective.
 * First Contact
 * Flexible Tourney Rules: The teachers at Battle School start purposely stacking the deck against Ender as he racks up an unbroken string of wins, challenging him to adapt, and seeing how far he can bend without breaking.
 * Full Frontal Assault: Ender was attacked by Bonzo and many others while he's in the shower, so Ender is naturally naked, but Bonzo takes off his clothes after Ender goads him, telling him how cowardly it is to attack a kid naked in the shower who's smaller than you, with lots of reinforcements.


 * Gag Penis: When Ender first meets Rose de Nose, he's lying naked on his bed with the holographic notepad thing over his groin with an oversized pair of genitals projecting onto it that waggle whenever he moves.
 * Gender Flip: Major Anderson will be played by Viola Davis in the life-action adaptation.
 * Genocide Dilemma: Forms a major part of the novel's theme, in a complicated and very brutal way.
 * Lampshaded in the last book of the first series, Children of the Mind. "I'm more afraid that we're varelse. That humanity is the species that should be destroyed," for the sake of all other sentient life.
 * General Failure: Bonzo, apparently. Even after Ender prevents him from losing a battle (for which the rest of the army likes him) Bonzo punches him in the stomach and insults him. Ender can hear mutinous muttering over this from the rest of the Salamanders.
 * Going Cosmic: While Ender's Game itself is tightly focused, the sequels get progressively more and more Cosmic.
 * Justified in that the sequels were never meant to be sequels, but a completely separate story. Word of God is that he was stumped on creating a protagonist for them, and his wife suggested that he bring back Ender from a short story he'd done about the Battle Room. He then expanded the short story into Ender's Game, partially with the intent of setting up Ender's role in the new story.
 * I believe it was a friend of his, whom Card used as a sounding board. Card's wife dissuaded him from calling the book Singer of Death, as he had already written two books about singing.
 * The Great Politics Mess Up: The "Warsaw Pact" is still around and ready to threaten world peace after the Third Invasion is over. Retconned in the later books by calling it the New Warsaw Pact.
 * Groin Attack: Ender does this while defending himself against bullies, on two separate occasions, and ends up.
 * Subverted when Ender is ambushed later,
 * Hive Mind/Hive Queen: The composition of the Bugger race.
 * Honor Before Reason: After being goaded by Ender over ganging up on him in the shower, Bonzo Madrid decides to fight Ender one-on-one. It doesn't go well.
 * Averted with most of the other characters. The series repeatedly plays on the fact that war isn't about honor, it's about defeating your enemy any way you can. The protagonists fight to win.
 * Innocence Lost: A central theme in the original novel
 * Insectoid Aliens: There's a reason they call them Buggers...
 * Instant Win Condition: Former Trope Namer ("The Enemys Gate Is Down"). Ender wins a match at Battle School by capturing the enemy gate without "killing" the entire enemy team, which up until that point was assumed to be necessary. Also comes up when dealing with the Bugger queens,
 * Interestingly, this was set up earlier in the novel: Salamander Army loses a battle even though Ender is "wounded" but not fully disabled.
 * Insult Backfire: While still in school, Ender gets taunted by other kids sending covert IMs over the net-enabled school desks. Ender, who figured out how to do this in the first place, sees every message as a tribute to his intelligence.
 * It's a Small Net After All: Averted, the "Net" in Ender's world is just about as accurate as someone in 1985 could predict. He even predicted Trolls, Sock Puppets and the blogosphere.
 * Keystone Army: The Buggers -- the queens are their keystone.
 * Kick Them While They Are Down: Ender does this to Stilson so the bullies will think he's too crazy/dirty-fighting to mess with again..
 * Kids Are Cruel: Very cruel at Battle School.
 * Loners Are Freaks: Ender is intentionally isolated by his teachers so he'll be able to command other students.
 * Loophole Abuse: Ender's entire modus operandi is to thoroughly master the rules of any game, then reinterpret or just plain screw them in new and imaginative ways. His teachers, counting on him to become the greatest living weapon in the history of humanity, are only too happy to let him do so, and have deliberately designed the school environment to favor such thinking.
 * Meaningful Name: One of the Battle School leaders points out that "Ender," a mispronunciation of the name Andrew, can be taken to mean "Finisher," as they hope that he will finish the war between humans and the Formics.
 * Most Writers Are Adults: Attempted Justified Trope.
 * Multinational Team: The International Fleet and the children at Battle School come from a wide array of nationalities.
 * My God What Have I Done: The Buggers on realizing the fundamental mistake in how they had attempted first contact, Ender on finding out the Twist Ending.
 * Nietzsche Wannabe: Peter, in the spirit of Machiavelli. Ender and Bean are similarly ruthless in exploiting the weaknesses of their opponents in true Unfettered style.
 * No Holds Barred Beatdown: Ender seems to invoke this anytime someone tries to ambush him,
 * Not So Different: Ender struggles with the realization of how similar he is to his brother Peter. Likewise Valentine and Peter, which is how he coaxes her into becoming Demosthenes.
 * Obvious Rule Patch: The immediate reaction to Dragon Army winning by exploiting an Instant Win Condition in the Battle Room game. From then on, all enemy soldiers must be killed or disabled before the gate can be opened.
 * One Man Army: Subverted, each of the Battle School grads is dangerous precisely because of how they can work with groups.
 * Only Known By Their Nickname: All over the place. Ender (childhood mispronunciation of Andrew), Rose de Nose, Bean (from another street kid saying he "wasn't worth a bean"), Hot Soup (romanization/bastardization of Han Tzu), Crazy Tom (self-explanatory), Dumper, Fly Molo...
 * Performance Anxiety: Petra suffers from this, making her much less useful to Ender than she could've been, mostly because of the sheer weight of responsibility she carries.
 * Poor Communication Kills: At the end we find that the buggers were not, they were simply trying to . This was a big reason for Humanity's fear and hatred of the buggers; when they happened upon a human colony, they After their first two invasions, they realize this
 * Population Control: Ender is a third child in a society where that's generally illegal.
 * Positive Discrimination: Ender uses this with a select few of his commanders, but in Petra's case it has unintended consequences.
 * Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Dragon Army seems like this, as none of the members really stood out from the crowd in their previous armies. Ender's leadership and empathy draws them together into the finest unit the school has ever seen. Later played with in Ender's Shadow:
 * Reality Is Unrealistic: Some people complain that the kids at the battle school are too smart, but Orson Scott Card has received letters from gifted children telling him that they found the children in the battle school to be realistic (Ender is Over the Top, but he's supposed to be).
 * Science Marches On: Notably averted in the remarkably accurate descriptions of tablet-sized computers, the Internet and the blogosphere, in a book written before the creation of the World Wide Web. Although, as xkcd points out, it missed the mark on the blogosphere in terms of scale if nothing else.
 * Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Lampshaded by Ender himself, when reviewing war footage and noting that real-life space battles are nothing like in popular media. The ships are so far apart that they navigate and aim their weapons entirely on instruments, and never see each other except for the flash of a direct-impact nuke.
 * Sealed Badass in A Can:.
 * Sock Puppet: "Locke" and "Demosthenes."
 * The Spartan Way: Although students at Battle School are not subject to physical abuse (at least, not by the instructors) they do undergo the psychological equivalent of Training From Hell.
 * Subspace Ansible: Namechecking Le Guin, even.
 * Super Soldier: Almost everyone in the Battle School… the best of the best move on to Tactical and/or Command training to become super-generals actually.
 * Ender, being the best of the best of the best, skips a few grades here and there, graduating to effectively become the supreme commander of all Earth's (space-bound) military forces by the time he's starting to enter puberty.
 * The Unfettered: Ender may have mercy, but you sure as hell won't see it in the Battle Room. Or if you decide to ambush him.
 * Time Dilation: Responsible for the Chekhov MIA. Also becomes a significant factor in later books, explaining how Ender and Valentine manage to remain alive millenia after the events of the first book.
 * Token Girl: Petra Arkanian, the only Battle School girl of any importance (until the sequels add Virlomi to the Battle School roster). Possibly justified in that, according to the novel, fewer girls have the necessary personality and levels of aggression to be chosen for Battle School.
 * It does seem that there's a degree of sociopathy necessary for a child to even be considered for Battle School, much less succeed there. Current psychological research suggests that less than a quarter of sociopaths are female, with the most common line of descent being father-to-son.
 * Tournament Arc: Battle School is run this way.
 * Trickster Mentor: Ender's mentor on Eros:.
 * Two-D Space: Completely subverted. In fact, Ender uses his understanding of 3-dimensional space to his early advantage at Battle School.
 * Truth and Lies: Peter's campaign to manipulate the public via Sock Puppet bloggers.
 * Trying to Catch Me Fighting Dirty: If you think Ender is playing fair, it is either a coincidence or a set up. Either way, you're screwed.
 * Twist Ending: Two of them:
 * Tyke Bomb: The entire school is set up so innocent kids can be manipulated into perfect commanders. This works a bit too well for them in the Ender's Shadow series, as the kids that return to Earth after Command School go on to vie for world domination before the still-literally psychopathic.
 * The Verse: Orson Scott Card kind of, sort of, made up the term, maybe.
 * Wave Motion Gun: the Little Doctor, a.k.a. MD Device, which operates on the principle of crossing two lasers to create a chain reaction of molecular disintegration. In the first novel it's described as a beam weapon; the POV Sequel houses the device in a bomb.
 * The first novel also implies that the fleets are armed with only the Little Doctor, but without clustering, the ships are picked off one at a time. In Ender's Shadow, it's claimed that the Little Doctor is used only twice. The rest of the time, (presumably) nukes are used. This is probably why the weapon was retconned.
 * We Could Have Avoided All This: The whole Formic War, pointed out by the protagonist himself.
 * What Measure Is a Non Human: For once, the aliens are guilty of this.
 * Would Be Rude to Say Genocide:
 * Additionally, when the Starways Congress decides to send an evacuation fleet to Lusitania, Valentine (under the name Demosthenes) publishes articles attacking the Congress and revealing the true mission of the fleet, to the point of calling it . The Congress immediately sends their State Sec to discover who is writing the articles to shut up Demosthenes, declaring whoever it is to be a traitor to the Hundred Worlds. Anyone using the term is likewise considered to be speaking treason. So much for free speech.
 * Word of God: The writer in one interview on National Review says he was inspired by Bruce Catton's histories of the American Civil War and that part of the message was that war means sacrificing the innocence of young people for the Greater Good and that it is the duty of the old to make sure their civilization is worth it.
 * Zeerust: Peter gains control of the world by anonymously distributing political articles on the Internet. Nowadays we call that "blogging," which has become so common that the idea of a blogger gaining that much power seems unlikely. Parodied by Xkcd here.
 * Word of God: The writer in one interview on National Review says he was inspired by Bruce Catton's histories of the American Civil War and that part of the message was that war means sacrificing the innocence of young people for the Greater Good and that it is the duty of the old to make sure their civilization is worth it.
 * Zeerust: Peter gains control of the world by anonymously distributing political articles on the Internet. Nowadays we call that "blogging," which has become so common that the idea of a blogger gaining that much power seems unlikely. Parodied by Xkcd here.

The rest of the Ender series
""I don't have to be your commander anymore, do I? I don't want to command anybody again."

"You don't have to command anybody, but you're always our commander"."


 * AI Is a Crapshoot: Played with and examined with Jane. She's spent most of her existence hiding in the Galactic "Internet" because she's aware of the whole Killer Robot cliche and worried how humans will react to her, and they do indeed try to kill her by essentially shutting off every computer in the galaxy at once. However, this was after her overreaction to Ender doing the equivalent of hanging up the phone on her nearly got his planet blown up...
 * Alien Non Interference Clause: The colonists of Luisitania initially practice this towards the pequenios. Turns out the pequenios are less than happy with this arrangement. Turns out later that breaking the clause brings the threat that the human government will try to subject you to rather extreme "decontamination" procedures.
 * Babies Ever After: subverted when it ends the second book: there's still half a series to go, and plus Ender never actually has a child. Played straight otherwise.
 * Biological Mashup: The eventual result of the descolada -- see Bizarre Alien Biology below for one example.
 * Bizarre Alien Biology: well, let's put it this way:.
 * Bread Eggs Milk Squick: In Xenocide, one of the mentioned methods that the godspoken use to commune with the gods is "checking for accidental murders". This is in a list with "doorway-standing" and "counting multiples of five".
 * Break the Haughty: Ender does this to Zeck. Also Novinha's children, particularly Quim.
 * Brother Sister Incest: Twice over. Incest Is Relative is responsible for one. The other is (probably) nonexistent, but rather maliciously suggested.
 * This allows Card to issue a Take That toward one of his more obnoxious critics, who decided it was "obvious" that Ender and Valentine were incestuous. Ender replies to the remark above with "God forbid that a brother and sister should love each other!"
 * Chekhov's Gun: Wang-mu's dream of being the wife and companion of.
 * Conflict Ball: Quara has one superglued to herself. Ventures often into Too Dumb to Live, such as when she indirectly ends up causing  death by
 * Commander Contrarian: Quara
 * Decoy Protagonist: The real protagonist of the Path story thread in Xenocide isn't Qing-Jao, it's Wang-Mu.
 * Knight Templar
 * Dark and Troubled Past: Novinha
 * Defictionalization: The job description for a Speaker for the Dead is to do historical and narrative research into the dead person's life, and then get up at the funeral and tell the deceased's life story-as they would've told it. OSC reports that people have started to do this in Real Life, and that it is just as powerful as you might imagine.
 * Card allegedly wants someone to speak at his funeral.
 * Defrosting Ice Queen: Novinha, though she only gets a certain amount defrosted.
 * Deus Ex Machina:.
 * Qing-Jao's searches for information  with pretty much no explanation behind it.
 * Disappeared Dad: Marcao. It takes Ender to point out the trauma that this really inflicted on the family.
 * Eye Scream: Olhado lost his eyes in a freak accident with a hologram projector.
 * Failsafe Failure: Averted in how a Doctor Device is designed to be easy to disarm. Pretty important for a planet buster.
 * Faster Than Light Travel: Achieved using a modified version of Subspace or Hyperspace and the series' particle which adheres to Minovsky Physics.
 * Freudian Excuse: Novinha builds her entire life around trying not to get her lover killed. (She fails.)
 * Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke:
 * Genocide Dilemma: Hangs over the series even more prominently than it did Ender's Game. The third book is even named "Xenocide," which is a portmanteau of "xeno" (aliens) and "genocide."
 * Genre Shift: Speaker for the Dead is an excellent book by any standards, and it's still science fiction, but it's very philosophical and revolves about stopping a war, not winning one.
 * Go Mad From the Revelation:.
 * Ice Cream Koan: At one point, Wang Mu has to pretend to be a philosopher that specializes in these, but she's too logical to last long.
 * Idiot Ball: Some of Novinha and Libo's decisions, and how the Xenologers act towards the pequinos before Ender shows up.
 * Qing Jao has one superglued to herself, justified because of her devotion to the gods.
 * Jane's idea to  ends up causing most of the major conflicts in the series.
 * Instant AI Just Add Water: Averted. AI evolves on the Internet after a few thousand years of maturation.
 * Jerkass: Quara.
 * Love At First Sight: Ender, to Novinha. Because of Ender's empathy and their shared experiences, we can claim this as real love at first sight, too, as opposed to Hormones At First Sight. (In light of the tone of the series, is that a subversion or playing it straight?) Also Jane to Ender, because
 * Love Martyr: Deconstructed in the person of.
 * Mama Bear: Novinha
 * A Man Is Not a Virgin: subverted by Miro (and, until he marries, possibly by Ender too). Which makes Miro resent his paralysis even more...
 * Minovsky Physics: Philotes. Pay attention to that word, it shows up a lot.
 * Missing Mom: Han Qing-jao
 * My God What Have I Done: The Pequeninos' reaction after being told that humans, unlike them, can't, meaning instead of honoring their most favored humans, they There is literal wailing and gnashing of teeth when they find out.
 * Never Speak Ill of the Dead: the whole point of being a Speaker For The Dead is to avert this custom, by telling the truth instead. (Fortunately, the kind of people who have Speakers at their funeral tend to have more interesting truths than lies.)
 * The Nondescript: Plikt, through personal habits
 * Not Blood Siblings: The Reveal is inverted: they are blood siblings, and didn't know it.
 * Obfuscating Stupidity:.
 * Only Known By Their Nickname: Olhado ("the guy with the eyes") is the big one, but it's true of everyone on Lusitania, mostly due to the Overly Long Names that seem to be the vogue for the Brazilian colonists.
 * Played straight and then averted with Quim (which comes from his middle name Rei, meaning "King", which is transliterated into Portuguese), whom Bishop Peregrino insists on calling "Father Estevão" after the latter becomes a priest, even by his family members.
 * Our Souls Are Different: They're subatomic particles and involve quantum entanglement!
 * Aside from being subatomic particles, their properties are taken straight out of Mormon theology. (Card is a practicing Mormon.) The final book in the series, Children of the Mind, is filled with lots of Exposition about exactly those properties, and it isn't as well regarded as the others.
 * The Plan: ; in fact, there's enough of this going on to be quite accurately described as a Gambit Pileup.
 * Planet of Hats: Justifed as a natural consequence of instant communication with sub-lightspeed travel. In the later books, after the 3,000 year Time Skip, many specific cultures - industrialist Japanese, Nordic sailors, and Brazilian Catholics, for example - have entire worlds to themselves. The gulf of space keeps them from having to butt heads with each other, while ansible technology allows them to stay in constant contact.
 * Revealed to be a deliberate plan by Graff, who grouped colonists by culture so that humanity would become more diverse and therefore stronger.
 * Justified too; we only ever see a smattering of planets, and the two of the only ones shown in any detail are limited in certain habitable areas, meaning that they more adequately represent a nation rather than a completely separate planet.
 * Poor Communication Kills: While a lack of understanding and proper communication between  lead to xenocide in the first book, the Starways Congress decides that to prevent the same thing from ever happening again... they should be as conservative as possible and deliberately withhold as much knowledge as they can from another sapient species. This leads to two men being killed in what is merely a gross misunderstanding of alien biology.
 * Preacher Man: Quim
 * Promotion to Parent: Ela, and to a lesser extent Miro, due to their parents' messy lives
 * Rewrite: Several details of the conclusion of Xenocide and the beginning of Children of the Mind don't line up with each other:
 * In Xenocide, Jane, but Children of the Mind starts again with that plot point.
 * Novinha's  is inexplicably changed to.
 * Faster-than-Light travel in Xenocide . Children of the Mind treats this as optional with no explanation.
 * Science Marches On: Xenology. In part thanks books like this, the xenologer's assumption  would scarcely be considered at all. In fact, even the study of the piggies would probably be avoided, given advances in remote probes.
 * Single Biome Planet: Lusitania. Of course, it was deliberately terraformed by some heartless-bastard aliens.
 * Starfish Aliens: The central moral quandary of this series is whether an alien species is too different to co-exist with. It occasionally descends into Humans Are Bastards territory. Four alien species are seen in story, and none of them remotely resemble each other.
 * Surprise Incest : are siblings but don't find out right until Ender speaks Marcao's death.
 * Of course, thanks to them being Catholic, they never actualy do it, for religious and  for practical reasons.
 * Technology Marches On: Oh, Speaker for the Dead, let me count the ways:
 * Right at the end of the book, Miro is very impressed by the AI's unique capability of... auto-completion.
 * The fact that the xenologists have no unobtrusive recording devices. We already have cameras attachable to eye-glasses, shouldn't be too hard to place a couple in their clothes or wherever.
 * Olhado's mechanical eyes aren't quite yet possible, but we can be sure that within five years of the first, very obviously mechanical version that we get, there will be ones that aren't easily distinguished as such from a distance. Also, even today, no one in their right mind would insert the plug in the other eye socket rather than at the side or back of the skull.
 * Olhado mentions that he could have opted for binocular vision instead of the socket, but decided on the latter. As it is, he sees everything as a flat image with people appearing as cardboard cut-outs.
 * The concept that a husband and wife can automatically gain complete read access to all the files of their mate, even the very important ones pertaining to their job, is rather ridiculous from today's information security standpoint. Of course, one must remember that they were living in a Catholic Mission colony in which marriage was still a high sacrament with lots of strings attached.
 * Likewise the concept of a team of a handful of people doing the work of dozens (Xenologists and Xenobiologist both) is completely ridiculous. As mentioned above in Science Marches On, it's unlikely that Xenologists would even be allowed to make contact, due to great advances in remote probes.
 * In Xenocide, Card mispredicted how searches for information would go. Waiting hours for information to turn up simply doesn't happen anymore; the problem is figuring out how to word your queries in such a way to turn up adequate information.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: It's established in the first novel that a single ship can be used to blow up a planet, if it's armed with the MD Device..
 * Trilogy Creep: Xenocide and Children of the Mind were originally supposed to be one book. It didn't work out, and Children of the Mind ended up being published five years after Xenocide.
 * True Companions: a big part of what keeps Ender on Lusitania
 * TV Genius: Most of the main cast is of above average intelligence, but never is this really displayed outside of ridiculous feats of intuition and scientific discovery.
 * Two Part Trilogy: Ender's Game began as a stand-alone short story, then was later expanded into a novel. The novel is also sufficiently stand-alone, but the final chapter does have a sequel hook that allows for a sequel if you choose to read it. The sequel also sits surprisingly well as a stand-alone conclusion to Ender's story, but also has a sequel hook if you want to tie up some below-the-surface loose ends. This is where it gets into Two Part Trilogy country. The final two books in the series, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, are far more connected than the previous books and were originally intended to be a single volume, but were broken off into two with a superficial cliffhanger between them. Children of the Mind returns to being a suitable conclusion, if you count, but only opens up the biggest cliffhanger in literature since Chapterhouse: Dune. Like the Dune series, it's near impossible to differentiate between the overlapping Sequelitis, Two Part Trilogy, and Trilogy Creep.
 * The Sequel Hook at the end of Ender's Game is actually a complete aversion of the trope, because the entire novel was written only after Card was stumped on creating a good protagonist for Speaker. See Going Cosmic under Ender's Game above for the whole story.
 * Unlucky Childhood Friend: Miro to Ouanda. Not to mention Novinha and Libo.
 * The Untwist: In universe..
 * The Virus: the descolada, complete with mutation. "Descolada" translates to "ungluing," for what it does to DNA.
 * Voice With an Internet Connection: Jane. (Actually more like an Internet with a voice.)
 * What Happened to The Mouse: In an early chapter of Speaker for the Dead, Valentine's eldest daughter Syfte is set up as having a bit of a hero-worship for her uncle Ender, and planning to maybe follow him to Lusitania to help him. In the next book, Valentine's family does do that... But Syfte is barely mentioned. (Of course, this is the series that can't make up its mind how many children Valentine actually had.)
 * Write What You Know: OSC's Mormon mission trip was to Brazil. Lusitania is a colony made up of Brazilians.
 * You Should Know This Already:.
 * Zero Approval Gambit: Admiral Lands tries to pull one.
 * His reason for disobeying orders seems pretty petty. While it's true that he's prepared to bear the consequences of committing another Xenocide to protect humanity, his main reason appear to be so as not to cause his men additional discomfort by forcing them to be placed in long-term duty above the surface of Lusitania.

Shadow series
""You think anybody will ask me for military advice? Because I'm going to get into this war, even if I have to lie about my age and join the marines.""


 * A Child Shall Lead Them
 * Action Girl: any female Battle School grad would be this, but Petra and Virlomi are the only ones who have any major prominence in the story, so they get the awards.
 * After the End: of the Formic War, that is.
 * A God Am I: Virlomi
 * Air Vent Passageway: Used for various stealth tactics.
 * Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: how Peter perceives his family.
 * Ascended Extra: Bean and Petra, who become the main characters of this series after getting only a few lines in Ender's Game (despite being two of his best friends, thanks to Ender's isolation).
 * Not to mention all the other Battle School graduates that warranted maybe one or two lines in the original book.
 * Babies Ever After: Orson Scott Card's opinion that raising a family is the only true happiness is certainly in full force here. Leads to, among other things, Chickification.
 * Slightly subverted in "Shadow Puppets", where John Paul is shown contemplating why and how much he loves his children.
 * Be Careful What You Wish For: Bean wants to get bigger. He will. Too big.
 * Beware the Superman: The Battle School graduates are treated as People Of Mass Destruction throughout the series, for increasingly justifiable reasons. And then there's the fear and loathing about Bean.
 * Bilingual Bonus: This series introduces Battle School slang, which is appropriately polyglot since Battle School draws children from all over the world. All of them are variations or corruptions of extant non-English words and phrases, but we'll stick with the one you'll hear most: the slang term for a personal army, "jeesh," comes from the Arabic جيش ("jaysh"), literally meaning "army" or "corps".
 * Blessed With Suck: Bean.
 * Chickification: gets applied to the male characters as well. Ambition? Ruling the world? Saving the world? Being the most influential politician or general in human history? Nope: nobody's happy until they're married and making babies. And that means everyone, even the almost mad scientist, gets married and starts having babies.
 * Everyone except Graff, and Card makes sure he regrets that.
 * Said scientist also specifically claims that it's the male biological imperative to seek out a female partner (one, specifically), marry her, and start making kids. Which goes into sharp contrast to Valentine's speech where she claims that the male imperative is to make babies, but not to marry a single woman.
 * Confusion Fu: Achilles's M.O.
 * Adopted by Bean when he
 * Corrupt Politician: Card's poor opinion of the governments of Russia and China (in the 'verse, as in real life, at least nominally elected) shines through.
 * Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Hyper-competitive supergeniuses are throwing earth into nonstop war, so Graff gives each of them a planet to rule.
 * Evilutionary Biologist: Volescu.
 * Fake Defector: Revealed with the Meaningful Echo below.
 * False Flag Operation: Several in Shadow of the Hegemon. When the Chakri (Thailand's supreme commander) desides to get rid of, he blows up the barracks where they are staying and blames it on an Indian strike force in order to justify a military response. However, as survive, the Chakri's deception is discovered, but the Prime Minister of Thailand decides to maintain the ruse for the same purpose.
 * Also, when preparing to attack, sends a truck with a hidden missile launcher across the border in order to shoot down a  plane in  full of  passengers. Then  would claim that  deliberately set up the attack on its own citizens in order to justify attacking , thus allowing  to strike first.
 * Friendly Enemies: though the members of Ender's Jeesh end up opposing each other at various times, the lines of communication remain open. (Especially since they all have each other's email addresses.)
 * Gambit Pileup: Hoo boy. The whole world is one big Gambit Pileup.
 * Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke
 * Happily Married: The Wiggins and the Delphikis.
 * If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him: subverted, for laughs. (They don't actually kill him.)
 * Insufferable Genius: Bean. (Dies down a little once he stops being an emossin' little showoff.)
 * Long Lost Sibling
 * Manipulative Bastard: Achilles de Flandres.
 * Meaningful Echo: "I expect you to solve your own problems."
 * Followed by another one. "I serve the Hegemon." Serves as Suriyawong's Crowning Moment of Awesome
 * Memetic Mutation: Invoked by Petra, who starts a meme to send a Message in A Bottle.
 * Moe Greene Special:
 * My God What Have I Done: multiple Battle School grads, in a row, though most particularly Virlomi. (Deliberately set up by Graff so that he can cut them a check.)
 * Not Blood Siblings: once again inverted. Bean becomes very close friends with Nikolai Delphiki and calls him as good as a brother, before discovering that his "creator" (Volescu) stole some of the Delphikis' IVF embryos for modification. One of those embryos became, of course, Bean.
 * Not My Driver
 * Lampshaded by Petra.
 * Number Two: Julian "Bean" Delphiki, by definition: there's a reason all the book titles are, "Shadow of the [Someone Else]". (At least, until the final book, where it is him casting the shadow.)
 * Obfuscating Stupidity: what John Paul and Theresa Wiggin have been displaying to let their kids run mad.
 * The Plan: Even more so than the original novel, now that there are multiple Battle School grads and worthy contenders all trying to outthink, outmaneuver, and outpsych each other for their own ends.
 * POV Sequel: Basically the whole point of Ender's Shadow.
 * Pretty Little Headshots: Averted. Many people are shot in the head, and it's a messy affair. Specifically, when shoots Petra's protector in the head from point-blank range, Petra is covered in blood and brain matter. Later on, the blood spatter is used to analyze the size and rough shape of who was sitting in the back seat and walked out alive (i.e. the missing silhouette).
 * However, gets a Moe Greene Special, and it strikes so perfectly that it'd said he looks like he just fell asleep.
 * Properly Paranoid: Bean. As soon as he starts feeling that he's currently too vulnerable, it probably means there's an airstrike headed in his direction.
 * Ranked By IQ: A Battle School teacher creates resentment toward young Bean from his classmates by revealing that Bean scored highest among them not just on IQ, but on every aptitude measure but one — that of physical ability, since Bean is much younger and smaller.
 * Retcon: Bean's internal monologues from Ender's Game have been replaced with new ones in Ender's Shadow to better fit with his new backstory and characterization. For example, there's a brief scene from Bean's POV where he remembers his mother and father back on earth, whereas in the Shadow series he's been a street urchin since he was an infant. However, any other scenes shared in the two books remain the same.
 * Take Over the World: Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets are a reconstruction of this trope. They present a well thought-out political scenario where this could actually happen, and a super-genius villain who could probably pull it off.
 * Token Girl: Petra Arkanian. Yes, we mentioned it before, but it bears mentioning again.
 * Unusual Euphemism: Battle School slang allows OSC to get away with swearing in foreign languages.
 * We Have Reserves: At the time of Shadow of the Hegemon, India has the largest army in the world (with a population of over 1.5 billion). So, naturally, their military leaders try to overwhelm their enemies with sheer numbers despite heavy attrition. All the Battle School kids can see how stupid this idea is. Not only do you lose a lot of men but you also strain your supply lines, which can be easily raided by hit-and-run strike forces, causing the massive army to starve and quickly run out of ammunition. Of course, it turns out that the whole thing is designed to.
 * Well Done Son Guy: Peter. With an added bonus that he has been Overshadowed By Awesome Younger Brother by the age of 16, even though he (Peter) had already proved himself at that point to be one of the greatest statesmen in history. This is basically Peter's Freudian Excuse and combines with his sociopathy in interesting ways.
 * Writers Cannot Do Math: Super genius Bean adds up the number of toon leaders and seconds in an army divided into five toons, adds one for himself (who was in command of a special "part-time" toon) and comes up with nine instead of eleven. Card was apparently still thinking of the four-toon system the armies used before Ender shook things up.
 * You Fail History Forever: In-universe. Achilles seems to think that Vladimir Lenin made Joseph Stalin into his trusted Dragon, until Stalin turned against him and killed him. In Real Life, Lenin hated Stalin and tried to discourage him from gaining power, only for Stalin to do so after Vladimir's death.
 * You Fail History Forever: In-universe. Achilles seems to think that Vladimir Lenin made Joseph Stalin into his trusted Dragon, until Stalin turned against him and killed him. In Real Life, Lenin hated Stalin and tried to discourage him from gaining power, only for Stalin to do so after Vladimir's death.