Ender's Game and the Hero's Journey

I never really liked hero stories. For me, every story was the same: the hero always did the right thing, the hero was brave enough to save the day, the hero had a happy ending. He (or, occasionally, she) ignored rules and laws, but it didn’t matter because their morals were never in question, and they saved the day anyway. It was the good guys vs. the bad guys and the good guys always won. Maybe if I had looked at it differently, I could have seen inspiration or at least reassurance in that, but I didn't. Instead, it always seemed fake. I felt like I was being lied to.

The problem with hero stories is that it all works out on paper, the good defeats the evil, but in real life it's never that simple. In real life, everyone thinks they’re the hero, and someone is inevitably going to be wrong. As a kid I was always worried that person would be me --- that I would grow up and think I was the hero, give my life to a cause or an idea but eventually, far too late, realize it was the wrong one. Or worse, never realize at all, and be laughed at in a future classroom as another poor sucker on the wrong side of history. I would read historical fiction, or stories about a dystopian future world, and every time, I wanted to see myself in the war hero, the revolutionary, the underground spy. But I couldn’t help worrying that instead, I would find myself in the blind crowds following the corrupt dictator. Because just like any hero, they too must have thought they were doing the right thing.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t read hero stories: I sped through Harry Potter and Percy Jackson just as quickly as everyone else. But I didn't like the heroes themselves. People like characters they can see themselves in, and I, the awkward middle school nerd who questioned everything I did, could never see myself in a hero that always had the right choice laid out so neatly in front of them. So when I read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, I approached it with exactly the same skeptical worldview that I threw at every other hero story I encountered. But as I soon realized, Ender was a very different hero than the others I had encountered.

The story is set in the distant future, after Earth had already once defended itself from a murderous alien race but was deep in desperate preparations for another war. In the beginning, Ender is the classic “chosen one,” born at the request of the International Military Federation (IMF) to be the military commander that would save the human race. His early life is shaped by his loving sister Valentine and his brother Peter who is cruelly manipulative and explicitly capable of killing his siblings. All three siblings are geniuses, and all three were born for the purpose of saving the human race but only Ender was accepted: the idea was that he needed to be part Valentine, part Peter to succeed. Ender’s story fits the arc of the hero’s journey well: at the request of a senior IMF officer, Ender must leave his family to train on a space station to be a military officer for IMF, and after much personal effort and transformation he eventually succeeds in killing the aliens and returns home victorious. But the character of Ender is much more complex than it might seem.

Ender is the hero, and at heart he is a very moral person, but he is forced to become like his brother Peter in order to succeed. As the story goes on, Ender is torn apart and always unsure of whether what he is doing is justified. Everything he does is supposed to be for the greater good, but as he is manipulated into getting increasingly ruthless he, and the reader, are left unsure of whether it was worth it. And in the end, (spoiler alert, even though it was published in 1985 and you’ve all had 32 years to read it) he does launch a bomb into the home planet and kill the alien race but in exchange for succeeding in his hero’s journey he is rewarded with the knowledge that he extinguished an entire species that wasn’t even intending to attack Earth in the first place. As a spoil of war, he receives the last remaining offspring of the species, and a responsibility to find a place they can live in peace.
I was really captivated by the book for a while, and looking back, I think it was because Ender was the kind of person I was afraid of becoming, the hero who succeeds only to find they were on the wrong side. I revisited the novel again and again because the moral dilemmas Ender faced, and the constant internal struggle of whether he was doing the right thing, fascinated me. Ender was manipulated into doing something horrible, but in the end he found the truth and the novel ends with him going on another journey, for the right reason this time, and making amends. I didn't like hero stories because they were too fake and straightforward. Ender was the opposite, and in a weird way it was reassuring to twelve-year-old Elizabeth when I read it because it meant that someone who did, in the end, do the right thing didn't have to come to it by some unshakable moral compass that let them paint the world black and white and always choose the right side: instead, the hero could face the same doubts and ambiguity that everyone has to face and yet still complete the journey and still, somehow, save the day.