#ender's game

[penultimate-step]

Lately, I've been thinking about the effect of real-world time on perception of media. Or, wait, let me start from the beginning.

When I was 11, I read the book Ender's Game for some school assignment or another. I don't remember ever considering Ender a relatable character, but certainly my understanding of the events was shaped by being of an age to see the protagonist not so much as a young child but as someone of my peer group, someone who could have been slotted amongst my classmates without anybody batting an eye.

Over a decade later, I read the sequel, Speaker for the Dead; it takes place many years later, when Ender is in his thirties, and my feelings about the in-universe time skip were undeniably shaped by the real life time gap between my reading of the novels. Reading the first book back then and then the second book now created a feeling where it's almost like, I'm browsing the facebook page of someone I had known in middle school but lost contact with, checking up on how they're doing today. The real-time factor caused me to perceive it less like a timeskip, and more like a reunion - the feelings were closer to "oh wow, that's my boy! I haven't seen him in years! Wonder what he's up to?" Which in turn gave me a better position to appreciate the parts of the narrative about him struggling to find a place in his adulthood than I would have been had I perceived it more strictly as a quick skip from 11 to 20 to 36.

While musing about this, I considered a VN I played a few years back, which took place over three in-game days - except at the end of one in-game day, the game would lock you out from progressing for 24 hours real time. So that as the in-game investigator protagonist was ruminating on the information that had been discovered that day, the player would be forced to do the same. In this example, by forcing the player to experience the same timeframe as the in-game characters, the sense of it being an in-depth and extensive investigation increases, even though without the forced pauses the game would be short enough to blow through in a handful of hours real-time.

Which brings to mind how time effects things in long-running serial works. It's well known that an audience which watches an episode or reads a chapter week by week has a very different experience than one binging through whole seasons or volumes at a time, but I wonder if the real time relative to the in-universe time makes that effect stand out more? Fight scenes, for instance, have been known to take up several chapters in certain manga or webnovels. What does it do to the reader's perception, if from their point a view a fight takes a whole month, while for the characters they read about it's only been a couple hours? Readers might feel that the situation is more stressful, since the pressure of the fight has been ongoing for a long time for them, while in-universe it was a rough afternoon but no more than that. Contrastingly, when a series skips ahead or otherwise has long periods of time for characters that feel short for readers, it can feel like no time has passed and everything is still the same, unless the author really stresses the differences in world-state that occurred offscreen. Because the reader hasn't changed at all.

No conclusion here exactly, I just think it's interesting how often an audience's response to a work, the emotions felt, are more closely tied to their real-life timescale, something almost completely out of the author's control, as opposed to in-universe time, which can be intentionally shifted or played with for the sake of the narrative.

[fortunaegloria]

Appreciation post of Harrison Ford's smile (part 6) 🥰💕

[ndrew-ender-wiggin]

hashtag sibling bonding😛

Peter isnt even using his headband correctly Bless his heart. ik valentine's sick of him

[alphamecha-mkii]

Ender's Game by Julie Bell

[knightotoc]

I picked 1-2 things from all the authors/directors I could think of, but let me know if I've forgotten something interesting. I was thinking about this topic because this year's bestseller Fourth Wing was apparently written by an ex-Mormon who now loves coffee and smut, which I think is pretty funny.

[charactersmashorpass-2]

"bug hot 😳😳😳"

[inevitablychaotic]

Poseidon is my favourite Epic character for reasons, and it occurs to me he and Ender Wiggin (from Ender's Game) would've gotten along very well.

Ender has a philosophy of not winning just the one fight, but all future ones, a particular principle that turns him far more deadly than he should be out of sheer self-preservation.

Poseidon would've loved him.

[thelingering]

hmmmm

perhaps we the ender's game fandom need to come out of hibernation and stretch our legs for a sec

how many of y'all like Bean?

[transrevolutions]

"ender wiggin is ontologically evil and the real villain of ender's game" ender is like. eleven years old. neurodivergent and a minor in the most literal sense of the term.

[theotherpacman]

orson scott card: there is no tragedy greater than the violence we teach to our children before they can understand it - violence against those who, despite how completely and irrevocably different from ourselves they may seem to us, deep down, are people and that's what matters

orson scott card: homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to be members of society <3 and I also hate black people

[f-arelos]

god, i never felt young

percy jackson and the olympians (2023) / first love/late spring - mitski / jackie and wilson - hozier / daria (1997) ender's game - orson scott card / daisy jones & the six (2023) / caesar on a tv screen - the last dinner party / stranger things (2016) / arsonist's lullaby - hozier / the picture of dorian gray - oscar wilde / omori

[minus-hyphen]

I can't believe the b-plot of Ender's Game is just Rose Lalonde and Dirk Strider using AOL online chatrooms to manipulate the world government

[podplease]

Valentine Wiggin: They're not going to make you hegemon bro Peter Wiggin: They will. They will if I post good.

[ndrew-ender-wiggin]

5 days later: VALENTINE WIGGIN FOUND DEAD IN THE BRONX

[imagesofcelebrities]

Hailee Steinfeld as Petra Arkanian in Ender's Game (2013)