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Ender's Game Trailer Released
The first trailer has been released for the movie adaptation of Orson Scott Card's sci-fi classic Ender's Game. It gives us a good look at Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham, and Hugo's Asa Butterfield as Ender. It also demonstrates just how much money they put into the special effects for this movie.
The most fascinating part of this, for me, is that I connected with Ender's Game more easily as a young adolescent precisely because I was gay and understood how harsh and how quickly a child has to grow up. I also understood empathizing with my enemy, my enemy not understanding the degree of harm he was doing to me, and not trusting adults or authorities.
I also keenly felt the idea of being tested in subtle ways, in manipulating adults and politics with their own fears, and deeply appreciated the affects of demagoguery before I even knew what it was called.
I felt like Orson Scott Card so deeply understood the plight of being a bright, homosexual child with more self-awareness and introspection than many an adult, that I was shocked to find out that he was so antagonistic to it. This was after I read Speaker of the Dead which seems to so perfectly capture that sensation of oppression.
Maybe my sense of connecting with the author and his general outlook on human emotion was so great, that to find out he is as homophobic as he is caused a deep-seated sensation of betrayal and cognitive dissonance. Also, I don't even want to separate my knowledge of the artist from the art, which is a topic worthy of an essay itself.
Also, I feel that while it seems a bit pushy and bitchy, and will evoke the typical "uppity homosexual" response, complaining about a popular person's homophobia and suggesting that they, and even their art, be considered as lesser because of it, still seems to me to be an effective way at showing strength and causing people to realize the tenuousness of their position.
No art or artist is held to account for all their crimes, and in the fullness of time people will forgive Card as a fuddy duddy for his homophobia, but in the here and now where it has extreme political relevance to my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people on this globe, I say he is an ass for his views and I do not wish to patronize him. Let the future enjoy him unfettered by these concerns like I can enjoy Wagner now.
You're describing elements of the Hero's Journey. That shows up damn near everywhere because it's a compelling template - the reluctant or unlikely hero who turns out to have more strength than they thought... it's an easy model to imagine yourself into, to draw inspiration from, as well as providing counterpoints to what would otherwise be "Awesome person saves the day again, the end"
That said, Ender's game does particularly gel with certain geek-guy stereotypes; the bullied outcast who gets to be entirely justified in striking back, and whose unique genius makes them valuable. There's a potential comparison with Twilight also; both books make for good escapist fiction (for the gender they're aimed at) whilst having some somewhat disturbing moral assumptions buried just below the surface.
The difference (I think) is that Ender's Game does that at least somewhat knowingly, to force you to consider some ugly ideas that it's holding up as virtues.
It's the deviations from the Hero's Journey that make a story interesting. The human brain is very good at looking for patterns; once a pattern is learned, the subtle changes away from the pattern are what provides the interest. This is how we distinguish faces, and it's why all Asians look alike to a westerner (the base pattern is tuned to one facial style, but Asian faces introduce more than just subtle differences from that pattern, which really throws things off).
Also interesting reading, a list of examples of the Hero's Journey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monomyths