Ender vs. Harry SPOILERS for Ender's Game (WAS Re: JKR's Intent)

[Zara]

No: HPFGUIDX 178774

> > >>zgirnius:
> > Harry did save the world, in precisely the same sense that 
Ender   
> > did. 
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Oh goodness, no.  On that I cannot agree.  Ender used his 
> intelligence (which was massive) and in the end, his compassion 
> (which was massive enough to break him at one point and worry his 
> teachers).  Harry was (as per usual) lucky.  Also, Voldemort hardly 
> threatened the *world*.  Humanity's survival was not at stake.  But 
> that's bygones and also personal opinion.

zgirnius:
I love Ender too. Yes, in that book, the planet Earth and humanity 
faced an existential thread. Whereas Voldemort was an existential 
threat to the British Wizarding World. He was responsible for wiping 
out at least one prominent Pureblood family, and at the same time was 
instituting policies hat would prevent internarriage with Muggles 
(without which, we are told, the WW cannot survive in the long term). 
So Harry was the hero in a smaller pond. He was still the hero that 
saved the world that his story is about. Was Harry as compassionate, 
or as intelligent, as Ender? Probably not and definitely not, in my 
opinion, though I have defended the position that compassion is a 
trait he has, and which pays off for him in the story, on earlier 
threads.

> Betsy Hp:
> Heh.  I've never read the sequels.  Ender's Game was such a perfect 
> tale I feared an attempt to stretch it out would ruin it. (I've 
read 
> Bean's adventures, but that's almost like going into a different 
> world, IMO.)  So, yeah, everything I read took place when Ender was 
a 
> kid.  As to Ender killing where Harry didn't: the stakes were much, 
> much higher.  And *very* unlike Harry, Ender noticed, worried 
about, 
> and then did his best to heal his equivelent of the screaming and 
> flayed baby.

zgirnius:
Ender's equivalent of the flayed baby was a very different creature. 
She/her people felt remorse for their terrible crime of murder long 
before anybody asked them to, and in fact understood the desire on 
the part of humanity to wipe them out because of how seriously they 
took what they had done (once they knew it). Further, she/they 
reached out to Ender, *not* the other way around. 

Would Harry have responded as Ender did, had someone reached out to 
him? Heck yes, he would, in my opinion, but it was not a story in 
which the villains, or 'villains', did much of that. He did not need 
even that much, just seeing Draco's misery and inability to kill was 
enough to make him pity Dracom and to help Draco, when he had the 
occasion. 

> BetsyHP:
> Oh!  Another difference: The ending of Ender's Game does push Ender 
> into adulthood and show some of the stuff he accomplished.  That's 
> how I know that he did follow through on what he'd learned as a 
boy.  
> Harry...had two kids.

zgirnius:
To the extent that Slytherin is Harry's Other as the buggers were 
Ender's, the Epilogue does show this as well. Albus *Severus*, as 
people keep pointing out, together with his assertion that he would 
be in no way displeased, were his son to be a Slytherin. (And, three 
kids, right? Ron had two).

> BetsyHP:
> That's what, three lines?  JKR managed to sneak in the possibility 
of 
> Teddy joining the OBHWF, tell us Neville is a professor and that 
> Draco is suitably squished.  And now we're just supposed to guess 
> that the vision of domestic bliss (circa 1950) includes dramatic 
> political change? 

zgirnius:
I see nothing in that scene to differentiate my domestic bliss from 
that of Ron and Hermione. I work full time, have two young kids, and 
am not married to their father, and the year is 2007. Totally not 
1950's. You insist on dating it to 1950 and making Hermione a stay-at-
home mom, but there is no more evidence of that view than there is of 
mine. If Rowling wanted to make that point, one snippet between 
Hermione and Ginny discussing housewifely matters would have helped, 
no?

I mean, Hermione grew up in Muggle Britain of the 1980's/90's, in a 
two career family. Why is it natural to assume she would adapt to a 
totally different lifestyle?

> Betsy:
> Frankly, I figure they're *all* stay-at-home.  Ron maybe putzes 
> around somewhere (using his Weasley networks which are pretty 
> formidable) to keep him in golf club dues.  There's nothing in the 
> epilogue to suggest anything different.

zgirnius:
No, there is not, and I like it that way. It was nice and open-ended. 
There is no obligation on the part of the author to provide a CV of 
her characters in her Epilogue, if all she wants to show is that her 
main characters are still alive, well, happy, and still great friends.

Since the subject of exams and their implications for future 
employment has been raised several times for assorted characters on 
that platform elsewhere in canon, I think they all work. Harry was 
all eager to be an Auror even after he inherited a second pile of 
money and a house. Why should I suppose he changed his mind? And why 
shoudl I care whether he did?