Ender's Game is The Hunger Games in space????!?!?

(Jim's note: this has been sitting in my "unpublished" file for a while. It dates back to whenever-it-was that Catching Fire came out.)

It's not. It's just... no! Stop! That's a stupid, stupid comparison. The Hunger Games is (I hasten to add a very good example of) a typical Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (on a related note, no, I cannot watch the trailer for Divergent without cracking up). You have the plucky hero,* the love triangle, good and evil. Hunger Games is more nuanced than others, yes, but aside from the fact that it has "Game" in the title, it has pretty much nothing in common with Ender's Game.

*I hate the term "heroine." It implies that what's between her legs defines her more than her actions do. On this blog, "hero" is gender-neutral.

Now, I've hinted before that I read Ender's Game at a fairly young age. It was the first book I read with swear words in it! I certainly did not consider it "Young Adult," although I had absolutely no frame of reference (the only comparable thing I know for certain I read before Ender's Game was the Thrawn trilogy, and I wouldn't consider that "Young Adult" either).

So what do I mean by "Young Adult?" Usually it's going to have these characteristics:

• A teenage protagonist
• A coming-of-age story
• A love triangle
• A stark contrast between the heroes and the villains
• Morally gray characters are not treated as heroes by the "matured" protagonist

These are by no means exclusive to the genre, and they are by no means the only characteristics of the genre, but I think they are more or less essential. And if you're familiar with them, The Hunger Games ticks at least three of the boxes, whereas Ender's Game ticks at most one. To discuss:

Teenage protagonist is obvious. Ender is a child, so he doesn't count. I have always had an extremely low tolerance for underage protagonists, and here are the ones I like: Ender Wiggin, Katniss Everdeen, Buffy Summers,* Harry Potter, and Arya Stark. End of list.  I mention this because, when I finished the sixth Harry Potter book and realized that 16/17-year-old Harry was going to go off and kill Voldemort in the next book, I thought, "wow, that's dark." Because up until the fourth book or so, the Harry Potter books were fairly light-hearted adventures. Yeah, we all knew that the Dark Lord was out there, somewhere,

*She's underage for 3/4ths of the show's best two seasons. She counts.

Ender's Game is not a coming-of-age story; Ender is playing games for the whole time and his only bit of emotional growth comes at the very end of the story. Yes, he's "becoming a better leader" throughout the book, but that's not the same as "coming of age."  The adults are deliberately keeping the consequences of his actions from him. As far as I'm concerned, Card cheats, and most of Ender's character development occurs off-screen between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. (Or, to nitpick, during the epilogue to Ender's Game as the narration tells us how he becomes the Speaker for the Dead.)

There is no love triangle in Ender's Game, but there is in The Hunger Games. Two young men vie for Katniss's affections: Saint Peeta, and her old hunting buddy Gale, who's basically just a slightly darker version of her. And as for the morality, well, the first two books have a "Capitol bad, oppressed peasants good" morality, and the third one introduces a third faction that turns out to be just as bad as the Capitol and they all get their just desserts at the end. Meanwhile Gale does something very, very gray, and Katniss chooses Saint Peeta over him. So I would argue that The Hunger Games ticks all four boxes, though I can understand why some people might choose to read a lot of gray into Katniss's actions across the books.

Meanwhile, the moral box is really the only one Ender ticks. Ender is destroyed when he discovers that he's just committed a necessary evil.

That, and the ridiculous amount of casual nudity, are the main reasons why I never considered Ender's Game a "Young Adult" novel.