Many of the things said about Ender's Game could also be said about Harry Potter:

"...the plot is contrived to make sure that other characters always hate Ender. There is no obvious reason for him to be so despised, at every turn, by his peers: he's a confident guy who excels at games, the kind of guy who would typically be well-liked at school."

"Geek wish-fulfillment is not the only fetish on display in Ender's Game: the other is self-pity, the lonely self-pity of the truly gifted and persecuted."

For the record, I like Ender's Game and the Harry Potter books. (But wouldn't claim they were anything more than an enjoyable read.)

I don't get the self-pity thing off Potter, and I don't get the sense that the plot in the Potter books has been contorted to align most of the other characters in the book after him; there's a coherent set of adversaries for Potter, with understandable motives. It's harder to make that argument about all of Ender's adversaries.

The rest of the books in the Enderverse flush them out nicely.

I think Harry Potter is on a level above Ender's Game in terms of ambition. Rowling does some pretty impressive things in her novels.

But in both cases, it helps to look at why the authors make their heroes despised. Card does it to isolate Ender, to force him into being brilliant when he really doesn't want to be a hero. That's the theme that underscores the original four books.

In Harry Potter, it's done because Rowling marks Harry as this object of perfect good. Not as a perfect character, mind you, but a character that serves as a metric against which the other characters are judged. And so Harry finds himself disliked by certain other groups throughout the series, and it's almost always used to illustrate a certain vicious aspect of personality (be it class/race warfare, or glory-seeking, or bureaucracy).

I like Ender's Game as well (haven't read Harry Potter), but in retrospect, the characters are a little cartoony and unbelievable compared to what I've seen in "real" literature. We like to read about unreal characters, true, but it makes it hard for the reader to relate to these characters or to the plot they are going through.

I'll say how I've always felt about sci-fi: the universe and the concepts in play are more important than any of the traditional literary mechanisms such as plot, character development, etc.. I feel that this guy is just comparing the character of Ender on the level of the "real" literature I mention above. By those standards, characters like King Arthur or Siegfried are ridiculous charicatures, devoid of any true humanity.

This could also be why Mr. Bonds doesn't like Anime. The hook is the sense of motion, tension, and action that can be conveyed. A lot of the other aspects of Anime shows are bad, however. Then again, you can say the same for any given genre of books or for cinema in general.

On an unrelated note, someone should create some type of 'record' thing on the net, where we can actually record all the things that people say 'for the record'.

It's of no use. I've already decided against running for office.