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No, not real videos. Ender studied the vids of the Bugger Wars over and over again in Battle School, to extract every drop of intuition about the Buggers. We examine the books just as closely to bring you a miscellaneous collection of notes, comments, and observations.
The annotations are meant to provide a background guide to the Ender series. The idea unfortunately isn�t wholly ours; the Pratchett Annotated File is the inspiration for our own set of annotations. But really, there is a whole host of references and allusions, both subtle and obvious, throughout the books, connecting the Ender universe to our own. The content of these vids are either inferred by close reading or gleaned from statements by Orson Scott Card himself, in which case the note is marked with a link to the original source of the information.
The commentaries are long strings of subjective surprises, insights, streams of consciousness and other mental activity provoked by reading the Ender series. (Especially after you�ve read all the books four or five times, memorized the stories, and start dangerously speculating on the world �between the lines.�) Here are all the questions evoked by all that is left unwritten in the Ender series, plus our attempts to answer these unsolved mysteries. And amazing as it may seem, we actually have textual support for all our fanciful conjectures.
You may not notice it the first time around, but Orson Scott Card, brilliant writer though he is, does slip up more than a few times throughout the series. And one sign of true obsession with the Ender universe is when you pounce on every single one�and try to explain them away. Only the direct textual contradictions found in the books are listed, not the natural differences in perspective found between parallel novels like Ender�s Game and Ender�s Shadow. Are you a careful reader? How many of these did you catch?
What can we say? We�re pretty sure Orson Scott Card knows how to spell, so obviously Tor needs to get better copy editors! Oh, you mean, �What! You�ve actually listed all the typos?!� Well, yes, we don�t have any lives of our own outside the Ender universe, and yes, we�re insane, but you knew that already, didn�t you? But rest assured, you weren�t hallucinating when you thought you saw �accidentally� spelled �accidently� in an otherwise pristine copy of Speaker for the Dead.
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