Something like this comes up a few times in <em>Ender’s Game</em> – see 9.182, 11.62, and 14.237. In all of these cases, Ender’s friends are never very friendly with him. (Or vice versa – let’s not blame anyone yet.) In all these cases, people focus on the game and on Ender’s responsibility as commander. In some ways, Ender’s position as commander gets in the way of his potential as a friend. Which raises some questions: does friendship require some sort of equality? Is there any way that Ender can be both a commander and a friend?

Ender might be the best in some ways, but for all his work in Battle School, we’re reminded that he’s constantly being manipulated (which makes him seem a little less smart). If we want an example of some one who’s smart enough to do the manipulating, we might want to look at Peter and Val. For one thing, they work together to manipulate the world. But there are also serious questions about which one of them is manipulating the other. Here Val comes out and thinks about the issue. At its heart, the question is, who is the smartest Wiggin? Which might remind us that all the competitions and battles happen in regular life as well, not just at Battle School.

Ender’s the focus of the book, but his sister Val probably comes in second in terms of page-count. Just like Ender, Val worries that she has Peter’s hankering for power and violence. They haven’t yet started their Locke and Demosthenes plan, but Peter is about to convince her. (In fact, Val wants to be convinced (9.107), so maybe there <em>is</em> some Peter in her.) But here’s a slight difference between Val and Ender: in this case, the narrator seems to come out and say that Val has some similarity to Peter, but the narrator never ever says that about Ender.