dragoongfa wrote:
That has the plot hole of the Formics not wandering how a species without 'sentient guidance' managed to get technology at the first place. If they really thought that humanity had queens of its own they would have wondered why not only they couldn't talk with them but why they couldn't even 'listen' to the orders that the 'drones' got.
The Formics assumed we did have guidance, they just assumed they hadn't seen our queens yet. The very premise of Ender's Game is only possible because the Formics can control their drones when they aren't in the system, so the fact that they hadn't bumped into any in the first war would be odd but not so strange from their point of view.
dragoongfa wrote:
This huge plot hole can be explained in universe only if the Formics never bothered to even consider someone else as 'equal sentient' and just considered everyone but themselves as fodder; only challenging this notion after Mazer Rahkam killed the Queen that was sent to exterminate the pests and colonize Earth. Then there are the Piggies which I have only seen through the comics. Those would certainly not pass as sentient to them.
The final Formic queen who Ender saves at the end of Enders game makes contact with the Piggies in Speaker for the Dead. She considers them fully sentient, and actually gets along better with them than she does with the Humans because the Piggies in their tree stage are capable of telepathic communication like she is.
dragoongfa wrote:
Them not sending out FTL ships can be attributed to their want to make moral amends but that still doesn't change the fact that what they did to humanity up to that point was a callous act of evil that would only bring retribution until one of the two species was annihilated.
Then again, considering how advanced the Formics are, I cannot help but wonder if they had a way to peek into the future and went all eldar Farseer, picking the only solution that would guarantee a future for their species; all the others ending with berserk humans hunting them down to the ends of the universe (but thats my Humanity Fuck Yeah sense tingling).
While the idea that it was 'evil' is disputable (they didn't understand what they were doing was actually causing any lasting harm, and stopped the moment they realized it was), the Formics knew what they did was going to invite genocidal retaliation. Canon says they didn't have a way of seeing into the future, but considering they managed to put their infant queen on the exact world Ender eventually ended up going to (as opposed to the dozen or so other Bugger worlds he might have become governor of) the plot would actually have made more sense if they did.
dragoongfa wrote:
In the end the Ferengi put it best: Stupidity is not an excuse. Attacking someone with spaceships and genociding their populace twice all because you thought that they weren't sentient is a special kind of stupid action that was probably repeated at nauseum until someone actually died.
Arioch wrote:This falls short as an excuse on a huge number of levels; the Buggers are still aggressive conquerors who don't mind depopulating planets full of "non-sentient" organisms or attacking fellow queens and taking their stuff. Even if we buy Card's "philotic" god-particle bullshit about what causes sentience, that's still an appalling disrespect for life, when your first impulse is to exterminate. It's also incredibly narcissistic and unimaginative, not to consider for even a moment that aliens might not be exactly the same as them. We can argue about whether that qualifies as evil, but I think the Buggers deserved every little bit of what they received in terms of retribution.
Can't argue with the idea that Formics were certainly much more aggressive than they should have been, regardless of whether or not they thought they were fighting a harmless proxy war via drone. However claiming that they deserved wiped out down to the literal last (wo)man simply for being aggressive expanders is going a bit far. If we apply that logic to our own race just about every nation on the planet would have earned annihilation two or three times over.
Argron wrote:From what we have seen allying with the Loroi means cooperation on a reasonable level. Allying with the umiak means slavery and forced labour, not because they are evil but because that's how they treat their own people and their particular psyche accepts it as normal. The evil part they are guilty of is not caring about how very different cultures and species see their monstrous treatment of the individual, and not giving nations a choice in the matter: with them it's voluntary slavery, forced slavery or death.
The loroi have also not initiated all out wars, they only entered wars that were declared on them (like the current umiak war) or came to the help of allies, while the umiak have initiated both of the wars we so far know they have fought. The loroi also don't smoke everyone that looks them badly or else they wouldn't have had several wars with some of their client races, they would have exterminated them the first time they met. The slug-like people were being backstabbing dicks in a war of extermination... good luck to whoever does that to humanity, let alone the umiak.
The orgus could be biased, but all the media and logs they have on board and that humanity has surely analyzed to the tiniest detail most likely isn't as much, and they have no reason to edit it all to make the umiak look worse since they didn't even know humanity was there. And hell, if they are very biased that could be proof in itself of how badly they were treated.
Just about everything you've said is true, but recall that one of the central questions for Humanity in this story is which side should they take? If everything where that clear-cut, there wouldn't be much plot tension. The fact that the Loroi are just as likely to decide to exterminate Humanity because we're a threat to them as they are to welcome us as new allies is a big part of the story.