Valentine Wiggin
From Orson Scott Card Wiki
| Valentine Wiggin | |
| Status | |
| Nicknames | Val |
| Occupation | Historian, Writer |
| Known relatives | Ender Wiggin Peter Wiggin John Paul Wiggin Theresa Wiggin |
| Characteristics | |
| Height | Unknown |
| Weight | Unknown |
| Eye color | Unknown |
| Hair color | Blonde |
| Skin color | Unknown |
| Unusual features | Unknown |
| Appearances | |
| Ender's Game Ender's Shadow Speaker for the Dead Xenocide Children of the Mind | |
Valentine Wiggin was Ender Wiggin's sister. Along with her bother Peter Wiggin, Valentine created the pseudonym Demosthenes on The Nets.
Contents |
[edit] History
[edit] Early Years
The second child in the Wiggin family, the International Fleet requested that a girl (later named Valentine) be conceived because they decided that the eldest child, Peter, was too brutal and aggressive to be taken to the Battle School. It was thought that by having a girl, the Wiggin Family genius could still be used, but in a more humane person. However, the girl was too empathic, and too conciliatory for the Battle School program. Because of this, the I.F. requested that a Third(later named Ender), a child who would hopefully balance the two extremes of his siblings, be conceived.
During his early years, Valentine served as a protector for Ender, whom Peter, angry and sullen over his failure to get into the Battle School program, often tormented. Afraid for both Ender's and her life, Valentine claimed in a confrontation with Peter that she had hidden a public record in a library warning the general public that if it turned out that she were killed, that it was most likely Peter who murdered her and that if he hadn't already, that he would soon move against Ender. She used the gambit in the hopes that Peter would realize that if the record came out it would not necessarily convict him of anything, but it would be a damaging enough record to keep him out of politics, a realm he wished desperately to enter.
[edit] Demosthenes
While Ender was away in Battle School, Peter convinced Valentine to work with him. As young children, they wrote manipulating political commentary under pseudonyms, Valentine as "Demosthenes" and Peter as Locke. Demosthenes became a paranoid writer about Russian expansion. Through great pathos and demagoguery, as well as playing off Locke (who wrote in the style of a mild intellectual), Demosthenes was able to acquire a vast popularity. The roles that the two took is in itself an irony, because Peter's personality was more like Demosthenes and Valentine's Locke. During this time, Valentine recognized that Peter often was trying to manipulate her for his own purposes, though Valentine felt like she was manipulating Peter as well.
[edit] Space Flight With Ender
After Ender's victory over the Buggers, Valentine forced Peter to let her go off to space because Peter prevented Ender from coming back to Earth. Valentine still wrote with her Demosthenes identity, but instead of being paranoid, she wrote about histories of different cultures on different planets, and in addition, she also applied some concepts to all humankind. Under the Demosthenes pseudonym, Valentine developed the 4-tiered Hierarchy of Foreignness.
After the equivalent of hundreds of years of real time, far less because she was so often traveling in relativistic time with Ender, she fell in love with, and married, Jakt on the planet Trondheim. 22 years later, she went to Lusitania to help her brother help the Pequeninos.
She is two years younger than Peter and three years older than Ender. However, the relativistic effects of interstellar travel render moot the question of how old she is in comparison to Ender or Peter.
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