"Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice."
"But we don't think like other children, do we, Val? We don't talk like other children. And above all, we don't write like other children." (9.61-62)
Adults may have clumsy, fat hands (see the first quote – we’re not just saying that to insult ourselves), but children have some problems, too. For one thing, as Val makes clear here, no one takes children’s ideas seriously. Peter has a solution for that, which is to hide their ages online. What’s curious here is that children have problems, but they can find ways to get around those. Can the adults? Well, sure: they can manipulate and use the kids.
Quote 2
"Val, we can say the words that everyone else will be saying two weeks later. We can do that." (9.80)
Peter is the most manipulative of the Wiggin kids. Or is he? Maybe he’s merely the most open about it. Here he is, planning with Val about how they should manipulate the world. In this case, his form of manipulation will be almost entirely verbal. (By contrast, the school teachers try to manipulate Ender through a number of techniques, such as isolation.) Peter and Val are useful for us because they talk a lot about their plans for manipulation (so we can see exactly how they plan to do it); and also because they demonstrate that manipulation is not totally about Ender. (See also 9.37 and 9.63.)
Quote 3
“We play by their rules long enough, and it becomes our game." (13.114)
What exactly is Val saying here? She’s trying to comfort Ender by telling him that he’s not a puppet other people's games, he’s actually a player. Is she right? The school administrators’ other quotes (that we pulled here) make us reconsider our attitude towards manipulation: oh, well, if Anderson says that manipulation is good for Ender, maybe he’s right. But here, Val takes another approach. She seems to be saying that we can escape manipulation by…ignoring it? Or leaning into it? This seems like a radically different approach from, say, Dink’s awareness of manipulation.