Valentine Wiggin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Valentine Wiggin is a fictional character in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series of novels. She is the older sister of Ender Wiggin.

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^[1] 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 (named Andrew, later nicknamed "Ender"), a child who would hopefully balance the two extremes of his siblings, be conceived.

During her 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 the library that would be opened in the event of her death, stating 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 saying it would not be enough to 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.

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 developed as a fairly paranoid anti-Russian. 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.

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 Alienness.

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, along with Jakt and their children.

Physically, Valentine has been described as having blonde hair. 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.

1. ^ This was later refuted in Shadow of the Giant by Mazer Rackham in a discussion with Hegemon Peter Wiggin. Battleschoolers were not denied entry on the basis of excessive aggression. Peter was denied entrance because he lacked the fundamental charisma of a leader - people would follow him out of like-minded goals, but never show him the same devotion and love that Ender could command.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series
International Fleet	Admiral Chamrajnagar | Hyrum Graff | Mazer Rackham
Battle School	Petra Arkanian | Bean | Han Tzu | Alai | Achilles de Flandres | Ender's jeesh | Other Battle School students
Ender's family	Ender Wiggin | John Paul Wiggin | Peter Wiggin | Theresa Wiggin | Valentine Wiggin
Other	Novinha | Han Qing-jao | Si Wang-mu | Jane | The Hive Queen | Minor characters
Books | Characters | Concepts