What is a Smurf
There is a concept in games called “smurfing.” It’s an odd term and I don’t know the origins, but it refers to a highly-skilled player who spends his time beating up on lower-skilled players rather than players in his own skill level. He plays to make sure he wins, not to become better, and in so doing he makes the game worse for everyone else.
I will argue here this concept also describes a certain sort of person who writes critical literary essays on the internet. Or, more generally, anyone who writes “serious” essays but posts only them in such a way as to avoid serious feedback.
The first similarity is their choice of venue. They do not publish in journals where academics read and write1. They also do not publish in more professional open-internet sites such as Substack and Wordpress, which are increasingly being used by academics (although still taken less seriously than the academic journals). Instead they write on sites such as Tumblr and AO3, which are massively read by fans of the original work but rarely by anyone looking for serious literary criticism. By writing there, just as gaming smurfs choose venues where no one can challenge their gaming skills, they can be assured that there is no one who can seriously challenge their skill as an analyst.
The next similarity is their tone. Professional e-sports players usually take the game quite seriously — it’s their life, after all — and rarely make jokes in the middle of an important match. Smurfs, however, are playing purely for their own amusement, and will frequently make jokes, sometimes intentionally to unhinge their opponent. I’ve noticed this as well in popular internet essays — the joke-to-analysis ratio is quite high. This can sometimes be hilarious, but also makes it difficult to focus on the more serious points. Especially when discussing something as serious as the genocide in Ender's Game, the jokes can get in the way of the message.
What is a Pro
Mainly it’s just a skill issue. Smurfs might seem good, or even pro, compared to an average player. But when you compare them to the real pros, you see the difference in skill level.
Professional literary critics don’t just write; they also read. They read a rather astonishing amount, well past the point where it stops being enjoyable. A big part of earning a humanities PhD is simply reading all of the voluminous literature on a subject so that they can be familiar with what’s already been written. They build by standing on the shoulders of giants, not as lone geniuses.
Amateurs don’t do that. We read for fun, which generally means only reading a few of the most popular authors and skipping (or not even knowing) the less famous. It is notable, for example, that when Bavitz does a quick degression through postmodern American literature, he mentions only Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow as examples, which are widely known because they sold well among the general public (and perhaps also because their giant size and complex structure makes them appear intimidating), but are not representative of the genre and somewhat passe among modern academics.
In addition to reading many books, academics also read a lot of criticism of those books. Much of this criticism only appears in paywalled literary journals and is rather dense with jargon, making it difficult to access for amateurs. But it also makes for efficient communication of complex ideas, and allows the professionals to build on each other’s work, rather than starting from scratch in each essay.
Notably, in Bavitz’s Ender’s Game essay, he doesn’t reference any of the many critical essays written on that book by famous academics. Some examples are Blackmore (1991) analyzing its military paradigm, Sara Day (2012) on its blurred lines between children and adults, and James Campbell (2009) on the topic of its sexual cross-currents.
But most relevant here is an essay by Elaine Radford in 1987, where she argued that the entire book was basically an elaborate excuse for literal Hitler:
I don't know of any pair of novels that have been as consistently misinterpreted as Card's Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Even a reader with a rudimentary knowledge of twentieth century history might be expected to guess that the character of Ender Wiggin, the near messianic superhero, is based on that of Adolf Hitler. Card himself is the "Speaker for the Dead" who seeks to understand and forgive the genocidal dictator's behavior by demonstrating that his intentions were good. Because Hitler/Ender committed genocide to preserve the existence and dignity of what he defined as human, he is not a monster but a true Superman who willingly shouldered the heavy responsibility thrust upon him.
This essay was very controversial, as the book’s many fans fiercely resented this comparison. At some point, it inspired Card to write a personal rebuttal which was printed in later editions of the novel (providing an interesting twist on “the author is dead” when the actual author is still alive and can directly respond to his critics by adding text to the book). But as long as so many young people were reading this book, taking inspiration from it, and (arguably) misinterpreting it, the literary world was still offering its criticism, and this eventually culminated in John Kessel’s 2004 masterpiece, Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality, where he expands and refines Radford’s thesis. Here is one excerpt:
Card sets up Ender to be the sincere, abused innocent, and rigs the game to make us accept that he does no wrong. I see the entire purpose of the “remote war by game” trick in the novel as a device to make this argument plausible. But in the real world genocide is not committed by accident. We see the immoral consequences of such a mode of thought in the heaps of dead bodies that history has piled up, committed always by leaders who tell us they only meant to protect us from evil. I just will not accept that.
The biggest difference I see between these professional literary criticism and the work of amateurs like Bavitz, is that the amateurs simply spend too much time on plot summary. They take the plot as fixed and highly important, because in the mind of a typical reader that’s simply what happened. They read to find out what happened, and they can’t change it. But to the mind of a professional literary author or academic, the plot is generally less important than the style, themes, and characterization. The plot can be easily changed to fit whatever message the author wants to convey, and in a truly postmodernist novel it often makes little sense. They are highly aware that this is fiction, not reality, and that what really counts is what readers take away from it, not the literal ink on the page. If Ender’s actions made perfect logical sense in the context of the story, it’s only because Card chose to set up the story that way. The story can often twist in the mind, especially when read by a young reader who sympathizes with an abused sympathetic main character, and misses the disturbing parallels the how real people who do terrible things often self-describe as feeling themselves the victim.
Or to put it more simply: the types of people who read serious literature criticism have already read the book and don’t need a plot recap.
The Game is Real
In one of my first blog posts, I argued that Critical Theory is essentially a theory of action. In other words, it is not meant to simply entertain or even enlighten us with endless naval-gazing about our favorite books, it is meant to directly change the world. In an odd way, it is not like Ender’s Game that way. They saw themselves trapped in an unfair system, on the brink of genocide, and they fought back with the only weapon they had available, which was their words (as highly skilled writers and literature professors). If they sometimes “cheated the game” by writing words that are not literally true, it’s because they had a more important purpose than winning word games; they needed to win at all costs and by any means necessary. That’s the game that the real pros play; all the rest of us are merely amateurs dabbling, no matter how many fancy words and literary references we throw in.
Admittedly these journals are not free to access, but they’re also not that expensive. A one-year subscription to Modern Fiction Studies for example costs $60, or you can probably access it through a nearby library
LMAOOOOO real shit, get his ass