this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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I'm out of the loop, what's up with Orson Scott Card?
The base Ender series didn't seem to have a lot of issues, and I was surprised when one of my friends said he had nothing to do with Card because he was Mormon.
Then I read the Shadow series (side story in the Ender universe), and whooooo-boy. There was a section with one of the most brilliant genetic scientists of the age talking about how, despite being gay, he chose to marry a woman because the most important thing, the only way to really participate in humanity, is to make babies. Beyond the homophobia, beyond the absolute what-the-fuck about life being meaningless without having kids, he had a genetic scientist in the future who lacked the imagination to figure out how a gay man could have biological children while being married to a man. Something that gay married people are completely capable of doing right now.
He's a Mormon and the church teaches him to be a bigoted homophobe basically.
Sanderson veils Mormonism better, but seems to be very progressive... hiping he doesn't fall off that train.
He's also friends with Howard Taylor(or at least did 18 seasons of a podcast with him) who is also mormon but writes a reasonably hard scifi comic. I don't recall if there was any direct or implied bigotry that wasn't treated as a bad thing, but I don't recall any specifically lgbt characters either. Some races didn't really have sexes, or didn't have sexual dimorphism iirc, but it's been a while.
Woah Sandy Branderson is a Mormon?
Think about Mistborn, and words only being true when etched in metal...
He is, doesn't hide it, and goes about researching stuff he shouldn't religiously agree with by interviewing people of those beliefs/experiences instead of using his own perceptions, from what I've seen and read of his process for Stormlight (where iirc, a gay relationship is seen as more normal and acceptable than a woman having a hand exposed).
Whatever the balance is, my impression of Sanderson that of a stable individual. I would be surprised if he suddenly regressed, barring something like a traumatic brain injury of course.
I do think that cult holds him back creatively. He can write a truly horrific scene that I can barely get through about an enslaved man hauling war bridges on his back day after day, but no birds and the bees.
Well, he has wrote people having sex, just not the scenes themselves, in both Warbeaker and Mistborn. I think in all those cases they were married though...