3 Lessons Learned from 3 Stories
Stories have the capacity to teach us things—they can leave a significant impact on us as readers or viewers. I know that there are several stories I’ve experienced that left their mark on me in a positive way. There are many different ways that a story can do this. Sometimes the story is just remarkable and emotional, sometimes it’s beautiful, but other times a story can teach us a valuable, powerful lesson—something that changes us for the better. That’s what I’m going to be talking about today: stories that have taught me something. In today’s post, I’ll be listing three different lessons that I learned from three different stories.
In advance, I want to say that there will likely be spoilers for each of the stories that I mention in this post. I try to avoid spoilers on my website and YouTube channel, but it’s hard to talk about lessons learned from stories without spoiling them to some degree. If you want to avoid spoilers for a particular story, you can just skip ahead to the next one. You’ve been warned!
Ender’s Game
You likely know that I’ve mentioned Ender’s Game several times in my posts—it’s one of my favorite books of all time, and it’s also a prime example of a story that is powerful in spite of its creator. I recognize that Orson Scott Card is a controversial figure and, if you haven’t read Ender’s Game, I would encourage you to pick up a used copy somewhere. It’s an older book, but it has a lot to say. It’s also one of the first stories to truly leave a mark on me—I read it when I was about eleven or twelve years old and still remember the powerful change that it had on me.
Ender’s Game is about war, but it’s more specifically about empathy. Throughout Ender’s Game, everything seems to be practice or training for the inevitable yet elusive real battle. Ender is constantly training and playing what are basically games… until one day he realizes it isn’t a game. He’s just wiped out a swath of enemy forces. He was used for his tactical mind and unknowingly slaughtered an entire species. Ender realizes that it wasn’t a game at the same time this information is revealed to the reader, and the impact is immediate. We, and Ender, suddenly feel a terrible weight—not only the weight of the human soldiers Ender threw away, but also the weight of the entire species that Ender wiped out.
If you continue reading the series—and I recommend at least reading Speaker for the Dead—you’ll see further explorations of how dreadful war is, but Ender’s Game alone is enough to drive the point home. This story was enough to shape my own views on war; especially as someone who grew up in a small town in Texas where a great many people view people outside of the United States as enemies, reading a book about the natural conclusion of that viewpoint was incredibly powerful. I’ve continued to grow and learn since then, but my views on war and enemies all largely stemmed from the first time I read Ender’s Game.
The Last of Us Part II
The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of all time. Unlike many people, I also really enjoyed the sequel, with my main complaint being that it feels a bit short. While I enjoyed the first one more than its successor, I found the second one to have a more solid lesson to teach us than the first game (which isn’t to say the first one doesn’t have lessons or impact, just that the sequel has a more powerful message). Interestingly, the message of The Last of Us Part II is incredibly similar to the message in Ender’s Game, just on a much smaller scale.
In The Last of Us Part II, Naughty Dog perfectly executes a story in a way that only a video game can. They force us to empathize not only with our protagonist but with our supposed antagonist as well. This is actually one reason why many people hated the game and attacked it. They hated that they were forced to play as someone they despised… except that's the point. We, as players, are meant to hate the person we are playing as. Then, over time, we would begin to empathize with her. We’d start to see her perspective, and we’d start to see that this isn’t a game with protagonists and antagonists. It’s a game about two people who are absolutely consumed with their own ideas of justice, which are really just staunch pursuits of revenge.. They have their own lives and relationships that they want to protect.
Like Ender’s Game, the end of The Last of Us Part II is a lesson on empathy. The final combat scene between Ellie and Abby is just… sad. It’s pathetic, miserable, and hard to watch. You just want it to be over because it feels so… pointless. Ellie’s drive for revenge has cost her everything, and she will gain nothing at all from it. There’s an emptiness to the vengeance, as there often is, and it’s even harder to stomach because we as players have spent such a significant amount of time playing as the character we’re trying to kill, and we see her as being just as human as Ellie.
Hogfather
My favorite author of all time is Terry Pratchett, and his books are filled with lessons and ideas that are meant to make you ponder for a while—sometimes, they’re meant to make you ponder for a good while. It’s hard to pick just one book to pull lessons from, but I don’t want to make this a Discworld-heavy post, so I’ve chosen to focus on Hogfather for the purposes of this article. This book is jam-packed with ideas and lessons for you to consider, and they aren’t just about Christmas! If I had to pick one core theme for Hogfather, it would be humanity and what that represents. Much of Pratchett’s works contain musings about humanity and humans in general, but I find that Hogfather is one of the most direct and accessible examples of his ideas regarding what it means to be human.
In Hogfather, we are faced with the notion that much of what formulates the human experience is a lie, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Justice, love, and many human ideas are, technically, lies. They don’t really exist, they’re things we’ve conjured for ourselves. They’re concepts that we have agreed to live by, but they only exist because we believe in them. In the book Death argues that this is why it’s important for children to believe in the Hogfather (or, really, Santa Claus).
To be human, the book suggests, is to have faith—to believe in these concepts that ultimately don’t exist without us, and that we simultaneously don’t exist without. It’s a symbiotic relationship: humans and their ideals. This ideology is summed up by this quote, toward the end of the book:
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
Conclusion
I have learned so much from so many stories, but these are three stories that stand out in my mind when I think about the messages I’ve taken away from stories that I have experienced. I could easily go on and on about lessons from other stories. Ghost of Tsushima, Mr. Nobody, and even Dark Souls all have strong messages, as do countless other stories I’ve experienced! Is there a story that stands out to you when you think about stories that have left an impact on you? What story is it, and what lesson did you take away?
Additionally, I’m really curious as to whether or not anyone has taken away a lesson that differs from those I’ve listed here for any (or all) of the stories I talked about in this post. Did you learn something different from Ender’s Game, Hogfather, or The Last of Us Part II? I’d love to hear about it, if so!
Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this post; I hope that you enjoyed it! If you’d like to see more from me or just want to support me, the best way to do so is to subscribe to my YouTube channel. You can also follow me on social media; I’m @TLBainter on most platforms, and I’ll have links for everything at the bottom of this post.
Thanks again. Until next time, bye!