YMMV / Ender's Shadow

• Anvilicious: Babies are what makes you a real member of society.
  • Bean feels disconnected from everything and only reluctantly agrees to father children, but once he does he suddenly has a whole world to protect just to keep his children safe, even the unborn fertilized eggs.
  • When we first meet Anton, he is depressed to the point of suicide and dealing with a huge psychological dissonance; when we see him again he is calm and happy. What changed? He decided to get married, and have children, even though he openly states that he isn't attracted to his wife in the slightest.
  • In the sequel Shadow Puppets, we meet Ivan Lankowski, a Russian-born Muslim who serves the caliphate. Some time is taken away from the main point of the story so Ivan can wax on about how evil and lost Islam used to be (i.e. in our present day), and how nuclear bombs needed to fall on Mecca and other important centers of Islam so that its successors could "find their way" again.
• Complete Monster: Achilles de Flandres, Bean's Arch-Enemy, is a megalomaniac obsessed with conquering the world. Becoming a Serial Killer in his teens, Achilles murders anyone he thinks has seen him as weak, which includes a surgeon who repaired his malformed leg. Recruited by Battle School largely due to his natural charisma, Achilles is expelled and institutionalized just two days later after Bean exposes his crimes, only to be freed shortly afterward by agents of the New Warsaw Pact. Achilles then begins manipulating various powerful nations into a series of brutal wars, intent on gaining enough influence over the eventual victor that he can effectively rule himself, and caring nothing for the resultant death and destruction. He also tries to have the School destroyed along with its students, simply out of revenge for expelling him. Driven by hatred both for Bean and for his friend and later wife Petra—whom he was attracted to, which made him feel weak—he murders an old friend of Bean's out of sheer spite, and sabotages the couple's efforts to have children just so he can crush their hopes utterly before killing them both.