This comic references the immensely popular book “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card, in which a young genius and his two older genius siblings (who were not selected for Ender’s role because of their unstable personalities) effect massive political change on a world locked in a war for survival with a foreign species. While Ender is in space learning to be a space general and govern space armies, his less stable siblings Peter and Valentine try to help stabilize the world’s tumultuous political scene by going onto the world network anonymously and posting political advice under the pseudonyms of “Locke” and ”Demosthenes”. Eventually these pseudonyms, because of their undeniable brilliance and powerful prose, begin to have influence over world politics.
This comic plays off the forwards-thinking fictitious technology of Orson Scott Card’s world (which plainly predicted such tech-culture staples as text messaging and hacking and weblogs) by placing it in a the modern real-world context of a well known blogging engine, Wordpress. While this might be enough for the typical XKCD punchline, the author has also a slight undercurrent of irony because it is highly unlikely that any modern blogger could gain enough influence amongst the noise of the internet to actually alter world politics, especially with a blog that sports the default WordPress theme.
