How does the Fantasy Game affect Ender mentally?

The fascinating thing about these choices is that the buggers seem to have put all their hope in him. If this queen truly is the very last one, and seeing that they built an elaborate scene from the fantasy game for him to find, they have put an incredible amount of trust in Ender's goodwill. And as the queen grows up, she will be extremely defenseless, without technology, and someone will have to make sure that she survives long enough to perpetuate the species. It is almost impossible to think that anyone but Ender could take on such a huge responsibility, now that he has saved the humans from the buggers, to save the buggers from the humans.

Valentine's last volume of the bugger wars is to be on the story of Ender Wiggin. Her idea is to bring it up to the present day and then stop, though Ender prefers that she stop it on the day they won the final battle. They never again mention Valentine's final volume--except to say that she finished it. These circumstances suggest that this novel, Ender's Game, is itself meant to be Valentine's (Demosthenes') final volume of the bugger war. If not, then who else could know enough about Ender to be the author of this novel--the new bugger queen? Who will be Ender's "Speaker" when he is dead?

When Ender finds the queen's cocoon, he sees a flash of memories and hears thoughts in his mind as the buggers communicated. The bugger-queen "tells" him that they did not mean to murder the humans, and when they understood what they had done, they never returned. She insists that they could live with the humans in peace. This thought-speech between Ender and the bugger queen supports what Ender repeatedly asked Graff and Mazer during his training: if the buggers never knew that that they were killing sentient beings, and they have not returned, why should the humans attack them? While Graff's and Mazer's point of view--that the buggers had attacked them twice and thus would probably return--is valid on the basis of experience, Ender seems to understand the buggers better than anyone else. Ender's experience of learning the bugger memories proves to him that the buggers should not have been punished for doing something they did not understand. Even so, killing humans as they did was murder, intentional or not.

Mazer tells Ender that his reputation will not be destroyed until the historians attack him in thirty years or so, suggesting that such revisionist historians tend to be iconoclasts, casting unwarranted doubt on the character of true heroes. Interestingly, the sequels to the novel show what one might guess on the basis of the end of the novel. Ender's reputation is ruined during his lifetime because of the sympathy he engendered for the buggers through his book. The book of the Speaker for the Dead causes the humans to forgive the buggers and to understand them, and thus they begin to hate Ender for what he did, considering his action a massive genocide. (The negative repercussions of killing the civilian population on the bugger home world hit, first of all, Ender himself.) Yet, the final line suggests that this reversal of human opinion will take "a long time."