Helldivers 2’s Politics Appear To Be Flying Over The Heads Of Some

Really? I'm fed up with one humanity. Can't think I can handle any more. 🫠

Those weren't bugs, those were "Skinnies", humanoid aliens.

They showed up in the animated series, but not the movie.

Yeah, if I saw that movie I definitely wouldn't have wanted to sign up to go kill bugs after I saw it.

Maybe it should be rebooted as a gritty, Vietnam-esque series.

I mean wasn't the author of the book saying that's how things should be run? I had always heard the movie was basically mocking the premise of the book.

Speaking of which, they made a Robocop videogame recently, too. I haven't played it but I can't imagine it goes any better than this game does, as far as authentically delivering the message of the movie. If you're the cop holding the gun, how does the story deliver the message that police authority is just gang violence done for the rich and powerful?

That's so much more polite than the commentary that is warranted for that very same capacity.

Thats amazing... also Jeez he is old... oh jeez... I'm old...

Professional reviewers missed the satire of the movie. Or pretended to as fake outrage sells papers better and being the loudest to scream offense means you're the most right.

Honestly, I can't tell anymore what's an act, what's shitposting being misread and what's genuine. There's no way to tell what's a widely held belief and what's a hand full of idiots in the corner being put on blast. Take Forbidden West and Stellar Blade. How many of the people making hours long rants about either actually play games? How can they? They're spending all their time just chasing the outrage algorithm.

If they want Nazis to stop liking Warhammer, they should try putting the satire back in it. It's been fascist sympathy for decades at this point.

Short of the Emperor coming back and correcting his title to "Dictator of the Proletariat" I don't even know how'd they'd fix it now.

Canonize Chaos just being rebels with no demons? Horus Heresy already canonized them as being even more fashy than the Imperium. Tyranids or Necrons or whoever winning wouldn't do shit either. The chuds would just whine about people diverting resources from the war by fighting for "rights" and "food"

It's an easy worldview. Those people need the world to make sense, and fascism and authoritarianism give easy answers.

To be fair, some Warhammer writers also don't understand that they're writing satire. The Imperium lights it's spaceships with candles because they're too religious for common sense, and yet some claim only a fascist government is efficient enough to save humanity.

The Administratum is such a tangled and immense bureaucracy that entire planets are a rounding error to them. Their propaganda says this is because the Imperium is too big to manage efficiently. But the true reason is, fascists are bad at math

Even when the movie came out, people didn't get that it was satire and thought it was 100% serious.

Is there any chance that comment was satire?

Of course it's age restricted so you're not really supposed to watch it at 10. But anyway a 10-year-old isn't really the target demographic, at that age you're not going to have a developed understanding of politics yet so that's not really a problem.

When I first watched the matrix I didn't really understand what that was about either.

You missed Goldilocks zone for watching it, apparently.

I don't like it because I think it was both bad at being a Starship Troopers movie and bad at satirizing Starship Troopers.

At least read the whole book, Paul. Maybe then you'd have known Johnny Rico was Filipino and that particular reveal was actually a rather important detail when it was written. You did a white washing by accident, you crazy Dutch bastard.

A nazy sounds like some sort of cute little thing that old ladies make.

The complaints about Wolfenstein becoming political really took the cake for me.

More because they were a white Christian doomsday cult.

Clearly a little close to home for some people out there.

Most of the bad guys in Resident Evil 5 were black because of the relevancy to the setting, and people were similarly kicking up.

Is getting up in arms about one of those any different to the other?

(And just to be clear, I'm not taking about the tribal depictions, I'm referring to the reaction to the early trailers)

It was also kind of like,really pro-eugenics.

Sadly they were too optimistic and their leaders listened to smart people unlike ours.

Smart != benevolent

Doesn't really apply outside of text. It's entire tone of the cutscenes is very blatantly satirical

Most of them still haven't figured it out as far as I can tell.

Keep in mind, these are the same people who watched the Colbert Report unironically for years. I genuinely believe that there is a certain portion of the population which lacks the cognitive tools to process satire.

No, Joshua Sawyer, the Project Lead. He wrote characters like Arcade Gannon, told Gonzales to add dialectics to the Legion, etc.

He has shown up on Communist podcasts and is vocally a Socialist on Twitter.

"I don't enjoy killing, but when done righteously, it's just a chore, like any other."

While it is no secret that Heinlein was a closeted auto-fellating fascist with a fetish for ubermensch fantasies, neither is it argued that he was disingenuous in writing the book as unabashed bootlicking propaganda. His earnest attempt to aggrandize the measuring of individual citizens' worth by hardline nationalism, et al, is precisely why Starship Troopers is an unintentional satire.

The 1997 movie underscores this in its simplicity, and the chucklefucks described in the article above are yet more reasons why the rest of us need to be vigilant against the normalization of this bullshit.

You're not wrong. I have no idea why people are downvoting you

They'd have to know what the concept of subtext meant first, and then be able to perceive such, before even beginning to understand the blatant (to most anytime else in the human species) undertones of eviscerating sarcasm.

I apologize if I gave you that impression, as that is incorrect and I completely agree with your assessment: the movie was a cult classic for many reasons that include it being just subtle enough to almost feel sincere but overt enough to deliver the cheeky dark humor that Heinlein himself was too fervent a fanboi to grasp.

I'm a Leftist who watched One Punch Man, doesn't that show imply that gays are rapists and that anyone without a job most be lazy? Not very progressive...

I mean if they're missing that Super Troopers Hell Divers is satire, then probably xD

Maybe I missed it, but do they say that anywhere in the course of the gameplay or required interactions for getting into the gameplay? If it’s missable, it’s going to be missed. That’s fine for some stuff, but if your messaging relies on people with the most incurious ideology actively seeking it, you’re going to be disappointed.

We’re talking about it because it is something people misunderstood. You can’t wholly blame the audience without acknowledging the flaws of the media. Not that they bear no responsibility for their reading of it, but it’s not without value to critique the way the message was delivered.

There are some others, although I don’t know that they always need to do a “this is bad btw” message. Like Paday or GTA are crime fantasies. The player gets to have fun pretending to act outside the bounds of law and/or morality and get away with it in a safe environment. In the same way you root for the thieves in a heist movie. Although in a movies usually they do more to give you reasons to like the heroes like giving them some sad backstory.

These aren’t really trying to be a political commentary on crime. They might have a component of criticizing the society that forces people into crime, but I don’t know they have anything to say about the act or the people who do it in specific. And they don’t really need to. Not just because they don’t need to send a political message, but also because the game depends on the general understanding that crime is bad and. If it didn’t have that cultural context as a backdrop, the element of the game that makes the player feel like they’re getting away with something they shouldn’t be wouldn’t be effective.

Or to make a more direct thematic comparison: Call of Duty. They’re military fantasy games. The games are pretty much unironic imperialist propaganda. They, like a lot of big budget action movies that include military hardware, get direct support from, and in exchange cede editorial control to, the US military. In these games you are cast as a heroic soldier for either the US or an ally fighting against a bunch of evil, scary foreigners who want to destroy our way of life. When the bad guy turns out to be part of the military, it’s one rogue guy/faction. The one setting that doesn’t twist real life imperialist invasions as being good is WWII. But in the broader context, by placing the fight against the Nazis next to conflicts which have largely been about resource extraction and access to markets, they project the roles of WWII, where America is the good guy and the ones they’re fighting are evil, onto those invasions.

While CoD has to do some work to characterize the enemies to avoid humanizing them, they are heavily leaning on the pre-existing cultural assumption that America is good and brings freedom and democracy to the world. So while I’d criticize CoD for being what it is, I can’t really critique its effectiveness in conveying its message. It might not win over someone who already knows what’s up, and it probably doesn’t make any difference to the complete fascist nutjobs, for most people who don’t like violence and war, but might be convinced it’s necessary for some greater good, it helps reinforce the message that the wars we’re fighting are necessary and are for the greater good.

So yeah. My criticism of Helldivers 2 isn’t just that it doesn’t say it to your face that the things it depicts and represents are bad. It’s just that if it is a satire (and I don’t really have any reason to doubt that given a lot of context), I don’t know that it’s that effective at conveying its message. Sort of responding to some of the other comments: I don’t think you can reasonably expect that the majority of players playing a mission based co-op live service action game are going to stop to read lore or chat with NPCs that aren’t mechanically relevant. So if you want anything to get across, it has to happen in the course of gameplay, maybe even integrated into the mechanics. Granted, that game might not turn out to be fun to play, but that might just be a case for video games in general not being a very effective vehicle for anti-violence messaging.

Going back to those 3 groups:

• For anti-imperialists, it doesn’t matter. We know already.

• For straight up fascists, it doesn’t really do anything to make them re-evaluate their worldview. Maybe they might get something out of the way the lives of the soldiers is so valueless, but I kind of doubt it. But it certainly wouldn’t change their minds about their enemies being non-human and dangerous/worthy of being killed.

• For the average person… they might get the overly patriotic propaganda part of it, but there are so many times when these kinds of people recognize that, but then are like “it’s just like some communist dictatorship! Good thing we’re not like that.” There’s zero self awareness. For the part of it about the nature of the enemy and the necessity of military conflict, the killer bugs and bots that we see in game really only reinforce the idea that this is a necessary conflict.

Idk. It’s fine if the game wants to just be a fun goofy shooting game, and I don’t begrudge it for trying to be something more than that even if it fails, but it’s kind of hard to give it much credit either when it basically just copied someone else’s homework poorly.

As per the lore of Starship Troopers, yes I'm sure. There is no evidence even slightly that it was done by humans in that universe. On the other hand, in Helldivers 2 the intro video is clearly staged and prerecorded produced by the "Ministry of Truth" with the statement "scenes like these are happening all over the galaxy" making it clear that it was a staged video.

https://starshiptroopers.fandom.com/wiki/Bug_Meteor

The bugs in Starship Troopers even tried to send another one which was stopped:

"Later, at a certain point, the Arachnids launched a second meteor towards Earth. Fortunately for the Federation, it was destroyed by a Missile defence turret on Luna Base. The meteor would have slammed into southern Africa, possibly at Cape Town. "

It's actually refreshingly different for Overwatch Steam reviews, where people mostly just complain about 6v6 being gone and post Widowmaker ASCII porn.

Lemmy is literally the other side of that coin though. A bunch of 14 year olds yelling "fuck capitalism/America" in every thread.

But for those who don’t, and who don’t see beyond the surface veneer of “we’re defending Earth from invaders”… It looks a lot like AmericaWorld, where everyone is happy and free and kept safe from the nasty aliens.

If you don't think of it as a military dictatorship (remember, this is not the real world, it's fiction and people read into it whatever they want) then super earth is the good guys.

Super earth is painted as the most pristine fascist ideal of the polity united under a single uniform banner (because everyone who wasn't in line has already been purged or will be, shortly), why would your average normie (who by definition won't be strongly objecting on principle) ever oppose that if not for the means it was achieved with?

Most people come into fiction assuming the author agrees with whatever they think.

That's why you can hear lefties praise Ocarina of Time as anti-monarchist because Link is deposing Ganondorf, when it's obviously restorationist since Link is actually reinstating the rightful king of Hyrule, not ending monarchy altogether.

That's also why preachy, obnoxious, clumsy propaganda that bludgeons you with its political stance sells about as well as a kick to the teeth. Anyone who agrees will be bored by hearing repeated talking points, and anyone who doesn't will despise the message, not be moved or convinced.

Good art with a political message makes you actually come to the conclusions the author came to through the process of enjoying the art and having the experience the author has built in it.

For instance, by humanizing a character with ideas or traits you find distasteful.

Like the original Starship Troopers book, whose main character is not a blonde blue eyed all American boy, but Tagalog-speaking Filipino Johnny Rico, whose ethnic background Heinlein hides until the final chapter to make his 60s mostly WASP teenage boy audience identify with him, so they can have the realization that in a society that does not care about race they would not even realise which race the characters are until something practical comes up (his natively speaking Tagalog in this case), which was exceedingly anti-racist for the 60s.

Bad art tells you the political conclusion you should reach then calls you a bigot for rejecting its message. It's less than worthless as a political tool, it's actively detrimental because it creates the kind of staunch opposition and attempted purges we see weekly at this point trying to get woke shit out of media, the same way we had those in the 2000s with conservative trash like the "drugs are bad and a single joint will ruin your life" we would see in sit-coms every fucking season.

Every side does this when they have hegemonic control of media production, and everyone who isn't aggressively brainrotted eventually gets fed up because not only is it not helpful, it makes for bad art even when you agree with it.

Eh, in Fallout 3 and 4 Bethesda diverted the canon a bit too much for me. It never seemed like they understood the universe. In 1 and 2, the BoS was, if not good, at least lawful neutral, and quite helpful, despite isolationist. I haven't played New Vegas yet.

We are talking about the same people who think Fallout isn’t political and the Brotherhood of Steel is a cool good guy army.

Firstly, in the Bethesda games the political aspect of Fallout is so paper thin they may as well be correct, most people have not played the Black Isle fallouts.

Secondly, you need to realise that people don't see something as political if there is no dilemma in their mind, they see it as moral instead.

A good example: the Megaton ""dilemma"" in Fallout 3. Ostensibly, you could make an argument that the conversation of land development vs settler rights is a political one. The argument as to whether the lives of rando fucks living in shanties and slowly dying of radiation exposure are worth preserving if the alternative is starting over and building something better for other people could also be political at some point in history.

But in modern society, shaped by enlightenment ideas of equality and the concept of human rights and dignity, these have stopped being political questions because they sit in conflict with the basic social mores (hence moral questions) our society is built upon, and thus they take on a moral character instead.

The question "should we slaughter a bunch of useless peasants we are not in charge of to turn their land into my 15th palace" would hardly have been a matter of debate for some Mongolian horde for instance (yes, I know they didn't have palaces, you get the point), the debate would have been about ratios of enslaved captives vs killed in battle, if anything.

The vast majority of people's engagement with politics doesn't even approach the level of brainrot you see online.

People want security, prosperity, and for people not to suffer needlessly. That's about it.

In fact, most debate in society is about what those 3 concepts mean, not whether they're good ideas.

Some people also demand freedom but they're not the majority, and definitions of such and whom it should extend to also vary greatly.

So looking at the fallout 3 and 4 Brotherhood and saying "those are the cool post apocalyptic knights and they're the good guys" is a perfectly in line read for the average not politically savvy person. The Brotherhood is not perfect, but they want more or less those things.

That's also why New Vegas is by far the better game because it actually poses 2 forces (Legion and NCR) in opposition as to the meaning of those concepts and not as to whether they are goals worth pursuing, an actual political dilemma, unlike say "should people be allowed to drink water without getting radiation poisoning."

You’re giving these people too much benefit of the doubt on their critical thinking skills.

I extend the same benefit to people who make comments like this one, despite their blatant disregard for the humanity of their opposition and their expectation that disagreement with them means inability to conceptualise the world to the same level of complexity, instead of simply conceptualising it differently.

I might be wrong to do either, who knows, maybe I should treat all people who disagree with me with the contempt someone unintelligent and beneath me would deserve, I'm sure that never went poorly before.

To them, any politics is blatant cringeworthy soapboxing, and their definition of politics is anything that disagrees with their black and white worldview. They don’t think any deeper than whether something affirms their worldview or not. They’ll go from supporting the cops and government taking away other people’s freedoms to screaming at a cop a second later for giving them a speeding ticket because the cop “violated their first amendment rights” or whatever.

You know absolutely nothing of rightwingers or right wing thought. The fact alone that you'd flatten them all into one mass with a black and white worldview when "the right" encompasses such a massive swath of political ideologies to dwarf the left in variety should make you re-evaluate how much you actually understand them and how much of this is partisan hatred and dehumanisation.

By that exact same token I could paint the exact same picture of a leftwinger. Hell, it was all the rage to do so in 2016, and i'm sure you know exactly what I'm thinking of if you are old enough to have been politically involved back then.

These kinds of people believe that there are two groups of people: an in-group that consists of themselves, and an out-group that is everybody else. And they aren’t political, but the out-group is. They believe that there are two races: white and political. Two sexualities: straight and political. Two genders: male and political.

Good job erasing conservative blacks, conservative latinos, conservative immigrants, conservative women, and what few conservative LGBT people exist (not that many admittedly, but a few nonetheless).

It's really funny to see someone decry the inability of others to conceive and appreciate diversity, while doing exactly the same on a different axis.

You can have Coco Chanel. I'm taking Hugo Boss. The Nazis did NOT deserve to have that stylish of uniforms.

Obama an ultraconservative. I have seen enough for today

Are you high?

No but the fumes off of this comment might get me there.

Fascists are really good at misreading shit. They can assume ethnic homogeneity.

Ok, important distinction: fascists don't give a shit about race, identitarians (nazis) do. And yes, it's different, that's why I used the word "identitarian" and not "fascist."

Nazis would literally never assume homogeneity, nazi groups purity spiral around what ethnic group you belong to, let alone fucking skin color, they would absolutely want it to be an explicit ethnically homogenous group.

Everybody likes Mussolini

Which, not whom. The pronoun refers to the world in the prior phrase, not the person.

And on that topic, a lot of people really really like the idea of being free to remove people they disagree with from society, either by straight up violence, or by starving them out of work, civil liberties, protections, etc, regardless of political side.

Which is basically exactly what fascism is in thoery and in practice. Fascism is a non-ideological anti-liberal totalitarian government.

It explicitly has no tenets other than "whatever the few running the party believe works" and "you disagree, you disappear".

And I'm going to go out on a limb that since you called fucking Obama an ultraconservative, you probably have a sizeable list of people you'd get rid of "after the revolution," so forgive me if I'm not surprised that you don't see that the fascists' mentality is a lot more widespread than you think.

It's very dangerous to oversimplify your opponents (in a strategic sense). Generalization is also very risky.

Also, to label them as particularly different from yourself/your social group in some way (especially a way that you consider to be inferior) is the first step on the path to dehumanizing them, as a basis for justifying disdain/anger/hatred/etc. It's far more likely that they have different life experiences from yours which have lead them to understanding the world differently, but are generally similar otherwise. They "do not comprehend satire" in the same way that you do, that does not mean they are incapable broadly.

The book makes it a lot less handwaveable by giving the clendathu a much more pronounced civilization ane culture

Meanwhile the movie literally has a scene with one of the bugs mutilating a cow, and it's made up as poking fun at fascist propaganda, but it's also designed, advertently or not, to propagandize to the audience outside the setting too.

I don’t think Starship Troopers really describes an utopia

I disagree. Rico's family was quite well off. They lived a very comfortable life, and his dad didn't see any reason to go to the effort of gaining citizenship, because it earned him nothing more than what he already had. They had basic rights, they just weren't citizens with the right to vote. Rico joined because he had a more civic-minded group of friends that was joining. TBH, Rico isn't shown as being particularly bright; when he did his aptitude tests, mobile infantry was the very best that he was qualified for, and... That wasn't really that great. (That would be like getting a 36 on the ASVABs right now; juuuuuuuuuust enough to get into the Marine Corp, and not high enough to do anything other than the most basic jobs.) As far as a human population goes that we see in the story, there isn't any obvious underclass, which is a requirement for fascism. Yes, there were non-citizens that had no vote, but there was always a path for them to get their franchise, if they were willing to put in the effort. (As far as I recall, there wasn't a specific requirement that you serve in military; given that Heinlein goes out of his way to say that a position would be created for someone that was profoundly disabled, I think it's pretty clear that it was never just military service. But Heinlein was a military vet, and he was writing science fiction for a YA audience at the time, and military service was more exciting than, say, civil engineering.)

Moreover, Heinlein goes out of his way to say that no one that is currently in their term of service has the franchise. By choosing to become career military, Rico is giving up the ability to exercise his franchise unless and until he retires. Fascism is often--if not always--characterized by military control over large areas of civilian life. But if the military has no direct political power, that's sharply undermined.

And the democracy-accustomed reader is expected to understand the horror of these practices,

...But it was a democracy. It just wasn't a birthright democracy. Every person had to affirmatively choose to work for citizenship, rather than citizenship being granted based on where you were born, or who your parents were, but the right to work towards citizenship was afforded to everyone regardless of parentage, etc. I think that's a pretty positive thing, TBH. I think that the US would likely be a lot better place politically if everyone had to be personally invested in the system, and if everyone had to actually pass civics and history tests before they were allowed to vote. I know, I know, it's crazy, but maaaaaaaaybe a basic understanding of civics would mean that someone like Trump never would have gotten elected in the first place, since he's so bent on undermining and destroying the entire system.

I think that Heinlein gets some things very right; people value a thing much more if they have to put in some kind of personal effort to get the thing than people who simply have it handed to them. I also think that he gets some things very, very wrong, like his ideas on corporal punishment. (Which, TBF, were not that out of line for 1959.)

And this, in my opinion, is Starship Troopers’ greatest and most unique trait.

I think that you haven't read very much Heinlein if you think that he was writing satire at this point in his career. Stranger In a Strange Land had elements of satire, and Job was absolutely satire, but things like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is very straight forward. Heinlein is remarkably consistent in a lot of his writing; he's largely libertarian and believes people should be able to be self-reliant, but he still mostly believes in the gov't as a positive force. He's deeply distrustful of religion though; any time religion shows up in his books, it's a net negative.

We're also not given any circumstances behind this war. We can't draw any definitive conclusions about it.

Heinlein was a WWII veteran, and WWII was where the concept of 'total war' was pioneered. (And later demonstrated to be a pretty bad idea, but that's still not accepted by everyone.) We firebombed Tokyo and Dresden, knowing that it would cause massive civilian casualties, with only the barest military excuses; civilian casualties were the point, because we believed that it would break the will of the people of Germany and Japan to keep fighting. We can look back now and see that this was a dumb idea, esp. since Hitler was doing the same thing to England, and it was stiffening the resolve of the English. But unless you argue that the Allies were fundamentally fascist during WWII--which seems plainly false--then it's not reasonable to argue that the idea of total war was a fascist idea.

At a minimum, we know that it's a failed idea now.

Of course there's a lot of discourse, it's a popular game, it's a lot of fun and it's been a long time since something so high profile was also so over the top in it's satire.

Now I thought these comments WERE about the article, but if you want thoughts on the topic itself before you'll be satisfied, sure.

There will always be people who miss the point. There are people who unironically think Starship Troopers is the best thing ever and represents a model society. There are also people who honestly think Fallout doesn't contain any political commentary. There are people who thought SpecOps: The Line was just an okay modern military shooter. That isn't a flaw of the media itself, nor is it the problem of people who do understand. Dummies with a complete lack of media literacy or social awareness aren't a new concept, and the media they fail to understand isn't responsible for them. It isn't news that some people didn't understand a thing, and trying to MAKE it news is just disingenuous and reeks of clickbait and lazy journalism.