There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor. Their faith was been shaken by an Arrowhead community manager they believed they found to be (gasp) progressive who was then subsequently harassed, but their head-scratching reading of Helldivers 2 as a “non-political” game is worth examining.
The only thing that makes sense is that these players have the shallowest of surface-level readings of the game. You are a patriotic soldier serving Super Earth. You must kill bugs and evil robots trying to hurt your brothers-in-arms and innocent citizens. There are no storylines to insert progressive causes into, everyone wears helmets so no “forced diversity.” Therefore, no politics.
Of course, this is…wildly off the mark, as Helldivers 2 is about the most blatantly obvious satire of militaristic fascism since the film that inspired it, Starship Troopers.
I think what a lot of people miss here is that when people say “keep politics out of x” what they mean is “keep blatant cringeworthy soapboxing out of x.”
Helldivers is tongue in cheek and doesn’t feel the need to bash you over the head with “But actually fascism bad” every five seconds, instead it has gag recruitment ads and an overall really funny presentation that works whether you get it or you don’t.
I guarantee you that no rightoid looks at a one world government “super earth” with fond eyes.
If you’re an identitarian the fact that the Helldivers can be men or women is unacceptable, not to mention it’s not clear if they’re ethnically homogeneous
If you’re a libertarian the de-individualization and constant surveillance/propaganda from a totalitarian state is unacceptable, double that if you’re an ancap
Monarchists would probably like this if it were an explicit monarchy, but it’s not, so they would probably also not like it
The only faction who would like this game’s world is classical fascists, the kind Mussolini was, which ironically a lot of people seem to really really like on any side of the political spectrum, cause it’s literally just totalitarian ideological illiberal authority.
I think you are expecting a lot more subtlety in people’s interpretation than the people doing the interpretation deserve. Yes, super earth is clearly a military dictatorship to anyone who recognises that it is a political satire. 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.
Spacetravel is fueled by bugblood (element 710, or “oil” upside down) which the government actively “farms” by letting them rampage freely around civilian worlds, for the benefit of the homeworld. They likely engineered the terminids to increase the 710 production, making them more aggressive.
The Automatons are the direct descendants of the cyborgs, whom Super Earth keeps enslaved on Cyberstan, for the crime of disagreeing with the government.
These things aren’t subtle at all, or hard to see in-game. Every dead helldiver is a direct result of the actions of the government.
Also, uh, try walking out of bounds. What does that tell you?
They are also depicted in Black-Red-White pattern, with skulls on their heads, are deemed to be “socialists” by the government, and are rebuilding coming off of a punishing defeat, sound familiar?
There is a deliberate series of conflicting points of satire in the game precisely to make it so you can read it multiple ways.
Which is a very on the nose parody of the US foreign policy regarding the middle east, and the US crucially isn’t a military dictatorship.
Every dead soldier always is, doesn’t make their cause automatically unworthy. Obviously in this case it is, that’s the joke, but that’s not an argument in itself.
Also I know plenty of dead helldivers who caused it to themselves, but I digress.
My point is, the game is political satire, but it doesn’t have a single valid interpretation. Nothing does, but this does even less than usual.
It satirizes fascism, but also liberalism, it satirizes those who look at an oppressed group and can’t see their current evil behaviour because of their oppressed path, it satirizes those who see conspiracies everywhere but in plain sight, I’m sure there’s jabs at communism too (or maybe that was just twitter lefties identifying with bugs again…)
There’s a lot of variety because it’s not some garbage propaganda piece, but an actually well made piece of satire and, as such, it should make you think not tell you what you ought to think.
*looks over at the Palestinian genocide being supported so hard by the US military industrial complex it might actually cause the sitting President to throw their entire campaign over refusing to budge to voters REALLY not wanting the US to support Israel in committing ethnic cleansing…. *
You sure about that one? Yeah it doesn’t say “Military Dictatorship” on the tin but ommm….
What does foreign policy have to do with local governance, exactly?
The US is not a military dictatorship. There is no debate about it. Case in point: you are allowed (or would be in case you’re not from the US) to post this and not get disappeared by the FBI tomorrow.
The US has a very hawkish foreign policy that you can absolutely condemn and disagree with, but words mean things and “military dictatorship” does not mean “mean to brown people.”
I am sorry, voting has no measurable impact on what and how the military and government of the US chooses to commit genocide and fight wars.
Edward Snowden would be put away in jail for the rest of his life for the second he stepped on US soil for speaking up against the US government.
I am equating living under a typical military dictatorship with living in the US? No, but honestly we aren’t very far from a military dictatorship given how incredibly, incomprehensibly powerful the military industrial complex is in the US. There has never been a more powerful military either in absolute terms of force or in relative terms of force compared to similar peer militaries, it doesn’t really matter that we can vote, the votes don’t have any meaning against that degree of entrenched power.
Its pretty easy to aim at lib or fasch and hit the other. They’re kind of fucking. Have been since that one free city in the alps with all the cocaine and nonstop street fights, orgies, and street fight orgies at the end of, I wanna say, the Austria Hungarian empire?
We are talking about the same people who think Fallout isn’t political and the Brotherhood of Steel is a cool good guy army.
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.
I mean, they send a random stranger who wants to join them to die in a radioactive hole for fun. They are just kinda there in the originals until something bigger shows up.
Yep, that’s lawful neutral for you. They safeguard and preserve technology while biding their time, but they don’t share it with those in need. I’m sure lots of people bother them, and they send them all over to get rid of them. They’re not really good guys, but they’re also not bad guys. I like them well enough.
Yeah, I can see that.
I think Bethesda made them too much of the good guys in Fallout 3 and overcorrected in Fallout 4.
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.”
I never actually mentioned Bethesda so I don’t know why you went straight there.
Fallout is inherently political, it’s a gigantic criticism of the US after all, politics and everything.
The dilemmas are definitely there. Should we turn humans into super mutants since they are much better suited to the environment? Are the old world values of the NCR worth restoring? Are synthetic humans the same as other humans or should they be treated differently (this is a gigantic metaphor for racism and slavery btw considering their saviors are literally called the railroad).
Everything you said about Megaton is wrong, Tenpenny wants to blow it up because he doesn’t like looking at it, there are no plans to develop the radioactive hole left in it’s place if you do blow it up. It’s 100% a black and white choice that’s there because it’s memorable and nothing else.
I’m not going to bother with the rest, it’s too long.
When someone says “fallout is not political” what I hear is “the fallout games I played are not political.”
The Bethesda games are the ones most people have played, and those have absolutely shit political depth, so the idea that “fallout is not political” is valid. It technically is but the message is so dirt simple it would make Will Smith’s musical career look like the epitome of edgy content.
Technically so is calling americans fat and lazy, doesn’t make it insightful or particularly complex, which is my point: if a “political” dilemma is shallow enough it decays into a moral one or simply into a non-issue.
I was being exceedingly charitable but my point stands, this is the caliber of choices you have to “think” about in the bethesda fallout games: cartoonish evil or sensible normal person.
Sorry for trying to have an actual in depth conversation and not a soundbyte like “hurr durr the people who disagree with me are media illiterates.” Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
My brother in Christ, “rightoids” are literally falling over themselves to support a man who openly proclaims his intentions to become a dictator.
You’re giving these people too much benefit of the doubt on their critical thinking skills. The kinds of people you’re talking about aren’t the ones who complain about politics in media. It might annoy them when it’s as bad as you’re talking about, but it bothers everybody else as well when it’s that bad. The ones who can’t see the satire here are the same ones who scream about the main character being a woman.
To them, any politics is blatant cringeworthy soapboxing, and their definition of politics is anything that disagrees with their black and white worldview. When they say “keep politics out of x”, they mean “never give me anything outside of my echo chamber.” And they absolutely love the Super Earth world government. 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. As somebody else put it in the comments:
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not talking about conservatives as a whole. I believe there’s plenty of conservatives who get that this is satire. And plenty who probably didn’t pick up on it, but would get it if you explained it to them. I’m saying that you’re mistaking the vocal minority for the silent majority. The majority of people, conservatives and progressives alike, only really care about political stances in media when it’s hamfisted in awkwardly. Nobody enjoys that. But you usually won’t see people complaining about it because people don’t usually care enough to bother. All art is political, but not all art is a stupid hamfisted attempt to appeal to some minority group in a way that even they hate. Art has a piece of the artist’s beliefs and convictions behind it, so it is inherently political regardless of whether or not it’s attempting to say a specific political message. That’s just the way that life is. Steven Spielberg’s biggest regret is making Jaws, because it is directly responsible for the mass culling of sharks. It wasn’t his intention, but it changed the way people saw sharks and terrified them all across the world. He just wanted to make a horror movie and ended up changing the cultural landscape of the entire world. If you look specifically at what the “no politics in my media!” crowd is crying about, you’ll usually find that it’s something like “two men kissed on screen and now I have to unpack the fact that I search for femboy porn every night” or “I can’t believe that they dared to make Deadpool bisexual even though he’s been canonically bi since the character was created” or even “I am upset that the Punisher hates cops despite the fact that he was literally created for the sole purpose of being a bad guy who doesn’t hesitate to kill bad cops as well as criminals.”
I’m talking about that specific subgroup who visit /pol/ on 4Chan. Who would call themselves Gamers with a capital g. That vocal minority who make up a very specific block of the US Republican party. The people that you’re referring to from 2016. The ones who hung effigies of Obama from nooses and carried them through the streets while he was in office. The kinds of people who have no actual values themselves, just supporting whatever hurts the people that they’ve been told to hate. The people who support DeSantis and the others who pushed forward 200+ anti trans laws in the first six months of last year (it was somewhere around 1.2 new bills every day) because trans people are the new boogeyman after the gay boogeyman failed. Who only take up an ideological stance as long as it supports their argument and will support the exact opposite ideology the next moment when the first one becomes inconvenient to their worldview. The people who supported quotes from Hitler and Mussolini when they were misattributed to Trump, and when told who actually said them responded with stuff like, “If Hitler said it, then no. But I would if Trump had said it.”
Like my first boss, and my grandfather before him, who would look at you like you insulted them if you asked them who they were voting for and respond every time with “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee.” It wouldn’t matter to these people if the nominee was Trump, Bush, Obama, or Stalin himself risen from the grave to finally destroy the specter of capitalism once and for all. So long as the letter next to their name was an R, that’s who they’d vote for.
These are the kinds of people who don’t get that the game is satire and decry media as being too political when it’s pointed out to them. They see the Super Earth world government and go “See, this is how a country should be run!” The same people who saw Starship Troopers as an ideal we should strive for. This is a group for whom no bridge is a bridge too far, because it’s in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”.
That’s who this article is about. Not conservatives, but conservatives who see no difference between fascism and conservative ideologies. Conservatives see two women holding hands walking down the street and don’t give a shit. These people go home and rant about how gay people make their whole lives revolve around being gay and need to stop shoving it down everybody else’s throats on Reddit. These people literally harassed one of the devs on the Steam forums for “being too liberal and pushing an agenda”. There are conservatives, Republicans, and then these people, and they’re a subset within a subset. Not all conservatives are Republicans, and not all Republicans are these guys, but they sure as hell do exist.
But you should check your own biases, because stuff like this:
Is just straight up false. There are as many varieties of left leaning ideologies as there are right. Because no two people believe in exactly the same thing. You did right in that quote exactly what you were accusing me of doing. If we want to get into the weeds of politics, the two party system of the US leaves no room for any nuance on either side, but the political compass of both parties leans more conservative than progressive. The Republicans are a right-wing party while the Democrats are largely a left leaning centrist party. There are many people who vote Democrat not because they support the Democrats, but because they oppose stuff like the current Party of Trump’s push towards authoritarianism. There’s a whole swath of left leaning ideologies that have no representation in the government, and many of them are so different from each other that they have opposing and conflicting ideals. There is something to be said about the conservatives rallying behind the authoritarians and fascists in the Republican party instead of saying “Maybe we should take the L this time so we can clean out our own party”, but there’s also something to be said about Democrats funding these extremists in the first place because they think that they’ll be easy to beat; but all of that goes far beyond the scope of an article about Helldivers 2.
How about we “flatten” then to supporting the most comically idiotic fascist on the face of the earth?
Are you high?
Fascists are really good at misreading shit. They can assume ethnic homogeneity
‘Double that if youre an ancap’ wut?
‘Everybody likes Mussolini’ citation n… No. I like that he was dragged around on a meat hook. Nobody left of an ultraconservative like Obama likes any fascist (though if we time travel to kill 40s nazis, i call coco Chanel; and yes I’m stealing most of her wardrobe after, no you can’t have any. I have a seam ripper for those parts, or I’ll buy a trophy case)
You can have Coco Chanel. I’m taking Hugo Boss. The Nazis did NOT deserve to have that stylish of uniforms.
I heard an argument that they put style before function and that’s why so many froze to death.
So maybe a few of them deserved the jackets.
Obama an ultraconservative. I have seen enough for today
He was though? He was absolutely not a fascist, which is what we mean when we say ‘conservative’ today, but if you put him in white face, or included some ‘magically not be racist’ in your ‘magically bring back the dead’ spell, onald Reagan and Winston Churchill would’ve both adored him.
Sure, Ronald “let the poor die” Reagan, Ronald “cuts for welfare, debt for military expenses” Reagan wpuld have adored Obamacare, stronger Wallstreet Regulations and the most extensive climate protection bills up that üoint. Yeah, thats what Reagan stood for.
No but the fumes off of this comment might get me there.
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.
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.
Totally, that’s me, ms. ‘Kill em all, God will know his own’ human disposability advocating authoritarian.
Everything else you said is wrong, except that fascists hate libs-but hate fucking and hatesturbation in front of a mirror I think still counts.