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.
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?