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

Oh the humanities.

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.

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.

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

Smart != benevolent

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

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)

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.