this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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It's bizarre to see people role-playing enthusiastic fascism with the world the way it is right now.
It's possible to be an anarchist while roleplaying a hardcore fascist in a tabletop RPG. It's fantasy. Fascism's best kept as a non-tenable, mockable idea for fiction.
Rping in a game is one thing. Bringing it into the world with memes and more is just...icky.
I don't understand how the game mocking it and a meme mocking it are different. Care to explain?
If you were to go into a bar today and shout out "Join the army! All bugs must die!" or something, do you think everyone would know exactly what you were talking about? Or would they maybe think you were promoting some fascist, hateful action among the many others taking place currently? Satire is a very thin line, and without context (which most people aren't going to have regarding this), role-playing this stuff just comes off as the exact thing that is being satirized.
First, this isn't a bar. This is Lemmy, a community on the internet mostly filled with nerds. This is one of the most popular games at the moment. Also, even if they didn't know the game, odds are they know Starship troopers, and this is just an expanded meme of that.
Second, no I don't think anyone hearing you say to kill all the bugs will think you're a fascist. They might think you're crazy, but, as far as I'm aware, there aren't giant bugs we're at war with in real life.
I think there's almost zero chance of this being mistaken as a sincere fascist post, and it's pretty much harmless.
Dude - you asked me to explain and I did. Not sure what you're really looking for here, but you're not gonna find it with me.
Not fascism, managed democracy. The bugs are the fascists
I thought we started it, by invading, and they were acting in self defense?
One of my favorite lines in the game is (paraphrasing):
The problem with the bugs is that they're relentless expansionists. We've found them on almost every planet in their territory that we've colonized.
It's also pretty clear that we've been farming the bugs for space oil.
It's explicit, isn't it? Some of the characters on the super destroyer mention it.
Doesn’t make em not fascists, and if the solution to FTL travel was just to kill a few bugs, wouldn’t you too?
You might be thinking of the movie series, not the novel. In the book humans were essentially fascist, you could alternatively label it as "democracy" managed by a military dictatorship.
The bugs were not fascist, they were meant to represent communist China. Hienlien wrote starship trooper in a couple weeks, as a response to America announcing they were scaling back their nuclear arsenal.
Also, I don't think the book ever mentioned FTL.
I was speaking in reference to Helldivers 2, because the parent comment was talking about roleplaying and people don’t usually use that language around books or TV shows.
Fwiw, I was indeed taking about Helldivers, though I was referring to the irl "roleplay" of it in memes and in social media, even in communities completely unrelated to the game, like this one.
Same goes for those that take stuff like Fallout's Brotherhood of Steel or Warhammer's Imperium of Man too seriously. This stuff is better left in the context of the game. Bringing it into real life is sketchy at best.
But this isn’t real life. This is a niche social media site with a very specific demographic, namely huge nerds.
Now if someone outside was yelling "I‘M FROM BUENOS AIRES AND I SAY KILL 'EM ALL!" that would be pretty awkward. But we aren’t outside so excuse me while I
I know this is was crossposted to the helldivers sub, tbh i duno anything about it.. but the meme image is from starship troopers and its defo a fash government
Helldivers is effectively just starship troopers: the game. Same kind of satire.
The fascism in the game is ironic and on the nose in a way that's easy to laugh at, like "what if?"
I'm aware. This isn't the game, though. It's not even in a sub about the game.
The headline, which very likely isn't even real, is also not inherently fascistic. If anything its more a statement on people being so stressed with life, that a fantastical idea of going off to live a sci-fi movie life is appealing.
You're pulling the fascism from the movie, which is inherently satirical. It makes sense something like that, which was already popular, continues to be so when the satire has more real world connections. You're on a platform with a ton of nerds, they're gonna reference sci-fi classics. If anything I'd say that's a healthy sign. Satire is arguably one of the strongest forces pushing back against fascism and the like on a cultural level.
Please visit your local democracy officer for re-education
Is it? I think externalizing our bad impulses is the only way we as a species could possibly survive. People love to hate. People love to group around shared hate. Internally, that urge causes social unrest and racism, externally it could hit someone else and give humans something to come together around, the hatred of everything else…
Sounds super cynical, and it is. But we are just dumb monkey tribes who figured out to obliterate their own world with the push of a button
I used to think this way, until I tried writing more sci-fi and I kept running into weird moral quandaries trying to keep stuff realistic on a human level. I genuinely don't think there will ever be a threat that could rally all of humanity at this point. Not only because I don't believe aliens are a thing we'll ever experience, but also because everything I've seen points to people being too chaotic. Even the perfect enemy (some bugs that just want to kill us all) would have humans helping them out, a contingent of people who think the whole thing is a deep fake, and a multitude of people preying on the flawed reality of those groups and others to horde whichever resource (money, food, manpower, etc.). That's before you even get into the various well-intentioned factions that would form around a variety of "best" approaches to the issue.
I'm not even saying this in a doomer kind of way, I'm rather optimistic and believe we tend to stumble forward. I'm just saying the rally around the flag moment for humanity feels like a total fantasy.
Except the fictional "fixing" of humanity involves an inhuman "enemy", a thing that very much happens in real life (dehumanizing others in war or oppression), which tracks because these things are satire of that real world scenario.
All of this is to say that embracing the fiction without that distinction as satire really just enforces those innate bad impulses you brought up, and we have enough of that right now, imo.
I feel ya. We need sole aliens out there for us to mostly stop hating ourselves.
And our governments would totally turn any first contact into a war type thing if they could get away with it. Because the loss of control otherwise would be terrifying to them.
Well, as long as we bring 'democracy and freedom and capitalism' to them and win, it's all good. :)
It'll be awful if we lose but I am a firm believer that humanity I'll be able to handle any of the dangers lurking out there after thousands of years of practice within the tutorial part of our history, aka, when we were still confined to our homeworld.
Sounds like traitor talk!