Games

If conservatives had any media literacy, they wouldn’t be conservatives anymore.

I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don't.

Brutal. He did it too, he did it.

These are the same people that thought the machine RATM was raging against was a refrigerator or something.

Same thing happens with WH40k and GW has to put out memos telling Nazis to fuck off every few years.

Media literacy is apparently difficult

There are still people who think that Starship Troopers should be taken seriously. This despite the fact that it has Neil Patrick Harris in it, a man who sings and dances in every possible opportunity.

I never played the game but watched some trailers and gameplay videos. I'm 99% certain that Helldivers 2 is following the Starship Troopers formula and purely making fun of patrionism, propaganda, war, the military, military personnel, "freedom", heroism, politics and military advertisements and turning that into a game. There's just so many obvious signs, it seems impossible to miss. In other words, it is a political game. Or maybe I just really don't get either of the two.

Political = this game contains things I disagree with.

The usual things. Black people. Trans people. Women who aren't just a set of tits with a gun.

Nazies are too stupid to even draw a swastika properly. There is zero hope they are capable of understanding satire.

"I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don't.”

Wellcome to the post-internet era, where u can no longer tell if that obviously idiotic argument was written by a bot, a troll, your average right-winger or a twitter justice warrior.

I mean, the game is really on the nose with its parodic elements, how could they possibly not see that? Just talk to the supply officer ladies in the back part of the ship.

They are full of gems like “the bot society is wholly built on war. If they ever won they wouldnt know what to do“ (paraphrased), or the ministry of truth which ensures all citizens are properly ~~indoctrinated~~ informed, or the ministry of economy which makes sure resources flow to the "most deserving".

The same thing happened with Fallout: New Vegas when chuds realized Joshua Sawyer is a Socialist

See: Does Call Of Duty Believe In Anything?, by Jacob Geller.

Conservatives think they're the default. They don't have an ideology, a religion, a sexuality, or an ethnicity. They're normal. It's everyone else who's different.

I don't disagree with this synopsis, but I'm sadly unsurprised that your familiarity with the source material stops at the movie — which, in fact, was preceded (nearly 40 years) & inspired by a (far better) book of the same name from Heinlein. 😅😶 What's more, Helldivers 2 seems to take more cues from the book than the movie, and it does the original more honor than the cult classic did in '97, too.

Lastly, who in their right mind ever expects alt-right fucknuts to parse irony? Isn't that integral to their M.O., the consistent whoosh so frequent that it must be like white noise in their skulls 24/7? (Yes, there's a supremacy joke in there, but I'm too tired to dig it up)

I wonder if when extreme satire flies over someones head, outside of not consuming the media critically enough, the difference between heavy satire and pantomime can be subtle. A quick example being One Punch Man, I'd categorize that show as a Pantomime of Anime Cliches rather than satire, as while its playing up the ridiculousness of common anime tropes, its clear it's doing so with a full love of the medium, and indeed the tropes its making fun of

So, I think there's something weird about the nature of the satire in Helldivers 2 that might lead to some problems.

I don't feel like it's that controversial to say that the game is pretty obviously ripping off Starship Troopers. Like to a point that goes way beyond mere homage. Now I don't view this as an inherent problem, because I don't believe IP should be a thing, but this fact, combined with the way they've adapted it into a game leads to some issues.

The game basically has all the aesthetic elements of the satire of Starship Troopers: The over the top patriotism, nationalism, militarism, the devaluing of the individual and life, etc. On it's own, this is enough for people who have already become disillusioned with the US war machine to get what it's saying. However, to someone who's deep in the propaganda that America is a force for good in the world that is simply fighting evil enemies who hate freedom and democracy, there is no cognitive dissonance there. Of course we're gonna be all patriotic about fighting against some big bad enemy that's threatening us.

Not that people didn't also misunderstand Starship Troopers, but a key difference it has in driving it's point home is that moment at the end of the movie when they capture one of the bugs and learn it feels fear and then they all cheer. We see that no, the bugs aren't some unthinking monsters bent on destroying us, they're intelligent creatures and we're the invaders, but the people are so indoctrinated at this point that this fact doesn't even phase them.

Helldivers 2 doesn't really have that anywhere within the main "text" of the game. Sure, you can read some lore and get a bit of that from some conversations with NPCs on the ship, but that's not really how people interact with games, or at least a game like this. Most people are going to load into a lobby, pick a mission, maybe mess around with their loadout, then go jump into a game where the bugs ARE horrible unthinking monsters who represent an existential threat to humanity. In the ways the game lets you interact with it, there's no option where you make peace with the bugs or come to understand the horror of what you're doing. The bugs are just enemies and you have an assortment of guns and bombs to interact with them.

So since the mechanics of the game itself don't really mesh well with the message of the satire, what it relies on is either a) You already having seen Starship Troopers or b) You already understanding imperialism, fascism, and recognizing those traits in America's military culture.

It's kind of a weird place for a piece of media to be when it's message only makes sense in the context of another similar piece of media or when the player/reader/viewer already agrees with it's message.

It's not terribly surprising that it hasn't had any success breaking through to the people who need their minds changed.

The satirical nature of Helldivers 2 is obvious, but in Starship Troopers the bugs flung a meteor at Earth which destroyed a major city and killed millions. I would argue that Starship Troopers has a bit more of a serious vibe with subtle satire, aside from some of the commercials like the one of soldiers giving kids guns. In Helldivers 2 the intro video shows that bugs are killing civilians, which could be true or could be purely propaganda. But yea, anyone who doesn't understand that Helldivers 2 is satirical is a fucking idiot. It all makes fun of militaristic imperialism, you can literally name your ship "King of Democracy".