It's been a while since I've played the original, but when I started playing helldivers 2, I felt like the satire was much more obvious than the first one.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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there's no such thing as satire obvious enough to penetrate the mirror-smooth surface of the chud brain
Shit they think Star Trek is apolitical
That won't stop anyone from willfully ignoring it
Never underestimate the chud's capacity to glaze over really fucking obvious satire
The first thing my partner noticed when she started the tutorial is that the average age of a Helldiver was 18
She turns to me and asks "Wait, how young do they recruit?"
"Children contribute to the war effort starting at 7"
"How?"
"Someone has to get into the tight areas an older citizen can't"
Sorry, I can only see aesthetics and everything looks really cool. Now how about a nice cup of liber-TEA!?
The terminids keep invading new planets despite having no space ships. Their blood is useful as fuel and the tutorial has you fight some domesticated ones.
How are the terminids invading all these planets?
Biological weapons to cover up atrocities, forcefully drum up nationalism, be an excuse for an eternal military state, AND a money printer for the MIC?
Nobody tell the US
That's what confuses me about this game and particularly Starship Troopers. In this game you can kinda just deduce that either the government is lying and farms the bugs to create oil-producing wars on foreign planets, or the bugs just shoot eggs or spores or something into space and by sheer luck it lands on habitable planets. In the DVD commentary of Starship Troopers though, Paul Verhoeven says that the bugs sent the meteor (???). This is directly contradicted by the movie in the very scene we learn about Buenos Aires. Unless we're supposed to believe that the bugs sent the meteor thousands of years ago somehow with the knowledge of Earth's location and orbit and also for some reason had reason and intent to destroy humanity before first contact? And then on top of that, the Federation intentionally allowed the meteor to land to generate pretext for war? This "bug imperialism" makes even less sense in Helldivers where the government doesn't even pretend or theorize that the bugs are guided by an intelligent presence such as the brain bug. They seem to be purely instinctual and driven to reproduce like every other animal species. They are extremely hostile, but only if you enter their territory and refuse to leave after they identify you and take their alert stance.
I'm gonna keep saying it: we need a 5 minute unskippable video at the start of all media that lays out the thesis statement and, in this scenario, yells "the fascists are bad and if you like them you're a fucking moron".
Put this after the credits, make the dedicated chuds mad!
Well I'm glad they do the satire properly. My first concern when I saw the opening cinematic was they were just aping Starship Troopers' aesthetic and not its message.
The OG Helldivers game had some clearn statements on post 9/11 America and ultrantionalism, then again chuds don't really think that much
Ironic then that the subreddit team bans politics.
yeah but it's fucking BADASS shooting BUGS with GUNS PYEW PYEW BWOOOSH KABOOM KILL EM ALL
There are two readings to Helldivers lore. Either the evil fascist government is farming the bugs and allowing the robots to keep making more robots as some sort of control mechanism and external enemy to fight, or the fascist government is so incompetent that all it's effort is misdirected at ineffectual efforts.
I lean towards the latter because all we do as divers is throw grenades down bug tunnel entrances and into robot fabricators. The bugs clearly have vast subterrean hives that we never see, we just kill the symptom on the surface with 500kg bombs and mini nukes. We probably never fully defeat the bugs on a given planet, we merely cull them enough so that they retreat from the surface for a time. As for the robots: their technology is on par with humanity and they might simply have different FTL technologies. If they want to lay low, they absolutely can.
So yea, fascists be incompetent and wasteful. They fly oil into orbit from a planets surface via rocket ospreys, clearly their methods are crap!
Space elevator but it's an oil pipeline. Absolutely bonkers idea but I would totally put it in a show.