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Helldivers 2’s Politics Appear To Be Flying Over The Heads Of Some (www.forbes.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

201 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Oof, looks like someone had a deadline looming and decided to take the non-issue of a few dummies lacking media literacy and blow it up into a full article.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (7 children)

Couple points:

Verhoeven didn't even read the source material. Starship Troopers (the book), is only fascist if you assume that anyone that's pro-military is fascist. Heinlein was a very unlikely fascist, given that he was largely libertarian. The point of the book was that people needed to be directly, personally invested in a society for it to function; the bugs were a plot device that he used to flesh out his social concepts. It was closer to utopian than fascist.

Secondly, Lucas directly based Star Wars off Kurosawa Akira's "The Hidden Fortress". Ideas about the rebels and the empire might have been echoing US imperialism in Vietnam, but the overarching narrative structure owes a lot to Kurosawa. Ben Kenobi, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, C3PO and R2-D2 are very clearly present in the Kurosawa film. It's a fun movie, if not terribly deep or meaningful compared to Kurosawa's later films, and I would def. recommend it.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Do we have /c/swoosh in here?

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