Jfc. The trailer/intro was laying the parody so thick, you’d think even a liberal brain would pick it up. Thicker, and more transparent than Verhooven’s Starship Troopers did. Significantly so.
Time and time again, if you make the subject of satire look cool people will latch onto it
Yeah the obvious satire doesn’t matter to them. They can still enjoy it, and they can be openly and loudly fascist knowing that they can safely hide behind the defence of satire if anyone calls them out.
It is no coincidence that gamers love roleplaying as fascists.
I’m a gamer (at least according to other people). I would love to roleplay as a communist and would love to never again play as pro-nato propaganda. Alas!
It is no coincidence that games where roleplaying as a fascist are popular, would be a better rephrasing.
Skull and Bones is heavy on anti-imperialist, anti-colonial rhetoric. It’s pretty satisfying to play.
When I tried HoI, I consistently made every country I played communist-aligned.
I only really liked the political side of that game though, the actual war mechanics kind of bored me and the community made me run away screaming.
They make a huge deal out of your life being completely meaningless. You can die easily in the tutorial and they injure you on purpose to show how to heal. You die constantly and just get dropped back in as reinforcements, showing you that the mission is most important and you are merely fodder. All of the dialogue from NPCs on the ship allude to this absolute capitalist hell scape back on earth. I recall this one line where they talk about doing enough in their lifetime so their children might have a chance at owning a pet one day.
There is no media literacy left in the west.
Man that hard to read. Took a few passes just to try and figure out what they were trying to say.
See this is what gets me about 40k as well.
At every level, from loading screens to shipboard chatter to the text on loading screens, the Helldivers 2 satirizes fascism. But that doesn’t stop fascists from swarming to it. It doesn’t matter that the message is critical or that the intent was good, it just crestes a safe space for them.
You go into a random group with voice chat on and you’ll quickly find them, being openly fascist and openly racist, and they just duck behind the cover of “I’m just leaning into the lore/roleplaying” when you call them out.
Same thing happened when I played Darktide.
In Helldivers 2, though, friendly fire is on and very lethal. And it feels good to shoot real nazis in a videogame.
Tbf in the case of 40k this is mostly an online problem. I can’t speak for every region but at least here in my part of Germany I have yet to met a fascist playing Warhammer irl. Which is impressive considering I life in east Germany which is unfortunately swarmed by Nazis.
It’s been proven time and time again, if it’s possible for fascists to ignore the satirical aspects of the media that criticises them, they’ll happily do so. They’ll appropriate the satire that makes them look scary, violent or insane. The only surefire way to avoid that is to make them look stupid and ridiculous.
Butting in the discussion, when we see people liking a parody of fascism and saying that they are dumb because they didn’t understood, we are the dumb that didn’t understood, not the media, but the audience. so, they like the fascist not because they didn’t understood, they do understand and like it because they are fascists.
I guess I’ve been pretty lucky and haven’t come across any outright fascists in voice chat. Most of the time no one says anything or occasionally I’ll hear a “my bad” after someone accidentally cluster bombs our whole squad lol. The worst I’ve had so far was some guy who didn’t know his mic was on and was speaking Spanish to someone in his room the entire match.
I stay far the hell away from the game’s subreddit though because it’s just full of the people unironically doing the “FOR DEMOCRACY!!!” thing. It’s nuts how thick the game lays on the satire and gamers just recreate that Fallout meme where the point about Liberty Prime is flying over their head while they think “wow!! cool robot!!”
I walked past a spotlight on the edge of an outpost and its text box popped up saying “authoritarian searchlight”. The ship names give you options between first words “paragon”, “defender” etc. And the second fragment “of Freedom” or “of Democracy”.
It’s like starship troopers, but very dumb and blunt.
The robots are probably cpc and the bugs are the bugs from starship troopers and tyranids.
Edit: on hexbear we like Red Alert, despite knowing its a piece of anticommunist propaganda. Sometimes it’s fun to lean into it
Big reveal at the end is definitely that you are the bad guy right? That trailer is way too fucking on the nose it has to be intentionally sarcastic right?
There’s no big reveal, but there’s also loads of in-game lore telling you that the wars aren’t going as well as your commanders are telling you it is, which is a nice touch. But it doesn’t change the fact that the game creates an atmosphere for fascists and imperialists to come out of their shells and affirm each other.
Damn, I had hope
It’s fine. There’s friendly fire. You can have accidents.
Oh, or just play with carefully-chosen friends. It sucks as a solo experience, but with friends the gameplay loop is actually excellent. Especially for friendship groups that can only afford to play an hour or two (or less) at a time.
Yeah, excepting myself my gaming group are all dads now so our playtime has become increasingly limited. Plus we are spread around 4 countries. We were trying a co-op BG3 campaign on weekends, but having to have everybody on for an extended time period was hard.
Helldivers is great because we can play with however many we have, the time investment is fairly low, and even if I miss a week or two I can still contribute to the squad at a lower level.
The new Season 11 updates to Sea of Thieves are great for your situation too. That’s always been an excellent game for friend groups but always asked too much of your time until they revised how voyages work.
It’s not really a game with a narrative, after the tutorial you are thrown into the war. Same as the first game, it is very much just about the framing for the gameplay.
It is extremely obvious that yes, the people of Super Earth (they actually call it this) absolutely suck. The framing makes this exceptionally clear, but that has never stopped assholes from identifying with the bad guys in media before though.
Big reveal at the end is definitely that you are the bad guy right?
Not sure about the second game, since I’m still not, and will not consider buying it until the server issue is resolved (and even then…), but the first game doesn’t really leave it ambiguous that you are the bad guy to begin with.
Why am I not surprised. I thought the game looked cool but was getting a real weird vibe from the sub with how they talked about “bringing democracy” which was no different from how dumbfuck cracker chuds, so I suppose this was just a matter of time.
I think (hope) it just people getting into the satire.
The game never seems to paint the antagonists with any ideology though. So when people like the one in the OP start talking about communism they’re telling on themselves.
Fascists are always just “joking” and “ironic” right up until they no longer have to pretend to be.
I have been playing it, but exclusively with friends so I have no idea (nor do I really want to know) how bad the community is. I thought that it was so on the nose about the satire that surely nobody would take it at face value, but obviously I am still too naieve.
Do…people actually come away from Starship Troopers thinking fascism is cool? THAT is the takeaway from that film?
