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.
The Automatons are the direct descendants of the cyborgs, whom Super Earth keeps enslaved on Cyberstan, for the crime of disagreeing with the government.
They are also depicted in Black-Red-White pattern, with skulls on their heads, are deemed to be “socialists” by the government, and are rebuilding coming off of a punishing defeat, sound familiar?
There is a deliberate series of conflicting points of satire in the game precisely to make it so you can read it multiple ways.
Spacetravel is fueled by bugblood (element 710, or “oil” upside down) which the government actively “farms” by letting them rampage freely around civilian worlds, for the benefit of the homeworld. They likely engineered the terminids to increase the 710 production, making them more aggressive.
Which is a very on the nose parody of the US foreign policy regarding the middle east, and the US crucially isn’t a military dictatorship.
Every dead helldiver is a direct result of the actions of the government.
Every dead soldier always is, doesn’t make their cause automatically unworthy. Obviously in this case it is, that’s the joke, but that’s not an argument in itself.
Also I know plenty of dead helldivers who caused it to themselves, but I digress.
My point is, the game is political satire, but it doesn’t have a single valid interpretation. Nothing does, but this does even less than usual.
It satirizes fascism, but also liberalism, it satirizes those who look at an oppressed group and can’t see their current evil behaviour because of their oppressed path, it satirizes those who see conspiracies everywhere but in plain sight, I’m sure there’s jabs at communism too (or maybe that was just twitter lefties identifying with bugs again…)
There’s a lot of variety because it’s not some garbage propaganda piece, but an actually well made piece of satire and, as such, it should make you think not tell you what you ought to think.
Its pretty easy to aim at lib or fasch and hit the other. They’re kind of fucking. Have been since that one free city in the alps with all the cocaine and nonstop street fights, orgies, and street fight orgies at the end of, I wanna say, the Austria Hungarian empire?
