If conservatives had any media literacy, they wouldn’t be conservatives anymore.
This is why the humanities are important
Really? I'm fed up with one humanity. Can't think I can handle any more. 🫠
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.
But he still toned it down from the book...
The first chapter is them taking a village of anthropomorphic insects over. They didn't have any soldiers, it was just a random village and there's a part where a mother and infant are hiding in a closest, get blasted by a flamethrower, and as the soldier jetbacks away he just shoots rockets everywhere because they get in trouble if they return with any unused ammo.
Just completely blasie about genocide.
Trimming it down to just the one 100% bug race really made it easier to write them off as monsters. But makes sense for a movie.
Those weren't bugs, those were "Skinnies", humanoid aliens.
They showed up in the animated series, but not the movie.
Paul Verhoeven is about as subtle as a brick to the skull with his messaging, and people still think movies like RoboCop are pro-police
Especially brutal considering the average quality of right wing humor in media across the ages, a merciless yet very revealing index of the capacity of the average right winger to gets what is humor and what is not
These are the same people that thought the machine RATM was raging against was a refrigerator or something.
Also that Homelander was someone to idolize.
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
Some people somehow miss the over the top, in your face satire of the Starship Troopers movie so I'm not surprised.
Simple solution tho, 'american gods' nailed it.
See, they knew they were gonna have a Nazi problem; having one of the main characters be 'sleazy grifter ultra american Odin on a quest to restore The Old Ways' even though he's transparently a total piece of shit and everyone knows it and hates him. (Especially with an actor that good playing him)
So they added a bunch of really explicit queer Fucking every season. Just gayed it UP. You think the taxi driver doesn't do anything for the plot? He doesn't directly. But he does keep the Nazis away for a whole season.
We just need to do this with all media! Just add long explicit queer fucking to everything, with no warning. Yeah it might be boring when the big climactic fight cuts from its beautifully choreographed martial arts set piece to some side character sucking his girlfriend's dick outside, including foreplay and pillow talk, but I think we can agree; it's worth it.
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.
You nailed it. It's 100% inspired by Starship Troopers and is a criticism of US propaganda in the same vein while also being an incredibly fun co-op game.
The only thing you're missing is just how obtuse some people are. It runs into the same thing as the Warhammer 40k universe, where the humans are obviously just as bad as everybody else, but people praise their fascist military industrial complex society. Either people are so incredibly media illiterate that it makes your head spin, or they're wilfully ignorant because it supports their worldview. Take your pick, but I go for a little of both.
It's an easy worldview. Those people need the world to make sense, and fascism and authoritarianism give easy answers.
You definitely get it. Pure satire.
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.
Just the other say I saw a facebook comment saying Starship Troopers is not a satire of fascism but its about patriotism and serving your country
I first saw it as a kid and didn't like it too much because I took it too seriously. Rewatched it years later and I didn't like it because the satire was just so way too obvious and forced to be enjoyable.
So I can kinda understand how it could over someone's head since it did over mine (when I was like 10).
Of course it's age restricted so you're not really supposed to watch it at 10. But anyway a 10-year-old isn't really the target demographic, at that age you're not going to have a developed understanding of politics yet so that's not really a problem.
When I first watched the matrix I didn't really understand what that was about either.
Nazies are too stupid to even draw a swastika properly. There is zero hope they are capable of understanding satire.
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.
I remember when some of them kicked up about Far Cry 5 because the villains were all white (which was relevant to the games setting) and they accused the devs of demonising white people LMAO
The complaints about Wolfenstein becoming political really took the cake for me.
More because they were a white Christian doomsday cult.
Clearly a little close to home for some people out there.
"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".
Because actual fascists are hearing shit they agree with. Yes, it's over the top, but they're also too stupid to understand satire. If they had the critical thinking skills to realize they were being made fun of, they wouldn't be fascist in the first place. A fun little catch 22.
The same thing happened with Fallout: New Vegas when chuds realized Joshua Sawyer is a Socialist
And The Boys with Homelander when they realized he’s a caricature.
Most of them still haven't figured it out as far as I can tell.
Keep in mind, these are the same people who watched the Colbert Report unironically for years. I genuinely believe that there is a certain portion of the population which lacks the cognitive tools to process satire.
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)
The main difference from the film being that the novel isn't a satire--Heinlein was being sincere.
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.
I understand where you're coming from, but you'd have to really go out of your way to ignore a lot of stuff in the game to just get the gameplay without any of the dialogue or text that is absolutely dripping with satire.
They kinda threaten to send you off to freedom camp if you disagree with them. The fascisim ain't subtle.
Blaming the game devs for making it not obvious enough is really highlighting the lack of media literacy. The game is not subtle at all, man.
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
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