Games

If you can't tell it's satire, you are the punchline of the joke.

This seems like some made up shit. For all 5 people who don't seem to get the stinging nature of this game's satire, I just can't bring myself to care.

This could be right and maybe I'm under a rock but I am suspicious of articles that reference dumb things people are supposedly saying without any quotes or citations

I think what a lot of people miss here is that when people say "keep politics out of x" what they mean is "keep blatant cringeworthy soapboxing out of x."

Helldivers is tongue in cheek and doesn't feel the need to bash you over the head with "But actually fascism bad" every five seconds, instead it has gag recruitment ads and an overall really funny presentation that works whether you get it or you don't.

I guarantee you that no rightoid looks at a one world government "super earth" with fond eyes.

• If you're an identitarian the fact that the Helldivers can be men or women is unacceptable, not to mention it's not clear if they're ethnically homogeneous

• If you're a libertarian the de-individualization and constant surveillance/propaganda from a totalitarian state is unacceptable, double that if you're an ancap

• Monarchists would probably like this if it were an explicit monarchy, but it's not, so they would probably also not like it

The only faction who would like this game's world is classical fascists, the kind Mussolini was, which ironically a lot of people seem to really really like on any side of the political spectrum, cause it's literally just totalitarian ideological illiberal authority.

I'm gonna watch the opening video to restore my faith in managed democracy.

Because people disagree about whether a certain ideology is desirable, you could have an accurate portrayal of it accepted as positive by its supporters and negative by its opponents. The supporters aren't necessarily missing "satire" - maybe they see the same thing that the opponents do, but they like it.

I am all about killing fucking bugs in the name of humanity. They are the bugs, after all, not us! Hell yeah.

Paul would be so proud.

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.