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.
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.
Professional reviewers missed the satire of the movie. Or pretended to as fake outrage sells papers better and being the loudest to scream offense means you’re the most right.
Honestly, I can’t tell anymore what’s an act, what’s shitposting being misread and what’s genuine. There’s no way to tell what’s a widely held belief and what’s a hand full of idiots in the corner being put on blast. Take Forbidden West and Stellar Blade. How many of the people making hours long rants about either actually play games? How can they? They’re spending all their time just chasing the outrage algorithm.
I personally choose to believe the people complaining about Aloys peach fuzz have never seen a real woman
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.
They put out a notice on the topic more than once?
If they want Nazis to stop liking Warhammer, they should try putting the satire back in it. It’s been fascist sympathy for decades at this point.
Short of the Emperor coming back and correcting his title to “Dictator of the Proletariat” I don’t even know how’d they’d fix it now.
Canonize Chaos just being rebels with no demons? Horus Heresy already canonized them as being even more fashy than the Imperium. Tyranids or Necrons or whoever winning wouldn’t do shit either. The chuds would just whine about people diverting resources from the war by fighting for “rights” and “food”