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Certain hobbies set off warning bells
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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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I read an interesting article about 40K Space Marines last year, the problem with them is that some people just don't get satire no matter how glaringly obvious it is
Starship Troopers is so badass!
"The mobile infantry made me the man I am today" shows off two missing legs and one missing arm
And while they all need a prosthetic, none of them have one unless it specifically pertains to something that will benefit their military job.
The front desk guy needs 2 legs and an arm, but only has an arm and is in a wheel chair. The arm helps his job stamping new recruits in. The legs serve no purpose but to make his life better, but unnecessary for the job.
Ricos teacher needs an arm, but while he's teaching, he doesn't have one. Once he's back on active duty, he's allowed a prosthetic arm because it helps the Federation. He doesn't require an arm to teach.
If it's not required for your specific position, you don't deserve to be made whole. It's a pretty fucked up society overall, and not nearly enough people understand that the humans aren't the good guys.
In the book there's an additional interesting scene with Rico and the recruiter: Rico runs in to the recruiter as he's leaving the office. The recruiter does actually have prosthetic legs, and he's walking out the door. Rico asks why he didn't have them on before. The recruiter explains that his job is actually to scare away recruits. He's supposed to show potential recruits his missing legs as a consequence of his service. That way those that aren't really serious about it, those who are doing it because it just seems like a cool idea, don't go through with signing up. He then explains that the government doesn't require him to be a living warning sign in his off-time, so he puts on his legs and goes about his life that way.
Yeah, but the film is a glaringly obvious satire of the society it depicts, the book isn't.
Wut?! How can someone not understand Starship Troopers is satire? What about all of the propaganda cut ins?!
There really is no limit to how dense some dipshits can be. Hell, there are even fascist Star Trek fans, despite the show beating them over the head with stuff like this all the time!
Unfortunately that’s rather understandable. A largely ‘white’ and mostly male cast of mostly humans running around saving the day and ‘defeating/ enlightening’ backwards ‘alien’ cultures in what are basically military ships.
So if you ignore the messages and the actual stories being told and only look at the superficial stuff (as MAGA Morons are wont to do) it does, sadly, pass the facist vibe check.
A lot of - I dare say most - people reach for fiction as a form of escapism, and they do need a suspense of disbelief to enjoy it. So if someone points out that in-fiction events are obvious caricatures of real ones, they don't like it because they don't want to see it, that's why they are there and not in the real world.
I have no doubt it's satire, but for me it's always been more of a fun escape into a ridiculous, militarized sci fi fantasy world. I'd never want to genuinely set foot in that world though. Except the sexy coed showers. Booyah!
I really blame the games industry as a whole for this. They keep making games with Space Marines as the protagonists, where their violence is presented as justified, when a lore-friendly space marine game should be like "No Russian" missions all the time and the resulting failure this causes to their Empire. This constant "whitewashing" of the lore, is what has attracted a ton of people.
I would LOVE to see a WH40k setting where the space marines are lore-accurate murdering an entire multi-billion hive-city for some minor heresy by a few thousand of the people on the 925th-sub-basement, and you're playing random ganger Scumface Mc Spikearms who's just trying to survive.
Apropos , the Necromunda video game was such a disappointment :(
yeah, agreed. But Rogue Trader was remarkably on brand.
There were a LOT of parts where you basically had to decide the life and death of tens to hundreds of thousands. And often, the ethical thing was NOT the in-game right choice. For example, you could allow refugees aboard, it gets you nothing, but some of them will try to sabotage you. If you kill them all, you even get piety points for killing (some) heretics.
I recall one of the developer replying to a comment that said "If I'm evil, I get cool items, if I'm good, I get nothing, why is that?" and they replied with "If you're doing it for a rewards, you're not really being good, are you now?"
This is moon logic. Yes, that's how it works in the real world, but you aren't in the real world. You're playing a game.
You do in fact score points in the "people love me" stats if you do things like that. But the "people love me" path is far less powerful than the either of the "Religious fundamentalists love me" paths.
So a WH40K/Spec-Ops: The Line mashup.
The Line was an anti-shooter, in the sense that it felt like a generic third-person shooter while constantly hammering the “you shouldn’t be having fun playing this because war is awful and full of atrocities” messaging. It was actually a fairly decent critique of the shooters that were prevalent when the game was developed. It came out when games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Red Dead Redemption were dominating the third-person shooter market, while the FPS market was dominated by Halo and COD.
Eh, I feel the message of Spec Ops was really sabotaged by the poor in-game systems.
There's a mission where you have to defend a point, and you get the option to drop white phosphorus. But that mission is really easy, and you can easily play it for hours and hours, killing an infinite number of enemies. It doesn't progress without pushing the button.
And then it berates you, the player, for pushing the button.
This feels really weird to me. I can see the point in the distance, but it really doesn't work for me, since you can obviously just murder people till eternity as well.
And the game has several hidden "better ways", like shooting the rope at the hanging, where it will reward you for doing it better. But it doesn't have that option elsewhere, like the white phosphorus option.
Honestly, there's a big disconnect between some of the scenes, and the heavyhanded message.
Contrast it with "no Russian", which is a map that's offered with zero commentary, letting you shoot unarmed civilians, but not punishing you at all if you don't. And no matter what you do, the end result is the same. That's a system that fits with everything in the game, it doesn't have to swing a message in your face, and it doesn't have to break with normal gameplay to insert elements required for the message.
I always hear people talk about the white phosphorus part of the game, but the game doesn't give you a choice there. I much prefer the parts where you are actually given a choice. The one that I remember the best is the civilians, you don't have to kill them and I just fired a warning shot and they quickly dispersed. Apparently some people will gun them down.
You hear people talk about it, because it's so bad and jarring and forced. People keep bringing up specops as some great writing inversion of a shooter trope, when it really just doesn't get what agency is.
If you don't give a player agency, you can't then berate them for doing something wrong, because they didn't actually do a thing. The phosphorous part of the game is a thing you don't get a say in, but the game blames you as a player.
It's like me blaming you for reading the word phosphorus, when you had basically no choice in that.
If you don't give agency, you can only ever blame the character. And the writer made the characters, not the player.
The article discusses this; basically the video games want you to at least slightly like the protagonist you're playing as, which means they can't entirely be the monstrous caricatures they were designed to be.
I don't get it why not though, Spec Ops The Line was not a technical marvel or an outstanding gameplay experience even for its time, but we are still talking about it for its message.
GW constantly pushes Space Marines and to a lesser extent the Imperial Guard as a majority of time as the protagonist. People don’t have the media literacy to understand that protagonist does not equal the hero. The protagonist is just the main character of the story and they can be evil or good or anything in between.
I feel like the satire is being washed out to support the line that shall always go up.
But hey, Space Marines goes “Pew! Pew! Pew!”
God-Emperor (mostly dead sitting on a cybernetic throne preserving his life, requires like 100 psychics a day to feed on to live) wants to spread his Religious-no-religion religion across the cosmos, and the brutality with which is required is a small price to pay for industry.
And then they choose to like the guy unironically. But if they're really into Slaneesh then they just get a special brand of weird.
I think the problem is that despite everyone being evil, they are all also cool, and there is no real satire in it when there is no point being made.
The tyranids are an expression of entropy more than they are a species, they're very nearly a force of nature. They're not really "good" or "bad" in the same way that gravity isn't good or bad.
Now the Orkz I think are just fun and good dudes. They don't really hate anybody in particular, they just LOVE to FIGHT and will keep doing that unless stopped. They will gladly fight amongst themselves if no one else appears to fight with them. They don't really have grand dreams of conquest beyond swarming over the horizon to fight whatever is on the other side of it. The optimal end state of Ork supremacy isn't galactic domination, it's one big WAAGH cloud that rips across the galaxy in a giant loop and takes long enough doing it that the survivors can settle back down and bunker back up before the Boyz come back to town. They don't even necessarily want to win, they just love to fight, they think it's the best activity that you can do, and they want to share that with any and everyone.
From anyone else's perspective this is a horrifying wall of green skinned, brutal cunning monsters that will sprout up out of literal nowhere and reproduce faster than you can print more bullets for them. But from the Orkz perspective they're basically just asking you to join their football game. They're fun guys.
Look at this traitor here^^^^
All praise be to Omnissiah. May his leadership and grace guide you to the one true path. Give yourself to him and become one.
Yeah they are really fucked up, but man....what great lore! Best thing about 40k baby
Yeah, this was on full display when Helldivers 2 launched. So many people just didn’t get the satire, and unironically leaned into the messaging.
For the unaware, Helldivers 2 is basically a Starship Troopers video game.
Starship Troopers the book was flat out propaganda. It's only the movie that is satire.
The book is an exploration of and presents an argument for militarism. That alone doesn't make it propaganda. While many of the sentiments, implications, premises in the book carry a clear bias, the book nevertheless invites the reader to engage with and reflect on the ideology rather than aiming to manipulate and indoctrinate the reader.
I'd say the earnest argument presented by Heinlein in ST is flawed and morally objectionable, but not a piece of propaganda.
So the book presents an argument for and has a bias towards militarism, but it's not propaganda? Are you also going to tell me that Atlas Shrugged invites the reader to explore whether capitalism is good or not? Hard disagree.
I mean... yeah? I don't agree with it, but I feel like its to detailed and nuanced to be merely propaganda. Propaganda would be shit like the Red Dawn remake or almost any movie involving the US military that tends to be to shallow to be anything but propaganda.
It's just a glaring lack of critical thinking brought on by our (sometimes willingly) ignorant masses. Satire is dead in this country because we didn't have the capacity to comprehend it.
This country of Lemmy?
Is my American-centrism showing? My bad, but the majority of this problem is from here unfortunately.
I think we've all got our idiots, yours are just a bit louder!
Yeah I am having a great time with Helldivers 2 but damn if I don't feel this pretty much every time I play