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.
I’m not talking about conservatives as a whole. I believe there’s plenty of conservatives who get that this is satire. And plenty who probably didn’t pick up on it, but would get it if you explained it to them. I’m saying that you’re mistaking the vocal minority for the silent majority. The majority of people, conservatives and progressives alike, only really care about political stances in media when it’s hamfisted in awkwardly. Nobody enjoys that. But you usually won’t see people complaining about it because people don’t usually care enough to bother. All art is political, but not all art is a stupid hamfisted attempt to appeal to some minority group in a way that even they hate. Art has a piece of the artist’s beliefs and convictions behind it, so it is inherently political regardless of whether or not it’s attempting to say a specific political message. That’s just the way that life is. Steven Spielberg’s biggest regret is making Jaws, because it is directly responsible for the mass culling of sharks. It wasn’t his intention, but it changed the way people saw sharks and terrified them all across the world. He just wanted to make a horror movie and ended up changing the cultural landscape of the entire world. If you look specifically at what the “no politics in my media!” crowd is crying about, you’ll usually find that it’s something like “two men kissed on screen and now I have to unpack the fact that I search for femboy porn every night” or “I can’t believe that they dared to make Deadpool bisexual even though he’s been canonically bi since the character was created” or even “I am upset that the Punisher hates cops despite the fact that he was literally created for the sole purpose of being a bad guy who doesn’t hesitate to kill bad cops as well as criminals.”
I’m talking about that specific subgroup who visit /pol/ on 4Chan. Who would call themselves Gamers with a capital g. That vocal minority who make up a very specific block of the US Republican party. The people that you’re referring to from 2016. The ones who hung effigies of Obama from nooses and carried them through the streets while he was in office. The kinds of people who have no actual values themselves, just supporting whatever hurts the people that they’ve been told to hate. The people who support DeSantis and the others who pushed forward 200+ anti trans laws in the first six months of last year (it was somewhere around 1.2 new bills every day) because trans people are the new boogeyman after the gay boogeyman failed. Who only take up an ideological stance as long as it supports their argument and will support the exact opposite ideology the next moment when the first one becomes inconvenient to their worldview. The people who supported quotes from Hitler and Mussolini when they were misattributed to Trump, and when told who actually said them responded with stuff like, “If Hitler said it, then no. But I would if Trump had said it.”
Like my first boss, and my grandfather before him, who would look at you like you insulted them if you asked them who they were voting for and respond every time with “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee.” It wouldn’t matter to these people if the nominee was Trump, Bush, Obama, or Stalin himself risen from the grave to finally destroy the specter of capitalism once and for all. So long as the letter next to their name was an R, that’s who they’d vote for.
These are the kinds of people who don’t get that the game is satire and decry media as being too political when it’s pointed out to them. They see the Super Earth world government and go “See, this is how a country should be run!” The same people who saw Starship Troopers as an ideal we should strive for. This is a group for whom no bridge is a bridge too far, because it’s in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”.
That’s who this article is about. Not conservatives, but conservatives who see no difference between fascism and conservative ideologies. Conservatives see two women holding hands walking down the street and don’t give a shit. These people go home and rant about how gay people make their whole lives revolve around being gay and need to stop shoving it down everybody else’s throats on Reddit. These people literally harassed one of the devs on the Steam forums for “being too liberal and pushing an agenda”. There are conservatives, Republicans, and then these people, and they’re a subset within a subset. Not all conservatives are Republicans, and not all Republicans are these guys, but they sure as hell do exist.
But you should check your own biases, because stuff like this:
Is just straight up false. There are as many varieties of left leaning ideologies as there are right. Because no two people believe in exactly the same thing. You did right in that quote exactly what you were accusing me of doing. If we want to get into the weeds of politics, the two party system of the US leaves no room for any nuance on either side, but the political compass of both parties leans more conservative than progressive. The Republicans are a right-wing party while the Democrats are largely a left leaning centrist party. There are many people who vote Democrat not because they support the Democrats, but because they oppose stuff like the current Party of Trump’s push towards authoritarianism. There’s a whole swath of left leaning ideologies that have no representation in the government, and many of them are so different from each other that they have opposing and conflicting ideals. There is something to be said about the conservatives rallying behind the authoritarians and fascists in the Republican party instead of saying “Maybe we should take the L this time so we can clean out our own party”, but there’s also something to be said about Democrats funding these extremists in the first place because they think that they’ll be easy to beat; but all of that goes far beyond the scope of an article about Helldivers 2.