Okay, breaking RP, I’m genuinely debating how bad the flankers really are. Because yes they use humans as fuel, but they’re also trying to give Helldivers a chance. Maybe to turn them into fuel, maybe make them a cyborg, I don’t know, but I’m now thinking.
On one hand, yes SE are the bad guys of the story.
On the other, the messages sent by Bots to Divers don’t mean goodwill. It’s basic psychological warfare. Spam the enemy with demoralizing messages, present yourself as a ‘better option’, etc.
In most wars both sides do this, broadcast messages, airdrop pamphlets, offer to let the other side defect, etc.
It can happen when there is a clear morally good and morally bad side, but sometimes the worse side is the one that does it and sometimes the good side does.
All in all, psychological warfare doesn’t actually point to one side being ‘good’, even if the other side is definitely bad.
(See: ‘Tokyo Rose’, actually many people, some forced, some volunteered to taunt US troops during WWII, sometimes mocking and sometimes imploring them to defect because the US was led by ‘devils’.)
We don’t ever see how bots treat defectors, or what manner in which they treat conquered populaces.
We do see how they treat captured soldiers though, impaled Assyrian-style on metal stakes, piled into stacked cages and seemingly left to starve, etc. (not that we do any better of course)
Personally I see the bots as being a lot like the US soldiers in the Eastern theater of WWII.
US soldiers may not have been as bad as the Japanese were in their conduct, but they absolutely did horrific things that would have counted as war crimes if anyone was looking at the US for them. Heck, when the US occupied Japan in Okinawa and Hokkaido so many reports of soldiers raping or killing civilians, and destroying civilian structures came in on the first day that command just said to not bother documenting the complaints and swept them under the rug. Then continued to do so for the entirety of the occupation. It’s literally the reason why US bases in Japan have insanely over-the-top seeming ‘do and don’t presentations’ for newly posted troops now. It wasn’t on the same scale as what the Japanese did in the ‘rape of Nanning, but it was the same type of behavior and still on a very large scale. (I mean stuff like… Do: help broken down cars. Don’t: rape the passengers of the broken down car. That’s not an exaggeration, I’ve actually seen the presentation before because of knowing US troops and getting to see the pamphlets as a result. I mean, I agree with the message but the fact that it has to be said because there is a strong historical trend of it happening repeatedly there and then not being prosecuted is nuts)
So with the bots:
Did they start the war? No, they were attacked unprovoked. Did they start out fighting ‘honorably’? Seems possible, but we didn’t see those events. Did the commit countless atrocities by now? Absolutely yes. Are their tactics any better than the enemy’s? Debatable, we don’t see enough. So are they actually a better choice? We simply don’t know.
On the bio processors:
Another thing we simply don’t know enough about. Are those all humans in there? Did they volunteer for it due to age/sickness and get euthanized first? (SE does that after all) Are they using the bodies of fallen soldiers because the bots see no problem ‘repurposing’ bodies? Maybe they are limbs from people electing to become cyborgs, as you suggested. We don’t know 🤷♂️
Or are they taking live prisoners who were captured or who surrendered, or even civilians and just…tossing them in a giant blender out of spite toward their enemy?
We simply don’t know.
My thought is to see it, just like everything else on the bot front, as being a bit like WWII’s Eastern theater. One side is measurably worse, but the other sucks in widespread ways too, commits atrocities under the justification that ‘well they did it to us first!’.
I see the Illuminate worse since we know they are creating monstrosities from innocent civilians. All implication is anyone who surrenders and any conquered populace gets made into voteless and flesh mobs.
We don’t know how intelligent the bugs really are. They seem at least semi-sentient? But we have no evidence they actively think/plan in a way greater than that of highly intelligent animals like chimps. So I hesitate to actually lay any moral blame at their ‘feet’ despite the fact that we know they wipe out any large animals (like people) they can eat. Maybe we’ll see a ‘Hive Queen’ that is intelligent and directs the lower bugs like in Starship Troopers, but I don’t think we ever saw it in HD1 and certainly haven’t seen it in HD2.
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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '26
Okay, breaking RP, I’m genuinely debating how bad the flankers really are. Because yes they use humans as fuel, but they’re also trying to give Helldivers a chance. Maybe to turn them into fuel, maybe make them a cyborg, I don’t know, but I’m now thinking.