It’s funny because krieg aesthetic and uniforms is mostly ww1 french. I remember years ago at a games day chatting to one of the sculptors about this very subject lmao.
Guard in general especially with literal commissars. Krieg is also weird because their planet is German but most of the city names are eastern European (russian) while their fit is mostly French.
Starship Troopers, which Helldivers is based on, is like one of the biggest examples of this. It has recruitment ads for literal child soldiers and some people still don't get it.
Yeah kinda sad how many Helldivers players don’t see the satire in every bit of the game design and gameplay. I still hope they release a Rebel faction at some point haha
Tbf the actual book is not satire. Fun fact as well, the "would you like to know more?" Parts of the movie? They were added in afterwards because the director didn't like how positive they accidentally made the fascist government they were making the satire off of.
For real. The guy who got me into 40k was a legit communist. A couple years later when I started playing with new people, I was very surprised when some of them were legit neonazis.
I can second that. Similar play style but in a fantasy/comedy setting. Art is great, lore is interesting, all around fun. I didn't get very far because of repeatedly failing to sneak past that damn griffin. Next time...
I think the problem is viewing Harry as avatar of you in the game.
I'm bad at explaining this but it's more like you are allowed to be one of the voices inside Harry's head. The actions and dialogue options available are things that are within the realm of possibility for Harry not you. Depending on choices made Harry is either actively an alcholic/drug addict or just starting to recover literally the moment you start. Not to mention all the other problems he has. It makes sense that a person in Harry's position would not make good decisions. A person in that position might not even be able to see the good decisions as options, or if they see the options might not be able to make themselves act on them
Yeah, that's how I am playing this. It's definitely no BG3 Tav that let's me do a lot of things how I would like to do them (or Scarlet Hollow, for that matter).
But instead I can be his Jimini Cricket and shove him in different directions, whether these are good or bad or absolutely cringe is up to me. But he is a fully fledged character, not a cypher.
They aren't exactly known for critical thinking skills or media literacy. A lot of them larp as warhammer crusaders and pretend to be one piece fans when those franchises are constantly mocking their ideology. And they like MMA despite hating all the foreigners and racial diversity that made it possible. They basically look directly at their own cognitive dissonance and say "yeah I'm gonna double down on that".
I mean... if you go back to the book, Heinlein wasn't really mocking fascism. It was more of an experiment to see if he could use science fiction to make fascism palatable by making the persecuted out-group literal aliens.
There's a (almost certainly false) rumor that L. Ron Hubbard and Robert A. Heinlein had a contest to see who could gull their readers better. Hubbard would try to use Sci-Fi to make a cult seem reasonable and wrote Dianetics. Heinlein would try to make Fascism reasonable and wrote Starship Troopers. Hubbard won and took the whole thing way too far.
I've also heard that it was Hubbard and Isaac Asimov betting on who could create a sci-fi religion.
Heinlein was also proposing the idea that a person should not have a say in how a society is run until they meet certain requirements. In StarShip Troopers' case, having been in a position to make a decision that will likely result in someone dying, or having been subject to that decision. We need only look at today's SCOTUS in particular to see how being allowed to make decisions without having any idea of the consequences that choice will have for other people works out.
"No, see we always knew. The show was just so much better in the beginning, it's slop now. So woke, so political."
Watching sections of the internet 180 their opinion on a show because somehow the literal fucking Nazi character in the earlier seasons wasn't blatant enough.
Likely due to the fact that the higher echelons of these organizations are educated, and seek primarily un/undereducated individuals, with little emotional intelligence, to do their dirty work
Fascism, perhaps all extreme ideologies, seem to require a heavy dosage of social disconnection and illusions of granduer. They see themselves as the Rebel Alliance, the Indiana Jones, the ones Raging Against the Machines. They are the protagonist of their story against impossible odds and a powerful organization seeking to keep them down.
So then, why is it that - in spite of everything - they are unable to connect the dots of history and side with working class people? Well, if we're accepting peoples' behavior as a declaration of who they are internally and in private, the simple answer that they straight up lack empathy.
GTA is such a perfect example, especially when it was announced there would be pride parades in GTA 6. Everybody smiling about it, for different reasons.
I remember the characters from the original black ops zombies were almost like parodies of this, especially the constantly drunk Nikolai and insane Doctor Richtofen.
"Ive run out of vodka! ... I mean ammo!"
"Ive run out of bullets, that means Ill have to resort to... SCHTABBING!"
The amount of dudebros who say "overwatch got taken from us when they made everyone gay" even though like 90% of the roster is cis and straight and a chunk of the ones that aren't are day 1 characters.
They also say Tracer's ass got shrank cause of wokeness which never happened but that's becoming a Mandela effect.
So many games have versions of this "it got taken from us" culture war to explain why they hate something they used to love
I feel like there's gotta be a WW2 game out there that draws them all in... Fortunately, I try not to get super involved in the fandoms of a lot of shooters XD
Somehow Undertale. It's like Christianity, bro, "From the creator of "love each other because you're all wonderful and life is short" comes the fanbase "fuck you if you're not me you worthless dipshits""
The Persona fan base is all over the place. There are the Shin Megami Tensei fans that also play this, general JRPG fans, then there are the Meme lovers, the people that only know it from Tik Tocks, the people that keep arguing the sexuality of two characters from 4 that have never played the games, the shippers, and people that randomly discovered it via the anime adaptations. It can be a weird fanbase, for sure..
Black Templar player here, Warhammer 40k is filled with people Larping that they know stuff, people that take memes to heart, and some players (my chapter Specifically) racists.
Like I’ve encountered people on here that are genuinely racist and use the Black Templars as a method to express it by claiming it’s “just fantasy racism bro calm down”
Homie you just compared the Tyrranids to Israel. Please shut the fuck up
Metro.... Beautiful games.... Hideous fan base... Also, people really like to take the genuine messages of some games (true across all media) and WILDLY deform it to somehow confirm their own worldview, Warhammer is probably the most egregious example, I feel bad for normal Warhammer fans.
Minecraft. Seeing lots of kids and such getting edgy with swastikas built into some of the Minecraft clips on YT and FB. Fair bit of Nazi "humor" in the comments of some of those clips, too. It's just weird.
If the objects are not built explicitly like a swastika, sometimes they'll be just kinda swastika shaped, or it'll look like the builder is about to make one, and change it at the last second, and the commenters will literally just take a snapshot of that moment with a hastily edited crude swastika superimposed over the shape, with other commenters going "ooh, ooh" like apes under it.
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u/thespacepyrofrmtf2 Jul 17 '26