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.
But he still toned it down from the book…
The first chapter is them taking a village of anthropomorphic insects over. They didn’t have any soldiers, it was just a random village and there’s a part where a mother and infant are hiding in a closest, get blasted by a flamethrower, and as the soldier jetbacks away he just shoots rockets everywhere because they get in trouble if they return with any unused ammo.
Just completely blasie about genocide.
Trimming it down to just the one 100% bug race really made it easier to write them off as monsters. But makes sense for a movie.
I mean wasn’t the author of the book saying that’s how things should be run? I had always heard the movie was basically mocking the premise of the book.
Nah, dude was a Naval officer that became disillusioned and wrote Stranger in a Strange Land. Hippies called that one “The Hippy Bible” because, well it basically was.
Then there’s his modern retelling if Job.
Like, if you read the Lazarus Long novels, there’s gonna be some sexism and toxic masculinity, along with some libertarianism shit. But we’re talking late 60s/early 70s pulp SciFi. It would be like judging current media because there’s always sex scenes and huge explosions.
Its rarely there because the creators want it there, it’s there to sell the media.
Starship Troopers is basically about what he feared the military could easily become if it took over the government.
That was kind of Heinleins whole style, you enjoy a book all the the way thru, but by the end everything is completely different and almost unrecognizable from chapter 1.
Those weren’t bugs, those were “Skinnies”, humanoid aliens.
They showed up in the animated series, but not the movie.
I never watched the cartoon, and it’s been a while since I read the book, but for some reason I always pictured them like the aliens in Invincible where they’re humanoid aliens, but bug like.
I dunno. That’s the thing about books, our brains just fill in the gaps.