it is so gross how much fascists seem to like Helldivers 2. every time YouTube recommends me a video about the game it’s always full of dog whistles and sometimes actual slurs

I get that the game is trying to parody fascism but fascists love to miss the point of parodies of their ideology, and then unironically love and embrace the parody

could Helldivers 2 have avoided this by getting even more heavy-handed with their satire? I’m honestly not sure. but I wish they had just done something else

Eclipse Phase ran into this problem too. one of their factions is kinda a Nazi faction and another smaller faction is definitely a Nazi faction

in the first edition, they tried to leave it ambiguous which factions were “evil” and which were “good” because they thought it would be self-evident that the fascist factions were terrible, but they also wanted to leave room for nuance

but enough chuds started getting into the game that for the second edition they had to get pretty heavy-handed and almost parody the viewpoints of a lot of their nastier factions. which resulted in some darkly hilarious writing that I love, so I’m not complaining