Hey, if you enjoyed the video and you would like to support us further, we now have a Patreon. While support is appreciated, it is in no way expected. www.patreon.com/WikiWeekends - Karl and Lucas
Even when people notice the reproductive rights thing, they don't notice that Citizenship only makes it easier to get the license to have kids, it doesn't guarantee it.
Given his work on RoboCop and Starship Troopers and how well he works with hyper violence and satire, Paul Verhoeven would probably be my first pick if Hollywood were looking for a director to make a Warhammer 40K movie.
Verhoeven style is one of my absolute favorites he's getting up there in age and I really hope he blesses us with another action sci-fi masterpiece before he passes on.
I would say while his work on those films was excellent his brand of ironic satire would poke fun at 40K. Remember 40K itself takes itself seriously which we looking in get the absurdity of it. Verhoeven would have put a magnifying glass to that absurdity thus missing the point. Sort of like explaining a joke.
I wonder if most people even realize that their 'character' in Helldivers 2 is not a single dude who survives multiple missions. When you die on a mission, that soldier is dead and another is sent down to take it's place. Granted it's a video game and video games often play fast and loose with explaining why you can keep playing after your character dies. Some have explanations, some just don't. But Helldivers 2 does explain it, the characters you play as are disposable. Cogs in the machine of war, as it were.
Even moreso- when you join someone else's ship, you aren't arriving on a shuttle, oh no. You're another body unfrozen from THEIR ship. You're just using the call-ins from your built up and named Super Destroyer. You play as the ship, not the soldiers. The soldiers are just an extension of it.
The classroom scene was filmed in a way that you can easily get distracted from what is being said. It just comes across as world building for the fictional universe, rather than satirical. Like the politics of gondor not having a king for generations, or the establishing lore of the clone wars in star wars.
As a military veteran I adore this movie. It does more to explain the damage to the self that joining the military requires, than any of the myriad military films out there based on real soldiers who actually existed.
Yeah, Jarhead for example doesn't exist. A lot of frontline movies about the dissolution of soldiers don't exist. It's not like it was so common at a time it became a trope, showing the damage that the war and following orders inflicted, with the fleeting moments of "excitement" that the victory gets.
Problem with people not realizing it's a satire is the people in the movie act like this is just normal reality so our suspension of disbelief doesn't question it and just accept it as is. It's like cartoon logic, where everyone accepts the absurdity of the situation until someone points it out.
On the brainbug I also want to comment an important part of the film. That the bug is afraid is celebrated in of itself. It's not important whether or not the bugs pose a threat to earth, it's not important that the battle is over. What is important that anything outside the system of the government should be afraid of it, and the achievement of that fear is an inherant good. I don't know how better to perform a scathing critique of fascism.
22:13 - iirc, in the same statement GW themselves outright said that (paraphrasing) ‘if you agree with these ideologies, fuck off, we don’t want your money’.
The 3D animated series is EVEN clearer that the humans are bad, especially because the clearest nazi, Neil Patrick Harris, STOPS being on the human’s side. He outright gets disillusioned because he’s psychic and decides that the humans are going too far, (which is framed as him being mind controlled). Then eventually, the troopers (that we follow) and the bugs team up against some other group of things. It’s a wild series man.
One of my interpretations was that the EVERYTHING the government said about the bugs was bull shit and they were using this false threat to keep people enlisting. The military weren't training soldiers to fight bugs, they were being trained to put down rebellion. Just look at the weapons and armour, they wear ballistic vests and helmets that are shown to be completely useless against the bugs, but they will stop bullets. Their weapons are also unsuted to target the weak spots on the bugs, but will work very well on humans. Lastly, when you see the training montage, all the targets are human shaped and fire weapons, and the environments they train in dont match the bug planets, but they do match the enclosed spaces you'd fight rebels in. Damn this was a long post
the issue with this is that everything the government does say about the bugs is true. the bugs can travel through space, the director in the commentary track even says the asteroid was sent by the bugs. the bugs totally could of massacred the civilian settlement since we see them repeatedly take no prisoners and leave evidence of a massacre. and the propaganda is never shown to lie but is shown to tell the truth. the commanding officers admit that humanity is losing the war with the bugs as well. also the training against human targets is at the start of the war, literally half way through after the first few battles do we get the fednet video with a captured bug and how to defeat it showing that the federation only just was able to start bug research, on top of that the whole point of capturing a brain bug is because they dont know much about the bugs. irl every army is still fighting the last war before adapting, the training at the start is at the start of the war before humanity adapted to the bugs.
The age of the soldiers at the end is never clarified. They look young, but maybe 18 years old young. They say they just got out of boot, which for them was right after high school. It is kind of hard to tell if they are child soldiers when the main characters are supposed to be 10+ years younger than the actors who play them.
"A murderer was captured this morning and tried today. "GUILTY". Execution tonight at 6 on federation broadcasting." That timeline genuinely went over my head until now, and I've seen this movie a thousand times. Also I will say that in the sequels, they straight up tell you that the federation actually dropped the meteorite and deliberately let it hit. They did it to get public sentiment behind the extermination war. Please never watch the sequels.
@Canoby Hero of the federation is my guilty pleasure. I say that knowing full well it is a stain on the concept of cinema. Sexy brain bugs, enough said.
I much preferred the subtle ways they hinted at the meteor being launched by humanity if you payed attention to plot details and thought about it a bit rather then just flat out telling the audience
@sofaninja0552 100% agree, I just wanted to point out that they did, in fact, confirm that. I believe NPHs character actually ends up being assassinated to keep it covered up. They made it the core plot of the movie which is cool, but it ruins the mystique.
I know, it's had all its guardian bugs killed, been wrapped in a net and dragged out of its home infront of hundreds of enemies shooting very loud weapons... Even a mindless animal would be terrified!
It's not that they "needed" him to tell them that. He was providing undeniable proof of it. Same reason we conduct scientific studies of the "I could've told them that, everybody knows that" kind. The bugs had been an unrelenting force dead set on destruction at any cost until that point, now we know they can be made to fear us, which means we can defeat them. Hence everybody celebrating.
@@LordBaktor that's a good point, psychics are the way the gain intelligence on the bugs. In the books it's how they knew where the bugs were going to attack.
14:40 It's worse and more personal than that, he was born in 1938 and spent his early childhood growing up under the Nazi-occupied Netherlands *during* WWII.
The first time I saw Starship Troopers was just before 9/11. As an American, it was uncanny. Maybe that's why so many people missed the satire; it was too accurate. For someone growing up in that era of ultra patriotic and militaristic fervor; Starship Troopers felt more like a documentary than a work of fiction.
If you looks at the scene where they first encounter a bug, notice how it doesn't attack them, but rather appears to try and intimidate them or scare them off by roaring and swiping the air while keeping distance, then the soldier shoots it, it screams in pain and defends itself before getting mowed down. Then, once the rest of the bugs show up, they too only line up defensively, stand their ground and roar at them, seemingly not wanting to attack - only for Rico to initiate hostilities. ua-cam.com/video/-lDHoPPQIu8/v-deo.html The bugs were not the aggressors.
Friendly reminder that Heinlein (the author of the book) also was opposed to the world of the book and it was a criticism of jingoistic eternal wars. The book was released during the cold war when the memory of the horrors of WW2 were being co-opted and at the tail end of McCarthyism. It has ALWAYS been satire.
@@Nick-pu3of For me, it's mainly the fact that, despite the distance, the Feds could still fly there in a decent amount of time, on top of the existence of a brain bug and bugs capable of firing off into space. However, the meteor scraping the ship was never much of a consideration for me, either. Ah well, "It's a good day to diieee!"
@@RippahRooJizah Personally I imagine those missile bugs probably don't have THAT great of a range ? Mostly because I would assume they exist to protect the hive and not necessarily as an offensive force hence they probably wouldn't need to evolve to fire as far as Earth ? That's my conclusion at least.
I think part of why people side with the Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40K, is the grim-dark framing. Pretty much every major faction in the setting, is in some way, explicitly evil or monstrous. It's a setting with no "Good guys". So instead of an objective heroic faction, it becomes "Who is the least shit" (or rather, who is the easiest to swallow). Amongst daemons and monsters, it's easiest to empathize with the humans. And so for many players, ends up being the faction they have the least dissonance with. The problem then ends up being that people take "Easiest to role-play in the context of the game" and turn that into "THE GOOD GUYS!", and then you have some really shallow depictions of the cartoonishly evil Imperium of Man.
I do find it interesting that when GW tried introducing an actual good guy faction (while somewhat trying to downplay the marysue-ness by making them naïve small-fry), 40k fans were still pretty much universally disgusted and the faction still the butt of jokes and the target of distain to this day despite having since been grimdarked up with civil wars and mindcontrol and mass-sterilization and so on. Yes the different aesthetic and the unfair sniper bullshit playstyle probably didn't help either, but I can't help but wonder how much of the pushback came from people who were upset by the idea of a good faction because they needed their evil assholes to be completely justified.
@@evilcabbage1 You mean... the T'au? The brainwashing "Everyone is for the community"? Or do you mean the Farsight Enclave, which I haven't really heard much bad about. Even the original T'au wasn't really "good guys". And yeah, actual good guy faction doesn't really fit into the aesthetic of grimdark... Like how a gorefilled murder faction doesn't really fit into My Little Pony. Maybe we should start adding some little cute ponies of friendship into horror movies, that can't die or experience any kind of gore. Some things simply don't fit into certain aesthetics. Do you like, understand that, or is it so important to be so condescending and creating this monolithic idea of 40k players?
Media literacy and literacy in general is at an all time low. I love both warhammer 40k and Starship troopers but the satire is what makes them great for me. It’s also not surprising for me anymore how many people are susceptible to even satirical propaganda. Things literally set up to be as absurd as possible are eaten up seriously by people who aren’t quite… aware. It’s not that they’re dumb are anything necessarily, more of a quirk of the human mind.
media illiteracy goes the other way around too, too many think both are fascism when both don't fit the bill. Many sources of fascism on wikipedia can't seem to agree on what fascism is and seems to be just whatever the authors of said sources want fascism to be
If we're going to have a video about propoganda. Can we talk about JoJo rabbit The movie that whenever I bring up, people simply get uncomfortable thinking of it only as a nazi themed movie. When it's a critique on impressionable youths and the danger of losing autonomy to totalitarianism.
I just rewatched that movie the other week. It's such a great movie. I talked about it and work. Even in my opinion, the themes are on its sleeves, the movies only 2-3 layers deep, but i also received the same critiques that it was just about nazis.
imagine a situation where one force invades and colonises another force's territory, and then frames that second force's retaliation as an unforgivable act of war that requires their total annihilation...
And this is where the satire breaks down, in the novel, the Federation warned the "Neo Mormon" colonists to NOT colonize there because they had no clue to the safety or even viability of the planet for human colonization. They went anyway. Given the Federations "Freedom of choice means you accept the consequences of those choices without fail" attitude they have, they warned them but didn't stop them from going. The colony was killed by the bugs and the Feds closed book on it saying _"Well, we warned them"_ The bugs interpreted that as a collective invasion because the bugs don't realize that humans are individuals, so any one human on their planet to them means "All humans are invading". Hence the overwhelming response by the bugs, thinking mankind was invading. Then mankind, IE the Federation responds to what is an existential threat to all humans and then the war happens. If you think about it, it's like Ender's Game, both sides misinterpreting the meaning and actions of the other and simply responding with force to achieve what they THINK is the goal.
Helldivers, 40k and starship troopers are really fun universes to role play within. Saying stuff like "yeah lets kill all those bugs for humanity" "imperium did nothing wrong" "cmon you apes you wanna live forever" ect in character is fine in my book and doesnt make someone facist because its all part of playing in those worlds. But its a damn shame that some people dont see the satire or dont see it as make believe and carry these ideals into the real world. It makes making friends in these spaces akin to minesweeping
A lot of people don't look at the lore of Helldivers and realize humans are the bad guy. The Illuminate make peaceful first contact. We kill them and take their tech so we have faster-than-light technology. We continue to attack, invade, and conquer them for over 100 years to steal more of this technology because we cannot reverse engineer it. We encounter the terminid. Turns out their bodies turn into oil when they decompose. We conquer them, enslave them, and genetically alter them so they evolve faster to grow bigger and make more oil. They break free. We move in to conquer again. The cyborgs are unwantes human colonists sent to the fringe worlds to work in conditions that are guaranteed to kill and maim. The colonists augment themselves with robotic bodies and machines. The colonists rebel. Oh no! Another alien species attacking humans! Put them down!
Helldivers are rightous soldiers that fight off the teminid and automaton scourge. That is what the ministry of truth says, and the ministry of truth would never lie to us.
8:55 see, therein lies the issue. despite being a not-so-subtle parody of fascism, because it was basically copying propaganda films, the target of parody just saw the propaganda and went "man this film is so true"
Warhammer 40K's community is so unique, you have some of the most wholesome, friendly and wonderful people in the community. There is a person at my friendly local gamestore that is trans, and has all their Space Marines painted like Pride flags. Then at the same store I've seen people playing all black paunted armies with red armbands. Its a freaking trip.
The problem with Warhammer 40K as satire is that it's been watered down quite a bit. In the early days of the game Space Marines were brutal bastards that would crush your skull almost on a whim and the God-Emperor was propaganda and was probably just a guy. Nowadays the Emperor is demonstrably a god regardless of his own opinion on the matter and Space Marines are heroic figures (sometimes). Also the setting is told from the perspective of at best Guardsmen who are framed as "regular joes" fighting the horrors of the universe, which is true but glosses over the reality that the actual regular Imperial citizen lives about 40 years, works mind numbing manual labour akin to the early industrial revolution and are so dehumanised that processed human flesh is openly used as common food stuff for the masses. But if you don't deep dive into the lore you don't really get how bad it really would be to live in the Imperium of Man.
Yeah, in Rogue Trader there's very little of the "satire" and "parody" the current game is pushing in a panic to cleanse the public's perception of them. WH40K is just WHFB with sci Fi flavor. It was written in the intro of WH40K:RT that the game was meant to be a framework for players to build their sci-fi skirmish game in their favorite sci-fi setting. They strongly hint at Star Wars and Dune being their goals. This new "Um, actually the Imperium is evil" is just them backpedaling to cover their asses.
@@mr.pavone9719I mean you're right but there's also quite a lot of satire in the most recent campaign books and stuff. From the Leviathan campaign book: please ignore the science You must have faith that the god Emperor would protect us if there truly was any danger! From Pariah Nexus: breaking the rules of honorable combat in using weapons of mass destruction literally summoned demons. Clearly the only solution to this is to use bigger weapons of mass destruction!
@@mr.pavone9719 buy Rogue Trader do you mean 40K first edition or do you mean the 2009 spin-off tabletop RPG that isn't even published by Games Workshop? Because if you mean first edition Warhammer 40K, I know by the time of 1998 when the third edition came out, the famous "for more than one hundred centuries, the Emperor has set upon the golden throne..." Quote was the first words in the rulebook.
@@mr.pavone9719 "in Rogue Trader there's very little of the "satire" and "parody" " The fuck have you been smoking friend? Rogue Trader was the _most_ satirical that 40k ever was, and each subsequent edition played the setting a little more straight each time, to the point where the company has to make press releases about how the neo-nazis their game has appealed to for the last couple of decades (and whose money they're _very_ happy to take unquestioningly) aren't welcome in the hobby (even though GW don't _actually_ care if a player is a neo-nazi as long as they keep buying stuff)
Please do not lump all of us 40k fans in with those types. Many of us are aware that 40k is not aspirational. I can only hope it's the majority, but I do not know.
@ShadowMageAlpha from an outsider. Either your minority is incredibly vocal. Or like the creators themselves, there's a real fascist fascination in the fandom. I know that it's not everyone but from the little experience I have from light readings and playing (a bit) of Darktide, the satire never stood out to me.
Worst? Hell, a world like Starship Troopers would only be an improvement. In our reality, conscription is mandatory. In Starship Troopers, it's entirely voluntary. In our reality, the media is carefully cherry-picked so as to show only one narrative. In Starship Troopers, people are shown debating multiple sides of the issue of killing mindless bug creatures, whereas in our reality we have to grapple with justifying killing fellow humans in faraway countries.
Im glad the Gundam fandom has a consice meme for this exact issue "Wow! Cool Robot!" Then again, the Subreddit had a guy who unioronicly thought having a large Zeon flag (its slightly diffrent from the normal symbol if youve ever seen it a very _notible_ way) patch on a jacket would be cool and not get his dumbass pumled in to a bloody heap the second he goes outside. I think the poor fucker was German too if memory serves.
@@kiwigaming09 Tomino did that because he wasent subtle on a lot of things. He based the Principality Zeon on a mix of Nazi Germany with Spacnoid superiorty (the original leader believed humans would eventually mutate into a peaceful space umberminch race before he died/was poisened my his allies in a powergrab that made everything more radical and more Hitlery) with the arrogance of Imperial Japan with the Zabi family. They even did a Pearl harbor. Operation British. Killed billions just to miss the Main Federation base in South America and slap Sydney across the face with a gigantic phallic space station that could hold about 10 million people. Their opposition is not that much better in all honesty. Think *sightly* mild starship troopers as your base jobber and getting more radical the higher up the chain. TL:DR Both sides are bad, don't aspire to be either. AND DONT CASUALLY WEAR THEIR UNIFORMS, ESPECIALLY ZEON OR THE TITANS
@@kiwigaming09one of the children of the monarchy that rules zeon says pretty much word for word that Hitler is an inspiration, so kinda unsurprisingly zeon adopted nazi imagery
@@gremblorthesackgoblin7953 The point of Gundam was always neither side was truly right or wrong. Heck, the second ever season showed the Federarion forced Amuro, their own hero, into house arrest out of fear then crested the Titans who quickly became too powerful to control. Sure Zeon did horrific things, but Gundam did such an amazing job at humanizing both sides and using nuance. Plus it wasn't afraid to kill almost any character off.
We do but SciFi fans are not there for a astronomical lesson either. (Imagine a requirement on the film “must understand Einstein Field equations to enter”)
No, it was a deliberate gag, parodying how the U.S. is bordered by two seas in the East and West yet somehow is always "under threat" from people who live on the other side of the planet.
@@amiciprocul8501 Well in all fairness Japan was the largest ocean in the world away, Pearl Harbor still happened. And given the plane thing YT doesn't like people mentioning, same story. Being on a different continent means little in the modern day. That isn't me going to back for the US, far from it. Just pointing out that the distance isn't an insurmountable obstacle.
@@kingofhearts3185 And the 48 states that existed at the time (Alaska and Hawaii wouldn't become states until 1959) were never seriously threatened by Japan.
The very fact that the Federation is shown to control all space travel should be enough to prove that yeah, the Federation did in fact provoke the bugs by deliberately letting the Mormons settle in Arachnid space. Hell, they insist on calling them "Arachnids" when none of the "bugs" have eight legs. Because "Spiders" is scarier than "ants" (well, maybe not if you live in South America...).
Got to see this in my cinema, but it was ruined by my weirdo brother insisting we sit off the right, in the front row. Still massively enjoyed it though. Even at the tender age of 17, I was aware of the satirical nature of the film. One of the last scenes is especially intriguing for me is when Rico is meeting his replacement troops. Those actors are noticeably much, much younger than Rico and Ace. And that can be read in a number of ways. First is humanity is doing so poorly, it’s down to recruiting literal children (they all look no older than 14 or so. Second is a stylistic thing to show Rico has “matured” and is no longer a kid. Third is Ver Hoeven sneaking in a chance to go “this is the age Johnny and his mates were when they were recruited, but Hollywood prefers 20 something for teenaged roles. And it could be all three.
towards the end of ww2 a lot of the german soldiers defending against the allied invasion on the western front were teenagers. The Nazis had lost soo many in Russia that they were running out of able bodied fighting age men. Im sure it's a deliberate reference to that
About the teachers speech, “the notion that violence doesn’t solve anything is wishful thinking at its worst” I always interpret this differently than you present it. First it’s not condoning violence, it’s acknowledging it’s effectiveness and the dangers of forgetting that are very serious. Secondly it’s the argument for voting rights, laws only work when enforced and by passing laws you are exerting force on the people. The threat of violence is the final supreme authority by which all other authority is enforced. I always read this as a tragic truth, despite our desire to remove all violence from our lives it is an inherent reality of existence and pretending otherwise is wishful thinking and dangerous. This is why heinlein comes to the conclusion that military service gives voting rights because military service members accept and face the threat of violence in order to defend their society making the defense and strength of society their own personal responsibility. While I don’t agree with his conclusion that only veterans should vote, I do think that the message that pretending violence is never necessary or effective in defending ourselves our families or our values is opening ourselves up to danger. We drive cars everywhere every day and it’s normal and pretty safe overall but forgetting that it can be dangerous is foolishness that could be fatal
I saw starship troopers for the first time two days ago, mostly because people keep referencing it. I saw it knowing that it is supposed to be satirical, but had to keep reminding myself of that. Because it was too subtle. I watched it again with commentaries from the actors, and that helped a little.
Part of the problem is if you make anything in a universe a satire, if it is cool at all, it will either go over ppls heads or outright deny and ignore it
In general I'm of the opinion that any piece of media can be interpreted however it's consumers want to interpret it, but damn the mental gymnastics to see Starship Troopers(movie) as anything other than satire is on the level of "2+2 = 5 pink and yellow striped elephants in red business suits smoking maple leaves from a peace pipe"
Satire ridicules the attitudes and institutions depicted in the work. Gilbert and Sullivan's "Trial by Jury" is a satire on the court system. Being silly alone isn't satire, it's camp. For example, Mary Poppins isn't a satire about the institution of the family, it's a campy story that is pro-family. Verhoeven intended to satirize Heinlein by making the movie like a corny WW2 propaganda film, but the question is did he succeed in making fun of Heinlein's work or did he just make Heinlein's work fun. And remember, it was our American propaganda in WW2 that was corny, and the movie resembles our American WW2 war propaganda. Just because you have propaganda, or because you're fighting at all, doesn't mean you're the bad guys. Is the audience supposed to be anti-humanity?
@@Nick-pu3of The humans are unambiguously the bad guys? The response of the bugs to the Mormon settlers in in realistic terms would be like America nuking Guatemala City in response to illegal immigration. Neil Breen intended to make masterpieces. The intention of the director and the product they make clearly aren't the same thing.
@@Nick-pu3of The humans are the bad guys? So some migrants show up and the bugs obliterate a city, is that your conception of decency? Should we implement that policy in a just world? Neil Breen intended to make masterpieces, the director's intent doesn't matter.
@@Nick-pu3of There's no indication in the movie that the state would exterminate immigrants. But let's say that the roles were exactly reversed, that the humans slaughtered a group of bug immigrants, then flattened a bug city, and the bugs were coming to eliminate the human threat. Would you say the humans were unambiguously the good guys in that movie?
@@Nick-pu3of But there are other planets and aliens, and the whole conflict started because people emigrated, obviously there are places to migrate to and from. Did you not see District 9? Are you going to argue to me that the humans are the good guys in District 9?
@@timewasting3372 these guys made a silly mistake. Bit weird to attribute it to a British attitude. In my (very anecdotal) experience, I don't know a single person who'd describe the Netherlands as eastern Europe
There is no satire obvious enough that you won't still have somebody somewhere thinking its genuine, and there's no propaganda blatant enough that somebody won't sill fall for it. That's the problem with both 40K and Starship Troopers (Film), even if the creators personally sat down with everybody who has ever consumed it and explained exactly what is going on and why on their first viewing - somebody is still just not going to get it. (Or more likely was already on the wrong side of the satire anyway and are willfully ignoring it.)
I'll admit that I didn't realize Starship Troopers or Robocop was parody, but I can remember thinking, "Wow, this society is really messed up."😂 43:40 the main strategy of WW1?
Robocop would just be a documentary, but the idea that there was a corporation interested in developing real estate in Detroit is too silly to be ignored.
I am no where near as media savvy as Karl is and even I knew Starship Troopers was satire when I saw it as a kid who probably shouldn’t have been watching something that violent. I’m as baffled as Karl is 😂
This is how I feel about Mad Max: Fury Road. So many people describe it as "one long chase scene" and "boring", and I have to ask if we're talking about the same movie.
Look, all you need to know about the book is that Johnny Rico was originally Filipino, and they probably changed it in the movie because the problem would've been solved within minutes if they sent a Filipino to kill bugs, especially if he was wearing flip-flops. Also, those "missing" power suits got added in Starship Troopers 3, and it was DUMB.
Had a few pints with a friend, and saw this in theater shortly after releasing. Some git tried to have us ejected for laughing too loud. He made such a scene that he was asked to leave!😂 I guess he came to see a serious film.🤷♂️
When we had the film at my theater when it came out I saw it and was pissed at how badly they adapted the book, the first time! The second I realized what they were doing and thought it was fantastic!
You could make a satire of fascism where the fascist soldiers are called "piss babies" and fascists would start getting tattoos and calling themselves piss babies unironically within a week of it getting even mildly popular.
The contention is not that it isn't satire, but that it FAILS at being satire. You know... the whole reason to satirise anything is to make it look unappealing or distasteful, and yet Starship Troopers manages to do an exemplary job of making the targets of the satire (the humans) look rather wholesome. This rather obvious disconnect comes from the fact that Verhoeven didn't even bother to fully read the source material!
Just an in universe example that the imperium of man is wrong. there is a story about a ship that is from humanities golden age (very high tech, almost everyone living their best life ect) going on a war path because it as a sentient warship cannot comprehend that the emperor would allow humanity to devolve into what 40k shows it as. so yea 40k has such an issue with fans not recognizing the parody they had to make a whole ass book detailing every fault of the in universe government, like to the point where the book is called "death of integrity" and fans still did not get the message...
12:33 i played through most of the gears of war games. Was it supposed to be satire? I thought it was encouraging that the soldiers were called cogs. In a machine, one cog missing makes the it useless. Everyone is essential.
The mentioning of the shifting view of the bugs have to be both a massive threat and also must be inherently something inferior is one of the defining component parts of fascism “In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco distilled the 14 typical elements of “Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism,” Of these traits this is actually described as number 8: The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” This narritive that bugs are dumb unthinking animals and undeserving of being viewed as sapient. While also pushing a narritive that bugs are such a massive threat that they could bend space time physics in such a way to launch an asteroid at earth that arrives in a suprise fassion while also not impacting at such speed that it impacts at speeds similar to a normal asteroid strike is a classic feature of fascism. They are both dumb bugs and the idea of a brain bug is insulting (because to think bugs are even human level intelligent is insulting to humanity “how can we compare vermin to us the master species “ Mentality while also “we must always be ever vigilant of these dangerous creatures who for the safety of human kind must be eradicated.” Needless to say if you can trick a population into believing this kind of cognitively dissonant view you can get them behind the notion that the only solution to the “bug problem” is extermination. This is how you win a population over to the side of supporting genocide
I will never forget that, when I was in high school, we had an English teacher that insisted there was a theme in a book where the author explicitly said he didn't write in there and that anyone reading it as such is just seeing what they want to see.
It should also be noted that there are authors blinded by proximity to their work and own perspective to the degree that they miss obvious themes and ideologies within. Shadiversity's book is a very good example. Don't read the book by the way, it glorifies a monstrous self-insert.
@iaCreator Yeah but... the book was "Lord of the Flies". That English teacher was saying that there's a Christ figure in it and he claims ALL literature has a Christ figure in it...
@@sleepingkirby Through trope use, yes. But only if you break the fiction into pieces. To be honest though it would be more ideal to say that one should open up to multiple interpretations within media they consume, whether that is an inherent theme or not. This would build creativity, empathy and a better awareness of one's perspective down the road.
@@VelaiciaCreator Yes, but the reverse can also be true and can be just as harmful if not more so. Especially since this is a teacher that determined our grades, an authority figure, that judges our essays on what he thinks. So, at the same time, he is allowed his interpretation and will literally punish us if we don't agree with it, denying our perspective. At the same time, growing up Asian in the US in the 90's, our media is often misconstrued to align with the views and prejudices that westerners often have of eastern media, often calling them inferior or primitive, leading to perpetuation of racial stereotypes and systemic racism. You see this in the 90's where people constantly perpetuated ideas like: JRPG's are inferior to American RPG's in video games, Asians aren't creative, Chinese people really like period pieces (ignoring, of course, how most of "classical literature" in high school are set in Victorian or Shakespearian times. And that's ignoring ALL the cowboy movies) and Jackie Chan is only an action film star. Think about all the parodies of anime in western media and how shallow, inaccurate and often offensive they are just a decade or two ago. Anime had to fight to be taken seriously, but common perspective and interpretation was that all anime, including studio Ghibli films, were inferior to Disney films. All this while Disney literally made it illegal in the US for anyone to own a copy of a Studio Ghibli film. (And don't at me on that one. I was working in an animation studio at that time and we had to trade/smuggle studio Ghibli films like it was drugs.) So, on one hand, you can have your own views, interpretation and perspectives on media. On the other hand it may also end up being a self-delusion/self-justification, forming an echo chamber that leads into things like fascism, racism and sexism. Because, I have no doubt that that teacher would be one of the people who subscribes to the "great replacement theory" as much of his rhetoric about literature was literally touting Christian superiority over other religions. And often portrayed Christianity as the inevitable evolutionary result of all religions. Hence his insistence of Christ figures in ALL literature, including non-English ones.
41:30 - also, (from what I’ve heard, so might not be the case), the whole ‘there are other routes to citizenship’ thing is probably a retcon anyway, as that’s something from the sequel, whereas the original book only ever brought up military service as granting citizenship.
A lot of the people I witness being hyperbolic about Starship Troopers (after playing Helldivers) seem to fall into two camps. 1. They get the joke, but are playing up the propaganda for humour. Very much "FOR DEMOCRACY!" war cries. 2. Like with MGRR; they unironically prefer this setting and agree with it. Certainly some of these people understand that it is satire, yet willfully disagree with it (as it conflicts with their worldview). But a shocking about (like Karl references) are either unaware of the satire, or weirdly defensive about it.
Just a couple points to make... Even in the movie, it is expressed in the dialogue that there are other paths to citizenship besides the Fleet or MI. It's Civil Service. Military service just accelerates the process... if you survive anyway. I'm pretty sure that was one of the talking points of Rico's parents. My other point is that the accountability of the Sky Marshall is antithetical to basic fascism. The highest leadership would never step down or surrender their power, but that is exactly what happens after the botched invasion of Klendathu.
even in their news reels they don't lie, they're asking "Would you like to know more?", military enlistment is also discouraged but accepted. those Mormons would have been arrested if it were a dictatorship, but instead when they inevitably have been killed by the bugs humanity went in full swing against the bugs. Verhoeven doesn't understand fascism and only thinks giving them the dress wear makes them as such (I can dress like a CCP soldier from Tiananmen Square but that doesn't make me a soldier from then)
I have not seen anyone not knowing this film is satire. I have seen people saying that certain people dont get it is satire even though they literally type out that they get that it is satire. There are probably some people that dont know that it is satire but they are very very few, few enough to ignore as a stupid take. I know it is satire, but if you only have info from the film about the world you see and just like 40k if the threat of the bugs is real there is an argument for it to be necessary for the human race to survive. I am not saying it is good just the consequence of needing everyone to defend humanity. When it comes to Helldivers 2 that you mentioned, all it has been is people thinking that people dont get the satire because they take the fun role playing people do seriously. Like i have seen multiple post on reddit telling people that they need to know that the game is satire and people reply that they do understand that it is satire and that they are just having fun with the setting, only for OP to say that no you dont understand it is satire. These people act a little bit like the outraged moms during the satanic panic or the people complaining about violent video games.
I'm not the most media literate when it comes to films. But even i could see the themes in starship troopers. Reminds me of the time that some people claimed to not know that stormfront in the boys was a nazi. I mean come on, she was called stormfront ffs and even if she wasn't called that. Her motivation, dialogue and actions were still so obvious that i wouldn't even call it subtext
I was one of those weirdos who defended the book. Even when I was I realized the movie was another take on the subject. The UA-cam channel Knowing Better run by a man who read the book saw the movie and served in the armed forces made an astute point that the book's arguments work because it's supposed to support it's own reality. It's the same way Superman is able to fly in the comics. The same way the system is government works in the books only works because it has to in order to support the story.
Would’ve said Scott Pilgrim is another example of this; movie recreates scenes beat for beat, but still has fundamentally different motifs and tone from the books.
I find the irony of the helldivers 2 trailers interesting how it's both clearly a parody of war time propaganda but also is effective in being propaganda by making the game look really fun.
This makes me appreciate having friends in the warhammer hobby that understand parody and satire. Now I'm gonna go distribute managed democracy so hard in helldivers.
I watched the movie at the cinema and really enjoyed it, thinking it was great satire, I was 20 at the time. Fast foward to the UA-cam age and I am seeing all these videos explaining Starship Troopers is actually satire. And I am here thinking how effing stupid are people!
Well, aside from the random news segments, it is quite subtle. My impression was that the news segments were there to add humor to the otherwise very gruesome rest of the movie. When people think of fascism, they think of racist nazis. Which seems to be contradicted by the diversity in positions of leadership and in how soldiers treat fellow soldiers of color. (That is, exactly the same as everyone else.)
WH40k having "The Iron Ork" Ghazghull Mag Uruk Thrakka, in the 80s under Thatcher, with her face literally painted onto an Ork banner in a white dwarf magazine hasn't led people to figure out it's satire then nothing will. Also I know they came out a few years back and said something about it being in black speech from LotR but I outright refuse to believe that isn't GW just covering their asses legally. I bet these people are also the one's who think Liberty Prime from FO3 was a serious character.
Another great example of "book and movie must be talked about in almost 2 different contexts" is Wanted. Holy fricken cow wanted was a -ride- when I read that comic book. I was so upset at the movie when it came out and I had to be told to chill a -lot- like how people kinda get with this movie but much less popular Had a lot of growin' to do as a spicey nerd
Over time we've come to see the problem with Poe's Law is that the inclusion of a winky face or other sign of direct sarcasm is taken as an "I'm with you" gesture from those that think the work is sincere
If you want to go completely in-depth with the meta-analysis then while Verhoven shot the movie as if it was Fascistic propaganda it was also HIS propaganda of what fascism is. His understanding of the novel is what he's been told and what he's been told was affected by someone's bias, and in turn, his interpretation of what he was told was affected by his bias. While there are several things in the book that can be critiqued, they're also things that in controlled amounts are necessary to run a society else you try the anarchist model; since a society of Anarchic ideology will develop either into a society that embraces a Democratic ideology or into a society where one or a few grab power and rules it by Fascistic ideology. There are no in-betweens. These elements are completely missing from the movie to paint an obvious message, it's also the wrong message because a society can easily follow Fascistic ideology, without following a lot of the elements people associate with fascism due to Mussolini, and never even realise it. There are also elements of the bugs that are never mentioned that was mentioned in the novel yet are included in the periphery to make the events plausible. It's perfectly reasonable to interpret the meteor attack like a false flag and it's also plausible that it was a real one and the bugs really did do a well-calculated attack from across the galaxy. The bugs have space travel, else they would never have left their planet, and we have no idea how their space travel works as it's never mentioned. For all we know, they could get around by opening wormholes, and could have pointed the meteor towards Earth and fired it at it. A much better argument for it being a false flag is that the bugs seem to have no external engines or anything that can be used as such, how did they accelerate it in the first place as there are no visible engines on it? How did the government seem to know quickly it came from that sector of space? If it did then wormholes must had been involved since distnace in space is vast. So vast that even a one km diameter meteorite would be nearly impossible to spot. It's impossible that the Bugs could have attacked Buenos Aires without using wormholes as the distance between Earth and Klendathy is meassured in several light years. Sub-light travel is impossible from either sides if the plot if to be plausible. Those are much better arguments as they're impossible to straight up dismiss based on stuff that's never shown. Also, the bug structure is a bad argument. It's been a while since I saw the movie and while it might be a Mandela effect I do remember them talking about the Bugs as a hive mind. The novel also mentions them as being a hive mind and depending on the age of the one who told Verhoven about the plot of the novel the obvious communist dog-whistle of a unified purpose and mind would be lost on them. Yes, the USSR had that image, and like all good propaganda it had a grain of truth in it. Communistic ideology is a branch of ideological Conservatism where the power dynamic between worker and owner is reversed. Ideological Conservatism is a continuum on the spectrum of Conservative ideology and Conservative ideology requires the critical thinking abilities of the adherents to be anything from mildly reduced to completely gone. It's a "Believe what I say rather than what you see" system. This means the individual continuums have thought leaders, which is a hive mind would be the brain caste.
To mildly criticize the idea that “but the book says” automatically invalidates a statement in many cases the argument but the book says is being used to expand upon as aspect of the movie that is implied but not explicitly stated . For example in response to the dismissal that there are other paths to citizenship other than military and that people who say “but the book says” should be invalidated is itself a bad reason to dismiss the statement. The movie in its own scenes creates implications that there are many other paths to citizenship and that citizens have an easier time getting a license to have children. The kobei even has that slogan “service guarantees citizenship”. Meaning if you enlist or apply for a military academy to become an officer and are accepted and make it through boot or graduate as an officer you automatically become a citizen presumably after your tour of duty. To support that there are other paths of citizenship as implied by the film may argue the book states that there are. This is using the book as a means of supporting that something that is implied is canon. In this kind of scenario. A person using the book as a supporting item to craft some aspects of unseen world-building is simply using the book to support something implied by the movie but saying because the book and movie are similar in this aspect it’s reasonable to assume that the book can be used to imply what is unseen in this aspect.
Exactly. They may be different stories, but they share enough elements that using the book to fill in gaps or clarify things that are only implied or given a passing mention in the movie is absolutely valid.
Even though I didn't have the vocabulary to verbalize it, I *absolutely* got the point when I first saw this film at like 10-yrs-old. I knew little about World War II, absolutely nothing about fascism & politics, & my young pubescent mind came out of it with this thought, "The bugs...did nothing wrong"
'but, in the books' is what's now being applied to the X-Men animated TV show. The usual suspects are pointing out that initially in the X-Men comics they weren't intended to be a civil rights allegory. Thing is, that aspect of it was added later on, and it was definitely present in the Animated show. However they are already complaining the revivification of the Animated series has 'gone political', even though it was political back in the 90s. I think it's important to remember they have an agenda to alter the history of these shows and movies to suit their narrative.
Heinlein's politics were dogsh!t. He was pro-military, but anti-government. just about every protagonist in his novels were in the military and become ex-pats after they get out or are "space cowboys" that are self-reliant 'survival of the fittest' types (some are teenagers learning to become one of the two). he pmuch believed in eugnics, and that 'if it bleeds it can breed' and would treat children as 'small adults' and women were there to be 'taken care of' by the men. (read about a dozen of his books)
The only thing I'll say comparing the books to the movie is this: I've read the book once. I watch this movie every chance I get. Also, Armor by John Steakley is a much better book about a rookie infantryman having to face the realities of war.
Starship Troopers (The Film, I haven't read the Books) definitely is Satire, as is (probably) Helldivers. BUT, as someone who hates Bugs (actual insects and such), getting to eradicate entire Hives of them with Orbital Strikes is extremely cathartic for me.
Hey, if you enjoyed the video and you would like to support us further, we now have a Patreon. While support is appreciated, it is in no way expected.
www.patreon.com/WikiWeekends
- Karl and Lucas
Karl: "The fact people don't get it is hilarious to me"
Me: it frightens the hell outta me
"Wave after wave of men..."
Ah, yes, the Zapp Brannigan Gambit.
Some of you will be pressed through a fine mesh screen for your planet. Those will be the luckiest of all.
"you suck!"
Even when people notice the reproductive rights thing, they don't notice that Citizenship only makes it easier to get the license to have kids, it doesn't guarantee it.
Given his work on RoboCop and Starship Troopers and how well he works with hyper violence and satire, Paul Verhoeven would probably be my first pick if Hollywood were looking for a director to make a Warhammer 40K movie.
This is an amazing idea I had not considered before
Well Amazon is currently working on WH40k film/tv projects with Henry Cavill, so there’s always hope they can rope Verhoeven in too. 😉
Sir, you are a genius.
Verhoeven style is one of my absolute favorites he's getting up there in age and I really hope he blesses us with another action sci-fi masterpiece before he passes on.
I would say while his work on those films was excellent his brand of ironic satire would poke fun at 40K. Remember 40K itself takes itself seriously which we looking in get the absurdity of it. Verhoeven would have put a magnifying glass to that absurdity thus missing the point. Sort of like explaining a joke.
Starship Troopers is a satire of a book that the director didn't read, understand and was poorly explained to him. And it's great!
I wonder if most people even realize that their 'character' in Helldivers 2 is not a single dude who survives multiple missions. When you die on a mission, that soldier is dead and another is sent down to take it's place.
Granted it's a video game and video games often play fast and loose with explaining why you can keep playing after your character dies. Some have explanations, some just don't. But Helldivers 2 does explain it, the characters you play as are disposable. Cogs in the machine of war, as it were.
To further this, the default character voice in Helldivers 2 is "Random" which will change the character's voice with every "respawn".
Alot of people do realize it yes
Even moreso- when you join someone else's ship, you aren't arriving on a shuttle, oh no. You're another body unfrozen from THEIR ship. You're just using the call-ins from your built up and named Super Destroyer. You play as the ship, not the soldiers. The soldiers are just an extension of it.
As a Warhammer 40k fan, nothing is more irritating than other fans not understanding it's an over the top, insane joke.
The Troopers are basically the Guardsmen of 40k. If the tactic of throwing bodies at doesn't work, you aren't throwing enough bodies!
At least guardsmen have armor and artillery to back them up
Well no, although that was the tactic in the first battle, it immediately changed to small squad tactics
The classroom scene was filmed in a way that you can easily get distracted from what is being said. It just comes across as world building for the fictional universe, rather than satirical. Like the politics of gondor not having a king for generations, or the establishing lore of the clone wars in star wars.
As a military veteran I adore this movie. It does more to explain the damage to the self that joining the military requires, than any of the myriad military films out there based on real soldiers who actually existed.
Yeah, Jarhead for example doesn't exist. A lot of frontline movies about the dissolution of soldiers don't exist.
It's not like it was so common at a time it became a trope, showing the damage that the war and following orders inflicted, with the fleeting moments of "excitement" that the victory gets.
Problem with people not realizing it's a satire is the people in the movie act like this is just normal reality so our suspension of disbelief doesn't question it and just accept it as is.
It's like cartoon logic, where everyone accepts the absurdity of the situation until someone points it out.
On the brainbug I also want to comment an important part of the film.
That the bug is afraid is celebrated in of itself.
It's not important whether or not the bugs pose a threat to earth, it's not important that the battle is over. What is important that anything outside the system of the government should be afraid of it, and the achievement of that fear is an inherant good.
I don't know how better to perform a scathing critique of fascism.
43:18 - reminder that Australia did go to war with emus. …and lost.
Yes
Karl did a video on it too
then changed the system they used to handle the issue and very much won.
22:13 - iirc, in the same statement GW themselves outright said that (paraphrasing) ‘if you agree with these ideologies, fuck off, we don’t want your money’.
As a 30 year 40k fan, yeah, those neckbeard basement dweller types can fuck right off. They drag the hobby down.
“Well, in the 3D animated series.”
Was jarring to hear rasczak after watching roughnecks
The 3D animated series is EVEN clearer that the humans are bad, especially because the clearest nazi, Neil Patrick Harris, STOPS being on the human’s side. He outright gets disillusioned because he’s psychic and decides that the humans are going too far, (which is framed as him being mind controlled). Then eventually, the troopers (that we follow) and the bugs team up against some other group of things. It’s a wild series man.
@@lucyinchatIs there more than one 3D series I am not aware of?
@@rpghorrorstories it's a reference to the animated movie sequels.
One of my interpretations was that the EVERYTHING the government said about the bugs was bull shit and they were using this false threat to keep people enlisting. The military weren't training soldiers to fight bugs, they were being trained to put down rebellion. Just look at the weapons and armour, they wear ballistic vests and helmets that are shown to be completely useless against the bugs, but they will stop bullets. Their weapons are also unsuted to target the weak spots on the bugs, but will work very well on humans. Lastly, when you see the training montage, all the targets are human shaped and fire weapons, and the environments they train in dont match the bug planets, but they do match the enclosed spaces you'd fight rebels in. Damn this was a long post
@@0potionI've read the book. It's not really very good sci-fi, but it is bad philosophy.
@@0potion well the book's ass anyways so we don't care.
the issue with this is that everything the government does say about the bugs is true.
the bugs can travel through space, the director in the commentary track even says the asteroid was sent by the bugs. the bugs totally could of massacred the civilian settlement since we see them repeatedly take no prisoners and leave evidence of a massacre. and the propaganda is never shown to lie but is shown to tell the truth. the commanding officers admit that humanity is losing the war with the bugs as well.
also the training against human targets is at the start of the war, literally half way through after the first few battles do we get the fednet video with a captured bug and how to defeat it showing that the federation only just was able to start bug research, on top of that the whole point of capturing a brain bug is because they dont know much about the bugs.
irl every army is still fighting the last war before adapting, the training at the start is at the start of the war before humanity adapted to the bugs.
@@f0rth3l0v30fchr15twhat aspect(s) of the book’s philosophy do you think is bad?
@@johnharmon6119 Philosphy is a debate, niot a lecture, and the book is a lecture about how might equals right.
It's bollocks.
The age of the soldiers at the end is never clarified. They look young, but maybe 18 years old young. They say they just got out of boot, which for them was right after high school. It is kind of hard to tell if they are child soldiers when the main characters are supposed to be 10+ years younger than the actors who play them.
"A murderer was captured this morning and tried today. "GUILTY". Execution tonight at 6 on federation broadcasting." That timeline genuinely went over my head until now, and I've seen this movie a thousand times. Also I will say that in the sequels, they straight up tell you that the federation actually dropped the meteorite and deliberately let it hit. They did it to get public sentiment behind the extermination war. Please never watch the sequels.
IDK I thought Marauder was so bad it was enjoyably bad. Being drunk off my ass helped.
@Canoby Hero of the federation is my guilty pleasure. I say that knowing full well it is a stain on the concept of cinema. Sexy brain bugs, enough said.
I much preferred the subtle ways they hinted at the meteor being launched by humanity if you payed attention to plot details and thought about it a bit rather then just flat out telling the audience
@sofaninja0552 100% agree, I just wanted to point out that they did, in fact, confirm that. I believe NPHs character actually ends up being assassinated to keep it covered up. They made it the core plot of the movie which is cool, but it ruins the mystique.
@@mikhaelgribkov4117 Bait used to be believable.
I love that they needed a psychic to tell the brain recoil from being touched was afraid.
I know, it's had all its guardian bugs killed, been wrapped in a net and dragged out of its home infront of hundreds of enemies shooting very loud weapons... Even a mindless animal would be terrified!
It's not that they "needed" him to tell them that. He was providing undeniable proof of it. Same reason we conduct scientific studies of the "I could've told them that, everybody knows that" kind. The bugs had been an unrelenting force dead set on destruction at any cost until that point, now we know they can be made to fear us, which means we can defeat them. Hence everybody celebrating.
@@LordBaktor that's a good point, psychics are the way the gain intelligence on the bugs. In the books it's how they knew where the bugs were going to attack.
14:40
It's worse and more personal than that, he was born in 1938 and spent his early childhood growing up under the Nazi-occupied Netherlands *during* WWII.
The first time I saw Starship Troopers was just before 9/11.
As an American, it was uncanny.
Maybe that's why so many people missed the satire; it was too accurate.
For someone growing up in that era of ultra patriotic and militaristic fervor; Starship Troopers felt more like a documentary than a work of fiction.
I’m glad the fact fiend crew find “bitches leave” as funny as I do. And I would like to know more Carl.
If you looks at the scene where they first encounter a bug, notice how it doesn't attack them, but rather appears to try and intimidate them or scare them off by roaring and swiping the air while keeping distance, then the soldier shoots it, it screams in pain and defends itself before getting mowed down. Then, once the rest of the bugs show up, they too only line up defensively, stand their ground and roar at them, seemingly not wanting to attack - only for Rico to initiate hostilities.
ua-cam.com/video/-lDHoPPQIu8/v-deo.html
The bugs were not the aggressors.
Friendly reminder that Heinlein (the author of the book) also was opposed to the world of the book and it was a criticism of jingoistic eternal wars. The book was released during the cold war when the memory of the horrors of WW2 were being co-opted and at the tail end of McCarthyism. It has ALWAYS been satire.
I admit, I never considered that the meteor was blamed on the bugs, but not necessarily caused by them.
@@Nick-pu3of For me, it's mainly the fact that, despite the distance, the Feds could still fly there in a decent amount of time, on top of the existence of a brain bug and bugs capable of firing off into space. However, the meteor scraping the ship was never much of a consideration for me, either.
Ah well, "It's a good day to diieee!"
@@RippahRooJizah Personally I imagine those missile bugs probably don't have THAT great of a range ? Mostly because I would assume they exist to protect the hive and not necessarily as an offensive force hence they probably wouldn't need to evolve to fire as far as Earth ? That's my conclusion at least.
@@nicolasgarant9124 Oh, I meant those bugs shooting at the asteroids in such a way to launch them out of orbit.
@@RippahRooJizah they must amazing at billiards
@@alicepbg2042 The corner pocket was Brenos Aries.
I think part of why people side with the Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40K, is the grim-dark framing.
Pretty much every major faction in the setting, is in some way, explicitly evil or monstrous. It's a setting with no "Good guys". So instead of an objective heroic faction, it becomes "Who is the least shit" (or rather, who is the easiest to swallow).
Amongst daemons and monsters, it's easiest to empathize with the humans. And so for many players, ends up being the faction they have the least dissonance with.
The problem then ends up being that people take "Easiest to role-play in the context of the game" and turn that into "THE GOOD GUYS!", and then you have some really shallow depictions of the cartoonishly evil Imperium of Man.
As a Tyranid I find everyone equally easy to swallow!
I do find it interesting that when GW tried introducing an actual good guy faction (while somewhat trying to downplay the marysue-ness by making them naïve small-fry), 40k fans were still pretty much universally disgusted and the faction still the butt of jokes and the target of distain to this day despite having since been grimdarked up with civil wars and mindcontrol and mass-sterilization and so on.
Yes the different aesthetic and the unfair sniper bullshit playstyle probably didn't help either, but I can't help but wonder how much of the pushback came from people who were upset by the idea of a good faction because they needed their evil assholes to be completely justified.
Whereas the federation are confirmed to be the good guys as they are acting defensively and are a democratic state
@@evilcabbage1 and then there's the farsight enclave which are pretty much just actually good
@@evilcabbage1 You mean... the T'au? The brainwashing "Everyone is for the community"? Or do you mean the Farsight Enclave, which I haven't really heard much bad about.
Even the original T'au wasn't really "good guys".
And yeah, actual good guy faction doesn't really fit into the aesthetic of grimdark... Like how a gorefilled murder faction doesn't really fit into My Little Pony. Maybe we should start adding some little cute ponies of friendship into horror movies, that can't die or experience any kind of gore.
Some things simply don't fit into certain aesthetics. Do you like, understand that, or is it so important to be so condescending and creating this monolithic idea of 40k players?
Media literacy and literacy in general is at an all time low. I love both warhammer 40k and Starship troopers but the satire is what makes them great for me. It’s also not surprising for me anymore how many people are susceptible to even satirical propaganda. Things literally set up to be as absurd as possible are eaten up seriously by people who aren’t quite… aware. It’s not that they’re dumb are anything necessarily, more of a quirk of the human mind.
media illiteracy goes the other way around too, too many think both are fascism when both don't fit the bill. Many sources of fascism on wikipedia can't seem to agree on what fascism is and seems to be just whatever the authors of said sources want fascism to be
If we're going to have a video about propoganda. Can we talk about JoJo rabbit
The movie that whenever I bring up, people simply get uncomfortable thinking of it only as a nazi themed movie. When it's a critique on impressionable youths and the danger of losing autonomy to totalitarianism.
I wonder how many people you argued with just didn't watch the film, I could see people getting it wrong from the trailers.
I just rewatched that movie the other week. It's such a great movie. I talked about it and work. Even in my opinion, the themes are on its sleeves, the movies only 2-3 layers deep, but i also received the same critiques that it was just about nazis.
imagine a situation where one force invades and colonises another force's territory, and then frames that second force's retaliation as an unforgivable act of war that requires their total annihilation...
Hah . Imagine.
That's crazy talk. Where would that ever happen? Inconceivable.
We don't have to imagine... We have Starship Troopers! I'm just glad we live in the real world, and not that one 😐
IDF social media is unironically worse than the federal network
Verhoeven was on fucking point
And this is where the satire breaks down, in the novel, the Federation warned the "Neo Mormon" colonists to NOT colonize there because they had no clue to the safety or even viability of the planet for human colonization. They went anyway. Given the Federations "Freedom of choice means you accept the consequences of those choices without fail" attitude they have, they warned them but didn't stop them from going. The colony was killed by the bugs and the Feds closed book on it saying _"Well, we warned them"_
The bugs interpreted that as a collective invasion because the bugs don't realize that humans are individuals, so any one human on their planet to them means "All humans are invading". Hence the overwhelming response by the bugs, thinking mankind was invading. Then mankind, IE the Federation responds to what is an existential threat to all humans and then the war happens.
If you think about it, it's like Ender's Game, both sides misinterpreting the meaning and actions of the other and simply responding with force to achieve what they THINK is the goal.
Verhoeven did not grow up in "Eastern Europe", he's Dutch FFS.
Once again a very British perspective of Eastern Europe
@@timewasting3372if it's to the west of France, it's eastern europe. it's so obvious. you must clearly be ignorant of british-european geography.
Helldivers, 40k and starship troopers are really fun universes to role play within. Saying stuff like "yeah lets kill all those bugs for humanity" "imperium did nothing wrong" "cmon you apes you wanna live forever" ect in character is fine in my book and doesnt make someone facist because its all part of playing in those worlds. But its a damn shame that some people dont see the satire or dont see it as make believe and carry these ideals into the real world. It makes making friends in these spaces akin to minesweeping
A lot of people don't look at the lore of Helldivers and realize humans are the bad guy.
The Illuminate make peaceful first contact. We kill them and take their tech so we have faster-than-light technology. We continue to attack, invade, and conquer them for over 100 years to steal more of this technology because we cannot reverse engineer it.
We encounter the terminid. Turns out their bodies turn into oil when they decompose. We conquer them, enslave them, and genetically alter them so they evolve faster to grow bigger and make more oil. They break free. We move in to conquer again.
The cyborgs are unwantes human colonists sent to the fringe worlds to work in conditions that are guaranteed to kill and maim. The colonists augment themselves with robotic bodies and machines. The colonists rebel. Oh no! Another alien species attacking humans! Put them down!
Helldivers are rightous soldiers that fight off the teminid and automaton scourge. That is what the ministry of truth says, and the ministry of truth would never lie to us.
8:55 see, therein lies the issue. despite being a not-so-subtle parody of fascism, because it was basically copying propaganda films, the target of parody just saw the propaganda and went "man this film is so true"
Warhammer 40K's community is so unique, you have some of the most wholesome, friendly and wonderful people in the community. There is a person at my friendly local gamestore that is trans, and has all their Space Marines painted like Pride flags.
Then at the same store I've seen people playing all black paunted armies with red armbands.
Its a freaking trip.
For real I wanna just play with my Boyz not deal with nazis
Let me guess
The nice people have amazing artistic skills in their miniatures and the Nazis paint like shit
@@plaguedoctorjamespainshe6009well, history does repeat after all
@@catnerdadrian7601would playing wif da Boyz krumpin da nazi's be acceptable to you?
@@plaguedoctorjamespainshe6009the whole 'nazi' colour scheme is pretty easy to paint it must be said...
Whats that one edited Garfield meme? "You are disturbingly susceptible to propaganda."
The problem with Warhammer 40K as satire is that it's been watered down quite a bit. In the early days of the game Space Marines were brutal bastards that would crush your skull almost on a whim and the God-Emperor was propaganda and was probably just a guy. Nowadays the Emperor is demonstrably a god regardless of his own opinion on the matter and Space Marines are heroic figures (sometimes). Also the setting is told from the perspective of at best Guardsmen who are framed as "regular joes" fighting the horrors of the universe, which is true but glosses over the reality that the actual regular Imperial citizen lives about 40 years, works mind numbing manual labour akin to the early industrial revolution and are so dehumanised that processed human flesh is openly used as common food stuff for the masses. But if you don't deep dive into the lore you don't really get how bad it really would be to live in the Imperium of Man.
Yeah, in Rogue Trader there's very little of the "satire" and "parody" the current game is pushing in a panic to cleanse the public's perception of them.
WH40K is just WHFB with sci Fi flavor. It was written in the intro of WH40K:RT that the game was meant to be a framework for players to build their sci-fi skirmish game in their favorite sci-fi setting. They strongly hint at Star Wars and Dune being their goals.
This new "Um, actually the Imperium is evil" is just them backpedaling to cover their asses.
@@mr.pavone9719I mean you're right but there's also quite a lot of satire in the most recent campaign books and stuff.
From the Leviathan campaign book: please ignore the science You must have faith that the god Emperor would protect us if there truly was any danger!
From Pariah Nexus: breaking the rules of honorable combat in using weapons of mass destruction literally summoned demons. Clearly the only solution to this is to use bigger weapons of mass destruction!
@@mr.pavone9719 buy Rogue Trader do you mean 40K first edition or do you mean the 2009 spin-off tabletop RPG that isn't even published by Games Workshop?
Because if you mean first edition Warhammer 40K, I know by the time of 1998 when the third edition came out, the famous "for more than one hundred centuries, the Emperor has set upon the golden throne..." Quote was the first words in the rulebook.
@@mr.pavone9719 "in Rogue Trader there's very little of the "satire" and "parody" "
The fuck have you been smoking friend? Rogue Trader was the _most_ satirical that 40k ever was, and each subsequent edition played the setting a little more straight each time, to the point where the company has to make press releases about how the neo-nazis their game has appealed to for the last couple of decades (and whose money they're _very_ happy to take unquestioningly) aren't welcome in the hobby (even though GW don't _actually_ care if a player is a neo-nazi as long as they keep buying stuff)
Keyword: SOME space marines... its not the same a Black Templar to the GOAT Salamanders
Movie: "What if government authoritarianism and dehumanizing people into being cogs in the war machine is bad"
WH 40k fans: "NUH UH"
its the glue the fumes mess with your head
WH40k misunderstanders*
Please do not lump all of us 40k fans in with those types. Many of us are aware that 40k is not aspirational. I can only hope it's the majority, but I do not know.
Also movie: What if we leave out the fact military was actually dissuaded against then claim the movie is a satire of whatever belief we hate?
@ShadowMageAlpha from an outsider. Either your minority is incredibly vocal. Or like the creators themselves, there's a real fascist fascination in the fandom. I know that it's not everyone but from the little experience I have from light readings and playing (a bit) of Darktide, the satire never stood out to me.
The worst people aren't the ones who don't understand it's satire, they are the ones who think the world should be like it
Worst? Hell, a world like Starship Troopers would only be an improvement. In our reality, conscription is mandatory. In Starship Troopers, it's entirely voluntary. In our reality, the media is carefully cherry-picked so as to show only one narrative. In Starship Troopers, people are shown debating multiple sides of the issue of killing mindless bug creatures, whereas in our reality we have to grapple with justifying killing fellow humans in faraway countries.
Im glad the Gundam fandom has a consice meme for this exact issue "Wow! Cool Robot!"
Then again, the Subreddit had a guy who unioronicly thought having a large Zeon flag (its slightly diffrent from the normal symbol if youve ever seen it a very _notible_ way) patch on a jacket would be cool and not get his dumbass pumled in to a bloody heap the second he goes outside. I think the poor fucker was German too if memory serves.
after a quick google search..... who approved that flag design? and why? what drugs were they on?
@@kiwigaming09 Tomino did that because he wasent subtle on a lot of things. He based the Principality Zeon on a mix of Nazi Germany with Spacnoid superiorty (the original leader believed humans would eventually mutate into a peaceful space umberminch race before he died/was poisened my his allies in a powergrab that made everything more radical and more Hitlery) with the arrogance of Imperial Japan with the Zabi family.
They even did a Pearl harbor. Operation British. Killed billions just to miss the Main Federation base in South America and slap Sydney across the face with a gigantic phallic space station that could hold about 10 million people.
Their opposition is not that much better in all honesty. Think *sightly* mild starship troopers as your base jobber and getting more radical the higher up the chain.
TL:DR Both sides are bad, don't aspire to be either. AND DONT CASUALLY WEAR THEIR UNIFORMS, ESPECIALLY ZEON OR THE TITANS
@@kiwigaming09one of the children of the monarchy that rules zeon says pretty much word for word that Hitler is an inspiration, so kinda unsurprisingly zeon adopted nazi imagery
@@gremblorthesackgoblin7953 The point of Gundam was always neither side was truly right or wrong.
Heck, the second ever season showed the Federarion forced Amuro, their own hero, into house arrest out of fear then crested the Titans who quickly became too powerful to control.
Sure Zeon did horrific things, but Gundam did such an amazing job at humanizing both sides and using nuance.
Plus it wasn't afraid to kill almost any character off.
Rico does also literally die in the movie, when he's in the healing friends show him he was marked KIA.
Yup!
I'm still inclined to write off the galaxy map scene as an example of "Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale"
We do but SciFi fans are not there for a astronomical lesson either. (Imagine a requirement on the film “must understand Einstein Field equations to enter”)
Well in the books
No, it was a deliberate gag, parodying how the U.S. is bordered by two seas in the East and West yet somehow is always "under threat" from people who live on the other side of the planet.
@@amiciprocul8501 Well in all fairness Japan was the largest ocean in the world away, Pearl Harbor still happened. And given the plane thing YT doesn't like people mentioning, same story. Being on a different continent means little in the modern day.
That isn't me going to back for the US, far from it. Just pointing out that the distance isn't an insurmountable obstacle.
@@kingofhearts3185 And the 48 states that existed at the time (Alaska and Hawaii wouldn't become states until 1959) were never seriously threatened by Japan.
My spouse watched the Helldivers 2 intro and was SHOCKED that it wasn't Starship Troopers
The very fact that the Federation is shown to control all space travel should be enough to prove that yeah, the Federation did in fact provoke the bugs by deliberately letting the Mormons settle in Arachnid space. Hell, they insist on calling them "Arachnids" when none of the "bugs" have eight legs. Because "Spiders" is scarier than "ants" (well, maybe not if you live in South America...).
2 of my favorite universes are finally colliding Karl and starship troopers
The irony of you blurring the gore scene of the attack of the mormon outpost attack had me rollin.
Got to see this in my cinema, but it was ruined by my weirdo brother insisting we sit off the right, in the front row. Still massively enjoyed it though. Even at the tender age of 17, I was aware of the satirical nature of the film.
One of the last scenes is especially intriguing for me is when Rico is meeting his replacement troops. Those actors are noticeably much, much younger than Rico and Ace. And that can be read in a number of ways. First is humanity is doing so poorly, it’s down to recruiting literal children (they all look no older than 14 or so. Second is a stylistic thing to show Rico has “matured” and is no longer a kid. Third is Ver Hoeven sneaking in a chance to go “this is the age Johnny and his mates were when they were recruited, but Hollywood prefers 20 something for teenaged roles. And it could be all three.
towards the end of ww2 a lot of the german soldiers defending against the allied invasion on the western front were teenagers. The Nazis had lost soo many in Russia that they were running out of able bodied fighting age men. Im sure it's a deliberate reference to that
Ww2? Heck ww1 Germany was having similar issues
About the teachers speech, “the notion that violence doesn’t solve anything is wishful thinking at its worst” I always interpret this differently than you present it. First it’s not condoning violence, it’s acknowledging it’s effectiveness and the dangers of forgetting that are very serious. Secondly it’s the argument for voting rights, laws only work when enforced and by passing laws you are exerting force on the people. The threat of violence is the final supreme authority by which all other authority is enforced. I always read this as a tragic truth, despite our desire to remove all violence from our lives it is an inherent reality of existence and pretending otherwise is wishful thinking and dangerous. This is why heinlein comes to the conclusion that military service gives voting rights because military service members accept and face the threat of violence in order to defend their society making the defense and strength of society their own personal responsibility. While I don’t agree with his conclusion that only veterans should vote, I do think that the message that pretending violence is never necessary or effective in defending ourselves our families or our values is opening ourselves up to danger. We drive cars everywhere every day and it’s normal and pretty safe overall but forgetting that it can be dangerous is foolishness that could be fatal
It's crazy how this whole thing happened because people were thinking about what to talk about while waiting in the queue for Helldivers 2.
I saw starship troopers for the first time two days ago, mostly because people keep referencing it. I saw it knowing that it is supposed to be satirical, but had to keep reminding myself of that. Because it was too subtle. I watched it again with commentaries from the actors, and that helped a little.
Part of the problem is if you make anything in a universe a satire, if it is cool at all, it will either go over ppls heads or outright deny and ignore it
In general I'm of the opinion that any piece of media can be interpreted however it's consumers want to interpret it, but damn the mental gymnastics to see Starship Troopers(movie) as anything other than satire is on the level of "2+2 = 5 pink and yellow striped elephants in red business suits smoking maple leaves from a peace pipe"
Satire ridicules the attitudes and institutions depicted in the work. Gilbert and Sullivan's "Trial by Jury" is a satire on the court system. Being silly alone isn't satire, it's camp. For example, Mary Poppins isn't a satire about the institution of the family, it's a campy story that is pro-family. Verhoeven intended to satirize Heinlein by making the movie like a corny WW2 propaganda film, but the question is did he succeed in making fun of Heinlein's work or did he just make Heinlein's work fun. And remember, it was our American propaganda in WW2 that was corny, and the movie resembles our American WW2 war propaganda. Just because you have propaganda, or because you're fighting at all, doesn't mean you're the bad guys. Is the audience supposed to be anti-humanity?
@@Nick-pu3of The humans are unambiguously the bad guys? The response of the bugs to the Mormon settlers in in realistic terms would be like America nuking Guatemala City in response to illegal immigration.
Neil Breen intended to make masterpieces. The intention of the director and the product they make clearly aren't the same thing.
@@Nick-pu3of The humans are the bad guys? So some migrants show up and the bugs obliterate a city, is that your conception of decency? Should we implement that policy in a just world? Neil Breen intended to make masterpieces, the director's intent doesn't matter.
@@Nick-pu3of There's no indication in the movie that the state would exterminate immigrants. But let's say that the roles were exactly reversed, that the humans slaughtered a group of bug immigrants, then flattened a bug city, and the bugs were coming to eliminate the human threat. Would you say the humans were unambiguously the good guys in that movie?
@@Nick-pu3of But there are other planets and aliens, and the whole conflict started because people emigrated, obviously there are places to migrate to and from. Did you not see District 9? Are you going to argue to me that the humans are the good guys in District 9?
"Verhoven", grew up in "Eastern Europe"... It is a good thing the video overall is so good...
I'm saving this for work later tonight, but I'm excited to hear it mate.
Paul Verhoeven is Dutch, he did not grow up in eastern Europe
Once again a very British perspective of Eastern Europe
@@timewasting3372English perspective. Those cunts will also unironically tell you that the western end of the 'north/south divide' is in Bristol.
Look it doesn't matter. You have 'Murica and then the rest of the world. That's all that matters.
@@timewasting3372 these guys made a silly mistake. Bit weird to attribute it to a British attitude. In my (very anecdotal) experience, I don't know a single person who'd describe the Netherlands as eastern Europe
Welcome to warhammer 40k, where everything is horrible and no one matters.
There is no satire obvious enough that you won't still have somebody somewhere thinking its genuine, and there's no propaganda blatant enough that somebody won't sill fall for it. That's the problem with both 40K and Starship Troopers (Film), even if the creators personally sat down with everybody who has ever consumed it and explained exactly what is going on and why on their first viewing - somebody is still just not going to get it. (Or more likely was already on the wrong side of the satire anyway and are willfully ignoring it.)
I'll admit that I didn't realize Starship Troopers or Robocop was parody, but I can remember thinking, "Wow, this society is really messed up."😂
43:40 the main strategy of WW1?
Robocop would just be a documentary, but the idea that there was a corporation interested in developing real estate in Detroit is too silly to be ignored.
Like Veerhoven…you don’t read.
It shows.
I will say that calling any sort of wave system the "main" strategy of WWI is a very false idea of the conflict.
I am no where near as media savvy as Karl is and even I knew Starship Troopers was satire when I saw it as a kid who probably shouldn’t have been watching something that violent. I’m as baffled as Karl is 😂
This is how I feel about Mad Max: Fury Road. So many people describe it as "one long chase scene" and "boring", and I have to ask if we're talking about the same movie.
Look, all you need to know about the book is that Johnny Rico was originally Filipino, and they probably changed it in the movie because the problem would've been solved within minutes if they sent a Filipino to kill bugs, especially if he was wearing flip-flops.
Also, those "missing" power suits got added in Starship Troopers 3, and it was DUMB.
But awesome
Had a few pints with a friend, and saw this in theater shortly after releasing. Some git tried to have us ejected for laughing too loud. He made such a scene that he was asked to leave!😂 I guess he came to see a serious film.🤷♂️
Especially during the "live fire exercise", where the big guy loses half his head, and Rico screams,"MEDIC!!!" to the sky. We lost our shit!🤣🤣🤣🤣
When we had the film at my theater when it came out I saw it and was pissed at how badly they adapted the book, the first time! The second I realized what they were doing and thought it was fantastic!
lso Heinlein was in the navy before he got TB and yeah really believed in it!
You could make a satire of fascism where the fascist soldiers are called "piss babies" and fascists would start getting tattoos and calling themselves piss babies unironically within a week of it getting even mildly popular.
The contention is not that it isn't satire, but that it FAILS at being satire. You know... the whole reason to satirise anything is to make it look unappealing or distasteful, and yet Starship Troopers manages to do an exemplary job of making the targets of the satire (the humans) look rather wholesome. This rather obvious disconnect comes from the fact that Verhoeven didn't even bother to fully read the source material!
Just an in universe example that the imperium of man is wrong.
there is a story about a ship that is from humanities golden age (very high tech, almost everyone living their best life ect) going on a war path because it as a sentient warship cannot comprehend that the emperor would allow humanity to devolve into what 40k shows it as.
so yea 40k has such an issue with fans not recognizing the parody they had to make a whole ass book detailing every fault of the in universe government, like to the point where the book is called "death of integrity" and fans still did not get the message...
12:33 i played through most of the gears of war games. Was it supposed to be satire? I thought it was encouraging that the soldiers were called cogs. In a machine, one cog missing makes the it useless. Everyone is essential.
*looks around the USA today*
Uh... I might like to downgrade the fascism down to starship troopers levels.
the wrong woman died #Justice4Dizzy #CarmenSucks
The mentioning of the shifting view of the bugs have to be both a massive threat and also must be inherently something inferior is one of the defining component parts of fascism
“In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco distilled the 14 typical elements of “Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism,” Of these traits this is actually described as number 8:
The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
This narritive that bugs are dumb unthinking animals and undeserving of being viewed as sapient. While also pushing a narritive that bugs are such a massive threat that they could bend space time physics in such a way to launch an asteroid at earth that arrives in a suprise fassion while also not impacting at such speed that it impacts at speeds similar to a normal asteroid strike is a classic feature of fascism.
They are both dumb bugs and the idea of a brain bug is insulting (because to think bugs are even human level intelligent is insulting to humanity “how can we compare vermin to us the master species “ Mentality while also “we must always be ever vigilant of these dangerous creatures who for the safety of human kind must be eradicated.” Needless to say if you can trick a population into believing this kind of cognitively dissonant view you can get them behind the notion that the only solution to the “bug problem” is extermination.
This is how you win a population over to the side of supporting genocide
"But the bugs are the bad guys right?" - far to many people.
I will never forget that, when I was in high school, we had an English teacher that insisted there was a theme in a book where the author explicitly said he didn't write in there and that anyone reading it as such is just seeing what they want to see.
It should also be noted that there are authors blinded by proximity to their work and own perspective to the degree that they miss obvious themes and ideologies within. Shadiversity's book is a very good example. Don't read the book by the way, it glorifies a monstrous self-insert.
@iaCreator Yeah but... the book was "Lord of the Flies". That English teacher was saying that there's a Christ figure in it and he claims ALL literature has a Christ figure in it...
@@sleepingkirby Through trope use, yes. But only if you break the fiction into pieces. To be honest though it would be more ideal to say that one should open up to multiple interpretations within media they consume, whether that is an inherent theme or not. This would build creativity, empathy and a better awareness of one's perspective down the road.
@@VelaiciaCreator Yes, but the reverse can also be true and can be just as harmful if not more so. Especially since this is a teacher that determined our grades, an authority figure, that judges our essays on what he thinks. So, at the same time, he is allowed his interpretation and will literally punish us if we don't agree with it, denying our perspective. At the same time, growing up Asian in the US in the 90's, our media is often misconstrued to align with the views and prejudices that westerners often have of eastern media, often calling them inferior or primitive, leading to perpetuation of racial stereotypes and systemic racism. You see this in the 90's where people constantly perpetuated ideas like: JRPG's are inferior to American RPG's in video games, Asians aren't creative, Chinese people really like period pieces (ignoring, of course, how most of "classical literature" in high school are set in Victorian or Shakespearian times. And that's ignoring ALL the cowboy movies) and Jackie Chan is only an action film star. Think about all the parodies of anime in western media and how shallow, inaccurate and often offensive they are just a decade or two ago. Anime had to fight to be taken seriously, but common perspective and interpretation was that all anime, including studio Ghibli films, were inferior to Disney films. All this while Disney literally made it illegal in the US for anyone to own a copy of a Studio Ghibli film. (And don't at me on that one. I was working in an animation studio at that time and we had to trade/smuggle studio Ghibli films like it was drugs.)
So, on one hand, you can have your own views, interpretation and perspectives on media. On the other hand it may also end up being a self-delusion/self-justification, forming an echo chamber that leads into things like fascism, racism and sexism. Because, I have no doubt that that teacher would be one of the people who subscribes to the "great replacement theory" as much of his rhetoric about literature was literally touting Christian superiority over other religions. And often portrayed Christianity as the inevitable evolutionary result of all religions. Hence his insistence of Christ figures in ALL literature, including non-English ones.
@@sleepingkirby No, I 100% get and agree with what you're saying. I was "yes, and"-ing you.
41:30 - also, (from what I’ve heard, so might not be the case), the whole ‘there are other routes to citizenship’ thing is probably a retcon anyway, as that’s something from the sequel, whereas the original book only ever brought up military service as granting citizenship.
A lot of the people I witness being hyperbolic about Starship Troopers (after playing Helldivers) seem to fall into two camps.
1. They get the joke, but are playing up the propaganda for humour. Very much "FOR DEMOCRACY!" war cries.
2. Like with MGRR; they unironically prefer this setting and agree with it. Certainly some of these people understand that it is satire, yet willfully disagree with it (as it conflicts with their worldview). But a shocking about (like Karl references) are either unaware of the satire, or weirdly defensive about it.
I would say the same thing. I'd also add on that fortunately, camp #1 vastly outnumbers camp #2
>chortles< "fasci-inating"
Just a couple points to make... Even in the movie, it is expressed in the dialogue that there are other paths to citizenship besides the Fleet or MI. It's Civil Service. Military service just accelerates the process... if you survive anyway. I'm pretty sure that was one of the talking points of Rico's parents.
My other point is that the accountability of the Sky Marshall is antithetical to basic fascism. The highest leadership would never step down or surrender their power, but that is exactly what happens after the botched invasion of Klendathu.
even in their news reels they don't lie, they're asking "Would you like to know more?", military enlistment is also discouraged but accepted. those Mormons would have been arrested if it were a dictatorship, but instead when they inevitably have been killed by the bugs humanity went in full swing against the bugs. Verhoeven doesn't understand fascism and only thinks giving them the dress wear makes them as such (I can dress like a CCP soldier from Tiananmen Square but that doesn't make me a soldier from then)
"no it's the first time a creator became frightened when we asked" is such a hard line i actually need to retry to get in to this series at some point
I have not seen anyone not knowing this film is satire. I have seen people saying that certain people dont get it is satire even though they literally type out that they get that it is satire. There are probably some people that dont know that it is satire but they are very very few, few enough to ignore as a stupid take.
I know it is satire, but if you only have info from the film about the world you see and just like 40k if the threat of the bugs is real there is an argument for it to be necessary for the human race to survive. I am not saying it is good just the consequence of needing everyone to defend humanity.
When it comes to Helldivers 2 that you mentioned, all it has been is people thinking that people dont get the satire because they take the fun role playing people do seriously. Like i have seen multiple post on reddit telling people that they need to know that the game is satire and people reply that they do understand that it is satire and that they are just having fun with the setting, only for OP to say that no you dont understand it is satire. These people act a little bit like the outraged moms during the satanic panic or the people complaining about violent video games.
"I'd buy that for a dollar!!"
I'm not the most media literate when it comes to films. But even i could see the themes in starship troopers. Reminds me of the time that some people claimed to not know that stormfront in the boys was a nazi. I mean come on, she was called stormfront ffs and even if she wasn't called that. Her motivation, dialogue and actions were still so obvious that i wouldn't even call it subtext
I was one of those weirdos who defended the book. Even when I was I realized the movie was another take on the subject. The UA-cam channel Knowing Better run by a man who read the book saw the movie and served in the armed forces made an astute point that the book's arguments work because it's supposed to support it's own reality. It's the same way Superman is able to fly in the comics. The same way the system is government works in the books only works because it has to in order to support the story.
I feel like that goes for quite a few sci-fi goverments.
I am from Buenos Aires and I approve this video!
Would’ve said Scott Pilgrim is another example of this; movie recreates scenes beat for beat, but still has fundamentally different motifs and tone from the books.
Ready Player 1 also does this from what I understand, but I haven't seen or read it.
Except Scott Pilgrim’s changes are for the worse
@@doctoradventure413 True
I had once seen a breakdown of this movie that said it was apolitical, a stance I cannot begin to understand.
Probably by the same people who think Star Trek is just fun space adventure
When people say an obviously political work is apolitical that always seems like a red flag for right wing politics in my opinion.
I find the irony of the helldivers 2 trailers interesting how it's both clearly a parody of war time propaganda but also is effective in being propaganda by making the game look really fun.
This makes me appreciate having friends in the warhammer hobby that understand parody and satire. Now I'm gonna go distribute managed democracy so hard in helldivers.
I watched the movie at the cinema and really enjoyed it, thinking it was great satire, I was 20 at the time. Fast foward to the UA-cam age and I am seeing all these videos explaining Starship Troopers is actually satire. And I am here thinking how effing stupid are people!
Well, aside from the random news segments, it is quite subtle. My impression was that the news segments were there to add humor to the otherwise very gruesome rest of the movie.
When people think of fascism, they think of racist nazis. Which seems to be contradicted by the diversity in positions of leadership and in how soldiers treat fellow soldiers of color. (That is, exactly the same as everyone else.)
WH40k having "The Iron Ork" Ghazghull Mag Uruk Thrakka, in the 80s under Thatcher, with her face literally painted onto an Ork banner in a white dwarf magazine hasn't led people to figure out it's satire then nothing will.
Also I know they came out a few years back and said something about it being in black speech from LotR but I outright refuse to believe that isn't GW just covering their asses legally.
I bet these people are also the one's who think Liberty Prime from FO3 was a serious character.
nobody whose had a look at the Orks in 40K can still think that the thing is anything other then satire.
Another great example of "book and movie must be talked about in almost 2 different contexts" is Wanted. Holy fricken cow wanted was a -ride- when I read that comic book. I was so upset at the movie when it came out and I had to be told to chill a -lot- like how people kinda get with this movie but much less popular
Had a lot of growin' to do as a spicey nerd
I always thought a sequel to this movie should've started w a propaganda news report of Rico dying on the mission he goes on at the end
Over time we've come to see the problem with Poe's Law is that the inclusion of a winky face or other sign of direct sarcasm is taken as an "I'm with you" gesture from those that think the work is sincere
If you want to go completely in-depth with the meta-analysis then while Verhoven shot the movie as if it was Fascistic propaganda it was also HIS propaganda of what fascism is. His understanding of the novel is what he's been told and what he's been told was affected by someone's bias, and in turn, his interpretation of what he was told was affected by his bias.
While there are several things in the book that can be critiqued, they're also things that in controlled amounts are necessary to run a society else you try the anarchist model; since a society of Anarchic ideology will develop either into a society that embraces a Democratic ideology or into a society where one or a few grab power and rules it by Fascistic ideology. There are no in-betweens. These elements are completely missing from the movie to paint an obvious message, it's also the wrong message because a society can easily follow Fascistic ideology, without following a lot of the elements people associate with fascism due to Mussolini, and never even realise it.
There are also elements of the bugs that are never mentioned that was mentioned in the novel yet are included in the periphery to make the events plausible. It's perfectly reasonable to interpret the meteor attack like a false flag and it's also plausible that it was a real one and the bugs really did do a well-calculated attack from across the galaxy. The bugs have space travel, else they would never have left their planet, and we have no idea how their space travel works as it's never mentioned. For all we know, they could get around by opening wormholes, and could have pointed the meteor towards Earth and fired it at it. A much better argument for it being a false flag is that the bugs seem to have no external engines or anything that can be used as such, how did they accelerate it in the first place as there are no visible engines on it? How did the government seem to know quickly it came from that sector of space? If it did then wormholes must had been involved since distnace in space is vast. So vast that even a one km diameter meteorite would be nearly impossible to spot. It's impossible that the Bugs could have attacked Buenos Aires without using wormholes as the distance between Earth and Klendathy is meassured in several light years. Sub-light travel is impossible from either sides if the plot if to be plausible. Those are much better arguments as they're impossible to straight up dismiss based on stuff that's never shown.
Also, the bug structure is a bad argument. It's been a while since I saw the movie and while it might be a Mandela effect I do remember them talking about the Bugs as a hive mind. The novel also mentions them as being a hive mind and depending on the age of the one who told Verhoven about the plot of the novel the obvious communist dog-whistle of a unified purpose and mind would be lost on them. Yes, the USSR had that image, and like all good propaganda it had a grain of truth in it. Communistic ideology is a branch of ideological Conservatism where the power dynamic between worker and owner is reversed.
Ideological Conservatism is a continuum on the spectrum of Conservative ideology and Conservative ideology requires the critical thinking abilities of the adherents to be anything from mildly reduced to completely gone. It's a "Believe what I say rather than what you see" system. This means the individual continuums have thought leaders, which is a hive mind would be the brain caste.
To mildly criticize the idea that “but the book says” automatically invalidates a statement in many cases the argument but the book says is being used to expand upon as aspect of the movie that is implied but not explicitly stated .
For example in response to the dismissal that there are other paths to citizenship other than military and that people who say “but the book says” should be invalidated is itself a bad reason to dismiss the statement.
The movie in its own scenes creates implications that there are many other paths to citizenship and that citizens have an easier time getting a license to have children. The kobei even has that slogan “service guarantees citizenship”. Meaning if you enlist or apply for a military academy to become an officer and are accepted and make it through boot or graduate as an officer you automatically become a citizen presumably after your tour of duty.
To support that there are other paths of citizenship as implied by the film may argue the book states that there are. This is using the book as a means of supporting that something that is implied is canon.
In this kind of scenario. A person using the book as a supporting item to craft some aspects of unseen world-building is simply using the book to support something implied by the movie but saying because the book and movie are similar in this aspect it’s reasonable to assume that the book can be used to imply what is unseen in this aspect.
Exactly. They may be different stories, but they share enough elements that using the book to fill in gaps or clarify things that are only implied or given a passing mention in the movie is absolutely valid.
American high schools when the army recruiters show up.
Even though I didn't have the vocabulary to verbalize it, I *absolutely* got the point when I first saw this film at like 10-yrs-old. I knew little about World War II, absolutely nothing about fascism & politics, & my young pubescent mind came out of it with this thought, "The bugs...did nothing wrong"
'but, in the books' is what's now being applied to the X-Men animated TV show. The usual suspects are pointing out that initially in the X-Men comics they weren't intended to be a civil rights allegory.
Thing is, that aspect of it was added later on, and it was definitely present in the Animated show. However they are already complaining the revivification of the Animated series has 'gone political', even though it was political back in the 90s.
I think it's important to remember they have an agenda to alter the history of these shows and movies to suit their narrative.
Heinlein's politics were dogsh!t. He was pro-military, but anti-government. just about every protagonist in his novels were in the military and become ex-pats after they get out or are "space cowboys" that are self-reliant 'survival of the fittest' types (some are teenagers learning to become one of the two). he pmuch believed in eugnics, and that 'if it bleeds it can breed' and would treat children as 'small adults' and women were there to be 'taken care of' by the men. (read about a dozen of his books)
The only thing I'll say comparing the books to the movie is this: I've read the book once. I watch this movie every chance I get.
Also, Armor by John Steakley is a much better book about a rookie infantryman having to face the realities of war.
Starship Troopers (The Film, I haven't read the Books) definitely is Satire, as is (probably) Helldivers. BUT, as someone who hates Bugs (actual insects and such), getting to eradicate entire Hives of them with Orbital Strikes is extremely cathartic for me.