The good groups are the ones who are very interested in fantasy Nazis ironically.
If I play the theo-fascists then my total incompetence at strategy makes them look bad
If strapping tank treads to a church isn’t peak military competence, I don’t know what is.
A railgun the size of the Eiffel Tower strapped to mech. Can’t get more competent than that.
If you ask someone if they are Nazis, and their answer is to get confused and ask about the premise of the question, there is about a 90% chance they are Nazis. Non-Nazis will say, “What? No, definitely not.”
Tbf, if someone asked to join my discord server and asked if we’re Nazis I would also ask for further clarification. Not because there’s a chance we might be Nazis but because it’s an odd question.
If you ask someone who isn’t a Nazi if they’re a Nazi out of nowhere then confusion seems pretty valid. If there’s a premise to it that they understand (by being Nazis or acting like ones) you’d get less genuine confusion.
E: I wasn’t talking about the specific case in OP but in general
Yeah but even if there’s some initial confusion, most normal people will get to a clear negative answer pretty quickly.
That’s true. But I’d definitely also want to know what prompted the question
Is there something about the tabletop portion of the community I don’t get? I just like the lore of the universe and if someone asked me if I was a nazi based on that I would be very confused.
Meh depends on the setting. My partner and I are organizing smaller concerts from time to time. If we are about to book an unknown band sooner or later we have to ask the Nazi question.
The setting here feels similar.
Of course setting, their actions and whatnot matter. It isn’t out of nowhere if there’s some context for it that the recipient also understands.
what do you look for in their responses?
surely they dont go „oh yeah we are nazis, you got us“
Non-Nazis will say, "What?
This is also ‘getting confused’, to be fair, lol.
I get the impression that even those agreeing with the Nazi-like stuff are not literally self-identifying as “Nazi”, so I think you’ll get that initial “huh” reaction regardless.
Might be better to ask a more specific telltale question.
> join good group
> look inside
> neo-nazis
They only people I know who play 40k are obsessed with Orks. Dunno what kind of person that makes them, but at least they aren’t nazis.
It might be the same phenomenon as bimbofication / puppygirl stuff, where one longs to be released from the responsibility of thinking
Always amazing when people don’t get satire.
My Dad actually thought Starship Troopers was pro-military.
I know the book was but this sort of people who think that starship troopers is profascism, are also a sort of people that will definitely not be well read.
I can interpret something as pro facist without being a facist. They are not mutually exclusive things
The book is super pro military; arguably it’s a political science treatise arguing about the nature of the monopoly of violence and, given that concept, how society inevitably flows. He also throws a few digs in there at communism.
He then dedicates the rest of the book to figuring out the training and doctrinal approaches of literal space marines.
Because the dad read the book, and hasn’t seen the movie.
The book definitely is pro-military.
Half of America has the literacy of a 5-6th grader. They can understand the words, but not the "deep"er meaning of things. If it’s not explicitly spelled out by name, they won’t connect the dots.
If you’ll recall, their defense of the quid pro quo during the Ukraine impeachment was that he never used the phrase quid pro quo, so he could have done that.
They’re that stupid
I’d like to know more.
In all seriousness though, I thought it had some aspects of good, which was odd given that it’s satirical commentary on fascism. For instance, gender didn’t really matter and women were promoted, and while the shower scene was meant to show how fascism castrates the masses (or something like that, iirc), I thought it was a relatively wholesome scene, all things considered.
So did The Boys and Helldiver’s 2, and yet a substantial population of conservatives took it literally. Now The Boys has to be so blatant, it’s not as funny anymore.
Some people are just idiots, just the way it is.
Maybe if they paid more attention in English (and history) class, they wouldn’t miss subtext the size of a tractor trailer running into them. But conservatives and STEM bros almost always seem to be on the same page with that shit “No one needs English classes, it’s always just like ‘hur the curtains are blue’ bro.”
Lmao about the boys. I started watching that and definitely in the first season it wasn’t even subtle, by the 4th season, which apparently is when conservatives got mad (?), it was beating you into submission with the messaging. Like, subtlety was not even in the lexicon, more like bulldozing you.
So, I have read and been told this many times before. Some times I will rewatch the movie to try and see that narrative. And I’ll admit, I’m and idiot. But I can’t get past the idea of: Bugs are just icky, no matter the size. Remove at all costs.
I will never understand how they made the entire movie and then had any possible thought people would understand their perspective. The problem is they got lost in the utopia part of the fascist utopia. Sure their culture looks weird from our perspective and has a fascist paint job., but is it really that bad of a society to live in as depicted? Everyone is depicted as generally agreeing with society and it’s norms, society seems to filter people into the roles that actually let them reach the best of their own abilities and that of the culture. No semblance or poverty or even elitism – except against bugs which are mindless as far as the audience knows. The closest we get to seeing that the bugs might be sentient is a psychic dude telling us that a prisoner of war is feeling fear while it is bound, defeated, and surrounded by its enemies.
Except they aren’t bugs in your home, they’re isolated to their own planet already.
Plus, consider the justification for the attack;
“the bugs attacked Earth first”
REALLY?
Consider the amount of maths and physics knowledge for us to get to our own moon. We have to calculate the trajectory of our own moon, the spin of the Earth, gravity, etc.
Now, in the movie, apparently the bugs bombed Earth.
FUCKING HOW. They exist outside our solar system. The level of maths for this is impossible without computers.
Not only have you got all the complications we had for a celestial body which was closest to us, but our sun has its own orbit within the milky way.
The narrative that the bugs attacked Earth first was a false flag. It was almost certainly just a meteor which couldn’t be stopped, which gave someone a reason to keep the perpetual motion machine of Fascism alive.
Without a common enemy, Fascism turns inwards.
The most blatant satire part of the movie (imo) is when the recruiter with the prosthetic arm says “the mobile infantry made me the man I am today” and scoots his chair back revealing both legs missing.
Also near the end when NPH shows up in what is almost a direct copy of an SS uniform. It’s a bit on the nose.
The brilliance of the movie is you follow the main characters who are 100% indoctrinated into this shit. There’s really no voice of reason. Nothing (aside from the whole nazi uniform thing) really screams fash if you’re not paying attention.
I watched it way back when I was young and didn’t get any of the satire. I watched in my 20s and I asked myself:
You have technology to move through space and shit, they could just rain bombs from orbit or throw asteroids onto the planet. But no! The best way to fight is to use masses of underquipped soldiers that fight the horrors of bugs.
The war seems secondary, killing soldiers looks like the first priority in these movies.
The most satire parts are not about fighting the bugs. The “only a dead … is a good …” is a classic fascist trope, but it’s the parts about disregard of human life and health and the propaganda in the movie that really mock fascism.
