They started a three front war ,prioritize citizens differently based on a state defined class system, got the earth blown up on at least one occasion, use their soldiers as disposable cannon fodder, and send everyone who disagree with them to reeducation camps. Other than that its a swell place.

Its tiring how bad general media literacy is that I can’t tell if the 4chan post above is a joke.

I’ve seen one Lemmy bigbrain recently argue that even when artists are showing mafia or army to be terrible for people in them, they romanticize the mafia and army nonetheless, and that in general media glorifies its subject matter regardless of the author’s intent. This schmuck would probably say with a straight face that ‘Helldivers’, or whatever this post is about, actually advocates for its model of utopia even if it pretends not to.

The idea of there being no anti-war films is older than Lemmy. The problem is Poe’s Law related. You can make a movie or a game that shows the horror of war or the tyranny of distopian totalitarian regimes, but regardless of the intended message, your creation is filtered through your audience’s lenses of perception, and some of that audience has been raised to be white supremacists, some have been through schooling that acts more as indoctrination than education, and some of that audience are just seriously fucking stupid.

Yeah, I think I’ve heard of the ‘no anti-war films’ sentiment before, and vaguely heard that army recruiting increased after ‘Full Metal Jacket’, of all films. However, I don’t agree that idiocy of some part of the public is a reason to write off army, mafia, or any such quasi-satire media wholesale, as the aforementioned commenter did. That position essentially says that it’s not allowed to do critique of institutions and practices as part of ‘entertainment’ art.

The whole point of Poe’s Law is that you can’t get away from it even if you ham it to eleven, or even 38.7 gigahams/second. Unless you explicitly state ‘This is satire. That stuff is bad,’ there is little to no way to tell if it’s satire or extremism, and even if you do make it explicit, there are always the idiots who won’t notice that part and assume it’s sincere, (see naive interpretations of Starship Troopers) and those who willfully block out that part because they sincerely hold an opposing view. (See white nationalists opinions on American History X)

No one is saying it’s ‘not allowed’ for people to make those things. They’re saying it’s literally impossible because of how the media work. The kind of people who are saying ‘you can’t’ would love it to be possible. If we could movie our way to a utopia, it’d be awesome, but it seems we can’t.