Fascist Pleasures and Failed Satire

David Shipko faces down postmodern fascism in the video game “Helldivers 2.”

By David ShipkoDecember 23, 2025

• SF

• Politics

AMERICAN FASCISTS SAY aliens are invading our cities and must be repelled with violent force. “Defend the homeland,” commands a July 2025 recruitment campaign poster featuring a saluting Donald Trump: “Join ICE today.” That same month, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” allocating $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security through 2029—more funding than most militaries enjoy—including an extra $75 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This surge of dollars presages a surge of combat boots. There are signs that ICE may be struggling to recruit enough personnel—they recently eliminated recruitment age limits, for example—but the pay and signing bonuses may prove enough for many, like some attendees of a Homeland Security job fair, who cited their desire to use their military training, attain financial stability, and escape boredom as reasons for joining.

In addition to economic incentives, however, there is another major national and cultural factor at play: the structuring of the collective political unconscious, by literature and other media, toward fascist pleasures. Helldivers 2, a video game released in early 2024 for PlayStation and Windows, serves as a particularly good example of this process.

In Helldivers 2, it is the year 2185, and Super Earth High Command says that aliens are invading our cities and must be repelled with violent force: “[H]ostile forces have breached our sovereign homeworld,” reads the Major Order issued to players that inaugurates this new in-game narrative arc. The Illuminate, an alien civilization Super Earth once sought to eradicate and had thought defeated, has invaded. Helldivers, elite soldiers, are redeployed from front lines across the galaxy. Players, meanwhile, experienced these developments in May 2025, less than a month before the Trump administration invaded Los Angeles with ICE, then California’s own National Guard, and finally the US Marines, escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric with state terror and kidnappings, tactics ICE would later deploy in the nation’s capital, followed by Chicago and other cities and towns across the country. The near-simultaneity of these events is coincidental but, as we will see, meaningful, pointing toward what these events share as symptoms of our historical moment.

On the one hand, Helldivers 2 is a space-fascism simulator. As Helldiver soldiers, players in squads of up to four descend from starships to complete missions, such as securing crude oil access, destroying enemy military and reproductive infrastructure, and launching intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. At game launch—before the Illuminate’s surprise return—enemy factions consisted of giant alien insects (Terminids) and alien robots (Automatons), two science-fictional figurations that have often functioned to dehumanize political and racialized others. Invading their planets, killing them en masse, destroying their means of reproduction, and pilfering their resources, players reenact the imperialist script, committing genocide for the sake of Super Earth’s political-economic expansion.

On the other hand, Helldivers 2 leverages satirical framing to join and develop a tradition of military science fiction attempting an immanent critique of fascism, imperialism, and violent accumulation. The game’s marketing materials, cinematic opening, in-game dialogue, and Terminid designs comprise a pastiche of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997), while player armor designs openly signal their Star Wars (1977) inspirations and player ships—“Super Destroyers”—look like overgrown TIE fighters. The in-game dialogue—“spreading managed democracy, one bullet at a time”—and the storytelling parody the discourse the United States has used to justify its terroristic military actions. The imperial homeworld is called Super Earth, tongue-in-cheek propagandizing made ridiculous. The opening cinematic Terminid “attack” on a Super Earth suburb is also explicitly theatrical. It’s all hyperperformative patriotism serving nakedly nefarious ends. Even the game’s score—grand orchestral arrangements of bombastic brass and soaring strings—becomes satirical.

Satire, in this context, is what Nicholas Holm describes as “forms of humour that ostensibly manifest critical intention […] with the potential to make a change in the world.” Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) are classic examples. The political sketches on Saturday Night Live (1975– ) are more contemporary versions. In Holm’s words, satire is “an aesthetic practice wherein the formal (comic) arrangement of the work is central to the employment and expression of its political purpose”—or, in short, “humour that ought to be taken seriously.” It leverages the absurd, not merely for fun but also to make a point.

The satire in the Helldivers universe is pervasive. As Len Hafer has observed in a study of Helldivers lore, despite proclaiming democracy, liberty, and prosperity, “Super Earth isn’t exactly all that democratic, and many of the problems we’re out solving with our bullets and lasers are of our own making.” Hafer shows that Super Earth’s “managed democracy” amounts to AI-driven (non)representation through personality quiz; that oil-bleeding Terminids may have come from fossil-capital bioengineering to “present a more compelling threat, produce more oil, or maybe both”; and that Automatons are descended from cyborg “communists who rebelled against Super Earth.” These “alien” factions are externalized products of Super Earth’s fascist regime. Waging endless war on them to advance the interests of Super Earth, police its boundaries, and reaffirm its identity constitutes the work of the Helldivers. Explicitly and self-reflexively, the game positions the player as one of the bad guys.

Well, more than one. The player controls one Helldiver but ultimately plays as many. Dead Helldivers do not respawn. Instead, using the system that summons artillery, players’ teammates must call down a reinforcement. The player then resumes as a new Helldiver, whose appearance and voice can be fixed or randomized in the game settings, allowing one to deny or embrace this brutal process. Between overwhelming enemy forces and friendly fire, death comes often. The longer one plays Helldivers, the more Helldivers one plays. The game’s problematic pleasures derive from occupying this impossible position within the machinery of late-capitalist imperialism, the position of the military-industrial system itself, which, like the player, transcends, controls, and outlives every particular Helldiver.

Helldivers 2 reveals capital’s underwriting barbarism, which confronts its own manufactured externalities as invading aliens that it meets with sacrificial soldiers. In Helldivers 2, there is no homecoming, no parade, only the next drop and the next death, maybe to the enemy, often to teammates; either way, the cause of death is Super Earth. A virtual civilization can endlessly conjure new bodies, but a material one cannot. Helldivers 2 reveals the dependence of infinite value accumulation on infinite sacrificial bodies, which can be simulated but cannot actually exist. This gap between simulation and reality produces the game’s most critical argument: in the real world, such a process can only ever produce more devastation. In the possibility space of Helldivers 2—of imperialism, fascism, late capitalism—there are many ways to kill and die but none to survive.

There is thus a lot of evidence to support the game’s reception as satire, but there are also compelling reasons to question satire’s contemporary function, particularly in this game. Rather than ensuring its critical impact, the satire in Helldivers 2 actually enables unrepentant enjoyment, providing enough distance for players to feel separated from the fascist imperialism into which they have enthusiastically enlisted. This produces a mode of identification-through-disidentification that Mark Fisher has described as “postmodern fascism,” whose strategy of disavowal is “to refuse the identification while pursuing the political programme.”

This kind of discontinuity between speech and action models the relation between narrative and play in Helldivers 2. The game’s speech—narrative, dialogue, and aesthetics—denounces the fascist action its gameplay demands. Its ubiquitous satire permeates equipment names and descriptions, tutorials and levels, in-game communications, and even announcements from the studio, often formed as denials and propaganda by the in-game Super Earth Ministry of Truth. All of this creates conditions for players to derive pleasure in actions that would be unpalatable if represented unironically.

This humor, however, withers. The first time a Helldiver punctuated a flamethrower attack by screaming “Demoooocraaaaaacyyyyyyyyy!,” I laughed, but eventually the joke became nightmarish. The satire wears thin quickly; only slaughter remains. In Helldivers 2, ridicule gradually transforms from a form of criticism into a means of enjoying the formerly mocked system. This identification-through-disidentification plays out in social media gameplay clips. A player assumes the role of subversive questioning soldier, and another player promptly executes them. A player evacuating NPC (non-player character) civilians realizes the quota has been filled and executes the remainder. A player cornered by a Terminid climbs a cliff, unclips a grenade, and leaps onto the alien’s head, embracing their fate as an expendable weapon, music and slow-motion framing their sacrifice as heroic.

Interestingly, the game sometimes penalizes players for these performances. For example, killing dissenting players reduces the limited reinforcement budget, and each civilian death reduces rewarded in-game currency. Some players willingly pay these prices. Player performances can appear as extending the game’s satire, but their penalties also produce the conditions for a form of what David Higgins has called “imperial masochism”—“the way subjects who enjoy the advantages of empire adopt the fantastical role of colonized victims to fortify and expand their agency.” In his 2021 book Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, Higgins examines how this imperial masochism—which is “less about an authentic enjoyment of pain and more about enjoying the presumed moral superiority that fantasies of victimization enable”—emerges from a period of cultural production in the 1960s, “when it became overwhelmingly uncool to be a conqueror or colonizer.” (Full disclosure: Higgins is LARB’s SF editor and participated in editing this piece.)

Helldivers 2 narrativizes reverse colonization and imperial masochism in many ways. For example, the player’s multitude of doomed Helldivers are presented as victims of the imperial war machine themselves. After all, they are stored in cryogenic sleeper pods racked like ammunition, shot from orbit like bullets, and kept far from the Super Earth they serve. Helldivers are soldiers trapped in a nightmare liminality. For players, hyperbolically performing the game’s fascist imperial soldier role allows one to enjoy a position of violent privilege while simultaneously understanding oneself as also victimized. Players can revel in imperial extermination because they know they will themselves be exterminated.

There are other roles players can take on to momentarily bend the game’s ideological arc. I experimented with playing as a disillusioned veteran trying to undermine the Helldivers, improvising dissenting dialogue and destroying Super Earth flags; inciting teammate ire was defused only through my threat of mutually assured destruction (later, I died by friendly fire). The apotheosis of dissenter play would be continuously killing teammates to deplete the reinforcement budget and prevent mission completion—though this could easily result in being kicked out or spurring other players to leave. I couldn’t bring myself to actively ruin a stranger’s fun, so the game put me back in line.

Helldivers 2 thus allows multiple, opposing forms of play, but they are unequal. One end of the spectrum, despite minor punishment, accords with the logic of the game’s possibility space, while the other is easily curtailed by players expelling you from their session or leaving yours. The game’s procedural logic supports fascist identification while imposing limits on dissent. These limits may be contested through dissident play (“griefing”), but inasmuch as such contestation is always doomed to failure, they are absolute. Of course, they are necessary for the game to function: one cannot play a game with others who only want to ruin the fun. But this is exactly the point.

The player of Helldivers 2 runs straight into the concrete wall that Holm identifies as the limit of satire, which “encounters the grand promise of cultural politics as a joke, rather than a dream,” and ends by “burn[ing] the bridge of cultural politics behind itself.” In Helldivers 2, one can ultimately only pretend to laugh while actually (perhaps secretly) enjoying what’s being mocked. Pretend for whom? Others, but also oneself (the same thing). Through this satirical game, the player encounters the “utopian promise that the production and consumption of popular culture can change the world,” as Holm puts it, but then the satire “carries out the ideological work of explaining that this has already been successfully achieved by the comic resolution of the text.”

Against overt intentions, this game reproduces the structures it satirizes. Whether one serves in a fascist military satirically or sincerely matters not at all. Within Helldivers 2, one does both, simultaneously. Diegetically, as a Helldiver, the player identifies through their actions with the sincere Super Earth propaganda; simultaneously, as a subject with access to the historical context necessary for reading this same propaganda satirically, the player disidentifies. By mocking their own actions, the player can continue. Satire becomes an enabling mode of Super Earth itself, critical distance rendered a tool for enabling subjects to submit without guilt. From the player’s perspective, it is as if Super Earth is in on the joke, as if it knows what it is, and knows you know. Such mutual knowing produces domination that demands no belief, only obedience.

This essay began from self-interrogation: why did I ever enjoy this game? While I enjoyed such games as a teenager, I now find Call of Duty (2003) and other “realistic” military shooters unnerving. I cannot see them outside of history; cannot uncouple them from Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza; cannot detach them from the military recruitment circuit. And yet, I enjoyed Helldivers 2, quite a lot, for many hours. My first answer was that perhaps it wasn’t the game I enjoyed so much as playing with my younger brother, who lives in another state.

The better answer is simple and disquieting. The game’s satire satisfied my critical mind just enough to create space for naive enjoyment. There is a personal level to this. I received a right-wing upbringing and served as an infantry officer in the California Army National Guard (yes, my old brigade was the one ordered into Los Angeles). Some form of fascist structuring still survives in me, still finds some pleasure in the script given to it, long ago. Twenty years of critical self-examination have nearly eradicated these impulses, but they can never be fully erased.

I am not unique; within our society, such structuring is pervasive. It can be glimpsed in required pledges of allegiance, military aircraft flyovers at sporting events, and the seemingly endless parade of jingoistic propaganda produced as entertainment, such as the Top Gun films and the aforementioned Call of Duty games. I cannot decisively prove that this kind of fascist structuring has at least partially contributed to the meteoric success of Helldivers 2—selling 12 million copies in its first three months—but at a time when fascism pursues its goals in practice while denying itself in (satirical) speech, I think this is an important question, as is that which necessarily follows: what is the full extent to which Helldivers 2 valorizes the fascist unconscious it (un)successfully satirizes? We may not yet know. Sony recently announced that it has greenlit not only a Helldivers movie but also a reportedly nonsatirical Starship Troopers remake.

Helldivers 2 supplements Fisher’s postmodern fascism. The flip side of disidentification is the impotence of individual refusal. One may detest the fascist regime and yet do its bidding. It matters little how far the morale of ICE agents falls if they keep reporting for duty. Individual refusal means nothing—unless it’s developed into a collective remaking. In Helldivers 2, as in history, realizing anti-fascist ends requires changing the game.