God forbid we have fun in games instead of a 3 hour morality lecture

As much as I loved the character of Loki the trend that he started of "oh no you don't understand, he's not REALLY a bad guy!" needs to stop.

Robert Englund once said in an interview that there is absolutely no redeeming qualities in Freddy Krueger. He’s 100% pure evil, he knows it, and he loves the fact that he’s evil. And I’m so glad that he said that, because one day someone’s going to try & make a movie, where he’s really a misunderstood, tragic anti-villain. And it’s like- no. This guy is pure evil. And it’s ok that he’s pure evil. Sometimes we just need villains like that.

if Last of us like scenario happens, these people will be protesting for zombie rights

Sargon being a canon 40k villain is epic AF.

Still baffled as to how the CGI in Starship Troopers looks better (perhaps more "real" is the correct term) than the CGI in most Marvel movies made 25 years later.

Gamers are having fun?! Not on our watch! -Sony, probably

You will own no game, you will not drop in a pod and you will not kill the bugs.

the irony of helldivers beeing an amazing game just to have the fun killed by the despicable company called sony is.... not irony. it's just sad.

It's kinda why they always fail to understand post-apocalyptic settings and hate characters like Joel. They don't see that normal rules of morality become suspended when you're literally fighting for your own survival on the brink of extinction.

When Lucas introduced the "Roger-Roger-Robots" into the Star Wars universe, I felt like he was going for that a bit. A lighter, more guilt-free tone about destroying the enemy. If Ben & Anakin were SLASHING Storm Troopers up with such flagrant, flippant ease and disregard, it wouldn't have seemed so fun & adventurous. LoL! That being said, over 654,000 Storm Troopers fell to Hon Solo's blaster in "A New Hope!" 💥💥💥 So, nevermind! Haha!

The Covenant in Halo is an interesting one. They originally start as an existential threat that unites humanity against a common foe. Then, in Halo 2, they splinter as the veil is lifted as to what the Covenant truly is, and the Elites ally with the Humans to defeat them.

Out: eating bugs In: shooting bugs

One of the best aspects of Paul Verhoven's action movies is how even if you strip all the political aspects youre still left with an amazing action movie you can have fun watching. Thats what makes movies like Starship so memorable, and it was very well replicated in Helldivers.

Speaking of talking things out with the Borg. Remember that the Borg explicitly say in(I think) Best Of Both Worlds "We only wish to raise the quality of life for all" and look at the cost.

Starship Troopers had moral complexity. The bugs are always shown from the human perspective, demonized etc, although one would wonder if it's simply an alien race that would've minded its own business had humans not discovered it, and immediately considered to be an enemy, even if only because of the way they look. Either way, the game is a blast, as was the movie. One of my all time favs, I remember watching it in the theatres when I was 17, it was GLORIOUS.

Had this playing in the background, the whiplash I had when I heard that cheeky Lotus Eater 😂 Would love to see Drinker, Carl and Dank doing a drunk watch party one day

As for the ST reference, there is the DS9 episode where they find an infant Jem'Hadar - a genetically engineered race of super-soldiers, who matures like in a week. SPOILER: The crew have to send the kid to the Dominion, where he originated, because the race is "evil" - they are bred to kill. And die.

Sad how Sony bungled it up

How are we supposed to eat ze bugs if we aren't allowed to kill them?

'starship troopers' is a great novel. so is 'old mans war' which is partially derived from it.

The reason people are enjoying helldivers is the same reason everyone loves 40k. We know there are no "good guys" in the setting. Everything is over the top so far that for 95% of it parallels between the IP and the real world can't actually be drawn. It's fun because it's pure escapism where it's more fun to just commit to the bit 100% and enjoy the ride rather than feel the need to pick everything apart.

To be fair, those mercenaries at the beginning of Deadpool WERE working for a company that lies to people, gets them to sign their lives away to them and tortures them to mutate their bodies and then to brainwash them to be mindless killing machines...whether or not they knew about the details there is anyone's guess. But they were fighting for the benefit of the bad guy. Hence, later Deadpool offered them a chance to surrender and receive...possibly lover-like treatment...

Makes me think of all the "there's no such thing as an evil race" arguments in Dungeons and Dragons. I actually think evil races are a good thing--not just because you can defeat them and become a hero and all, and they enrich the culture and nature of the world, but because they allow people who might be squeamish about killing sentient creatures to say, "Okay, these aren't human, and they're universally bad, so we can kill them with impunity. This is not the same as real life." The awesomeness of being a hero comes from defeating evil creatures. And in a world so wracked with evil, there's something cathartic in being able to squash evil and make the world better, even if only in fantasy.

7:56 And then you have Deadpool 2 where Domino kills her whole team a whole pile of innocent civilians by draining their luck thus causing fatal accidents. That's how her power works. She's not "lucky" she drains everyone else's luck to make herself lucky. All those people are dead because of her.

I think it's worth noting that a consistent theme in the humor of the game is that Super Earth is the cause of all its own problems. But it's more of a joke than a subject for a morality lecture.

It's true that every villian is the hero of their own story. It's also true that villians still exist.

"Kill them all!" vs "All hail our insect overlords"

I wouldn't mind the kind of "do you _really_ understand where the 'bad guys' are coming from" mentality if people who tried to apply it would actually follow through. There's always someone they regard as irredeemable; always somewhere where they'd sooner force their own morality than try to understand the prevailing one. It often seems like they merely want to keep the choice as to _where_ to apply the "judge, jury, and executioner" power for themselves, displaying a really hypocritical contempt for the morality _and_ intelligence of anyone who dares not see eye-to-eye.

Yes, yes, very good, very good indeed. A Drinker review of *_Gangs of London_* would still be something to see!

Loved how in The Last Wish, they lampshaded the idea that that Jack Horner was a misunderstood villain with a secret heart of gold only later to reveal that, no, he’s just an irredeemable monster

My entire book series (Exopreneurs) is based on humans dealing with Insectoids, and the nuances and cultural clashes and trying put human morals onto bugs-and even in that series, there are bugs you just gotta squash. Some species are outright murder machines.

If monsters didn't exist then we'd have to invent them

That scenario ya'll were talking about actually happened in Frieren. Demons are these absolutely pure evil monsters and one guy in a village ended up taking a demon girl in talking about giving her a chance or whatever and she slaughtered the whole village. There were also a couple of other examples, but I don't care enough to remember exactly. You also had a bunch of idiots raging about that. Oddly and thankfully enough though, no one has a problem with Goblin Slayer's goblin genocide. Probably because episode 1 filtered a lot of those people. Honestly, I've always despised this "villains need to be morally gray/sympathetic/relatable/etc. to be good and pure evil villains/races are bad/boring" mentality and I've been seeing it since the mid-late 2000s. It feels good seeing so many other people finally grow sick of this garbage and push back against it.

From what I've seen, most the reaction by the playerbase to Helldiver 2's 'politics' has been to play along. Not taking is seriously, just effectively RPing it out.

Sargon! Holy shit!

Carl!

The "sympathetic villain" trope in the mcu got old really quick. That's why people were loving the green goblin return in no way home. It was like a breath of fresh air.

In the book human telepaths communicated telepathically with Bug brains to propose some sort of treaty and accommodation but the Bugs being truly alien had no idea what we were talking about. Both our species live on the same earth type oxygen atmosphere, liquid water planets, therefore to them the only rational course is that one species has to exterminate the other and take all the real estate, so therefore we must be crazy. The philosophical question is if something like the Bugs has no idea of good and evil are they evil or like a tsunami or fire are not morally “bad” but just “bad for us”?

If I’m playing a video game or watching a movie, I’m usually doing it to be entertained and escape from the real world. I’m not looking to be lectured about how I’m an awful person.

I miss unapologetic villans

Deadpool deleted countless mercenaries in the first movie, except for one guy who he knew showcasing the nature of unaliving faceless men.

Can't tell you how many times I tried and failed to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Space Invaders.

4:35 SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!

It looks like Grummz is constantly starting into my soul

"My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulsion at being dragged into what they call “discussions of ideas.” My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works." Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

If you want to experience angst about killing all the bugs, go read the Ender series by Orson Scott Card.

"maybe Darth Vader isn't really a bad guy" Except this is 1000% happening in current Star Wars and within the fanbase. They are legitimately saying that Anakin and Darth Vader are 2 separate people, even though Anakin straight up murdered kids and entire families *BEFORE* Darth Vader happened, even in Episode 2 when he kills the sand people

Surprised nobody mentioned Ender’s Game during all of this. The sequels deliberately tried to make the Bugs more sympathetic.

Starship Troopers is the best movie of all time. War Love Romance Death Compassion

I poke an ant hole with a stick, one of them bites me, i get a hose and solve an existential crises.

nice of the drinker to let an applebee's employee give their blue collar take

So great to have Sargon on the conversation. He’s one of my favorite You-tubers!

I think the point of Helldivers was that you can learn of the fact that Humanity is the invading force for both the AI and insect home-worlds and still continue playing the game anyway. It's a satire on Human expansionism that has often used ideals like bringing civilisation or freedom as a guise for taking over territories and resources. Some people are into that. There's a reason RPGs offer you the alternative of being evil. You can have fun being evil, especially in a video game, as long as you understand that this what the games are made for, and you don't mistake it for a training ground on how to be an asshole IRL. When people were playing Counter-Strike and being put on the Terrorist team, you didn't see anyone growing a conscience and running out out in front of the CTs to intentionally die and make the bomb drop somewhere where they could guard it. You blew up the objective. Hell, I remember people killing the hostages for fun on the other maps. With how many generations of kids grew up playing that, you'd think there'd be bombs going off every other week.... Hell, in Half-Life you end up killing a bunch of soldiers who, by all intents, were just doing their jobs and following orders and you're supposed to be the "good guy" in it. And while the Alien franchise is pretty clear-cut on the Xenomorphs being dangerous antagonists, even in Starship Troopers there is a suggestion of the Arachnids not actually being invaders but rather defenders, with the Federation using their existence as a means to provide unity for Humanity (during the parody presentations at the start of the movie, Klendathu is shown to be on the other side of the galaxy, with ships having to hyper-jump to get there, requiring that the asteroid which is encountered by Carmen and Zander and which later destroys Buenos Aires be launched potentially billions of years in advance with some insane calculations in order to slowly make its way across to strike Earth. Meaning it was far more likely the asteroid was put on course by the Federation, which was willing to sacrifice some of its citizens if it meant uniting the rest of them).

"They are desperate to introduce moral complexity here." It's about feeling morally superior to everyone else.

For Democracy!

The lack of actual villains in so many current stories is really annoying.

A fireteam of Drinker, Chris Gore, Casper Van Dien, and Jake Busey would go so hard. Stream that shit!

I was talking about this to my friends three days ago. Its ok to just make a villian unapologetically evil

On the other hand, if you want to fight an endless stream of alien bugs with all kinds of weapons, there's still _Earth Defense Force..._

At a certain point, if you intentionally look for a message to get pissed about, you're going to find it.

I was thinking about the Alien prequel films this morning (Prometheus & Covenant) and how David's character was pure evil. His was an exploration of amoral, pure evil and I actually despair that the prequel trilogy was never rounded out. I think an effort to stop David - leading into the original films would have been brilliant. It would have salvaged the series.

I want to enjoy an escapism game, too. 🎉

Starship Troopers teaching us how to deal with fanatical invaders since the late nineties😂

Recently Disney announced that the Chosen would be streaming on Disney plus and it got me thinking what if Disney made that show. The first thing I thought was they’d try to humanize Judas and the Pharisees and make them misunderstood and say they weren’t totally evil. Other things I came up with is they’d definitely put the focus on Mary Magdalene and make her a girl boss who puts the Pharisees and apostles in their place and constantly upstages the apostles. They wouldn’t make her learn the important lessons the apostles learned and say she was the reason that Christianity spread across the Roman Empire and to other parts of the world instead of Paul and the Apostles. Israel would also be unrealistically diverse. It would look like Los Angelos and the Israelites and Roman soldiers would be comprised of every race. They also wouldn’t portray any of Jesus’s miracles and would just have the other characters tell us that Jesus can do miracles.

Man, I’m so drunk, I’m seeing two drinkers on screen at the same time lol

Beep boop bop

When Earth tries to understand the aliens you get Mars Attacks!

Dark Horse’s Alien comics were epic.

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.” - Alexander Tytler, 1787

I don't remember the spaceship asking the asteroids a goddamned thing! Pew pew pew! Looks like vector graphics are back on our menu, boys! Let's see you spin that one into something political.

To Grummz, I really like the painting behind your avatar of the woman reclining in a chair with her feet up. What is this from? Is it possible to get this picture from you or from somewhere? I appreciate any help.

What next, someone suggests to Vader that he returns to Tatooine to visit his mothers’ grave, and lo behold . . .

bUT DiVerSItY!!!!

There is a word for people like this...Conscript.

Dark Horse comics Aliens Nightmare Asylum, fantastic stuff

It's just different tropes, there's the misunderstood alien like in "Enders Game" or the plain evil "Alien", or even the apparent good guys that turn out to be the baddies. All those concepts can be entertaining.

7:56 flashbacks of Austin Powers 😂

Where can I find this full livestream?

Oh shit, he got Grumz on!

The thing is I understood the point of starship troopers. The problem is the bugs eats brains to steal information from the enemy. How is that not evil?! If nothing else it shows the bugs are cognizant enough that they’re probably capable of communicating.

It's funny how all this can apply to something like 40k or the original comic version of the skrulls and kree and their war in marvel, yet the same people who complain about starship troopers or now helldivers for example have zero qualms for condemning as dogwhistling something as ridiculous as playing "zee Germans" in historical tabletop games or WW2 videogames or whatever, I mean, someone has to be the bad guy for these games to work, right? What do you expect? It's beyond reasonable to assume that a not-insignificant amount of people fight in wars not because they support the reasons for the war they're involved in but because to them it's about protecting their way of life and their families and so on. So even if it's not an existential threat a la starship troopers, why is one country invading another any different when you're the one in a series of foxholes you dug up with your neighbours where a park your kids would frequent used to be? Furthermore, it's a bit hypocritical how progressives don't apply the same standards to something they seem to gravitate more towards like say Nintendo games or star wars for example, and that boils down to either their being tourists in spaces they know nothing about nor care for, justifying their dilution and destruction in their eyes, and/or that they apply ridiculous double standards to these that if you apply the same logic to, say, Zelda, their whole argument would collapse! What a shocker! Always good to see sargon visit, and cheers to a great open bar, Drinker!

I, for one, welcome our insectoid overlords.

Don't worry, there are some of us left that just want to make great games. ;)

Can we just let villians be evil?

6:20 Someone should've convinced Fauci and his ilk of that.

Happy May the 4th, Drinker

Two of the best examples I can think of who make for perfect evil villains are The Joker and Makorv. Both don't need motivations or backstories to tell us why they do the things that they do, only that they're serious about the chaos they bring to the world. They're simply evil and we love that.

the death row analogy wasn't a smart argument.

Carl looks like drinker's brother just with a little bit wider face. I know many "white bearded dudes" look alike, but these guys also have very similar eyes 😅

One of my Top 5 sci-fy movies !! Yet if you pay attention in the High School scenes & towards the end they give "THE MESSAGE" or the very start of it at least it's in there . But I enjoy the movie regardless !!

"But every single one of these people is absolutely convicted of something monsterous." "As of February 2nd, 2024, the Innocence Database maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center shows 196 exonerations of prisoners on death row in the United States since 1973."

Agreed Nightmare Asylum is a great Aliens comic series

My question is "Why commit seppuku?".

I'm all for totally evil races, because you can still make them unique and interesting even if they are irredeemable. Take Warhammer Fantasy; you have Chaos (4 differing factions), Orcs, Goblins, Dark Elves, Chaos Dwarves, Undead & Skaven. All distinct from each other and all waiting to be brutally killed off by the good guys.

Sargon's Aliens reference was compiled in Dark Horse's "Aliens: Book 1 and 2". The artwork on Book 2 was leagues better than Book 1 in my opinion. Worth looking up if you are into comics.

Can anyone tell me what Grummz's background wallpaper is and/or artist?

I mean you obviously missed the point of starship troopers

7:33 I'm not so sure. I think the reason there's a battle over it has nothing to do with elements of moral satire, it's that it's big and popular, and that potential influence sends up a flag.

Best wishes to Sargon for becoming part of WH40K!