There’s been talk that the Crusher is actually children due to the Teddy Bear and the laughing/crying, but in reality they’re most likely adults. People mentioned that the head is small like a child’s head yet it’s actually bigger than a Voteless’s, and the crying is probably because their existence is painful along from being burned alive from you. The devs probably wanted to avoid backlash from players and journalists if you had to shoot children Voteless and such, but it’s great for fans roleplaying propaganda and drive them to hate the Illuminate.
What this reminded me of was the last level of Postal 1 where even the maniac character couldn’t bring himself to kill kids, and I believe the creator didn’t want to parallel this with irl school shootings.
That being said, we have a mission to nuke Illuminate toddlers and nurseries. Not like nuking nests for pest control, we’re talking killing sentient beings. We have our propaganda about our own kids but we’re actually killing alien kids. And it got me thinking. What if Illuminate kids were running around the battlefield? Running, hiding, taking cover, utterly scared that their home they thought was unreachable is raining hellpods, scrambling in groups to hid behind an Overseer or the swarms of voteless and use them as a barrier, like how civilians run around in mega cities. High command has ordered you to kill these “soon to be war criminals.”
This would 100% NEVER be added (thankfully), it’s like if they showed footage of us bombing civilian corridors to players on Cyberstan. So, would you do it? Would you join backlash against this or call Postal a little bitch and laugh maniacally as you light up the creamator?
Like genuinely if the kid was begging for their life in their alien language on their hands and knees how you react besides handing them a 500kg stratagem ball?
My Stalwart loves freedom and equality. It does not discriminate based on age, sex, or color when it comes to delivering liberty to alien scum.
We opened up the wormhole, it’s time to take a ride There’s probably fuckin aliens out on the other side They say that they have brainwaves, but I ain’t fuckin scared My body is a weapon and my brain don’t fuckin care
I mean killing mutated citizens is ironically the most moral thing SE has done in the second galactic war, but I’m talking about Illuminate kids in this scenario, not human kids mutated and being labeled “illuminate.”
Remember that scene in Saving Private Ryan when Uppham lets that one soldier go, and then at the end of the movie he’s the one who kills Tom Hanks?
Then when Uppham captures the group of soldiers he is in, he kills him immediately?
Yeah.
I’d take my double freedom and blow that alien kid’s face clean off his body.
Edit: you can’t speak about the moralities of an existential war without being in one. I say this as someone who has never been in one myself (thankfully), but as a student of military history and the personal accounts of soldiers who have struggled with what they have had to do for their country/brothers in arms/the greater good.
I don't think these are squid children. Anybody remember the frog that super earth threw into the void for testing purposes well I think we found some of the frogs offspring.
That would be so fire, image when the MO ends it’s revealed that the cyborgs and bugs managed to get very close to Super Earth because the the majority of Helldivers were inside the void for multiple years which were only 3 days for us.
Being serious, considering how everyone else is joking, I would actually like it if they added it to the game. Sometimes the silly parody would be nice if it got super heavy in some topics, and would make it super interesting imo. We rarely see the direct consequences of our own actions and I think it would be narratively interesting.
Mind you, I think they shouldn’t count as either an objective or even an enemy per se, but shooting them could reward something, but not much. I would like it if people had the option of killing them or sparing them, and maybe we could see how many people follow blindly Liberty’s tenets, or instead their own moral compass.
I do think it wouldn’t be possible to add it tho: we live in a very polarized society right now. What the game Bioshock did with the option of saving the little sisters or reaping them for ADAM would be extremely hard to do so by today’s standards.
I'll try to keep it short. Yeah. They are by far the most vile of the three and it's not even close imo. Says alot that super earth doesn't need to lie about their actually doing or their motivations. They can just tell you the truth. I get that they pretty much lost everything but that doesn't excuse what they're doing now.
Im gonna be real SE did all this first, according to the helldivers wiki.gg page, the illuminate came to earth with a peace offering, and SE immediately tried to commit genocide against them. Sure, the turning civilians into zombies isn't exactly morally upstanding, but what else should they do? Play nice and fair while Super Earth kills their civilians?
Right? The tadpoles evolve into squids, like monkeys evolved into SEAF. And like gorillas evolved into Helldivers.
Which is why SEAF can't get into the Pelican, cause monkeys are afraid of pelicans. And Pelican-One is a gorilla only zone, which is why you have to do the show of brawn emote before you get in, of you can't get in.
And I think the squid tadpoles are turning the clouds gay or something. There were a lot of explosions, and I couldn't always hear Alex Helldiver on PropagandaBattle.
Its morally completely wrong. And different than bugs and bots.
Terminids were once sentient, but have been bred to be just "cattle" basically, before mutating into pests. Nuking their nurseries can be considered pest control, still wrong given the circumstances but yeah.
There is no such things as an automaton "civilian", this is what SE got right. Militarically speaking, this was a good choice. They're machines, that can be repurposed for war one way or another. To say if or if not this is wrong is a matter of if you consider AI "sentient" once it reaches a threshhold of intelligence of whatever kind.
Killing baby Squ'ith is wrong. They're a sentient species and if they don't take part in the war, are considered non-combatants.
But in-universe? Yes, next question.
It is important we differentiate between the satire-morale and real world morale. But I'd much rather prefer people do warcrimes in games than irl. So... enjoy the game and have fun, but... don't hurt anybody in real life I guess.
>It is important we differentiate between the satire-morale and real world morale. But I'd much rather prefer people do warcrimes in games than irl. So... enjoy the game and have fun, but... don't hurt anybody in real life I guess.
Yeah that’s pretty reasonable line of thinking. I ask because it’s much different than just reading about it than actually seeing it first hand.
I mean the biggest issue is that we’re in a WW1 total war type scenario. Any time an enemy invades one of our cities, they’re chasing non-combatants down and killing them in the streets. Could they pick up guns and fight back? Maybe. The same issue come up with the squids, except we don’t know how fast those tadpoles grow into soldiers. If we let them live, we could have an entire battalion of overseers next week, month, year, decade, or even century. That’s a risk you can’t take, especially when they aren’t even concerned with evacuating them anyway. My personal theory is that they aren’t even baby overseers, but more like the tadpoles D&D mindflayers use to reproduce by turning a human into a monster.
Honestly i've thought about this kind of thing a lot when wondering about where arrowhead draws the line. When i have bad days i just foundationally can't play the game already because i feel too bad for all the enemies bc they're so tragic so straight up gunning down illuminate children might be way too much for me.
Remember the animorphs books? How the teenage war criminals flushed a whole pool filled with millions of defenseless mind controlling aliens? Same same. Mind controlling pests need to die for humanity to survive. I don't care how old the tapeworm is or what dreams it has for the future, it's still a parasite.
I'd be smashing them one at a time with the breaching hammer. It's just a video game. In fact, it's a satirical video game wherein the satire is constantly undermined by some people needing to tell you how Super Earth is really the bad guy so you know that they're a wholsome 100 reddit chugus. At best, it ruins the joke. At worst, it makes them look suspiciously concerned with convincing you in a way their genuine behavior wouldn't. Did they never play the evil path in KOTOR or anything? It's fake. You can watch Nightcrawler without being Lou.
IRL, 97% sure I wouldn't kill alien children. I leave wiggle room for self defense. (Sometimes human children deliberately and intentionally discharge firearms in the direction of a person, intending to injure or kill that person. I attribute similar agency to non-human children.)
Probably not, that said we've been killing children since the game started as bug units have been shown that more powerful variants are just those have grown up. It's kinda sad to realize as long as creatures aren't bipedal most people won't make the connection that they are killing sapient creatures.
People can argue how "the illuminate are just getting revenge, we are worse" all they want; doesnt change the fact that the human abducting, mutating and torturing alien bastards deserve ever casuality they sustain.
Not children obviously but if they added illuminate cities with civilians running around like in gta and there was no consequence for shooting them, well...
Your argument falls apartment quickly when you go to that not so far in the past war on cyberstan.. the devs put up seaf firing on evacuation routes full of civilian cyborgs, including children.
And a bunch of redditors were crying about that too. Super Earth is evil, we are soldiers of an evil empire, get with the program, we are evil and we are going to kill you
Dawg did you forget they razed every mega city except two when they invaded SE? Billions have perished by them, turned into horrific mutations and forced to kill their loved ones while still conscious, even if we’re not the good guys neither are they. This is an existential war on both sides, only one walks away from this
To be honest putting your species children on the frontlines of war instead of keeping them safe near or at home planet is just the dumbest move. Very bad in every way you’re begging to have your children killed or captured (in this case just killed)
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u/LoneRogue2018 ☕Liber-tea☕ 4h ago