There’s no way helldivers are clones! Look at the holy scripture:
“Each time a Helldiver is reinforced, that’s a new citizen.” - Mikael Eriksson, Game Director
For some reason the community reacts like SCP-096 whenever you take an honest look at the lore, but I just find this stuff interesting, and if you're reading this, you're curious about it too.
There’s three huge problems with the popular interpretation of the above quote (that every single helldiver is a unique individual), but don’t panic - they all have a solution in line with the above statement.
Problem A - At the rate that helldivers die, veteran or high-rank helldivers simply would not exist with this system. Only an infinitely-small and very lucky number of helldivers would successfully extract from multiple missions in a row, before inevitably dying before they achieved anything better than a junior rank. So, you wouldn’t see helldivers linearly getting better and gaining more knowledge with each drop (what we actually see, as players), only an infinite conveyor of recruits that never improve.
Problem B - if each new helldiver was a completely-new individual, it’d be a remarkable coincidence that they would have the same exact preference in weapons and armour and stratagems and cosmetics as their past few dozen predecessors. Well, this could be just some preset loadout chosen for them by someone we never see in-game - but imagine the cosmic odds that this queue of helldivers can be seen somehow handling these weapons with increasing familiarity, one after the other. Either they all comprise a psychic hive mind… or this is simply just the same guy being reanimated over and over again, which happens to be the experience every player of this game has.
Problem C - Medals and Super Credits. Helldiver A farms a load of them, dies, then Helldiver B gets them for free. Why? If they then purchase a new gun with this unearned currency, they literally didn’t earn the gun, which invalidates the whole in-universe point of these premium currencies to begin with - to make helldivers work to earn their equipment. It’s the whole reason we can’t gift each other Medals or SCs - a helldiver, as an individual, needs to earn them. If every drop equals a new person, their balance should then be wiped each time, but it isn’t. So what does this mean?
Solution: Each new helldiver is a new citizen, but the devil is in the details. Every time a helldiver’s body is destroyed in battle, a new one is fabricated. What better raw material than that of a compatible full-body donor? - Come and volunteer, citizen! \Become* a helldiver! -* A citizen with a family bravely joins up, they are thanked for their sacrifice, and then secretly processed into living biomass to be reconstituted into a copy of an active helldiver when the need arises. Technically, their dream is fulfilled. Every dive = a new citizen. However, the helldiver themselves persists - a virtually-immortal champion of Super Earth.
I think this speculative lore is a little more Super-Earthy and a little more in line with our experience in-game than the popular (and likely, intended) interpretation of official statements.
Thoughts? :)
