Hearing about Helldivers 2 and watching gameplay footage, I'm struck by the comparisons to Starship Troopers and how many people are quick to call it genius satire. The core of both Starship Troopers¹ and Helldivers 2 is a vision of a fascist future that sucks, and the idea is that by showing the ludicrous extremes of the fascist project, you may get some fascists to realize how silly they look.²

The problem is it doesn't work. For a multitude of reasons. One is endemic to Helldivers 2 and Starship Troopers (and Fight Club, for that matter). When you phrase your "cutting satire" as also a fun action game (or movie), the audience will engage with it as a fun action game/movie. No matter what the third act twist is, it'll be at best a cool fun story with a weird ending. And when you phrase your "cutting satire" as "name your ship the Father of Traditional Values and use it to nuke a city, then do that at least an hour a day for a month to fill out the Battle Pass so your bext ship can have a flame decal," you may have lost the plot.
For every leftist playing the game going "hahaha fascists are so stupid look at the future they want!" There's a fascist playing the game going "This rules! I hope the future is just like this!"
Capitalism once again subsumes all critiques into itself.

Which brings me to Watchmen. Watchmen isn't a fun action comic book graphic novel. In fact it's a slog. So how could the fascists miss the point? How could they read it as anything other than a damning indictment of their ideology?? I don't know. Ask Zak Schnieder. It's gritty. It's real. Nevermind that they wear tights, they're breaking people's arms. And talking about how much they hate the godless commies! Fuck yeah!!
But for a long time I had a problem with the ending of Watchmen. The book spends so long drilling in the point that there are no supervillains in real life. The vigilantes are beating up bums. Or regular guys in the bar. Or students protesting. We are supposed to see the disconnect between the superhero power fantasy and the violence that they do. So when the book ends with a comic book supervillain (despite Ozymandias saying explicitly that he's not) I thought it cheapened the message. But I see it now as a raising the stakes. Taking the satire one step further. Dan is left standing there, faced with the reality of the situation. Millions of people have just exploded, and Dan gets to see Rorshach explode in front of him in the same way. Here, faced with a real supervillain, Dan is asked to put his money where his mouth is. Is he a superhero? Will he fight against this supervillain? Was the violence he visited on so many ordinary people meaningful? Does he have The Mandate of Heaven??

No. Of course not. He's a middle aged man dressed like a god damned owl. This is you, Frank Miller. This is you, Robert Heinlein. This is you, guy who drives an F-350 to the shooting range and imagines you'll be in a Die Hard-style situation someday. When faced with the ability to make a statement, to do violence against someone on even footing, the fascists are revealed to be impotent man-children playing dress-up. This is the crux of the pirate comic. In the end, he only hurts those he was ostensibly doing this for.

But none of that matters, because they got to indulge in the power fantasy while the book lasted. I guess in summary, fascism is impossible to parody because the fascists no longer have the conscience to see violence as anything other than a Glorious Struggle for Manhood³. And Watchmen missed its mark because anyone with enough media literacy to understand its position wasn't reading Frank Miller's Dark Knight books anyway.

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1. the movie. The novel shows a vision of a fascist future that sucks and goes "isn't this so much better?" Which I think further illustrates my point.

2. or at least have a good time laughing at them.

3. We as leftists need to be aware of the reality of violence and examine our own motives in advocating for it.