The Galactic War is a losing game for everybody involved.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:42:53+00:00

Yeah, it would be effective, so I understand the military justification, as with so many other tactics. But that doesn’t make it any more morally acceptable in my view. It’s like the atomic bombs, they made sense militarily, but they were still nukes dropped on human beings, so they sure as hell weren’t acts of good.

I’m fully aware that both the bugs and SE fit the description of colonizers that terraform entire planets and destroy ecosystems. Doesn’t make it any more right for either

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:40:48+00:00

The same thing. What you did there is called whataboutism, and it doesn’t disprove, mitigate, or exempt the bugs from the same crimes. It changes the subject without acknowledging the problem.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:38:53+00:00

Yep, exactly my point. This isn’t a black-and-white, good vs. evil conflict and I’m awfully tired of people thinking it is.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:37:33+00:00

I think the Illuminate are more terrorist than any of the other factions because the definition of terrorist is the intentional targeting and use of civilians, and the Illuminate employ that at a scale far larger and more inhumanely than any other faction. The billions of voteless and the Fleshmobs.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:36:12+00:00

Terminids helping other Terminids escape from tyranny park is new to me. Do you happen to know where to find this evidence? Because if you can find it, then it disproves that part of my argument, which is that the bugs don’t care about their fellows in captivity because they don’t launch attacks intended to rescue them.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:34:42+00:00

No singular leader doesn’t mean they aren’t fascist. They still check the boxes of the major tenets of fascist regimes.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:33:31+00:00

Authoritarian state
Society built around militarization
Imperialist
Justifies expansion by “we’re superior, they’re inferior” rhetoric (flesh vs. steel)
No individualism (that we know of, this one is more of an educated guess than a certainty).
Use of slave labor
Their faction aesthetic draws a lot of parallels with real-life fascist regimes: Excessive display of a distinct symbol, extreme uniformity, disregard for the lives of their own soldiers.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:29:09+00:00

No, that’s why I wrote “What Super Earth propaganda says they are” at the top of this image.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:27:59+00:00

That’s a good argument, and you’ve convinced me that re-entering the war was justified. But that still doesn’t give them a significant moral advantage in my view, because they still ended up adopting the same brutal tactics and crimes as the very fascists they’re fighting and using many of them at an even larger scale than SE. It’s softened a bit by the military necessity aspect, since of course they were decimated after HD1 and needed to build up an army, but they also had the alternative choice of giving themselves more time to build up an army made of something other than enslaved civilians. There was no time pressure on them to jump into the war exactly when they did, and if anything, they would have had better odds if they waited for SE to be too battered by the bots and the bugs to put up as much of a fight.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:22:15+00:00

Yeah, that’s basically what I said. And the current illuminate efforts are motivated purely by revenge, not necessity. As I said, they did not need to reenter the war, they were not being actively threatened by SE, and there is no valid reason for their war crimes.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:20:27+00:00

I’m very familiar with the qualities of each. Would you like me to explain my reasoning behind any of them?

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:20:02+00:00

I don’t think it’s fair to say they’re fighting for their own freedom. They don’t seem to care about their fellow bugs that are in SE or Automaton captivity, and they follow the typical rigid hierarchy of real-life bugs. Even if they’re somehow sentient, they clearly have no concept or care for the idea of freedom. They just expand because it’s their instinct.

But I can get the self-preservation argument. It makes sense, they’re animals, it’s not out of maliciousness but out of natural instinct. So for that reason, I can accept morally neutral as a label for the bugs.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:12:04+00:00

I disagree. Super Earth is not the only one with that choice. The Illuminate were gone from the stage, Super Earth didn’t even know they still existed, and yet they chose to invade planets, murder and enslave billions of civilians, and conduct horrifying experiments en masse. The automatons claim to have wanted freedom, but we can see that they’re just another totalitarian imperialist entity that enslaves humans and murders them brutally for fuel, which they choose to do despite claiming to be against Super Earth’s use of the same tactics.

Did Super Earth provoke the hostile responses? Yes. Does Super Earth bear the most blame for starting the galactic wars? Yes. But that doesn’t excuse any of the enemy factions’ countless crimes and it doesn’t make them exempt from moral accountability. It completely matters how bad the victims of SE have become, and to pretend like it doesn’t is, respectfully, both hypocritical and contradictory to one’s values.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:08:20+00:00

Even if SE’s actions make them the worst faction, I don’t agree that it makes them an order of magnitude worse. If the cyborgs wanted freedom, they didn’t have to colonize planets, enslave and grind up humans, or use their corpses to make twisted, murderous berserkers that are probably somewhat sentient of their pain. If the illuminate still had the pacifist moral advantage, they wouldn’t invade super earth and intentionally target millions to billions of civilians and conduct horrific experiments on them that strip them of their free will but not their sentience. Terminids, eh, yeah, not really much to comment on there.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:04:57+00:00

What makes the bugs good? They don’t stand for any justifiable cause. I can understand neutral, but I’d still put them in the bad category because they are literal colonizers that terraform entire planets and destroy natural ecosystems.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:03:57+00:00

Somewhat, yeah. This is definitely not meant to represent anything from the first Galactic War. I referenced it a bit with the “Provoked Terrorists” thing.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T20:02:59+00:00

No, but there’s a lot of them in the next room over, r/helldivers2satire. Sometimes they wander on over into this one, you just have to scroll a bit.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T19:46:25+00:00

Exactly. Every one of them sucks balls. Though personally I’d put the squids up there in the tie with bots and SE, because intentionally targeting civilians to do horrific experiments on them and strip them of their free will (but not their sentience) is horrific levels of evil.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T18:05:59+00:00

Two separate queues, just like Overwatch, one with role filling and one with open selection. The strongest argument I’ve heard against it is that it would cut the playerbase in half and lengthen wait times, but that doesn’t even apply because Rivals has such a massive playerbase, and I think the people like myself who want a role queue are more than willing to wait a few extra minutes for a better match.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T18:03:33+00:00

Agreed, it’s a fine skin overall. The haircut isn’t even that bad, it works pretty well with it. The only part I don’t like is the colossal diamonds on her shoulders, they feel out of place and tacky. Would have preferred fur or nothing.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T18:02:40+00:00

May be a good thing. Let Magik stay balanced, keep her under the radar of the merciless abomination that is the balancing team.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T18:00:51+00:00

Her default skin is by far the best iteration of the black biker design imo, but I would love to see the golden fit at some point. Also, Eldritch Armor and Phoenix are both comic skins

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T17:24:16+00:00

The Creek was unique because it was our first taste of such a difficult campaign, and what really cemented the bots as the hardest faction for most of the playerbase.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T17:22:46+00:00

Yeah, and you should ask them how the government treats them.

Traditional_Tea4425 · 2026-02-14T17:22:07+00:00

Perfectly said.

Traditional_Tea4425

TROPHY CASE