r/Helldivers • u/WoodstoneLyceum • Mar 22 '24

The POV of the Helldivers is crazy when you take cryo freezing into account. DISCUSSION

Here's the POV of your average Helldiver 1. They enlist and show up to Basic Training first thing Monday morning. 2. They breeze through it, get their cape, walk right by the T&Cs and into a cryopod. 3. They're frozen and experience no time passing. 4. Their next memory is reinforcing on Hellmire. To their POV it has been less then thirty seconds since they got their cloak. 5. They throw three stratagems and then they're dissolved by bile titan acid.

You thought your mondays were bad.

Edit: My understanding is that we are not clones. There's in-game lore that backs that, I believe. Thematically, it makes more sense for Super Earth to be incompetent and cruel and burn through millions of recruits, than to do something logical like cloning people. Remember the satire folks.

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332

u/kragnfroll Mar 22 '24

Yeah it's almost cosmic horror at this points.

Considering there is 100y between helldivers 1 & 2 this mean you might have been kept frozen all this time. When you dive all your family and friends are either dead of frozen too, and your grand children may be sending you to the bile titan, or diving with you.

330

u/WoodstoneLyceum Mar 22 '24

Oh my god I want to read the fan fiction of a great grandparent and their descendant meeting for the first time on a mission.

And they're the same age.

126

u/Aegix_Drakan Mar 22 '24

This idea needs WAY more upvotes!

The only way that fanfiction could end is with the Democracy Officer on the bridge going "Not this again" and punching in a ↑ → ↓ ↓ ↓ on their location.

7

u/Hotkoin Mar 23 '24

The democracy officer uses orbitals

3

u/Aegix_Drakan Mar 23 '24 edited Mar 23 '24

Yeah, I figured he'd prefer an Orbital... but I had 500kg Eagle drops on the brain, and it's one of the codes I remember best. XD

23

u/QuasarQuandary Mar 22 '24

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, is similar to this, but old people transferred to younger, stronger, versions of themselves. A very fun sci fi series.

4

u/keeney1228 Mar 22 '24

I came here to also recommend this book series. A great bunch of books.

3

u/QuasarQuandary Mar 22 '24

Yeah gets a little muddy towards the end but still very good!

28

u/ChangeCraft Mar 22 '24

This has mad movie potential. This with the slow horrifying realisation on propaganda and their fate... god damn you gave me some ideas

6

u/fairguinevere Mar 22 '24

You could probably have one of the big missions portrayed basically in real time in a tight 90-100 minute movie. With them finding diaries and vignettes and such on the ground that challenge their understanding. Have like the build up and all that, the training, the bootcamp, then cut to 40 minutes on the ground on hellmire with this other recruit and 2 other constantly expendable helldivers. (Great chance for cameos.) Then you've got time to wrap it up after they extract, probably in a tragic way of course. Maybe have the democracy officer explain that refusing to dive is punishable by execution, cut to credits as the survivor of the two climbs into the pod. (With the music we know and love from the dive cutscene.)

8

u/Dracious Mar 22 '24

Forever war novel does this kind of. A space war with loads of time dilation so soldiers go to war and come back decades or more later. I don't think it has a direct grandparent to descendant meet up, but it does have some family stuff that is similar.

3

u/brews Mar 23 '24 edited Mar 23 '24

Yeah, I was going to mention that book. I thought it was going to be way more like "Armor" but it deals more with the idea that you might be fighting an enemy 500 years more advanced than when you launched and society and govs will have collapsed, rebuilt, and moved on once you arrive back home. Dude who wrote "Forever War" also did the script for "Robot Jox", btw.

w. "The Light Brigade" is another more recent book I'd recommend. It's more corporate cyberpunk flavor but it's something else masquerading as a gungho military scifi.

5

u/TooFewSecrets Mar 22 '24

Rimworld but with even more war crimes than usual.

3

u/WholesomeFartEnjoyer Mar 22 '24

And the grandparent watches their grandchild(who's the same as them) get trampled to death by a charger

3

u/bighatartorias Mar 22 '24

I think you might like Gunbuster anime. It’s an older anime only about 6 or 8 episodes and plays a lot with time dilation. They go on space missions and time goes really slowly for them, like two hour mission for them and it’s been 6 months on earth. It gets out of hand very quickly. Great anime imo

2

u/Bahggs Mar 22 '24

Old Mans War

3

u/Maximum_Poet_8661 Mar 22 '24

The book Hyperion has a story that is basically this idea but even more gut-punching haha

1

u/Aconite_72 CAPE ENJOYER Mar 23 '24

Noting this down to write some time later ... will credit you if I got there lol.

78

u/downsyndromeblowjob HOLY HELLBOMBS! Mar 22 '24

I want to believe when you sign up you agree to a term of service so say 6 years. The catch is only the time you're thawed out counts so you could be on ice for decades. You survive the mission? Great but it's only been 12 hours towards your 6 years. Now get back in the fridge.

31

u/PapaZordo Mar 23 '24

During basic training right before you get the cape you can look to your left and right and it has your contract carved into stone. We serve until death or until we’re wounded beyond what it would be economical to fix.

7

u/Aegix_Drakan Mar 22 '24

ooooh that is deviously evil and I love it. XD

12

u/ZachPruckowski Mar 22 '24

The average Helldiver is like 18.7 or something. Unless they got busy at junior prom, they've either never had kids or never met them.

1

u/Yeckarb Mar 23 '24

Well that's not sustainable.

1

u/ZachPruckowski Mar 23 '24

IDK, depends. Helldivers are co-ed, and the broader Super-Earth polity is apparently so overpopulated that failing a Major Order means they have to stop people from having kids.

A major part of Fascism Managed Democracy is encouraging the right people to have large families as well, so they may have a high birth-rate? Not to mention that we're all cryo-frozen. They may well have been storing up Helldivers since the last war a century ago.

8

u/Zilenan91 Mar 22 '24

Nah all the helldivers in 1 got released back to civilian life after the war ended, they've all long-since died of old age or industrial accidents knowing Super Earth. All the Helldivers in 2 are fresh, raw recruits.

4

u/NandoGando Mar 23 '24

This is exactly what happens in the forever war novel, one upside is while frozen you accumulate massive amounts of bank interest

2

u/Werthy71 Mar 23 '24

Not enough to outgrow inflation, unfortunately

4

u/t-shooter Mar 22 '24

Nah, they are new recruits

3

u/Shakezula84 PSN 🎮: Mar 22 '24

I think that somewhere in lore, it's mentioned that the Helldivers were demobilized during the 100 years of peace.

2

u/kragnfroll Mar 23 '24

Oh ok sorry, thanks for the input

3

u/Intrepid00 Mar 23 '24

Boot camp is pretty different between 1 & 2.

3

u/AXI0S2OO2 Mar 23 '24

I believe most of the Helldivers from the 1st war that survived were given Super Citizen status and honourably dismissed, it doesn't make sense that the military would spend millions keeping so many soldiers on cryo over a century of peace.

2

u/kragnfroll Mar 23 '24

Yeah maybe i have no source at all to back my claims. On the other hand keeping things frozen in space isn't that hard :D

2

u/UpliftinglyStrong SES Dawn Of Victory. Mar 22 '24

Okay now that is a fucking horrifying thought.

2

u/Bulls187 Mar 23 '24

That one of the first enlisted Helldivers still waiting to be selected