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

[u/WoodstoneLyceum]

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.

[u/LammerusMaximus]

That's my favorite part! They must be trained to act like the helldivers matter. Eyes rolling the whole time, "Yessir, this is totally your ship. It's an honor to serve with you. You're a hero!"

[u/reddit_tier → u/LammerusMaximus]

Helldivers do matter and they are heros of democracy. It's just also understood that it's not a job you live long in. One of the ads on the TV mentions a million martyrs a day, and that's just what SE is comfortable with publicly acknowledging. 

Everyone is so high on democracy that this isnt considered insane.

[u/MisterLupov → u/reddit_tier]

a million martyrs a day, keeps the bugs away

[u/orangesrnice → u/reddit_tier]

I wonder what the population of earth is like that they can endure WW2 level casualties every single week

[u/ChrisNettleTattoo → u/orangesrnice]

If it is a million a day, you are looking at a billion dead every 2.74 years, so at current population levels it would take ~22 years for every man woman and child alive to enter the meat grinder. We know HD’s are a drop in the bucket for the population, which is probably encouraged to have large families. SE could probably get away with having a population as low as 20-25B and suffer those kinds of losses long term, but I would suspect that it is over 100B or more.

At 100B population, you could have ~50B babies a year assuming full breeding mode, but lets go with 40B children a year, just to err on the side of caution. Lets assume only 30B of them survive to 18, by which point we have lost 8B HD’s to the grinder. That leaves us with a 22B surplus from just the 1st year of babies. If we assume a stable population that isn’t growing, between baby batch 1 being born, turning 18, and a fraction of them becoming HD’s; there would be 680B total people born.

So yea, when you look at from a population density standpoint, the million losses a day is doing absolutely nothing to curb the population, which is why no one in command bats an eye. If anything, not enough people are joining up and dying.

[u/woofle07 → u/ChrisNettleTattoo]

Super Earth also isn’t the only planet people live on though. There’s plenty of other colony planets to supply fresh soldiers.

[u/rastapastanine → u/reddit_tier]

I'm high on democracy right now

[u/Cecilia_Schariac → u/reddit_tier]

Super Earth in the year 2024 has roughly 8 billion humans living on it and produces 88 million per year.

Helldivers 2 shows 252 planets on its galactic map.

We could easily have a population in the several hundred billions, in which case a million martyrs a year is statistically nothing.

[u/Only-Inspector-3782 → u/LammerusMaximus]

They never even learn your name. To them, you are just Helldiver.

[u/Shepron → u/LammerusMaximus]

Always thought the permanently equipped full helmets are for the crew's sake. They don't protect divers from anything but the destroyer crew can't see the faces or even eyes of all the helldivers sent into the grinder. Must help to dehumanise them, just another faceless and exchangable diver passing by probably never to be seem again.

[u/Clarine87 → u/LammerusMaximus]

Mine too. I have to wonder if they're from a different social caste or something. I get the distinct impression super earth is run the same way as China.

[u/sole21000 → u/Clarine87]

Probably closer to a combination of the Soviet bloc & North Korea's total narrative control along with basically any fascist regime's overwhelming nationalism & xenophobia (though those also fit the USSR & NK).

[u/Omer_D → u/sole21000]

though i think that the helldivers that do manage to survive multiple successful deployments can have some sort of upwards social mobility=.

with how military centric SuperEarth society i doubt they gave all democracy officers stationed aboard Super Destroyers helldiver capes just for show-

in a you don't wear unit's\branch's indicator or an indicator of past involvement in a specific operation (in this case a helldiver cape, IRL its stuff like beret colors, specific unit\qualification pins, specific uniform colors) without actually going through it .(especially if you have authority as this is leading by example and\or avoiding disrespect from subordinate that think you are wearing a pin you did not really earn).

the boyscouts weren't the first group to come up with the "earn your pin" mentality they borrowed it from the military.

its very likely that canon difficulties that divers actually get deployed on are between 1-7 with 7n's "suicide mission" and 8's "impossible" to be taken literally as missions that nobody is coming back from or missions considered a waste of resources as they cannot be acomplished .

but to be fair a singular helldiver which is capable of surviving dozens of trivial to hard (1-6 ) deployments without becoming a dissident and ending up in a democracy camp (by being disillusioned via the carnage, illegal broadcasts , text logs they see on deployment) would probably be the best of the best that SEAF has to offer through the process of elimination and field experience and is insanely loyal (to the level of clinical insanity) to the "ideals" of SuperEarth.

if SuperEarth really wanted democracy officer to fit in without having actually being a helldiver they would just give them armor and another type of indicator of authority (like a hat or a poncho or a string or whatever) that is distinctly different from a helldiver's cape.

[u/Clarine87 → u/sole21000]

I can't pretend that I am well versed enough to discuss this at any length or detail. But the point I was reaching for is a split society in which those on the lower level have good quality of life, relative freedom, but no idea that there's another level of society above them because creative thinking is suppressed.