Premium Episode 238: We Love The Starship Troopers Bugs (Sample)
This week, we drop Liv Agar on planet P to wade through the thousands of bug carcasses that have been discussing Starship Troopers as of late. Meanwhile, Brain Bug Travis has been captured and forced out of his comfy cave amidst the rallying cries of one million Julians. Will Liv be able to make it all the way through a pro-fascism science fiction novel from 1959? Will Jake be able to critically discuss the politics surrounding “Helldivers 2”, a video game inspired by a satirical movie adapted from the aforementioned pro-fascism novel? Will he instead include gameplay footage despite there being no video component of this podcast? Join us, on one express elevator to Hell.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to our archive of premium episodes and ongoing series like PERVERTS, Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
https://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 238 of the QAA podcast, the We Love the Starship Troopers Bugs episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, Liv Aker, and Travis View.
As usual, I think that my co-hosts are not going far enough.
We don't just love the bugs, we are the bugs.
And today we're rubbing our little mandibules and we're chittering at each other in a way that communicates fear, excitement, and pride at the finest mind of our podcast being applied to the finest topic of the day.
Whether a Verhoeven movie is actually just totally fine and good and not a parody because Verhoeven loves fascism.
Which, you know, this is really what we should be doing with our time in this era, I think.
Is discussing our misunderstanding of every possible thing.
And relitigating it online because we've had a new enjoyment product come out.
A new pacifier came out.
And as we shoved it into our mouths and got the nice and immediate soothing effect from the fentanyl that's in it, we were also told, but it's also a parody.
And then our brains had to go into like this absolute scatter mode of just...
But wait, so I'm enjoying it, but it's also a parody, it's pacifying me, and it's making me a better subject of capitalism, but also there's a hidden message inside of it that resists capitalism and fascism.
My head is going to explode.
You know what's wrong with this?
Probably e-girls, the left, the breasts of Sidney Sweeney, and other topics that are very important for politics.
And the concept of media literacy as well.
That's another big one.
I don't know what that means, but it sounds smart.
Throwing to my co-host who has a brain, Liv Agar, is me, Julian, who's back and is a bug and has a brain of a bug.
I'm sitting on my couch.
I'm going, hey, I'm having a pretty good time.
And then I'm going, hey, should I really be enjoying this?
Yeah.
I'm jacking off, but why does the bug make me cum?
The bug is supposed to teach me, and yet I'm horny too.
I feel good and bad all at once.
In case you haven't realized, listeners, we have replaced Julian with an AI.
We're still working on some of the bugs, so he will kind of short-circuit every now and again.
Kill!
No, no, no, but it's mostly the Julian that you love, know, and remember, so don't ask any questions about the AI.
Don't ask how much of the Patreon money we spent on it and just enjoy, just enjoy this going forward.
Don't sit on the couch going, should I be enjoying this?
Alright Liv, take us away.
I think when we put it into the Julian bot to like solve all the bugs, he misunderstood it.
Kill Liv!
Kill Travis!
Kill Jake!
Do death threats!
We generally think of satirical works as attempting to make the object of mockery look foolish.
To make them feel as if everyone is laughing at them because of how dumb, stupid, ugly, etc.
they are.
But what happens when they don't react this way?
When instead of saying how uncharitable or inaccurate the work depicting them is, they instead embrace it.
As if it's not a work of satire, but instead a compliment.
Does this discredit the work of satire?
As not being mean enough?
Or does it show how prescient it is?
That the object of mockery lacks self-awareness to such an extent that they can't even conceive of how obviously stupid, dumb, ugly, etc.
they are.
I'm actually now thinking that maybe in doing this for Hovind, like in taking a text that was fucked up and then adapting it into a satire and a parody, that maybe he like did what the producers was about.
Like he was like, well it's springtime for Hitler.
This is a problem that one film released in the 90s, that has since become a cult classic, often runs into.
Starship Troopers is an action comedy film that follows a group of starry-eyed, patriotic high school graduates who live in a one-world government ran by the military, as they join up for active service to fight against a brutal race of alien bugs that has attacked humanity and wiped out the entire city of Buenos Aires, their home.
Oh, yes.
That's such a good little touch, making it Buenos Aires.
It's like if Third Worldism succeeded, but fascism also succeeded, and then Buenos Aires is our new world capital.
Perfect.
I never understood that as a kid, because I was fairly young when the movie came out.
I, of course, loved it.
Obsessed with it, actually.
Made it a little bit of a part of my personality, not because it was tied to, you know, Any kind of political ideology.
I just like loved the killing of the bugs.
Of course I had to read the book first because it was a rated R movie and so the rule in my house was if I wanted to see a movie that was R rated or you know a little bit inappropriate that I had to read the book if there was a book and sometimes I even read the novelization if the movie came first.
Wait, this could not be more perfect.
So your Jewish mom made you read the fascist book so you could watch the movie that you didn't understand was a parody of the original text.
This is like if producers came out and you were like, I want to go see, I want to go see Springtime for Hitler.
And your mom made you read Mein Kampf.
I think it was my dad.
I think it might've been my dad.
I can't imagine my mom pushing Starship Troopers as a book.
I think that's a Jake's dad recommendation and requirement.
Your dad came up with that rule with the book?
The book rule?
Oh, it was... I think it was a committee selected.
Okay.
Well, I was gonna give props... But I think he probably would have suggested Heinlein and Starship Troopers overall.
I am quieted.
But I was always... I never understood.
I was like, if they're in Buenos Aires and they're white, I don't understand this.
Oh, that's so good, man.
This is awesome.
That's awesome.
Well I was like, what are all these Americans doing?
A child's mind doesn't understand geopolitics and racism and that sort of thing.
No, when I was really young and watched Starship Troopers, I just was like, this is a bad movie.
I just thought, this is bad.
Oh, I liked it.
I don't like the vibe of this.
Something's wrong about this movie.
But I was like two layers away from understanding it.
That it's actually good.
I was like ten layers probably.
Because I was a huge Aliens fan, and so to me this was more of that.
It was big guns, it was cool armor, it was alien planets, you know, fighting these creatures that were very dangerous, that could turn you into soup very quickly.
What did you think of their clothes?
What, the Starship Troopers's?
Yeah.
I knew that they were kind of Nazi-esque.
I mean, I wasn't that dumb.
I mean, I knew that there was, there were similarities.
Yeah.
But I really liked Denise Richards too, so.
Oh my God.
Yeah, no, the shower scene is, you know.
Well, that's, no, that's Diz.
That's the other, that's the other character played by, I can't remember the actor's name.
You don't see multiple people nude?
It's multiple people nude, but not Denise Richard.
I don't think you see Denise Richard's nude in that.
I mean, you're maybe thinking of wild things.
Welcome to Mr. Skin, the podcast.
We are breaking down the tit scenes.
Has anybody done a Mr. Skin podcast yet?
That'd be such a good podcast.
Like, oh, dude, look at her tits.
I see this, but it's great.
We're all looking at it.
We're all horny.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like less people would misunderstand the movie if the bugs had tits.
If there was a shower scene for the bugs.
On the surface, this film may sound just like your average sci-fi action movie, where we're meant to root for the heroes against the evil, genocidal aliens, etc, etc.
And this is how a majority, according to the wiki page in the film, of reviewers received it when it was initially released.
As an example of this reaction, here's a review made for the Washington Post in 1997, when the film came out, titled, Goose Stepping at the Movies, Starship Troopers and the Nazi Aesthetic, posted by film critic Stephen Hunter.
Silly me!
I thought the Nazis lost the war!
But here's the exceedingly strange new movie, Starship Troopers, commandeering 22 million American dollars in its first weekend and certain to make gobs more, while secretly whispering, Sieg Heil!
The movie recounts the adventures of a platoon of mobile infantry sometime in the next century, as it does battle with a race of arachnid nasties on the far planet of Klendathu.
It's an epic of bug blasting, a movie whose script appears to have been the instructions on a can of Raid, and in some profoundly disturbing way, it's Nazi to the core.
Oh my god!
I love getting almost there, having the brain to get almost there, but then just failing to cross the finish line.
I love that.
I don't mean to suggest that it's political propaganda in the literal sense, or that it advocates Nazism, but it's a film that presupposes it.
It's spiritually Nazi.
Psychologically Nazi.
It comes directly out of the Nazi imagination, and is set in the Nazi universe.
This reminds me of an unnamed Twitter user who called Robocop Copaganda.
It hails from what would be year 64 of the Thousand-Year Reich, a sanitized utopia of heroic, sexless young folk, grandly aware of their role as defenders of the known reality, and descended from the Nazi pioneer generation of the 1930s and 40s.
Of course, the great Fuhrer has gone to Valhalla, but it's possible that in a home in some mountain fastness, some shiny facsimile of holy Berchtesgaden, the 97-year-old Heinrich Himmler still daughters about, drooling and filling his Depends with waste.
Jesus, why are you writing... Why are you writing fucking... Why are you writing fucking... That's why he gets paid the big bucks.
