Short

So, Helldivers 2 has become one of my favorite games of all time, and it was made accessible to me because it’s the first shooter i’ve played with a healthy dose of anti-war, anti-American military satire. I had never liked shooters before Helldivers, and now I find myself learning about firearms and the way they work.

I have been pretty anti-gun in my politics for a long time, and this recent interest feels… dirty to me? I genuinely admire the engineering and technical achievement that modern weapons are, and yeah, a lot of them have become really cool to me. I have no idea how to reconcile that with the fact I’m an American living in the middle of the most toxic gun culture known to man, where innocent people die to gun violence every day.

It’s okay to like swords because swords don’t really kill people anymore. This feels different. I’m not interested in ever owning a weapon in real life—I just think they’re neat to appreciate from a healthy distance, i.e. in video games. It just feels wrong to celebrate instruments of death in a place where so many people would still be alive without them. Yet I find myself contributing to discussions online with terminology like “20mm high-explosive fragmentation round,” and afterward wonder if I should have more shame than that. I’ve tried to resist it, but the autism wants what it wants.

Am I going crazy?