The Lore Of The 'Helldivers' Universe

Video Games

Jun 2

Helldivers 2 is an interesting game, since much of its current lore is derived from content created a decade ago for the first title in the franchise. From this kernel, the growing world of Helldivers is surprisingly rich, and shows us a dystopian future full of conflict of Super Earth’s own making.

With a recent major update bringing Helldivers to Super Earth itself as an enemy to Managed Democracy pushes against Humanity, CultureSlate thought it would be a good time to explore this developing Sony franchise since its world is set to continue expanding both beyond the sequel, and through more storylines in that sequel.

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Time Immemorial, AKA, Before Helldivers 2

The world of Helldivers takes place in an alternative universe where an enormously destructive war was unleashed across Earth. Very little of this conflict is known today, but what is certain is that a world government formed, possibly out of Sweden, and became incredibly authoritarian in character. While it claimed to represent the values of Democracy, it created a society where ideas like Freedom and Liberty became weighted terms, and any trace of questioning the government, called the Federation, was deemed to be treason.

Super Earth also took on an extremely xenophobic character as humanity began to rapidly expand into the stars where they encountered two advanced forms of life, the “Squids” and the “Bugs”. These derogatory names have generally supplanted true names the aliens had for themselves, though we know the Squids were called the Squ’ith, but are also referred to as the Illuminate. Elsewhere, Super Earth’s tyrannical obsession with human perfection probably meant that colonists on a world now called Cyberstan who possessed cybernetics to complete the labor demanded by Super Earth were ostracized, especially as they began to embrace the ideal of socialism.

140 years before the time of Helldivers 2, these three factions entered into simultaneous conflicts with Super Earth. Cyberstan was accused of a horrific terrorist attack on humanity’s homeworld, and was declared an extremist state. The Illuminate, who came to humanity with peaceful intentions and advanced technology, were accused of possessing weapons of planetary destruction which Super Earth could not allow them to possess, and so attacked preemptively. Lastly, the Bugs were deemed to lack intelligence, and the discovery that their bodies could be used as a fuel source saw them killed to extract that resource but to also corral them for further use.

Each of these conflicts was ultimately successful over a 40-year period, though in the process, Super Earth created the future threats players now face in Helldivers 2. They put down Cyberstan’s rebellion, but in doing so almost certainly pushed some Cyborgs into extremism, who then fled the known galaxy to bide their time. They annihilated the Squids, and exiled them from the Milky Way, also seemingly driving these aliens to extremism and a horrified focus on body and mind-altering technology while their own advanced technology largely became the property of Super Earth. Lastly, the Bugs were “domesticated” and treated as an industrial resource, with vast facilities harvesting billions of them for E-710 aka, oil, for decades after the conflict finished. This is despite the fact that the Bugs were intelligent entities with a hive mind and leadership.

The Modern Era, AKA, Helldivers 2

Super Earth intensively rewrote its history following the end of the First Galactic War. They claimed the Illuminate were rendered extinct, that the Bugs were merely animals, and that the Cyborgs and their infernal, Undemocratic socialism had been defeated, and they were peacefully put to work in the mines on their homeworld. Managed Democracy chugged along for decades, until roughly 100 years after the end of theWar, when some of the Bugs began to act strangely.

Altered by the scientists of Super Earth, the new species called the Terminids suddenly began to escape the E-710 farms. Within an incredibly short span of time, Terminid colonies were emerging across the galactic northeast, forcing planets to evacuate as Super Earth sent the Super Earth Armed Forces, or SEAF, to respond, followed by the elite soldiers known as Helldivers.

But then, in the galactic west and northwest, a new threat known as the Automatons emerged. Seemingly entirely mechanical beings, yet bearing symbolism and broadcasting slogans closely mirroring those of the Cyborgs, the out-of-universe fanbase has concluded that the Automatons are either machines built by Cyborgs to help get their revenge on Super Earth, or are machine beings whose one organic part is their brain, and are a natural though extreme conclusion of the Cyborg’s philosophy. In either case, both external forces rapidly advanced across the galaxy, with devastating victories and losses over the months of the new Second Galactic War.

A turning point came when the Terminids created a supercolony on the planet Meridia. Using old Illuminate technology, a vote from the Helldivers confirmed the destruction of Meridia and the creation of a singularity through an intense saturation of Dark Matter into the planet. Elsewhere, a strange mist that deteriorated most materials called the Gloom spread across Terminid space, obscuring the heart of their operations from view. It would later be revealed to be causing rapid and intense mutations in the Terminids, creating strains that would prove both incredibly aggressive and resilient, to external threats. As for the Automatons, they conquered Cyberstan and later developed special Brigades, armed forces which focused on technology such as jetpacks, or most recently, incendiary technologies.

Super Earth had not been idle throughout all of this. In addition to a range of new technologies being developed to counteract their foes, they also constructed the truly enormous DSS (Democracy Space Station) to help support Super Earth operations over planets chosen by the Helldivers (aka, the player-base).

Most recently, however, has been the emergence and evolving narrative of the Illuminate. Returned after a century of exile, they are few in number, but supplement this weakness in manpower with machinery, and also horrific biological experimentation. They have abducted billions of humans, and created creatures such as the Voteless and Fleshmob from them, mindless ravenous beings which, based on fan analysis, might ultimately hold some small shred of humanity deep within. The Illuminate’s attack came as part of a vanguard force whose primary objective was guerilla in nature, raided human worlds, abducting those billions of humans, and conducting secret operations.

After weeks of accumulating and funneling Dark Energy back to the Meridian Singularity, a process which began to move the anomaly, Super Earth managed to stop the effort. However, it was too late. The Great Host, the main fleet of the Illuminate, invaded through what is now absolutely certain to be a wormhole, and moved on Super Earth. Their ongoing attack has been relentless, and billions of humans on the worlds near Super Earth and on Super Earth itself have been taken. Even if or when the Illuminate are pushed off of Humanity’s homeworld, who knows what their next goal will be?

Closing Thoughts

While the world of Helldivers is ultimately satirical in nature, closely in the vein of the most recent Starship Troopers adaptation, it bears emphasizing: this is a disaster of the Federation government’s own making. They are an authoritarian, xenophobic state which has repeatedly chosen to misinform its own citizens. Broadcasts and information heard and found in-game have catalogued a clear lack of transparency and a desire to obscure the truth even when it proves detrimental. These leaders commanded a violent assault against others and colonized the galaxy. Now, the forces they brutalized are back for their revenge. It is unfortunate that so much of that anger has fallen onto the average citizens of humanity, but the extreme ends these hostile forces have gone to is an understandable response after they were crushed and brushed aside by an insidious and brutal state that treated them as mere obstructions to progress instead of fellow sentient beings.

So Helldivers, when you dive in against any of these three forces, remember that you’re not fighting for the top military brass, you’re not fighting for the various Ministries that manage the Federation, you’re fighting for the innocent civilians who have been indoctrinated into not understanding the horrors their state has perpetuated against others. You are fighting to defend the lives of those who do not, who cannot, understand what is happening, because their history has been aggressively rewritten and their ability to reasonably understand the world has been thoroughly poisoned by the ideals of “Managed Democracy”.

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