GlitchyDigiBun

Is that... 5 AC10's in CT? Or a really weird looking RAC20?

That mentality is surely broader than fascism itself. You see it in any hypernationalist state. Rome had "the barbarians." The British Empire had "the savages." Nazi Germany had "the jews." There is always an "other" when the state needs it. Unless you're painting a broader form of fascism, perhaps.

Glue-Extractor(tm)

That's what you're hung up on? There's a whole subgenre of sharks with tits.

Maybe publishing houses will never get the memo, but the Helldivers team knew to make a fun game first, and THEN added amazing graphics. If the market prooves they prefer that dev cycle ethos, it will bring change.

Religious makeup

I now explicitly trust this writer and take his word as gospel.

Sci Fi is a flavor of fantasy that favors grounded explainations over magic, yet can't escape it entirely. In order for something to be sci fi, it must have something in it that can be percieved as "magical," even in the "sufficiently advanced technology" sense of the word. Jump/warp tech, laser weapons, space warfare in general, most life support concepts, AGI... All magic as far as we know now. Any sci fi without the roots of fantasy is really just modern fiction.

slaps the thin red recoil line on shoulder

This baby c-oww...

Protection from grit. And because polymers that can resist balistic shock and heat had only very recently been invented by then, and it was "cool" to find a way to make it useful.

Universally incompatible.

That's a smoke screen. Another is the "liberal brainwashing machine" school system scare. What they fear is the statistic that higher educated individuals trend towards populism and progressivism. They see higher education of youths as a threat to their political base, which turns into "spineless parents sending kids to liberul brainwashing camps funded by the gubmnt."