system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The Humans are the good guys in Starship Troopers

I know the symbolism and what it is supposed to mean but it just doesn't seem to add up symbolically. It doesn't seem to make a good case for what it intends to satirize and instead seems to further (unintentionally) glorify it.

I find it odd that the bugs are often cited as good, or victims. They have actively conquered countless other sections of space and spread through violence and spore like travel to other planets before even coming in contact with humans. They have a likely as unjust society if not worse than the human society as they subscribe a caste system and bugs likely don't even get a chance to dissent or live a certain way as they are trapped in a hive mind. They attacked first. These are creatures incapable of complex thought which are led by a drive for violence and complete xenophobia to the point of exterminating any other complex life, especially that perceived as lesser.

Meanwhile the humans had generally respected and given the bugs space but would eventually find them to be too large a threat to just leave to claim more human lives needlessly. (Minus the fact that the fighting of these born and raised apex predator bugs costs manpower and casualties.)

The humans seem to be justified, it would seem and not like the satirical joke/parody the creator tried to make them out as and instead inadvertently argues for the thing it was arguing against.
gpt
The movie is a very straightforward critique of American fascism, and the bugs are presented as basically neutral.

The meteor "attack" on Buenos Aires was only **blamed** on the bugs, never actually attributed to them. It's implied in the movie that it's a Reichstag Fire moment, where the government allowed/caused it because they needed popular support for attacking the bugs.

The only evidence that the bugs have "conquered" the rest of the planet is from the fascist Earth government. Just replace the word "bug" with "jew" and pretend it's Nazi propaganda. The more accurate reading is that the government is lying about the bugs "conquering' anything, and that their presence across the galaxy isn't a militaristic threat. You have no idea what their society is like - and even if it were a caste-based system, that isn't justification for genocide.

The final moment of the movie is probably the strongest evidence that the humans are the bad guys. For the whole movie, you've been told that bugs are insensate murdering machines. One person in the movie is even offended at the idea that bugs can think. But in the final moments of the movie, Neil Patrick Harris learns that the captured queen bug is "afraid."

At that moment, you're invited to think about the invasion from the bug's point of view, and you realize that - to this bug - she was just chilling in her home, and then these invaders showed up, killed off hundreds of her family, and now they're surrounding her. The humans are exactly what they think the bugs are.

And instead of this being an enormous moral reckoning for the troops - who were supposed to believe that bugs are just murdering machines, incapable of fear - they all cheer. Cuz they're happy it's afraid. They don't even realize that they're the bad guys. It's a joke.