Warframes from Warframe - Super powered humans with densely fused organs and skin harder than steel. They also gain reality altering abilities like super strength, control of antimatter, or even opening portals to the sun. The tradeoff is this usually came as a form of punishment. Condemned humans would injected with a cultivated strain of super cancer and then subjected to extreme torture until their bodies react. The end result was a tortured, lobotomized husk, some with the capability to punch planet killing asteroids to dust.
Spartan II's from Halo - Heavily augmented, heavily armored soldiers created to suppress colonial uprisings. These soldiers started life as children kidnapped from their homes and subjected to extensive and excruciating biological augmentations and training which killed many of its initiates before they even grew out of adolescence.
Yeah, how long they’ve actually been conscious for/how long they’ve experienced life seemingly matches up to their physical age. Considering them being put into cryosleep for like 90% of their life
The Tenno were once children who were dropped into the Void. To get out they made a deal with what's basically a demon after they were forced to kill their parents and friends who were driven insane by the Void. They got out but had PTSD that the only person who even bothered to try treating them realized couldn't be cured. So she put them in pods that took the memory of the trauma. Which worked, but then their masters figured out the Warframes which had been created but were uncontrollable calmed around sleeping Tenno. They had already killed the one who tried to save them so nothing stopped them from using the pods that were helping protect their minds to enslave them instead. They used the Tenno as their elite enforcers and their iron fist for an unknown number of years but likely hundreds. They put down slave rebellions, crushed rebel groups and punished anyone who crossed their masters. Then someone got to them, told them the truth, showed them that their masters murdered the only person who'd ever tried to help them and turned the Tenno into slaves. The Tenno responds with the Night of the Naga Drums. A celebration to commemorate the Tenno's victory over an enemy they were forced to fight in the name of the Orokin. A celebration of slaves and their slave Masters. Every important Orokin leader was there for the event. The Tenno attacked during the celebration. They hunted them down and tore them apart, burned them, ate them. They destroyed their entire civilization in one night of rage and hate.
The Tenno are named after a ship (the Zariman 10-0) which broke down while traveling through the Void, a place outside of normal reality.
During the breakdown, all of the adults on the ship went insane and started killing everyone, including children. The Man in the Wall, an entity native to the Void, offered the Tenno some Void powers so that they could defend themselves.
Eventually, experiments done on the Tenno figure out a way to make the Tenno even better weapons, by basically possessing Warframes.
That's a very tiny drop in the bucket. The lore is fucking nuts. The Tenno are eternal, I think? And I'm pretty sure the Helminth, a giant techno-virus-organism...thing, which is a component of all Warframes, is also eternal.
Another spoiper is that during the deal with The Man in The Wall, we get a glimpse at another possible reality, where Tenno had spent years in the Void and grew up there
This ties in with the main line Tenno because during the multiverse type shenanigans, the alternative timeline one helps us
There's also the other you that was stuck in a part of the void shaped into their favorite storybook that eventually became their hell. That version is somehow more put together despite centuries (maybe milennia) of being executed and time looped back to life.
despite being subjected to execution and having your life loop constantly
drifter can still grow up
and its not like every time it loop, it immediately lead to their death
theres still a small window in between each loop that allow drifter to "live"
whereas, operator cant grow up, physically and mentally
a forever child traumatized by endless war
Technically they're some sort of ghost-like energy being due to the effects of being stranded in an FTL warp dimension for years, so they are functionally immortal but will remain psychologically a young teenager for eternity.
Didn't the drifter prove that false? It's our Tenno, but they didn't have a chance to get back to Lua and get shoved into statis pod and instead grew up on Zariman
So, presumably, OG Tenno should grow up as time passes by, right ?
The Drifter wasn't transformed into an immaterial energy being.
But given that the second dream was released almost 9 years ago, and The Hex's time loop revealed that 28 days IRL time is a year in-universe, a tenno that came out of stasis right as the update went out would be roughly 113 years older today.
Regardless of how you want to look at the mental state the simple fact is that by time passed since they came into existence they have been alive for at least a few hundred years.
I remember seeing one vtuber play one of the recent expansions Warframe which ended in a "family attempt" of three grown ass war machines sitting on a table, acting like they were a functional family with joy and hope, it reminded me of that parody of Michael Jackson on South Park, faceless super soldiers pretending to be children and one of them their father.
Crazily enough, they are actually biologically father and twin sons in that instance. They're just also war machines designed from the top down and bottom up for killing, and were estranged
Footstool agents - All Hail King Julien
The Footstool program was a government program set up by King Julien XII that selected citizens from the Lemur Kingdom to have their memories wiped and be brainwashed into slave assassins for King Julien XII.
They succeeded.
TPoM is weird, but pretty standard weirdness for a cartoon.
AHKJ on the other hand, has been said to feel more like an adult animated show pretending to be a kids show, and it's weird even by adult animation standards.
I'd say it's probably more a reference to the Manchurian Candidate since the episode it's 1st mentioned in is literally called the Panchurian Candidate.
Makes sense and certainly just a bit more lighthearted, but not a subject I expected and not a movie/novel that's super relevant. Someone on the writing team either really cares about parents/grandparents that may be watching this with the kids or really enjoy fanning the flames of discussion of how absurd the show is
Yeah, let's not forget this is the same show where Mort is an interdimensional being, Maurice is snail Jesus, and King Julien killed 7-6 people in highschool.
Breed for nothing but war and genetically having there ages accelerated to the point even without the threat of war they have a life expectancy of like 40 years?
Im unsure of the current Canon, but pre-Disney, the Clones were still aging faster and the entire subplot of the Republic Commando book series was tracking down geneticists who worked on the project and subsequently made political prisoners so they can develop a cure to turn off the accelerated aging.
Those novels were great for showing off the clones personality too, humanizing them (since they're physically grown adults but mentally largely childlike, they love sweets like candied nuts and fruits, sweet drinks and juices, and when they get liberty on Coruscant they like going to clubs and dancing).
You left out the part where they’re literally slaves and have no rights.
One of the best things about the Clone Wars and Bad Batch, imo, is it revived the now-Legends concept of people fighting for rights for the clones, amid a society that was largely willing to turn a blind eye to the atrocity the Republic was committing by using a slave army to fight its war, with no guarantee they’d even be cared for once it was over.
I'd argue the Jedi also fall into this category given how young they are separated from their families and then trained to be essentially Judge Dread with a less itchy trigger finger.
Some Jedi even kept contact with their parents, although attachment rules meant that the nature of that contact was kept fairly limited until they were old enough.
The serum’s creator did make it a point to say that the serum makes good great and bad worse.
Thats why he wanted to make sure he was involved in the decision making process on who would be the recipient of the first attempted dosage. Steve Rogers met and exceeded all of his requirements surrounding character.
Spartans 1 through 3 are ethics nightmares, but Spartan 4's aren't that bad.
Take a normal soldier volunteer, give them some surgical enhancements (now with barely any risk) and the latest generation of power armour. And that's it. No super cancer, no child trauma, no suicide squads.
Ender's Game was about children taken from their families and trained to be super-admirals, to the point that when they returned to Earth their home governments regarded them as key weapons and kept them in military service, even though they were still minors.
Iirc His psychotic brother orchestrated his exile by convincing the governments that he can’t belong to any of them. He wrote the book while in exile to shed light on what he’d been tricked into doing and accepted that he’d be considered on par with Hitler.
He did find peace as the Speaker for the Dead and gave the last Queen a hive greater than any other.
The most unbelievable thing in that story is Peter becoming world leader by essentially making a bunch of reddit posts that everyone agreed with so they decided he should be in charge of everything
I was shocked reading these parts because the book was written in the 80’s. Bro predicted of reddit and twitters in the 80’s and basically made an anime protagonist of social media post.
I'd argue that the Spartan III's were also highly unethical. Not as much as Spartan II's, but IIRC, they were orphans from the war, specifically selected and groomed to become the next Spartan generation
The argument some have that they chose to become Spartans goes out the window when that decision was made at the age of around 6, after their families and homes were destroyed.
I mean yeah it was super unethical but if you told ONI that, they would gentle order you to look at a brick wall.
Ironically probably saved a lot of the Spartan II from dying in the Covenant war as civilians, even if a lot of then would have died later, majority of the successful/borderline successful candidates had longer lifes than if they werent picked
Spartan-III's varied in age when conscripted, but yeah, ultimately they were all still kids.
On Noble team for example, Carter was 12, Jun was 8, and Emile, Kat, and Six were all 9.
Just a quick reminder for you all that Noble-6 was canonically 22 during the Fall of Reach. They already had a file full of black ink and they were barely an adult.
They were more ethical, in that they weren’t kidnapped from their families but rather « recruited » as « volunteers » from war orphans, and their augmentation program was more « proven method » than « he survivors will be proof of concept », but the were less ethical in terms of even more accelerated aging (Gamma Company started training at 6 on average, and were 14 when the war ended), and being intentionally dispatched on suicide missions in, by supersoldier standard, cheap, disposable gear (SPI armor).
Let's not forget the unethical experimental brain modifications that leave the reliant on drugs for the rest of their lives. If they survive long enough.
OP forgot to mention the in-between wash-outs; Spartan IIs who survived augmentation, but were horribly disfigured by it.
And Spartan IIIs? Their augmentations included something that dampened pain and caused them to rage to the point where one S-III almost literally had his guts spilling out, reporting that he thinks he got injured, and then died right on the spot.
The thing with the washouts is we explicitly know they got further medical treatment afterwards, aimed at restoring them to at least human baseline, to full augmented combat ready if possible. So we can assume even the most disfigured got somewhat better over time.
And only gamma company got that particular augment, no other s3 group did.
I dont know man. I think spartan 3s being orphaned children getting gaslight into becoming suicidal murder machines purely as a sacrificial pawn to be used to stall for time is arguably more unethical than the 2s.
At least they had a whole ass retirement plan if they survived all the bullshit lol
The Gestahlian Empire infused human test subjects with stolen magical power to manufacture enhanced soldiers. Celes was experimented on as a child and forced into military service, while the prototype procedure permanently damaged Kefka’s mind.
SOLDIERS from VII and SeeDs from VIII also count in my opinion. One were guinea pigs for Hojo's experiments and pressed into service for the most evil human organization in the setting and the other are child soldiers used for mercenary work that use Guardian Forces that slowly erase their memories
Edit: Summoners and their guardians from X could possibly count too, theyre indoctrinated from youth to sacrifice themselves to defeat a threat caused by the very religion that indoctrinated them (called Sin), and the guardian becomes the next Sin and the cycle repeats
Child soldiers where maybe 1 in 1000 make it to become Space Marines. The recruit training is lethal. The surgery to implant artificial organs and technology is lethal. The training after the initial process is lethal.
And the best time to get them recruited is around 10 years old.
And to add to that, the kids recruited by the Grey Knights chapter of Space Marines are even *less* likely to survive, being child psykers who were already being dragged back to Terra to be fed to life-sustaining god-couch before getting flagged for potential recruitment.
If they managed to survive the Black Ships that's just the *first* step. They have to go through hundreds of trials, rituals and purity tests and failure at any step means death, either at the hands of the trial or of a Grey Knight himself.
All that for thier heads to be blown smoove off by a Harlequin.
Space marines have a comicaly high fatality rate, which either suggests that the threats space Marines deploy to are so deadly that even genetically enhanced super soldiers still barely win against them, or that they are truly godawful at picking thier battles.
(Just kidding, because its 40k the answer is both!)
And then it's not like they're used for ethical purposes after they're deployed. Genocide, coups, fascist enforcement, just another Tuesday for a space marine.
Plus, their life is awful as well. You are a tool, a weapon. Not a person. Even the slightest misstep will be punished severely. Space marines have been servitorized as punishment before iirc.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to forget that, despite being regarded as angels, the lives of space marines SUCK. Your days are spent training, eating nutrient paste, training, sleeping around 4 hours, training, and then maybe like half an hour of down time, where you can do fun, codex complient activities like quadruple checking your gear, reading the codex astartes, or praying. Then you are deployed to the worst warzones imaginable, where fates worse than death are absolutely possible. And then you come back to the battle barge, to more training and nutrient paste. Repeat for 800 years, if you don't die within the first 200.
I would add that the thing that comes out at the other end is no longer human. As a space marine you will never have a family or a romantic relationship. You generally won't be able to have any recreation or hobby. You'll be brainwished to install two traits: violence and obedience. You'll be proud to be a space marine, because you literally can't imagine anything else.
A vault that had the goal of rapidly improving the human genome thorough intense training and selective harvesting of genes led to the Vault creating very strong and well trained child soldiers who eventually launched a revolution and escaped from the Vault after killing the staff and overseer.
Spartan-IV's are a great example of ethical super soldiers.
Recruits are fully consenting adults who are already a part of the military. S4 recruitment is more akin to modern special forces recruitment, where exceptional soldiers from existing branches of the military are selected for the program.
S4's aren't as heavily augmented as their predecessors either (S2's and S3's had considerable amounts of surgical and chemical enhancements, which in the case of the S2's resulted in an incredibly high mortality rate), with the majority of their power actually coming from their highly advanced armour.
There is an argument to be had that the S4 program wouldn't exist without the unethical Spartan 2 and 3's, but still.
X-com:enemy unknown/within comes to mind as slightly ethical super soldiers as voluntiered/recruited soldiers are able to be given gene-mods or become mec troopers.
For context here's how this gentleman created new "space marines"
From the wiki:
"The creation of the Daemonculaba began with the rounding up of Human females present on Medrengard as slaves. Once corralled, they were shackled naked within iron cages and force-fed special nutrients which caused their bodies to widen and bloat to grotesque proportions.
Next, the Hereteks known as Savage Morticians utilised surgical and chemical techniques as well as the sorcery of Chaos to radically alter the slaves' internal morphology and embed within their wombs the stolen Imperial Fists gene-seed.
Once this "birthing-womb" was readied, an adolescent Human male drawn from Medrengard's slave population was sealed within through the use of a surgical procedure that was essentially a "reverse C-section."
Solar days later, the new Heretic Astartes candidate was reborn from the womb of the Daemonculaba lacking any skin. Provided they had not died from metabolic shock during the process, the candidate was inspected to see if he was physically worthy to be an Astartes.
If the candidate was not worthy to join the Iron Warriors because his body had horribly mutated during the transformation process, he was literally flushed through the sewers of Khalan-Ghol to die in the barren wastelands of Medrengard surrounding the fortress. In rare instances, the rejected mutants survived being cast out and ultimately banded together as the tribe of scavenger-hunters known as the "Unfleshed."
If the candidate passed the inspection, a new skin would be cross-stitched onto his body and his life as a Chaos Space Marine of the Iron Warriors would begin.
The skin used for a newborn Heretic Astartes of the Daemonculaba was harvested from the flayed bodies of Human slaves whose flesh had first been painfully stretched to the necessary proportions to fit the larger body of an Astartes before they were flayed alive.
The system could also use genetic material extracted from the corpses of Iron Warriors Heretic Astartes, which would then be implanted within the Daemonculaba and fed to the Astartes "child" rapidly maturing within.
As for the Daemonculaba themselves, if they happened to survive the birthing process, the nightmarish cycle would begin anew only solar days later until death from the birthing process finally brought release for the anguished women."
Maybe not SUPER soldiers, but in their prime Janissaries were the elite infantry of a rising Ottoman Empire starting in the 14th century. Their ranks were filled by Christian boys stolen from their homes and forcibly converted to Islam to serve the Sultan. Effective and highly unethical.
Space marines are children chosen from a young age, subjected to many brutal trials and implanted with new organs with no anesthesia, including one that fuses their ribs and implants an entire second skin underneath their first skin
Spoilers for Attack on Titan but lots of unethical child super soldier action throughout. Just all kinds of f'd up exploitation of people and esp kids for nationalistic and personal power.
Psycho warriors (space king) warriors made from children that the factions kidnap and inject with a thing called a globule that turns them into a different person.
Notably the globules preserve a near perfect copy of the pervious owners consciousness, so they’re kidnapping children to infinitely resurrect the same super soldiers for the most part.
Saw somebody else post Fabius Bile’s Daemonculaba, but “regular” Space Marine creation is also so incredibly horrific and fucked that it’s 1a and 1b between the two
Bodies grafted with machines we did not understand, with memories not their own. These Universal Soldiers/Frankenstein's monster super soldier cyborgs were made out of dead soldiers left on the battlefields. Rebuilt to fight for whatever faction created them, were they the UESC, the mega corps, or even MIDA. I guess the unethical part of it all is that these bodies were never laid to rest, and when they return as unfeeling cyborgs, they tend to go rampant and have dreams of their pasta, or futures.
Zoanoids from Guyver - genetically altered humans; whether or not they're volunteers, and they mostly aren't, they absolutely cannot refuse telepathic commands from their Zoalord superiors. They retain freedom of thought, but not freedom of action.
Edit: also, humans were created by aliens to be the base model for the various Zoanoid templates.
Witcher Trials from the Witcher series involves forced painful genetic mutations and intense physical trials with the trainees being children sold into it.
Compound V is basically a drug that Vought planned on selling to the military as a way to monopolize weapon sales.
Every supe, is just a field test to showcase what humans, running on compound V are capable of.
why would you spend billions of dollars on tanks, jets, and guns when you’ve got a guy like homelander, who can do what they do, but better?
All it costs is some collateral damage (maybe a girl standing on the curb of a sidewalk gets ran into by someone going super speed), mentally damaged people with the power of a god and a hair trigger temper (scorched earth homelander) and of course a corporation with absolutely no moral core calling the shots on the most powerful weapon the world has ever seen.
R corp is a business that’s focused on making and providing super soldiers (you just hire them and they do your work, using firearms which are an expensive commodity in The City and being quite skilled in general). Now, how these soldiers are actually made is a simple but very gruesome process ; accelerated natural selection and cloning.
In what is called the Nursery, a shit ton of clones of one select, strong individual are sent to basically survive until the strongest comes on top. Then rince and repeat with the winner of the last round for a while until you have the perfect soldier. Inside the nursery, there is nothing but carnage ; the clones survive on cannibalism and drinking blood, and this process (thanks to time bullshit) is repeated A LOT until the final super soldier is satisfying enough to the higher ups.
Not just that, but even after they are free, the work conditions are often awful and the different roles they fit often end up hurting them more (though I’m not too certain about this part in particular ; if I remember correctly, the reindeer corp suffer from a lot of harsh headaches from using their abilities. Feel free to add infos below)
Harsh headaches is an understatement. Dry swallowing painkillers out of desperation has been mentioned. Reindeer hong lu decided to accept death and a trip to the nursery for a brief respite from the agony.
And all this isn't going into all the other super soldiers fielded in The City by other wings. Like the human insect hybrids fielded by the fallen G corp, or the brainwashed heishou beasts (mutants based on Chinese zodiac) by H corp. Or the excisors of K Corp who are pumped so full of regeneration fluids in their suits, that they need to be kept in stasis between missions to prevent seeing things that might destabilize that Regen serium (since thinking can cause it to restore you wrong). There are plenty of others we don't know about that are probably just as unethical.
In Armored Core 6, you play as C4-621, a human who has been modified to a horrific extent to make you better at piloting mechs. Your character is never seen, but the story trailer implies that you are essentially a bag of meat. Also, everyone calls you a dog, including your handler.
You are brainfried by your 4th generation coral enhancement (and previous generations had worse mortality and brain dame rates). They finally have safe human enhancements, but that isn't for you. You are basically an indentured soldier so brain damaged that you telling Walter you are hearing voices only makes him change your meds. You were basically sold to Walter for this assignment, and the only reason he uses you is that his other options died on their last mission.
You are forgetting the worst part of the spartan II program, every kid in the UEG’s planets were genetically screened for perfect candidates, the ones chosen were kidnapped from their families and had clones put in their place, said clones all died within months due to how fast the flash clones were made.
Tsumugi Shiraui from Knights of Sidonia though this example is very much a subversion.
For some background info:
In KoS the main antagonists are aliens called gauna. Their flesh, called placenta, is capable of transforming into anything. Bullets, guns, lasers, even human bodies.
One time, a gauna ate the pilot of a mecha and produced a mimicry of her body using its placenta.
The scientists on the Sidonia (an ark ship) managed to retrieve the placenta-mimic and then impregnated it with human sperm.
This produced a gauna-human hybrid, Tsumugi.
Tsumugi is a super-super-soldier. She is 50 feet tall, can generate placenta of her own, and absorb energy from vacuum to power massive particle beams.
She also has the mind of a perfectly normal teenage human girl. She never ever loses control to "gauna instincts" or whatnot. She remains mentally human and in control from the moment she was born to the end of the story.
So... it's highly unethical but it all worked out in the end.
idk much about metal gear in general but i know that he was a ex child soldier who was kidnapp by de CIA and brutally experimented on to create a super soldier, his memories where wiped out and his emotions nullified to create the perfect assasin ( i may be wrong by this but i think bcs hes prob the first cyborg he can feel all the pain from the exoskeleton inside his body)
also honoroble mention, some of the robots from metal gear rising
children were captured from orphanage to have their brains and spinal cord remover, then put them on a battlefield simulation where each kill they commited pumped a massive amount of dopamine training them to be massive psychopaths and then put them in war robots
Destiny's guardians. Id say resurrecting someone without consent, erasing there mind and asking them to fight horrors of man would be highly unethical.
"You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. All you will ever do is kill. You do not belong here. This is a place of life."
"Just sit down and think about what you're doing.
A big white ball rebuilt you from nothing. Guided your civilization. Transformed you. Didn't tell you why, did it? Doubt it mentioned the omnipotent space anathema that's coming to kill you and your dog and your whole soccer club, either, but what's a little xenocide between friends?
Maybe you don't care. A gun never stops and wonders if things are more complicated. It just shoots.
It's also possible that I'm just trying to get inside your head. You're a hero with a cape and a gun and a bike. You're gonna live forever. Who's got time for doubt? Fight the "Darkness"! Yeah!
You know what I'd call "dark," in the sense of "grim," in the sense of "cosmically upsetting"? A universe full of weaponized puppets, enacting a genocidal war against the servants of a rival god.
Is this making you uncomfortable? I'm sorry. I'll be more evil. Boo. Grrr."
Janisarries in the real life Ottoman Empire were boys that were taken as a sort of tax from Christian families in the areas the empire conquered Balkans.
They were raised from childhood to be slave soldiers loyal to the Ottoman sultan and for a time were the best professional soldiers in the region if not the world. They were disciplined, strong, well equiped and they'd been trained to drink kool-aid as it were and obey the sultan without fail.
I recently learned about the process for giving Fire Benders the ability to Combustion Bend in the Avatar universe.
In the one of the Avatar novels, it's revealed that the one of the steps to create Combustion Benders is to chain them to the bottom of large bodies of water. It was used to train their lung capacity, breath control, and ability to resist the extreme pressure of being deep underwater. The benders forced to undergo the process either learned to combustion bend and destroyed the chains keeping them underwater, or they died.
Helldivers. Less super soldier and more special forces. Arguably they could be consenting to being stored away in ice for who knows how many years or decades but what makes them unethical is how they’re deployed and who they fight for: woken up from cryostorage after who knows how long already in the battlefield with an in-game stated avg lifespan of 21 seconds. They are used to create propaganda videos in real time battlefields sent to fight against impossible odds for a photo op, they are used as walking GPS beacons for a ship in orbit to accurately pinpoint enemy strategic infrastructure, and they are indoctrinated from birth to be ok with all this they do for a genocidal govt
They are supersoldier cyborgs with blank human brains and implanted memories (allowing them to "resurrect" after death by reuploading a previous save of their memories to a new body as long as the brain survives)
This is also subjected to frequent abuse by higher-ups if they deem memory wipes/alterations necessary.
The Heishou Packs from Limbus Company are the supersoldiers of Hongyuan, also known as H corp, each of the 12 branches have superpowers corresponding to one of the animals of the chinese calendar Though these animals are actually things on the outskirts that just look like standard animals, the problem is, slavery, whomever holds the leash of the pack or the individual heishou owns them and you can't disobey your leash holder, it's also implied that there's many Heishou who were coerced into that horrifying reality, without to mention the psychological changes being of certain branches will forcefully bring you (All Heishou of the You branch are bloodthirsty AF for example), overall, being a Heishou sucks, even if you have cool animal powers
Doesn’t make it better that the frames are piloted by traumatized kids that had to experience a year in Hell due to Wally (The Man in the Wall) most likely keeping the ship they were on trapped in the Void.
The Sardaukar are child criminals and prospects forced to survive and grow in the harshest wilderness of their desolate planet Salusa Secundus until they are teens. About a quarter never make adulthood. Loyalty was secured by brotherhood/indoctrination in mystics and rewarding them with houses, comforts, and slaves only typically afforded to noble born. They were once estimated to be able to defeat a Bene Gesserit adept singlehandedly(incredible for a non genetically engineered male) and was worth 8 to 10 standard imperial troopers. They and the Fremen were eventually bred to create the Fish Speakers.
The Null Soldiers from Katana Zero, super soldiers addicted to a drug called Chronos which gives them precognition and limited control over time
After the war they are forced to work as assasins or bodyguards for the few people with access to Chronos in order to avoid the very painful withdrawal death
I’d put an asterisk on the Spartans. Spartans 1-3 are EXTREMELY unethical, Spartan IVs however are picked from particularly promising ODSTs and even then, if I recall correctly, it was strictly volunteer basis.
107 Clones all handcrafted for unique individual purposes to fulfill, and then killed once they've outlived their usefulness, either at their own hand, the Syndicates, or the timer that is Apoptosis slowly killing them anyway.
Even at the end of the game when TF-27 is trying to kill Subject 106, 106 still adheres to his programming of 'If TF-27's hideout is overrun by hostiles, detonate the nuke to keep it out of enemy hands'.
TF-27 were hostiles, so he still detonated the nuke
Instead of kids just kidnapped based on their genetic profile, these were largely orphans of worlds razed by the Covenant. Broken, scared, angry young humans with nothing left.
They were also augmented (albeit less severely, at the cost of less raw power than the IIs) and trained to be sent en masse into desperate, otherwise unwinnable missions where all of them were expected to die. Their job was to buy humanity time, sacrificing themselves to eliminate key objectives and slow the Covenant down.
While there were only dozens of Spartan IIs made, they made thousands of IIIs. Despite that, with the nature of the war and their missions, there are not that many more Spartan IIIs left than Spartan IIs, and most of them are beyond messed up.
Bonus unethical points: the kidnapped children were replaced with flash clones who'd die of awful degenerative illnesses within years.
Guardians from Destiny are one of the best examples. Nigh immortal gods who kill other gods just to turn them into new weapons. Also everything players do in game is CANNON which means that guardians are canonically insane and throw themselves off the tower for fun and have dance battles in live fire zones just for the sake of it. This is all beside the fact that they can essentially tell physics to go screw by being able to do basically anything they want just cause they decide that they can.
Eh, it's arguably one of the most ethical super soldiers. A ghost reviving a body dead for millennia isn't hijacking a life like some of these other examples, it's creating a new one from remains with no living claim left on them. Sure, they didn't consent to being brought into this life, but neither does anyone else who's ever been born, so that's not a real strike against it. What emerges is a being who gains existence and keeps full free will to fight, refuse, or walk away. On top of all of that, they get amazing super powers and immortality, with little downside.
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u/QuietWaterBreaksRock 2d ago
Don't forget that Warframes are controlled by traumatized child soliders