The Helldivers community is coping with a spotlight it doesn’t want

“Yesterday was an interesting day for the Helldivers community.” That’s the very obvious understatement that announced the reopening of the Helldivers gaming subreddit in the small hours of Saturday morning. On Friday it was discovered that Tyler Robinson, arrested for the alleged killing of Charlie Kirk, had inscribed messages on the casings of several bullets found at the crime scene. One of those read “Hey fascist! Catch!” accompanied by an up arrow symbol, a right arrow, and three down arrows, a reference to the code to call down the 500KG Bomb stratagem in the cooperative shooter Helldivers 2.

Unsurprisingly, within minutes the official subreddit and Discord servers were thrown into chaos. Moderators quickly locked the Helldivers subreddit, pointing to a high number of posts that violated its rule against “Real-World Political Discussions.” Similarly, references to Robinson, Kirk, or the 500KG Bomb stratagem were quickly deleted on the Discord server, and some users speculated the code had been flagged for autodeletion. (Arrowhead Game Studios, makers of the Helldivers series, hasn’t released a public statement about the incident and didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Users merely asking why the subreddit was locked were shut down — “We are not allowed to discuss, I would suggest looking elsewhere,” one user was told.

In moderation gaps and conversations with The Verge, Helldivers fans mostly seemed confused and a little concerned about what might come along with all of this sudden attention. “I just don’t want to see a community I love get slandered to no fault of their own,” one Discord user, Inferionix, wrote.

Helldivers is hardly the first piece of media tied to an act of violence; the Columbine High School shooting famously put an unwelcome spotlight on Doom as commentators searched for a meaning behind the attack. But Kirk’s slaying inspired widespread calls for retaliatory violence by Republicans, making the still-ongoing search for Robinson’s motive particularly high-stakes. Even discussing it is risky, as lawmakers and right-wing tycoon Elon Musk are surveilling social media to police social media users’ responses to Kirk’s death, demanding firings at employers including Microsoft. The subreddit mods said in their reopening post that nobody was banned during the initial flood of shooting-related comments, but anyone who discusses it in the future will be.

One brief bastion where fans of the game could share their feelings was the Helldivers 2 subreddit, which doesn’t have the same strict ban on real life political discussions. A megathread there, at least for a while, was filled mostly was fans marveling at just how surreal the situation was. “Waking up and hearing a sitting governor of the United States say ‘Notices bulge OwO whats this?’ was a goddamn flashbang,” Reddit user Snaxwheels wrote, referring to one of the other, non-Helldivers-related inscriptions. But eventually that thread was also removed after moderators felt it had gotten out of hand.

Some posters there expressed concern that the attention could reignite the culture war around violent video games. One even pointed out that RFK Jr. had recently revived a largely dismissed theory linking violent games to school shootings. Isadora, an active community member who spoke with The Verge, was more dubious. “Givin [sic] the short news cycles and the fact that such a large portion of MAGAs youth base are among the [conservative games streamer] Asmongold/gamergate type I don’t see the admin and its media machine coming super hard against the game itself.”

One outstanding question is what — if anything — Robinson thought about Helldiver’s politics. The series, which draws from Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation, is a satire where players take the role of brainwashed military grunts fighting to spread “managed democracy” for a quasi-fascist Super Earth government. Isadora calls the gameplay the biggest draw, but “its politics is what made me fall in love with it,” they said. “I’m a big Paul Verhoeven fan and Starship Troopers was one of my favorites.”

As with other satires on authoritarianism, like Warhammer 40K, there’s a persistent discussion about whether some players get the joke. Isadora, largely, thinks they do. “I’m sad that this community has been drug into this as I think the game’s ironic criticism of fascism is a great outlet for so many people,” they told The Verge. “It reflects negatively on a community that largely understands the criticisms it lays out.”
Helldivers will almost certainly go down as a footnote in Kirk’s death. But for some players, the strangeness of using the 500KG Bomb combo — or having it as a tattoo — might linger. One Redditor suggested starting a petition to encourage Arrowhead to change the button command. Most disagreed, littering his message with thumbs down and big red X reactions. “Please don’t bring it here,” said the only reply.

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