Helldivers Subreddit Reopens After Alleged Killer Referenced Game

“Yesterday was an fascinating day for teh 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 it’s 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.

Online and in 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 especially high-stakes. Even discussing it is indeed 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.