For some Helldivers 2 players, the fascist role-play has gone too far
It took GantztheDemon 10 days to be able to play Helldivers 2 again. On Feb. 21, TikTok user AJGaming shared a video featuring Gantz killing them. The sequence went viral overnight, garnering 4.8 million views as of this writing. A subsection of the Helldivers 2 community, hung up on the politically charged satire theme of the online shooter, labeled the player as a “traitor” and began inciting others to shoot on sight. Alongside dozens of TikToks campaigning for a witch hunt, Gantz’s PlayStation account was temporarily banned after receiving hundreds of reports.
“The last two weeks have been surreal, I never thought I would be getting this attention over a team kill inside of a video game,” GantztheDemon told Polygon over Discord. “It was pretty cool, but at the same time, reading comments of people saying they were going to find out who I was and release my personal information, I thought about just deleting it all.”
Just a mere few weeks after the launch of Helldivers 2, in which thousands of players were forced to wait in a queue due to the servers being at max capacity almost every day, GantztheDemon was immortalized in the fan lore. According to Gantz, however, it was all a misunderstanding. The team kill, or TK for short, was payback for a friend being attacked by two random players in a team of four. Gantz then avenged them, which is the clip we’ve all seen.
The Gantz situation has since cemented itself as an example of how the in-game theme of fighting a war together is, for better or worse, resounding in the community beyond the game itself. After conducting interviews with over 60 players for this article, it’s clear that the propaganda of Helldivers 2 inherently encourages people to band together. But some are acting in bad faith, spinning the clear satire into an overly serious military role-play — one that extends beyond acts like consecrating someone as public enemy number one.
Toxicity has become a popular topic around the Helldivers 2 community as
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