Last month, on February 17, Arrowhead Games revealed the new War Horse armor set for Helldivers 2. The announcement came in the form of a trailer, with audio recorded in Mandarin. The trailer states that the new armor set can be used to “send super Spring Festival greetings to the Cyborg” army, a reference to the fact that the set dropped on the same day as the Lunar New Year.
For the majority of Helldivers 2 fans, that’s the start and end of the story. However, if you scroll through the comments for the War Horse trailer on X, you’ll immediately notice that 90 percent of the 860+ replies feature the same picture: a recreation of the “Tank Man” image, an iconic photograph taken during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, using Helldivers 2 assets. So, what’s the origin of this oddly specific recreation, and why are users on X spamming the official Helldivers 2 account with it?
Let’s start with the origin of this Helldivers meme image. From what I can tell, the first instance of this image appearing online was on the r/Helldivers subreddit, in a post titled “Liberty Square Massacre” on February 3. This date lines up with the release of the Helldivers 2 patch Into the Unjust: 6.0.1, which introduced the TD-220 Bastion Mk XVI tank stratagem. The post in question has been locked and all of its comments have been deleted, with the official Helldivers-ModTeam account citing Rule 1 as the reason. Rule 1 on the r/Helldivers subreddit states “No insults, racism, toxicity, trolling, rage-bait, harassment, inappropriate language, NSFW content, etc. Remember the human and be civil!”
The reason behind the image being spammed on the War Horse trailer post is far more complex and requires a lot of extra context. Firstly, Helldivers 2 is extremely popular in China. The Chinese playerbase made it into the news a few times last year, most famously because of their tireless defence of Equality-on-Sea. This location lines up with the city of Shanghai, which explains why players in China were so adamant about liberating it. The story became so popular online that the official Chinese Embassy in US X account congratulated Chinese and American Helldivers 2 players for “turning pixels into real human connection.”
Secondly, on June 5, 2025, Tencent, the Chinese multinational conglomerate that is estimated to be worth roughly 600 billion dollars, purchased a 15.75-percent stake in Helldivers 2’s developer, Arrowhead Game Studios. Tencent has drawn the ire of some Western gamers for its never-ending series of video game studio acquisitions and investments, which includes a 34.9-percent stake in Ubisoft, a 35-percent investment in Epic Games, and a 100-percent share of Riot Games. Given the Communist Party of China’s oversight of Tencent, which includes the “special management shares” used to influence the company’s business decisions and the regulatory oversight of Tencent’s WeChat messaging service (known as Weixin in China), its ever-expanding reach in the video game market has been a topic of concern for video game enthusiasts outside of China.
Tencent’s investment in Arrowhead and Helldivers 2’s popularity in China has resulted in a portion of the game’s fanbase accusing the developer of capitulating to secret, undefined demands. For example, here’s a popular post on the r/HelldiversUnfiltered subreddit titled “Are the R/Helldivers Mods working for the Chinese government or some shit?” This post is in reaction to the aforementioned locked Liberty Square Massacre thread on the official r/Helldivers subreddit.
Obviously, these criticisms are speculative at best, as there’s no direct evidence that Arrowhead is being influenced by the Communist Party of China via Tencent. However, the stream of abuse that Arrowhead has put up with as a result of these accusations is very real. The Tank Man Helldivers 2 recreation image spam on the War Horse trailer was triggered by this comment featuring the same image, which was posted roughly two minutes after the trailer went live. The comment in question was hidden by the Helldivers 2 X account, which resulted in the backlash and further accusations of Tencent’s influence over Arrowhead.
In reality, the reasoning behind the decision to hide the initial Tank Man comment is likely far simpler. As it turns out, the official Helldivers 2 Discord server was subjected to a similar wave of abuse following the release of the previously mentioned Into the Unjust: 6.0.1 patch and the Liberty Square Massacre post. Because of this, the Helldivers 2 Tank Man image has been banned on the Discord server, as several users had been spamming the image in all of the available channels. This has also led to the phrase “Tiananmen Square” being censored by the server’s automod. As a result, all references to both Tiananmen Square and the Tank Man image, prior to November 23, 2025, have been removed. I was able to confirm this by chatting with a few general members of the Discord server and by triggering the automod myself by referencing Tiananmen Square.
The truly unfortunate part of this is that, from the outside looking in, it may appear as if Arrowhead Games is doing the exact thing it’s being accused of: censoring images and phrases that the Chinese Communist Party also attempts to suppress. The original Tank Man photograph and references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which more than 1,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the People’s Liberation Army, are censored by the government in Chinese media, as the Chinese Communist Party continues to maintain that nobody died during the protests. For example, in August 2020, Activision Blizzard released a trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War that featured a reference to the Tank Man image. The segment featuring the reference was removed on Chinese media platforms such as Bilibili, and replaced with a black screen.
The issue here is that this has become a sort of ironic self-fulfilling prophecy. Arrowhead’s decision to block any references to Tiananmen Square and the Helldivers 2 Tank Man image was something it was forced into doing by the very same people who have accused it of bowing to censorship. The alternative was enduring the never-ending spam. Both options are a PR nightmare for Arrowhead Games, but the community team chose the option that put the Helldivers 2 community at less risk. Sadly, this is exactly the sort of ammunition that the crowd accusing Arrowhead of being pro-CCP will love to use against them, while being completely ignorant of the fact that they’re the ones who triggered the need to censor it in the first place.