After discovering that a form of armor in Destiny 2 featured a design strongly resembling synonymous with white supremacy, Bungie made offers get rid of armor within the game. But merely how exactly did such abhorrent symbology escape within the biggest blockbuster game of all seasons to this point?
Bungie Community Manager David “DeeJ” Dague explained inside a post the fact that armor was designed in June 2015. Dague explained that designers will often be inspired by existing imagery but that this causes of inspiration wasn’t the “Kekistan” flag, which was co-opted because of the alt-right as a symbol of white supremacy.
“In cases like this, a few of the reference imagery featured the simple mirrored chevron shapes situated in the finished piece,” wrote Dague of the armor’s origins. “Some graphics that belongs to sports teams provided some inspiration as well, along with some primitive shapes and chevrons that have been helpful to permeate our Guardian class iconography.”
But that doesn’t mean nobody at Bungie noticed the symbology resembled that surrounding Kekistan. An organization of answerable for “reviewing content for cultural, geographical, and various sensitive issues” caught it during development. The c’s, however, flagged the piece given it resembled Kekistan’s original purpose, as a silly internet meme representing shitposters, though not that surrounding the white supremacist variety.
“Greater contemporary, vile derivation which was repurposed by hate groups hasn’t been surfaced through this process,” continued Dague, “therefore, the armor was approved for ship.”
To that end, Know Your Meme explains that “kek” began gaining steam in 2004 rather for “LOL,” tracing its origins to the Korean onomatopoeia. Kek even resulted in in World of Warcraft and Starcraft a long time before spreading and ultimately being repurposed as a symbol of white supremacy. Seems like similar to Pepe the Frog’s story, that’s considering that the two are tied together.
Dague insisted that Bungie couldn’t purposely include symbology closely resembling that relate to Kekistan in Destiny 2. He stated that “there was no a higher level malicious intent,” from anyone at Bungie, although the developer realized the similarity was a lot and thus took action to take out the potentially offensive armor.
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