While we wait for Hollywood's Helldivers 2 movie to be made, a fan film called For Liberty! is here to fill the gap. Or it would be, if not for a YouTube takedown that unceremoniously removed the video from the platform without notice.

After almost a year of anticipation, For Liberty! arrived recently to helped deliver democracy across the known universe. Sadly, the powers that be had other things in mind, with the short production getting taken off YouTube soon after becoming publicly available.

In the immediate aftermath, there were suspicions Sony or Arrowhead Game Studios were involved in some way, especially as the Helldivers movie is moving along, with Fast and Furious director Justin Lin attached to helm. But production company Plot Coalition has been clear that the reason is more arbitrary than that.

"We have no confirmation that Sony was involved in the removal," the team comments on Reddit. "This appears to be an automatic system with YouTube itself that flagged that the film was made available to download for free." Another comment clears the devs of responsibility.

"I am in contact with Arrowhead and I can assure you that they had nothing to do with the takedown," Plot Coalition says, mentioning in another comment: "I am chatting with YouTube right now."

YouTube disallows download links to be placed anywhere in uploads, and the belief as of now is that For Liberty! being freely downloadable from the video description caused an automatic removal. While the producers are trying to sort this out, I wouldn't hold my breath for a resolution too soon. YouTube is famously hard to deal with on these issues, but hopefully the film is freely available again in the near future.

An animated tribute to Helldivers 2, For Liberty! follows several recruits as they take on legions of bugs and other threats. It's a fun, bombastic celebration of the series and its community, and at the very least, this has all helped give the movie more attention.