Smashboards

Smash fans gatekeeping as usual for petty reasons.

how are they gatekeeping?

it's just them saying the character isn't coming to smash.

That is something nobody but Sakurai knows.

Banjo in Smash, Sephiroth and Min Min already showed he doesn't care about the limits fans assume exist.

For all we know the next character is someone who is already a stage element like Pauline or Tails or yet another Spirit like Eggman or Rayman.

I mean yeah, but people are just trying to look at what has happened and seeing how that might effect a character's chances.

that isn't "gatekeeping as usual for petty reasons" that's just trying to speculate, there's nothing wrong with that.

The next barrier or fan rule I expect to die is the Assist Trophy one. If a Spirit can become a playable characters than so can Assist Trophy.

in my opinion "fan rules" should be treated like theories

also saying a character with their own model an animations can become a character just because a png can is a little silly.

Not really. What we the fans call decofirmed or rules is actually fan rules unless Sakurai comes out and confirms it himself. We are the ones making the silly assumptions as only the words of the developers confirm or deconfirm if a character is out or not.

they aren't "silly assumptions" they are theories

you can't fault people for trying to use the information available to them to try and guess who is in and who is out

but you can fault people who say "how dare you try and guess who the next character could possibly be using available facts and logic? don't you know that until the almighty sakurai says it so we are not permitted to hypothesize? you're just trying to make it seem like your favorites are more likely!"

like, people know nothing is confirmed

of course if there are people who act like fan theories are facts then yeah, they might be proven wrong

I mean, Chrom is still in Robin's Final Smash and Chrom became playable in Ultimate. Certain Assist Trophies are turned off in a certain stages so if they ever promoted Assist Trophy, they could just turn it off when someone is playing as the character.