Okay so this section is going to be much more opinion-based than the others, so bear with me. Apparently the blue crab and witch pics were posted within a couple weeks of their respective announcements. However, it has been about two months since we got starling. Why is that? I have a couple of theories. First, the Source posts hints as soon as they hear about them, and just so happened to hear the first two right before their announcements, but heard about Starling well ahead of time. This is certainly possible, as a brand ambassador mainly deals with advertising, so most of their info would be relevant to announcements. Second, the Source could be sitting on info for however long and purposefully chose to drop these hints two weeks and two months apart from their announcements.
If the former is true, then the two month wait is unfortunate, but ultimately meaningless. If the latter is true, then the Source believed this is an announcement worth of two months of hype and speculation (or they’re just ****ing with us, which, judging by the fact I’ve spent over an hour writing a long-ass post about this whole thing, I deserve). And while we tend to believe Nintendo as a whole and (depending on who you ask) Sakurai can be a little off kilter about what the community gets hype for, the Source seems to be a little in tune. They successfully predicted that the community would find the Pokemon direct pretty underwhelming and I think they predicted people would be pissed about Hero’s presentation (which turned out to be about the RNG mechanics).
Let’s be real here, Smash is one of, if not the only game that fans will put up with months of blueballing and speculation for. Let’s say the Starling is about a new Star Fox game. Some people would be incredibly excited, but you know a lot of people in the community would be like “Okay that’s cool, but that’s it? That’s all this speculation was about?” Teasing Smash fans for months, on the other hand, pretty widely accepted and even people who don’t care about Smash wouldn’t be particularly thrown off if that’s what Starling was about.
Now, the final question: assuming allllll of this rampant speculation so far is true (which, let’s face it, it probably isn’t), why tease a character two months in advance when even Banjo was given a two week wait? Is this character somehow more hype than Banjo? Is that even possible? Did the Source just want to up the ante on the anticipation? If you want a hopeful take for our boy in blue, I feel like the only announcement that could be considered Banjo-tier or higher is another “never ever” character, and the only one of these characters with any sort of link to Starling is Geno.