Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Brawl speculation was a different beast altogether because Sakurai made it sound like at E3 2006 that it was going to be the final Smash game so expectations were through the roof. The Big 5 in the post Brawl days were Geno, Megaman, K. Rool, Ridley, and Isaac up until SSB4 was pseudo announced in 2012. Geno support definitely took a hit during Smash 4 but, still, he stuck around. Post Brawl up and bulldozed a lot of the disconfirmed character fanbases and people played things a lot safer with SSB4. Looking back, a lot of the characters that did make it in weren't really that heavily supported. Megaman, Little Mac, Palutena, and Shulk were like the only newcomers that had notably sized fanbases. Nobody expected an Animal Crossing rep or Wii Fit, people were strangely not super invested in any of the 6th gen Pokemon (more people honestly wanted Zoroark), Rosalina, Miis, Pac-Man, and Bowser Jr had mostly casual fanbases outside the Smash fanbase, Robin and Lucina were considered far behind Chrom in likeliness, Duck Hunt had a small but tenacious fanbase, and Dark Pit was thought to be such a dumb choice that almost no one took the consideration seriously. Of course, this was worlds different when Brawl gave us Diddy, Pokemon Trainer, Olimar, Dedede, Lucario, Ike, Toon Link, Wolf, and, of course, Sonic, who all had a big presence on this site along with the 5 I mentioned earlier plus Krystal post E3 2006.