Sorry to interrupt the thread, but does anybody still think that Doom Slayer has any shot of making it into the second Fighter Pass? Apparently the DOOM: Eternal director flat-out deconfirmed it, and wanted to know if they were officially out of the running.
And I'm not talking about a leaker deconfirming it. I'm talking about the actual devs doing that.
I honestly think there's only a slim chance we'll get any Western character in Fighter's Pass 2. Banjo & Kazooie was unique because they started out as a Nintendo series, even though they were developed by British developer Rare and then later were owned by Microsoft. It's possible we'll get another Western character, but Sakurai and his team are Japanese, and in general Western games are not very popular in Japan. At least Sakurai has played a very wide variety of Western games, but for him to narrow down even just one he feels would work in Smash and be able to be licensed, it'd be a daunting task.
Among the potential candidates, Doom Slayer is one a lot of people assume because of the history with Nintendo and DOOM being to the FPS genre what Metal Gear is to the stealth genre. Bethesda has also been very friendly with Nintendo this generation, releasing all new and old DOOM games on the Switch despite the challenges. However, Sakurai loves to represent a game's content as faithfully as possible, both in the character and in their stage. His long broadcasts for the DLC fighters have showcased this more explicitly than ever. He wants to introduce as much of the world/series as he can in just one fighter and one stage.
To that end, the fact that blood and gore are such critical parts of DOOM's identity almost knocks it entirely out of the running. To get DOOM to work, you'd have to sanitize everything in such a bloodless and significantly less violent way to the point that it'd barely resemble DOOM anymore. You could maybe make the stage a Mars base free of any blood or gore, and maybe give Doom Slayer a moveset that is toned down in its violence, but at that point, why bother? Why not go for a character that doesn't require so much effort to fit the tone of Smash?
But Ultimate's newcomer rollercoaster has shown us that all assumptions are meant to be broken, good and bad. Sakurai could find a way to sanitize the character/series and still represent it faithfully, but that's a really big stretch.