TheHypist

ThunderNinja96

ZekeDaGeek

BusterKnuckle

TheRealTravisT

SodaChugger

**TheHypist** is a GameFAQs user known for being incredibly obnoxious thanks to his extreme overconfidence in his predictions, as well as his tendency to whine and complain endlessly between character reveals. He has gone under a plethora of different names throughout the years, including ThunderNinja96, ZekeDaGeek, BusterKnuckle, TheRealTravisT, and SodaChugger.

## Background and History

While it's unknown when his original account was made, or when he first surfaced on SmashFAQs, Hypist began Ultimate's speculation period as a diehard supporter of *WarioWare*'s Ashley. She was among the first characters he felt was guaranteed would be joining the roster, citing the then-upcoming release of *WarioWare Gold* as evidence. Hypist's confidence level was so high that he went as far as to tell SmashBurb (who would go on to become Hypist's arch-nemesis) that he would kick his ass using her upon the release of Ultimate.[1]

Suffice to say, Ashley returned as an Assist Trophy rather than a playable character, as revealed during the August 2018 Smash Direct. Hypist soon jumped onto the Shantae bandwagon instead, claiming that an upcoming Nindies Direct coinciding with Shantae creator Matt Bozon following Sakurai on Twitter meant that the Half-Genie Hero would be joining the Smash roster.[2] Naturally, this resulted in more "guarantees" and gloating. He would drop Shantae as his most-wanted after the Nindies Direct aired without Shantae being revealed for *Smash Ultimate*, and instead began supporting Banjo & Kazooie.

Following the release of Smash Ultimate, Hypist began antagonizing fans and supporters of Dragon Quest's Erdrick, as he is one of the many users on SmashFAQs who detests "anime swordsmen" (though, in Hypist's case, he's cool with *Xenoblade*).[3] He could frequently be spotted in the Erdrick Support thread saying that he had no chance of ever being in Smash, and most notably, said that anyone who wanted Erdrick in Smash was "autistic". While Erdrick (under the name "Hero", alongside three other *Dragon Quest* protagonists) was eventually revealed to be playable as the second character in *Smash Ultimate'*s first Fighters Pass, Hypist never owned up to his actions, and instead gloated over the close reveal of Banjo as a playable character. He would make threads and posts bragging over the amount of attention and reaction videos Banjo was getting in comparison to Hero. A month later, however, Hypist began singing a different tune, and instead began whining about Hero taking too long to release (a trend that would continue for months to come).

In August 2019, Hypist's overconfidence got the best of him, as he began to guarantee that the Banjo DLC would include a Classic Mode/World of Light boss battle against *Banjo-Kazooie* series antagonist Gruntilda, and responded rather angrily to anyone who questioned him.[4] In response, SmashBurb would challenge him to an account bet over Gruntilda's role in the game. Then, on September 4th, 2019, the "Mr. Sakurai Presents Banjo & Kazooie" presentation aired, in which Gruntilda was confirmed as a background element, costing Hypist the bet and his GameFAQs account. Predictably, he attempted to welsh at first, saying that the confirmation of Sans as a Mii Costume somehow absolved him of having to keep his end of the bet (despite Sans having nothing to do with the bet whatsoever), and later began ignoring all mentions of the bet.[5] The heat began to mount, however, and soon became too much for him to handle. Thus, he gave in, closing his account. He would return less than a day later under the new name "ThunderNinja96", and sent SmashBurb an embarrassing private message accusing Burb of "turning the board against him" and vowing revenge. He initially tried pretending to be a different person than Hypist, but after nobody bought the routine (as all of TN96's initial posts were in defense of Hypist), he quickly began to acknowledge that he was Hypist.

Not long after, Hypist jumped onto the Geno bandwagon, initially openly admitting that he never played Super Mario RPG (he only watched a Let's Play) and was mainly supporting the character because of "the haters".[6][7] After being ridiculed about this for several days, he instead began to claim he had purchased a SNES Classic and played through Super Mario RPG, though he later changed the story to say he had played it years back on the Wii Virtual Console. He also soon began denying he had ever stated he hadn't played SMRPG, but after receipts were uncovered, he began to instead ignore any mention of it.[8]

Sometime in the middle of 2020, Hypist's ThunderNinja96 account was banned for homophobia, and he resurfaced under the name "TheHypist" (his original username minus the underscore). He continued his normal routine for much of 2020, up until the reveal of Sephiroth as Challenger Pack 8 on December 10th. With a crippling blow having been dealt to Geno's chances, and Hypist having spent the past year telling people he would brag and harass them when Geno is confirmed playable, Hypist went into panic mode, expecting people to treat him the same way he threatened to treat them. He initially tried saving face by pretending to be excited by Sephiroth's addition (even putting him down on his list of mains in his sig), but showed his true colors a mere two days later and began calling Sephiroth a "generic anime swordsman". Hypist would then attempt to wipe his hands clean of Geno by making a thread titled "There's something I need to come forward with", where he more or less acknowledged that he was a bandwagoner and had no actual attachment to Geno as a character or SMRPG as a whole. He would follow it up with a separate thread demanding forgiveness [1]. Naturally, this blew up in his face, so he made an AMA thread, claiming he'd be deleting his account at midnight on December 13th, 2020 and leaving GameFAQs forever.

Hours before he was due to leave, however, a new user by the name of "ZekeDaGeek" would arrive. Much like ThunderNinja96, Zeke began immediately defending Hypist in every thread he was currently arguing with people in, which immediately gave away his identity again. Unlike with ThunderNinja, Zeke maintains that he is not Hypist, despite the fact that nobody believes him. He has even been seen sharing posts from other sites where he still goes by The\_Hypist.[2] Zeke's attitude is no different than Hypist's so far, despite his intention being to trick people into thinking he's someone else. The only real effort he's made to try and cover up the fact that they are one in the same, other than just claiming he's not Hypist, was to try and say that he is a Sora supporter instead of a Geno supporter. In a display of ineptitude one should expect from Hypist, he almost immediately forgot about this and is primarily spending his time in Geno threads defending Geno. He would also bash Sora not long afterward, celebrating that he got "jack shit" in a post that aged like milk.[3]

After waiting a full two days (and embarrassingly backing himself up on arguments as both TheHypist and ZekeDaGeek), Hypist finally closed his TheHypist account as promised, but remained on the board under his ZekeDaGeek persona, still not acknowledging that he was, in fact, TheHypist. Hypist also created a second new account (this time, pretending to be a different person than both Hypist *and* Zeke) by the name of "BusterKnuckle" on the same day his Zeke account was made (claiming to be a Terry player, despite Hypist having previously bashed Terry). As BusterKnuckle, he made a thread titled "The thing that's ruined Smash speculation..." [4], lamenting how people are "only allowed to support safe picks", despite having spent the past year bandwagoning for Geno, one of the aforementioned "safe picks". Hilariously, within the same thread, he would bash Byleth, a character who was the complete opposite of a "safe pick" that constantly gets ragged on. Much like he initially used ZekeDaGeek to defend his TheHypist account, he also began using BusterKnuckle to defend Zeke (and vice-versa), most notably in a thread titled "It appears Sephiroth killed papagenos hopes and dreams".

As of late January 2021, Zeke finally stopped denying the fact that he is Hypist (once again posting images that give away his identity [5], on top of directly responding to people referring to him as Hypist [6]). His BusterKnuckle account, on the other hand, was largely abandoned and only made sporadic appearances following the Sephiroth thread.

Following the reveal of *Xenoblade Chronicles 2'*s Pyra and Mythra as the fighters included in Challenger Pack 9 during the Nintendo Direct on February 17th, 2021, Zeke would spend the next few months bragging and acting as though he finally got a character he was predicting, even if he was still technically wrong due to him pushing Rex in particular instead of just Pyra and/or Mythra. He also picked his newest bandwagon, as, at around the same time, he began to support Crash Bandicoot. Much like with Geno and Super Mario RPG, Hypist has never played a single game in the Crash Bandicoot franchise. Unlike with SMRPG, however, he openly acknowledged that he didn't play the games, and went as far as to say "there's no point in playing them if Crash doesn't get into Smash". Even though he couldn't even bring himself to play any Crash games, Hypist would constantly talk up Crash as being "too iconic" not to get in.

Things would go south drastically for Hypist following the reveal of *Tekken*'s Kazuya Mishima as a Smash newcomer at E3 2021. Hypist would have one of the biggest meltdowns of his SmashFAQs tenure, stating that Kazuya was a Ryu clone (referring to him as "Devil Ryu", "Purple Ryu", and other variations), was a character nobody wanted, and that the fighting game genre didn't need any more characters (despite he himself supporting characters from platformers and JRPGs, the two most represented genres in Smash). Following the Kazuya reveal, Zeke ditched the Crash bandwagon and instead began doomposting about how the final character was guaranteed to be a letdown. Then, on July 10th, Zeke's main account was put on Warned status, leading to him finally admitting that he was BusterKnuckle the whole time (and reviving the account in the process to use as his new main). Zeke's suspension would later become a ban, and BusterKnuckle would fall not long afterward.

Under the names TheRealTravisT and SodaChugger, Hypist would spend the remainder of Smash Ultimate speculation complaining about the inclusion of Kazuya and Byleth and the exclusion of Geno and Crash Bandicoot, as well as bashing the game, referring to anyone with a positive outlook on the game as being "Sakurai bootlickers" in a similar fashion to CuterChihuahua2. He would also begin claiming that Smash was on the brink of death and would be outdone by rival platform fighting games such as *Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl* and Warner's *Multiversus*. Eventually, both of these new accounts would suffer the same fate as the majority of his other accounts, and would end up getting banned. After his SodaChugger account got banned, Hypist never came back to SmashFAQs and instead, migrated to Twitter where he whines about NFTs and posts (mostly lewd) fanart of Nia and Mio from the Xenoblade series.

ZekeDaGeek was warned twice before being banned for sexualizing Marnie and the Gen 8 female trainer from Pokémon. Once for posting foot fetish fanart of Nagatoro with KomodoMike and the other for posting a pic of Mythra's vagina. TheRealTravisT suffered the same fate by pulling a KagamineRin via encouraging sexualizing underage girls. SodaChugger was banned for posting foot fetish fanart of Marnie.

There is widespread suspicion that FusionChicken may be his account due to their activity on the Nickelodeon All Star board and their comment about Corrin's feet in SmashFAQs. However, there is doubt as FusionChicken posts things that Hypist usually never posts (most notably having a bias towards first party characters and a hatred for third party ones; Hypist has no such bias, having had supported and bashed characters both first and third party characters) and FusionChicken's activity on boards that Hypist never went to (most notable being the Politics board). There is evidence that confirms that FusionChicken's previous account was DixiesNo1Fan, a troll with FC's exact "Third party bad. "Beloved" first parties like Dixie, Geno, etc. good" gimmick that was active between the time before Sephiroth was revealed and when they got banned shortly after for calling Banjo black representation [#144]. FusionChicken has been banned for disruptive posting plus repeat offenses, so it'll never be known whether or not he was actually Hypist.

## Personality

The Hypist is arrogant to an obnoxious degree, not very intelligent (particularly in arguments, where he will repeat the exact same points over and over again, even long after they had been refuted), a perverted deviant (showing a very CuterChihuahua2-esque attraction to underage characters like Ashley, even at one point calling loli porn "normal" and referring to her as "an attractive woman") [9] [10], and a coward who cannot admit when he's wrong. He's also delusional and seems genuinely unaware that literally nobody on the site likes him or wants him around except maybe demon\_cleaner, the one user who frequently sides with him in arguments due to their shared love of Geno and mutual hatred of Fire Emblem. Worst of all, Hypist is known to be openly hateful and bigoted, often using offensive language to describe mentally disabled people, gays, and transgender individuals.

He's also known to bandwagon, going as far as to feign excitement over characters that garnered a positive response from the Smash community, even if he had previously openly hated on them. Examples of this include Sora and Steve.

## Mains and Secondaries

* Banjo & Kazooie

* Shulk

* Rex: He listed Rex as a main of his on his third account (TheHypist) despite him not even having been announced at the time. This was made even funnier retroactively by Rex's disconfirmation in February 2021.

* Geno: Same case as Rex. He later replaced Geno with Sephiroth to make it seem like he wasn't upset about Sephiroth getting in over Geno, but later began bashing him, making it unlikely that he actually intends on maining Sephiroth.

* Terry: Doesn't actually play, just a red herring on his BusterKnuckle sockpuppet

## Most Wanteds

* Ashley (abandoned)

* Shantae (abandoned)

* Banjo (confirmed)

* Geno (abandoned)

* Rex (abandoned; essentially overturned by Pyra/Mythra)

* Crash Bandicoot (abandoned; gave up after the "Sakurai Presents Kazuya" stream)