During the pre-release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, there was a minor controversy involving the character of Waluigi, a long-time fan-requested character who had been announced as an Assist Trophy (rendering him a non-playable character) early in the game's pre-launch cycle. This controversy entailed Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai supposedly being harassed en masse by Waluigi fans with inappropriate memes, requiring him to block the offending users - this was picked up by many gaming news sites, usually with the sources being unsourced tweets from random users, and became a hot topic in Smash speculation with some speculating that Waluigi would be blacklisted from appearing in any Smash game from that point as a bizarre form of retribution.

Further investigation into this, however, shows that there are only 2 known tweets that fall under the category of "inappropriate memes" that had gained users blocks - one depicting Sakurai in front of the September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers and another depicting him as Adolf Hitler, both with extremely low interaction rates and content that, while certainly detestable, had its quantity exaggerated beyond reason and is not a rare or unusual occurrence for game developers. Additionally, Sakurai has been known to block Twitter users for anything that he finds strange, even if it isn't actually offensive or related to Smash requests, such as a thread of users playing tic-tac-toe on an edited image of Persona 5 character Haru's forehead.