Ninja Eliminated From The Masked Singer

You may or may not be familiar with Fox's The Masked Singer, but for those who aren't, here's a short summary. Imagine a TV show where somewhat forgotten stars and not-quite-A-list celebrities don masks and sing, while having other somewhat forgotten stars and not-quite-A-list celebrities guess who they are. Believe it or not, this is a television phenomenon. This show is beloved. And for a short time, the world fell in love with a dancing ice cream cone who crooned "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X.

That dancing ice cream cone was later revealed to be none other than Ninja, the famous video game streamer who made headlines this summer by moving from Twitch to Mixer. And not long afterward, Ninja learned that he should probably keep his video-game-playing day job. He was eliminated from The Masked Singer and sent to do the Pon Pon dance in the comfort of his own home.

It was definitely a strange thing to behold. CNET's Claire Reilly may have put it best when she called the performance, "clear proof that existence is meaningless and satire is dead," adding, "We live in the sunken, 15th reflection of a Black Mirror episode and life is nothing but a mise-en-abyme of pop culture nightmares."

For what it's worth, Ninja seemed to have a good time; you know, despite being jettisoned.

"I've only sang in front of, like, six people up until now, and going from that to an audience of a couple hundred... it's a big step," Ninja said in a behind-the-scenes chat during the show. "I've never done anything like this before, so it was really awesome and incredible. I'm just going to miss being able to make people laugh and smile."

Hilariously, the panelists on the show came pretty darn close to guessing who Ninja was following his "Old Town Road" performance. One guessed PewDiePie, which is, you know, on the right track. Another guessed Marshmello, who Ninja actually teamed up with in the Fortnite Celebrity Pro-Am tournament at E3 2018. That is a red hot guess!

And then someone guessed DanTDM. And not to knock DanTDM at all; he's a very accomplished YouTuber with a huge following. But Dan is from the United Kingdom. He has the accent to prove it. And one could have a real debate as to whether DanTDM is on Ninja's level in terms of being mainstream. It's almost as though all the clues pointed to the singer being a member of a popular 90s boy band, and rather than go for the answer that is so obvious we don't need to say it, someone yelled out, "JC Chasez!"

But really, none of that matters anymore. Ninja is officially off the show, having gifted the world with renditions of both "Old Town Road" and Devo's "Whip It," both of which will undoubtedly be used against him in every argument for the rest of eternity.

The good news is, now that Ninja is no longer dressing up like an ice cream cone, he'll have more time for the streaming side of things. One place he definitely won't be showing up, however, is TwitchCon 2019. 

It seems there is no love lost between Ninja and Twitch, as evidenced by some comments he made a few days back while playing Fortnite with some other streamers. When someone in chat asked Ninja if any Ninja-branded merchandise would be on sale during TwitchCon 2019 (which kicks off tomorrow), he joked about offering a shirt with "a picture of a cat being thrown over." He also mentioned that same cat would be "spitting out what appears to be water." That seems like a pretty clear reference to a controversy surrounding another Twitch streamer named Alinity, who tossed her cat over her head on one stream and appeared to feed it vodka during another.

From where we're sitting, it looks like Ninja feels that Twitch has been marred by the multitude of scandals its streamers have been getting caught up in. We wouldn't be surprised if he's still a big miffed about all of that porn being shown at his old Twitch URL, too. So you probably shouldn't expect to see Ninja heading to any Twitch-related events anytime soon, especially while he's streaming exclusively on Mixer.

Celebrity singing competitions, however? Those are fair game.

We'll let you know if Ninja shows up on any other reality TV programs.