JBPoppinZ wants to be LoL’s #1 streamer, here’s why I believe he can do it.

How do you solve an interview like JBPoppinZ?

JBPoppinZ intends to be the biggest… I think he’s got what it takes

Chatting with Jayden “JBPoppinZ” Belton (JB) is, for certain, the most unique and likely unhinged interview I’ve done in my entire career, and I’ve interviewed G2 Kesha. I sat down with JB a while ago, and I’ve been chipping away at just how to tell the story of our conversation. Here’s where I landed:

I hopped onto the Discord call with JB early one morning, and we exchanged pleasantries and chatted a little about what I have planned for the interview. My first impression of JB is thusly: this guy truly, genuinely, cares about what he does, and how he does it. For a guy who came across my Instagram feed shouting about Fiora, Tryndamere, and other top lane “Shaytaan” champions (Evil spirits from Islamic folklore, I know, deep cut), he’s relaxed, funny, and affable in the same way a regular you see in the wee hours at your local bodega might be. 

We’ve immediately got something in common – we both love Yorick, one of the historically least popular but most-beloved-by-mains champions in all of League of Legends, so we hit things off quickly. I ask if he’s caught the Yorick games this year in pro play, and JB says he’s been watching the highlights. The next string of words from JB isn’t fit to print, but suffice to say, he strays Judeo-Christian in his colorful confirmation that he has, in fact, seen some of the criminal games in which our Shepherd of Souls has been involved.

JB: Anytime anything happens, if there’s, like, any Yorick presence at all, my DMs get flooded with clips man. It’s f—ing insane. It’s crazy. 

Nick: It’s been years since he was viable, too. 

JB: And that was back in 2018 when he was like insta-OP, and just one-tapping people. You hit your E and you’d just f—ing one-shot everybody, even if you were going like Triforce + Spirit Visage.

JB has only done one interview before, he tells me, back when his main focus was his music, and he’s not really sure what to expect from a gaming interview. I walk him through the skeleton of my plan, and he says it all sounds copacetic. Little did I know at that moment, this interview was going to leave the rails and never come back, and looking back on it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Suffice to say, even when it’s not written down, one or both of us was generally giggling and cracking up, and I’d be padding the word count tremendously for no reason, trying to include it all.

What was meant to be a 20-30 minute quick chat becomes a distressingly close-to-two-hour nerd session, in a way I’ve never quite experienced. With no deadline or time limit, JB’s passion for League of Legends expands, like work, to fill the time allotted in a way that is infectious and genuine. This interview will collect snippets of our conversation, along with shortened recaps of all the things I think my average reader can go without the play-by-play on. 

Can you tell the folks at home who might not know you, who you are? What do you do? Where can people find your stuff?

JB: My name is JB, or JBPoppinZ. That’s how you say it: Jay-bee-poppin’-Zee. Not “J.B. Poppins”, not none of that. Just “Jay-bee-poppin’-Zee.” I’m the rank one Yorick in the World. (I’m not, I’m Emerald.) But I’m the rank one Yorick in the world, I’m the guy on Instagram and TikTok always complaining about Yorick, the one with the filter that makes his eyes look super red, so everybody always thinks I’m high. I’m not, I’m fully sober, I just play too much League.

Let’s start at our common ground. How’d you fall in love with Yorick?

JB: I actually know the exact time. So, I used to be an Illaoi main for a very, very, very, very long time, and it was actually the worst thing ever for me because I just cannot hit my Es, and if I miss my E, she can just lose the entire game. It was driving me insane, every game I was missing all my Es, and I needed something to play so badly. Right around that time is when Yorick got the giga-ultra buff, where if you hit your E, your ghouls would do like 100% more damage. Since then, he’s been the love of my life. 

JB and I continue to chat about Yorick’s balance over his lifetime in League. We’re hitting each other with weird trivia about various patches, and his pre-VGU form comes up as a topic of conversation. JB, it turns out, loved old Yorick, while I can’t recall playing a single game of the champion before the rework. I’m a rework purist, JB’s a Yorick OG. JB’s as baffled by me not liking old Yorick as I am by his missing one League’s most toxic trading patterns.

JB: I miss having each ghoul doing something different. The people doing the Yorick rework invited a bunch of Yorick mains back in the day, high elo, low elo, to give their feedback and input, and I was one of the people there. A lot of the suggestions I gave were to make each ghoul do something different, and they shot that sh– down ASAP. They shot that down ASAP.

One slowed, one healed, it was crazy. God…I miss it so much.

JB talks niche champions and niche stories

Nick: The one thing that stayed the same about Yorick between his rework and now is that he’s one of the least-popular, but most-loved champions. Riot uses a DepthxWidth matrix to represent how many people play a champion and how much the people who main a champion play it.

Yorick was one of the champions with the fewest players who put in the most hours. He’s the most niche champion in League. Have you seen the graph?

JB: I have not! That’s crazy! Yorick’s just so unique, I don’t think most people can wrap their heads around Yorick. Even though he’s not like a complex champion, a lot of people just can’t seem to understand him. People don’t know, there are people in my chat who don’t know that Yorick can continually spawn ghouls while you’re marked if he has the Graves. It’s crazy!

Nick: Yeah! People don’t understand a lot of the small interactions with Yorick, and that feels so bad when you don’t know what’s going on.

JB: Ah… man, I just love Yorick, he’s such a funky champion, you can do so much fun sh-t with him.

For the next several minutes, JB and I devolve into a discussion of Yorick’s potential in the jungle. In the interest of our sane readers who won’t need the nuances of Yorick’s early clear and objective capabilities, JB and I move our way into Yorick’s story, the lore of League, and his hopes for the future of the game.

JB: The Bandle Tale game is the only thing they’ve really done with Yordles, man, and it’s so bad. It’s SO bad. Don’t even play it.

Nick: Have you seen some of the stuff they’re doing to update champions in Legends of Runeterra? They’re doing a lot of world and lore update stuff in LoR, and they do some cool stuff with Yordles there. Veigar gets a giant evil mech that he builds to blast people with.

JB: I have not! I only have one friend who plays Legends of Runetera, I gotta check this out.

Nick: Yeah, Necrit has a great video on how Legends of Runeterra is Riot doing a bunch of world design and concept prep for the MMO, and they’re absolutely cooking with the lore and visual updates in the game there. Here’s Veigar’s giant mech.

JB: What the f–k? What am I looking at? What is that? What the f–ck is happening in Legends of Runeterra? What am I missing? (*laughs*) 

Nick: Oh, bro, you don’t even know. Malphite has a kid in Legends of Runeterra and he’s the absolute GOAT.

JB: Malphite has a kid? What? How the f-isn’t he a mountain? How does he have kids?

Nick: Well, he’s a magically animated mountain, and as he walks around, sometimes little rocks fall off, and those become his kids. This one is named Chip, and he’s my favourite.

JB: What? What is this? So, all of this is them planning for the MMO? 

Nick: That’s the popular theory, it would let them double up on the work for two different games at the same time.” 

JB: How big is the MMO? Isn’t it coming out next year? 

Nick: No, it’s been delayed. We won’t see it for several years at least.

JB: Hm? Ah, that makes sense.

JB and I discuss the storytelling opportunities ahead for the world of Runeterra, which brings us on to Arcane and Riot’s animated and live-action endeavours.

I ask JB my timeless question of who he’d want to see in an Arcane-style show, and what he’d put on his wishlist. 

JB: It’s Yorick for sure. I don’t know if it would be popular, like…I don’t think it would be a cultural phenomenon like Arcane, but I think it would be really popular among the community.

Nick: So, is this a Ruination show or a Sentinels of Light redo? Because I’ll be honest, I’m praying for an animated season that retcons the events of Viego’s return. I want to see our boy restart the Brethren of the Dusk. But at the same time, all that takes so much world-building, it’d be tough to sell to non-LoL fans.”

JB: Yeah, I feel like the Ruination event is so big in League that people might be scared away from it, if that makes sense.

JB and I pivot from here to chatting a little bit more about our specific desires for a Yorick-involved show, which mostly boil down to seeing Yorick, Senna, and Gwen, the only known carrier of Isolde’s soul, actually talk about their shared experiences. We agree that a bunch of people Yorick has never met showing up in anime tournament arc outfits and stealing the two things he’s held onto for centuries didn’t actually happen, and commiserate with the fact that Riot has said they’d like to adjust the events of Sentinels of Light.

From there, we pivot back to content creation and how I first became aware of his stuff earlier this year.

How JBPoppinZ popped off, got the bag, and what the burnout it brought taught him about passion and purpose

Nick: You’ve clearly had a pretty rapid rise in online content… Tell me about it.

When did you really start to see your content creation and streaming journey kick off?

JB: You know, I can tell you the exact moment. I just wasn’t posting on other platforms. I don’t know what was wrong with me, but I was like, ‘I’m gonna be a streamer, it’ll go up no matter what. I streamed to 2 people and had zero growth, literally zero growth for an entire year; it was so tragic.

After a while I was like ‘okay, this was f—ing stupid’, so I went onto TikTok and saw what people were posting. The only people doing LoL TikTok at the time were like, this guy named Yobras, and Elekktro. I was like ‘okay, clearly there’s an audience, let me see what I can do.’ I was posting gameplays to start and it wasn’t really going that well, and I said ‘well, I’m pretty eccentric person, let me just put my face in front of the camera and talk about League of Legends. Whenever I did that, my interactions just went crazy. 

In that year alone, I posted 850 TikToks! I went from 0 followers to 60k in six months. On TikTok, people didn’t respond as well because I’m really forward with my opinions, and people don’t like that as much…and I was also low ELO at the time. I think people followed me because it’s not common to see people talk openly about their feelings around League.

Then, I hired Dantes’ editor to do clips for my stream, because I wanted more people to check out my stream. And his editor gave me the suggestion of doing reaction content, so I did. And that blew me up more than I could have ever imagined. And this is the reaction content from outside of the League. I’ll circle back to League in a second, I promise. The first video we made together got 1 million views, the second got 4 million, the third got 66 million views on TikTok, the next one got 70 – it was insane. I went to sleep, not joking, and woke up with sixty thousand more followers. It was unreal.

So for like, six-ish months, I was doing that and cross-posting to Instagram, and that got me like 20k on Instagram. But after a while of that content, I was only doing it for money. If you do videos that are longer than a minute, TikTok will pay you. I started seeing like 10k a month, 8k a month, 9k a month, and I was just doing it for money. And whenever you only think about money when it comes to content creation, you’ll burn out on it. And I was so far from where I wanted to be.

What I want to be is still the number one streamer in the League of Legends category. That’s my goal, I’m going to grind every day until I get to that point. I realized how far I was from my goal, even though it was successful, and I was like, ‘I can’t keep going.’ After quitting reactions and going back to League of Legends content, I realized people did actually like me for my League of Legends content, it wasn’t just the reactions, and then they saw me as some mega-dogs—t low ELO player. People liked my content for my personality, they f—ed with who I was. 

But, even then, there was this three-month period where everything was at an all-time low. No views, no followers, nothing. Or like, maybe our videos were just bad at the time, I don’t know. It took one clip, I’m trying to remember what it was – I was outside, I was talking about League, I had the red eyes face filter on, and it just got like 4 million views. And ever since then, it’s just been up.”

Nick: Yeah, it’s crazy how much the algorithm just needs a single piece to do well before it just shoots your content out into the world.

JB: It takes one thing! It’s crazy, it’s wild.

Nick: Alright. Thanks so much for your time. This has been our interview with JayBePoppinZed, everybody’s favourite Zed main, it’s why he has Zed in his name.”

JB: Yup! Yup! Rank two Zed player in the world!

Nick: Second only to Faker.

JB: Yeah, yeah, for sure. (*laughs*)

In the weeks since the interview, something about my conversation with Jayden has stuck with me. It took me a while to locate what it was that had impressed me so much about him, and I think, having finally crafted what I think is the most genuine reflection of that conversation he and I had, I understand what it is.

JB has that loud, unhinged, unrepentantly himself energy that has been the keystone of League of Legends’ biggest streamers, from Tyler1 to Caedrel. There’s no guarantee that the bravado of JBPoppinZ’s rank one assertions will manifest, but I know one thing for sure – he has the X factor to do it.

In a year where North American fans have lamented the dire state of content and esports for League of Legends, Jayden gives me new hope for the future of the region. He’s got the music chops of Instalock, the religious vocabulary of Humzh, the vocal-fried rage scream of an early Tyler1, and the sheer gremlin energy, eyes-locked-to-camera, of streamers like the aforementioned G2 Kesha or TheBurntPeanut. I’ve seen all the elements that make up who Jayden is when it comes to his content and his personality, and they’re the elemental underpinnings of every star before him.

If he wants to be the biggest LoL streamer, he has his work cut out for him, but it’s work I genuinely believe he’s up to the task of.

Like Yorick, he could be infinite, but has decided, more importantly, that he is enough instead.