#paper chopper

[mechanicaloven]

Here's something I did for a Paper Mario art collab. We were tasked to make a Paper Mario character based on any of the species exclusive to the Paper Mario universe. I decided to draw a Pixl from a fanfiction I wrote over ten years ago, Starbow!

[mechanicaloven]

I had this video ready back in 2024 but I had trouble uploading it for some reason. I probably forgot to publish this here for some reason.

So when Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was getting a remake and I saw some of the Crystal Stars there, I remembered I had designed about thirteen other Crystal Stars for a fanfic I wrote fifteen years ago, and seeing the remake inspired me to try to make some kind of Paper Mario animation. I hadn't really gotten far in it, just at the Crystal Stars and a few environment parts that left me on a roadblock and made me work on other things. But at least I can show the work on the Crystal Stars I made.

I was originally going to do just the remake designs of the stars, but I went a step further and did the original Crystal Star designs from the GameCube version and made a little switch in Geometry Nodes to swap to either one.

Maybe I'll eventually finish the animation I wanted to work on, but it's also hard to work on it when you got many other ideas to boot, but that's really on me.

That said, enjoy these stars!

[mechanicaloven]

Warning: this description is a bit wordy... So over ten years ago, I ended up creating a fanfiction series on the internet called Paper Chopper, based off the first three Paper Mario games. At the moment, they have the biggest word count in the Mario section, with one of them having around 1.2 million words. Unlike a regular Paper Mario game where there are eight chapters, the first story was double that (sixteen chapters), while the two sequels had twenty chapters. Personally, I do not think these stories hold up well today and are filled with many plot points, they overstay their welcome, and there's other stuff I'm not really fond of looking back. The first eight chapters of all three stories were essentially the Paper Mario games repeated, even though I meant to treat them as sequels, when I really should've just made them original Paper Mario stories in the first place (Chapters 1, 5, and 6 were exceptions though...mostly). Also, characters from the Kirby and Sonic games appeared, so there was that too. I wouldn't exactly call these stories successful either. They all had over one hundred chapters, yet they only had around fifty reviews - which really isn't good when you compare that to other stories with that many words. I can understand why people wouldn't be interested in them - with the main character being an original character, so my story's success rate was probably my own fault. Admittedly, I have ideas of rebooting these stories into something completely new, as my writing has actually improved, but I kinda have doubts that many people would take a look. That, and I wanna focus more on art, comics, and animation, since I think that would work a lot better for me. Yet despite my mixed feelings about the Paper Chopper trilogy, I do get nostalgic from thinking of them. There are SOME things I do kind of like looking back, such as some of the settings Chopper and Co. go to throughout their adventures. Chapter 1 of Paper Chopper: The Crystal Stars has a pretty neat concept in my opinion. It's just that - well, it could be better execution-wise... TL;DR: These stories don't hold up today, but I still have some nostalgia for them. So to celebrate these stories being around for around ten years, I made this. I based the characters off the TTYD color palette, while the background is based off Color Splash's look. Mario and Sonic's poses are even based off official art of them.

Who knows? I might make more of these if I ever have to drive to do so!

Included is also closeups of the characters! But you probably saw them already before reading this.

[mechanicaloven]

Here are all ten partners from Paper Chopper: The Crystal Stars in the Paper Mario style. Like in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, there's a bit more variety in character appearances. Heck, there are some not even from the Mario world!

[mechanicaloven]

Here are all ten partners from Paper Chopper, all of them in the Paper Mario style.