Happy 16th to spm!

I ASK AGAIN DO YOU SEE THE VISION

YOU REALLY GOTTA HEAR ME OUT BUT I THINK IM ONTO SOMETHING HERE

More of Count Bleck's crew.

The templates are all made by @/MagicalPouch on Twitter.

Hi! Hope your doing well!! I was curious, in your Mr. L comic au, did Luigi get captured by Dimentio and crew or did he go there willingly? I've seen some fan head canons where he sided with dimentio willingly. I don't remember if this was at all mentioned in your comic. Also how did he get captured in your au if this is in the mario 2023 universe? I've never played super paper mario before but Mr. L is one of my favorite concepts in the mario universe!

Hello! Actually, I've got a long post detailing all the events leading up to my comic, but I'll go ahead and answer what I can (even if it might be a little confusing if you don't know the plot of Super Paper Mario):

Luigi was captured alongside DK and Toad to witness the forced wedding between Peach and Bowser (the inciting event that created The Chaos Heart.)

While DK, Toad, and Peach eventually escaped/were secretly freed by Dimentio, Luigi got brainwashed and became Mr. L. The reason why he was brainwashed is because it was prophesied that "The Man In Green shall use the Chaos Heart's power to bring darkness to all," and Count Bleck wanted to ensure that prophecy came to pass.

In the original game, Dimentio eventually frees Mr. L from his brainwashing and reunites him with Mario and company so they could all work together to defeat Count Bleck. In my version of events that never happens, rather Dimentio cozies up to Mr. L and– after saving him from Bowser and "saving" him from Mario– convinces him to join him in usurping Count Bleck.

Like I said, a little confusing if you don't know anything about Super Paper Mario. There's a lot to cover, but there's a reason why it's widely regarded as the most dark and story-driven Mario game. I highly suggest it!

What do you think the rest of the mario crew thinks of luigis villains?

Oooh hoo hoo. Fun question, anon! I'll include my projected opinions of Bowser, Peach, Mario and maybe a little addendum of E. Gadd as they're the main players who would have definite and varying things to say about each villain.

Bowser

Antasma: Thinks he's an absolute pushover and annoying, to boot. 10/10 would join forces with and betray again as it was almost a little too easy.

King Boo: Is extremely wary of him and tries to avoid entering any deals or partnerships with him, as even Bowser thinks King Boo is seriously deranged and from the rumours he's heard from the Boos who immigrated to the Darklands, he is a petty, tyrannical, and insane ruler. (Not that Bowser isn't petty and tyrannical - at least in his own mind. But, in reality, Bowser is pretty fair according to Darklands culture and treats his minions well, even if he yells and stomps around a lot).

Dimentio: Hates him with a burning passion and wants a chance to go one on one with him, just so he can personally stuff a sock in the smooth-talking jester's mouth. Bowser is always open to less-than-healthy alliances for personal gain, but even he knows Dimentio is someone you do not do deals with if you want to live. But by the lava gods, would he love to dig him up from the River Twygz, just for the opportunity to bury him again.

Peach

Antasma: Frankly, to Peach, Antasma is another villain-of-the-week who kidnapped her. She has no patience for villains who rely solely on kidnapping as their modus operandi, it's insulting and she's over it. She'll, of course, keep an open line of communication with the Pi'illo Kingdom in case Antasma or someone similar tries to make a pass at the Dream Stone, which is a wildly dangerous artifact.

King Boo: Even though King Boo did kidnap her once, Peach holds less disdain for King Boo than Antasma, as, at least with King Boo, her imprisonment wasn't targeted solely on her. She has a healthy respect for King Boo's powers and does not want to get the Mushroom Kingdom entangled with whatever bizarre blood feud is going on between him and Luigi.

Dimentio: She's just glad he's (hopefully) dead. This hasn't stopped her from drafting up a contingency plan to account any reappearance, just in case. She considers him one of the most dangerous villains of all time and worse, due to the whole Chaos Heart fiasco, that contingency plan she's created? Strategies to contain Luigi are also in that plan, and she hates every word she has to dictate to her scribes.

Mario

Antasma: Hates him for the fact he managed to infiltrate his brother's dreams and not only violate his deepest thoughts, but bring Bowser along for that ride. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as the old saying goes.

King Boo: Wants. His. Head. On. A. Platter. (But also, that whole thing makes him doubt himself? He's supposed to the protector, not Luigi. And three times now, Mario has managed to fail and been taken captive by ghosts. He can't figure out why he's so ill-disposed to deal with the paranormal. He needs to fix it).

Dimentio: Mario simultaneously despises Dimentio and is also terrified of him, as he's one of the only bad guys he's never truly been able to kill. Sure, they brought down Super Dimentio (Mario doesn't want to think about that, the other way his brother was folded and stretched into a grotesque monster of the apocalypse), but even then, Dimentio had one last trick up his sleeve and if not for Count Bleck and Tippi, the worlds would have ended and that damned jester and his in-thrall brother would have been left kings of an empty universe. More than King Boo, the nightmare that returns to Mario again and again is Dimentio rising from Underwhere with dangerous, silky words, somehow convincing Luigi to join forces with him to reignite the Chaos Heart and bring reality crashing to an end.

Post-script: E. Gadd

I think of all the villains, E. Gadd would be most fascinated by Antasma. King Boo is a nuisance, one created - if he were to be honest with himself - in part due to his own negligence. He'll never know everything about ghosts, but he knows a damn lot after all these decades. But to traverse the world of dreams and use them to alter reality - that is something E. Gadd has not encountered before, and he would love to study Antasma's powers and see how they align with the brainwave charts he's taken in secret of Luigi.

I created some new redesigns for my versions of the Count Bleck crew and I wanted to share these concepts with you all! The heights/proportions are not to scale as this was done traditionally and colored digitally, but this is good as a reference for the designs!

Heights from tallest to shortest: O’Chunks, Count Bleck, Dimentio, Mimi, Nastasia

"Ahoy mates welcome to the crew exclaimed captain bleck! We are the heart hunters sailing to the chaos heart come ask me and the others questions and such!"

So welcome to the spm pirate au ask blog! Ive made this au and I wanted to share it and make a ask blog! I will explain the au here

The world has been overtaken by water and few survived the flood the flood was caused by the void or whatever it's called something like that and count bleck and crew have a treasure map that leads to the chaos heart they must cross the seas before Mario to get it or something I'm working on the plot

Count bleck turns into: captain blumiere seafoam or captain bleck for short (I liked this name cause I thought it was silly and fits the theme) he has a magical staff that can summon krakens and such like big old sea magic stuff his staff is made of coral and had a pearl on top

And next we have nastasia: nastaisa stormbreaker or nassy is the first mate of the crew usually keeping everyone in like and making sure no one does anything stupid and makes sure everyone is doing their job on the ship

Next he have dimentio silly jester man hehe: dimentio saltwater treasurekeeper or just dimentio/dimi is a Siren from the bottom of the sea he was summoned by captain bleck to aid him in battle and dimentio did so by SINKING A FUCKING SHIP so captain bleck let him stay on the ship to clean and fight others in exchange for his own universe and food.

MIMI is now: mimi melody inkwever or mimi for short she wanted to be a amazing pirate when she grown up so she decided one day to sneak into a ship while no one was looking to fulfill her dreams of being a pirate but was found by the crew after sailing pretty far she was stranded at sea with a bunch of pirates although the crew took her into a crew teaching her how to be a pirate and such while exploring she got bit by a poisonous spider and fell ill after a while she was nearly at death before their ship was attacked in sunk her last moments were seeing water fill the only home she had known and going to the bottom of the ocean years later bleck found her soul roaming a ghost ship all alone and wanted to give her a second chance at living her dream and living in general she accepted her spider related death giving her the power to become a spider when needed

And now finally O'chunks: O'chunks mcloin or just O'chunks is the main person that helps in battle he is VERY strong (bro beat up a kraken for offending him and won) and has some angry issues but is mostly a nice guy who cares about his fellow crew members and his captain a lot he usually plans battles and such he doesn't really like dimentio much cause of his mysteriousness and how he likes to annoy him usually

I hope you enjoy this blog and have fun!! :D -OVI

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Ask box: OPEN!!!

one of the things i love about super paper mario is the way the villain characters (count bleck’s crew) exist in the world (or at least; flipside/flopside and lineland) outside of the castle, outside of the heroes’ mission and the villains’ missions. it just makes the world so much bigger!! people are aware of them!

the rumors you get from carson’s bar in flopside about who the villains are, their backstories, what they could be! and then the gossip we share with sipsi in lineland, and a few npcs in flipside/flopside talking about them. it just makes the world bigger and real, and lets us get to know them better. (even if said dialogue is quiiite obscure if you don’t go looking, or don’t know where to look)

the amount of detail (and writing!) they put into this game and its lore and characters, and worldbuilding never fails to impress me! they have a lot for us to create our own stories with, while also letting us imagine and answer what is left unanswered, and I think that’s just one of the many things I love about this game!

I would like to hear your in-depth thoughts on O'Chunks, Count Bleck, and Super Paper Mario as a whole!

Woah this is just gonna be a big ramble on how much I love the game and why.

I’m gonna start with Super Paper Mario as a whole, I’m a really big fan and I have been since maybe around 2016 or so. I was vaguely aware of it as a kid but after watching a cosplay chess (its where you get a bunch of cosplayers to roleplay and they’re on a big chessboard and they act out in character to defeat each other until there’s a winner or sometimes even a subversion of plot) video that had a Dimentio cosplayer in it I decided to look into the game. By that point I was no stranger to jester characters, I used to rewatch the Marx fight from Kirby Super Star Ultra all of the time so I was immediately going through SPM play throughs, fanfic, fanart. It’s a game I seem to be thinking about all of the time for months and years on end without a break lol. It admittedly catches my attention more than the other Paper Mario games, I’m not sure why, perhaps because it’s so visually different in aesthetic and character design. I enjoy its silly moments and it’s dramatic lore, but I also have a very specific issue with some parts of the lore being vague in Carson’s stories specifically. He’s always ending his stories in a question or talking about how much of a mystery these stories are. Maybe it’s on purpose and maybe this is also wishful thinking on my end, but sometimes I theorize that maybe they were going to reuse some of SPM’s lore for another game. I uhhh can’t say much about the game play because I’ve been enjoying SPM through play throughs.

On to O’ Chunks!

I think he’s in last place in terms of fandom popularity in terms of the Castle Bleck cast. Honestly I sort of get it, he’s not conventionally attractive and most artists sort of struggle with drawing older, bald, and bearded characters. Especially back in 2007 when the game was released when the anime art style was very popular on Deviantart. You could turn everyone else in castle bleck into a cutesy attractive anime character since their designs are just vaguely human enough for you to make your own little interpretations but with O’ Chunks you can clearly see he has a very human design so you can’t really make a Gijinka of him like you could the others. I think there’s something cool yet funny about that though, like he’s some unchanging force throughout everyone’s interpretation of the cast. (But I think it would be really cool as well to see people stray from his main design and interpret his design in the same way people would the rest of castle bleck)

He’s played off as sort of a joke character and then you read up on Carson’s stories of him and then it’s all like Woahh this is the same dude we’re talking about?? Funny characters that are secretly tragic is a trope I really like.

I think it’s really silly how everyone plays into his “chunking” catchphrases like Count Bleck saying: "Very well, O'Chunks. I'll leave the hero-chunking to you. Do not fail Count Bleck." Or Dimentio saying: "Mmm... I do enjoy a good chunking...", it’s really fun that the other characters are willing to hype up O’ Chunk’s catchphrases.

Also I think everyone sort of just glossed over the fact O’ Chunks was begging to die because he didn’t want to go back to Count Bleck and tell him he got defeated for the second time and only changed his mind after Dimentio shows up and talks a bit and afterwards he’s all like: “yeah I wouldn’t kill myself unless the count told me to.”

In conclusion he’s a really cool and underrated character and I like him a lot!! (If you couldn’t already tell by the blog theme and name lol)

Finally on to Count Bleck!

Wahhhh I love his lore and story it’s sooo bittersweet I want to fall to my knees dramatically anytime I think of it. He definitely seems like the type of guy that thought he didn’t care about his crew and everything they’re all doing was purely business because he’s just so caught up in his whole depressive world ending shenanigans that by chapter 8 he’s sort of surprised that he likes his minions as much as they do.

He’s still very much a bad guy, wiping out whole worlds and also lying to his very loyal group about making a way cooler world afterwards, and also on top of that even manipulating some of his minions unfortunate circumstances to get them on his team. (I.E: O’ Chunks) but I will let it slide this time because he’s a cool character to me.

All the memory sections of the game are so cute until it hits chapter six and then it’s like….ouch my feelings. He was mourning her so bad he would’ve unknowingly killed her if he’d succeeded, damn. But he didn’t so they got their nice little happy ending, and they’re just so cute together yaayyy!! (I’m in love with the picture of them under the tree at the end of the credits and I totally start to tear up when I see it with the credits music)

He’s a really interesting character and I can’t find myself finding another Mario character that inflicts this same emotions his lore gave me.

Do Cackletta and P. Shroob know Count Bleck and his entourage?

Cackles and Shroobs know of Bleck n Crew from what they've heard from stories and Fawful

Fawful knows of them more personally since he's friends with Mimi

(a bit of blog canon I keep forgetting about from time to time)

This one is the only one that I loved a lot heheh

I tried to design LGBT+ flags based in the Count's crew (I forgor Mr L uhhhh). I'm not so good making designs for flags im sorry 🦋 I think i had see this flags before...

But hey, I just did it for fun. They can be interpreted as you want cuz they have not a description, like sexual orientation or gender identity but not for mockery. (Omg Bleck-sexual , sniff sniff it's literally me,,,,,,)

If you don't like this just pass by!

What's your opinion on Dimentio?

(gonna go into some endgame stuff so spoilers under the cut)

stinky

He's such a well-written and super calculated character that honestly amazes and terrifies me. The whole game he has us under his thumb and we don't even know it. He watches over everyone to make sure that nothing goes against his plan. He teleports Peach when it doesn't fit his plan for her to be hypnotized. He sends the crew to hell The Underwhere so they can fix the pure heart. His dialogue is funny at times yet scary and downright despicable at others. ("Count Bleck! You looked so tattered and pathetic I nearly forgot about you" had me seeing red) His similes are so oddly specific and hilarious it makes me laugh. I hate him. I love him. I love to hate him.

bassard

@milkywaypudding asked me if I had voice headcanons for the Bleck crew and I deleted the ask by accident so I'm gonna talk about it here!

I did found a video a long time ago that was a dub of one of their scenes, one very close to the end of the game, but the video is in private now so I won't have a way of showing it ;w; but anyways, it was really perfect, now the closest thing that I have is man on the internet's songs and I must say, they chose really good voices for the crew and since I never searched a lot for voices I can say that those are my headcanon voices for them for now :)

But if I were to put into words how I imagine their voices, without an actual audio...

Bleck would sound a bit husky and echoey, his tone is low and not so strong, unless he really means to talk louder. He sounds a lot like a ghost and Dracula were merged together.

Nastasia is almost monotone, sounds soft when she talks to herself but she knows how to make her voice hard when it comes to being harsh with others, mid tone, more low than high.

Mimi doesn't really have the squeakiest voice ever, but she's very emotional and her voice tends to follow her emotions closely, the tone is a strong kind of high, very "feminine" too.

O'Chunks isn't really husky like the Count but he has a strong voice, it sounds like he speaks straight from the throat, if you know what I mean, his tone is low too, and it sounds even stronger with his accent. He can sound soft when he wants, although it's very rare for him to so so. (I think of Heavy from TF2 when I think about O'Chunks' voice)

Dimentio, he has very soft voice, kind of seductive too, mid tone, also to the lower side, but he's actually really good at changing it, so he may sound higher or lower depending on what he wants from you hehe and he has an accent, but you can't really tell if it's French or Italian

And I'm gonna put Timpani here too, so, soft, mid, she speaks with clarity and tends to use a very comprehensive way of using words, so in general she sounds like an angel. (very biased btw akdjajf)

As I'm in the development stages of my SPM AU comic, I've been working on character designs.

For this page we've got most of Count Bleck's crew. This is where I first drew up the current designs I use for them. Here you can see my clear bias for Dimentio lmao. I drew him far more than the others. I also fiddled with his design a lot. When it comes to my favorite characters, I have trouble designing them cause I want to do them justice. Mimi is here a lot cause I just genuinely enjoy drawing her.  Count Bleck has an interesting facet to his design, where when he's Count Bleck, and has the hat on, you can't see his hair or ears. He also has a more jagged mouth, which gives him more of a creepy look.  And if you get the pose reference for the O'Chunks doodle on the bottom, then you're an MVP. Have fun with my little ship dump on the top of the canvas lol

Shadoo and King Croacus are also featured here. I honestly love them, and think they don't get enough love from the fandom. I'm really happy with both of their designs as well. Shadoo is made of white line art due to her being a shadow.  I could go on about the little details in Croacus' design that were taken from his canon model, but I won't lmao

We also have some designs for Luvbi. I wanted to lean into how Nimbi are like angels, so her arms are like an extra set of wings to reference the biblically accurate angels.  In the bottom left corner we have some Shaydes, the Spirits of the Underwhere. I wanted them to vary a bit more than just the two we see in game. Their variations also make up some of the different races we see throughout the SPM universe. We'll see more Shayde variations in the actual comic when I make it. 

Certain spots are also censored due to spolier reasons.

Guess who’s back on his “Professor Inkling and Count Bleck are the same person” nonsense

I got. Very attached to the Swap Designs

This is now my favourite drawing of Count Bleck ever. All my others can go home this wins this wins so hard

:3

Shoutout to whatever Professor Inkling has going on here though. I gave him his curl and his ears back

I need you all to know that under the muzzle he’s basically just doing the :D face

I like to think that they were just both YANKED from their respective medias in just. The middle of the story.

Mario’s already past Chapter 3 and Team Bleck is having a meeting and they take their eyes off Bleck for ONE SECOND and they look back and it’s. Old Man Octopus.

Meanwhile elsewhere they’ve like just finished the events of Ring of Fire and when the Octopod reaches the crew instead of the Professor its some ancient blue boy

Count Bleck minion shenanigans.

You know that Mr. L, at least once, gathered the whole minion crew into the rec room to give a 60-minute presentation on power poses and how they can be used in battle. He's 100% in on this after discovering an article about it on the team computer. This will definitely help him defeat that stupid Red Guy.

Nastasia is not impressed. She's a power pose all by herself.

Mimi says her fashion is the only power pose she needs.

O'Chunks just threatens to introduce them all to his power fist.

Dimentio makes up fake articles about increasingly bizarre poses, leaving them around for Mr. L, cackling as he catches him practicing an inverted tree pose. Luigi chases him out, promising to power pose his face.