Fic: We Launch in Five

[mrsluigivargas]

We Launch in Five
Mario and Kamek have a chat on the deck of Bowser’s airship.

Fandom: Super Mario
Rating: General Audiences
Characters: Kamek, Mario
Relationships: Mario & Kamek
Additional Tags: Implied/Referenced Character Death, Spoilers
Length: 992 words

This fic was written for the Paper Mario Zine 2024! It released in anticipation of the Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door remake and can be found here. Honored to be a part of it!

This WIP had been in my drafts for a while, so I was happy to dust it off. Really wanted to contrast Mario, who’d never really thought about Bob-ombs blowing up, and Kamek, who has seen hundreds if not thousands of them die in the name of Bowser’s Kingdom and is more or less numb to it.

The way I was thinking of it, all the soldiers are technically expendable (aside from super high-ranking ones like Kamek I guess), but the Bob-ombs are uniquely expendable in the sense that they're mass-produced and literally designed to explode (and therefore die), lmao. I feel like Kamek's been at the castle for so long, and he's seen so many Bob-ombs explode over the course of his life, that he's more or less numb to it now. Sure, there might be some deep-buried place in that cold heart of his that still kinda goes "aw man :/" when Bob-ombs start exploding, but they're all soldiers, you know? It comes with the territory. Every group of soldiers has a skill set to rely on, and a Bob-ombs's main skill is the power of its kamikaze explosion, ha. That sort of viewpoint probably passed to Bowser, in some fashion. Though sometimes I wonder whether the Bob-omb's culture of going out with an impact came from the Bob-ombs themselves in the factories when they realized how fragile they actually were — and then maybe got warped to serve the Army's needs — or if it was actually from some kind of propaganda campaign that promoted that sort of mentality from the moment the Bob-ombs stepped off the assembly line, so they would feel less wary about exploding to death for the goals of Bowser's Kingdom, that then melted into the aforementioned culture over many years of oral traditions. Or maybe both options reinforced each other. Or maybe I'm being too negative about it XD