You like Kirby? I’ll give you Kirby! This is something I stumbled upon while clicking around doing research for the previous post.
As someone who enjoys video games and also writes about them, I have an odd relationship with fandom. On one hand, fans are what makes a given thing popular enough that it hangs around — if not in the form of sequels and remakes then at the very least as art and text created in tribute to that original thing. On the other hand, however, some fans seem to have problems differentiating between how a given concept is portrayed in a game versus how they have chosen to interpret it, and it’s everyone else’s problem when their headcanon butts up against reality. Every now and then, those people end up on a site like this one, and god bless them, they leave comments and threaded social media responses explaining why everyone should get on board with their take, which is the correct one. I politely encourage them to return to their Tumblrs, but I do not relish these little peeks into their lives.
But sometimes I’ll stumble onto a bit of fandom that’s so niche that I have to stop and admire the desire to celebrate a specific thing that goes basically unnoticed by every other person who enjoys the game in question. And this is one of these.
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Allow me to introduce you to Chuchu, the octopus friend from Kirby’s Dreamland 3, and then also Nyupun, a different octopus — maybe a flapjack octopus? — who debuts in the same game but who is a different kind of octopus and who wears a sassy beret.
To be clear, Chuchu is essentially a playable character in the way Yoshi is in Super Mario World. If Kirby teams up with her, the player controls her and Kirby both. Just on her own, without any power-ups, this allows them to do things Kirby can’t do normally, such as stick to ceilings using Chuchu’s suction cup arms. But as with all six animal buddies in the game, Chuchu also changes the function of the enemy powers that Kirby can use. For example, with Chuchu the parasol power-up turns into a spinning top that the two of them ride as it smashes into enemies.
What’s more, it’s kind of implied that there’s some sort of love connection when Chuchu is riding around on Kirby like a hat. Kirby makes this dopey expression that kind of implies that he likes being her personal throne. And in this form, Chuchu actually hand-feeds Kirby enemies. Rather than sucking them in vacuum-style, she grabs them and places them into Kirby’s mouth. And I have to say, even for a game with a hand-drawn, Yoshi’s Island-esque aesthetic like this one, this seems rather… intimate.
And I’d imagine it’s all intentional, too, because she looks very much like Kirby. She is canonically an octopus, sure, but she’s an octopus that looks to have been designed specifically to look like Kirby, kind of in the style of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man.
Nyupun, on the other hand, is not a playable character. She is just Chuchu’s friend who shows up in a single stage, where she waits at a checkpoint to give Kirby an item if he shows up with Chuchu in tow. That’s it. Following Kirby’s Dream Land 3, Chuchu never showed up again as a playable character, so this means Nyupun has, like, extra not showed up again. By any standard, Nyupun is an extremely minor character in this franchise.
But that doesn’t stop the fans. Oh, no no no.
Despite everything I just said about Chuchu and how it seems like she and Kirby are supposed to be sweet on each other, a subset of Kirby fans actively ship the two cutesy-poo octopuses based on extremely scant evidence. For one thing, Nyupun shows up in one of the images produced by Ado, a little artist girl who may or may not be Adeleine from Kirby 64. (It’s complicated. I will explain in the miscellaneous notes section.) Anyway, one of the images Ado might produce features the six animal buddies’ respective buddies who are all animals but who are not Animal Buddies, if that makes sense.
For three of them, it’s a love interest. Kine, the sunfish, gets his wife Mine. Nago, the cat, gets his girlfriend Shiro. And Rick, the hamster, gets his girlfriend Pick. It opens up, however, when we get to Pitch, the green bird animal buddy who does not get a more specific identification, because he doesn’t get a girlfriend but instead his mother, whose name is apparently Pitch Mama. And then Chuchu gets Nyupun, leaving it up to the player to decide if their relationship is an outlier, like Pitch and his mother, or if this means that Nyupun is supposed to be Chuchu’s romantic counterpart.
For years, the story of Chuchu and Nyupun, potential lesbian octopuses, ended there, but in 2018, the official Kirby Twitter account celebrated Valentine’s Day with an illustration showing various characters making special treats. If you’ll notice, Chuchu is icing a cookie to look exactly like Nyupun. And while that could mean anything, the nature of this act was already a foregone conclusion for the aforementioned subset of Kirby fandom. (Please make nothing of the fact that Kirby is eating a cookie that has been decorated to look like himself.)
Based on this and this alone, just searching for images of Chuhu and Nyupun almost immediately pulls up ship art of them. And I’m not talking about anything smutty, either, though I don’t doubt for a second that that exists. I’m talking about tame art showing them being more than platonic. I even turned up a video, titled “The Sapphic Octopus Carousel,” in which the artist edited the sprite of Kirby and Chuchu on the spinning parasol top to instead be Chuchu and Nyupun.
As someone who modifies existing pixels for the thumbnail art for each post on the blog, I need to stress to you that it’s a giant pain in the ass to do this, and it just shows me that the need to pair off these two Kirby octopuses comes from a deep place. I may not understand it, but people are certainly doing the work.
So yeah, while most online fandom strikes me as a lot of work to fairly minimal payoff, I’m giving this one a pass. I’m not totally sure why? It might be that I see a like-minded weirdo in anyone who can seize onto a character that didn’t even register with anyone else. And it might be that this niche fandom has provided an extended life for Nyupun, a character whose entire canon existence amounts to “yellow octopus with a beret.” Like, Nintendo itself has only remembered her once — in that Valentine’s art — since Kirby’s Dreamland 3 debuted thirty years ago in 1997, but this small group of Kirby diehards has intervened, made her gay and found a way to celebrate her despite a lack of any sort of in-game follow-up whatsoever.
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Miscellaneous Notes
If Chuchu is supposed to look like Kirby, then I’m guessing that Nyupun is meant to be a reference to the fact that Shigeru Miyamoto initially envisioned Kirby as being yellow — not pink. It’s mentioned in this interview, and this is the reason that there is a yellow Kirby in 1994’s Kirby’s Dream Course, which was the first game in the series to have a versus mode. Essentially, they needed a different-colored Kirby to distinguish who is who, and so a yellow version of Kirby became a canon character. He even has a name: Keeby, from the Japanese word for “yellow,” 黄色 or kīro.
The thing with Ado and Adeleine is both confusing and not. Ado is a boss in Kirby’s Dreamland 3. She’s a little artist girl who summons various bosses from previous Kirby games via her paintings, and once defeated, she becomes friendly. Adeleine appears in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards and looks and behaves very similar to Ado, even becoming playable in the game’s multiplayer mode once defeated.
Excerpt from the 20th Anniversary Kirby Pupupu Encyclopedia — and yes, that really is the name — via WikiKirby.
It’s not stated however that they’re meant to be the same character, but they effectively are that regardless; Ado functions like a predecessor to Adeleine, and based on the fact that Adeleine appears in Kirby Star Allies makes me think we’re meant to think of her as finalized, “official” version of the character. What’s more, the katakana for Adeleine’s name, アドレーヌ, would be transliterated as Adorēnu, making it seem like Ado is merely a nickname for the character’s full name.