Li’l Miss Marshmallow
Image from Mother 3 (video game, 2006)
Short-Tempered Mecha-Maid
Electric/Cutter Type
Original Media: Mother 3 (video game, 2006)
Story
A robot maid by an unknown creator. Originally designed with the secondary purpose to protect one of her creator’s personal belongings, she was also designed to be incredibly capable in combat. She defected from her creator some time before her debut in Chaos Zone, and now lives life on her own.
While her archaic design (at least compared to other robots in the setting) means her speech and movement are more prone to malfunction, she still has a human-like ability to think.
True to her name, Li’l Miss Marshmallow usually acts soft and sweet around others. It’s not hard to get her provoked, though, and when she gets mad, she gets really, really mad; her peers generally exercise caution around her so as to not face the violent consequences of pushing her buttons.
While she’s willing to help when a world-endangering villain comes along, she stays busy even in more peaceful times, redirecting her old skills of maintenance and protection to more mundane, yet meaningful ways of keeping the world clean and beautiful, such as tending to a personal garden or cleaning litter.
Abilities
Angry Slap
The user slaps the opponent hard, usually in the face. Can’t be avoided.
Neutral/Damage Type
Hot Tea
Li’l Miss Marshmallow splashes multiple targets with a cup of absurdly hot tea. Like, third-degree burn level hot.
Water/Flame Type
Quick Trim
Li’l Miss Marshmallow uses her scissors to rapidly cut into her opponent.
Cutter/Swift Type
Li’l Miss Marshmallow can also activate her Ultra Ticked-Off System in a pinch, boosting her attack speed and power.
Image from Mother 3 (video game, 2006)
Voice
General Description
Teenager/Young Adult; high-pitched; when calm, she has a formal, polite tone to her voice; when angry or excited, she talks very loudly and frantically; voice is heavily filtered to sound “robotic”, but her intonation is still clear
Example Voice
Source: Peanuts (television series, 2014)
Original Context: The voice of the character “Lucy Van Pelt”.
Additional Notes: The samples have been edited from their source material to add the “robotic” sound mentioned above. The last sample in particular has been heavily edited.
Behind the Scenes
Despite only being a minor character in the 2006 game Mother 3 (a game praised for its great storytelling and cast), I found myself interested in Li’l Miss Marshmallow from a young age; despite just being a servant to the greater villain, one can choose to provoke her, leading to one of the most difficult fights in the game, even when her attacks are things as mundane as slaps and scalding tea until she activates her “Ultra Ticked-Off System”; I’ve always been a big fan of robots, so even realizing Li’l Miss Marshmallow had almost no relevance to the greater plot, I found the idea of a super-aggressive robot maid entertaining.
When she made her Chaos Zone debut in 2020, Li’l Miss Marshmallow’s plot relevance wasn’t much stronger than before; she was more of an example of the dramatic effects Limited could have, being used as a guinea pig for experimenting with it (with two villains, “Sakarin” and “Sakaros”, being born from Limited copying her data).
While she initially fell into my general cast of non-specific “characters who team up in times of crisis”, I eventually tried to push her into a team of 4 called the “Clockwork Alliance”, as a sort of secondary team to my main cast of heroes at the time, the “Brash Crew”. Nothing really came of this concept, and I quietly abandoned it.
Even so, I eventually decided to breathe new life into Marshmallow as the number of world-ending villains began to dwindle; for as much as her character seems designed as a joke about a seemingly sweet-natured character being a violent one-woman army, I felt tapping into what little of her past I had kept from Mother 3 was an opportunity to show a character who found a quieter purpose in her life, and trying to help another character of mine – one who was much more used to fighting powerful opponents – find something to live for even in peaceful times.
While the “Story” section describes Li’l Miss Marshmallow’s creator as “unknown”, her creator – or at least, master – actually is known in Mother 3, and my writing is meant to imply to those aware of the game’s story that her creator is the same person here (albeit not visibly). At the time Marshmallow is encountered, the character is only known as “King P.”, though their true identity spoils a massive part of the game’s story, hence why I’ve avoided saying the character’s name outright. That said, other websites will likely be a lot more open to the identity of “King P.”, so if you’re interested in learning the story of Mother 3, I’d suggest exercising caution.
Brash Buster 