Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread! I’m Wolfman Jew, your host. Now, it’s December. I’ve got five weeks before the end of the year, and that means it’s on me to find five scintillating, exciting, universally applicable prompts, prompts to which any regular video game player can relate. I take my role in this very seriously, as I have since I started these. And in honor of the recent release of Kirby Air Riders, here is perhaps the most scintillating, exciting, universally applicable topic I could make: an ode my personal friend and mentor, Marx, the mad, Eldritch jester from Kirby Super Star.

Marx started as the end boss of “Milky Way Wishes,” Super Star‘s eighth and final story. In the game, he’s a cute, clown-like creature who convinces Kirby to summon the wish-granting Galactic Nova—initially as a pretense to stop the sun and the moon from fighting, in reality to take over Planet Popstar. Kirby fixes things by piloting a ship into the Heart of Nova and blowing the whole thing to pieces, before finding Marx on a mysterious planet. And while Kirby had faced final bosses before, Marx’s True Form was something else. He grew giant, boney wings with hexagonal mirrors, and he had creepy powers like summoning vines or splitting himself in half to summon a black hole. Notably, creator Masahiro Sakurai has claimed that Nintendo or HAL Laboratory made him tone down the design, though he didn’t indicate if the complaints were about Super Star or Marx’s appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Even his theme was unnerving thanks to its constantly changing time signature.

The Kirby franchise has a lot of cast turnover when it comes to its final bosses. King Dedede, Meta Knight, and Whispy Woods are expected in every game, but historically the last guy you fought was pretty much gone afterwards. Nightmare got to be the overarching villain of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! but was persona non grata in the games (and also in Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, for that matter), Dark Matter got to return only to be replaced by Zero, and other villains like Dark Mind, Dark Nebula, and President Haltmann appear once before losing to Kirby in a big, showy battle. For many years, Marx had the same fate, but he had one thing going that almost all of those villains didn’t: he came from the game that defined the Kirby franchise. Being the star of Kirby Super Star is a lot more exciting than being the star of Kirby Squeak Squad or Kirby Triple Deluxe. But also, that made Marx the template of the “Kirby final boss.”

You know the longstanding joke about how Kirby’s games are super sweet and soft and colorful and end with some disgusting, monstrous horror? That was Marx. The final bosses who came before him were King Dedede, Nightmare (who even the Kirby Wiki describes as having “surprisingly little subsequent influence or impact on the video game series or its lore”), and the admittedly “kinda gnarly for the Game Boy” Dark Matter. The rest of the trope came off of this specific boss fight, from shooting crystals into 0²‘s bleeding eye to flying around the mammoth Void Termina to the final twist villain of Kirby and the Forgotten Land whose craziness still astounds me, three years later. And in fact, many of those villains directly reference Marx, either through their aesthetics or their moves. “Shooter Cutter,” the deceptively annoying attack where he throws a series of laser sickles, has been used by at least eight successive bosses by my count. The most notable reference of all is Magalor, the twist villain of Kirby’s Return to Dream Land. He’s essentially a Marx successor—the same twist, the same transition from cute to horrifying, and the two even get paired a lot in merchandise—though he does survive his fight and now lives out his fate of being a second-string supporting character.

Still, no one’s been able to actually match Marx’s exact combination of cuteness, grossness, theatricality, and, well, being from a good game. Magolor’s cool, but Kirby’s Return to Dream Land decidedly isn’t. And so Marx has gotten to be something of a Dream Landian elder statesman, alluded to constantly through references and cameos. He got to be the most exciting “get” of Kirby Star Allies‘ numerous and series-hopping Dream Friends, he got to be a boss in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that was aided by decades of improvement on the front of grossness rendering, and now he’s in Kirby Air Riders in both roles. He’s a Rider and a boss. And so, for my prompt: talk about Marx, the mad, Eldtrich jester from Kirby Super Star. Talk about his surprisingly intense musical theme, or the way he embodies the trope of the final boss upping the craziness, or his fun reappearances.

While I’m sure this is the broadest and most universally of interest prompt I’ve ever come up with—who doesn’t love Marx?—just in case you aren’t interested in endlessly gushing over the best Kirby final boss, do tell us about what you played this Thanksgiving weekend.