Piranhette

About

Piranhette, Piranette or Piranha Plantette refers to the Super Crown versions of the Piranha Plant enemies from the Super Mario series that rose in popularity during September and October of 2018.

Origin

At the September 13th, 2018 Nintendo Direct, Nintendo unveiled a trailer for New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch (trailer shown below). The trailer also introduced a new exclusive power up for Toadette, the Super Crown, which allowed her to transform into a humanoid version called Peachette.

This led to the creation of fan art of multiple Nintendo characters drawn as humanoids, including Bowsette, Princess Boo, Chain Chompette, and finally, Pirahnette. One of the earliest known artworks of the Piranha Plant with a Super Crown was posted by Tumblr user liliruru on September 23rd, 2018, gaining over 7,500 notes (shown below).

Spread

Fan art of the character spread quickly alongside the other Super Crown characters over the following several months. On September 30th, 2018 Twitter user Diives uploaded an animation showing the character emerging from a warp pipe (shown below left), gaining 9,300 likes and 2,200 retweets in the coming months. On November 4th of the same year, Reddit user PostsPornOnReddit^[1] uploaded an image by the artist SuperSatanSon^[2] (shown below right) to the Bowsette dedicated subreddit /r/Bowsette gaining 2,500 upvotes.

Other popular examples include a tweet by @hotGlossed that gained over 1,800 retweets and 10,000 likes (shown below, left) and a Twitter drawing by @calavanitas (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References