“I'm D Best! The Big D! Some other pun of my name! When I'm done with you, I'll get the most subs!”
Super Smash Brothers Lawl is a spinoff of a youtube poop series that inadvertently inspired many. A lot of other people would look at the idea of giving characters hypothetical Smash Brothers movesets and use them as a chance to make their dream crossovers. This eventually evolved into the Lawliverse, in which dozens of universes showing these Lawls would coexist, only occasionally crossing over with each other. But there was one guy who looked at this idea and decided it would be fun to make one, but with himself as a starring role. So then D Kess would establish D Kess City and Lawl D Kess.
This plan didn’t quite go to plan. Initially his attempts to gather fighters would lead to constant infighting, and his attempts to get popularity would be constantly met with failure. So he ended up taking a deal with a mysterious entity known as null, who used him as a pawn in his plans in exchange for the popularity Kess desired. Though this was short-lived, as the fighters of Lawl D Kess would end up coming into conflict with null, ultimately leading to them stopping these plots. This led to Kess getting cast out and left for dead in the middle of the ocean, as the fighters would part ways with him. This seemed to be the end for him.
And then, D Kess came back. Now in the real world, he’d find out the truth of his existence. His Lawl’s storyline was, in reality, seen by many as not very good. And this led to his actual creator abandoning the series to start a new one, abandoning everything D Kess thought he built in the process. Incensed, Kess would return to the Lawliverse. Initially he intended to take revenge on the world for abandoning him, but after losing many times in attempting to follow this, he’d refocus. Now believing he was brought back to once again be the hero, he’d seek out the entity he had previously worked for, and aimed to break into a prison housing the greatest threats of the Lawliverse known as Lawlcatraz.
However, after fighting his way through the prison, null once again pulled the rug on him. His entire legacy had been forgotten by everyone, in part thanks to null’s involvement subtly making his popularity fail to form. His worldview thoroughly shattered, Kess would become a massive monstrosity which many other denizanes of the LAwliverse had to team up to defeat. Ultimately, this led to a Subspace bomb blasting Kess back into the void, seemingly for good. But some say he’s still hiding in the fringes of the digital universe, plotting the next step of his attempt to make the world his…
Before We Begin
So if you mainly know me for my VS stuff, this might be a bit of a weird out of nowhere pick for a character to cover. And that’s because he’s actually an OC made by a friend of mine, ZippityZab, who I’ve also worked with on a VS show called Fiction Fights. I haven’t done a lot of advertising on that with these blogs or in general because I kinda suck at promotion, but if you’re interested in anything you see here, go ahead and give his stuff a watch, he deserves the best.
To get back to the more standard VS establishing stuff, this will mainly be looking at the character as presented in the main Super Smash Bros Lawl storyline made by ZippityZab. The first main source is his original titular Lawl. Thankfully things are easy due to a compilation of the lore segments for it in a big movie, and as this is considered the definitive version of the Lawl’s events, it will be taking main precedence. Though there will be some looking into the original videos on some details not covered in these lore segments, and will also include various other videos made by Zab at the time which are considered to be an extension of Kess’s story in the Lawl.
This also will look into the Escape to Lawlcatraz movie, which beyond the events within it, also involves a lot of crossing over with the lore of other Smash Brothers Lawl projects. As this is a big crossover event and a lot of the lore from each of these Lawls were impacted by this, I’ll also be using it as an avenue for scaling to the events of these other projects. Especially so with Lawl Aureus, which has Kess as one of the fighters, and Lawl Odyssey^4, which is the new Lawl made by Zab which Kess is a part of the lore for.
A big thing to note with covering Lawl projects is that, by their nature of giving characters hypothetical Smash Brothers movesets, all of these projects involve a lot of preexisting characters crossing over. But as they’re all original non-canon versions of these characters and I don’t want to deal with potentially cross scaling literally every series ever, I’m just going to be looking at the characters as they’re presented within the movesets and lore from these Lawls, so there will be no scaling back to anyone’s original series here.
I’m also not going to be bringing up the events of the Crossover Nexus, a roleplay discord server that Zab has had D Kess be a part of at a few points. Simply put, even as someone who has been a regular player on it for a few years now, there is far too much to look through and keep track of from it, and his direction as a character in it is already pretty much a separate thing from the events of the lore established within the Lawls, so it doesn’t feel right to include it.
Media List
Lawl D Kess
Other D Kess Productions animations
Escape from Lawlcatraz
Lawl projects which crossed over with Kess at some point
Lawl Aureus
Lawl Odyssey^4
Lawl Beatdown
Lawl Encore
Lawl Nova
Lawl Zero
Throw Some Lawl Z
(This isn’t all the Lawls he’s crossed with, but others I looked into didn’t have any feats of note to add here)
The Polybius Archives
Other works by ZippityZab
Intelligence & Skill
As you might expect from a guy who’s in charge of a Super Smash Brothers tournament, D Kess has shown himself to have some good skill in fighting. In his original Lawl, he was able to fight Robotnik in a fight, as well as Spongebob and Patrick. And during the events of Lawlcatraz, he was able to keep in a fight with plenty of other fighters, including Beatbox Thanos, Quote, April Fools Bob, Tord, Spinel, and Bill Cipher possessing Dipper. And his final form was able to make a fight against a lot of other Lawl Fighters and force them to work together. Speaking of which, he was able to make a plan to break into a prison, and was able to make a whole city on his own, so he does have some good general intelligence.
Equipment
ACME Supa Sucka
To help deal with some ghosts, Kess used this to suck them up, which seemingly killed them. He can also use it to redirect attacks, shoot out cannonballs, and potentially to fly.
Dark Cannon
A cannon which Kess has access to, which is able to transmute fighters into statues. He was seen using this to take out Spongebob, Patrick, and David Hasselhoff. Destroying these statues also counts as killing the target, as seen in this parody trailer for Mortal Kombat 11.
Internet Filter
Seen in the “Who Shot D Kess?” video, this is a device which Kess can utilize to filter comments on the internet to his wishes. What does that mean versus wise? Great question.
Chainsaw
Not all of Kess’ weaponry is super complex, as seen with this chainsaw. You don’t really need wit if you have a chainsaw.
Machine Gun
“̷̗̋Ĝ̸̪̼E̷̪̮̭̓Ṱ̵̨̞̀ ̸̛̬͖̾͘O̵̭̲͒Ǘ̸͚̥̍͊T̷͙̜͖͑͆ ̴̛̻͍̯̋Ẇ̷͇̈͘H̸̞̯͗̈́I̸͖̘͙̿̀Ļ̶͚̮̓̋E̵̞̔͋͘ ̵͈̈́̒͗Y̵͖̽̕Ő̴̯͆Ǘ̶̩͙̉͒ ̸͔̔̇Ş̸͎̿̅T̴͙͕̯̿̂̇I̸͉̔͜L̶̺̺͊̅L̵͈̳̕ ̶̩͈̽͒C̶̲̋͒À̵̧̹͇̎Ņ̶͒̈́”̸̲̇͐̚
(Sound Warning on the clips for this part)
Another weapon he uses often, this rifle is another common weapon of his. It was used to shoot Robotnik so hard he was reduced to a head. It’s also used as part of his final smash in Aureus.
Robot Body Parts
D Kess actually doesn’t have a leg, as he instead has this robot one which he was able to toss as a projectile on Robotnik, and can return to him. The leg covering it can also be launched as a projectile which can cause explosions. He also later got a metal arm after losing it in a fight with Beatbox Thanos.
In Aureus, his leg will be revealed if he’s randomly shot at, which leads to his top leg falling off to reveal the robot leg. He can then pick up his real leg, and after three successful tosses of it, will reequip it while getting the robot one as a highly damaging projectile.
NES
A game console which can suck people inside it to be trapped within its games. While this is already dangerous, even if you escape it you’ll start perceiving the world as if it’s 8 bits.
In Aureus, this can be used as a trap which can briefly trap enemies, dealing damage before releasing them. This also will leave them with pixelated eyes, which will cause them to trip occasionally.
Car
He also has a car which he can use to drive around places, which can turn into a boat.
KESS-I.N.G.-3R
In his boss fights, Kess pilots this mecha head. The starting phase attacks with bombs, laser beams, and a giant foot. After it goes to half health, he’ll attack in just the hat, which has a single bomb.
Lawl D Kess Items
Kess’s home Lawl also features several items which can be used in battle, the functionality of which were discussed in this video.
Abilities
Super Speen
A commonly done move where Kess will spin around, rapidly hitting an opponent.
Elasticity / Levitation
While it seems to be based on the art style, at a few points Kess appears to have the ability to stretch out his limbs, as well as floating above the ground slightly.
Teleportation
Kess also has the ability to teleport, which notably can even bring him across dimensions.
Laser Blasts
Another weird ability he has is that he can just make laser blasts from his mouth.
4th Wall Awareness
Kess has shown himself to be pretty aware of the 4th Wall. He’s reacted to his youtube channel subscribers and comments, narrated directly to the audience, recognized when part of the video wasn’t completed, and even was able to directly meet his creator. He’s also shown awareness of events which had been retconned, and in his boss fight he shows the ability to actively weaponize his subtitles, though they can hurt him.
Time Manipulation
In the ending of Who Shot D Kess?, after getting cornered by the police due to various crimes, he got out of it by using the video playback to reset time to earlier in the video before all his crimes happened. And this was an in-universe rewind, given the ending shows Sonic.exe and Null having remembered the events from before the rewind. Escape from Lawlcatrz further shows this ability, as not only could he rewind a fight he lost to the Sheriff of Nottingham, he was also able to fast forward through part of a video.
Regeneration
D Kess is also fairly hard to put down. He instantly recovered from having a broken leg, survived while being cut in half, and even was able to come back from getting blasted to nothingness after a few seconds.
Possession
Still, even if you do manage to kill him, he’s still capable of possessing you as a spirit, as seen in the post credit scene of Escape from Lawlcatraaz where possessed the Nostalgia Critic. Though what this means for the future has yet to really be seen.
Forms
Mimicked Forms
A more dangerous ability of Kess’ is that he’s able to mimic other characters, swapping to their artstyle and making it so he has similar abilities to them. A few of the forms he’s shown include:
Kesslossus
After finding Null, Kess would end up merging with him and everyone in the prison he was in to take on this massive monstrosity of a form. This was strong enough to take on multiple fighters at once, and it also demonstrates quite a few notable abilities.
Absorption - He’s able to forcibly absorb others, taking their abilities
Attack Reflection / Sealing - Summoned a magic book which absorbed several projectiles before sealing the goons that fired them
Barrier Creation - Summoned a brick wall to block retreats
Corruption - Could use the Weegee stare
Extra Limbs - Can summon hands which can smack back enemies
Fire Manipulation - Could attack with fire breath
Electricity Manipulation - Could summon an electric attack
Tongue - Ew
Summoning - Could also summon various objects, including an explosive box, a poorly cropped lion, bombs, a toaster, a stop sign, and even fighters from Lawl D Kess
Data Manipulation - Was able to reach out of the animation software and remove Dolan from the fight entirely by removing him from the animation
Power Nullification Resistance - Was able to tank multiple slashes from Spinel’s rejuvenator, which can forcibly restrict enemy’s moves
Feats
Overall
Got a 1000 subscribers
Survived being in an abandoned channel
Broke into Lawlcatraz
Met his creator
Power
His fight with Robotnik led to a building collapsing in the background
Beat up ZippityZab, his creator (See Q&A)
In Merged Form:
Speed
Durability
Got shot by Tari, though he did need to be taken to a hospital
Survived getting used as a meteor which blew up part of a building
In Merged Form:
Scaling
Lawl D Kess Cast
D Kess is a fairly prominent character within the lore of his self titled Lawl, and directly fought quite a few members of the cast in various videos. He’s also meant to be the final boss of the hypothetical game’s Classic mode, which would further support the idea of him generally being comparable to all these characters.
Awesome Face can turn into a meteor (16.319 - 668.422 Exatons)
Doodlebob can take opponents to the Doodle Dimension, which he has control over (Arguably Universal, See Q&A)
Mario and Papyrus were able to shake the ground while fighting
A big fight between them led to heavy damage to multiple buildings
Other Lawls
This section will go over the various other Lawls created by other creators which have crossed paths with D Kess. For all of these, they typically show the characters as fairly consistently on par with each other, so each of their casts should roughly scale to each other. More blatantly for Kess, his ultimate form was one which required multiple characters from each of them teaming up to defeat, so that acts as another direct indication of his scaling to everyone here.
Lawl Aureus
Awesome Parody Steve and Michael P weaponize sound waves which fighters can move in tandem with
Sr Pelo can survive ramming people after flying around the earth (3.514 Megatons, 6% c)
Lawl Odyssey^4
Boyfriend smacked Mr Hippo into the air (223.015 Kilojoules)
Green Thunder can attack with a nuke, and survive riding it (18 - 160 Kilotons)
Lawl Beatdown
Batter can destroy the stage and take it to another one (Arguably Universal, See Q&A)
Dangeresque can replace himself with his opponent in a flash of light
Genocide Frisk can destroy the stage and take it to another one (Arguably Universal, See Q&A)
Lawl Encore
Throw Some Lawl Z
JibJab Bush can attack with nukes and survive riding them (11 - 15 Megatons)
Melies Moon is a sentient moon which can fly around (1.017 Ninatons, 3.6% c)
Neo Cortex made an explosion on Melies Moon (402.896 Teratons)
Ole Anderson and Melies Moon survived a nuke that blew up the Loyal Fumble city (642.947 Kilotons)
Spitting Image Ronald Reagan can set off a nuke in the background
Bluster Kong and 60s Moonintroll could pilot ships that kept pace with Starscream flying interstellar distances (1,120.775 c)
Toon Pac Man ran around Earth several times before crashing into Pokey the Penguin (301.164 Gigatons, 50% c)
Untold Paper Luigi can blow up various stages, including Cybertron
Lawl Nova / Noba
Bipper can summon Kryptos and Keyhole, who play tennis with a dwarf planet (626.346 Yottatons, 12% c)
Hat Kid survived her spaceship exploding and falling from orbit
San Andreas Bigfoot can cause Mount Chiliad to rise in the background (19.418 Gigatons)
Steamed Hams Man can turn into an Aurora Borealis (6 - 11% c)
Vinesauce Joel can launch nukes that blew up Norway (480.345 Megatons - 2.402 Teratons)
At the end of classic mode fighters defeat Dolan and take the Dolan Badg, which has all his unlimited power
ZippityZab Cast
This is kind of more a “for fun” section since there’s not really a solid scaling chain between Kess and Zab’s current line up of characters at the moment. Though that could change in the future as they are meant to be in the same multiverse…
Mary smacked a volleyball past the horizon (3.375 Megajoules)
Mr Sys intended to merge the Digital Realm multiverse with real life (Inapplicable, See Q & A)
Weaknesses
While Kess is impressive, he still has his weak points. First off, he’s incredibly egotistical and self centered, which has made him easy to anger and made him get into needless fights often, and has made him a prime target for manipulations, which led to the story of his Lawl happening thanks to Null exploiting this. And while his regeneration is impressive, it doesn't seem like it can deny death entirely, so something like atomization or instant death could very well kill him. It also doesn’t prevent him from being generally incapacitated, as his general stamina has been depleted and left him downed by lesser attacks. BFR is also a valid way of taking him down, as in the end of Escape from Lawlcatraz a subspace bomb going off was able to blast him into the digital world separate from the Lawliverse.
Also the D stands for Deke. L.
Q & A
OG Lawl Scaling
If you’re unfamiliar with the wider Lawl making scene, you might have noticed that there was a bit of a conspicuous absence here in the guy that started this trend, that being Chincherrinas’ series which spun off of the Frollo Show YTP series. Several of the projects mentioned here have directly included references to the original Lawl and its characters, even having them show up to fight other characters from their Lawls. This even includes Kess himself, as Escape to Lawlcatraz features an extended sequence where Kess directly meets characters from Lawl, which ends with Kess directly fighting Frollo personally.
On the other hand, Chin’s also been fairly hand-off when it comes to interacting with these projects within his own series, so unlike the mutually impacted lore seen in Kess’ crossovers, it’s a lot more questionable to assume these crossovers are canon. Additionally, without getting into too much detail, it should be noted that Chincherrinas has become a bit… infamous among the other Lawl creators due to recent developments with how he’s run his Lawl, so I personally feel like it’d be fairly disingenuous to include his series on this.
Melies Moon Feats
There’s a couple big feats for Throw Some Lawl Z which involve Melies Moon, who is, well, a sentient moon. His size can be a bit inconsistent throughout the series, with him typically being about 4 times as large than most people. So why did most of the feats instead measure him as if he was a full size moon? Because, well, it’s still treated like the moon in lore. Its smaller size in these scenes can likely just be handwaved as for the sake of animation, since as any Hulk vs Godzilla fan would know it’s hard to animate anyone fighting something thousands of times larger than them.
Also it’s funny and doesn’t really change the scaling much considering other big feats.
Universal Feats
There’s a couple feats here which you could interpret as universal in scope, though typically they’re all fairly questionable to utilize.
Kesslossus destroying everything - Probably the most solid feat here, though it does have the issue of timeframe. Since this was implied to be something he would do over time if not stopped, it’s not really fair to say he’s just naturally able to wipe out a universe in this state.
Doodlebob - His final smash involves sending the opponent to his dimension. It is directly shown he has control over it, though the question of if that extends to the point where he can scale to destroying it or if the dimension itself is large enough to qualify are questions which are left unanswered.
Frisk and Batter - Both of these two have final smashes which directly destroy the entire stage, which could be seen as universal. On the one hand, both attacks have clear parallels to canon events which do make these characters that strong, and are directly wrecking everything around them. On the other hand, there’s not a lot implying these stages take place in separate worlds, as Beatdown’s own lore is clear in noting how the characters within it had recently been brought to the same world.
MULTIVERSAL-OUTERVERSAL KESS?
So at the start of the Escape from Lawlcatraz movie, D Kess ends up directly confronting Zab, his creator, and ends up fighting him. So is this a reality transcending moment? Does this recolor solo (insert your favorite anime here)? Well, it’s kind of complicated, but no.
First off, this version of Zab is a character with his own history, as beyond obviously being a fictitious version of the real life Zab, he’s also the protagonist of the ZabBlab reviews and a separate ARG storyline involving Polybius. This ARG’s story is a bit too complicated to fully sum up here, but to get to the main relevant point, near the end of the storyline Zab ends up getting sucked into the Polybius machine and getting the abilities of Ness from Earthbound, which he kept after defeating the machine and freeing the souls trapped in it. The more important thing to note here is that these new abilities are why Kess ended up getting brought to life and into the real world in the first place. So that already strikes against Kess being able to transcend fiction personally, as this was just the result of a higher being dragging him into the real world.
But does being able to throw hands with Zab at least indicate he scales to someone who transcends his old universe and therefore gets dimensional tiering? Well, to get into this we need a quick cosmology lesson. The Polybius ARG established that much of the non-Zab starring content takes place in a multiverse known as the Digital Realm, in which every program and game acts as its own universe and which was created by Mr SyS, the big bad of the ARG. SyS’s goal in the ARG was absorbing the power of several human souls in order to merge these realms with reality, but Zab stopped him before he could do this.
Now that all sounds impressive, but there’s not much reason to really scale anyone to it. First off, there’s the direct point in that Mr Sys’s attempted merging was over time and not something he was capable of doing at the time when Zab beat him, so there’s no reason to directly scale Zab to this multiversal threat. And while Zab’s home universe is meant to be a reality over the Digital Realm, none of the humans involved in the story really do anything that suggests they naturally transcend the Digital universes in power, as they are just normal humans and end up having to get powers from the system they’re trapped by. This pretty blatantly shows that Zab isn’t meant to be some all powerful creator deity when Kess fought him. So no, Outerversal Kess is not real. Sad.
Ending Thoughts
This was a pretty fun blog to make. Before I got super focused on VS stuff, Lawl projects were a pretty big hyperfixation of mine in high school. I enjoyed keeping up with the big creators, and I even had ambitions of making my own Lawl, though it never got out of planning because I did not have the patience to learn how Pivot worked. It was a bit nostalgic to go through this and look at it with a different perspective, and I hope people who mainly know me for my VS stuff will get interested in some of these Lawls, as plenty of them are made by cool guys and friends of mine. And for the people who made these Lawls, while I am more of a casual fan of them nowadays, I hope you all continue to make great stuff with this.
Anyways, this is the part where I probably talk about matches I could think of for him. And, well, this was actually made partly as research for an upcoming Fiction Fights episode where Kess will face Bob from Bob & George, who I’ve previously covered. Both of them are OCs who initially got abandoned due to perceived low quality before invading the stories themselves, and have a big vendetta against their creator in part due to the circumstances of this. I came up with the idea myself, and I thought it would make for a cool animation. As for who I think wins?
In any case, I don’t have too much else to add here. As a minor update, Angstrom vs Spot is still being worked on and is going to hopefully come out next month, and I do have some good matches planned after that, including one which has been unfinished business for a couple years now. As for solo blogs? Well, they’re not gonna be a big priority, but I do have a few ideas for them in mind, and I feel like announcing the next one will be for someone who helped start these blogs that I want to give a more up to date coverage of…
