Nintendo explains how they came up with Paper Mario: The Origami King's Legion of Stationary

Paper Mario: The Origami King has quite a unique set of bosses called the Legion of Stationary. These battles put you up against real-life objects like colored pencils, tape, rubber bands, and more. In an interview with PCGames, Nintendo producer Kensuke Tanabe explained how the team came up with the interesting idea.

“The Paper Mario series revolves around paper. We landed on the stationery idea when we were thinking about various concepts that are related to paper, but don’t have anything to do with origami. We thought that this slightly strange depiction of realistic stationery with no anthropomorphic features would be a great visual hook for the game. In the end, ‘normal’ isn’t all that exciting, isn’t it?”