• he/him

Avatar by @DrDubz.
Banner by one of Colin Jackson, Rick Lodge, Steve Noake, or David Severn from Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales for the Atari Jaguar.

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in reply to @josephgribbin's post:

At one time the Toadstool royal family and the Koopa clan were basically at war, with kidnappings by Bowser and guerilla raids by the Marios. Then suddenly they're all buddy buddy, playing golf and racing go karts every weekend. What did you think happened

in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

In Mario's Time Machine, Bowser travels back in time to 1989 and steals a single Sledgehammer from the site, which is apparently enough to halt its destruction. The Berlin Wall then becomes filled with Bodyslam Koopas and Koopa Troopas.

no further questions, your honor

of course Mario is complicit in structural oppression! Mario is a myth made flesh, and that myth is about upholding the monarchy. this is textual. to the extent that one believes that Nintendo settings should be treated as having any diegetic content other than light fluff at all, there is structural oppression and Mario is the one who perpetuates it, time and again.

another Irene would like to add that as an alternative to taking the Mario setting seriously, one can go the route of aggressively headcanoning it in more pleasant directions.

once one has decided on that approach, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Mario, Peach, and Bowser are a poly triad re-enacting a kink scene. the Koopalings and Bowser Jr. are part of this family (they're adults, by the way, out-of-universe they're in their thirties and in-universe they're hundreds of years old, as is the entire cast) and always eager to spend time with their other parents. why else would the kidnapping thing keep happening, when it's so clearly an ineffective strategy?

personally we find this approach to be far more fun than taking it seriously. death of the author and all that, but it would be difficult to argue that Nintendo intended the games to be taken seriously.

multiple friends of mine have independently arrived at this explanation for the entire mario series, i'm fond of it myself (and it makes things like them all playing tennis together so wholesome!). the screenshotted tweet above was more or less a shitpost reflecting earlier stages of fan consciousness around these questions.