Talking about a development in the Mario universe is really a fool’s errand. Mario is a brand that is pure surface, pure fun; everything in its design and presentation is meant to serve the user experience. It is not written the way a novel or a movie is; nor are the characters expected to reflect the psychological depth of characters in those idioms. The world of Mario is constructed to invite people in as easily as possible, to present a safe, simple canvas for the player’s identification. Mario does not have an inner life. One could even say that the primary signification of Mario is the recognition of one’s self, or one’s avatar. So we shouldn’t expect developments in this world to have an author’s intent. We cannot meaningfully interpret why decisions were made by the developers—they are quite many and faceless – but on the other hand it is quite fruitful to interpret how these developments are received. The appropriateness of a new game, a new character, a new concept, can be proved by the style and extent of its reception.

There were recently three consecutive pieces of Nintendo-related news tidbits that all took on memetic status. These stories caught plenty of attention due to their novelty, but each on its own is rather thin and clickbaity—it is only through their accumulation that they seem to indicate a broader cultural moment. The first incident concerns Mario’s friend Toad, who was publicly compared to Donald Trump’s penis.

The next moment centered around Toad’s feminine counterpart, Toadette, who had a curious ability revealed by Nintendo: in an upcoming Mario game, when Toadette collects an item called the “Super Crown, she turns into Peachette, a new character who resembles Princess Peach. The Mario fandom began to wonder about the implications of this transformation—what exactly is the effect that this crown is having on Toadette?

Within the community’s deliberation, one artist drew a comic in which Bowser made use of the Super Crown to transform into a princess-ified version of himself. The Internet took a sudden and fierce interest in the idea of a feminine and anthropomorphic Bowser, and 1000s of permutations of this character “mushroomed” up overnight. She came to be known, in all her many forms, as Bowsette. This third Nintendo-related phenomenon was by far the most diffuse.

Now, there is much to make of the symbolism of these events. In this 3-act play of Nintendo news, we have some clearly identifiable lead characters. Let’s just treat this event like a dream, and use some very general and rudimentary symbolic amplifications. It begins with Toad, as a euphemism for penis, itself a representation of phallus, logos, libido, etc. This is by no means the first time that a mushroom has been compared to a penis; in fact it is a timeless association. There are a few special qualities about Toad, of course, mainly his centrality to Mario imagery, via his isomorphism with the Super Mushroom, the quintessential Mario object. This is what makes Mario bigger, and more himself. In the next act, the feminine version of this same image uses a crown to turn herself into a familiar princess. Due to Peach’s perpetually “trapped” feature in the games, and the fact that reconciliation with her is an iconic win condition, she can be said to represent Sophia, the divine wisdom of God that lies hidden in matter. Or in a related sense, the face of the soul. In the final act, the dragon who is known to guard the princess, uses the same crown to become a darker variant of that same divine feminine figure.



Now, even without all the other details, we could ponder on this symbolism for a long time. It is deeply archetypal. But following our broad outline, there are just a few items that are especially important. First, there is the fact while the second act led directly into the third act, the first act is attached only by coincidence. But the fact that it is a world leader’s penis that becomes the mushroom gives the images that follow a certain stamp of importance, suggesting that they are bubbling up from a primal place. But the most dramatic element of this “dream” is the tension and contrast between the second and third acts. In either case we have this Princess figure at the center, as the result of a transformation catalyzed by the bestowal of a crown.

When it happens in the second act, it is encompassed by a single picture: a Nintendo-branded on-model CG render of Toadette turning into Peachette. This throws the community into doubt. “Does Toadette become a human? Is Peach even a human? How are Peach and Peachette related?” It threatens to retcon a bunch of categorical information about the canon Mario universe.

In the third act, in which Bowser becomes the princess Bowsette, we do not have a single representation of the product of transformation – we have hundreds. The princess is not defined by one official Nintendo model: she is a sea of multivalent personifications. She is soft, she is hard, she is demure, she is fierce, she is thin, buff, brown, white, hairy, humanoid, monstrous, girl, woman, man. Only a few things cohere across her manifestations, chief among them her pulsing vitality. The breath of life bestowed into her by her many artists, by all the little things each individual sees in her. So the accumulation of Bowsette, if we were to mentally bundle her many forms into one character, cuts a stark contrast to Peachette’s extremely sanitized and staid model. Peachette, with her tidy little bow, is designed to appeal to many people, and to sell video games. Whatever the core meaning of “princess” may be – the face of the soul, or some other thing – Peachette refers to it quite plainly. On the other hand, Bowsette is highly personal, filled, in each rendition, with its artist’s own inclinations. Together, these two Princesses provide a handy illustration of one major disconnect between mainstream video games and the people who play them.

As gaming has gone from a niche to a mainstream artform, games have gone from relatively small-staffed idiosyncratic art pieces, to hyper-funded homogenous blockbusters. Nintendo is no exception to this, and after a bit of financial trouble in the late 2000s, they are managing their brand more conservatively than ever. Games are expected to appeal to more and more people, and Nintendo has been extremely careful about the ethic and aesthetic content of their games. In 2018, Nintendo titles are bland at worst, and fun but safe at best.

Taking something like Smash Brothers as an example, we can see that there is still something deeply weird about a monkey wearing a tie throwing turtle shells at an anime supersoldier wielding a huge sword, atop a floating platform in a village of chibi animals – or whatever. It would be hard to take any still image of Smash Bros’ pop culture circus, and not find that it becomes unbearably odd under descriptive analysis. But of course, we are almost totally numb to this weirdness while playing. All the iconic characters bouncing around have become entrenched in our visual vocabulary – we don’t have to decode Pikachu anymore, we get what he’s about. And the same goes for the aesthetic presentation of the game: we see everyone from the side as they move around a 2D plane with its own gravity—that is even more familiar to us. So while the game remains deeply, deeply, weird … the weirdness derives from design choices made decades ago. The only new thing about the game is the way these elements are brought together, and the manner in which they are expressed by newer technology. But this material is selected and presented in an entirely safe and marketable way. The inclusion of characters into Smash Bros, for instance, is not decided by the questions, “What would be conceptually interesting? Artistically challenging?” Of course not. The question is “What does the average consumer want? Will this character attract attention and sell copies?” Most, if not all, of Nintendo games are like this. Gaming is big business!



As the industry approached its current state, where did the weirdness of Nintendo go? One answer would be in to all the little minds that were imbibing this material in its rawest form. Bowsette is obviously not the first example of a fanart trend so fertile that it immediately spawned entire communities and cosmologies. Sonic is a timeless and notorious mascot of this phenomenon; in the 90s, without even reaching through the internet, countless children in totally disparate parts of the world were caught up in the rushing stream of impulse to draw Sonic personas and OCs, arranging them into teams, societies, universes, as if mapping out some dimly sensed pantheon of divinities begging to be born. This is how the unconscious works, after all! But the startling force and ubiquity of video game fanart – and its enduring status as somehow “outsider” despite the mainstream success of games themselves – has been unprecedented, as we should expect given its relationship to the brand new artistic idiom of interactive virtual worlds. It is that curious interactivity, that intimate involvement with the world and its action, that enmeshing of identity into avatar, that has been so revolutionary in the audience’s digestion of images. We really don’t know shit about how games are operating on the unconscious mind. The medical use of games to treat mood disorders is getting to be better known, as the body of literature accumulates. But it’s still a short history of scientific study, and games have been having their effects – particularly on the plastic minds of children – for way longer, and even gamers who are not critically reflective on the issue will be able to cite anecdotes from their lives in which a game has helped them relieve tension or anxiety etc.

I mention the unknown psychic mechanics of gaming only to emphasize the apparently compensatory relationship of fringe gamer culture to the mainstream blockbuster gaming industry. It’s as if, by some arcane transmission, all the subversive, irrational, and idiosyncratic content of early video games “left” the industry and took up residence in the people playing. The collective imagination of gamer artists is perpetually mounting in strangeness, as if to leverage the increasingly cardboard games being produced. But of course it is not only artists and outsiders who have this urge; anyone who has had exposure to video games feels the pressure on some level – it is a mass phenomenon after all. Now, without the literature to make sense of how their young minds have been freaked, people are baking Yoshi cakes, or keeping a Chocobo on their keychains, or emblazoning 8-bit Link on their DIY entertainment unit, etc. In a lot of cases, they are more numb to aspects of the immersion than they once were. Maybe some plasticity is gone, or they are unsure how to synchronize their identification in the same way – so all that remains are these idols, vestiges of some formative psychic events. The rise of Funko Pops and such similar totems is a testament to the collective urge to resolve the questions of our virtual worlds.

By the grace of another gift from our dear Internet, we now undoubtedly live in a golden age of sampling: in our social media, our music, in our TV remakes and extended cinematic universes, in our YouTube excrement, Podcasts, digests, aggregates, reacts. Culture pastiche is an important method of understanding and navigating the crises of our world,* which is why we are having discussions about topics like appropriation, and why we now have words like meme. It has long been known that animals are living things, and now we are finally beginning to confer that status to language/culture, the other half of the hybrid being called person. With this increasing clarity that our world is evolving at least partially through the governance of characters and tropes, we are all more tempted to line our Funko Fucks up on our desk and move them around a bit.

Making characters fight, shipping them, codeswitching them, queering them – these are all tools in service of that same goal. Smash Bros (and Mario sports games) can account for that first option, but that’s about it. Sky’s the limit when it comes to fanart! Consider the highly fringe webcomic Tails Gets Trolled, which is in many respects an identical premise to that of Smash Bros: a cornucopia of video game characters get together to beat the shit out of each other. TGT features Sonic, Tails, Mario, Spyro, Chester the Cheetah, some League of Legends moogle, and a wealth of other pop culture figures. Whereas Smash Bros. entirely lacks an author or any creative idiosyncrasy, Tails Gets Trolled absolutely bleeds with its artist’s pneuma. While Smash Bros. is totally safe, TGT is uncomfortably edgy, surprising, problematic.



Early in the series we meet the main antagonist, a rare original character, the Troll King. He is a dark, hairy, black-eyed and brutish man of nearly limitless power. He comes from the Middle Ages, and his ultimate technique is his “forbidden words”: racial slurs and other hateful epithets, that when uttered cause his enemies to bleed from their eyes and ears. Though inspired in part by modern internet trolls and their hatespeech, the Troll King is also clearly an ancient and chthonic figure. As the central and enduring antagonist of the series, Troll King represents a problem that the entire league of video game heroes cannot solve. All the mighty aliases we hop into when playing a game, Pac-Man, Mario, Spyro, etc, are useless when confronted with this personification of raw and rejected unconscious content. Games heat people up, get them to sing and yell surprising things, whether they are voicechatting or not. How many times have you been playing alone, monologuing or interjecting at the screen? Perhaps we all have our own version of the Troll King who sits in the shadows while we play Smash Bros, or Skyrim, or Shenmue, or anything else.

The Troll King actually somewhat resembles a few of the more monstrous Bowsettes. In either case, they present a strong unconscious compensation for the soullessness of mainstream games. As we collectively become more aware of the fluidity of the archetypes that surround us, of their influence in our world, and of the unique capacity of video games to allow us to manipulate these figures, it seems inevitable that a wider cast of representations will have to be included – especially those sourced from an of individual introspection. Will these dark royalty ever be invited to the party?

* The curious delight that comes across a person as they recognize a video game character (I was you once!) twisted into another person’s fanart, another person’s expression of the same identification, finds a nice parallel in streaming and in Let’s Plays. There too, the viewer is coaxed both identification with the avatar form, and also with the other person, the person playing, who is mediating the avatar’s character through their inputs.