Super Mario World Revolution
Trying to Ruin Nintendo’s “Racist” & “Sexist” Cartoon Plumber in the Name of Diversity

1,981 words

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console in Japan on 13 September 1985, the first true game in the all-conquering series which would go on to become perhaps the most popular in video game history.

Playing the games as a child, it was self-evident they came from another culture. The original creator of Super Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto, knew very well certain references in his games “wouldn’t make sense to some non-Japanese players”, but was “so excited” by such ideas he “left [them] in” anyway. By retaining these references unaltered, Miyamoto was acting inadvertently to help teach foreign kids like me about Japanese culture; the modern-day Japanese government has actually since exploited this fact for geopolitical purposes.

Some such references were essentially invisible. The Treasure Ship, a magical wooden airship which travels through the Mario series’ clouds filled with glittering coins, is actually a digital version of the Takarabune, a similar vessel piloted by the Seven Lucky Gods through the sky during the first three days of New Year in Japanese myth. The average Western child-player would just think “Oh, a magic airship”, and not give it a second thought. But other specifically Japanese references seemed altogether more puzzling…

You’ll Believe a Coon Can Fly!

Most notably, in the wildly influential 1988 NES title Super Mario Bros 3, one of the power-ups Mario can consume to change his form is the Super-Leaf, something which, for no apparent reason, makes him sprout a striped tail and become Raccoon Mario, who is able to jump into the air and fly. A superior variant of this same power-up allows Mario to become Tanooki Mario. Here, he dons what looks to Western eyes like a full-body raccoon suit, gaining the further bemusing ability to temporarily disguise himself as a statue, thereby avoiding the attentions of nearby enemies.

Western children have often found this confusing, but to their Japanese equivalents it all made perfect sense. The tanuki is the Japanese name for a native species known in English as a “raccoon dog”, a canid which looks as if it has the face and ears of a raccoon, but the body and tail of a fox. Raccoon dogs had their own mythological supernatural doubles, the bake-danuki, which enjoyed both powers of levitation and shape-shifting abilities accessed via placing leaves on their heads and chanting – hence explaining why a Super-Leaf transforms Mario into something which looks to occidental eyes like an ordinary raccoon, but actually isn’t. The bake-danuki’s shape-shifting capacities also explain why Tanooki Mario can suddenly become a statue. The specific form of statue Mario morphs into is a Zen Buddhist Jizō Bosatsu, something else a domestic Japanese audience would be immediately primed to recognize: to a Westerner, Mario’s stone form looks recognizably Eastern, but most players would be unable to say specifically how.

The overall magical land within which Mario’s adventures take place, the Mushroom Kingdom, could also be seen as a fantasy-realm analog of Japan. Even the fact the level architecture and backgrounds seem to be alive, with the hills literally having eyes, is not simply a means of “cutesifying” proceedings, but a nod towards the animist traditions of the age-old Japanese religion of Shinto, in which every hill and tree really did possess its inherent animating mini-god.

But, if the success of the Super Mario series is at least partially due to its inherent cultural sincerity, then to many left-wing anti-nationalist Westerners today, that seems to make the games into a kind of most unlikely civilizational threat. If children are exposed to highly enjoyable, and utterly non-woke, products which embody a sincere expression of still unruined and well-preserved native First World cultures like that of Japan, and find they have not yet been transformed into fungible, deracinated, globalist slop like our own increasingly have, then perhaps kids might start to get the unacceptable idea that strong national cultures are actually a good thing, not a bad one, as they have been traitorously mis-taught in their schools and media for years now. The chosen left-wing solution to this alleged “problem” was obvious: try to corrupt and ruin Super Mario too, just like they have with everything else.

Tools of the System

One of the West’s own biggest corporate video game developers is Activision-Blizzard, who have developed something called the Diversity Space Tool, intended to analyze any given game in terms of how faithful it is towards the contemporary sacred tenets of Gay Race Marxism. In 2017, a comical presentation of a Tool-analysis of the Super Mario series was given by Activision-Blizzard staff, in which they bemoaned how the games lacked diversity in terms of disability and sexual orientation. Quite how a new wheelchair-bound third Mario Brother would be supposed to be able to navigate the levels’ challenging obstacle-course layouts was not explained, nor was it explained how precisely the Tool was able to gauge whether or not all the games’ characters were homosexuals.

On the plus side, however, the Tool did note the Mario brothers were Italian-American, not simply traditional WASP American, which was deemed to be somehow slightly “out there” representation-wise. Furthermore, it was noted Mario himself was unusually “short and rounded” for a superhero, rather than tall and slim as is the norm, which was a great victory for the fat body-positivity movement. (“Movement” obviously not meant literally.)

Others, however, view Mario and Luigi’s Italian-American ethnicity (and the former’s borderline obesity) as being more problematic, with the world’s most famous plumbers sometimes being considered crude stereotypes of “short, stocky and mustachioed” Mediterranean men. The video-gaming press is notoriously left-wing these days, and in 2022 leading online outlet The Gamer gave space to Italian-American gaming journo Damiano Gerli to complain how, to him, “Mario’s nationality seems to be little more than a joke.”

Ever since the games started getting digitized speech during the 1990s, moaned Gerli, the character “has never been voiced nor acted by an Italian.” The first-ever voice of Mario was Californian actor Charles Martinet, who admits he auditioned for the role by speaking pure gibberish in a cod-Italian accent, wibbling out things like “hello ima Mario, okey dokey letsa makea pizza pie together!” which Gerli seems to imply is akin to a white actor winning a role as a black man by putting on a comedy Jamaican accent and shouting “arriiite rastaman, we be gonna be smokin de ganja, aiiiii!” or something. Gerli’s overall conclusion is this:

Many Italians, myself included, feel that Mario is just a vague sketch of a character which should belong to the national culture, but he is so exaggerated that he doesn’t feel part of it at all. Clearly, no self-respecting Italian would grow a mustache like that in 2022, unless they were looking for work as a vintage porn actor. This vague pseudo-Italian identity is something I’m not happy about, because if it’s just a joke then it’s time to reign it in.

For a video game journalist, it is lamentable he clearly doesn’t realize the true original reason for the character possessing such an oversized comedy moustache was that it made him easier to animate as it obscured Mario’s mouth completely, thus saving precious memory capacity during the kilobyte-short early days of video-gaming. In the character’s first-ever appearance, in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, Mario wasn’t even called Mario, just “Jumpman”, and his ethnicity was left unspecified. With hair-trigger sensibilities like that, Gerli should be black or Muslim, not white.

Another terminally offended white video game journalist was Ben Gilbert of Business Insider, who, when given a privileged sneak-preview play of the then-forthcoming Super Mario Maker release back in 2015, chose to focus not on the game itself, but on something surely much more important to his readers: the skin color of a large on-screen pixelated hand. The game allowed players to use a touch-screen to design their own new Super Mario levels, necessitating an avatar of the player’s hand appearing on the linked TV whenever you added new elements, like so:

You’ll notice that the hand there is white. Despite being white himself, this ‘unacceptable’ fact seems to have seriously annoyed Mr Gilbert:

What if I were, say, a 10-year-old black girl? Or a 30-year-old Japanese man? Or literally anything other than an adult white woman (which the hand appears to belong to)? Given the mainstream appeal of the mustachioed hero [surely racist Italian-American caricature?] and his ongoing battle against [his arch-enemy] Bowser, you’d think Nintendo – a company that’s repeatedly shown willingness to be inclusive – would have thought of this.

It turned out Nintendo had thought of this, though. There was indeed a menu option to adjust the skin color and sex of the hand, Gilbert just hadn’t noticed it. Maybe he self-identifies as a blind man?

Super Mario Sisterhood

Mario is also now sexist too, on account of the fact he repeatedly rescues a helpless damsel-in-distress named Princess Peach, rather than having her rescue him, as is only right and proper in our blessed era of fourth-wave feminism. In 2016, The New York Times ran an op-ed by concerned parent Chris Suellentrop, bemoaning how the hit new mobile-only Mario title Super Mario Run was “not a family-friendly game – or at least not one my wife and I will be letting our 6-year-old daughter play.” The whole game was highly misogynistic in Suellentrop’s view, because not only does it “relegate its female characters to positions of near helplessness”, but, far worse, “Just before her ritual kidnapping, Peach invites Mario to her castle and pledges to bake him a cake.”

No doubt Suellentrop would have preferred the approach of NY English teacher Remy Elliott towards using the characters of the Mario universe to undermine “harmful” gender stereotypes by lying to her students that they all embodied various types of queer; Peach herself was now “a massive cis lesbian”, whilst Mario “probably marched at Stonewall”, and Luigi “has big bi-wife energy” (I have written further about her and other attempts to turn Mario queer here).

In 2024, Google’s AI query-bot Gemini began returning remarkably similar answers when asked by users if Mario and his chums were gay. Gemini said they were. Despite being male, the green dinosaur Yoshi was a “tender non-binary lesbian”, big ape Donkey Kong a “late-in-life gay with a child”, and Mario’s evil anti-double Wario a “sassy, messy, polyamorous bottom”, as in a submissive gay man who likes to get penetrated. Furthermore, the Koopa Troopa turtle enemies were all suddenly trans men who had been “dishonorably discharged from the military” by Donald Trump, whilst Princess Peach was only kidnapped in the first place due to her legendary status as a “gay icon”. What does this tell you about the kind of people who program Google’s algorithms for them? That they’re all morally disturbed leftists like Remi Elliott, presumably.

In 2014, meanwhile, a Nintendo employee briefly mentioned how, when designing the series’ living mushroom-people, called Toads, “we never really went out of our way to decide on the sex of these characters”, possibly because, being mentally normal, they really couldn’t give a shit. Left-wing UK newspaper The Independent could give a shit, though, running with the headline “It’s ‘Mx Toad’ From Now On”, and blatantly mis-spinning this as follows: “Nintendo has revealed that long-serving Super Mario ally Toad, assumed to be male, is in fact genderless, and possibly not even a mushroom.” I repeat: The Independent claims it is a “newspaper.” But then, so does The New York Times.

I used to love reading (and even writing for – see my pieces here, here and here for the type of incredibly weird Japanese titles I especially enjoy playing) video game magazines and websites. I don’t any more.

Many people who dislike video games often complain those who play them must have too much free time on their hands. Not as much free time as the wankers detailed above, I would wager.