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Sunday, November 9, 2008

The Eternal Struggle

Speculation as to what drives Bowser to repeatedly attempt to kidnap Princess Peach and, thus, create more and more Super Mario Bros. games:



One: He wants to eat her.

Two: He wants to have sex with her.

Three: He wants to marry her.

Four: He wants some combination of the three above choices, in an order depending on how much depravity you’re willing to infer into a fairly innocent child’s game.

Five: He wants to overtake homeland — the Mushroom Kingdom, which is bucolic and pleasant — and escape his own — the Koopa Kingdom, which is riddled with lava rivers and ghosts and exists under a gloomy permanight.

Six: His offspring lacks an apparent maternal influence and he’d like to remedy this by introducing into his household the embodiment of passive femininity.

Seven: He has boundary issues resulting confusion which itself results from the fact that he routinely gets invited to various golf tournaments, tennis matches and go-kart races that Peach attends.

Eight: He’s compelled to perpetuate a gender-flipped Freudian metaphor that involves turtle shells and mushrooms serving as symbols for female and male genitals, only these symbols are each associated with the wrong gender and consequently create a great deal of psychological strife.

And nine: Housekeeping needs.

6 comments:

  1. I remember the instruction booklet for the first SMB saying that he kidnapped her because she was the only one who could break the spell on her people. I'm inclined to think that wasn't the whole story, though.

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  2. Yeah, that was some weird exposition. Something about the shroomfolk being turned into "field horsehair plants," which, unless I'm mistaken, isn't a thing. There's also this weird mention to a Mushroom King, which never amounted to anything in the games but is notable if you think about it in terms of Peach being the chief executive of where she lives. Like, maybe it wasn't plausible that this woman would be in charge, so they invent an unseen male higher-up so everyone feels better.

    Then again, it's the Mushroom Kingdom and not the Mushroom Princessdom.

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  3. I always kind of figured the "field horsehair plants" were the Fire Flowers.

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  4. For the longest time, I couldn't remember if Alf (from ALF) was trying to eat the housecat or have sex with it.

    I was leaning towards the sex.

    I've since been corrected.

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  5. I don't think I was ever allowed to watch Alf.

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  6. Probably because your parents also didn't know whether he was trying to eat the cat or make love to it.

    Come to think of it, it's pretty astounding that ALF never actually ate the family cat, seeing as how he and the cat lived in the same house and the family probably could have averted their attention at some point. I mean, really.

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