Let’s all get on the identical web page earlier than going any additional: this isn’t canon. This isn’t hidden lore, endorsed by Nintendo, that it is best to arm your self with and take with you on an official foundation each time you play a Mario recreation any longer. OK?
OK good. So, right here’s a panel from a 1996 manga (Tremendous Mario 64 4Koma Gag Battle), which is suggesting that possibly 1-UP mushrooms develop out of the our bodies of the Marios who’ve died earlier than you.
Let’s improve:
G/O Media could get a fee
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Fuck.
As the ever-wonderful Supper Mario Broth point out, that is from a manga that’s “stuffed with jokes and eccentric theories”, and that it “ought to be taken extra as an attention-grabbing thought experiment than something that may really be endorsed by Nintendo!”
Let’s do this, then. Let’s take this as a thought experiment. Think about that is actually how this all works. What it’s suggesting for the best way the Mushroom Kingdom operates, and Mario’s relation to it, is fascinating. It’s some Returnal, Groundhog Day kind shit. Mario isn’t simply right here to save lots of the Princess. He’s trapped right here, in a spot exterior of not simply Brooklyn, however house and time.
Each 1-UP mushroom you see is a former, failed try, the place a Mario—you, identical to you, but in addition not you—has died, his heroic spirit extracted and preserved for the subsequent Mario. Who can be you, till his demise, when the mushroom will probably be collected by…you.
As replies to Supper Mario Broth’s tweet have identified, it’s an concept extra just lately explored in this traditional Further Fabulous comedian from 2019:
I like the concept in 2023 lots of people’s first ideas—mine included—weren’t in regards to the timeline stuff however drawing fungus analogies with The Final Of Us. And that this is able to be such a Nintendo tackle it. In Naughty Canine’s universe, the mushrooms rising out of useless persons are a risk to all of humanity, and create ravenous zombies. In Nintendo’s, they’re only a cute little factor that helps the participant by giving them particular powers. Nicely, “cute” offered you don’t take into consideration the place they got here from…