The Mario Series Theory: Peach's Power and Helplessness

A few months ago, I played Mario and Luigi 4, the one where they’re messing around with dreams. It was boring, like every other MaL before it, and very little about it caught my attention. There was, however, one moment during the final confrontation with Bowser that I was interested in. Things were looking bad for the Mario brothers, as Bowser had supercharged himself with power from the Dream Stone, AKA, ultra-powerful-relic-doohickey-of-the-day. There didn’t seem to be much hope for Mario and Luigi as they stood completely outgunned and terrified before the might of their magically enhanced foe...

And then, from behind Bowser, Princess Peach (who’s chilling in a locked cell, as usual) rallies Starlow, and together they blast Bowser with a beam of magic so staggeringly powerful that it actually blows the Dream Stone he’s drawing ungodly power from into a haze of magical shards. I mean, the thing’s not broken, it’s disintegrated.

Now, let’s get one thing straight right here: magical ultra-empowering plot devices may be a dime a dozen for RPGs, and not exactly uncommon in regular Mario games either, but common or not, this thing was legit. Because after Peach makes her attack, Bowser manages to inhale several of the shards left over, and these shards, these motes of power, are still enough to increase his power to end boss proportions. The fact that Peach and Starlow (and I think it’s safe to say it’s mostly Peach; Starlow hasn’t shown, to my recollection, any really great magical prowess before now) can send Bowser reeling when he’s got the whole thing in his grasp, and then destroy the Dream Stone to boot, suggests magical power on a tremendous scale. Even if we suppose it’s 50-50 between her and Starlow, it’s still incredible.

This got me thinking about where Peach stands in terms of power in her world. She has access to this love-powered magic that can knock an above-end-boss-powered foe on his ass. She’s shown multiple times to be able to use the same kinds of power ups that Mario can, and she can generally keep up with him in terms of overall physical prowess. Then there’s that game where the Vibe Scepter grants her the ability to channel her non-love emotions into magical power. Oh, yeah, big deal, you say. Emotion-fueled power, who cares. Well you know who else does that? Fucking super saiyans, that’s who.

So when you think about it...Peach is only a step or two behind the hero of the entire series, Mario, in terms of physical prowess, she can use the same equipment that he does, and in addition, she has a range of magical powers that range from the mildly convenient (floaty-ness) to the insanely powerful (the love magic beam thing). I think...guys, I think Peach might actually be the single most powerful being in the Mario franchise.

At the very least, she’s pretty damn high up on the scale. And hey, that’s a kind of interesting thing, yeah? Worth a little rant, I figured. So I started typing this up. And then halfway through, the obvious question hit me:

If she’s so goddamn powerful, why, then, does she let herself get kidnapped all the damn time!?

Yeah, okay, people have been criticizing Peach (and other frequent damsels in distress) about the kidnapping thing for ages. It’s not a new thing. I’ve kinda always just given it a disgruntled pass before now. I mean, I’m as sick of it as the next bloke. Even if you want to ignore that underlying sexism of the issue, it’s been the most overused, tired, bland cliche imaginable for some time now. But so long as it seemed reasonable to say that Peach was not, on her own, capable of matching Bowser in combat, I was willing to let it pass, albeit, again, reluctantly.*

But now that it seems clear that Princess Peach is close to Mario in athletic prowess and command of power ups, and that she far outclasses pretty much everyone else on her planet in terms of magical power, the question is a lot harder to ignore. If she has offensive options on par, or even superior, to a ultra-magic plot mcguffin, why does she let herself get kidnapped by Bowser so frequently? It doesn’t make any sense!

Or...

Does it actually make more sense than ever?

Alright, hear me out. So let’s follow the evidence and implications on this, and assume that Peach has massive magical power. Let’s even go as far as to assume that she could, any day of the week, overcome Bowser herself in an outright no-holds-barred fight. Here’s a question: what is the collateral damage of a fight like that?

I mean, consider Bowser. He is a big lug. He breathes fire. He leaps around. He smashes through floors and walls. Sometimes he’s using some heavy artillery while riding a ridiculous flying clown thing. And he’s never above having a ton of his minions help him in combat. Any extended fight with Bowser inevitably requires significant space and causes a lot of damage to the surroundings. And even with our operating assumption that Peach has tremendous power and can subdue Bowser without question, there is NEVER going to be an all-out fight between them that ends quickly. By far more than his offense, Bowser’s durability is insane. I mean, if you look for a moment at the damage he takes in his battles with Mario, you start to realize that this dude is the next best thing to immortal! Bombs in his face, hammers and fireballs and all manner of solid objects pelting him, and outright falling into molten lava, multiple times, and Bowser somehow stays alive. The guy had the entire fucking galaxy collapse in on him, and survived it! Oh, sure, it all hurts him, and he can be taken down by it, but things that should be insanely lethal and would destroy many villains we might assume more powerful than him just cannot kill Bowser.

Pretend you’re in Peach’s position. You’re the ruler of your kingdom, and you genuinely care about it and its citizens. Bowser launches an attack on your castle, his minions smacking your subjects around and his flying artillery bombarding your home. What, exactly, is your best option in this scenario? A fight with Bowser, in most cases, is going to take place on your home turf, with innocent civilians in the area. If you have to fight all out, you’re probably going to be causing damage to your surroundings. Even if you don’t, Bowser absolutely will if he’s going all out. And there’s little chance it’ll be a short fight. In this scenario, what’s the better option: to unleash your real power on Bowser and initiate a fight that will damage your own home and hurt those you’re responsible for...or to go along with the blustering turtle-dragon, knowing that you have a couple of warriors on your side who will come to save you once you’re in enemy territory, ensuring that the only collateral damage of a confrontation with Bowser will be against Bowser’s own turf?

Besides a concern for her kingdom and citizenry’s welfare--which should, as a ruler, be her primary concern, I’ll note--there’s also a longer-term situation to consider. Even if Peach did cut loose and drive Bowser away in defeat herself, then what? You think Bowser would give up? He hasn’t been Mario’s arch nemesis for the last 30 years out of a lack of persistence. He’d be back...but this time, he would, perhaps, up his game, launching a much larger attack against Peach’s kingdom since the first one didn’t work. A defeat for Bowser in this situation could just provoke a stronger attack next time, getting more innocent bystanders caught in the middle of it.

On the other hand, if Peach allows herself to get kidnapped, what happens? Bowser takes her away to his own territory, and then a lot of his time is occupied with hampering the Mario brothers as they come to fetch the princess. For the period of her captivity, Bowser’s attention is on her, and her coming rescuers, not on her kingdom and its people. The mushroom people are perhaps safest while Peach is held captive. And when Mario and Luigi come and beat Bowser, and rescue her? Well, Bowser will be back again later, but if his defeat teaches him to up his game, he’ll be escalating in laying down more serious obstacles for Mario and Luigi, not launching a bigger attack during the Kidnap Peach part of his scheme--because that part went off without a hitch before.

And if the shit hits the fan hard enough while she’s held prisoner...well, the scenario which inspired this rant proves that the bars of a cage won’t be able to stop Peach when she needs to act. She can afford to bide her time until her hand is forced. Which, given the Mario brothers' resourcefulness, skill, and good luck, is quite a rare occurrence.

Peach is, of course, not always taken by Bowser. Plenty of other enemies also kidnap the chick. But there’s still some logic in her refusing to unleash her power on them: A, the collateral damage thing is still a consideration, and B, new enemies are unknowns, and it’s smarter to test the waters with them and find out what their capabilities and limits are before outright engaging with them in combat.

Anyway, there you go. Am I overthinking this? Absolutely. Do I even for a second believe that anyone at Nintendo has intentionally set up this situation, which now makes responsible sense of Peach’s kidnapping problem? Nope. But does it nonetheless provide a rational explanation that I can stand behind for why Princess Peach allows herself to be taken by her foes so frequently even when she’s one of the most powerful individuals in her world? Yup. And that’s all I require.









* Incidentally, I do know that a criticism leveled against Peach (when working with the apparently false assumption that she can’t fight back) is that she has plenty of opportunity to learn self defense between kidnappings and should do so, but I still gave her a pass in the face of this argument. Bowser being what he is, I think it’s fair to say that (again, under the apparently incorrect belief that she doesn’t hold any extraordinary power naturally) any normal amount of self defense training isn’t going to cut it when he shows up to rumble.

The Mario Series's Mario: The True Knight

Queelez will surely be pleased as punch to know that this rant was partially inspired by my reading the script for Man of La Mancha a few weeks ago.

So I know Mario's not exactly known for his RPGs, but he's been in a few, so I figure he's fair game. But I do admit that today's rant is more on Mario in the general sense than on his roles in RPGs. Still and all, I reckon it's only a minor breach in protocol.

So, Mario. We all know him. Hell, EVERYONE knows him. He's been widely-recognized and immensely popular internationally since his days on the NES, and most of us here have grown up playing and loving several of his classic games.

The thing, though, is that we've grown up playing the games. We're not 8-year-olds running for bridge-destroying axes, drifting through the air thanks to magical capes or raccoon tails, and hopping through magical paintings into whole new worlds. Our impressions of things we watch and play, and our understandings of characters and plots and so on, have grown with us, so the way we see and identify with iconic characters such as Mario also have changed accordingly.

Normally, this is fine, and even can give us some interesting new insight into old characters. However, there are a great many individuals out there, particularly amongst game-players and internet-users, who never mentally mature past the age of 14. These are the great intellectuals who, for example, spend their time postulating that The Legend of Zelda series's Link's motivation for his heroism is the hopes that he's going to get some from Zelda. They take something they've known since they were kids, and force their mature-yet-immature perspectives onto it, warping and perverting it into something that the original purely child-friendly and simplistic product never intended.

Now, before I go on, I should note that I don't necessarily mean to make a stand against the very concept of applying sexual tones to the stories and characters that one encounters. I'd be just a little bit hypocritical if I did. You can do so many times in a way that manages to bring about interesting truths and perspectives about characters that one hadn't considered before. Although rare, there are several sexually-explicit fanfics out there that tell a story or explore the characters within them in a thoroughly good way, for example. And I've had some unexpectedly interesting conversations in the past about, for another example, whether Kain in FF4 might actually be bisexual, and in love with both Rosa and Cecil. More on that in another rant, perhaps.

So yes. It's not that sex is an EVIL AND BAD subject that you will BURN IN HELL for applying to video games and the like. It can be an interesting tool for further exploring a character or theme.

And even if you're not using the subject for such lofty goals, it can sometimes be good for a chuckle. I mean, going back to my original example of The Legend of Zelda, I can't exactly pretend that I haven't, in some of my past columns here, poked fun at just how odd but funny some of the series's characters are in the sexual sense--as I've mentioned, Impa, Zelda/Sheik, and Link from Ocarina of Time could practically throw their own traditionally in-terrible-taste gay parade by themselves, with the ways they look.

But using themes of sex to explore a character or underscore a theme, or to get a few laughs at a clever jibe, has its time and place. The characters you can explore well in such a way are complex ones that we encounter in games made for teens and adults, with themes of more maturity than something just made for kids. Even if it started out as being a kids thing, the Legend of Zelda series has matured and grown with its fans, and is now a complex enough entity that it can appeal to adults and children in more than just the "Find a princess and save her" way the original did.

See, Mario just isn't like that. The Mario series has never made the slightest pretense of growing up with us. Oh, the graphics and look improve as time goes on, yes, but it's always to the same effect of having Mario be a cartoony, goofy-looking little dude who hops around, gains super powers that are childlike in how simple they are (flying thanks to a magical cape, bouncing around better thanks to a big spring, and the ever simple act of just getting bigger). His villain is the same as he ever was: a big, scary-looking turtle monster with spikes and claws, who is ornery for the sake of being so. His objective is most often always the same: save the princess and stop the bad guy. On the occasions where he swaps this objective for an alternate one, the new one is almost always just as simple. Unlike other series which have grown up with us to take on complex and often darker tones as we mature enough to appreciate them (The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc), Mario stays as wholesome and immature as ever.

This is why it annoys me when the adolescent-minded individuals I mentioned earlier apply their singular focus on sex to him. There are a lot of people who seriously are convinced that Mario is getting it on with Peach, and that's at least a significant part of why he goes through such trials for her all the time.

Guys, seriously. Let's look at the characters and face facts here. Mario is not getting any from Peach. Mario doesn't CARE about getting any from Peach. As he scurries from one painting and world and galaxy to another to save her, it's not on his mind. This is a man who, at the end of a game, is occasionally fortunate enough to be rewarded with a single chaste kiss from the person he just spent hours getting blown up, eaten, smashed, electrocuted, fried, frozen, sliced, drowned and...um...falling-down-bottomeless-pits'ed for. And each time, he gives every indication of being completely content, even ecstatic, at this seemingly tiny reward. And it doesn't seem likely that he's putting on some happy facade while seething at her ingratitude underneath because, well...it's Mario. This guy ain't exactly a master of deception or complex emotion.

And, as an afterthought, Peach isn't leading him on, either. Again, that's a concept of a mindset foreign to that of the series. She's chaste and innocent, and in her mind, cakes and kisses are obviously as good a reward for something as anything could be. I mean, look at her. It's Peach. She ain't exactly a master of deception or complex emotion, herself.

Mario isn't doing it for sex, or even sexual love. He's being a hero countless times, uncomplaining and ever eager, because that's simply what he is: a hero. He does the right thing because it's the right thing to do. He saves his princess with no expectation or even desire for reward because that's what he wants to do, what he knows is RIGHT to do. He may love her, but it's a pure, chivalrous love, reverent enough of the object of his affections that her small shows of simple affection for him are more than enough reward for all he does. Not that he can't treat her as an equal and even competitor in those many games like Mario Party or Mario Kart, but his general treatment of her is with chivalrous respect.

That's why, in my mind, Mario's a true knight, more of one now than almost any other video game character in their current form to be found. Sure, he's goofy through and through, from his looks to his style to the battles he fights, but the core essence is the same regardless of outer appearances: He fights for what's right, no questions asked, no personal motives needed, and he cherishes the object of his affections with devout chivalry and unquestioning loyalty. He's a simple character, always has been, always will be, and that simplistic nature is what makes his heroism noteworthy, even inspiring, on the level of other such iconic heroes as Superman and Captain America.