There is a big difference between Mario and Wario

Mario is a fiasco. He has no personality outside of his career. He carries a green pipe from world to world, stealing all the gold while slaughtering all the Goomba in his path. He hardly says anything but we’re supposed to love him because what, is he a white knight wife man? The man, at best, is naive and personalityless, and at worst, a charismatic sociopath.

That’s why I support Wario. With years of design experience separating the creation of Mario and Wario, Nintendo filled in his yellow and purple avatar with the personality Mario should have had all along.

Wario introduces himself as the anti-Mario, a second-year id who loves to burp, steal, and generally threaten everyone around him. But isn’t it just a description of Mario? Mario has the same affinity for collecting coins and equally murderous tendencies on display whenever he breaks the spines of his unsuspecting victims. Wario’s gassiness is more explicit, but who can say that the puffs of air trailing behind Mario are not dust but little touches?

What I’m arguing here is as controversial as it is simple: the difference between Mario and Wario is purely one of presentation.

Mario doesn’t have an outward personality, but that’s not his fault. Nintendo conceived the little one decades ago when video game consoles could barely push a few pixels across the screen and video game cartridges struggled to store the text of a short story, let alone the spoken dialogue. The little backstory that Mario had came from the cardboard box and Super Mario Bros. instruction manual, video game magazines, art books, and playground speculation stated as fact. He is an Italian plumber with an easy smile and a fondness for silence. That is all.

Apocryphally speaking, some folks at Nintendo wanted more than Mario could offer. In a 2008 story of Nintendo’s early development process, Anthony JC wrote:

“While working on the Mario Land franchise, the team even managed to create the Nintendo antihero called Wario and stop using the character (Mario) they had no creative passion for. Wario Land became the great success of Nintendo R & D1. The excellent level design of the Super Mario Land “

Is this anecdote true? I will say that it certainly rings true.

After all, Wario is what happens if you explain Mario’s actions to someone who has never seen Mario and then ask him to draw the person he imagines in his head. He’s a little rounder, his smile a little more crooked. He has a surprising amount of arm muscle from breaking countless blocks and thin legs from running forever east. He is a greedy boy, obsessed with accumulating powers and exploring new worlds. He is not ashamed. You don’t need an altruistic false motive, like saving a princess.

So why does Wario get a bad rap, while Mario gets all the praise? Is Wario really that bad?

Nintendo itself has agreed that Wario deserves better. In a 2008 interview before the release of Wario Land: The Shake Dimension, a Nintendo representative told IGN that, “in recent games where Wario makes cameos, he is often treated as a villain, but originally Wario just intended to get what he wanted, he was not intentionally a bad boy. . Because of this, him being a villain is not something we really consider. It’s just their behavior, which could be considered good or bad. “

Pop culture writer Mike Scholars made a breathless defense of Wario in his essay, “Wario is not evil, he is honest. “The scholars concluded that” Wario was conceived with the desire to put a twist on the familiar, but its creators harnessed a powerful and universal constant: The Unrepentant Idiot. “

So, as Scholars said, Wario is not evil. He is simply open about his particular pursuit of happiness. While Mario is a sweet tooth with impossible optimism who disguises his ruthless plunder of the Mushroom Kingdom, Wario is a self-fulfilling disaster of a person.

Or to put it in three words: Wario is human.