Wario reminds me of my Italian family

I’ve always had an imposter syndrome because I’m Italian-American. Although most of my family has never been to Italy, at Christmas we eat pasta instead of ham and indulge in the loud and boisterous Italian stereotype. When I was a kid, I clung to the Italian characters that I saw on TV shows, movies, and of course, video games. I’ve always been proud that the The video game’s mascot, Mario, is of Italian origin, like me. But as I got older and tried to understand what being Italian-American meant to me, I learned that I have more in common with Wario than his inspiration.

It is not clear if Mario is Italian or Italian American. While Mario is based in Brooklyn, no one seems to know if he’s an Italian immigrant who took up the arts of plumbing before coming to the Mushroom Kingdom, or if he’s a New York native with a surprisingly strong accent. When you try to explain why baby Mario is hanging out in the Mushroom Kingdom with Yoshi before he becomes a Brooklyn plumber, things get even more complicated.

But regardless of where Mario is from, he is a famous Italian character. His scripted speech and thick accent, its-a-mes and lets-a-gos, are a pervasive stereotype. He’s a bit burly, not particularly tall, and has a thick black mustache and bushy hair, just like me, my uncles, and every male relative I’ve seen a photo of.

Mario’s gaze and language seem to come from old italian stereotypes, the kind of things shown in anti-Italian political cartoons in the early 20th century. However, unlike those representations, Mario does not designed with malice in mind. He has a calm and confident personality, which one can easily read as having no personality at all. He doesn’t engage in some of the crudest and loudest behavior we sometimes see in Italian stereotypes on TV. I would never associate it with the mafia, the most popular brand of Italian-American fiction. Today, Mario’s goofy accent, bright blue eyes, and plump belly are felt as affective characteristics, given the changing place of Italians in American culture and Mario’s power as a character.

Image: Nintendo

Wario, like Mirror Mario, takes the opposite approach. While Mario is apparently polite and quiet, Wario is loud and flashy. He’s fat, greasy, outrageous, arrogant, and obsessed with garlic. It’s another Italian stereotype, but darker than Mario. He is the situation of the The Jersey Shore or basically all the characters of good friends – an expanded and exaggerated version of a national identity. Wario has many of the same negative characteristics as gangsters and other unsavory “Italian” depictions in American culture.

But when I look at my own family, I see more of Wario’s loud and obnoxious charm than Mario’s quiet confidence. My family emulates Italian culture the same way Wario does: loudly and proudly. Some of us struggle with our weight, there is definitely some bragging and we are also obsessed with garlic (which, if you ask me, is a positive, although the people around us may disagree). As for me, my uncle who rides a motorcycle, farts and curses is basically Wario manifested.

It seems that the further my family strays from Italy, generationally, the more we adopt that exaggerated stereotype. For my family, and for many of the Italian-Americans we see on television, there seems to be an impulse to exaggerate: to be extra to be Italian. Not all Italians are like that, just look at Mario, but for my family, this is how we make an identity for ourselves.

My great-grandparents did not teach my grandfather to speak Italian on purpose, for fear of making him appear abnormal to his fellow Americans. But where we have lost the culture that comes with language, we have retained some energetic gestures and the joy of yelling at each other, and perhaps even exaggerating them further to make up for the culture we have lost. the years.

When I consider Wario, I feel like he’s doing the same thing – his over-the-top, over-the-top personality sets him apart from Mario and makes him more than just an evil twin or a copy. The Italian characteristics that Nintendo uses to denote Wario as “evil Mario” and obnoxious are the same traits that make me feel a kinship with him. Those features are not unpleasant to me, they are familiar to me; they remind me of the people I love.

Mario is the hero; Wario is a character that I feel like I’m not supposed to like. But for me, Wario captures much more of the Italian personality that resonates with me. Wario surpasses Mario as my family’s pet, who was born with a crucial and identifiable need to be louder and larger than life.