Good Friends

“Princess Peach and Mario are good friends and help each other out whenever they can.”

That was a very innocent paragraph of text that very blandly describes the status quo of two video game characters. No new information, no retcons, just one aside that’s part of a larger character bio.

It, of course, led to a disproportionate amount of teeth-gnashing and wailing on the internet. 🙃

This is a story about the mutation of clickbait into engagement-bait, where getting readers for your article became a distant second (if it rates at all) to getting retweets. This is a story about men expecting rewards for their good deeds. This is also, most importantly, a story about good friends.

I have a feeling this is gonna be a long one. I’m sorry. It will happen again. 😔

Setting the Stage

Mario is a short, fat, Italian American plumber from Brooklyn whose rise to stardom is as inexplicable as this description would lead you to believe. There is nothing about Mario that screamed “global icon” when he debuted and that fact has hardly changed in the years since. Nonetheless, he is primarily the star of a series of video games - said series isn’t really ‘about’ romance.

Now, to be fair, romance has consistently been in the background for very nearly as long as Mario’s existed. Donkey Kong was about Mario rescuing his then-girlfriend, after all, and Nintendo has hardly been shy about depicting Mario & Peach as having chemistry with one another (as seen above!)

So even if Mario isn’t necessarily a “love story,” it’s generally understood that Mario has feelings for Peach and likewise Peach has feelings for Mario.

Frankly it felt so mundanely real that “Mareach” barely rates as a “ship” compared to pairings that’re either more-actively shown like Luigi & Daisy or ships that’re more obscure like Mario & Rosalina, to say nothing of ships for the people who like to bust their ass to convince others that their rare pair is valid like MariToad.

You know, Mario & Toad together? Who says that’s not a thing? That’s a thing! Right? Anyway.

To put a fine point on it: I, someone who cares a lot about the romance of Mario and Princess Peach, am an outlier. Most people realize on some level that the romance of Mario and Princess Peach does not fucking matter. This is important. It’s gonna come up later.

Collapse of Internet Infrastructure

There was a time, years ago, when social media was young and Twitter wasn’t what it is now. It became a one-stop shop for keeping up with your friends as well as updates on various things, up to and including the new developments of Nintendo games!

It would be remiss of me not to mention that during this time Nintendo was already branching out from relying on third-parties when it came to getting its news out. There have been imitators since, but there’s only one true Nintendo Direct.

Nintendo Directs are broadcasted on third-party platforms like YouTube and Twitch to this day, however, and they regularly shared info on various social media sites and still do today.

But the two big social media companies, Meta and Twitter, just keep getting worse and worse.

Platforms are dense with misinformation, people have repeatedly proven they’re willing to inhale fake news if it confirms their priors, and it’s all become so much less reliable. This, as of writing, has not yet led to Nintendo cancelling their presences on these platforms.

It was, however, the context that preceded the creation of Nintendo Today - a mobile app that exists solely for Nintendo deliver information to you every day, with no room for third-parties to inject any fake news or post anything inappropriate in replies.

With this, we can safely discard any worries of misinformation cropping up when it comes to Nintendo. Right?

CulturePop Craves Engagement

There are a number of accounts on social media that are allowed to exist on the premise that they will deliver news in a succinct retweetable format. There will always be media attached, either image or video, and they will tell you some news they obtained from somewhere.

At most, they will mention the name of their source in brackets like “(via British Vogue).” No links, no articles, so it fundamentally isn’t clickbait - it’s engagement-bait.

For the purposes of this article, I will be generalizing them as if they were all one account called CulturePop.

Now, CulturePop usually doesn’t do a whole lot of editorializing so it’s hard to say that they’re really doing that much harm. Do we need to read a whole article or press release for every movie’s release date? Probably not!

But notice I said “usually.” 💀

On One Fateful Nintendo Today…

On March 31st, 2025, my partner (who had been checking Nintendo Today every day) viewed the third edition of the “Super Mario Who is it?” Silhouette quiz, in which a generic bio of Princess Peach was featured along with renders of the princess from various Mario titles on Nintendo Switch.

I will now share this profile in its totality so you, the reader, can judge it for yourself. I do so because I’m not afraid of the truth and I don’t need out-of-context excerpts for my point to stand.

Without further ado, here is Super Mario Who is it? Silhouette quiz #3:

I will also note that this profile existed on Nintendo’s Mario Portal as far back as March 11th, 2024, the Internet Archive’s earliest snapshot of the webpage. This was not only not a brand new announcement of any sort, the bio itself was written over a year prior.

So what happened on that day, then? Well, nothing.

Anyone who looked at the bio probably thought nothing of it and moved on. There were no headlines, no press releases sent out, just some filler for the new app.

But Nintendo Today is a funny little app. The silhouette quiz itself’s publication date is March 27th in the Americas, but Cluster first saw it on the 31st!

Meanwhile, as you may note above, my browsing history shows that I first saw it in my app on the 23rd of November! Cluster had previously shared it with me since, at the time, I didn’t have a phone that could run Nintendo Today.

Maybe the 31st was the earliest you could’ve seen the silhouette quiz, maybe if you only set Mario as an interest you’d see it even sooner, it doesn’t matter - all that is just to illustrate that Nintendo “Today!” will just catch you up on stuff from before you were using the app even if it’s not from “Today!”

Not really a big deal, anyway. After all, everyone who downloaded the app when it was new saw it and promptly moved on. That’s all, folks!

On Another Fateful Nintendo Today…

About 2 months later, someone stumbled on that same silhouette quiz in their Nintendo Today app and found the aside about Mario and Peach being “good friends” weird. Then CulturePop (again, several accounts that post “news” without actual sources) picks it up, causing more people to hear about it - but with some very pointed framing.

“Nintendo says Mario and Princess Peach are just ‘good friends’ who help each other out whenever they can.”

“Nintendo says that Mario and Peach are not a couple.”

“Nintendo has confirmed after 40 years that Mario and Peach are just good friends.”

That last one was the headline of a Nintendo Wire article , which I am linking to so you can see for yourself. In it, they claim that Nintendo “delivered us a message” that consisted only of the small excerpt this article began with.

As you know by now, that didn’t happen. The silhouette quiz was from months prior, it was not a message released to update fans on Mario & Peach’s “relationship status,” and the bio the excerpt came from was over a year old.

But, despite my repeated efforts to correct the record on Bluesky, the damage was done. Everyone from internet commenters to Twitch streamers (all of whom almost certainly did not check for a source on the matter) were repeating the fake news as fact.

Is the opaque nature of the Nintendo Today app, the fact that you cannot share a link to the Silhouette quiz and the fact there is no web presence for it beyond the app, to blame? Partly, I’d say so. Did this fake news landing at the perfect intersection between “shit that doesn’t matter so I won’t check it” and “shit that makes me mad” help turn it into what it became? Maddeningly, yes.

But there’s another layer to this, something old and foul, that I am of course going to delve right into. Because I must.

Mario and his Poor Dry Dick

For decades, the ‘reward’ (or lack thereof) for Mario’s repeated efforts to rescue Princess Peach has been a source of lowbrow humor and genuine rage among gamers.

“Mario goes through so much trouble,” they say, describing the famously-enjoyable gameplay of Super Mario Bros. as if it was a chore for them, “and he gets, what, a cake? A kiss on the cheek?”

Like when men complain about “unrealistically muscular men” in fiction only to distract from the subject of women being depicted with unrealistically sexualized bodies, who will in fact complain when men aren’t sufficiently buff otherwise, this notion that they are unable to cope with fun and engaging Mario video games without Mario being rewarded with love (and probably sex) from Princess Toadstool is a lie.

If it’s anything beyond generalized entitlement and misogyny, it’s a projection of their own sense of inadequacy regarding how little “action” they’re getting. They might even describe themselves as “involuntarily celibate,” or, “incel” as it is more-commonly known.

I’m not trying to call everyone who complained about Mario & Peach being “confirmed to be just friends” incels, but I would like to point out there is a more succinct way of putting this than “confirmed to be just friends” that a lot of people are pointedly avoiding because they know better - they’re upset that Mario & Peach got “friend zoned.”

They’re not saying it because they know it makes them sound like incels, or otherwise like creeps who think men are entitled to women’s romantic affections just for being nice, but not saying something doesn’t get you off the hook for embodying the sentiment - and that is exactly what’s happening here.

This is not the part where I stupidly insist that you should “at least own it” because my brain has been poisoned by the internet and someone acting contradictory to their own ideals is worse to me than actually holding worse beliefs. I think it’s good that so many people are uncomfortable with giving space to the idea of “the friend zone.”

I also think it’s important to call people in and let them know when they’re (unwittingly or otherwise) engaging in something I know is incongruous with the kind of person they want to be, which is what I’m trying to do here.

Peach does not have to be sleeping with Mario to “make up for” him rescuing her so many times. Peach and Mario having as many ‘moments’ together as they’ve had doesn’t automatically mean they’re destined to start a relationship (just ask Mario & Rosalina shippers!)

No one needs Mario & Peach to be anything more than good friends, even if I think (beyond shipping it myself) that’s not entirely what’s going on here.

So What’s Actually Going on with Mario & Peach?

As the earlier Nintendo Wire article ineffectually mentions, there was never any point where Mario & Peach were confirmed to be in a relationship. Notably, that isn’t the same thing as their feelings for one another never being established.

The cover image for this article is a scene from the Mario film that hints at Mario’s feelings toward Peach, with Peach quietly indicating they may be a little reciprocated. If you’re not a baby, you’re hopefully able to pick up on other (very unsubtle) subtext in the film that points to them having a connection that will likely be built on in later films.

There have also been numerous moments throughout the games that indicate from either side of the equation that they like each other! Even going as far back as an obscure anime movie, which bears a striking resemblance to the modern animated film, The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach devotes most of its runtime to Mario & Peach longing for one another!

None of this is necessarily contradicted by saying they’re good friends. Frankly, I’ve lived the difference between being in a relationship with someone you can say is a good friend and otherwise - and let me fucking tell you, you don’t want a “love” in your life without a solid foundation of friendship.

Even if we grant (I don’t, but for the sake of argument) that Mario & Peach really are just friends, they’ve simply been placed in the exact starting point that every ship begins at. You never see Peach & Bowser shippers complaining about them not literally being confirmed to be together, and Peach actively rebuts Bowser’s advances!

A lot of characters may be more or less “single” or ‘just’ going steady instead of actually getting married, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun imagining them together! Hell, literal Walt Disney was not above this!

Per The Walt Disney Family Museum, in an issue of Film Pictorial magazine, Walt Disney said the following about Mickey & Minnie Mouse:

“In private life, Mickey is married to Minnie. A lot of people have written to him asking this question, because sometimes he appears to be married to her in his films and other times still courting her. What it really amounts to is that Minnie is, for screen purposes, his leading lady. If the story calls for a romantic courtship, then Minnie is the girl; but when the story requires a married couple, then they appear as man and wife. In the studio we have decided that they are married already.”

All that said, I fully believe they’re setting up for Mario & Peach to become a couple in the movies! It would legitimately be bolder not to and, for reasons I don’t begrudge them for, I don’t believe these movies are radical enough not to eventually have them get together!

So why issue corrections like I have when I believe it’s all going to resolve itself? Why make a whole blog post on this topic when it’s just gonna look like I wrote about how “water is wet” later? Well…

“Bullying Works”

Half a decade ago, the Sonic movie had an ungodly-awful design for Sonic that everyone hated. Not just Sonic fans, but everyone. Late show hosts were taking shots at it, people who’d never played a single Sonic game were horrified by it, so Paramount was obviously forced to change the design.

In doing so, they told a little lie to save face. They weren’t just redesigning Sonic so that anyone in the world would suffer through watching their bad movie, no, they redesigned Sonic for Sonic fans. Because they like and respect Sonic fans so much, and they heard Sonic fans’ complaints.

In telling this lie, they hoped anyone in the world would believe that they would’ve taken the same course of action if it was just Sonic fans complaining instead of everyone complaining - a stupid and unbelievable notion that, of course, Sonic fans ate the fuck up.

Things have been kinda fucked in a lot of ways, since then. A lot of it can be crystalized by a deeply-unsettling refrain that has taken hold in some corners of the web: “Bullying works.”

Now, to be fair, the “bullying” in question is always dressed up as “punching up.” Even when it’s not actually “punching up,” there’s usually a veneer that the would-be bullies are simply “speaking truth to power” as they try to force the world to be exactly how they want it by mobbing anyone who gets in the way of that.

People are very good at convincing themselves of the “righteousness” of whatever cause they’ve joined, as evidenced by… all recorded history, basically. So no, “bullying works” has not been a strictly-positive development. It’s made a lot of shit worse, with people acting on their worst impulses with the thinnest of justifications frequently emboldening them.

What does all this have to do with Mario & Peach? Well… I’ve got this very bad feeling.

’Cause people freaked out, right? People yelled and gnashed their teeth over Nintendo “confirming” they’re “just friends.” They’ve gotten themselves so worked up over it even though, as I’ve pointed out, Mario & Peach are very likely going to get together very publicly in one of those movies.

Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

People on the internet convincing themselves that they made Paramount redesign Sonic already did this much damage. Fucking imagine what would come next if people convinced themselves they made Mario & Peach officially a couple. Imagine what would happen if “bullying works” was extended to shipping.

I desperately don’t want to live in that world, so I wrote this! And I’ve told anyone who would listen that Nintendo didn’t just send out a random relationship-ending message on Nintendo Today, that the excerpt was part of a larger bio that wasn’t designed to disqualify (or endorse) a relationship between the two, so when they do become a couple in a movie it’s correctly recognized as what it would’ve been before all this nonsense:

Completely predictable, easy-to-see-coming, and (hopefully) still nice to see all the same. :)