Does Mario really kill tanooki

[THE END]

The quote from the manual says bricks, stone and horsetails:

Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros. is a video game released for the Family Computer and Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. It shifted the gameplay away from its single-screen arcade predecessor, Mario Bros., and instead featured side-scrolling platformer levels. While not...

www.mariowiki.com

.

(this is all facetious btw)

But still, it is never stated that Mario kills them and there is zero evidence to suggest this. Mario may be killing them, or he could be freeing them, or maybe people should stop trying to look too deep where there's nothing to look for! Mario is the hero of the Mushroom Kingdom, he fights Bowser and other threats to the kingdom. Period. It's okay to speculate, but saying things like 'Mario is a killer' or 'Peach secretly loves Bowser' or 'Mario wears Tanooki skin' is dumb.

 

[fantanoice]

Why do you think there's nothing to look for?

(Also Mario locks an ape in a cage and keeps him away from his child in Donkey Kong Jr)

 

[THE END]

Why do you think there's nothing to look for?

(Also Mario locks an ape in a cage and keeps him away from his child in Donkey Kong Jr)

If you want to look deep for "hidden" stuff, Kirby and Kingdom Hearts are over there. Mario games are not meant to have any hidden lore/secrets/story, they're just fun platforming games. and if you consider that Mario kills Toads in SMB, that's fine, but saying that EVERYONE knows that and believes that is not true.

(Well Mario did lock DK in a cage, that's the only real evil Mario has done that we know about)

we DO know Mario is a killer.

Phrasing it like that makes it seem like you're asuming that everyone believes that Mario is a killer, while the majority of players (including me) don't. Plus, there's no evidence suggesting it other than 'mario break block; manual say toad is block so mario kill toad'. Same for other dumb fan theories like the fur-wearing, Peach loving Bowser, etc.

 

[Princess Viola]

Mario games are not meant to have any hidden lore/secrets/story

You were saying?

 

[Koopa con Carne]

Phrasing it like that makes it seem like you're asuming that everyone believes that Mario is a killer, while the majority of players (including me) don't. Plus, there's no evidence suggesting it other than 'mario break block; manual say toad is block so mario kill toad'. Same for other dumb fan theories like the fur-wearing, Peach loving Bowser, etc.

I won't deny that there are people who actually entertain these theories, but like, this entire discussion has been rather frivolous. People here just kinda take part in discussion for the brouhahas. Heck, I just said earlier in the thread that the reason tanukis monetise Shine Sprites is because they hold a grudge against Mario for making fur suits out of them. That's dumb and I don't believe any second of it, but I said it nonetheless!

 

[Xiahou Dun]

Have any of you even seen Mario's eagle animation for Mario Golf World Tour?

 

[I'm the lil bro.]

Obviously I don't think anyone here sincerely thinks that Mario skins tanuki, but an interesting thing to note about the leaf aspect in particular is that it implies less that Mario is wearing the suit from a live tanuki and more like he literally becomes one with typical tanuki myth. This is backed up by the fact that he becomes a statue. They're pretty well-known for shapeshifting, as detailed from an article I nabbed:

The earliest appearance of a tanuki in Japanese folklore comes from the Nihon Shokai (The Chronicles of Japan), which deals mostly with Japanese mythology. It was written in 720, and the chapter about the Empress Suiko expressly mentions the tanuki: "in two months of spring, there are tanuki in the country of Mutsu, they turn into humans and sing songs." The tanuki also appears in the Nihon Ryōiki (written around 780 CE) and the Shūi Monogatari (written in the 13th century) — these works mention more of the tanuki's magical abilities: its shape-shifting, whether into human or animal forms, the ability to possess human beings, and its love of pranks.

[...]

Using their shape-shifting abilities, the tanuki will try and pass off leaves or scraps of paper as money in exchange for goods, and the ceramic statuettes are left outside restaurants and bars in particular, in an attempt to trick the tricksters into believing that they or one of their kind have already visited the store in question.

Though, here's an interesting little tidbit about the golden leaves in particular:

Craftsmen in the medieval period used tanuki pelts to soften their hammer blows while shaping gold-leaf[...]

(Both cited from here. Note this goes into, umm... Some other myth in regard to tanuki. Specifically, their body parts.)

Anyway, this honestly has more to say about Japanese culture than about Mario. I wouldn't listen to anything that PETA says, as I don't think anything in Mario is supposed to be an analogue for anything that actually occurs in real life, but it does draw inspiration from Japanese culture/myth as well as from typical media tropes, and if we're going to make a critical analysis of that I'd say that Mario is more symptomatic of widespread issue of symbology that may be harmful becoming so commonplace that many are not knowledgeable about the initial source (especially in the West). The idea that there is nothing to dig into at all is ignoring the fact that media rarely exists within a vacuum.

I don't think Mario has anything in particular to say, nor is it attempting to advertise literally taking tanuki suits. So I think the better question is to ask if the symbology that Mario uses is harmful because of the potential origins it has, rather than anything the games are directly saying.