Which is true about Paper Mario canon?

[Dorayaki]

As we knew from Paper Jam, the OG and Paper stories are two worlds, with Paper being the storybook version of the OG. However, sometime ago I also see some opinions that say Paper Mario is entirely seperate from the main Super Mario series thus OG or Paper world doesn't share contents from the other series. Altho there is Super Mario Kun which integrate PM stories as part of mainline, Nintendo don't seem to consider that as canon.

Personally, I don't think there is official evidence of difference since chances are the characters just mostly don't talk about it directly in games, and that wouldn't cause direct conflicts in stories or canon (e.g. Paper Florian and Flower Kingdom exist in Paper World, just they don't show up and nobody ever feel the need to mention them.) Of course, no evidence for being entirely identical either way so we don't have clear answer for now until official reveal. In series history Star Spirits were the only Paper characters that make canon appearances in OG world, and Nintendo have been very passive in showing any Paper contents in mainline games or major media like the Illumination movie series.

While it's understandable for NIntendo to not easily mention RPG contents due to having trouble with controlling the recurring contents in main series, plus that Nintendo have no budget to do more 3D renders, as a Paper fan I sure wish to see Paper contents acknowledged as mainline canon and wish that they at least mention each other more often.

Which theory do you think Nintendo / Miyamoto stans? And which theory do you personally stan?

 

[LuigiFan24]

I don't think they're identical. It has been confirmed that the world of Paper Mario is in a book, and that is further confirmed in Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam. Also, why is Paper Jam so hated on? It seems like a good game.

 

[Xiahou Ba]

I think they're two separate continuities entirely, but Paper Mario sometimes comes out and has a strange urge to kill Homer Simpson.

 

[Redboot]

I write them to be the same, but a lot of that comes from me finding the worlds in PM64 and TTYD more interesting and fun to write but I do have a little bit of evidence for that. The first three Paper Mario games didn't do the annoying "look at all the paper aren't we so clever for being made of paper and acknowledging that we're made of paper" shtick from Sticker Star and were only in the Paper Mario style because it started as a hardware limitation on the N64, so that leads me more to believe that the first few Paper Mario games are part of the normal Mario universe but the later ones aren't.

 

[Mcmadness]

The real answer is not to think about it as they'll make up whatever for the sake of the current scenario.

The fun answer is to view it as you see fit, lord knows I do.

 

[Hint Toad]

The paper toads in Rosalina's storybook from the Super Mario Galaxy movie direct look very similar to the ones from the games.

 

[Shmalu Sniffer]

Personally I think its like this

Sticker star, Color Splash, Origami King: All take place in a story book format as seen in paper jam in which those versions of the characters live in that respective world and have storys base don the real Mario world, but Super TTYD and the first game are all in the real Mario world with the paper style being how the story of these events were told.

 

[Xiahou Dun]

All Paper Mario games are based off fictional accounts in the Mario universe. Within Mushroom Kingdom, Paper Mario is a classic popular picture book for young children that retells Mario's adventures in a cutesy art style but with some dramatizing and fabrication to make it more amusing for children (for instance Parakarry is a real character, but he's a pilot, not a mail carrier, and Rip Cheato doesn't exist but serves to scare children from exploring the sewers without adult supervision). The books have been chronicled as what we recognize as video games titled Paper Mario, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Paper Mario: Color Splash, and Paper Mario: The Origami King. Just because the original characters are considered fiction in the Marioverse doesn't mean they can't interact with the Mario World, like coming to life or something. Paper Jam demonstrates that it has happened before and it shows that Paper Mario is different from real Mario, as Paper Mario has no ability to speak due to an unfortunate incident with his tongue, but he is an eloquent writer. He reveals that he is behind the descriptions of each Thing from Sticky Wiki in Sticker Star.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Super Paper Mario are unofficial fanfics written by some kids who grew up on these children's books. They attracted and amassed a small cult following in Mushroom Kingdom who find the work intriguing although divergent from the typical simplistic stories the official series tell, so most adherents are like young adults vs the target audience of the original Paper Mario being geared to young children. The general public doesn't know very well about them. Not even Mario knows.

 

[Captain Lumacey]

In general, the stories of most Mario games are self-contained enough that it doesn't really matter how they relate to other games in the series. There are still references to other games sometimes, but they're usually small, and the status quo won't change much at all by the end of a game beyond the addition of some new side characters, powerups, and locations.

So to summarize, you can imagine things how you like because Nintendo is unlikely to give the true answer anytime soon.

 

[Fawfulthegreat64]

Neither of these fit my answer. They aren't separate universes. At least when thinking about the original vision for Paper Mario.

The "Paper World" as a separate universe exclusively appears in Paper Jam, which I struggle to find reason to even recognize as canon to the M&L continuity given just how much is randomly super sanitized for just that one game. Outside that game M&L has a strong sense of continuity with multiple recurring original characters and/or species between any two games. PJ explicitly abandons all of that except for Starlow, who alone just isn't quite enough (and has like no explanation for why she's present unlike in DT where they establish that she's vacationing)

So now that PJ and my general distaste for that game as a definitive source is addressed, yeah the original Paper Mario was conceived as a sequel to Super Mario RPG, with its distinct visuals being to convey a storybook style to fit the tone of the story. They were never meant to imply canonical things about the world that splits it off from the main Mario world.

Its first two sequels make heavy use of species like Clefts & Whacka and races like the Shaman clan (who date back to Super Mario RPG, but their specific named members were introduced in Paper Mario). They do incorporate the art style into gameplay more, but I don't believe this causes the stories to be incompatible with happening in the core Mario world. It's not hard to visualize versions of the curse transformations being applied to a non-stylized Mario, he merely becomes flat temporarily via magic. I made a visualization of how this could look last year:

When it comes to the 3D flip from SPM, all you have to do is imagine the base 2D dimension from SPM as being exactly how any 2D Mario game is. The same world that exists in 3D, just being shown to the player in 2D for gameplay purposes. The fact that the intro features two locations from TTYD at the 2D perspective supports this. With this in mind, it changes nothing narratively about the ability Mario gains, it's just globally dialed back a dimension so the player can perceive it. He is granted this ability magically by an abstract interdimensional wizard, so in-universe he could easily be transcending to a higher dimension that we wouldn't be able to perceive.

There's also the appearances of classic Paper Mario characters in some 3D games in the 2000s. Something I wish could happen again but sadly since Nintendo shifted their framing of the Paper Mario series the chances of that have gotten as bleak as ever.

As for the modern trilogy, yeah i don't have much backing them up. They are pretty overt in their insistence that everything is actually physically crafted from parchment in-universe, with paper puns literally being inserted into the dialogue for moments that in my view would have included a laugh track if acted out live. Other than the way the characters are drawn, almost nothing about these games feels like it has any interest in building on the continuity established throughout the first 3 games, and instead build exclusively on a rebooted foundation established in Sticker Star (with all species and characters debuting in the first 3 games scrubbed from existence). So yeah these i can much more easily picture as being part of an alternate universe where everything is actually made of paper for reals.

That said I do think VERSIONS of these events happened in the core Mario world. They'd just look way different. Instead of Royal Stickers there'd be Cosmic Crowns or something, Just like the Star Spirits, Crystal Stars and Pure Hearts had nothing to do with paper and were just straight up magical entities organically built into the world. Color Splash could still have its paint shenanigans but it would be handled more like Mario Sunshine or Bowser's Fury rather than being something that directly plays on paper theming. And King Olly could still be an origami villain, as I could still see origami being a hobby of non-paper beings in the core Mario world. Instead of folding paper people into origami, he uses magic to flatten people and THEN turn them into origami. His minions would be other origami creatures folded to life by him, rather than a bunch of sentient art supplies that only exist to play off the idea of a paper world. They could still wield some of these items, like scissors being wielded like swords as that would still be a threat to an organic Mario. And their personalities could remain intact. Bottom line is, there exist hypothetical versions of these stories that could feasibly take place in the main timeline in the main universe, they just aren't the ones we see.

TLR: The first 3 games absolutely happened in THE Mario world, and that is the version we see. The "Paper Mario Style" is a stylistic choice for presenting it to the player, and all paper elements in gameplay are explainable via magic. The modern trilogy as we see them are most likely in a separate world, possibly the one from Paper Jam but i really don't care enough about Paper Jam to definitively decide on that. But their events in some form or another most likely did happen in the main world, we just didn't see it.

 

[ThatOneUniqueToad]

Neither of these fit my answer. They aren't separate universes. At least when thinking about the original vision for Paper Mario.

The "Paper World" as a separate universe exclusively appears in Paper Jam, which I struggle to find reason to even recognize as canon to the M&L continuity given just how much is randomly super sanitized for just that one game. Outside that game M&L has a strong sense of continuity with multiple recurring original characters and/or species between any two games. PJ explicitly abandons all of that except for Starlow, who alone just isn't quite enough (and has like no explanation for why she's present unlike in DT where they establish that she's vacationing)

So now that PJ and my general distaste for that game as a definitive source is addressed, yeah the original Paper Mario was conceived as a sequel to Super Mario RPG, with its distinct visuals being to convey a storybook style to fit the tone of the story. They were never meant to imply canonical things about the world that splits it off from the main Mario world.

Its first two sequels make heavy use of species like Clefts & Whacka and races like the Shaman clan (who date back to Super Mario RPG, but their specific named members were introduced in Paper Mario). They do incorporate the art style into gameplay more, but I don't believe this causes the stories to be incompatible with happening in the core Mario world. It's not hard to visualize versions of the curse transformations being applied to a non-stylized Mario, he merely becomes flat temporarily via magic. I made a visualization of how this could look last year:

View attachment 59925

When it comes to the 3D flip from SPM, all you have to do is imagine the base 2D dimension from SPM as being exactly how any 2D Mario game is. The same world that exists in 3D, just being shown to the player in 2D for gameplay purposes. The fact that the intro features two locations from TTYD at the 2D perspective supports this. With this in mind, it changes nothing narratively about the ability Mario gains, it's just globally dialed back a dimension so the player can perceive it. He is granted this ability magically by an abstract interdimensional wizard, so in-universe he could easily be transcending to a higher dimension that we wouldn't be able to perceive.

There's also the appearances of classic Paper Mario characters in some 3D games in the 2000s. Something I wish could happen again but sadly since Nintendo shifted their framing of the Paper Mario series the chances of that have gotten as bleak as ever.

As for the modern trilogy, yeah i don't have much backing them up. They are pretty overt in their insistence that everything is actually physically crafted from parchment in-universe, with paper puns literally being inserted into the dialogue for moments that in my view would have included a laugh track if acted out live. Other than the way the characters are drawn, almost nothing about these games feels like it has any interest in building on the continuity established throughout the first 3 games, and instead build exclusively on a rebooted foundation established in Sticker Star (with all species and characters debuting in the first 3 games scrubbed from existence). So yeah these i can much more easily picture as being part of an alternate universe where everything is actually made of paper for reals.

That said I do think VERSIONS of these events happened in the core Mario world. They'd just look way different. Instead of Royal Stickers there'd be Cosmic Crowns or something, Just like the Star Spirits, Crystal Stars and Pure Hearts had nothing to do with paper and were just straight up magical entities organically built into the world. Color Splash could still have its paint shenanigans but it would be handled more like Mario Sunshine or Bowser's Fury rather than being something that directly plays on paper theming. And King Olly could still be an origami villain, as I could still see origami being a hobby of non-paper beings in the core Mario world. Instead of folding paper people into origami, he uses magic to flatten people and THEN turn them into origami. His minions would be other origami creatures folded to life by him, rather than a bunch of sentient art supplies that only exist to play off the idea of a paper world. They could still wield some of these items, like scissors being wielded like swords as that would still be a threat to an organic Mario. And their personalities could remain intact. Bottom line is, there exist hypothetical versions of these stories that could feasibly take place in the main timeline in the main universe, they just aren't the ones we see.

TLR: The first 3 games absolutely happened in THE Mario world, and that is the version we see. The "Paper Mario Style" is a stylistic choice for presenting it to the player, and all paper elements in gameplay are explainable via magic. The modern trilogy as we see them are most likely in a separate world, possibly the one from Paper Jam but i really don't care enough about Paper Jam to definitively decide on that. But their events in some form or another most likely did happen in the main world, we just didn't see it.

The Paper Mario series is truly an enigma.

 

[Dorayaki]

I don't think they're identical. It has been confirmed that the world of Paper Mario is in a book, and that is further confirmed in Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam. Also, why is Paper Jam so hated on? It seems like a good game.

That's been noted in OP. We're asking if it's a history book that records everything from real world, or it's a made-up fiction which contents don't exist in real world.

 

[LuigiFan24]

That's been noted in OP. We're asking if it's a history book that records everything from real world, or it's a made-up fiction which contents don't exist in real world.

I understand that. I'm leaning towards it being fictional with contents that don't exist in the real world because some things are drastically different and there are characters from the Paper Mario franchise that don't appear in mainline or spinoff (like Sports and Party).

 

[Xiahou Dun]

The two options don't really fit with my interpretation of how Paper Mario is handled though. I do think there is another world going on in Paper Mario, but Mushroom Kingdomers see it as just a bunch of still pictures. Maybe in the beginning, yeah they started as illustrations, but maybe, like, a copy of the special serialized edition of the books got enchanted, like in Paper Jam, and so the characters in the books were able to get out and interact with Mushroom Kingdom (hell I mean this explains Star Spirits, Goomba King, and Whacka nicely). I can't even say whatever happened in Paper Mario, Paper Mario Sticker Star, Paper Mario Color Splash, and Paper Mario Origami King is "not canon" because they became "canon" once Paper Jam's events happened and the books become maybe a kind of portal between Mario's world and Paper Mario's world.

Because Thousand-Year Door and Super Paper Mario exist as a fanfic that was published online, and it has a niche following but not dedicated enough to publish works in print, so their world is separated from the "official" Paper Mario world and that's why none of them show up in Paper Jam. If characters were to access Super Paper Mario's world, it would at least explain why it's all digitized. As for Thousand Year Door, the paper elements were dialed back a bit, so maybe the world was like written on an older piece of software but also printed out so the author could share their work with their friends or something.