Nintendo has always been weirdly cagey about the personal details of its most iconic characters—to the point that you have to catch one of the company’s executives on a very good day if you want them to confirm something as simple as whether Mario is Italian, a plumber, or has the last name “Mario.” When it comes to actual romantic connections between its characters, the Japanese firm is even more uptight, something it displayed aggressively this week, when it reminded fans that its iconic turtle-killing problem solver and his favorite unelected head of state, Princess Peach, are just friends—all but daring the wider internet to go “Oh, yeah?”
Nintendo made the announcement through the normal public relations outlets, which is to say that it came as a daily tooltip on the company’s weird Nintendo Today! digital calendar app that it launched back in March. Users were informed recently that “Princess Peach and Mario are good friends and help each other out whenever they can,” which, when received in a normal brain, probably feels like a fairly anodyne statement. But we’re talking about a fanbase that has done anatomical analyses on things like Mario’s briefly glimpsed nipples, so suffice it to say historians were quick to comb through the evidence to try to refute this “good friends” slander. (Nintendo put out a Valentine’s Day tweet a scant 15 years ago featuring the pair together, for instance, and referred to them as “Cutest Couple” in Mario Party 5. Also, Peach kisses Mario on the cheek or nose quite a lot, usually as a transactional reward for having rescued her—although it’s worth noting that Super Mario Odyssey ends with her rejecting a marriage proposal from him and stranding him on the moon. So, y’know, mixed signals.)
Honestly, we get it: The folks in the Mario group of characters are, by design, pretty blank slates, designed to have little in the way of history or personality traits that would stop them from being dropped into new games and scenarios sans baggage. Establishing a canonical romance, even for its most obvious pairing, would get in the way of the characters’ mix-and-match nature, and maybe screw with some of Nintendo’s cherished “identify as the character” mentality. That being said, the only Nintendo fans who seem especially happy about the no-hook-ups ruling are the ones who were already ‘shipping these characters with someone else—the Peach/Daisy people have been eating well this weekend, from what we’ve seen on Bluesky—at least partly because it seems kind of disingenuous, given how much the pair have been depicted in such close proximity for so long. (It also feels weirdly timed, at a moment when video game marketplaces Steam and itch.io both announced that they were clamping down on games with sexual content or themes in order to appease credit card companies; Nintendo’s never been at the forefront of sexuality in gaming, but there’s still a mild vibe of “Hold our beer, our characters have never even kissed on the mouth” to the whole thing.)
We did, in our capacity as journalists, run a quick tags search on internet fan-fiction archive A03—kind of the “checking the dipstick” of gauging internet horniness for character pairings—this evening, and will note that Mario/Peach massively outranks any other duo we could think of. (And some we wish we hadn’t; shout out to the 129 Luigi/Mario fics in the pile, and their let’s say controversial definitions of brotherly love.) So there is at least some clear indication that a lot of people naturally slot the pair into coupledom. Anyway: Here’s your regular reminder that Nintendo can never touch the erotic mindscapes inside your own head; if you want Mario and Peach to have been long-term monogamous for the last 40 years, drive yourself wild, friend.
[
via Consequence]
