© 2005 By J. Nicholas Lewis
© 2005 By J. Nicholas Lewis
The media is always complaining about violent games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and the ever so famous Grand Theft Auto. To this day I have no idea why these games have sparked so much controversy. Any one with an average IQ and the ability to differentiate reality from the phantasmal world of video games is smart enough to know that upper cutting someone is not going to cause them to fly fifteen feet in the air and that running around rampantly, raping and beating the shit out of prostitutes, killing people in open public for no other reason than personal satisfaction may not be such a good idea in the real world. The media points the finger at violent video games for tainting today’s youth when they should be pointing the finger at parents who had no business breeding.
I just don’t understand why the media and bad parents reproach works of art like Mortal Kombat and Doom, claiming that they have a bad influence on today’s youth, but when it comes to a game like The Super Mario Brothers series, it’s deemed as suitable for a child to play despite the fact that the game’s underlying elements makes it possibly one of the most vulgar games ever to be created.
Now, I was playing Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Brothers 3 on my Nintendo a couple days ago for the sake of nostalgia. All I have to say is I can’t believe how many disturbing thematic elements I detected as I was playing through them. They may seem like happy child-friendly games but when you look deeper into it, no kid should be playing them (if I had kids this would be the only game I wouldn’t allow them to play) and these are my reasons why I don’t think they are suitable for young audiences:
1. The game advocates the use of drugs. It shows that poppy flowers give you the ability to spit fireballs and that Shroom Mushrooms do one of two things—give you an extra life or make you bigger.
2. It advocates sloth by showing you that you don’t have to have a job to make money because when you’re on drugs (in this case: Opium/Pot and Shrooms) you can simply collect money floating in the sky or by bashing your head into question mark boxes.
3. The game is very misogynistic (which I think is the game’s key point). I mean think about it, the object of the game is to save the Princess. You play as two schizophrenic guys who are plumbers, pumping themselves full of drugs, getting sucked into pipes that transport them to different areas of the world, jumping on top of creatures to kill them, constantly putting themselves in danger, dying numerous times, and collecting coins for the sole purpose of buying extra lives all for a woman! This is misogynistic because it’s showing that women are inherently evil and all they do is influence men to do crazy things like spend all their money, pollute their bodies, and die. The game is also misogynistic in that it portrays a woman as being nothing more than a piece of property. It portrays them as such because Princess Toadstool has no sense of free will. She’s either being kidnapped by Bowser and then locked in a castle somewhere or saved by Mario and Luigi just for the whole fucking process to repeat itself in another Mario game or when the game is restarted. She is basically a prisoner to two schizophrenic drug addicts and some guy who looks like a dragon/humanoid crossbreed. My last reason to justify why this game is misogynistic is that it conveys the notion that a woman’s only purpose is to reproduce and sexually gratify. I say this because well… why else would Bowser keep kidnapping the princess if it weren’t for sexual gratification and reproducing!? As I see it, the princess is the only female in the game and Bowser(the poor guy) looks like he was born as a result of a demented orgy involving Medusa, a dragon, an Alligator Snapping Turtle, and Elmer Fud, he’s probably a very lonely man and he has this beauteous maiden, who again is the only female in the game, locked up in his castle… what do you think he’s doing? The seven koopalings you fought in Super Mario Brothers 3 had to come from somewhere...
Now that I have made my points as to why I think the Super Mario Brothers is the most obscene game in the history of video games I hope that any parent reading this article will put all of what I said into consideration next time they see their children playing a Super Mario Brothers game.
