Captain Hideous
Mannikin
Hey, everyone. I've silently frequented the site for a long time, and I speak up now to shamelessly peddle my wares. I wrote a piece in which I attempt to expose the great Super Mario to the conspiracy against the human race, thereby turning those NES games into horror stories. Hopefully the thing is enjoyable on its own, but I'm also hungry for feedback, especially from such an illustrious group of more literate peers. It was written with the intention of performing it for YouTube, but the script is pasted below, should you prefer to indulge in your literacy.
I once met a man on the thirteenth floor who claimed he was the true Super Mario. All others were facsimiles, mere gestures at his identity. Even those Japanese games were but myths taking him as inspiration. He promised by night he could leap amongst the stars and ride the foggy clouds of heaven through the incessantly formless architecture of the sky. He spoke of a grand kingdom built out of the labyrinthine shadows twisting only into themselves, grotesquely evolving into new roads without substance, an endless series of growing, infinitesimal towers. There he frolicked, night, after night, after night, bathed in so much emptiness he could feel it at play.
Why shouldn’t he believe? Mario is in all of us; he reflects us in our bones. He is the spirit of optimism, an idol to the joys of conscious experience. There are even titles where he thanks us for playing, brimming with delight at the thought of being useful, our imagination smiling back for having wasted our time.
One cannot venerate our consciousness without betraying our underlying fear of it, however. Mario and his worlds exist to be vehicles of pure fun and enjoyment, but in their earliest tellings they paint a picture of the deepest horrors faced by those with knowledge of their being. True, he would later voice gratitude for being considered a toy worth playing with. This was not always the case.
My sympathy for the man reaches back to his creation, where he was conceived in a womb with strict existential limitations. Even his most beloved adventures are defined by such limits; every virtual world a pitiful construction, a poor parody of the real. It was simply the best we could do, harvesting advancements in technology and design to hopelessly make matter from dreams.
Did he feel it then, the limits of that first world? Did he thrash against the cage of his genesis, hopping through landscapes that always felt off? Perhaps, somehow, he could taste the artificiality. The Mushroom Kingdom, in its beginning, was a Pinocchio place that was itself the lie. A land of blocks drawn on paper and projected by code. It was nowhere near natural; it did not grow on trees. It validates itself only within itself, and outside the boundaries of the unreal, it is understood to be fiction. The stone castles harbor falsehoods. Inside them are only spacious lies.
Arguably, the most egregious unreality present in the original Super Mario Bros. is the supposition of a world with purpose. One validated within the game itself, not just to us. These lands were built with teleology, a goal. Rescue Princess Peach from the Koopa King, Bowser. A finite, unchanging place flowing with an unseen ultimate calling, the mission for which everything was built to fulfill. Though he exists in the confines of kilobytes, Mario, unlike us, has a God-given purpose imbued into every pixel of his universe. And, unlike us, were he to put his faith in that purpose, he might rise to spiritual realms of fulfillment forever gated to those in a meandering material existence. He may live in a feeble approximation of the real, but at least Mario need not bemoan his uselessness in things.
That may have been enough for him were he not made to continue. The true tragedy of Mario’s story is that he was forced to go on, horrible revelations being fed to him each new day, and in their metabolism crumble away at the paper towers of meaning erected in his mind. Case in point: Super Mario Bros. 2.
Here it is Subcon that requires emancipation from the enigmatic King Wart, purveyor of nightmares. Subcon is a realm not unlike the Mushroom Kingdom; in fact, it reads as a strange parody of that other world, rearranging conventions to create a planet slightly askew. Nothing is quite right here — not the grassy sentinels carved from starless night, nor the scrolling ascent through cotton bricks between the pillars of the sky. Certainly not the doors opening between shades of reality, products of a magic potion allowing Mario to mingle in the space behind his own. He walks amongst shadows, but does not feel them as such. He feels material is the shadow cast by this dead world without light, the formless dark the shape of everything, the matter of his soul. Worst of all to Mario were his enemies, the forces in service to the incubus king. Almost all bore a facade across their unseen visage. False faces themselves come to life and terrorize our hero, floating through the membrane of reality, their smiles frozen in grim delight, reveling in the absence behind their eyes. He feared the Shy Guys above all; creatures hypnotically waddling to a tune broadcast only in the heart of things. Their petrified expression looked to Mario very much like a perpetual, silent scream.
They were not enough to prevent Mario from meeting Wart in final confrontation. Again he triumphs, and the eminence of bad dreams is defeated with the aid of the very machine meant to keep Subcon in chains. The ultimate goal is once again achieved. Salvation is at hand.
Until, of course, the credits roll. Here we see the adventure, indeed all adventures, for what they are in the reality beyond our minds: a story cooked up by our consciousness, one whose completion matters only in our heads. Divine the purpose may be, built into the fabric of the world itself, does meeting it grant anything more than an ephemeral sense of accomplishment, a fleeting ghost of contentment, until life requires we meet that purpose again and again? Apparently, it does not. Rising to God’s challenge does not liberate Mario from existing as he does. It merely makes way for God to provide another.
But such discussion is mainly for our purposes. For Mario himself, the problem runs far deeper. Have we not all had dreams so vivid they leak into our understanding of the waking world? A detail so powerfully conjured it causes us to wonder if it did not follow us out of our sleep?
Imagine, then, a nightly hallucination so cogent in its presentation that you relive it in a way indistinguishable from memory. Every sensation so richly remembered you feel you have been there, that this place is substance, its people more than fiction. Not a snapshot carried into your daytime, but an entire motion picture masquerading as history.
For Mario, his time in Subcon haunts him like the demon that plagued Descartes, causing him to question everything he thought was indeed true. After all, how can one trust the validity of what they’ve experienced if the sensation of a dream felt just as real?
Like Descartes, Mario worked his way down to the core of his knowledge. His family, his history, his sense of self and choice, the universe as he sees it — he no longer knew if any of it was fact. In truth, the only reality Mario found himself sure of was that he exists in a constant web of illusions produced by his mind. If something truer lies beneath what he can see, then even Mario himself is but a limited construction.
So, unlike Descartes, Mario could not even be sure he was really real. Perhaps he too is an illusion in a great, tangled network of lies. He thinks, but who provided the thoughts? What choices could he make when he was capable of only the one? Maybe everything Mario is to himself is an expression of something else, some black force beyond the bounds of all he could understand. Something that made him a piece, not a whole. A living puppet animated by something outside his control.
From then on, Mario could no longer meet his eyes in the mirror, for he saw not cheeks of flesh but the stone-faced mask he was forever unable to shed. Behind the mask, he knew there was nothing; a thousand faces at once, all congealing into the grimacing smile of the moving void.
Mario was allowed to forget these lessons come Super Mario World. Here, everything is bright and wacky and wonderful. A delightful traipse through a truly vast locale, a landscape unified, whole…and real.
Although it comes off the heels of Super Mario Bros. 3, the truer globe-trotting tale. Not confined to the singular Dinosaur Land, the eight worlds here are each a kingdom hounded by the black magic of Bowser’s return, threatening to throw Mario’s stable peacetime into chaotic dissolution. Inside that cartridge was a virtual conception of untold scale, an entire universe packed into a processing chip, the grandest land possibly projected by those systems of entertainment.
Yet in the game’s presentation is a naked truth of that universe sung beneath the notes. On our side, the gag is obvious. The curtains rise and the drama begins, making the whole of Mario’s existence a play for our enjoyment. A man fulfilling his ultimate purpose is merely a performance for faces he cannot see.
Why, exactly, is that so uncanny? It is only so if the actors believe themselves real.
So the joke works from his side, from behind poor Mario’s eyes. All the flavorful miseries of war, the bland politics of kingdoms, all merely a play without plot, without direction or substance. Expressions of things acting out in a toy box, the script unknown but already written in their veins. Everyone, himself included, animate dolls without reason, floating dreamers with false faces, ghosts haunting their own hopeless fantasies. All achievements a dream to keep them dancing on strings.
A sinister question then arises in the unspeakable corners of his mind. If something made that super mushroom…is that the puller of the strings? He’ll make himself mad before reaching an acceptable answer, his silent lamentations echoing all the way to floor thirteen.
Sweet Mario, poor Mario, little thing of code. Sometimes I stare into the glass of my screen, the dim outline of my reflection sculpted into his sky. Hear my whispers, watch my lips…and together we will cry. You’ve always felt off in that world you call home. You make movements through life, though they feel not your own. They come from outside you, with you but a vessel, your choices made for you in a role you were prescribed.
You know you perform on the largest possible stage, but do you fear that something is watching this play? You’ve got a full house, fuller than you can ever dream. The hall full of seats ripple out all through time, velvet shadows giving birth from places even I cannot see. Chairs cascade out of blackness, forming rows out of tune. The theatre is rotting, but it won’t blow away.
Do not squint at their faces, there’s nothing to see. Though what man could keep from turning to the horror of things? So look, and see the manikins in each of their seats. A hall full of dummies unable to blink. And lo, hear them weeping in their impotent choir, and realize in God you see only a mirror.
I was liar before, when I spoke of sole purpose. Your world has another, though not one you can see. Surely you’ve felt it, come close to speaking its name. You know the blocks are placed for reason indeed, and those facts of your person mean so much to me. Understand your reality exists for the delight of idiot gods with power so useless they can do naught but play. They cannot live with what they are, and so they are weeping. It’s why they built you, so they might safely gaze into their own sorry reflections.
“I can see them,” he told me, looking up to the stars. “I can see them through the dark, past the veil taking shape. Their smiles are horrible. Their lips are crimson and worn.”
Then leap, one last time, towards your kingdom in heaven. Look upon us with pity, should you manage your escape. And perhaps then, sweet Mario, we will meet once again in that rotten old theatre where the shadows are cast to make our poor material dreams.
I once met a man on the thirteenth floor who claimed he was the true Super Mario. All others were facsimiles, mere gestures at his identity. Even those Japanese games were but myths taking him as inspiration. He promised by night he could leap amongst the stars and ride the foggy clouds of heaven through the incessantly formless architecture of the sky. He spoke of a grand kingdom built out of the labyrinthine shadows twisting only into themselves, grotesquely evolving into new roads without substance, an endless series of growing, infinitesimal towers. There he frolicked, night, after night, after night, bathed in so much emptiness he could feel it at play.
Why shouldn’t he believe? Mario is in all of us; he reflects us in our bones. He is the spirit of optimism, an idol to the joys of conscious experience. There are even titles where he thanks us for playing, brimming with delight at the thought of being useful, our imagination smiling back for having wasted our time.
One cannot venerate our consciousness without betraying our underlying fear of it, however. Mario and his worlds exist to be vehicles of pure fun and enjoyment, but in their earliest tellings they paint a picture of the deepest horrors faced by those with knowledge of their being. True, he would later voice gratitude for being considered a toy worth playing with. This was not always the case.
My sympathy for the man reaches back to his creation, where he was conceived in a womb with strict existential limitations. Even his most beloved adventures are defined by such limits; every virtual world a pitiful construction, a poor parody of the real. It was simply the best we could do, harvesting advancements in technology and design to hopelessly make matter from dreams.
Did he feel it then, the limits of that first world? Did he thrash against the cage of his genesis, hopping through landscapes that always felt off? Perhaps, somehow, he could taste the artificiality. The Mushroom Kingdom, in its beginning, was a Pinocchio place that was itself the lie. A land of blocks drawn on paper and projected by code. It was nowhere near natural; it did not grow on trees. It validates itself only within itself, and outside the boundaries of the unreal, it is understood to be fiction. The stone castles harbor falsehoods. Inside them are only spacious lies.
Arguably, the most egregious unreality present in the original Super Mario Bros. is the supposition of a world with purpose. One validated within the game itself, not just to us. These lands were built with teleology, a goal. Rescue Princess Peach from the Koopa King, Bowser. A finite, unchanging place flowing with an unseen ultimate calling, the mission for which everything was built to fulfill. Though he exists in the confines of kilobytes, Mario, unlike us, has a God-given purpose imbued into every pixel of his universe. And, unlike us, were he to put his faith in that purpose, he might rise to spiritual realms of fulfillment forever gated to those in a meandering material existence. He may live in a feeble approximation of the real, but at least Mario need not bemoan his uselessness in things.
That may have been enough for him were he not made to continue. The true tragedy of Mario’s story is that he was forced to go on, horrible revelations being fed to him each new day, and in their metabolism crumble away at the paper towers of meaning erected in his mind. Case in point: Super Mario Bros. 2.
Here it is Subcon that requires emancipation from the enigmatic King Wart, purveyor of nightmares. Subcon is a realm not unlike the Mushroom Kingdom; in fact, it reads as a strange parody of that other world, rearranging conventions to create a planet slightly askew. Nothing is quite right here — not the grassy sentinels carved from starless night, nor the scrolling ascent through cotton bricks between the pillars of the sky. Certainly not the doors opening between shades of reality, products of a magic potion allowing Mario to mingle in the space behind his own. He walks amongst shadows, but does not feel them as such. He feels material is the shadow cast by this dead world without light, the formless dark the shape of everything, the matter of his soul. Worst of all to Mario were his enemies, the forces in service to the incubus king. Almost all bore a facade across their unseen visage. False faces themselves come to life and terrorize our hero, floating through the membrane of reality, their smiles frozen in grim delight, reveling in the absence behind their eyes. He feared the Shy Guys above all; creatures hypnotically waddling to a tune broadcast only in the heart of things. Their petrified expression looked to Mario very much like a perpetual, silent scream.
They were not enough to prevent Mario from meeting Wart in final confrontation. Again he triumphs, and the eminence of bad dreams is defeated with the aid of the very machine meant to keep Subcon in chains. The ultimate goal is once again achieved. Salvation is at hand.
Until, of course, the credits roll. Here we see the adventure, indeed all adventures, for what they are in the reality beyond our minds: a story cooked up by our consciousness, one whose completion matters only in our heads. Divine the purpose may be, built into the fabric of the world itself, does meeting it grant anything more than an ephemeral sense of accomplishment, a fleeting ghost of contentment, until life requires we meet that purpose again and again? Apparently, it does not. Rising to God’s challenge does not liberate Mario from existing as he does. It merely makes way for God to provide another.
But such discussion is mainly for our purposes. For Mario himself, the problem runs far deeper. Have we not all had dreams so vivid they leak into our understanding of the waking world? A detail so powerfully conjured it causes us to wonder if it did not follow us out of our sleep?
Imagine, then, a nightly hallucination so cogent in its presentation that you relive it in a way indistinguishable from memory. Every sensation so richly remembered you feel you have been there, that this place is substance, its people more than fiction. Not a snapshot carried into your daytime, but an entire motion picture masquerading as history.
For Mario, his time in Subcon haunts him like the demon that plagued Descartes, causing him to question everything he thought was indeed true. After all, how can one trust the validity of what they’ve experienced if the sensation of a dream felt just as real?
Like Descartes, Mario worked his way down to the core of his knowledge. His family, his history, his sense of self and choice, the universe as he sees it — he no longer knew if any of it was fact. In truth, the only reality Mario found himself sure of was that he exists in a constant web of illusions produced by his mind. If something truer lies beneath what he can see, then even Mario himself is but a limited construction.
So, unlike Descartes, Mario could not even be sure he was really real. Perhaps he too is an illusion in a great, tangled network of lies. He thinks, but who provided the thoughts? What choices could he make when he was capable of only the one? Maybe everything Mario is to himself is an expression of something else, some black force beyond the bounds of all he could understand. Something that made him a piece, not a whole. A living puppet animated by something outside his control.
From then on, Mario could no longer meet his eyes in the mirror, for he saw not cheeks of flesh but the stone-faced mask he was forever unable to shed. Behind the mask, he knew there was nothing; a thousand faces at once, all congealing into the grimacing smile of the moving void.
Mario was allowed to forget these lessons come Super Mario World. Here, everything is bright and wacky and wonderful. A delightful traipse through a truly vast locale, a landscape unified, whole…and real.
Although it comes off the heels of Super Mario Bros. 3, the truer globe-trotting tale. Not confined to the singular Dinosaur Land, the eight worlds here are each a kingdom hounded by the black magic of Bowser’s return, threatening to throw Mario’s stable peacetime into chaotic dissolution. Inside that cartridge was a virtual conception of untold scale, an entire universe packed into a processing chip, the grandest land possibly projected by those systems of entertainment.
Yet in the game’s presentation is a naked truth of that universe sung beneath the notes. On our side, the gag is obvious. The curtains rise and the drama begins, making the whole of Mario’s existence a play for our enjoyment. A man fulfilling his ultimate purpose is merely a performance for faces he cannot see.
Why, exactly, is that so uncanny? It is only so if the actors believe themselves real.
So the joke works from his side, from behind poor Mario’s eyes. All the flavorful miseries of war, the bland politics of kingdoms, all merely a play without plot, without direction or substance. Expressions of things acting out in a toy box, the script unknown but already written in their veins. Everyone, himself included, animate dolls without reason, floating dreamers with false faces, ghosts haunting their own hopeless fantasies. All achievements a dream to keep them dancing on strings.
A sinister question then arises in the unspeakable corners of his mind. If something made that super mushroom…is that the puller of the strings? He’ll make himself mad before reaching an acceptable answer, his silent lamentations echoing all the way to floor thirteen.
Sweet Mario, poor Mario, little thing of code. Sometimes I stare into the glass of my screen, the dim outline of my reflection sculpted into his sky. Hear my whispers, watch my lips…and together we will cry. You’ve always felt off in that world you call home. You make movements through life, though they feel not your own. They come from outside you, with you but a vessel, your choices made for you in a role you were prescribed.
You know you perform on the largest possible stage, but do you fear that something is watching this play? You’ve got a full house, fuller than you can ever dream. The hall full of seats ripple out all through time, velvet shadows giving birth from places even I cannot see. Chairs cascade out of blackness, forming rows out of tune. The theatre is rotting, but it won’t blow away.
Do not squint at their faces, there’s nothing to see. Though what man could keep from turning to the horror of things? So look, and see the manikins in each of their seats. A hall full of dummies unable to blink. And lo, hear them weeping in their impotent choir, and realize in God you see only a mirror.
I was liar before, when I spoke of sole purpose. Your world has another, though not one you can see. Surely you’ve felt it, come close to speaking its name. You know the blocks are placed for reason indeed, and those facts of your person mean so much to me. Understand your reality exists for the delight of idiot gods with power so useless they can do naught but play. They cannot live with what they are, and so they are weeping. It’s why they built you, so they might safely gaze into their own sorry reflections.
“I can see them,” he told me, looking up to the stars. “I can see them through the dark, past the veil taking shape. Their smiles are horrible. Their lips are crimson and worn.”
Then leap, one last time, towards your kingdom in heaven. Look upon us with pity, should you manage your escape. And perhaps then, sweet Mario, we will meet once again in that rotten old theatre where the shadows are cast to make our poor material dreams.
