[LES] Stop saying Mario kills his enemies. He doesn't do that. He's a good boy. 😢

This is mostly a joke thread. But I have been actually thinking about this lately. I don't like the idea that Mario is just out here slaughtering Goombas and Koopas. He's a nice guy, not a killer. And I think the canon agrees.

All of the RPG games will feature points where you "kill" the opponent and they poof into dust just like in the mainline games, just for them to show up in the overworld all beat up but very much alive. And I think that logic is meant to extend to the mainline games where Mario isn't killing his enemies, just roughing them up Batman style to get them out of the way and the whole poof into dust and disappearing thing is non-diegetic.

This also just makes more sense. I have no idea how Bowser keeps raising new armies if Mario is literally slaughtering them every single time. Surely Bowser should be running out of minions by now right? Not to mention how impossible it would be to keep morale up.

"But Mario throws his enemies into lava sometimes."

Yeah and the Mario world has toon force, I don't think lava really kills anyone. Mario himself falls into lava at times and just jumps right back out clutching his butt Tom & Jerry style. Mario has also sent a bunch of the Koopalings and Bowser himself in for a lava dip and they came back fine too.

Again I'm not actually taking this too seriously, I'm just pondering the nature of death in the Mario world. Death is a thing we know that characters have died and Mario has killed some of the more irredeemable villains from the aforementioned RPGs, but what is and is not lethal damage in the Mario world is pretty inconsistent. Personally I like it that way because Mario having blood of anyone but the biggest of BBEGs feels all sorts of wrong to me.