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Description
Alternate universe where instead of going into space with a ship to find the Luma's mother, she turned into some kind of space mermaid, like the space whale from that one Courage the Cowardly Dog episode, and now you're thinking of that episode, as well as Rosalina's origin story, so now you're crying, ain't I a stinker?

Also gonna take the opportunity to go on another long ramble because I'm probably never gonna get the opportunity to write about this again, but like, why do people get so pissed off when you subscribe to the theory that Peach and Rosalina are related? The only straight answer I've ever gotten is just that the theory originates from Matpat, or at least was popularized by him, so people just hate it on principle. And look, I'm no Matpat apologist, there's plenty of videos between his three channels that I would never dare try to defend, (Sans is Ness, red shirt Shaggy, ...that Grubhub one he did recently...*shudders*) and I find it just as obnoxious as anyone else does when his fanboys take everything he says as 100% fact and just close the conversation there when there's still more to discuss at best or his conclusion is flat-out wrong at worst. (Anyone who thinks Mario being a dick to his brother while playing tennis is evidence of sociopathy doesn't have siblings)

But I also find it just as obnoxious when he could have a perfectly valid theory with plenty to back it up, such as the theory that there's actually two Marios, a Mario Sr. and a Mario Jr., and then the opposite kind of people just fold their arms and refuse to even consider its validity no matter what case gets made. I mean, the crux of that theory is that Donkey Kong from the arcade game grew old and became Cranky Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr. grew up to be the father of Donkey Kong the third. That part's not even a theory, that's actually canon. But Yoshi's Island DS shows us that Mario and Donkey Kong the third are the same age, so how was there a Mario to fight Cranky Kong when he was young if Mario's not supposed to be born yet? Sure, time travel exists in Mario, but then that opens a whole new can of worms, why did Mario go back in time to fight a young Cranky Kong? What scenario lead to that? Good luck filling that gap in, and remember, you gotta use evidence from the material to make your case, otherwise you're not crafting a theory you're just writing a fanfiction. And that's usually the part where people say something like "Mario's not supposed to have deep lore or character development, it was always Miyamoto's intention for Mario to be as simple and unnuanced as possible," and that right there is when you officially lose the fan theory game. If you don't know why, read this (when you have the time, because this description's only gonna get longer):

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php…

Even ignoring the Death of the Author though, obviously there was something intended in Mario Galaxy, not only is the game notorious for being more story-driven than most Mario games, but there's documentation of more being intended, and that the developers had to fight Miyamoto tooth and nail just to get what they did into the game. So forgive me if I simply can't bring myself to believe that there wasn't something to the storybook illustration having Rosalina's mother look just like Peach, as if they did it by accident or something. I have drawn hundreds of female figures in just the past few years alone, and drawing Princess Peach by accident when I meant to draw somebody else has never occurred. Not once.

And that's not to say that there weren't reaches in that video, such as his explanation for why he thinks Luigi is Rosalina's father, because of the green hat her brother was drawn with, which I suppose is compelling enough, to a point, but also because her father owned a telescope, and the haunted mansion in Boo Woods Luigi won in a contest had a telescope in it so Luigi totally canonically owns a telescope, even though that mansion wasn't real, it was an illusion made by King Boo and it and all the stuff in it faded away and disappeared at the end of the game, so no, we don't actually know for sure whether or not Luigi owns a telescope, maybe he does, but he just as easily could not. If the father is either of the Mario brothers, why couldn't Mario own the telescope and the hat just be a gift from an uncle rather than a father?

The crux of the theory doesn't really depend on who the father is though, it's about the relation to Peach. And his explanation for how Rosalina and Peach not only look the same age but are both alive when Rosalina's mother is supposed to have died when she was a kid is because whatever causes her to be immortal (Mat speculates time dilation, though I wouldn't find it hard to believe if the collective power of 120 power stars could halt the aging process) has simply allowed her to outlive the universe and see it replaced by a new mostly-identical one, like that Futurama episode with the time machine that only moves forward, which is something we know to be true about Rosalina because she more or less spells it out at the end of the game, describing the life cycle of the universe as if she's seen it before. Between that explanation and the fact that the comet observatory returns to Earth (or whatever planet Mario lives on) every hundred years (implying that Rosalina's capable of being hundreds of years old, so god-knows how much older she could be) leaves little doubt that Rosalina originates from a previous boot of the universe, and between that and the illustration of her mother looking just like Peach, I've always found the case for the mother/daughter connection very compelling, the only real evidence against it would just be that Miyamoto would never allow it to be canon, and the perceived authority of the creator doesn't really exist in the theory game anyway. So I never really understood why that theory was always so controversial. In a sea of awful theories presented by Matpat, I just never felt like that was one of them, and that if it came from basically any other channel, it would probably be better-regarded

and yet for some reason, in spite of finding that theory to be one of his better ones, I never found his conclusion totally satisfying, like when I say out loud "Rosalina is Peach's daughter from another universe" something about it just doesn't sound right, like there's some part of this theory missing. That video, and the later video about the two Marios theory both came out when I was still in high school, so I've had plenty of time to mull over them both as a part of the much bigger tapestry that is my experience with a franchise I loved so much as a kid that, had I known the word, I would have gladly called myself a historian for. When I was a kid, my fandom for Mario didn't stop at the products that were available on store shelves at the time, I spent so many hours scouring any fansites I found for any information on Mario products that came out before I was born. The shampoo bottle shaped like a Yoshi? I knew it existed. Mario sodas with a different flavor associated with each character? I knew they existed. The Mario popsicle with the gumball nose that you could only get from ice cream trucks? I knew it existed. The Mario 3 McDonald's toys? I knew they existed. The Mario walltrim from 1987? I OWNED IT! It was one of the first things I ever got on Ebay, and it stayed on my bedroom wall WELL into adulthood. There's probably a collector in the audience ready to strangle me for that, but I don't regret it in the slightest.

So many hours as a kid were spent watching old VHS rips on YouTube of Mario commercials, that it should really go without saying that you couldn't pull me away from the Mario cartoons. Hell, that was actually where my fandom started! I liked the games before, but it was getting an episode of the Mario 3 cartoon (Sneaky Lying Cheating Giant Ninja Koopas) on a DVD that came in a cereal box when it finally occurred to me that the imagination and creativity of people is where they come from. Before that you could have told me that video games were just the natural fallout from nuclear radiation or some shit and I would have bought it, but no, a person had to conceive of them, Mario picking up a leaf to grow a raccoon tail that lets him fly isn't natural, a person had to think of it in just the same way that Stephen Hillenburg had to think of a talking sponge who flips burgers and lives in a pineapple before I could actually see it happen, something that blew my mind as a kid and made creativity feel like a form of magic, and video games had the same magic, so not only did I suddenly like video games a lot more that day, I liked Mario a lot more. So my formative years with the character, the years that shaped my relationship with the character, were spent equally between just about every instance of the character that existed up to that point. Which means that even as a kid I was familiar with how the story got retconned from Yoshi's Island onward, how Mario used to be the older brother and Luigi was the younger brother, and how they once had a superhero-style origin story where they were plumbers from Brooklyn, who got pulled into a warp zone on a plumbing job, brought to the Mushroom Kingdom, and had to rise to the occasion to become heroes. But starting in Yoshi's Island, the Mario brothers are now the same age, and they always lived in the Mushroom Kingdom. No more origin story, no more occasion to rise to, no more moment where they went from zero to hero, so much less relatable, and so much less inspirational. And I felt that way even as a kid, if you asked kid-me which Mario is the true Mario, despite the latter being the one that was contemporaneous to my childhood, the former was my Mario of choice. Even as a kid, the blue collar everyman was a much more interesting character to me than the true-born hero. I think that's why I roll my eyes when people say that Mario isn't supposed to have deep fleshed-out characters like that because they're supposed to just be simple fun kids games, because I was a kid, and I thought even that small amount of depth made the character way more fun. Obviously I don't think he should be a SUPER deep character, I'm not asking for Kingdom Hearts levels of lore here, just for Mario to be a LITTLE bit more than just the guy who says "let's-a go" and "mama-mia."

Going back to the Peach and Rosalina theory, and it's connection to my full experience with the series, I think the reason I was never fully satisfied with Matpat's conclusion is because it actually goes really well together with the two Marios theory and explains the Yoshi's Island retcon. It's just one fragment of a larger theory, and I've just never seen anyone come to this conclusion before. Oh yeah, I'm actually doing this.

There isn't just a Mario Sr. and a Mario Jr., there's two SETS of Mario brothers. That's why there's two different age gaps and two different origin stories. It's not a retcon. After the events of Donkey Kong, Mario and his younger brother Luigi are brought to the Mushroom Kingdom, they defeat Bowser, they rescue Princess Peach. They have several adventures just like this one before age catches up with them and they settle down. Mario (or Luigi, it doesn't really matter which but I'm gonna go with Mario for the sake of the conversation) settles down and starts a family, becoming the father of two twin sons, one named after his father, and one named after his uncle. Mario Jr. and his twin brother Luigi the second. At around this time, Princess Peach has also settled down and had two children of her own, a son we don't know the name of and a daughter named Rosalina. Sometime after Rosalina meets the Luma and goes into space to find its mother, Princess Peach passes away sometime after giving birth to her second daughter, Princess Peach Jr. (and yes, girls named after their mothers can also get the Jr. suffix) As for who Mario and Peach settled down with to have their kids, I'm not sure. Whoever Mario got with, it probably wasn't Peach as it would make the current Mario and Peach siblings (though that would give some hilarious new context to why Peach turns him down when he proposes in Odyssey, she's just like "fuckin' what? No, weirdo.") some would probably speculate Pauline, as Matpat did in his two Marios video, but in Odyssey Pauline refers to Mario as an old friend rather than her son, some people have even used that as evidence against the two Marios theory, but all it really proves is just that the mother isn't Pauline either. As for who Peach got with, maybe Prince Haru from the animated movie? Who Mario and Peach ended up with doesn't really matter too much anyway, the crux of this theory is the Mario brothers, Peach, and Rosalina. As the offspring left on Earth (or whatever planet this is) grew up, the new Mario brothers and the new princess fall into the same roles as their parents before them, Bowser has his own heir in Bowser Jr., and history repeats itself. From the perspective of Rosalina still out in space, literally.

But hey, that's just a theory, a LAME THEORY, thanks for watching!

Description
Alternate universe where instead of going into space with a ship to find the Luma's mother, she turned into some kind of space mermaid, like the space whale from that one Courage the Cowardly Dog episode, and now you're thinking of that episode, as well as Rosalina's origin story, so now you're crying, ain't I a stinker?

Also gonna take the opportunity to go on another long ramble because I'm probably never gonna get the opportunity to write about this again, but like, why do people get so pissed off when you subscribe to the theory that Peach and Rosalina are related? The only straight answer I've ever gotten is just that the theory originates from Matpat, or at least was popularized by him, so people just hate it on principle. And look, I'm no Matpat apologist, there's plenty of videos between his three channels that I would never dare try to defend, (Sans is Ness, red shirt Shaggy, ...that Grubhub one he did recently...*shudders*) and I find it just as obnoxious as anyone else does when his fanboys take everything he says as 100% fact and just close the conversation there when there's still more to discuss at best or his conclusion is flat-out wrong at worst. (Anyone who thinks Mario being a dick to his brother while playing tennis is evidence of sociopathy doesn't have siblings)

But I also find it just as obnoxious when he could have a perfectly valid theory with plenty to back it up, such as the theory that there's actually two Marios, a Mario Sr. and a Mario Jr., and then the opposite kind of people just fold their arms and refuse to even consider its validity no matter what case gets made. I mean, the crux of that theory is that Donkey Kong from the arcade game grew old and became Cranky Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr. grew up to be the father of Donkey Kong the third. That part's not even a theory, that's actually canon. But Yoshi's Island DS shows us that Mario and Donkey Kong the third are the same age, so how was there a Mario to fight Cranky Kong when he was young if Mario's not supposed to be born yet? Sure, time travel exists in Mario, but then that opens a whole new can of worms, why did Mario go back in time to fight a young Cranky Kong? What scenario lead to that? Good luck filling that gap in, and remember, you gotta use evidence from the material to make your case, otherwise you're not crafting a theory you're just writing a fanfiction. And that's usually the part where people say something like "Mario's not supposed to have deep lore or character development, it was always Miyamoto's intention for Mario to be as simple and unnuanced as possible," and that right there is when you officially lose the fan theory game. If you don't know why, read this (when you have the time, because this description's only gonna get longer):

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php…

Even ignoring the Death of the Author though, obviously there was something intended in Mario Galaxy, not only is the game notorious for being more story-driven than most Mario games, but there's documentation of more being intended, and that the developers had to fight Miyamoto tooth and nail just to get what they did into the game. So forgive me if I simply can't bring myself to believe that there wasn't something to the storybook illustration having Rosalina's mother look just like Peach, as if they did it by accident or something. I have drawn hundreds of female figures in just the past few years alone, and drawing Princess Peach by accident when I meant to draw somebody else has never occurred. Not once.

And that's not to say that there weren't reaches in that video, such as his explanation for why he thinks Luigi is Rosalina's father, because of the green hat her brother was drawn with, which I suppose is compelling enough, to a point, but also because her father owned a telescope, and the haunted mansion in Boo Woods Luigi won in a contest had a telescope in it so Luigi totally canonically owns a telescope, even though that mansion wasn't real, it was an illusion made by King Boo and it and all the stuff in it faded away and disappeared at the end of the game, so no, we don't actually know for sure whether or not Luigi owns a telescope, maybe he does, but he just as easily could not. If the father is either of the Mario brothers, why couldn't Mario own the telescope and the hat just be a gift from an uncle rather than a father?

The crux of the theory doesn't really depend on who the father is though, it's about the relation to Peach. And his explanation for how Rosalina and Peach not only look the same age but are both alive when Rosalina's mother is supposed to have died when she was a kid is because whatever causes her to be immortal (Mat speculates time dilation, though I wouldn't find it hard to believe if the collective power of 120 power stars could halt the aging process) has simply allowed her to outlive the universe and see it replaced by a new mostly-identical one, like that Futurama episode with the time machine that only moves forward, which is something we know to be true about Rosalina because she more or less spells it out at the end of the game, describing the life cycle of the universe as if she's seen it before. Between that explanation and the fact that the comet observatory returns to Earth (or whatever planet Mario lives on) every hundred years (implying that Rosalina's capable of being hundreds of years old, so god-knows how much older she could be) leaves little doubt that Rosalina originates from a previous boot of the universe, and between that and the illustration of her mother looking just like Peach, I've always found the case for the mother/daughter connection very compelling, the only real evidence against it would just be that Miyamoto would never allow it to be canon, and the perceived authority of the creator doesn't really exist in the theory game anyway. So I never really understood why that theory was always so controversial. In a sea of awful theories presented by Matpat, I just never felt like that was one of them, and that if it came from basically any other channel, it would probably be better-regarded

and yet for some reason, in spite of finding that theory to be one of his better ones, I never found his conclusion totally satisfying, like when I say out loud "Rosalina is Peach's daughter from another universe" something about it just doesn't sound right, like there's some part of this theory missing. That video, and the later video about the two Marios theory both came out when I was still in high school, so I've had plenty of time to mull over them both as a part of the much bigger tapestry that is my experience with a franchise I loved so much as a kid that, had I known the word, I would have gladly called myself a historian for. When I was a kid, my fandom for Mario didn't stop at the products that were available on store shelves at the time, I spent so many hours scouring any fansites I found for any information on Mario products that came out before I was born. The shampoo bottle shaped like a Yoshi? I knew it existed. Mario sodas with a different flavor associated with each character? I knew they existed. The Mario popsicle with the gumball nose that you could only get from ice cream trucks? I knew it existed. The Mario 3 McDonald's toys? I knew they existed. The Mario walltrim from 1987? I OWNED IT! It was one of the first things I ever got on Ebay, and it stayed on my bedroom wall WELL into adulthood. There's probably a collector in the audience ready to strangle me for that, but I don't regret it in the slightest.

So many hours as a kid were spent watching old VHS rips on YouTube of Mario commercials, that it should really go without saying that you couldn't pull me away from the Mario cartoons. Hell, that was actually where my fandom started! I liked the games before, but it was getting an episode of the Mario 3 cartoon (Sneaky Lying Cheating Giant Ninja Koopas) on a DVD that came in a cereal box when it finally occurred to me that the imagination and creativity of people is where they come from. Before that you could have told me that video games were just the natural fallout from nuclear radiation or some shit and I would have bought it, but no, a person had to conceive of them, Mario picking up a leaf to grow a raccoon tail that lets him fly isn't natural, a person had to think of it in just the same way that Stephen Hillenburg had to think of a talking sponge who flips burgers and lives in a pineapple before I could actually see it happen, something that blew my mind as a kid and made creativity feel like a form of magic, and video games had the same magic, so not only did I suddenly like video games a lot more that day, I liked Mario a lot more. So my formative years with the character, the years that shaped my relationship with the character, were spent equally between just about every instance of the character that existed up to that point. Which means that even as a kid I was familiar with how the story got retconned from Yoshi's Island onward, how Mario used to be the older brother and Luigi was the younger brother, and how they once had a superhero-style origin story where they were plumbers from Brooklyn, who got pulled into a warp zone on a plumbing job, brought to the Mushroom Kingdom, and had to rise to the occasion to become heroes. But starting in Yoshi's Island, the Mario brothers are now the same age, and they always lived in the Mushroom Kingdom. No more origin story, no more occasion to rise to, no more moment where they went from zero to hero, so much less relatable, and so much less inspirational. And I felt that way even as a kid, if you asked kid-me which Mario is the true Mario, despite the latter being the one that was contemporaneous to my childhood, the former was my Mario of choice. Even as a kid, the blue collar everyman was a much more interesting character to me than the true-born hero. I think that's why I roll my eyes when people say that Mario isn't supposed to have deep fleshed-out characters like that because they're supposed to just be simple fun kids games, because I was a kid, and I thought even that small amount of depth made the character way more fun. Obviously I don't think he should be a SUPER deep character, I'm not asking for Kingdom Hearts levels of lore here, just for Mario to be a LITTLE bit more than just the guy who says "let's-a go" and "mama-mia."

Going back to the Peach and Rosalina theory, and it's connection to my full experience with the series, I think the reason I was never fully satisfied with Matpat's conclusion is because it actually goes really well together with the two Marios theory and explains the Yoshi's Island retcon. It's just one fragment of a larger theory, and I've just never seen anyone come to this conclusion before. Oh yeah, I'm actually doing this.

There isn't just a Mario Sr. and a Mario Jr., there's two SETS of Mario brothers. That's why there's two different age gaps and two different origin stories. It's not a retcon. After the events of Donkey Kong, Mario and his younger brother Luigi are brought to the Mushroom Kingdom, they defeat Bowser, they rescue Princess Peach. They have several adventures just like this one before age catches up with them and they settle down. Mario (or Luigi, it doesn't really matter which but I'm gonna go with Mario for the sake of the conversation) settles down and starts a family, becoming the father of two twin sons, one named after his father, and one named after his uncle. Mario Jr. and his twin brother Luigi the second. At around this time, Princess Peach has also settled down and had two children of her own, a son we don't know the name of and a daughter named Rosalina. Sometime after Rosalina meets the Luma and goes into space to find its mother, Princess Peach passes away sometime after giving birth to her second daughter, Princess Peach Jr. (and yes, girls named after their mothers can also get the Jr. suffix) As for who Mario and Peach settled down with to have their kids, I'm not sure. Whoever Mario got with, it probably wasn't Peach as it would make the current Mario and Peach siblings (though that would give some hilarious new context to why Peach turns him down when he proposes in Odyssey, she's just like "fuckin' what? No, weirdo.") some would probably speculate Pauline, as Matpat did in his two Marios video, but in Odyssey Pauline refers to Mario as an old friend rather than her son, some people have even used that as evidence against the two Marios theory, but all it really proves is just that the mother isn't Pauline either. As for who Peach got with, maybe Prince Haru from the animated movie? Who Mario and Peach ended up with doesn't really matter too much anyway, the crux of this theory is the Mario brothers, Peach, and Rosalina. As the offspring left on Earth (or whatever planet this is) grew up, the new Mario brothers and the new princess fall into the same roles as their parents before them, Bowser has his own heir in Bowser Jr., and history repeats itself. From the perspective of Rosalina still out in space, literally.

But hey, that's just a theory, a LAME THEORY, thanks for watching!