Release the Kraken! - Addendum: The Princess Is an Avatar.
Deconstruction, whore of Babylon and mother of critical abominations, involves at her most basic level unearthing alternate narratives from beneath the overwhelming weight of the dominant sequences which comprise the known, accepted canon.
Have fun with that sentence? I thought so. Bear with me.
Last week on Justify Your Childhood, brought to you by the letters A Button, B Button, and the number 8, we learned about Mario, pixilated alpha-male extraordinaire, and followed his very traditional hero quest as it paralleled that of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha. Good times.
This week we flip the coin and examine the dark, empty room which lies at the end of Mario's quest, and its single, solitary, enigmatic inhabitant: Princess Toadstool, later to be re-christened by Nintendo as Princess Peach, a figure who is intriguing, to say the least, as a kind of shorthand for basic gender relations.
It hardly needs to be mentioned that this dark, empty space which is both the goal of Mario's quest and the source of all subsequent quests is a huge, throbbing Freudian womb-symbol. In addition, it clearly codes the Princess as Other to Mario's Self, almost patronizingly stereotypical in her dominion over the Dark Screen, her association with the atavistic and animalistic Dragon, and her implied, but not explicitly offered, sexual availability to the triumphant hero. Samsara is bounded on all sides by the Dark Screen, the Dragon-Guarded Womb, and incarnation depends upon it: lightless, infinite (from the perspective of its inhabitant) and utterly within the power of the feminine. It is often characterized as the Void: an ultimately passive place, simply existing, waiting for the hero's penetration or expulsion, surrounding and influencing but not functioning in any truly meaningful way.
In other words, the womb is an NPC.
Of course this is a ridiculous metaphor, and only has any meaning at all from the point of view of the hero. But the womb is a constantly busy place, full of complicated hydraulics and systems, and ultimately contained within a very alive and complex entity. It does not, in fact, exist only to either service or create the hero. But the hero sees nothing but his own progress, and with his limited knowledge of the world through which he travels, he simply assumes that while he acts, his opposite number, the Princess, Monarch of the Void, is silently and motionlessly positioned at the linear conclusion of his side-scrolling pilgrimage.
The evolving names of the Princess are an interesting liner-note to this assumption of her as simple a set and mute goal for Mario. Both Toadstool and Peach are food names, things which are consumed in order for the body (the Self) to create energy and then expel as waste. The progression from mushroom (a food which in and of itself originates in waste and decay, only to become waste and decay again when it is eaten) to summer fruit which originates high in the air, on the branches of a tree (the Tree of Life?) coincides with the slow evolution of the Princess from this first game into Super Mario Bros. 2 where she is an avatar, and subsequent incarnations as both playable and non-playable characters, all unified by a constant and immutable weakness. The Princess, as all players know, is a universally weak character to play, almost always slower, less physically formidable, (in Mario Kart 64, her almost non-existent weight makes her a particularly poor player in the Battle section of the game) and even, in Mario 2, lacking in requisite upper body strength which the male characters, even the comically diminutive Toad (himself arguably descended from the False Princesses of the original game) possesses. She will usually have a compensatory skill, such as her short-span flight capability in Mario 2, however, these skills usually have something to do with her status as light, small, feminine, and less physically present than the male avatars.
But in her first foray into Mario's narrative, she is not playable at all. However, to assume that because we as players do not control her she is not herself an avatar is to affirm a crucial element in the gender relations of the hero cycle: women, in Kant's terms, are seen inevitably as means to an end (enlightenment, the grail, sex, what have you) rather than ends in themselves. But I am here to tell you, out of the Dark Screen and the Dragon's Lair: brother, it just ain't so.
The Princess is an Avatar.
One of the most basic misogynistic conceits is that women are not On the Path, they are the Path. They are closer to nature, more primitive, more aligned with Mystical Powers, and therefore do not need the sturm und drang of the hero's progress, the pilgrim's striving for enlightenment: nature gives them all the enlightenment they need. They do not need rites of passage, because they menstruate. They do not need art, for they create children. They are Other, existing only to unify with the hero so that he can achieve whatever nirvana he requires, and then to wither away to nothing once they have fulfilled their purpose.
If Mario is our (the user's) Avatar, it is perhaps forgivable that we have seen her from the plumber's perspective, that our gaze has turned her to 8-bit stone, immobile in her black chamber, there only for us, our reward. But deconstruction, like Warp Zones, frees us from the linear progression of traditional narrative, and allows us to imagine a possible gameworld in which the Princess is not perpetually and inexplicably prone to capture by the same old shabby Dragon, but a figure who intercepts Mario at only one point in her own progression, her own game, her own pilgrim's progress. Who knows what circumstances led her to be in that room when we, clothed in our workingman's overalls, encounter her? Like Schrödinger's cat, we cannot know if she has always been there, whether she remains after we have gone. To assume that she has been, and will be, is the height of hubris.
It is equally possible that Schrödinger's Princess has been scrolling through her own Eightfold Worlds, and arrived in the Dark Screen only just in time to appear in the hero's vision as the pixilated Grail Maiden. That we do not play her does not mean that she is not an Avatar; that we do not know her mind does not infer its absence.
Perhaps Bowser is her pet, her guardian, her defense against the inane penetrations of an obnoxious Italian pillager of castles. It is, after all, always and forever a matter of perspective.
The hero forever seeks unification with the Other, with the World-Soul, but he proves his unworthiness by his assumption of the passivity of his goal: he rarely stops swilling pasta long enough to consider that the World-Soul might not want to unify with him, that it may be seeking its own Other, its own unification. It may be perfectly happy hanging out with dragons and chatting up hammer-wielding turtles.
You are not necessarily your Other's Other.
The moral of the story is this: as you travel from Sewer World to Water World to Dark World, realize that you are not the only entity in the Mushroom Kingdom, that there are no true NPCs, and that every Princess is also a hero, a seeker, and an avatar.
And she's not impressed by your fireballs.