MARIO THINKS LIKE A CAT
AN UNDERRATED BUT GREAT GAME RETURNS, USING FELINE INTUITION TO BATTLE BOWSER
AS O N E of the world’s most invasive species, it was only a matter of time before cats found their way to the inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom.
And when they arrived in 2013’s “Super Mario 3D World,” cats, just as they did when they came as stowaways on boats to new worlds, immediately asserted their dominance among the members of the local population. It’s fitting, of course, that this vicious animal — cats, recent studies have estimated, are responsible for more than 1 billion bird deaths a year in America — would not simply be subservient to Mario, Luigi, Peach and other stars of the “Super Mario Bros.” games.
No, cats would bend the game to their will, resulting in one of the greatest but least played “Super Mario” games ever made. To date, Nintendo reports “Super Mario 3D World” has sold 5.86 million copies, a hearty amount for a normal video game, but disappointing for a key Nintendo brand, especially one starring Mario and Luigi. For comparison, the Nintendo Switch showcase “Super Mario Odyssey” has tallied more than 20 million in sales.
Cat details abound in this allaround cutesy addition to the “Super Mario Bros.” franchise. Mario villains are re-imagined with upright, triangular ears, and levels are meant to be climbed and pounced upon. This results in a design that’s as vertical as it is horizontal and is also peppered with plenty of cat-friendly nooks. While it’s delightful to see Mario and Peach don a cat suit — yes, they make cat noises — the game has always worked as well as it has because its levels are designed as if they were elaborate cat trees.
Climb up, go right, now down — ooh, look, a hiding spot! Mario games over the years have increasingly become about exploration as much as running and jumping, and “3D World” celebrates the player’s tendency to ask questions: Can I run up here? Can I swat this? Can I go behind that? The answer here is almost always yes.
When “Super Mario 3D World” was released, it had quite a bit going against it. For one, it arrived on Nintendo’s poorly received and poorselling Wi U console. Second, it came out around the same time as Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One, so regardless of how a-meowz-ing (sorry) this “Super Mario” installment was, it was destined to be overlooked and underplayed.
Thankfully, the flourishing reissue market, which Nintendo has strategically exploited with “Mario,” “Zelda” and “Pikmin” rereleases, has restored one of “Super Mario 3D World’s” nine lives (the cat puns are almost out of my system, I promise).
And now, in 2021, it comes exclusively to the Switch with even more to ponder, complete with a new, freeroaming kibble-size game in “Bowser’s Fury,” in which a giant, Godzilla-like Bowser rains lava on Mario and his unlikely partner, Bowser Jr. The latter is distraught at the existential anger suddenly coursing through his father and turns to Mario for help. If you take a moment and think about it, that all starts to get a bit dark.
Little Bowser Jr. is clearly upset that pops has gone full-on abusive. Anger, in 2021, is easy to come by, and battling a paralyzing emotion feels more of-the-moment than probably anything in any prior Mario game to date. Mario immediately takes sympathy, and it all serves as a reminder that as Nintendo games have gotten longer, better looking and smarter, we’ve also started to get a peek into the philosophy of the “Super Mario Bros.” games.
“Super Mario 3D World” has long been my second favorite in the 35-yearold series, for reasons I’ll continue to unpack, behind only the Switch’s 2017 masterpiece “Super Mario Odyssey.” Through the help of a magic hat, “Odyssey” allowed Mario to become other characters and objects, and at long last he started to see himself as something more than an overachieving plumber locked in endless battles with Bowser.
Bowser, of course, has never really been a so-called “good” nemesis — his creepy fascination with Princess Peach furthered sexist, damsel-indistress stereotypes. In recent years, however, he’s been more of a troll. In “Super Mario 3D World,” Bowser sets things off by kidnapping a bunch of colorful fairy-like princess creatures called Sprixies seemingly just because. (I can practically hear him holler, “If you think kidnapping one princess is offensive, wait till I kidnap a whole group of them!”) To get academic for a moment, I’ve long considered “Super Mario 3D World” to be inspired by and a reply to the internet, specifically how it’s affecting our responses to the world around us. See, for instance, its use of online culture’s meme-beloved cats, or its overabundance of tubes, which send Mario and pals zipping from deserts to grassy plains to haunted houses to icy cliffs faster than a Google search. While Mario has long been able to transform into other animals via powerful suits, the raccoon-like tanooki suit never felt born of a trend in the same way.
Then there’s Bowser, back with his castle and his obnoxious vintage car, a grotesque thing that’s all purple and spikes and looks like an ice cream cone with exhaust pipes and candy corn. No one would drive this, but it would look neat in an Instagram photo. Bowser is basically just an online bully, harassing Mario and Co. simply for living differently. It’s easy to imagine he spends his non-kidnapping time reading Reddit, at least that’s my explanation for his irrational rages at everything in “Bowser’s Fury.”
In fact, “Bowser’s Fury” is a Mario game that seems perfectly suited to our anything-goes, short-attentionspan world of social media chaos, where Mario and Bowser Jr. can be running up towers and sliding down grassy slopes with a bunch of pink, blue and green cats, only to be interrupted out of nowhere by Bowser’s silly tantrums. Bowser will eventually disappear — he’ll come back at random intervals — but ignore him all we might and he will aim fireball after fireball at us until we’re forced to respond.
The bulk of the game is essentially Mario and Bowser Jr. trying to clean up Lake Lapcat (yes, that’s what the world is called), when suddenly Bowser arrives to get all up in their mentions with fireballs to ruin everyone’s day. But collect a few powerups and, faster than Mario can tweet “send me cute pet pics,” he’ll turn into a giant cat.
This, while not only turning Mario into full-on internet cat maximalism, will allow him, with a few well-timed jumps, to begin to fight back against the oversize Bowser, all the while freeing up more of this cat paradise from Bowser’s grip (aside: Nintendo’s attention to detail in Lake Lapcat is lovely, as there are cat hieroglyphics dotted throughout to hint at a onceancient feline civilization).
Compared to the core game of “Super Mario 3D World,” which, though on rails, manages to feel relatively free-form in its depiction of cozy running, pawing and pouncing, “Bowser’s Fury” is wide-open noise and action, an experiment in which we move at will among locales rather than enter in and out of levels. Combined, however, they show us that there’s one thing a bully and a troll can’t stand: adorability.
Cuteness wins, yes, but with “Bower’s Fury” taking the franchise into more emotional realms, let’s hope that some vulnerability, if not full-on therapy, is next for the ever-expanding world of “Super Mario Bros.”
WHENshewas 15, Tracy Clark-Flory discovered her father’s pornography collection. She was using his computer and came across a website called Perfect10.com. She saw no part of her awkward teenage self reflected in the women onscreen, a collection of blonds with inflated breasts, heavyhanded blush and Barbie doll proportions.
She was horrified — not by the graphic acts depicted on the monitor but by the idea that this was what her father found attractive. Her dad: a Berkeley hippie who’d always preached, “High heels are crippling. Makeup is unnecessary. Plastic surgery is unfortunate. Shaving your legs is silly. A woman’s most attractive feature is her brain.”
After she finished crying, she printed some of the pictures, went to her bedroom and masturbated as she imagined herself as one of the porn stars — the type of woman who could incite such desire.
It was the start of Clark-Flory’s inquiry into sexuality, a journey that would lead to jobs as a sex writer for Salon and Jezebel. Over the past 15 years, she has followed animal role players dressed in BDSM gear through the woods, answered questions about penises you were “too afraid to ask” and had a woman ejaculate on her shoe at a sexual healing workshop. But this week the 37-year-old turns the lens fully on herself in a debut memoir, “Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey Into the Heart of Desire.”
The book is a candid, often unflinching portrayal of a young woman coming to terms with the connection between her desirability and her self-worth. In the process, she reckons with her identity as a sexually liberated feminist who also faked orgasms with every man she was with until meeting her husband in 2007.
“I could pretty successfully cater to men’s desires and get that affirmation, but in the end, that affirmation never really felt like power,” Clark-Flory said via video call from the home she shares with her spouse and 3-year-old son, a 10-minute drive from where she grew up in the Bay Area. “I really believed that a woman’s pleasure and desire was important, but it also felt like the satisfaction that I could get from sex was from being desired. I had a hard time even identifying what it was that I wanted.”
Clark-Flory’s journalism — call it post-third-wave feminism — has pushed back against writers like Ariel Levy who posited that women were presenting themselves as sex objects in order to advance in a male-dominated culture. It’s not that Clark-Flory disagreed with the assessment but, as an elder millennial who came of age as Oprah Winfrey was extolling the virtues of pole dancing, she was more empathetic to the struggle.
“She grew up in a time when there was a bacchanal in your eyeballs all the time, so of course that becomes a part of who you want to be,” said Sarah Hepola, who was Clark-Flory’s editor at Salon and wrote the sobriety memoir “Blackout.” “Women carry around this shame, like they should be above that. But Tracy owns that contradiction. She says: ‘I know I want to be wanted.’ But that doesn’t take away from the fact that she has this intellectual life. She lets those things spark up against one another.”
If there’s a stereotypical idea of a sex writer — a flamboyant Carrie Bradshaw type who kisses and tells and relishes the attention — ClarkFlory does not fit it. At Salon, she would often show up in “cardigans buttoned all the way to the top,” said Hepola, describing her as a reserved listener who “had something in her fighting to get out.”
Despite her lack of a “performative nature,” the editor said, ClarkFlory was never embarrassed when it came to sex. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted her out talking to people,” said Hepola. “People have so much shame about their desires, and I knew when they spoke to Tracy it would release them from that.”
As “Want Me” reveals, ClarkFlory was privately using her 20s as a period to test her inhibitions. In search of some elusive state of female empowerment, she said she set out to “have sex like a man would have sex.” She wanted to be so sexually free — so “game for anything” — that nothing could be done against her will. It was, she said, a sort of self-perpetuating myth she created to reassure herself that she was in control.
“That warrior-like attitude necessarily comes with a lot of armor,” she said. “That armor comes with a lack of feeling and a sense of selfprotection. And that’s not a critique of my younger self. I think that was a reasonable, adaptive response to the reality of the dating-and-sex landscape as I encountered it in my 20s. I think those were the compromises I made to be able to have sex freely in the world in which we live.”
After her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Clark-Flory asked one man to choke her so aggressively he left bruises. She even slept with her favorite male porn star, re-creating an act she’d seen him perform with women — “the ultimate representation of men’s desire” — that made her vomit. She writes that when she first met her husband, he was shocked to learn she was “just a sweet sweetie” because of the mystique she’d cultivated as “daring, irreverent sex writer.”
The sex she had prior to her marriage was all consensual. But did she enjoy it, or did she just want to enjoy it? Recalling a fleeting affair with a man she met at a New York City photo shoot during this time, she writes: “Sometimes over the years, I would think: Man, wish I could do that again. But, looking back, I’ll never shake the feeling that
I was barely even there to experience it for the first time, like it was a ghost of a girl who did it all for me.”
Peggy Orenstein, the New York Times-bestselling author who explores modern sexuality in her own writing, began to pick up on these themes in Clark-Flory’s work. After reading a 2012 essay in which ClarkFlory confessed to faking her orgasms, Orenstein reached out to the young writer on Twitter. She found the piece brave, and told Clark-Flory it “echoed what I heard so often among girls — the divide between this performance of sexiness and actual embodied, pleasurable sexuality.”
“It had accelerated and been codified in a new internet era when so much is visual ... and it’s even more confusing when, simultaneously, you are supposed to have — or do have — a sense of power, voice and claim in the public realm,” said Orenstein. “On top of that, the whole idea that as a woman, what proved your desirability and your sexuality was being able to ‘take it’ — whatever ‘it’ was — male indifference, aggressive [oral sex], being slapped . ... I think Tracy is articulating how something that women have always wrestled with is being filtered through the experience of a new generation.”
One discovery Clark-Flory came to while writing “Want Me” was that she was grieving the idea that the sexual revolution had been fought and won. She’d always wanted to believe in the “girl power message” she received as a girl — that if she played her cards right, everything she wanted would come to her.
“But that isn’t true,” she said. “We’re in this space of neoliberal, individualistic, commercial feminism that really emphasizes women seeing themselves, and I think that takes us away from the collective solution. And I want to acknowledge that unfairness. To have us cut ourselves some slack and realize: It’s not you.”
While Clark-Flory feels lucky to have found a loving partner — she’s been married since 2013 — there’s also a part of her that distrusts, even resents, that sense of relief. In other words: Why is the romantic landscape for women now so dire that ending up in a reciprocal, loving relationship feels like dodging a bullet?
Clark-Flory makes no secret in her book about how much of her self-image was shaped through men: “I was never alone. There was always a fantasy of some boy watching and warning me, making me better. Making me whole.”
In that sense, “Want Me” is her rallying cry for the generations of women coming up behind her.
“I wanted to write the book that I wish I had when I was a 21-year-old,” she said. “Because what I had was Laura Sessions Stepp talking about depleting your oxytocin stores if you have casual sex and Lori Gottlieb being, like, ‘Settle for Mr. Good Enough.’ I didn’t feel like I had any allies — anyone doing anything other than trying to scare me. I hope young women can take away from this that we are being told a lie about these notions of empowerment. The reality of what’s available to us, given the current state of the world, is very limited. And I hope anyone navigating this stuff can hold that broader backdrop, because I didn’t have that sense at all.”