As someone who watches YouTube on a daily basis, I see a lot of things of various genres. I watch videos about gaming, some things about professional wrestling, and even sports. Some channels are popular and others are not.
But one channel, one channel that this blog post is about is The Game Theorist. A channel made by a guy named Matthew Patrick and it mostly has videos of a show he does called “Game Theory.” What he does is he basically runs gaming knowledge through science to come up with various results. It can be educational if you don’t know much about science and some of the episodes are interesting. Some episodes are pretty interesting, like the one if Sonic the Hedgehog really is the fastest thing alive and the one about Watchdogs, which talks about how far hacking can go in today’s society. But sometimes, he makes some really questionable episodes. These are not much to get me angry enough to point out some things, but his most recent episode is one that has me up in arms.
THE EPISODE
The most recent episode in question is something about Rosalina from the Mario series. And with his last episode about the Mario series (in which he said that Mario was a sociopath), an episode which he still beats us over the head with (very questionably), I was not really expecting anything good. But when I saw it, I saw a lot of problems. A lot of problems.
As Patrick’s defenders bring up,
”He does it for fun,” or
“He’s not serious.” However, it is very questionable when you see his Mario is a Sociopath two-parter, which he beats us over the head with, as I mentioned.
Now, before we even get to MatPat’s “facts”, let’s get into the source material. Pretty much in the beginning of his theory, MatPat brought up that if you look at the cut scenes in Rosalina’s storybook in
Super Mario Galaxy, you notice that the story is really about her. (Oh, like we couldn’t see that.) He cites one chapter in the book that talks about the little girl’s mother, who happened to leave the girl in space. What MatPat points out is that the mother bears a slight resemblance to Princess Peach. (Even he points out this is superficial at best.) He notes that the ear features, hair features, everything looks similar. We’re gonna go on a big one for this.
Since MatPat’s going by the storybook, he’s using what a lot of people still use as the true canon in Rosalina’s story. Baby Rosalina was initially fanmade. Let’s just act like she doesn’t exist.
Along with the fact that he repeatedly mispronounced Rosalina’s name — except for one in the whole damn video, but so much that I would love to slap him through the screen I’m watching on — there are so many things that the so-called “Mario fan” got wrong in his crusade to say that Princess Peach is Rosalina’s mother!
The Location Matches in NO Way
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Also in the beginning of the video, MatPat talks about the Rosalina’s old home. He points out what she saw when looking through her father’s old telescope. The silhouette of the castle is similar to Princess Peach’s home, and there is one tree in front of it. Peach’s castle does not resemble Rosalina’s besides the three spires.
Later in the video, he talks more about the hill by Rosalina’s home, with the tree and flowers. There is also a collection of flowers of the same colors (yellow, blue, and purple) on a hill near Peach’s castle, and a tree near the hill as seen in a pan shot at the end. However, the tree by Rosalina’s home is a pine while the one by Peach’s castle is just a generic tree. Also, there is a whole town area and a road between Peach’s hill and her castle.
DNA
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MatPat does not mention Rosalina’s height, although this can support his point. Mario is short, but Peach is much taller than he is, and her height compared to her the toads opens up some questions. Peach is even taller than other toadstools, and she does not have a mushroom on her head. Something needs to be said for her genetics, so it is possible taller ancestors are there.
Also, there is a common equation that people use to get a projected height of a person. Take the mother’s height and add it to the father’s height. Take five inches that go either way. Then divide all that by two to get the projected height. Here is an equation to make it clear:
Mother’s Height + Father’s Height +/- 5 in. (Add 5 for males, subtract 5 for females) ÷ 2 = Projected Height
Now, this would suggest that Rosalina would have a height in between Mario and Peach, but Rosalina is taller than the both of them. Considering that Rosalina was never exposed to anything that would stunt her growth, she’s likely to be as close to the projected height as possible. How’s this? There are some various outliers and differences in growth that can occur. She might have a little more goint on because, you know, space and all.
And now we go onto the things that MatPat brought up.
The very first thing MatPat actually points out is the hair. Oh wow, the hair is so similar, Yuk-yuk! Well, if you’ve actually looked at the characters in the book, you’d notice that the little girl’s hair is a bright pinkish-red, which would point to Rosalina not really being an actual platinum blond. Space hair dye, much?
Let’s pause here. Before you go and comment that I’m moving the goalpost, I’m just gonna explain this later on, so sit tight.
MatPat goes on a tangent about various other things (even though he never points out that the girl’s mother is wearing an outfit that Princess Peach would never actually wearEVER!).
Secondly, MatPat talks about the earlobes and this is really the first thing he goes into detail about. He establishes that dangling earlobes are dominant and attached earlobes are recessive, so only two recessive alleles can produce this trait in an offspring. In this case, Rosalina appears to have an attached earlobe, as does Peach….and Mario. However, the earlobe allele argument may be based on a myth according to various sources. In an article written by Diane Wu (
http://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask372), she states how limited the studies on earlobes are, but points out that parents with attached earlobes can have children with unattached earlobes. There is a page written by John H. McDonald from the University of Delaware (
http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythearlobe.html) in which he pretty much confirms this, but also states that earlobes can range from the two extremes.
Third, MatPat has an argument about the eyes. He basically points to Mario being the father by saying two blue-eyed parents would only produce a blue eyed child. Although I have a limited knowledge of genetics, I know this to be true...but Rosalina’s eyes are kind of slightly greenish and brighter. They might be turquoise. Wouldn’t that mean that she has more melanin in her eyes and thus has different genetics than both Mario and Peach?
Coming back to the hair, yes, Peach has blond hair and so does Rosalina, and the latter’s is lighter than the former’s — in adulthood, for no explained reason. Even if this is Rosalina’s real hair color now, her being Peach’s child is still too loose of an argument to make and very superficial.
Character Relationships
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If the theory was true, wouldn’t Mario recognize Rosalina and vice versa? The fact is Mario does not know Rosalina before
Super Mario Galaxy. He was going on a new adventure and he pretty much encountered someone he never met before. You can clearly see in the storybook that Rosalina clearly knew her father. If Mario was Rosalina’s father, he would clearly recognize her and she would recognize him.
Peach & Rosalina are basically gal pals according to non-game works (such as
Super Mario-Kun). There are some relationships in real life where mothers and daughters are good friends, but Peach and Rosalina and not like that in any way. There are no motherly or sister aspects of their relationship at all. They are basically like valley girls in high school without all the bitch-calling.
Implications of Age
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I should get to this point, which he did not mention. There are many implications that Rosalina is older than a majority of the cast in the Mario series. While she is listed as a human, she’s not quite as human as everybody else. Various things found in the
Mario Kart series and
Smash Bros. show that. Also, she’s been living in space all this time. Time in space is not exactly the same as it is on Earth. (Rosalina had to have time to develop that space ass *Mmm-mmm*.)She could be light years older than anybody and that just nips his theory in the bud right before it starts to grow. Hell, if we go by
Super Mario Galaxy, the Comet Observatory only comes around every 100 years, with Rosalina on it!
Sports Games and Peach’s Left Hand
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This argument was the most insulting one in the entire video.
As someone who’s a Mario fan and a fan of sports games, I get ridiculed a lot, but I take pride in the fact that I am a literal expert when it comes to Mario sports games.
MatPat says that in every sports game except for
Golf, Peach is right-handed and when I heard that, that ticked me off, because I have been playing these games for years. I pretty much knew them inside and out and I know for sure that in no game does Peach default to her left hand. In the series he cites, the
Mario Golf series, nobody ever defaults left unless you choose for them to do so. Never does the computer change it, never does an in-game story change it.
So I decided,
why not check this out? I checked
Toadstool Tour. Everyone is right-handed. I checked
Advance Tour. Everyone right-handed. I checked every golf game with a left-handed option and no one defaulted left. I thought,
maybe he got the wrong series, so I checked the baseball. Peach is right-handed in both games. I checked basketball games and
Mario Sports Mix, and still right-handed. I even checked
Strikers, where really there is no left-handed option. (I checked it just so I could play it because I haven’t played it in a while. Good game. You should try it.)
I maybe thought,
hey, maybe Matpat was just looking at art and went off of that. So, I looked because sometimes Rosalina’s right-handed, sometimes, she’s left-handed in the art. I checked and there was nobody left-handed. I checked every single piece of art from every single sports game and not a single damn character was left-handed. So, if he’s gonna use the Golf games as his proof to Peach being ambidextrious, then why isn’t everyone ambidextrious in his theory? If his left-hand argument is to make sense, then why didn’t he use the one character who I know for sure is default left, Luigi? As someone who has gotten through the
Mario Baseball games and damn near completed them, I know for a fact that Luigi uses his left hand to bat and to pitch. To field, he uses the right hand. Come on, man!
Final Thought
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In closing, I watch this channel for two things, but one of the things on this channel, “Game Theory,” has gotten increasingly stupid. It all started with the “Wii U is the New Virtual Boy” episode, which is so damn unresearched that you have to question whether he jumped on the NINTENDOOMED bandwagon to get some cheap views. Honestly, I’ve been getting sick of this channel for awhile. I would have unsubscribed from this channel already if it wasn’t for the fact that Gaijin Goombah pretty much puts all his main videos on the channel now. I love learning about culture, but I hate getting told about bullshit. I’d recommend the Watch_Dogs episode for a good “Game Theory” episode, but I wouldn’t recommend watching anything beyond that. Honestly, having a “Game Theory” shouldn’t be saying some random stupid shit just to have a video made. Just take something that’s interesting, something that people would want to know the science about and do that, not this. I may have a lot of time in a day, but I ain’t got time for that.
Holy Qatar, its Ravi Drums
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— Justice Weller Colde aka King D.
