Let’s see: Mario is a sociopath, Peach is a bipolar dictator commanding an army of brainwashed
fungi, and Bowser is a struggling single parent.
Is there anyone left?
Well hello…
[Intro]
Hello Internet!
Welcome to Game Theory, where today, you’re going to learn how you’ve been brainwashed
without even knowing it! But more on that later.
At this point, you’d think we would be able to just leave the Mario franchise alone.
I mean, is no corner of the Mushroom Kingdom sacred?!
No, no it’s not.
And let’s face it, if my Mario theories have shown us anything, it’s that Luigi
is probably the best of the bunch.
Although most of the 160+ games he’s appeared in have kept him in the background,
yeah 160...I was surprised too.
When he’s not there to just fill out the doubles for Mario’s tennis games or ride
in the back of Mario’s Kart, we get the sense that he’s an awesome guy.
Sure, he may be a coward, but even in the face of fear, he still gets the job done.
He clearly loves, admires, and respects his brother,
as we see countless times throughout the series.
Specifically on Star Hill in Super Mario RPG and from his journal in Paper Mario.
I mean, the guy's willing to suffer through haunted mansions and horrendous spinoff titles
whenever Mario goes missing.
And he’s even been known to cry tears of joy when he successfully saves his brother.
He’s just cool.
More psychologically deep than pretty much any other character in the franchise; with
fears, hopes, dreams, wishes.
And let’s face it, he wears green; Game Theory’s color is also green, match made in Heaven.
I kinda like the guy. You know what? It’s long past time that we give Luigi some well-deserved love.
AND YET, once again, as we've seen time and time again in this franchise, looks may be deceiving.
Because in researching the lovable underdog Luigi, one
particular appearance of his stood out from the rest.
If we’re talking about really diving deep to find out what makes Luigi tick, we need
to look no further than a game where we get to see all the sides of him…
all TWO sides, that is.
Because the most insightful title for talking about Luigi is Super Paper Mario.
Admittedly, while the characters may seem “flat” at first, let me tell you there
are a lot of "dimensions" to explore here.
Get it? They're all paper jokes.
I'm sure you got it, and you're just cringing and hoping that the script moves on.
Hey, PewDiePie, put this in your next cringe compilation, huh?
In case you haven’t stumbled into this particular corner of Mario games, I can’t really blame you.
This game is perhaps the most unusual in the official Mario lineup.
Outside of the gameplay being completely unique, and completely bonkers.
Requiring you to hop into and out of 2D and 3D environments,
the tone of this game is just so much darker, so much more sarcastic and incredibly cynical.
Whole worlds get ripped to shreds, leaving only nothingness in their place.
Mario and the gang quite literally travel to hell, known here as the Underwhere.
And breaking all rules, Bowser and Peach pretty much get married!
You know all the creepy music I used in my early FNAF theories?
A bunch came from this game.
Yeah, we’ve come a long way from your parent’s Mario Athletic theme.
Regardless, even if you didn’t play Super Paper Mario, here’s what you need to know:
the big baddies for this game aren’t Bowser and Peach, it’s Count Bleck.
Not “Ech,” Jontron.
BLECK.
And his, like, totally angsty counterculture business associate Nastasia.
At an early point in our story, Luigi finds himself to be the first responder on the scene
at Count Bleck’s castle, where he gets duped by two goombas, who lead him straight to Nastasia.
What happens next is why this game will end up being important for Luigi: Nastasia uses
her hypnotic laser eyes to instantly hypnotize him, turning him into the evil Mr L.
"Mr. F"
Nope, Mr. L, an arrogant villain with an attraction to Peach
and a jealousy of Mario’s jumping abilities.
He fights viciously against Mario and the gang in multiple forms across the entirety of the game,
up to and including the final boss.
He's violent, he's aggressive, and he is out for blood.
And if you're upset that I didn't put SPOILER tags before revealing that THIS GUY is Luigi,
well then...I just...I just have no words for you.
NO WORDS, I SAY!
To understand why this is important for Luigi, we have to talk about hypnosis.
In all the official game wikis, Nastasia is referred to as having “instantaneous hypnotic
powers,” and Luigi is referred to as being hypnotized.
In game, though, Nastasia refers to her power as both hypnosis and as “brainwashing.”
So which is it?
We need to start off by figuring out the differences between the two.
In most definitions, brainwashing and hypnosis are different,
but they’re not necessarily completely unrelated.
It's probably best to think of brainwashing as a spectrum: you can brainwash people in
a whole bunch of ways with some being way more extreme than others.
When you think “brainwashing” I’m sure you think about things like the Winter Soldier
in Captain America, or worse, cult leaders who brainwash their followers into doing crazy
things, like fearing babies toting nuclear warheads.
Actually, yeah, I’m NOT brainwashed and that thing scares me, so uh...good job cult?
Anyway, there are actually three major types of brainwashing that exist: educational, persuasive,
and suggestive, with hypnosis being one of the stops on that spectrum.
The most extreme type of brainwashing is known as the “education method,” and is the
kind of stuff you see in the movies and most associate with the concept of brainwashing.
This is your Winter Solider or CoD: Black Ops styles of mind control, where torture and
isolation are working to alter the way the mind feels and thinks.
As a result, it’s the only type of brainwashing that literally reprograms the concepts of
right and wrong in the human brain.
It takes weeks, oftentimes months for someone to be affected by the educational method,
which is why cults indoctrinate people over the course of years until they’re finally
ready to ask them to drink the Kool-Aid...literally.
One of the most famous cases of this kind of brainwashing is the Patty Hearst case.
In case you don’t know this one, 19-year-old Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese
Liberation Army in 1974.
After she was kidnapped, she was left in a closet for weeks on end with nothing but Liberation
Army pamphlets.
Every time they let her out of the closet, they talked to her about politics, threatening
to kill her until one day she announced that she wanted to join their cause.
After that, she became one of the most vocal representatives of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
She even changed her name to Tania before robbing a bank, kidnapping two people, and
even building bombs to help murder police officers.
And this wasn’t an act to make nice with her captors.
She never attempted to escape and even went to prison for her actions as a member of the army.
So you can see the educational method is pretty scary…but it’s also pretty hard to pull off.
For example, during the Korean war, North Korea tried to re-educate tens of thousands
of South Korean and American prisoners of war in special camps designed to brainwash
prisoners into being sympathetic to the North Korean cause.
At the end of the war, though, only a few hundred POWs, including 21 Americans, were
reported to have voluntarily remained loyal to North Korea.
Long story short, this kind of brainwashing is NOT what we’re seeing in Super Paper Mario.
This takes years and usually involves extreme physical and mental torture.
What we see happen in the game is practically instantaneous – Nastasia barely has to blink her laser
eyes to change Luigi into Mr L.; it’s not possible that this is the educational method.
So we move down the spectrum to persuasive brainwashing.
And this is the form that all of us, myself included, have gone through.
Did you ever get a compliment on something you wore, so you started wearing it more?
Or stop doing something because your parents yelled at you?
Well then, congratulations on a successful brainwashing!
Another name for persuasive brainwashing is simply classical (Operant) conditioning—something
a lot of us are familiar with—where our behavior changes because we get a reward or
punishment for doing something.
Our beliefs aren’t different, but our expectation for reward IS.
Think about it this way, when you bribe someone to go against their morals, since that’s
a scenario I’m sure happens to you all the time, that person probably know what they’re
doing isn’t right, but they also know they’re going to get paid for it, so they’re
acting based on where they’re going to be rewarded.
You’re not changing their moral code, you’re just changing their expectation for reward
every time they break that moral code.
So is that what’s happening with Luigi?
Again, no.
The dialogue at the beginning of the game is clear, Nastasia and Count Bleck haven’t
offered Luigi anything to cross over to the dark side and become Mr. L.
There’s also no major threat, either.
Once Luigi becomes Mr. L, he starts actively making evil decisions on his own, without Nastasia interfering.
So that’s not it either, meaning we have to move to the third and final form of brainwashing:
suggestive brainwashing, A.k.a Hypnosis.
As I mentioned, Nastasia herself says that her power is hypnosis, but what does that
actually mean?
Personally, I always thought that hypnosis was just a magic trick.
There are plenty of people out there, though, who practice hypnosis as a profession and
they’ll tell you a much different story.
According to statistics from the Society of Clinical Hypnosis, hypnosis is a state of
selective, focused attention and about 85% of people can achieve some kind of hypnotic
state. But still, this is still just a bunch of malarchy, right?
Well...no.
Last month I went to a YouTube event in New York where JackSepticEye and I happened to
win a taco challenge judged by world-renowned chef Rachel Ray...sorry, I had no other opportunity
to really brag about that, so I figured I'd shove it in here.
But more to the point, we got to see a real hypnosis demonstration done on YouTubers who
I know and I'm personal friends with.
And let me tell you, these guys weren’t acting.
And, of course, because it happened to YouTubers, duh, it’s all over YouTube.
Cue the clip!
At first it starts out fine, the hypnotist just asks them to relax. That’s nice.
Then they start falling over.
Then they start licking ice cream…aggressively.
And then there come the cows.
That, of course, have to be milked…enthusiastically.
Joey’s name got switched to EIEIO and FouseyTube became a fairy.
It was…a weird day.
Afterward, you can see in Joey Graceffa’s vlog that he felt awake and aware during the
whole experience.
"Like, in the moment, like my mind was like, 'Oh, you can do this', like this is what you're supposed to do."
Looking at my own personal experience watching that show, it seems pretty clear that the
hypnosis happened pretty fast, as quickly as you saw in the video.
It’s just a matter of finding people whose minds are open to accept the power of suggestion.
And look at Luigi -- he’s a textbook candidate: he’s used to taking direction from everyone!
He’s been controlled by people all his life, he’s already used to taking action based
on what’s suggested to him.This is also definitely the closest thing we see to Nastasia’s
powers in Super Paper Mario.
She’s described as having “instantaneous hypnotic powers,” which is a little faster
than happened at the YouTube event, but frankly not by all that much.
The hypnotist wasn’t shooting hypno-lasers out of his eyeballs or anything.
We also see characters in the game going in and out of this hypnotic trance: Luigi flips
back and forth between himself and Mr L as fast as you see YouTubers falling asleep and
waking back up in the video.
Ok, great!
So Luigi is hypnotized!
That explains what happens to him and why he becomes the evil Mr. L, right?
Actually…no.
It turns out that Luigi’s behavior can’t be explained away by hypnosis.
Listen to this clip from the beginning of my YouTuber hypno-sesh:
Stare straight ahead for just a moment.
I'll count to three, but not to four, when I do reach three, all you have to do is just
close your eyes, that's all I'm gonna ask you to do.
One, two, and three. Close your eyes.
Good! Open them back up.
There ya go, there's no motion, potion, magic pixie dust, Harry Potter's not going to run
on stage with a magic wand.
There is no "feeling"of hypnosis.
All hypnosis feels like is what you imagine it to be.
Hypnosis is what you imagine it to be.
This is really important because once in a trance, you’re essentially only as hypnotized
as you let yourself become.
In my research, one of the most common questions that hypnotherapists get is, “Will I be
forced to do things that I don’t want to do?”
And the answer they all give is NO.
That even if the hypnotherapist wanted to make the patient do something that they wouldn't
otherwise do, they wouldn't be able to, quote: “If you hypnotize someone, they'll not do
anything against their morals.”
And here's another quote: ”No, there is no loss of control.
Hypnosis allows clients to be more focused and actually achieve more, not less control.”
Remember, you’re not changing what they believe in, you’re not bribing them and
you’re not forcing them. You’re just making suggestions that,
based on the patient’s existing morals, sound like a really good idea.
Yeah, Joey, you milk that cow!
You milk it good and hard!
So what's that mean for Mr. L and Luigi?
Well, considering Luigi has been hypnotized and that those under hypnosis won’t break
their moral codes, that only leaves one possibility: Luigi ISN’T acting against his own will
in Super Paper Mario when he becomes Mr. L!
When Nastasia hypnotizes him, his morals aren’t changing.
Under that sweet, doofy Luigi exterior we all know and love, has existed Mr. L all along.
He didn’t need to be re-educated, he didn’t even need to be threatened!
He just needed to find himself in a hypnotic trance where he lost all his inhibitions and
fears and for once in his life, wasn’t afraid to show how he really felt.
And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Sarcasm for Bowser?
Feelings for Peach? Open antagonism for Mario?
When he falls into a trance, the real Luigi comes out, unearthing what seems to be some
pretty intense feelings for the gang.
They might not think he’s in control, that this is all some alternate persona, but he most definitely is.
That man, Mr. L, is the true form of Luigi, his thoughts, and his ambitions.
So there you have it, the most real Luigi has ever been with us was under hypnosis in
Super Paper Mario.
So the next time you’re playing a game with Luigi, just remember there’s a lot more
underneath that cute little green ensemble than you think.
Hah, and you thought that the Luigi death stare was just a meme...think again.
But hey, that’s just a theory!
A Game theory!
Thanks for watching.