Today we're talking about a Guardian of the Galaxy,
a female one,
one that has entirely nothing to do with that movie...
It's Rosalina, we're talking about Rosalina,
from Super Mario Galaxy?
But yeah that movie was great, right?
I loved the part where Starlord
was like "I'm starlord" and he's all like
"pew, pew pew, pew pew, p-"
(intro music)
then Groot was totally like,
"I am Groot."
Oh, we're on, uh, huh.
Hello internet!
Welcome to Game Theory;
the show that, really can't
wait for Guardians Of The Galaxy 2.
Seriously, I have not had that much fun
in a movie in a long time!
Aah so good!
Sorry, sorry, I gotta stay focused.
Anyway, let's talk about Rosalina.
She's a galaxy hoppin' princess with a hair style stolen straight from Captain Planet's Dr. Blight.
And from her humble beginnings in Super Mario Galaxy,
she's starting to appear in everything!
Three main series titles,
Four Mario Karts, a party,
a round at the links, and pretty soon,
the newest Smash!
Really!?
Rosalina and like fifteen Fire Emblem characters, and Ness still hasn't been confirmed for the game?
Get your priorities straight, Nintendo.
But outside of "She owns a space station!" and "She looks smokin' hot in a biker outfit!"
What do we really know about this monotone maiden?
Nothing! She's an interstellar enigma.
Or is she? Who is Rosalina?
Have there been clues hidden in plain sight as to what her true identity is?
Today we're out to solve this maiden's mystery,
and what we find throws everything you thought you knew about the Mario universe
out the window.
Well, except for the fact that he's a sociopath, which is still a hundred percent legit.
It seems to be the best place to start is with the bedtime story
Roaslina reads throughout Super Mario Galaxy.
The story recounts the tale of a sad little girl on a quest to
find one Luma's missing mother.
Prepare to be shocked: that story is actually about Roaslina herself!
What!? An Earth-shattering revelation, I know.
But seriously - where it gets interesting is in Chapter Four,
when the story mentions Rosalina's mother.
Via the book's illustrations, we get two glimpses of her:
first, from the back, and then again, the bottom half of her face.
Do those hair flips, that mouth shape, the gold crown, and those rounded blue earrings look familiar?
Because they should!
Peach is Rosalina's mother.
Cue the dramatic music!
(non-dramatic music plays)
Uhhhhhhh... not quite as dramatic as I envisioned, but okay.
Now wait, I can read your mind!
"But the hair is longer and the dress is blue!"
That's what you're thinking right?
Right? Be honest!
Man, I'm like the geeky version of David Blaine.
But I agree; these similarities are very superficial,
and far from a hundred percent confirmation.
That's why it's also worth mentioning the silhouette of the castle that appears in Chapter Seven of the book,
when the little girl in the story looks at her former home through her father's old telescope.
Notice the three prominent spires with the one big one in the middle?
Seems an awful lot like typical depictions of Peach's castle, no?
Since it's in shadow, though, I suppose it could be just any old three-spired castle
with one very tall one in the center... I mean,
I hear those are very popular in the Mushroom Kingdom, after all...
Hashtag ovious sarcasm is obvious.
But...
If we're going to prove something as huge as Rosalina being the daughter of
the first lady of gaming, we need something more than hints.
We need something more definitive.
We need something... scientific.
Jeans!
Ronnie, come on, let's try it again -
Genes!
Genetics, DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid!
Come on, dude, you're ruining my flow!
If Peach and Rosalina are truly related, they should be sharing some physical features, right?
And, yeah, I mean obviously they look alike,
but we're the Game Theorists!
We can do one better.
We can use genetics to show that there's a high statistical probability
that the two are related.
So let's start with one of Rosalina's most identifiable traits:
her earlobes. Bet you didn't see that one coming!
Whether or not your earlobes hang low and wobble to-and-fro,
or are attached to your head,
is dictated by a simple dominant-recessive gene relationship.
You probably did this stuff in school, right? Seventh grade bio-sci, anyone?
But to recap, you get one set of "genes", or "alleles", from your father,
and one set from your mother.
The combination dictates what trait you show.
That's called your "Phenotype".
"Phenotype" for "Physical" - it's what people see.
So for earlobes, dangling earlobes are dominant and attached earlobes are recessive.
Let's demonstrate that with a big "D" and a little "d".
So as an example, let's say that your father and mother both have one big "D" allele,
and one small "d" allele.
By creating a chart called a "Punnett Square" that shows all the possible gene combinations
the child could have, where he gets one gene from each parent,
you see that the child is most likely to have dangling earlobes,
because three out of the four scenarios contain a big "D".
The big "D" is dominant, or stronger, and covers up the little "d".
But, if you have two little "d" alleles,
one from mom and one from dad,
your lobes will be attached, making it the rarer trait.
Which is funny, because Rosalina, believe it or not, has attached earlobes.
Check it out! And that means,
both her parents would need to posses the small "d" allele.
But how could we possibly figure out the genetic code of fictional video game characters?
Glad you asked that.
Well, you start by looking at the Phenotype.
What do Peach's ears look like?
Trick is, Peach's ears are normally covered by her ungodly large blue earrings.
But, Nintendo has been kind enough to show us
Peach in her developmental stages.
Baby Peach. Baby Peach doesn't have her ears pierced, and thus
we can see that she, too, has attached earlobes.
In other words, she possesses two small "d" alleles,
greatly increasing the likelihood that her child would also have attached lobes.
And that's not all; look at Mario, who presumably would be the father.
Attached earlobes again!
Which means that the child of Peach and Mario would have a one hundred percent chance
of also having attached earlobes -
Rosalina.
And that's not all - what about eye and hair color?
Now, these things work a little bit differently.
Both are "Polygenic", or controlled by multiple genes.
Let's focus on eye color. Eye color happens to be controlled by at least two separate genes.
The first one, "OCA2", comes in two forms:
brown, and blue.
The second one, called "Gey" - Gee? Gay? Guy? Eh.
- also comes in two forms, but this time, it's green and blue.
Now, the way this works is in a tiered system,
with blue alleles being recessive, green being dominant over blue,
and brown trumping them all.
Here's a chart mapping out all the possible combinations, and, as you can see,
blue eyes are super rare because there are so many other genes that overpower those small "b"s.
So for Rosalina to have those piercing blue eyes of hers, her parents would also need to -
Well, somebody call Staples, 'cause that was easy.
The fact that both Peach and Mario also have blue eyes means that
their child would have a very high likelihood of also having bright blue eyes.
Just like you see in Rosalina.
Hair color works in a lot the same way - it's also polygenic.
Without getting too detailed, the fact that Peach has blonde hair greatly increases the likelihood
her child would also have blonde hair.
So to summarize, with genetics, we're talking about "Statistical Odds",
and in this case, were Peach and Mario to have a baby,
there's a very high likelihood that it would have the same phenotypes
that you see in Rosalina.
The last huge piece of genetic evidence, though, comes from Rosalina's handedness.
Watch all the gameplay footage of her, and you see that she's left-handed.
Notice how she prefers to keep her wand in her left hand?
In an interesting twist, promotional art for her shows her holding it in her right hand.
But I would assume that this is actually the product of the world's right-handed bias.
But that's a can of worms for an entirely different day.
For now, let's focus on the genetics.
Handedness is weird, because it's not like the previous genetic examples.
Researchers have no clear predictors that they've been able to figure out.
What scientists do know, is that consistently, ten percent of the world's population
is left-handed, and that left-handedness tends to run in families,
with the mother's preference being an important factor.
On average, the chances of two right-handed parents having a left-handed child are around ten percent.
Having a right-handed mother and left-handed father keeps that percentage about the same.
But, having a left-handed mother and right-handed father makes the probability double.
Now looking across games, particularly the sports games;
Mario Super Sluggers, Mario Tennis, Mario Golf,
Nintendo's main man is clearly right-handed, no question there.
But Peach is actually ambidextrous;
good with bother her right and left hands,
Playing baseball and tennis favoring the right, but golfing favoring the left.
People born with a left-hand bias at birth are statistically more likely to show ambidextrous qualities
later in life. So, the likelihood of a couple like her and Mario having a left-handed child
like Rosalina, is actually greater than most other couples.
The only thing that would increase those odds would have both parents be lefties,
which increases the probability to thirty-five percent.
So similar to how we approach TF2's Pyro,
not only does Peach match the mother's depiction in the storybook,
but statistically speaking, Peach's hypothetical daughter would have a much higher than normal
chance of sharing a lot of the same qualities as Rosalina.
But there's one final piece to this puzzle.
Let's revisit Chapter Seven of Rosalina's bedtime story.
We've already talked about the illustrations, but let's talk about the clues buried in the actual text.
"She twisted the knob of the telescope, and the blue dot grew until she could make out a grassy hill dotted with flowers. It seemed very familiar to her."
"Zooming even closer, a terrace on the hill came into view."
"She remembered rubbing the sleep out of her eyes as she followed her father up that hill to look at the stars..."
So we know that Rosalina's home - that castle we saw in the silhouette - isn't far from a good stargazing hill dotted with flowers.
Galaxy's opening scene has Mario running to the top of a hill that overlooks Peach's castle,
meaning it's close enough to walk to,
and has a beautiful view of the stars.
It also happens to be lined with flowers,
just like the hill described in the storybook.
And not only does it have flowers, but look at the color of the flowers in the illustration;
purple, white, and yellow.
Now look at the flowers on Mario's hill at the beginning of the game:
purple, white, and yellow.
Now we're getting somewhere.
And there's more - here's an excerpt from when Rosalina's story takes a dark turn:
"She remembered having picnics with her mother on that hill on bright and windy days..."
"And..." the girl burst into tears, "'I want to go home! I want to go back to my house by the hill!'"
"'I want to see my mother!' The girl was shouting now, her face wet with tears."
"'But I know she's not there! I knew all along that she wasn't out there in the sky!'"
"'Because... because...'"
"'She's sleeping under the tree on the hill!'"
"The girl's cries echoed through the stars, and a hush fell over the area."
Like a punch to the gut, the story reveals that the girl's mother has been dead and buried the whole time.
In a game like Mario where dying in pits of lava or getting sucked into black holes is pretty much par for the course,
knowing that there's a character that has died and is buried, is just, unsettling...
It's a bit eerie...
But this passage also provides us another clue as to the geography of this hill:
there's a single tree on top of it.
Find that tree on top of that stargazing hill that's right down the road from Peach's castle
and with the yellow, purple, and white flowers,
and you've got yourself a slam-dunk.
So, I played through the beginning of the game again looking to find that tree,
and didn't.
Theory: busted.
Or was it?
I remembered that the end of the game features one final grand sweeping shot of the landscape
around Peach's castle, and would you believe it,
at the top of that hill, the hill that Mario just so happens to start the game at,
the hill that matches all the qualities we've been looking for so far;
what's at the top of that hill?
A single tree.
Whew. Did you feel that?
I just got a chill down my spine.
All the signs are there!
Peach's hair, earrings, mouth, and crown in the illustrations,
the genetics contributing to Rosalina's attached earlobes,
blue eyes, blonde hair, and left-handedness,
and the geography of the stargazing hill with white, yellow, and purple flowers,
with a single tree on top that Rosalina's mother is buried under-
(record scratch) Wait, if Peach is Rosalina's mother,
that would mean Peach should be buried under that tree...
How is that possible? Clearly I've overlooked something,
or I'm just running out of time and have to save it for part two.
I promise you, not only is there an explanation,
it's one that perfectly fits with the theme of the game,
ties together all the weird, cryptic, loose ends present in Super Mario Galaxy,
and even begins to offer us some deep philosophical undertones to the Mario franchise as a whole.
In the meantime,
that's just a theory - a game theory!
Thanks for watching!
Hey! While you're here, you should probably subscribe!
That way you don't miss part two of this epic duology!
Have to admit, this might be my favorite series of episodes I've done to date!
I'm just gonna leave that right here for you to think about.
Now, welcome back to the super amazing endcard tournament,
where last time, Star Wars trounced Doctor Who
sixty-thousand votes to thirty,
and Star Trek was left in the space dust with fifteen K.
Khaaaaaaan!
More like, caaaaaaan't!
...that joke didn't work.
This week, I've got an important question;
with Smash Bros. on the way, I have a hankering to do some Super Smash physics,
and I wanna know what my next Nintendo theory should be:
Could Link's Hookshot be real, or how the Falcon Punch works.
Click on one to choose!
Or, if you have a better idea, let me know in the comments!
In addition to whatever you choose, I've also got a super secret project that I've been working on,
which I'm super excited about!
So, I'm keeping busy, but it's all to give you guys some great stuff over the next few months!
I'm excited about all of it, and you should be too!
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a quantum physics text book with my name on it,
good light reading before bed.