Players are familiar with Mario topless after a wave of memes featured his “boxer shorts” outfit from Super Mario Odyssey. After a period where fans were contemplating the character’s bare torso and his curious lack of a belly button, a design change in this recent image of the Italian plumber is both subtle and attention-grabbing.
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The Super Mario Odyssey memes inspired a mod adding shirtless Mario to Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U and even prompted the producer Yoshiaki Koizumi to give his take via YouTube on Mario having nipples but no belly button. “I didn’t really expect that to be a topic among fans,” he said. “It made me start to think if we should revisit the topic on the design side.” It appears, Nintendo has done exactly that, but the result is sure to be a topic of discussion for at least a few days.
The decision for an artist or company to leave in or out certain pieces of anatomy, such as Pokemon trainers’ belly buttons in Indonesia, is heavily dependent on the artist’s style, cultural norms of the era, political and commercial pressures, and personal views on morality, particularly puritanism. Typically the arguments revolve around female nipples, but Mario most certainly identifies as male, and the morality argument surrounding his chest is a bit fuzzier.
When comparing the cultural norms surrounding the depiction of male nipples from Mario’s home country of Japan with its peers, the decision to portray Mario as smooth-chested becomes clearer. In 2015, Japan Today noted that Japanese women were expressing a distaste for seeing so-called “male chesty-buds,” to the point that it spurred a spike in the sale of male stick-on nipple coverings two years later. In contrast, people in Western countries tend to be more brazen with characters’ chests, to the point where the absence of nipples just looks weird to them.
That is not to say that Japanese body norms are stricter. Gamers were upset enough to call for a boycott when the Switch port of Tokyo Mirage Sessions was censored in several ways to more closely conform to mainstream Western standards. There are plenty of other examples of Nintendo characters being changed for the sake of being palatable to more puritan audiences.
Ultimately it’s the artist’s decision whether Mario should be portrayed with nipples or not. Even with his Italian appearance and name, he is still a Japanese character and is therefore subject to Japanese cultural norms. Additionally, just like a real person, his appearance and personality will continue to change over time depending on his circumstances. He could also claim that his bare chest gives him an aerodynamic advantage in Mario Kart.
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