Aro!Mario and Aro!Bowser icons!
Feb. 24th, 2024 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Icon table generated by Chlor's Icon Table Generator
Lowish-effort Aro Mario and Aro Bowser icons for
arospecfanworksweek on Tumblr! They’re very simple, but I like making them. I should do it more often :DOK, so I’ve headcanoned Mario as aro for a while, now. Part of it is me projecting, of course. But also I think it would be interesting if he was, mainly because of how it would affect his dynamic with Peach. Because, you know, the hero and the princess; the knight and the damsel; he was a boy, she was a girl - at least a lot of the Toads seem to think that it couldn’t be any more obvious. But Mario wouldn’t think it was obvious. And any suggestions otherwise would just be mostly awkward and off-putting for reasons that are difficult to get across to the romance-minded. He and Peach were already close, as friends. That’s all they needed to be, right?
But anyway, what I’m trying to say is a major appeal of this headcanon for me is the like…inherent defiantness of it. Standing in step with so many normally romance-coded things and doing them platonically, despite what everyone wants or expects. And then also me projecting, like I said before 😊. Wrote a couple of fics about it even, if you wanna read them~ 😁
As for aro!Bowser, though, it’s only something I’ve vaguely been thinking about recently. ‘Cause I read a whole bunch of Bowuigi fic last year, and in almost all of those they gotta wave away/retcon/reconcile Bowser’s attraction to/kidnapping of Peach, right? So one way I’ve seen of doing that is something to the effect of Bowser kidnapping Peach because Junior needs a mom. Which is such an interesting rationale to give him, haha. But to be fair it's usually not by itself; there’s usually a sense of "well, Peach is very kind and beautiful, so marriage is definitely the way to go on this (or so I thought)". But sometimes it isn’t and that’s very funny to me. The things shippers do to pull their stories off are something to behold sometimes 🤭
But still! It got me thinking. What if Bowser’s crush on Peach was completely manufactured? Unknowingly, of course; in the sense that Peach is very kind and beautiful and powerful and the monarch of a nearby kingdom in his age range so that’s how these things are supposed to go, yeah? He wasn’t totally sure; becoming King didn’t really leave any room to know otherwise, with how much work there was to be done every day. At least Kamek had seemed to think so, though, talking about alliances and heirs and a bunch of other things Bowser hadn’t been really listening to. Though Kamek was hardly wrong about anything important, would it kill him to be a lot less boring about it?
But even still, Bowser’s proud and headstrong and stubborn, so when the marriage-alliance with Peach doesn’t work out then he decides to make it work out. And then the kidnappings start. And then continue. Because “it’ll totally work this time, this plan is perfect!”. Like trying to jam a square peg into a round box over and over with no clue that there’s anything wrong. Or maybe an inkling of a clue that we’ve decided to ignore because, you know, “I’ll kidnap Peach for good, this time, you’ll see!” Also, I remember seeing discussion somewhere about how Bowser could be interpreted as someone with abandonment issues, which could play into this too; people will stay if you keep them by force, after all, whether by kidnapping, marriage, or both.
So yeah. Not the greatest outlook on things, obviously.
Regardless, I think that in this universe where Mario and Bowser are both aromantic, they both get on track to consciously realizing it post-Super Mario Odyssey.
Mario because as he and Peach are flying home Peach obviously wants to know why he snap-proposed to her like that. To which Mario has to sheepishly explain how his inner competitiveness had flared up when Bowser had tried to propose to her again. To which Peach sighs because yeah, of course it was that. And then Mario gets around to asking if Peach is okay, to which Peach describes the nightmare of a past while she’d had because of this wedding business, to which the conversation pivots to weddings in general, and then romance in general. And Mario contributes to the conversation as best he can, but… he knows from watching Luigi’s romance-related ups and downs over the years that the way he himself thought about the concept wasn’t…correct.
But Peach won’t stand for Mario thinking that there was something wrong with him; it takes an overnight stint or three in the castle library (to Toadsworth’s chagrin) before she finally finds an answer for him. So she invites him to the castle for tea, and for a vocabulary lesson that’ll change his life.
Meanwhile, Bowser sits on the moon. Reflecting on his utter defeat that must have been more crushing than he’d thought for him to not even remember how he got out of that cave, thinking about how even aside from Mario being on his tail the entire time this whole wedding planning business was more of a stress-filled ordeal than he’d initially thought it would be, considering the fact that the post-wedding future that he’d figured he’d figure out as it came had stubbornly remained an amorphous blob of ambiguity instead of snapping into place during those final hours, despite the Broodals’ assurances to the contrary. He’d indulge in a rare bout of self-reflection, maybe, about these inconsistencies.
And then he would shrug, get up, and make his way home. Because while he wasn’t particularly sure about marrying Peach anymore, he knew he would still be kidnapping her. Because of the engaging process of making and executing perfectly laid plans, because of the adrenaline rush of a good fight, because of the future bonding experiences with his kids, because the rest of his minions needed something to do, ha.
Because of the fact that he was Bowser, King of the Koopas, and he’s absolutely not the sort of person to just give up, even if his core motivations have shifted slightly! And just as Mario would always show up to ruin his plans and take Peach back home, Bowser would just make new plans, and he was going to successfully pull a kidnapping off and beat Mario once and for all, he just knew it!
So all in all, everything changes, nothing changes, you know how it is! 😉
But anyway, what I’m trying to say is a major appeal of this headcanon for me is the like…inherent defiantness of it. Standing in step with so many normally romance-coded things and doing them platonically, despite what everyone wants or expects. And then also me projecting, like I said before 😊. Wrote a couple of fics about it even, if you wanna read them~ 😁
As for aro!Bowser, though, it’s only something I’ve vaguely been thinking about recently. ‘Cause I read a whole bunch of Bowuigi fic last year, and in almost all of those they gotta wave away/retcon/reconcile Bowser’s attraction to/kidnapping of Peach, right? So one way I’ve seen of doing that is something to the effect of Bowser kidnapping Peach because Junior needs a mom. Which is such an interesting rationale to give him, haha. But to be fair it's usually not by itself; there’s usually a sense of "well, Peach is very kind and beautiful, so marriage is definitely the way to go on this (or so I thought)". But sometimes it isn’t and that’s very funny to me. The things shippers do to pull their stories off are something to behold sometimes 🤭
But still! It got me thinking. What if Bowser’s crush on Peach was completely manufactured? Unknowingly, of course; in the sense that Peach is very kind and beautiful and powerful and the monarch of a nearby kingdom in his age range so that’s how these things are supposed to go, yeah? He wasn’t totally sure; becoming King didn’t really leave any room to know otherwise, with how much work there was to be done every day. At least Kamek had seemed to think so, though, talking about alliances and heirs and a bunch of other things Bowser hadn’t been really listening to. Though Kamek was hardly wrong about anything important, would it kill him to be a lot less boring about it?
But even still, Bowser’s proud and headstrong and stubborn, so when the marriage-alliance with Peach doesn’t work out then he decides to make it work out. And then the kidnappings start. And then continue. Because “it’ll totally work this time, this plan is perfect!”. Like trying to jam a square peg into a round box over and over with no clue that there’s anything wrong. Or maybe an inkling of a clue that we’ve decided to ignore because, you know, “I’ll kidnap Peach for good, this time, you’ll see!” Also, I remember seeing discussion somewhere about how Bowser could be interpreted as someone with abandonment issues, which could play into this too; people will stay if you keep them by force, after all, whether by kidnapping, marriage, or both.
So yeah. Not the greatest outlook on things, obviously.
Regardless, I think that in this universe where Mario and Bowser are both aromantic, they both get on track to consciously realizing it post-Super Mario Odyssey.
Mario because as he and Peach are flying home Peach obviously wants to know why he snap-proposed to her like that. To which Mario has to sheepishly explain how his inner competitiveness had flared up when Bowser had tried to propose to her again. To which Peach sighs because yeah, of course it was that. And then Mario gets around to asking if Peach is okay, to which Peach describes the nightmare of a past while she’d had because of this wedding business, to which the conversation pivots to weddings in general, and then romance in general. And Mario contributes to the conversation as best he can, but… he knows from watching Luigi’s romance-related ups and downs over the years that the way he himself thought about the concept wasn’t…correct.
But Peach won’t stand for Mario thinking that there was something wrong with him; it takes an overnight stint or three in the castle library (to Toadsworth’s chagrin) before she finally finds an answer for him. So she invites him to the castle for tea, and for a vocabulary lesson that’ll change his life.
Meanwhile, Bowser sits on the moon. Reflecting on his utter defeat that must have been more crushing than he’d thought for him to not even remember how he got out of that cave, thinking about how even aside from Mario being on his tail the entire time this whole wedding planning business was more of a stress-filled ordeal than he’d initially thought it would be, considering the fact that the post-wedding future that he’d figured he’d figure out as it came had stubbornly remained an amorphous blob of ambiguity instead of snapping into place during those final hours, despite the Broodals’ assurances to the contrary. He’d indulge in a rare bout of self-reflection, maybe, about these inconsistencies.
And then he would shrug, get up, and make his way home. Because while he wasn’t particularly sure about marrying Peach anymore, he knew he would still be kidnapping her. Because of the engaging process of making and executing perfectly laid plans, because of the adrenaline rush of a good fight, because of the future bonding experiences with his kids, because the rest of his minions needed something to do, ha.
Because of the fact that he was Bowser, King of the Koopas, and he’s absolutely not the sort of person to just give up, even if his core motivations have shifted slightly! And just as Mario would always show up to ruin his plans and take Peach back home, Bowser would just make new plans, and he was going to successfully pull a kidnapping off and beat Mario once and for all, he just knew it!
So all in all, everything changes, nothing changes, you know how it is! 😉