But ya know...I never really noticed it before.
They say that every time you experience a story you notice something different about it. You bring to it the perspective of where you currently are in your life and the characters, the plot, and the themes all hit you in a way that is unique to that experience. I've played Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door from start to finish so many times in my life that I've lost count. But it was only during my current playthrough that I noticed - really noticed - just how much this game wants you to know: Mario is a capital M Man. A fight-winning, princess-rescuing, hottie-kissing, mustache-having pinnacle of masculinity. The kind of man that every man should want to be.
I think this aspect of the game stands out to me in this moment because of my own journey to unpack and understand what my gender really means to me. My feelings about manhood are complicated. The idea of aspiring to be like Mario - a sentence that sounds ridiculous even as I type it - is one that part of me sneers at. I see commercials for Manly Soap or Manly Water and roll my eyes. This doesn't represent me or what I want to be. But the idea of being a burly, heroic guy who gets a lot of attention from women...well, now that doesn't sound so bad. Except even admitting that brings up feelings of shame, because wanting that feels...shallow? Unevolved? Heteronormative? I don't fully understand what it is inside of me that recoils at the idea of achieving a more masculine self, while another part of me actively strives for it.
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At the beginning of this year I started two new endeavors: going to the gym and going to therapy. At the gym, I work to sculpt my body into a more masculine one. I used to say it was for health reasons but let's not kid ourselves here. I want to be fucking hot, and to me what that means is building and toning my muscles. Every morning I get up at 5:15 AM to do cardio, and twice a week I go lift weights after work. I've cut my meal portions, completely removed certain drinks and snacks from my diet, and I even started drinking protein shakes. What's happening to me? I make muscles at myself in the bathroom mirror hoping to see some definition in my biceps. If only I can make my body manlier, then it will be more desirable. Burly. Like Mario.
At therapy, I work to unpack the cognitive patterns that have led to me being depressed for the past seven years. A big part of that is understanding and addressing the stereotypically masculine ways I interact with the world. Poor communication and social skills, terrible personal hygiene and aesthetic self-care, hating my body because it isn't strong, needing to be successful and competent to feel loved - all these things are tied to the ways I was taught growing up that men are supposed to be. Men don't moisturize, we don't care about our wardrobe, we succeed at everything we do, and we definitely don't talk about our fucking feelings. Unless it's anger, of course. Anger we can feel.
There's something weird about both striving towards and away from masculinity at the same time. Trying to make my body more manly while breaking away from "manly" thought patterns and ways of being. I look at the work I do at the gym and part of me is proud of my progress - but part of me hates it. I think about the ways in which I don't want to be perceived as stereotypically masculine, and then a voice in my head questions why I'm judging half of the human experience. "I'm not that kind of guy." Like by distancing myself from one idea of masculinity I am somehow making myself smarter, elevated, superior.
Am I not a man at all? Or am I just trying to position myself as a better type of man? There are days I seriously consider soft-launching a transition to he/they pronouns, and others where I don't feel queer enough to take that step because the things I want for myself are ultimately some form of me striving for a perfected vision of manhood. It's not that I'm not a man - I just want to do it in a way that rises above criticism, a way that's praiseworthy and progressive. But no one is above criticism and no one embodies their ideals perfectly; interrogating everything I do to make sure I'm doing it the perfect way only sets me up for disappointment. Regardless of whether I decide I'm a man or nonbinary, there's no such thing as one single way to perfectly embody that gender.
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Something that's interesting in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is that we don't really get Mario's side of the story at all. He's the protagonist, yeah, but he's silent. We don't hear his voice, we don't get his internal monologue; we don't really get a full understanding of how he feels about being put in the box that others have created for him. Does Mario like when everyone calls him burly? When they praise his bushy mustache? Does he welcome the barrage of kisses? He certainly doesn't seem to welcome Flurrie's, and most of the time when Mario receives kisses his reaction is one of shock rather than one of obvious pleasure or excitement. Even in that there's another sort of masculine stereotype, the idea that there's no such thing as a kiss from a woman that a man wouldn't want. Other than these little glimpses, though, we don't ever really get to understand whether any part of him wants to push back against this masculine ideal he is meant to uphold.
This to me is what makes Paper Mario an interesting picture of masculinity to unpack. Most of his "masculine" qualities are things that other characters in the game ascribe to him, rather than things he claims for himself. And isn't that how it goes in real life? Each of us is our own unique person, but the world at large tries to fit our features and our behaviors into a neatly-organized box for them to make sense of. In my case, the times I buck the hardest against "man" as my gender are the times when the world makes assumptions about what I desire or care about because of it. When an advertisement assumes I must want to smell or look a particular way, or when another man wants to fraternize over annoying habits of our wives or mothers-in-law. I don't have an issue with masculinity itself - I take issue with being put in a box, with people using my gender as shorthand for a particular kind of very American masculinity that I don't align with at all. Does Mario feel the same, I wonder? Given the information we have to work with, the best we can do to get an idea of Mario's own perception of his masculinity is to compare his behaviors to those of other men in the game.
Earlier this week I finished chapter three, Of Glitz and Glory. This is perhaps the manliest chapter of the game, the one in which Mario fights his way to the top at a wrestling arena to become the champion and discover the truth behind the mystery of the missing arena fighters. The other men against whom Mario is pitted in this chapter, particularly Rawk Hawk and Grubba, demonstrate the ways in which masculinity can be harmful. Rawk Hawk is so obsessed with being the best that he cheats in the arena, going so far as to poison people or bribing security to sabotage their escort to the arena. Grubba is so attached to being young and muscular that he is willing to kill in the name of eternal youth. Mario overcomes both of these foes in trial by combat, of course, but what really sets him apart from either Rawk Hawk or Grubba is his motivation. Before this chapter we see him recovering Flurrie's necklace; after this chapter he helps Vivian to escape the abuse of her sisters. Assisting Koops in finding his dad, helping Jolene solve the mystery of her missing brother - what makes Mario's masculinity shine compared to that of the other Glitz Pit fighters is the way he uses his manly qualities to help others rather than serve his own vain desires.
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Mario's manliness manifesting as compassion is something that appeals to me more than his manliness being a result of his physique or his facial hair. Because for me, the moments that come closest to gender euphoria are the ones where the work I have been doing to make myself "more masculine" helps me to be a better father, uncle, husband, and friend. Sometimes getting better at those things require me to look inward and think about how I've been taught to be masculine in ways that need to be unpacked or reconfigured. Sometimes towards, sometimes away, with a final destination that right now I'm not sure where it's going to end up.
The thing about figuring out your gender is that there is no right answer. I'm a guy, I'm nonbinary - whichever place I land will be true to my own experience of existing in the world. Maybe my journey is one that will lead me to be more like Mario, focused on striving towards an idealized masculinity with an emphasis on helping others. Or maybe my path will lead me in a different direction, further and further away from manliness until I land in a new place entirely. Either way, I don't have to figure it out all at once, and I don't have to judge the journey.
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