Why bowser is the most successful

The two of them have an epic showdown atop a pair of goddamn chandeliers while a dope remix of his Super Mario Bros. Their rivalry had never been this intense nor cinematic. Then Mario beats him in under a minute, Bowser cries when he thinks no one is looking, and Peach is immediately kidnapped by a gang of darker, more competent villains. The rest of the game sets up a now-recurring dynamic in the RPG spin-offs: Bowser working alongside Mario and for the only time, Peach to get rid of interloper villains and restore his status quo of regular antagonist.

We see him rally his dwindling troops to diminishing returns. We see him kiss a weird cake-loving viking, or Mario, or both. Most of the Mario RPGs keep this quirk of his characterization, and it seldom gets old. But there does seem to be a limit to the charms of Comedy Bowser: the mainline games themselves. The only time the goofy, bumbling version of Bowser appears as a villain is in Super Mario Sunshine , and it is weird. And different from Baby Bowser, who is actually just Bowser as a delinquent child raised alone by his wizard-butler, Kamek.

Bowser is Batman? Like all strong personalities, he needs to be used at the right time and in the right way. Both versions, interestingly enough, have embraced his most unique aspect: his fatherhood. Bowser Jr. In a multimedia franchise owned by a corporation that approaches change in a cautious, measured fashion, Bowser just keeps growing.

Monarchies are normal and just. Plumbing is universally subsidized. Things are simple. Bowser is anything but.

Bowser gets to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, in the full knowledge that everyone will put up with it. He ruins Mario's life almost yearly, and Mario doesn't seem to care.

Repeated home invasions and sexual assaults normally lead to restraining orders, not golf invitations. Diplomatic immunity? When you've abducted our girlfriend 10 times, then no, you may not come Go-Karting with us. It's not like Mario even gets to hit him -- Bowser is constantly being bathed in fire and dropped down bottomless chasms.

Drops don't kill things in Mario-land, gravity being somewhat less powerful than homeopathy in that universe, and as for the lava, we've already mentioned how he breathes fire. That's less a fiery end than a gentle magma spa and the one time it did anything, in New SMB, it turned him into a Dry Bones Bowser, and those things are even more unkillable. If a sports analyst wants to use math to say Team A is much better than Team B, he'll often say, "If they played 10 times on a neutral field, Team A would win nine times out of Well, we don't have to use hypothetical scenarios for the matchup between Bowser and Mario.

They've played on a neutral field billions of times and, whether you choose to believe that there's a Prestige -style Mario cloning machine just off screen at the beginning of each game or use quantum physics' notion of multiple universes, the fact is that Mario has set out on a quest to defeat Bowser billions of times, and his winning percentage has to be somewhere well below. Mario has died millions, maybe billions of pointless, futile deaths.

His incredibly mortal coil is repeatedly flung into everything from medieval spiked pits to relativistic black holes -- everything human technology has ever achieved has been used to kill Mario. A very mortal coil. Now granted, most video game characters are slightly more expendable than shotgun ammunition in Texas, but Mario has it worse, because he's the family-friendly one. He's the My First Character for everyone introduced to video games to try controlling. And since he was the character that launched the NES and popularized home gaming in the first place, most of the people who have ever controlled him had no idea what they were doing at first.

He's died more often at the hands of children than ants, and was steered clumsily off more cliffs in the 80s alone than the entire history of cars in Ireland.

Add the fact that most casual Marionizers never beat the game, and you've got an endless expanse of parallel worlds where Bowser is not just winning, but winning with ease. In any coherent universe in which Bowser exists, the odds are extremely likely that Mario is either a minor blip on his security radar that went away within 15 seconds, or an army of clones he entertains himself by killing over and over again.

In the end, Mario vs Bowser might be the most unhealthy rivalry the world of fiction has seen since Captain Ahab decided he could take Moby Dick in a fist fight. And even Ahab had a better attack ratio: At least he got to see his nemesis twice, and managed to only die once.

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Continue Reading Below Advertisement. Archaeologists have responded to invasions faster. The instant Bowser wants the kingdom, he has it -- his life is what the God of the Old Testament would wish for if he was given a magic lantern from the spirit of Alexander the Great. He just sits back on his throne of fire and watches Mario scamper through the obstacle course that he designed. Hell, some of the time, he probably stages an invasion just because there's nothing good on TV.

Personal Life. Mario's the most recognizable family-friendly hero this side of Mickey Mouse, yet he's fighting to defend his home against a villain who is better at that as well. Bowser has a bigger family than Catholic sumo wrestlers, while the most famous hero in gaming is a something bachelor, presumably still living knee-deep in mushroom pizza boxes, since we know he doesn't own more than one set of clothes.

There are college students more mature than him -- at least they don't have to gather coins on their way to meet their girlfriends. We know Bowser's home life has to be good, because even in the most annoying embodiments of the "rebellious teenager phase" possible, Bowser Jr.

We never see his wife Bowser keeps the woman he loves safe from harm and out of the games. The closest thing that Mario has to a stable relationship is the perpetually kidnapped Peach. While the game presents her prolonged disappearances as something between a shell game and a hostage situation, she's never as thankful as you'd hope when you rescue her.

Meanwhile, she's perfectly happy to race Go-Karts against Bowser. In the real world, after the third time a woman disappears with the same man, either common sense or the police usually tell you to stop filing missing-person reports, let alone smash up his place trying to get her back. So Bowser's got Mario's girl and a Mrs. Bowser somewhere tending a beautiful three-bedroom castle. Mario has the worst job in the world, and in his downtime, he's a lonely plumber.

You can't blame Mario for having less natural talent than Bowser. He's just a tiny plumber in a magical world where both flora and fauna are deadly to the touch. Bowser, on the other hand, is made of spikes and flame in a world where those are the most unavoidable causes of death.