Everything Ages, Even Mario
An animator named Daiki Sugimoto made a short video imagining Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser, and the rest of Nintendo’s cast at the end of their lives—gray, slow, uncertain. Mario shuffles. Bowser sits in a chair. Peach looks out a window. It runs less than two minutes and it made me sit with something uncomfortable for longer than I expected.
The thing is, we grew up with these characters. They weren’t real—obviously—but they occupied our childhoods with such insistence that aging them is genuinely unsettling. When you watch old Mario moving toward whatever’s waiting for him, what you’re actually watching is time doing its thing on your own memory. Sugimoto knew exactly what he was making.
Japan was up to other things that week too. A plus-size idol group called la BIG 3 released a song called Pochative ~ Body mo Heart mo Glamorous—and in a country where exceeding a certain weight threshold can apparently get you classified as obese, this functions as a small act of cultural defiance. The video consists largely of the members eating hamburgers, pancakes, and fried chicken with the unselfconscious pleasure of people who have decided not to care what anyone thinks. The fetishization angle is real—Japan’s male fandom will extend to literally any subcategory of women—but there’s something refreshingly direct about the whole thing that I didn’t fully expect.
Miku Hatsune, the virtual idol who exists entirely as software, merchandise, and collective projection, received her own official car from Daihatsu that week. Of course she did. By that point she already had cosmetics, umbrellas, game consoles, and life-size body pillows for the enthusiast who had fully committed, so a car was the logical next step. At some point virtual celebrity starts to feel more internally coherent than the human kind—at least Miku won’t say anything embarrassing on social media at 2am.
I’ve developed a principled objection to timelapse videos at this point—every city has been tilt-shifted and time-compressed and set to ambient music, and none of them surprise you anymore. But a filmmaker named darwinfish105 made a miniature-effect timelapse of Tokyo that still does something. The city just holds up. Even processed through every cliché in the urban video playbook, it looks like nowhere else.
The week ended with FEMM’s Wannabe—two women dancing with the precise, glassy affect of well-maintained mannequins while something genuinely catchy happens underneath it. FEMM occupied a specific niche in Japanese pop at the time: robotic staging, tight choreography, polished surfaces that may or may not be concealing something human. Wannabe is them at full power. If you’re not at least a little moved by it, you’ve let something important die.