So I replayed Mother 3 very recently. Had a good time with it. Beyond everything else, I think that Mother 3 is actually a pretty good game, and one of Nintendo's better games in its line-up. Despite a lot of what I am going to say about it down below, coming from a perspective that has learned a lot since I originally played the game, this remains a very distinctive title for Nintendo. It is both intensely political and has some of the most prominent queer characters in their library, and in many ways, it is the type of game I want Nintendo to be making. It is a game that is actually saying something.
But, I think that I've found myself more critical of what exactly it's saying now than I have in the past.
The Politics of Mother 3
This is an interesting point to start off with, because Mother 3 is pretty transparently a very anti-capitalist work. It directly associates the introduction of money and capitalism to Tazmily Village by Porky and the Pigmask Army with the illness in society that takes root afterwards. This does immediately though beg the question of what exactly is the solution to the issue? If not a capitalist society, what is the best way for society to be ordered?
In strict accordance with its canon, the answer is an unknown. The climax of the game involves pulling the seventh and final needle, and causing the rebirth of the world. However, we the player are not given any indication as to what this rebirth of the world actually entails, merely being told during the fake-out end screen that everything is going to be okay. Lucas, the boy with the good and pure heart, pulled the final needle, so everything is going to be okay. Of course, we are only told this. Lucas, as a silent protagonist, is given no real motivations of his own, merely acting as a vessel for the other characters with moral statements: Alec, Wess, Kumatora, and the Ma[*******]. Lucas can really be argued to not be much different than Claus is. Lucas is given no real motivation to pull out the needles, and as a result, the end result of the world is similarly empty. You, the Player, Lucas's Porky Minch, are asked to imagine what a world that might look like.
Except. That's not really the whole story, is it?
After you beat the game, you get the title you see at the beginning of the post, replacing this one in the end card. On some level, this is obviously intended to be a callback to the titles of both Mother 1 and Mother 2, in particular with the image of the Earth acting as the O. But one must contrast it with the original title and there's an obvious message. By the end of the game, your rebirth has healed the world, removing its metallic pieces and allowing the natural world to flourish again.
Mother 3 is anti-capitalist, but it is also pastoralist, and I would even argue flirts with primitivism quite often. The replacement of the metal in the logo with wood here is not accidental, and it resonates with the themes and ideas that the game has been telling you for quite some time. While the fate of the world is ambiguous in the narrative, thematically speaking, Mother 3 has an idea of what the world should look like.
Life in Tazmily Village is quite simply by the time that Fassad and the Pigmask Army show up. There's very little in the ways of modern technology, and there's also no sense of money or a market. The items that you find in Thomas's Bazaar are all free of charge, and can be taken freely. This is deliberate, as is revealed very late into the story, as the village is full of survivors of an apocalyptic scenario and blamed their current lifestyles for causing it. They choose then to take on the role of a small, quiet village, the kind of lives they all wanted. While it is not clear whether that society was capitalist to the same extent as what would come afterwards, the message is pretty clear. The pastoral lifestyle that Tazmily exists in is considered the ideal, it is what several characters, including Lucas, fight for.
This, by itself, puts a bit of a conservative spin on the work as a whole. Mother 3 is not anti-capitalist in the same way that a communist or a socialist would be. It is not concerned with the plight of the workers, or even generally for society's well-being. You perform no meaningful anti-capitalist action in the entire game. You cannot improve the lives of the elderly that were placed in Old Man's Paradise, a decrepit and falling down nursing home. You cannot stand up for the exploitation of the workers of Tazmily Village. You engage with the capitalist system of shops and labor with no real alarm.
But where this gets really interesting is in the social messaging. A conversation that initially struck me as quite odd replaying this game was the conversation in Chapter 4 involving Mike in the nursing home.
Mike: I can't keep burdening Lisa forever, but I do have a Happy Box and nice-bodied girls like Nan and Linda here to keep me company, so I'm pretty happy in my own way. Linda: I'm sorry, Mike, but that's called sexual harassment these days. Mike: This is a hard world we live in now. How disappointing.
This scene is obviously meant as a joke at Mike's expense here. You're not really supposed to take his side here, but let's break this down a bit more here given the context of the entire game.
Mother 3 gives literally nothing to the Pigmask Army what so ever. The game never, ever, tries to play anything they do as a positive. The encroaching of capitalism and suburbanization is not presented as a net zero, it is presented as entirely negative. Nothing good came out of it, the world is worse off for it. Wildlife is mutilated for sport, people become engrossed in their pursuit of happiness (another point we'll get into shortly), and the people of Tazmily drift away from each other, becoming more rude and more curt to each other, especially towards those deemed "undesirable".
But the scene reads strangely in this context. The constant here is Mike's inappropriate comments about women's bodies, not their nonacceptance. It is explicitly marked as a change to the world that the concept of sexual harassment even exists, and there's no other source for it than the Pigmasks. The Pigmasks introduced feminism to Tazmily, and in the overarching narrative of the story, that's a bad thing. The game makes no concessions towards any good result happening, so every impact must be bad. While in a vacuum, the butt of the joke is Mike, the narrative actually vindicates him.
To give another example of the game's conservative bent, let's look at family structures that are present in the game. One might expect that family structures would be much more loose in the pastoral Tazmily Village than in the suburbanized Tazmily Village. After all, the nuclear family as it exists today is entirely an invention of capitalism, and specifically, came about because of cultural shifts after WWII in response to the growing Cold War.
But if you paid attention, the family dynamics don't actually shift at all. Families in Tazmily remain nuclear the entire time. This makes sense given the canonical explanation, that Tazmily was a rush job and these people were probably coming from a culture that had nuclear family dynamics, but it grates roughly with the idea that Tazmily Village is an ideal. What goes unstated is that the nuclear family is inherently a part of that. Sure, the gender roles become more clear past Chapter 4, where men go off to work and the women stay home, but in truth, it really wasn't that much different in the past.
Then there is the Happy Boxes. In the narrative of the story, the Happy Boxes are dubiously brainwashing devices. They emit odd lights and noises, and at least a couple of characters are enraptured with them to the exclusion of all else. They are the devices planted in Tazmily to begin its metamorphosis into a suburban town. But, there is actual brainwashing later on in the game, so I'm hesitant to merely take them at that. Rather, what do the Happy Boxes represent thematically? I believe the answer to that is propaganda.
Visually, the Happy Boxes resemble CRT screens, either TVs or computer monitors, and this is pretty consistent with their placement in homes as well, often being central to living areas. The introduction of television revolutionized the ability to disseminate propaganda to people, as now the same message could be sent to millions of people worldwide with basically no downside. in addition, there's no direct changes as a result of the Happy Boxes existing. People are more rude, more dismissive, and a bit meaner than they were previously, but they maintain their dominant personalities. Some people, such as Abbot and Abbey, are remarkably similar. The message in the Happy Boxes is a more subtextual one. The Happy Boxes are supposed to bring happiness to you, so the act of getting one is the desire for happiness.
This, to Mother 3, is a key poison. It is Fassad who sells the Happy Boxes to the people of Tazmily on the idea that we want to be happy, and there's nothing wrong with wanting happiness. This of course being Fassad, we are inclined to as the viewers see their words as deceptive in nature. Since the core part of Mother 3's politics is pastoralism and anti-capitalism, it makes pursuing happiness a moral ill. This is probably why there's no real sympathy given to any of the workers in the story. They were the ones who chose to pursue happiness, chose to get a Happy Box, and chose to listen to Fassad's words. They should have remained resolute in not getting a Happy Box. Working in the system is being part of it. It's being complicit.
(In a way that is, of course, separate from the ways in which the main party are also working in and complicit in the system.)
This isn't to say to end this that Mother 3's politics are wholly bad. It provides, for example, the important connotation that suburbanization comes at a cost. The happy, suburban lifestyle comes at the mistreatment of the elderly, the outsiders, and of queer people.
Oh yeah we haven't talked about that hu-
QUEERNESS AND MOTHER 3
So we're going to have to talk about the Magypsies. For the remainder of this post I am not going to call them that, because their name just straight out includes a slur used against the Roma, and given that they play into the mysticism tropes of them in media. This post isn't about that, but it is worth bringing up here and it's why I censored their name earlier.
(As an aside, there's an entire post to be made talking about specifically Fassad, and the ways in which he is coded quite bizarrely as Islamic, from Fassad's dress and name, to his focus on bananas, and his proper introductory chapter taking place in a desert and being in charge of a pair of monkeys. In addition, the fact that Fassad is associated with the introduction of money and being a propaganda mouthpiece is...concerning. This isn't strictly the point of this section but it would feel remiss to not include this in some place, and this felt like the best.)
What specifically the Ma[*******] are in the narrative is never defined. They are left somewhat gender ambiguous, although undeniably queer.
This, to me however, is limiting to an understanding of them, and honestly I think we should just say it here.
They're meant to be a facsimile of trans women.
Now, whether or not specifically they are trans women or are meant to merely be in drag is up in the air, and I don't think either option is actually good. Any claims of gender ambiguity go out the window given that they are all effeminate looking men, refer to each other as women, and face either general ambivalence or outright derision by other characters in the story. "Is it a he or a she?" is not really meant kindly. They are also in a whirlpool of homoerotic innuendo, and when discussing them being facsimiles, whether or not they are actually trans women or men in drag is pointless. Those are the same things when presented this way.
Mother 3 also doesn't really know what to do with them or how it even really feels about them. They are both intended to be comedic and also magical protectors of the land. They are part of the protagonist faction but are entirely passive, figures that merely guide and help awaken powers in the actual protagonists before being pre-determinately fridged as the story progresses. There is one exception.
Locria, or really, Fassad, the con-artist formerly known as Locria. The game reveals very, very late into the story through a floor in the Porky Tower and in Miracle Fassad's use of PK Starstorm that Fassad is very likely Locria, a traitor to her other friends and assistant of the Porky Empire. At no point ever is Fassad's gender or sex ever in question. He is referred to entirely with male pronouns, is discussed as a guy, and even once his identity is revealed as Locria, the mouse that he lived with still refers to him with male pronouns. This to me is kind of critical to my distinction of them as facsimiles of trans women, because there would be no reason to make Fassad explicitly always male. Fassad betrayed the others, and assimilated into what the capitalist army needed of him.
Or, well, that's a nice way of thinking about it. The Ma[*******] existed on the Nowhere Islands for much longer than the people of Tazmily Village. In Mother 3, there is basically no other meaningful signifier of queerness to be seen in the entire game. There are no gay men, there are no gay women, and there is no other gender ambiguity. Even Kumatora, who was raised by Ionia, is basically a tomboy in her appearance.
The people of Tazmily Village are seemingly completely unaware of their presence until later in the game, as it seems to be that they are completely unaware of queerness. The message the game tells here is that queerness essentially exists outside both the pastoral idealism and the capitalist dystopia that exist as the two main points of reference. They willingly self-sacrifice to see the world change, but while they are invested in the world not being destroyed, the time will come no matter what. They aren't shown to be reborn in the new world either, as none of the textboxes can be attributed to them.
Is it positive? Is it negative!? Who knows! I don't think I have come to particularly like their depiction in this game as a trans woman, they aren't really uniquely hated or loved by the game's narrative. If anything, the game just seems to regard them as existing, and pretty okay people, if not very weird in their queerness.
Conclusions I guess, I don't know, I wasn't intended for this post to essentially become an ess-
While I have a lot to say about how Mother 3 gives its messaging and what messaging that is, it is still a good game from the fundamentals. The characters are well written, the game has a good sense of tension and delivery, etc. I think the game makes missteps, and I do want to be clear here, I think this is a game with good intentions but limited by writers who are probably somewhat conservative and couldn't imagine what a better world would be. But it still takes a pretty massive risk by talking about what it does. In a gaming climate where Nintendo games often try to talk about as little as possible, in order to be consumable vessels for entertainment, I think Mother 3 stands out in a good way. This post isn't even going into the ideas of grief, loss, and motherhood that are central to the story as well. I just wanted to talk politics lmao.
