I remember the first time I ever saw Wario as a kid. It was an ad for a Wario land game on funbrain.com. It intrigued me. I knew who Mario was, and I gathered that Wario was supposed to be an evil doppelgänger of some kind. For context, this was a year after the advent of the war in Iraq (Stay with me, please. I swear this is relevant). I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I heard about it on the radio nonstop.
This is important because the first thing that six year old me noticed about this strange evil man was that he had the word “war” in his name. Being a literal child, I assumed that this was supposed to be some kind of thematic pun. It made sense to a boy growing up in a post 9/11 world. War is bad, and Wario is clearly supposed to be bad.
So for the next seven years I assumed that Wario’s main gimmick was that he started wars. Bowser kidnapped the princess, fawful tried to take over the world, and the ghosts haunted the mansion. So why not have an antagonist that visits war upon the Mushroom Kingdom? I’m not embarrassed that I made this leap of logic as a kid.
I’m embarrassed that I never questioned it until I was 14 years old.