PETA: Mario is Pro Fur

[Nikolaz72]

Funny thing PETA. All those animals we slaughter? If it wasnt for us there wouldnt be so many of them. All Cows/Chickens/Pigs wouldnt survive in the wilds. And I gotta say, between living on a farm for a ten years with food, sleep, grassfields and then being put down painlessly before getting turned into cooked meat and eaten by humans. And having to flee for your life fearing for your very existance for the last minutes of your life on the great plains and then get eaten by a lion while you are still lying down on the ground breathing as the darkness closes down around you. Which food for the predator has the best life? Eh? Eh?

Compared to the free out-in-the-wilds gazelle. Our cows and chickens have it great. Now I dont mean the stacked on top of eachother cows in America. But not everyone mistreat the animals they eat. There is more of the open-grassfield cowfarms than the closed crowded factories.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

If that's the case, then so is this adorable baby:

What? That lion suit probably isn't from a real lion and is therefore irrelevant to the fur fashion debate? DON'T ASK QUESTIONS. Just draw the baby with the bloody head of a lion and that automatically makes PETA right.

 

[ReinWeisserRitter]

That child has the obvious leer of a hardened killer and sadist. Your pro-baby nonsense can't evade the lance of truth here, sir.

More seriously, this has the reek of a group of people who act retarded when they're bored or looking for attention all over it. The odor is all the more unfortunate when it's a legitimate, recognized organization.

 

[Avalanche91]

It was just a matter of time, wasn't it PETA?
One of you just HAD to play Mario on a bored day and gasp in shock and terror as Mario suddenly wore a raccoon suit.

How bored do PETA employees have to be, and do they honestly, HONESTLY think this particular cause if worth fighting for?

 

[LilithSlave]

How completely ignorant about Japanese mythology. A simple Google search would show this as ignorant.

A suit that looks like an animal does not mean a skinned animal. It's practically just a furry fursuit with magical powers. If anything, it's empowering, and it's just another reference, again, to Japanese mythology/Shinto. Tanuki are shapeshifters, and mario essentially becomes like a shapeshifter when given magical suits, turning him into things like frogs and tanuki.

By this logic, Buffalo Bell and fursuits in general promote animal cruelty.

I don't understand why people hate furries so much. PETA are the real animal hating crazies. I'm a person who's pretty sympathetic to a lot of hardcore pro-animal and pro-environmental causes, and I think PETA are crazy nutjobs.

Do they just want attention? Yes. Is it in bad taste? Somewhat. But is this an attack on videogames or Mario? No, not at all.

And for the record, I thought the game was pretty amusing, at least for a propaganda game. Also, I think PETA's right to an extent, we shouldn't buy fur products when there are equally viable alternatives out there.

Oh, is that what's going on? Well, that's a bit better. You sure? I hope you're right.

 

[Plucky]

Wow, and they're trying to knock down the big dog?

Compared to Cooking Mama, they're just splitting hairs, atleast shes actually using meat (which indirectly means that an animal was killed by someone, but not her, not like she advocates no vegetables), but trying to demonise Mario simply because he looks like a Tanuki? (which is basically a Raccoon Dog) is practically trying to demonize him and could be seen as a backhanded slap to Japan's culture.


I think they're more conscious about the wildlife and the environment that surrounds them, a large number of people in Japan are either Buddhists or followers of Shinto, im pretty sure they acknowledge that an animal was killed to get to their plate and is thankful for their sustenance.



But yeah, Mario is essentially an extremely well known icon at the moment, i seriously doubt it would do things like brutally killing animals (obviously) an interesting point to make that there is next to no meat consumed by Mario in his series, it's usually weird powerups, mushrooms and (in some of the newer games) strange, biologically weird powerups that happens to grow on plants.

The closest things to meat might either be Wacka Bumps, or (in Bowser's Inside Story) Chicken Wings, though the latter is primarily consumable by Bowser only anyway.

 

[hexFrank202]

I'm going to have to un-say some of the things I've said (or thought) before, so here goes.

This scorning of PeTA by the escapist disproves to me that the gaming community is mindlessly running 'liberal' at everything. They're really only interested in how individual situations treat their cause. That's perfectly reasonable.

Just thought I'd say that a lot of Republicans--and some of the people at Fox news--don't support animal cruelty, but also fight against enviro-terrorists' scheme to make everybody's life suck.

 

[Daft Sikes]

I don't recall ever seeing Mario tear the fur right off of a racoon dog. Ever.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

When on a mission to rescue the princess, Mario has been known to use any means necessary to defeat his enemy-even wearing the skin of a raccoon dog to give him special powers.

Yeah. Because it's totally and explicitly the hide of a recently skinned animal. And not just a clever visual representation of him gaining super powers.

Tanooki may be just a "suit" in Mario games, but in real life, tanuki are raccoon dogs who are skinned alive for their fur.

You know what I find the weirdest about this? That they're inexplicably jumping years late on the Mario bandwagon when Skyrim just got released, ie, a game that practically has a medieval big game hunting simulator built into it.

The site even features a charming little flash game, in which a skinless tanooki chases a grisly, fur-draped Mario through a nightmarish, blood-soaked version of the mushroom kingdom. The game is sure to delight children everywhere right up until Nintendo's lawyers get wind of it. Other games from the PETA line-up include Super Tofu boy [http://features.peta.org/super-meat-boy-parody/] and the Super Chick Sisters. [http://www.mccruelty.com/SuperChickSisters.aspx]

Know what? I'm not even giving them the page views. That's what they use to validate their existence.

Mario first donned the tanooki suit, which is admittedly quite grim when you think about it, back in Super Mario Bros 3, but he retired it in favor of the Cape in Super Mario World. The suit returned, much to the delight of fans, in the recent Super Mario 3D Land. Personally I find it far more disturbing that Mario lives in a land populated with mushroom people yet he has no qualms about eating mushrooms to grow larger, that raises some very difficult questions.

And, of course, PETA doesn't give a shit about all the clearly-much-more-real-than-this-crap turtle stomping that goes on in Mario games. But then again, they're PETA.

 

[Hookman]

So I'm gonna go ahead and decide that PETA are not serious, and have never been serious about anything but euthanesia. Its just better for my blood pressure that I believe my own lie.

 

[The Lugz]

ok.. peta have officially screwed with something they cant handle.. Nintendo's lawyers are going to rip this in half
and i'm going to watch them cackle all the way to the bank and cheer them on too!

 

[Danzavare]

Which is good news. Surely that just means there aren't any real animal issues left for PETA to worry about so they're turning their attention to video games. What else could it possibly mean!?

 

[snave]

Dear PETA,

I invite you to come visit East Asia. Go to Japan and step inside any of Don Quixote's many discount department stores. Won't take you long to browse the merchandise and find a genuine animal onesie because each store fits into a space roughly the size of your closet.

* * *

Actually, I'm a fool for penning a response before following up the sources: this is genuinely one of their better campaigns. The raccoon dog live skinning issue is something rather horrifying that I had heard of previously, and their site only uses the Mario reference as a joke and a marketing hook. There's not even any subtle irony or sarcasm, they admit it in the second bold line atop the page. I'd say it's a good tactic, that is if there are no legal problems with Nintendo.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Do PETA actually protest against real animals or just pretend ones? lol.

 

[Foxpack1]

I love PETA but this is just nonsense.

 

[Sansha]

No, he's not, because it's a fucking video game character.

 

[Dott]

Hey, PETA, I wear a cottoncoat.
OH MY GOD SHEEP HAIR.

 

[Furioso]

Peta Is NOT worse than Westboro, although they are incredibly annoying. And stupid. Just like Westboro. Boy, I sure hope these two groups never join forces.

I would say they are worse, WBC is all talk, they just yell at you, horrible yes but no actual harm is done, PETA actually firebombs places, encourages violence, teaches classes on how to make firebombs, and they slaughtered about 90% of the animals they "saved" last year, with a total "saved" animal kill rate of about 86%

 

[EternalFacepalm]

Is there anything you can say to this apart from /facepalm?

/eternalfacepalm

PETA, go away. Holy shit, if you're complaining that a video game features fur, then what the hell. It hurts literally no one.

 

[Jabberwock King]

And while we're at it, OMG! Alex Mercer ate a crow at the end of Prototype to regenerate after a nuclear explosion! Somebody should start complaining!