Saving Supper Mario Broth didn’t just restore my faith in fans, it restored my faith in humanity. Because, buddy, we are in short supply of humanity right now and I’m gonna take any of the little Magla crystals of happiness I can find. If you don’t know, Supper Mario Broth is the name of a social media account: guy that finds incredibly obscure, weird Super Mario ephemera and posts about it.
While he had made some money off the Patreon in the past, the creator of Supper Mario Broth got most of his income from caring for his mother, who died suddenly last week. Clearly going through the worst day of his life, he posted a video asking for help. He said that he knew he “didn’t deserve” to work on Supper Mario Broth full time, but he also knew that he couldn’t handle both finding a full time job and running his account. He asked for a little help during something that crushes you.
And folks, people came through. In fact, the reason I didn’t link to his post or the video is because it seems he’s since taken them down. We had his back. His Patreon has jumped from a few hundred people to a few thousand. We weren’t just helping someone out. We were giving him hope in very dark times by allowing him to do what he loves most: Being the best Super Mario archivist on planet Earth.
Thank God Nobuo Uematsu Isn’t Retiring Yet
The architect of Final Fantasy's, Chrono Trigger's, and Fantasian's soundtracks is stepping back, but not away, from composing.
Seriously, check out his Twitter. It’s maybe one of the few accounts that’s not made of acid and spite. Just one recent example: his explanation of how a knock-off Wario product could have ended up with the name ‘Terrorist Louis’. It’s good. You don’t have to take my word for it. The dude has got years of work to page through.
It reminded me of something that’s very easy for me to forget: As fans, we can sometimes be… not terrible? We don’t have to hope for games and artists and creators and designers and influencers to fail! We don’t have to be disappointed at success and pleased at people we don’t know feeling bad. I’m not saying I’m innocent of this! Far from it! And I know that most fans are good!
The fandom for video games is 95 percent awesome, 4 percent fine, and 1 percent Randall Weems if he joined the National Socialist Party. But that 1 percent dominates the discourse so hard and can feel so overwhelming that it blinds me to the good things fans do all the time. Which is my fault. Because I sometimes feel like I’m becoming that 4 percent of “eh, could do without them” fans.
Yes, every hobby, pastime, and art form comes with some good fans and some terrible fans. There are sports fans who come to every game and use the experience to feel connected to their friends, family, and community. And there are sports fans who will get very angry if you do a stand-up show in a bar showing the playoffs on television - but you have to turn off the televisions to start the show.
Okay, that part isn’t really them being terrible - it’s just something I’ve experienced a few times. It’s wild. You see every eye in a large drinking establishment turn dark with rage. That’s on the people who booked that show, which - I want to be clear - was not me. But, you know, I still participated in ruining some nights.
And, yes, there are famously good fandoms within this one! There are yearly events like Games Done Quick that raise money for charity and those wouldn’t exist without fans opening their wallets or, I don’t know, going to Venmo and judging everyone who keeps their transactions public. That said, the face we often get shown online - and the face that people who don’t play games sometimes think we all are - is the rude, angry one. They get a lot of attention.
As fans, we can sometimes be… not terrible?
I am not innocent of focusing on the toxic parts of the fandom. I take the bait like the stupid idiot fish I am. My beehive-kicked to birdhouse-built ratio isn’t great, if you get my drift. Every time I write a joke article about toxic fans (which you aren’t if you’re reading this, kiss emoji, heart emoji, kiss emoji) I get angry responses from the people who assume I’m making fun of them and much, much angrier responses from the people who think the joke is real.
The problem is that toxic fandoms are dramatic. We’re drawn to conflict and strife - it’s interesting to see and interesting to talk about, if pretty bad to experience. But that makes it hard to look away. It’s easy to feel like we’re drowning in hundreds of YouTube think pieces about whether an indie game failed because it was woke or it failed because literally nobody heard about it other than the people who absolutely hate it. Just now - while writing this - I was this close to just going on about bad fans. See? I’m part of the problem!
But everyone coming together for Supper Mario Broth was kind of a reminder I needed. I know, I know, it ain’t about me! But I think I needed to see spontaneous, unplanned love and respect for the work of a fan as he went through a difficult time. We’ve seen plenty of spontaneous, unplanned outrages, but seeing something like this? Thank god.
It feels good to be reminded about the 95 percent of fans who derive actual joy from this hobby. This wasn’t just friends or a community on Discord coming together for someone, which itself is amazing. This was people promoting him! Introducing him to new fans. The internet didn’t just help him out, we all came together to say, “Hey, everyone! Take a look at this guy!” And we said for a nice reason for once!
That’s what we should be doing. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘me’ because a lot of people already do! I don’t expect that this will change my dramatic, histrionic way of picking fights with the wrong people or missing the point entirely of some controversy or other. But it is a nice reminder of the good we can do for each other and how fans can make other fans’ dreams come true.
And - to boot - there are thousands of people who do that all the time. They raise money. They help out friends. They tell you that, in Super Mario 64 DS, if you move the character model of Princess Peach outside the castle and interact with her, she says Bowser’s final speech. So thank you, fans. And thank you, Supper Mario Broth. Please don’t be a milkshake duck or that might finally be the thing that breaks me.
UFO’s Night Manor Is My Favorite Short Horror Game Of The Year
One of UFO 50's games is an amazing horror title that can be beaten in about the same time as it takes to watch a horror movie.
