Game Theory - You Are WRONG About Toad!

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he figures out what Toad ACTUALLY Is! Writers: Matthew Patrick, Mike Keenan (The Pokémon Biologist), Ash, Matt Dershowitz, and Tom Robinson Editors: Tyler Mascola, Jerika (NekoOnigiri) and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: Caitie Turner (Caiterpillart) Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Ah, Mario. So many unforgettable characters. Who could forget the terror the first time they encounter Wingo? The sheer delight that comes with your first Motos toss, the confusing new feelings surging through your body the first time you meet Bousat. Alright, obviously these aren't the ones that immediately come to mind when you think Mario. This is a 40-year-old franchise. There are a lot of characters. Not all of them are gonna be winners. For every shy guy, you're getting a King Sammer. For every Lacketoo, there's a Lord of Lightning. But when it comes down to it, there's a small handful of true icons. in the series. And ever since the introduction of spinoffs like Mario Tennis, those characters are required to come in matching sets. Mario is suddenly a game of pairs. Of course, you have the original duo that started at all, Mario and Luigi.

You have the dueling princesses, peach and daisy. For every Bowser, you've got Bowser Jr. Yoshi and Birdo, Wario and Mem God. So then where does that leave Portoad? Fortunately, when Mario Kart Double Dash released back in 2003, that is nearly 20 years old. Oh boy, I am gonna need a minute to process this. Existential crises about my own mortality aside, Double Dash gave Toad a partner who's now almost synonymous with the brand. Toadet swap the original Toad, give it some pig tails, bam. You've got yourself Toad's girlfriend.

The perfect partner for... Sorry, what was that? They're not dating? They're not even human? Oh, oh, it's the twist of the episode. Yeah, don't spoil it. Yeah, uh-huh, okay, uh-huh, okay. Yeah, I can't really tell you that one.

Roll intro! Oh, internet, welcome to game theory. Ah, good old reliable toad, character that needs no introduction. Someone who's been around since Super Mario Brothers back in 1985. A friend who's always there to knock himself out with his own trophy, show off his washboard abs, and slap Mario because his wife left him. Normally, I would follow up that sentence with context around the random stuff I just referenced,

but honestly, even with the context for those three moments, it's just so weird. For a while, it seemed like Nintendo just happy palette swapping Toad to infinity. Makes sense. He's an endlessly versatile character. Need a partner for Blue Toad? Boom! Yellow Toad. Two completely different characters, we swear. But then Nintendo introduced Toadette. Todette was pink. Todette had distinctive pigtails. Todette had the whole et thing at the end of their name. All of it seemed to indicate that Tod was meant to be the feminine counterpart to Tode, until an interview said differently. An interview from Mr. Mario Maker himself, Shigeru Miyamoto.

When we made the original Toad, we didn't really have in mind whether Toad was a boy or a girl. Ever since Todette has started appearing in games, I think people have come to take the impression that Toad was a boy because Todette was a girl. Obviously, there's lots of different toads that have been in a lot of different games. He leaves it open-ended, and by saying, we never thought about it, the hope is that the discussion can just move on, because if he doesn't know, then does it really matter? No, actually, it doesn't. None of this matters. It's a fictional mushroom monster in a game where a giant dragon turtle go-carts with you. But...

I specialize in things that don't matter. It's an unsolved gaming mystery that I'd like to get a definitive answer on. So the question remains. If Toad and Todette are canonically neither male nor female, what are they? The obvious answer here is that they're a mushroom of some kind. They look like a mushroom and they live in a place called Mushroom Kingdom, so it seems like a fairly reasonable logical leap to make. In an old theory of ours, we actually use this quote from Koichi Hayashita, producer of Captain

Toad, which implies that the two are at least very close. Quote, well, Toads may be mushroom-like if you It's unclear just how closely related to mushrooms they are. The resemblance and nomenclature is too uncanny not to wonder. So, are they or are they not mushrooms? Well, in the manual for the original Super Mario Bros., the mushroom retainers, as they were known back then, are described as, quote,

mushrooms who originally served in the court of Princess Toad's duel. In Mario Sports Mix, Toad has a special ability that allows them to grow and manipulate mushrooms out of the ground to disrupt the other players. This lines up real nicely with what we see real-life mushrooms doing when it's time to reproduce, which kind of makes the appearance in the game a bit awkward. We also have Peach's special move from the Super Smash Bros. series to go off of.

She whips out her Toad, no, that's not a euphemism. And it releases what I always thought to be a cloud of dust, but reading the in-game description is actually meant to be fungal spores, just like mushrooms are known to do. Looking at descriptions of the move in the PAL version of Smash 4, we get this, quote, holds Toad in front of you. If he gets hit, he spreads spores that deal damage.

Toad's spores will put attacking foes to sleep, not a counterattack. Always spread spores that deal as. small amount of damage. And lastly, Nintendo has gone on record saying that the big white and red thing on Toad's head is in fact part of his head and not just a hat. Sorry Super Mario Brothers Super Show, this one ain't gonna fly, literally. Based on everything we know, I have to call it. Toads are advanced forms of mushrooms. The games are already filled with sentient plants after all, so it's not all that crazy. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck, you know? So by determining that Toad and Toadette are both mushrooms, or at least an advanced version of the sort, we can start looking at real-world mushroom mating

patterns to get more context to our diaper-wearing buddy and his palette-swapped pal. Broadly speaking, most fungi reproduce in one of two ways. They can reproduce asexually, where one fungus buds off and splits into two identical copies, or they can reproduce sexually, similar to how humans and other animals do it. To do this, mushrooms are released spores into the air that settle on the ground and begin to grow into root-like structures called Hafei. These Hafei continue to spread on the ground and send out chemical signals to any suitable mates, letting them know that they're ready to get their fungi freak on. If two compatible Hafe meet up, then they fuse together to grow and become a fully fledged mushroom.

Now, Nintendo has never come out and said how these characters reproduce for obvious reasons. But we can figure it out. You see, for as cool as it be to say that Toads reproduced by splitting into copies, the games never actually give us any evidence to suggest that. What we do tend to see are two Toads coming together to get married and start families. There's a love-struck couple found in the streets of Toad Town in Paper Mario. We find a family living together in Super Mario RPG, married couple with kids. In the same game, there's one toad named Raz who talks about him and his beloved Rainy get married. The evidence in the franchise seems to be leaning heavily towards the idea that these mushrooms, including toadette, can be romantically involved and get married. Does that necessarily mean that they're reproducing sexually? No, but it certainly seems to imply it.

So that's it then. Toads and Todettes are mushrooms that reproduce sexually and are therefore coded as male and female? Eh, not quite. Fungi don't play by our rules, so we can't think about them using the human ideas. of sex and gender. A mushroom's biological sex, which biologists refer to as mating types, are determined by a set of genes found in their DNA called mat genes. Still haven't found the matching pat genes yet, but they're working on it. And unlike in humans where biological reproduction requires some combination of X and Y chromosomes, the matte genes and fungi lend themselves to even more options for mating types. Just how many mating types you ask? Well, it depends on the fungi that you're talking about. Some can have two, others can have 20,000. Therefore, whatever specific mating types, toads, and tootets are, depends on the type of mushroom they are

The first thing that comes to mind is that they're whatever kind of mushroom the super mushroom is And at this point, it's pretty well known that the real-life inspiration for the original super mushroom was a type of fungus called the fly agaric Mushroom with its red cap and white spots appearing all across pop culture and things like the Smurfs and movies like Fantasia It's pretty hard to deny the resemblance between the two but the fly agaric is also a psychedelic mushroom One that could make a say an overall wearing plumber thing he's saving a princess from an evil turtle named Bowser. Side note, Fly Agaric is also poisonous, so don't go looking for those things out in the wild. However, for as easy as it would be to connect the two, it would also be incorrect.

Super mushrooms have white spots on a red cap. Toad, from the very beginning, has been shown to be the complete reverse. Red spots on a white cap. This is critical because color is very important in the fungi world. It's the difference between dining on something that's delicious and something that's deadly. So are there any mushrooms out there that can match our desired color scheme that also reproduce via sexual reproduction. Dear theorist, after literal hours of scouring through just catalogs of mushrooms, I found the one that fits the bill. Introducing Hynelem-Peckyye, also known as the strawberries and cream fungus, or the bleeding tooth fungus.

This is one you do not want to eat, not because it's poisonous or anything, but just because it has a woody cork-like texture. Look at it. White cap red spots, and that's not all. Look at how it ages. It begins to develop a beige color with brown spots, just like another elder toad that we know about. So if toads and toadettes are meant to be related to the Hydenellum, how many mating types does it actually have? We don't know. No one has coughed up enough coin for researchers to look into it. Apparently, the number of mating types of a random mushroom in the Pacific Northwest doesn't qualify as important enough for the benefit of mankind, which is something that I only learned after hours of Googling how many sexes do mushrooms have. Which let me tell you, took me to some weird places. Rule 34 is a definite effect for the mushroom world. I need to go scrub my search results with bleach. So if science doesn't have the answer, video games must. Going back to Paper Mario and Super Mario RPG, you notice anything that might help us differentiate between the toads? Look at the couples that we pointed out earlier.

Each couple is formed from two different colors of toad. Each color has to be its own mating type. I mean, there are plenty of animals that do exactly this, using sight as a means of identifying members of their own species, knowing which mates are gonna produce the best offspring. Having toad's color correlate to mating type would serve as a quick way of rooting out who their potential sweetheart is meant to be. And with that, we finally have our answer. After nearly 20 years, we've finally figured out who Toadette is in relation to Toad.

They're not Toad's girlfriend, they're not Toad's boyfriend, they're just Toadet. In fact, each of the different Toad colors that we see throughout the Mario franchise is likely to be their own specific mating types. You can have a red toad and a toad and a toad, a blue and a yellow to, a green and a purple, the possibilities are endless. Well, not quite endless. You guys know me, I had to do the math on this. I had to do the impossible. I had to do what science had failed to do out in the real world. I had to figure out how many possibilities of Toad there are.

Currently, there's no Pocatex for Toads that shows every color that's ever existed, so we made one. We went step by step through every Mario game where Toad appears. 88 total games. And we cataloged each and every single unique color that we could find. And I can tell you now that the total number of Toad Mating Types is, Drumroll, please. 53.

53 differently colored Toads and Toadettes across the entire franchise. Each one capable of mating with any other. color, meaning that there are actually 1,378 different possible Toad couples across the Mario franchise. So don't worry, my dear, sweet little Toad. If Toad's not your match, there are plenty other fish in the sea, or mushrooms in the kingdom, I guess. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.