What We Talk About When We Talk About Waluigi

Ben had just lost a game of the new Battlefield on the big screen in the living room while the rest of us looked on. He dropped his controller and cursed a little bit. Lisa moved to briefly touch his shoulder in an ambiguously comforting way but otherwise didn’t look up from her phone. It was Ben and Lisa’s apartment, but Cassidy and I hung out there enough that we even had our own customary places on the couch. It was just the four of us, still there after a “board game night” that had sort of petered out after a few hours.

“Do you guys want anything?” he asked, halfway to the fridge already. He already had half a beer in front of him, but this was just a displacement activity. For as long as I’ve known him, when he loses he gets mad, and when he’s mad he keeps losing. So he makes sure to stand up and do something, anything, after a particularly bad match, just to give him time to clear his head. Lisa made a sort of non-committal grunt, but otherwise nobody responded. He got some more beers anyway, and sat three of them down in front of us on the low table in front of the TV.

There was quiet for a while, so I cleared my throat. “I heard Waluigi isn’t in the new Smash Brothers,” I said. “There was a Washington Post article about it and everything.” Cassidy sat up alert. This was their wheelhouse.

“It’s total bullshit,” they said. “They added every other character that’s ever been in a Smash Brothers, and a bunch of other people, but no Waluigi.” Nobody said anything, but they kept on. “Cloud is in it. Sonic is in it. The damn dog from animal crossing is in it.”

“Isabelle,” Lisa said, almost as a reflex.

“Right, Isabelle. And of course like every Mario character that’s ever existed, pretty much, but not Waluigi. How hard can it be? They’ve got lots of other characters that are pretty much reskins.”

“Maybe they’ll add him as DLC or something,” Lisa said.

“Who even is Waluigi, anyway? Does anybody actually care about him, or is this just an irony thing?” I said.

“It’s definitely an irony thing.” Ben said. “No question. Nobody gives a shit about Waluigi as a character. Nobody is clamoring for more Waluigi lore.”

“Okay, sure, but what is even his deal? What is he about?”

“They needed a doubles partner for Wario in Mario tennis, is his deal. I’d be surprised if anybody thought about him more deeply than that.”

Cassidy popped the top on their beer with a metal opener that they kept on a belt loop. “Bullshit,” they said, drawing out the first “bull” two or three syllables longer than it needed to be. “Wario is ‘Mario’ plus ‘warui’ meaning evil. Equal and opposite. Can’t have a Mario without a Wario. Same with his brother, good and bad. If you have Luigi you need a Waluigi. Yin yang. Thesis antithesis.”

“Is this a Hegelian thing or a Manichean heresy thing?” said Lisa. Ben made a face, but Cassidy didn’t notice and kept on.

“It’s both, right? Probably more Hegel, right. Like you have Mario by himself, but that thesis needs an antithesis,”

“Donkey Kong, maybe. Or Bowser,” Lisa interrupted.

“No, no. Luigi. Need a second player. Then you’ve got a new synthesis, the Mario Brothers. Wario is the antithesis, then you’ve got a new hero and anti-hero synthesis that’s stable until you start bringing in cooperative activities like tennis or kart racing. Waluigi is the antithesis to that.”

Ben left the matchmaking lobby and sipped his beer. “Not everything with opposites is Hegelian,” he said. “It’s not a spirit of history, it’s filling out a roster for party games.”

“There’s no like deep lore or anything that they need to protect,” he continued. “Nobody is going to contradict them on the official Mario wikipedia or whatever the hell. So they just add people when they need it. They need a princess who lives in space? Boom. There’s a princess who lives in space. They need a city full of normally proportioned people and also T-Rexes? Boom. There’s a big city that’s also named after Donkey Kong for some reason. None of it matters. Waluigi is the least possible effort at filling a temporary void created by the need to have tennis played in pairs. He’s a disposable convenience that fulfills a purpose, like a kleenex or a plastic spork. There’s no gap that needs to be filled in Smash Brothers, so he’s not there.”

“You seem mad about Waluigi, dude,” I said. “He’s just a purple guy. Relax.”

“What about Daisy?” said Cassidy, ignoring me while they reached for another drink. “Same thing. They needed a princess for Luigi so it’s not just Mario and Peach. She has the same deal as Waluigi, but she’s playable in the new Smash.”

“As like a recolor of Peach. The same move set and everything,” Ben said. He glanced at his phone. “I mean, Waluigi is in the game as an assist trophy, which is kind of the same level of effort.”

“But you can play as her. You can’t play as an assist trophy. It’s fundamentally different,” Cassidy continued. “There’s agency there that they are willing to give to Daisy but not to Waluigi. It smells, no, it reeks of favoritism.” They had finished their beer and began peeling the label off the bottle with their nails.

I wasn’t sure how sincerely I was supposed to take them, so I didn’t say anything. I guess nobody else was certain either. We sat around for a minute or two, silently sipping beer and looking at the post-game lobby screen that was still on the TV.

Lisa broke the silence. “He’s perfect because he’s half-assed,” she said. She had gotten to the level of drunk she sometimes did where she was intensely worried about hydration, and was checking which of the open cans of LaCroix still had some water left in them.

“He’s been in more than a dozen games for almost two decades, and in all that time he hasn’t solidified his character at all, really. Everybody else accumulates story and canon or even head canon around them like seagulls following a fishing boat…” She did some sort of gesture I couldn’t follow with her hands.

“…But Waluigi hasn’t. He refuses to get any signifieds on his signifier. It’s pure, in a way. He’s free to be taken up by anybody who wants to. It’s…”

“I swear if you say ‘punk’ or ‘authentic’ or anything like that,” interrupted Ben.

“No, actually,” Lisa said, unperturbed. “I was thinking more of the Deleuzian notion of the war machine. You see…”

“Absolutely not,” said Ben. “Waluigi is not a Deleuzian anything. Fuck Deleuze and fuck Waluigi.” Lisa looked like she was going to say more, but instead unlocked her phone with her forefinger and sort of slumped back into the couch.

“Jesus. He’s just a weird tall dude,” I said. “Would anybody actually want to play as him, if he were even in the game?”

“Sure,” Cassidy said. “I mean, like, it would be…”

“Not ironically, or to troll other players. But to genuinely select him on the screen and say ‘yes, Waluigi is who I want to play today.’”

“It depends if he were competitively viable,” said Ben.

“Okay, sure, but that’s not on Waluigi, that’s on Nintendo. I’m asking if you would genuinely want to be a Waluigi main. To sink in the time to master some Waluigi-specific combo.”

“Ironically? Absolutely,” Cassidy said, without hesitation. “I would play the hell out of him. Like imagine getting absolutely wrecked by a Waluigi one-trick.”

“Unironically. I said it had to be unironic.”

“Why? Who cares? What does it matter how sincerely I’m playing the character? Does Nintendo only get money when people are genuine?”

Lisa hit the lock button on her phone, put it back in her hoody pocket, and folded her hands on her lap. “They are calling them ‘echo fighters,’” she said.

“What?”

“Not recolors. Echo fighters. And there are seven of them, so far.” She was staring straight ahead, not looking at us. It had gotten dark in the room, and I could read the menu text on the TV reflected in her glasses. “A lucky number.”

“We’ve been going about this all wrong. What if it’s not a yin-yang thing or a Hegel thing or any kind of dichotomy thing,” she continued. “What if it’s a numerology thing.”

Ben had gotten us more beers again without anybody asking for them. There was a clinking rattle as he stuffed the empties away in the over-full recycling bin. I was a feeling a little too drunk already, but it seemed rude to refuse.

“You know how many characters there will be in the new Smash, when it releases?” Lisa said.

Nobody responded.

“Only including the three forms of the Mii fighter as one character, and the three different Pokémon forms of the Pokémon trainer as one character, and so on. And including all the echoes.”

I felt somebody had to say something, so I answered. “No idea. A bunch, though, right? There were over fifty in the 3DS one, I think.”

“I never played that one, was it good?” said Ben.

“Seventy-two.” Lisa continued, ignoring us. “They keep obfuscating it on the web with the multiple forms and recolors and DLCs and whatever, but it’s seventy-two at release. And do you know how many demons are in the Lesser Key of Solomon? In the Ars Goetia? How many dukes and lords and presidents of Hell?” Her eyes were shining and she was leaning forward.

“Is this also an irony thing?” I asked.

“Seventy-two.”

Nobody said anything for a while. We drank some more. Cassidy had started flipping a coaster around and around in their hand.

“Games are rituals. They are planned and organized. Waluigi was an accident, a tennis-related improvisation. What if Waluigi wasn’t included because he was the only one who wasn’t in the system, who wasn’t planned and accounted for many years in the past?”

I wanted to interject, to diffuse the tension a little bit, but it seemed sacrilegious somehow.

“What if Waluigi wasn’t included because he was the only one who could save us?”

“I think that’s enough talk about video games,” said Ben. But he didn’t pick up the controller.