I’m hopeful for 2024 but that’s not because of any external circumstances. I’m just seeing the world differently lately. Choosing to interpret things in a way that inspires hope. Deferring that hope to 2024 because that clean start to a new year is just symbolically tempting.
I had a dream recently in which I gave a little tiny piglet a bath.
What do you think that means?
At first the piglet was resistant, but then it was into it.
I checked the zodiac calendar, but we’re going from rabbit to dragon. I don’t know.
Look, the real reason I sat down to write this is this: The only thing more beautiful in life than finding the beauty in mundane moments is finding the ways in which seemingly disparate things are linked together.
In my mind, there’s a link between Mallow from Super Mario RPG and Shohei Ohtani. Give me a minute. See if you can see it.
Most of what we encounter when we interface with screens inspires loneliness and rage, in some combination. It’s designed this way, because loneliness and rage keep us coming back to the screens, and the Content Providers like that.
So when I’m away from screens I try to think about what brings me joy.
Mallow brings me joy. Shohei Ohtani brings me joy. They both have brought a lot of people a lot of joy and are poised to bring more. They are case studies in joy bringing.
Have you seen Mallow? He’s a cloud who looks like a marshmallow who thinks he’s a frog. He’s, somewhat remarkably, second fiddle to Mario (that’s Super Mario the Italian Plumber) in a game called Super Mario RPG, a game in which only one guy’s name is mentioned in the title.
Cast your mind back to 1996. Video games were still niche. RPG wasn’t an acronym most people had ever heard. A company called Squaresoft had made a few of them, and earned appreciation as the purveyor of choice for those who would embark on a Super Nintendo game with epic literature aspirations and prog rock sounds.
There was also Nintendo, who made games with a guy called Mario. Mario jumped good. That was what you needed to know about Mario.
At some point, Squaresoft and Nintendo decided to smash their two signature flavours together. This resulted in a weirdly compelling baby’s-first-RPG, elevated by transcendent Yoko Shimomura music. Mario needed a sidekick, and for whatever reason (I have theories), Luigi was not available.
Point is, it was someone’s job to invent Mallow from whole cloth. He didn’t exist before, and he hasn’t appeared anywhere else, until this year, when the Super Mario RPG remaster was released for Nintendo Switch. Now, many millions more people will experience a slightly enhanced version of a 27-year-old game.
I don’t know who exactly invented Mallow, with his striped billowy pants, pink shoes, and matching pink pompadour. It may have been Kiyofumi Kato, or Yuko Hatae, who are listed as lead character designers on the game. If you’re reading this, and you know, please drop a comment below.
Imagine a year or whatever of your working life devoted to coming up with characters for Mario to hang out with for 15 hours’ worth of video game. In 1995. That was somebody’s job.
It’s easy to be cynical about this and think, yeah, if I was getting a paycheque to come up with a cloud baby boy in Hammer pants, I could fucking do that. Sure, you could. But you didn’t. And I didn’t. But somebody did.
It’s impossible to encounter Mallow and not smile. He is naivety and plush toy aesthetics personified. Somebody’s imagination put him into the world, and somebody else then programmed him into a video game, which has been enjoyed by millions of people. But a lot of them particularly enjoyed the Mallow element. For several iterations of Super Smash Bros games, people have clamoured for Mallow to be included.
That represents the potential each one of us has, to put a little joy into the world and leave it there, for millions of other humans to find later and welcome into their hearts.
A few days ago, Shohei Ohtani announced that he’d be signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers. This had been a foregone conclusion for a long time, but things got interesting for a minute with all those Ohtani to the Toronto Blue Jays rumours. And as a lifelong Blue Jays fan (fun fact: they’re the reason I have that Y in my first name), I still feel ways about it.
The Dodgers are going to pay Ohtani close to 700 million US dollars to play baseball for them for the next decade. Don’t even try to make sense of that. No, it’s not fair, or sensible.
I’ve written before about how the wrong people make the most money in our society, so this might sound hypocritical. Isn’t a baseball player making that kind of money exactly what’s wrong?
Maybe not.
Shohei Ohtani represents a mythical amount of childlike purity and dedication to a craft. He is quite possibly better than anyone has ever been at a sport that two major global powers have been obsessed with for most of modern history. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a real-life superhero.
You can’t put a price tag on something like that.
What he does on a daily basis, as his chosen profession, requires that he affiliate himself with some organization. As such, any and every organization purveying baseball would be interested in having him do baseball for them. And the one resource large organizations have is money.
Sure, Ohtani could have chosen to embark on a selfless baseball pilgrimage, pinch hitting for neighbourhood teams and refusing compensation, like some character from a bad movie adaptation of Maniac Magee. But instead he got that bag. Who can blame him.
Let’s set aside the fact that the Los Angeles Dodgers have 700 million USD in their coffers that they could have spent on, say, affordable housing in Southern California.
Somebody made Ohtani. Not the man, but the legend. You could argue it was his parents. You could argue it was him, himself. But I think we all had a hand in making Ohtani into the totem he is today, because it feels good to look up to someone as blithely competent and pleasing as he is.
A guy got so good at an extremely difficult activity that he 1) earned the largest paycheque in professional sports history, and 2) inspires excitement and hope in millions of people, doing what he does, and being coy with his dog, who is named Decoy, and you know he’s trolling us with that. Decoy! Come on.
Not everyone who chases a dream and focuses on a craft like Ohtani did will be rewarded for it. Almost nobody ever in history has been or will be compensated like he has. But the fact that one supremely talented man set this precedent, by sticking to his weird niche, and the fact that so many people give a shit about it, tells me that it’s not time to give up on humanity just yet.
Life is hard. Life is increasingly lonely. It can be hard to find reasons to stay hopeful. I feel like that sometimes.
But then I think of the person who came up with Mallow, and I offer them silent thanks. Or I think of Shohei Ohtani, and shake my head at how absurd all of this is.
The other day, I heard Andre 3000 recount to Questlove some advice that Erykah Badu’s grandmother told him, for when times get hard: Just keep living. It’ll happen to you.