silveradept | Jul. 14th, 2023

Prompt 4: Daisy
These sunny springtime blooms have several positive meanings. The meaning of a daisy flower can be purity, innocence, new beginnings, joy and cheerfulness. In the Victorian Era, daisies symbolized innocence, loyalty and an ability to keep things secret.

Bonus Prompt: White Rose

See also: Daisy, Princess of Sarasaland, introduced in Super Mario Land, the Game Boy spinoff series to the main Super Mario Brothers sequence on the Nintendo. Princess Daisy made Mario a series that no longer ran on the Smurfette Principle. (Depending on how you slot Super Mario USA (the reskinned Doki Doki Panic released as Super Mario Brothers 2 in the US) into the canon, Birdo has Daisy beat on that front by a year, but SMBUSA was a panic reaction to the difficulty of Super Mario Brothers 2 (released as The Lost Levels in the US), so Daisy is the first intentional new female character into the series. Anyway…) Because Daisy's series was a Game Boy spinoff, her presence is more known and felt in her appearances in the SMB sports games, Mario Party series, Mario Kart series, and Smash Brothers. She's not as well-known as Peach is, and she's usually canonically paired off with Luigi so that both Bros have a princess of their own, in what likely was a pair the spares situation. In the same way that Luigi started as a palette swap and slowly began developing his own ability set to play games with, Daisy seems to have started as a Peach clone and is still differentiating herself from the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom, even as Peach herself has started to become more active in her own right. She and Luigi probably have a lot to chat about regarding their journeys to become characters in their own right, with unique mechanics and motivations. As characters without quite as much history and definition as Mario and Peach, though, I thoroughly expect the fanon about Daisy and Luigi to be intense and voluminous.

Daisy was also a regular Mario Kart and Mario Party choice for some of the people I played with when they came over to game and talk during the evil ex phase of my life. The one where my evil ex deliberately mistook my grumbles about the fairness of the RNG as me having sour grapes about not winning all the time. I don't hold the character any ill will from the experience, though.

And it's also interesting how few human-looking characters there are in the Mario Brothers series: two plumbers, two princesses, Rosalina, who probably qualifies as at least a Princess, if not higher on the authority scale, and Paulina, who came back in Odyssey as the mayor of New Donk City after having been connected to the Mario Brothers greater universe because Jumpman was in Donkey Kong before he became Mario. (And, okay, New Donk City is full of humans and humanlike characters, but they're an outlier, a single world across basically all of the games and their various worlds.)

( The rest, based on the flower language virtues. Talks about the anti-fandom, anti-freedom factions a fair amount. )

We do not need to put these virtues at odds with each other. Joy and cheerfulness at the act of creation (and possibly even creating things where someone's innocence or purity are given freely, corrupted, taken, or manipulated) can co-exist alongside reasonable efforts to make sure that people know what they're getting into, such that if they want to maintain their innocence about what a particular trope or stay "pure" by not reading something they don't like, they have the opportunity to avoid it. It's a lot easier to promote and uphold Don't Like, Don't Read, The Back Button Is Your Friend, and Your Kink Is Okay, It's Just Not My Kink when there's been an effort put in to tags and warnings. I'd rather someone use a search engine to figure out what "Dead Dove, Do Not Eat" means before they read through a fic with that tag and find out the hard way. Yes, I know, metadata is a pain in the ass to have to write. I work with metadata on a daily basis. I know. But I would much rather have a world where the norms are such that when someone says "I don't want to describe those tags, they'll spoil the story," they use a tag that indicates they've consciously thought about this and have made the decision to go "Choose Not To Warn" or they indicate "Some Content Notes Untagged." By doing that, it becomes harder for the next moral panicker to look at a lack of tags and say "This person clearly intends to endorse everything in their fic! They're Problematic! Cancel them!" And if they adopted similar kinds of warnings or indications that the lack of warnings is a deliberate choice with traditionally published materials, I would be ecstatic. I want a world where people can find what they love and filter out what they don't, rather than one where a reader always has to be on guard against something that wasn't mentioned. And I want authors to be able to be their entire selves so that their readers can decide whether or not the author is someone they want to support according to their own moral and ethical systems, without being pressured into taking the side of "they're perfect and can do no wrong" or "they're Problematic and nobody is allowed to like them."