Lately I've been spending a lot of time in the Mushroom Kingdom.

I know what you're thinking. The other one. With Mario and Luigi. I confess to being utterly helpless to the combination of cute and surreal. Add to that the carrot on a stick mechanics of platforming and I lose days to coin and star collecting. Currently, I've been catching up with Super Mario Galaxy, ostensibly to help out my 5 yr old daughter who often gets stuck in the more obstacle-intensive levels of the game. She's content to watch and advise, and I'm content to turn what I always intend to be just a brief battle with Bowser Jr. into an afternoon. I'll admit though, I hardly ever finish games, especially if there is no narrative through-line. So, I've never saved Peach from Bowser, or any of her other abductors. It is enough for me to pal around with Mario, to thrill at his occasional costume changes and the new abilities they bring, to laugh at Luigi, and to just bask in the nursery-room hallucination of it all. All this is a preamble to the horror of this:

Click on the picture above for more deranged Marioland fan art, including Bowser as hair-metal god. Translation through Google was useless in explaining the madness. The most comprehensible line I could find was, "Nintendo is invincible fist in the water!" Yes, indeed.