Mario and Luigi Kissing

About

Mario and Luigi Kissing refers to a piece of fan art depicting Mario and Luigi from the Super Mario kissing in a warp pipe. Since its publication in 2010, it became a somewhat notorious piece of fan art, culminating in a parody Nintendo account tweeting the image in June of 2019 to celebrate Pride Month and fooling some people, including prominent conservative Sebastian Gorka, into thinking the real Nintendo was "promoting incest."

Origin

On August 4th, 2010, Newgrounds artist brycemilburn posted the image, titling the image "The Gay Brothers"^[1] and captioning the image "lets do some plumbing" (shown below).

Spread

The image saw light spread over the following eight years. It appeared in a YouTube video posted by John deer on November 27th, 2010 that gained over 56,000 views (shown below, left). On March 2nd, 2017, Twitter user @bobvulfov used it in a This Is the Future Liberals Want joke, gaining over 150 retweets and 640 likes.^[2]

On April 24th, 2014, parody Twitter account @RealShigeruM tweeted "Saw a picture of Mario and Luigi kissing one another online. Please do not do that," though it is unclear if the account was making reference to a specific piece of fan art or just making a joke. When the account was suspended, a successor parody account @shigerumlyamoto^[3] made the same joke.

Nlntendo America Tweet

On June 1st, 2019, the parody account @NltendoAmerica^[4] tweeted the picture with the caption "Happy #PrideMonth! Our staff is filled with people of all sexualities so we love supporting that," gaining over 11,000 retweets and 38,000 likes (shown below).

Following the tweet, former Donald Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka tweeted his disappointment that Nintendo was "promoting incest," apparently unaware that the account he quoted was a parody account.^[5] Twitter users quickly mocked Gorka for missing the joke, including users like Justin Whang, who tweeted an edited screenshot of a Sega tweet showing Sonic the Hedgehog voring Tails (shown below, right).

Gorka's tweet gave the image mainstream attention. On June 4th, Lushsux posted street art of the picture, gaining over 1,500 likes in four hours (shown below, left). The parody @ShigeruMlyamoto account again tweeted "please do not do that" about the picture, gaining 130 retweets and 650 likes (shown below, right). The situation was covered by AV Club^[6] and Daily Dot.^[7]

Search Interest

External References