There are some things we all quietly accept as universal truths: the sky is blue, socks disappear in the wash, and Mario and Princess Peach are, if not married, at least a little bit more than “just friends.” It’s not the sort of question many expected to need Nintendo’s position on, yet this week, the company made its stance unmistakably clear—and, depending on your perspective, either delightfully unexpected or deeply disillusioning. Mario and Peach? Just good friends. That’s it. Nintendo says so. According to Consequence, the gaming giant has drawn a crisp, unmistakable line between camaraderie and courtship.

Forty Years of Platonic Pipe Cleaning

For those who haven’t spent decades cataloguing every power-up and princess rescue, here’s the crux: for forty years, Mario has risked life, limb, and questionable workplace safety protocols to rescue Peach from one peril after another. This pattern is an immutable part of the Mario mythos. Along the way, the series handed out more than a few narrative winks—Peach bestowing kisses on Mario, Nintendo celebrating Valentine’s Day with duo-themed posts, and even, in Mario Party 5, calling the plumber and princess “the cutest couple,” as documented by Consequence.

Despite these moments that could pass for the relationship equivalent of neon signage, Nintendo has chosen to pull the emergency brake. This week, the Nintendo Today app issued a statement: “Princess Peach and Mario are good friends and help each other out whenever they can.” Consequence points out this is as definitive as declarations come, quashing the hopes of anyone expecting a late-in-life Mushroom Kingdom wedding announcement.

Canon, Lore, and Un-Romanticizing the Pipe Dream

Grouping multiple observations, ComicBook.com dives into how this is not the first time the company has tread lightly around romance. Mario, gaming’s best-known mustached plumber, has never explicitly been given “boyfriend” or “husband” status in relation to Peach, despite long-running fan beliefs to the contrary. Fairy tales typically reward the hero with romance after saving the princess, and Nintendo’s own marketing—such as the aforementioned Valentine’s Day posts—has done little to quell those assumptions over the years. Yet, as the outlet details, Nintendo rarely, if ever, directly labels their relationship as romantic.

The new insistence that Mario and Peach are nothing more than “good friends” arrives courtesy of the Nintendo Today app and has, as ComicBook.com observes, left longtime fans more than a little baffled. Even while discussing other duos like Link and Zelda, Nintendo maintains an almost stringent policy of platonic partnership—a trend that, at this point, reads more like company policy than creative accident.

GoNintendo adds further context, tracing Nintendo’s pattern of making this assertion over the years. Despite fans piecing together evidence from games, lore, and even those semi-affectionate smooches, the company has doubled down, describing the partnership as “strictly plutonic,” friend-fiction be damned.

Fans, Smooches, and the Unwritten Rules of the Mushroom Kingdom

So how has the broader community taken this? GoNintendo, for instance, highlights the humorous resignation in fan commentary—one commenter deadpanning, “Okay, Nintendo. I believe you… Now explain Link and Zelda,” while others debate Peach’s actual interests or muse about alternate romantic pairings altogether. Browsing reactions and threads, one gets the sense that some players, faced with the friend-zone canonization of Mario, are left somewhere between exasperated and amused. There’s a certain sympathy for Mario’s four-decade courtship, punctuated by the occasional public kiss, only to be rewarded with the world’s most prominent “just friends” title card.

Of course, plenty of fans shrug happily along, seeing in this perpetual platonic bond something almost refreshingly quaint. For every person who sees it as a narrative injustice, there’s another who appreciates a story where selfless heroic deeds aren’t motivated by romance, but by simple, consistent goodwill (and perhaps a mutual enjoyment of kart racing on weekends).

Coda: Love in a Different Castle

Where does this leave us? GoNintendo muses whether “stranger things have happened,” but also acknowledges a romantic future for the duo seems all but impossible by this point. Nintendo is unlikely to revisit the question anytime soon.

In a way, the whole saga cements Mario as gaming’s most persistent hero—and maybe, unintentionally, its most relatable. Is it possible that being “just friends” really is the best outcome? Or is the real fairy tale the Goomba-stomping, star-chasing adventures we’ve shared over all these years—accomplices, companions, and, if nothing else, prime examples of dedicated friendship in the Mushroom Kingdom.