#floatanium

[fnrrfygmschnish]

Apparently one of the directors of the Mario movie came out and said that the reason why blocks float is that they’re made using a magical mineral that’s mined in the Mushroom Kingdom, which gives anything crafted from it floating properties.  There doesn’t seem to be an “official” name for it (unsurprisingly) but they mentioned that they’ve been calling it “floatanium” because the name sounds funny.

Thinking about it... yeah, that actually works!

I think I’m going to adopt this as my explanation for the floaty blocks (I didn’t have one before) if I ever write/draw/etc. anything Mario related at some point in the future.

Unlike many of the weird random theories people come up with to try to explain game-mechanicsy things that most likely were never intended to have an explanation, this idea actually works with what we see of the games.

Donut blocks that fall if you stand on them -- well, they’re made with less of this material than other blocks (they’ve even got a hole in the middle, hence “donut” in the name.)  So they can float themselves just fine, but their floaty magic is not strong enough to support someone’s weight, and if you stand on one for more than a couple seconds it burns through the floaty magic and the block falls.

Other blocks are made of enough floaty-stuff that they can stay up for a very long time even with additional weight added on top; maybe they eventually fall if they’re left floating for years (leading to some ?-blocks lying on the ground in various games), but it probably takes a while.

Blocks that float, but appear to be wooden... maybe somebody in the Mushroom Kingdom just likes the woodgrain pattern and painted/carved blocks to look that way?  Or they are made of actual wood, but with pins/rods of floaty stuff distributed throughout, like how concrete has metal rebar inside for added support.

Bowser’s airships.  They usually are depicted as barely having any propulsion mechanisms, especially for something their size -- just a few jets and propellers scattered here and there.  And they float in midair and need to drop anchor to stay in the same place for long, a lot like sailing ships.  So what if a lot of the metal parts of these airships are made from floaty-material in metallic form?  That way they don’t need any means of propulsion powerful enough to “lift off,” and the few little jets and propellers would be mostly for added speed or changes in direction.

Other parts of the same world seem to have a lot less floating blocks than the Mushroom Kingdom itself -- the setting of the Wario Land games does have them (but then, it might be part of the Mushroom Kingdom or at least located nearby, since the plot of one of them involved a giant gold statue of Peach), but the WarioWare games seem to be set in a city with more real-world style construction materials, and you don’t really see floating blocks in the Donkey Kong Country games either.  Though there are floating barrels... which could be because the metal bands around them are made of floaty-stuff.  There seemed to be a lot less floating blocks in Yoshi’s Island than in the main Mario series, too.  Everything points toward this material being more abundant in the Mushroom Kingdom than in other places.

And if the Mushroom Kingdom is the only place you can find reliable mines for the stuff... well, no wonder so many villains want to conquer the place! People always fight over major resources -- gold, spices, copper, oil, and so on are all good real-world examples, and none of those have obvious magical powers. Maybe Bowser’s Koopa Kingdom used to have a fair amount but he’s already mined it out and used it to build his airship fleet.  And of course Smithy the “fill the world with weapons and have non-stop war” guy would want exclusive access to a magical ore he could potentially craft all kinds of weird floating weapons with.