Mario and Luigi have swapped places, promising horrors to come

Photo: Yoshikazu Tsuno (Getty Images)

Children may be able to intuit psychic disturbances before they arrive, like animals behaving strangely as a storm starts to develop far away. Danny Torrance scrawls REDRUM on a bathroom mirror before his family moves to the Overlook Hotel, knowing what horrors lie in wait. Haley Joel Osment claims to see the dead all around him, frightened at what this means for the therapist he speaks to. In each case, terror follows the kids’ unnerving behavior.

God help us all when we must inevitably face whatever evil our latest child prophet is channeling in their decision to create an ominous vision of Mario and Luigi inhabiting one another’s bodies.

Tweeted by @boy_chimney, who writes that “one of the kids at my job made this,” the image shows a coloring book page that uses only three pigments and a few words to instill a bone-deep sense of dread. Mario stands frozen, hands bent into an unnatural position, as he wears Luigi’s green hat and stares forward through dead green eyes. Next to him, Luigi wears Mario’s red and is unable to move his crimson pupils. “They are not themselves,” the child has written above them, underlining “themselves” once to underscore a mysterious message. Luigi, who suffers some invisible torment, whimpers “help.”

The internet has tried to decode the picture, zooming in on various features in an attempt to uncover clues as to what all of this could mean.

So far, the prophecy remains unclear. All we know is that something bad is on the way and that the plumber bros. have been chosen as its vessel. It isn’t fair. Mario and Luigi have been so much already. They’ve been accused of incest by Sebastian Gorka, had their genitals analyzed by the perverts at this very website, and poor Mario’s been the subject of a human woman’s lust and stripped bare for the world’s amusement. Now they’ve been repurposed as harbingers of doom, made by a child’s hand to peer back into the minds of everyone who looks at their swapped places and strike fear into our hearts.

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