Headscratchers / Super Mario RPG

• What's up with Geno's real name, "♡♪!?"? He's a Star Spirit, right? Well, in Paper Mario, we meet other star spirits, and get eight names — most all of which are star puns of some sort, and all of which are pronounceable by human tongues. So, did ♡♪!?'s parents hate him a lot, was he just messing with Mario, or were Twink and co. using pronounceable aliases in Paper Mario?
  • Considering that Geno had to find a body to inhabit while the star spirits in Paper Mario seemed to have physical bodies already, it may be that there are two or more 'tribes' of star spirits, some of which dwell closer to the physical world/have material bodies and speak the languages of the people they live near, up to and including names, while the others live as pure spirits or energy and speak their own unpronounceable-to-mortals language.
    • I wonder if they have their own unpronounceable-to-mortals names, but they realize this, and skip straight to giving alternate names that we can pronounce. 'Cause that trope may be fine once in a while, but if you're encountering it several times in the same game, it'd get kind of irritating.
  • Some real people deliberately give themselves names that are pronounced wholly differently from how they're spelt.
• Why was Mallow taken away from Nimbus Land? Who put him in that basket? Why did he have to go at all?
  • This troper assumed his parents got careless and accidentally dropped him off of a cloud in a tragic accident. The basket may have been his baby carriage.
  • Perhaps Mallow is younger than he looks and matures quickly. The game never really specifies how long he's been with Frogfucious and the tadpoles, so maybe a castle servant spirited him away to safety when Valentina took over.
• Who the hell was Geno? Not the Star Road guy — the actual Geno, the guy who Gaz's doll was based on. He's important enough to have a pretty advanced doll made of him (with star attacks for some reason), but nobody's ever heard of him except Gaz.
  • It might just be a custom toy.
    • A toy that Geno, or rather, the star-thing that possessed him, gave powers on the spot.
    • No, the toy was able to attack hard enough to knock out a full-grown man even before the star spirit inhabited it.
  • More importantly, who's bright idea was it to give a toy for children built-in guns and rocket fists?
    • Assuming that Geno's Spirit animated the doll and made it real there have been plenty of toys that have rocket fists and kung fu chopping action. Which also potentially answers the why do people sell upgrades for him? He could be a highly popular (or incredibly generic fits in with any set sort) doll and finding his new sword is no different from finding a new Power Ranger accessory.
    • Yeah, but remember, the toy - before Geno-the-spirit animates it, when it's just a normal toy - has weapons powerful enough to knock out Mario. That's the reason that the spirit says that the Geno toy looked the most powerful (even more than the Mario and Bowser figures), but that reason itself makes no sense.
    • If he's a highly popular doll, how come literally no one has ever heard of him? This is a world where people do that, everyone recognizes Mario by sight. If, I dunno, Woody from Toy Story came walking by in real life, people would be like "Hey, that's Woody!"
  • Probably the same people who sell upgrades for the toy, which I must assume are in turn magically upgraded by Geno's star powers to be compatible with his new magical body. Another question to ask is that what does Gaz think after he receives the doll with its Infinity +1 Sword attached?
• Why is Mallow considered the emo one? Bowser is seen crying just as often as him if not more, and generally for stupider reasons. And he writes poetry.
  • To be fair, when Bowser cries, he's more restrained and makes a token effort not to draw attention to himself.
• Booster owns Mario and Peach dolls. He knows about Mario's reputation of saving Peach. Yet minutes before the dolls are revealed Booster indicates he neither recognizes the real Mario nor knows who Peach is talking about when she calls for Mario. What gives?
  • The short, easy answer: Booster needed to have the mere concepts of crying and parties explained to him. It's clear that he's not exactly very bright.
  • The long, overly complicated: Some people are just not very good at mentally linking concepts together, even when to others it seems like a no-brainer
  • It's also possible that Booster has heard of Mario's reputation, but doesn't know what he looks like. As far as he knows, the toys are just cool dolls that he picked up somewhere (presumably from the same company that Gaz frequents). Perhaps the dolls come in packaging that vaguely describes who they're based on ("Now you can save the Princess just like Mario!"), so Booster assumes they're simply characters and not real people.
• This really only applies to the remake, but the Clown Car Barrage Triple Move utilizes Bowser's Koopa Clown Car. If Bowser has access to his Clown Car, why not ride it over to his keep long before reaching Nimbus Land? Sure, it would've been cumbersome to transport all of Bowser's minions to the keep before their numbers started to dwindle, but by the time he joins up with Mario, it couldn't have required more than two trips to get the whole party across.
  • Maybe he was secretly really invested in Mallow’s quest to meet his parents and wanted to see it through?
• How exactly does Czar Dragon, which is made of fireballs, turn into a skeletal dragon?