Mad_Dog_of_Fujiwara
She/Her- 9,211
- 10,535
A second high tier downgrade has hit the Mario supporters.
(sorry this is so close after the 2A upgrade but this has been in the works for a while lol) -Kirbonic Pikmin
I’m not sorry though -Mad Dog “Massive Fucking Sadist” of Fujiwara
@Kirbonic_Pikmin and I have been in the kitchen for a while, and it's time to show you what we've been cooking.
The Premise
Individual dreams in Mario are treated as Universal, mainly, through Mario Party 5’s Future Dream. This is due to the English Manual stating that Future Dream contains “...the wonders of the universe in this outer-space race for the stars!”, as well as in the Japanese version of the game, where Eldstar states that Future Dream is “endless”.There is some supporting evidence for this as well, with dreams visibly containing countless stars and what appear to be nebulae in the background. Dreams contain their own dimensions, and as shown with Dreamy Luigi merging with a dream world, they contain their own space-time as well.
The Future Dream Problem
To get straight into it, viewing Future Dream as a full universe is flawed. Aside from there being little evidence in the first place, what’s present is very shaky or outright wrong, so let's get to it bit by bit, along with some new evidence.The English Manual statement doesn’t really prove anything. Future Dream contains “... the wonders of the universe in this outer-space race for the stars!”. This isn’t an explicit statement of it being universal in size, nor containing ALL the universes’ wonders, just that it contains wonders of the universe. Many things can count as a “wonder” of the universe, our planet, Earth, is frankly a miracle wonder, as it's the only fully inhabitable planet we’ve found yet. A solar system is a wonder of the universe, a galaxy is a wonder of the universe. This specific phrase doesn’t really prove that Future Dream is universal in size, just that it contains celestial bodies from the universe. Considering what’s visible within all depictions of Future Dream is at least a Multi-Solar System sized space, that would qualify for a “wonder of the universe”.
No character ever refers to Future Dream as a universe in size. In the English translation of the game, it's pretty explicitly referred to as a galaxy, which is why the Japanese text is used. However, the JPN text also doesn’t refer to Future Dream as a universe either. When introducing Future Dream, Eldstar refers to it as a dream made up of “dreams of space”, using “uchuu no yume (うちゅうのユメ)”. Uchuu is an infamous and contentious word within versus debating, as it's very general, and has a multitude of meanings of varying size, with its main meaning being “space”, but it can also be used for “universe”, or “cosmos”, among other things. Uchuu on its own isn’t definitive proof of universal size, and is just a blanket term to refer to space / being in space. To further this point, Misstar, when speaking to whoever was the Super Star of Future Dream, refers to it as a “dream of space”, using “uchuu no yume” again, continuing the non-specific size. The lack of a specific size could be part of why the English translation just called it a Galaxy and left it at that.
However, the death blow to this would be what’s present in the Official Japanese only guide for Mario Party 5. Within the Future Dream section of the guide, sates:
"In Future Dream, you can experience what it's like to go on a journey through space. Run around the inside of a space floating in space and master using rockets and transportation devices."
What’s notable, is that this guide doesn’t just use the blanket term “uchuu (宇宙 )”, which can mean many things, it uses “uchuu kuukan (宇宙空間 )”, which very explicitly only means “outer space”. Not the universe, just outer space. Just flat out saying “outer space” isn’t enough to qualify as universal in any power scaling site.
So, in total, Future Dream has never been referred to as a universe, only having been referred to with vague terms of “space” or “outer space”, it has only visually been shown to contain a Multi-Solar System sized space, with any other arguments being massive extrapolations.
Considering that Future Dream currently stands as the only proof that Dreams can be universal in size, without it standing as proof of universal dreams, there is simply no other evidence for dreams being universal. Effectively, this kills any arguments for Mario’s Cosmology being 2A, or even 2B. Before we discuss where the verse’s god tiers and cosmology would land, let's discuss some other notable arguments that need coverage..
(It’s Not Infinite, Either)
In a recent translation by HakanaiBlue, a trustworthy translator, and translation checking from Agnaa, someone familiar with proofreading translations on VSBW, especially within a versus context, the Japanese statement by Eldstar has been found to go as such:“"Welcome to Future Dream! This is a world created from "dreams of space."
"Everyone holds a yearning for space. We'll have an exciting time within those unending dreams!"
("endless" is also a valid interpretation over “unending”)
Agnaa (here and here) has pointed out that while Future Dream is called “endless/unending”, it doesn't necessarily mean that in a spatial sense. While most initially believed this statement implied infinite spatial size, upon looking further into the context, he agrees that Eldstar is likely referring to Future Dream in the sense that it will last forever. Hakanai has also specified that it uses the phrase “endless/unending dream”, which uses the term “Hatenai yume (はてないユメ)”.
Hatenai yume isn’t the most frequently used phrase, and interpretation wise its usage for unending / endless dreams can be meant both in terms of it going on eternally, the dream never stopping to exist because people always dream of space, or the dream being spatially infinite. However, considering the context of what Eldstar is speaking of, the former makes much more sense. He’s speaking about a dream that’s created from many dreams, and that EVERYONE holds a yearning for space. The sentence reads much better as him saying that they’ll have a great time within the dreams that will never end, as people are always dreaming of space. If they wanted to be more clear with the interpretation of this being an infinite space spatially, it would be more clear to refer to it as an infinite world, or even infinite space. But instead he calls them unending dreams.
Overall, the interpretation of Future Dream being infinite in size simply doesn’t hold up, and honestly, a universe being infinite in size should require a bit more evidence than something as vague as this anyways.
What About Everything Else?
Recently however, non Future Dream related arguments for universal sized dreams have cropped up, so lets cover all of them now as well:One major argument would be that, In Dream Team, multiple locations can be seen with full starry skies or nebulae in the sky, implying they have some sort of large cosmic scope to them. However, simple starry skies or nebulae aren’t enough to denote universal size. Galaxies can contain tens of thousands of nebulae and over a hundred billion stars within them, and the universe contains upwards of 20 trillion galaxies within it. It would take an astronomical amount of dreams of the currently shown size in Dream Team, in order to reach universal size. So no, just because dreams appear to contain space, starry skies, or nebulae within, does not justifiably mean they’re universal in scope.
Dreams containing entire dimensions is notable, but not particularly relevant. As per our universe standards, dimensions can qualify as universes but only if they possess sufficient size; As in, a dimension with size comparable to our own universe would, of course, be a universe, but would not be a universe if it was only shown to contain a starry sky. It’s a similar case for the space-time argument; Being a space-time continuum is all well and good, but it ultimately means nothing if the space in question is not demonstrably universe sized.
What if it Was Valid, Though?
This is somewhat of an aside, as the arguments above present a comprehensive case as to why Future Dream is not a universe, but this section is still needed as a secondary argument in case any of the points raised here are brought up in the thread itself. Future Dream is currently interpreted as being one person’s dream. However, this isn’t necessarily the case. As newer and more accurate translations have shown, Future Dream is the collective of all dreams about the universe (“dreams” is said plurally); Basically, if you and I were to have two separate dreams about the universe, they wouldn’t be separate dreams at all - they’d both make up the greater “whole” that is Future Dream.The obvious problem that stems from this new translation is how regular dreams would scale to Future Dream; If Future Dream is made of multiple dreams, then no singular dream can be equal to Future Dream. In that same line of reasoning, no individual component of something made of multiple pieces can be equal to its entirety - Or in other words, 1 cannot equal 2, 3, or so on, because it is one component of several. To scale one dream to Future Dream is to, in effect, argue against basic mathematics.
This still raises the question of what to do about the Mario Party 5 ending, which depicts each dream as an orb relative in size to one another, including Future Dream. While there’s not much that can be said about that, the logical issue presented above should take precedence; The visuals presented in MP5 are not absolute, and if they lead to logical paradoxes like “1 >/= 2”, then we can’t really let that slide.
The main counterargument to the above is that Future Dream is infinite. Ignoring how the very first section heavily implies this isn’t the case, let’s give Future Dream the benefit of the doubt and say that it is in fact infinite. Therefore, dividing it by a finite number of dreams would result in infinite space anyways, right?. This would be true, if there actually were finite dreamers - As accepted in this thread, there are actually an infinite number of people dreaming, and therefore infinite dreams. So, it's only reasonable to assume that Future Dream, being a collective of dreams of the universe, must be an amalgamation of an infinite number of such dreams.
At that point, we're dealing with an infinite space divided into infinite pieces (infinity/infinity). This isn't infinite, nor is it finite, but rather undefined - And that makes the size of a single dream completely unquantifiable using this specific method.
Conclusion
So essentially, Future Dream is not only not of universal size, but it isn’t any one person’s individual dream, and is instead a cumulative dream formed by an unknown amount of people dreaming about space, meaning that even if it was infinite, it wouldn’t be scalable to regular dream sizes. It’s also distinctly not of infinite size, with its statements of being unending/endless likely referring to the fact that Future Dream will always exist, as there will always be people dreaming of space.Due to Future Dream’s unique state as a cumulative dream with an unknown amount of people contributing to it, Future Dream’s size could not reasonably be scaled to any other dream, this means that essentially any other dream related feat would be knocked down in scale significantly.
The current largest size we can grant Dreams besides Future Dream would be their showings in Dream Team, where the space of a dream can be seen, with entire starry skies and potentially entire nebulae visible in the background. This would be Multi-Solar System.
This, as you can imagine, would have a massive knockdown effect on all dream related feats, as well as cosmology related feats.
Future Dream would no longer be a universe, instead becoming Multi-Solar System due to the moderately large amount of stars visible within its background, and scaling to the size of dreams in Dream Team.
Antasma would be knocked down to Multi-Solar System level from consuming individual dreams.
The Dream Stone / Dark Stone / Dreamy Bowser / Zeekeeper / Dreamy Luigi would be Multi-Solar System level at minimum. Depending on how many dreams you believe the Dream Stone absorbed at the end of Dream Team, this could potentially be bumped up higher, however this would need some discussion.
Seeing as this thread essentially annihilates Mario’s 2B and 2A cosmology, all the god tier’s stats would be dropped to whatever the next best thing is. However currently uh, there isn’t quite a next best thing! So we’ll make a simple proposal that could hopefully act as a hold over for the time being, and things could be further discussed in future CRTs to adjust it's placing further.
The Void from SPM, as well as those who scale to it (Super Dimentio, Chaos Heart, and Pure Heart Wielders), would remain at some degree of multiversal - However, they would no longer be able to scale to 2-B/2A due to the cosmology no longer containing countless dreams of universal size. It would be limited to the universes/dimensions we see in Super Paper Mario (The 7 Worlds, Mario’s home universe, and Count Bleck’s home universe), and we can likely count a parallel dimension in Color Splash, which would be Low Multiversal (should be about 10 universes, however there are arguments for more or less, the specifics can be worked out later).
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