The Most Terrible Things Princess Peach Has Ever Done

Unlike some other Mario characters, Princess Peach is a genuinely good person who cares about her friends. Unfortunately, she also gets kidnapped all the time. For a semi-professional damsel in distress, that's bad news. While languishing in the bad guys' clutches, Princess Peach often ends up brainwashed, possessed, or enchanted, and under the influence of King Koopa and other ne'er-do-wells, she can get up to some pretty bad things.

That's just how things work in the Mushroom Kingdom, and while Peach has some pretty dastardly deeds to her name, it's not her fault. Most of the time, anyway—Peach's abysmal sense of humor is all on her. Bowser's not going to take the fall for that one.

Let's get the big one out of the way first: in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Princess Peach straight-up tries to murder her longtime beau after he refuses to bend the knee and become her slave. Well, sort of, anyway. When the confrontation takes place, Peach is possessed by an ancient entity known as the Shadow Queen, who's taken over Peach's body and transformed her into "Shadow Peach." But it's still Peach's body doing the would-be killing, and that's close enough for us.

Shadow Peach is a force to be reckoned with, too. After The Thousand Year Door's main villain, Sir Grodus, goes through all the trouble to resurrect the Shadow Queen using Peach's body, the Shadow Queen decimates his robot body after he orders her to kill Mario—which is something she's going to do anyway. After a brief battle, the Queen gathers her energy and makes Shadow Peach impervious to Mario's attacks. No matter how hard he tries, Mario can't do anything but wait and hope he's not slaughtered in the meantime.

Of course, Peach gave the Shadow Queen a body, and she can take it away. When the Crystal Stars allow Mario's allies to distract the Queen by sending the plumber positive vibes, Peach gains control long enough to siphon off some of her power, giving Mario a means of attack. Ultimately, the Shadow Queen is defeated and sealed away and Peach returns to her normal self—but we're betting the reunion was pretty awkward.

If you know anything about classic video games, you'll recognize the phrase "Thank you, Mario! But our princess is in another castle!" That's what a series of thankful but ultimately worthless Toads tell Mario at the end of Super Mario Bros.' first seven castles—if they were really trying to help, they'd tell Mario where Peach is, not where she isn't. We're just saying.

Anyway, Mario finally discovers Peach at the end of the eighth and final castle, and the Toads and their signature taunt eventually fade into memory. But one person didn't forget: Princess Peach, who wasn't even there when Mario rescued the Toads, decided to tuck the line away, only to resuscitate it at the most inappropriate time. After helping Mario take out Wart in Super Mario Bros. 2, Peach manages to get kidnapped again in Super Mario Bros. 3, forcing Mario to travel across eight continents—including an arid desert, a frozen wasteland, and a world where everything is gigantic—to rescue her.

And once he does, how does she greet him? By saying, "Thank you, but our Princess is in another castle...," before adding, "Just kidding. Ha ha ha! Bye bye." Never mind that Peach is standing right there, or that Mario just risked his life (or lives) and decimated the entire Koopa bloodline to find her. Even if Super Mario Bros. 3 is a stage play and not a real adventure, it's not a great time for a joke, especially a bad one.

The 1986 anime movie Super Mario Bros.: Pīchi-hime Kyushutsu Dai Sakusen! (which loosely translates to Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!) plays fast and loose with Super Mario Bros. continuity—Luigi is dressed in blue and yellow, for starters—but that's understandable. In 1986, there wasn't much Mario material out there, and the crew at Grouper Studios had to cobble together whatever they could from Super Mario Bros. That's a great game, but it's pretty light on story.

The film loosely follows the first game: while Mario plays Nintendo, Princess Peach appears on his television screen and hops into the real world. She's around just long enough for Mario to fall madly in love, and then Bowser appears and whisks Peach away, forcing her to drop her necklace. The next day, a doglike creature named Kibidango scurries into the grocery store where Mario and Luigi work and steals the necklace. The Mario brothers chase Kibidango to the Mushroom Kingdom, and the trio set out to rescue Peach before Bowser can get her to the altar.

They succeed, of course, and send Bowser packing, which restores the Mushroom Kingdom to its former glory. It's not a happy ending for Mario, however. After the battle, he returns Peach's necklace, and Kibidango suddenly transforms into a handsome prince named Haru. Even worse, Mario learns that Haru is Peach's fiancé. Heartbroken, Mario returns to the real world to toil away at the grocery store, while Peach and Haru get married and live happily ever after.

The moral of the story? If a beautiful princess leaps out of your television screen, it's probably best to ignore her. Chances are, she's already taken.

Daisy, like her boyfriend Luigi, is more or less an afterthought in the Mario universe. She's Mario's love interest in the Game Boy exclusive Super Mario Land, which is widely considered a second-tier Mario title. A couple of years later, she made a brief appearance in NES Open Tournament Golf before disappearing for pretty much the entire '90s. In 2000, Daisy reappeared in Mario Tennis, and has since been a mainstay of Mario spinoffs like Mario Party, Mario Kart, and various sports games.

But unlike Peach, who received her own game (Super Princess Peach) and shows up regularly as a playable character (see Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario 3D World), Daisy has never appeared as a playable character in a mainline Super Mario title. She's conspicuously missing from the Super Smash Bros. franchise, too, even though later editions of those games feature pretty much every Nintendo character who's worth anything at all (as well as a few who aren't).

That's a pretty glaring omission already, but leave it to Peach to rub salt in the wound. In Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, one of Peach's alternate skins gives her Daisy's dress and hair—and gives Daisy absolutely none of the credit. Sure, Peach might not be the best character in Super Smash Bros., but at least she gets to compete. Stealing Daisy's signature look while the princess is limited to appearing as a trophy? Even for Peach, that's pretty low.

Princess Peach grew up to be prim and proper, but she was a terror as a child. In fact, in Japan, there was entire manga series devoted to her troubled upbringing. It's hard to find information about the comic in English (we can't even find a decent scan of the cover—the included image comes from Super Mario-Kun, an entirely different manga), but according to people who've read it, it's called Otenba Peach-hime, or Tomboy Princess Peach, and depicts the Mushroom Kingdom's future ruler as an absolute nightmare.

To wit: in one story, called "I wanted such a villa!," Peach invites her friends over to play in her treehouse, and then subjects them to all kinds of nasty pranks. She feeds them bird food. She uses tree sap to glue her guests to hammocks. The blankets she gives them are covered in caterpillars. And then, worst of all, she sends them into the shower, where the showerhead spouts "cicada pee." Gross.

Like the United States' Nintendo Power, the German magazine Club Nintendo ran a number of Nintendo-themed comics in the early-to-mid '90s alongside its regular previews, reviews, and reports on video game news. Unlike Nintendo Power, however, Club Nintendo's comics were less interested in telling a coherent story and more focused on cramming as many different characters onto the page as possible, resulting in surreal mashups of popular (and not so popular) video game franchises that only kind of make sense. They are fantastic.

Among the best is Super Mario: Verloren in der Zeit (or Super Mario: Lost in Time), which sends Mario on a time-hopping journey that sees him facing off against long-forgotten Super Nintendo stars like Joe and Mac, the Lost Vikings, and Plok. Things get really weird when Mario returns home, however. In his absence, Mega Man's nemesis Dr. Wiley used science to make all of Mario's friends evil—including Princess Peach, who serves as his second-in-command. Instead of her pink dress, Peach now wears a slinky black gown and sports long blonde hair. Mario thinks it's kind of hot—but he quickly changes his tune when Peach decides to capture Mario, strap him to a table, and subject him to some Clockwork Orange-style mental reconditioning.

Of course, right before the procedure begins, Mario's alarm clock goes off and the plumber realizes that the entire adventure was just a bad dream. Gee, where have we seen that one before?

By all accounts, Peach is pretty conservative. She wears frilly dresses. She spends most of her time (when she's not being held captive) baking cakes. Sure, she can tear it up on the race course or the soccer field, but all things considered, Peach is a very conventional Princess.

Not so in "Magic Carpet Madness," one of the stories published in Valiant Comics' short-lived Nintendo Comics System line. Sure, when it begins, she's as domestic as they come—the conflict in the comic's opening pages is Peach's frustration with her father, who tracked mud all over the palace carpet. It doesn't last. King Koopa infiltrates the Toadstools' castle by posing as a carpet cleaner, then transforms the palace rugs into flying carpets. One snatches Peach and propels her high into the sky. When she returns, she ditches her signature pink dress for a pair of tight jeans, a denim vest, spiked bracelets, and the most '80s sunglasses imaginable.

Peach gets a new attitude to go along with her fresh duds, too. She recklessly runs down passing birds with her carpet, heckles passenger planes, crashes Koopa's "Bad Year" blimp, and calls the Super Mario Brothers "suckers." Eventually, Mario realizes Peach has been hypnotized by Koopa's minions and all he needs to do is wake her up, so he grows a magic beanstalk right in her flight path, causing a head-on collision that knocks her to her senses.

Y'know, we take it all back. If that's how Mario treats his girlfriend (who characters in "Magic Carpet Madness" confirm is still a teenager, which, yuck), he deserves all the trouble Peach gives him and then some.