Are Mario power-ups alive...?

Mount Wario

Mount Wario

King Bowser
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I mean, almost all of them either dance, move and/or have eyes... so that means they're alive, right?
 
Last time I checked, mushrooms are alive, even in Earth! :O
 
If one looks at the Super Mario Bros. manual, one will see the following line on page 2:

The quiet, peace-loving Mushroom People were turned into mere stones, bricks and even field horse-hair plants, and the Mushroom Kingdom fell into ruin.
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A lot of people take this to mean "omg mario iz killing teh toads guiz", but one has to look at page 8 to see a different take on the matter:

Mario's Friends
If you come across mushrooms who have been turned into bricks or made invisible, they reward you by giving you a power boost. With each boost Mario changes into a different, more powerful Mario, as shown below.
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One could easily take this to mean that Mario is freeing the Toads from the spell by breaking the blocks and they're giving him power-up items in return, but they conspicuously don't refer to the power-ups as objects at all. This entire section is simply called "Mario's Friends". Between that, the eyes on the Starman, and the Mushroom's ability to move on its own, it's very possible the power-ups themselves were intended to be living characters in their own right, and they were the ones you were supposed to be freeing from the blocks.

Obviously this entire idea was thrown out by Mario 3, but it still bears looking into.
 
I mean, the collectibles in Banjo-Kazooie have eyes and actually talk so...

The items in Mario should talk, then.
 
Just like LGM said, Mushrooms are alive. And flowers are also alive in the real world. However, powerups like the Cat Bell are just alive because Mario has a lot of fiction.
 
I guess the topic is about if the power-ups are sentient like animals, since they have eyes, which is something I can't really answer. I mean, technically, Fire Flowers and Mushrooms are alive. But maybe they're on the same tier as Bob-ombs and Bullet Bills, where in some games they're sentient, but others, it seems like their eyes are just painted on.
 
I think the power-ups just have eyes, but aren't actually sentient because plants or mushrooms aren't sentient. Actually it would be a lot worse if they can talk.

Thank you for reading
 
Just imagine Mario grabbing a puppy faced Mushroom and taking a bite out of it, like Paula Pancake from Fairly Oddparents's Channel Chasers.
 
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