For most people, their only experience with EarthBound (also known as Mother 2 in Japan) is the characters and levels that also appear in the Super Smash Bros. games: little kids with bats and yo-yos in bright, colorful environments. And that's a pretty accurate representation of about 95 percent of the game, where you run around with four little kids who are trying to save the world by fighting things like bugs and robots and taxicabs.
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But the last hour of the game is something really different from everything that comes before it. First the kids have their souls ripped from their bodies and put into robots. When you finally reach the final boss, Giygas, an evil alien entity who is trying to destroy the world, things start to take a turn for the truly disturbing.
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The middle part looks remarkably like an endoscopic image of a woman's cervix. As we'll see, that isn't an accident. When you fight Giygas, he starts out looking like this:
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And ends up looking like this:
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First a cervix and now something that looks like an Andy Warhol painting of a fetus. What could all of this possibly mean? The commonly accepted theory is that, in order to defeat the evil alien, the characters travel in time to the point where it's at its weakest: that is, as a fetus. So basically, Ness and his friends are performing a stylized abortion. In a game originally called Mother.
But this has to be a creepy accident, right? Not really. Shigesato Itoi, the game's creator, has said in interviews that he based the Giygas fight on a traumatic childhood experience: He accidentally walked into the wrong theater at the movies and witnessed a murder scene from the Japanese film The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (yes, that's a thing). As if that didn't sound horrible enough, Itoi thought he was watching a rape and was deeply affected by it.
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Apparently, Itoi decided to work out his childhood trauma by including something equally disturbing in a Nintendo game ... thus traumatizing millions of other kids.
