Web Animation / SMG4 - The Anime Arc

It's time to fight to save anime! Hopefully this won't have any serious consequences...

"Mario and friends pay the ultimate price in a war waged against anime."

—Official description

Anime is banned, and the gang have to save the medium...and each other.

The Anime Arc is the third major SMG4 Story Arc. Its story encompasses two major events: Princess Peach banning all anime after Bob destroys her castle, and the wide-scale disappearance of Inklings in Inkopolis just before the Splatfest.

The arc is told through several subplots and from multiple viewpoints. Spanning 12 episodes across 3 months, it is the series' longest official standalone story arc, not counting the two-arc Cosmology saga. The series' first movie, Meggy's Destiny: An SMG4 Movie, also serves as an epilogue to the arc's events.

The Anime Arc was the only major story arc in Season 9 and 2019, preceded by The Rapper Bob Arc, and followed by The YouTube Arc.

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Main Episodes

Prologues:

• "Mario Goes to the Fridge to Get a Glass Of Milk"
• "Mario's Prison Escape"

Part 1: The Anime Ban

• "Mario and the Anime Challenge"
• "Mario's Illegal Operation"
• "Mario's Lemonade Stand"
• "The Japan Trip"
• "Meggy's Bootcamp"
• "The Mario Showdown"
• "Mario Saves Anime"

Part 2: The Missing Inklings and the Battle of Anime Island

• "The Splatfest Incident"
• "The Inkling Disappearances"
• "Mario And The Experiment"
• "World War Mario"
• "Final Hours"

The Arc provides examples of:

• Aborted Arc: Meggy's desire to finally win Splatfest would have to wait until "Meggy's Destiny: An SMG4 Movie", thanks to Francis.
• Adaptational Villainy: You thought Francis was bad in Super Paper Mario? Wait 'til you see him here!
• Arc Villain: Three. Peach and Desti for part 1, the former issuing the anime ban and the latter wanting to win Splatfest. Francis serves as this for part 2, kidnapping Axol and using his Inkweaver to kidnap all of Inkopolis for the sake of his island filled with anime waifus.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: After the ban is lifted, it seemed that all the heroes had to do was beat Desti at Splatfest before their lives could go back to normal. Oh, how wrong they were...
• Big Bad Ensemble: Both Princess Peach and Desti serve as the villains of Part 1.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Inkweaver is returned to Axol, all the Inklings are rescued, Francis meets his demise in his island's explosion, and the main cast make it out safely with Meggy thanks to Ultra Instinct Shaggy. However, Desti is killed for her troubles (a funeral is even held for her) and Meggy is transformed into a human permanently, due to her sacrificing her ink and taking a blast from Francis's Goku Blue Replica to save her friends, and the Splatfest being ruined because of Francis.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Axol to Francis. Since Francis lives for anime, it's only natural he would fawn over Axol, who creates anime. But when it becomes clear that Axol wasn't going to make Francis any waifus, he decides to take matters into his own hands...
  • Francis to Saiko. He originally did what his "anime queen" asked without question, and she trusted him well enough in return. But when he is revealed to be behind the Inkling kidnappings, all bets are off.
• Cerebus Syndrome: See Killed Off for Real. You'll be more likely see this in later arcs from here on out.
• Darker and Edgier: Than even the Waluigi Arc, believe it or not. Peach becomes even more hostile for the first part of the arc, Meggy reveals her inferiority complex and why she's obsessed with training for Splatfest, Saiko spends the entire first half of the arc trying to cope with her status as a Persona Non Grata, Axol was bullied by Inklings as a kid for his love of anime, and the gang is forced to work with the Anime Cartel to deal with the crisis. This is all before Part 2, by the way, which is a Rescue Arc and War Arc mixed into one and ends with two people Killed Off for Real.
• A Day in the Limelight: Resident Token Evil Teammate Saiko and Action Girl Meggy both take center stage in this arc.
• Decoy Protagonist: You think Mario, Bob, Tari, and Fishy Boopkins, being the idiots who caused the mess to begin with, would be the heroes of this arc. Well, they're not USELESS, but the arc primarily focuses on Meggy and Saiko.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Peach being convinced into unbanning anime just in time for Meggy to make it to Splatfest is what ends Part 1, and kickstarts Part 2—where things truly get intense.
• Disaster Dominoes: An anime challenge gone wrong leads to Peach's castle once again being destroyed and an Anime craze to sweep across the kingdom, leading to the creation of A.S.S. and the Anime ban, which causes Francis to become leader of the Anime Cartel, who would later on cause the widespread kidnapping of most of Inkopolis, the cancelation of Splatfest, the death of Desti the Octoling, and the permanent change of Meggy from Inkling to human.
• Enemy Mine: In Part 1, the group joins forces with the Anime Cartel led by Francis to counter Peach's ban and eventually save anime. Unfortunately, this team-up later costs them and directly leads to Part 2.
  • Played Straight in Part 2, where the heroes team-up with not only Desti, but the remnants of the A.S.S., led by Chris And Swagmaster. While the former unfortunately dies, the latter two warm-up to the cast and by the end of the arc stay semi-good friends with the main cast.
• Everyone Has Standards: You know the Anime Cartel is bad news when not even Tari, a sweetheart who sees the good in everyone, wants anything to do with them.
• Evil Is Petty: Why is Francis trying out his newest version of Ink Zuccer on Meggy?... She gave him a "Reason Why You Suck" Speech back in "Mario's Lemonade Stand". And entire second part of Anime Arc began just because Axol refuse to draw to him some anime waifus.
• Fantastic Racism: In Part 1, Peach bans anime from the Mushroom Kingdom... including anime characters and anime-inspired Visual Novel characters like Saiko, due to Bob's Kamehame Hadoken destroying her castle, which causes more anime-induced acts of destruction called "The Anime Crisis". Saiko then has to flee for her life for much of Part 1 because of this.
  • Axol subverts this. Despite having plenty of reasons to detest the Inklings and use them as fuel for his pen, Axol doesn't seem to hold that much of a grudge for his childhood bullying.
    • Francis, meanwhile, has NO qualms kidnapping and draining the ink of half a species, potentially killing them, to fuel his lust for power and waifus, writing them off as mere collateral.
• Fire-Forged Friends: This arc, in case you had doubts about Mario's friend group actually liking each other, establishes that this Ragtag Band of Misfits can actually be a Badass Crew, even joined by former enemies for it.
• For Want Of A Nail: The death of Desti and all of Part 2 can be attributed to this trope. With Fishy Boopkins revealing how Inkweaver works to the Anime Cartel while unbanning Anime in the Mushroom Kingdom, its leader Francis decides to kidnap all the Inklings, including Meggy. This leads to Desti finding that Meggy's team was too easy to defeat in the Splatfest competition, convincing her to help find Meggy. During the trip to Anime Island, she herself gets kidnapped and abducted there. In it, she and Meggy tried to break out but was seized by False Goku. Just as she assisted the gang in breaking free, she was killed by False Sephiroth.
• Fugitive Arc: Essentially sums up the cast's position for Part 1, especially Saiko, since the Anime Ban has her forced to flee the Mushroom Kingdom.
• Heel–Face Turn: Peach, having ordered the ban and formed the Anime Secret Service to begin with to enforce the ban, is shown that anime isn't all bad, and peacefully removes the ban.
  • SMG4 himself starts the arc as a Hero Antagonist, having promised Peach to curb the group's shenanigans and joining the Anime Secret Service as part of this. However, when Chris and Swagmaster betray him, he's taken hostage by Mario and Boopkins, and discovers Saiko's position as a Persona Non Grata, he almost immediately renounces the A.S.S. and joins the heroes.
  • Chris and Swagmaster, first introduced properly to Mario and company as antagonists and having spent the first half of the arc as enforcers of the Anime Secret Service partially out of revenge for the heroes costing them their original jobs, ultimately join forces with the heroes when anime characters go kidnapping Inklings and Octolings left and right, and later become friendlier to Mario and company because of it.
  • Desti, Meggy's rival, also joins forces with the gang to rescue her rival. Unfortunately, we don't see her becoming a full-time hero since she dies in the second-to-last episode.
• Humanity Ensues: A combination of Meggy sacrificing all of her ink and getting hit by Replica Goku Blue's ki blast turns her into an anime girl.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Francis was shown to at least have some semi-decent moments in part 1, and mostly wanted anime unbanned like everyone else. Come part 2, he's far off the deep end.
• Killed Off for Real: Both Desti and Francis meet their ends permanently during "Final Hours". Desti dies from being backstabbed from Replica Sephiroth during "World War Mario", which is then confired at the end of the episode, while Francis is left for dead in one of his own Ink-Zucker machines as his Replica Goku Blue self-destructs and takes all of Anime Island with it.
• Lack of Empathy: Francis was the first Arc Villain to have no remorse for anything he did.
• Lampshade Hanging: Once anime is banned, Luigi wonders if the ban will have any major consequences and spark a series of huge events. Come the second part, he ends up being right.
  Mario: Nah, it's probably nothing!
• Non-Action Big Bad: Peach was responsible for banning anime, but she lets the A.S.S. do all the work.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Perhaps the biggest by far; Desti is Killed Off for Real and Meggy the Inkling has been turned into an anime girl.
• Once More, with Clarity: The first shot of "The Inkling Disappearances" (even before the Glitch Productions logo) is an ominous clip of Axol (who some of the characters theorized to be the culprit of the titular kidnappings in the previous episode) opening his eyes in what seems like a Traitor Shot backed by Dramatic Wind. The end of the episode reveals that this was Axol waking up chained to a wall in the same prison as Meggy. Lampshaded by the episode's captions.
  Start of episode: "Wait, was it Axol that did it?"
  End of episode: "We see our main antagonist of this arc once more. Look at him, so evil, so diaboli— wait what the!?!"
• Plucky Comic Relief: Swag and Chris serve as this, as they’re the sources of most of the comedy during the darkest episodes of the arc.
• Properly Paranoid: Tari's bad premonitions about the Anime Cartel in "Mario's Lemonade Stand" later prove to be 100% correct in the second part of the Arc.
• Rescue Arc: The second half of the Anime Arc is this played as straight as possible for the SMG4-Marioverse, with Meggy being the victim.
• Trauma Conga Line: This arc was far from kind for any of our heroes, but Saiko and Meggy got hit the hardest.
  • Saiko had to flee the country for reasons beyond her control, discovered one of her friends was kidnapped, briefly consider someone who helped her get her citizenship back was using her for his own plans, had to deal with being the Only Sane Woman for most of the second half of the arc, watched as someone else she trusted turn out to be a perverted, power-hungry monster, lost a potential friend who was not so different from her, and the first aforementioned friend nearly die and worried at the end that her efforts had been All for Nothing.
  • Meanwhile, Meggy was blown off for nearly three episodes by Mario and Tari, fought a gang war just to save her Too Dumb to Live companions, became a Drill Sergeant Nasty with Training from Hell in response to her insecurities of being unable to win, loses her weapons for an entire episode, is forced to donate some of her ink and time to save her Absurd Phobia in order to help her friend Saiko end the anime ban, gets kidnapped and tortured for her ink to help fulfill the Big Bad's fetish, watches her rival be murdered right in front of her, and endures one more round in the Ink Zuccer to defeat Francis and nearly died for her efforts. Hell, she has full-blown Survivor's Guilt in later episodes, and even changed species, forced to live the rest of her life as an anime girl!
• Token Evil Teammate: Deconstructed like you wouldn't BELIEVE with Francis. Whenever the group was forced to work with Francis and the Anime Cartel, the Otaku chameleon only escalated the problem of the week and did more harm than good. Furthermore, the arc would have ended with "Mario Saves Anime" had Fishy Boopkins kept his mouth shut about Inkweaver around Francis. Later, Francis becomes the Big Bad and nearly kills an entire species just for his anime fetish.
  • Downplayed with Desti. She's more of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, wanting to beat Meggy properly, which is why she teams up with the heroes to rescue her rival.
• Took a Level in Kindness: This arc brings out the heroic side of Saiko. The same goes for Desti in the second half, even if she does end up getting killed.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Bob for the first part, thanks to his Kamehameha destroying Peach's castle and kick-starting a full-scale Anime Crisis and starting the Anime ban, and Boopkins for the second, telling how the Inkweaver works to the Anime Cartel while unbanning Anime in the Mushroom Kingdom causes their leader Francis to steal the Inkweaver, Axol and the Inklings to create an island of anime waifus.
• Villain Has a Point: Surprisingly, almost every villain of this arc, at some point or another, actually DOES have a justified grievance.
  • Peach: Peach instilled the ban, not just because Bob blew up her castle and blamed Goku for it, but other folks inspired by Bob and Boopkins' Anime Challenge also caused chaos between episodes. As the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, she had to respond to the crisis caused by the idiots she lets hang out at her castle. She even is willing to let Boopkins, Mario, and Axol make a case when they approach her.
    • Peach also, intentionally or not, was right about anime being a source of violence. Especially when, almost immediately after she steps down as Big Bad, Francis slides in, snatches up Axol and Inkweaver, abducts at least half of Inkopolis' population including CHILDREN and teenagers (Meggy being among them), and would subject the Inklings to Cold-Blooded Torture and nearly kills them all to harness their ink... all to fulfill his anime fetishes. Not to mention that Francis has most of the anime characters he creates act like incredibly violent soldiers.
  • SMG4: Peach lets him use her Secret Slide Room in her castle as his editing room, so he needs to do better by her to keep his channel afloat and thus joins up with the Anime Secret Service to do so. Furthermore, stupid law or not, Mario and Boopkins were actually breaking the law he was trying to enforce by trying to smuggle anime.
  • 'Chris and Swagmaster:' Mario, Luigi, Boopkins, and Bob's escape from prison before the arc actually cost the two their previous jobs. They're even reluctant to help the cast at all at first for the second half of the arc because the disbandment of the A.S.S. once again left them unemployed.
  • Jeeves: Mario and Tari set up a small, rival business venture right in front of his Milk Emporium. Considering the start of the 2019 season, Jeeves was being lenient with Mario's shenanigans and polite for ruining his previous milk venture by simply asking Mario to move his lemonade stand elsewhere. He only got violent when Mario refused, and Francis was the one who escalated the conflict to a gang war.
  • Francis: Due to Mario and Boopkins losing his shipment of products, SMG4 getting in the way, and Bob fleeing with his merchandise, all four of them are lucky that he just forces them to work for him to make up for the amount of money they cost him.
    • He also is justifiably angry that Axol decides to just leave after saving Anime in the Mushroom Kingdom. Whether Axol found his work was done or just finding Francis and the Anime Cartel creepily obsessed with him, just leaving immediately after Peach changed her mind about anime was kind of a dick move. Axol also never gave Francis a reason as to WHY he couldn't just create a waifu or two for Francis, thus inspiring Francis to kidnap him, Meggy, and half of Inkopolis.
  • Desti: As horrible as it is to sabotage Meggy's team in any way she can, Desti IS a fellow competitor against Meggy in the Splatfests, and she wants to keep a leg up on her as best as she could. Not to mention that due to her status as an Octoling, Desti was probably not going to be favored to win.
    • She was also proved right to be concerned about Axol, but not specifically because of his mistreatment by the inklings. Axol's a sweetheart, it's just that Inkweaver in the wrong hands is dangerous. Those hands, of course, being Francis'.
• War Arc: The last two episodes of the arc are this mixed into the Rescue Arc. And no war is without its casualties....
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Ironically, it's the very princess this trope is named after who prompts this trope! Peach unbans anime just in time for Splatfest, where our heroes have unfinished business before they finally move on with their lives...or so they think.