Talk:Boom Boom (species)

I'm not going to argue for or against having an article on Boom Boom's species, but I'm going to disagree about including Pom Pom as a member of Boom Boom's species...I think there's several things wrong with that, for instance: 1) Of any sources that indicate Boom Boom is an enemy species, there is also indication of multiple Pom Poms, implying they would be rather exclusive from each other (think Birdo/Yoshi), 2) In addition, absolutely nowhere official does it say Pom Pom(s) is/are a member of Boom Boom's species (just like there's nothing saying the Boom Boom(s) is/are a member of Pom Pom's species - if anything they're all just a rare breed of overgrown Koopas like Bowser and his "kids"), and 3) This just reinforces the Smurfette Principle without a solid reason. LinkTheLefty (talk) 12:11, 27 September 2013 (EDT)
 * Except Birdos and Yoshis look completely different (and originated separately), whereas Boom Boom and Pom Pom are physically the same barring the hair and slightly different shell features (although how Boom Boom shells are depicted changes all the time). The lower half of the shell covers the entire body with the limbs coming out of holes, like regular Koopas, and quite unlike Bowser and the Koopalings, who have regular scaled flesh separating the belly scutes from the carapace. It'd be far more speculative to lump them all into one species (and any ambiguous talk of "breeds" should be avoided like the plague), whereas calling Pom Pom a Boom Boom isn't unreasonable: if we needed Nintendo to spit out every last detail before we can do anything, the comprehensibility of the wiki would suffer greatly. And as discussed on Pom Pom's article (with all the references necessary to back up the wiki's assertions), while some sources do say there's multiple Pom Poms, others say there's only one Pom Pom character, with the original Japanese explicitly saying she's the "Koopa Army's lone female" 「クッパ軍の紅一点. 」, so blame Nintendo for the Smurfette Principle (continuing the tradition they started back in 1988 with Wendy). - 13:09, 27 September 2013 (EDT)
 * My point about Birdos and Yoshis has more to do with how they seem to all have seem to have set genders (I suppose) across their species, but if that doesn't work then here's another example (albeit a different Nintendo series): Tauros and Miltank. Considered different species, but all have the opposite gender and are similar enough to be considered "counterparts" (it's completely irrelevant they were introduced at different times, but this is virtually universally accepted). Or actually, going back to Mario: Boss Bass and Big Bertha are considered male and female-exclusive sub-species of Cheep Cheep, respectively. But that's neither here nor there - the Japanese flavor text for both characters normally doesn't differentiate from singular and plural from my understanding, so you've still got varying official translations out there that refer to either of them in the singular or plural form. Some "ambiguous talk" is unavoidable because of certain vague qualities in the language. In any case, I maintain that Boom Boom(s) and Pom Pom(s) is/are categorically different based on the fact they are always classified as separate entities, regardless if you go by the original or a localization...especially considering the Boom Boom articles are primarily split due to conflicting, inconsistent translation in the first place. LinkTheLefty (talk) 15:32, 27 September 2013 (EDT)
 * Except there have been explicitly male and female Yoshis (and you could argue that the different ways the Birdo character is dealt with also indicate that there are male and female Birdos too, but that's a really messy situation). The Boss Bass / Big Bertha thing seems to be more like the Nidorans of Pokémon than Tauros and Miltank since their Japanese names are the same, "Kyodai Pukupuku", save for the gender sign - I'm not even sure if anything in English even says they're male/female counterparts (it's not in the SMB3, YIDS, SM64DS, SMAS or NSMB manuals, at any rate). But either way, that's beside the point: what matters is what's happening with this species. And while Japanese usually is useless for plural/singular stuff, the phrase used to describe Pom Pom literally means "the lone female": 「紅一点」 (the full line's here): it's not ambiguous at all - it's very deliberate (and a deliberate pun, too). Inconsistencies between localizations give us wiggle room to deal with subjects in the most logical way possible without having to break from canon; it'd be folly to not look at different translations, because that'd be ignoring whole swathes of valuable information. -  19:33, 28 September 2013 (EDT)
 * Hm, I think whether or not there are truly supposed to be Yoshi genders is arguable because in the rare case they give out gender-specific designations it's likely certain localizers doing what sounds better and not realizing that it's supposed to be an it all along, but I digress. However, while I don't think there's much to add on this topic at the moment, I do want to point out that there's a recent Super Mario 3D World screenshot with multiple Pom Poms, which would seem to back me up on the idea of keeping them separate (seen here). While the game isn't out yet and for all we know she does a duplicate trick before the battle like a Chargin' Chuck, it's nonetheless something to keep an eye on for the game's release. LinkTheLefty (talk) 14:06, 15 October 2013 (EDT)
 * My guess it is a duplication situation - hence the Pom Pom on the left threw a different-looking shuriken, while the other two are both lacking the green hair decoration, by the looks of it (i.e. clues to let the player figure out which one to stomp). - 18:57, 17 October 2013 (EDT)

Duplication Situation
And now, it turns out that both Boom Boom, Pom Pom and even Bowser can duplicate themselves in Super Mario 3D World. I kinda knew it would happen, but I didn't expect it would happen too soon. But Pom Pom is definitely not a species.--Prince Ludwig (talk) 01:00, 25 November 2013 (EST)

Where's the Super Mario 3D World section of this article?
I thought this article would be updated fairly quickly when Super Mario 3D World came out, but there isn't anything about Boom Booms being in the game. Is it because The Boom Boom being mentioned to be in SM3DW already covers that, do we have evidence or just clinging to his character status, is it laziness, what? SmokedChili (Talk) (Thoughts) 13:08, 22 January 2014 (EST)

Boom Boom (species)?
I'm sorry, but where has it ever been implied that Boom Boom is a species? Is it because you fight Boom Boom more than once? You fight Bowser more than once, but Bowser isn't a species, so that can't be it. What is it then? Do we just assume every Koopa is a species? Should there be a Morton (species) article? Or a Lemmy (species)?


 * Because there is Pom Pom, hope that helps.


 * Reasons are here, the main one being that you fight multiple Boom Booms at the same time, and not just Boom Boom and Pom Pom in the new games, but also two identical Boom Booms in SMA4. A lot of other things were ambiguous, so it made more sense to have both a species page and a character page instead of just a character page while ignoring all the iffy stuff. There was a lot of discussion preceding that TPP, where the definitive decision was made: 15 people voted in favour of making a species article (one of whom wanted only a species page), against 9 opposers. - 18:41, 3 November 2014 (EST)


 * I guess the multiple Boom Booms could consider it a species. I'm reminded of Pom Pom being able to create copies of herself. That could very well be the case in SMA4, but like the saying goes, "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras", so I guess the article has enough evidence for it. Thanks, Walky.

New Super Mario Bros. U
The Prima guide says they are one character. There is nothing stating they aren't all one character. The appearance on top of a castle isn't intended to be taken literally, it's just a marker for where Boom Boom will be fought if it were intended to be taken literally, then A: he's really huge up there, and B: he has some remarkable powers of incorporealness, being able to phase through that doorless roof when the player enters. As for Screwtop, Boss Sumo Bro isn't shown normally to keep the unusual boss a surprise. Given that one official source says they're all the same character and no official source says they're different, that means they're the same character, and should be treated here as such. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk) 20:45, 11 January 2018 (EST)
 * This is part of a broader issue for us. After what Nintendo finally decided to tell us two years ago about the existence of character names which aren't actually personal names and after looking at the Japanese bios of various characters having this "issue", I came to the conclusion that the most appropriate answer to the question "Is the Boom Boom appearing in Super Mario Bros. 3 the same Boom Boom appearing in New Super Mario Bros. U?" is neither "yes" or "no", but rather "That's irrelevant for Nintendo Co., Ltd.". They are always characters having the standard appearance of the species and the name of the species. I'm still wondering if we should make a proposal to more explicitly follow the depictions of Nintendo of America, who are more prone to stating the existence of "The characters", just like in this case. Regarding the second point, the Koopalings too were huge compared to the towers and castles and passed through the roof in New Super Mario Bros. Wii so this is not something unique to Boom Booms. I mean, New Super Mario Bros. Wii had a similar system but clearly showed that there was just one Koopaling in each world who then jumped to the castle after being defeated at the tower, whereas here we clearly see different Boom Booms standing on top of the various towers at the same time. So, in terms of what the game shows us, we should conclude that the Boom Boom boss isn't the same. At the moment you can add what the PRIMA guide states in the New Super Mario Bros. U section, but I really wonder if someday we'll have to tackle the two big issues of regional depictions and the characters who have the standard appearance and name of the species. If anything, despite what the PRIMA guide consistently told us, we are not stating that Bowser Jr. is one of the eight Koopalings, i.e. Bowser's children, in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, are we?--Mister Wu (talk) 09:22, 12 January 2018 (EST)
 * Prima as a whole feels like a questionable source. As Mister Wu pointed out, they consider Bowser Jr. a koopaling when he's not and they claim (or used to claim, at least) that Daisy was Peach's cousin when Nintendo has never suggested that. I'm positive that more inaccuracies may exist somewhere in those guides.--Thatguy62 (talk) 10:44, 12 January 2018 (EST)
 * iirc, it was Shonen Jump that called Bowser Jr. a Koopaling and not Prima. Either way, by simply being a young Koopa, he is, in fact, a "Koopaling," he's just not one of the "notorious" seven. And could you provide an exact source on the Daisy thing? Either way, Prima is an inordinately more accurate source than whatever Nintendo of Europe spontaneously decides to say, they've been known to outright make things up that are extraordinarily contradictory to what actual games depict. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk)

Derived species
I gotta ask why that was changed to "variant" it was fine before MarioLover54 (talk) 20:22, August 17, 2019 (EDT)
 * There was a discussion about changing the terms here. -- 20:25, August 17, 2019 (EDT)

Merge this with Boom Boom
I think we should merge this page with the Boom Boom page. My reasons for this are similar to my reasoning for my proposal for merging Birdo and Birdo (species), except that here there are even fewer differences and reasons to split. Whereas Birdo at least has different colours, every Boom Boom besides Pom Pom (who I don't think is relevant here since she's in her own page) is identical (the shell having spikes or not is a design detail that varies by the game, not the individual), so we end up covering games with multiple Boom Booms here and games where there's only one on the main page, which is strange and results in much of the information about Boom Boom being arbitrarily split across two pages while some of it is on both pages (potentially violating once and only once). There's also a lot of contradictory official information here about whether there's one Boom Boom or multiple (far more than Birdo has), when really all it is is the developers of each game using however many Boom Booms they want to use; this wouldn't be a problem if we had one page about Boom Boom, but because we have two, we have to speculate about which appearances are the character and which are the species. As an example, Boom Boom in New Super Mario Bros. U is the character according to a PRIMA guide but is the species according to the world map, which leads to us picking between the two official sources (which is discouraged by Canonicity) to decide which page to put it on. Just because there's more than one doesn't mean we need to split in such a bizarre way, otherwise we should split Mario into character and species because there's two of him in the intro for Donkey Kong Jr., or Toadette because there's two in the Super Mario Galaxy intro, or Pom Pom because there can be two as goalkeepers in Mario Sports Superstars, or Bowser because you can place multiple of him in the Super Mario Maker games. There's also the fact that the Birdo proposal passing means that this being split is inconsistent.

Proposer: Deadline: August 23, 2021, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Per proposal.
 * 2) I've actually never really liked how this was handled
 * 3) Per proposal.
 * 4) Per this all the way, I hated the way this article is handled for years. Having a general Boom Boom article that covers both and mentions instances where both individuals and species occur is much more ideal than having two almost redundant articles.
 * 5) Now that we are starting to have the templates to handle the situation where individuals tend to be as close to generic members of the species as possible and even bear the species' name, merging is feasible and should better reflect how these are handled by Nintendo.
 * 6) I think we can agree that there is meant to be a Boom Boom character, however trying to discern whether it's the character or just a random member of the species (or both) in any given game is way too difficult.
 * 7) Per Proposal.
 * 8) Yes. Please.
 * 9) Per proposal, this has always bothered me.