My stance on Mario canon (for versus debating)
The Mario series is very controversial when it comes to versus debating and power scaling, in no small part to its confusing canon. Now to a certain extent this is understandable, as there are so many games in the Mario franchise and not everyone is going to be knowledgeable in all or even most of them. However, I also feel that there is absolutely a double standard when it comes to the Mario series to write everything off as non-canon, while series with similar loose canons are not given the same treatment. Today I hope to reconcile some of that. This will intend to connect every part of the Mario franchise that I believe to be canon, with everything linking back to the mainline platformer Super Mario series. Also, there is a certain idea that I have seen go around that I will call "not canon until proven otherwise". Now I don't necessarily have a problem with this argument, except that the Mario franchise seems to be the only series that this argument gets used against.