The internet is fighting about whether The Super Mario Bros. Movie is woke or anti-woke. You might ask, “Don’t we all have better things to do?” But I assure you that the answer is no. No, we do not.

In its opening weekend, this adaptation of the hugely popular Nintendo franchise pulled in more than $375 million (set against a $100 million budget). Some conservative media personalities interpreted this as a victory for normal people with pre-2020 politics: “The anti-woke Super Mario Bros movie just set a global record,” comedian Steven Crowder tweeted .

Well, Super Mario Bros. is beautifully rendered. It’s charming and visually faithful to the madcap environments of the games. But it is by no means anti-woke. Insofar as it looks that way to observers in 2023, that only shows how far the baseline has shifted. “Anti-woke” at this point basically means no one gives a lecture about the gender pay gap, the Koopas aren’t a metaphor for global warming, and the only rainbow is the road the characters drive on in Mario Kart. If Luigi isn’t on estrogen, we’ll count that as a win.

I get it. When practically every character , brand , and storyline is aggressively retconned to fit a social agenda, one feels relieved if writers do nothing more than recast an iconic maiden as an axe-wielding girl boss. But that’s the point: Conservatives are suffering from a kind of Stockholm syndrome, grateful for movies that don’t sneer at them too openly. It starts to feel like begging for scraps.

Because love it or hate it, Super Mario Bros. entirely rewrites the basic plot of the original video games. That plot is extremely simple: A beautiful princess is locked away by an evil dragon (technically a turtle, but that’s a separate online debate). You, an Italian plumber, must conquer the dragon’s minions (also turtles) in their castles. But each time you discover, per the iconic line from Mario’s first solo game in 1985, that “our princess is in another castle.”

Peach is beautiful, courageous, encouraging — and in need of rescue. There are innumerable variations on this theme, but that’s its basic template. Those inclined to point out that Peach is a playable character in the first sequel should be advised that Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) isn’t actually a Mario game. It’s a different game, Doki Doki Panic (1987), which got reskinned because the real second sequel (The Lost Levels, 1986) was deemed too hard for American audiences. Mario itself, in essence, is about saving Princess Peach from Bowser.

If you set out to make the definitive movie version of these games, the obvious choice would be to tell that story. But the creators of Super Mario Bros. bent over backward to avoid putting the classic version on screen. Mario’s motivations and relationships are thoroughly reimagined: He has to team up with Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) to save his brother Luigi (Charlie Day). Peach becomes the indomitable fighter who smuggles a weapon into the midst of Bowser’s henchmen even when she (very briefly) consents to be kidnapped. “She can do anything!” says her sidekick Toad, flexing a tiny muscle.

As aging nerds like me will recall from the days of GamerGate, “your princess is in another castle” was a byword for everything the feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian despised about video game tropes. It represents the kind of plotline that the professionally offended cannot abide. Wokeness means translating that kind of sensitivity into ironclad doctrine.

The damsel-in-distress story is not the only story in the world. There are great stories of female heroism. But they are not the story of Super Mario. That story goes: Our princess is in another castle. You must save her. It’s a good story and an ancient one. It expresses something essential about human nature.

If we cannot admit that, if our tastemakers refuse to, if we don’t even notice them going out of their way to deny it — that is a victory for wokeness, not a loss. A victory for reality, by contrast, would mean telling the truth without apology: Sometimes brave men have to fight strong men to save vulnerable women. Not always, but it happens. We should be able to say so.

Spencer Klavan is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and host of the Young Heretics podcast. His book,  How to Save the West , is available now.