What is Mario and Luigi Kissing?

A 2010 piece of fan art by Newgrounds user brycemilburn showing the Super Mario brothers kissing inside a green warp pipe, originally posted under the title 'The Gay Brothers'.

Where did Mario and Luigi Kissing come from?

It first appeared on Newgrounds on August 4, 2010, when brycemilburn uploaded the drawing with the caption 'lets do some plumbing'.

What does Mario and Luigi Kissing mean?

It is a shock/humor fan-art joke that plays on Mario and Luigi being canonical brothers, and it later doubled as a media-literacy punchline after Sebastian Gorka mistook a parody Nintendo Pride Month tweet for the real thing.

How do you use Mario and Luigi Kissing?

Users typically share the image inside parody Nintendo tweets or Pride Month jokes, and the John deer YouTube upload is one of the older reposts that keeps the picture in circulation.

Is Mario and Luigi Kissing still popular?

It is best remembered as a classic viral moment from 2019, and new reposts are rare, though the John deer YouTube upload still sits above 56,000 views.

Mario and Luigi Kissing

2010fan artclassic

Published September 5, 2026

Mario and Luigi Kissing is a 2010 piece of Newgrounds fan art picturing the two plumber brothers making out inside a green warp pipe. The image drifted through niche corners of the internet for nine years until a parody Nintendo account posted it for Pride Month 2019 and fooled former Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka into accusing Nintendo of promoting incest.

mario fan art memes newgrounds memes lgbtq memes backfire memes

Overview

The drawing places Nintendo's two plumber brothers in an open-mouthed kiss inside one of Mario's signature green warp pipes, done in the flat cartoon style brycemilburn used for the rest of his Super Mario fan art. It leans on the taboo that Mario and Luigi are canonically siblings, which is precisely the fault line the meme's history keeps pressing on2.

For most of its life the picture sat quietly on Newgrounds and inside a handful of YouTube reposts. Sebastian Gorka's misreading of a parody Nintendo tweet in June 2019 pushed Mario and Luigi Kissing from niche fan art into a mainstream story about parody accounts and media literacy3.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Newgrounds (viral spread on Twitter)

Creator

brycemilburn

Date

2010

Newgrounds artist brycemilburn uploaded the drawing on August 4, 2010, under the title 'The Gay Brothers' and with the short caption 'lets do some plumbing'2. It stayed a niche piece of Super Mario fan art in the years right after, circulating mostly inside Newgrounds and among the artist's own small following.

How It Spread

On November 27, 2010, a YouTuber named John deer uploaded a video that included the image, and that clip eventually pulled more than 56,000 views1. Over the next several years the picture moved slowly through niche channels rather than going viral in any single burst.

Parody Nintendo Twitter handles then kept Mario and Luigi Kissing in circulation. First @RealShigeruM in April 2014, then a successor account @shigerumlyamoto after the original was suspended, each tweeting 'Saw a picture of Mario and Luigi kissing one another online. Please do not do that' whenever the drawing resurfaced. The image broke wide on June 1, 2019, when parody account @NltendoAmerica posted it with a fake Pride Month message about staff 'of all sexualities,' pulling over 11,000 retweets and 38,000 likes3. Former Donald Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka quote-tweeted the account to accuse Nintendo of 'promoting incest,' apparently unaware it was fake, and users including Justin Whang piled on Gorka with a doctored Sega screenshot that showed Sonic voring Tails. Three days later, on June 4, street artist Lushsux painted a mural of the picture, and both AV Club and Daily Dot wrote the whole affair up as a media literacy story.

How to Use This Meme

There is no template to fill in. The image is typically shared as-is inside parody Nintendo tweets or Pride Month gags, often paired with a straight-faced scold like 'please do not do that' meant to mimic an official Nintendo statement.