Wawario and Wawaluigi

2015fan art / charactertrending

Published September 18, 2026

Wawario and Wawaluigi are fan-made rival characters to Wario and Waluigi, drawn as grotesque, off-model doubles of Nintendo's mustachioed antagonists. Cobbled together from fan wikis, DeviantArt uploads and YouTube animations across the mid-2010s, the pair exploded on X and TikTok in late August and September 2026 as one of the year's breakout Mario fan-art edits.

mariofan art memesnintendo memescharacter design memesdeviantart memes

Overview

Wawario is a bulky, eyeless man with a missing tooth, an orange cap and shirt, and green overalls, styled as an even uglier mirror to Wario. Wawaluigi is his lanky, ratty counterpart with a blue shirt and black overalls, a stretched-out gremlin version of Waluigi1. The pair sit inside a wider Mario Bros. fan-character tree that shipping-obsessed corners of the internet like to draw as rows of increasingly cursed doubles3.

On X and TikTok, the joke is usually the reveal itself: someone lists off the normal Mario cast, then keeps going, and Wawario and Wawaluigi appear as characters that look like they crawled out of a bootleg NES cartridge5. Fan artists lean into the ugliness, drawing the two in classic 8-bit Super Mario Bros. style or in polished, high-detail illustrations that make the deformed proportions even funnier69.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube / DeviantArt (source creation), X and TikTok (viral spread)
Date
2015

The name Wawario first turned up on June 23rd, 2015, when YouTuber Theguywhoplaysgames uploaded a short animation in which Wario meets a shadowy rival called Wawario1. Wawaluigi's earliest known appearance came a little over a year later, on September 19th, 2016, when Fandom user JoeTheDerp created a page on The Amazing Waluigi wiki showing Wawaluigi as a lanky, grotesque Waluigi variant2.

The modern look for Wawario was locked in on September 18th, 2021, when Fantendo wiki user Cutman1987 made a page for the character and posted the orange-and-green design that later versions copied4. Nintendo made Wario and Waluigi; the Wawario and Wawaluigi characters are entirely fan creations, and the artists behind the individual designs that went viral in 2026 are largely uncredited.

How It Spread

How to Use This Meme

The format is usually a lineup reveal or a fake character select screen. Creators list off the real Mario cast, then keep adding uglier and uglier doubles, with Wawario and Wawaluigi as the punchline pair5. Fan artists also redraw them in retro Super Mario Bros. sprite style or in glossy, over-rendered illustrations that lean into how off-model they look69.

Frequently Asked Questions