SPICY Take: I LOATHE Fox McCloud in the Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
I don't just hate Fox McCloud, I LOATHE Fox now. It's all thanks to Nintendo and Illumination for severely damaging my perception of him. This is definitely my SPICIEST take on the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, but I said what I said.
To me, Fox isn't the "coolest character to ever exist," as my friends put it. I LOATHE him because his inclusion completely ruined and hurt my own perception of the Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
The constant glazing and spoiling of Fox with more and more screentime felt like a SEVERE betrayal to me. Seeing Fox get more of the spotlight over actual Mario characters made me visibly angry; I was clenching my fist every time he appeared on-screen. He's singlehandedly the biggest reason why Rosalina barely got her time to shine in a Galaxy movie, why Toad was reduced to even bigger comic relief lapdog than the first movie, and why Toadette was left out completely. And him getting more screentime than Rosalina in particular only solidified the hatred for me.
Not to mention the fact that in the grand scheme of things, he's just a "glorified pilot" to get the main characters from point A to point B, and his role could've been taken by somebody else! He didn't even participate in the final battle, either. Imagine if Toad finally had the courage to fully become Captain Toad, assembled the Toad Brigade (and Toadette) and piloted the Starshroom! Or, it could've been Lubba instead - Lubba is super underrated, she recently got more love in the Switch port of Galaxy 2. Her being the pilot would've given her more of a prevalent role, and either of those two taking Fox's role in the movie would have been so much better.
There are also plenty of Fox McCloud fans that have made me hate the character even more too. It's sad how I'm the only one willing to defend Rosalina, and attack the movie for not giving her any screentme. I'm the only person out there who feels genuinely heartbroken over how Rosalina got treated, especially since I cosplayed as her and she was the only new character I truly felt excited for.
And yet everywhere I go on social media, I see people glazing Star Fox. Everyone thinks that it's perfectly okay for a non-Mario character to just come in, and get more screentime than the core and main Mario cast themselves. It's like Skull Kid getting shafted just to make way for a Marth cameo in a Zelda: Ocarina of Time movie. All this shows how fans are willing to defend main characters being treated like dogwater and being abandoned in favor of propping up Fox. In fact, not only do people defend the latter, they think it's FUNNY, too.
Now to address some counterarguments I've seen.
Even if you loved Star Fox's inclusion, it was still objectively, a d*ck move of Nintendo to spoil him on social media, without showing him in any trailers or marketing until a week before the movie released. And no, "them doing it to advertise Glen Powell voicing him" is not a good defense. All the other voice actors were revealed in the movie directs, and yet they STILL chose to go the route of spoiling him.
And for those who say "oh, it's meant to set up a Smash movie," the execution of that was POOR. Let me put it this way. The Infinity Saga didn't shoehorn Thanos in constantly, instead, they kept his screentime small but meaningful as a way to gradually establish him as the big bad in Infinity War. Fox is the opposite - he was clearly shoved into the movie for every little second to FORCE the build-up, rather than keeping it gradual and under wraps.
And for those who also say "oh, it's just Nintendo reviving a dead franchise, why don't you love it?" I have this to say. Recently, the new Star Fox game was announced, and it's coming out this June. And it was only announced a month after the movie released. Given that the development of this new Star Fox game has likely been going on for a while, and likely even predates the development of the second movie, Nintendo could've just left Fox out of the movie and WAITED until the new game was announced to revive the Star Fox hype.
All in all, Fox McCloud's inclusion was clearly for forced fan-service, and him getting more screentime than actual Mario characters in the movie s what makes me loathe him. He also exposes a huge problem the Galaxy Movie suffers from overall - heavy reliance on cameos and external IPs and fan-service shenanigans just to prove a point.