Gay luigi originates from the philips CD-i videogame, "Hotel mario". The parody @ShigeruMlyamoto account again tweeted "please do not do that" about the picture, gaining 130 retweets and 650 likes (shown below, right).
Twitter users quickly mocked Gorka for missing the joke, including users like Justin Whang, who tweeted an edited screenshot of a Sega tweet showing Sonic the Hedgehogvoring Tails (shown below, right).
Gorka's tweet gave the image mainstream attention. I don’t know what’s worse: Being outed as a homophobe, or possibly accidentally coming out of the closet at work before you’re ready.
Several Spanish speakers on Twitter have tried to explain just how bad marica is.
On March 2nd, 2017, Twitter user @bobvulfov used it in a This Is the Future Liberals Want joke, gaining over 150 retweets and 640 likes.
On April 24th, 2014, parody Twitter account @RealShigeruM tweeted "Saw a picture of Mario and Luigi kissing one another online. It's probably the first fully done digital piece I've done that I feel extremely proud of.
“That is why we are in favor of all initiatives that make the LGBTIQ+ population visible, and we work on guaranteeing their rights.” The tweet ended with the tag “save a community manager,” in case anyone was confused about who was responsible for such a blunder.
What likely happened here is that the ministry account manager forgot to switch to their personal account when they tweeted about The Super Mario Bros Movie, at least that’s what I suspect.
On June 4th, Lushsux posted street art of the picture, gaining over 1,500 likes in four hours (shown below, left).