The theme of the story

What is the narrative theme of the PM games? Besides being interpretations of the monolithic Hero's Journey, not much. You could of course copy this and do yet another straightforward tale of Mario saving the world from an evil of inconsequential identity, or you could do something more. You could make an attempt at some depth and pretentiousness.

And pretentiousness I have come up with. First, since this is a video game, I concluded that the narrative theme must mesh together with the gameplay and visuals. What theme does the gameplay of Paper Mario evoke? Well, the only thing I could come up with is paper (duh). We can actually take the paper in PM to be metaphorical or symbolic of something else.

The common qualities we associate with paper are frailty, artificiality, and shallowness. From this we can deduce a commonly explored narrative theme: the value of imitations over real things. Also known as "can a copy surpass the original?". With slight adjustment, this is the main question I believe the game should ask:

"Does a shallow and fragile imitation still possess value?"

The question applies to papercraft itself, but it works on a meta level. Does this game that we're working on, that merely imitates PM, still have value? What about video games as a whole, as they are a shallow imitation of real life? Or any work of fiction, for that matter? In the context of CtC, it has relevance in the motivation for the antagonists. The tribe that controls time in the PM are effectively content creators, and time itself is just an imitation, or creation that they maintain. Does something so artificial and easily broken as in the CtC story still possess real value? The ones who want to destroy it obviously believe "no". It is a valid question, however, and you don't necessarily have to give a clear-cut answer.

As the main narrative theme, it should ideally be echoed all through the writing and atmosphere of the game. You may or may not do so, but this is the theme I came up with.