Super Mario RPG - What is Mallow saying? マリオさん！ ひどいじゃないですか。 I've been working on my understanding of and I came across a line in Super Mario RPG that I think I know the meaning of, but I'm not certain so I wanted to check. The scene is, Mario and Mallow go charging through a hail of arrows to reach the boss. At some point during their charge, Mallow trips and falls down and Mario just keeps on going. Mario then reaches the boss and Mallow shows up a moment later. Mallow then turns to Mario and says: > One of the meanings for on Jisho.org is 'heartless', which I think fits the context pretty well. So I'm thinking Mallow is saying "Mario San! Are you heartless?" Implying, "How could you just leave me back there?" From what I've learned so far the is supposed to be the text equivalent of intonation to change what would normally be ( not heartless) into (are you heartless?) Am I even close or am I completely getting the wrong here?

There are many answers covering this piece of grammar called `rhetorical negative`, like this one I asked myself over 3 years ago...

Basically adding or / to the end of a sentence can turn it into a rhetorical negative.

exploring your example:

> - Mario-san! That's cruel. / You are cruel.

> - Mario-san! That's not cruel. You are not cruel.

> - Mario-san! Aren't you cruel?

If we want to be more specific, and perhaps have a more natural translation:

> Mario! Don’t you think that’s cruel of you? (Leaving me there) or Mario! You are so cruel, aren’t you?

In the polite form, when using this rhetorical negative you will definitely end it with ``. And for proper affirmations you will end it with ``.

It gets trickier when we're using informal language because both affirmations and rhetorical negatives can end with just ``.

In that case you will only be able to tell the difference by the speaker's intonation, and / or by the context.