[jacobolus]

You’re taking it too literally. The point was that they made it so that players would necessarily quickly learn that the mushroom wasn’t an enemy, even though other things that looked nearly like mushrooms were enemies (as was learned the first two or three plays by dying to them). If it was easy to avoid the mushroom, some players would spend many plays through carefully avoiding it. “Force” is relative.

[eru]

You could have tried jumping on mushrooms.