featured-image

‘Truth is, it took me a while to realise I was their sister...

not their brother.’ This is the simple line uttered by a character named Vivian in Nintendo ’s latest game, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door . It was originally released for the Gamecube console in 2004, but has now been re-released for Nintendo Switch .



.. with one huge difference.

Vivian is now openly transgender – and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Some of the earlier Mario games were actually one of the first games I ever played, and I remember playing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door when it came out in 2004. I specifically recall Vivian as a fun and an interesting character, and I related to her because she shared stories about being bullied.

But back then, I had no idea that the English version of the game I played was hiding something. It turns out that instead of translators correctly stating she was bullied by her two older sisters – known collectively as the Three Shadow Sisters – for being trans, they said it was because she was ugly. In the original Japanese version, Vivian’s sister Marilyn corrects herself for calling Vivian a man, while the Italian version has Vivian state at one point: ‘That’s true, you are two sisters, but I am a woman too now, and I’m proud to have turned into a woman,’ according to the University of Perugia’s Japanese lecturer Francesca Di Marco.

Thankfully, in this new version, this erasure of her transness has been rectified and she makes several r.

Back to Entertainment Page