‘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.