‘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 references to her identity.
Unsurprisingly, this has caused a wave of negative responses from a certain subset of gamers and critics, who take issue with her being a trans. ‘Nintendo has gone woke,’ one account tweeted. While another stated: ‘This trans bulls**t has gone too far.’
As soon as I saw criticism like this, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. It seems trans characters existing in a video game world where there are murderous flowers, walking mushrooms and flying racoons is too much of a stretch for them.
I, for one, welcome this correction and find it sad that this was originally censored out of the game.
As a kid growing up on a farm in rural Iceland, I rarely saw any positive representation of trans people anywhere. If they were depicted, it was often in a very negative way, and portrayed as objects of disgust or tragedy – like in soap operas that my mum and grandmother watched, where they were depicted as violent predators or ridiculed.
Constantly seeing people like you depicted negatively — especially when you are trying to figure out fully who you are — can fill you with shame and disgust. This is definitely something I had to battle growing up, so unlearning and shedding that shame took me a very long time.
Representation like Vivian really would have helped me and made me feel seen and accepted. It would’ve given me the opportunity to see myself reflected in my favourite hobby. It would have affirmed that I wasn’t alone, and that there was nothing wrong with being trans.
Queer people exist, and they should exist in video games. This is a fact people simply have to get over.
Vivian isn’t even the first transgender character in the Mario series. A character called Birdo (also known as Ostro) is depicted in a 1988 manual for Super Mario 2 with the description: ‘Ostro, he thinks he is a girl. He’d rather be called Birdetta’.
While she would be framed very differently now than she was then, she was still an important character to many – myself included. I often pick her when playing Mario Kart, and have fond memories of the character from previous games.
People up in arms about Vivian being openly transgender seem to be so unable to step out of their own personal experience and put themselves in other people’s shoes that it’s astounding. This is why I think they get so offended and angry about anything that doesn’t fit their normative and narrow world view.
The irony here is that those groups often claim that ‘woke’ people are the ones that get ‘offended’ and ‘triggered’ about everything, while being unable to contain their feelings about a trans character simply existing in a video game.
The fact is that their negative reactions only strengthen the need for characters like Vivian to be visible in modern gaming. It remains more important than ever.
Trans people like myself have always existed in society in one way or another, and we will continue to do so. We’re not going anywhere, so we also deserve to see ourselves positively represented in things like video games.
Diverse characters are becoming more and more visible in gaming. As a result, those objecting to it will soon find themselves without many games to play.
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