Let's Talk About Vivian's Trans Identity in 'Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door'

A revelatory discovery for myself in my teens was vindicated twenty years after the original game's release with its remake.

image via Nintendo

I still have very vivid memories of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on the Nintendo GameCube. If you asked me to list down what are my favourite games ever made for the GameCube, this would probably be one of the first titles that I could think back to, and thus, seeing the game be remade for the Nintendo Switch (very faithfully at that, too) only brought back that feeling I vividly remember from having played the game for the first time when I was younger.

Of course, this isn’t going to be a review of the game itself because I think that would deserve a whole other piece in and of itself. But I did want to focus on one particular aspect of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door that’s gotten most of its fans celebrating like no other: it’s the fact that Vivian, one of the game’s main characters, is transgender.

This was actually something I only learned for the first time in high school, long after when I’d first beaten the game. In the original Japanese-language version of the game, in fact, it was made more explicit that Vivian was transgender, and was frequently the subject of transphobia by her sister Beldam.

The moment I first found out about this; I remember thinking to myself, as a closeted bisexual at the time, it was revelatory. Vivian wasn’t only one of my most-used characters in all of my replays of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, but she was the one character I remember having felt an aspect of relatability towards. After all, being a queer kid who didn’t really find that they were fitting in with most of your classmates, doesn’t it feel like you hurt at least a little bit inside when you’re not allowed to be yourself?

And thus, I also couldn’t find myself looking back at the GameCube copy with the initial localization in the same way again. Of course, things were far more conservative back at the time when the game first came out, and to maintain the E for Everyone rating from the ESRB, all references to Vivian being trans had to be written out. It was this point where I’d only remembered having been told that I was making stuff up when talking about Vivian being transgender.

A still from the original version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in Japanese.

But I also couldn’t help but feel like this was a moment of rediscovery for me. I just couldn’t see Vivian in the same light anymore - even with the proper translation from the original Japanese text having been hidden away. She still has all the same traits that we’ve loved about her for so long, but something about that treatment from her sisters only feels like it stings more. And with me having grown up a racial and sexual minority in a Catholic school environment, there’s only so much about how social expectations are placed upon you at that age. Thus I can only say I felt lucky that among my own teachers there, my coming out to them eventually built into a support system for me.

Alas, even her representation in the original Japanese version wasn’t perfect. On a Paper Mario subreddit I’d found, it was a point of contention even in the Japanese version, where Vivian’s sisters would call her masculine terms as a joke. Even then, there were other localizations that had referred to her as a cross-dresser, although even if that were the case, she’s still shown a great deal of love through the whole game and thus treated with love from the rest of the party members in the game.

Yet I think the fact that she was even shown to be transgender at all was enough for me back then. It was enough for me, because it felt like I’d seen a queer character in something that I’ve loved for so long not being treated as an “other.” That alone was a point where I had also realized that Vivian being seen in this manner was crucial towards my own coming out at the time.

Which only makes the fact she’s explicitly transgender in the Nintendo Switch remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door feel especially vindicating. It’s a vindicating moment because many queer gamers had known about this for a long while, and of course, it will still be vehemently denied by another sector of bigots who refuse to accept reality for what it is. But even if Vivian’s trans identity was only briefly hinted at rather than made explicit as the Switch remake were to show it, the treatment she’s received from her sisters happens to be a reality for many queer people.

The fact that the Switch remake had fixed this mistake that a more conservative era had made is huge enough as is. It’s a moment of vindication for many queer gamers who’d known about this for a while; but it’s also given many people the satisfaction of beating up video game bosses for the fact that they’ve given such a beloved character transphobic treatment through most of her life.

It’s stuff like that, which at least keeps the love for a classic game like this going strong all these years later. But for many queer gamers, this is far more than just a moment of empowerment for us.