Vivian: Difference between revisions

'''Vivian''' is a major [[List of characters|character]] in ''[[Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door]]''. She originally worked as a member of the villainous [[Shadow Sirens]] alongside her sisters, [[Beldam]] and [[Marilyn]]. Later, Vivian defects from the Shadow Sirens and joins Mario as his fifth party member. She is consistently put down by her oldest sister, Beldam, and has had a poor relationship with both her sisters for quite some time when Mario meets her. Although she suffers from an inferiority complex throughout the events of the game, she learns to respect herself as she travels with Mario. In the original Japanese version of the game and some translations, Vivian is inconsistently depicted as either a {{wp|transgender}} woman, or as a male-identifying cross-dresser; however, due to the age rating the localizers were aiming at when translating ''Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door'',<ref name="DiMarcoessay">Francesca Di Marco. [http://www.fti.uab.es/tradumatica/revista/num5/articles/06/06central.htm Cultural Localization: Orientation and Disorientation in Japanese Video Games]. Retrieved September 27, 2016. ([https://web.archive.org/web/20210921074641/http://www.fti.uab.es/tradumatica/revista/num5/articles/06/06central.htm Archived] September 21, 2021 07:46 UTC via Wayback Machine)</ref> this is lost in the English version, and she is described only with feminine pronouns.<ref name="Japanese tmk"/>

In the Japanese version of ''Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door'', Vivian is implied to be a {{wp|transgender}} girl. While various other characters and narrative text describe Vivian using masculine terms such as ''otoko'' ("man"), and ''otōto'' ("little brother"),<ref name="Japanese boggly"/><ref name="Japanese tattle"/><ref name="Japanese menu"/><ref name="Japanese Goom Goom"/> Vivian initially describes the shadow sirens as ''san shimai'' "three sisters",<ref name="Japanese boggly"/> and routinely uses the feminine first person pronoun ''atai''. However, in ''Super Paper Mario'', Vivian's Catch Card describes her using the term ''{{wp|Otokonoko|otoko no ko}}'',<ref name="Japanese SPM"/> a Japanese-language term that can interchangeably refer to a feminine-presenting man or a crossdressing man, rather than "transgender" (which is identical in Japanese to the English-language word) or ''okama'' (a term for an otherwise masculine man who dresses as a woman, sometimes used as a slur to refer to trans women, even in family-friendly media at the time). However, Vivian never refers to herself this way.