Fan-based relationships, pt. 2

All aboard the S.S. Love Ship! Destination: Mario fandom. Haven't seen the first part? It's right THERE!


VIVIAN x MARIO: Mario, being the main character/every man/straight dude of the series, is paired with virtually everybody. This is most evident in the RPG games, especially Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, where it is often hinted that other  partner characters have some kind of attraction to him. There's Goombella, who almost confessed at the end of the game, and then you got Vivian, who spends a considerable amount of time alone with the hero... and who also almost confess. That last one initially got a lot of attention shipping-wise. The human/ghost pairing thing is a bit unusual if you weigh the implications, and that's without taking into account that Vivian is strongly implied to be transgender. Hmm...

LUIGI x PEASLEY: Sometimes, the biggest of things can be in the smallest details. Prince Peasley was a minor character in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, but his interaction with Luigi, as little as it was, seem to have sparkled the imagination of a million fan girls, as now there is a huge amount of fan fiction depicting the two in a romantic relationship. If you're looking for yaoi/slash fan fiction in the Mario fandom, this is likely you'll get a ton of this pairing.

PEACH x BOWSER: Have a classic! It's the oldest of them, and the most enduring nowadays. I mean, Peach gets kidnapped so much, maybe it's all part of an elaborate plan to be together with Bowser without hurting Mario's feelings, who knows? Maybe it's just Peach developing a Stockholm syndrome over the years? I'm not here to tell you, there's plenty of fan fiction to quench your thirst for answers, though. But I can tell you that there are also plenty of bait-and-switch scenarios involving the two, courtesy of Nintendo themselves. First, Peach and Bowser getting married in Super Paper Mario, wedding suit and dress and all. Then, it happening again in Super Mario Odyssey (because yes, even though this deviation was submitted in 2008, I still took the time to update the description to include that detail! What are you doing here anyway, looking at my old ass, outdated art? Go see my newest stuff, you silly goose!)

YOSHI x BIRDO: There's something kinda interesting about this shipping: it kind of transcends the traditional couple composition, in the sense that both characters' genders are unclear. Yoshis are sometimes regarded as genderless, since they're all able to lay eggs and there is no gender-specific characteristics in the species. And then you got Birdo who, like Vivian in the second Paper Mario game, can be described as transgender (the Super Mario Bros. 2 manual explicitly states that Birdo is a male who thinks he's a female. That's a rather clumsy and outdated definition of a trans girl, yet it's still one in its core). Although Nintendo subtly let go of the trans implications in recent years, they still tend to associate her with Yoshi, and have gone so far as to make them similar in design and gameplay (after all, they're both egg-generating dinosaurs).


All the characters above belong to Nintendo!


Update, 2018-06-23: brushed up and streamlined the descriptions a bit to reflect my current feelings on each pairing.