In the tearjerker ending scene, the various party members say goodbye as the curtain closes on the adventure. Vivian stops just short of confessing that she is in love with Mario: “Uhhhh… Mario… I… I feel… I feel like I’ve grown to lo– Uh, yeah, um, never mind… Y-Yeah, I sure do think that you and Peach make a nice couple… Hmm hmm hmm…” In the epilogue, Vivian is leading a happy life with her sisters, as Beldam has implausibly promised to never be mean to her again. Her replacement Doopliss, meanwhile, has turned over a new leaf in his arrogant quest for attention and uses his shapeshifting powers to perform in stage plays.
Since the original release, some fans have held up Vivian as positive transgender representation. The 2004 English and German releases completely scrub all mentions of Vivian being trans or “a boy” from the script, weakening the drama. However, the 2004 Italian-, French-, and Spanish-language releases retain that Vivian is transgender, and apparently the Italian script even has her call herself a woman and proud of it. The 2024 remake depicts Vivian as transgender in the original Japanese and (as far as I know) in every translation/localization.
Reviewing all the dialogue relevant to this topic may be informative. To analyze the depiction of Vivian’s gender, I will refer to five different versions of the script: the original 2004 Japanese-language script of the GameCube release; the 2004 English translation/localization of this script; a 2023 fan-made patch by Griscuit called Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door+, which, among numerous other tweaks, restores text about Vivian’s gender; the 2024 Japanese-language script of the Switch remake; and the 2024 English-language script of the remake. My Japanese language skills are poor, but because Paper Mario RPG is intended for elementary schoolers, I can understand the text at least well enough for our purposes here.
In Japanese, Vivian uses the feminine first-person pronoun あたし atashi for herself. Third-person pronouns are less common in Japanese than in English, and I did not notice any used for Vivian in any of the text I checked. All English-language scripts refer to Vivian only with feminine pronouns. Details about Vivian are not the only variations between these scripts, but they might be the most meaningful. Unfortunately, a lot of the specifics we will look at are Vivian being misgendered.