Nintendo made a revelatory announcement that one of its well-known characters doesn't identify along the gender binary of "male" or "female."
Toad, Mario's long-time compatriot in many, classic games, has long been thought of as male, but was supposed to be genderless/asexual, according to the Huffington Post (via GameSpot). During an interview discussing the upcoming "Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker," producer Koichi Hayashida divulged some unexpected information about Toad, Toadette, and the gender binary.
"This is maybe a little bit of a strange story, but we never really went out of our way to decide on the sex of these characters, even though they have somewhat gendered appearances," Hayashida stated. "But I think what I can say is that Toadette and Toad are not siblings...perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are adventure pals. And that's certainly true here [in Captain Toad]."
Hayashida also revealed that Toad is neither a toad nor a mushroom...which is good to know because I really can't stand fungi or amphibians in my video games.
This isn't the first time a beloved Nintendo character has turned out to be something other than what was expected at first blush. In the manual for "Super Mario Bros. 2," it was written that the character Birdo is, in fact, a boy who believes that he is a girl and would much rather be called "Birdetta." In an interesting bit of "retconning," the later versions of "Super Mario Bros." did not mention Birdo's transgender leanings.
