Toads are apparently a genderless race

Ray Trace

Ray Trace

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Ray Trace
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-reveals-the-toads-gender-secret/1100-6423610/

(btw, toad and toadette are not romantically involved, just...friends. welp, another official thing i'm going to flat out ignore)
 
i assumed they reproduced asexually anyway

as for toad and toadettes relationship i thought they were siblings
 
The plot.....thickens?
 
Natural hermaphrodites. Like slugs. They still like to be identified as "he" and "she". Just like Yoshi.
 
one of the mario tennis games implies toadsworths moustache is fake

also
Magikrazy said:
wait so whats the deal with peach then

shes at the very least 1/4 toad

is she 1/4 genderless
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DragonFreak said:
Yyyeeeaaahhhh I almost dislike this as much as "koopalings are not Bowser's children" thing.
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I personally think this is even worse.
 
Frankly, that article has problems. Only three direct quotes were provided. One explicitly put the kibosh on Toad and Toadette being siblings ("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]"), but the one about Toad genders is actually a lot more ambiguous than the article's writer leads us to believe: "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" - that's all we can be sure that Koichi Hayashida said, and frankly, that sounds like like Nintendo's stance on Toad genders is "lol idk", not "nope, no genders, they just take on gendered roles" (whatever the hell that even means). And really, given Nintendo's fondness for whitewashing plot and making things ambiguous (i.e. "Toad and Toadette are not siblings"), "lol idk" actually seems like a much more believable stance than what the article's writer's proposing.

I wish Gamespot would post the actual interview. The full context and content of what the dude said would make the whole thing a lot more credible and usable as a reference. The third and final quote isn't even understandable without the article text framing it: "Hayashida clarified that Toads are not mushrooms at all, but the resemblance and nomenclature is too uncanny not to wonder. “This particular riddle might stay unsolved,” Hayashida said. “That’s one of the great mysteries of the Mario universe.”" - seeing as the paragraph above that was acting like one mushroom eating another mushroom is cannibalism, maybe all he was saying is that they're not the same as Super Mushrooms and whatnot.

Hell, the whole cannibalism is idiotic nonsense. If one species of mushroom (i.e. a Toad or Goomba) is a cannibal for eating a completely unrelated species (i.e. a Super Mushroom or a 1-Up Shroom), then you might as say we're cannibals for eating unrelated species of mammals like cows or pigs. That's not how that word works.
 
^Hear, hear!

This is the "Sakurai said they scrapped adventure mode in SSB4 because they didn't want the cutscenes posted on Youtube" thing all over again.
 
Walkazo said:
Hell, the whole cannibalism is idiotic nonsense. If one species of mushroom (i.e. a Toad or Goomba) is a cannibal for eating a completely unrelated species (i.e. a Super Mushroom or a 1-Up Shroom), then you might as say we're cannibals for eating unrelated species of mammals like cows or pigs. That's not how that word works.
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yeah that's kinda like saying sharks are cannibals for eating other species of sharks
 
i actually think this hilarious, it goes against what everyone would have expected otherwise.
 
Walkazo said:
I wish Gamespot would post the actual interview. The full context and content of what the dude said would make the whole thing a lot more credible and usable as a reference. The third and final quote isn't even understandable without the article text framing it: "Hayashida clarified that Toads are not mushrooms at all, but the resemblance and nomenclature is too uncanny not to wonder. “This particular riddle might stay unsolved,” Hayashida said. “That’s one of the great mysteries of the Mario universe.”" - seeing as the paragraph above that was acting like one mushroom eating another mushroom is cannibalism, maybe all he was saying is that they're not the same as Super Mushrooms and whatnot.
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Well, I'd want that too, and perhaps a translation, rather than an interpretation from a writer who has potential to distort and sensationalize.

So...

I'm getting this vibe.

Glowsquid said:
This is the "Sakurai said they scrapped adventure mode in SSB4 because they didn't want the cutscenes posted on Youtube" thing all over again.
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I have one question: is it true that characters like Yoshi and Kirby (the article included is Japanese, retrieved from the Kirby Wikia) have no explicitly stated pronouns in the Japanese media; it's just that they are localized to the masculine pronoun? Hell, I've read somewhere that the developers even joked that Kirby is female. If that's the case, it seems to me that the article has drawn conclusions: they say that because Nintendo hasn't explicitly stated their genders, this makes them genderless.

So yeah, I'm skeptical about this.
 
Walkazo said:
Frankly, that article has problems. Only three direct quotes were provided. One explicitly put the kibosh on Toad and Toadette being siblings ("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]"), but the one about Toad genders is actually a lot more ambiguous than the article's writer leads us to believe: "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" - that's all we can be sure that Koichi Hayashida said, and frankly, that sounds like like Nintendo's stance on Toad genders is "lol idk", not "nope, no genders, they just take on gendered roles" (whatever the hell that even means). And really, given Nintendo's fondness for whitewashing plot and making things ambiguous (i.e. "Toad and Toadette are not siblings"), "lol idk" actually seems like a much more believable stance than what the article's writer's proposing.

I wish Gamespot would post the actual interview. The full context and content of what the dude said would make the whole thing a lot more credible and usable as a reference. The third and final quote isn't even understandable without the article text framing it: "Hayashida clarified that Toads are not mushrooms at all, but the resemblance and nomenclature is too uncanny not to wonder. “This particular riddle might stay unsolved,” Hayashida said. “That’s one of the great mysteries of the Mario universe.”" - seeing as the paragraph above that was acting like one mushroom eating another mushroom is cannibalism, maybe all he was saying is that they're not the same as Super Mushrooms and whatnot.

Hell, the whole cannibalism is idiotic nonsense. If one species of mushroom (i.e. a Toad or Goomba) is a cannibal for eating a completely unrelated species (i.e. a Super Mushroom or a 1-Up Shroom), then you might as say we're cannibals for eating unrelated species of mammals like cows or pigs. That's not how that word works.
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Walkazo, I want to quote you on a DA journal regarding this. That was pure gold.

Dr. Mario said:
I have one question: is it true that characters like Yoshi and Kirby (the article included is Japanese, retrieved from the Kirby Wikia) have no explicitly stated pronouns in the Japanese media; it's just that they are localized to the masculine pronoun? Hell, I've read somewhere that the developers even joked that Kirby is female. If that's the case, it seems to me that the article has drawn conclusions: they say that because Nintendo hasn't explicitly stated their genders, this makes them genderless.

So yeah, I'm skeptical about this.
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I read once (I forget wear) that only female Yoshis lay eggs that hatch into Yoshis, and male Yoshis can only lay eggs that explode. I wanna say it was Wikipedia, but I seriously have no clue where I got the info.
 
Hey cool, quote away - spread the word about the terrible journalism that is that article. Just give credit ;)

The Yoshi egg things sounds like fanon: it makes sense, and I've seen it and similar theories around the fanfiction archives and whatnot, but afaik, nothing solid's ever been said by Nintendo on the matter.

As for the age-old pronoun trouble, Japanese just doesn't use them much: once a subject's introduced, the noun parts of following sentences can just be dropped altogether (English can do this too within sentences: "Sally ate dinner, ran around and fell asleep." - nary a pronoun in sight), and using pronouns would actually seem unnecessary and awkward. I dunno for sure that pronouns were never used for those characters, but it makes sense if it's true. And it also makes sense that the localizers would then have to choose one gender or the other when translating, since English is less flexible about noun dropping, restating the name over and over and over would sound as awkward to us as pronouns would to the Japanese, and "it" is generally considered too dehumanizing or whatever. Although you do still see "it" sometimes, like the Codec Conversation about Yoshi in SSBB.
 
Which is wrong. And stupid.

Toad wears their mushroom hat sideways?
 
I also use "they". I think it's perfectly fine, if you don't know the gender. It's either that or you have to say all those nouns over and over again, which is so wearing.
I agree with Walkazo in that "it" is a bit dehumanizing. You only ever use that word to refer to people when you say "Congratulations! It's a [insert gender here]."
 
I first thought Toad was a girl the first time I played a mario game.

Also it's pretty stupid think their genderless.
 
Magikrazy said:
I use they.
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Dr. Mario said:
Which is wrong. And stupid.

Toad wears their mushroom hat sideways?
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Singular "they" IS viable, but for some reason, lots of people are taught that it's unacceptable, and people doing the translation work are either part of the misinformed bracket or they know that if they try to use it, other people will get mad and say it's wrong and demand that it be changed to "he/she" or some other ugly nonsense like that. Which is wrong. And stupid. Prescriptionist attitudes towards language is pretty irritating to me in general, whether it's people swapping British/American spellings (both ways), poo-pooing the use of contractions in formal writing, refusing to acknowledge emergent vocabulary and novel derivational affixation, or yes, flipping the hell out about singular "they". Like really, it's filling the problematic gender-neutral-pronoun gap in the language: it's a good thing, stop blocking progress. If people always acted so stubborn, we'd still be speaking like Shakespeare. Actually no, not even that: we'd still be grunting cave people if language didn't evolve.
 
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