Earlier this week, one of the T-shirts available on The Yetee featured Princess Peach wearing a combination of her dress and a skirt reminiscent of a magical girl costume. After purchasing a T-shirt because obviously it’s freaking awesome, I started to ponder an important question.
Is Princess Peach actually a magical girl?
I know, I know. megax, Mario itself has so many transformations ever since the original game in 1985, so how could we take that and say Peach is a magical girl?
To that, I say it’s a valid point. When you have Mario, Luigi, Toad, and even Rosalina also turning into a cat with a bell, it’s tough to argue specifically that Peach herself stands out as a magical girl, even if everyone’s cute in the cat outfit. (it’s the gap moe of the mustache). The core Mario series has several powerups that transform characters into special outfits and even animal powers, so we really can’t specifically point out one character as being special.
So my mind went towards attributes that we’d consider magical girl-ish. Several Zelda games have the titular character either supporting or gifting Link/Lunk/Lonk/Twink with a special endgame power-up during the final battle, so that’s something I’d consider a magical girl to do. However, I can’t really say that Peach does that for the Mario series at all, so that element is out.
Next, I thought to examine Peach’s specific games where she plays the main role. 2005’s Super Princess Peach does use an anime trope that’s seen sometimes in magical girl series: the overactive emotions leading to power. So that’s an interesting sign even if nothing else in the game works towards my hypothesis (or anything approaching worthy of playing).
And then we arrive at Princess Peach: Showtime. I was incredibly excited for the video game starring Peach that released back in March, but never got around to purchasing it or playing it, so I do what I always do when thinking about a topic: look to see if someone else has done the hard work. And unsurprisingly, someone’s already uploaded all of Peach’s transformations on YouTube. (thank you for your hard work!)
As you can see in the video above, we have stock footage of transformations, a powered-up version of her, and a super, super powered up version for the final battle. All of that is historic magical girl elements needed for a title. We have episodes that feature a lot of different jobs and battles relating to those themes.
I absolutely cannot disagree that at this point it feels like somehow Nintendo have truly made Princess Peach into a magical girl and I am all on board with it. While most of the world associates magical girls with the Sailor Moon franchise, we have a lot of titles that celebrate that heritage and any time we have something mainstream like the Mario franchise embrace the lore, we should take it and say “yes, this too is magical girls and you should love it.”
And that’s my argument that somehow ties together what this blog is about.
Wait, it’s not about magical girls on stage?
Perhaps Nintendo will get Peach to do one of her transformations in Showtime in a later Mario game.