I have a lot to say about Super Princess Peach and Sexism
I have a confession. Princess Peach was one of my first “sexual awakenings”. No, wait, okay. I have to be REALLY honest. She was my first sexual awakening. There. I said it. I had a crush on a fictional character before a real person. She always had and always will have a soft spot in my heart ever since I first played Super Mario 64.
Nowadays, Princess Peach has been shat on in favor for Princess Daisy.
In our more enlightened age, people have forsaken the “classical view” of a princess that was seen in Princess Peach in favor of Daisy. Over the years, Daisy has been subtly marketed as the more tomboyish of the two. She’s peppy, she’s loud, she’s brown-haired because we need to take back the throne from the blonds, and she’s “the more fun one”.
Fuck that Princess Peach, amright? That hoity-toity dumb bimbo who keeps needing to be saved. This is the 21st century - down with stuck-up blonds! And meanwhile, I was there in the corner laughing nervously at this uproar and whispering, “I’ll never betray you, Princess Peach. They don’t understand you like I do.”
I get it though. We need to showcase a wider variety of what a princess acts like. All for it. Princess Peach stood for the stereotypical blond bombshell princess that Nintendo cashed in on.
Well, originally, she was red-haired, but that changed with the times in favor of blond. That’s the thing though! Peach became what the popular male psyche demanded and desired at the time!
Therefore, she became the target of contention for every woman who grew up failing to meet her standard. But now it tipped too far in one direction, and I can’t help but feel that we never learned our lesson.
It concerned me when female gamers seemed to learn to hate Princess Peach by practically drawing an X on her face a la Mean Girls and muttering, “She’s a bitch.” When I’ve played Super Smash Bros. with girls, one of them typically makes some scathing remark about Princess Peach. “What a whore.” “That bitch.”
“That blond bimbo.”
Yay. In reality, we fell into the patriarchy’s trap all along - women hating on women. When Super Princess Peach first came out in 2005, I happened upon it by chance in Best Buy when I was looking for something for my birthday. It was always a deep dark secret that I now openly admit. I fervently wanted a video game that starred Princess Peach ever since I was little. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars for the SNES was the closest thing at the time, but we all know how obscure that game became. And there I was, 15 years old, all red-faced at buying a stupid video game. When I approached my mom in the store to show her what I wanted, I felt like I was making a drug deal. I shifted my eyes around me to make sure I wasn’t being followed or watched. I murmured, “This one.” I was confident that she would go along. She doesn’t read much into these things. She mixes Nintendo games with PlayStation. She would just buy it and go.
But that time, she stared at the cover for a while and said aloud, “Is this right? Super Princess Peach? Are you sure this is for you?”
AUUGGGGH. MOM DON’T MAKE A SCENE HERE IN BEST BUY THIS IS WHAT I WANT OKAY? BYE. I said yes, and she further asked some questions like “Are you sure?” and “Is that a little kid’s game?” And I just gritted my teeth and mumbled something incoherent about it being just another Mario game. I finally got the game, and I was excited to play, and breezed through it in almost one sitting. At the same time, it was an awful game. Let me lay it out this way. This is the first time in Nintendo history that Princess Peach gets her own video game.
Right? It’s her BIG debut. And so. . . The game has her trying to retrieve the Vibe Scepter from Bowser, and place it back in its rightful place on Vibe Island. Without the Vibe Scepter, people’s emotions are out of control.
Are you sensing a theme yet?
No?
Let me go into more detail.
The gameplay requires you to tap into Princess Peach’s four emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, and Calm) to get through obstacles. So, say you need to grow a flower, you make her sad and she cries so much that it---I fucking can’t even continue writing this. You get the picture.
So there I was playing this game in my bedroom and realizing how horribly sexist it was. I had so many conflicting feelings about it (maybe THAT’S what they were trying to do?) because on one hand I wanted to support my first waifu but on the other hand this was laughably dumb and sexist. I played through to the very end anyway. The other non-emotion-based abilities were enough to keep me going. That was really what I wanted. I just wanted a Mario-like game starring Peach where she used her umbrella and shit, maybe did a dance, and then saved the day and winded down with some tea in the final cutscene. Like you know Super Smash Bros. Brawl in the Subspace Emissary cutscene where she meets Fox? She’s sauntering down the Halberd while a literal dogfight is happening in the sky above her, completely unperturbed.
(Peach just not giving a fuck.)
And like her only reaction is a little “Oh!” as she protects herself from the wind as if it were nothing more than a little squall. There’s some sweet action of Sheik breaking into Fox’s cockpit, and the two jump down to the Halberd and run at each other until Peach raises a hand and offers tea to stop the conflict.
That is the Princess Peach I want to see, the one I think is rare in media - a conventionally feminine action/adventure protagonist.
Lord knows we have enough femme fatale assassins with a dark past.
The femme fatale assassin is seemingly the only acceptable female protagonist in movies. Why? Because it’s a male fantasy. The only way men are going to see a movie about a female action hero is if she acts more masculine. And it’s a trap. It’s a fucking trap. We dug ourselves in a hole again and can’t see the point three inches from our fucking eyes. You rarely see a female action protagonist who shouts “Ew!” when she sees a bug, or who loves to collect pins, or who has a thing for baking, or who doesn’t have some terrible trauma as a backstory. You never see a female action hero who is awkward around men or has no idea how to seduce someone. The moment a female character like Princess Peach can star in her own game, the developers play into female stereotypes of emotions. They market the game for girls by tying it to emotions, in a world where we are still afraid to treat the female lead equal to the male lead. THAT is the problem I have with Super Princess Peach. I brought this up once in a certain video game forum a long time ago. The reception wasn’t very well met. I knew I shouldn’t have opened that can of worms but I fucking did it anyway. Just couldn’t shut up about it. Goddammit, Eddie, you should have shut up. You should have shut up. But no, I couldn’t. We’re doing this. We’re having this conversation. It was just burning on the tips of my lips. “Hey, isn’t Super Princess Peach a bit sexist?”
The surge of counter-arguments included things like “Well it’s not about Peach being emotional, it’s the island and the island is out of control so everyone’s emotions are out of control.” To me, that sounds awfully like the developers tried really hard to find an excuse to incorporate female stereotypes about emotions. It’s just so obviously contrived. I fervently wanted someone to see my point. I didn’t go out and about just starting arguments this way. I kept waiting for the right opportunity to spring into action.
The second and final chance popped up on Facebook. This was still a long time ago. Maybe some six-ish years ago? I don’t even remember how the debacle started but I think someone brought up female protagonists in video games, and I brought up the unfortunate failure of Super Princess Peach and how it was sexist. I was immediately torn apart. Immediately. This time was different though, because the person who tore me apart was a woman. I thought, “Dammit, Eddie, maybe you were wrong the whole time. Maybe I AM the bad guy.” Not only did the dude bro Pr0 GaMeRs disagree with me, but now a female gamer too.
“You are dangerously belittling women's’ emotions”, she told me. I cringed so hard at myself and wanted to just crawl up and die. It was such a stupid argument and I honestly was ready to die. I feel SO dumb admitting it but I was just SO into that argument. I had officially died on the hill that I so desperately wanted to defend and nobody - fucking NOBODY - was on my side. I went through a dark time (of like maybe a week) and dove into in a dark place (my bedroom). I questioned my morals and my goodness. Was it sexist to dislike the game? Was it not sexist? Was it sexist to equate the game with the stereotype that men think of women as PMSing all the time? Was it not sexist to identify the stereotype? Because aren’t the makers of the game trying to weasel their way into applying their beliefs about women and what they think would attract female gamers? Maybe it’s only sexist in the metaphysical context? Maybe this is what the patriarchy is all about - trapping you in an endless pandemonium where you can never be sure if you are advocating for freedom or oppression. It was a never-ending soul-crushing conundrum that I couldn’t break free from, constantly philosophizing and moralizing.
But look - Nintendo marketed Super Princes Peach towards girls in hopes of drawing them in to what they think they could relate to. It sold well, yeah, but it wasn’t like large swaths of girls in the gaming community suddenly exclaimed and said “FINALLY! THE GAME FOR US!”. Why? Because it’s fucking patronizing, that’s why! Girl gamers just want to play the same shit that guy gamers play. Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Call of fucking Duty. I had this piece in my drafts for well over two years, afraid to post it.
Fuck it.
Here it is. Anyway. It’s 2022 now and apparently most of us can agree that yeah - Super Princess Peach was pretty fucking sexist. I hate you all.












