Watt’s Pronoun in Paper Mario’s English Translation

A reader asked about the Watt character from the original Paper Mario, which debuted on the Nintendo 64 in the early 2000s:

According to the manual, the official strategy guide, and some dialogue in the game, Watt is female. However, when you use a Super Block to power her up, it refers to her as male!

Similarly, in Super Paper Mario, you can get a special rare card with Watt on it that also calls her male! So my question is, what was she like in Japanese? Was she definitely female there, or more gender ambiguous, and the NoA translators decided to go with female? But mess up? And why does it come back in SPM?

First, in Paper Mario, Watt seems to be a baby sun or lightbulb that lights up dark areas and can use electric attacks.

In Japanese, this character’s name is “Akarin”, which is a play on words with akari (“light; illumination”) and akachan (“baby”). The rin at the end also lends a sense of cute youthfulness to Akarin’s name in Japanese.

Now, let’s get to the point of the reader’s question: what gender is this character?

Usually, gender in Japanese entertainment can be determined from basic speech patterns. In this situation, however, the character speaks in an extreme, baby-like way in Japanese, which obscures the usual context hints. In particular, Japanese “baby speech” tends to transform “s” and “sh” sounds into “ch” sounds, among other things. This pattern turns ordinary words like desu (“to be”) into dechu, to give one example.

Akarin speaks in a heavy, baby-talk manner

Watt speaks youthfully in English

With all of this in mind, I scoured the Japanese script to the best of my ability and couldn’t turn up anything 100% definitive about Akarin’s gender. This is partly due to the baby talk overshadowing everything else, and also because youthful characters in Japanese entertainment often use their own name instead of “I” or “me”.

Digging a little deeper, though, I was able to find that the official Japanese site has Akarin using atachi as a first-person pronoun. By itself this highly suggests that Akarin is female, especially given that atachi in baby-talk would equal “atashi” in normal-talk.

Indeed, Japanese fan sites and even the Japanese Wikipedia article writers seem to reach the same conclusion as I have – that the use of this atachi pronoun makes it most likely that Akarin is a girl.

From the Japanese Wikipedia article about Akarin/Watt

For reference, the key text here says:

Because of the atachi first-person pronoun, Akarin is believed to be a girl.

So it’s not set in stone, but what few signs there are point to Akarin/Watt being a girl.

What’s the deal with Watt’s gender in translation though? For the Nintendo 64 version, there are a couple of things at play:

First, as the Japanese script doesn’t make Watt’s gender 100% clear, this might’ve tripped up the translators a bit. But given that the translators obviously had access to the creators and other internal resources, most of Paper Mario’s text DOES call Watt a girl:

The Japanese text doesn't offer any gender information

The English text adds gender information through use of the word "her"

However, someone on the translation team dropped the ball, as there’s non-main script text that instead refers to Watt as a he:

No gender clues are presented in this Japanese line

The English translation adds gender information through use of the word "he'll"

Then, when Super Paper Mario came out seven years later, those translators accidentally made a gender-related mistake too:

Akarin referenced in Super Paper Mario without any clear gender information

Watt referenced in Super Paper Mario's English translation adds gender information through use of the phrases "this guy" and "his"

Here’s this Super Paper Mario text side-by-side:

As we can see, the original Japanese text here made no mention of gender, but to make things flow more naturally, the English translators assigned a gender to Watt. I don’t know if they lacked old documentation for the character or if they just decided to take a 50-50 chance at whatever Watt’s gender was. But the end result was that Watt’s gender was put into further confusion for fans outside of Japan.

In short, all signs point to Akarin/Watt being female in the Japanese version of the games. The English versions sort of go back and forth between genders, most likely due to a lack of internal documentation and/or internal miscommunications among the translation teams.