When I first scrolled through my Twitter feed and spied the Bowsette hashtag, I had no idea of what was to follow. What I believed to be a niche deviantart trend quickly evolved into something of a monster – kind of like Peach, really. But perhaps the most amazing thing about the phenomenon was that despite the internet’s belief it was undermining Nintendo’s family image, it turns out Nintendo had beaten Twitter to it all along.
Here’s a quick refresh. In September, Nintendo introduced a new power-up item into New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe called the Super Crown. The (quite innocent) object is used to transform Toadette into a Princess Peach version called Peachette – but naturally, this sparked a debate amongst Nintendo fans as to how the crown actually worked. Under the assumption it could morph any character into its Peach form, cartoonist ayyk92 applied the concept to Mario lore – namely, as a way to solve Peach’s continued rejection of Bowser. And just like that, Bowsette was born.
The Super Crown’s some spicy new Mario lore pic.twitter.com/7DQe6UXvLQ
— haniwa (@ayyk92) September 19, 2018
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Over the course of the next few days, thousands of artists started producing their own versions of Bowsette, and various debates emerged over how she should look. Blonde or red-headed? Pale or tanned? Bowser-esque or humanoid? One of the near-unifying factors, however, was that the artwork was most definitely NSFW, which meant I got plenty of strange looks when researching it in the office.
At the height of her popularity, Bowsette became the no.1 trending hashtag in Japan, and over the course of five days racked up 150,000 mentions on English-speaking Twitter. Nintendo, in contrast, had absolutely nothing to say on the topic.
It was an incredible explosion of creativity (among other things) that spread in a heartbeat, and I couldn’t help but admire the inventiveness of the creations. Thinking back on Bowsette, however, I’m still trying to pinpoint the exact reasons for her rapid ascent. Aside from obviously becoming a new kink for vast swathes of the internet (Bowsette quite easily won the crown for most searched-for video game character on Pornhub this year), I think it was also about deliberately trying to subvert Nintendo.