Moments of 2018: Bowsette, or when Nintendo proved no-one can subvert it like itself
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.
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.
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