| In english, at least, Toad used to be an actual character, where as the species in general were simply refered to as the mushroom people. It wasn't until the N64 era that they started mixing the meaning of the two. Given the timeframe of when the confusion began, I suspect that maybe there was never such a distinction in Japan, since it started right around when Nintendo started unifying their storys and much of what had become accepted in NA got overwritten.
Even recently, Toadette was stated to be "the" Toad's sister, so there's still some confusion. |