YMMV / Animal Crossing

YMMV subpages per installment:

• Animal Crossing (2001)
• Animal Crossing: Wild World
• Animal Crossing: City Folk
• Animal Crossing: New Leaf
• Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer
• Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival
• Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• Animal Crossing: The Movie

---

• Adorkable:
  • Blathers once ran into the Able Sisters' shop and bought things frantically to cover up the fact he ran in to hide from a bug, only noticing afterwards that he was buying women's clothing.
  • When Leif gives you the Golden Axe, he gets very flustered after saying you can cut as many trees as you want with it and realizing what he just said.
  • "Normal"-type Villagers are the token female geeks of Animal Crossing, and their introverted and shy nature makes them very cute.
  • "Snooty"-type Villagers will outright squee when you give them a good present in New Leaf along with being a lot more Cloud Cuckoolander.
  • "Lazy"-type Villagers, especially in the first game. One of them, Derwin, is especially precious. Bob is another example of an Adorkable Lazy Villager, sleeping with a night light, having near child-like innocence, and even crying a river when he's feeling sad. Aww...
  • "Jock"-type Villagers will go on tangents sometimes about how they're actually a sensitive, misunderstood guy and cry in front of the player. They may also cry Tears of Joy upon seeing the player character again if the game has not been played for a very long time.
  • Yep, even "Smug"-types. They say stay out of their closets because they have their baby toys and clothes in it, giving them some similarities to Lazy villagers; immediately become very flustered when caught out during a bragging session, and they also cry often when you write them a good letter. And they love to go on tangents about trains.
  • As of New Horizons the seemingly ditzy Peppy Villagers are now not only cloudcuckoolanders but also gamer girls too, showing an obvious interest in manga, and yuri.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing turns the fluffy slice-of-life sim game into Nightmare Fuel.
  • And it's neither the only one nor anything but the tip of the iceberg. Rather... large numbers of people like to enjoy doing this, often in that direction. To name just one case: Tom Nook. Is he a friendly shopkeeper or iron-pawed savvy mercantilist and slum lord? He has near-complete control of the economy with the only place to sell save for some very specific exceptions and the dominant supplier of resources outside of nature itself. Particularly after he upgrades his shop thanks to your upgrades to your house. Which he does even without your consent. Which is to mention the fact that the first thing he does when you enter the town is to shack you up with an undignified shack which you must pay him for without your prior knowledge or consent. In effect, he is using you for involuntary indentured servitude. And he effectively runs the economic system. Which has led to an even further ACI that he is in fact a very benevolent Slum Lord since he never actually forces you to pay the money you owe him. And that's one of the better known and more apparent examples in the fandom and nowhere near the worst. See Dark Fic for more info. Tom Nook as evil slumlord is probably the most common alternative character interpretation in any game ever.
    • The Animal Crossing localization team got in on it themselves. Ninomiya pointed out that Nook's prices are entirely reasonable if not a bit low compared to the price index of the city. Amtower stated that Nook being willing to offer employment and loans to a newcomer is both risky and a sign of his generosity and lack of prejudice. He then jokingly condemns the "anti-Nook bias" of the community.
    • Due to the way Nook forces you to upgrade your house, he's commonly interpreted as an evil, greedy, money-hungry businessman who keeps you in indentured servitude to him. Or a mafia boss. NGC Magazine in particular liked to interpret Nook as one of the most evil megalomaniacs in all of gaming, who held the player in his thrall purely For the Evulz. The "mafia boss Nook" thing is entirely averted by New Leaf, though: In this one he only sells home upgrades and exterior designs, and after a few upgrades will not force you to upgrade at all and will instead wait for you to ask him for an upgrade. He also never makes you work for him at any point (the tutorial instead comes from Isabelle and is optional). His nephews run the store in his absence, but they're not even the the primary people you sell stuff to now, with Re-Tail replacing them in that aspect. While you can still sell to Timmy and Tommy, the game will make it clear that better prices are offered at Re-Tail.
    • Nook does charge approximately half a million bells for each upgrade and New Leaf is the only game where you do not get your house immediately; instead you have to give him a down payment of 10,000 bells for him to build a house (though this is admittedly very easy to do on your first day with all the ways you can get money in this game). It makes him come off as very money-hungry.
    • This comic suggests a softer side to Nook — namely, that he's the one who hides Bells in trees and rocks in order to help you because he feels guilty about saddling you with so much debt.
  • Kapp'n will sometimes flirt with female player characters during the boat ride in the first game, which paints him as a bit of a creep. He does it again in New Leaf, however the game also introduces Kapp'n's wife Leilani and daughter Leila, which makes his flirting come off as a bit sleazy and unfaithful. He doesn't really flirt that heavily though; he's much more likely to sing about his family now.
  • Resetti. Does he genuinely care about the player and yell at them so that they don't make mistakes in real life and try to "reset" them, or is he a sadistic grump that loves scaring children and finds that playing a game a way he doesn't like a good enough excuse to yell at them? While Don says it's the former, it's possible Resetti is just giving an excuse. New Leaf definitely makes it look like the former. Some have even suggested that Mr. Resetti is the most heroic character in the series because his job is to protect the entire Animal Crossing universe from paradoxical destruction.
  • Dr. Shrunk is often interpreted as a depressed loser who's possibly in an abusive relationship, due to his jokes about his Awful Wedded Life and general exploits as a Butt-Monkey.
  • Chrissy and Francine, two rabbit villagers that can potentially move in to your town. Due to their design, the fandom likes to think that they're actually humans dressed up in bunny hoods. It doesn't help that there's a Bunny Hood that you can purchase and wear as well.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The Juicy-Apple TV (or Apple TV prior to New Horizons), which a literal TV shaped like an apple, may seem like a joke on the more well-known Apple TV. However, not only was this TV available in the games long before Apple produced theirs, but one Chinese company called Hannspree has been making apple-shaped TVs since the early 2000s. These novelty TVs were still being made as late as 2018.
• Americans Hate Tingle: In Japan, Zipper's considered quirky at best and annoying at worst, seemingly; in the West, he's often compared to a haunted animatronic. Even for those American and European players who don't think he's creepy, he's seen as abrasive, two-faced, and insincere. It got extremely bad during the Bunny Day event in New Horizons due to the high egg rate irritating players, which only worsened Zipper's image in the West.
• Audience-Alienating Era: 2015 was one of the worst times to be an Animal Crossing fan, with the releases of Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer and Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival. The former was perceived as So Okay, It's Average for its lack of any real challenge, while the latter was critically panned for its shallow and entirely luck-based gameplay, reliance on the amiibo, and for not being a mainline Animal Crossing game for the Wii U. This would eventually be alleviated a bit with the Welcome amiibo update for Animal Crossing: New Leaf in 2016, but the franchise would not get another main game until Animal Crossing: New Horizons four years later.
• Awesome Music:
  • In general, a large majority of songs throughout the series are very pleasant on the ears, largely due to Animal Crossing being intended as a more relaxed kind of game.
  • K.K. Slider makes some pretty awesome tunes such as "K.K. Metal" and "DJ K.K.", but "K.K. Cruisin'" (particularly the "aircheck" version) and "Go, K.K. Rider" are just plain epic. The Super Smash Bros. Brawl remix takes the greatness of the last of these and gives them amazing orchestral treatments. Many of the serene, walking-around themes from the original game also qualify.
  • The opening theme, as well as the songs that describe the time of day (those songs change per hour), and most of the songs by K.K. Slider. This one is particularly catchy, and WILL get stuck in your head.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Mr. Resetti. Some people actually reset to see what he has to say, others hate him for his attitude and for wasting their time, especially if they didn't reset on purpose.
  • Katt, an uchi cat, is another case of a polarizing villager who is either liked for her unique design, or disliked due to being a Gonk.
  • Labelle irks many fans for being a Long-Lost Relative to Mabel and Sable. Some felt she was unneeded, while others find that she adds an interesting dynamic to the story or at least like her design.
  • Isabelle is one of the most debated characters in the franchise. She has quickly become the Series Mascot, but whether she deserves it is a base breaker. Either she's a cute and adorable newcomer or she's annoying moe bait taking the spotlight from "better" characters that Nintendo loves. New Horizons made this worse due to the fanfare upon her arrival compared to her reduced role in the actual game, and the apparent uselessness in said role.
  • Of the holiday characters, Zipper T. Bunny gets the most mixed reception. Some fans dislike his cutesy personality and off-putting mascot design, while others like him for being an overworked actor who mixes in deadpan quips with his cheeriness.
  • Pietro the sheep has gotten a lot of flak, with many players disliking how his eccentric personality and garish, over-the-top clown aesthetic clash with the rest of the town and rub villagers the wrong way, and who try to bully him until he leaves. Many others defend him, saying he's a very sweet fellow misunderstood for his strangeness, and go out of their way to make him feel welcome and accommodate him.
    • Similarly a lot of players view Rodney the hamster as a gonk-ish villager to the point where there's an entire a subreddit dedicated hating him. Others see him as ugly cute and have defended him.
  • Out of the eight new villagers that came out in New Horizons, only Raymond the smug cat had become the subject of mixed receptions within the community. His huge popularity among many within the community, thanks to people dressing him up in a maid costume, alongside popular gamers trying to hunt him down has many feeling sick of seeing Raymond among their feed. This has led to hate groups and smear campaigns against Raymond forming as of result of his popularity. At this point, Raymond has left the community extremely divided, and you either love Raymond or you hate him entirely.
• Broken Base:
  • Time traveling, or "TT" for short, where you change the in-game date in order to reach certain events. Some people don't want to wait a long time for new items and features, and others say time traveling goes against the spirit of the game. For what it's worth, the games consider time traveling to be a form of cheating and will punish you if you make it too obvious; the developers are aware of it and only try to enforce punishment if it's used to break the rules of the game (for example, accumulating interest or jumping ahead for good turnip prices).
  • Duplication, known as "duping", which is railed against because it makes rarer items more common, thus forcing down the overinflated prices in the online trading markets—and also removes some of the challenge of obtaining rare items. There's also concerns that duping may corrupt your save file if you do it too much, but so far there haven't been any reliable reports of that happening.
  • Since the release of New Horizons, hacked items like item trees has lately garnered huge controversy among the community. Those that are against hacked items argue that they ruin the fun of the game, and are against Nintendo's terms of service policy on their online service, while those in favor say that hacked items only serve as harmless decoration, even explaining that hacking in Animal Crossing has been a thing since the original game, where many individual would only use these hacks to decorate their entire town. The discussion would only explode with the reintroduction of the dream mechanic in New Horizons and the ability to report dream islands, with many speculating that the mass reporting of islands with star trees had led Nintendo into patching those trees in 1.4.1, with said removal only worsening the issue further.
    • And as if things couldn't have gone bad, it did. Griefers soon began giving certain hacked items wrapped, where from there they cannot remove the item when they unwrap the gift, which led to many losing inventory slots to these hacked items. This lead to many individuals to blame hackers for trying to sabotage their game. The 1.5.0 update ended up deleting all hacked items to fix this issue, except camo items and Luna's gyroid item, leaving those same people that had obtained those hacked items outraged that their hacked items were gone for good. Needless to say, hacked items have now become a major headache for the community, not only to those that hate it, but to those that liked having hacked items.
• Character Perception Evolution:
  • For years, Tom Nook held a reputation as a Memetic Psychopath thanks to him appearing to single-handedly control the town's economy and due to much of his behavior towards the player (e.g. forcing them to work for him and pay off a large debt, only to force them into an even bigger one by upgrading their house automatically) coming off as creepy and coercive, which isn’t helped by him joking about sending the raccoon mafia after you if you refuse to join the Happy Room Academy. However, the series' popularity grew concurrently with the Great Recession, which did much to expose how idealistic Nook's portrayal is compared to the actual job and housing markets (among other things, he never sets deadlines for mortgages or charges interest). Furthermore, Animal Crossing: New Leaf would ramp up his kinder traits while doing away with his more coercive habits, removing the work-based tutorial and making housing upgrades optional. As a result, Nook is nowadays seen as a fatherly Benevolent Boss — a far cry from his original "mafia don" image among fans.
• Character Tiers: Even these games have them. The tiers are based solely on popularity (since there isn't really anything else to base them on) and can be safely ignored by anyone who doesn't engage in villager trading. Unsurprisingly, the top-tier villagers also tend to be the cutest, and the low-tier villagers are often ugly.
• Common Knowledge: Since New Horizons' release, many people will tell you that Tom Nook's favorite song is K.K. Lament, based on a line he gives when talking about K.K. Slider. What he actually says is that that is his "go-to karaoke song". And, if Happy Home Designer is to be believed, his actual favorite song is K.K. Bossa, given that it is the default song that plays in his house.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Many players sell more cyclommatus stags than any other item, thanks to the fact that it's a reasonably common beetle on the island and is much easier to catch than its fellow beetles since it doesn't fly away when you walk towards it at maximum speed. Despite this, it's still worth around 8,000 bells, making it an excellent source of currency.
• Creepy Cute: Some villagers, such as Stitches^note has x-shaped eyes, Lucky^note almost completely covered in bandages aside from one glowing eye, Coco^note looks like a walking rabbit gyroid and has a Frozen Face, and Ruby^note has eerie red eyes, look a little off-putting to some players, but they're just so adorable and friendly you'd want to hug them anyway.
• Crossover Ship:
  • Isabelle has a few with other Nintendo characters, but possibly the weirdest case is how ironic "doge" memes from late 2018-early 2019 usually chose her for Doge's loving partner.
  • Because Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Doom Eternal were both set to be released on the same date (March 20, 2020), people started to ship Isabelle with the Doomguy.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Tarantulas and scorpions. If they get you, they'll knock you out and force you back to your house, so they're tough to catch.
  • Tarantulas and scorpions are actual enemies in the Desert Island Escape mini-game. They are also joined by the snakes and their cousins the toxic snakes, which can poison your character.
  • The Banded Dragonflies and Petaltail Dragonflies are rare, only available for two months, and if you do see one, you'll usually have one lousy chance to catch it. While the former does have the advantage of being available on the island through certain tours, they're incredibly fast and difficult to catch.
• Discredited Meme: While public perception of Tom Nook already improved in New Leaf, New Horizons helped kill the "Mafia Tom Nook" interpretation and the memes associated with it stone-dead, with more and more players willing to jump to his defense, as Tom actively helps you building a town on a deserted island from scratch and even lets you pay off your mortgage with "Miles", instead of charging you with a ridiculously high amount of money straight ahead. Many players looked back in confusion on how the meme even came to be, given that Tom hasn't done anything wrong to actually deserve such a horrid reputation.^note It’s a joke he makes in the GameCube game that got out of hand.
• Draco in Leather Pants: As a contrast to Nook being portrayed as a corrupt business mogul especially for how his dialogue was localized in the original game, his counterfeit-laden Evil Counterpart, Crazy Redd, has had a degree of positive reception.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Now with its own page.
• Fanon:
  • Blathers and Celeste as Black and Nerdy in humanized artwork due to Blathers' feathers being brown, at least in the western fanbase. It's also common to interpret them as British, because Smart People Speak the Queen's English; both of the fan dubs of the movie give them British accents.
  • Chrissy and Francine, two rabbit villagers, actually being humans who are either Trans Nature or are just pretending to be rabbits.
• Fridge Horror: A good number of villagers are named after products made from the species they are, both edible and non-edible:
  • Elmer the horse. Glue used to be made from horses. Granted, Elmer's glue is made from synthetic materials, but that doesn't make it any less dark.
  • Many games have Angus the bull. He even has pictures of flames on his vest, which looks like it's leather....
  • Rasher the pig is named for a rasher, as in a thin slice of bacon. Pancetti is another pig named after a pork product (Pancetta, an Italian bacon).
• Game-Breaker:
  • "Time traveling" allows players to access items or events that are limited to a certain time of the year/day, though it contributes to a Broken Base.
  • Perfect fruit. Using the type of fruit that's native to your town, plant tons of perfect fruit trees, harvest and store as many stacks as you can in your locker, go to the town of a friend with a different native fruit, where they'll sell for more, even more if you're lucky and that particular perfect fruit is a special item that day at their Re-Tail.
  • The online features of post-Wild World games allow you to catch any bug/fish in the game (except tarantulas and scorpions) by traveling between different time/date setups and give or receive almost any item in the game, making all that waiting patiently history.
  • In Desert Island Escape, ostrich and horse villagers are generally the best villagers to use thanks to their ridiculously high mobility and low hunger meter, to the point that running a team of nothing but ostriches and/or horses is actually a viable strategy. The zero visibility for undiscovered tiles rarely matters. Ducks and deer have similarly high mobility and low hunger, plus the extra ability to occasionally evade enemies, which is incredibly useful for avoiding the Demonic Spiders.
• Gameplay Derailment: Because the games' In-Universe Game Clock is tied to the system clock (or the cartridge's internal battery in the N64 version), players may miss out on certain events or going to certain stores because they couldn't play it at the required time, or forgot to do so. This leads to players doing what is known as "time travelling": manipulating the system clock so that the player can enjoy these events and stores even if it's, say, 2 AM (because the game thinks it's 2 PM). Whether time travelling is a "right" way to play the game is a huge point of debate among players.
• Genius Bonus:
  • For most of the villagers and characters, it's fairly obvious what animal they are. Most of them are pretty well-known critters. And then... there's Dr. Shrunk. How many people know what he is without looking it up? He's an axolotl, a kind of salamander well known for its six frilly gills—which it keeps all its life. You might also recognize them as the animal that inspired the Pokémon Wooper.
  • At the beginning of the month of September, salmon start showing up where the river meets the ocean. Then halfway through the month, they move up into the river as a reference to their spawn cycle.
• Goddamned Bats: Has it's own page.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ever since Animal Crossing (2001), there has always been a few furniture sets styled after fruits. One of the furniture is the Apple TV. Come 2019, the two words would have a different meaning. With this in mind, it has been renamed a "Juicy-apple TV".
  • Lazy villagers will sometimes send you a letter, talking about a dream they had in which you saved them from a giant rampaging Isabelle. And while she's not giant, Isabelle is definitely rampaging as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (You can make her giant with the Super Mushroom item, though).
  • Towards the climax of The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing, the protagonist learns that his and all the other towns are on a secluded island, and in one of the Multiple Endings he decides to build a raft to escape from it. Perhaps that's where Nintendo got the idea for the Desert Island Escape minigame? Even better—later still, it's revealed that New Horizons does take place on a deserted island.
• Jerkass Woobie: Resetti just can't catch a break. His job is incredibly stressful and has negative effects on his life and health, he gets genuinely upset and angry when your player doesn't listen to his advice, which he gives because he cares, and in New Leaf the Reset Surveillance Center closes, putting him out of a job, which he is very distraught about. Is it any wonder why he's so grouchy all the time?
• It Was His Sled: Labelle being the third long-lost Able Sister, and her real name being Label, has become common knowledge nowdays. The games that came after City Folk don't bother hiding this either.
• Junk Rare:
  • Many items can qualify, especially if it's something you don't really want in your house, or never wear, but you can't get rid of it because it can't be found in stores or is only available on a single day of the year or a single playthrough with the character.
  • The one furniture series that exemplifies this is the Sloppy Series (or Messy Series in European versions). All the furniture in that series looks unkempt or broken, but they all happen to be exceedingly rare (it isn't sold in stores and is only available if a villager puts it up for sale at Re-tail or appears in the police station's lost and found, which only happens once in a blue moon). Players are willing to pay millions of bells for a whole set.
  • The Cardboard set (which is a set of furniture that appear to be made up of cardboard boxes) is also extremely rare. They actually work well with the Sloppy series.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Tom Nook. He's been shipped with Sable, Blathers, Lyle, K.K. Slider, Isabelle, Digby, various animal villagers and even Redd.
• Memetic Badass: Isabelle, of all characters, due to being a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and, to some extent, the sheer amount of crossover fanarts with Doom because of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Doom Eternal sharing the same release date.
• Memetic Loser: Blathers's fear of bugs is often used for parody in fan works.
• Memetic Molester:
  • Kapp'n in the early games, due to his flirting with female players who resemble kids.
  • Smug villagers, because of the fact that they hit on female villagers. (Or any villagers, really.)
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Remixing popular songs with K.K. Slider's soundfont has gotten pretty popular on YouTube.
  • Ever since the Villager was announced to be a new character in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS/Wii U at E3, people have been making him into a Memetic Badass (and sometimes even worse), saying things like "No one is safe from him and his ax." Isabelle started getting the same treatment after she was announced as a playable fighter in Ultimate.
  • "Okay, that’s all the time I've got. I got to get back to playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on my Nintendo 3DS." ^Explanation A line from a Nintendo YouTube video that featured former NoA president Reggie Fils-Aimé showing off his house in New Leaf. As with most Reggie quotes, it became a popular as a conversation-ender. Reggie announcing his retirement didn't stop Animal Crossing fans from making jokes about how Reggie retired so he can play New Leaf on his 3DS after being tired of waiting for it on the Nintendo Switch.
  • "You can stick 17 refrigerators in your pocket, but god forbid you put a fish in a letter." An often quoted post whenever fans joke about the bizarre capabilities and limitations of the games' hammerspace inventory system.
  • Due to the Sequel Gap between New Leaf and New Horizons, which was approximately twice the length of the gaps between previous mainline games, Animal Crossing fans began obsessing over even the smallest of details added to the game, especially the addition of stairs. This led to a lot of jokes about the Animal Crossing fandom being Easily Impressed.
  • In the February 2020 Animal Crossing Direct, Isabelle was shown with a glass of a brown-colored drink with ice◊. While it was likely intended to be iced tea or cola, many mistook it for a whiskey on the rocks, leading to several jokes about Isabelle being The Alcoholic (not helped by fans discovering an alleged Japanese PSA where Isabelle was used to help explain different types of whiskey).
  • A gravestone made an appearance hiding behind a tree in the February 2020 Animal Crossing Direct sparked some Wild Mass Guessing. Some people◊ took this as meaning that Tortimer or Joan had finally died, the former because he didn't appear in the presentation and Tom Nook seems to be filling his role, and the latter because it was revealed Daisy Mae would be taking up her role as turnip dealer, but it hadn't been explained yet that Joan had just retired and the gravestone was just an ordinary item the player can put anywhere.
  • Starting in February of 2020, edits involving the Froggy Chair began to get popular. They were followed by anguish when dataminers discovered that the Froggy Set did not return for New Horizons. It's likely directly because of these memes that the Froggy Chair made its triumphant return in the game's 2.0 update.
  • Asshole villagers/I want to be verbally abused by my villagers. ^Explanation The English localization of the original GameCube game has become notorious in later years because of how visceral the treatment the player could receive from the villagers, who always got upset at the player for the smallest reasons, could be. However, the fact that the villagers became much more nicer in the following games in the series, especially in New Leaf and New Horizons, led to some fans arguing that the villagers had become one-dimensional and that they are way too nice now, and thus want the nasty characterization the villagers once had back, a sentiment that became widespread once JaidenAnimations complained about it.
  • Cat Groove ^Explanation An animation of 20 cat villagers (using their City Folk models) grooving on a dancefloor to the already memetic "Catgroove" by Parov Stelar.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • Tom Nook was once commonly interpreted as a greedy, capitalist loan shark, if not an outright mobster villain who might break your knees if you don't pay back your debts to him.
  • Pietro is often portrayed as a Monster Clown, with people joking about how the teardrop tattoo under his eye means he killed someone.
  • Shari has fallen into this due to her sketchy behavior exhibited in both Chuggaaconroy and Jacksepticeye's playthroughs.
• Moe:
  • Isabelle is already pretty much this in Japan (given the amount of Japanese fanart that turns up if you search her on Google Images). And the epidemic is spreading worldwide.
  • Katie, due to being a Cute Kitten.
  • Celeste. In some of the games, you can even tell her she's cute.
• Narm Charm: Starting in New Leaf, snowmen slowly melt day by day, and you can see the puddles they create. In other words, this lighthearted game actually shows a character slowly dying; which is actually pretty gruesome compared to everything else you see in the game. Not to mention that other than the line "Well, please do stop by tomorrow... if I haven't melted away yet", they can also say "Do come again! I shall be waiting right here, weather permitting!" (note the exclamation mark used in the last sentence). It's as if the snowman knows he's going to die, but tells the player to pass it off as no big deal.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The concept of the Happy Room Academy. A group of people who enter your house, and evaluate your interior decoration every day. The problem is that you never see them. Even if you stayed in your house all day, every day of the week. In 3.x, you can visit their headquarters, and it's revealed that they have keys. Lots of keys. Thousands of 'em. It's also worth noting that 3.x lampshades this in some of the conversations with the villagers, where you find them worrying about just that.
  • Nook can do the HRA several better. By building up both his shop and your house, sometimes by more than its pre-existing size, overnight, without you noticing anything even if you are in that given location or even fall asleep there. Even if you wait for him in your house all night, he never shows up and your house never changes. 6 AM comes. You wait 5 more minutes just to be sure. Seeing that he still hasn't come, you leave the house. As soon as you step out of your house, it cuts to the town hall making an announcement, then the game forces you to save whether you want to or not, and when you regain control, 30 seconds have passed and your house's renovation is done. In other words, Nook is a ninja, The Flash and Superman rolled into one. This is lampshaded in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS/Wii U, in which Villager's Final Smash is summoning Nook, Timmy, and Tommy who build a house around the opponent within seconds.
  • The Resettis are worse. They are so thorough they even break the fourth wall itself to punish those who reset without saving and quitting. Double in City Folk and New Leaf, where you can see their HQ and how they work.
  • Summer nights. Don't walk around without your bug net out, or else the tarantulas and scorpions will come for you.
    • Now made even worse in Animal Crossing: New Horizons since tarantulas and scorpions were adjusted to appear consecutively (tarantulas now appear from late-autumn to mid-spring, while scorpions appear from late-spring to mid-autumn). Now no nights are safe around without your net!
  • If you shake a tree, lots of stuff can come from them. Bells, furniture, rare bugs like spiders, and swarms of bees or hornets. There will always be five trees each day that have beehives in them, and you will never know which one will leave you with a swollen eye. That said, prepared players with a good sense of timing can make a fair amount of bells catching these bees when they show up. Or if they're lucky, they may make it home or the nearest occupied house before the bees get to them. And with New Leaf, quickly hitting Start and then choosing to save will cause the bees to disappear, and its Welcome amiibo update allows you to shake trees when you're already holding a net, which makes them much easier to catch. You can even catch bees, renamed to Wasps, instantly in New Horizons right as you regain control of your character, unless you accidentally shake the tree again or hit it with your net afterwards because you were too close to the left or right sides of it.
  • Blanca is a case of this in New Leaf. Taking a level in badass, she went from The Faceless to Voluntary Shapeshifting, and has a whole minigame centered around impersonating your neighbors throughout April Fools day and you must tell them apart.
  • When you've hit the limit on how many villagers can live in your town, there's that looming shadow that one of your favorite villagers is planning to move away. It's effectively random and the only way to prevent it is to regularly check up on your town on a regular basis.
• Periphery Demographic: It's arguably Nintendo's most "kid-friendly" series, but many teenagers and adults play them.
• Player Punch: Whenever a beloved villager moves out of town and you miss the chance to stop them. Once you've become close, it can feel like a real-life friend leaving, even though no villager is technically different from another of their type.
• Popular with Furries: Animal Crossing is one of Nintendo's most popular IPs with furries (along with Pokémon and Star Fox). It's full of cute Funny Animal characters after all. Sable, Ankha and especially Isabelle stand out among most characters when it comes to the furry fandom. Several villagers are popular with furry artists, including Apollo and the male bear villagers.
• Quicksand Box: You get dropped off in your town, get a quick tutorial, and then the game all but tells you to make your own fun. New Leaf and New Horizons at least try to ease you in more gradually.
• Recurring Fanon Character:
  • Brutus is a character originating from an Urban Legend of Zelda. He is allegedly a black version of one of the dog townspeople with red eyes. He is claimed to move in if you neglect your game for too long, speaks and sends letters in binary, and has a house full of nothing but fish that crashes after entering it. He apparently leaves the town after just one day. While the rumors of his existence are fake, he became a popular character in the fandom for a while.
  • Bill Wibbly is a bear villager originating from a Tumblr post that parodies the fandom’s strange hatred of certain villagers. After the meme became popular, artworks, memes, and fan edits of Bill Wibbly appeared in the fandom.
  • Aika is a creepy little girl from Aika Village, a fan made horror-themed village accessed through the Dream Suite. She is a female human villager who dresses like the red doll item and whose only line is "This is inside of my dream." The disturbing story told by the village led to Aika receiving fanart and fanfics which interpret the story.
  • Shaki, nicknamed Blazel or Chestnut before her actual name was discovered, is a Dummied Out squirrel villager who can only be found in the files of the first game. She became rather popular among fans for her mysteriousness and cute design.
• The Scrappy:
  • Gracie, the rude giraffe that will berate your sense of style simply because it doesn't match hers (his in the Japanese version). The GameCube "mini-game" in which you had to mash the A button in order to wash her car made it even worse, as most of the time, you would only get common clothing you could get anywhere else. Although trying to get her to set up shop in New Leaf can still verge on Guide Dang It! territory, her car never shows up in any capacity. To say how bad the car washing minigame is, it's possible to fail using a turbo controller.
  • Introduced in Wild World is Lyle, an annoying insurance salesman who would relentlessly try to get players to buy insurance from him on Saturdays. His insurance wasn't even worth the money since it only occasionally covers bee stings, falls and forged paintings for a pitiful amount of money. Thankfully, he lost his job as an insurance salesman in City Folk and was forced to work at the Happy Room Academy.
  • Katie isn't very well-liked due to her annoying sidequest, which requires you to head to another person's town. Her crybaby personality, slow walking speed, and high frequency of showing up make her case worse. It is alleviated somewhat in New Leaf, where she's grown up a little (so she's less prone to tears), she walks faster, and she shows up less often.
  • Any villager that is considered ugly can be this.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • From the second and third games, counterfeit paintings. Getting all the paintings was difficult ENOUGH when Redd sells the majority of 'em, shows up once a week and has a random assortment of items. In New Leaf the counterfeits have something differentiating them from the real thing, but then that requires you to know the source. In exchange, however, you might find that your neighbors may try to pawn off their counterfeit artwork on you. And since it's only mentioned in dialogue until you pay over 7,000 bells for it, there's no way to tell if it's real or not. Though this is subverted in New Leaf, as villagers will tell you that they don't know if it's real or not when it may be fake. If it's real, you'll be charged more and the villager will be confident it's real.
  • In earlier installments, if you want your character to have a darker skin tone, you need to resort to tanning, which can be a time-consuming and complicated hurdle. You need to be outside for at least an hour a day on sunny days during the summer months, or go to the island in the GameCube game or New Leaf, and you need to repeat the process for several days to get darker. Also the tan gradually fades after several days, meaning you need to do this constantly if you want to keep the desired tan. Starting with Happy Home Designer, the option for different skin tones is available from the start, while in the Welcome amiibo update, the player can use the Mii Mask to give the character the skin tone needed without the need of tanning for hours.
  • Katrina doesn't show up on a fixed day, though in her case it isn't as irritating as you can have her be a part of your town, but even then, you need to have had 20 fortunes read in order to do so.
  • Letter writing is this, especially prior to City Folk, one of two games with USB keyboard support. Writing ANY letter that had even the slightest spelling/grammar mistake would result in villagers thinking you were writing in a foreign language. New Leaf reverts this back because you had to rely on game's own keyboard, again, and even worse, it added the mechanic of villagers sending letters every day if their friendship with you is really high, clogging up your mailbox of the same compliment repeatedly. On the bright side, they'll often send you presents that you can sell.
  • Obtaining furniture from your neighbors can be this. One of them might have a piece of furniture that you would love to get your hands on, and they might let you have if they invite you to their place. Key word being might. A lot of the time, the neighbor won't be willing to part with the item you want. Perhaps they might if you give them a replacement? They'll set it up in your house and still won't give you the original furniture piece that you wanted. The item may very well be lost forever.
  • Sometimes, villagers will give you a gift without warning. This can be a problem for those who don't even want any items at the moment. Even worse when there's a Yes/No option, where selecting "No" will have the villager still give you the item, anyway.
  • Across multiple games, getting a "Perfect Town" rating and actually having a town layout designed to how you want are mutually exclusive. Frequently, getting a perfect town means having giant amounts of trees and flowers placed haphazardly throughout the town, meaning that if you don't want your town looking like an overgrown forest, you're already out of luck. Most damnable though is the fact getting a perfect town means you can't have any custom designs on the ground. If you want to set up a dedicated pathway between houses or give your town more character with custom designs, your perfect town just can't be.
  • Because the Happy Home Academy takes your entire home into account, if you decide to accept a home upgrade on the day before they do evaluations, that new, blank room that is ready the next day will count against your rating.
  • Trash items. You can't sell them, they lower your town/island rating if left on the ground, and you need to dispose of them with a trash can. In New Leaf, you can get rid of them at Re-Tail, but you will be charged for them. Recitified in New Horizons, where trash items can now be sold for a small amount and they can be used for DIY recipes.
  • Since Wild World, scorpions and tarantulas have been available as catchable bugs, spawning between 7 PM and 4 AM during the summer months (or during different halves of the year in New Horizons). What makes them different from other bugs is that they can attack and knock you out if you make sudden movements near them while holding a net — and it's very easy to set them off by casually walking around. As a result, they can become an unexpected source of Paranoia Fuel for nighttime players who want to catch other bugs, especially considering the number of other valuable bugs with overlapping spawn periods. Short of time traveling, the only way to prevent these two arachnids from appearing is to have another player visit your town/island.
• Self-Fanservice: In terms of Funny Animal artwork, their lacking of attributes tends to be sidelined. Humanized interpretations, on the other hand, tend to shave several years off of Tom and Sable.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Since Animal Crossing has no real endgoal, most of the gameplay is this. In terms of concrete milestones, there's paying off your home debt, completing the catalog (which is impossible in certain games now, due to online-exclusive items), getting all the golden tools, and completing the museum with every insect, fish, fossil, and work of art.
  • Believe it or not, there are even speedruns of Animal Crossing. Most involve paying off every debt as fast as possible, but completing the museum and obtaining the golden tools are also consistent sub-categories. Some runs simply aim for completing Tom Nook's chores. For New Horizons, an additional category is reaching the credits, since the game has a more defined goal (attract K.K. Slider to the island, which requires a 3-star rating).
  • There have been a few 100% Completion speedruns of the original GameCube version; it's the only one where doing so in a timely manner is feasible, due to universal codes allowing access to hard-to-find items. Even so, the current world record is 19 hours, and first recorded attempt was 70 hours (three real time days, with breaks). Said world record holder, Coldeggman, has also completed a timed 100% run for Wild World, clocking in at 209 hours (a little under nine days, across multiple play sessions, of course).
  • A unique self-imposed challenge is becoming a "bellionaire", i.e., reaching the 999,999,999 bell deposit cap in the bank. Doing so unlocks the post office model in earlier games, meaning it's necessary for true 100% completion, but few have ever attempted it. The first legitimate bellionaire for the GameCube version did so in March of 2020, just shy of New Horizons' release date, by reverse-engineering the game's code to determine turnip prices and playing the stalk market from there.
• Shipping: Some fans have opted to ship the villagers together, if they aren't shipping the villagers with themselves.
  • Colton/Julian seems to be a fairly common ship in the western player-base, due to both characters being flamboyant smug horse-type villagers.
  • Bam/Beau has a decent following, probably due to both of them being deers and having contrasting Jock and Lazy personalities.
  • It's not rare to see some fans shipping Poppy and Marshal, most likely due to both being squirrels and popular among their villager personality type pool (Normal and Smug respectively).
  • Lucky/Ankha is quite popular among fans as both characters have a character design inspired by Ancient Egypt (Lucky being a Bandage Mummy and Ankha's design being heavily influenced by Cleopatra). It may also help that Lucky is a dog and Ankha is a cat.
  • Apollo/Whitney is a very-well liked ship due to the Animal Crossing movie implying that they used to be a couple, with the implication that they reconciled at the end of the movie.
  • As for yuri ships, Goldie/Cherry tend to be the top dogs (pun intended) due to their contrasting designs and personalities, as well as their general popularity, being some of the fan-favorite villagers of their respective types, Normal and Big Sister.
  • A less so but still popular yuri ship is Tabby/Katt, as they are both cats that have similar intentionally ugly appearances and tomboyish clothing. They also have similar contrasting Peppy and Big Sister personalities.
  • If one does not choose to interpret Nan and Chevre as sisters or cousins, then them being a couple is another alternative for fans. It also helps a lot that both of them are based off a Japanese's Children song called "Goat Mail", which tells the story of a black goat and a white goat that write letters to each other, but keep eating them before even reading them.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Some Dutch fans have found the game's characters, setting and aesthetics to be very similar to that of the classic children's puppet TV show De Fabeltjeskrant (better known in the United Kingdom as The Daily Fable).
  • This is also the closest we will ever get to the cancelled Simsville game.
• Squick: Finding cockroaches in your house. The only way to get rid of them is to step on all of them. This goes double if you're playing a character who goes barefoot in New Leaf and New Horizons.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: K.K. Slider's songs have a few examples of this.
  • The intro to "Soulful K.K." kinda sounds like "Lean on Me".
  • "K.K. Country" sounds near identical to the Choco Mountain theme from Mario Kart 64.
  • "Rockin' K.K." is very similar to the New Age Retro Hippie music from EarthBound, which in turn was suspiciously similar to Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode".
  • "K.K. Western" has a very similar melody to "House of the Rising Sun".
  • In the original Dōbutsu no Mori, "DJ K.K." had an opening riff nearly identical to that of "Get Ready For This" by 2 Unlimited. This was changed in Dōbutsu no Mori+ and all subsequent versions to a more distinct riff, making the original version a rarity.
  • "K.K. Adventure", introduced in New Leaf, sounds a lot like "He's a Pirate" from Pirates of the Caribbean and retroactively like Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS/Wii U's main theme.
  • Unsurprisingly, "K.K. Birthday" sounds an awful lot like Happy Birthday to You! — New Leaf's release predates the ruling invalidating the song's copyright in the US by about three years.
  • K.K. Sonata's aircheck sounds very similar to "The Lonely Man", the opening theme song for The Incredible Hulk (1977).
  • One of K.K.'s new "fake" songs in New Horizons is a dead ringer for Tatsuro Yamashita's "Sparkle", to the point where "K.K. Sparkle" became a popular Fan Nickname for it.
  • "Only Me" sounds a lot like R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" (and by extension David Bowie's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", which the R.E.M. song pays homage to).
  • "K.K. Condor" sounds similar to Andean folk song "El Humahuaqueño."
  • "K.K. Faire" sounds similar to Okinawan folk song "Tancha Mebushi."
  • "K.K. Chorinho" sounds similar to "Tico-Tico no fubá," a Brazilian choro song by Zequinha de Abreu.
  • "K.K. Bossa" seems to be inspired by "The Girl From Ipanema."
  • "K.K. Dixie" sounds like "When the Saints Go Marching In."
  • "K.K. Moody" sounds similar to the Mexican bolero "Sabor a Mi" by Álvaro Carillo.
  • Part of "K.K. Milonga" sound like "Milonga del Angel" by Astor Piazzolla.
  • "Steep Hill" sounds similar to Japanese folk rock song "'Ichigohakusho' o Mōichido" by Bang Bang.
  • "K.K. Synth" sounds similar to "Pure Jam" by Yellow Magic Orchestra.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel:
  • The game itself. It's a relaxing small town environment with cute and friendly animals to hang out with. If you play with friends, you can have them meet your villagers.
  • The movie is a generally happy slice-of-life story about a young girl befriending the nice animal villagers in her town. Even when something bad happens, the girl bounces back to her positive nature.
• Take That, Scrappy!: For another game series. The fortune that can be exchanged for an Arwing reads: "Your friends need you. They always need you. They will never stop."
• That One Sidequest:
  • You can spend anywhere from half an hour to half a day looking for a coelacanth on a rainy/snowy day.
  • If a villager requests you to hunt down a specific insect that requires you to do some kind of task to spawn it, such as cutting down a tree and leaving the stump present. In this instance, if you just started playing and don't have access to an Axe- it's impossible to catch.
  • The Snowman furniture series is the hardest one to get because unlike the other three special series (where you can get the whole set and some extras in a few hours), this one can (and likely will) take somewhere between 15 days to three months at a minimum to get the whole thing. Add to this the fact that if the snowman is not perfect you won't get a reward and you have the most annoying sidequest ever.
  • Mushroom furniture is worse. Sure, you don't have to build a snowman, but you have only a single month to get 12 different objects, once per day, with no guarantee that you won't get repeats.
  • Completing the Jingle series in the original Animal Crossing is difficult for primarily one reason: Jingle only appears once per year, and he will only give out ten presents per save file (not per player). There are 13 items total. And he can give out duplicates.
  • How about accumulating 999,999,999 bells for your bank account? It was necessary to get every item in the game (well, without cheating, not counting two NES games in the GameCube game). To put this in perspective, if you made 150,000 bells a day since the GameCube game's release date, you still wouldn't have reached the threshold by New Horizons' release date. The first person in the world to legitimately reach this goal spent two months reverse-engineering the game to determine turnip prices, finally accomplishing it after spending 180 hours playing the stalk market. Considering this is outside the realm of realistic goals, New Leaf reduced it to 100,000,000, which is still a large amount, but easier to obtain if you repeatedly farm beetles on the island.
  • Filling out the art wing of the museum is incredibly luck-based; in almost every game, you have very limited access to artwork in the first place, typically once a week at best before the 2.0 update of New Horizons. However, even when you do have a chance to get them, there's a high chance that the piece you can buy is actually a forgery, which the museum will refuse to accept - to say nothing of the chance of getting a legitimate artwork that happens to be one you've donated already. It's not uncommon to hear about players who have completed the fish, bug, and fossil wings of the museum, but within the same timeframe have only managed to donate a single-digit number of art pieces.
  • Finding scorpions and tarantulas in the summer. They're only available late at night, which already limits some players, and to make it worse, they only spawn on clear days, on bare ground; that means no patterns or flowers, the latter of which is a pain in the ass for those with a Beautiful Town ordinance (where there are flowers practically everywhere). Not to mention that they're two of the rarest bugs in the game, and they attack you if you're holding a net (leading to some unpleasant surprises for some players not hunting them), causing you to pass out. And if you try to sneak up on them? They just might vanish into a tree or fall off a cliff or the bank of a river. Many players tear their hair out about finding them, especially when hearing anecdotes of people with more bare ground in their villages catching both of them within a couple of hours. Thinking about trying to find either of them in a friend's town? Nope. Just like the bees, they don't spawn when the town gates are open.
  • Similarly, catching bees/wasps. Even with the amount of features introduced in later games to make it an easier endeavour, you still need to have near perfect timing to do so without getting stung. However, with New Leaf's Welcome amiibo update allowing you to shake trees while holding most types of tool (including the net), catching them is trivial if you're prepared with your net out (allowing you to snatch one before the swarm even fully forms).
  • Buying turnips can be this depending on your availability for playing the game. The NPC who sells them (Joan in games up to New Leaf, Daisy Mae in New Horizons) is only available starting at anywhere between 5 AM and 9 AM depending on the game, and leaves at noon, shorter than nearly any other shop or limited-time merchant. If you work or sleep during this period? No turnips for you!
• Theme Pairing:
  • Gulliver the seagull occasionally gets paired with one of the dodo birds, Orville and Wilbur, by fans, given that they're bird characters with a theme of traveling across the ocean.
  • The villagers Audie and Whitney tend to be paired together a lot, romantically or platonically, due to them both being wolves with contrasting color palettes—Whitney has a more wintry look compared to Audie’s summer vibe.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Any change to holidays and other events causes this. The decision to remove the regional holidays in place of, often times bland, general ones in Wild World was met with backlash. The exclusion of the Sports Fair and Morning Aerobics in games past the original doesn't resonate well with many players either.
  • Some personality changes made in the newer games, such as the lack of rude villagers, leaves some fans reminiscing on the days when the villagers were outright rude to the player rather than unfailingly polite. This is especially prominent in villagers that would be by definition of their types be rather snippy such as “Snooty” and “Cranky” villagers.
• Ugly Cute: If an animal isn't classically cute, it's ugly cute. It's a very cute game, is what we're saying.
• Unconvincingly Unpopular Character: Kapp'n is a Renaissance Man that operates both boats and buses, has a wife and child, has gone on many oceanic adventures, and has a downright beautiful singing voice. Despite having all the makings for a beloved character, he's ostracized In-Universe because of his singing voice, to the point that his wife outright exiled him from Tortimer Island because she can't stand his singing. Fans were rightfully confused by this, as they love Kapp'n's songs, and feel this untoward behavior towards him is completely unjustified.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • K.K. Slider's model appears to have been designed with his trademark position (seated with one leg crossed and holding his guitar) in mind, so when he stands up to his full height and walks around, as seen in the Roost in New Leaf, it reveals he was given more realistically humanoid proportions, with a bigger torso and limbs and fairly small head, compared to most character models (who normally appear very cartoonish with heads that are equal or bigger than their bodies for some species) to make that position work well. He's also the only character with fully-modeled paws, where other characters have "stump" hands.
  • Some of the player faces fall into this, with the most notable ones being these faces, due to their very small eyes and the fact that, unlike other player faces, they look directly in front, making it look like they're staring into your soul.^note The fact that the female version made it in as an alternate costume in Smash 4 and Ultimate didn't help much either considering the infamous Killager meme.
    • New Leaf introduced four brand-new types of player faces (three for males, since the fourth new male face was previously a female-exclusive face). Out of all the new faces, these◊ faces◊ garnered the most attention, due to their uncanny resemblance to the Lenny Face.
    • There is a player face that has droopy eyes, and it's available for both genders. The female version looks fine enough. The male version on the other hand makes it look like the boy hasn't slept for days.
• Values Dissonance: In the Japanese version of the original game, Gracie still presents effeminately, but she's male and has the deep cranky villager voice. Some villagers will quiz the player on her "real" name, with the correct answer being "Nabenosuke" (figuratively "saucy woman"; "nabe" means "saucepan", but "onabe" is a derogatory term for butch lesbians). This was naturally censored out of the English release, and starting with Wild World, Gracie has the female snooty villager voice and no mention is made of her "real" name. Still, it's a very unfortunate show of the game's age, especially given the series' growing LGBT Fanbase.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Chief, Fang, and Wolfgang wear androgynous clothing and have feminine-looking eyes, meaning, unless you knew their names or personalities prior to meeting them, they are easy to mistake for females.
  • Some villagers fall into this due to their species only wearing what seems to be dresses. (They are actually shirts, it's just that they're apparently too long for their bodies. New Leaf would later make the shirts on several species look more like shirts than dresses)
  • Ed and Julian, both horses, look remarkably feminine. Julian's catchphrase is even "glitter".
  • Bob's default outfit is a feminine-looking flower shirt and it can look more like a dress on him than a shirt (The latter is averted in New Leaf, though, where it looks more like a shirt now).
  • Filbert's default outfit in the first three titles was a white dress-like shirt with a pink floral design on it, complete with a ribbon on the chest. Combine that with his bright pink blushing cheeks, and you have a very feminine looking male villager. Averted for him in New Leaf, where his default outfit was changed to a black and white checkerboard shirt.
  • Agent S is frequently mistaken as male due to her superhero name, blue jumpsuit and helmet, and lack of obvious Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
  • Gabi in New Horizons. No tertiary sexual characteristics : Check. Masculine outfit : Check. Neutral colors : Check. Good luck guessing her gender at first sight. The old games gave her dresses but this game decided to go with the unisex shirt.
  • Everything about Pate's design, with the exception of the Blush Stickers, makes her look rather masculine, including the blue color scheme, boyish haircut and huge eyebrows. Another subdued case is Olive, a female cub villager who completely lacks any sort of the Tertiary Sexual Characteristics and has the same sort of "standard" design that's almost always given to male villagers (in fact, there's also a male cub villager named Poncho who shares a lot of similarities with her design).
  • Canberra, a female koala villager, has dark orange fur, prominent eyebrows and a tank top as her default outfit, making her look pretty masculine. She also has the tomboyish "sisterly" personality.
  • Many fans were surprised when they discovered that Sasha is male, due to being a seemingly deliberate subversion of Tertiary Sexual Characteristics with his eyelashes and light green coloring.
  • Some also seemed to think Petri was male, often pointing to the fact that she (or at least the labware she was named after) was named after Julius Richard Petri, despite the fact that A. Petri was his LAST name and B. the fact that her names in other languages were clearly feminine.
  • Pave, he dresses in makeup and feminine clothes and acts very flamboyant.
• Viewer Species Confusion:
  • Fans have a hard time telling whether the Able Sisters are porcupines or hedgehogs. (They are hedgehogs, since they have long snouts.)
  • For a long time, people have thought that Lyle was a weasel. Then came a Nintendo Treehouse stream for Happy Home Designer during E3 2015, where it was revealed that his niece is actually a river otter.
  • While in-game dialogue referring to them as "alligators", many people are unsure whether the crocodilian villagers are crocodiles or alligators. (Although since they have angular snouts and their lower teeth sticking out of their mouths, it would be more logical that they're crocodiles.)
  • Dr. Shrunk's species is oft-questioned, since the game's artstyle can make him look like a human with a strange haircut. He's an axolotl, which were obscure at the time Wild World was released.
• Win Back the Crowd: Much like Metroid Prime 4, the announcement that there is going to be a new game on the Nintendo Switch made a lot of people excited after months of speculation and how Animal Crossing's spin-offs like Pocket Camp have been getting controversy around that time.
• Woolseyism: All over the place. The English translators have said that their goal wasn't to create a fully-accurate translation of the games, but to make sure that the English version of the game provides the same experience for an English speaker that the Japanese version provides for a Japanese speaker.

---