Animal Crossing and The Normalization of Sexual Violence
Much like a lot of people right now, I am overwhelmed by the current state of the world. Every aspect of it, but of course the fresh hell that is sexual harassment in the entertainment industry both being taken more seriously and denied more heavily than ever is the freshest in my mind. Working in theater myself, I have my fair share of personal horror stories as well as far too many secondhand accounts I could tell. I’m glad it’s being addressed in such a big way, but facing both the horrifying experiences and the “lol bitches just want money” counterarguments every day can be emotionally taxing. Sometimes you just need an escape, y’know? A chance to dive into a nice, peaceful, simpler world where these issues don’t even exi —
GODDAMMIT.
Fine, let’s talk about this.
This half-peeled pear dressed like John Lasseter who wants you to paint him like one of your French girls is actually a turtle, named Kapp’n. He’s appeared in all five Animal Crossing releases, including the original, Japan-only Animal Forest. He drove a boat in that game and Animal Crossing, switches to a taxi in Animal Crossing: Wild World, switches again to driving a bus in Animal Crossing: City Folk, and is finally back on his boat in the latest installment, Animal Crossing: New Leaf. As his name and his pirate accent would suggest, he’s happiest at sea, and has almost no identity or purpose outside of it. In the two games where he’s not driving a boat, he can be found getting the E-rated equivalent of wasted at the bar — er, cafe.
Animal Crossing is a game series that is hard to explain without making it sound like simultaneously the weirdest and the most boring thing ever invented (see also: Harvest Moon, Night in the Woods, and basically all clicker games ever). So with that in mind: Animal Crossing is a game where you play as a human in a town entirely populated with animals, and your main goals are to pay off your home loan, make friends with your villagers, and maybe improve your town a bit by donating bugs and fish to the museum and raising money to build benches and clocks.
I know. But there’s a reason these games are so popular, and it has to do with how unique and relaxing it is. As far as unique goes, the amount of other villagers in your town at any given time is typically between six and eight, but considering that the original Animal Crossing created 216 unique villagers, and that the number in the current game is now closer to 460, PLUS the fact that villagers can move out and new ones can move in — well, it’s fair to say that no two people will have exactly the same town.
The game also runs on real time, keeping track of the day and hour. Many holidays are celebrated, and include fun minigames that give you rewards. And by “fun minigames”, I mean, “I won charades with Portia fair and square, so she gave me a piece of candy that I could trade for a rare furniture item and then IMMEDIATELY cornered me and asked me to play another game and I couldn’t risk losing my stuff again so I had to give her the candy back and now I hate Halloween and I wish I’d never gone to her birthday party two weeks ago.”
The point is that, most of the time, Animal Crossing is a quaint, relaxing game. Unlike similar games like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, which run on accelerated time that allows for easy binge-playing, Animal Crossing’s real-time system gives you room to breathe. There’s only so much you can do in one day, and there’s a lot of waiting involved. Obviously there are cheats and ways to jump around in time, but it’s not actively encouraged. The game would rather have you relax and go fishing for fun or chat with your villagers than force you to do any one task. Even the home loan I mentioned earlier has no time limit. The only thing forcing you to pay it off is the fact that you can’t expand or add on to your home until you pay it off. That’s it. There’s no interest, no minimum payment, and certainly no endless phone calls and feeling of impending dread and hopelessness; just the sheer feeling of accomplishment. The teller even claps for you when you finish a payment.
The villagers themselves range in personality — from laid-back freeloaders to snotty fashionistas, from helpful older-sister types to “do you even lift?” bros. But even the grumpiest of villagers isn’t outwardly mean or spiteful. They’re mischievous, at worst. You might be tempted to yell obscenities at them from time to time, but at the end of the day, they’re well-meaning people (animals?) with a penchant for asking difficult favors and pulling pranks on occasion. Certainly not evil or threatening.
So why am I bringing all this up? Well, as I mentioned, Animal Crossing’s main appeal has always been its peaceful, innocent happiness. And when players have shown dissatisfaction in the past, they’ve gone out of their way to change things to keep it a happy place for everyone.
The easiest example of this would be clothes. The player tells the game at the beginning whether they want to play as a boy or a girl character. This binary view of gender still exists in all the games, unfortunately, but there was a major step forward in New Leaf, the newest game in the series.
See, in the older games, your gender also determined the clothes that were available to you. Boys couldn’t buy or wear dresses at all, and girls couldn’t wear some of the more boy-ish clothes or accessories. But in New Leaf?
It’s a small step forward, but it’s still a step, and one that makes this open-world game more open not just to non-binary and questioning players, but to male players who maybe just want to wear a damn dress every once in a while. All players, really.
Nintendo has also responded to things that upset players. Allow me to show you an image that the average person will find a bit creepy, but that strikes the pure fear of God into anyone who’s ever played Animal Crossing.
This esteemed gentlemen is named Mr. Resetti, and he only appears when the player has reset (geddit?) their game. He appears out of the ground, and gives you a long lecture about how terrible it is to reset your game, the importance of living with the consequences of your actions, all the work he has to do to put everything back, etc. etc. etc. The lecture is always long-winded, it gets even longer if you try to skip through it, and sometimes he even makes you write him an apology. It’s a clever cheat deterrent that’s still centered in the logic of the game.
However, you might notice that Mr. Resetti looks a touch terrifying. Many young players (and not-so-young players) were scared of him, and would avoid the game forever after an accidental reset to avoid ever seeing him. And that proves another point: his lecture doesn’t really take into account the scenario of the game suddenly shutting off not with intent, but due to power outages, drained batteries, or a parent who got fed up waiting for their kids to come down to dinner and turned off the GameCube without understanding THE CONSEQUENCES. WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST LET ME SAVE, MOTHER?! NOW I MUST BE FLOGGED BY THE MOLE MAN!!!
Nintendo heard the cries of the flogged. His presence was calmed down and diminished as time went on, and in New Leaf, he almost completely disappears. The game still gets on you for resetting, but it’s less of a flogging than a guilt trip by your assistant mayor.
If you want, though, you can bring Mr. Resetti back, by way of funding the Reset Surveillance Center public works project, which will give him his old job back. But even still, it takes him quite a few resets to get back to that original level of rage, and you get the option to tell him that your battery ran out, in which case he’ll just calmly tell you to be more careful next time. Same fun level of engagement and fourth-wall breaking, without the trauma!
These instances prove that Nintendo is more than capable of and open to changing aspects of their game, even integral ones, to suit the emotional needs of their players. They understand that, whether it’s being forced into gender roles or being forcibly lectured for something that may not even be your fault, fear and the loss of control are not the feelings they want to inspire in their players. Animal Crossing should be, for lack of a better term, a safe space, where the biggest threat you’ll face is the threat of a bee sting that can be solved with some cheap medicine.
Which brings us back to this.
Male characters and female characters see completely different sides of this character. See if you can spot the difference.
Did you spot it? It’s a bit subtle.
Kapp’n’s character profile mentions his “fondness of women” as one of his defining personality traits, and it certainly is that. This “fondness” has shown up in every game. Here’s a list of some of Kapp’n’s lines from the first Animal Crossing game.
Yeah, some of them are just random, but some of them really aren’t. And also worth considering: the character’s age is left mostly ambiguous in the rest of the games, but the first Animal Crossing makes it very clear, as does Kapp’n in the lines above, that your character is a child. Meanwhile, Kapp’n is old enough to have a bald spot.
Nintendo did decide to change this in later games, but not entirely. You’ll notice there are some fat jokes and other general jokes at the expense of the player’s appearance up there. Those don’t exist in later games, but that almost makes it worse, since now they’re entirely dedicated to hitting on the player.
All of these screenshots are from New Leaf. Which is relevant, because it’s the only game where Kapp’n has a wife and young daughter. And yet, there it is.
And we don’t even have time to really get into his heteronormativity.
I can’t find the screenshot I need, but I know from experience if there’s two girls on the boat, he will totally gal-pal both of you. I don’t know what he says when there’s two guys, but I imagine it’s similar.
And look, I know what a bunch of you are probably gearing up to say: It’s a silly game! Kapp’n is supposed to be a little backwards and cringey! Can’t you damn libtard snowflake millennials take a damn joke?
But I, and I imagine many others, don’t find it funny. I get plenty of old men giving me unsolicited, creepy compliments on public transportation in my actual life. I don’t need it in my virtual one, too.
And yes, you can skip the songs in this game, which you couldn’t really do in the previous ones. But a) Kapp’n guilt-trips you for it, and b) the song themselves are genuinely fun and cute. Here’s an adorable one about his daughter.
As you can see, his comments in the middle aren’t always hitting on you, but it’s always a possibility if you’re playing as a girl. And while it is genuinely funny the first few times he hits on you, in a “…Did that actually just happen? Haha oh my god what the hell” kind of way, it gets old fast. It sucks that your only options are to skip out on something fun, or risk getting harassed.
As I’ve mentioned before, media isn’t great at telling us right from wrong, but it’s great at telling us what’s normal. Tons upon tons of Hollywood media involving old dudes hitting on younger women as a source of comedy, even if it’s at the expense of the old dude, still tells audiences that this is a behavior that is expected of old dudes, and as annoying and awful as it is, there’s no point trying to change it.
Animal Crossing is hardly alone in the way it normalizes pervy old dudes who hit on younger women with no consequences because “oh, they’re just old and backwards, what are you gonna do?”. But the fact that it does so to such a historically young audience made me feel more uneasy than usual, in the wake of similar “products of a different time” Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, who took our culture of sexualizing children and giving adult men a pass on actual consequences to its logical and horrifying extreme.
There is no easy solution to untangling the mess that is the normalization of sexual violence in this country. But if all these scandals have taught us anything, it’s that silence is not the answer, and neither is waiting until the damage is already done.
It starts with teaching kids about consent. It starts with not telling little girls that little boys only pull on their hair because they like them. It starts with not making “jokes” that a little boy and a little girl who are friends are “such a cute couple”, or assuming that putting boys and girls together is a recipe for sex, because “you know how boys are”. It starts with encouraging little girls to speak up when they feel uncomfortable, and making sure “No” is always an option for them.
Even in video games.
