LogFAQs > #967457922

Hi! Sorry about the total lack of updates to this list, but I'm back now. I got weirdly depressed for a few days and couldn't write, and then getting back on the wagon was really hard. This shit is always the bane of my existence when it comes to writing topics and I'm trying to get better about it. Anyway, I'm back on the wagon now.

#17: Animal Crossing: New Horizons

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/6/8/AAA-H0AADldc.jpg

There are two different versions of this writeup that I could make. In one, I speak straightforwardly about this game that pretty much everyone is already familiar with, talk about its pros and cons, maybe analyze its place in the 2020 landscape a bit, you know, the standard stuff. In the other, where I acknowledge that that's all well-worn ground that everyone's already discussed before, and what I really find pressing and noteworthy to talk about is my experience with the game and what it means personally to me, I get to talk about how this game finally cracked my damn egg. What would you rather talk about? This game's slightly disappointing quality of life features, or the fact that it's turning everyone you know transgender? Just kidding, you're obviously getting both! They're both issues very close to my heart, after all.

I have a sort of weird nostalgia for the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in March-April 2020. Not that it was a very good time, mind you, but the brain processes strange times in strange ways, I guess. We were all stuck at home and couldn't go out and do anything and everything was scary, and while that sucked, there was at least some pleasantness to the way society in general slowed down for a little while. This period of mass isolation, of course, nearly perfectly coincided with the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and I'm far from the first person to point this out. It couldn't have come at a better time.

I didn't actually own a Switch at the time - we had one in the family, and I played on it when I needed to (mostly for BOTW/Smash), but Animal Crossing coming out kind of changed things. Initially my mom and my younger brother (then 11) played AC:NH on a shared Switch, but quickly realized that not having their own villages sucked. And my mom absolutely demanded that I get my own copy of the game and play it on my own Switch so they could visit my village, which I was happy to oblige with. At the time, there were shortages of Switches for pretty obvious reasons (supply disruptions plus a surge in demand), so we had to wait a few weeks and preorder Switch Lites from Best Buy. Going out to pick up two Switch Lites at Best Buy is a memory that weirdly stands out for me, since it was like, probably the first time since lockdown really happened that I even left the house. It was surreal; not much traffic on the road, a lot of businesses closed, the Best Buy was only doing deliveries to cars at the time, so we drove up and they dropped the Switches off.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/6/9/AAA-H0AADldd.jpg

I got a yellow Switch Lite! (Pictured above. Forgive the poor screenshot quality here, but I'm using pictures I took of my actual game using my phone because the idea of using screenshots from someone else's village DISGUSTS ME.) I'm pretty pleased about the color actually. Yellow's underrated. It's cute! Maybe I'm just a primary color contrarian, I don't know. The yellow really brings me back to the PLAY IT LOUD days of the colored Game Boys. I kinda miss those days, but they're back now, kinda! Wow, I am getting SERIOUSLY off track here, sorry about that.

Anyway, I was excited to finally get to boot up the game and check it out, since this was at the height of everyone playing Animal Crossing and I was a few weeks behind, so I had some catching up to do. Beginning a new Animal Crossing game is super exciting - wondering what your particular island is going to look like, which starting villagers are going to be your destiny, all that. I got Hamlet the hamster and Dierdre the deer, which I consider a pretty above average get. (I've since let Dierdre go, but Hamlet's still here.) Getting a choice of island layouts led to an incredible amount of analysis paralysis, given that there's so many features I wouldn't be able to change later, so I must have spent literally 30 minutes thinking about it - I eventually chose an island that had more interesting features over one that was more convenient, since I thought that would make the island more interesting to design around.

There was one thing that gave me even more analysis paralysis, though, and that was my villager's name. Because I used my first name for my last character in AC:NL, and I hadn't decided on a new, more feminine first name yet.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/0/AAA-H0AADlde.jpg

I knew I wanted to play a girl in New Horizons, and I mean, obviously there's nothing wrong with that. Boys playing girls in video games is a time-honored tradition! I've told myself that for decades, of course. Very powerful transfem gamer coping mechanism. But it's a little different when it's like, Mass Effect or World of Warcraft or even Pokemon, versus when it's supposed to be something a lot closer to an avatar character that's supposed to be 'you' for the next couple hundred hours. I made my avatar character a boy in New Leaf because making them a girl felt sort of unseemingly, something weird I wasn't supposed to be doing. Well fuck that! I decided to just name myself "Para" - good nonbinary vibes - and I set out making up for lost time.

All this is to say - playing a girl in Animal Crossing for the first time completely transformed the way I felt about the whole game and made this a different experience for me. For some people, that won't make much sense, and that's fine! For me, it was a lightbulb moment. Aha! Gender euphoria! It's real!

In previous AC games, I'd never cared about my character's appearance at all. To be fair, part of that is because in AC for the GameCube you play as a WEIRD LITTLE GREMLIN rather than just a cute regular person. A stylistic choice, I suppose, and one that made me wish my horned child avatar was sacrificed by being buried alive like in Ico. But okay, aside from that, also it's because I was playing a boy. And who cares about appearances on a boy character? That's right, obviously nobody, I told myself. Don't care about buying clothes for myself, don't care about buying clothes for my character. The Able Sisters was a place that existed for completionist purposes. It was not a place that existed for personal enjoyment.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/1/AAA-H0AADldf.jpg

Obviously, of course, in New Horizons, the Able Sisters suddenly became the absolute most important place in the game. I have to go there EVERY DAY to see the CUTE CLOTHES that I can put on my CUTE NON-GREMLIN AVATAR. Most of my storage is now dresses. (I mostly take them out of a cooler I keep outside of my house. This is normal in this universe I'm sure.) In previous games, I was only focused on furniture and making money and shit, but suddenly, now aesthetic preferences had meaning! It was something I cared about! And that's how I and also probably like tens of thousands of trans girls just popped into existence overnight. Thanks Animal Crossing for advancing the trans agenda!