A Complete History of Animal Crossing Controversies

so when you think of animal crossing the first thing that probably pops into your head is cute wholesome or that one song every streamer plays while you might not expect it from a game as innocent as animal crossing the franchise actually has a long history of bizarre controversies hidden racism questionable content for children and black markets how did we go from cute animals to hackers are going to destroy your game and consoles the AC Phantom itself is filled with drama resulting in witch and stocksing death threats and people losing it over not having their comfort characters on their islands and it just got worse with every game so today we're going to look at the bizarre history of Animal Crossing controversies but wait if you're asking yourself what is Animal Crossing what are the animals crossing why are they Crossing and that's that cat dancing then here's the tldi it's a cozy social simulation game where you the human move into a village city island or hopefully a space station and a future release that is by cute animals from here you build your Utopia and communicate with random furry villagers and NPCs also you are enslaved to a greedy trash Panda the game runs in real time so the time of day and seasons change as they do in real life time stop passes even when you're not playing so when you're gone your Villages are set and your town turns into a dumpster fire just like the AC fandom give it to the Murray or animal forest was the first of many successful Animal Crossing titles little did Nintendo know that the odd game they released in April 2001 for the slowly dying N64 would become a cult classic let alone frighten children for years to come the original Animal Crossing introduced many of the NPCs beloved by the Phantom today including the mole Sony wisetti he would appear whenever a player quit the game without saving and lecturing brutally he insulted players in all caps had scary music and threatened to completely delete your game data if you resetted more than seven times because of that he scared children in Japan to tears and concerned parents actually convinced Nintendo to make him optional in later games so he literally got canceled but still remained in the games players also had it out for Tom Nook because right from the start the player base firmly believed that he was evil and just extorting the player evil nuclear resonated with the Phantom so much that he was nominated as the top Nintendo villain in the 2 2003 annual Nintendo Power Awards despite not being a villain Nintendo has tried to convince players that he's actually a good guy and even gave Tom Nook multiple Redemption hikes in later games still Tom luck is evil to most players and creepy fan fiction just proves that maybe because of the scary NPCs or the n64's death animal forest would never leave Japan through the dismay of many AC fans it became an elusive collectible full of Forgotten exclusive content thus there aren't a lot of controversies surrounding it the few I mentioned are extremely tame and nothing in comparison to the stuff that happened in later games especially New Horizon animal forest success paved the way for a GameCube re-release with added content called dobitsunamori Plus in December 2001. its U.S part followed in 2002 and became widely known as Animal Crossing however localization for the game was no easy undertaking because numerous dialogues had to be Rewritten replacing Japanese items that could confuse a US audience changing some questionable things and introducing other questionable things double tsunamari plus introduced the male fashion giraffe Gracie who gives the player exclusive items the Japanese and Korean games present gracely as an offensive lgbtq plus stereotype they gave him a deep voice made him act and present very feminine and his last name was nabanasca which translates to Saucy woman and is an anagram for a slur the international Parts got rid of anti-lgbtq plus undertones and just turned Gracie into a mean girl fashion critic similarly the carpet and wallpaper selling camel Sahara was male but represented themselves as very feminine in the Japanese and Korean entries of Animal Crossing while Roland or Laurent is now a female character in international localizations they still retain an exotic accent that makes some people a bit uncomfortable due to stereotypical representations of Middle Eastern folks but don't worry Animal Crossing improved its representation over the years and in New Horizons they even added characters like Sasha whose male but has typically female hobbies and looks and NPCs that implied dating the same gender following the pattern of controversial animals the Eagles lay incredible were introduced in The mitsunamari Returned in plus but get removed from Animal Crossing because of their offensive representation of Native Americans who greenlit this interestingly they weren't removed in all animal crossing Parts because some European Ones Still featured them presumably because of backlash Japanese games stopped featuring them too after the mutsuno Marie e plus the story of controversial Villages doesn't end here though they go villager chain got a makeover in Animal Crossing because her design was well this that's about as bad as jinx's original design which also got banned in the US however the less offensive inspiration of those designs was the popular Japanese Guero Street fashion looking at the core elements of a specific hikiara style like bleached hair colorful makeup and spray tans there is a resemblance to Jane still Jane's color scheme and face were changed to not be offensive and then Jane just vanished after e-plus when fans bring up the original Animal Crossing they often claim that Villages were meaner calling the player a freak mental case a filthy ogre or some variations of fat and unlovable was normal for villagers with snooty and cranky personalities fans loved it and many still beg Nintendo to bring back those mean villagers because the new ones are quote unquote boring dry and void of any character but Nintendo didn't really remove mean villagers Japanese Animal Crossing games always featured polite and friendly villagers the localization just added edgy phrases to Animal Crossing so if anything the new villagers just stick to the original script the infamous love mechanic wasn't removed during localization even though it's inappropriate for kids in Animal Crossing Villages could develop a crush on players based on luck players didn't receive benefits from that aside from Awkward floating and weird letters which is probably why it was removed from the games but a phantom still wants Animal Crossing to reintroduce romantic features like weddings even though the alpaca wedding was a touchy subject for some but the game had even worse mechanics that would get scrapped due to player hatred Villages could simply steal items from your inventory we paint your house and whenever you visited someone's Town one of your villagers had to move if this was still in the game today had to just roll the Watson Omari plus and Animal Crossing both Granite players access to a new tropical island provided they had a Gameboy Advance and cable to connect it to the GameCube hiding an in-game feature behind a real world paywall was a No-No for a lot of players and still causes backlash to this day but players enjoyed Animal Crossing nonetheless so Nintendo didn't care and they also knew we'd just come back for new games anyways with the localization being a success Nintendo pointed English exclusive items along with new ones into a noble Animal Crossing game called dobutsunamari e Plus in 2003. eplus had its fair share of exclusive and exciting content but was again only available in Japan since most eplus exclusives wouldn't return in successive games fans were angry especially e-plus exclusive villagers that could only be obtained via Nintendo's e-reader and special cards were highly sought after in the west while half of the e-plus villagers got the international debut with new leaf and amiibo cards the promotional ones never returned meow and bow usually come up in online Animal Crossing discussions because players nevertheless hoped that they could get them one day without hacking both villagers were inspired by the meowling girl and bowling girl which were devices that translated with your cats and dogs said the gimmicks were only popular in Japan around the time of e-plus's release so Nintendo just grabbed their reference other lesser known promotional characters like nindori with interesting backstories are also lost to time Nintendo also doubled down on their scam Island and e-plus instead of requiring a Game Boy Advance to access it players could purchase it from Tom Nook but in order to populate it with villagers they had to scan in special Islander cards which required an e-reader and an e-reader required a Game Boy Advance anyways prior to e-plus quite a few NES and famicom games could be legally emulated with an animal forest but Mario Bros ice climber Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda disappeared in Animal Crossing and e-plus fans called them the Forbidden floor and resorted to hacking them back into the game after some backlash nintend and the re-released Mario Bros and Ice clamber's cards but the other two were made in limbo a few content dry years passed but then Animal Crossing wild World was released right at the end of 2005 for the Nintendo DS and boys it was wild Nintendo added an online multiplayer to Wild World so players could visit each other's towns via the Wi-Fi connection service this was extremely cool until towns got hacked and consoles got destroyed Wild World used seats to place map items like buildings and rocks whenever a new town was generated or during the development of the game normally seats aren't accessible in the game but players found a way to hack them in malicious players would visit other towns and place seats spawning small items like trees cost minor inconveniences because player could get locked out of buildings and features this could trigger some weird glitches where players get stuck in Endless Loops of trying to enter and exit the house or they just couldn't let people into their towns anymore but for some ruining the experience of others wasn't enough brick seats are seats placed with the intention of corrupting the game's memory Beyond repair or crashing the DS Hardware which could damage the console hackers would either stack large seeds like buildings on top of each other in the same location or at more than eight villager homes to the map Wildwood's memory couldn't handle either case so whenever the game would try to load a brickseated area it would just crash brick seats usually don't appear immediately after being placed so malicious players could leave the victim's town and force Animal Crossing to save which would render the damage permanent apart from spawning seeds hackers also managed to trigger events that are usually blocked during online multiplayer like players fainting from getting stung by a tarantula in single player your game was just Fade to Black in multiplayer it would crash some militias players even organized into groups online to find and bricksy towns together the online posts are kind of edgy so it's safe to assume that most of them were teens in their Edge Lord phase once you get brick seated there wasn't really anything you could do except for hope that your DS wasn't toast and just completely restart your game of course the Phantom was in complete panic because Nintendo didn't offer fix benevolent players shared guides on how to hack brickseeds out of your game and Animal Crossing communities advise their members to not let strangers into their towns Some Farms even made white lists to secure a safe trading Network for their members besides seats players were also haunted by the red tulip plague in January 2006 in-game letters from Nintendo that had a red tulip attached circulated by a Wi-Fi connection the item seemed innocent enough but players who placed it indoors couldn't get rid of it the Tulip could neither be moved covered or picked up it was just an invisible block that made one tile in a player's home unusable quickly rumor spread that the Tulip wasn't sent from Nintendo but that the Wi-Fi connection network had been hacked and the Tulip was actually a virus within a week of player Mass reporting the alleged hack Nintendo issued an official statement and apologized for the Tulip incident they assured players that the Tulip wasn't the virus but rather back of their item uploader since the too late was corrupting wild world's memory Nintendo removed the letter from circulation and advised players to delete the Tulip on site we all know that KK Slider is a free spirit but according to the New York Times he's also a pirate in 2005 one of the journalists investigated Animal Crossing and specifically slider for promoting piracy after his performance at the Brew the new dog hands out his music to the player for free sometimes he even goes as far as telling the player that those industry Fat Cats tried to put a price on my music but it wants to be free this prompted the New York Times Reporter to ask Nintendo if KK offered some meta commentary on the music industry Nintendo's vice president for marketing replied that no real social commentary was intended but that KK Slider is a free spirit who cannot be bought for money and as a dog he doesn't want to deal with any Fat Cats pretty based Nintendo so at the end of wild world's era in 2008 right when Nintendo announced that Animal Crossing would come to the Wii with city Folk he also introduced a feature that allowed players to move Animal Crossing safe data from the DS to the new Wii game this should have been our first warning that city Folk was just a wee Port of wild world anyway to promote a new data transfer feature Nintendo sent pristine copies of city Folk along with fault World copies that had existing save files to game journalists without checking them for bad content on the Wildwood press copies The Fluffy shade Barbara had her custom catchphrase saturation slur instead of her default darling also her greeting was modified to a controversial innuendo from Full Metal Jacket normally Animal Crossing filters offensive words but the catchphrase contained accents which made it slip through this made the situation worse because it showed that Animal Crossing's profanity detection system doesn't work that well and the Animal Crossing is in fact not for every sheep Nintendo had to issue an apology and give an explanation in the official statement Nintendo claimed that the phrase was included without the knowledge by a Wireless feature of worldworld that allowed user-generated catchphrases to spread from copy to copy still we don't know how it got into the game in the first place Nintendo probably wouldn't just use some random save file but use a new copy of wild world and unlock stuff and then multiply that one but in that case someone must have tempered the world world copies on purpose fans were still stoked for new Animal Crossing game coming to the V ever since Nintendo t-state back in 2005 at E3 this excitement only grew when Edge magazine reported that the new Animal Crossing title would be an MMO but to the disappointment of the fandom city Folk was more like a report of wild world than an actual game on its own and you couldn't even fight with other players or gang up on villagers online when asked about a development process in 2006 a producer of wild world in City Folk stated that not a lot of work had been complete needed on city Folk and confirmed that it still was an unplayable concept city folks concept predates wild world so it's possible that all the ideas and resources went into Wild World instead of city Folk and when they missed their initial release that line set in 2007 the development team just wrapped everything up and just put the additions they couldn't put into wild world into city Folk and shipped it still city Folk had one striking difference from Wild World deteriorating grass animal tracks was a game mechanic that recorded the player's movements and wore grass down accordingly the grass would regrow but the deterioration was faster with solving in towns with no grass left in some areas the Phantom was Furious because the part of Animal Crossing is to keep your town aesthetically pleasing do it to the grass disaster and lack of new features Animal Crossing city Folk is widely known as the most hated and worst game in the series but not as hated as Thor Dima was by parents concerned parents said tordima as kids for their birthday in the game and thought it was an adult trying to get information from kids online Nintendo had to publicly explain the mechanics of NPCs versus online players and why tardima asked for the Player's birthday it's too Freedom a birthday surprise party since Nintendo got rid of brick seats and city Folk everyone thought that Wi-Fi connection hacking was a thing of the past until the hdlc virus made its rounds an hdlc is hacked downloadable content so like a DLC but not official if a player visited someone who had hdlc items or they visited an infected town they would receive the hdlc 2. hdlc items showed up randomly in the able sister shop so it was hard to tell if someone was infected and who gave it to them most common hdlc items included Pokemon balls Ash's hat lightsabers and The dementio Mask rumors that these and city Folk copies could get corrupted but only in very rare cases quickly made rounds in the fandom players panicked even more after multiple posts claimed that hdlc spread via friend lists if one of your friends had it you would get it too a few days passed and fans found out that hdlcs are pretty harmless Nintendo equipped city Folk with 256 placeholders for DLCs hdlcs just take up some of that space if a player received official DLCs they were either added to their game or replaced some hdlc slots city Folk was a bust so Nintendo tried to turn over a new Leaf in 2013 with its 3Ds release of Animal Crossing new Leaf New Leaf was well received by fans but again the online multiplayer led to some controversies although brickseeds were patched new leaves online modes still allowed players to spawn little objects like rocks and trees hackers would visit towns and block access to buildings or important areas with non-removable items to keep people from playing the game the text to item hack allowed players to spawn items just by entering their IDs in chat however if they ever did the hair can spawned thousands of tomato juice shirts the game would usually just freeze without any permanent damage hacking your own town got increasingly popular with new Leaf but even visiting extremely modified towns wasn't dangerous it was to multiplayer connection would end prematurely still some hacked items could damage your game new Leaf allowed users to receive 4 mannequins from side quests this limit couldn't be exceeded so players who wanted more had to resort to hacking copying the mannequins once worked perfectly fine but every copy mimicked the original exactly so you couldn't dress them separately this was probably because New Leaf didn't recognize them as unique items however placing a second copy could crash your game and corrupt your memory before warnings of the mannequin problem spread through the fandom a lot of players would visit hacked islands and receive additional mannequins which would ultimately ruin their game wrapped items were another source of potential permanent damage to your game players would sometimes web hacked items as presents and give them to unsuspecting players after unwrapping the gift players would find a nasty surprise they couldn't get rid of the Hacked item depending on the item it would either take up inventory space irreversibly or they could place and use the item but not sell or trash it what a shitty gift hacked rental wetsuits were a popular choice for the letter but hacked scavenger hunt lists often cast unusable inventory spaces all of this was annoying but nothing compared to the Dream Town stealing incident New Leaf added the dream suit which allowed players to share their Town online without having to invite people or even be online after uploading your town you'd receive a dream address that could be easily used by other players to find and explore your town a major part of the fandom put an exuberant amount of time into their towns to theme them according to an aesthetic of fandom with new Leaf the Animal Crossing fandom got extremely popular on Tumblr so a lot of Tumblr users would share their towns along with custom designs they specifically made for them towns that either looked cool or were intricate and told the story like horror towns went viral and everyone wanted to visit them scrolling through Tumblr in that era of Animal Crossing was such a bliss and extremely inspiring y'all had cool stuff going on but sadly hackers found a way to copy dream towns and even the owner's character model pixel by pixel players couldn't do anything to protect their town from getting stoned because hackers could just read Any Dream Town from memory and replace their own with it hiding your Gmail address or not sharing it online didn't help because New Leaf allowed players to visit random dream towns some hackers even uploaded the stolen towns and pretended they were their own in some cases hackers didn't even bother to rename the dream or remove watermarks or Tumblr links but even if all traces of the original Creator were gone most houses in stolen dream towns were empty so that was a dead giveaway this demoralized the Phantom because really all they could do was just reports to own dream towns as inappropriate funnily enough if you visited a hack Dream Town you couldn't knowingly steal it entering Main Street or any building that was usually inaccessible in a dream like your Roost would replace your own town with the hack dream and you also got the empty houses Nintendo briefly fixed both Dream Town stealing issues with their welcome amiibo update in 2016 but a couple weeks later hackers already found the work around the welcome amiibo update was a pleasant surprise for the fandom because it added new content for an almost four year old game for free that that's almost unheard of by the way amiibos are physical Nintendo Collectibles like figurines or cards that you can scan in games to get special content because Nintendo also fixed hacks with the update they force every player to use it players with hacked towns however lost access to their save files good error messages always stuck in a loop of the game asking them to update at first fans thought that this was Nintendo's way of banning hackers though Nintendo usually only bends Hackers from the online services and not the actual games but vanilla players also reported issues with the update it didn't fit on a game card because it was too huge so you had to install it on a memory card and on every device you plan to play the game on but let's talk about the amiibo apocalypse about a week after the update Nintendo released a special amiibo card series that featured 50 villagers who were missing from prior releases villagers are a huge deal in the fandom with some being extremely popular and others well they hated players would go to extreme lengths to get their favorite villager like resetting their town down over and over again bullying and love villagers to make them move out a bribing other players to buy Villages from them once players could get their highly desired villagers and keep them forever they went bananas amiibo villager cards sold out almost immediately in the US and Japan it didn't help that the cards were mostly sold in steel packs so you never really knew which one you'd get and the whole thing turned into a gacha game Nintendo was slower for stockings the cards got sculpt except it didn't sell out in some European countries that received more stock than they needed for the local player base since amiibo cards aren't region locked and religious languages their friend players would buy cards from European countries the Natural Balance was restored Nintendo also released six amiibo cards in collaboration with Sanrio but decided to only sell them in Japan and Europe again International fans were bummed out and tried to order them from France which was more difficult this time around because everyone wanted them even you don't lie to me however these cards would become even more Infamous for New Horizons because the U.S release was a complete disaster but we're still not done with new Leaf yet remember it is scammy Island from earlier it returned a new Leaf as tardimus island with new features and without asking players to buy more console Parts the new mechanic Club tortima allowed you to meet other random players on an online version of the island to catch fish bugs or play many games besides hacking problems and ensuing crashes players figured out ways to block others from leaving or doing basically anything on the island malicious players would start a Mini-Game or open the inventory to limit the actions of other players and then ask them for in-game currencies to let them leave if players didn't want to pay up their only choice was to disconnect the 3DS and lose all the progress they made on the island or I wait and hope that the blackmailers would just give up kleptodima quickly became famous for virtual kidnapping so the fandom came up with strategies to lock the island and prevent others from joining sadly there was never an official fix for the situation so kept still is a scary dumpster fire after the welcome amiiwa update two years passed without any new game announcements the time gap between main game releases had grown so large that even hardcore fans stopped playing a resorted to Desperate Measures like Animal Crossing themed summoning rituals and it worked because Nintendo teased a new Animal Crossing game during their Nintendo Direct in 2018. well they first introduced Isabell in Smash and the live chat went up in Flames but then Nintendo announced that we should expect the new game in 2019 and defend them was revived fans posted theories about the new game and even old Animal Crossing content was relevant again so when 2019 came and Nintendo announced that the game would be delayed until March 2020 some fans lasted While others were glad Nintendo decided to delay the game because it wasn't ready yet and they didn't want to send their employees into crunch shell if only every gaming company would be this way as we approached the new release date the world would shut down and everyone was forced to stay at home so Animal Crossing fans started a sadly unsuccessful petition for Nintendo to release the game early because the world needed it amidst the pre-release news New Horizons first problem surfaced Nintendo decided that each island the place you play in was bound to one switch so players couldn't have more than one C file per switch a transfer their saves from one switch to another this posed severe restrictions on people who had to share their switch because they had to fight about who gets to do stuff even worse only the first player gets to be the residential representative who can access all features of the game like adding new structures to the island Nintendo added save data transfer a couple months of the New Horizons release but they still haven't fixed the representative issue or the one switch one Island policy despite massive fan backlash New Horizons also didn't use Nintendo's Cloud safe feature when it was released so if you switch your game broke your progress was just gone since Cloud saves for other games were only accessible with a paid Nintendo switch online membership fans who specifically subscribe for Animal Crossing and those who already had it were equally upset why pay for a service when almost no game supports it luckily Nintendo changed that after a few months after players had already lost their game data due to random memory corruption and rage credit while this was annoying it didn't weren't the hate some fans would send towards ayakyo Goku one of New Horizons directors she received nasty messages and allegedly even death threats from players who demanded Cloud backups on Twitter so she deleted her account directing your anger at Nintendo was all nice and fun but going around and being mean to people who work on the game is just not okay for all you know she was for cloud backups release day felt like the closest Humanity could come to world peace and even the Doom Community cheered us on still Peter had a bone to pick with us because Animal Crossing wasn't vegan enough three days after New Horizons released they posted peta's vegan guide to Animal Crossing New Horizons and everyone memed on it the guide urged players to pay basically do nothing in the game everything that could help you progress like fishing or collecting bucks was off limits and if you thought about building a doghouse the guide would describe why you shouldn't in very graphic details the post also had a kids version and it's just as brutal as the normal one but at least the guide says that Tom Nook is not exploiting the player and oh no what is that what the [ __ ] Peter although the guide is bizarre it's karma suggests that we should treat animals as our equals also Isabel's Wigan this wasn't the end of peta's antics because two months later they posted a tick tock of players waiting in Animal Crossing museum and yelling empty their tanks via chat the goal was to cancel the custodian NPC by others because he encourages the player to remove fish and bugs from the habitat and that's not very vegan of him I guess no one told them about animal conservation and Rehabilitation programs and Aquariums throughout their Animal Crossing Bill and Eric Peter replied to innocent tweets about the game with graphic pictures and descriptions of animal abuse forget the fact that nothing in Animal Crossing is real and it's literally just a game if you ever fished an animal crossing or thought about catching a buck you an animal abuser never mind that they promote smashing rocks which destroys the habitat of bugs in the game New Horizons was released with the promise of continuous updates to expand the game this was directly needed because fans soon noticed that a lot of content from prior games was cut beloved items like the froggy chair weren't there NPC integral to gameplay and lore like Brewster were missing features like diving and dreams were scrapped and we didn't even get gyroids with every update Nintendo added a tiny bit of missing stuff back into the game and some new things after the initial honeymoon phase with New Horizons was over fans felt like Nintendo wasn't giving them enough players started to return only for larger updates and then stopped playing some updates resulted in bizarre discussions about the game's suitability for kids one Infamous update included accurate depictions of historic art pieces like Michael Angelo's David which also added high resolution dicks and clopless Lady paintings to the game without any cover-ups Nintendo also had to review their guidelines after they added dream Islands Brands created Islands to promote themselves and connect with players this didn't agree with Nintendo's core values so they banned islands that directed players to activities outside the game by advertising the website current campaigns or giving out coupons the new Wheels also have a bit promoting your social media accounts to Animal Crossing content creators could get into hot Waters however sharing custom patterns or having branded Islands was still okay which is why KFC and Uniqlo islands are still around still some people get banned for just having the Apple logo on the island apart from Brands political movements used Islands to promote their cars most notably Biden had his own Island filled with custom designs that promoted voting and his campaign but according to Nintendo's revised rules politics shouldn't be brought into the game which makes this island illegal and thus he got Nintendo's blessing not all updates were good either because some introduced bugs or glitches that could break your game like item duplication critical bucks received slow patches while the 9 ones were fixed almost immediately the dreaded glitch and moving glitch that gave players an inaccessible villager house with a note saying I moved out instead of an NPC was never fixed but a simple interface glitch that was used by creators to make animal crossing videos more immersive got patched I didn't really know that Animal Crossing fan videos were such a huge deal or had storylines before I researched this video but holy [ __ ] they put a lot of effort into that luckily Nintendo noticed the error and we added the glitch as a feature after almost two years of sporadic updates Nintendo announced New Horizons final big free update and the pay DLC version 2.0 added back a lot of content that fans missed from prior games but it didn't satisfy the fandom articles and fans claimed that Nintendo didn't follow up on its long-term support promises and dropped a ball on one of its most successful franchises just for comparison in the spin-off game pocket cam which featured micro transactions had already been supported for 5 years when New Horizons received its last update Nintendo didn't even give fans a nice two-year anniversary event but on the bright side fans who bought the DLC without any expansion subscription pack were really happy about it the online expansion only went to DLC to you for a year and gives you access to other Nintendo online services also free update stopping isn't entirely a bad sign maybe the devs are working on a new paid DLC or on a new Animal Crossing game just please don't be a spin-off if you're into Animal Crossing chances are you've seen this screenshot of a player's character with the caption cute space buns hide face in November 2020 Twitter user stardew Leaf posted this seemingly innocent tweet to Showcase a new hairstyle that was just added to the game her tweet went viral but to her surprise not because it was cute but because it was problematic the space buns look a lot like afropuffs a hairstyle predominantly worn by black girls fights broke out about the name of the hairstyle and if it's even okay for a Caucasian character a player to wear them people defending the post argued that Animal Crossing hairstyles are inclusive for every player While others called stardew leaf and her supporters out for cultural appropriation some players even advised her to change the hairstyle before it was too late the argument escalated so badly that polygon wrote an article about it the article tried to prove that the hairstyle was afro puffs with zoomed in pictures and argued that calling them space buns is a raising Black Culture meanwhile a lot of black players didn't see any issue with the tweet and the fandom generally thought it was a ridiculous debate because Nintendo put the hairstyles into the game without limitations still many players thought that it wasn't cool to call them space buns or hide their cultural significance especially because players of color had to fight hard for representation in Animal Crossing and other games also Animal Crossing doesn't have the best track record with representation so I can see why people were mad at stardo leaf for sticking to her original tweet not apologizing and continuously pissing people off by posting about her space buns but it didn't warrant the hate and threats sent to her people also accused the relief of being ableist because their profile font was hard to read for folks of Dyslexia as the situation got Messier Twitter users Mass reported her account posted that they hope she gets doxed and threatened to kill her doc some even centered death threats in her DMS and told her to end herself but start to leave didn't back down until her private information got leaked and she privated her account the controversy still continue so she contacted Nintendo their support replied and officially stated that all in-game items are meant to be used by all players provided they have good intentions I should note that a part of the fandom didn't believe that this was an actual statement from Nintendo or that statue Leaf acted without bad intentions especially because some Animal Crossing fans found what is believed to be one of stardolli's old Twitter accounts from which offensive tweets and slurs were posted although both accounts share convincing similarities like the same villagers island name character customization and similar handles there is no definite proof that it belongs to study relief and it could just be a coincidence even though the drama almost died down a couple of months later stadio Leaf announced that she would delete her Twitter she wanted no association with the drama and was in her words done now the controversy lives on through screenshots and [ __ ] posts right after the dream suit update staff fragmentaries dominated the Animal Crossing fandom everyone buddy wanted them I wanted them but they were no ordinary New Horizons items they were hacked and thus Contraband in Nintendo's eyes so having them on your Island was risky players devised an underground trading system where people would invite others to the island and hand out the heck trees for free in-game currencies or real money the latter would set you back three dollars per tree and there's an even worse terms of service violation than hacking just like the elusive trees spread through the fandom misinformation did too allegedly the evil trees could corrupt your game's memory produce their tiles after shaking the trees a prick your game if a villager sat under it although there was never a confirmed case and the people coming up with the hack tested it extensively there's always a risk of hacked items with the growing popularity of the Forbidden star fragment trees more players contempt them the Animal Crossing fandom has always been very divisive when it comes to hacking with some claiming that it's against the game spirit and ruining the experience for everyone so anti-hacking players bounded together online trying to find Islands or star fragmentaries and mass report them for cheating if enough people reported a dream address Nintendo would take it down immediately and potentially ban the owner from online services or uploading to the dream suit permanently the star fragment tree which hunt was led by One content creator who posted multiple videos of his Crusade against Contraband trees and incentivized his audience to follow his example what a modern day hero less than a week after the controversial trees Inception Nintendo squashed the beef and released a small update that patched star fragment trees out of the game the fandom mainly blamed the crusading content creator for flooding Nintendo's report systems and thus alerting them to the hack in the first place players who had the trees were left with the original version of the heck trees those who paid with money felt scammed and some even tried to get a refund from Nintendo for a Contraband item they purchased on basically the black market to this day star fragmentaries sadly haven't made a comeback when New Horizons introduced Raymond a very smart cats he quickly became the most popular villager everyone loved Raymond but the chance of getting him in the game were almost 1 in 400. again players flocked to the Animal Crossing Black Market to purchase Raymond and other highly desired villagers for millions in in-game currencies or around 50 real USD allegedly one lucky scalper sold Raymond for one thousand dollars on eBay but looking into it I think it was a meme during the peak of the Raymond craze bizarre actions showed up on newcaston the most popular trading platform for Animal Crossing which became the heart of New Horizons furry slave trade players charged thousands of nukmals a very grind intense in-game currency just to let others see Raymond on the islands for a few minutes or get Raymond memorabilia of course cute outfits and interactions cost extra scammers would offer women in boxes which means Raymond was ready to move to another Island just pack his things up in boxes and was waiting for players to adopt him but after completing the payment players noticed that this wasn't true and they could only take pictures with him at least we get their inboxes meme from that Raymond tries to fame and knights some players so much that they paid others to bully him by hitting him with Nets or making him fall down holes I always thought it was very strange that no one seemed to care about Animal Crossing's guidelines that explicitly prohibit actions for financial game but everyone Drew their line with star fragment trees at least Nintendo is now officially trying to crack down on the Forbidden Fury trade concerned by the greed of the fandom content creator Pokey ninja hacked the game and gave desired villagers in boxes away to anyone who contacted him via Twitter within a couple of days hundreds of Raymonds saturated the black market according to him being a parent changed his perspective and he couldn't bear the thought of people struggling to afford their dream villagers so he spent literal days of his life trying to make the Phantom better very cool move their response to poke Ninja's Villages and boxes was so enormous that he couldn't keep up with the requests so he formed a team of 20 people to help more players get their dreamies for free they called the project villager Haven and launched it at the end of June 2020 via Discord thousands of players have joined the discard and received their dream villagers since by just typing their names in a designated butt chat and then arranging pickup of the team but why Raymond his popularity was probably due to his unique design and smug personality the fandom quickly recognized his meme potential and people were thirsty for him because he was a Tumblr sexy man theiston started to put him into various mate costumes and far more questionable outfits which only increased his Chokehold on the fandom people would send players that posted about Raymond ominous messages in which they rendered about how someone didn't deserve him because they don't treat him right this gave us the infamous Comfort character end which is a masterpiece in itself and turned into a great copy pasta the Animal Crossing fandom is new to this sort of behavior it is pretty common to see people rant about how to play the game correctly and it's equally bad as in the undertale Venom time traveling the act of changing your console state has been a controversial Topic in the fandom since the very first game Animal Crossing has always been a game about expressing your creativity freely unless you play it in a way that doesn't agree with the toxic minority of the fandom and then you're canceled also you don't deserve your villagers anymore so give them to me now fans get seriously territorial about players stealing the furniture Island Arrangements without credit copying their Aesthetics or using similar designs to them some even toyed with the idea of patenting their Islands or Furniture Arrangements but players got especially protective over design patterns when Infamous band posted their version of a simple brick pattern to the AC QR code subreddit another user claimed they stole the design from them and filed two dmca takedowns despite Infamous bun crediting them after they requested it via DMS the other user posted about the fake pattern circulating on the subreddit and tweeted that it sucks when someone booed like your design and gets more up boats with a screenshot of Infamous buns post Infamous Ben replied to the separated post and clarified that the other user had actually thanked them for the credit initially before filing the takedowns but one of the most toxic traits of the Phantom is still how fans treat ugly villagers the Phantom normalized bullying ugly villagers trying to get rid of them is actively encouraged and fans were the elaborate rents on why they deserve hate you need help eventually Nintendo announced amiibo support in cards for New Horizons which effectively legalized villager trading and put an end to the overpriced Black Market listings for irregular villagers Nintendo also re-released send Rio collaboration cards in March of 2021 that featured exclusive promotional villagers and special items thus making a six in Rio villagers the most desirable and rare villagers and New Horizons the kites were only set to release on Target's website players should order them online and then pick them up at their Target locations naturally the morning of their release Target its website got flooded with Bots and fans and only a few of them emerged Victorious with her order confirmation however those who succeeded weren't guaranteed cards because no one told target employees that they shouldn't stock the cards in store so a lot of confirmed card orders got sold before the actual owners could get them fans were outraged and it didn't help that sculpt cards popped up immediately with some listings exceeding 17K for the whole set but again hackers saved the day because small businesses manufactured an official amiibo buttons now the kites have been restocked so cinnamon roll can be mined forever in the game Betty amoeba frenzy was far from over when Nintendo announced Animal Crossing's final big update they also introduced new villagers and new kites thus the amiibo Series 5 was released on November 5th 2021 and featured fan favorites like Raymond Sasha Shino and Judy naturally the competition was again Fierce pre-orders sold out quickly the cards were immediately out of stock online and people lined up outside of Best Buy and Target at the crack of dawn while some could get in early enough to grab a few packs most players were greeted by empty shelves and scalp listings online scalpers sold seal packs of six cards for 40 dollars instead of six bucks again the Villager cards you get in the packs are random so there's no guarantee you'll find your dreamy interestingly Nintendo is aware of the scalping issue and they announced and made to order re-release by the Animal Crossing amiibo series 1-4 in Japan to meet the fans demand however the solution to the initial amiibo shortages in 2020 the same Rio collapse disaster and a series 5 rupture outside of Japan was to just slowly restock the cards the quickest way to get bells and Animal Crossing and progress in a game was to play the stock market the stock market is like the stock market but with turnips each island had different turnip prices throughout the week so players analyzed turnip Trends to come up with different selling strategies since you could only buy turnips on Sundays and they would spoil at the end of the week players bounded together to find Islands online with extremely high Turner prizes while it started at innocent with players just inviting others to the islands and running into a few celebrities a part of the fandom soon charged fees to visit and sell turnips on their Islands people even hired bouncers that would collect those fees and only let people in after they paid as the Phantom obsessed they were playing the stock markets scammers would also advertise mostly fake Turner prizes online and just boot every one of their Island once they collected the payment of course the people visiting them never got anything in return stock market communities have created extensive white lists and reviewing systems as a response however the stock market hype has died down noticeably since 2002. players that profited from the tourney Bloom switch to trading rare items villagers and knock miles Treasure Islands have since built a turnip void these islands are usually hacked feature various rare items and allow visitors to take whatever they want for an entrance fee but getting an invite to them is quite treaty because they aren't explicitly advertised because they are hacked and also many fans consider them as crossing the line there are a few other honorable mentions for New Horizons controversies hacked mystery items could again break your inventory because once unwrapped they just block the slot permanently hackers will also give players items that were unbeknownst to them hacked which could corrupt their save files or make the item non-disposable New Horizons multiplayer was pretty safe and put an update added a glitch that would allow visitors to get out of bounds this allowed visitors to get to fenced off areas on the island and just steal precious items fruits or resources that don't grow back also New Horizons added features that allowed your best Trends to do more damaging things on your Island like landscaping or destroying stuff players that trusted others or didn't know about that feature got burned badly pretty trees weren't the only hack that made really upset players in the summer of 2022 dream address stealing made its Grand return Island duplication tools that allowed users to easily copy a Dream Island including all the custom designs gained popularity people even paid around 50 dollars on websites like taobao to have dream addresses duplicated or by popular Islands besides the prior issue of people claiming others work as their own this time original creators could allegedly get banned from the dream suit for hacking since every island should be its own unique instance multiple exec duplicates of dream addresses could trigger Nintendo's band criteria despite the original post claiming this there is no known case of the original owner getting banned for a stone dream address Nintendo is very mysterious about their band criteria so no one knows for sure but they'd be more likely to bend a hack dream address private designs that are against terms of service on the other hand could get the original Creator band because they can get reported after someone copies and then publishes them besides not uploading their dream address not letting strangers visit their islands and Reporting stolen dream addresses as hacked players sadly couldn't do anything to protect their Islands however the creator of a popular Island duplication tool stated that he never intended for it to be used for stealing dream addresses but rather for archiving your own island or Inspirations offline but there's also a non-honorable controversy that concerns an Infamous Animal Crossing content creator I wasn't sure if I should include this because it's quite gruesome so trigger warning for animal cruelty and discrimination I put a timestamp in for when it's safe to watch again right after this content creator gained a considerable following for the cottage core aesthetic in New Horizon reasons people called the mattress scamming being extremely toxic to fans and spreading hateful ideologies the Creator would take up to 300 from fans to give them advice on their Island design and charge them seven dollars per in-game item on the Discord and in live streams the Creator would often make insensitive remarks towards the lgbtq plus Community BLM and non-Christian beliefs besides lashing out at fans and basically anything that wasn't Christian enough for them on Twitter they also admitted to neglecting a blind and deaf puppy who died as a result in the same ASMR video they admitted to cracking a fertilized egg open just to see if there was a chicken inside yeah that's a pretty much unganky person I don't want to intersection a tragic note so let's talk about the infamous dancing cat at the end of 2021 animator Stone posted a video of the cat vulture anchor dancing to Sandy Morton's camel by camel hmm the video went viral on Tick Tock and led to many parodies of the animation fan art and people dancing to the song like Anka but son's video was actually a parody of an animation by -8 in the original Anka is doing loot things to a default clear character but people cropped the video to make it look like she's just doing a weird dance which caused that is the cat dancing meme as more people found someone's animation and its loot Origins questions about the appropriateness of adult themes and memes and fandoms that also contain children were raised but despite the controversy and some articles negating the loot origins of the meme the two videos continue to spread and also the song is now stuck in my ears forever so is the cat dancing well kind of there's a lot of controversy and drama and Animal Crossing fandom and surrounding the games I tried to pick very prominent controversies for each of the main Series games but hey if I left something out please tell me in the comments and maybe I can make an update video once they release a new game you might have noticed that it didn't talk about the spin-offs and that's because they are bad and no one likes them no but seriously I wanted to focus on the main series because I felt like most of the fandom put their time and hearts into the main Series games also the spinos are highly contested and usually only fun for a few weeks I briefly try to play Pocket Camp while I was waiting for New Horizons and to me it was just another gacha but with Animal Crossing flavoring and basically everything in the game required you to buy stuff from the cash shop growing up Animal Crossing meant a lot to me so I just love talking about weird things in the games and also the fandom like when I was little I thought the villagers were wheels so when I was talking to them I actually thought I was chatting to a real person so when Mitzi decided to leave my town I took it really personally and I was sad and cried for multiple days it was really bad and a rough time I left looking at Animal Crossing tumblers and visiting dream towns in New Leaf but I also have to agree with people that felt like with New Horizons the game turned more into work than fun and the community just got worse with every game for some reason those cozy nice Escapist games just started to stress people out a lot including me still I hope you liked the video and that you got anything out of it even if it was just a giggle and hey if I made you laugh you owe me a subscription so don't forget to subscribe and see you in the next video bye

Channel: PlushiePath

Views: 341,018

Keywords: animal crossing, controversy, animal crossing controversy, acnh, acww, animal crossing fandom, animal crossing drama, star fragment trees, raymond, sanrio amiibo, sanrio animal crossing, nookazon, commentary, acnh 2.0, animal crossing iceberg, animal crossing facts, animal crossing ost, animal crossing lore, animal crossing secrets, animal crossing hack, animal crossing glitch, acnl, animal crossing history, animal crossing deep dive, animal crossing scam, video game controversy

Id: 62p41ncqVCo

Length: 51min 23sec (3083 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2022