Every now and then I wonder what happened to Jerry, the spindly little boy who was ruthlessly bullied by just about every kid in my 5th grade class. He didn’t smell great. Glasses thick as a Kool-Aid pitcher. Hair gel flaking off, causing everyone to pick on him for his “dandruff”.
I still remember him whining, “I don’t have dandruff. It’s hair geeeeeel!” No one listened to him. It was more important for us to believe he had dandruff than to admit that he probably didn’t.
I never felt comfortable picking on him directly, but I was too much of a coward to really stick up for him. The one time I did anything - timidly asking another kid to just leave him alone - Jerry turned to me and gave a feral growl. So I told myself it was ok to not defend him, even though I understood that his weird behavior was probably an effect of the bullying and not the cause.
Bullying Jerry was a bonding exercise between the kids in my class. He was our scapegoat. If Jerry was beneath us then at least we were above someone. That comforted us at an age where we were becoming aware of the social strata. Most of us felt pretty low on that strata and picking on Jerry made us feel like at least we weren’t at the very bottom.
I wonder what happened to Jerry. I wonder what happened to Karen, too, that freckle-faced blonde girl that we also picked on. She wasn’t an ugly girl, but a bit plain and scatter-brained. She was terrible at schoolwork and probably should have repeated a grade somewhere. As an adult, that’s just a sad situation. Something that breaks your heart, not something you’d bully someone over. But we bullied her, too. What did it matter to us, I wonder?
I do remember being floored the day I learned Jerry and Karen were “going together,” since nothing could have been more natural than a relationship between the boy and the girl who got aggressively attacked every day. Bullied just for existing. In some ways Jerry was doing better than us. None of us had girlfriends. We were too terrified of being rejected! But those two knew all about rejection. My only positive memory of this situation is that at least Jerry and Karen had each other.
So what the hell does this have to do with Animal Crossing?
Animal Crossing! That sweet, kindly, bucolic game series that I first encountered on the Nintendo GameCube!
Back then, a 25 year old man played Animal Crossing to collect all the NES roms Nintendo helpfully included. Those were different times, young grasshopper. Before the Virtual Console or the eShop sometimes you had to make friends with a talking alligator if you just wanted to play Punch-Out.
So I came for the roms, but I stayed for the good-hearted charm. It is the most kindly game I’ve ever played. It's hard to describe to someone who's never played it because, well, it’s mostly a game about making friends with animals. Mr. Rogers could have created this game. It's your own little neighborhood of make-believe. My wife and I stuck with the series, making towns again in Wild World and City Folk. A busy life kept me away from New Leaf, but my wife played her copy as a kind of stress-reliever throughout one of her pregnancies. It’s probably the best video game experience we’ve shared together. It stuck with us, too. Right now, there’s a 4 foot tall painting of K.K. Slider on my daughter’s wall.
Is it just me, or does it seem like Animal Crossing exploded in popularity recently? Maybe it’s some combination of the ubiquity of the Switch, the loneliness of the COVID-19 quarantine, and the ease of sharing on social media, but from the perspective of a long-time fan, it feels like Animal Crossing’s time has finally come. Just today I got added to a group chat of six people from work who wanted to collaborate on getting the best turnip prices possible. I’ve been with this series for over 15 years, but that level of enthusiasm for the little animal village simulator is new to me.
Animal Crossing is thoroughly charming and I want other people to get the kind-hearted joy out of it that I’ve gotten over the years. So it pains me to point out that there are parts of the Animal Crossing culture that are a little messed up, right now.
For one, there seems to be a rush to be the first person to do everything. I understand that gamers blast through so many releases nowadays and they may put pressure on themselves to get to the ending as fast as possible, impress their Twitch followers, and move on to the next big game. Animal Crossing flouts that style of play, though. This isn’t a game you blast through. There’s no real objective to it, other than to pay off a few building projects. If you think the game is all about making good on your loan or expanding the store or getting KK Slider to play a gig in your square, you’re missing the point.
And yet, the first weekend of release I already saw videos popping up about how to maximize bells by selling tarantulas or bragging about getting rare items or desirable villagers. I don’t fault the enthusiasm or helpfulness of some of these videos, but I kept detecting a weird little status chase going on, as if the more bells you had or the rarer your items or the cooler your villagers, the higher your overall score.
I used to play Animal Crossing because I wanted to check in with Punchy the cat. To hear a new KK song. To see if Kapp'n had anything funny to say. I wasn’t in a hurry to make a million bells so I could move on to the next thing. I always considered it the slowest of slow burns. Maybe I’ve been playing it wrong all this time.
But if there’s a weird status symbol thing happening with Animal Crossing on the internet right now, I can think of no worse symptom of it than the subreddit
Fuck Rodney.
To catch you up, there’s a blue hamster that you might get in Animal Crossing named Rodney. He’s, uh… look, he’s got some challenges going on to say the least. I’ll admit he doesn’t have the most appealing design. I like Animal Crossing hamsters in general because they’re so small and silly looking, but Rodney probably has the worst aesthetics. And that’s saying something in a game where Gerald exists. (Hmm… I wonder if Gerald ever went by Jerry.)
Rodney also has the smug personality type, which is nobody’s favorite. Smug characters sometimes take low-level digs at the player, the town or other villagers. But they’re also considered gentlemanly and able to get along with other characters. They aren’t as aggressive as cranky villagers, but they’re still not particularly lovable. So Rodney isn’t winning any congeniality awards.
But here’s the thing. Everyone can relate to having a couple of villagers in town who they don’t like all that much. But when you look through “Fuck Rodney”, here are some of posts you’ll read:
-Someone celebrating that Rodney has agreed to move out, with a screenshot of him standing outside his house next to a sign that screams, “Die SCUM!”
-Someone who has decorated the front of his house with toxic waste, a portapotty, barbed wire fencing and something that frankly looks like a giant elephant turd. Their comment? “May he rot in hell with the smell of garbage every morning.”
-Someone offering a QR Code so you can get artwork of Rodney with a gun to his face.
-A picture of Rodney sick and needing medicine with the caption, “The beast is ill, his death is imminent.”
-A picture of Marshall moving in with the caption, “Finally fucking kicked that piece of shit Rodney off the island for Marshall, good riddance shithead”
-Lots of photos of village-wide celebrations where Rodney is obscured by a tree or a larger character with captions intimating that the other villagers hate Rodney just as much as the gamer does and also want him out of the photo.
-And this comment, which might be my least favorite: “I still remember the time I saw Rodney on a mystery island and he thought he had the privilege to speak to me or be in my presence. Still recovering from the trauma.”
Before I go on, I want to say: I’m not an idiot. Of course the whole “Fuck Rodney” thing is an ironic, memetic joke. The humor derives from pretending to have strong feelings about something that ultimately isn’t very important. It’s tongue-in-cheek and largely an in-joke.
I’m also well aware that Rodney doesn’t exist. Rodney is a few lines of code and nothing more. He doesn’t feel or care about anything said about him online. So I’m not offended on Rodney’s behalf or anything ridiculous like that. I don’t want to overblow the bullying angle.
And yet…
God, when I read that subreddit, I’m just reminded of the way we scapegoated Jerry. And I can’t help but feel it reveals something darker about human nature. We’re still worried about our place in the social strata. We want Raymond on our island because we're being told that it matters if we don't have him. We want that loan paid off and the extra bells for the big house. And if we can't have those things sooner than other people, we still want a scapegoat for it. And our reasons for who we scapegoat are largely arbitrary.
If you look through it long enough, you’ll see where people say, “Hey, it’s not just that we think he’s ugly. He’s a smug little pissant to everyone.” Sure. I guess. He is a smug type, so I can believe it. But the first thing Rodney did when he moved to my village was give me a sand castle. I thought that was kind of sweet. He's got a fun, throwback diner aesthetic going on in his house. Sure, it makes it look like he wants to live in a Chili's, but that's not a reason to call him scum. He hasn't been worse than some of my other villagers so far. Maybe he acted worse to you.
Right now my island has been a magnet for snooty and smug villagers. (That’s what happens when your 5 year old daughter names the town “Ft. Every” because “Everyone’s invited!” I haven’t been allowed to refuse a single camper.) I also have Hippeaux, Kidd, Eloise and Peggy. Ft. Every is an island full of self-involved little snots. But none of those characters have a hate cult the size of Rodneys. Why is that, I wonder?
I'll go further. Marshall is a smug villager too and yet he’s considered hilarious and highly desirable. Someone up there was celebrating trading for Marshall when his personality is basically a copy of Rodney. Why is that?
I think it’s simple: Rodney is uglier than they are. He looks like a fucking smelly nerd. That’s it. That's as complicated as this gets.
And that’s the part that I think is gross. I don’t have a problem with people wanting to get rid of their least favorite villagers. If you want to spend 400 Nook Miles Tickets to get Raymond, because you think he’s better designed overall, I can’t fault you for that. But I’d encourage gamers to lay off the ironic scapegoating of characters they don’t like. I get the joke and it works for about 5 minutes flat. After that it starts to sound like you’re just role-playing being an asshole. And I have no idea why you’d want to bring something that mean-spirited to something as good-natured as Animal Crossing.
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