📺 Jesse's Funhouse 📺
Or why you shouldn't trust me with my own website...
Today's Tangent (29/6/2024)
Animal Crossing is a game that I had always wanted since I was a child. Of course, I was always too nervous to ask my parents for money, so I dodged asking for it as much as possible; that means I only got into the series when I was a bit too old to properly appreciate the characters and the way they interact with the player. I'm sure they would be a lot more meaningful back in my days as a lonely schoolgirl, but they aren't now. Still, that's the inherent appeal to the game- building a town and bonding with your villagers. So, for the life of me, I can never understand why people are so fixated on villager appearance.
Sure, it's your town and you can play how you like, but the bustling market of villager trades was always a depressing and grim one for me. Am I supposed to look at your trading of these digital people and understand it from an aesthetic standpoint when that's against the spirit of the game as a whole? It was always difficult for me especially when people try to put conventional beauty onto the faces of these anthropomorphic animals. Every single person knows that Hazel is not conventionally beautiful. She has a unibrow and overall objectionable facial features; the unibrow has been out of style since caveman times. However, people back in the earlier 2020's tried to argue that she was, somehow, conventionally beautiful. It always irked me to see the fanart of her where they tried to make her look 'cute,' whether they changed her design or not. Hazel is not conventionally beautiful, and that's okay because the beauty of your Animal Crossing villagers should not come before the personality of the villager themself. I know they're not real, but hasn't there been such a large movement to reclaim the humanity of 'ugly' people as well? All this shows is the shallowness of society as a whole and how our perceptions of conventional beauty permeate even relaxing pastimes such as video games. It's incredibly disheartening to think about. It was on my mind today, playing New Leaf and all. On an unrelated note, I think what happened to Citra was pretty fucked up.