I love being a part of something bigger than myself, which is why I recently dove into Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch despite never playing a single entry in the franchise before. Not only were all my friends playing it, but it felt like the whole world, with nothing better to do in the midst of this global pandemic, had wholeheartedly embraced Animal Crossing. Call it peer pressure if you want, but I just loved the energy I saw coming from the people praising the game, drawing fan art, and making memes. I wanted to be able to speak that new shared social language too.
Having invested far more hours in the game now than I’d care to admit, I can see why it’s resonated so strongly in this specific moment in time. Sure, Animal Crossing is a popular franchise that had already built plenty of buzz before its release. Sure, the first major game released after the pandemic was always going to receive a sales boost. But in the age of COVID-19, Animal Crossing: New Horizons lets us live a totally different, far more free life than the one we currently are. That kind of escapism is a welcome balm right about now.
In a time where many of us are feeling especially unmoored — and in an era when more young people than ever are facing hopeless job prospects — Animal Crossing provides purpose, or at least fulfilling work. Yeah, much of the game amounts to running around the island collecting supplies, but then you can use those supplies to build new items for yourself, or sell them for money. Your labor isn’t profiting bigwig corporate goons, your money isn’t going to a landlord*, every ounce of your work is to your benefit, helps progress your character and their life. It’s pathetic that that’s such an exciting prospect in 2020, but that’s just the way it is, I guess.
*And no, Tom Nook is not a landlord. He sells you your home for a reasonable, interest-free loan you don’t even have to pay back if you don’t want to — but if you do, the game opens up so much more. Hm…there’s an argument here for Universal Basic Income if you squint, but I’m probably not the guy to write that essay.
Animal Crossing also fosters creativity. Your character, your home, and eventually every aspect of the island is fully customizable, and the available options are nearly endless — your imagination is quite literally the limit. Want to recreate a peaceful French villa? Turn your home into a punk dive? Assemble a sacrificial altar in your bedroom? Play a concert to thirty captive tarantulas? I’ve literally seen all these with my own eyes. To many Millenials and Gen Zers dealing with restrictive jobs and dreaming of having their own place, that kind of freedom is something sorely missing in their lives — and in the time of COVID, when any kind of control over our lives at all almost seems alien, well, it’s a godsend.
Believe it or not, Animal Crossing can also help fill, even if just a tiny bit, that hole social distancing has created in many of our lives. The villagers within the game all have their own personalities and behave differently depending on how you interact with them, which really helps you get attached to them. These same villagers also lead their own lives, wandering around the island going about their own business in a way that makes your island home feel far more inhabited than most public places these days. While playing last night, two of my villagers decided to meet up in the town square and start singing and stayed there for quite some time. I was able to make my character applaud them. It was oddly beautiful.
But more importantly, Animal Crossing also provides a new platform for us to be social with our actual, flesh-and-blood friends. The ability to visit your friends’ islands (and have them visit yours) allows your to tour your friends’ homes, share creations, and physically interact, if only through digital avatars. I have a friend who held his birthday party on Animal Crossing, inviting all his friends to his island and having them all bring him items as presents. Even the ability to send mail to your real life friends on their various islands helps foster that feeling of connection.
Finally, Animal Crossing creates space to just do whatever you want. There’s a kind of zen peace to be found in the openness of the game, in the ability to spend time on the kind of tasks both other games and real life so rarely leave time for. For example, I’ve been greatly enjoying the science facts Blathers teaches me about the animals I donate to the museum. I’ve also found myself abandoning my tasks to follow a whim; I’ll be collecting wood, but stop to catch a fish, but abandon that to shoot down a balloon that flies by, but be interrupted from that by a villager who needs my help, etc. That sounds like it should be overwhelming, but I’ve found peace in realizing that my plans aren’t as important as I think — or, if they are important, than I’ll be able to get back to them eventually with no problem. It’s actually something I’ve been trying to apply to my own life while under quarantine; instead of holding myself to a tight schedule, I follow my whim, even if it means stopping an episode of TV halfway through to go write for a while because inspiration suddenly struck, or seeing that it’s a nice day so dropping everything to go ride my bike for a few hours. It won’t be tenable when society starts back up, but for now, it’s a really fulfilling way to live.
So yeah, I completely get why Animal Crossing is resonating so strongly right now. It was released at just the exact perfect moment to capture the Zeitgeist of this quarantine; of all the things that could’ve caught on, I’m so glad such a positive and freeing game ended up being the one that did.
WAIT, WHAT ABOUT THAT OTHER BIT OF VIRAL QUARANTINE CULTURE?
Oh, you mean Tiger King?
(Minor spoilers for Tiger King lie ahead)
I actually only just finished watching it after putting it off for a while. Yeah, I was always going to watch it (I’m a sucker for anything even remotely about cults, and while Carole and especially Joe’s outfits have cult-like elements, Doc Antle is absolutely running a full blown sex cult, to the point where I was surprised Allison Mack didn’t show up), but seeing the public reaction to it turned me off for a while.
What’s fun about being a part of Animal Crossing as it sweeps the world is seeing how it connects people, and how they all react to the same things happening in the game in different, fun ways. In short: Animal Crossing has great memes. Tiger King most assuredly does not — and it probably shouldn’t. While the majority of the documentary’s major players are scumbags at best, they’re outnumbered by the sheer amount of victims involved, especially when you include the animals. It raises — but never really answers — serious questions about animal cruelty, zoos vs. sanctuaries, prisons and the criminal justice system, but the public response has mainly been to laugh at Joe Exotic and his music, or to go on about Carole Baskin killing her husband. Inserting “Carole Baskin killed her husband” into random places is not a funny meme — it’s barely a meme at all.
Do I think Carole Baskin killed her husband? The documentary makes a compelling argument, and she certainly had means and motive. But Don Lewis also had means and motive to fake his own death and/or frame Carole. I don’t know if the world will ever know for sure, and in the meantime, there’s at least a 50% chance she’s just a woman whose husband disappeared and she’s faced decades of accusations ever since. If I thought Joe and Doc and all the others in the documentary actually cared about finding justice for Don that would be one thing, but they don’t; preaching that Carole murdered him is just a way to discredit and maybe even take down their greatest enemy, which lends the real life viewers parroting them a serious air of ghoulishness.
Same thing goes for Joe’s husbands. I’m as guilty as anyone, early on, for laughing at the fact that someone who looks and acts like Joe Exotic managed to get not one, but two men to marry him at the same time, both of them being straight at that, but as the documentary goes on and I see the level of manipulation and tragedy involved in those relationships, well, I feel a lot worse for laughing at it.
Those speak more to the public response to Tiger King than Tiger King itself, but even when it comes to the doc and the information it presents it’s hard to know exactly what to trust. The only piece of information that really mattered in Joe Exotic’s murder-for-hire trial was if he ever actually exchanged money with anyone in return for murdering Carole, but that was also the fact that seemed most frustratingly vague. Based on the information in the documentary, I don’t think Joe is a “good person” and I don’t believe a single word that comes out of his mouth, and I think he sealed his own fate by broadcasting death threats against Carole Baskin over the internet for literal years, and it seems pretty overwhelmingly likely that he would pay to have Carole killed if given the opportunity, but it also seems pretty apparent that if he actually did take that step, he only did so because Jeff Lowe and James Garretson presented him with the opportunity with the sole intent of getting him arrested. That sure seems like entrapment to me.
Again, though, that’s assuming you can fully believe what Tiger King put on screen. Carole Baskin certainly objects to how the documentary portrays her (even if, murder allegations aside, she comes out looking far better than Joe or Doc or Jeff — if she is a scumbag, she knows how to put on a veneer of civility, which the others absolutely do not), and many associates of Joe Exotic have come forward saying that he’s far worse than the documentary makes him out to be, pointing out his racism, or the time he solicited money by pretending to be dying of prostate and bone marrow cancer when he, in actuality, “had an infected prostate, dehydration, and a bad outbreak of herpes.”
Many of those above allegations come from a Twitter thread started by Robert Moore, which you should check out in full if/once you’ve watched Tiger King.
Much of the evidence Robert cites is actually far more damning than anything in the documentary, making both Joe and Carole look far more guilty of their respective crimes than I originally thought.
So, do I recommend Tiger King? That’s hard to say. It’s excellent schlock entertainment, but I almost feel bad calling it that, because that feels like the worst possible way to watch it (and I realize I’m writing that from atop a very high horse that my own conjecture may have already undermined, believe me). It’s worth checking out if you’re interested in a thoughtful examination of the material (including doing some digging outside the documentary itself), but be aware that the majority of the people making this thing the number one show on Netflix aren’t going to be viewing it through the same lens.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!