Not only is Animal Crossing: New Horizons a great game and a huge hit but it has multiple, subtle references to gay relationships.
For the first time ever, a Nintendo game has what seems to be unambiguously gay characters, some of which are in a relationship.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has already gained a lot of praise for offering gender neutral character options, where the avatar you play as isn’t specifically male or female and can sport any clothing or hair options they like.
But while you can make friends with other computer-controlled animal characters you can’t date them or anything, and yet subtle bits of dialogue point towards some of them being gay.
The easiest to run into is C.J. the beaver who boasts of the model-making skills of his ‘partner’, who you meet later and turns out to be a chameleon named Flick.
There’s some ambiguity as to whether he’s just a business partner or not, but many online have embraced the relationship as more than just platonic.
One reference that’s definitely not ambiguous though, even if it’s less likely you’ll see it in the game, is the cat Merry, who excitedly talks about her favourite comic book that involves the Princess of Rocketboarding and her ‘true love’ the Princess of Explosions.
Since there are a lot of animal characters in the game there’s a good chance you won’t run into Merry for a while, but unlike C.J. there’s no other way to interpret her comments.
Further proof that the dialogue is intentional comes from the fact that there are numerous changes to the English language version of the game to make it more inclusive, as the Japanese version still makes you choose whether you want to be a boy or a girl at the start.
To be fair to Nintendo, most of their games don’t have much in the way of relationships of any kind. Link and Zelda are rarely even hinted at being an item and Princess Peach always seems more interested in Bowser than Mario.
But they did receive a lot of criticism for Tomodachi Life back in 2014, which refused to include same-sex relationships but promised to do so in a sequel.
A sequel never happened but, especially as the two games do have some minor similarities, it seems they’ve kept their promise for Animal Crossing: New Horizons instead.
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