Animal Crossing Villager Personalities Shouldn’t Be Tied To Gender

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is home to nearly 400 unique villagers players can have living on their islands. Each villager has one of eight personality types, and these are separated into male and female categories. Perhaps this distinction was originally made as a way to add variety to Animal Crossing‘s villager population, but it unnecessarily narrows them into gendered stereotypes and limits the kinds of characters players get to interact with.

Villager personalities in Animal Crossing determine how each character behaves, the kind of clothes they like, the hobbies they enjoy, who they get along with, and even what time they go to sleep. They also dictate what kind of dialogue each villager can say and the pitch of their voice. For instance, peppy voices are very high pitched, while cranky voices are low. Male villagers can be the jock, smug, lazy, or cranky types, while females villagers can be the sisterly, peppy, snooty, or normal types. Some of these Animal Crossing personality types do have things in common (both smugs and snooties care a lot about their appearances, for example), but locking them to certain genders puts limitations on the clothing, behavior, habits, and hobbies any given villager can have.

Outside of this system, New Horizons puts very little emphasis on gender. When a player starts up the game for the first time, they are never asked to select a gender for their character. In fact, all cosmetics are left genderless, and players can use any of them at any time. The same can be said for villager clothing. Male villagers will proudly rock a good maid outfit, as Animal Crossing’s Raymond has been known to do. Even more than that, the game doesn’t actually use gendered pronouns. When text mentions a villager or another character, it always refers to them as “they.” With these aspects of New Horizons already free of gender norms’ constraints, villager personalities have little reason to be separated in this way.

Animal Crossing Villager Personalities Should Be Genderless

If Nintendo wanted to keep gendered villagers, it could simply make male and female villagers for each of the eight personality types, which would add a lot more variety to the game. If it added female jocks, male normals, etc., there could potentially be double the number of characters. And while 397 Animal Crossing villagers is already quite a lot, the more variety New Horizons has, the better.

Removing gendered villagers or creating villagers of any personality type, regardless of gender, would allow Animal Crossing‘s development team to be even more creative. Instead of being confined to gendered stereotypes, like that only men like to exercise, the team could create Animal Crossing: New Horizons characters that are more complex – and therefore more lovable and interesting.

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