The "Bell Boom" ordinance in New Leaf is supposed to boost the town's economy by increasing how much the player earns and the prices of items in shops by an identical ratio. But wait, isn't that called... inflation?
Actually, inflation, in small enough amounts, can be healthy for an economy. And the increase actually isn't that much; We can reasonably assume that Bells are based off of Japanese currency, where Yen are closer to Cents as opposed to Dollars—meaning that, using US currency, an apple that would sell for a Dollar would instead sell for a Dollar and Twenty Cents with the Bell Boom ordinance. Besides, inflation is a WEE bit more complex than an across the board 20% increase in the price of everything commonly bought and sold in stores.
The villagers even comment on the fact that it doesn't change much for them, but assume that it must be nice for the stores or something.
If you're stung by a bee and go to see a sick villager who you're very close with, they'll give you medicine for your sting before you can give them theirs. Since the one kind of medicine is universal, why doesn't the villager take the medicine they had, instead of making you get some? Though it could be a case of heartwarming, seeing as they give you their medicine even though they need it more.
Don't ask us how or why planting a Rotten Fruit (which looks identical to Perfect Fruit) results in a wilted sapling the moment dirt is over it.
On Halloween, if you enter an animal's house wearing the costume they're scared of, they'll give you candy in hopes you leave them alone. However, if they confront you outside, they're not scared at all even if you're still wearing the costume they're afraid of.
When you're outside they're not as scared because it's a much bigger area and it's easier for them to get away if they need to. In their house it's much more cramped, and you're likely blocking the door anyway. Seeing a spider outside is much less frightening than seeing a spider in your room.
How Zipper T. manages the egg hunt is a mystery for the ages. In the ground? Believable. In trees? Might need some effort to get up there, but possible. In the tree trunks?? How is that possible? In the water? Might lose some in there, and hooking them is the second mystery. In the balloon presents in the sky? Does he have an accomplice for that?? In the rocks!? Explain that!
It's for the same reason why you can bonk money out of rocks.
As spooky as the Gyroids are when you consider their haniwa origins, New Horizons brings in a curious question to the table: Why do Gyroids restore themselves after you water fragments of them when they're buried? For that matter, why do they start showing up after rainfall?
Octopuses in New Horizons can get fleas. So can robots and other "non-living object" villagers (such as Stitches). How?
In New Leaf, they introduce a Pig villager named Kevin. Hmmm...
In New Leaf, Dr. Shrunk will only perform his jokes for you if you give him some fruit to eat. It's the developers' way of ensuring you will always have enough room when he gives you his jacket after telling you the last joke!
The villager Ribbot (A robot frog) is revealed to be scared of bugs on Halloween. Is it ironic that a frog is afraid of insects or fitting that a robot's afraid of bugs? Like...computer bugs?
People have noticed that the Grumpy and Snooty villagers have gotten kinder over the course of the series. New Leaf shows that time really does pass by from one game to the next. This could mean that the Grumpy and Snooty villagers are getting nicer because of their interactions with the players in previous games.
A partial Fridge Brilliance moment also comes when you realize that it's possible that they're nicer because they know they're talking to the town mayor. Though this falls apart if you're not the mayor of the town.
The snooty Deer villager Diana new to New Leaf, has a house with a bath house theme. Her house, her name, and her species could be based off of the Roman story of Actaeon the hunter, who saw the maiden goddess Diana bathing. When she realized, she turned him into a stag, upon which he was pursued by his own hunting dogs.
Gulliver mentions going to Ricco Harbour, Pinnacle Rock and Rogueport though unless Hyrule, The Mushroom Kingdom, and The Animal Crossing towns, exist on the same planet, it seems likely they're simply other planets in one big Nintendo universe, and who do we know that can travel through space?
Ever wait until 6 AM, only to discover your house has been upgraded within the space of a second? This may seem like an Ass Pull or an Accepted Break From Reality unless you played Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U in which Villager's Final Smash shows Tom Nook, Timmy and Tommy appearing out of nowhere, building a house around the other players within a second, then immediately disappearing.
When you buy one of his products, Redd tells you to make sure your mailbox isn't full when he sends your purchase to you after the showcase is over, and you do indeed get your letter at 6 am, but wait, doesn't the mail get delivered at 9 am and 5 pm? Well, Redd personally delivers your purchase to your mailbox because of his shady practices, and since he's leaving town right then, if your mailbox is full, he can't place it in there.
If a multiplayer session crashes in New Leaf, the players are shown an error message before their respective games are essentially "reset" to the point before multiplayer started (this, of course, being why the game saves when starting multiplayer in the first place). The image on the error message shows Resetti with his head hung low. Why? Mr. Resetti is well known for his hatred of game resetting, to the point that it's basically his job to give you angry lectures on why you shouldn't do it. When multiplayer crashes, the game is forced to basically do the very thing he hates, which causes the mole great shame.
In New Leaf, Tom Nook is now affiliated with Happy Room Academy. A Raccoon involved with a business that sneaks around your house at six in the morning... hmm...
One of the errands you do is to deliver a package from the incorrect recipient to its intended one, which happens surprisingly often and makes you wonder if Pete, the mail carrier, is incompetent. If you catch him during delivery hours, he sometimes comments about how the animals' lack of opposable thumbs leads to illegible handwriting, meaning that addresses are nigh-unreadable. If you connect the dots, it becomes clear as to why those incidents keep happening. Pete's doing his job; sloppy handwriting doesn't make it any easier!
When it comes to Happy Home Designer's facility projects, a common joke among players publishing screenshots of villagers using them is how ill-suited they sound for the assigned jobs. But then, they aren't trained for those jobs—the game just plucks random joes off the street and puts them in uniforms.
If Isabelle is sent to the campground via amiibo in the New Leaf update, she still loads your game and announces day events. How is she doing this when she is away from town hall? Simple Gameplay and Story Segregation? Or could it be the PA system she has in her camper?
Joey, a Lazy duck villager, wears what appears to be a diaper. New Leaf's April Fool's Day info on him reveals his goal is to become a sumo wrestler. That's not a diaper—it's a sumo loincloth! Or as it's actually called, a mawashi.
Wolf Link's Smug personality may be baffling and confusing on why a character from a franchise who's well known to be a Heroic Mime has the personality of a Smug villager. Smug villagers are one of the most talkative personalities in the game. Ganon's personality is Cranky. Both of their personalities are conflicting by default, and both characters are mortal enemies in their respective franchise, which makes the personality choices for the two amiibo villagers more meaningful.
Mr. Resetti's new job in New Horizons is to return the player to their house if they call him. This still fits his resetting theme because now he's "resetting" your position.
The two villager types that are guaranteed to appear with you when you first embark on the island are the Jock and Sisterly type. It's natural that the Jock is willing to go, as they desire adventure and opportunities to get themselves stronger, and it's just as natural that the big sister type is willing to go to the island as well. Sisterly villagers are known for being protective towards previous residents, and so them being here allows for strong emotional support on the island.
Why does Redd show up on his own ship in New Horizons? Tom Nook knows how shady Redd can be (especially with some of the previous games heavily implying that Redd was the one who backstabbed Nook during his younger years while in The City) and now that Nook has actual control over the town, he can tell Wilbur and Orville to not let Redd in, like some of the other visitors, requiring Redd to find another way in to sell his wares.
Wait, if the above is true, then why is Redd the vendor for the August weekly firework shows? Isabelle! Redd built up a rapport with Isabelle over the course of New Leaf, where Redd was a vendor for multiple events, and Nook begrudgingly allows him in to sell his wares, likely with the caveat that Redd can't sell furniture.
Additionally, if Redd needed to sneak in to do some shady business, he needed to alter his identity to keep himself on the down-low, hence he goes by "Jolly" instead of "Crazy". Though how effective it is depends on the person, it at least puts a smokescreen.
Why is the inside of his Treasure Trawler so dark? It's so prospective customers have a harder time detecting the finer details on his art that give away the forgeries.
Why are black bass purposely made so undesirable (common and selling for a low amount of Bells) in-game? Turns out that in Japan, several types of bass are considered invasive species. The largemouth and smallmouth bass are considered such a big problem that they are one of only about a dozen species of fish regulated under Japan's national-level Invasive Alien Species Act. This point is finally noted by Blathers in his description of the black bass in New Horizons.
There are plenty of food references for the Villager names and appearances. Some are species-related, which are below in Fridge Horror. But for the ones that aren't horrific:
Tangy is an orange cat with green leaf-shaped hair, making her look like an orange.
Tia is an elephant whose head is shaped like a tea pot.
Ketchup is a red-headed duck.
Both the dog Cherry and the cub Cheri are cherry red.
Of course a flightless bird would be the one flying the Dodo Air Lines seaplane. How else is he going to fly?
New Horizons debuts a new song; Animal City (a cover of the city theme from CF). The three villagers who have this song in their house? Gala, Gloria and Bettina (all villagers who debuted in City Folk).
Saharah sometimes mentions having a hump, but her model doesn't appear to have one (unless the "backpack" she's wearing is actually a hump covered with a piece of cloth that has pockets on it). Keep in mind, however, that the purpose of a camel's hump is to store fat and thus energy, and that as a camel exerts itself, its hump shrinks as it metabolizes the fat, but it never fully disappears. Combine that knowledge with the fact that Saharah lives far from the player's town and her Funny Foreigner personality possibly getting in the way of her using vehicular transport, and it's possible that she made the entire journey to the player's town on foot (swimming where necessary) and thus she's used up so much of her hump fat that it's small enough to be obscured by her backpack.
Villagers are bilingual at least, and even trilingual for those introduced before New Leaf, and code-switch regularly. They speak to you in Animalese (or Bebebese), and write letters to you in the game's language. In New Leaf, Bebebese is reserved for special characters who want to go into Hiding Behind the Language Barrier with Sarcasm Mode.
Your player is then also trilingual. They think in the game's language, but can seemingly understand Animalese/Bebebese, whichever the town prefers to speak. Even after New Leaf scraps Bebebese, your player thinks in it when catching a fish or insect. Which begs the question - do special characters know that players know full well what they're saying when they code-switch to Bebebese for Sarcasm Mode purposes?
+1 language for everybody when you include Silence. For the curious, a demonstration starts here and carries on for the rest of the line:
Tom Nook can speak Raccoonish, making him able to speak 5 languages at least. A linguist's equivalent to God.
In Happy Home Designer, you design dream homes and make them very happy. Designing so everyone gets what they want. Then… stuff cost money, you only design so for you it won't matter, but some of the animals might be drowning in debts afterwards…
Considering the player's own debt situation, it's likely they have all the time in the world to pay it off with no issues.
On top of that, if the player plants a fruit tree on the lot, the client has an infinite source of daily income which could accelerate the debt repaying process
The Harvest Festival. Tortimer wants to prepare a turkey feast, a Thanksgiving tradition… except the turkey in question is Franklin, who is clearly just as sentient as any other NPC in the game. Tortimer fully intended to kill and eat another intelligent, talking animal.
If you haven't played in a very long time, the villagers talk about how they haven't seen you in X months or X weeks. The fact that they have been counting every single week they've been separated from you is rather unsettling.
Erasing the town. You basically delete the town and its inhabitants from existence.
This seems to be more of a Ret-Gone if anything, if you treat each cartridge like it's own parallel universe. When you erase a save and start a new one, you're literally resetting reality. So the characters are in a sense, in a Groundhog Day type loop unless the player leaves the town there forever.
The realization that you likely will reach the point where you stop playing sooner or later, because life happens. And then the counting begins...
If a character moves from your town to a friend's town, then you erase your town and start a new one, and that same friend visits you and it turns out that same character is planning on moving again... and moves to your town showing you letters from your old character and singing the old town tune... that is just pure unsettling.
Normal villagers all apparently have a best friend called Moppina, who is a... mop. It's Played for Laughs and can be seen as just a tendency of a Cloudcuckoolander but according to Word of God, it's meant to be a symbol of their phobias of germs and disease. The fact that this mop is their best friend gives you an indication of how deep those fears go.
In New Leaf, you arrived into town and are told you're the new mayor that's been expected. You're told this as soon as you get off the train, with no previous knowledge. What happened to the person who was originally supposed to be the new mayor?
They send you a letter apologizing for making you go in their place and telling you you'll do an excellent job.
Tortimer was the last mayor. He's retired, and will sometimes invite you to his island in the game.
...And the mayor who was expected was supposed to replace him, but they didn't show up and the title of New Mayor was instead given to the player. As said above, the mayor sends a letter to the player, but what exactly happened that made them unable to come or why they decided to force the title on you is topic of another discussion.
Many people either assume it was supposed to be Isabelle, but before she actually got the job she chickened out and decided to throw it on the very next person who arrives. Or Rover, as the Mayor was "supposed" to have gotten off of the train. And he was the only other one there and just happened to have a map of the village with him.
In New Leaf, the stingray and hammerhead shark go in the same tank in the museum, even though the description for the hammerhead shark clearly states that these sharks have a great taste for stingrays. Not only that, but there's also some other predatory fish, such as the piranha and shark, that are in the same tank as fish that they naturally eat.
Real life public aquariums will sometimes house natural predator and prey fish in the same tank with few if any attacks, since by the time that the predator fish were removed from quarantine or fish holding they'd be used to eating prepared frozen fish.
Tom Nook is a Tanuki, a Japanese mythological raccoon-like creature. One of its notable features are its large testicles. Tom Nook's only piece of clothing only covers that special area...
For added squick, his nephews/possible sons wear them too...
Until they renovate their store in New Leaf. As the owners of T&T Mart, their uniform doesn't have anything covering their lower body at all. Fortunately, they don't need to.
With Crazy Redd, in the Japanese version he's a Kitsune yet he doesn't have nine tails. So in equal fairness the Tanuki's aren't required to have youknowwhat.
Kitsune can have up to nine tails, but they don't have to have more than one. Mabel, Sable, Reese, and Cyrus only wear aprons as well. It's probably just a fashion trend, given that pantslessness and full nudity are apparently fine in this universe (for the animals, at least).
The Gyroids are based off of haniwa, which are figurines found in ancient graves. When you dig them up, you are disturbing someone's remains. Even worse, since Gyroids exist, it's entirely possible that it could happen to your player character years after they pass away. And the haniwa they're based on were considered by the Japanese to be Soul Jars...
The fact that some of these Gyroids make silly noises that can even be matched up to whatever K.K. Slider song you have playing is a handy bit of Nightmare Retardant, though.
Even better (worse?), there's an entire villager based on the Gyroids, Coco. Which definitely confirms the Soul Jar bit. She doesn't seem to have any qualms about your digging up other Gyroids, though. Doyoing!
An item sold in Gracie's store in New Leaf is "shearling boots". Shearling is the tanned skin from a recently sheared lamb or sheep that has the short wool still attached. It's possible to have sheep as villagers in the series, meaning that they are as sentient as any other character in the game. It wouldn't be like Gracie to skimp on the quality of her products, so one has to wonder just where the material for these boots is coming from...
It's possible that there exists sentient and non-sentient versions of animals in the world, as you can catch frogs as animals in the pond, but you also have anthropomorphic frogs as villagers.
In New Leaf, that is confirmed. Not only you can talk to dog villagers about adopting pet dogs, you can fish regular animal octopi from the sea at the same time you might have octopus villagers.
The Octopus villager, introduced in New Leaf, a Lazy villager called Zucker, looks quite odd, with his head resembling a tan ball with sauce on it, and red tentacles. Turns out his appearance and Japanese name are based off of a Japanese snack called takoyaki...which contains chopped octopus. He's based off off something he would be an ingredient in...yikes. It's almost cruel considering that lazy villagers are known for their love of food, and he's based off of a food he'd be in. Also, takoyaki is usually eaten on a stick. His head is pierced with a stick. There is a stick penetrating his skull, as if his head is a dumpling about to be eaten. All three octopi have something on their heads (Octavian-band-aid, Marina-bow) but to include a skewer-like stick on or IN Zucker's head is pretty creepy. Also, a common children's Japanese lunchbox item is sausage cut beforehand to look like octopus tentacles when properly cooked. So yeah, it's a sentient takoyaki attached to working sausage limbs, as if sentient animals weren't enough, food is now possible to also be sentient! Awesome!
Several sheep villagers will be scared of the Wolf Hood on Halloween night. And then you realize why...
It also crosses with Fridge Logic considering you can have both sheep and wolves in your village.
In New Leaf, Phineas. Just think about it. He knows exactly how many bells you've spent. He knows exactly how much time you've spent playing the game. He knows how many bells you have stored in the ABD/ATM. As soon as you reach a certain number, he's right there, waiting to give you the badge. He's always watching. He might be watching you right now.
One of the possible villagers you can come across is a horse named Elmer. Like the glue company? And we know the connection between horses and glue, right?
There's also a cow named Patty, and (at least in New Horizons), her clothes look like meat.
Other food references include the aforementioned Zucker, and the bulls named Angus and T-Bone.
On a lighter note there is also a cow villager called Tipper
The option to resell a town adds some horror to deleting it. If you pay attention to what Nook says, he will mention the player will get a new design and face while all the residents will relocate. This implies you are the same person from the old town even though you are given the option to change everything, including name and gender. There is also the possibility someone from the old town will move in to the new one; despite the fact it should be the same person, they have no memory of you and it is implied you have no memory of them either. So what happenswhen a town is deleted? Maybe all those Dark Fic interpretations are not far off after all.
A feature new to Wild World is villager pictures, which gives details about them and even includes a "quote" from them. In Goldie's pic, she states that she is attracted (subtly implied to be in a romantic way) to the Labrador Retriever on the cover of Nintendogsnote The quote in question: "I'm really into that Lab on the cover of Nintendogs. He's pretty dreamy.". While both may be the same species, keep in mind that one is a standard non-sapient animal and the other is a full-on Funny Animal (as in, an animal that's practically a person). If she really is romantically attracted to the Nintendog...then questions need to be asked.
Chip and Nat eating all the fish/bugs you catch for them can be a bit disturbing in general if you're the type of person who likes keeping them around as pets...which is probably why their replacements in New Horizons don't do it (especially Flick, as he admires bugs so much he's estranged from his father because of his eating habits).
Now as of New Horizons 2.0, various fish can be cooked and either be eaten by the player or served to the villagers.
Tucker is a lazy elephant villager introduced in New Leaf who is designed to look like a woolly mammoth, and then there are the woolly mammoth fossils you donate to the museum...
If a player visits The Roost regularly, Brewster will offer to add "pigeon milk" to your coffee. Pigeon milk is a substance that pigeons and some other birds regurgitate to feed their young. It's sweet that Brewster has parental feelings towards the player, but ewww.
In the Happy Home Paradise DLC for New Horizons, adjusting the size of a room is as easy as adjusting a dial on a menu in the customization screen. So Tom Nook really HAS been ripping us off all these years!
Alternatively, since we know Lottie used to work for Nook at the Happy Home Academy and now runs her own company, it's entirely possible Nook passed his secrets to her, and she now passes them to us, ie. we haven't so much as been ripped off, we just didn't know the secret to his techniques until Happy Home Paradise opened up an avenue to learn them.
In New Horizons, Joan has apparently gotten too old to travel, so her granddaughter Daisy Mae is the one who sells turnips to the player. Daisy Mae apparently lives with her grandmother and her parents are never mentioned. Since Joan is so old that she can't travel anymore, she might not be long for this world...and Daisy Mae has no one else to take care of her...
. When you dig them up, you are disturbing someone's remains. Even worse, since Gyroids exist, it's entirely possible that it could happen to your player character years after they pass away. And the haniwa they're based on were considered by the Japanese to be Soul Jars...