Animal Crossing/YMMV

The Games

 * Alternate Character Interpretation: The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing turns the fluffy, day-in-the-life sim game into Nightmare Fuel.
 * And it's neither the only one nor anything but the tip of the iceberg. Rather... large numbers of people like to enjoy doing this, often in that direction. To name just one case: Tom Nook: friendly shopkeeper or iron-pawed savvy mercantilist and slum lord? He has near-complete control of the economy with the only place to sell save for some very specific exceptions and the dominant supplier of resources outside of nature itself. Particularly after he upgrades his shop thanks to YOUR upgrades to your house. Which he does even without your consent. Which is to mention the fact that the first thing he does when you enter the town is to shack you up with an undignified shack which you must pay him for without your prior knowledge or consent. In effect, he is using you for involuntary indentured servitude. And he effectively runs the economic system. Which has led to an even further ACI that he is in fact a very BENEVOLENT Slum Lord since he never actually forces you to PAY the money you owe him. And that's one of the better known and more apparent examples in the fandom and nowhere near the worst. See Dark Fic for more info.
 * Ambiguously Gay: With plumage like he's got (and the fact that he refers to himself as male), there's no denying that Pavo's a peacock... But with his sparkly white muscle tee, flamboyant dance moves, and female voice, well...
 * Also Gracie. She's a Man In Japan. The fact that they changed his gender for the international release must mean something, most likely that people are just way too hung up over gender roles...
 * And the Fandom Rejoiced: The newest Animal Crossing 3DS trailer which shows that Nintendo seems to have taken the advice for more new features to the series, benches and street lamps in town (possibly the Town decoration from the Japan only Dōbutsu no Mori e+ which had tons of cool features that some never made it into future Animal Crossing titles) and you and the animals can actually use the benches, being able to put more on your wall than wallpaper (such as clocks), the ability to change your pants (as well as the shoes with them), and, after so many fans who have wanted to be able to do it, swimming is now possible in the game.
 * This gradually dissipated as months and years passed by with only a very slow drip-feed of information. As of June 2012, the game is due to be released in Fall 2012 in Japan, but there has been no mention of an international release date. Fans were particularly upset when it was not mentioned once at E3 2012, not even in their lists of 2012 releases.
 * Base Breaker: Mr. Resetti. Some people actually reset to see what he has to say, others hate him.
 * Creepy Twins: Tommy and Timmy, Tom Nook's assistants. Their unblinking stares and single-mindedness are contributing factors. Not to mention the fact that they follow you around everywhere you go.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: K.K. Slider makes some pretty awesome tunes such as "K.K. Metal" and "DJ K.K.", but "K.K. Cruisin'" (particularly the "aircheck" version) and "Go, K.K. Rider!" are just plain epic. The Brawl remix takes the greatness of the latter and turns it Up to Eleven. Many of the serene, walking around themes from the original game also qualify.
 * The opening theme, as well as the songs that describe the time of day (those songs change per hour), and most of the songs by KK Slider. This one is particularly catchy, and WILL get stuck in your head.
 * Ear Worm: Do do dooo dodo doo dooo...
 * The Brawl version is just as bad, if not worse.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: Quite a few villagers. Bob comes to mind.
 * Fridge Horror: Elmer the horse. Glue used to be made from horses. Granted, Elmer's glue is made from synthetic materials, but that doesn't make it any less dark.
 * Game Breaker: The whole code system became broken once codes were posted online.
 * Genius Bonus: For most of the villagers and characters, it's fairly obvious what animal they are. Most of them are pretty well-known critters. And then... there's Dr. Shrunk. How many people know what he is without looking it up?
 * Which means he will never truly become an adult...
 * Goddamned Bats: More like Goddamned Bass. In the original, there were very few fish you could catch in the sea, and nine times out of ten, you'd pull in a worthless Sea Bass. In the later games, they became less common when there were more ocean fish to catch, but it still lampshades their annoyance: whenever your character catches one, (s)he says: "Not AGAIN!"
 * Mosquitos. They're common and they're attracted to the player character instead of flying away like other flying insects, and they bite. Their bites don't cause any major problems normally aside from merely being mildly annoying, but if you're fishing and waiting for the fish to bite and you get bit by a mosquito, though luck, because the player character automatically reels in his or her line when bitten, so the fish is lost if it isn't reeled in beforehand.
 * Ho Yay: The characters with the Lazy personality and the characters with the jock personality usually end up as friends. Really. Close. Friends. In Wild World, they sometimes end up having a conversation with the lazy character complimenting the jock character with such compliments as "And those dimples you get when you smile are dreamy too". the conversation ends with both of them skipping away. Very. Happily.
 * This happens with the "grumpy" and "lazy" personalities as well. Specifically a conversation with the "lazy" requesting the "grumpy" to breathe on him.
 * Its the Same Now It Sucks: The series suffers from this pretty badly. Nintendo has certainly listened, as they're shaking things up for 4.x.
 * Memetic Mutation: Remixing popular songs with K. K. Slider's soundfont has gotten pretty popular on Youtube.
 * Nightmare Fuel: Lucky, a big-eared dog with a hungry personality. The Nightmare Fuel kicks in as soon as you see him: his entire body is covered in gauze. There's a little patch over his left eye that shows utter blackness and a pure yellow eye. His default Catch Phrase is, “rrr-ow.” Furthermore, the City Folk/Let's Go To the City manual claims that Mr. Resetti might be this to younger players.
 * In the original Gamecube version the music plays at 11:00 p.m. as well as the music that plays at Midnight can sound really spooky for such a lighthearted game like Animal Crossing.
 * Coco. How many people have seen her walking around with her back turned, go to talk to the new villager and get a load of...this? No, her mouth is not open because she is shocked, she always looks like that.
 * Paranoia Fuel: The concept of the Happy Room Academy. A group of people who enter your house, and evaluate your fashion sense every day. No problem, right? Well, you never see them. At all. Ever. Even if you stayed in your house all day, every day of the week.
 * In 3.x, you can visit their headquarters, and it's revealed that they have keys. Lots of keys. Thousands of 'em.
 * It's also worth noting that 3.x lampshades this in some of the conversations with the villagers, where you find them worrying about just that.
 * How about this: Nook can do the HRA several better. By building up both his shop and your house, sometimes by more than its pre-existing size. OVERNIGHT. Without you noticing ANYTHING even if you are in that given location or even fall asleep there.
 * Can it get worse? Yes, yes it can. How? Two words: the Resettis. They are so thorough they even break the Fourth Wall itself to punish those who reset without saving. Double in City Folk, where you can see their HQ and how they work.
 * Summer nights. Don't walk around with your bug net out...
 * Scrappy Mechanic: The grass wearing system in City Folk--so much so that people were willing to hack their save files to reverse the effect.
 * From the second (and third) games, counterfeit paintings. Getting all the paintings was difficult ENOUGH when Redd sells 90% of 'em, shows up once a week and has a random assortment of items, so the only real reason to add this in is to force the Socialization Bonus.
 * Sweet Dreams Fuel: The game itself. Even more so if you play with friends.
 * The movie exceeds this and begins to taste like the 'beetus.
 * Tear Jerker: This
 * That One Sidequest: Be prepared to spend anywhere from half an hour to half the bloody day looking for a coelacanth on a rainy day. Nnngggggrrrrgg...
 * The Snowman furniture series is the hardest one to get because, unlike the other 3 special series (where you can get the whole set and some extras in a few hours) this one can (and likely will) take somewhere between 15 days to 3 months to get the whole thing. Add to this the fact that if the snowman is not perfect you won't get a reward and you have the most annoying sidequest ever.
 * Mushroom furniture is worse. Sure, you don't have to build a snowman, but you have only a single month to get 12 different objects, once per day, with no guarantee that you won't get repeats.
 * How about accumulating 999,999,999 bells for your bank account? It's necessary to get every item in the game... well, without cheating. (But even then, you have to cheat to get two NES games...)
 * Getting Gracie brand clothing in the first game, think the concept for the Canary Mary button mashing races from Banjo-Tooie, now add to the fact that sometimes no matter how fast you press the A button your character will still not move fast enough to earn one of Gracie's brand clothing along with taking away the ability to pause in order to rest your thumbs and catch your breath before starting to press the A button quickly as you can again like you could with the button mashing races in Tooie and you've got yourself one of the worst button-mashing mini-games in a Nintendo game, and considering Gracie is one of the visitors that appears at random and you can only have one turn per person who gets on the game try if you fail at getting them you have to wait until she turns up in your town again, it justifies actually getting a turbo controller for those who don't want to go through the hassle of button mashing (even worse for those who actually have played and hated the Banjo-Tooie Canary Mary Cloud Cuckooland races already).
 * The paintings wing of the Museum became this in the second and third games. While you were always at the mercy of whatever random items Redd decided to bring, the second game introduced Counterfeit Paintings. There is NO way to tell for sure if a given painting is real or not before purchasing it, the museum will not display them and they only sell for 10 bells.
 * Somewhat alleviated in City Folk, where you can visit Crazy Redd's store every day rather than once in a while. You may still get counterfeits, but as long as you have Bells to burn through you can at least try every week (Assuming he has a painting that week.)
 * Urban Legend of Zelda: There was a rumor for the Game Cube Animal Crossing on some forums that a purple dog named Brutus, or Burtis, would move to your town and do weird things like talk and send letters in binary, have a house that freezes your Gamecube when you enter it, and would move out of town after staying for 1 day. There was also a (poorly) edited picture of him talking in binary, with the animal edited to be Octavian.
 * Viewer Gender Confusion: Blanca appears to be wearing a dress ala the female villagers, and "Blanca" is itself the feminine version of the Spanish word for white, such that you might give a girl if you had no sense of humor. But Blanca is evidently just as much a dude as a similarly named Street Fighter character.
 * The Woobie: In City Folk, Lyle the insurance-hawking weasel went from the most annoying and despicable character in the game, constantly hounding the player to buy his policies, to a chronically-depressed sulker in a job he despises, playing a Stepford Smiler for everyone who walks through the doors. Ouch. He was like that in Wild World as well--try running into him at The Roost to see just how world-weary he is when not in "trying to sell the player insurance" mode.
 * Sable's backstory is just as woobie-tastic, if not more so.
 * Katie, though her annoyingly slow speed may bug some people.

The Anime Movie

 * Big Lipped Alligator Moment: Wendell's segment doesn't really make much sense. For that matter, neither does Pascal's. Don't worry; you won't hear from either ever again.
 * Mind you, Wendell's a walrus, so he has a good excuse.
 * Tear Jerker:
 * Video Game Movies Suck: Like its source, it's a little light on plot, but it's enjoyable if you just think of it as the Slice of Life tale it is, making this an aversion.
 * The Woobie: Ai is thoroughly woobified throughout much of fall and winter.