Animal Crossing’s Lottie Is An Even Bigger Capitalist Monster Than Tom Nook

Tom Nook just wants your money. Lottie wants a whole archipelago.

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We can all admit that it’s a little bit strange to spend 30 bucks to come home from work and keep working, right? And yet that’s exactly what happens in the Happy Home Paradise DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It allows you to travel to an archipelago to work for Lottie, who has begun selling vacation homes to people on the varied nearby islands.

For some reason, I, like many others, couldn’t wait to get my hands on this DLC. I began work right away on a bunch of dream homes for my favourite animal companions.

You’re introduced to Lottie by Tom Nook. This should have set off alarm bells (sorry) right away since, as we all know, Tom Nook is a nightmare capitalist. Once you agree to design homes and visit the archipelago, your first customer is Eloise, a friendly and unassuming yellow elephant. Everything seems pretty innocent.

That is, until you start to pay attention.

One of Lottie’s other employees is a monkey named Niko. He’s got a unique model unlike all of the other monkeys in the game. That’s probably because he’s native to the exotic islands where Happy Home Paradise takes place.

Once you get to know Niko a little better, he reveals that he was the one to show Lottie around the archipelago. Back then, Lottie was just a tourist. So, we know that Lottie saw the islands, fell in love with them, and then bought up the land for her vacation home business. What happened to Niko’s society, which was here for Lottie to visit? Where are his family and his friends? Where does Niko live? Is it possible that the vacation homes, which you refurbish and present to the animals, are all that remains of the society that once thrived here?

It certainly seems that, as happens so often in the real world, Lottie, a rich investor, has bought up a natural paradise in order to sell its beauty and foreign, exotic thrills to other tourists and, in doing so, kicked out the people who called it home.

Consider the main island in the archipelago, where the Happy Home Paradise offices are located. That area is dotted with unused buildings, grey on the outside and stripped down to the studs on the inside – and we won’t get into the safety concerns of offering vacation homes here before you’ve even built a proper hospital. Lottie tells you that whoever owned the area before her didn’t do much with these buildings, leaving all their potential wasted. It just so happens that Happy Home Paradise can use and redecorate them as they please!

But doesn’t it seem odd that a previous owner would have done absolutely nothing with these buildings? Or would have built so many before getting around to fill any of them? We can guess about surprise problems, money drying out, etc., but another obvious answer is staring us right in the face.

Lottie bought up the area, drove out the native monkeys (except for Niko, who she deemed necessary to her success), and stripped their local buildings down to the studs. Their hospital, their restaurant, their school… they could all be made into tourist attractions to bring in more customers for Happy Home Paradise.

I hear you asking: but what about Niko? Would he really have agreed to help Lottie if she had driven his family and friends away and destroyed their local buildings? That’s a good point. The Niko that we interact with is a friendly guy, not one who is likely to agree with Lottie’s changes.

However, he’s also portrayed as young and inexperienced. He’s a builder who doesn’t know what DIY is until you tell him about it. He is also flustered, shy, and unsure of himself when he has to take over Lottie’s job while she’s in hospital. It’s not a stretch to think that Lottie might have lured him in with the “possibilities” and blinded him to the reality and magnitude of the truth. She probably would have done anything to keep him around, since the presence of one of the locals would lend her brand some authenticity.

Lottie’s use of the local currency, ‘Poki,’ should also raise suspicion. Lottie pays you – and presumably her other employees at the main office and in each of the facilities – with Poki instead of Bells. Poki can only be spent in the archipelago. While Poki can be exchanged for Bells, the exchange rate changes drastically every day and you can only exchange a certain amount. Animals who purchase vacation homes with her aren’t local to the archipelago. They can’t possibly be paying with Poki. They must be paying with Bells, which is the currency everywhere else that we know of. Yet, on the island, they’re subjected to using Poki, which they can only get by participating in island life (working in one of the facilities) or exchanging their Bells that they could be using at home.

Why do arcades give you tickets instead of coins or bills? Because tickets can only be spent at the arcade. Lottie’s using Poki even though all the locals have disappeared because it’s a very sneaky way to keep animals on the resort, instead of going home where they won’t be giving her their money.

There’s an even closer real-world parallel to this phenomenon: company scrip. Company scrip was a currency that mining and logging companies used to pay their employees with. It meant the company could mark up products at the stores and make their workers dependent on their jobs (and, by extension, the company). It’s like a less fun version of Disney Dollars.

While it’s all fun and games to visit plots of land and decorate houses for the diverse set of characters available in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the DLC’s premise raises some very real questions about colonization, tourism, and capitalism in today’s day and age.

And, at the centre of it all, is one otter.

Lottie.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/animal-crossing-new-horizons-lottie-capitalist-monster-tom-nook/