Animal Crossing: New HorizonsThe relaxing, slice-of-life based island getaway game that took social media by storm for weeks after its release. New Horizons combined mellow muisc, cute animals, and the satisfying rhythm of finishing simple tasks and errands for some rightly-earned praise.

With a laid-back premise like that, an outsider could never imagine the theatrics and chaos New Horizons has wrought on Twitter. Because, as it turns out, one character in this game has a special power: to make bare the hearts of mortals, exposing us for the wretched, greed-motivated goblins we are. We are talking, of course, about Raymond.

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Raymond is a new villager in the Animal Crossing series, who might (naively) be mistaken for just another of the game's cute little cat villagers. Sure, he's cute, but aren't they all? He's one of 35 villagers with the "smug" personality trait. Raymond is also known for making people act insane on social media.

Even the mention of his name can stir up a frenzy, let alone the dreaded (sought-after?) phrase "Raymond in boxes." Because of his status as a new villager in New Horizons, Raymond is the victim of artificial scarcity: all the villagers who came out in games prior to New Horizons can be accessed using Amiibo cards, ensuring that you can still get them if you aren't having any luck with finding them out in the wild. New villagers, like Raymond and Audie, don't have Amiibo cards – that means the only guaranteed way to get them is by going to someone else's island and talking to them after they've made up their mind to move.

Everything about Raymond has culminated in the perfect storm of an online fad. He's new. He has a unique design – heterochromia certainly helps his popularity, let alone the glasses – and for some reason smug personality villagers are popular on their own, possibly because they're also relatively new to the series, only being added in New Leaf. Add that to the incredibly low odds of getting him: he's one of 23 cat villagers, out of 35 species in the game. Because of the way New Horizons calculates which villager you'll find on a Nook Tour, it makes his odds of showing up worse than just about any other villager's.

As a result of that clash between rarity and popularity, Animal Crossing fans are losing their minds over the barest hint of the possibility of acquiring a Raymond of their own. To sell, to dress up, or for bragging rights – it doesn't particularly matter, as long as they get a glasses cat of their own. Such hubris has led to exchanges like this, with Discord users charging hundreds of the expensive in-game currency Nook Miles Tickets to... look at him.

Of course some instances are more extreme than others, but eventually this kind of scalping and the frenzied efforts to acquire Raymond beg the question: is it worth all this fuss? We're not saying to stop trying to get a Raymond, or that he's overrated and not worth being interested in. We're just saying it might be time to calm down.

Raymond is a very cute villager, and he's very hard to get. But, just like every other villager in the game, he can be found on mystery islands. Yes, his odds are fairly low. But he's not going anywhere: Animal Crossing is not a game that values speed. The virtual world will keep turning whether you get a Raymond tomorrow or two months from now, and the odds players could get him by just using the 500 tickets they might otherwise pay another player for a guaranteed Raymond aren't zero – there's only just shy of 400 villagers in the game, so that's 100 more than if you cycled through every single one of them on a Raymond hunt. Supposedly some will pay more than double that, all for the sake of getting him more quickly.

Nintendo is very likely to release Amiibo cards for the New Horizons villagers at some point in the future, bringing the Raymond-trade to a screeching halt when they do. If players are desperate, there's more options than frantically chasing people down on Twitter or crashing their Discord when they offer one up for sale: waiting for an amiibo card, or finding him yourself. In the meantime, there's 396 other villagers to meet in New Horizons. Maybe it's time to spread the love a little?

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