My former best friend is standing right next to me. We haven’t spoken in more than eight months. Well over a decade of friendship was destroyed by one careless letter. He’s here now because he wants something. He always wants something. This time he’s demanding a single coconut.
If this were an older Animal Crossing game I would equip my butterfly net and accidentally-on-purpose bonk him on the head until he lost his temper. Perhaps if I could engage in some antisocial activity to convey my shock and sadness, or at least get it out of my system, we would have made up by now. But Pocket Camp, with its laser focus on furniture collection, leaf tickets, and making Gulliver go wrong, is bereft of the usual Animal Crossing expressions of vengeance.
I mean, as well as being unable to “accidentally” bonk Octavian on his irritating head, I am not able to plant hundreds of trees outside his home, hoping to trap him in an impromptu forest. I cannot shun him until he leaves town. There are no custom floor tiles which I can redesign to say “GO AWAY” and then use them to pave a pathway to his front door. And, without a letter-writing facility, I can’t even send rude-but-perfectly-spelled missives. The latter is a particular sore point given Octavian’s own letter – a VALENTINE if you can believe it – is what started this argument in the first place.
Here’s what happened:
In February Animal Crossing Pocket Camp gave each player one piece of best friend candy with the instruction to give it to our favourite villager. I picked my bestie Octavian. Of course I did! I love Octavian and his frowny pink face! Octavian responded with a letter.
To? Why not “Dear Pip”, Octavian?
Oh wow. That’s a brutal ellipsis. All these years and you can barely choke out the word “friend”?
YOU LITERALLY MOVED INTO MY TOWN AND GOT ME TO DO THINGS FOR YOU!
…But? …But! He’s going to remember the good times! Maybe all the midnight chats we’ve had, or the fish I’ve caught for him, or the flying saucer I built him which actually hovers!
You’re kidding. Is this negging? Am I being negged by a cartoon octopus?
That’s it? After everything we’ve been through? Well, you know what, Octavian? You’re a toxic friend.
Do you know what other people got told by their best friends on Animal Crossing Valentine’s? They got “You are the sun to my darkness, the rain to my drought, the coming of spring to my winter”. They got “Here’s to spending many more wonderful days together”. They got “Every day we spend together is more fun than the last!” And this is why I have spent the best part of a year finding little ways to circumvent Pocket Camp’s aggressive niceness and express my outrage towards this toxic former bestie.