Recreating famous scenes and locations from pop culture is an ongoing trend in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and an iconic line from Harry Potter's Professor McGonagall is the latest to receive the game's fan treatment. The recreation scores some bonus points for poking fun at one of Animal Crossing: New Horizon's more aggravating in-game tasks: fishing.
Fishing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a key activity for collectors and those looking to easy bells by selling fish caught in ponds, rivers, and the sea. Different regions and different times of year can affect which fish can be caught, and each species comes in different sizes, with rarer fish yielding more bells at Nook's Cranny. Fishermen break out their rods to catch one of each species of fish to earn the Critterpedia app, but since players don't know what they've hooked until they've reeled it in, it can take some time to catch what they're actually looking for. This can translate into a certain degree of frustration for players looking for a particularly rare fish, and ending up instead with a dime-a-dozen fish like a carp or - most commonly - bass.
One player on Reddit, 4RCSIN3, channeled that exasperation when recreating a well-known scene from the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in which the matriarchal Professor McGonagall admonishes the trio with an exasperated sentiment probably shared among the remaining staff at Hogwarts: "Why is it, when something happens, it is always you three?" The scene became iconic almost instantaneously thanks to Dame Maggie Smith's flawlessly wry delivery, and it evolved into the base for countless memes once it made its way onto the internet in 2013. In this case, 4RCSIN3 recreated Professor McGonagall in Animal Crossing: New Horizons to ask the same question to the trio of common fish most likely to be caught when the player is trying for something else:
Even without a description of which fish are referenced in the meme, even semi-avid Animal Crossing: New Horizon fishers will instantly recognize them as the banes of their existence: carp, sea bass, and black bass. The meme perfectly encapsulates the original scene and the irritation of every player out there who's ever aimed for a large shadow hoping for a Snakehead and hooking a sea bass instead, and the McGonagall cosplay ties it all together. It's one of the reasons why fishing in game like Animal Crossing is considered too tedious by some, as the rewards are only sometimes worth the time, effort, and frustration.
However, the meme potential of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is one of the key factors in its ongoing online presence, along with the creative freedom it offers to recreate some of the most well-known pop culture references. So as long as players continue to have a shared annoyance with any part of the game, there will always be one intrepid player who knows exactly what meme works best to capture it.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available on Nintendo Switch.
Source: 4RCSIN3