We Are Ankha Stans First, Resident Reps Second

“i have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” ― sarah williams

So thing is about Raymond is that there are a lot of factors as to why he is so popular and it’s getting really out of hand with people trading him

The fact that he’s a new interesting looking cat villager isn’t least among them. Cat villagers have always been pretty popular, and so it’s not surprising that a new one would get a lot of love. He is also smug, which is probably the male personality type that bothers people the least. The fact that he is very anthropomorphized, has glasses and heterochromia only makes him more of an interesting looking villager.

And of course he fits the cartoon twink aesthetic a la onceler that large parts of fandoms like

But it’s not just his appeal that has lead to this whole Thing. It’s also his rarity. Raymond is actually the most rare villager in the game, which a lot of people probably don’t realize.

You might think you get an equal chance to get any villager when you go to mystery islands, but that isn’t the case. See, when the game decides what villager will be at your island, it rolls two factors. First it rolls for the species of the villager. So here, there is an equal chance of any species. After it figures out the species, it rolls for the specific villager. Here is what makes some more rare than others. There are more cats than any other species, so your chances of getting the specific cat you want are much slimmer than, say, getting the specific octopus you want.

Now you don’t have a slimmer chance of getting Raymond than any other cat, so what makes Raymond more rare? Amiibo cards.

Raymond is the only new cat, which means that he is the only cat that doesn’t have an amiibo card. This means that the only way you can get Raymond with 100% certainty is by trading him with someone else but also means that more Raymonds aren’t being introduced into the ecosystem like character with amiibos are.

And people might not realize this, but there IS an ecosystem when it comes to the pool of villagers available. When you let a villager leave without someone taking them, that villager doesn’t just disappear. They will go into a queue of villagers and then move into an empty space that someone on your friend list has if it’s left open too long. So once a villager exists, it exists for theoretically all AC players and can jump from friend list to friend list as long as they aren’t allowed to leave while you have no friends or aren’t connected to the internet.

So villagers with amiibo cards can be introduced into this ecosystem all the time, but Raymond and the other new villagers can only be introduced when they’re found, and Raymond is the one least likely to be found.