“Tom Nook is a nice landlord/rent-to-owner/market overseer” is such a failure of utopian imagination, which ought to play a part in Animal Crossing? He’s nice compared to horrible actual banks and landlords. But there are no other AC landlords to compare him to, which is telling.
As someone who’s been an actual landlord: it’s only possible for Tom Nook to be “nice” if he has other non-player options to occupy and pay for his unused, unrenovated property, which is otherwise a depreciating liability. No such other options ever appear, to my knowledge?
Tom Nook at the start has: several empty, single-floor, bare-concrete housing units. He’s not advertising them, nobody comes by to ask about them unless player(s) show up.
Tom Nook later has: $$$$ or outstanding loan notes—all assets—plus is selling your local goods at a markup.
Tom Nook later has: $$$$ or outstanding loan notes—all assets—plus is selling your local goods at a markup.
All capitalism that sells goods/services to consumers presents as “a much better, nicer, quality deal for your $$.” Wow, how are these guys even staying in business! You’ll definitely never know (or be able to negotiate?) if you don’t look for their angle and scheme, right?
You can note all of the above, and see how Nook benefits from your deal, without even asking about how this state of affairs came to be (why is he situated differently than his neighbors?)—a question which has been fodder for conspiracy theory in the past.
These points can be true in real housing situations too. Landlords may offer false, perpetual rent-to-own schemes. Got a below market rent? Think it’s out of the landlord’s kindness? That often has more to do with avoiding unseen cost and labor of more frequent tenant turnover.
In the original design almost all currency flows to/from Nook. He’s bank+landowner in a “company town” where you’ve no alternative. Closest historical equivalents: plantation or prison scrip? Of course such a system wants to be SEEN as “nice for you... given your circumstances.”
The possibility of a better world through solidarity and societal change only exists when we can pause to say “why should it have to be like this?” instead of just “well, it’s the best/only deal we can find.”
Games are a space of plasticity in their partial-relationship to reality and in their “could have been designed another way” structures of rules and play. They can be a good place to imagine alternatives! —not just say “c’mon, he’s a nice landlord.”
The deep subtext involved here, if you know the history, is that Tom Nook and his ancestors have every reason to resent and exploit humans—their furusato was paved over for development and golf courses between the late 60s and early 90s
So if you really want to valorize Tom Nook, start there: he became a cunning capitalist to take revenge on you, the unwitting scion of the culture that destroyed and assimilated his
It’s not symmetrical revenge (destroying human homes) but transformative—*creating* a home but instea of just giving it away, using the tools of the colonizer to manipulate and subvert the youth into once again uniting with the “lost past” of pastoral nature.
