Animal Crossing: New Horizons' Wedding Season Event is a Wonderful Pastel Toybox

June marks a new season in Animal Crossing, the introduction of sharks, fireflies, and other critters, and most prominently: a fresh event. The new Wedding Season event makes good use of Harv's Island, bringing back classic series characters Reese and Cyrus to celebrate their wedding anniversary. It's up for the whole month of June, because as Isabelle tells us, it's the ideal month to have a wedding.

Like the rest of Animal Crossing: New Horizons' events so far, the Wedding Season event stands out as unique. It's slight, like all the events since Animal Crossing's blowout Bunny Day, but it's more substantial than either the International Museum Day event and May Day event. It's also a lot more fun.

The Wedding Season event sends us off to Harv's Island to help take wedding anniversary photos of the happiest of couples: Reese and Cyrus. They ask for anything white and pink to take them back to their wedding day. I obliged. And then I didn't. I made a forested wedding, complete with all the random toys and figures I had in my inventory to stand-in as guests on log stools. My Zipper toy was the wedding officiator. With daily photo shoots, I'm getting Heart Crystals for unique, new furniture. All in all, it's a more swell time than the past events were.

Just like the rest of the Photopia sets you can construct on Harv's Island, the wedding photos are fully customizable. Floors, rugs, wallpaper, furniture-players can drag and drop it all, and with an added bonus, pose villagers too. For the Wedding Season event's room, only Reese and Cyrus are poseable.

On social media, players have made creepy graveyards and lavishly decorated wedding scenes. Watching the wedding event play out online, it's reminding me of the heyday of the underrated Animal Crossing spin-off, Happy Home Designer. In Happy Home Designer, you design homes for villager clients according to their favored guidelines. No matter what though: there's room for creativity. At release, some criticized Happy Home Designer for being too light on flourishes, but to me, it was focused. Its wealth of furniture and other goods were a delight to toy around with.

Happy Home Designer inspired so much creativity in the Animal Crossing community that eventually its increased decorating tools were added to its mainline predecessor on 3DS, Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Its dense feature set proved good practice for the immense challenge of decorating an entire island in New Horizons.

In just a few months time, I'm supposed be a bridesmaid in a wedding. The dress is hanging in my closet. As I inch closer to the date, I wonder why it hasn't been postponed yet due to the pandemic, and whether I should risk even attending at all. It will probably be the only time I'll ever be a bridesmaid, and it might not even happen now. It's something that's been buried far at the back of my mind while more pressing and important conversations dominate the world, but it feels narcissistic to dwell on. After all, who the hell cares about a silly wedding when black lives still don't matter to police, or to society?

At least, there has been a sense of normalcy that I've found within Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the past few months. While the world faces crisis after crisis, Animal Crossing stays the same. Friends still hang out IRL; weddings aren't postponed here-in fact, we're all invited. Or at least, we all get to work the wedding as a photographer. In Animal Crossing, everyone is equal, and everyone is friendly. It is idyllic, maybe too saccharine right now, but when I look out at Reese and Cyrus as I drag and drop them around a wedding of my own making, I feel a hint of satisfaction. And that feels nice right now.