An Animal Crossing mod which makes the character Isabelle “slightly curvier” has left the internet in ruins.

The Animal Crossing: New Horizons modification, uploaded to the site GameBanana on Saturday (4 January), gives the cartoon Shih Tzu larger breasts and buttocks as well as a thinner waist.

Activist and author Parker Molloy highlighted the fan-made addon in a seemingly bewildered post on BlueSky, asking: “Why, though?”

Her post received such significant backlash, including a flurry of transphobic death threats, that Molloy not only deleted the post, but her entire Bluesky account.

Since then, the social media platform has devolved into furious debate between those who believe the Nintendo game mod is benign and those who not only feel the mod is misogynistic, but who also condemned the abuse against Molloy.

Activist Alejandra Caraballo deplored those harassing Molloy, writing: “Watching yet another trans woman with a platform getting dog-piled for an innocuous post is enraging. The attacks on Parker Molloy are absurd.”

Also chiming in, Katelyn Burns urged everyone to “step back and realise how often it’s a trans woman getting bullied off social media”.

One user criticising the mod highlighted the absurdity of the discourse, writing: “No f****** way this website chased a trans woman off because she thought a mod that gave Isabelle in Animal Crossing boobs to be weird. F*** sake.”

Another, defending Molloy, wrote: “You can mod dog boobs into Animal Crossing if you want to, but you can’t expect people to not think it’s weird.”

Animal Crossing mod ‘completely harmless’, some argue

On the other side of the frontline, users defending the mod argued that the internet is “choc-full” of adult cartoon content and those objecting to it were simply naive.

“Wait people are upsetti spaghetti about an Animal Crossing mod that gives Isabelle boobs? Holy c***? Is this your first day on the internet?” one user wrote.

Another described the mod as “completely harmless”, adding that the modder had also been harassed over the discourse.

Others responded arguing that the mod wasn’t the issue, but the abuse Molloy had received over a simple post, with one user writing: “How much lead do you need to have in your brain to be able to connect the dots from ‘why though?’, in response to an Animal Crossing mod giving Isabelle exaggerated curves, to the f****** ‘first they came for’ poem.”

“Look: It’s weird (good) to mod Animal Crossing to give the animal big t*** and it’s weird (bad) to call someone a transphobic fascist for not understanding why people mod Animal Crossing to give the animals big t***.”

At the time of reporting, the game mod has 59 likes and 309 downloads in the three days it has been available.

The mod creator also has a submission which gives a similar hourglass figure to the character Ankha, as well as mods for the game Team Fortress 2, including some that replace several of the game’s nine classes with gender-swapped versions.

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