The Animal Crossing character Ankha is currently a popular meme trending on TikTok, and (perhaps not so) surprisingly, it’s because of a fan-made animated porn clip of her.
Ankha is a snooty villager who has appeared in multiple installments of the Animal Crossing series. Her visual design and localised names suggest that she’s based on the pharaohs of Egypt. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, her house includes hieroglyphic walls, a burial pyramid, and golden coffins. Ankha lives like she’s already died.
But thanks to the porn artist Zone, Ankha’s popularity has never been more alive. Zone is a cartoon animator who makes parody adult videos in Flash. On January 28, they posted an animation of Ankha having sex to a song called “Camel by Camel,” an Egypt-inspired song originally released in 1985 by artist Sandy Marton. Zone has only uploaded their video to sites where it can be adult-locked, such as Patreon. However, Tiktok users, inspired by Zone’s video, created the tag #ankhazone to denote their own memey riffs on the artist’s creation. The tag has exploded in popularity this month, and has now amassed over 17 million views at the time of writing. Meanwhile, one upload of the original video on Twitter currently has over seven million views.
While more risque videos on TikTok (which doesn’t allow content that depicts sexual activity) have been removed, numerous creators on the platform have been making parody clips out of the more safe-for-work parts of the original video. There’s also fanart, fan animations, and Ankha cosplays. Not all creations bearing the #ankhazone tag are sexualized in nature. Several just celebrate Ankha or Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Most of them include “Camel by Camel”. Some creators have opted not to cosplay the Animal Crossing character, but simply recreated the dance from the original video for their TikTok audience.
The risque Ankha animation isn’t Zone’s first adult animated video, but it’s their most widely known. According to their website, they’ve been making adult parodies since at least 2005. Besides video games, they’ve also drawn on anime and western animation as source material for their explicit content. If the TikTok remixes are anything to go by, the catchy music Zone used helped #ankhazone achieve mainstream popularity. But there’s likely a deeper cultural reason for the trend’s appeal.
The English-speaking world’s obsession with Egypt is not new, and historians have coined the term “Egyptomania” to describe the west’s habit of exotifying Egypt. If Ankha had been any other Animal Crossing villager, the video might not have inspired so many imitators on the internet.
Or maybe some Animal Crossing fans are just really desperate for any new ACNH content they can get.
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