When I played Mouthwashing, Wrong Organ’s psychological horror game and surprise dark horse in the 2024 Game of the Year race, I couldn’t have anticipated it would reach the level of fandom in which it got cute, marketable plushies. Its subject matter is very dark, but then again, that’s never really stopped horror games and movies from going down this path. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising, then, that its characters are getting stuffed toys, despite the terrible things they all go through in Mouthwashing’s brief runtime. What is surprising is that after all this time, the community is not only still debating the game’s horrors and morality…but now, they’ve devolved into going for each other’s throats over a plush of a character named Jimmy reimagined as a cute cat.
Content warning: Sexual assault
Jimmy is the primary player character in Mouthwashing. He and his crew have been stranded in space after their freight ship collided with an asteroid, and the game goes over the fallout of the crash and the months that followed. Without getting too into everything that goes down, suffice it to say Mouthwashing is a pretty harrowing story involving some of the worst things humans are capable of, and Jimmy is the perpetrator of a lot of those crimes. He’s also an unreliable narrator attempting to cover up what he’s done, and the things he’s revealed to have done on the ship put him far beyond any possible redemption.
Jimmy does a lot of reprehensible things in Mouthwashing, and the one that’s perhaps most notable is that the game implies he raped Anya, the lone woman on the ship, who is now pregnant. We don’t need to get into all the repercussions of this act here, but as you can imagine, a lot of Mouthwashing fans are not fans of Jimmy’s. In fact, I’d argue the game’s entire point is to make you hate this guy. He’s the villain of this story, and even if he attempts to do the right thing at the end of the game, that’s not going to be enough for some. Others, meanwhile, do find him compelling as a character whose layered story has a lot of depth. For some who find his actions unforgivable, even believing him an interesting centerpiece in Mouthwashing’s story goes beyond what they believe to be morally acceptable.
Fast forward to August 2025, and a collectible manufacturer called Plushshop is making a cat-shaped plush of Jimmy. The store has stuffed cats based on characters from anime, TV shows, and video games, ranging from Squid Game to One Piece. When the company first announced plans to make Mouthwashing plushes, those plans didn’t include one for Jimmy, which led to backlash from fans. The company has since removed those initial Mouthwashing plushes from its store and deleted any mention of them from its social media accounts.
However, after the shop announced its Jimmy plush as a separate launch, Mouthwashing fans jumped on the website to leave negative user reviews saying that given Jimmy’s true nature, he shouldn’t be made into a cute cat plush. That alone is maybe a conversation worth having, but the comments quickly devolved into a toxic cesspool, with some people claiming that those who bought the plush were rape apologists and several comments that, for some reason, included racial slurs. I went to go look at them myself on PlusShop’s website, but the Jimmy plush seems to have been removed. We’ve reached out to PlushShop for comment on the situation and will update the story if we hear back. In the meantime, screenshots of the reviews have begun circulating on places like X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, but do be warned that there’s some foul language in those links.
As someone who really enjoyed Mouthwashing for its exploration of the human psyche and its striking visuals, am I thrilled that its characters are being made into plushes? Not particularly. I do think it’s a bit weird to make those characters cute cats or even just regular toys. It turns a pretty horrific story into an almost absurdist display prop, and even the officially licensed plush of a man wrapped up in bandages with his painkillers made into an accessory kind of feels like a parody or shitpost, turning some of the most memorable, horrific imagery in the game into a purchasable gag. All that said, the reaction to this cat plush is so ludicrously overblown and reeks of the kind of “putting fictional characters on trial” nonsense that has plagued discussions around games like The Last of Us or Nier and that I can’t believe we’re still dealing with in 2025.
Good stories are built around conflict, and in some of those stories, the perpetrators of that conflict are reprehensible people who cannot be redeemed in the eyes of the beholder. Yes, in Mouthwashing, one character has committed one of the most vile things a person is capable of. But he is not a real person, and he is not on trial. Liking a story in which people do terrible things is not the same as endorsing their actions, and if that goes over someone’s head, I’m surprised they’re engaging with Mouthwashing to begin with considering several of its characters are morally dubious, to say the least. Since some of the comments weighing in on this use racial slurs, I imagine at least some of those people putting Jimmy on trial have larger issues than a lack of media literacy.
The root of these kinds of arguments is that there will always be people who don’t understand that others engage with art differently than they do. One thing I’ve learned in my years of writing, reading, watching, and listening to criticism is that you’ll find that there are some people who have different expectations when they voice an opinion about a work. For example, when someone lashes out at a critique, it’s often under the pretense that a critic is trying to “change” something they think is fine. When some fans voice a complaint about a game, they expect the developers to address it in a patch, and so when they see another person criticizing anything, this is the only framework they have for understanding that critique: as, effectively, a complaint to management over an issue they wish to see rectified.
The same thing happens with how people engage with characters. Some people only “like” characters if they support everything they do and can stand by them in the end, so the concept of enjoying a character who does reprehensible shit is so foreign to them that it is somehow a moral failing to derive any sort of satisfaction from them, even from dissecting their actions. Because people are so fixated on their own media literacy framework, art that engages in uncomfortable topics will never be free from Tumblr-era moralizing. To people who make these arguments, “problematic” storylines are just problems to be solved, rather than a means of exploring potentially challenging or uncomfortable themes. The curtains were blue. Jimmy was a bad guy. That’s all there is to it.
I didn’t expect to rant about this on a random Friday in August, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be over a toy cat. I really enjoyed Mouthwashing, but I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get too involved with its community, because it sure seems like there are a lot of people in that community who are ill-equipped to engage with the game they’re purportedly fans of.