Fight me in the crater

I'll start with the joke one because from here on it's only going to get hoooo boy, and because every joke is only partly a joke and we can still find things to discuss here, and because joke's on you, my headcanon for the longest time has been that at least one head should fly / should've already flown off with how things are set up.

Ideally: Behead all three. The universe will be grateful.

Less ideally: if I have to assign each option to just one, then it's...

Bed Big Ape. I feel like with him I'd run the lowest risk of getting claws/beaks/fangs/talons in my tenderloins. Some of you may be into that. I'm not.

Wed Thornwing. He's already divorced from Kluex, so he shouldn't be too religiously annoying, and he seems like the most manageable of the bunch.

Behead Greenfinger. Really. Just behead him. He's my favorite, but I'm also making the responsible choice of acknowledging that he's got the most levels of potential ominous global-scale threat about him, and everyone's better off with his head off.

But actually: the one who's most likely to get beheaded in the story proper should be the guy whose in-game presence is already that of a detached head. A really big detached head that flies around and shoots rockets and shit.

A small incident after which Ape's ever-present background paranoia went into overdrive, and he insisted on showing up anywhere public only through a holographic projection from the perceived safety of his quarters. This, of course, didn't save him; but it did save Miniknog some effort in their ensuing task of replacing Big Ape with his virtual Minisoft-run copy. After all, a figurehead doesn't actually need to be alive to keep doing its job.

I don't mind at all, however! how much patience have you got for me? because if you've got some to spare, then I'll prefer to turn your bombardment into an art plan for myself for this summer and draw even more beta stuff, as well as my magnificent unparalleled combined beta-release bullshit

There are flowers that mean 'I love you', there are flowers that mean 'I'm sorry', and then there are flowers that mean 'you're about to have a catastrophically bad time'.

~~~

I can't help but wonder if the characters of the beta lore would've been allowed to leave the confines of codex pages and enter the gameplay proper, had it been decided to proceed with the initial storyline. Which roles would've they assumed in relation to the protagonist? to each other? to the new faces that popped up after the rewrite?

Thing is, with some careful handwork, the legacy and the release versions can actually fit together quite nicely. The hero could have fled under the Protectorate's wing from whatever issues had been plaguing their people, only to land themself right on track to watch Earth get expeditiously Xipe Totecked some months or years down the line.

Greenfinger is curious to see what came of this fiasco – great, I wouldn't put it past him to wriggle into the hero's favor to secure inside scoops on the Protectorate's and Earth's fates. Shouldn't be hard at all, he's a real charming and friendly fellow. Just remember to place the codices in which he apparently puts a hit on his own bestie somewhere closer to the end of the story, just so you can accumulate your own collection of red flags about him before the grand reveal.

*shoots a look at the tag*

*the character is confidently being dragged through the shipping AU mental illness hell, kicking and screaming, bumping their head on one traumatic experience after another*

Babygirl there's some yarn on the couch

I said babygirl stuff it into your mouth

I saw this fellow in a dream a few nights ago. He cut a very striking image even through all the dreamy haze, so I've been putting him onto canvas ever since, in case I might need him later. His name was... something with a C, I think. Connor? Conrad? Something much more humble that one would expect.

At some point, for whatever reason, each one of them walked off the face of the Earth, and was never seen again.

~~~

Inspired by that time my TS3 game unrouted little Bella Bachelor, because of course. Who else.

I used to be fascinated by the stories of unexplained disappearances as a child, and I think it still carries over a bit. When looking for characters to pay special attention to, I follow the smell of lingering questions. Where did he go after I'd done what had to be done? Why did they do this to her? Was it intentional? Is it significant to the story?

I'm talking about Viola, of course. I haven't been that interested in Bella for a long time now. She's too well-known of a mystery. She's JFK of The Sims, and everyone's already poked their nose in there – and I prefer to poke my nose into places rarely poked.

No but really, who needs true OCs when there's a whole trinity of abandoned pre-release characters, and together they make for an exceptional can of worms

Like, each one of them is terrifyingly competent at being evil, but at the same time, that meeting minutes entry exists where they're collectively talking shit about why you don't date a hylotl and half their lines had to be censored. A bunch of universal bully buddies where each one would happily throw the other two under a space bus. What a treat!

A brief memory of a world in the fall

Also, that time Jo unearthed some artifact from an archaeology pile and caused the entire Al Simhara to go up in hundreds of nRaas script errors.

And I mean, 994/1016 hundreds. The count kept going, I just stopped screening. Sara got her inventory wiped clean, and Jo got wiped from existence altogether. The game apparently thought I had no sim chosen, so I couldn't click on anything in the world, and on exiting w/o saving I got a forever black screen with a cheerful main menu tune and had to kill the process.

Then, on replay, Jo did it again.

Girl why is it always you

Listen. I'm of chaotic alignment on the issue. I hope everything gets fumbled, and the new owners kill off the series for good, and then shoot EA on top of The Sims' grave, and it all turns into abandonware, and there's a huge vacant ecological niche in the life sim industry that gets filled with new innovative gaming startups. TS4's been milked for so long it's now a desiccated corpse of what it could be. At 100 DLCs, a game is finished. That's it. It's done. Leave it alone. Don't even have to fix the bugs, it's not like you've ever bothered anyway.

I mean, really, wasn't it clear long ago that EA consistently values money over morals? Imo if those are the people they've accepted as their buyers, then EA's values are just like that. Have been like that for quite some time now. Maybe I'm just a paranoid bitter man, idk, but as I see it, they've leaned into diversity because they've figured it sells with their core audience.

And for the same reason, profit being the deciding factor, I really doubt they'll go all those extra miles to scrub every single bit of gay out of the game. Like bro, they're looking at vast layoffs and restructuring down the line, they're literally in debt, they need to make money, they need to keep turning profit so that their investors won't consider them a complete waste. Why would they drive off a huge chunk of their player base and completely trash their public image in one fell swoop? The sole fact that people have found out who exactly they're selling out to is already a PR issue.