Right, let's discuss the Hansen family story on All My Sims 4. I know I said when I started that section that its reason for being was so I could write relateable stories, of the type you can't get using any other Sims game. However, there's a very fine line between relateable and incompatible with the medium. As I was building and furnishing their house, I was coming up with the story in my head and, well, you know how it is with good ideas. They're always good until they're not. Using the real-life events of 2 of my high school classmates as a frame of reference, I wrote the story of a family that began with 17-year-old parents. WHY am I so interested in writing about teenage pregnancy all of a sudden? Where did this obsession come from? No! No more of that.
Basically, here's the story in bulletpoints so I don't need to carry on writing...
This story is actually a synthesis of 2 stories. The first is the "teen daughter of a teen parent gets pregnant" angle. The second is the "cottagecore tradwife" deal. After I built an off-the-grid tiny house with a subsistence farm, I decided I wanted cottagecore enthusiasts to live there. Naturally, a white gen-z cishet couple. I even asked R what the better name for a MAGA-type fascist survival nut would be: Noah or Logan, and we both agreed that "Noah" fit better. As I was building the house where the cottagecore tradcouple were going to live, I was basically coming up with the story in my head and realising more and more that I didn't want to write it. Several key points in the story would require setting it in the United States, from at least 2020 onwards. I thought I could dilute the story a bit by making it the B-story somewhere, but as it turns out, the A-story also requires setting the story not only in the United States, but also in my hometown from 2020 onwards.
I mentioned being incompatible with the medium before. You have to accept a certain amount of contrivance to make a story work in The Sims, but this story has no room for it. I mean, like, you don't have to make it totally absurdly E-for-Everyone sanitised; like having an old granny get interrogated by the police for passing off raisin cookies as chocolate chip cookies; but so far, I've been setting my story in a different world. This world was untouched by COVID19, it has no cottagecore, no systemic fascism, no eugenics. It can overlap real life just a bit— I've talked about people playing Doom before— but this is not the time or place for a story with that level of realism. Perhaps what I have to do is make another story; one that takes place in the world as we know it; where I can set stories like the Sanders' and the Hansen's and the Gragert's. I can use The Sims 4 for visualising, but nothing else. The story does not otherwise take place within the confines of The Sims as a narrative medium.
Maybe someday. Probably soon, depending on factors.
Quite honestly, I probably would have carried on with this story and damn the consequences had some heavy stuff not happened in the physical plane that required my immediate attention this afternoon. Fortunately everything equalised back out to normal, and it gave me the opportunity to rethink my narrative choices.