4

Fletcher

Not a dysfunctional family, just a bit chaotic.

Slack & Go Stockbox
If you could buy a house from a big box store, this would be it. Interior high-matte "StainSetter" paint will gladly show off every brush it's ever had with a person's clothing, exterior bricks have been reset occasionally with ill-fitting replacements that don't match the colour. The weed on the front lawn seems to have a mind of its own and has resisted every attempt to remove it. Property comes with a free landscaping rock.

Bedrooms: 4
Bathrooms: 2
House type: Ranch
Max. occupancy: 5
I added a basement to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force house, basically is what I did here. See, you can build a perfect replica of the Aqua Teen house in The Sims 2, but The Sims 4 doesn't have the right half-wall dowelling. The interior doesn't look a thing like it, but since we can't see it right now, maybe that doesn't matter.

Phil and Laura Fletcher wanted nothing more than to start a bakery. However, when Gina came along 41 weeks after their wedding night, they had to put their plans on hold and Phil accepted the first 9-to-5 job that came his way. 7 years later came twins, Sean and Suzy. Now, Gina's pubescent hormones attract her to anyone in trousers, pretty much; Sean's dreams of becoming a synthpop keyboardist are being hampered by his unwillingness to learn more than 1 chord, and Suzy's been to the counsellor's office so much, it's attracting the attention of the school board. Will the Fletchers ever be the baker family that Phil and Laura want?

Phil
Growing up in his parents' bakery, Phil could make a loaf of sandwich bread with the most tender crumb you've ever eaten before he could even ride a bike. While he doesn't like his office job all that much, at least it pays the bills, but that's ALL it does.
Astrological sign: Aries
Lifestage: Adult (aged 43)
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Laura
Laura's background in early-childhood education prepared her quite well for having kids of her own... however, now that her kids aren't in early childhood anymore, she's finding it kind of hard to relate to them now. Still, she's determined to be the best mom she can, even when that means letting things that Suzy does at school slide because she wants to be the Fun Mom.
Astrological sign: Aries
Lifestage: Adult (aged 41)
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Gina
Quiet and reserved, Gina is 50 kinds of '80s romance novel passion all bottled up inside the body of a plain-looking 16-year-old girl. The short stories she writes would make you want to hurl, then swoon, then cry, then kiss the person next to you.
Astrological sign: Aquarius
Lifestage: Teenager (aged 16)
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Sean
Receiving a toy keyboard for his 4th Christmas, Sean managed to plunk out the C-sharp Major scale on his own and has been using it consistently ever since to play little tunes. His strong artistic views say that 1 chord is quite enough for a musician to know and those who know more than that are simply showing off.
Astrological sign: Scorpio
Lifestage: Child (aged 9)
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Suzy
Suzy just can't help getting into trouble. It's impossible for her NOT to get into trouble because her personality doesn't fit within the rigid rules set by the school system. She needs to be outside, LARPing "Ichiban Keikaku"; not inside, getting useless maths shoved in her face.
Astrological sign: Scorpio
Lifestage: Child (aged 9)
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From a very young age, Phil Fletcher knew he wanted to start his own bakery. When he was a kid, while the rest of his classmates were drawing pictures of houses, and spacecraft, and manga characters, Phil was writing menu boards and setting prices for a pretend bakery called "Phil o' Dough". While everyone else in art class was building houses and dogs and geometric shapes out of modelling clay, he was rolling it out like scones and kneading it like bread.

On the other side of the country, Laura Notaro was LARPing horror musicals with her sister, Wendy, and their friend group. While she was a bundle of laughs outside on the playground, inside the classroom she was the most inattentive, talk-back-y girl in the whole school. She never did very well in school until her parents got her a private maths tutor, who turned out to be Loretta Lynley, the actress who played the lead role of Allie O'Leo in her favourite horror musical, Machete Alley. Loretta told Laura that she'd enjoyed the stardom for a while, taking pictures of herself holding newspapers and magazines with her face on it, but eventually it got too stressful, being asked to perform at charity events, just sing for random people on the street, and certainly the 11pm curtain calls weren't anything to sneeze at. She told Laura that she had wanted to be a teacher long before wanting to be an actress, and so she was taking classes online and tutoring in order to achieve that goal. Also, she agreed to sing songs from the play in harmony with Laura if she did well on her maths exams.

Phil, on the other hand, never wanted to be anything other than a baker. From his 12th birthday, he was helping out in his parents' commercial kitchen, measuring things, operating the stand-mixer, rolling out the scones, and cleaning up in the lobby. The customers noted that Phil's sandwich bread was actually better than his father's. His own academic performance wasn't really great either, but he figured that, as long as he knew how to make bread, he could live comfortably.

Phil and Laura met each other while they were in college. Laura was in South Central University's early-childhood development programme and Phil was a culinary arts student. Since, during finals week, it was cheaper to eat at the Culinary Arts department's restaurant than the campus dining hall, Laura and Wendy went there for lunch. Phil had made 5 loaves of his famous sandwich bread and was making crôque monsieur with Italian-style stir-fried vegetables at the flat-top grill, which had a view of the dining room. Wendy commented it was like a teppanyaki place where the chef prepares the food directly at the table. Laura, however, wasn't paying attention to the food so much as the chef. Phil had developed a habit of exclaiming, "yah!", whenever he flipped a sandwich, which reminded Laura of how Jack the Knife would do the same thing in his musical number in Machete Alley. At one point, the chef called out, "Fletcher, tone down the chopping, please," due to Phil's habit of drumming on the vegetables with the sides of his spatulas, which Phil responded to with a hearty, "Yes, chef!" Some other things happened, their sandwiches and veg were to die for, but Laura fell in love with that "Yes, chef!". She had trouble concentrating in class later because all she could think about was a sous-chef named "Fletcher".

As it happens, Machete Alley was one of Phil's favourites too, and he'd had Jack the Knife in mind. Laura returned to the Culinary Arts building after class and hung around until Phil came out of the kitchen. She introduced herself, said she'd never had a better grilled cheese sandwich, and they talked for a bit; about Machete Alley, about musicals, about what they were going to SCU for, and then she invited him to drop by the coffeeshop next door to the office she worked at. Phil and Laura went out for a few months and then, as graduation neared, Laura suddenly panicked that she would graduate and never see Phil again, so, in a somewhat unconventional move, she proposed to him. It wasn't anything fancy or thought-out, they were just sitting in the student centre having coffee together. Phil would tell you that he had talked about finding a beautiful storefront on one of the busiest streets in Newpeak (a town in Cabell County, Sylvania, about 600 miles to the west), then she put down her coffee and got a strange look on her face— kind of 1 part worry, 1 part ready to cry, and 1 part needing to rush off to the toilet— and she got quiet. Not saying a single thing about her tutoring sessions with Loretta Lynley anymore, she sat there for a couple seconds, breathing strangely, and just as he was about to ask what the matter was, she blurted out "Will you marry me?", loudly enough for passers-by to hear. He chuckled softly and muttered, "That's my line."

Fast forward to March of the next year and their first daughter was born, whom they named "Gina" after Phil's mother who had died of heart failure his last year of high school. Phil had been having trouble finding the money to start his bakery with and, when Laura announced she was pregnant, Phil shunted the bakery off to a siding without a second thought and took the first file clerk job he could find on Jobly. Meanwhile, Laura was teaching kindergarten class at PS-123. She felt that having a child of her own would help her relate to the kids in her class, a lot of whom were going to have new siblings soon themselves. Fast forward a bit more to Gina's 7th birthday, while she was sleeping over at Rylee's house, and Phil and Laura had "the house is empty at long last" sex. Phil couldn't remember how long that condom had been in his wallet, but as it was the only one available, he used it. Well, when he took it off, he noticed that it had torn. Sure enough, Gina got an early Christmas gift of twin siblings: a brother and a sister, whom her parents named "Sean" after Sean Connery and "Suzy" after Laura's lesbian auntie.

Neither Phil nor Laura can figure out where she got it from, but Suzy can be an absolute menace some days. While she never intentionally hurts anyone, she talks back like you wouldn't believe, and has a very clear-cut sense of what she wants to do and what will simply waste her time, which she never lets go of. She would rather play outside with her friends than receive another stupid maths worksheet, and she'll let the teacher know this in no uncertain terms. This, in amongst other more esoteric things, has led her to spend more time in the counsellor's office than really anyone else at PS-345. So many disciplinary reports sent home with words like "defiant", "inattentive", and "argumentative" written in great bold lettering that her behaviour is starting to affect the entire school system. Her file has been reviewed by all 12 members of the school board, but they have thus far decided not to take any action. Still, that was a pretty harrowing email for Phil to get in the middle of the day: rrappaport@newcrest.edu, Subject: School Board decision on Suzy L. Fletcher. If you asked Suzy (which, predictably, no one ever has), you would get a different picture of her average day at school. Not only are her natural tendencies toward play and creativity being trod upon by adults who are far too attached to "the syllabus", but her underachievement in maths class is the result of not having her questions answered. Indeed, she has stopped asking them, since the amount of understanding she's gotten from asking for clarification has been, if not zero, then some very small decimal, like 0.00927%. Her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Corcoran, never bothers explaining herself and leaves the task of explaining things outside the scope of a normal lecture to her student teacher, Mr. Perry, who doesn't seem to understand long division any more than Suzy does.

Outside of academics, Suzy is very territorial about places she likes to go and will often claim them for herself, only allowing others in if she feels they're worthy. She got that from her favourite manga, Ichiban Keikaku, where the main character, a boy named Karl, is the head of a secret society of ESPers. Even the phrasing of her "get out" speech is the same as Karl's: "I will tolerate your presence no longer! Scurry away!"

When he was very young— about 1 or 2— Sean was afraid of synthesisers. They made unfamiliar sounds at high volume specifically to scare him. His first encounter with one wasn't pleasant; he had pressed a key on an Ohayo DS9 in the Bayshare electronics section, expecting to hear a piano. Instead, he heard 1-02 BRASS1, a crunchy FM approximation of a jazz brass ensemble. As if that wasn't bad enough, there was a stern-looking middle-aged man nearby who immediately snapped at him, "Don't do that!", as soon as the sound stopped. Perhaps to spite the man, Sean intentionally smacked the keyboard with his open hand just to create more sound (his hand only being large enough to hit C, D, and E natural). He didn't like the sound at all, but he did it anyway. Who knows precisely why. When he was 4, he came into the sitting room while Phil was watching a MUNKI concert on DVD and saw the band's lead vocallist playing an Ohayo DS9 while singing a song. He realised that it was a piano, just a bit different. Bayshare was still selling them and he revisited it while the rest of his family was looking for DVDs in the discount bin, discovering that the sound changed depending on what number was being displayed on the screen. while "1-02" produced the harsh brass sound that plagued his nightmares, "1-03" was an approximation of a legato strings ensemble and "1-01" sounded like an electric piano. When he announced that he wanted an Ohayo DS9 for Christmas, Phil balked at the §4200 pricetag. As a compromise, he agreed to get him "a keyboard" but didn't specify what kind. On Christmas morning, when Sean got up, he passed the keyboard right on by on his way to the tree. Phil had set it up on its stand in the space between the doors to Sean's and Suzy's rooms. A Casale JR-290, the sample-based bank was more true-to-life accurate than the DS9's FM synthesis anyway, and Sean spent the rest of the morning plunking out Christmas carols thanks to the note name stickers that Laura had affixed to the keys. Apparently, the Ohayo DS9 was influential enough to have samples of the electric piano and brass ensemble patches, hidden in the patch library as "DS Piano" and "DSSynbras1"

Now, aged 9, Sean has warmed up to the DS9 quite a bit more, to the point where the sound that haunted his nightmares is now his most-frequently used patch in the JR-290 memory bank. However, his music is stalling due to his unwillingness to learn more than the C♯ Major chord. All of the books on piano playing that he's read recommend starting on C Major, but he feels more like a musician playing all those black keys. The term "relative minor" has come up before, but he's not sure what that means. In any case, he's figured out how to play some videogame music in his preferred key and he's recorded something in all 5 user song banks. Regardless of how many keys Sean can play in, Phil and Laura are proud of him for figuring it out. Phil had always wanted to learn the piano, but he never found the time. Laura can't understand how pianists and keyboardists keep track of all those buttons in the first place.

Gina has had a pretty interesting puberty so far. While her friends from elementary and middle school have all transitioned over to makeup and hairstyling products, Gina actually went the other way. During her childhood, she was the one who loved all the pink, frilly stuff, playing with JennaDolls and collecting Little Loonas. As she got older, however, she started dressing much more androgynously in more muted colours. While she still poses JennaDolls on playset furniture, they're more decorations than toys at this stage. She also started writing more after inheriting her dad's old netbook. While she couldn't do much else on it, it let her write stories in the privacy of her own little typewriter, which she would save onto a flashdrive. She found that she could even password-protect her files if she kept them in ZIP archives. As a result, there's about 4 dozen RTFs in a ZIP file called "nothing-to-see-here" that she can't access because she memorised the password and then promptly forgot it. Lately, she's been occasionally obsessive about figuring out what she could possibly have set the password to and will spend anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour trying various different possibilities only for the computer to say "Access Denied! Incorrect password". In any case, encryption allowed her to explore parts of her imagination that she'd felt were off-limits before, including a particular fascination with... well, maybe we should respect her privacy a bit. In any case, learning to write erotic fiction so early has helped her learn how to write positively lurid stories now. She even published one, though anonymously, on Quotever a couple years back: The Stripper's Folly, having to do with a stripper meeting a werewolf on her way home one night. Well, it stuck around for about 3 weeks before the Quotever moderation staff decided that it broke the terms of service; still, it was up long enough to be read 10,710 times and downloaded to epub 515 times.

These days, Gina's main interest is chess. She joined the chess club at the beginning of the year after learning how to play on her phone. She prefers physical chess to computerised chess because humans are always harder to predict. She started out using GrandmasterEX thinking it was so hard she would never win, however she discovered that she could anticipate the computer's moves. If she moved her king's side castle, the game would move its queen's side bishop, for instance. She's become something of a local phenom, actually; whenever she shows up to community chess events at the park with her iced coffee and her ebook reader, she can beat even the old-timers without even putting down Bury Your Gays.

While Gina's had crushes before, even going so far as to have an on-again/off-again boyfriend in Vince Vercetti Jr., most of them never lasted very long. However, when she saw the only cheerleader in school history to quit the squad come into the library and sit down across from Jonas, she got so flustered that Cody captured her last knight and nearly checked her. So far, they haven't played a match together yet, but Gina has started to play imaginary games with Cyndi Fairisle whenever she closes her eyes. Maybe Gina needs to permanently switch off from Vince? She hasn't decided yet.

In case you haven't noticed by now, the Fletchers are based on the Belcher family from Bob's Burgers. You can even see that in their names a bit. You can turn the letter B into a letter F by erasing bits of it, but "Felcher" doesn't sound like anything where "Fletcher" does. "Bob" is a fairly common name, but it also alliterates with "Belcher", so we need a common name that alliterates with Fletcher. How about "Phil"? It doesn't start with the same letter, but it's good enough. After that, it's just a matter of substitution. It's not "Linda", it's Laura. It's not "Tina", it's Gina. If you don't read English very well, you might think that "Gene" and "Sean" rhyme, so Sean. Also, there's a thing that happens when you type "Louise" a lot— occasionally, you go too fast and you type "Lousie" instead (this was made fun of a bit in S9E18, "If You Love It so Much, Why Don't You Marionette"), and "Lousie" rhymes with "Suzy".

I didn't want to just make the Belcher family. I didn't want to just port them from TV to the story because that's not my style. Since day 1 playing The Sims, I haven't been really comfortable making pre-existing characters, I've wanted to do it myself. So, I've developed this kind of oblique naming convention where I'll make a reference to the character I'm remaking while still having it be unique enough that I have to fill stuff in myself. That's why Phil doesn't want to make burgers, he wants to start a bakery (actually, in their very first iteration, back in 2015, he wanted to start a grocery store, but a bakery is more fun to build, I think); plus, I'm really bad at wordplay. Like, I won't know how to make a play on words until someone else has done it for me. "Phil O'Dough" (phyllo dough) isn't the best wordplay ever, but at least it makes sense.

Linda Belcher has a tendency to make everything into musical theatre, so I decided to give Laura that trait as well. However, this is as far as the similarities go. Try as I might, I can't see Linda as a kindergarten teacher, but Laura always wanted to be one, and now she is. I figure this will come into it more when Katie Kissimmee starts teaching first grade, she can be Mrs. Fletcher's student teacher.

If you've clicked around my website some, you'll find that I kin Tina Belcher. I named myself after her, I used her picture to come out to my mum, I sang a song with her voice. Even though all of my characters have bits of my own personality in them, Gina Fletcher has an idealised version of my teenage years. She's less gregarious than your average teen girl and quite plain looking (for as plain as you can get sims in TS4 to look). I always wanted to be so good at chess that I could multitask and still beat a grandmaster, so Gina can. It'll turn out that Gina accidentally cracked the code to how her phone's chess app works, an algorithm that professional chess players thought was uncrackable, and so she'll be heralded as a savant, a prodigy, an Einstein-level genius. But, it's like I read on tumblr once: being good at chess doesn't make you smart, it just makes you good at chess. That's something that The Sims is partly responsible for, I'm afraid— in order to get smart in The Sims, you play chess. Well, Gina isn't the world's foremost expert on everything, she just understands patterns better than most other people, to the point she can undercut an unhackable chess-playing program.

Sean and Suzy follow the characters they were based on pretty closely, except that Sean isn't a glutton like Gene Belcher is.

Like I said up at the top there, basically I just built the Aqua Teen Hunger Force house in The Sims 4. Unlike TS2, you can't build a perfect replica, because none of the necessary objects are available. I said it doesn't have the right halfwall dowelling. Well, it also doesn't have the right woodgrain wall panelling, the right TV sets, the right carpeting, the right paint colour for the kitchen, the right linoleum, or the right recliner. So, basically, everything that makes it the Aqua Teens' house, The Sims 4 doesn't have. So I used it more as a starting point, then turned it into a real house. For a start, the Aqua Teens' house doesnt have a bathroom. While it has a crawlspace, it doesn't have a basement. If I wanted to fit a 5-person family unit into this house, I needed more space, so I added a basement. Phil and Laura's bedroom is where Frylock's room would be, Gina's is where Meatwad's room would be, and the twins sleep in rooms in the basement. It's a finished basement, don't worry about it. There's even a 2nd bathroom down there. Basically, I hate basements. They're damp, they're poorly insulated, full of spiders and exposed flooring joists, but in my part of the country, it's the usual venue for your child's bedroom. So, yeah. Whenever kids need to sleep in the basement, I make it an extension of the main floor of the house, rather than a cement floor with 2x4's and cinderblock exterior walls.

Will Phil ever start that bakery? Yes. Just give it time.