Branch

Girlfriends living the country life.

- Content warning: Pregnancy mention

The Morris Cabin
This quaint cabin offers a garden, ready for planting.

Bedrooms: 1
Bathrooms: 1
House type: Log cabin
Max. occupancy: 2
This is simply the Morris Cottage from stock Unleashed, to which I added a breakfast nook, brick chimney, and cabin logs. I also monkeyed about with the windows somewhat and refurnished the interior, but the landscaping is untouched.

Willow
A former background dancer with Music Videos, Int'l., Willow got tired of working for exposure and decided to turn her hobby of gardening into a full-time job. Mostly full-time. Maybe part-time? In any case, she made off with the outfit for her last gig and wears it in the garden. And, really, everywhere else, too.

Astrological sign: Name it
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Haynes
When her girlfriend asked her to come and live in the country with her, Haynes' imagination raced, creating all kinds of situations from romance novels that they could get into. She had no idea that "the country" involved actual farming. While she's gotten used to earthworms at this stage and has learnt to tolerate Willow's obsession with fertiliser; if she comes back home one day to find a chicken coop in the backyard, she's out.

Astrological sign: Name it
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Outgoing..▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋
Active....▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋
Playful...▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋
Nice......▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋▋

Willow Branch (née Sophie Penny) went to school to be a choreographer, having aspirations of directing music videos. When her agent told her that Music Videos International was looking for background dancers to be in a number of high-profile music videos, she jumped at the chance and told him to sign her up. What he neglected to mention was the insanely long hours and working for free. She and several other dancers have been hurt on the job and were required to carry on working until the director called "that's a wrap". Once, she danced on a broken ankle for 3 hours. The final realisation that she was in the wrong line of work came when her working acquaintance, Kellie Greene, was pushed off the stage by a malfunctioning special effect and she separated her shoulder; the director ordered her replaced and her agent dropped her. Fortunately, when Koh'Dee Hott, the artist whose music video they were working on, learnt about the incident, she fired the director and paid for Kellie's hospital stay and physical therapy. However, Willow decided she had spent far too much time working for "exposure" in an industry where she was nothing more than a disposable plebeian with a pretty face and a tight butt.

Haynes Branch (no relation) was the director's assistant on Snew-P's video to his breakout single "It Do Be Like Dat". She'd made some small talk with Willow at the craft services table and thought she had such a clear, lyrical voice, she mistook her for a singer. The other girls in the room were either on the phone with their agents, doing some kind of weird new-age meditation, or touching up their makeup, and she found that extremely stand-offish. Haynes hadn't been having a great day... or a great week, really. Her book deal fell through and her agent destroyed the only copy of the manuscript in a wood-chipper; she had to exercise incredible self-restraint not to throw him into the chipper as well and decided a simple kick in the shins would suffice. That was on Monday. On Tuesday, she woke up late and had to rush away to the set without breakfast or putting on any makeup, which was repeated on Wednesday. Another problem she was having all week was the thought that she would never be able to find another girlfriend. She had been cautious about revealing that she was a lesbian and only told her last girlfriend, Danielle, at all because they'd been going out to places as friends for 4 years at that point and Haynes needed to move their relationship along. They'd dated for a year before an actress Danielle knew from work came out on Studio Town Sunday and suddenly, she and Haynes "just aren't compatible anymore", and she ran off with the actress. The last Haynes had known of them, they were on the cover of every magazine from here to San Myshuno because they got married. The reason for Haynes' despair that week was Danielle and her famous wife were on the cover of WhooNoo! magazine and Danielle was very visibly pregnant. So, apart from feeling betrayed, she now also felt empty and unloved. Well, then she met Willow. She watched as the dancers all performed a synchronised knee-bump and kick in their tight shorts. Willow's jogger-thighs caught Haynes attention and after the shoot was over, she approached Willow and asked her out for pizza.

While they aren't married, Haynes and Willow had been living together in Haynes' apartment since the month after their first date. This was mostly due to Willow being evicted from her own flat by her hard-ass landlord when she requested an extension on her rent. She didn't even have to ask; Haynes immediately offered to let her stay at her place as soon as she brought it up. Willow liked the fact that her building had an east-facing fire escape so that she could have someplace to put her plants. Haynes was impressed by her girlfriend's horticultural skills, growing vegetables from pots the size of coffee cans and smaller that would have cost §10 apiece at the organic grocer. Leading up to firing her agent, Willow had been reading as much as she could from brochures, pamphlets, and the internet about a small community near SimCity called Sunshine Acres. She was convinced that she could use gardening as a fallback from dancing and talked of nothing else for days. Haynes wasn't entirely convinced, but told her that she'd support her decision, whatever that turned out to be.

As Haynes thought, the call of the countryside was too much for Willow to resist and they soon found themselves moving into a cottage on the southernmost edge of Sunshine Acres. Once Willow planted her first packet of seeds into the ground, she realised that this had about as much in common with fire-escape gardening as an abacus has with a desktop computer. Nonetheless, if she gave up now, she would be admitting to not only Haynes but herself that she wasted their time and a lot of their money on this venture, so she's committed to it.

There's another thing she's committed to, as well. If the harvest goes well in the fall, she will ask Haynes to marry her. While Haynes is somewhat... less-than-entirely-comfortable living in a farm cottage, she also has been considering proposing to Willow. Maybe they'll both propose at the same time?

The origin of "Willow Branch" is pretty obvious. Trees. "Haynes Branch" is sort of an inside joke, though. There's a creek that runs along the Verley Trail at Pioneers Park in Lincoln, Nebraska, called the "Haines Branch Creek". I guess it's because I miss walking there so much that I named a sim after it. For the other bit of it; their being farmers, that is; there was something that Rush Limbaugh said in 2017 about "lesbian farmers taking over jobs" or some such thing. The picture that The Guardian provided alongside that headline was of an extremely femme-looking girl in a plaid shirt and cowboy hat. Since then, I've made it a point to have at least one pair of lesbian farmers in every new savefile in The Sims, and the Branch's are my latest one.

Since both Willow and Haynes are Studio Town insiders, I decided they needed a backstory that sounded like a film in its own right. I can't speak for everyone, obviously, but if my ex-girlfriend ran off to marry a millionaire and then flaunted her marriage and pregnancy at me from the cover of a magazine, I'd feel pretty empty and unloved myself. I accidentally made it sound like Haynes is only in love with Willow for her looks... I didn't know how to make it clear that Willow's jogger thighs were the catalyst for the chain reaction in her brain; it also required their small talk over the craft services table to demonstrate that Willow was kind and didn't care if she gained a little weight (craft services isn't well-renowned for its healthy food; though, I guess it depends on who's in charge). The fact that Willow could have been spending her break time sitting down or engaged in some other activity, but decided to spend it with Haynes instead, also built up a mutual respect for each other—on Haynes' side, it was a pretty girl choosing to make pleasant conversation with her; on Willow's, it was Haynes being considerate of her feelings and not simply treating her as a means unto an end unto a paycheque. The love wasn't one-sided, because, it's as I said: Willow was feeling like little more than a marionette and less than human. Imagine seeing your friend from work hurt and possibly killed by a malfunctioning piece of equipment, not knowing whether or not you'll meet the same fate, and being told to get back to work and shut up; feeling like you're less important than lichen, and then here comes this pretty girl you'd seen vaguely behind the stagelights, asking how your day's been and whether you watched the latest episode of Shipwreck Island last night. Haynes was the first one to treat Willow like a person in quite a while, and that was the catalyst for Willow falling in love with Haynes.

Despite Haynes' biography, she could come home to 3 chicken coops and a field of cattle and she still wouldn't leave Willow.

"Hold up, how can Haynes' ex be pregnant if she's married to a woman?" In-vitro fertilisation is a thing that exists. Transgender women also exist, but Danielle's wife is a cis-woman.