Boolpropian Round Robin Legacy: Generation Nine: Behind the Scenes: Part Two
For Previous Stuff, see Part One!
Issues of the First Person
Stacie chose to write Roxanna's turn (other than the prologue) in first person.
After a lot of thought, I decided to follow her example and use the first person as well.
This was both good and bad, for the same reasons that first person is both good and bad for, well, pretty much any fictional writing.
Good: you really get inside that one character's head, both biased and not. There's an immediacy that is sometimes lacking from third person but almost never from first.
Bad: you don't get to see anyone else's point of view. If your character doesn't witness something, it either doesn't happen or has to be told to the character later.
Most of the time, it's not the way you want to write a sims story, because so much occurs that one sim won't witness - and, in challenges such as a legacy or an apocalypse or a prosperity challenge or a BACC or an OWBC or a TPC or pretty much anything that lasts any time at all, that one sim is going to die. You really can't use purely first person unless you're willing to switch POVs once per generation, at minimum, if not more often.
In the Round Robin, it's not quite as bad. Yes, it's a legacy, but I was only writing one generation of it. So Roxanna really was there for the vast majority of important events, and I was okay with the readers not fully knowing some things ahead of time - the motivations of the Tricous, for instance, which were in my head but not explicitly stated until the actual confrontations, and even then some of it was left to the reader's imagination. I didn't need to explicitly state everything that was going on behind the scenes.
But even so, there were issues. I occasionally had to have Roxanna stealthily observe a conversation her kids had with each other or their friends, because it wasn't something they'd say to her - but I did need the reader to at least know that something was going on, if not exactly what. Same goes for the interactions at...one of the parties? Or maybe one afternoon? In Chapter 4, I think at Desdemona's teen party, I had Helen and Joyce talking and Shelly and Genevieve talking, both of which were hints - to Roxanna, to the reader - that something was going on, though not explicit.
And then there was Chapter 5.
The scene that confounded me there was Lily's death scene, because it couldn't be from Roxanna's point of view, but everything else was.
In some ways, it was useful that Annie went first, because that meant it wasn't a total shock to everyone when Lily died, even if they didn’t remember the exact details. Everyone knew Bad Stuff was coming, and that's the sort of major detail that, even if you don't remember it off the top of your head, you'll remember it when it's pointed out to you.
I still didn't want to give it away entirely, though, and I wanted to leave the suspense, which is why I ended up doing what I did: writing a short introduction to the scene, then switching to a description as though the other kids were telling Roxanna the story, but without all the "and then Grey said," interruptions.
I think it came out okay, but it was one of the more difficult scenes that chapter.
And not only for writing. For filming as well.
Hans' Trap Door Corp is honestly one of the weirdest lots in the game. No, seriously, I'm not kidding.
The place has something like 12 floors of walls, though some levels don't have floors. Other than the ground/second floor (which is really part of the ground floor - they use those two floor windows and all), every single one of them is empty and unreachable.
There are also four doors that lead nowhere (Okay, they lead to stairs that go down one square and then...you can go back up the other set of stairs? No logic, no logic at all.) in the middle of the ground floor, which I ended up using as some sort of magic portals.
Filming pretty much had to be done with cameraman mode, in order to actually get to the right places.
But it DID work for what I needed.
I ended up changing it to a residential lot and moving Shelly in there, since I knew I'd need her and she was already playable.
I also shoved the entire upper floors full of stuff - I pretty much went through the entire buy mode catalog (and some of build mode) and placed a hell of a lot of things pretty much everywhere, other than the one floor that was covered in water, though even that one got lots of stuff related to water. I added stairs and elevators.
And then I staged.
I liked this picture of Lily, but ended up deciding it would be too much trouble to make it look like an elevator shaft with no floor rather than, you know, an actual elevator. So I used the one from the other direction instead, where you could see their expressions as she fell to her death, rather than her reaction.
Ultimately, I think Roxanna's story did work in the first person (and you would not believe how weird it was to switch back to third for the epilogue), but it's not something I would choose to use again in a sims story, especially not a multi-generational one.
Vampires: How They Work
So, moving on to mythology!
Let's start with the vampires.
I knew from the beginning that Roxanna was going to become a vampire, but not until the end. Stacie had vamped Marcus - the babydaddy - and Annie mentioned that both of Lily's parents were vampires, so I wanted him to be a vampire earlier than Roxanna was, and have the kids grow up with one vampiric parent and one who became a vampire later.
Still, that left me with a lot of latitude.
I ended up deciding that Round Robin vampires:
- drink blood and need it to remain sane, but not to survive
- can eat real food, but it doesn't actually nourish them
- die when exposed to sunlight for too long, though that's really their only weakness (though I suppose they'd probably also die from, like, beheading, because everything dies when it's beheaded)
- can be awake during the day, but must remain indoors - and most of them prefer to sleep then, ideally in windowless rooms, as the sun makes them antsy and burns them up if they're near too much of it
- don't have to sleep in coffins, though I suspect the older ones prefer to, or at least pretend they do to regular humans, in order to creep them out/hold power over them/whatever, they have reasons
- don't age mentally after they become vampires any more than they age physically - you get turned at 18? Well, you're going to act like an 18-year-old forever.
- lose some part of their soul, explaining why they don't show up in mirrors and also why they lose some sense of perspective
- cannot be cured
The last one was the biggie. In the game Sims 2, vampires are curable. So are witches, werewolves, and plantsims, though zombies are not (unless you use hacks, and I can think of at least two off the top of my head that can cure a zombie, and I'm sure there's more out there). Even ghosts are somewhat curable - you can bring the dead back. Aliens aren't really a condition so much as a coloring, Elves are an ear shape, Bigfoot is an individual, and genies and servos are separate types of beings.
In pretty much every other mythology ever, vampires are vampires forever. I can think of a grand total of two times I've ever seen a vampire turn back to human in a piece of fiction, and when you consider the amount of vampire fiction that's out there, well, that's not very many. In one case, it was done by the blood of a demon (Angel: The Series) and was eventually reversed, in the other, it required a witch to perform the act, killing her in the process (Demon in My View). I suppose you could also count Darla's resurrection in Angel, but that wasn't so much bringing her back as a vampire as bringing back her mind and soul into the body she had as a human right before her original death.
In no case has it ever been as simple as going to a gypsy, buying a potion, drinking it, and everything being all hunky-dory again. Once you're a vampire, there's no turning back.
I needed that level of finality: I needed it to be a real choice when Roxanna willingly became a vampire, something she'd been fighting against for two full chapters. If it didn't matter, if it could be changed back by something simple, the choice wouldn't be real - it wouldn't show Roxanna's character development and her willingness to put her children ahead of herself. If I let Roxanna change back just as quickly as she'd changed in the first place, it would negate the impact of that decision, and I wanted it to have that impact.
I also ended up making up the Vampire Council, partly due to Roxanna's references to a Council in the prologue, which was admittedly mostly copied from Stacie's original, with a few sentences added and some words changed here and there. I decided, based on the prologue, that the Vampire Council was led by a Grand Magistrate, and I ended up appointing one of the four Nightlife Grand Vampires to that position.
(I also ended up changing both female vampires' names, because Contessa Gayle and Contessa Tracey didn't sound old enough - so they became Contessa Gabrielle and Contessa Trysta, though the gentlemen remained Count Bradford and Count Herman, the names they spawned with.)
The rest of the Vampire Council was made up of imports - sims who were vampires or had been vampires in various stories - and Kimberly Cordial, who I brought back for a little bit, as I realized that Jamie had vamped her and there was no way she'd ignore Roxanna after what happened to her due to David and his kids.
What the lot looked like for that scene - I added all the imports in a staging hood so I wouldn't have them in the main one, but that's 35 controllable sims, 26 of whom are vampires. Thank God for the freezer clock, right?
Oh, the random kid swinging on the bottom left? I needed it to look like Marco was pushing Roxanna, and, well, the easiest way to do that was to have him actually push someone while swinging. The kid then promptly decided to spend the next, oh, however long I filmed (no, I have no clue how long it was, I had the freezer clock freezing time so the sun wouldn't come up and kill all my vampires) on the swing.
Oh, vampires. Marcus generally wasn't much of a problem for filming, since 99% of what I needed to film with him took place at night, and the couple of pictures that didn't (the very end of Chapter 2) actually did happen at night, and I just set hour to make it sunny for a moment before changing it back.
However, the fact that Marcus was a vampire and had been on fifty dream dates with Roxanna (yes, that was her LTW, and yes, I decided to fill it), was a problem, since Marcus would do this Every Single Day, usually multiple times a day.
He'd walk onto the lot, slow as can be, burning up, holding a vase of roses. He'd walk ALL THE WAY AROUND the house, through the back gate, and to the garage, which the game had decided was the front door. He'd place the flowers down.
And then he'd go "AH! The sun! I must flee!" and run full-tilt to the front of the lot and away.
And then he'd do it again an hour later.
This one was just amusing. I think I may have directed Marcus to fly somewhere - possibly to get him across the lot faster - after he had already started walking. He's got some film and lit hobby, I guess, because he was walking with a book.
And that's what happens when a vampire who is holding a book decides to fly somewhere.
Tricous/Ghosts/Death Mythology
And moving on! Let's talk ghosts.
So, Roxanna obviously had the power to see the dead, which meant that, you know, the dead...well, they were going to play a role in this generation.
Following Stacie's script and having Roxanna tell the ghosts she'd primarily interacted with as a teen to go away worked, because it meant I didn't have to bring that baggage forward. In a sense, Roxanna turned her back on ghosts entirely when she left Viper Canyon, since being able to talk to the dead couldn't give her what she wanted most: Astraea.
But that sort of thing catches up to you, and you can't escape your gifts entirely. Also, Roxanna, who is a nice sim, couldn't turn her back on an injustice - she couldn't turn her back on Rainelle. When the ghosts seemed to be fine without her, she could ignore them. When they clearly weren't, she couldn't.
And so I found myself expanding on my original thoughts on ghosts, and how Roxanna saw them and what they meant.
The land of the dead was the scene that had, by far, the most sims for me. That's 73 playable sims, and I think I actually went up to 74 for that very last picture, as I needed two versions of Roxanna. Luckily, I could freeze most of them and not have them move, since they were there primarily as background.
However, I am very very glad that I set up and played the land of the dead all in the same day, as, despite the fact that it was like midnight when I finished the setup and I actually had to be awake the next day...well, I decided let's just go do this, I need to get this done. That was the right choice. Because the next day or the day after that, I realized that I'd made a mistake in that final picture with Roxanna and Grim and Vampire!Roxanna - Vampire!Roxanna is wearing her bracelet, which she shouldn't be. I therefore tried to open the lot to go in and retake that picture.
It hung.
Then it shut down.
I tried again.
The game refused to open the lot.
I said "fuck it, it's good enough, I don't think anyone but me will notice this unless I actually point it out, and the lot clearly isn't going to open - I'm just going to leave it."
So...yeah. Definitely for the best that I actually did all the filming immediately, as the lot refusing to open would have put a serious damper on my ability to actually do my filming and my motivation to actually get it done.
The Grim Reaper DOES NOT CARE WHAT YOU SAY.
Also, he has eyebrows from certain angles. I am amused.
I admit to being confused by this thought bubble, until I looked at Grim's relationships and realized that I'd had him fall in love with Staging!Marcus (for reasons of interactions) back when Marcus became a vampire and I staged that bit. Then I was amused.
So. Ghosts. Dead people. All that good stuff.
I ultimately decided that dead sims were kind of split - part of them wandered the earth as a ghost, and part lived in the land of the dead, explaining the lack of physicality and mirrors and all that stuff.
In general, they were inaudible, invisible, and insubstantial, mostly just drifting through the world. Roxanna could see and hear them, but substantiality had to be done by the ghosts themselves.
The Tricous (I had to deage the elders for the picture of them moving into the house and rekill the teens for the picture of them killing Rainelle) had a backstory in my head that didn't manage to show up in the story. Part of it was how much time I had to work with, part of it was the issue of writing entirely from Roxanna's point of view, and part of it was that I never fully worked out the details because it wasn't going to show up anyway.
The thing is...Jennicor Tricou has elf ears. I never fully managed to establish in my head if she was part of the North Forest Elves or not, but she clearly was at least part elf, and involved in magic - and in training her daughters in magic. The Tricous, if they were a legacy, would be a matriarchy.
The Tricous had to be capable of trapping Rainelle, so they had to be capable of being physical and of doing magic - and Jennicor's elf ears making her some form of elf made it a good explanation for that to happen.
The idea of the teens and that group - who were mostly Nightlife NPCs - worshipping the Tricou ghosts ended up becoming an explanation as to why the Tricou teens would go after the Dorans. If you're worshipping a ghost, and the ghost disappears and can't give you what they used to...well, you're not going to be happy.
However, Roxanna exorcised the Tricous well before her kids were born. If I wanted the Tricou teens to interact with my teens - to cause Lily's death - they needed to be in the same age range, which meant that they'd also be not born when the Tricou ghosts were exorcised. So I added to the group, giving them a few Elders, some Adults, and even a couple of Children, making it kind of a cult that, even though they weren't actually getting the benefits, still had followers.
As for Rainelle herself...a lot of what I did with her, establishing her abilities as a ghost and such, establishing her history...well, it was because of Astraea.
Rainelle was my red herring, but she needed to be a believable red herring.
"I get to clean things? Awesome!"
What I did with Rainelle was another thing that originated with Stacie and then underwent modifications. She originally was going to have Fricorith be the live-in ghost nanny - as a spirit tortured by his grandfather, Jon Smith Tricou, who Roxanna saves him from. He would provide the means for her to get the house and live with her - which was part of the reason the babydaddy never would, due to the fact that ghosts won't live in the same house as a vampire, as she stated in the prologue. After Roxanna raised the armies of the dead, he wouldn't be able to trust her anymore, and he'd move on.
I ended up deciding on Rainelle...I forget why, maybe to choose one sim. I considered Fricorith or Gvaudoin, or both of them, but eventually decided they'd work better as part of the group of Tricous, having them be a full group who were torturing Rainelle, their one victim.
However, after I switched to Rainelle, there were a few issues that had to be solved.
1. Why not leave earlier? Rainelle didn't want to be trapped in that house. It was a source of torture for her, not pleasure, so why the hell would she stay after Roxanna freed her, even if she liked Roxanna?
That got solved by her having to stay. What the Tricous had done trapped her there, so she didn't have a choice. And, well, Roxanna at least could talk to her. She wasn't ready to have her grave totally smashed, so she stayed, because she couldn't leave.
2. But if she had to stay, how could she leave at the end?
I'd already established - in Generation Eight - that when an urn was smashed, ghosts didn't come back. I'd done that by "smashing" Astraea's urn, and having her not return. Roxanna fully believed that Astraea was gone. Ultimately, that urn didn't belong to Astraea - Astraea had already been resurrected, but Roxanna didn't know that, which is why she didn't show up as a ghost. However, I kept the fact that smashed urns = fully gone sims, and I actually ended up getting a bit meta with the Grim Reaper in the land of the dead.
After all, urns used to disappear from neighborhoods with regularity. Until people got nounlinkondelete, an urn disappearing or being smashed meant the sim's character file was gone. Now we have hacks to fix that, of course, so I decided the Grim Reaper was slightly annoyed about that. :)
Therefore, when Rainelle wanted to move on, she asked Roxanna to smash her urn. I also wanted Roxanna to return from the land of the dead with some level of powers - having made a bargain with the Grim Reaper - and having the power to send ghosts on without having to smash their urns or graves worked for what I needed.
3. The "ghost" in the prologue was Astraea. Obviously she was invisible to everyone - including Roxanna - but the other vampires assumed she was invisible to them, but not Roxanna, as a ghost. However, she could open doors, make drinks, follow orders. Ghosts are insubstantial...so how could that "be" Rainelle?
Generally it couldn't. Therefore, I made Rainelle gain experience with the powers of substantiality throughout the later chapters. In order for the readers to assume it was her, she needed to be able to do everything the "ghost" in the prologue could.
In various bits of ghost lore, ghosts can affect the physical world in various ways. I decided that it depended on the ghost's belief in their own ability to do such a thing, and figured out a way for Rainelle to get that belief.
4. If the Tricous could trap Rainelle (as was necessary for her plot), why didn't they just kill Roxanna?
This one I solved with the bracelet - something magical that protected her from other magic, or anyone meaning to do her harm. I made it limited - there was only one, it only worked on her, and only until her death - so that Lily could still die and so that magic COULD work on Roxanna after she became a vampire, trapping her in the house.
It all ended up being a blend of Stacie's original thoughts and what ended up working for me so that Rainelle could act as a red herring for Astraea.
Makeovers: Life After Death
So...Tricous. I definitely didn't need all of them, and I definitely didn't want them sticking around as themselves after Roxanna exorcised them, since shooting around sims you don’t want to be there can be a pain.
I did consider rekilling them, but they hadn't actually done anything wrong, and, well, I didn't particularly want their ghosts hanging around, haunting people.
So instead they received that lovely thing known as death-by-makeover. I moved them to Gothier Green Lawns (I made it a residential lot to make filming easier) and filmed all the scenes there. Then, after they were "fully dead," I gave them all makeovers.
Tricous before and after.
I ended up using a few of the adults as a band in...Chapter 3, I think? Roxanna was out at a performance with Lisa, and that was actually the Tricous playing the instruments.
Fricorith and Gvaudoin, however, got at least slightly more major parts. Fricorith became "Corey," one of Desdemona's boytoys, while Gvaudoin became "Genevieve," who died.
Yes, she was slated from the very beginning to die mysteriously, because I was referencing Annie's chapters - Part 3, slide 78, to be exact. Rick Contrary killed someone Downtown when he was a teenager, during the start of his madness, and he remembered it later.
The sim he killed had long black hair and that outfit...so when I killed her by makeover, Gvaudoin got long black hair and that outfit, and she and Fricorith joined the group of Tricou teens. And then I used her second "death" to cause my plot to happen, even though it actually had nothing to do with Roxanna, the Tricous, or the vampires - Genevieve died because she happened to run into Rick Contrary and, well, something happened, the details don't really matter - and he killed her.
Basically, I needed someone to die, and I needed some reason why the Tricou teens went after the Dorans, so it all came together.
The dead-by-makeover Tricous ended up being both plot points (Fricorith and Gvaudoin) and aspiration fodder, primarily for Rainelle, who had a 20 Best Friends LTW. And, well, it's easy to invite over a whole household, and then she can make friends with everyone...
(I have no idea how John Smith Tricou ended up trapped behind the stairs, but he managed it...even with walls blocking them off from everything else.)
This, however, meant that they got to be...fairly amusing.
Ah, ACR. What WOULD we do without you?
(I'm pretty sure, when I looked at the Tricous' panels after I finished, not a single one of the adults was actually in love with their own spouse, and most of them were in love with someone else's...or, you know, a few townies here and there. Or both.)
There were a few other characters I used at the beginning: the three gypsies, Shelly, Kathy, and Lisa. Roxanna's housemates were all Nightlife NPCs - the gypsies are the ones who come when you put in Downtown, Shelly was a DJ, Kathy was a waitress, and Lisa was the female slob. I ended up choosing Kathy over Anne, the other waitress, because Kathy added a bit more variety in terms of looks, as Anne, like Shelly and Lisa, was a redhead, and had fairly similar hairdo/coloring to Lisa. Then I gave them all makeovers, because a) I didn't want three identically dressed gypsies in that very orange outfit with the terribly ugly hat and the horrendous makeup, b) the DJ outfit/hair sucks, and c) Kathy wouldn't wear a waitress uniform as her everyday. Lisa didn't get her clothing made over until later, as I did want her to be easily recognizable as the Slob.
I ended up putting Shelly into the group of Tricou-worshippers, and I tried to hint at it from the beginning, though I'm fairly certain I wasn't as successful as I'd have liked - because I had to do it from Roxanna's point of view, and Roxanna couldn't be too outwardly suspicious of her. So I did my best, and Shelly was suspicious of the gypsies and a bit off when she interacted with Roxanna in the earlier chapters, and was part of the group later, for continuity purposes.
Madam Barbara was the gypsy who generated in my original RR hood, the one who got the zombie skin. I extracted her and placed her here for that bit of plot - mostly to reveal to Roxanna that the other gypsies were actually on her side. They did chase her out of Downtown, but she's not gone entirely, so if anyone writing a spare story for either of my generations or whatever has a need for her...well, I'm fine with it.
Of course, once she was in the hood I didn't want her just wandering around, so she also got a drastic makeover and got used for other minor pictures - in her case, a receptionist at a club who was slightly scared of Marcus being a vampire and willing to let him in without waiting.
Kathy was the one sim I wished I could have done more with. I had Shelly as part of the Tricou group, the gypsies as their own set, Lisa as a slob and then joining the gypsies, but Kathy...I never did quite figure out where I wanted her story to go. It ended up not being important, of course - she was a minor character to begin with - but I wanted it to go somewhere and it never quite found its way.
The gypsies (don't ask me why Jean feels a need to beat up Lisa, but the two of them HATED each other by the end, and I'm not at all sure why) ended up being another group that I worked with, because, well, Nightlife. They're a hard group to quantify in some ways - I know a lot of people used them for magic before AL came out, but then AL came out and we actually got witches. And Jamie used witches in her turn and established quite a bit of RR canon for them.
So witches had been established - what was I going to do with gypsies? I mean, in game, they set people up on dates, sell potions, and deliver genie lamps. There's really not a whole lot to work with there, especially as I tossed the curing potions from consideration.
So what I ended up deciding to do was making them witches who consciously chose not to use their powers too much, who chose to work as a group for larger spells so that they didn't either lose their magic entirely or have to steal children's' souls to get the power to do so. Therefore, unlike Kimberly and Samantha Cordial (before Kimberly was vamped and Samantha chose to give up stealing souls), the gypsies were elders because they hadn't renewed themselves with the souls of children, and their powers were limited. Lisa eventually followed in their footsteps - which I think was inspired by a comment someone made about how clearly the gypsies only wanted to rent to women so they could gather new members for their coven, and solved the problem of what the hell to do with her after Marcus became a vampire and Roxanna moved out.
Ultimately, with everyone hanging around, this is often how days looked at the House of Fallen Trees, as Rainelle worked on making friends and everyone else just did whatever they wanted.
Slobs
On to Lisa...and Marcus.
I hate the slobs.
I can deal with a lack of neat points. I can deal with a lack of active points. I pretty much had to use Marcus as the babydaddy due to the genetics issues and that was fine.
What I cannot deal with is the coding.
On a regular basis, I would have free will completely off, everyone in position...and Lisa or Marcus would fart or burp and everyone would start laughing or getting disgusted.
I don't like having to freeze sims who are simply sitting at a table having a conversation - I'd rather let them change positions, interact, so they're not always exactly the same in the background. With Marcus and Lisa, I kept having to do so, which was really freaking annoying.
The last one there is truly the crowning glory. Marcus and Roxanna were in the middle of filming an argument, and he burped and farted at the same exact time.
There was one positive - slobs eat FAST. Therefore, as I had Marcus as a vampire, who "didn't eat real food," I could send him and Roxanna on dates and order them dinner, and his would be gone in sixty seconds, while she, with her 8 neat points, took much longer to eat.
Oh, one more negative that only applied to Marcus, as I moved Lisa in, so this didn't affect her: certain types of NPCs will not change their clothing as long as they are not playable.
I tried setting Marcus to a different everyday outfit and it just would not work, no matter what I did. So what I ended up doing when I wanted him to look nicer, as instructed by the Vampire Council, was give him new formal wear, which DID stick. And then I changed him into formal before filming pretty much anything. Hell, half the time I just set his clothing to formal the instant he walked onto the lot, just so that any pictures I took had him looking right.
LOOKING AT ME
Marcus was not the only annoying sim to film with.
I love Roxanna. I do. She's one of my all-time favorite sims. She's gorgeous, she's easy to play, she's good at taking care of herself...she's great.
She also STARES AT ME LIKE YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE.
I'm not the only one who has noticed this - back when Stacie was still involved, I sent her the kids, and she chose Roxanna as heiress. Then she started filming. And she commented to me "...you know, I gave Drusilla the powers that I did because she was creepy, but Roxanna just takes it to a whole new level."
Roxanna is flat out the creepiest sim I have ever played, because I swear she knows where the camera is at all times and WILL turn her head to stare at it, no matter what is going on around her.
This is a selection of the pictures that I took of Roxanna staring at me - a selection, not all of them - and I didn't take pictures every single time she did it.
The very first one, just as a reminder that Roxanna has done this in many hoods, at many ages, and never seems to stop.
If she weren't usually smiling when she did it, I think she'd be saying something like "I know what you did last summer." As it is, I'm pretty sure she's saying "I know what you have planned and I'm going to smile at you UNTIL YOU CHANGE IT."
It doesn't matter how far away from the camera she is, she still knows exactly where it is.
She's especially prone to doing it during arguments, staring right at me instead of whoever she's supposed to be arguing with, even when I'm behind her trying to get a shot of the other sim. No, really, Roxanna, you do not need to crane your neck around so that you can see the person behind the camera, who is over your shoulder, who wants to take pictures of the back of your head right now.
"Did you REALLY have to hurt my daughter like that?"
And not only did Roxanna do it herself, she also passed it on.
By the end of my turn, Astraea was doing it too. Though, as Marina can tell you, by the time I filmed this I was pretty much like "OH MY GOD I GET TO REVEAL ASTRAEA IT HAS BEEN THREE YEARS SHE'S STARING AT ME OH I DON'T CARE ASTRAEA ASTRAEA ASTRAEA EEEEEEEEEE!"
...Not a direct quote, but I did spend a good portion of the time I was filming those last couple of scenes with Astraea squeeing at Marina in capslock.
Continue on to Part Three!
Issues of the First Person
Stacie chose to write Roxanna's turn (other than the prologue) in first person.
After a lot of thought, I decided to follow her example and use the first person as well.
This was both good and bad, for the same reasons that first person is both good and bad for, well, pretty much any fictional writing.
Good: you really get inside that one character's head, both biased and not. There's an immediacy that is sometimes lacking from third person but almost never from first.
Bad: you don't get to see anyone else's point of view. If your character doesn't witness something, it either doesn't happen or has to be told to the character later.
Most of the time, it's not the way you want to write a sims story, because so much occurs that one sim won't witness - and, in challenges such as a legacy or an apocalypse or a prosperity challenge or a BACC or an OWBC or a TPC or pretty much anything that lasts any time at all, that one sim is going to die. You really can't use purely first person unless you're willing to switch POVs once per generation, at minimum, if not more often.
In the Round Robin, it's not quite as bad. Yes, it's a legacy, but I was only writing one generation of it. So Roxanna really was there for the vast majority of important events, and I was okay with the readers not fully knowing some things ahead of time - the motivations of the Tricous, for instance, which were in my head but not explicitly stated until the actual confrontations, and even then some of it was left to the reader's imagination. I didn't need to explicitly state everything that was going on behind the scenes.
But even so, there were issues. I occasionally had to have Roxanna stealthily observe a conversation her kids had with each other or their friends, because it wasn't something they'd say to her - but I did need the reader to at least know that something was going on, if not exactly what. Same goes for the interactions at...one of the parties? Or maybe one afternoon? In Chapter 4, I think at Desdemona's teen party, I had Helen and Joyce talking and Shelly and Genevieve talking, both of which were hints - to Roxanna, to the reader - that something was going on, though not explicit.
And then there was Chapter 5.
The scene that confounded me there was Lily's death scene, because it couldn't be from Roxanna's point of view, but everything else was.
In some ways, it was useful that Annie went first, because that meant it wasn't a total shock to everyone when Lily died, even if they didn’t remember the exact details. Everyone knew Bad Stuff was coming, and that's the sort of major detail that, even if you don't remember it off the top of your head, you'll remember it when it's pointed out to you.
I still didn't want to give it away entirely, though, and I wanted to leave the suspense, which is why I ended up doing what I did: writing a short introduction to the scene, then switching to a description as though the other kids were telling Roxanna the story, but without all the "and then Grey said," interruptions.
I think it came out okay, but it was one of the more difficult scenes that chapter.
And not only for writing. For filming as well.
Hans' Trap Door Corp is honestly one of the weirdest lots in the game. No, seriously, I'm not kidding.
The place has something like 12 floors of walls, though some levels don't have floors. Other than the ground/second floor (which is really part of the ground floor - they use those two floor windows and all), every single one of them is empty and unreachable.
There are also four doors that lead nowhere (Okay, they lead to stairs that go down one square and then...you can go back up the other set of stairs? No logic, no logic at all.) in the middle of the ground floor, which I ended up using as some sort of magic portals.
Filming pretty much had to be done with cameraman mode, in order to actually get to the right places.
But it DID work for what I needed.
I ended up changing it to a residential lot and moving Shelly in there, since I knew I'd need her and she was already playable.
I also shoved the entire upper floors full of stuff - I pretty much went through the entire buy mode catalog (and some of build mode) and placed a hell of a lot of things pretty much everywhere, other than the one floor that was covered in water, though even that one got lots of stuff related to water. I added stairs and elevators.
And then I staged.
I liked this picture of Lily, but ended up deciding it would be too much trouble to make it look like an elevator shaft with no floor rather than, you know, an actual elevator. So I used the one from the other direction instead, where you could see their expressions as she fell to her death, rather than her reaction.
Ultimately, I think Roxanna's story did work in the first person (and you would not believe how weird it was to switch back to third for the epilogue), but it's not something I would choose to use again in a sims story, especially not a multi-generational one.
Vampires: How They Work
So, moving on to mythology!
Let's start with the vampires.
I knew from the beginning that Roxanna was going to become a vampire, but not until the end. Stacie had vamped Marcus - the babydaddy - and Annie mentioned that both of Lily's parents were vampires, so I wanted him to be a vampire earlier than Roxanna was, and have the kids grow up with one vampiric parent and one who became a vampire later.
Still, that left me with a lot of latitude.
I ended up deciding that Round Robin vampires:
- drink blood and need it to remain sane, but not to survive
- can eat real food, but it doesn't actually nourish them
- die when exposed to sunlight for too long, though that's really their only weakness (though I suppose they'd probably also die from, like, beheading, because everything dies when it's beheaded)
- can be awake during the day, but must remain indoors - and most of them prefer to sleep then, ideally in windowless rooms, as the sun makes them antsy and burns them up if they're near too much of it
- don't have to sleep in coffins, though I suspect the older ones prefer to, or at least pretend they do to regular humans, in order to creep them out/hold power over them/whatever, they have reasons
- don't age mentally after they become vampires any more than they age physically - you get turned at 18? Well, you're going to act like an 18-year-old forever.
- lose some part of their soul, explaining why they don't show up in mirrors and also why they lose some sense of perspective
- cannot be cured
The last one was the biggie. In the game Sims 2, vampires are curable. So are witches, werewolves, and plantsims, though zombies are not (unless you use hacks, and I can think of at least two off the top of my head that can cure a zombie, and I'm sure there's more out there). Even ghosts are somewhat curable - you can bring the dead back. Aliens aren't really a condition so much as a coloring, Elves are an ear shape, Bigfoot is an individual, and genies and servos are separate types of beings.
In pretty much every other mythology ever, vampires are vampires forever. I can think of a grand total of two times I've ever seen a vampire turn back to human in a piece of fiction, and when you consider the amount of vampire fiction that's out there, well, that's not very many. In one case, it was done by the blood of a demon (Angel: The Series) and was eventually reversed, in the other, it required a witch to perform the act, killing her in the process (Demon in My View). I suppose you could also count Darla's resurrection in Angel, but that wasn't so much bringing her back as a vampire as bringing back her mind and soul into the body she had as a human right before her original death.
In no case has it ever been as simple as going to a gypsy, buying a potion, drinking it, and everything being all hunky-dory again. Once you're a vampire, there's no turning back.
I needed that level of finality: I needed it to be a real choice when Roxanna willingly became a vampire, something she'd been fighting against for two full chapters. If it didn't matter, if it could be changed back by something simple, the choice wouldn't be real - it wouldn't show Roxanna's character development and her willingness to put her children ahead of herself. If I let Roxanna change back just as quickly as she'd changed in the first place, it would negate the impact of that decision, and I wanted it to have that impact.
I also ended up making up the Vampire Council, partly due to Roxanna's references to a Council in the prologue, which was admittedly mostly copied from Stacie's original, with a few sentences added and some words changed here and there. I decided, based on the prologue, that the Vampire Council was led by a Grand Magistrate, and I ended up appointing one of the four Nightlife Grand Vampires to that position.
(I also ended up changing both female vampires' names, because Contessa Gayle and Contessa Tracey didn't sound old enough - so they became Contessa Gabrielle and Contessa Trysta, though the gentlemen remained Count Bradford and Count Herman, the names they spawned with.)
The rest of the Vampire Council was made up of imports - sims who were vampires or had been vampires in various stories - and Kimberly Cordial, who I brought back for a little bit, as I realized that Jamie had vamped her and there was no way she'd ignore Roxanna after what happened to her due to David and his kids.
What the lot looked like for that scene - I added all the imports in a staging hood so I wouldn't have them in the main one, but that's 35 controllable sims, 26 of whom are vampires. Thank God for the freezer clock, right?
Oh, the random kid swinging on the bottom left? I needed it to look like Marco was pushing Roxanna, and, well, the easiest way to do that was to have him actually push someone while swinging. The kid then promptly decided to spend the next, oh, however long I filmed (no, I have no clue how long it was, I had the freezer clock freezing time so the sun wouldn't come up and kill all my vampires) on the swing.
Oh, vampires. Marcus generally wasn't much of a problem for filming, since 99% of what I needed to film with him took place at night, and the couple of pictures that didn't (the very end of Chapter 2) actually did happen at night, and I just set hour to make it sunny for a moment before changing it back.
However, the fact that Marcus was a vampire and had been on fifty dream dates with Roxanna (yes, that was her LTW, and yes, I decided to fill it), was a problem, since Marcus would do this Every Single Day, usually multiple times a day.
He'd walk onto the lot, slow as can be, burning up, holding a vase of roses. He'd walk ALL THE WAY AROUND the house, through the back gate, and to the garage, which the game had decided was the front door. He'd place the flowers down.
And then he'd go "AH! The sun! I must flee!" and run full-tilt to the front of the lot and away.
And then he'd do it again an hour later.
This one was just amusing. I think I may have directed Marcus to fly somewhere - possibly to get him across the lot faster - after he had already started walking. He's got some film and lit hobby, I guess, because he was walking with a book.
And that's what happens when a vampire who is holding a book decides to fly somewhere.
Tricous/Ghosts/Death Mythology
And moving on! Let's talk ghosts.
So, Roxanna obviously had the power to see the dead, which meant that, you know, the dead...well, they were going to play a role in this generation.
Following Stacie's script and having Roxanna tell the ghosts she'd primarily interacted with as a teen to go away worked, because it meant I didn't have to bring that baggage forward. In a sense, Roxanna turned her back on ghosts entirely when she left Viper Canyon, since being able to talk to the dead couldn't give her what she wanted most: Astraea.
But that sort of thing catches up to you, and you can't escape your gifts entirely. Also, Roxanna, who is a nice sim, couldn't turn her back on an injustice - she couldn't turn her back on Rainelle. When the ghosts seemed to be fine without her, she could ignore them. When they clearly weren't, she couldn't.
And so I found myself expanding on my original thoughts on ghosts, and how Roxanna saw them and what they meant.
The land of the dead was the scene that had, by far, the most sims for me. That's 73 playable sims, and I think I actually went up to 74 for that very last picture, as I needed two versions of Roxanna. Luckily, I could freeze most of them and not have them move, since they were there primarily as background.
However, I am very very glad that I set up and played the land of the dead all in the same day, as, despite the fact that it was like midnight when I finished the setup and I actually had to be awake the next day...well, I decided let's just go do this, I need to get this done. That was the right choice. Because the next day or the day after that, I realized that I'd made a mistake in that final picture with Roxanna and Grim and Vampire!Roxanna - Vampire!Roxanna is wearing her bracelet, which she shouldn't be. I therefore tried to open the lot to go in and retake that picture.
It hung.
Then it shut down.
I tried again.
The game refused to open the lot.
I said "fuck it, it's good enough, I don't think anyone but me will notice this unless I actually point it out, and the lot clearly isn't going to open - I'm just going to leave it."
So...yeah. Definitely for the best that I actually did all the filming immediately, as the lot refusing to open would have put a serious damper on my ability to actually do my filming and my motivation to actually get it done.
The Grim Reaper DOES NOT CARE WHAT YOU SAY.
Also, he has eyebrows from certain angles. I am amused.
I admit to being confused by this thought bubble, until I looked at Grim's relationships and realized that I'd had him fall in love with Staging!Marcus (for reasons of interactions) back when Marcus became a vampire and I staged that bit. Then I was amused.
So. Ghosts. Dead people. All that good stuff.
I ultimately decided that dead sims were kind of split - part of them wandered the earth as a ghost, and part lived in the land of the dead, explaining the lack of physicality and mirrors and all that stuff.
In general, they were inaudible, invisible, and insubstantial, mostly just drifting through the world. Roxanna could see and hear them, but substantiality had to be done by the ghosts themselves.
The Tricous (I had to deage the elders for the picture of them moving into the house and rekill the teens for the picture of them killing Rainelle) had a backstory in my head that didn't manage to show up in the story. Part of it was how much time I had to work with, part of it was the issue of writing entirely from Roxanna's point of view, and part of it was that I never fully worked out the details because it wasn't going to show up anyway.
The thing is...Jennicor Tricou has elf ears. I never fully managed to establish in my head if she was part of the North Forest Elves or not, but she clearly was at least part elf, and involved in magic - and in training her daughters in magic. The Tricous, if they were a legacy, would be a matriarchy.
The Tricous had to be capable of trapping Rainelle, so they had to be capable of being physical and of doing magic - and Jennicor's elf ears making her some form of elf made it a good explanation for that to happen.
The idea of the teens and that group - who were mostly Nightlife NPCs - worshipping the Tricou ghosts ended up becoming an explanation as to why the Tricou teens would go after the Dorans. If you're worshipping a ghost, and the ghost disappears and can't give you what they used to...well, you're not going to be happy.
However, Roxanna exorcised the Tricous well before her kids were born. If I wanted the Tricou teens to interact with my teens - to cause Lily's death - they needed to be in the same age range, which meant that they'd also be not born when the Tricou ghosts were exorcised. So I added to the group, giving them a few Elders, some Adults, and even a couple of Children, making it kind of a cult that, even though they weren't actually getting the benefits, still had followers.
As for Rainelle herself...a lot of what I did with her, establishing her abilities as a ghost and such, establishing her history...well, it was because of Astraea.
Rainelle was my red herring, but she needed to be a believable red herring.
"I get to clean things? Awesome!"
What I did with Rainelle was another thing that originated with Stacie and then underwent modifications. She originally was going to have Fricorith be the live-in ghost nanny - as a spirit tortured by his grandfather, Jon Smith Tricou, who Roxanna saves him from. He would provide the means for her to get the house and live with her - which was part of the reason the babydaddy never would, due to the fact that ghosts won't live in the same house as a vampire, as she stated in the prologue. After Roxanna raised the armies of the dead, he wouldn't be able to trust her anymore, and he'd move on.
I ended up deciding on Rainelle...I forget why, maybe to choose one sim. I considered Fricorith or Gvaudoin, or both of them, but eventually decided they'd work better as part of the group of Tricous, having them be a full group who were torturing Rainelle, their one victim.
However, after I switched to Rainelle, there were a few issues that had to be solved.
1. Why not leave earlier? Rainelle didn't want to be trapped in that house. It was a source of torture for her, not pleasure, so why the hell would she stay after Roxanna freed her, even if she liked Roxanna?
That got solved by her having to stay. What the Tricous had done trapped her there, so she didn't have a choice. And, well, Roxanna at least could talk to her. She wasn't ready to have her grave totally smashed, so she stayed, because she couldn't leave.
2. But if she had to stay, how could she leave at the end?
I'd already established - in Generation Eight - that when an urn was smashed, ghosts didn't come back. I'd done that by "smashing" Astraea's urn, and having her not return. Roxanna fully believed that Astraea was gone. Ultimately, that urn didn't belong to Astraea - Astraea had already been resurrected, but Roxanna didn't know that, which is why she didn't show up as a ghost. However, I kept the fact that smashed urns = fully gone sims, and I actually ended up getting a bit meta with the Grim Reaper in the land of the dead.
After all, urns used to disappear from neighborhoods with regularity. Until people got nounlinkondelete, an urn disappearing or being smashed meant the sim's character file was gone. Now we have hacks to fix that, of course, so I decided the Grim Reaper was slightly annoyed about that. :)
Therefore, when Rainelle wanted to move on, she asked Roxanna to smash her urn. I also wanted Roxanna to return from the land of the dead with some level of powers - having made a bargain with the Grim Reaper - and having the power to send ghosts on without having to smash their urns or graves worked for what I needed.
3. The "ghost" in the prologue was Astraea. Obviously she was invisible to everyone - including Roxanna - but the other vampires assumed she was invisible to them, but not Roxanna, as a ghost. However, she could open doors, make drinks, follow orders. Ghosts are insubstantial...so how could that "be" Rainelle?
Generally it couldn't. Therefore, I made Rainelle gain experience with the powers of substantiality throughout the later chapters. In order for the readers to assume it was her, she needed to be able to do everything the "ghost" in the prologue could.
In various bits of ghost lore, ghosts can affect the physical world in various ways. I decided that it depended on the ghost's belief in their own ability to do such a thing, and figured out a way for Rainelle to get that belief.
4. If the Tricous could trap Rainelle (as was necessary for her plot), why didn't they just kill Roxanna?
This one I solved with the bracelet - something magical that protected her from other magic, or anyone meaning to do her harm. I made it limited - there was only one, it only worked on her, and only until her death - so that Lily could still die and so that magic COULD work on Roxanna after she became a vampire, trapping her in the house.
It all ended up being a blend of Stacie's original thoughts and what ended up working for me so that Rainelle could act as a red herring for Astraea.
Makeovers: Life After Death
So...Tricous. I definitely didn't need all of them, and I definitely didn't want them sticking around as themselves after Roxanna exorcised them, since shooting around sims you don’t want to be there can be a pain.
I did consider rekilling them, but they hadn't actually done anything wrong, and, well, I didn't particularly want their ghosts hanging around, haunting people.
So instead they received that lovely thing known as death-by-makeover. I moved them to Gothier Green Lawns (I made it a residential lot to make filming easier) and filmed all the scenes there. Then, after they were "fully dead," I gave them all makeovers.
Tricous before and after.
I ended up using a few of the adults as a band in...Chapter 3, I think? Roxanna was out at a performance with Lisa, and that was actually the Tricous playing the instruments.
Fricorith and Gvaudoin, however, got at least slightly more major parts. Fricorith became "Corey," one of Desdemona's boytoys, while Gvaudoin became "Genevieve," who died.
Yes, she was slated from the very beginning to die mysteriously, because I was referencing Annie's chapters - Part 3, slide 78, to be exact. Rick Contrary killed someone Downtown when he was a teenager, during the start of his madness, and he remembered it later.
The sim he killed had long black hair and that outfit...so when I killed her by makeover, Gvaudoin got long black hair and that outfit, and she and Fricorith joined the group of Tricou teens. And then I used her second "death" to cause my plot to happen, even though it actually had nothing to do with Roxanna, the Tricous, or the vampires - Genevieve died because she happened to run into Rick Contrary and, well, something happened, the details don't really matter - and he killed her.
Basically, I needed someone to die, and I needed some reason why the Tricou teens went after the Dorans, so it all came together.
The dead-by-makeover Tricous ended up being both plot points (Fricorith and Gvaudoin) and aspiration fodder, primarily for Rainelle, who had a 20 Best Friends LTW. And, well, it's easy to invite over a whole household, and then she can make friends with everyone...
(I have no idea how John Smith Tricou ended up trapped behind the stairs, but he managed it...even with walls blocking them off from everything else.)
This, however, meant that they got to be...fairly amusing.
Ah, ACR. What WOULD we do without you?
(I'm pretty sure, when I looked at the Tricous' panels after I finished, not a single one of the adults was actually in love with their own spouse, and most of them were in love with someone else's...or, you know, a few townies here and there. Or both.)
There were a few other characters I used at the beginning: the three gypsies, Shelly, Kathy, and Lisa. Roxanna's housemates were all Nightlife NPCs - the gypsies are the ones who come when you put in Downtown, Shelly was a DJ, Kathy was a waitress, and Lisa was the female slob. I ended up choosing Kathy over Anne, the other waitress, because Kathy added a bit more variety in terms of looks, as Anne, like Shelly and Lisa, was a redhead, and had fairly similar hairdo/coloring to Lisa. Then I gave them all makeovers, because a) I didn't want three identically dressed gypsies in that very orange outfit with the terribly ugly hat and the horrendous makeup, b) the DJ outfit/hair sucks, and c) Kathy wouldn't wear a waitress uniform as her everyday. Lisa didn't get her clothing made over until later, as I did want her to be easily recognizable as the Slob.
I ended up putting Shelly into the group of Tricou-worshippers, and I tried to hint at it from the beginning, though I'm fairly certain I wasn't as successful as I'd have liked - because I had to do it from Roxanna's point of view, and Roxanna couldn't be too outwardly suspicious of her. So I did my best, and Shelly was suspicious of the gypsies and a bit off when she interacted with Roxanna in the earlier chapters, and was part of the group later, for continuity purposes.
Madam Barbara was the gypsy who generated in my original RR hood, the one who got the zombie skin. I extracted her and placed her here for that bit of plot - mostly to reveal to Roxanna that the other gypsies were actually on her side. They did chase her out of Downtown, but she's not gone entirely, so if anyone writing a spare story for either of my generations or whatever has a need for her...well, I'm fine with it.
Of course, once she was in the hood I didn't want her just wandering around, so she also got a drastic makeover and got used for other minor pictures - in her case, a receptionist at a club who was slightly scared of Marcus being a vampire and willing to let him in without waiting.
Kathy was the one sim I wished I could have done more with. I had Shelly as part of the Tricou group, the gypsies as their own set, Lisa as a slob and then joining the gypsies, but Kathy...I never did quite figure out where I wanted her story to go. It ended up not being important, of course - she was a minor character to begin with - but I wanted it to go somewhere and it never quite found its way.
The gypsies (don't ask me why Jean feels a need to beat up Lisa, but the two of them HATED each other by the end, and I'm not at all sure why) ended up being another group that I worked with, because, well, Nightlife. They're a hard group to quantify in some ways - I know a lot of people used them for magic before AL came out, but then AL came out and we actually got witches. And Jamie used witches in her turn and established quite a bit of RR canon for them.
So witches had been established - what was I going to do with gypsies? I mean, in game, they set people up on dates, sell potions, and deliver genie lamps. There's really not a whole lot to work with there, especially as I tossed the curing potions from consideration.
So what I ended up deciding to do was making them witches who consciously chose not to use their powers too much, who chose to work as a group for larger spells so that they didn't either lose their magic entirely or have to steal children's' souls to get the power to do so. Therefore, unlike Kimberly and Samantha Cordial (before Kimberly was vamped and Samantha chose to give up stealing souls), the gypsies were elders because they hadn't renewed themselves with the souls of children, and their powers were limited. Lisa eventually followed in their footsteps - which I think was inspired by a comment someone made about how clearly the gypsies only wanted to rent to women so they could gather new members for their coven, and solved the problem of what the hell to do with her after Marcus became a vampire and Roxanna moved out.
Ultimately, with everyone hanging around, this is often how days looked at the House of Fallen Trees, as Rainelle worked on making friends and everyone else just did whatever they wanted.
Slobs
On to Lisa...and Marcus.
I hate the slobs.
I can deal with a lack of neat points. I can deal with a lack of active points. I pretty much had to use Marcus as the babydaddy due to the genetics issues and that was fine.
What I cannot deal with is the coding.
On a regular basis, I would have free will completely off, everyone in position...and Lisa or Marcus would fart or burp and everyone would start laughing or getting disgusted.
I don't like having to freeze sims who are simply sitting at a table having a conversation - I'd rather let them change positions, interact, so they're not always exactly the same in the background. With Marcus and Lisa, I kept having to do so, which was really freaking annoying.
The last one there is truly the crowning glory. Marcus and Roxanna were in the middle of filming an argument, and he burped and farted at the same exact time.
There was one positive - slobs eat FAST. Therefore, as I had Marcus as a vampire, who "didn't eat real food," I could send him and Roxanna on dates and order them dinner, and his would be gone in sixty seconds, while she, with her 8 neat points, took much longer to eat.
Oh, one more negative that only applied to Marcus, as I moved Lisa in, so this didn't affect her: certain types of NPCs will not change their clothing as long as they are not playable.
I tried setting Marcus to a different everyday outfit and it just would not work, no matter what I did. So what I ended up doing when I wanted him to look nicer, as instructed by the Vampire Council, was give him new formal wear, which DID stick. And then I changed him into formal before filming pretty much anything. Hell, half the time I just set his clothing to formal the instant he walked onto the lot, just so that any pictures I took had him looking right.
LOOKING AT ME
Marcus was not the only annoying sim to film with.
I love Roxanna. I do. She's one of my all-time favorite sims. She's gorgeous, she's easy to play, she's good at taking care of herself...she's great.
She also STARES AT ME LIKE YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE.
I'm not the only one who has noticed this - back when Stacie was still involved, I sent her the kids, and she chose Roxanna as heiress. Then she started filming. And she commented to me "...you know, I gave Drusilla the powers that I did because she was creepy, but Roxanna just takes it to a whole new level."
Roxanna is flat out the creepiest sim I have ever played, because I swear she knows where the camera is at all times and WILL turn her head to stare at it, no matter what is going on around her.
This is a selection of the pictures that I took of Roxanna staring at me - a selection, not all of them - and I didn't take pictures every single time she did it.
The very first one, just as a reminder that Roxanna has done this in many hoods, at many ages, and never seems to stop.
If she weren't usually smiling when she did it, I think she'd be saying something like "I know what you did last summer." As it is, I'm pretty sure she's saying "I know what you have planned and I'm going to smile at you UNTIL YOU CHANGE IT."
It doesn't matter how far away from the camera she is, she still knows exactly where it is.
She's especially prone to doing it during arguments, staring right at me instead of whoever she's supposed to be arguing with, even when I'm behind her trying to get a shot of the other sim. No, really, Roxanna, you do not need to crane your neck around so that you can see the person behind the camera, who is over your shoulder, who wants to take pictures of the back of your head right now.
"Did you REALLY have to hurt my daughter like that?"
And not only did Roxanna do it herself, she also passed it on.
By the end of my turn, Astraea was doing it too. Though, as Marina can tell you, by the time I filmed this I was pretty much like "OH MY GOD I GET TO REVEAL ASTRAEA IT HAS BEEN THREE YEARS SHE'S STARING AT ME OH I DON'T CARE ASTRAEA ASTRAEA ASTRAEA EEEEEEEEEE!"
...Not a direct quote, but I did spend a good portion of the time I was filming those last couple of scenes with Astraea squeeing at Marina in capslock.
Continue on to Part Three!