#nds bootstrap

[newfalco]

Actualización N°200 de NDS_bootstrap + Twilight Menú++ v27.8.0 para DS/DSi/3DS y Flashcards.

[gaysheep]

Touching is Good: A Retrospective

My trusty Nintendo 3DS, which has held out since I was gifted it for my 15th birthday, has turned one decade old with my 25th birthday this past November. Given new life with custom firmware and nds-bootstrap via TWiLightMenu, the 3DS is stellar for visiting any past handheld title or console title up to (and somewhat including) the N64. (Quick plug for the CFW/hacking community for the less popular PS Vita, too, which has accomplished some pretty crazy-cool stuff this last year.) I use my 3DS more often than I use my Nintendo Switch most weeks.

The Nintendo DS (minus the three) launched in late 2004. The second display and stylus support were novel tools for developers to experiment with, and the NDS is best remembered for its robust catalogue of RPGs and visual novels. Where it lacked in power, narrative-focused games flourished under its technical limitations.

That being said, while browsing the ROM archives on Vimm's Lair to pick up some titles, I was reminded of what an interesting era the mid-to-late 2000s were for games. While Sony and Microsoft were fighting over the "core gamer" demographic, who had outgrown Nintendo mascots, Nintendo led a series of wildly successful marketing campaigns for its hardware after the light failure of the Gamecube, where the Nintendo DS and then the Wii were targeted at...everyone else.

[Image source. Image description in alt text.]

If you look at ads for the DS and the Wii, you'll see that adults are featured much more prominently than children, especially women and seniors. (This did not go unnoticed, as I found this ancient relic of misogyny while looking for images for this post.) A Nintendo handheld was already an easy sell to parents with small children (though I think it's also notable that ads which do focus on children often prominently feature girls. Munchlax is pretty hot...), but Nintendo's angle for the DS and Wii was that their hardware wasn't just for children. The Wii was a way to get up off the couch and to play board games with grandma. The DS was a great gadget for a working woman to keep in her pocketbook.

This worked. The Wii and DS were two of the best-selling consoles of all time. In particular, the DS's marketing campaign only worked because it came out in the perfect window of time. PDA-phone hybrids had been around since the 90s, and the Blackberry had been kicking around for a few years, but the iPhone wouldn't be introduced until 2007, and the 4G LTE standard wouldn't be released until 2009. While the Blackberry was popular with businesspeople and the PDA was out of style, smartphones were luxury toys for several years; they wouldn't become near-ubiquious until the mid-2010s. I didn't get my own smartphone until probably around the same time I got my 3DS, a full handheld generation later.

Browsing the software library for the Nintendo DS and DSi with that in mind is really interesting. Many titles released for the platform serve the same purposes that would be fulfilled by simple smartphone apps less than a decade later: planners and diaries, fitness trackers, calculators, language learning and SAT prep software, even a guide to the then-most-recent version of the driver's test in the UK. These proliferated with the release of the DSi's virtual store, but they existed even with the base model. You could go to a brick-and-mortar store and buy them on physical cartridges. (You might be wondering, "Why would you bother carrying those around over just buying a Blackberry?" You can't underestimate how expensive the service bills for a smartphone were before companies realized they were the most powerful spyware tool in history.)

There was never a time where every single businesswoman in New York carried a DS Lite, but adults did buy and use them, and a not insignificant portion of the DS's software library is aimed at a casual adult audience. Another niche covered mostly by smartphone games these days—games designed to be picked up and played in short sessions on-the-go, in places like waiting rooms and subway commutes.

Nintendo made crazy bank in the seventh console generation. Publications of the time talked about a console war between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, but the real battle was between the PS3 and the Xbox 360 over the gamer demographic. Nintendo was producing hardware for a niche who would quietly disappear once smartphone sales began ballooning by hundreds of millions per year over the course of the early 2010s.

After the failure of the Wii U, Nintendo's marketing strategy pivoted again, though I doubt they'll ever completely abandon their family-friendly image. Currently beat out only by the PS2 and the DS, the Nintendo Switch may very well climb to a status as the best-selling console of all time before the end of its lifespan, but the "gamer" demographic is much bigger than it was two decades ago at the dawn of the DS. As more and more devices become consolidated into the Swiss army knife the smartphone has become, consoles can only carve out a role as dedicated gaming machines.

I'm not sure we'll ever see anything like the Nintendo DS or the Wii again. I think they're worth looking back on for their uniqueness in that way as much as they are for the more celebrated parts of their libraries.

[dualbrew]

How do I even run homebrew on a DS?

My own setup :) I use TWiLightMenu++ with Wood UI as a main menu, and the flashcard is used to run Moonshell, a media player for Nintendo DS

Fun fact: doing whatever to your Nintendo DS is easy and cheap, if not free.

Playing your game backups? Making your start menu pretty? Teaching the DS new tricks? These are all possible thanks to people contributing to hacking it for ages! This post will help you setup a basic way to achieve all of this on your system, regardless if you own a 3DS or that... weirdly thick first DS model.

Open below, and let yourself into the world of homebrew.

All systems - a DS flashcard

Someone's flashcart collection

They're also known as R4s pretty often, after the first kind of DS flashcarts. Being a first way to run unsigned code on a DS, it's essentially a Nintendo DS game card with a cool little SD card slot you can put things on, almost isolated from the system. For original DS and DS Lite, this is the only way to run homebrew on these systems.

There's A LOT of them and most are cheap - you can find them on places like AliExpress easily by searching for "nintendo ds flashcart", "r4 flashcart" or even something like "9999 in 1 ds game".

Resources like A Quick Guide on DS Flashcarts and Flashcart Guides can help you pick a good one, but to recap both those and my personal opinion: any flashcart that's reputable enough should work okay for most cases, and those guides (as well as flashcart's official site, if it still exists) can help you avoid the problematic ones and set them up.

Don't forget to buy a good SD card reader - even if its included with the flashcart!

Nintendo 3DS - Custom Firmware

"Hacking your 3DS is surprisingly easy"

Here's the guide. This will install a custom firmware (CFW) on your Nintendo 3DS, letting you run the unofficial software. You can either use TWiLight Menu++ to run DS backups and homebrew or put them as Home Menu icons using forwarders. Obviously, thanks to CFW you'll also get to use 3DS hardware to full extent and homebrew.

Nintendo DSi - Unlaunch and similar

A beautiful sight of a DSi succumbing to Unlaunch

See the guide here. This requires minimal risk (since you'll be pretty much installing something on DSi's internal storage - once) and no cost and lets you run even more software - like all of the DSiWare (although it's somewhat possible on a flashcard now too thanks to efforts of TWiLight Menu++ and nds-bootstrap!) and ones enhanced by or exclusive to DSi hardware. Do note that you may need to fiddle a bit with the settings or setup to fully run everything you'd want.

Any more questions?

Feel free to send asks here about how to homebrew your system, your experience or troubles regarding the matter!

As for further resources, you can take a look at GBATemp. It's a big resource for hacking Nintendo and other consoles, offering a forum for asking questions and sharing things about DS, various tutorials and more. DS(i) Mode Hacking and Nintendo Homebrew Discord are also useful for troubleshooting and advice.

I wish you luck in your (3)DS efforts!

-- Red

(Edit from June 5th 2025: Added additional resources for DS hacking and homebrew as "Any More Questions?" section)

[hogdeploymentzone]

can uou show me every picture you have. of the beast .my beast licki. please 🙏

ok here's all the beasts i've personally owned

first there's lickoo from my first bw playthrough like a decade ago (transplanted into my new one through PKSM) (not pictured because nds-bootstrap encases its screenshots in some sort of tar, might upload via emulator later)

then hotspot from my second ultra moon playthrough

then finally rotundra from cobblemon

[the-starlight-papers]

In today’s incredibly specific Nintendo homebrew lore:

One of the main pieces of homebrew used on the DSi (and 3DS in DSi mode) is TWiLight Menu++. This program patches the default DSi menu and comes bundled with a few other apps (notably nds-bootstrap and gbarunner) that let you run games off your SD card. It also patches the menu to let you play out of region games and add custom themes.

By itself, TWiLight Menu++ would require you to run an exploit (usually by opening the camera or flipnote) every time you wanted to use it.

One of the other main pieces of homebrew used on the DSi is Unlauncher, which allows you to do things like boot directly into a game cartridge or into TWiLight Menu++. It also patches the default DSi menu to let you play out of region games.

Unlauncher also, by default patches, the DSi menu to not have any sound, and display the Unlauncher background image. This is controversial, mostly because 1. The image is ugly, and 2. There’s no way to turn this off.

So in response, TWiLight Menu++ automatically patches out some of Unlauncher’s patches.

In conclusion: homebeef

[mekatrio]

its a shame that r4 cards dont work on n3ds cuz r4 cards specifically ysmenu is awesomeeee 😑 peak way to play nds roms imo like ok maybe there arent any save slates features which is a shame but aside from that it somehow comes with a million cheats for so many games and also u can run emulators on it (i ❤️ gameyob) and u can make suchhhh cute skins for it too like look at mine 🥰

and also it has a useful button combo to eject urself from the game and go back to the ysmenu root menu its soo convenient and also u can delete and create backups within ysmenu itself (altho this is a double-edged sword that can lead to accidental deletions.. i hv manyy childhood memories of games suddenly disappearing cuz of my siblings 😵‍💫) but yeah i loveee ysmenu ❤️ and from my n3ds testing ugh its looking like the only option for nds games are to use nds bootstrap which is essentially just barebones get the game working and that is that.. actually theres some ram things u can do here but im not rly sure how that works err ALSO ysmenu runs a lot faster compared to this booting up time on the nds bootstrap which is eh.. but oh well this is for my brother to deal w not me 👍

[gbatemp-net]

ICYMI: nds-bootstrap reaches v2.0.0 with milestone 200th release https://gbatemp.net/threads/nds-bootstrap-reaches-v2-0-0-with-milestone-200th-release.660962/

[sublimeobservationarcade]

The Real America Is A Moral Maelstrom

Rich people in the United States tell poor people, especially poor black people, that their poverty is their own fault. The American ethos celebrates the self-made man. The great American delusion is that every individual has the opportunity to make something of themselves. To achieve greatness by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. That this analogy represents something physically impossible and that it was originally coined as a joke is, perhaps, more telling about America than anything else. Especially as the white folk have rigged the game in their favour a long time back. The real America is a moral maelstrom.

President Trump Congratulates Record Breaking Astronaut (NHQ201704240002) by NASA HQ PHOTO is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Roots Of America As Slaver Nation

America was a slaver nation with half the country set up around slavery as the economic model. The rest of the country benefitted from slavery through the banks and the financialization of slavery via bonds. There were some 6 million slaves with an average worth of a $1000 per slave – that was a lot of money back then. Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and the 13th Amendment put an end to chattel slavery in 1865. However, Reconstruction did not serve the black former slaves well, as the South got around it by their Black Codes and peonage slavery. Jim Crow laws would establish apartheid and keep African Americans repressed as second class citizens for a hundred years. It was not until the Civil Rights protest of the 1960’s that these onerous impositions would be lifted. Americans all over from east to west and north to south took advantage of the suppression of African Americans economically. Blacks were banned from buying property on white only housing estates post WW2. The FDR New Deal reflected the racist heart of the nation because the politics of the time demanded it. The Nazis had looked to America as a role model for their apartheid and eugenics policies in the 1930’s.  Indeed, the US would take in some 10, 000 Nazi party members as new migrants immediately after the war for scientific and security purposes. America remains a racist nation and you can see this evidenced in the health and education systems. Segregation still exists in schools and neighbourhoods across the country. Too few black doctors are a direct result of racist policies by the academic medical training institutions. The imbalance in funding levels between white and black schools and campuses is huge. Democracy in America has failed African Americans. This is not a place to look up to on that score.

Photo by J SWING on Pexels.com America’s Identity Politics Greedy and exploitative behaviour hides behind identity politics and social issues. Voters are more motivated by emotive stuff like cultural values than just economics. Populist politicians like Trump and the new radical reactionary GOP clothe their campaigns in anti-woke stances on social issues. They champion socially conservative attitudes about LGBTQIA people and things like access to abortion and immigration. Critical Race Theory has been framed as a socially divisive bogeyman and banned in states like Florida. It seems that sensitive white folk do not want to be reminded of their history, slavery, apartheid, and the ongoing economic disparity between whites and African Americans. Better to ban all that bad news getting out to future generations of Americans. Nikki Hayley, one of the leading GOP candidates in the party’s primary race for the presidency cannot bring herself to mention what the Civil War was all about. The GOP want to whitewash American history in the 21C, as they have for a century or more in schools and colleges across the US. Nobody was taught about Wilmington, North Carolina or Tulsa, Oklahoma at school in America. These historical race massacres were conveniently left off the curriculum, it seems.

The GOP & Neoliberal Economic Policies The GOP has led the charge via neoliberal economic policies to dismantle the New Deal over the last 30 plus years. Reagan began the removal of anti-trust laws to allow for the fleecing of middle America by big business. Americans get so blinded by distracting cultural issues that they miss the main game. The divide between rich and poor has never been greater in economic terms. Manufacturing jobs were outsourced offshore to make more money for investors and CEOs. Unions were gutted and their influence made redundant. Both sides of politics embraced the neoliberal way forward. Private equity takeovers have seen healthcare and higher education become unaffordable for most Americans. Money managers have taken over the economy and despite global crashes still rule the roost. Central bank bail outs to the tune of $29 trillion have cemented the power of the banks within the economy. Most Americans despise the system but are locked into it by the two party setup. Conservative voters stick with the GOP because of their socially conservative position, even though the GOP is the party of billionaires and big business. Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose.

Photo by Aaron Kittredge on Pexels.com Gun Violence Plagues The US Gun violence continues to kill innocent Americans. “For God’s sake, how much more carnage are we willing to accept? How many more innocent American lives must be taken before we say enough is enough?” asked U.S. President Joe Biden in a nationally televised address in May — days after the deadliest U.S. school shooting incident in nearly a decade. Biden joined the nation in mourning after an 18-year-old gunman wielding a semi-automatic rifle killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. - (https://www.voanews.com/a/us-gun-violence-soars-in-2022/6876785.html)

Photo by Clement Eastwood on Pexels.com Fox News Poisoning America With Lies & Mistruths The polarization of pollical views and increasing tribalism means that many people only consume news from within their own bubble. Fox News is a prime example of this. It was recently successfully sued for $700 million dollars for libelous false reporting about the 2020 presidential election. There appear to be no standards of reporting upheld in the American media by any agency overseeing this. Fake news amid the social media platforms is rife. Trump has been fact checked and found to have lied many thousands of times to his followers on social media. A compulsive liar being elected to the presidency has been a nadir for America. If any one thing can be considered emblematic of the decline of the US it must be this. The re-election of Trump would be terminal in its catastrophic ramifications, not only for the US but for the world. President Trump oversaw close to a million Americans die from the Covid-19 pandemic in one of the richest nations on earth. Many of these victims were African Americans poorly served by the racist health system and medical profession.

#UNGA President Donald J. Trump by National Archives and Records Administration is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0 The real America is a moral maelstrom because as odious as Donald J Trump is – it is his supporters who define large parts of the country. The toxic nature of racism exploited by the politics of grievance propels conmen like Trump. Trump is primarily motivated by greed and grifts many millions of dollars from his supporters. They are paying his legal bills right now. Trump has been successfully sued for $83 million by E. Jean Carroll, a writer he sexually abused and then defamed. Trump is about to be fined a further $350 million by the New York state for business fraud. In addition, he is subject to multiple criminal indictments for election interference, the January 6th Insurrection, stealing top secret national security documents, and several other matters. His life and career is like a runaway train and right now it is leaving the rails for a date with his diabolical destiny. If Trump is the champion of America’s Christian Nationalists, white supremacists, and generally loathsome folk I hope his messy demise is a salutary lesson for this self-entitled bunch. “The louder they roar, The harder that they fall.” (The Harder They Fall, Song by Koffee) “Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics. Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world. People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in co-operation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour. Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf. Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.” - (George Monbiot, The Guardian, 1 Feb 2024) Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom.  ©MidasWord

Photo by Elena on Pexels.com Read the full article

[holmoris]

As much as I love the snes it's an absolute bitch to write for and a lot of the really cool stuff associated with the SNES is going to involve expansion chips and wrangling them, which sucks. If you really wanna get into it though a good suggestion is to start with a low-level romhack on some game you really like since it's a fun way to mess with a working system without having to bootstrap one fully, plus there's a massive community of people who play them.

If you really want the funnest console to homebrew from scratch for look into the NDS (here's the official sdk but I'd suggest BlocksDS instead). It came out during a weird transitional period and has most of the fun features of both the psx and the snes/gba (the full oam/background stack architecture is still there for one) plus enough ram that you can feasibly write games entirely in C without pulling in any assembler aside from maybe libraries like an audio muxer.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE OFFICIAL NINTENDO SNES DEVELOPMENT GUIDE IS AVAILABLE ONLINE AND I CAN JUST. LEARN HOW TO DEVELOP A SNES GAME??? THE WHOLE DOCUMENTATION HOLY SHIT I WILL SPEND SO MUCH TIME READING THIS

[bihet-dragonize]

Vulnerable people asking you for a plan in your anarchist world are not like....just playing into "learned helplessness", they're tired people who need more than a fucking "trust me" to support -essentially- random strangers who have been conditioned to see them as expendable in all endeavors.

[dodoisles]

how do you get such nice, crisp screenshots of wild world?

Sorry for taking forever to respond to this - I didn't realise I had asks turned on until I logged in on desktop today!

I play on a modded DSi running TWiLight Menu++, a menu replacement for DS/3DS that allows you to play DS game dumps from the SD card via nds-bootstap. I still have my original Wild World cartridge but I play through bootstrap because it allows me to take screenshots. However, only the main screen can be captured (whichever is currently displaying the player) and every so often taking a screenshot will cause the game to lock up and I have to hard reset. (ouch)

So yeah, a super useful bit of homebrew but you have to think carefully about any unsaved progress before taking a screenshot!

[valliass]

The nice thing abt having a hacked 3ds I can download all the awful ds shovelware I want and nobody has to know

[fingors]

Been playing Tetris DS a bit. Push mode fucks dude, I can not express how hard this variant of Tetris fucks. I need a modern Tetris game or emulator that has it so I can play it with friends online and also with T-spins and combos and other stuff.

Great game, would recommend, if you have a 3DS hack it and install twiilight menu++ and NDS Bootstrap and play it that way.

[gbatemp-net]

ICYMI: nds-bootstrap reaches v1.0.0, now boots "Golden Sun: Dark Dawn" https://gbatemp.net/threads/nds-bootstrap-reaches-v1-0-0-now-boots-golden-sun-dark-dawn.639342/

[soulvomit]

One of the things that happens with me looking back at my childhood...

There was simply a very very long time that I couldn’t put a lot together about experiences I had in my childhood, because I didn’t really know of a way to describe my interior experience and or when I did describe it, it got invalidated.

And this is where I have weird mixed feelings about my “from an ND family” narrative that I have, because... plenty of things my parents absolutely did well, like, they understood *how I needed to learn* and they also had an intuitive understanding of how I needed to learn *social* stuff. They didn’t ever assume I was going to pick that stuff up by osmosis and they recognized that I had issues with specific things. My dad taught me the “look at the bridge of their nose” trick because he used that trick. They absolutely supported me being intensely into some subject. I can’t find weird play habits early in my narrative because of how early my parents were already putting building toys and race tracks and educational toys in front of me. Etc.

But the flip side is that there are experiences I absolutely can’t talk about with my mom because she absolutely believes “oh, everyone does that.” 

Because of being a generation where she can still hide behind a husband, there are things I have to navigate that she hasn’t had to, and she can’t relate to. So nothing is ever going to get her into the diagnostic pipeline, either. Unlike me, who had to figure some shit out real fast after the dot-bomb, and had to do a whole surface personality makeover just to be employable, because of the employment outlook being very different for me in *my* 30s than it was for my mom in *her* 30s. 

It’s easier for her to see herself as normal because she’s never had to do the same degree of personality makeover, and what’s more is that there were just more jobs available in her earlier life. 

There was simply much more work. And yes, the different shape of marriage did conceal a lot for many women, but also many men. 

I have to navigate a very different world from my mom. She largely gets to just be herself, and it’s been painful at times for her but she simply was able to work as a secretary for a while (a job not available to many people anymore) between husbands then find a different man to attach herself to. She literally can’t wrap her mind around the fact that the reason I didn’t find a husband in my 20s, is because of a combination of being weird and growing man-cession, and that fewer men even being marriageable, means that the ones who were, had higher social standards. I was only *not* Too Weird for the very classically spergiest guy in any group. I literally have only ever made it work for very long with other weird people. (My partner doesn’t really scan as particularly weird; he scans as kind of a hipster to people. But he has CP and this is a significant part of early narrative that we bonded with each other over.)

My mom literally believes that a lot of my issues are just things where I couldn’t pull myself up by the bootstraps, or socially finagle myself into a higher class social group like she did.

We have the same exact issues - and yet she sees them as normal, and I can’t help but wonder if so much of it is because she gets to *be* more normal than I ever got to be. Even having been born and raised with less than I was. 

She also got to go to more schools that had natural lighting, and got to grow up wearing natural fibers despite being poor.

[michelo-thedreamer]

BLOG NUMBER THREE

Sunday, February 6, 2022

Mara Nettleton Michaud is my primary character in the story Flight from Egypt.  I chose the name Michaud as a tribute to my first cousins of Quebecois descent and to symbolize the agrarian/ working class Quebecois people who migrated to Maine seeking better lives as mill workers.  Mara is of staunch New England Anglo descent having been raised a privileged offspring of a mercantile family that owns the Nettleton supermarket chain (fictional).  She was born in Portland, Maine and grew up in a seven-bedroom house on Portland’s West Promenade, overlooking Casco Bay.  Attending a private academy, she graduated honorably and without incident, hoping thereafter to intern in one of her family’s many supermarkets.

(vintage postcard)

Her father, believing that women in retail was an unseemly prospect, packed her off to a pricey small town private college.  Her family’s plan for her was to serve as a marriageable pawn in furthering their grocery empire.  But to chagrin of her family, she married Joel Michaud, the son of papermill workers in Rumford, Maine and liberal idealist active as a union official at a Maine nuclear power plant, Wiscasset Yankee Atomic Power Plant.

(photo copyright by ND Paper Corporation)

I am reminded of Sanjeev in Lahiri’s short story “This Blessed House” having acquired a spouse from “a suitably high caste” as a partial motivation for a good life and, likely, achieving his family’s approval.  But thinking of Mara’s family intentions for her life,  Joel Michaud, of course, was not of suitably high caste.

(photo from Bibilcalcouseling.com, a source of advice Mara’s family would support)

Though Joel wooed Mara with his sensitive and intelligent personality as well as a tender lover, Mara has never-settled misgivings in having defied her patrician family in marrying Joel. Her chosen path has been more difficult than that planned by her family. Their married life is challenged by persistent budgetary challenges and Joel’s area reputation as an agitator for liberal causes.  While she loves and admires her husband, she was raised to be comfortable, not confrontational.  She’s a graduate of the staid Colby College, while Joel bootstrapped himself over time with a degree earned over time at Southern Maine University following his Navy service.  Mara’s college friends are establishment souls who pity her life.  Joel’s are partying activists who live and play hard. Mara and Joel are often at odds over their life’s differences: Mara, with marked hesitance, usually accedes to Joel’s approaches.

Mara does not have an established sense of self-esteem: she has been raised to comply and does that handily.  However, she’s smart enough to know she should, in some ways, step out on her own path.  Her college friends and  women at her local liberal church call her dowdy behind her back.  Much to her dislike she has a boyish figure and a face that could have been called child-like had it not been so unremarkable.  Again, like Lahiri’s Sammy, Mara is not happy with her body, she with her shape and he with his height.

Her hair is fine and straight, shoulder-length with a dull dark brown tone without highlights. Her clothing styles of choice adhere, at best, to what some call LL Bean chic owning to her persistent donning of corduroy shirtwaist and denim shift dressed, flannel-lined parkas, and, in winter, gum soled boots.  

https://www.askandyaboutclothes.com/community/threads/ll-bean-christmas-1984-catalog.235188/

She smokes irregularly, a habit she acquired during preps for college final exams … though she loathes the habit, she excuses it as a product of stressful episodes.  She has been finding life more stressful than previously; hence, more smoking.    

What drives Mara? During normal times she would have claimed that she was driven primarily by the requirements and demands of raising three children, each younger than adolescents.  Her youngest, Joshua, is still an infant. Painfully aware that her life, both pre- and post-marriage, has not abundantly enabled her the independence to seek her own life’s course as she thinks she should.  She naively believes that those opportunities were prohibited from her and, in this belief, she is driven with a desire to ensure those opportunities are afforded to each of her children. It is not obvious to her self-understanding that she is not necessarily open-minded to her offspring taking steps that deviate from her own ideas of an appropriate life.

Yet Mara is fiercely loyal to her family, husband and children alike.  She does not suffer criticism of those in her family lightly and will take any step to protect them from physical or emotional harm.  Hence, Mara’s ongoing primary motivation: protecting the very lives of those she loves.  She is on the run for reasons that have yet to be elaborated.  She must act swiftly and wisely, to be quick on her feet to take the actions needed at any moment to carry her family to safety.  In summary, she has embarked on a short course to live her immediate life in a way that she has never lived her past.

As with Sammy in John Updike’s story “A & P”, Mara’s ongoing plight is triggered by actions and activities that preceded the story’s beginning.  Mara’s plight is significantly more sobering, however, than a young man’s difficulty in learning the world’s ways … she has no other choices if she wants to survive. She is fleeing in the night in a borrowed car.