#queer robot polycule

[zipzedziltch]

Hi I’m Zed and all I do is make Sweet Cap’n Cakes au designs all day every day and change them constantly. Ask me about my guys.

[voltaic-resonance]

hey robotfuckers . look at my stupid ocs, 4 robots who all fuck each other

(feels like the first time i’ve implemented the “i think that shits hot” character design strategy with my whole heart. this is fun)

you can ignore the writing, I am unfortunately incapable of writing/drawing even porn without also writing pages and pages of worldbuilding. porn with Lore

[luckyshinyhunter]

🐶🔧This film is incredible and I stand by it!🔧🐶

[kinziethings]

REVIEW: A Game of Monsters (Realm of Fey series finale by Ben Alderson || it's been a wild ride! 5 ⭐️

[sluttyblacksmith]

Grabbing your robot boyfriend’s cock and using it like a joystick

[helenaheissner]

Love During Robot Fighting Time is now available in paperback format!!!

[misscammiedawn]

Thinking about We Know The Devil and Heaven Will Be Mine today. A duology. WKTD the tells the story of accepting you're queer, framed as a horror story of 3 repressed teenagers at a christian summer camp fighting off their inherent queerness and HWBM tells the story of how one accepts their place in society after embracing their queerness.

WKTD uses magical girl tropes in a fairly grounded Midwestern teen experience.

Magical girl stories often involve the struggle of the forces of Good and Evil. Purity and Impurity. Corruption often being a core theme of any girl squad facing down the nightmarish forces. This can be seen from Madoka's approach to the concept which is often referred to as a deconstruction. The Pink Opaque from I Saw The TV Glow overtly uses these themes in the exact same allegory as WKTD with the evil forces attempting to suppress the queerness of the protagonists.

HWBM uses mech anime tropes in an allegorical wonderland where the setting fades away to have the audience engage with the ideas at play rather than the lore. Mech anime often uses the giant robot duels as a method of visualizing ideological struggles. Too often in these shows beam sabers will cross as the pilots yell at one another to embrace ideas of how the concepts of war and prejudice can be battled out of existence.

In HWBM the "war" in play is humans versus space... or more accurately humans versus those who are not of Earth. Versus those who are alien. Versus those who are not human.

The dominant culture versus queer culture.

WKTD frames its tropes via the dating sim mechanics popular within its visual novel medium. But rather than choosing which of the 3 girls the player wishes to romance you must choose which of the 3 you wish to exclude. The idea being to scapegoat one's struggle with queerness by attacking outward, blaming the other, by shaming others into the closet to keep yourself in there.

Lashing outward to prevent reflecting inward.

The only good ending of the game is to accept a polycule dynamic where everyone is seen, accepted and embraced for who they are unconditionally. God's love, in this world, is conditional and one must always be excluded. The devil has room for three.

There is no room in normal society for a polycule. It is inherently queer. The dominant culture is binary and there's no version of a polycule where only a 0 and a 1 are represented. The binary is incompatible.

I recently told a friend that the duology tells the journey of a thousand miles and how it begins with a single step. WKTD is the story of that first and all too important step acceptance.

HWBM is the story of what comes after acceptance. After that first step.

It tells the story of the thousand mile journey.

The ideologies at play are the concepts of assimilation, activism and separationism. In the allegory Earth/Humanity represents the dominant "straight" society and the three characters represent each of these ideologies. Assimilation is to return to Earth, to integrate into the dominant culture and lose some of the inherent joy and "otherness" that being queer brings. It's no coincidence that the character representing this path is a trans woman who is known for defecting from her faction and crossing over to every other side while repeating the mantra "I've never betrayed anyone in my life", it is a coincidence however that her faction's war efforts are lead in part by God's Strongest Chaser herself (as far as I'm aware the Halimede Twitter Account is not affiliated with the game, but I find it funny that the assimilation path is represented by someone who a character whose gimmick account argues "t4t is incest"). It is a life of peace. But it is a life of compromise. Of giving up humanity's dream of the stars. To be grounded and tethered to Earth forever.

The Activism Path represents the idea of staying in Earth's orbit but never surrendering even an ounce of the queer identity for the sake of acceptance. Forcing the dominant culture to argue with us on our terms. Accept us on our terms. It is a life of constant battle but in that battle we will save those on Earth, invite them into the stars, embrace them with acceptance and love. Let them join us or remain where they are. This is a life of constant war, knowing that until all are loved and accepted, no one is and so we continue fighting. Letting people change sides. Nothing changes but maybe it's better that way.

Separation is the idea of abandoning Earth entirely. To become so incompatible with the dominant culture that we are no longer "human" to those who remain tethered. We are unapproachable. Separate. Unique. Other. Queer above anything else and incapable of creating a rational dialogue with the dominant culture. It is picking up your toys and walking away. Going far enough away from the culture war that it will never be able to reach you.

The author of the Halimede account once wrote, while in character, that this is the saddest ending of them all because it's unsustainable and that it does not address the inherent intersectional fighting between communities, allowing wars to simply break out further away from our blue marble in the distant stars. It is a life of abandoning war without embracing peace. To live separate in bubbles apart.

The ending of the game forces you to pick. There is no existing outside of these options. Maybe one day we'll find other ways to be but within the view of this game they are all we have. Embrace Earth, declare war on Earth or abandon Earth.

Choose.

I admit. Since the pandemic and coming out as trans, I've favored Saturn's ideology more than others. Completely giving up on "humanity" and only working within circles of those whose acceptance of queer culture is baked in. I fought so hard to accept who I was and "know the devil", so to speak, that I pulled back and withdrew.

Both games have a lot of themes about the demons ones must face within queer culture and outside of it. The way we hurt ourselves, hurt our allies and how the world outside societal, structural and individual will force us to compromise, to cut away parts of ourselves.

These games are masterpieces.

I wish I found them earlier in my life. I want everyone able to read these words to find them now.

[ndnbutch]

A, K, V for the asks? o/

hello! thank u!

ask meme here

A - Ships that you currently like a lot. (They don’t have to be OTPs because not everyone has OTPs.) Friendships, pairings, threesomes, etc. are allowed.

Trudy and Kelsey from DnDads have wormed their way so far into my brain I love my problematic biology gap yuri (one of them is a robot). I don’t think I ship the Drawtectives team like romantically in any way but they’re kind of a queer platonic polycule to me

K - What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?

Sorry this is gonna be mostly DnDads I think. I ADORE Glenn Close’s arc in season 1 so much it means the world to me. Honorable mention: Taako of The Adventure Zone fame wow you are so special to me.

V - Which character do you relate to most?

It always feels kind of up my own ass to say Kingston Brown from TUC but oh man. In a very different way though, Normal Oak of Season 2 DnDads.

[enbyleighlines]

I have a gift card to Barnes and Noble and a desire to read a cozy queer fantasy. I have a list of titles but I am also up for taking suggestions. Reply to this or message me with your suggestion and why I should read it.

Books I’ve read and adored:

A Marvelous Light series by Freya Marske

The Wolfsong series by TJ Klune

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Books of the Raksura series by Martha Wells

Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea and its sequel by Rebecca Thorne

Legends and Lattes and its prequel by Travis Baldee

That Inevitable Victorian Thing by E.K. Johnston

What I’m looking for:

Queer! It’s gotta be queer. It can be about two guys falling in love, two girls falling in one, maybe one of them is trans or nonbinary, or maybe there’s a whole tangle of queer folks in a happy polycule? As long as it’s queer, it’s fine by me

Explicit adult scenes between the main couple/throuple/polycule appreciated but not required

High fantasy, low fantasy, steampunk? All are acceptable. Just don’t go recommending me any sci-fi with robots and aliens and spaceships and whatnot

Psychological horror is a no-go

Preferably it comes in paperback, because I don’t like wrestling with hardcover books and their slippery removable outer skin

So please send me some suggestions!

[cedar-sunshine]

writer intro!

making a real one this time! I'll probably pin this one haha

Me!

My name is Sunny, I use he/they pronouns primarily, and I'm a queer writer. I'm 15, AuDHD, and a little chronically in pain. If you're reading this, tell me to drink water and stop doom scrolling so I can actually write like I want to, please

What I write!

I mostly write fantasy, although it very much ranges from urban to high and all the in betweens. My main WIP, Star, is technically not fantasy, but it IS apocalyptic, which is my second favorite genre. Technically, everything I write has an element of romance or is a romance, but the romance is never the forefront of the plot and is rarely only romantic (aroace romance writer time).

My current WIPs are

Star, a post-apocalyptic queer romance starring Mental Health Boy and Mental Health Boy #2. It's atmospheric and deals with a lot of Things. I like it a lot! It's my main WIP and I have the most done in it, the cast includes Tristan and Orion. I've described it as grumpy x sunshine vs cult and that's still accurate. It's my longest running piece and if u follow me for it I PROMISE I won't abandon it. I haven't done it for years anyways

Science fiction Australia situation! 100 criminals get (consentually) sent to a superhabitable planet to prepare it for a human colony, the trip should take 150 years but something goes wrong and they end up making an emergency landing (read: aimed crash) on a smaller habitable planet leaving only 9 alive of the original 100. And humanity's already forgotten about them after nearly 120 years, so... found family queer bullshit, I think a majority of the characters aren't fully human including 1 squid person with bright colors, weird eyes, transparent skin and very strange hair, 1 robot made of pieces of magnetic metal so small they're basically magnetic fluid, 1 Guy with synthetic parts and a cool tail, 1 mildly mad scientist-esque dude that can only be described as if a person was a seal with maned wolf hardware, lots of microplants around a natural frame who is a hacker and diplomat, a mix between a fossa/civet type thing and a human, and a Guy with cool ears and a non-human genetic disease. Only two people bit don't worry they're cool too (autistic mechanic who likes engineering more than people and space pirate emo boy with a lot of grief and anger at the System, plus some symbiotic friends). Most likely includes a polycule because I can't choose who should be dating who (if you have an opinion, look for my poll a while ago)

[darby-draws]

1 and 12 for Quinn, 18 for Andre ?

Thanks for asking! [questions]

Read More for big long post! <3

1 What was the first element of your OC that you remember considering (name, appearance, backstory, etc.)?

It was right after Art Fight and I desperately wanted a Queer Horror OC before Halloween season. There was a lot of talk about what kind of horror we wanted to go towards. (which maybe still is not quite settled as there are multiple "Horror Movie Plots" in our Whorror Movie story.) But we settled on demon possessed with some religious trauma and a bit of delicious revenge, and Darla and I both worked on designing our own guys separately and see how they would fit together. I sketched these:

I thought the demon might be similar to an AU demon we have, Goopy, who possesses Lucky and Nate in a story, so that's why I have the drippy drawing in the corner and the inspo for the top surgery tattoos. That's how Goopy was! But Quinn's Demon is a bit different now! Black hair with horns was a must but it mostly became spiky hair with the Vibe of horns. (… unless! rule of cool: draw them as horns anyway its badass!!)

In an early iteration of the story Quinn and Parker were going to find a baby possessed by a demon, from an Evil Cult Town. Quinn's demon and Parker's strength (and bloodthirst) destroyed their Big Bad leader who was doing the baby/demon sacrifices, and the baby was abandoned, maybe thought to be dead? They were like sure… We'll see what we can do with this little thang. They named it Blair Belladonna. They knew of an older witchy/demon knowledgeable grandma figure (literally Domino's Grandma before Domino was a character) who could help them learn about this baby's demon and how to raise a little demonling. BUT That never settled into canon, there is no baby Blair. (However! Much of the baby demon possessing cult thing turned into Domino's backstory. 👀)

12 What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC?

Remembering the dripping perma crying eyeliner down his cheeks. Yes it's supposed to be a permanent feature. 😔 Also figuring out how to draw the hair in between the "horns", how to make it spiky but not distract from The Big Spikes, which direction its going off in, etc. Otherwise I think Quinns pretty easy to grasp for me! 🤔 I love when I get to use flat black for hair and clothes when I'm just doodling so thats always a relief.

18 What is the most recent thing you’ve discovered about your OC?

This was trickyyy ahh Andre's such an old character that hasn't been the main focus lately, so a lot of thinking of him recently has been like. Reminiscing on old facts and not necessarily bringing in anything new. If theres something I've recently discovered of him, I can't think of it!

One thing I've recently decided after some consideration is that I'm going to fuse the Original Andre story where he adopts Delilah the robot and the AU where Andre has an Actual Human Baby instead of the robot together. So now, Delilah and baby Leia exist at the same time! Yay, two of them!!! It's gonna have to make me rethink and plan out his timeline a bit differently and see how he reacts to things now. I just haven't actually set out the time to plan the combined story yet. I feel like I softened up Andre's story a bit in the baby AU, (less drug use, less bad relationships with sketchy people, etc) so I'll have to see if I end up keeping it slightly more balanced or if it'll stay more true to the Actual Canon events, maybe just pushed around the timeline a bit.

Something else that feels new from semi recent times: I thought of an AU where all three of his parents actually like. Get together/stay together polycule it up and raise Andre together rather than the usual backstory of:

two good friends in college befriend and get a crush on the same woman

the guys start a business together

one of them marries the woman and they have a kid together but he gets way too into his work and neglects his wife, oops :(

she then goes to their friend for comfort, which leads to cheating, which leads to she GETS PrEGNANT (WITH ANDRE!) (NOT her Husband's child!) oops :(

she tells her husband the truth and they talk about separating

The Friend leaves The Business and is told to basically never speak to them again

Husband decides will simply raise this child as his own and works on bettering himself and the marriage (if only for appearances and/or for their older daughters sake) and he will simply Not resent the New Child for any reason, it's That Easy! (he said, you know, like a liar.)

Andre finds this out (Accidentally! From his SISTER) as a full grown ass adult and it fucks him up for a bit. oops :(

⬆ this is a lot to Get Into. And also it's Not the new stuff, although I probably haven't actually delved into it before…!

But basically, all this to say, this New 3 Parent AU leads to Andre being much more well adjusted, because so much of his… THing in his life (in canon timeline) has juust been. family treating him unfairly for something he had no part in and resenting/reacting to that. 🥴 And his two dads are such opposite strict/lenient personalities that they'd balance each other like, reallly wellll if they had that opportunity to both raise him from the start, and Andre would have someone in his corner when he's Going Through rough times in life. AUgh. If only… (Also his bio dad is … probably autistic like him so I think someone would like, UNDERSTAND him and the way he does things while growing up which is like, wow groundbreaking.)

[z-alien-boi]

Gonna take a wild guess and say Jax is part fae?

Do you have art of your other characters as well? Your drawings are soooo good I'd love to see what everyone else looks like!

I'm determined to make my way through this list and hear at least a bit about everyone, so whenever you're up for it let's do Zed! :D (i cant hear that name without thinking of Zedaph helpp-)

1 - i can not confirm nor deny since the people who havent figured it out know my blog ;]

2- yesss!

In order of who i could find-

Z

Nox

Archer

Ryan

[Zed is at the end]

Alastair [and his partner in the second image]

Mal

Cas

Atelo

3-

Zed! Yessss

and yeah, lol. It does remind people of zedaph a lot, considering those who know it are all also hermitcraft fans lmao, but it's the british-english pronunciation or my name, so.

Zed is quite litteraly a harbinger of chaos, cursed items seen tk just appear around them, they live in a cave community with 4-5 others around a pit to the void, and they leave to explore distant lands by jumping into said pit. The others of the cave have different methods of exit.

They have a hammock in the attic of the local newspaper offices as one of the 2 attic cryptids.

They can shapeshift to most anything, mostly for comedic effect though. When shapeshifting to an aninal, they often are a black coloured one with pale blue eyes, and this is the main way to tell them apart.

They have a lab tucked behind a secret door in their stage in the cave community, where they work on engineering projects. This includes making robotic legs for a seasnake hybrid.

They absolutely live to torment their friend and self-proclaimed older sibling, also a shapeshifter.

They also are technically part of a queer-platonic polycule because of a bit with some friends lol.

Their true[?] Form is like a giant demonic wolf creature, basicly just a giant eldrich puppy, depicted here:

[kaxen]

Like I do like queer people existing being treated like a not particularly unusual sight more than I enjoy "we invented fantasy homophobia" and "let's write another coming out story about a conventionally attractive teenager." As the "nah" orientation of asexual-aromantic-agender, my ideal queer existence is just vibin'

But yeah, some implementations of queerness in speculative fiction could use a bit more meat to it.

I feel like my queerness would manifest in different ways if I was raised in a wildly different society. Hell, I added "wanna be a robot" to my gender goals because I am insane for Armored Core 6. lol

This is why I really never jivved with "born this way"/"I always knew!" stuff. Like I feel like my relationship to gender and sexuality is both preference and a response to society's treatment of gender and sexuality. Like I use "he" in a "are you too damn lazy to learn to use more pronouns?" way at this point, but sometimes I feel like "he" works best for embodying "Most Unremarkable Gender" since femininity is more... Stick A Bow On It You Have To Have Eyelashes You Have To Perform It, but this would obviously be very different if society wasn't Like That about women. And boy, can no one be normal about using "it/its"....... =_= but I prefer it/its

While my setting for Armored Hearts skews a bit "free love future" it doesn't really mean everyone is acting "yes I know exactly what I wanna identify as and we have no friction with others ever." Temir is working through some stuff in regards to his gender and sexuality because he has kind of been denied the ability to develop as a person by his life experiences.

There are a lot of currently unexplained implications in my story setting because Ibarra has a giant polycule

The tax situation has gotta be insane, at the very least.

I feel like a sentiment growing in popularity is that queer people want stories were queerness is incidental, because they're tired of stories about struggling against oppression and want something more escapist. But I've been reading some speculative fiction recently where the queerness of characters is completely unremarked upon, and finding it deeply unsatisfying. It feels less like like escapism to me and more like a gaping hole in the worldbuilding. It's not an issue that the societies depicted are queer-neutral or queer-positive, it's that there is like nothing addressing what those societies think about sexuality, gender, and family systems at all. There's a lot of interesting ways you can write about third genders and same-sex societies/relationships in speculative culture and ignoring all of it entirely to plaster over a surface level modern queer culture veneer is just tragic, in my opinion

[fandom-space-princess]

Read 2023 (Jan-June)

Curious about what good books I've read so far this year? Cool, because I want to tell you about them. List by genre and very brief thoughts about each below. (Ratings out of 10 are how each book landed for me personally; they're not meant to be in any way objective).

SFF: Uranians - Theodore McCombs 10/10. Scifi; short story collection. Queer pasts, presents, and possible futures, populated with as many trans spaceship priests and unkillable women as you could want. Counterweight - Djuna 8/10. Scifi; short novel. Biopunk cybercrime detective mashup by South Korea's science fiction Banksy. Quick and weird and fun. The Crane Husband - Kelly Barnhill 10/10. Fantasy; short novel. Retelling of the crane wife as a dark midwestern Americana fable. Equal parts charming and distressing. The writing is utterly lovely. A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers, both 9/10. Scifi/fantasy novellas. Nonbinary tea monk and it/its robot strike up a friendship and wander the land having pleasant adventures. I don't think I've ever read anything written with such palpable kindness and charity of spirit. A soothing, joyful read. To Be Taught, If Fortunate - Becky Chambers 10/10. Scifi; novella. Polycule who may be Earth's last astronauts go exploring among the stars. This was so beautiful it left me a sobbing mess on my couch. Light From Uncommon Stars - Ryka Aoki 9/10. Scifi/fantasy; novel. Dramatis personae: a violin teacher trying to save her soul from hell by damning her students, a runaway trans girl with otherworldly musical talents, and an alien refugee spaceship captain and her family fleeing from intergalactic war. Strange, and hard to read at points (tw: transphobia, sa) but it was lovingly constructed and a wonderful ride. Space Opera - Catherynne Valente. Currently reading, but so far I LOVE this. Like Douglas Adams dropped acid and watched The Fifth Element, then decided to invent Eurovision about it. Completely bananas. I'm in awe.

Horror: Sister, Maiden, Monster - Lucy A. Snyder 6/10. Three interconnected stories of an apocalypse that turns people into brain-eating Lovecraftian horrors. Heavy on body horror and sexual gore. Kind of "everything and the kitchen sink" writing for my tastes, but it was a good, creepifying romp if you're up for it. Monstrilio - Gerardo Samano Cordova 9/10. Literary horror. After losing a child, a mother carves out a piece of his lung and grows it into a replacement son. Impressive character writing. Tone: monstrous and tender. Desert Creatures - Kay Chronister 8/10. Postapocalyptic Southwestern desert wasteland wandering. Very "The Last of Us" vibes. Camp Damascus - Chuck Tingle 9/10. Short novel. Tonally, I imagine this story is what you would get if "Hellraiser" and "But I'm a Cheerleader" had a fanfic baby. A quick, fun read. Saluting you, Mr. Tingle.

Fiction: Idol, Burning - Rin Usami 8/10. Short novel. Exploration of pop idol culture and teenage obsession. A solid addition to the "fandom culture required reading" list. Cursed Bread - Sophie Mackintosh 9/10. Historical fiction, technically, about a town that suffered mass poisoning and hallucinations after WWII, told from the POV of the baker's wife. A story about desire and shame, and the ways in which they can rot a person from the inside out. I only wish I could write obsession like this. Mrs. Caliban - Rachel Ingalls 8/10. Novella. 1980s precursor to "The Shape of Water" (though they apparently aren't related): housewife falls in love with frog man. Subtle but haunting. The Fifth Wound - Aurora Mattia 10/10. My new favorite book! God this was good. Lyrical trans life, full of joy and pain and love and the most gorgeously-rendered language. I could not put this down, and keep recommending it to everybody. The Museum of Human History - Rebekah Bergman 7/10. Story about what it means to stop living: to be in a coma, to lose your memory, to cease to age. Kind of lacking in direction; wandering but pretty. House Gone Quiet - Kelsey Norris 9/10. Short story collection. Each of these stories, in its own way, dredges up all the guilt and wonder and nostalgia of the family/community/hometown left behind. "Her Body and Other Parties"-type of energy. This is a debut collection, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the author does next. Piranesi - Susanna Clarke 8/10. Surrealist story about a man with no memory trapped under mysterious circumstances in an infinite, labyrinthine house filled with the sea. This deserved all the rave reviews that it got. Nightbitch - Rachel Yoder 9/10. A story about a woman who is convinced she's transforming into a dog: about reconciling what it is to be an artist and a mother, to be messy and animal and human, full of love and rage. I don't normally connect with stories so intimately tied up in motherhood, but this one goes for the throat. Loved. Bliss Montage - Ling Ma 8/10. Short story collection. Speculative fiction in a realist way? Happy, in an intensely lonely way? Hard to pin down, but worth taking the time to try.

Poetry: Judas Goat - Gabrielle Bates 9/10. I originally picked this up while I was receiving books at the store, flipped to a random page, read a paragraph, and muttered "Jesus Christ fuck" so loudly that my coworkers were concerned 💀 That pretty much sums up my feelings on this collection: velvety in a gothic sort of way, sharp and unkind: not in the way of a butcher's knife, but in the way of an amputation. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On - Franny Choi 9/10. Poems for surviving your daily dystopia with acceptance and hope. Mad Honey Symposium - Sally Wen Mao 9/10. Lush, sticky, verdant language with phenomenal rhythm. The written equivalent of being dropped into a greenhouse in which much of the vegetation is carnivorous.

Graphica: Night Eaters: She Eats the Night - Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda 9/10. The first in a new trilogy by the creators of "Monstress." Signature quality from both author and artist on display here, with a darker premise about family, inheritance, and the dangers of both. Gender Queer - Maia Kobabe 9/10. If I could change one thing about the way I grew up, I would wish to have had this book, or something like it, 20 years ago.

As usual, please feel free to creep into my dms or asks if you've read any of these and want to talk about them, or have been reading your own cool stuff. I will literally always want to hear about it.

[penig]

Let’s hear it for Sims.

Let’s hear it for meticulously crafted, efficient lots built with love and perfectly designed and decorated for the family that lives there.

Let’s hear it for huge barns with with three pinball machines, two arcade games, a billiard table, and four bowling alleys, but no stove.

Let’s hear it for gorgeous, gigantic, replicas of real palaces that crash 90% of games when loaded.

Let’s hear it for neighborhoods played in strict rotation; for neighborhoods where one family is played for three generations before another household is ever loaded; for neighborhoods still being used after 15 years of doing every Very Bad Thing under the sun; for neighborhoods that vanish inexplicably after being played once.

Let’s hear it for Maxis Match, for vanilla only, for palettes that are used exclusively for six months and then scrubbed in favor of a new one, for players who don’t know what any Maxis items, hairs, or clothing actually look like anymore.

Let’s hear it for unmodded games and for games modded into unrecognizability.

Let’s hear it for games in which each neighborhood has its own separate folder so it can have its own specific set of downloads and the player has to sit down and think about whether they want to play medieval, regency, fantasy, the 70s game, the BACC, the Test of Time,or the zombie apocalypse; and games in which the technology and fashion of all eras cohabit unselfconsiously in the same household.

Let’s hear it for non-supernatural heteronormative nuclear sim families; for  werewolf/vampire/plantsim polycules; for queer utopias; for dictatorships that Big Brother would think too restrictive; for rigidly “realistic” games; for unabashed nonsense.

Let’s hear it for perfect worlds with no injury or sickness or fire or death and for hellholes of unending drama and danger.

Let’s hear it for defaults that make even aliens, plantsims, and robots conform to the range of current real-world skintones; and for those in which all colors of the rainbow are available except for those seen in the real world.

Let’s hear it for players who create neighborhood after neighborhood, setting them up perfectly, and never ever have a household open and unpaused long enough to see a welcome wagon.

Let’s hear it for players who build and build and build and never take the game out of build/buy except to playtest their build.

Let’s hear it for players who create CC for games they never play anymore.

Let’s hear it for players who have never made a thing, but toss in families, houses, clothes, objects, and businesses made by Maxis or other players, and play the stuffing out of them.

Let’s hear it for storytellers who never turn on free will and set everything up with poseboxes.

Let’s hear it for storytellers who never turn free will off and are continually surprised.

Let’s hear it for those who document their games and share them, and those who keep their games to themselves.

Let’s hear it for players who rush on to the next new thing.

Let’s hear it for players who doggedly maintain the tech to play their favorite iteration in the face of all difficulties.

Let’s hear it for no-cheat games, and all-cheat games, and every game in between.

Let’s hear it for the sandbox, and all the players therein, playing exactly the way they like to play.

Let’s hear it for sims.

[helenaheissner]