thecarlileclan-blog

[thecarlileclan-blog]

Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads, a woman who feels too much, a woman who writes.  Don’t fall in love with an educated, magical, delusional, crazy woman. Don’t fall in love with a woman who thinks, who knows what she knows and also knows how to fly; a woman sure of herself.  Don’t fall in love with a woman who laughs or cries making love, knows how to turn her spirit into flesh; let alone that one who loves poetry (these are the most dangerous) or spends half an hour contemplating a painting and isn’t able to live without music.  Don’t fall in love with a woman who is interested in politics and is rebellious and feels a huge horror from injustice. One who does not like to watch television at all. Or a woman who is beautiful no matter the features of her face or her body.  Don’t fall in love with a woman who is intense, entertaining, lucid and irrelevant. Don’t wish to fall in love with a woman like that. Because when you fall in love with a woman like that, whether she stays with you or not, whether she loves you or not, from a woman like that, you never come back.

Martha Riveria Garrido (via anavableu)

[thecarlileclan-blog]

Opal Carlile Age: Elder Traits: Cheeful, Neat, Art-Lover Hair: Blonde Eyes: Violet (a distinct Carlile trait) Profession: Small business owner. Mother: Lilac Carlile Father: Sherman Carlile Sibling(s): Smolder Carlile (half-brother) Partner(s): Naomi Hirano (broken up), Grey McCollough Progeny: Lavender Carlile, Amethyst McCollough Descended from: Shmoobly, Holmes, Stylinson Powers: Vampire slaying, childhood premonitions, healing (potions and massage). Playlist: Juniper and Opal (Spotify). 

There were always high expectations for Opal. I named her after my own great-grandmother, not only as a tribute, but because this is a family, which I have now followed for nearly two years, full of elemental names. 

Opal was the second-born child of Lilac Carlile, the Original Carlile Witch. As many of you know, toddlers were nonexistent in The Sims 4, until January of this year. Consequently, Opal was my first toddler. And, even as a toddler, she displayed a great deal of magical promise. Throughout her childhood, Opal was plagued by nightmares, which generally surrounded her live-in uncle, Black Cat Stylinson. As an observer, it was actually rather disconcerting. There was sexual violence in Opal’s mother’s past, and I was concerned that, perhaps, something similar was developing, but, sensing her daughter’s fears, asked her little brother to move elsewhere. Black Cat was, years later, murdered by a particularly nasty vampire named Juniper Piña. (We’ll come right back to her, I promise). Opal’s nightmares became merely premonitions of the crime that would befall him, rather than a suggestion that he might abuse her. 

As a child, Opal was close to only two sims: her brother, Smolder, and her neighbour, Juniper. 

Smolder (photographed, above, in a chequered jumper) was already a Young Adult by the time his little sister was born, but the two were still very close, even with Smolder coming and going as he pleased until he settled down with his husband, Johnny. Opal relied on him for a great deal of emotional support -- she did not get along with either of her parents, as a child -- and spent a lot of time with his eventual family. 

Juniper, however, was not a strong pillar of support. She was a teenager, someone that Opal looked up to, but June was an extremely hot-and-cold type of friend. When she was bored, the pair would play; but when she was agitated, she went out of her way to make Opal’s life miserable. On the brink of Young Adult-hood, Juniper convinced a vampire to turn her, and as a vampire, her mission to ruin Opal’s life became an obsession. 

Shortly after this, Lilac and Sherman decided that it was time to move out of the city and away from Juniper, who continuously broke into their apartment and watched their daughter sleep. And it was in Newcrest that Opal really began to figure out who she was. She delved into herbalism on nature-hikes with her mom; she converted her own bedroom to accommodate a makeshift yoga studio; she even found a boy that she liked, named Trollop. But one night, at Discotheque Pan Europa with her friends, Opal encountered Juniper who had, unbeknownst to anyone else, taken over the club and filled it with vampires. Juniper drained Opal of her Life Force, that night, stealing from her all of her relationships and a part of her memory. 

Deciding that her daughter was unsafe, Lilac sent her to an entrusted coven. There, Opal hit the books hard, studying up to be a Vampire Hunter. It was also there that Opal met her first serious girlfriend, Naomi. The relationship was passionate, but unstable, and when Opal left, trained up enough to defend herself against Juniper’s growing Vampire Army, the pair did not keep in touch. 

When she arrived back home, however, Opal’s father, Sherman -- a quiet, loyal , but altogether dissatisfied man -- had passed away, before she ever had a chance to re-engage and re-build their relationship. Juniper had also taken over Black Cat’s apartment, frequently compelling him for sex and, eventually, getting pregnant. Once he was of no use to her, Juniper turned him, and left him outside, hallucinating in the sunlight, until he burned alive. And she did this in front of Lilac. 

Opal dove even further into vampire slaying; and slay, she did. Now, that wasn’t to say that she ever disliked vampires, as a species, but those that were aligned with Juniper Piña were fair game. She slayed a huge chunk of Juniper’s vampire army while she locked herself away to have her son. Together, Opal and Lilac finally took her down, leaving the once-fearsome vampire as little more than a powerless-human-and-single-mother. 

Finally, Opal decided it was time to live on her own. She reconnected with Naomi Hirano, her first girlfriend, and became pregnant by her. (There’s a lot of same-sex reproduction in my game. Buckle your seatbelts.) Unfortunately for Opal, after coming to terms with the idea of motherhood, she discovered that Naomi was already married to Guberg Johannesberg and that she had already had a daughter, Wendy, with her. Opal broke off the relationship despite several attempts by Naomi to repair it and, now alone, moved her widowed mother into her spare bedroom to help with the coming baby. Opal spent the entirety of her pregnancy as a Plant Sim, perhaps an allusion to the powers vested in the child within her. That child, obviously, was Lavender. 

Although juggling around single-motherhood, herself, and eventually losing her own mother to old age, Opal soon met and fell head-over-fucking-heels with Grey McCollough (pictured above, see: wedding). [Note: Smolder’s husband, Johnny, died by Sunlight at the wedding.] Naomi still came around every couple of days to see Lavender, but the Grey, Opal, and Lav became an instant, seamless, little family. So, when Lavender was a little older, they decided to have another. Grey was the one who carried Amethyst, the younger of Opal’s two daughters. And, in may ways, Amethyst took after Grey a great deal more than she did Opal. She was not born with the violet eyes that she, Lavender, Lilac, Smolder, and Smolder’s eldest daughter, Britta, all possessed; instead, she had Grey’s bright blues. Instead of being interested in the family magic, like Lavender was, Amethyst shied away from it. Opal encouraged her to practice Wellness, but that was as far as Amethyst’s exploration ever went. 

After Lavender became a teen, and after Opal’s yoga studio took off, tensions began to rise in their family unit. Suddenly, Lavender and Grey were no longer getting along, but rather shouting at each other, almost constantly. Finally, Grey had enough, and she left Opal. The pair split custody -- one week on, one week off -- throughout Amethyst’s childhood, leaving Opal’s home-life on opposite ends of the spectrum: either incredibly calm and docile, or horrendously chaotic and stressful. She also took to attending a sex-club built underneath Planet Honey Pop! karaoke bar, to drown her sorrows.

Lavender left that environment the day she could, despite high relationships with her mother and her sister, to embark upon a spirit quest; desperate for human contact on her off-weeks, Opal invited her brother Smolder to live in Lavender’s old bedroom. Smolder, whose youngest daughter had just given birth to twins and desperately needed a place to stay, gave her the keys to his apartment and moved in with his baby sister, where he remained until he died of Old Age, Johnny’s urn still poised upon his computer desk.

[thecarlileclan-blog]

Lavender Carlile Age: Young Adult Traits: Cheerful, romantic, non-committal, compassionate, mediator, socially gifted, creatively gifted. Hair: Black. Eyes: Violet. (A distinct Carlile trait.) Profession: Painter, escort. Mother: Opal Carlile Father: Naomi Hirano (pictured above) Sibling(s): Wendy Hirano, Amethyst McCullough Partner(s): Anne Stone, Sterling Shoemaker, Major Pence Descended from: Shmoobly, Stylinson, Holmes Powers: Communication with the dead, herbalism, gardening.

Lavender, frequently referred to as simply ‘Lav,’ is a tenth-generation Sim with a powerful, magical bloodline. When I started this game, almost two years ago, I had seven Original Families — the Stylinsons, the Shmooblies, the Johannesbergs, the Mikaelsons, the Salvatores, the Potters, and the Holmeses. (Yes, many of them were fandom-based. Sue me.) Lav is a sprig off of my own bloodline — the Shmooblies — as well as the Stylinson and Holmes lines, but a full ten generations removed from the silly fandom-game I began.

The Carliles are, by nature, a magical family. Magic began to manifest in Lavender’s grandmother, Lilac, after the loss of her husband, Ambrose, from whom she took the Carlile name, when she was a young woman. Lilac’s mood inadvertently affected the moods of everyone around her; at first, I thought it was just a glitch, but as the game continued, more signs cropped up. Her two children, Smolder and Opal, displayed even more compelling abilities. As a child, Opal had frequent nightmares about her uncle, Black Cat. (Black Cat was later murdered.) Smolder works almost exclusively with potions and Opal, Lavender’s mother, is a trained and accomplished witch. She runs a yoga studio and massage parlour out of her apartment, where she heals ailing Sims’ bodies and minds.

And Lav displays even more promise.

When Opal became pregnant with the first of her two daughters, the game did something odd. From the moment she took the pregnancy test until shortly after Lavender was born, Opal glitched into a Plant Sim. Even from within her mother’s body, she had a magical effect. Unsurprisingly, Lav is a very gifted gardener. She is deeply connected to the element earth and, from the time she was a toddler, spoke effortlessly with spirits — including the spirit of her grandmother, Lilac, who passed away in front of her.

Pictured above is Lavender and her biological father, Naomi — she was the product of a same-sex relationship, but has always referred to Naomi as, “dad,” despite her gender. Naomi has been relatively absent in Lavender’s life, as has her elder half-sister, Wendy, with whom Lavender has never really gotten along.

Opal also had another daughter, with Lavender’s step-mother, Grey. Together, they produced her little half-sister, Amethyst. (I routinely refer to her as, “Ames.”) The two are about seven years apart, as far as I can tell, and while their relationship has had rough patches, they are very close. Unfortunately, Grey left, shortly after Lav hit puberty, and they share custody of teenage-Ames, meaning that she lived with Opal and Lavender only part-time, growing up.

For the past few sim-years, Lav has been on a spiritual journey, travelling around the world in an attempt to master the four elements — air, water, earth, and fire — in order to realise her full magical potential.

She began with air, under the guidance of a sage, old witch named Zephyr. Zephyr taught her patience, meditation, and flexibility. It was under Zephyr’s guidance that Lavender learned how to listen to her intuition. Shortly before leaving Zephyr’s tutelage, Lav realised how unhappy she was in her long-term relationship and broke up with her high-school boyfriend, Leo Moone.

Next came her exploration of water, under a warlock called Magnus Raine. It was an emotional time, for her, recovering from her break-up and, shortly afterward, rebounding with a young man named Sterling Shoemaker. Sterling comes from a non-magical, working-class family of five brothers, of which he is the middle-son. Their relationship remains fairly casual. It was under Magnus’ teaching that Lavender mastered teleportation.

Then, Lavender moved on to earth with Anne Stone, which, frankly, I thought she would have the easiest time with. I was wrong. Although she is, and always has been a very earthy Sim, Lav stuck with Anne for a full five years, during which time she curated a vast and unique garden, explored her sexuality, and, for the first time, curated a real sense of self, separate from the women by whom she was surrounded, growing up. She remained partnered with her boyfriend, Sterling, but Lavender also tried her hand at escorting in a local sex-club. Her relationships with her mother, her little sister, and her uncle flourished, but her relationships with her father, step-mother, and elder sister became considerably more dismissive and contentious.

She just entered the fire phase, at long last. I’ll keep you updated.