#growing up legacy challenge | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wudlund · 1 year

Text

GROWING UP LEGACY CHALLENGE

* ˚ ✦

| by wudlund

i wanted to create a legacy challenge that focusses on the parent-child relationship and how that impacts their adult life. (i know growing together would be the perfect pack for this challenge, but i can't afford it rip)

-> this has not been playtested so pls let me know if anything is too difficult or doesn't work :)

-> included packs: get to work, outdoor retreat/jungle adventure, city living, get together, seasons, cats & dogs, discover university, high school years, parenthood, strangerville, island living, paranormal stuff, snowy escape, cottage living, nifty knitting, eco lifestyle (if you don't have a pack, just exclude that part of the challenge)

-> for each generation, they should complete their aspiration, master any skill(s) i've outlined, complete a collection and master their career (if relevant) the recommended world is only my opinion, you do not have to live there :)

-> whenever 'parent' is mentioned, i mean the founder/heir before as some generations do not specify a spouse (they are secondary characters here, babes)

GEN 1: The Parental Scriptures

You grew up hopping between various foster parents and children’s homes. You vowed to adopt as many children as you could handle as an adult and make them feel as loved and welcome as possible. Incorporating your passion for writing, you write novels about each of them throughout their lives.

Traits; Family Oriented, Childish & Good

Aspiration; Big Happy Family

Career; Writer

Collection; Postcards (recieved from grown up children living in different locations/worlds)

Max Skills: Parenting & Writing

Recommended World; Henford-on-Bagley

Start as a Young Adult

Have an 8 sim household (can be a single parent for ‘hard mode’ or married), adopting 6/7 children

Write 6/7 books (corresponding with however many children you have)

Name each book after the child that it's about

Hire a nanny to help with the children

Celebrate every holiday fully (e.g. decorate to the max)

Help children with homework and interact with them as much as possible

Take lots of pictures of each child at each life stage (e.g. toddler, child) and decorate your house with them

Go on holiday to a vacation world every summer with all your children

Buy all grandchildren a toy for their first birthday (aging up into an infant)

Don’t die before becoming an elder (this will be important later !)

GEN 2: The Malevolent Amalgam

Growing up, you despised your parent. They were so overbearing and involved in your life, something burned inside you. You channelled your rage into criminal activity and found a love for experimental dishes. You hatched a nefarious plan to get revenge on the parent that you hated so much.

Traits; Evil, Mean, Hates Children

Aspiration; Public Enemy

Career; Criminal

Max Skill; Mischief

Collection; Experimental Food Photos (inspiration for murderous plan)

Recommended World; San Myshuno

Have 2 best friends in childhood who you pull pranks with

Skip school/play hooky regularly

Have a child by accident with someone who is similar to your parent (at least 2 of the same traits)

Have one child who you are very distant from

Have other parent of child die by cowplant or denizens pond ("accidental")

Never celebrate holidays (cancel them when they start or remove from the calendar -> however you may want to keep them for future generations)

Instead, go on vacation to any vacation lot without your child or partner

Learn Pufferfish Nigiri

Kill parent with dish

When your child moves out, give them 1200 simoleons

GEN 3: The Questioned Innocence

Throughout your childhood, you were very close to your grandparent, who died under very mysterious circumstances. Once you were old enough, you dedicated your life to investigating the death of your grandparent, finally finding out the truth. You begin to wish you’d never started investigating.

Traits; Genius, Loyal, Paranoid

Aspiration; Strangerville Mystery

Career; Detective

Collection; Fossils (clues about grandparent's death)

Max Skill ; Logic & Medium

Recommended World; Strangerville

Start with 1200 simoleons (after purchasing lot)

Keep the toy/soft toy from your grandparent for the rest of your life

Have 3 children

Buy them all a newer version of your favourite toy (different swatch)

Live on a remote lot (to avoiding your investigation being detected)

Complete the Strangerville Mystery

Confront and fight your parent in adulthood and have max negative relationship when they die

Contact your grandparent from beyond the grave and have them move into the household as a ghost

GEN 4: The Sidelined Affinity

Your parent loved you but never had much time for you, being so absorbed by their work. You maintained a positive relationship with them, but decided to take your life in a different direction. Beginning freelance work at the start of your adult life, you quickly realised animals had your heart.

Traits; Cat Lover, Dog Lover, Clumsy

Aspiration; Friend of the Animals

Max Skills; Veterinarian & Dog Training

Collection; Feathers (mementos of your pets)

Recommended World; Brindleton Bay

Meet someone as a child and date through your teen years until the start of young adulthood

Regularly get boba tea with your pets

Always have one cat and one dog in the household

Work in any freelance branch you choose through young adulthood

Have one child by accident in young adulthood

Buy a vet clinic on your birthday into adulthood (cheat for money - it's a gift from your parent)

Adopt another child later

Marry a spellcaster as an elder and become a spellcaster yourself

Take in your grandchildren after their parent dies

GEN 5: The Regimented Defense

You grew up seeing how unattached and careless your parent was. You hated it. Life is meant to be structured. There are rules. You always knew you were destined for bigger, better and more organised things.

Traits; Hot-Headed, Perfectionist and Proper

Aspiration; Bodybuilder

Max Skills; Fishing (only peaceful time in your life)

Career; Military

Collection; Fish

Recommended World; Oasis Springs

Join the Scouts as a child and get all trophies

Marry childhood sweetheart in early young adulthood

Have 2 children, use strict parenting methods

Sign both children up for after-school clubs

Both children must earn Good Manners trait from childhood

Set an early curfew for both children

Mount one of each fish you catch

Your spouse has an affair in adulthood and elopes with their partner

Have the workaholic lifestyle

Die in adulthood (you can cheat this to be any death - like dying on duty)

GEN 6: The Detached Secrecy

You learned early in life how unpredictable and fleeting life is and how futile attachments are. You decided to never allow yourself to get tied down and live life as meaningfully and freely as possible. Any commitment scared you, leading to you exploring all corners of life and finding out what it truly means to live.

Traits; Adventurous, Noncommittal, Loves Outdoors

Aspiration; Serial Romantic /Live Fast

Collection; Frogs (exception to the rule of 'no attachments')

Career; Secret Agent

Max Skill; Rock Climbing

Recommended World; Mt. Komorebi

Do not complete your aspiration as a child (can be any aspiration)

Complete the Live Fast aspiration as a teen

Drop out of High School early and move out of your grandparent's house

Never marry, date different people sporadically (never for longer than a week)

Have triplets - you will probably have to cheat this :)

Give them names beginning with the same letter or names that are very similar

When one child demonstrates an interest in fame, actively discourage them

Have a frog that you are a little bit too attached to

Retire and move worlds (must be a different climate to one you were living in - e.g. mt. komorebi to sulani)

GEN 7: The Unsatisfied Luxury

You actually might have had the most average, normal childhood ever. One of three children, you didn't even have individuality to your name. Nothing spectacularly out of the ordinary. Although, you never did find out what your parent’s career was… probably something normal, right? You set your sights on something a little less ordinary. You wanted to be rich.

Traits; Materialistic, Self-Absorbed, Ambitious

Aspiration; Fabulously Wealthy/Admired Icon

Max Skills; Charisma & Dancing

Career; Retail Store Owner

Collection; Crystals (imagine they are rare jewels etc.)

Recommended World; Del Sol Valley

Have lots of friends as a child/teen

Be Prom Queen

Work on the Admired Icon aspiration as a teen

Own a retail store, selling very expensive items

Become famous (at least Rank 4)

Have 4 children with a big celebrity

Own a fancy dog (e.g. poodle, bichon frise, pomeranian)

Have a messy divorce from the parent of your children, fighting regularly

Lose relationships with children

When you die, have no strong relationships (no more than acquaintances with anyone)

GEN 8: The Inspired Modesty

You got to see first hand what a life of money and fame does to a person. You knew you wanted something more modest, finding your purpose in life through painting. You had a turbulent family life growing up, so you channelled those feelings into paintings.

Traits; Art Lover, Gloomy, Lactose Intolerant

Aspiration; Master Painter

Max Skills; Painting & Cross Stitching

Career; Painter

Collection; Seashells (you find beauty in everything, no matter how small)

Recommended World; Sulani

Buy most of your clothes via thrifting

Join the cheer team but move to the football team later in high school

Live on a 20x15 lot

Dumpster dive for furniture etc.

Use the recycler for trash

Sell your work on Plopsy

Find your soulmate at work (also a painter)

Have 2 science babies

Have close relationship with only your first child

Paint portraits of your spouse and children

Make cross-stitched hoops as gifts for your children's birthdays

Have spouse die just after second baby is born

Never remarry

Heir must be the second child

GEN 9: The Broken Machinery

After your parent's death, you detached yourself completely from your family, swore off relationships and delved into your studies. Your remaining parent tried to connect with you but you felt incomplete, missing someone you never knew.

Traits; Genius, Geek, Socially Awkward

Aspiration; Computer Whiz/Whiz Kid

Collection; Voidcritters (as a child)

Max Skills; Rocket Science & Robotics

Career; Engineer

Recommended World; Britechester

Complete the Whiz Kid aspiration as a child

Join the Chess Club in High School

Have one best friend growing up (never speak again after school ends)

Attain Distinguished Physics Degree from Foxbury Institute

Meet another friend at university

Get a cat after leaving university

Be friends for at least 2 months before starting romantic relationship (fearful to lose them like you lost your parent)

Have a child together in late adulthood

Your partner must be revealed to be an alien after you become romantically involved

Build rocket ship

Travel to sixam with your partner

GEN 10: The Last Hurrah

You admired your parent for being so skilled and intelligent but you just weren’t up for that. To be honest, you didn’t have the energy for it. You never aspired to much but you were happy.

Traits; Lazy, Cheerful, Unflirty

Aspirations; Party Animal/Joke Star

Max Skills; Charisma & Comedy

Collection; Gardening (have a little herb garden)

Career; Odd Jobs

Recommended World; Henford-on-Bagley

Go to prom with your best friend

Have a games room in your house

Never marry but have multiple long term relationships

Have no children

Have a big dog

Have lots of close friends and party with them regularly

Create and maintain a club

Attend the Henford-on-Bagley village fairs (you do not have to compete, just engage with it)

Visit every bar and have a drink in every world at least once (like a pub crawl)

Have the people person lifestyle

Live on the same lot the founder lived on (the house may be different)

if you play this, pls use the #growing up legacy challenge tag so i can see your posts <3 - essie xo

#growing up legacy challenge #gulc #ts4 #ts4 legacy challenge #sims 4 #sims 4 legacy challenge #wudlund #new legacy #legacy challenge #new legacy challenge

175 notes · View notes

angorwhosebabyisthis · 1 year

Text

honestly like. the more i take it apart and examine it, while going into it entirely is going to be A Post or Three of Its Own and will probably get its own thread: i think one of the reasons nine in canon upsets me so much is that i genuinely related to the version of him that made sense to me, when i tried to apply some continuity to his character from before his imprisonment vs after. he's actually the muse i wrote for the most prose for in this fandom, even more than five--which is saying something!--and he came to me pretty easily.

[longpost and Decidedly Harsh toward canon's depiction of him, but less ARGFMSKDKDKFK HATE than usual so much as 'man the awful way these people handled him was a waste.' believe it or not i'm actually pretty attached to him, but as the secret Better Version that lives in my head lmao]

the arc of his character could have been such a good one about how men and boys and the people around them are harmed by toxic masculinity, and examining the ways in which that's held up by other cis men, every other configuration of gender and AGAB, and both. he came through loud and clear to me as an example of a poorly socialized, abused, isolated homeschooler with very little life experience, who is throwing bits and pieces at the wall that he's cobbled together from the outside without understanding the experiences behind that kind of thing, to see what sticks. all this while having suppressed and sublimated his emotions so much that he doesn't actually recognize what he's feeling, and goes 'well, i guess this trauma reaction to killing people means i like killing people. let's go then!'

like... in canon, you can kind of see how the seeds of his trauma, and baseline personality, from before his capture might have gone septic in the process the way it does in canon. if he was already the kind of person who would spit that result out on the other side. the writers used his Acute Trauma as an excuse to go 'anyway his cêpan was a sexist dickhead under the guise of ~respecting women,~ and he got captured by pursuing a normal teenage crush and blames himself for it, and then he went through solitary for a year. so now he's a gleeful sexual predator who harasses john and thinks women are meat!'

and this becomes even more glaringly obvious when you set it next to how the aftereffects of his trauma are (not) depicted. this kid spent a year in solitary confinement--broken up by the intermission of mercy-killing his adopted dad after watching his torture--while not being fed enough and hurting himself on the forcefield on the regular. he's not going to immediately come out of that Ripped and an Incredible Polished Fighter; he's not going to come out of that a ~charming edgy debonair lovable asshole.~ this kid knows what the fuckin hat man looks like, dude. that's shit you come out of an emotional, physical, and psychological wreck, and not in a 'haha look how rude and boundary-pushing and violent and sleazy i am uwu' way.

he is barely going to be able to walk out of there on his own two feet. he is going to be hallucinating and not remember how to tell faces apart. he is going to freak out at anything like an enclosed space. he is going to be food-insecure. he is going to be constantly finding ways to self-harm when he feels at all out of control, and once again not in a 'haha i'm so quirky and edgy' way. he is going to have obsessive rituals and get stuck on repetitive thought patterns because you run out of shit to think about after a year with nothing to do but pushups, even before you add in the shiny new PTSD events to obsess over. which tend to take up all of your brain space even when you aren't isolated with them for long periods. he is going to be doing weird fucking shit after he gets out, bizarre and frightening shit that's not just 'being violent and a dick,' and other people will probably notice.

and all of this is before you factor in his backstory! (which, by the way, is not conducive to him coming out of his imprisonment an Unstoppable Highly Trained Killing Machine. he was taught how to actually fight opponents for Three Whole Ass Weeks before he got captured, and none of that was training against human-shaped opponents. i don't care how many pushups he does over how long, he still has had zero practice fighting Other People and that's immediately going to fuck him over in a fight. it's one thing to have him be dangerous because he makes up for lack of skill with being completely fucking berserk with zero regard for his own safety or anyone else's, but he's not going to be an unstoppable whirlwind of death. and you're not going to build muscle while you're being starved.)

and like. i could go on for a long time about how they fucked up his character to the point where seeing him onscreen anywhere outside his novella makes me instantly want to flip a table. but i think so much of what it comes down to--and i don't say this casually, i mean after laying out and examining all his scenes in the first series--is that he doesn't actually have an arc. he doesn't grow. the entire point of his character's existence is to be an awful person and never be held accountable, self-examine, or allowed to face any kind of real consequences for it.

it's genuinely fascinating to examine all the different methods they use to do this (which is for a whole post of its own), but he's not an exploration of culpability or responsibility--for past, current, and future actions--the way five's arc is. he's just a parade of all the abuse tactics and rhetoric the authors could think of, both direct and via enablement by people around him, to pour into one guy. nine is literally The Missing Stair: The Character.

contrast this with five getting nailed to the fuckin wall for things that are often, arguably, much less horrific or unhinged than what nine does. he's treated like a ~broken, irreparably insane monster~ by characters and narrative both. he's punished brutally and endlessly over and over and over and over no matter how much he tries to grow, or make amends, or even lay down and take everything that might be done to him as punishment because he Deserves It for, [checks notes] repeatedly having been groomed and manipulated for years. If You Can't Tell I am a Little Bitter

and it's not just other characters who suffer for it. the creators are SO invested in nine never being accountable, by himself or anyone else, that he is PUNISHED FOR IT when he makes even the slightest effort to unpack. when he has a moment of vulnerability during a breakdown over fucking up, he is restrained in exactly the same way as when he had to watch eight die. this so that he can have his self-blame literally beaten out of him to make him 'stop moping.' the writers don't care about his trauma, or being compassionate or fair in their portrayal of it, or letting him heal. the only thing they care about here is getting to write a Missing Stair as a good thing, and trying to get you, the reader, in on it by forcing you to like him.

anyway just. man. they did nine so fuckin dirty and their version of him brings down every other narrative around it. i know i rant about nine a lot but justice for my boy

#lorien legacies #LL number nine #LL number five #LL crit tag #the crit files #nine is a platter of sushi the writers put in the microwave and [horse staring out over the ocean meme] man #also if you fix this SO MUCH about his parallels and foils with five snap right into place and it is CHEF'S KISS UGH #also lifts up john's arc in the process to 'kid with some pretty ugly qualities buried under Nice Guy surface; who has to grow past them'#'and does'#instead of 'oh gross wtf'#dyn: lost boys #like frankly i feel like it's pretty shitty to both neglected/abused homeschoolers and survivors of solitary confinement #to go 'ya that's what made this guy a sadistic bullying bigoted creep uwu'#instead of you know. establishing the traits of /his/ that would be brought out by that #there's also just. so much to be said here about how in the process of giving nine a pass for his cruelty and toxic masculinity #the writers also give a pass for perpetuating the cruelty of toxic masculinity toward men and boys against /him/#also like this kid self-harms in a variety of ways when he needs control and it's a pattern that starts from his very first scene #Writers Address Literally Any of This Instead of Portraying Men Self-Harming as Quirky Badass Peak of Masculinity Shit Challenge #LL tag

16 notes · View notes