Sometimes I just want to smack people unjustly

[lliira]

I'm totally being oversensitive with this. So many threads in Sims communities that are "look at my pretty Sims"! and a wall of incredibly pale people (almost always women, though there is the occasional feminine-looking man) staring back at me. Okay. It's their fun little fantasy world, they can have whatever kind of Sims they want, it's not my business and it doesn't mean that they're bad people. But jeez. If nothing else, don't people get bored looking at the same stuff over and over and over?

Comments

[smurasaki]

That reminds me of the time my friend's husband praised the fact that virtual worlds were free of racism because no one could tell what race people really were. In Second Life, everyone's white! (Or a furry.)

Where to even begin.

[lliira]

See, Sims can be free of racism. It isn't actually possible for a Sim to care about someone's skin color or any other things we see as racial signifiers. My Sims 2 world is definitely free of racism, as it is my little fantasy world, and there are people of all sorts of skin tones in it, from darkest to lightest to the occasional green. I don't have to deal with anyone else's Sims unless I want to -- that's what's great about it being a single-player game. And I want to play my little game and have fun, not make some kind of political statement every time.

And, of course, it's also an international game, and someone from Japan not having any black people in their game is rather different than someone from the U.S. not having any black people in their game. And it IS one's own little fantasy bubble, where one can do whatever one wishes. (I just had a woman breed with her sister's husband because they've been attracted to each other for many Simyears and I wanted to see what the baby would look like, and there will be no fallout from that for anyone involved.) But. Most of the people on the boards I go to are American. And a majority of the custom skintones people make seem to be pale, paler, palest, and dead for a week. Though this has actually gotten a lot better in the last couple years, and to be fair, some of that is because it took years for people to figure out how to make dark skintones that didn't look purple or red.

I'm conflicted and annoyed and mostly I just don't understand why anyone would want only extremely pale people all over the place. So dull.