Unfortunately Not a Real Pony

My opinion on Romeo and Juliette was permanently affected by the fact that my first exposure to the story was in Sims 2, where Romeo is a romance sim who rolls wants to flirt with Juliette's sister and cousin.

Also in the game, Juliette's aunts are named Goneril and Regan, and they're good friends. This... was very confusing once I read King Lear.

I make Good Decisions(TM), which is why I spent most of my free time today downloading hair for my sims, and why I will probably spend most of tomorrow's free time sorting them.

You know what I just realized?

When Maxis made Sims 2 in 2004, they remembered that dark-skinned people have lighter soles and palms: the default darkest skin has squares around those parts lightened. I mean, it looks like they made the skin and only realized that they needed to do this when they were almost done, but it's there.

But I can't think of any custom skin I've downloaded that did the same.

I've been trying to find the right words for this for a month and can't, so whatever, have poorly formulated words.

In the Sims community (and others where you can easily create large numbers of your own characters, probably, but this is the one I'm most familiar with), I've noticed two interesting trends.

"A sim who looks white and doesn't have visibly non-white ancestors in their family tree* has to be white."

"All People of Color are basically white people with brown skin or ethnic hair/accessories/clothing/names."

I feel like these two are somehow related, but I can't get my arguments together. (I have not seen anyone espousing both beliefs simultaneously, though.)

*Sims made in the character creator or spawned as NPCs by the game don't come with family trees unless the player makes one.

I just saw a set of Sims 2 skin tones where S4 (the darkest skintone the game itself comes with) was replaced by a skin that was, generously, about as dark as my (white-passing) mother at the end of summer.

Uh, my friend... you gotta examine your racism.

Me: "Look at all this awesome stuff I made for the game!"

PMC: "Cool! Have you played it at all?"

Me: [deer in headlights face]

Me: [makes a female sim with a heavy jaw]

Me: "I wonder what she looks like as a dude." [clicks male symbol]

Sim: [develops a jaw that can be seen from orbit]

Me: "..."

A couple of times a month, my partner comes home with some work that needs to be done, always saying "this will only take a little while".

Inevitably, it goes on until midnight.

Anyway, I'm staying up to keep them company, and in the meanwhile I'm recategorizing all my sim makeup so male sims can also wear it.

Red eyeshadow in Sims 2: 200 megabytes.

Blue eyeshadow, identical except that the creator moved the hue slider over: 500 megabytes.

The way Sims 2 (both the game and the fandom) treats romance sims is a fascinating study in amatonormativity.